Author: Discover Main Feed

“Tennessee high schools will be getting guidelines from the state next fall on teaching the Bible as part of a secular curriculum”.

Yes, it’s a comparative literature class. Yes, it’s legal. Yes, I would even approve of this… in theory. In practice?

Right. Read the title of this post again.

Still, in better news, you may remember the Mississippi anti-evolution bill I wrote about, submitted to the legislature there as an obvious wedge for creationism. Well, it died in committee, so the Magnolia State gets itself a reprieve. I’m glad; I didn’t have a “Mississippi: Doomed” graphic ready yet. But I’ll keep the draft waiting just in case.

Tip o’ the coming ACLU lawsuit to Fark.

The Point of Inquiry podcast would be nothing without its founder and host, D.J. Grothe, who has now moved on to serve as the president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. I’m pleased that DJ has commented on the new hosts, including yours truly:

All three of the new hosts are perfect for their new roles. I first met Chris Mooney in the late ’90s when I was just getting involved with CFI while in grad school. Over the years, I have really enjoyed seeing him succeed at bringing the public’s attention to important issues of science education and public science policy, both through his best-selling books and his national media appearances. And I’ve enjoyed interviewing him a number of times on Point of Inquiry. Bob Price, an engaging thinker on matters of historical Biblical criticism and popular nonsense claims, will be an excellent host for episodes dealing with religious skepticism. I have known Bob and have admired his work for many years, and recently had the pleasure of spending a weekend with him in the middle of Missouri at a skepticism conference. He is one of the best conversationalists I know, and one of the most popular guests we’ve had on Point of Inquiry. Karen Stollznow is a rising star in the skeptical movement, and an active paranormal investigator. She has experience with podcasts and I think she will bring a fresh perspective to discussions of the paranormal and pseudoscience. I sincerely wish all three new hosts well, and look forward to seeing what Point of Inquiry becomes going forward.

You can read D.J.’s whole post here. And I want to personally thank him for his vote of confidence. I know I have shoes to fill….

Success of self-administered home fecal transplantation for chronic Clostridium difficile infection.

“Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) can relapse in patients with significant comorbidities. A subset of these patients becomes dependent on oral vancomycin therapy for prolonged periods with only temporary clinical improvement. These patients incur significant morbidity from recurrent diarrhea and financial costs from chronic antibiotic therapy. We sought to investigate whether self- or family-administered fecal transplantation could be used to definitively treat refractory CDI. We report a case series (n=7) where 100% clinical success was achieved in treating these individuals with up to 14 months follow up.”

Thanks to Caryn for today’s ROFL!
Photo: flickr/★Debs★

And in case you didn’t get our title reference:

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A few days after the White House released its budget that proposes axing NASA’s Constellation program and providing more support to private space flight, the Obama administration began to follow through on the second part of that equation. NASA has announced that it’s giving $50 million to five companies to support new space vehicles.

That $50 million isn’t from the revised budget, but rather the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (or in more common parlance, the $787 billion federal stimulus package). Nevertheless, NASA chief Charles Bolden said these five companies–Sierra Nevada Corporation, Blue Origin, Boeing, Paragon Space Development Corp., and United Launch Alliance–would play a large part in future plans. “Ladies and gentlemen, these are the faces of the new frontier. The vanguard,” said Bolden. “We will certainly be adding to this group in the near future” [Space.com].

Sierra Nevada received the largest grant: $20 million for the development of their “Dream Chaser,” a seven-person crew vehicle based on the Hl-20 runway landing, heavy lifting body concept (looks similar to the canceled Crew Return Vehicle for the ISS) [Universe Today]. Boeing received $18 million to advance its work on a personnel capsule that could be launced by various different rockets; the company has partnered with Bigelow Aerospace on the project. Blue Origin, the pet project of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos that DISCOVER has covered before, was awarded nearly $4 million to develop the escape system for its module. The others received funds for environmental controls on board their spaceships or for monitoring the health of old rockets that could be reused.

Those totals are small compared to the $3.5 billion NASA has already provided SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation to develop vehicles to reach the International Space Station, as well as the monetary support that could reach private space companies if Congress approves Obama’s budget with its change of direction for NASA. But Bolden acknowledged that this announcement was tied to the Administration’s new plans, and NASA will be working more and more with these companies in the days to come.

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Bad Astronomy: Give Space a Chance
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Image: flickr / PauloReCanuto

Apropos of my recent post showing a Hubble image of two asteroids colliding, the website Word Spy just happened to have a funny choice for their word of the day: cosmophobia, “the strong and irrational fear that in the near future the earth will be destroyed by some cosmic event.”

Personally, I figured it’s really for people who don’t like vodka, triple sec, cranberry and lime juice all mixed together, which is silly. Unless it’s headed for you at 30 km/sec. Because that’ll give you a pretty wicked hangover.

Picture the classic shoot-out in a Western movie: The good guy and the bad guy face each other, their hands quivering over their gun holsters. The bad guy reaches for his weapon, causing the good guy to react–he whips out his pistol and BAM! The hero triumphs. Physicist Niels Bohr once had a theory on why the good guy always won shoot-outs in Hollywood westerns. It was simple: the bad guy always drew first. That left the good guy to react unthinkingly – and therefore faster. When Bohr tested his hypothesis with toy pistols and colleagues who drew first, he always won [New Scientist].

But new research suggests that Bohr didn’t have it exactly right. In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists suggest that people do move faster when they are reacting to what is happening around them–but not fast enough for a heroic gunslinger to save his own life.

Researchers set up an experimental (and bullet-less) duel to study two types of movement, and found that “unplanned actions” were faster than “planned actions.” Pairs of participants were put in a button-pressing competition with each other…. “There was no ‘go’ signal,” said Dr Andrew Welchman from the University of Birmingham, who led the research. “All they had to go by was either their own intention to move or a reaction to their opponent – just like in the gunslingers legend” [BBC]. Welchman found that the subjects who started the sequence of button-pressing first didn’t move as quickly as their partners who were reacting to the action. Those reactive participants pressed their buttons 21 milliseconds faster.

Welchman observed: “If you’re making a cup of tea that would be an intentional decision. If we then knock the cup of tea off the table, the reactive comes into play as we try to catch the cup as fast as possible” [BBC].

But the button-pressing duel also revealed that the reactive party was critically delayed. A “reaction time” of 200 milliseconds elapsed between the moment the first player hit a button and when the second player began to move, which meant that the reactive player never won the duel. Welchman notes that the same reaction time would slow down a cowboy, so in a gunfight, the 21 millisecond reactionary advantage would be unlikely to save you [BBC].

The researchers plan to investigate whether there are two different brain processes for “planned actions” and “reactive actions.” They hope future findings will help patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease, who have greater trouble with intentional movements like picking up a ball on the table, as opposed to catching it when thrown at them. This might be evidence that particular areas of the brain affected by Parkinson’s contribute more to intentional actions than reactive ones. If this turns out to be the case, then it may also be possible to develop some strategies to ease movement in such patients [University of Birmingham].

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Image: Wikipedia/ James G. Howes

I’ll be a judge again this year for the National Academies Communication Award, a $20,000 prize for excellence in reporting on science. The prize is awarded in four categories:

• Book
• Magazine/Newspaper
• Film/Radio/TV
• Online

The nominations are now open. More information can be found here.

The next time your partner isn’t in the mood for some nookie, how about tempting him or her with a piece of… er… pork? It may sound strange, but Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez swears that a little bit of pig has a whole lot of pop to it.

Reuters quotes the president:

“I’ve just been told something I didn’t know; that eating pork improves your sex life… I’d say it’s a lot nicer to eat a bit of grilled pork than take Viagra,” President Cristina Fernandez said to leaders of the pig farming industry. She said she recently ate pork and “things went very well that weekend, so it could well be true.”

Well, maybe pork could spice things up in the bedroom, but plenty of other foods have previously been rumored to be aphrodisiacs, like oysters, bananas, figs, strawberries, raspberries, sweet basil, and garlic. It also helps to remember that President Fernandez made this remark while addressing bigwigs from the pig farming industry, and that the country is trying to get beef-happy Argentinians to eat more pork.

Speaking of pigs, there’s related news from Europe. A new law approved by the upper house of the Dutch parliament bans human sex with animals, which until now was legal in the Netherlands, providing the animal was unharmed. The new law also prohibits the production or distribution of animal pornography, dealing a body blow to–ahem–animal lovers around the world.

Reuters reports:

Given the illicit nature of the product, precise figures on animal pornography video sales are difficult to find, but the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, in a 2007 survey, found that distributors in the Netherlands were responsible for some 80 percent of bestiality videos worldwide.

So, no more crazy horse-lady-man-tortoise videos anymore. Which could potentially be a blow to frustrated Chinese migrant workers who, the Chinese government worries, aren’t getting enough action. Guangdong province, whose export industries are powered by millions of migrant workers from across China, is home to many men who have left their wives behind–and 36 percent of those married men, according to a new China Daily survey, are sexually repressed.

The provincial government is now anxious that these men could be out and about, indulging in unsafe sex. Meanwhile, women may also be corrupted, China Daily reported, and could be turning to the internet for release–going as far as “participating in the online sex industry, such as chatting to men online while nude.”

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DISCOVER: The Science of Great Sex at 80

Image: iStockphoto

As I’m writing, blogging, and more, there’s a guy who patiently stands by me through everything. He doesn’t mind listening as I endlessly discuss the trials and tribulations of a postdoc while he tirelessly works to prepare for his. It doesn’t upset him that my perspective occasionally ruffles the feathers of others in his field–including those friendly with his awesome advisor John Willis. He doesn’t even complain about how late he needs to come collect me from the airport constantly. Instead, he helps me get the details right whenever I have a question, brings me along on cross country road trips to the field, and has a kind word no matter what the DNA sequence looks like on any given day. And he always supports my crazy ideas with boundless encouragement and enthusiasm.

So today I want to congratulate my wonderful, brilliant fiancé David Lowry, who just received his Ph.D. in evolutionary genetics and genomics at Duke. (Photo left was taken just before his final seminar talk). David’s a damn good field and lab biologist who’s taught me everything I know about speciation, adaptation, Mimulus–and so much more. His research on understanding ecotype formation amazes me and I’m so excited to see where it goes next!

And directly to David: You continue to inspire me every day and I love you.

What’s better than a gorgeously stunning image of a massive cluster surrounded by delicate, wispy nebulosity?

Well, nothing, really. Unless you can use it for SCIENCE!

[Click to gigantisize.]

Purty, ain’t it? That’s NGC 3603, a very large star-forming region in our own Milky Way Galaxy, lying about 20,000 light years away. It can only be seen from the southern hemisphere, which is why the European Southern Observatory folks got this image using the ginormous Very Large Telescope, an 8-meter behemoth in Chile (and actually, Ginormous Telescope would be a cool name).

Not too long ago — no more than a million years, give or take — a lot of the stars forming the central cluster there were born. There are so many that they appear to overlap, but that’s an illusion due to the blurring of the image from the Earth’s atmosphere (and the nature of light itself only allows us to make star images so small).

Lost in that crowd is a star designated NGC 3603 A1, and it is the most massive star to ever have its mass directly measured. It’s actually a binary star, two monsters locked in a gravitational dance, orbiting each other once every 3.77 days — which right away tells you this is a special pair, possessing enough gravity to toss themselves around that rapidly.

Using simple laws of physics discovered by Kepler back in the 1600s, we can measure the masses of each star in the duo. The heftier of the two is a whopping 116 times the mass of the Sun — which is close to the upper limit of what a star can get to without tearing itself apart. The more massive a star, the more luminous it is, and the surface can get so hot that any material there gets blown off… so that sets a lid on how big a star can get. Details vary depending on a lot of factors, but really 116 times the mass of the Sun is about as big as you’ll ever get for a star in our galaxy.

The other star in the binary is no slouch, tipping the scales at 89 solar masses. If it were just sitting out there all by itself it would rate as a phenomenal star, too. But its partner still wins the prize.

And how do I know those stars were born no more than a million years ago? Because massive stars don’t live long, and any beasts like these two live short lives indeed. It won’t be long before they detonate as supernovae, lighting up with a violence and fury that will make each outshine the rest of the stars in our entire galaxy combined!

Not only that, but pretty much every star you see in that cluster is of the massive and luminous classes astronomers call O and B stars, bruisers with enough oomph to explode as supernovae. How many stars do you see in that cluster? Dozens? So think about that: each one of those will become a titanic supernova, wreaking havoc across dozens of light years, sending out blasts of light to outshine galaxies, and throwing out octillions of tons of gas.

Eventually that gas, laced with heavier elements created in the nuclear forge of the supernova blast wave itself, will slam into, merge with, and seed the surrounding gas in the nebula. Compressed beyond its ability to sustain itself, the gas will collapse and form more stars. Some of these may be massive ones which will again repeat the cycle, and some will have lower mass, be fainter, cooler. They may form planets from those heavy elements. It will be a rocky birth, given the environment, but the vagaries of orbital dynamics dictate that eventually those systems will leave the nebula and move out on their own in the Milky Way. And a billion years from now, two, four billion, who knows what creatures may roam the surfaces of any of those worlds.

And will they see more stellar factories dotting the galaxies starscape, and wonder what their own looked like, all those eons ago?

There’s been lots of gloating, arguing, and tossing around of cliches like “game-changing” in the wake of a new study on abstinence education and its potential to reduce sexual activity in teens. But the study isn’t exactly what the political forces trumpeting its arrival would like you to believe.

The study appears in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. In its introduction, study leader John B. Jemmott III concludes that “Theory-based abstinence-only interventions may have an important role in preventing adolescent sexual involvement.”

So what’s actually in the study? Between 2001 and 2004, Jemmott’s team studied 662 African-American middle schoolers in the northeastern United States, who were each paid $20 a session to attend sex-education classes. The kids were randomly assigned to one of several different programs: One program emphasized only abstinence, one both safe sex and abstinence, one just safe sex, and the last was a control group that simply taught healthy living—eating well, exercise, and the like.

According to the study, which relied on self-reported surveys, about half of the kids in the safe-sex only class began having sex over the next two years, compared to a third for the students in the abstinence-focused program and 42 percent of those in the combination program. But while abstinence-only backers jumped for joy at the results, the journal ran an accompanying editorial cautioning that public policy should not be based on the results of a single study and that policy makers should not “selectively use scientific literature to formulate a policy that meets preconceived ideologies” [The New York Times]. That speaks directly to the posture of Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association, who said the study “just verifies what we’ve known intuitively all along.”

Jemmott’s study will now rightfully enter the debate as the first to show that abstinence programs could work in some situations. But there are other reasons to question how much his results mean for the country at large (other than the previous studies casting doubt on the effectiveness of abstinence-only education). He says the team chose to study only African-American students, and at such a young age (about 12 on average), because “African-Americans tend to have a higher rate of early sexual initiation than others,” and starting young could allow for intervention. Researchers will have to duplicate the study with other demographic groups and time spans to sort out this question further.

In addition, the abstinence-only program that Jemmott’s team devised wasn’t exactly the “wait until your married” approach that many social conservatives would like to see taught to kids. It did not take a moralistic tone, as many abstinence programs do. Most notably, the sessions encouraged children to delay sex until they are ready, not necessarily until married; did not portray sex outside marriage as never appropriate; and did not disparage condoms [The Washington Post].

Among those critical of the Jemmott study was Heather Boonstra of the Guttmacher Institute, which released data showing that after a decade-long decline, America’s teen-pregnancy rate rose 3 percent in 2006. Ms. Boonstra is among those who believe some of that uptick may be due to the reliance on abstinence-only programs [Christian Science Monitor]. Once again, though, correlation doesn’t imply causation. So although the trend reversal coincides in time with President Bush’s emphasis on funding abstinence programs, we can’t say for sure that’s the main cause.

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Image: iStockphoto

Talk about keeping up with technology. The Pope recently urged his priests to go forth and blog and to use social networking sites to keep up with their flock, but a priest in Poland has already taken it one step further. He now fingerprints his flock.

The priest, who lives in Southern Poland has taken to fingerprinting school children to check if they have been attending mass regularly. If they’ve checked in the requisite 200 times over three years, then the kids are spared exams prior to their confirmations. The kids love the idea.

Reuters interviewed one young churchgoer:

“This is comfortable. We don’t have to stand in a line to get the priest’s signature (confirming our presence at the mass) in our confirmation notebooks,” said one pupil, who gave her name as Karolina. Poland is perhaps the most devoutly Roman Catholic country in Europe today and churches are regularly packed on Sundays.

While the fingerprinting idea seems to have gone down well with the kids, it must make some adults nervous that someone out there (possibly in the Vatican?) has access to a huge database of tiny fingerprints.

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Image: iStockphoto

Joan Oates’s sharp blue eyes spotted something that was not right. Standing on the windy summit of a vast, human-made mound in northeastern Syria, the wiry 81-year-old archaeologist noticed an ugly scar that had been left by a backhoe on one of the smaller mounds ringing the ancient city of Nagar, where she has excavated for a quarter century. Oates had just arrived to begin her latest season at the site, and this blemish on her cherished landscape annoyed her. Two young men on her team volunteered to investigate the damage. They returned, shaken. Jumping into the trench, one of them had come face-to-face with a skull. “Everywhere we looked, there were human bones,” one recalls. “There were an enormous number of dead people.”

More than 100, it turned out, and their remains had rested there undisturbed for nearly six millennia. What Oates’s team found that hot autumn day in 2006 were the remnants of a ferocious battle or a brutal mass murder on a scale unprecedented for such an early date. And the inadvertent discovery lay within sight of what is currently our best and oldest evidence of early urban life. Digging just a few hundred yards away on the main mound of what today is called Tell Brak, the archaeologists recently uncovered large buildings and extensive workshops from the same period—around 3800 B.C.—as well as imported material and fancy tableware.

The dual finds make Brak a unique window into the time when humans first began to live in cities, trade over long distances, and, apparently, organize warfare on a mass scale. The conventional wisdom holds that urban living began nearly 1,000 years later and nearly 1,000 miles to the southeast in the so-called cradle of civilization once known as Sumer, located in today’s Iraq. When civilization arrived in this northern edge of the Mesopotamian plain, the story goes, it was bestowed by the Sumerians from fabled cities like Ur, Uruk, Eridu. But this hulking mound in a remote corner of Syria (tell means “hill”) offers a radical new view of just how, where, and why our globalized lifestyle may have gotten its start.

One of the most mind-blowing things I learned about while writing my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life was the incredibly diversity of microbes that call our bodies home. These microbes outnumber our cells by about ten to one, and collectively they have thousands times more genes than found in the human genome. E. coli may be the most familiar of these lodgers, but it is just small player in an inconceivably complex ecosystem on which our health depends.

So I was very excited to interview Rob Knight of the University of Colorado, a biologist who’s been co-authoring a string of stunning papers recently on the thousands of species that live on our skin, in our mouths, in our guts, and elsewhere on or in our bodies. Our conversation is now available on the latest “Meet the Scientist” podcast. We talk about how microbes help each other thrive in our bodies, the way bacteria in our guts release neurotransmitters, how microbes may regulate your weight, and much more. Check it out.

We’re very pleased to see The Intersection listed among the Top 30 Science Blogs by the UK Times–esp in such great company! We’d also like to congratulate Phil, Bora, Tim, Revere, Brian, Carl, David, Neurotopia, Ed, RealClimate, Orac, and the rest of the terrific bloggers that made the list!

This “Top 30″ also highlights the need to encourage more women to express ourselves online, as men continue to be the far more dominant sex in the science blogosphere. And although CM and I might have substituted a favorite group of physicists for a particular climate change denier, we’re truly honored to be included in this impressive group!

Our thanks to the UK Times!

From Eternity to Here addresses the problem of the arrow of time — why is the past different from the future? But Chapter Six is all about time travel, and in particular the interesting version in which you travel backwards in time. Whether it’s possible, what rules it would have to obey, and so on. And now — even though I’m sure there aren’t more than two or three of you out there who haven’t purchased the book already — you can get a sneak peek of part of that chapter. It’s going to be the cover story in the March issue of Discover, and the story is already available online.

And here’s a bit of multimedia bonus: to get the cool exploding-clock image, the intrepid editors worked with Biwa Studios to film high-speed video of exploding clocks, and you can see the whole videos online. They run the events forwards and backwards, just in case your personal arrow of time needs to be calibrated.

One may ask, why is there a chapter about time travel in a book about time’s arrow? Just couldn’t resist the temptation to talk about everything related to “time”? In fact there is a deeper reason. In the real world, the laws of physics may or may not allow for closed timelike curves — physicist-speak for time machines. (Probably not, but we’re not as sure as we could be.) But apart from the difficulty in constructing them, time machines boggle our minds by offering up logical paradoxes — what’s to prevent you from traveling into the past and killing your parents before they met? There is a consistent way to handle these paradoxes, simply by insisting that they never happen. (And we’re still hopeful that the folks at Lost adhere to this principle, regardless of the surface interpretation of last night’s Season Six premiere.)

The reason why that’s hard to swallow is because we can’t imagine anything that stops us from killing our parents, once we grant the existence of time machines. We conceptualize the past and future very differently — the past is settled once and for all, while we can still make choices about what happens in the future. That, of course, is the arrow of time. At the heart of what bothers us about time-travel paradoxes is the difficulty of establishing a uniform arrow of time in a universe where time loops back on itself.

Of course the easy, and probably correct, way out is to simply believe that time machines don’t and can’t exist. But disentangling the demands of logic from the demands of common sense is always a rewarding exercise in its own right.

I’m very pleased to hear that TAM London DVDs are now available for pre-order!

W00t!

They have 12 hours of skeptical and scientific wonderfulness on them, including performances by James Randi, Richard Wiseman, Brian Cox, Ariane Sherine, Simon Singh, Jon Ronson (who wrote Men Who Stare At Goats), as well as exclusive interviews, backstage footage, and lots more.

To give you an idea of what it’s all about, event organizer Tracy King (whom I thank very much for putting this together) has posted a preview on YouTube:

Yeah, you want this. And proceeds go to the JREF, so it’s a good cause, too! So go! Get yer DVD!

While astronomers continue to learn about peculiar phenomena in distant galaxies, our own sun’s behavior still presents a mystery. So NASA’s next mission, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, will watch every move the sun makes in the hope of fully figuring out its cycles of sunspots, solar flares, and other activity.

Set to launch next week aboard an Atlas V rocket, the SDO will snap 60 high-resolution images of the sun every minute. Using three specific science instruments, SDO will measure how much extreme ultraviolet light the Sun emits, map plasma flows in the Sun, map the surface of its magnetic field, and image the solar atmosphere [Astronomy]. Scientists hope this huge catalog of images, taken at a resolution far better than that of HDTV and measuring about 1.5 terabytes of data per day, will help them connect the flares and spots on the solar surface to what’s happening down below, inside the star.

Barbara Thompson, the SDO project scientist, says connecting cause and effect in the sun will help us know what’s coming, and how it will impact life on Earth. “We know things happen on the sun which affect spacecraft, communications and radio signals. If we can understand the underlying causes of what is happening then we can turn this information into forecasts” [The Times].

Astronomers have observed the sun’s cycles for centuries. It oscillates between minimum and maximum number of sunspots over the course of about 11 years, and reverses its magnetic field on a 22-year cycle. But the sun can break its patterns, thwarting scientists trying to predict its activity with greater accuracy. The most famous example is the Maunder Minimum, when few sunspots at all appeared on the sun between 1645 and 1715. The most recent minimum was unusually quiet, too, for reasons that perhaps the SDO’s future observations could explain.

Better understanding of the sun’s rhythms is critical not simply for scientific curiosity; peaks of solar activity can disrupt the communications and power systems that we all rely on. A 1989 magnetic storm shut down power grids in Canada and the United States, and one of the most powerful of all time disrupted telegraph systems in 1859. The current solar cycle has the British concerned: After a period of unprecedented calm within the massive nuclear furnace that powers the Sun, scientists have detected the signs of a fresh cycle of sunspots that could peak in 2012, just in time for the arrival of the Olympic torch in London [The Independent]. Look out, Olympic broadcasters: Here comes the sun.

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Space Weather and the havoc it can cause
DISCOVER: Seeing Sun Storms in Stereo

Image: SOHO/NASA/ESA

My latest Science Progress blog post riffs on the news about Andrew Wakefield and the Lancet yesterday. In case you didn’t hear:

The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, has now gone to the extreme of fully retracting a notorious 1998 paper by gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues, purporting to show a shocking new cause of autism—the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine. Wakefield and his team studied digestion in 12 children with various types of behavioral disorders, nine of whom were autistic, and found inflammation in the intestines. The vaccine was blamed for letting toxins loose into the bloodstream, which not only caused the intestinal problems but, it was conjectured, then also affected the children’s brains.

The 1998 paper hit the British public like a thunderclap, triggering a decline in use of the MMR vaccine as well as a resurgence of the measles. It was the opening shot in the vaccine-autism controversy that still rages today (albeit in varied forms, not all of which still focus on the MMR vaccine). But the credibility of Wakefield’s work has since taken a steady stream of hits, culminating in this last devastating blow.

The post then goes on to relate the whole Wakefield story, and to extrapolate: Now that we know this study has been pretty much totally discredited, whence the vaccine-autism controversy, which the study kicked off back in 1998? Shouldn’t it, too, go away?

Sadly, I’m not optimistic about that happening. You can read why here.

Thanks to the UK Times for including The Loom among their top science blogs. It’s great company to be in, including fellow Discover blogs Bad Astronomy and the Intersection. I am just going to assume that the Times has not yet discovered Cosmic Variance, because its omission is a gross oversight.

I also think their description of the Loom as “authoritative science writing” may be a bit of an oversight, too (as flattering as it maybe). I mean, really: Duck porn? Tattoo parlors? Cockroach zombies? Other adjectives come to mind…