Author: Discover Main Feed

We’re having a big problem in America these days, with the forces of antireality on the march to deceive our children. Evolution is a big target for them, of course, and I need not belabor the battle here.

But what can we do? We need to excite kids about the real world, and about evolution in particular. And we need to do it in a wonderful way, grabbing their attention, staying positive, and revealing all the beauty and majesty of the way life has self-propagated on this planet of ours.

Daniel Loxton has come to the rescue! He’s the brain behind Skeptic Magazine’s Junior Skeptic, a terrific feature designed to get young kids thinking. His experience putting that together is clear in his new book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be. This book has everything for younger readers: excellent writing, simple yet compelling layout, and a diversity of topics in evolution and its related studies which give the reader a solid background in evolutionary biology. That’s critical, as it gives them a basis on which they can build when they read more about the topic.

And Daniel covers a lot of topics, like transitional fossils, population growth, diversity of species, how we know that life changes over time, mutations, natural selection, and more. He even deals simply and efficiently with the topic of religion at the very end, telling the reader to talk to family, friends, and religious leaders about it. While I might disagree with him a bit (really, just a bit) over the boundaries of religion and science we’ve had a few discussion on Twitter about this — I think he deals with the topic elegantly in the book. After all, the book isn’t about religion, and instead of being arrogant or dismissive, he relies on the book itself being an effective treatment of the topic. I think that was a shrewd move.

And I simply cannot praise the illustrations enough, which were done by Daniel himself. WOW! The drawings are simply magnificent; the Archeopteryx on the cover will grab any kid’s attention, as will the gorgeous T-Rex on the first page. My favorite drawing was this one, which he also uses as a banner for the book:

It shows two women of different eras, and it beautifully demonstrates our similarities and differences. And the woman on the right is an actual human — Daniel’s wife! — something of a well-known skeptic herself. I bet if you come to TAM with a copy of the book, you can find her yourself and get both her and Daniel to sign it…

I think this book is absolutely terrific, and if you’re looking for a simple statement about it, then how about this? Simply put, I would’ve loved this book when I was a kid. It would have made me want to be a scientist.

You can get buy a copy of Evolution through the Skeptics.com website, or if you donate $100 they’ll send you a copy for free. I know, it’s not really free then, but you’ll be helping out a good group of skeptics, so it’s a good thing to do. If you prefer, it’s also available on Amazon and Amazon.ca.

My suggestion: buy several copies and give them away as gifts to kids. And maybe one for your local school as well. I know they could use it there.

MediaBistro has the news.

CBS has let go of Daniel Sieberg, its science and technology correspondent.

What I referred to yesterday as the news business’s “science core” keeps on shrinking.

Insert rants below about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket….

Wii have a problem: a review of self-reported Wii related injuries.

“PURPOSE: The increasing popularity of the Wii video game console has been associated with a number of gameplay related traumas. We sought to investigate if there were any identifiable injury patterns associated with Wii use. METHODS: Utilising a database of self-reported Wii related injuries, the data was categorised by type of injury and game title being played at the time of injury. FINDINGS: We found that of 39 reported Wii related injuries over a two-year span, 46% occurred while playing the Wii Sports Tennis software. Further, we identified 14 distinct injury patterns sustained during gameplay. Of these injuries, hand lacerations were the most common, accounting for 44% of the total number of reported cases. CONCLUSIONS: Injury associated with video game play is not unique to the Wii, nor is it a new phenomenon. However, the Wii console appears to have a higher rate of associated injuries than traditional game consoles because of its unique user interface. We review the literature and discuss some of the medical complications associated with the Wii and other video game consoles.”

Photo: flickr/Joe Shlabotnik

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We have another MAJOR win for reality and skepticism, folks. And this is a good one: Meryl Dorey just announced she’s stepping down as head of the Anti Australian Vaccination Network, and that the AVN itself may shut down.

Ah, the hits keep on a-comin’.

Regular readers may remember Ms. Dorey, that hero of the antivaxxers who has twisted the truth about vaccinations so much it’s shocking her tongue hasn’t turned into a Möbius strip. She has said no one dies from pertussis anymore… when little four-week-old Dana McCaffery died of that very disease, because herd immunity in her area of Australia was so low. Dorey is an HIV denier. She thinks doctors lie and poison babies. She viciously defames those who disagree with her. It goes on and on.

The timing of this announcement is very interesting, seeing as how the Australian Skeptics have been hammering at Dorey and the AVN, and in fact Dorey and the AVN may be held accountable for breaking Australian laws about dispensing medical advice without a license; they are currently under investigation by the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission.

They’ve also been getting a lot of negative publicity, which is the very, very least that they deserve. My friend, the tireless Rachael Dunlop, has been instrumental in exposing the truth about Meryl Dorey, and is largely responsible for holding Dorey’s and the AVN’s feet to the fire.

Reading Dorey’s statement on the AVN blog is actually rather interesting. She says:

I am getting older; my children have missed out on so much so I could run the AVN; and at this stage in my existence, I need to be able to work on this subject and still have a life. Without a large injection of capital behind me, I simply cannot continue.

In other words, she’s leaving to spend more time with her family. Hmmmm. Also, her use of the word “injection” nearly made every molecule in my irony gland explode at the speed of light.

OK, no more snark. Dorey, in that blog post, is asking someone to step up and take her place. I have no doubt someone will, so I expect the AVN will go on without her, spreading their falsehoods, slathering their fearmongering over an unsuspecting and trusting audience, and helping thousands of Australian babies be exposed to pertussis, measles, mumps, polio, and all sorts of other preventable diseases that would have been otherwise eradicated by simple vaccinations.

I can hope, though, that without Dorey’s voice, the AVN will be far weaker, and if the charges against them hold up, they may fall apart entirely. That would be a very good thing indeed.

So whaddya know? Dorey claims she wants to save people’s lives. This move on on her part may finally do it.

Tip o’ the syringe to HappySinger and the Young Australian Skeptics for this news.

These. Are. Brilliant.

Dear Media, Dear Homeopathy, and Dear Astrology are three polite letters written by, um, Science. Well, really, “the personification of the abstract concept of Science, just to clarify,” as he says in his own letters.

These are funny, dead on, satirical, clever, and dagnabbit I’m ticked I didn’t think of this first. Oh well. To be honest, I’m just glad someone did. Oh– they are ever-so-mildly not safe for work, but just for language, not content.

These won’t convince any believers, of course. But they do make excellent points, and they’ll help rally the troops, I think. That’s pretty important too! I hope he writes more.

If you were looking to make tomatoes last longer in your kitchen, then researchers in India might have the answer. Scientists at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR) in New Delhi have found that by suppressing two enzymes (alpha-Man and beta-Hex) associated with ripening, they could push tomatoes to last close to 45 days before they turned mushy. Their research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science journal.

The tomatoes in which the alpha-Man enzyme was suppressed were 2.5 times firmer than conventional tomatoes, while those lacking in beta-Hex were two times firmer [Moneycontrol]. The genetically modified (GM) tomatoes also survived for days without refrigeration, which scientists say is great news for farmers in developing nations; India, for example, loses almost 40 percent of its annual produce of fruits and vegetables to spoilage during transportation.

The genetically-modified tomato would have to pass a series of field trials, including animal safety tests, before it can be considered for commercial cultivation. The NIPGR scientists say the process could take three years, perhaps longer [The Telegraph]. The researchers have also been reported as saying they will consider the same technique to try and make fruits like papayas and bananas last longer. However, GM tomatoes and fruits would likely encounter stiff resistance from consumers who don’t want food they perceive as unnatural in the grocery stores. Also, no word from scientists on how their GM tomatoes taste.

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Image: iStockphoto

Every year, not long after the state of the union address, the administration unveils its budget request to Congress. Then comes the long authorization and appropriations process; in an election year I’d bet that they try hard to have it done before November. The Obama administration’s request came out yesterday, and so it’s time to take a look at how science may fare next year.

Jeffrey Mervis at ScienceInsider over at the AAAS has a nice article summarizing the general picture for science in the budget, including an 8% increase for the National Science Foundation and a smaller 3% boost to the National Institutes of Health. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (headed by the president’s science advisor) has a set of fact sheets on science policy. Check out the one on doubling the science budget – the administration is on track for doing just that by 2017. Will Congress support that?

But, being funded by it, I always start first with the DOE Office of Science. The DOE has a summary document with budget highlights; for the Office of Science the most succinct table shows the breakdown by program and year (click on it for a bigger version):

Overall, the OS is looking at a 4.4% increase over FY2009, not including the stimulus bump in 2009, listed in the column called “recovery”. In a year when the administration wants to freeze discretionary spending, that is not bad for science. It’s clearly coming from savings elsewhere, meaning someone’s program got cut, and those people (and their congressional representatives) will be fighting like crazy to restore it.

Within the OS there are winners and losers as well. Basic Energy Sciences, which covers a host of research in condensed matter including nanotechnology, materials, and multipurpose facilities such as the large light sources, gets the lion’s share of the OS budget, and are slated for a 12% increase. I think this reflects the administration’s desire to foster research in areas that could lead in the near to medium term to new sources of energy. That increase, though, along with increases for advanced computing and bio/environment research, has to come from the other programs in OS, and it appears that fusion energy (-10%) and a line titled “Congressionally Directed Projects” . Now what on earth is that?

Now, I am not a Washington insider by any means, but I don’t recall seeing that designation explicitly in the tables before. I believe, though, that it means projects funded through Congressional earmarks. Are all earmark-funded projects being killed? It certainly appears so…

Within my own field the tea leaves say that the administration is requesting that the Tevatron remain in operation through 2011, support participation in the LHC and work on future upgrades to the experiments, and begin to develop the next big project at Fermilab, so-called “Project X” (which deserves a post all by itself some day). Project X will deliver an ultra-intense beam of protons for neutrino and rare decay experiments, including the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) in the Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota. There is also a substantial appropriation for the Dark Energy Survey; Fermilab is building the camera.

So begins the 2011 budget cycle.

People all have their own ideas of what a time machine would look like. If you are a fan of the 1960 movie version of H. G. Wells’s classic novel, it would be a steampunk sled with a red velvet chair, flashing lights, and a giant spinning wheel on the back. For those whose notions of time travel were formed in the 1980s, it would be a souped-up stainless steel sports car. Details of operation vary from model to model, but they all have one thing in common: When someone actually travels through time, the machine ostentatiously dematerializes, only to reappear many years in the past or future. And most people could tell you that such a time machine would never work, even if it looked like a DeLorean.

They would be half right: That is not how time travel might work, but time travel in some other form is not necessarily off the table. Since time is kind of like space (the four dimensions go hand in hand), a working time machine would zoom off like a rocket rather than disappearing in a puff of smoke. Einstein described our universe in four dimensions: the three dimensions of space and one of time. So traveling back in time is nothing more or less than the fourth-dimensional version of walking in a circle. All you would have to do is use an extremely strong gravitational field, like that of a black hole, to bend space-time. From this point of view, time travel seems quite difficult but not obviously impossible.

These days, most people feel comfortable with the notion of curved space-time. What they trip up on is actually a more difficult conceptual problem, the time travel paradox. This is the worry that someone could go back in time and change the course of history. What would happen if you traveled into the past, to a time before you were born, and murdered your parents? Put more broadly, how do we avoid changing the past as we think we have already experienced it? At the moment, scientists don’t know enough about the laws of physics to say whether these laws would permit the time equivalent of walking in a circle—or, in the parlance of time travelers, a “closed timelike curve.” If they don’t permit it, there is obviously no need to worry about paradoxes. If physics is not an obstacle, however, the problem could still be constrained by logic. Do closed timelike curves necessarily lead to paradoxes?

While North Carolina is buried in snow, it’s good to remember Spring is on the way…

H/T Zuska

For the last five years, Oscar the cat has been sniffing out death. Literally.

The cat lives at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation in Providence, Rhode Island, a facility that cares for people with severe dementia.

Back in 2007, geriatrician and Brown University professor David Dosa wrote a perspective in The New England Journal of Medicine claiming that Oscar is the cuddlier, feline equivalent of the Grim Reaper. According to Dosa, his mere presence at the bedside of severely ill patients is viewed by doctors and nurses alike as an almost absolute indicator of impending death.

Now Oscar is back in the news, as Dosa has just published a book expanding on the story.

The Telegraph reports:

The tortoiseshell and white cat spends its days pacing from room to room, rarely spending any time with patients except those with just hours to live.

If kept outside the room of a dying patient, Oscar will scratch on the door trying to get in.

When nurses once placed the cat on the bed of a patient they thought close to death, Oscar “charged out” and went to sit beside someone in another room. The cat’s judgment was better than that of the nurses: the second patient died that evening, while the first lived for two more days.

Over the years, Oscar has racked up an impressive record; Dosa claims the cat has morbidly predicted the deaths of about 50 patients at the nursing home. Dosa suggests Oscar’s unique ability could stem from an ability to detect ketones–distinctly odored biochemicals given off by dying cells. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds; after all, some dogs have been trained to sniff out cancer. However, since Dosa has only speculated on the science that could, maybe, potentially be at work here, we’re not going to consider this anything more than a sweet and odd story for the time being.

Or maybe there’s something more ominous going on. Could Oscar be an “angel of mercy,” taking it upon himself to put patients out of their misery? Judging from Dosa’s article in The New England Journal of Medicine, he may have half-suspected this himself:

“There will be no more deaths today, not in Room 310 or in any other room for that matter. After all, no one dies on the third floor unless Oscar pays a visit and stays awhile.”

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Image: New England Journal of Medicine

Oh, this is wonderful to hear: The Lancet — a leading UK professional medical research journal — is retracting the paper published by Andrew Wakefield back in 1998 that linked vaccines with autism.

The paper has been found to be multiply and fatally flawed, with Wakefield and his work being thoroughly discredited. As the Lancet editorial itself states:

Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al. are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation. In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.

That’s great news, especially after Wakefield had his head handed to him last week by the GMC over his unethical and irresponsible behavior that led to this horrible paper being published in the first place.

The Lancet statement is a bit bloodless… but they are a professional research journal and not a blog, so it’s not appropriate for them to call out Wakefield in more emotional — and utterly deserved — terms. It’s up to the blogs to call out Wakefield for his tireless efforts in creating of the modern antivaccination movement, which is becoming so successful that measles, mumps, pertussis, and other preventable diseases are on the rise again. And to note that not only was his research wrong, but that he may have faked his data. And to say that he has a huge conflict of interest here, since at the time he was involved in creating an alternative to vaccination that would make him very, very rich if people became scared to vaccinate their kids. And to inform people that Wakefield was in the pocket of lawyers trying to sue the vaccine industry. And to basically call out the entire antivax movement for the incredible damage they have done and continue to do to public health.

All that’s left now is for the GMC to officially sanction Wakefield, disbar him, essentially, to finish this all up officially.

Of course, that won’t even slow Wakefield or the antivaxxers. They don’t care for the real world, based on evidence and fact. They are, for all intents and purposes, religious zealots now, believing in Wakefield, Jenny McCarthy, and the rest with such fervor that there is literally no amount of evidence that can ever sway them. And they will continue to spin, fold, and mutilate the truth, while we watch as diseases rise back from the dead, infecting hundreds of thousands of people, and killing many of them.

Never forget what’s at stake here. Never.

My thanks to the many, many BABloggees who sent me email or tweeted about this.

When Beethoven got frustrated with his deafness and was struggling to hear the music that he had composed, music historians report that he laid his piano down on the floor without the legs and pounded the keys loudly in an attempt to feel the vibrations. Other times, he tried to hear by clenching a stick tightly between his teeth with one end touching the piano so the sound could transfer from the piano to the stick, and then travel through his teeth to finally reach his ear.

We aren’t sure how much of his music he heard this way, but a new device uses some of the same conduction techniques to restore hearing to people who are deaf in one ear. Thanks to a couple centuries of technological enhancement, there are now no sticks involved.

The new system, called SoundBite, has two distinct pieces. One piece clips behind the ear and houses a receiver, a wireless transmitter, and attached microphone. The other part goes inside your mouth, and clips onto your teeth.

Discovery News explains how it works:

The microphone captures sound. A digital audio device processes the sound signal and transmits it wirelessly to the device inside the person’s mouth. The sound is then carried along the teeth, through the jaw bones to the inner ear. It’s particularly helpful to patients who have problems with their middle and outer ear, because sound bypasses these places entirely.

Wonder what Beethoven would have said about that.

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Image: Sonitus Medical

Brazil’s controversial plan to build the third-largest dam in the world right in Amazon rainforest got the go-ahead from the environmental ministry this week. The ministers approved the permits for the dam project, and now companies can begin to bid on the building rights. But whoever wins will have to pay out at least some money to protect the local environment.

The 11,000-megawatt Belo Monte dam is part of Brazil’s largest concerted development plan for the Amazon since the country’s military government cut highways through the rainforest to settle the vast region during its two-decade reign starting in 1964 [Reuters]. Nearly all huge dam projects raise environmental concerns because they flood vast areas and can change ecosystems so drastically. But the Belo Monte, to be built on the Xingu River, has the additional trouble of being in one of the most important habitats in world and near to populations of indigenous peoples. The Xingu is a tributary of the Amazon River.

In the announcement yesterday, environment minister Carlos Minc tried to reassure everyone that Belo Monte would not be an ecological disaster. “Not a single Indian [sic] will be displaced. They will be indirectly affected, but they will not have to leave indigenous lands,” he said [The Guardian]. But Brazilian officials say that about 12,000 people living in towns beyond the protected wild areas will be affected by the construction, and may have to be relocated. Whatever company wins the bid to build the dam will have to pay in excess of $800 million to protect the environment and offset damage caused by the dam, and to resettle the displaced.

But Minc’s assurances didn’t satisfy all the project’s critics, who say diverting the flow of the Xingu river will still lead to devastation in a large area of the rainforest and damage fish stocks [BBC News]. They also contend that his pledge not to displace native populations is untrue, because the dam could flood nearly 200 square miles and affect 40,000 people there.

When completed, the dam could power the homes of 23 million people, the BBC reports. And with Brazil’s population growing steadily, Belo Monte won’t be the last dam project in the Amazon: 70 more are in the planning stages.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / Matanya

On February 18 – 20, in my home town of Boulder, Colorado, the Lunar and Planetary Institute is holding a very interesting conference called The Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference 2010 (NSRC2010). It’s to promote the awareness of the coming revolution in access to space provided by private companies.

This revolution is not only coming, it’s practically here. I know some folks who plan quite seriously to be launched into space next year. If you’re interested in this field, then this is the conference you want to attend:

NSRC2010 will provide a forum to learn about the research and EPO [Education and Public Outreach] capabilities of these new systems, their experiments, and EPO integration processes. NSRC2010 will also provide input on vehicle design requirements for science and education.

That sounds like a fascinating meeting to me. I’m hoping to attend myself, but I’m unsure if I’ll be in town then; I’ll know more soon and let y’all know here. I really want to go; a lot of solid people are running this, including my friends Alan Stern and Dan Durda, as well as many other space scientists. Sponsors include Virgin Galactic, the United Launch Alliance, and Space X! So we’re talking serious contenders here.

I hope to see some BABloggees there. The future of space travel may very well be in our hands, and this meeting will help put it there.

In what looks like an act of conveniently looking the other way, social networking site Facebook doesn’t seem to mind that a new Facebook fad is violating the site’s terms of service.

If you are a self-respecting Facebooker, you must have come across a bunch of people changing their profile pictures during “Doppelganger Week,” in which people change their picture to that of the celebrity they think they resemble.

While this is allowing a busload of people to unabashedly proclaim that they resemble the world’s hottest celebrities, it also flies in the face of the Facebook terms of service. As CNET reports, the legalese states explicitly:

“You will not post content or take any action on Facebook that infringes or violates someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law… We can remove any content or information you post on Facebook if we believe that it violates this Statement.” So unless you took that celebrity photo yourself or bought the rights to it, it’s probably infringing on someone’s copyright.

But while you were explicitly violating FB terms of service by changing your profile picture to that of Darth Vader and then to Angelina Jolie before settling on Lassie, the social network didn’t really think it was an issue. Reports CNET:

“Users are responsible for the content they post, but as always, Facebook will respond to requests for removal that it receives from copyright holders,” spokeswoman Brandee Barker said in an e-mail to CNET. “In this case, we have received no such requests.”

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Image: Facebook

Last week, the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) sky survey program, designed to sweep the heavens looking for near-Earth asteroids, spotted something really weird; an elongated streak that looked as if two asteroids had collided. Just days later, Hubble was pointed at the object, and what it saw was really really weird:

[Click to armageddonate.]

This is a false-color image showing the object, called P/2010 A2, in visible light. The long tail of debris is obvious; this is probably dust being blown back by the solar wind, similar to the way a comet’s tail is blown back. What apparently has happened is that two small, previously-undiscovered asteroids collided, impacting with a speed of at least 5 km/sec (and possibly faster). The energy in such a collision is like setting off a nuclear bomb, or actually many nuclear bombs! The asteroids shattered, and much of the debris expanded outward as pulverized dust.

Now, let me just take a moment and say HOLY HALEAKALA WHAT WE’RE SEEING HERE IS THE COLLISION BETWEEN TWO PREVIOUSLY UNDISCOVERED ASTEROIDS THAT EXPLODED LIKE THERMONUCLEAR WEAPONS WHEN THEY IMPACTED!!!

Phew. OK, I feel better. I needed to get that off my chest.

First off, to be clear we’re in no danger from this event. It was really far away (in human terms; 140 million km or 90 million miles — the object’s orbit keeps it farther from the Sun than Mars — so we’re not about to get pummeled with debris. And while the explosion energy was quite large — certainly much larger than any weapon ever detonated on Earth — it wasn’t radioactive, in case you’re worried about that sort of thing. This was a kinetic explosion, caused by a high-speed collision, and not an actual detonation of any kind.

Looking at the image, the bright spot to the left is most likely what’s left of one of the two asteroids, a chunk of rock estimated to be a mere 140 meters (450 feet) across. In the press release they’re not clear about the curved line emanating to the right of the nucleus. It may be — and I’m spitballing here — dust blown back from a stream of chunks, since the tail is broad and appears to originate from that swept curve, and not from the nucleus itself. The other filament perpendicular to the curve is from yet another piece of debris.

Despite how much this looks like a comet, ground-based observations indicate no gas is present, meaning this was from asteroids colliding, not comets, which have significant amounts of ice which turn to gas near the Sun. The collision energy was high enough to produce a lot of gas if any were present. That clinches this being an asteroid impact.

Also, the orbit of the object indicates it’s an asteroid, and it appears to be part of a well-known group of asteroids called the Flora family, which share similar orbital characteristics, and are probably remnants themselves of an ancient breakup of a much larger parent asteroid.

Nothing like this has ever been seen before. Sure, Hubble and about a hundred other telescopes observed the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slam in to Jupiter in 1994, but that was different than seeing two asteroids hit. Asteroids are small, and very very far apart on average (don’t believe scenes like that in “Empire Strikes Back”), so a collision like this is extremely rare, and catching it from such a great vantage point rarer still. But we have a lot of eyes on the sky, and the more we watch the more we’ll see.

And we’d better. An object 140 meters across hitting the Earth would, to be technical, suck. Hard. Whatever caused Meteor Crater in Arizona, an impact scar over a kilometer across, was itself probably about 40 meters across. An object like 2010 A2, which is three times the diameter, would have 20 -30 times the mass, and do considerably more damage. I’m glad groups like LINEAR are out there patrolling the skies for such things. We need to learn as much as we can about these asteroids, so that we can prevent the next Meteor Crater from occurring.

Over at ABCNews, a headline earlier this week read, “For Women Who Want Kids, ‘the Sooner the Better’: 90 Percent of Eggs Gone By Age 30.” As expected, the story popped up all over facebook during the next few days with ensuing commentary on female fertility. To which I must respond…

Let me begin with the opening sentence:

By the time a woman hits 30, nearly all of her ovarian eggs are gone for good, according a new study that says women who put off childbearing for too long could have difficulty ever conceiving.

Hyperbole anyone? (I mean sure, that outta scare lots of women enough into reading what follows and clicking through the links.) The piece reports that according to a study out of the University of St. Andrews and Edinburgh University, women have lost 90 percent of their eggs by the time they are 30 years old. But wait just one second. Yes it’s true that fertility drops significantly between 21 and 35, but it’s more complicated than this topical claim suggests, and furthermore, there’s a lot more to the story. So before women nearing the big 3-0 (like me) and younger rush off to get preggers, let’s examine this claim a bit…

Baby girls are born with one to two million follicles (immature eggs), but the majority die off early. By the time we reach puberty, we have, on average, about 400,000. From then on, we shed one developed egg–along with about one thousand follicles–every time we ovulate. So in the end, about 400 such follicles ever reach maturity. While this study tries to quantify the number of shed over time, it bothers me the way this story seems to overstate a sense that women are somehow running out.

There are so many layers to this issue, it would be impossible to list all of them in a blog post, so I think what’s most important for everyone to remember is relatively simple: To actually make a baby, it takes just one.

Today the British medical journal The Lancet, which published the 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield implying autism was linked to vaccinations, fully retracted the study in the wake of increasing allegations of misconduct against the lead author.

The 1998 paper, based on a small sample of 12 children, implied a connection between an autism-like disorder and a triple vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella [AFP]. Despite the small sample size, and a commentary published by The Lancet encouraging caution in interpreting the results, the Wakefield paper became one of the chief sources cited by the modern anti-vaccination movement. His assertion caused one of the biggest medical rows in a generation and led to a big fall in the number of vaccinations, prompting a worrying rise in cases of measles [Reuters].

But accusations of malfeasance and misinterpretation have dogged the Wakefield study in the dozen years since its publication. In 2004, many of the lead authors tried to distance themselves from Wakefield’s interpretation of the results. At the same time, The Lancet published a statement (pdf) on the controversy: while defending the publication of the study, they accepted that, in hindsight, they may not have after accusations of a conflict of interest — Dr Wakefield was in the pay of solicitors who were acting for parents who believed their children had been harmed by MMR [BBC News].

The last straw came last week, when Britain’s General Medical Council finally issued a damning statement criticizing not Wakefield’s results, but rather his unethical methods. He was found guilty of conducting tests like spinal taps on children that hadn’t been approved by an ethics committee and that may not have been in the children’s best medical interest; on another occasion he paid children at his son’s birthday party for their blood samples.

The council found him guilty of “callous disregard” for the pain that the children in the study might have suffered, as well as dishonesty and irresponsibility. The GMC has yet to announce whether it will sanction Wakefield or the other two scientists named in the statement, but the report was enough for the The Lancet. The journal’s retraction concludes, “we fully retract this paper from the public record.”

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Image: iStockphoto

If you have been itching to clamber across glass windows or cling to a ceiling like Spiderman, that wacky dream may today be one step less wacky than it was yesterday. Researchers Paul Steen and Michael Vogel of Cornell University think they can help you tap into your inner Spidey through a palm-sized adhesive device that could one day allow people scale walls.

The scientists didn’t work with any real-life arachnids while designing their tech, instead drawing inspiration from a beetle species in Florida that can stick and unstick from leaves at will. The leaf beetles can withstand pulling forces of 60 times its own body weight by using the surface tension of many tiny drops of water, which form “liquid bridges” between the beetle’s body and the leaf.

The scientists’ contraption looks like a little plate and could be worn either on the palm or as a boot sole. While the device isn’t strong enough to be tested on people yet, it did keep this Lego man dangling from a slick glass shelf.

The Register describes how this device works:

In the new beetlemimetic tech, the sticky plate has thousands of tiny holes in it, just microns across. An electric field — generated by a regular 9-volt battery — causes tiny droplets of water to be squeezed through the holes, each one generating a minuscule sticky blob in contact with the target surface.

The electrostatic pump is cunningly designed so that no more water can come out once it’s switched off, so preventing the blobs running together and losing effectiveness. When the electric field is reversed, the droplets are sucked back into the holes and the sticking effect disappears.

So far their prototype with 1,000 300-micron holes has managed to support 30 grams, and they estimate that a bootsole unit measuring 3 inches by 5 inches would theoretically be able to haul a full-grown man. You can watch how this device works in this video here, in which researchers daringly dangle a Hershey bar.

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Image: Micheal Vogel

Scientists knew that the Aztec people of pre-Columbian Mexico had domesticated the turkey by the time Europeans arrived, and that those birds are the forebears of the giant birds Americans devour in gut-busting volume every Thanksgiving. But a new study (pdf) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the Aztecs weren’t the only early Americans to tame the turkey: People of what is now the Southwestern United States, including the Anasazi, separately domesticated the birds.

Two teams that had been separately studying the bones and the fossilized dung of ancient turkeys joined forces for this find. Studying 38 different sites, they found that the Aztec peoples accomplished the feat first. But later, perhaps around 200 B.C., they saw that the people of the Southwest United States duplicated the achievement. The two instances of domestication appear to have been separate, based on DNA analysis of ancient turkey remains. However, the different Native American groups could have been in contact with each other, sharing turkey-raising tips [Discovery News].

Curiously, the turkey population raised by people who lived in what’s now the United States is distinct from the kind of turkeys that today’s Americans eat. In the 15th century, Spanish Conquistadors took Aztec turkeys back to Europe. The birds proved popular, and were bred with local subspecies before being reintroduced to North America by colonial settlers in the 17th century [Wired.com]. So while your Thanksgiving bird may trace its roots to the Aztecs, the turkeys that once roamed the Southwest United States may have gone extinct, the researchers say–or they could have living relatives in the wild turkeys still roaming around.

While turkey has become a large part of the American diet beyond just holiday feasts, study leader Camilla Speller argues that these early Americans first went to the trouble of domesticating the birds for uses other than food: “Interestingly, the domestic turkeys were initially raised for their feathers, which were used in rituals and ceremonies, as well as to make feather robes or blankets. Only later, around 1100 A.D., did the domestic turkeys become an important food source for the Ancestral Puebloans” [Discovery News].

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Image: Courtesy of The Amerind Foundation, Inc., Dragoon, Arizona. Eric J. Kaldahl, Photographer