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Skeptical reporter @ 2013-06-07

Jun 8

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Skeptical Reporter for June 7^th, 2013

The number of New York parents who had their child skip at least one required vaccine due to religious reasons increased over the past decade, according to a new study. What’s more, researchers found counties with high religious exemption rates also had more whooping cough cases – even among children that had been fully vaccinated. States set their own requirements on which vaccines a child must have received to enter school. All allow exemptions for medical reasons, and most, including New York, also permit parents with a religious objection to forgo vaccination. “Particularly in New YorkState, I do believe that parents are using religious exemptions for their personal beliefs,” said Dr. Jana Shaw, who worked on the study. Studies have shown cases of whooping cough, also known as pertussis, have been on the rise across the U.S. Researchers suspect that’s due to the use of a new type of pertussis vaccine – which is safer, but less effective over the long run – and to more children missing or delaying vaccination.

Journalist Tony Ortega has written an article about the Church of Scientology using a natural disaster to spread the faith: “One of our tipsters forwarded to us an e-mail that will be all too depressingly familiar to our longtime readers. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Scientology is leaping on the chance to take advantage of another natural disaster to promote itself. In this case, Texas Scientologists are being urged to head to Oklahoma, the site of several recent deadly tornadoes. Once they get there, the “volunteer ministers” will do what they’ve done in places like New York after 9/11 and Haiti after its big earthquake: set up yellow tents and pretend to be useful by giving out “touch assists” — running their fingers over people as if it were a form of faith healing — and handing out Scientology booklets”.

In the United States, the FDA is trying to better supervise mobile apps that promise users to help them with various medical conditions. The FDA said it will publish final guidelines for medical apps later this year, potentially sweeping tons of new apps under its jurisdiction. But some app makers and lawyers are worried that the FDA’s approach could be overkill. “If the FDA regulates in a broad brush fashion, that will stifle innovation,” said Matthew Kaminer, general counsel for Epocrates, a company that makes a drug-reference app for doctors, which has more than 1 million active users. Part of this issue is that it remains unclear exactly what type of app should be considered “medical,” and which of these should be regulated by the government. Medical apps can be grouped into two broad categories: those designed for patients to use on their own, and apps designed for healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses, to help them treat patients. And there is a larger problem in distinguishing between apps that offer legitimate medical functions, and those that are little more than digital snake oil.

Turkey has a long history as a secular state, for mostly Islamic people. So it comes as no surprise that a TV program is promoting Creationism. But what may be surprising is the women, or at least how they’re dressed, spreading that message. Turkey’s Islamic creationist guru Adnan Oktar is a regular fixture on his TV channel A9. Oktar and his cult-like organization have been in the Turkish media space for decades. But only last year did he deploy his new weapon in the battle against Darwinism: A flock of ostensibly attractive, curvy young women. The “kittens,” as he calls them, call him “master” and generally react at the right moments and nod their heads in agreement with whatever he says. Some of the women have their own programs in which they also “debunk” evolution, among other things. The spectacle has attracted attention beyond the creationist community. Turkish artist Pinar Demirdag describes herself as a “visual narrator” of “extreme happenings.” She says she finds herself drawn to Oktar’s kittens, who look eerily as though they were all created in a Turkish Barbie factory. Demirdag calls the spectacle a “sensation overload,” skillfully combining Islam, sexual objectification, demagoguery and Versace.

And now let’s look at some news in science.

Europe has launched its giant robotic freighter towards the International Space Station (ISS). The vehicle, dubbed Albert Einstein, is carrying food, water, equipment and fuel for the orbiting outpost. The space truck left Earth on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana at 18:52 local time on Wednesday. At 20.2 tones, the Albert Einstein freighter is the heaviest spacecraft ever launched by Europe. The vessel will spend the next 10 days performing checks and maneuvers designed to take it to the vicinity of the 415 km-high station. Albert Einstein will stay attached to the ISS until October. Astronauts will gradually remove its 6.6 tones of supplies, replacing them with rubbish that has built up on the platform. When the freighter leaves the platform, it will take this refuse into a destructive dive into the Earth’s atmosphere.

A mouse-sized fossil from China has provided remarkable new insights into the origin of primates. At 55 million years old, it represents the earliest known member of this broad group of animals that includes humans. Scientists have called the diminutive creature Archicebus, which roughly translates as “ancient monkey”. They believe that its skeleton helps explain the branching that occurred at the very base of the primate evolutionary tree. The team puts Archicebus on the line leading to tarsiers, a collection of small arboreal animals now found exclusively in south-east Asia. But its great age and primitive features mean it sits right at the base of this lineage, and so it has much to say also about the emergence of the tarsiers’ sister grouping – the anthropoids, the primates that include monkeys, apes and us. It suggests the first of these anthropoids were, likewise, petite creatures scurrying through the tropical canopies that grew to cover the Earth shortly after the dinosaurs’ extinction. “We are all very curious about the ancestors of primates, including those of human beings. From this almost complete skeleton, we can conclude that our ancestors were a kind of very small animal. It was very active and agile; and it lived in the trees and fed on insects”, Dr Xijun Ni from the Chinese Academy of Sciences explained.

The UK population must be encouraged to eat less meat “over time” in an effort to make the global food supply more sustainable, MPs have said. The International Development Committee said increased growing of grain to feed cattle was reducing the resources for nourishing people. And food production companies that wasted too much should face “clear sanctions”. The committee’s report comes ahead of World Environment Day, which focused on the issue of global hunger. Prime Minister David Cameron will be hosting a G8 “hunger summit” in London. The global demand for meat is growing, with China more than doubling its consumption per person since 1985. The amount of meat eaten by people in the UK stood at 85.8 kg each in 2007, according to official figures. The UK Food Group suggests that the production of meat causes an annual “calorie loss” around the world equivalent to the need of 3.5 billion people.

Japan has built a new generation of trains that will travel at speeds of 500 km/h. The nation has successfully tested its new generation of “L0″ trains that use magnetic levitation, or “maglev” technology, to achieve record-breaking speeds. The L0 trains — the fastest in the world — are on schedule to be ready for passengers in 2027 on the line connecting Tokyo with Nagoya, a trip of about 351 kilometers that will take just 40 minutes instead of the usual 90 minutes. Japan inaugurated the era of high-speed bullet trains almost 50 years ago. Maglev trains use powerful magnets to levitate and propel the train’s cars, which rely on the principles of magnetic attraction and repulsion to hover above their track without using wheels.

And, now, in local news from Romania, we learn that

The cleanest hospital in Europe might be in Braşov. A private medical unit in Romania is fighting for the prized title with three other hospitals from Germany, Luxembourg and Ireland. Representatives of the World Health Organization have arrived in Braşov and declared the medical unit has the highest chances of winning. “We use high grade disinfectants in turn according to regulations. The hospital areas are cleaned according to a closely kept schedule. And we have monthly checks to verify the microscopic state of cleanliness”, Andreea Moldovan, a specialist in infectious diseases has declared.

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Skeptical reporter @ 2013-05-24

May 26

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Skeptical Reporter for May 24^th, 2013

In the United States, Ball State University has agreed to investigate complaints that a course taught by a physics and astronomy professor has crossed a line from being about science to being about Christianity. Science blogs have been discussing the course for a few weeks now. Ball State received a letter from the Freedom From Religion Foundation charging that the course — “The Boundaries of Science” — is being used “to proselytize students and advance Christianity.” The letter states that the course’s description makes it seem “to be an honest objective investigation regarding the intersection of science and religion.” But the letter notes that the syllabus and reading list includes creationists and “Christian apologists who lack any scientific credentials whatsoever,” while leading proponents of the idea that evolution is true (embraced by a wide scientific consensus) are not represented.

The founder of a controversial anti-immunization group has been accused of using apprehended violence orders to gag her critics. Former Australian Vaccination Network president Meryl Dorey has applied for AVOs against three of her most vocal opponents. As a special condition of the AVOs, she wanted the men banned from making online comments about her in “any derogatory manner”. She took out an AVO against Daniel Raffaele, who helped start the Stop the Australian Vaccination Network group, claiming he made threatening calls to her. Raffaele, who denied making any threatening calls, said he eventually agreed to the order because he was “sick of dealing with it”, although he made sure her “gag order” was struck out. “The only thing I was never going to agree to was being silenced on the internet. The information (the AVN) spread is dangerous and it’s not based on anything other than lies – and it costs lives”, Raffaele said. Western Australia-based Dan Buzzard, another AVN opponent, said Ms Dorey probably saw taking out the AVOs as a “quick and easy” way to silence her critics. Ms Dorey refused to comment on the applications but denied using the AVOs to shut up her opponents. She said she had received anonymous death threats and had only taken the AVOs out at the suggestion of police.

Two Philadelphia faith-healing churches have a long history of the youngest members of their congregation dying because parents refused medical care. Families who attend Faith Tabernacle Congregation in North Philadelphia and First Century Gospel Church in Juniata Park have lost more than two dozen children to illness since 1971, according to non-profit Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty, Inc. Both churches believe in the power of prayer over modern medicine. Two members, Herbert and Catherine Schaible stand charged with third-degree murder and other crimes after their 7-month-old son Brandon died from bacterial pneumonia, dehydration and a group B streptococcus infection on April 18. The Schaibles are members of the First Century Gospel Church. At least 22 children from the congregations have died from illnesses. In 1991, Faith Tabernacle lost five children to the measles after an outbreak. One child from First Century Gospel also died.

For the fourth time since 1956, voters in Portland, defeated a plan to add fluoride to the public water supply. For weeks, residents have been debating fluoridation, the addition of fluoride to tap water for the purpose of reducing cavities and tooth decay. About 60 percent of voters cast their ballots against fluoridation. “The measure lost even with my own ‘yes’ vote,” Portland’s mayor Charlie Hales said in a statement. “Disappointing, but I accept the will of the voters.” More than $1 million dollars was spent on the campaign, which is a considerable sum for a Portland-only election issue. In the period before the vote, proponents of fluoridation outspent anti-fluoridation groups by a 3-to-1 margin, public records show. Pro-fluoride groups say that fluoridation will help reduce cavities among poor children who don’t have access to dental care. Those in the opposing camp object to fluoridation’s possible negative health effects, like impaired brain development and function, and say the practice amounts to forced medication of the populace without consent. Fluoridation is supported by the American Medical Association, the American Dental Association and the CDC, which lists it as one of the top 10 most important public health measures of the 20th century.

And now let’s look at some news in science.

Excavations at an archaeological site in Bahrain are shedding light on one of the oldest trading civilizations. Despite its antiquity, comparatively little is known about the advanced culture represented at Saar. The site in Bahrain is thought to be the location of the enigmatic Dilmun civilization. The belief system here has a lot in common with those of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt”. According to Salman al-Mahari, the Bahraini archaeologist in charge, the Saar settlement divides into two: a residential zone and, at a small distance, the cemetery where the inhabitants buried their dead. Dilmun, one of most important ancient civilisations of the region and said to date to the third millennium BC, was a hub on a major trading route between Mesopotamia – the world’s oldest civilisation – and the Indus Valley in South Asia. It is also believed that Dilmun had commercial ties with ancient sites at Elam in Oman, Alba in Syria and Haittan in Turkey.

The United Kingdom’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has come up with a printed circuit board that falls apart when immersed in hot water. The organization has developed circuit boards made out of what they’re calling “unzippable polymeric layers” built to withstand the heat stressing and long-term thermal cycling. The layers easily come apart, however, when they come into contact with water of sufficient temperature for several seconds. The resistors, capacitors and integrated circuits, which don’t have to be changed or adapted from their current formats in any way, are mounted on the boards. But after the contact with hot water, they can simply be scraped off, ready to be harvested and reused in other devices. The NPL says the technology can be applied to three-dimensional structures and flexible electronics as well as rigid circuit boards. Lab tests showed that 90 percent of the components can be reused, compared with the 2 percent that can be salvaged from current boards.

A new breed of flu vaccine is being developed that provides better and broader protection than commercially available ones — at least in animal tests. Current flu vaccines use inactivated whole viruses and must be regularly remade to target the strains most likely to cause illness in the coming year. But the nanoparticles in the new vaccine would require fewer updates because they induce the production of antibodies that neutralize a wider range of flu strains. They could even protect against varieties of flu that have not yet emerged. “This is taking us on the road to a universal vaccine,” says Gary Nabel, now at the biotechnology firm Sanofi, who led the work in his former lab at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. The self-assembling nanoparticles can be made in the lab without having to grow real viruses in eggs or cell cultures, a time-consuming step of commercial vaccine preparation. “In theory, a new version could be produced quickly once a new pandemic virus had been identified, or a new seasonal variant started to circulate,” says Sarah Gilbert, a vaccine researcher at the University of Oxford, UK, who was not involved in the work.

On the 17^th of March, an object the size of a small boulder slammed into the lunar surface, creating a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything scientists had ever seen. NASA’s lunar monitoring program has detected hundreds of meteoroid impacts. For the past eight years, NASA astronomers have been monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. “Lunar meteor showers” have turned out to be more common than anyone expected, with hundreds of detectable impacts occurring every year. But they just got to see the biggest one yet. “On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. Anyone looking at the Moon at the moment of impact could have seen the explosion–no telescope required. For about one second, the impact site was glowing like a 4th magnitude star. Ron Suggs, an analyst at the Marshall Space Flight Center, was the first to notice the impact in a digital video recorded by one of the monitoring program’s 14-inch telescopes. “It jumped right out at me, it was so bright,” he recalls. The explosion caused by the impact was similar to one caused by 5 tons of TNT.

And, now, in local news from Romania, we learn that

The winner of the famous INTEL science contest has returned home, to Romania. Ionuţ Budişteanu has won not only international recognition, but also a check for 75.000 dollars. The 19 year old student from Râmnicu Vâlcea won the contest with his self-driving automobile.

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Skeptical reporter @ 2013-03-17

May 19

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Skeptical Reporter for May 17^th, 2013

Announcement:

Romania will host the first international humanist conference in Eastern Europe, on the 25^th of May. The conference „Education, Science and Human Rights” is hosted by the Romanian Humanist Association in partnership with the International Humanist and Ethical Union and the European Humanist Federation. The event will take place at the Parliament Palace and has speakers such as PZ Meyers and Richard Wiseman. So, if interested, don’t hesitate to purchase a ticket now.

A research endeavor in China, regarding the genetic sources of genius has come under fire. Researchers at BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) in Shenzhen, China, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, are searching for the quirks of DNA that may contribute to superior intelligence. Plunging into an area that is littered with failures and full of controversy, the researchers are scouring the genomes of 1,600 genius subjects in an ambitious project to find the first common genetic variants associated with human intelligence. The project, which was launched in August 2012 and will begin data analysis in the next few months, has spawned wild accusations of eugenics plots, as well as more measured objections by social scientists who view such research as a distraction from pressing societal issues. Some geneticists, however, take issue with the study for a different reason. They say that it is highly unlikely to find anything of interest — because the sample size is too small and intelligence is too complex. Earlier large studies with the same goal have failed. But scientists from BGI’s Cognitive Genomics group hope that their super-smart sample will give them an edge, because it should be enriched with bits of DNA that confer effects on intelligence. “An exceptional person gets you an order of magnitude more statistical power than if you took random people from the population. I’d say we have a fighting chance,” says Stephen Hsu, a theoretical physicist from Michigan State University, who acts as a scientific adviser and is one of the project’s leaders.

Family Radio, the Oakland-based evangelical network run by Harold Camping, who predicted the end of the world in May 2011 is in financial trouble, according to public financial documents. The nonprofit that runs Family Radio has sold its three largest radio stations, all cash generators. At the start of 2007, Family Radio was worth $135 million, according to its tax returns. By the end of 2011 its net assets had dropped to $29.2 million, even though Family Radio received $85.2 million in donations over that five-year period. In 2012, records show it took out a $30 million bridge loan to keep operating while awaiting the station sales proceeds; it is not clear whether that loan has been paid off. Former and current insiders allege the situation may be even worse than it appears, claiming donations have dropped almost 70 percent since the Rapture prediction proved incorrect, leading to numerous layoffs of longtime Family Radio staff members. Those insiders say the nonprofit mishandled the sales of the stations, reaping far less than they were worth, and is on the hook for millions of dollars to devotees who have loaned them money over the years.

A rhino-head heist spree swept Europe in 2011, as thieves raided museums and auctions houses in seven countries, prompting 30 investigations by Europol, 20 of which are ongoing. Similar heists have also been on the rise in Africa, as well as in the odd American backwater town. One happened in Dublin just last month. Sales in Vietnam are driving these robberies. The country’s appetite for rhino horn is so great that it now fetches up to $100,000/kg, making it worth more than its weight in gold. The surge in Vietnamese demand is fairly recent. Though rhino horn elixirs for fevers and liver problems were first prescribed in traditional Chinese medicine more than 1,800 years ago, by the early 1990s demand was limited. The removal of rhino horn powder from traditional Chinese pharmacopoeia in the 1990s had largely doused demand. But things started changing in 2008. Although there is no certain evidence for this rise in demand, the issue may have to do with a rumor that swept Vietnam in the mid-2000s that imbibing rhino horn powder had cured a Vietnamese politician’s cancer. That rumor persists to this day. In Vietnam, at least some respected doctors vouch for rhino horn’s cancer-curing properties. The country has had a surge in the number of wealthy citizens, but as in many fast-developing countries, the quality and availability of cancer care hasn’t kept pace with the economic growth rate.

Consumers should not buy sexual enhancement supplements, either online or in stores, because the products may contain undisclosed drugs that could cause serious harm, medical experts say. Although advertisements on sex supplements purport that the products improve sexual function, there is no evidence to support these claims, said Dr. Pieter Cohen, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. In fact, there is no non-prescription product that has any proven benefit for helping with erections, Cohen said. Oftentimes manufacturers secretly add prescription drugs, such as sildenafil (sold under the brand name Viagra) or tadalafil (brand name Cialis), so that customers continue to use the products, Cohen said. Sometimes these undisclosed drugs are slightly modified versions of existing drugs, which are completely experimental and have not been shown to be safe. “These products either do not work, or if they do work, are potentially harmful,” because they contain undisclosed drugs, Cohen said. In 2009, sex supplements tainted with high doses of diabetes medication caused more than 12 deaths in Asia. If doctors, lawmakers and legislatures don’t act soon to reduce exposure to these supplements, more deaths could follow, he stated.

And now let’s look at some news in science.

Google and NASA have joined up to study artificial intelligence by creating a computer that relies on the unique properties of quantum physics. To study artificial intelligence and create this computer, the two giants are forming the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, which will be housed at NASA’s Ames Research Center located in Silicon Valley. They expect the quantum computer, which will complete calculations way faster — by some estimates at least 3,600 times faster — than today’s supercomputers, will be up and running by the third quarter of this year. The quantum computer would be able to find complex patterns in information in order to determine creative outputs, a process called machine learning. “We believe quantum computing may help solve some of the most challenging computer science problems, particularly in machine learning. Machine learning is all about building better models of the world to make more accurate predictions,” Google noted in a blog post announcing the partnership.

A pocket of water some 2.6 billion years old has now been discovered in a mine 3 kilometers below the Earth’s surface. It is the most ancient pocket of water known by far, older even than the dawn of multi-cellular life. The finding raises the tantalizing possibility that ancient life might be found deep underground not only within Earth, but in similar oases that may exist on Mars, the scientists who studied the water said. Geo-scientist Barbara Sherwood Lollar at the University of Toronto and her colleagues have investigated deep mines across the world since the 1980s. Water can flow into fractures in rocks and become isolated deep in the crust for many years, serving as a time capsule of what the environment was like at the time it got sealed off. “It was absolutely mind-blowing,” Sherwood Lollar said. The site was formed by geological activity similar to that seen in hydrothermal vents. This ancient water poured out of the boreholes the team drilled in the mine at the rate of nearly 2 liters per minute. It remains uncertain precisely how large this reservoir of water is.

In recent years astronomers have extended their view almost to the very edge of the observable universe. With the venerable Hubble Space Telescope researchers have spotted a handful of galaxies so faraway that we see them as they appeared just 400 million years or so after the Big Bang. But even as astronomers peer ever deeper into the Universe to explore the cosmic frontier, others are finding new realms to explore in our own backyard. Such is the case with Leo P, a dwarf galaxy that astronomers have just discovered in the Milky Way’s vicinity. At a distance of some five million or six million light-years from the Milky Way, Leo P is not quite a next-door neighbor, but on the vast scales of the Universe it counts as a neighbor nonetheless. Intriguingly, Leo P seems to have kept to itself, rarely if ever interacting with other galaxies. So the discovery offers astronomers a rare glimpse at a cosmic object unsullied by disruptive galactic encounters. It also suggests the presence of other small galaxies that await discovery in our corner of the cosmos.

A fundamental property of the rarest element on Earth, astatine, has been discovered for the first time, scientists say. Astatine occurs naturally; however, scientists estimate less than 30 grams exist worldwide. For a long time, the characteristics of this elusive element were a mystery, but researchers at the CERN physics laboratory in Switzerland have now measured its ionization potential — the amount of energy needed to remove one electron from an atom of astatine, turning it into an ion or a charged particle. The measurement fills in a missing piece of the periodic table of elements, because astatine was the last naturally occurring element for which this property was unknown. Astatine, which has 85 protons and 85 electrons per atom, is radioactive, and half of its most stable version decays in just 8.1 hours, a time called half-life.

And, now, in local news from Romania, we learn that

The Romanian Patriarchate, together with the Catholic Commission of European Episcopacies, is supporting a citizens’ initiative to stop financing for human embryos research. “The Romanian Patriarchate supports the “One of us” citizens’ initiative that aims to protect dignity, right to life and integrity for each human being since the moment of conception in the European Union”, a press release from the institution shows. The initiative requires the European Union to cease financing activities that include the destruction of human embryos.

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Skeptical reporter @ 2013-05-10

May 12

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Skeptical Reporter for May 10^th, 2013

Announcement:

After three women were freed in Cleveland, a decade after they disappeared, it was revealed that psychic Sylvia Browne declared that one of them, Amanda Berry, was dead. Amanda Berry’s mother traveled to New York to tell her story to psychic Sylvia Browne on the Montel Williams Show. Amanda Berry’s mother wanted to know if her daughter was still alive. “Can you tell me…Is she out there?” Berry’s mother Louwana Miller asked. “I hate when they’re in the water,” Browne said. “She’s not alive honey.” “It hurts my mind but it eases it; now I know,” Miller explained after hearing the prediction by the world-renowned psychic. Years later, Amanda Berry was found alive, together with two other women who had been held captive for a decade. Unfortunately, Amanda’s mother passed away and never got to see her daughter again.

The long-running saga of San Francisco’s proposed cell phone warning labels appears to finally be coming to a close. The law would have required cell phone makers to place labels on their devices that detail the typical energy they transfer to the human body. According to Reuters, the city government has now settled the lawsuit by accepting that the law will never come into effect, after an injunction The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, which sued the city, argued that the law was a bit of a mess. The Federal Communications Commission has established a safety level for wireless radiation exposure, and no phones sold in the US are allowed to exceed it. The ordinance was forcing companies to disclose numbers that were all below the legal limit. Complicating matters further, the exact dose users receive would vary depending on the wireless network the device was on and the manner in which it was being used. More generally, there are no clear indications that wireless hardware creates any health risks in the first place, which raises questions of what, exactly, the legislation was supposed to accomplish. Although a number of small, preliminary studies have suggested potential dangers, larger, more comprehensive works indicate that any potential risks take decades to be felt, and cell phones simply haven’t been in use long enough for us to know for sure.

Childcare centers should have the right to ban unvaccinated kids from childcare centers and preschools under a “no jab, no play” policy proposed in Australia. The Sunday Telegraph and The Daily Telegraph launched a campaign to stop the rise in the number of children succumbing to preventable diseases because parents are failing to have them fully immunized Although only 1.5 per cent of parents are “vaccine refusers” or conscientious objectors, many parents are forgetful, leaving areas of New South Wales with vaccination rates below 85 per cent – despite the inarguable scientific proof that the vaccination program has saved thousands of lives and eradicated diseases that crippled children just a generation ago, including polio. Despite effective vaccines, Australia has been unable to eradicate diseases such as whooping cough because some parents do not immunize leaving small babies and children with cancer and other immune-compromising conditions vulnerable. The Australian Medical Association believes tougher measures – potentially including bans for non-immunized children – should be introduced to make life harder for “free-riding” parents who refuse or forget to vaccinate.

Belief that the “Second Coming” of Jesus is nigh may be preventing climate change action, according to a study published in the Political Science Quarterly. The research examined data from the 2007 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to discover that belief in the “end times” reduced a person’s probability of strongly supporting government action on climate change by 12 percent, when controlling for demographic and cultural factors. Furthermore, when the effects of party affiliation, political ideology and media distrust were removed, this number increased by almost 20 percent. “It stands to reason that most non-believers would support preserving the Earth for future generations, but that end-times believers would rationally perceive such efforts to be ultimately futile, and hence ill-advised,” the authors of the study said. A similar study released in December 2012 found that roughly 36 percent of those living in the U.S. pointed to the severity of recent natural disasters, including super-storm Sandy, as evidence that the “end times” predicted in the Bible were near.

And now let’s look at some news in science.

Much to the consternation of scientists, the cylindrical platinum-iridium artifacts that represent the kilogram have been gradually packing on extra weight due to surface contamination. Since that unit of measure is the last to be based on an artifact and not a physical constant of nature it means that scientists no longer know exactly how much a kilogram is. That makes experiments requiring extreme precision more difficult, so researchers from Mettler Toledo, CERN and the EPFL have been working for the last 15 years on a so-called Watt balance. This would rely on the principle of electromagnetic force restoration. The team managed to created a “load cell” that’s much more accurate than the current standard. This means that the goal of replacing a hunk of metal from 1878 with something more “solid” is within reach by the 2015 target date.

Astronomers are calling for volunteers to help them search for “space warps,” rare and distant galaxies that bend light around them like enormous lenses. Citizen scientists participating in the Space Warps project, which was launched on the 8^th of May, could help shed light on the mysterious dark matter pervading the universe and aid research into a number of other cosmic phenomena, organizers said. “Not only do space warps act like lenses, magnifying the distant galaxies behind them, but we can also use the light they distort to weigh them, helping us to figure out how much dark matter they contain and how it’s distributed,” Phil Marshall, a physicist at Oxford University in England and one of Space Warps’ leaders, said in a statement. The Space Warps project asks armchair astronomers to spot gravitational lenses in hundreds of thousands of deep-sky images. The human brain is better than computers at picking out patterns, and amateurs can do it about as well as professional astronomers can. Participants don’t have to spend hours peering at their computers to make a meaningful contribution. “Even if individual visitors only spend a few minutes glancing over 40 or so images each, that’s really helpful to our research — we only need a handful of people to spot something in an image for us to say that it’s worth investigating,” Oxford’s Aprajita Verma, another of Space Warps’ principal investigators, said in a statement.

London Zoo is appealing to fish keepers to try to find a mate for a critically endangered, tropical species. The Mangarahara cichlid is extinct in the wild but the three in captivity are all male. Described as “gorgeously ugly”, the Zoo is hoping to start a conservation programme if a fit female can be found for the captive males. And with two of the males now 12 years old, the quest is said to be extremely urgent. These cichlids were named after the river in Madagascar where they were first found. The construction of dams on the river caused the streams they lived in to dry up and the fish is now believed to be extinct in its natural habitat. There are two males in captivity at London Zoo and another in Berlin. There had been a female in captivity at the German zoo but attempts to breed ended in disaster when the male killed her. The hope is that the much sought after female cichlid will be found in a private collection somewhere around the world. London Zoo is asking anyone with information about female cichlids to email the team at fishappeal@zsl.org

A particle storage ring spanning 15 meters in diameter is set to go on a long cruise this summer, from New York to Illinois, where it will get a new life capturing ultra-rare particles in a magnetic field. The huge electromagnet, made of steel and aluminum, is the centerpiece of a machine built at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1990s. Now it’s needed at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside of Chicago for a study on muons, exotic subatomic particles that exist for just 2.2 millionths of a second. While most parts of the machine can be broken down and shipped halfway across the country in parts, the huge but delicate ring needs to go in one piece. One wrong tilt or twist could irreparably damage the complex wiring inside. The ring will travel the roads only at night and at speeds of just 16 km/h when it goes from lab to port and then port to lab. “It costs about 10 times less to move the magnet from Brookhaven to Illinois than it would to build a new one,” Lee Roberts of Boston University said in a statement. “So that’s what we’re going to do. It’s an enormous effort from all sides, but it will be worth it.” The Muon g-2 experiment will start in 2016 and will involve 26 institutions around the world.

And, now, in local news from Romania, we learn that

Renowned academician Solomon Marcus expressed his disappointment in the poor financing of research in the European country. He explained that the doctoral title had become a trivial matter, with many who are unworthy gaining one without making the effort such a title should impose. He explained that doctoral titles should more easily be revoked if the work done to acquire one is not satisfactory.

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You can become a citizen scientist at:

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You can purchase your ticket for the “Education, Science and Human Rights” Humanist conference at:

http://www.eventim.ro/ro/bilete/education-science-and-human-rights-bucuresti-palatul-parlamentului-316070/event.html

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Skeptical reporter @ 2013-05-03

May 5

SkepRep

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:51 — 9.0MB)

Skeptical Reporter for May 3^rd, 2013

Announcement:

In most of the world, the use of graphology in recruitment is marginal. But in France – despite an appreciable decline of writing in recent years thanks to computers – the technique is proving remarkably resilient. Reliable figures are hard to come by. Graphologists themselves say that between 50% and 75% of companies make some use of hand-writing analysis, even if it is only occasional. The last independent study was in 1991, and it found that a massive 91% of public and private organisations in France were then making use of handwriting analysis. According to psychology professor Laurent Begue, there is no scientific basis for the use of graphology: “Lots of studies over the years have shown that it is all a load of rubbish, and not fit for use in any professional setting. If you ask a group of graphologists to study the same piece of handwriting, they all come out with different interpretations. It’s no different from astrology or numerology.” According to Begue, most graphologists are able to pull off the trick because they use the content of candidates’ letters – the detail about their lives, motivation and so on – to draw up a psychological profile.

Former Senator Mike Gravel has stated that the White House helped keep the truth about the “extraterrestrial influence that is investigating our planet” from the public. “It goes right to the White House, and of course, once the White House takes a position, ‘well there’s nothing going on’…it just goes down the chain of command, everyone stands toe,” Gravel declared. He is one of six former congress representatives who were paid $20,000 by the UFO advocacy group Paradigm Research to participate in a Congressional-style Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington, where witness after witness has presented first-hand accounts of UFO sightings and extraterrestrial visits. Gravel says the strongest accounts of alien encounters are from former military officers, such as retired Air Force Captain Robert Salas, who testified that UFOs temporarily disabled nuclear weapons on his watch. Gravel says the media has aided what he sees as a government cover-up by not taking reports of ET encounters seriously.

Nobody knows what exploded over Siberia in 1908, but the discovery of the first fragments could finally solve the mystery. The Tunguska impact event is one of the great mysteries of modern history. On 30 June 1908, a vast and powerful explosion engulfed an isolated region of Siberia near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. The blast was 1000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, registered 5 on the Richter scale and is thought to have knocked down some 80 million trees over an area of 2000 square kilometers The region is so isolated, however, that historians recorded only one death and just handful of eyewitness reports from nearby. But the most mysterious aspect of this explosion is that it left no crater and scientists have long argued over what could have caused it. The generally accepted theory is that the explosion was the result of a meteorite or comet exploding in the Earth’s atmosphere. That could have caused an explosion of this magnitude without leaving a crater. Andrei Zlobin from the Russian Academy of Sciences has announced that he found three rocks from the Tunguska region with the telltale characteristics of meteorites. If he is right, these rocks could finally help solve once and for all what kind of object struck Earth in 1908. The rocks will be analysed further in order to determine their origin.

A new article discusses the teaching of evolution in the United States. Despite the curriculum requirements, most teachers continue to promote creationism. “The ill-kept secret about public school biology classrooms nationwide is that evolution often isn’t taught robustly, if at all. Faith-based belief in creationism and intelligent design continues to be discussed and even openly taught in public school classrooms, despite state curriculum standards”, the investigation by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reveals. The Gazette distributed a questionnaire to school teachers statewide and drew 106 responses from science teachers. It asked them to choose one or more answers to a question of what they believe in: evolution, creationism, intelligent design or not sure/other. Ninety percent chose evolution; 19 percent said they believe in creationism, not defined in the questionnaire; 13 percent said they believe in intelligent design; and another 5 percent answered “not sure/other.” “The clear conclusion is that while most do, not all science teachers espouse evolution, with a notable minority speaking up in favor of creationism”, the article concludes.

And now let’s look at some news in science.

Researchers at IBM have created the world’s smallest movie by manipulating single atoms on a copper surface. The stop-motion animation uses a few dozen carbon atoms, moved around with the tiny tip of what is called a scanning tunneling microscope. It would take about 1,000 of the frames of the film laid side by side to span a single human hair. The extraordinary feat of atomic precision has been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records. It is a showpiece for IBM’s efforts to design next-generation data storage solutions based on single atoms. The new movie, titled A Boy and His Atom, has 242 frames and lasts 90 seconds. It depicts a boy playing with a “ball” made of a single atom, dancing, and jumping on a trampoline. The effort, detailed in a number of YouTube videos, took four scientists two weeks of 18-hour days to pull off.

A high-tech NASA telescope in orbit escaped a potentially disastrous collision with a Soviet-era Russian spy satellite last year in a close call that highlights the growing threat of orbital debris around Earth. NASA’s $690 million Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope — which studies the most powerful explosions in the universe — narrowly avoided a direct hit with the defunct 1.5-ton Russian reconnaissance satellite Cosmos 1805 on April 3, 2012, space agency officials announced this week. The potential space collision was avoided when engineers commanded Fermi to fire its thrusters in a critical dodging maneuver to move out of harm’s way. If the Russian satellite had smashed into the space telescope the explosion of the two spacecraft would have released “as much energy as two and a half tons of explosives,” NASA officials said. The two spacecraft ultimately missed each other by 9 kilometers when they passed one another. NASA tracks 17,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters across in orbit above the Earth every day. Only 7 percent of the objects tracked are currently active satellites.

US scientists have developed a way to embed radio frequency identification chips on to paper that they say is quicker, cheaper and offers wider applications than current methods. The technique could be used to prevent fraud as well as provide a new meaning to the term ‘paper trail’. The process uses lasers to transfer and assemble the chips on paper. Such smart paper could be used for banknotes, legal documents, tickets and smart labels, the team said. Some RFID-enabled paper is already on the market but the chips are much thicker, resulting in either bulky paper or a bump on the surface that would mean such paper could not be printed. The process developed by the researchers at North Dakota State University is known as Laser Enabled Advanced Packaging or Leap. The team is currently looking for commercial partners.

A team at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) has launched a project to re-create the first web page. The aim is to preserve the original hardware and software associated with the birth of the web. The world wide web was developed by Prof Sir Tim Berners-Lee while working at Cern. The initiative coincides with the 20th anniversary of the research centre giving the web to the world. According to Dan Noyes, the web manager for Cern’s communication group, re-creation of the world’s first website will enable future generations to explore, examine and think about how the web is changing modern life. “I want my children to be able to understand the significance of this point in time: the web is already so ubiquitous – so, well, normal – that one risks failing to see how fundamentally it has changed,” he explained. The hope is that the restoration of the first web page and web site will serve as a reminder and inspiration of the web’s fundamental values. At the heart of the original web is technology to decentralize control and make access to information freely available to all.

And, now, in local news from Romania, we learn that

The Babes Bolyai University is confronted with a plagiarism scandal. Professor Gheorghe Popescu, from the Economical Sciences Faculty is accused by a former doctoral student that he plagiarized her entire paper. Former doctoral student Valeria Gîdiu explained that she will file a complaint against her former professor. Faced with the accusations the professor declared that he sees no problem with what he did, since he plagiarized from his own student.

Links:

You can purchase your ticket for the “Education, Science and Human Rights” Humanist conference at:

http://www.eventim.ro/ro/bilete/education-science-and-human-rights-bucuresti-palatul-parlamentului-316070/event.html

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Skeptical reporter @ 2013-05-31

May 3

SkepRep

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:16 — 8.5MB)

Skeptical Reporter for May 31^st, 2013

David Colquhoun (UCL) and Steven Novella (Yale) have written an article on why acupuncture doesn’t work. The journal “Anesthesia & Analgesia” has published the article: “Acupuncture is a theatrical placebo” together with another article written by supporters of acupuncture as a form of alternative therapy. On his blog, Colquhoun wrote about his reasons for writing the article: “Acupuncture is an interesting case, because it seems to have achieved greater credibility than other forms of alternative medicine, despite its basis being just as bizarre as all the others. As a consequence, a lot more research has been done on acupuncture than on any other form of alternative medicine, and some of it has been of quite high quality. The outcome of all this research is that acupuncture has no effects that are big enough to be of noticeable benefit to patients, and it is, in all probability, just a theatrical placebo. After more than 3000 trials, there is no need for yet more. Acupuncture is dead”.

One former conspiracy theorist, Charlie Veitch, has opened up about the consequences of him changing his mind. After years of promoting the idea that the September 11 terrorist attack in the United States was just a controlled demolition, Veitch posted a video on his YouTube channel announcing that he had been wrong. Veitch had expected a few spiteful comments from the so-called “Truth Movement”. What he had not expected was the size or the sheer force of the attack. In the days after he uploaded his video, entitled “No Emotional Attachment to 9/11 Theories”, Veitch was disowned by his friends, issued with death threats and falsely accused of child abuse in an email sent to 15,000 of his followers. “I went from being Jesus to the devil,” he says now. “It was relentless. A guy in Manchester set up a YouTube channel called ‘Kill Charlie Veitch’. It said, ‘Charlie, I hope you know I’m going to come and kill you. Enjoy your last few days. Goodbye.’ So many hate videos were posted – my face superimposed on a pig and someone’s killing the pig.” Another message featured images of his sister’s young children incorporated within a video of child pornography. Alex Jones posted a film in which he claimed he’d known “all along”, and that Veitch had “psychopath, sociopath eyes”. His mother called, devastated, believing the pedophilia “confession” which she’d been emailed, along with 15,000 others, was real. Looking back, he describes the conspiracy community as an “evil-worshiping paranoia. As someone who’s been deep in it, and seen the hatred and the insanity, I think big terrorist attacks will come from conspiracy theorists.”

A man claiming to be Jesus is gaining followers and causing concern among cult experts in Australia. Former IT specialist Alan John Miller, or AJ as he prefers to be known, runs a religious movement known as the Divine Truth from his home near the small town of Kingaroy. Miller claims that not only is he Christ, but his partner, Australian Mary Luck, is in fact Mary Magdalene, who according to the Bible was present at the crucifixion. He told Sky News: “I have very clear memories of the crucifixion, but it wasn’t as harrowing for me as it was for others like Mary who was present. When you are one with God you are not in a state of fear, and you have quite good control over your body’s sensations and the level of pain that you absorb from your body”. He holds seminars near his home and also travels around the world teaching people how to have a personal relationship with God, often by delving deep into their emotions. Dozens of his followers are understood to have bought properties in the area to be closer to him. After his crucifixion the Australian claims he entered the spirit world where he met Plato, Socrates, popes and presidents. Whilst critics dismiss his claims the seminars attract large groups of people, up to 150 a time.

In New South Wales, Australia, an anti-vaccination group is encouraging parents to circumvent government’s crackdown on unvaccinated children by joining a “dubious” religious organization. The Australian Anti-Vaccination Network is telling supporters to join the Church of Conscious Living to get their children into preschool. “The tenets of this church absolutely oppose forced medication including vaccination,” the AVN says on its website. NSW Opposition Leader John Robertson has questioned the credentials of the church. “The credentials of the Church of Conscious Living as a genuine religious organization are completely dubious – yet its members will be able to use it to gain an exemption,” he said. Unvaccinated children will be banned from childcare and childcare centre operators will face fines of $4,000 if inspectors discover they are caring for children who don’t have proof of vaccination, under new state laws.

And now let’s look at some news in science.

Scientists have discovered that about one in thirteen people have flexible ape-like feet. A team studied the feet of 398 visitors to the Boston Museum of Science. The results show differences in foot bone structure similar to those seen in fossils of a member of the human lineage from two million years ago. Apes like the chimpanzee spend a lot of their time in trees, so their flexible feet are essential to grip branches and allow them to move around quickly – but how most of us ended up with more rigid feet remains unclear. Jeremy DeSilva from Boston University and a colleague asked the museum visitors to walk barefoot and observed how they walked by using a mechanized carpet that was able to analyze several components of the foot. Most of us have very rigid feet, helpful for stability, with stiff ligaments holding the bones in the foot together. When primates lift their heels off the ground, however, they have a floppy foot with nothing holding their bones together. This is known as a midtarsal break and is similar to what the Boston team identified in some of their participants. Most with this flexibility did not realize they had it and there was no observable difference in the speed of their stride.

Germany’s national railway company, Deutsche Bahn, plans to test small drones to try to reduce the amount of graffiti being sprayed on its property. The idea is to use airborne infrared cameras to collect evidence, which could then be used to prosecute vandals who deface property at night. A company spokesman said drones would be tested at rail depots soon. Graffiti is reported to cost Deutsche Bahn about 10 million dollars a year. German media report that each drone will cost about 60,000 euros and fly almost silently, up to 150m above ground.

A British Medical Journal report into non-emergency operations in England, suggests the overall risk of death from such planned procedures remains low. But it shows “unacceptable” variation in survival rates through the week, a leading body of UK surgeons says. Researchers from Imperial College London gathered data from all non-emergency surgery undertaken by the NHS in England in 2008-11. Looking at some 4 million operations they found more than 27,000 deaths within a month of surgery, putting the average risk of death at 0.67%. The researchers say they are concerned about the significant variation over the week, with the risk lowest for surgery carried out on Monday and then increasing with each subsequent day to peak at the weekend. The paper shows people who have their operations on Friday are 44% more likely to die than those who have a procedure on Monday. Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of NHS England announced that a forum had been set up to discuss the issue.

Eye and face-tracking technology that aims to prevent accidents caused by fatigue is being rolled out by the world’s biggest mining equipment maker. Caterpillar is to sell a package of sensors, alarms and software which detect when a truck driver is about to fall asleep. BHP Billiton and gold producer Newmont Mining have already carried out trials. The firms believe it out-performs earlier systems that needed workers to wear special equipment. Driver Safety Solution (DSS) also benefits from the fact it does not need to be re-calibrated when one worker swaps shift with another. DSS uses a camera to detect a driver’s pupil size, how frequently they blink, and how long they keep their eyes shut. In addition it tracks where the user’s mouth is in order to work out when the workers are not looking at the road. If the computer’s software detects behavior that indicates the driver is sleepy it triggers an audio alarm and vibrates a motor built into the driver’s seat to rouse them.

And, now, in local news from Romania, we learn that

The president of the Iași District Council, Cristian Adomniţei, has declared that the project for the Măgurele laser will have great value for Romania. “When finished, this project will be worth a couple of percents of the Romanian GDB. I am not talking about the value of the investment, I am talking about the value of its output”, he declared. In Măgurele, Romania is building the most powerful laser in the world, at the Extreme Light Infrastructure – Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) ScientificResearchCenter.

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Skeptical reporter @ 2013-04-26

Apr 28

SkepRep

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:12 — 9.3MB)

Skeptical Reporter for April 26^th, 2013

Jim McCormick has been found guilty of a multi-million-pound fraud involving the sale of fake bomb detectors to Iraq and around the world. A jury found McCormick guilty on three counts of fraud over a scam that included the sale of £55 million of devices based on a novelty golf ball finder to Iraq. They were installed at checkpoints in Baghdad through which car bombs and suicide bombers passed, killing hundreds of civilians. Last month they remained in use at checkpoints across the Iraqi capital. McCormick, who faces up to eight years in jail when he is sentenced next month, also sold the detectors to Niger, Syria, Mexico and other countries including Lebanon where a United Nations agency was a client. He claimed they could detect explosives at long range, deep underground, through lead-lined rooms and multiple buildings. In fact, the handheld devices were useless. Their antennae, which purported to detect explosives, and in other cases narcotics, were not connected to anything, they had no power source and one of the devices was simply the golf ball finder with a different sticker on it. “Both civilians and armed forces personnel were put at significant risk in relying upon this equipment,” said Detective Inspector Ed Heath, who led Avon and Somerset police’s three-year investigation.

In a recently published study, Korean researchers evaluated whether CAM-use influenced the survival and health-related quality of life of terminal cancer patients. From July 2005 to October 2006, they prospectively studied a cohort study of 481 cancer patients. Their multivariate analyses of these data showed that, compared with non-users, CAM-users did not have better survival. Using mind-body interventions or prayer was even associated with significantly worse survival. CAM users reported significantly worse cognitive functioning and more fatigue than nonusers. In sub-group analyses, users of alternative medical treatments, prayer, vitamin supplements, mushrooms, or rice and cereal reported significantly worse health related quality of life. The authors conclude that “CAM did not provide any definite survival benefit, CAM users reported clinically significant worse health related quality of lives.” Similar data have been reported before. For instance, a Norwegian study from 2003 examined the association between CAM-use and cancer survival. Death rates were higher in CAM-users (79%) than in those who did not use CAM (65%).

The ‘cinnamon challenge’ went viral online and still has takers, but can result in choking, aspiration and lung damage. The decades-old stunt in which thrill-seeking teens swallow a tablespoon of dry cinnamon with no water, gag and spew out a cloud of orange dust went viral in 2012, resulting in more than 50,000 YouTube video clips of young people attempting the so-called “cinnamon challenge.” Although the immediate physical effects — coughing, choking and burning of the mouth, nose, and throat — are temporary in most cases, attempts to swallow a large quantity of the dry spice may result in “long-lasting lesions, scarring and inflammation of the airway” or even lung damage, says a new research paper examining the dare. Nationwide in the US, at least 30 cases last year stemming from the challenge required medical attention, including ventilator support for some teens who suffered collapsed lungs, says the paper. The American Association of Poison Control Centers, which issued a March 2012 alert about the dare, reported 222 cinnamon-related exposures in 2012, up from 51 in 2011. So far this year, 20 exposures were reported from between Jan. 1 and Mar. 31.

During the armed confrontations following the Boston bombings, a post on Twitter from ”The Astrology Show” announced that astrology had predicted the death of a campus officer at MIT. The response from other users was not a welcoming one and the ”Heresy Club” blog commented on the statement: ”Sometime around all this mess, some genius had the foresight, and I do mean that with as much snark as I can possibly muster, to post this onto their Twitter feed: The shooting at the MIT in Boston is a tragedy that astrology predicted, almost to the day, one month ago. Words escape me to express the middling levels of idiocy needed to get onto your social media pedestal to take credit for predicting an ONGOING tragedy that left a man dead. This should go without saying, but where the hell were you guys in Waco, TX? Or, I don’t know, about five days ago in the same fricking state!? Let’s not forget the typical wishy-washy language of the actual prediction. Strange as it might seem, the world is susceptible to aggressive military action or civilian shootings generally about 365 days a year”.

And now let’s look at some news in science.

Scientists have made a step forward in their ability to mimic the sense of touch. A team from the US and China made an experimental array that can sense pressure in the same range as the human fingertip. The advance could speed the development of smarter artificial skin capable of “feeling” activity on the surface. The sensors, which are described in Science magazine, could also help give robots a more adaptive sense of touch. Using bundles of vertical zinc oxide nanowires, the researchers built arrays consisting of about 8,000 transistors. Each of the transistors can independently produce an electronic signal when placed under mechanical strain. The touch-sensitive transistors – dubbed taxels – have sensitivity comparable to that of a human fingertip.

The voice of Alexander Graham Bell has been identified for the first time, in a recording from 1885. On the wax-disc recording, the telephone inventor says: “Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.” The recording is among the earliest held by the Smithsonian Institution, which runs the National Museum of American History. Bell’s voice was recorded on to the disc on the 15^th of April 1885 at his Volta laboratory in Washington. As well as saying his name, he also recites a series of numbers and lines from several Shakespeare plays. “Identifying the voice of Alexander Graham Bell, the man who brought us everyone else’s voice, is a major moment in the study of history,” said museum director John Gray. The disc was too fragile to play using a needle so the museum, along with researchers at the US Library of Congress and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, developed an alternative play-back system that used light and a 3D camera to turn its bumps and grooves into sounds. Also identified was the voice of Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor’s father, in a recording from 1881.

Some 72,000 ladybugs have found a home within the Mall of America. The mall managers have released the insects inside the fully enclosed shopping and entertainment complex. The Bloomington, Minnesota, mall is enormous and has more than 30.000 live plants, including about 400 trees, which act as natural air purifiers for the indoor mall. But aphids — the pesky insects that feed on plants — thrive inside the Mall of America’s many landscaped areas. Aphids, however, have a natural enemy: Ladybugs, which are valued by gardeners for their habit of eating pests like aphids. “Ladybugs are what I like to call, sort of a biological defense system,” Lydell Newby, the Mall of America’s senior manager of environmental services explained. The mall has released ladybugs in the past as an alternative to commercial pesticides, the International Business Times reports. Though some shoppers have complained that the ladybugs might fly onto food, a mall spokesperson noted that the insects tend to spend their lives on plants, not human food. The Mall of America has other green initiatives: It converts its restaurants’ fryer fat into biodiesel fuel for the mall’s security vehicles. And though it’s located in the Twin Cities area (known for brutal winter weather), the complex has no central heating system. Instead, it uses passive solar heat from its 2 kilometers of skylights to warm the space.

Earth’s internal engine is running about 1,000 degrees Celsius hotter than previously measured, providing a better explanation for how the planet generates a magnetic field, a new study has found. A team of scientists has measured the melting point of iron at high precision in a laboratory. Then they drew from that result to calculate the temperature at the boundary of Earth’s inner and outer core. It is now estimated at 6.000 degrees C. That’s as hot as the surface of the sun. The Earth has a solid inner core surrounded by a liquid outer core, which, in turn, has the solid, but flowing, mantle above it. There needs to be a 1.500 degrees C difference between the inner core and the mantle to spur “thermal movements” that — along with Earth’s spin — create the magnetic field. The previously measured core temperature didn’t demonstrate enough of a differential, puzzling researchers for two decades.

And, now, in local news from Romania, we learn that

A glorious full moon rose on the 25^th of April and marked the pink moon event of this year. Romanians got to see the first full eclipse of the moon this year which was visible in most of Europe, central Asia, and Africa. The event has earned the colorful name “Pink Moon,” but not for its appearance. “This name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring”, writes the Farmers’ Almanac. It was the third shortest partial lunar eclipse this century, according to EarthSky.

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Skeptical reporter @ 2013-04-19

Apr 21

SkepRep

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:53 — 9.1MB)

Skeptical Reporter for April 19^th, 2013

Almost 80,000 Australian children are not immunized against deadly diseases, and the highest number live in Sydney’s west. Experts say the “baby Einstein” demographic – parents who take an intensive interest in their children’s education and health, eat organic food and use alternative medicines – is responsible. Sydney’s west has an immunization rate of 90 per cent for five-year-olds but last financial year was home to 3.600 children who were not fully immunized. In wealthy Manly, Mosman and eastern Sydney, however, fewer than 85 per cent of children are immunized in some age groups. The figures are contained in a National Health Performance Authority report. The World Health Organization says immunization rates for measles must be above 93 per cent to prevent its spread. Immunization expert Julie Leask says parents who perform extensive research and are often suspicious of medicine are more likely to object to vaccination. “I think what these figures say is… you can’t rely on herd immunity in your region,” the University of Sydney academic said.

Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture announced that it will be extending the deadline for applications for this year’s two intensive nine-day seminars on science, society and intelligent design for college and graduate students. The official deadline fell on April 15th, but applications will still be accepted through Monday, April 22nd. The Center’s seminars are free, but it still has not managed to attract a sufficient number of students. The first study track, the Seminar on Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences, will prepare students to make research contributions advancing the growing science of intelligent design, according to the description. The second study track, the C.S. Lewis Fellows Program on Science and Society, will explore the growing impact of science on politics, economics, social policy, bioethics, theology, and the arts.

In the United States, the Tampa Bay Times won a Pulitzer Prize for the nith time for a series of editorials last year by Tim Nickens and Daniel Ruth after the Pinellas County Commission moved to stop putting fluoride in the drinking water, affecting the dental health of 700,000 people in the county. As Nickens and Ruth wrote in the last of the 10 editorials submitted for the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing, “It took nearly 14 months, an election and the clarion voice of PinellasCounty voters to persuade county commissioners to correct a serious error in judgment”. And the newly reconstituted commission quickly moved to vote to restore fluoride to the water system. Here is what the Pulitzer nominating letter said: “In October 2011, the Pinellas County Commission turned back the clock. The commission, pressured by antifluoride zealots and tea party conservatives, abruptly voted to stop adding fluoride to the drinking water. The commissioners ignored established science and the public health, and in January 2012 the Pinellas water system suddenly became one of the nation’s largest without fluoridated water. More than 700,000 residents no longer benefited from what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls one of the nation’s greatest health care advances. The Tampa Bay Times editorial board went on mission to correct this travesty. With original reporting and persuasive arguments, Tim Nickens and Dan Ruth educated readers and delivered a clarion call for action on behalf of those who need fluoridated water the most: the poor families and the children of Pinellas County”.

In Great Britain, the GP and Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston is calling on homeopathy’s governing bodies to make it clear to parents that their alternative remedies will not protect children from measles outbreaks. Large numbers of children have not had the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, largely because of the scare that followed the publication of research by Andrew Wakefield in the Lancet medical journal in 1998 that postulated a link between the jab and autism. The research was later discredited and Wakefield was struck off by the General Medical Council for fraud. “Some parents have an unshakeable belief that homeopathy boosts their child’s immune system. They would rather put their faith in ‘natural’ methods, as they see it,” the MP explained. That belief can spread in communities and outside school gates, and those who accept the NHS advice to give their child the MMR vaccine start to feel pressured. Wollaston called on the governing bodies of homeopathy to tell parents that homeopathic “vaccines” and remedies would not protect against measles. The British Homeopathic Association and Faculty of Homeopathy said they would do so. “There is no evidence to suggest homeopathic vaccinations can protect against contagious diseases. We recommend people seek out the conventional treatments,” a spokesman said.

And now let’s look at some news in science.

Archaeologists have found a tomb in eastern China that may be the grave of the notorious Emperor Yang of Sui, according to news reports. With inscriptions revealing the surprising identity of the deceased, the burial chamber measures about 20 square meters. It was uncovered in Yangzhou, a city about 280 kilometers southeast of Shanghai. Shu Jiaping, who leads Yangzhou’s institute of archaeology, explained that researchers are “still not sure whether it was the emperor’s final resting place, as historical records said his tomb had been relocated several times.” Emperor Yang, also known as Yang Guang, is remembered as a fearsome and decadent tyrant. During his rule from 606 until his death at the hands of rebels in 618, he forced millions of laborers to take part in ambitious construction projects, such as building royal palaces, completing of the Grand Canal and reconstructing of the Great Wall. Emperor Yang also launched costly military campaigns, including a failed conquest of Goguryeo, an ancient kingdom of Korea, which eventually led to the collapse of the Sui Dynasty.

The United States remains an intellectual center for scientific thought, but is on the brink of falling behind in attracting the brightest minds, physicists believe. Speaking at the April meeting of the American Physical Society, researchers warned that the United States should commit to funding big science (and big science infrastructure) to remain competitive. “We still have a very vigorous intellectual environment, but we cannot continue to be complacent,” said Pushpa Bhat, a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. Fermilab has 10 particle accelerators on-site, but one of the most powerful, the Tevatron, was shut down for budgetary reasons in 2011. Science funding is a major concern for U.S. researchers, both in the long term and the short term. Federal research grants have become increasingly competitive over the decades, and the sequester, a series of budget cuts signed into law at the beginning of March, has not helped. The sequester involves an effective 9 percent cut to non-defense spending, including research funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation. NASA is coping with additional cuts.

Imaging specimens with electron microscopy imposes conditions that are typically deadly for living things, such as a high vacuum. But the electrons used to create the images might actually have a protective effect. Researchers have found that the beam of a scanning electron microscope can turn a thin coating that occurs naturally on the larvae of some insects into a sort of miniature spacesuit that can keep the animals alive in a vacuum for up to an hour. The discovery builds on previous findings that some organisms, including beetle larvae and ticks, can survive short stints in the extremely low-pressure environment of scanning electron microscopes and some of them, even in outer space. The researchers made their discovery while testing how long various animals could survive in a high vacuum while being imaged inside a scanning electron microscope. Most organisms begin to lose water rapidly in these conditions, leading to death by dehydration and physical distortion, but the larvae of the fruit-fly Drosophila survived for 60 minutes and went on to develop normally after being returned to normal pressure.

The skies are currently being flooded with the brightest display of gamma rays – the Universe’s highest-energy light – ever seen by astronomers. The culprit is a staggering flare-up of Markarian 421, a “blazar” that hosts a supermassive black hole. By sheer coincidence, a programme to study it had just begun, so dozens of the world’s telescopes – from visible to radio to gamma-ray – were watching. And it came just in time for a meeting of many of the world’s astrophysicists. The name of Markarian 421 is cropping up in many talks at the American Physical Society meeting. “It’s really quite exciting because we can exchange ideas about it while we’re here at the meeting in the same place,” said Greg Madejski of the Kavli Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. Blazars are a special case of “active galaxies” – those whose supermassive black holes spray out great quantities of light across the whole electromagnetic spectrum as they feed on surrounding matter. Active galaxies emit jets of light – up to trillions of times more energetic than the light we see – and a blazar is one with a jet pointing toward the Earth. What remains a mystery is how gamma rays are created at such extraordinary energies.

And, now, in local news from Romania, we learn that

A TV ad promoting a pot named Dry Cooker has been blocked from airing by the National Audiovisual Council of Romania. The Council decided that the material promoting the pot was not correctly informing the public and contained grammar errors. The Romanian authority on the audiovisual considered that the ad needed to change statements such as: “Since I’ve been using Dry Cooker I feel I have more energy”, or “Dry Cooker is not just a pot, it is the health of my children”.

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Skeptical reporter @ 2013-04-12

Apr 14

SkepRep

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:57 — 8.2MB)

Skeptical Reporter for April 12^th, 2013

In Great Britain, public health officials say a big increase in the demand for MMR vaccinations suggests parents’ “legacy of mistrust” over the jab is being overcome. Take-up for the MMR vaccine in the area dropped significantly in the late 1990s when research – which has since been discredited – raised concerns over the jab. After an outbreak of measles, hundreds of people have started queuing at hospitals offering drop-in clinics for children and young adults. Families began queuing at the drop-in MMR clinic at Swansea’s MorristonHospital an hour before it opened during the weekend. Before the introduction of the MMR vaccination in 1988, some half a million children in the UK caught measles each year and about 100 died from it. The latest figures for Wales, which cover October to December 2012, show that uptake of the first dose of MMR vaccine in two-year-old children was 94% and ranged by local authority from 87% to 97%.

The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects. But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without a hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by e-mail, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a résumé. “I think we were duped,” one of the scientists wrote in an e-mail to the Entomological Society. Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events. Steven Goodman, a dean and professor of medicine at Stanford and the editor of the journal Clinical Trials, which has its own imitators, called this phenomenon “the dark side of open access,” the movement to make scholarly publications freely available.

Ali Razeghi, a Tehran scientist has registered “The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine” with the state-run Centre for Strategic Inventions. The device can predict the future in a print out after taking readings from the touch of a user. Razaeghi said the device worked by a set of complex algorithims to “predict five to eight years of the future life of any individual, with 98 percent accuracy”. As the managing director of Iran’s Centre for Strategic Inventions, Razeghi is a serial inventor with 179 other inventions listed under his own name. “I have been working on this project for the last 10 years,” he said. Razeghi says Iran’s government can predict the possibility of a military confrontation with a foreign country, and forecast the fluctuation in the value of foreign currencies and oil prices by using his new invention. “Naturally a government that can see five years into the future would be able to prepare itself for challenges that might destabilise it,” he said.

In the United States, a natural medicine lobbyist dropped off a bottle of nutritional capsules labeled “Calm” to the office of state Sen. Charles Schwertner. They had the opposite effect. Staffers in Schwertner’s office called the Texas Department of Public Safety after the supplements were dropped off by a representative of the Texas Health Freedom Coalition, an advocacy group for natural health and alternative medicine. Coalition executive committee member Radhia Gleis said the senator’s office overreacted to the gift. The senator’s chief of staff, Thomas Holloway, said the office was complying with direction from DPS and wasn’t trying to worry anyone. Still, the coalition capitalized on the incident and used it to help spread awareness about its legislative goals. Gleis also had strong words for Schwertner, an orthopedic surgeon in Georgetown who represents Bryan and College Station in the Senate. “This is a perfect example of a medical doctor who knows nothing about these herbs,” Gleis said.

And now let’s look at some news in science

A population of 200 of the world’s rarest orangutans was found tucked away in the forests of the island of Borneo, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. All subspecies of Bornean orangutans are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But scientists estimate just 3,000 to 4,500 individuals are left in the subspecies known as Pongo pygmaeus pygmaeus, making them the most severely threatened. The previously unknown population was found by conservationists near the BatangPark, in an area covering about 140 square kilometers. Local communities apparently had been aware of the apes, but no major research projects had been undertaken in the area until February, when conservationists with WCS and other groups surveyed the region. They found a total of 995 orangutan nests, including fresh nests that indicated the rare population was recently using the area.

For the first time, scientists have developed a way to make organs transparent to light while keeping them intact, providing a detailed glimpse of their inner structure. Using the new technique, scientists imaged the neurological wiring in a mouse’s brain. The method, known as CLARITY was described in the journal Nature. “Studying intact systems with this sort of molecular resolution and global scope — to be able to see the fine detail and the big picture at the same time — has been a major unmet goal in biology, and a goal that CLARITY begins to address,” explained study leader Karl Deisseroth, a bioengineer and psychiatrist at Stanford University. Traditionally, imaging organs like the brain has involved slicing them into thin sections, which destroys long-distance connections between cells. Methods for imaging whole, intact organs exist, but are generally not compatible with methods for studying genes and other things at the molecular level. The new technique lets scientists study intact organs at different scales, from the broad to the very detailed.

The European Space Agency opened a new space weather center last week in Brussels to keep tabs on sun storms that could interfere with satellites in orbit and power grids on Earth. Formally inaugurated on the 3^rd of April, the Space Weather Coordination Centre (SSCC) will gather information on sun storms as well as disturbances in our planet’s geomagnetic environment and ionosphere. Experts at the center will issue alerts and provide support for satellite operators, government agencies and research institutes whose work might be affected by space weather, according to a statement from ESA. The SSCC, housed in the Royal Observatory of Belgium, is part of ESA’s Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program, which keeps track of hazards like space junk and potentially dangerous asteroids that pose a threat to Earth and its systems in orbit.

Like finally seeing all the gears of a watch and how they work together, researchers from UCLA and UC Berkeley have, for the first time ever, solved the puzzle of how the various components of an entire telomerase enzyme complex fit together and function in a three-dimensional structure. The creation of the first complete visual map of the telomerase enzyme, which is known to play a significant role in aging and most cancers, represents a breakthrough that could open up a host of new approaches to fighting disease, the researchers said. “Everyone in the field wants to know what telomerase looks like, and there it was. I was so excited, I could hardly breathe,” said Juli Feigon, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a senior author of the study. “We were the first to see it.” The scientists report the positions of each component of the enzyme relative to one another and the complete organization of the enzyme’s active site. In addition, they demonstrate how the different components contribute to the enzyme’s activity, uniquely correlating structure with biochemical function.

And now, in local news from Romania, we learn that

Romanian researchers have accomplished the first telocyte transplants in the country, after just three years since these novel types of cells were discovered. The operation was done on lab rats that had an induced heart attack. According to Romanian researchers, this is a first step in trying to develop a way to help heart muscles regenerate after a heart attack. The experimental operation took place at the “Matei Bals” Institute in Bucharest.

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Skeptical reporter @ 2013-04-05

Apr 7

SkepRep

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:45 — 8.0MB)

Skeptical Reporter for April 5^th, 2013

TED, the nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, has revoked its prestigious TEDx licensing for an upcoming West Hollywood event. The goals of the TEDx event, titled Brother can you spare a paradigm?, were to “illuminate the urgent need to change our fundamental value system or worldview to one in which humanity pulls together rather than separately,” the official website for the event states. The conversation the TED representative had with the organizers reveals the reason behind the decision: “When we look at your speaker line-up, we see several people who promote — as fact — theories that are well outside what most scientists would accept as credible. The problem is not the challenging of orthodox views. We believe in that. We’ve had numerous talks which do that. But we have rules about the presentation of science on the TEDx stage. We disallow speakers who use the language of science to claim they have proven the truth of ideas that are speculative and which have failed to gain significant scientific acceptance”.

The Church of Scientology is planning a publicity drive in Australia to challenge what it calls “misconceptions” among the public and the media. The controversial religious group kicked off a PR drive with an appearance on Seven breakfast show Sunrise. The Sunrise interview followed the publication of a guide for journalists that outlined the areas where the organisation feels it has been wrongly represented in the past. The Church of Scientology plans to launch a localised version of a US-made TV ad that ran around the Super Bowl, use direct marketing activity to promote its videos and books, and encourage people to visit its churches to learn about Scientology for themselves. The TV ad bears similarities to Apple’s ‘Think different’ classic from 1997. Scientology has used PR agency Wells Haslem since 2009, the year that Scientology was branded a “criminal organisation” by South Australian senator Nick Xenophon.

Measles is responsible for thousands of tragic (and preventable) deaths each year. Which is perhaps why there has been enormous backlash against a new (and apparently self-published) book by Stephanie Messenger, an Australian author and anti-vaccine activist. According to the author’s page, “Melanie’s Marvelous Measles” was written to: educate children on the benefits of having measles and how you can heal from them naturally and successfully. The description says: “Often today, we are being bombarded with messages from vested interests to fear all diseases in order for someone to sell some potion or vaccine, when, in fact, history shows that in industrialized countries, these diseases are quite benign and, according to natural health sources, beneficial to the body”. Amazon reviewers have not taken kindly to Messenger’s suggestion that measles can be an “adventure,” either. Australian Medical Association president Dr Steve Hambleton said the disease was still dangerous, potentially fatal, and that anyone promoting it should be ashamed of themselves. He said children with measles were very ill and at risk of death or brain damage. In Australia, the book has been removed from sale, by the largest online bookstore.

Australian neuroscientists have attacked a taxpayer-funded brain-training and exercise program used in classrooms for making ”silly” pseudo-scientific claims when explaining how it works. The Brain Gym program, created in the 1970s by an American educator and taught in more than 80 countries, is being used by teachers in all states in an attempt to improve students’ learning. Practitioners usually charge $660 for the basic Brain Gym 101 course, aimed at teachers and students. But the program has generated controversy overseas, with the British Neuroscience Association in 2008 slamming the product for promoting neuromyths. Teachers can train with more than 60 Brain Gym practitioners in Australia outside school hours and use its activities in the classroom. The Teachers Federation confirmed NSW teachers can be reimbursed through their schools’ professional development funds, provided by state governments. The Brain Gym website says its 26 physical exercises will “bring about rapid and often dramatic improvements in concentration, memory, organising and more” by developing “neural pathways” in participants’ brains.

And now let’s look at some news in science.

Five years ago, an IBM-built supercomputer designed to model the decay of the US nuclear weapons arsenal was clocked at speeds no computer in the history of Earth had ever reached. At more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second (that’s a million billion, or a “petaflop”), the aptly named Roadrunner was so far ahead of the competition that it earned the #1 slot on the Top 500 supercomputer list in 2008 and one last time in 2009. Today, that computer has been declared obsolete and it’s being taken offline. Based at the US Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Roadrunner will be studied for a while and then ultimately dismantled. While the computer is still one of the 22 fastest in the world, it isn’t energy-efficient enough to make the power bill worth it. Costing more than $120 million, Roadrunner’s 296 server racks covering more than 500 square metres contained 122,400 processor cores. Super-computing researchers are now looking toward exascale speeds—1,000 times faster than a petaflop—but major advances in energy efficiency and price-performance are necessary.

Scientists have found a way to “read” dreams, a study suggests. Researchers in Japan used MRI scans to reveal the images that people were seeing as they entered into an early stage of sleep. Writing in the journal Science, they reported that they could do this with 60% accuracy. The team now wants to see if brain activity can be used to decipher other aspects of dreaming, such as the emotions experienced during sleep. Professor Yukiyasu Kamitani, from the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, in Kyoto, said: “I had a strong belief that dream decoding should be possible at least for particular aspects of dreaming… I was not very surprised by the results, but excited”. The researchers now want to look at deeper sleep, where the most vivid dreams are thought to occur, as well as see whether brain scans can help them to reveal the emotions, smells, colours and actions that people experience as they sleep.

A 2 billion dollar experiment on the Space Station has made observations that could prove to be the first signs of dark matter, a mysterious component of the Universe. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer surveys the sky for high-energy particles, or cosmic rays. It has seen evidence for what could be dark matter colliding with itself in a process known as “annihilation”. But scientists stress that a precise description of this enigmatic cosmic constituent is still some way off. “It could take a few more years,” said AMS deputy spokesman Roberto Battiston, a professor of physics at Trento University, Italy. “But the accuracy that AMS is displaying is far greater than past experiments, so we’re getting closer to unveiling the cause of the particle events we’re detecting,” he explained. Dark matter accounts for most of the mass in the Universe.

Scientists showed they could erase a rat’s cocaine habit by shining a laser light on its brain. The achievement could give rise to a new therapy for people crippled by an addiction to the drug, researchers say. For people and lab rats alike, a compulsive cocaine addiction can dull activity in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region thought to be important for impulse control and decision making. In the new study, scientists used genetic engineering to transform neurons in the rats’ prefrontal cortex into a switch. They implanted light-sensitive proteins called rhodopsins in the neurons that they could turn on and off with a laser light. “When we turn on a laser light in the prelimbic region of the prefrontal cortex, the compulsive cocaine seeking is gone,” said study researcher Antonello Bonci, scientific director of the intramural research program at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

And, now, in local news from Romania, we learn that

In a famous Romanian murder case, know as ”Elodia”, the body of the victim was searched for using a device known to be a scam. The ADE 650 device, was said to be able to locate a dead body using just a few strands of hair, if it was handled by a capable person. But the inventor of ADE 650, James McCormick, has already been arrested by British authorities after the device was sold in Iraq and Afghanistan to detect bombs, but was proved inefficient.

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