The comment thread on a previous post [entitled “The New War on Science–Now It’s Guerilla Style”] unfortunately got way out of hand. Due to the nature and volume of these comments, we have presently unpublished the post while we decide on any other action. Meanwhile, we refer you to our comments policy.
– Chris and Sheril
Swoopy from Skepticality interviewed me about NASA, and the whole shebang is now live (you can also just grab the MP3).
I talked about Obama’s plan for NASA, the JREF, Pluto, Mars, my tattoo (sorry, folks, no news there), and doted on Swoopy maybe just a little because she is made of awesome and win and unicorns. She and co-host Derek run the Skeptic and Podcasting tracks at Dragon*Con, because that’s just how cool they are.
Skepticality is the original skeptical podcast, and still one of the best. You really should subscribe to it if you don’t already. And if you do, you are already smart and good-looking and likely to be President one day.
Asian carp—the giant invasive fish that have been moving up the Mississippi River for the better part of a decade–are getting close to the Great Lakes, and in fact some may have already crossed the barrier. For the lakes’ protectors, this is a near-doomsday scenario: Many fear that the ravenous carp could destroy the ecosystem by gobbling up the food that native fish depend on. This week the White House proposed a plan that would devote nearly $80 million to stopping the fish’s advance, but it’s not pleasing many people around the issue.
On one side, many environmentalists, as well as people who rely on Great Lakes fishing for their livelihood, have called on the federal government to shut down locks that connect the river to Lake Michigan. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm says, “The economic damage from these carp coming into the Great Lakes system would be irreparable…. They should shut the locks down until they get these other measures in place, and permanently have a solution to separating these two water systems” [Detroit News]. Granholm and other governors from the region met recently to try to craft another solution after the Supreme Court ruled that Illinois didn’t have to close the locks to stop the carp if it didn’t choose to.
Naturally there’s one group that would be mightily upset at closing the shipping locks: shipping companies. Illinois Rep. Judy Biggert said efforts to close locks and restrict barge and boat traffic in Chicago waterways would damage the local economy and have far-reaching national implications [Detroit Free Press]. The administration’s compromise plan would call for occasional closures of the locks, and though it would only conduct a long-range study of full closure, shipping representatives have still balked at that.
The federal plan is full of bizarre-sounding alternatives to closing the locks, too. Among them: barriers using sound, strobe lights and bubble curtains to repel carp and biological controls to prevent them from reproducing. They’re promising measures – but still on the drawing board [AP]. The plan would also bolster the system of electrical defenses in the water, intended to emit shocks that either scare the carp away or knock them unconscious. But since Asian carp DNA has now been found upstream of those barriers, it seems that at least some fish are slipping through.
The White House is set to brief the public on its plan this afternoon. But while they’re trying to play peacemaker in a money fight between states, they shouldn’t expect a rosy reception from anyone.
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DISCOVER: Humans vs Animals: Our Fiercest Battles With Invasive Species (photo gallery)
DISCOVER: The Truth About Invasive Species
Image: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
In honor of Valentine’s Day, we bring you the story of how hearts really can break. Doctors do occasionally diagnose someone with “broken heat syndrome,” but the patients aren’t necessarily the lovelorn dump-ees of the world.
The heart problem, which is more technically known as stress-induced cardiomyopathy, can be brought on by all kinds of emotional and physical stresses. Externally, someone with broken heart syndrome may appear to be having a heart attack, but the physical mechanism is actually quite different.
ABC News reports:
While a heart attack is usually caused by blocked arteries, medical experts believe broken heart syndrome is caused by a surge in adrenaline and other hormones. When patients experience an adrenaline rush in the aftermath of a stressful situation, the heart muscle may be overwhelmed and become temporarily weakened.
This causes the heart’s main pumping chamber, the left ventricle, to stop contracting normally. Doctors estimate that 1 to 2 percent of patients diagnosed with heart attacks are in fact suffering from broken heart syndrome.
In keeping with its name, the disorder has been known to bring down people shocked by the death of a spouse, as in the case of a woman who keeled over on the hospital floor minutes after her husband was pronounced dead. For reasons that aren’t yet understood, broken heart syndrome is usually seen in post-menopausal women. But not all cases are related to the loss of a loved one–other reported triggers have included a bad case of stage fright, a migraine headache, and a surprise party.
Happily, doctors report that nearly 95 percent of broken heart patients make a complete recovery within two months, and the syndrome rarely recurs. So at least one old saying is true: Time does heal a broken heart.
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DISCOVER: Adventures in the Petri Dish of Love, on how scientists find romance
Image: iStockphoto
You can listen here, and I also strongly encourage you to subscribe via iTunes from the same page.
The show introduction starts like this:
Recently, there was another nail in the coffin for vaccine skeptics. The British medical journal The Lancet took the dramatic step of retracting a 1998 paper that lies at the root of modern vaccine denialism. Authored by a doctor named Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues, it was heavily touted as having uncovered a new cause of autism—the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, or, the MMR vaccine.
Not so fast. Twelve years later, there are more problems with the paper than you can count—and yet somehow, it managed to spawn a movement.
In this conversation with host Chris Mooney, Dr. Paul Offit discusses the state of the vaccine skeptic movement in light of this latest news. In particular, Offit explores why the tides may be turning on the movement—as well as the grave public health consequences of ongoing vaccine avoidance.
Again, listen and subscribe here. And don’t forget to buy Paul Offit’s book Autism’s False Prophets if you don’t already own it…
Hey, remember Kevin Trudeau, the guy convicted of fraud, the larcenous liar who mercilessly (literally) plugs away on informercials to sell his books like Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About, books that tell people to turn away from real medicine so they can die of cancer if they follow his quackery?
Yeah, that sweetheart.
Well, he’s at it again. He just doesn’t think that his reputation can get any lower, despite being able to comfortably limbo underneath a mosquito’s belly with room to spare. Trudeau recently urged his minions to send protesting emails and text messages to federal judge Robert Gettleman — the hero who raised a fine against Trudeau from $5 million to $37 million, to better match the money Trudeau defrauded out of people for his books. Gettleman is currently working on potentially revising his order after an appellate court found his ruling too broad.
I can’t imagine Trudeau’s actions will help his case any.
And, oddly enough, Gettleman doesn’t think so either. Especially since some of the notes were threatening. Seriously folks, how stupid must you be to send threatening emails to a frakking federal judge?
Well, they are loyal to Trudeau, so I guess that answers that.
Anyway, Gettleman had Trudeau hauled into court yesterday, where he slapped the fraudulent huckster with a contempt of court charge:
Gettleman ordered Trudeau to turn over his passport, pay $50,000 bond and warned he could face future prison time.
Gettleman, on his own authority, can sentence Trudeau to up to six months in prison. In addition, the judge referred the matter and the emails to the U.S. Marshals Service, which investigates threats to judiciary.
It would certainly be interesting indeed if Trudeau were thrown in jail for the rest of his life, with the added rule that he is not allowed to sell any wares whatsoever in books, magazines, on TV, radio, or any and all future media. If you think that’s too harsh, then maybe you need to familiarize yourself with Trudeau’s past antics. Some purveyors of alt-med quackery may be honest in their beliefs, but if you read Trudeau’s history you may find yourself being just a wee bit skeptical of his pure motivations.
I love seeing justice being served in cases like this. I really hope judge Gettleman throws the book at Trudeau… and that’s something Trudeau really doesn’t want you to know.
Tip o’ the coral calcium to BABLoggeee Chris Babarskas.
Former President Bill Clinton is out of the hospital today after seeing a doctor in New York about chest pains this week. Clinton showed no evidence of a heart attack and his prognosis is excellent after a procedure Thursday to insert two stents in a coronary artery that had become blocked, said his cardiologist Dr. Alan Schwartz [Los Angeles Times].
Clinton’s rush to the hospital brought new attention to the common medical practice of using stents in heart patients. A stent is a small wire mesh tube that is inserted into an artery in order to prop it open, like a miniature scaffold. Surgeons use stents to improve blood flow to the heart muscle and relieve symptoms such as the chest pain that Clinton experienced [ABC News]. Most people who undergo coronary angioplasty procedures receive stents. Once the tube is in the artery, the artery grows over it and it becomes a permanent part.
Of course, no body part of President Clinton can enter the news cycle without it becoming politicized. Some conservatives took the opportunity to argue that the procedure he received would be harder to get under the kind of changes to the health care system he tried to achieve in 1994, and that the Democrats are working towards again at the moment. But it may be that fewer people should be getting stents. For people with first-time chest pain for the first, a major study found doctors implant stents too often and that patients fared no better, when it came to heart attacks and death, than when they didn’t have the procedure [NPR]. There’s also a risk of scar tissue and clotting, which is why patients often receive stents coated with a drug designed to prevent arteries from closing back up, and often must take blood thinners for a while after the operation.
As for the former President, his docs say he’s in pretty good shape. Heart disease doesn’t get cured or just go away, but Clinton has reportedly mended his former fast food- and doughnut-eating ways. Cardiologists Jon Resar noted that Clinton’s current troubles could be related to the bypass surgeries he’s had in the past. “What may have happened is one of the bypass grafts developed a blockage or became totally occluded [blocked] or a new blockage developed beyond where the the original bypass was inserted into the artery,” he said [ABC News].
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Image: flickr/ World Economic Forum
Slime molds have been popping up in the news quite a bit lately. A few weeks ago, they made headlines by mimicking the Japanese rail system. Now, a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that slime molds can make complicated choices about the amount and variety of nutrients they eat.
It might not seem like a big deal that an organism—whether mold, mouse, or man—can make complex decisions about how to feed itself.
Except that they have no brains. These amoeboid creatures have no specialized center dictating all their actions. So, as they spread across a landscape, they have no “mission control” to which to report their nutritional requirements.
In the recent study, scientists placed 11 different foods around the outside of a Petri dish, each with a different protein-to-carbohydrate ratio. They then plopped a slime mold into the center of the dish. The researchers found that the slime mold altered its growth pattern and migrated to contact the foods that provided it with the best proportion of nutrients. That’s a pretty great feat of coordination for a blob without a brain.
Speaking of which, the last time a slime ball got this much attention, The Blob was sweeping through 1950’s drive-ins. For now, I wouldn’t be worried—there have been no reports of bloodthirsty slime molds terrorizing quaint suburban neighborhoods. But don’t underestimate the slime. It’s smarter than you think.
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By Anna Rothschild. This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
Image: Flickr / Kristie’s NaturesPortraits
If we celebrate provocative new experimental findings, we should also celebrate the careful null results (experiments that agree with existing theories) on which much of science is based. Back in October we pointed to a new analysis that used observations of gravitational lensing by large-scale structure to test Einstein’s general relativity on cosmological scales, with the intriguing result that it didn’t seem to fit. And the caveat that it probably would end up fitting once we understood things better, but it’s always important to follow up on these kinds of clues.
So now we understand things a bit better, and a number of people have been working to dig into this apparent anomaly. Here is a new paper from this week, that presents their own way of using these kinds of data to test GR against large-scale structure.
Testing General Relativity with Current Cosmological Data
Authors: Scott F. Daniel, Eric V. Linder, Tristan L. Smith, Robert R. Caldwell, Asantha Cooray, Alexie Leauthaud, Lucas LombriserAbstract: Deviations from general relativity, such as could be responsible for the cosmic acceleration, would influence the growth of large scale structure and the deflection of light by that structure. We clarify the relations between several different model independent approaches to deviations from general relativity appearing in the literature, devising a translation table. We examine current constraints on such deviations, using weak gravitational lensing data of the CFHTLS and COSMOS surveys, cosmic microwave background radiation data of WMAP5, and supernova distance data of Union2. Markov Chain Monte Carlo likelihood analysis of the parameters over various redshift ranges yields consistency with general relativity at the 95% confidence level.
One issue, as we noted way back when, is that it’s very hard to “test GR” without committing yourself to a model of the mass and energy sources that are causing the curvature of spacetime. So the game is to make some plausible assumptions and see where you go from there. This group seems to have assembled a sensible framework for testing deviations from Einstein, and come back with the answer that everything is on the right track.
We keep getting new and better data, of course, so we’ll keep testing. I suspect Einstein will continue to be right, but probably a lot of people thought Newton would continue to be right a century ago.
I have a fondness for bipolar nebulae: double-barreled gaseous clouds formed when stars are born, and sometimes as they age and die. I’ve seen a lot of them, and studied a lot of them, so I was surprised to see this image from the Gemini North telescope of a BPN I’m not that familiar with, called Sharpless 2-106:
Oooo, pretty! Sharpless 2-106 is about 2000 light years away, located in a region of the galaxy known for birthing stars. The nebula is only about two light years across — small for a star-forming region, but still over 2,000 times bigger than our entire solar system!
Deep in the middle of the cloud is a star struggling to be born. It may have about 15 times the mass of the Sun, big enough to put it squarely into the “massive star” category. It’s flooding the nebula with ultraviolet radiation, causing the gas to glow. Different atoms glow at characteristic colors, allowing us to identify what elements are present, at what quantities, and even at what temperatures. In this case, special filters were used to pick out the elements helium (purple), hydrogen (red), oxygen (green), and sulfur (blue). The result is not really a true-color image — it’s not what your eye would see if you were out there floating around — but it’s close. Amazingly, to me, each filter was exposed for only 15 minutes, resulting in a one-hour total exposure time for this image!
[Note: the purple glow surrounding that bright star is just an internal reflection, light scattering around inside the telescope. That’s most likely a bright foreground star blasting out more light in the purple filter than the others; it doesn’t mean that star has a giant shell of helium around it!]
The nebula is double-lobed because the star is probably surrounded by a thick disk of material: gas, dust, silicates and other junk swirling around that forms the star itself (and perhaps planets, though we can’t tell in this case because there’s simply too much stuff there obscuring our view). A typical disk is on the order of the size of our solar system, so is invisibly tiny in this image.
But the star is blowing out material too in a stellar wind. It gets stopped by the equatorial disk, so it can only blow up and down, above and below the disk, forming these two great lobes that stretch for trillions of kilometers.
If we compare this image to one taken in the infrared by Subaru, we learn even more:
Like the Orion Nebula picture the other day, the IR image shows that a cavity is being carved out the surrounding gas, most likely from the winds from that massive star. Streamers of gas can be seen on the left, probably formed as the outflowing gas slams into dense knots of surrounding material, a bit like a sandbar that forms when water flows around a patch of sand. You can also see lots more stars than in the optical image, including many bright ones you don’t see at all in the optical. The thick dust surrounding Sharpless 2-106 blocks the optical light from stars, but IR can pierce that veil and reach our telescopes, showing us the hidden treasures.
We see bipolar nebulae all over the place… I have another one I’ll be telling you about soon, one of my very favorite objects in the whole sky. If you’ve been reading my blog for more than a couple of weeks you’ve already seen it, probably without even knowing it. But that’s the only hint I’ll give for now. Stay tuned and I’ll tell you all about it. Promise!
Until then, soak in the beauty of this nascent star, which, in a few million more years, will blow away the tattered remnants of its cocoon, and emerge as another bright blue-white star to light up our galaxy.
The International Space Station is almost done. Astronauts on board the current space shuttle Endeavour completed the first of three spacewalks to install the last major component of the ISS: the Tranquility module. Its huge windows will offer ISS residents 360-degree view of space, the station, and our home world.
The U.S. Tranquility module — shaped like a soda can — is the last major American addition to the station, now 98% complete. Its placement completes 11 years of U.S. construction work on the outpost, which the United States has spent more than $50 billion building [USA Today]. An Italian team designed the module’s magnificent dome, which measures 10 feet in diameter. Seven windows provide the panoramic view.
With Tranquility’s power hookup now in place, astronauts will install the plumbing during their second space walk. Tranquility will house functional items like exercise equipment, toilet, and water recycling system. But there’s another reason the astronauts are keen to see it open its huge windows. NASA readily acknowledges the observation deck and its 360-degree views will improve the quality of life aboard the orbital outpost, where astronauts spend six months at a stretch [AP].
Plus, it’s just nice to be approaching the finish line, especially with only a few shuttle flights remaining before they go into retirement this year, and the future of human spaceflight uncertain in the United States. “What this mission symbolizes, I think, in a lot of ways, it’s like the Transcontinental Railroad. And our flight is kind of like putting the Golden Spike in the Transcontinental Railroad,” shuttle pilot Terry Virts said [USA Today].
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DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Living in Space
Image: NASA
This is the fifth in a series of guest posts by Joel Barkan, a previous contributor to “The Intersection” and a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The renowned Scripps marine biologist Jeremy Jackson is teaching his famed “Marine Science, Economics, and Policy” course for what may be the last time this year (along with Jennifer Jacquet), and Joel will be reporting each week on the contents of the course.
In my favorite movie of all time, Jurassic Park, scientists clone a bunch of dinosaurs from the blood of prehistoric mosquitoes. I’m sure you’ve seen it. In the sequel, The Lost World, a Tyrannosaurus rex escapes from a cargo ship on mainland U.S. soil and wreaks havoc on my current hometown of San Diego—if this happened in real life, San Diegans would just shrug, grab their surfboards, and look for the next set of good waves. What if the T-Rex hadn’t been tranquillized and returned to its island? What if multiple dinosaurs had propagated on our continent and formed stable populations? We would label them invasive species. Or would we? After all, dinosaurs were native to North America about 70 million years ago. But I digress.
In our most recent class, we unfortunately did not discuss whether the repopulation of our country with dinosaurs would constitute a species invasion. We did, however, talk about many of the vectors that transport invasive species through the marine environment. One such vector is the ballast water of ships: a freighter will fill its ballast tank in one part of the globe with water and various organisms, traverse an ocean to deliver its cargo, and empty the water and non-native organisms into a new, unsuspecting region. The result is an invasion of crustaceans, mollusks, and algae that might out-compete native species in new habitats. The most famous ballast tank stowaway is probably the zebra mussel, native to the Black and Caspian Sea, which has invaded North American lakes.
There are several methods of managing invasive marine species, most of which are costly and none of which are easy. One student shed light on some interesting technological advancements that might tackle the ballast water problem. A ship could heat its ballast water to 40° Celsius with microwaves to kill any invader that may have hitched a ride. Purging oxygen from a ballast tank with nitrogen could also wipe out the hitchhiking organisms, with an added benefit of preventing corrosion of the tank’s interior.
One method that almost always seems to spectacularly fail is biocontrol—introducing a new species to get rid of a problematic invasive species. The history of biocontrol is rife with notorious blunders: cane toads were introduced to Australia in 1936 to combat beetles that were ravaging cane fields. The cane toads didn’t take well to the cane fields, however, and quickly spread throughout the country, reducing reptile biodiversity along the way. In Hawaii, mongoose were introduced in the 1870s to control the rat populations (also invasive) that were eating valuable sugar cane. Except the mongoose preys during the day, while rats feed nocturnally. Whoops. The mongoose instead decided to eat some endemic Hawaiian birds and threaten their fragile populations.
As globalization continues, more species invasions are inevitable, to the point where the term “native species” will become increasingly irrelevant. Once established, invasives are extremely difficult to eradicate. Prevention seems to be the most effective and most cost-effective way of dealing with this issue. In the future, it will be interesting to see how marine ecosystems respond to more and more invasions. To be honest, I’m not too worried. After all, to quote the famous chaotician Dr. Ian Malcolm, “Life finds a way.”
Love is in the air at NCBI ROFL! Tuesday-Friday this week, we will feature research articles about love in its most physical form (okay, we just mean plain ol’ sex). Enjoy!
The gag reflex and fellatio.
Extracts from the 1950 paper:
“In a study of consititutional psychopathic personalities especially the sexual deviants, it was found during a routine physical examination that the gag reflex was frequently absent. This was a more definite finding in those homosexuals who admitted fellatio. This observation, first made at an induction station in 1942, was studied further in 1,404 patients at a neuropsychiatric military hospital in 1944… …All were given a complete physical examination and psychiatric work-up. The gag reflex evaluation was made in each case. It was tested by manipulating a tongue depressor around the uvula, soft palate, and pharyngeal vault. Normally, the stimulus innervates this area and produces the gag reflex. In subjects practicing fellatio this reflex is absent even when the tongue depressor is inserted well into the vault of the pharynx. The positive test, i.e., the absence of the gag reflex, depends on the desensitization of this area due to conditioning, this being brought about by the repeated control of the reflex during the act of fellatio… …The findings having been established the test was employed routinely in the neuropsychiatric clinic. Frequently it proved valuable in detecting the malingerer who attempted to obtain a discharge by professing homosexuality. Presented with the gag test findings the soldier would invariably change his story or admit having lied for selfish gains.”
Image: flickr/NCBI ROFL: I vaaaant to suuuuck your…
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: That’s one miraculous conception.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: So THAT’s where that condom went…
Well, that’s what this art student calls his flipbook animation of almost pretty much everything. And if by “everything” you mean everything that’s violent with stabbing and blowing up stuff and shooting and things. But it’s pretty funny.
Love the ending.
Tip o’ the timeline to Geekologie.
Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have discovered the first genes linked to stuttering — a complex of three mutated genes that may be responsible for one in every 11 stuttering cases, especially in people of Asian descent [Los Angeles Times]. Scientists have long suspected that stuttering has genetic roots, as it’s often seen in families and twins, but this is the first time they’ve identified genes linked to the problem.
Dennis Drayna, the geneticist who led the study, said he was shocked that two of the implicated genes were linked to rare, fatal metabolic disorders [USA Today], but noted that must stutterers don’t suffer from those disorders. Surprisingly, the genes that were altered in the stutterers are involved in removing metabolic waste from brain cells.
The researchers analyzed a section of chromosome 12 in a large Pakistani family and found that there were several mutations in three particular genes. “We think a special group of cells in the brain are particularly sensitive to these subtle mutations in these genes,” Drayna said [BusinessWeek]. He suspects that the mutated genes still partially function, but likened the system to a car that needs a tune-up: “It still runs but not quite right. Some cells in the body need this to run like a Ferrari in order to function properly and those cells are involved in the production of speech in the brain,” he continued [BusinessWeek].
Drayna said that this finding, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, would be instrumental in identifying children who might develop a speech impediment later on in life. This could help parents preclude future problems by getting the child into speech therapy early on. The National Institutes of Health estimates that there are 3 million people in the United States afflicted with this speech impediment–many of them children. About 60 percent of these people have at least one family member who stutters. Researchers believe that other genes will be found that also play a role in stuttering.
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Image: iStockphoto
For those of you waiting with bated breath…
I’m happy to announce that, following last week’s news about the Lancet’s retraction of the 1998 paper that started the modern vaccine-autism scare, I decided to focus my first Point of Inquiry episode on this topic–and secured a guest who’s probably the best in the business for that purpose. I’m referring to Dr. Paul Offit, Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, life-saving inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, and most important for our purposes, the author of the single best book on the whole autism-vaccine fiasco, 2008’s Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure.
I’ve now read Offit’s fantastic book twice, and greatly enjoyed the conversation we had about it for the show. (Minus the gazillion technical hoops I had to jump through to learn how to record the program, which will hopefully get a lot easier.) I won’t tip my hand about the show any further–it airs tomorrow, please listen then–but I’m confident that listeners will enjoy and learn much from it (even though, given that this is my first show as a radio host, utter perfection is hardly to be expected).
I’ll have a post tomorrow as soon as the show is up and available for download.
What are we going to do with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?
The panel got itself in major trouble a few weeks ago when it admitted a major goof, that it included a detail in its 2007 report saying the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, which is a huge exaggeration. Chief Rajendra Pachauri stood by the report as a whole as a sound piece of research, and indeed the first section of the four-part series, which is about physics of anthropogenic climate change, has seen no errors surface. That section laid out the evidence that human activities are boosting carbon dioxide levels in the air and are therefore warming the planet. But four mistakes have been discovered in the second report, which attempts to explain how global warming might affect daily life around the world [Christian Science Monitor].
The IPCC’s errors have given ammunition to deniers of global warming, especially U.S. politicians who have spent the recent batch of snowstorms beating their chests over how wrong climate scientists must be for there to be a blizzard in February. (Though to be fair, and in recognition of the fact that all politicians are opportunists, people on the other side have blamed single storms like Hurricane Katrina on climate change, which is just as silly.) So, to save some face for climate science, several scientists have proposed ways to fix the IPCC in this week’s issue of the journal Nature:
1. Split Into Three Panels
The University of East Anglia’s Mike Hulme proposed breaking up the IPCC into three: one group for science, one to evaluate how climate change could alter various regions of the globe, and one to debate policy options. Says Hulme: “This restructuring would allow clearer distinctions to be made in areas that have been troublesome for the IPCC: assessments of published knowledge versus policy analysis and evaluation; the globalized physical sciences versus more geographically and culturally nuanced knowledge; a one-size, top-down model of ownership and governance versus more inclusive, representative and regionally varying forms of governance.”
2. Make it Independent
For German researcher Eduardo Zorita, it’s not just the IPCC’s mistakes that make it lose public trust, it’s the fact that it’s full of government nominees that occupy “a blurred space between science and politics,” and work under unmanageable stress and deadlines. Zorita says the a climate body ought to be more like the US Congressional Budget Office—accountable, but independent.
3. Don’t Throw Out the Baby With the Bathwater
Thomas F. Stocker has worked with the IPCC, and defends it as an “honest broker,” but not a perfect one. Rather than throwing away something that he argues has served the world well for two decades, he recommends against swift overhaul because of a spat of bad news. That includes resisting calls to speed up the process: “The panel concluded that the production of comprehensive reports roughly every six years is preferable because it ensures the robustness required for a thorough and rigorous assessment. Faster turnover would jeopardize the multi-stage review and thus compromise authority and comprehensiveness.”
4. Hurry Up Already
Jeff Price of the World Wildlife Federation takes the opposite stance: “The current period between assessments is too long. One option would be for the IPCC, or another body, to produce an annual review, assessment and synthesis of the literature for policy-makers (for example, three annual review volumes with a synthesis chapter in each volume) prepared by experts in the field.” He also recommends shorter, quickly produced papers in the interim between the longer tomes.
5. Open It Up
Citing the black eye that climate scientists got from the University of East Anglia emails controversy, IPCC contributor John R. Christy says that the IPCC needs to be as open as it can be, even at the risk of a little craziness: “An idea we pitched a few years ago that is now worth reviving was to establish a living, ‘Wikipedia-IPCC’. Groups of four to eight lead authors, chosen by learned societies, would serve in rotating, overlapping three-year terms to manage sections organized by science and policy questions (similar to the Fourth Assessment Report).… Controversies would be refereed by the lead authors, but with input from all sides in the text, with links to original documents and data. The result would be more useful than occasional big books and would be a more honest representation of what our fledgling science can offer. Defining and following rules for this idea would be agonizing, but would provide greater openness.”
If you want to read the full text of the recommendations, they’re currently available for free at Nature.
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The Intersection: Sounds Familiar
The Intersection: How the Global Warming Story Changed, Disastrously, Due to “ClimateGate”
Image: flickr / bsabarnowl
If you play right-wing radio-host Rush Limbaugh to a bunch of bark beetles, could the sound kill them? Or could rock music make make insects so annoyed that they’ll stop whatever they’re doing? In one of the goofier experiments we’ve heard of lately, scientists decided to find out.
The researchers had a serious goal: to find a way to combat invasive beetles and to stop their destructive, tree-destroying, bark-eating behavior. The answer: loud, nasty, and offensive noises.
Changing ecosystems and climate change have allowed destructive bark beetles to spread out through new territories, where they’re wreaking havoc on the ponderosa, pinyon, and lodgepole pines. So scientists took infested trees back to the lab and played the “nastiest, most offensive sounds” they could think of to the beetles in the bark. Enter, Limbaugh, Queen, and Guns n’ Roses.
The beetles were not amused.
Discovery News reports:
The sounds disrupted tunneling, mating and reproduction for the beetles, making it harder for the insects to eat through the trees. The project, dubbed “Beetle Mania,” concluded that acoustic stress may disrupt the tenacious insects’ feeding and even cause the beetles to kill each other, according to a presentation recently at the National Meeting of the Entomological Society of America.
But after a while, the beetles grew accustomed to the noxious noises, researchers found. What ticked off the beetles even more than Limbaugh was the manipulated call of the insect itself. The scientists took the aggression call made by males of the “tree killer” Dendroctonus species and altered the call, making it longer and louder than usual. This drove the beetles nuts. When they heard this sound right before mating they turned on each other, with the male beetles tearing apart the females.
So, what might the beetles have appreciated, if not loud, clangy, obnoxious music? The scientists suspect they might quite like their Liverpool-born namesakes.
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Image: The Rush Limbaugh Show
Does the human brain have a “God spot”–a particular region that regulates feelings of spirituality and connection to the universe? One year ago, DISCOVER reported on a scientific study of spiritual people that couldn’t pinpoint one location in the brain as key to controlling religious feelings. But now a new study proposes that there is a link between the physical make-up of the brain and attitudes towards religion and spirituality.
By observing brain cancer patients before and after brain surgery, researchers in Italy have found that damage to the posterior part of the brain, specifically in an area called the parietal cortex, can increase patients’ feelings of “self transcendence,” or feeling at one with the universe. The parietal cortex is the region that is is usually involved in maintaining a sense of self, for example by helping you keep track of your body parts. It has also been linked to prayer and meditation [New Scientist].
The study, led by psychologist Cosimo Urgesi of the University of Udine in Italy, surveyed 88 brain cancer patients before and after surgery to remove their tumors. They were made to fill out a questionnaire regarding their beliefs, including a section to check their measure of “self-transcendence.” People score highly for this trait if they answer “yes” to questions such as: “I often feel so connected to the people around me that I feel like there is no separation”; “I feel so connected to nature that everything feels like one single organism”; and “I got lost in the moment and detached from time”. The same people also tend to believe in miracles, extrasensory perception and other non-material phenomena [New Scientist].
The scientists found that before the surgery, patients with parietal cortex tumors reported higher levels of self-transcendence than patients with tumors in the frontal cortex. After the tumors were removed, the parietal cortex patients had even higher self-transcendence scores, while the frontal cortex patients showed no change.
The researchers say these findings, published in the journal Neuron, suggest that selective damage to the parietal cortex caused a specific increase in religiosity and spirituality. Patients who had parietal cortex tumors removed also dealt better with bad news regarding their mortality and health; while the ones with problems in the frontal cortex were more bitter about health problems. Urgesi hypothesized that naturally low activity in parietal regions in people without either brain damage or cancer could predispose them to self-transcendent feelings, and perhaps even to religions that emphasize such experiences such as Buddhism [New Scientist].
Critics point out that the study left a lot of unanswered questions, and note that directly equating spirituality to the self-transcendence scale is somewhat controversial. But other researchers see this study as an important step in understanding the religious brain. Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania said, “Sometimes people are quite skeptical about combining spirituality and religion with neuroscience,” he says. “This is one of the few things I’ve read that gives the hope that some of these questions might be tractable” [ScienceNow Daily News].
Related Content:
80beats: God on the Brain: Researchers Probe the Neural Circuitry Behind Religious Beliefs
DISCOVER: The God Experiments showcases five researchers who study religious experiences
DISCOVER: Dalai Lama Speaks Language of Science
Image: Cosimo Urgesi
I like my iPhone, kinda. It’s not that great as a phone, but it does have lots of fun apps. The maps hardly ever tell me to take a wrong turn at the last second, and I rather enjoy taking fuzzy red photos in low light levels.
Snark aside, there are a lot of good science and entertainment apps for the iPhone. But because I am so stubbornly reality-based, it didn’t occur to me that there would be some apps that border — if not flounce solidly into — alt-med nonsensery.
That is, until I received an email from BABLoggee Cameron Carr, who told me about an app that cures headaches.
Hmmm.
Called, oddly enough, “Headache”, it uses “… principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine [that] teach that energy imbalances in the body often contribute to headache symptoms, and these imbalances can be corrected with pressure to specific points on the body.”
Energy balances! Wow, that sure sounds sciencey! Except whenever you talk to people who believe in this, they can never really tell you what energy is, or how it flows, or what precisely it does. I guess it only sounds sciencey.
So basically, this app embraces both the ancient and the modern, but with a slippery grip on both.
My favorite line in the app description is, “Selected by licensed acupuncturists, these points may bring you safe, natural, effective relief.” Hmm, just “may”? And c’mon, “natural”? The app can make your phone emit sounds or vibrate, which it claims “may” relieve your headache if you hold the phone against these imagined points. How is that “natural”? Even Steve Jobs wouldn’t claim that.
Having this stuff supported by acupuncturists doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence either. Acupuncture is the idea that sticking needles at certain locations in your body can restore the balance of this energy flow. If that’s true, acupuncture can be tested to see if it works. Surprise! It has been, and it doesn’t. Or, to be more precise, it doesn’t work any better than the placebo effect.
The thing about headaches is, they can have lots of causes. Sometimes they go away by themselves, sometimes they don’t. Certainly the placebo effect will help some percentage of the time, as might a gentle vibration (just as a gentle neck massage might relieve some symptoms as well). So testing a product like this isn’t easy… and there are approximately a bajillion other products like it, so they’ll never all get tested. There are a hundred ridiculous products — no, probably ten thousand — for every person actually willing to do a proper scientific test of its efficacy. There’ll never be an end to them.
I cannot say whether this app really works, or is thinly disguised quackery. Given the description on the app’s page, I suspect it’s just another alt-med claim with little or no evidence in support of it, just as I suspect it’ll do quite well. Just as the company’s Aulterra cell phone EM neutralizer probably does quite well (and you have to read that page to believe — or disbelieve — it) despite there being no credible evidence that cell phones cause any harm… unless you’re using one while driving, or skydiving.
Science pays in the long run, but stuff you just make up pays off really well in the short run. And since it’ll never, ever, go away, nonsense pays off in the long run too.
I wish there were an app to cure that.