Brown recluse spider is sometimes to blame when anemia strikes

As spring approaches and people return to outdoor activities, caution should be taken in areas of the country that are home to Loxosceles reclusa, also called the brown recluse spider. A new study found that when patients present with sudden anemia, but the cause is elusive, the brown recluse spider should be part of the differential diagnosis, at least in parts of the nation where the spider is regularly found.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Lab on a chip: Ordinary cotton thread used to stitch together low-cost microfluidic analytical device

In a world first, the researchers have used ordinary cotton thread and sewing needles to literally stitch together the uniquely low-cost microfluidic analytical device, which is the size of a postage stamp and allows scientists to carry out chemical analyses of minute fluid samples, such as blood and urine.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Giant plankton-eating fishes roamed prehistoric seas, fossil evidence shows

Giant plankton-eating fishes roamed the prehistoric seas for over 100 million years before they were wiped out in the same event that killed off the dinosaurs, new fossil evidence has shown.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Regular exercise reduces patient anxiety by 20 percent, study finds

The anxiety that often accompanies a chronic illness can chip away at quality of life and make patients less likely to follow their treatment plan. But regular exercise can significantly reduce symptoms of anxiety, a new study shows.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Multiple sclerosis onset: Could mycobacteria play a role?

A non-pathogenic bacterium is capable to trigger an autoimmune disease similar to the multiple sclerosis in the mouse, the model animal which helps to explain how human diseases work. This is an unprecedented mechanism which could explain how this terrible central nervous system disease starts up in humans.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Novel way to study human inflammatory disease

A new study shows mice infected with the bacteria salmonella develop clinical signs consistent with a deadly and poorly understood human inflammatory disease, a finding that may lead to new therapies.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2010 | 3:00 pm

Oil droplets can navigate complex maze

Call them oil droplets with a brain or even "chemo-rats." Scientists have developed a way to make simple oil droplets "smart" enough to navigate through a complex maze almost like a trained lab rat. The finding could have a wide range of practical implications, including helping cancer drugs to reach their target and controlling the movement of futuristic nano-machines, the scientists say.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Babies, even when premature, 'see' with their hands

Even premature babies at 33 weeks post-conceptional age, about 2 months before term (40 gestational weeks), are capable of recognizing and distinguishing two objects of different shapes (a prism and a cylinder) with their right or left hands.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Novel compound found effective against avian influenza virus

A novel compound is highly effective against the pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza virus, including some drug-resistant strains, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Stents as good as surgery for clogged carotid arteries, study suggests

The CREST trial that compared traditional surgery with less-invasive stenting to clear dangerously clogged carotid arteries in the neck is being called "seminal and robust."
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 28 Feb 2010 | 9:00 am

Thousands still lack power after Northeast storm (AP)

AP - Frustration turned to resignation Saturday for hundreds of thousands of people in the Northeast struggling to survive another day waiting for utility crews to restore electricity after powerful storms socked the region with heavy snow, rain and hurricane-force winds.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 28 Feb 2010 | 2:06 am

Do the Meek Inherit the Galaxy?

The good news, the Milky Way could be abundant in intelligent life forms. The bad news, we may never hear from them. At last week's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, California's ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 28 Feb 2010 | 1:14 am

Chile quake in 'elite class' like 2004 Asian quake (AP)

AP - The huge earthquake that struck off the coast of Chile belongs to an "elite class" of mega earthquakes, experts said, and is similar to the 2004 Indian Ocean temblor that triggered deadly tsunami waves.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 11:13 pm

What of the Telescopes in Chile?

The ESO Very Large Array atop Cerro Paranal, northern Chile (ESO). There are many international telescopes in Chile making use of the low humidity conditions in the Chilean mountains and high-altitude deserts. But as one of the most seismically active ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 27 Feb 2010 | 7:00 pm

3 Best Standard-Definition Camcorders with Hard Drives (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - The marriage of hard drives and camcorders means the days of hauling around blank tapes or discs to record your family vacations are long gone. Here are three of the best in the standard-definition category, as rated by TechNewsDaily's sister site, TopTenReviews:
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 5:55 pm

When the net's wisdom of crowds turns into an online lynch mob

The internet's great advantages – speed, access and shared communication – can also have drawbacks, as Richard Dawkins found out last week. Here, author James Harkin reflects on the nature of discourse when everyone has their say

Even hell hath no fury like an electronic crowd, as Richard Dawkins discovered to his cost last week. Dawkins's mistake was to update his website with a letter politely giving notice of a few planned changes to its "community" bulletin-board, where 85,000 enthusiastic atheists come to air their views and discuss them with like minds.

"Dear forum members," his cheery email began, and before long the feedback was coming in thick and fast. Dawkins returned to his computer to find himself being described as "a suppurating rat's rectum". Another anonymous community member expressed a "sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails down your throat", while a third described the author of The God Delusion as having "a slack-jawed turd-in-the-mouth mug if ever I saw one".

The reaction must have confirmed Dawkins's worst suspicions. He was already concerned at the amount of gossip, abuse and irrelevant discussion turning up on his site, which was why he was keen to subject it to greater editorial control. Dawkins is no wallflower, but even for someone familiar with the fury of American creationists, the bile he unleashed seems to have taken him aback.

"Surely there has to be something wrong with people who can resort to such over-the-top language, overreacting so spectacularly to something so trivial," he wrote. "Was there ever such conservatism, such reactionary aversion to change, such vicious language in defence of a comfortable status quo? What is the underlying agenda of these people?" There must, he felt, be "something rotten in the internet culture that can vent it".

His language is extravagant, but he makes an interesting point. When anyone can have their say, what use is the stuff that comes out the other end? What can be done with it, and who is going to be in charge of quality control when things go wrong?

This weekend, three Google executives will be mulling over at least some of those questions. Last Wednesday they were convicted and awarded six-month suspended sentences for allowing a clip of an autistic boy being viciously bullied to play on Google Video. Google, the judges claimed, violated the boy's privacy, even though the company removed the video as soon as it was brought to its attention. The judgment is likely to be overturned on appeal; were it to stand, it would make much of the worldwide web unworkable.

Once again, however, it raises the question of what to do with the mass of material that is piling up on social media sites such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Google Video. For the internet gurus who travel around like fire-breathing evangelists, preaching hate for the old world and an all-consuming love for the new, the answer is clear. The vast ocean of electronic information out there on the net, according to them, represents a historic triumph of web users over the institutions that have kept them at bay.

There's no question that the deluge of data can be a great resource, or that social media is a fantastic way of passing around nuggets of information. Much of our media diet is made up of recommendations from social media – shared playlists on Spotify, for example, or articles that come our way via Twitter. It's also a great way to get things out, burrowing under the control of authorities. Trafigura is a case in point; in October 2009, a single elliptical tweet from the Guardian's editor lit the touch paper of a campaign that helped overturn a bullying legalistic attempt to silence the paper's investigations into the company.

Sometimes, however, the bullies are on the other side – witness the over-the-top online monstering of Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir in the same month, after her ill-advised ruminations on the death of singer Stephen Gately.Both examples, however, can be seen as two sides of the same coin. The paradox of the "wisdom of online crowds" is that it only works in clubbable, relatively small groups of like-thinking minds. The reason why the richest and most productive audiences online are for the most arcane subjects – on the relationship between economics and law, for example, or how to care for cats – is because everyone involved feels part of an exclusive club dedicated to finding out more about the same thing.

However, it's for exactly the same reason that many of these clubs can become breeding grounds for vicious tribalism. The brevity required for communication on Twitter does not lend itself to decorous etiquette, but neither is it the soul of wit to circulate snide, snarky tweets to an enthusiastic group of followers.

Too often the online audience separates into a series of rival gangs, each of them patting each other on the back and throwing stink-bombs at the other side. In this environment civility can disappear, with the result that those who do not take an extreme approach in offering their views decide that online forums are not for them.

When everyone is reinforcing everyone else's opinion in an online echo-chamber, there's little need to state a case or debate one's opponent. It's easier – like the schoolyard bully – just to abuse them. The other problem with online "communities" is that decisions about quality often become snagged in a highly conservative and self-reinforcing feedback loop in which everyone queues up to follow the leader.

In an intriguing experiment, three social network theorists at Columbia University used the web to invite more than 14,000 young people to rate songs by relatively unknown bands and download the ones they liked. The researchers began by dividing their subjects into two groups. The first group was asked to make their decisions independently of each other, while the second was allowed to see a rolling chart of how many times, in descending order, each song had been downloaded by others – telling them, in effect, which songs were the most popular among their peers.

When they came in, the results were as clear as day. Those who could see the download charts, the researchers discovered, tended to give higher ratings to the songs at the top of the chart and were more likely to download those songs. People tended to like songs more, in other words, if other people liked them. The result was to make the choices of those in the second group highly unpredictable, with a great deal depending on who rolled up to make their choices first. Identical songs were judged to be hits or flops depending on whether other people had been seen to download them earlier.

In their haste to rustle up an audience, mainstream institutions have not quite grasped the implications of all this, which is why they keep trying to flatter the vast, anonymous masses by inviting them in. The results can be ruinous.

When Penguin invited millions of web users to collaborate on a "group novel" called A Million Penguins in 2007, for example, the story was so chaotic as to be unreadable, and kept splintering off in new directions; at one point it even divided itself into "Novel A" and "Novel B" with links to alternative endings. Characters multiplied out of control, paragraphs and whole sections ended at random, plot lines drifted hopelessly and were left hanging in mid-air. Some collaborative novelists took it upon themselves to try to sabotage the whole experiment; one took the trouble to litter the text with references to bananas.

In the end, just like Dawkins, the organisers were forced to "lock down" the project for a few hours every day to ward off the vandals and to allow the novel time to develop. One of the reasons for the novel's incoherence, it became apparent, was that not even the masses of novelists who had queued up to help to write the book had bothered to read what had gone before. They were too busy writing.

Penguin's failed attempt to persuade an electronic crowd to co-write a novel illustrates one last problem throwing open one's organisation to electronic feedback. Often it only works until its beneficiaries realise that, no matter how many messages they fire off, those in authority are bound to retain the ultimate reins of control.

At that point it is likely that they will switch from offering "good" or helpful feedback into pushing "bad" or destructive feedback back into the system. The angry, splenetic or downright abusive tone sometimes exhibited by those former fans of Richard Dawkins is a good example of this kind of feedback. By then, of course, it's a little too late to show them the door.

James Harkin is the author of Cyburbia: the Dangerous Idea That's Changing How We Live and Who We Are. Published in paperback in April.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 27 Feb 2010 | 5:06 pm

So movies shouldn't break the laws of physics? Don't tell Captain Kirk | David Mitchell

When you're making a television sketch show, every so often – quite frequently if it's written by people like me who have few life experiences other than watching television programmes and being annoyed by them, or making television programmes and finding the process frustrating – you find yourself filming a sketch about television, in which the process of making television is depicted.

At this point, everyone on the crew gets a bit excited. They really want to get this right. The script might have the character of the director talking to an actor and then calling "action" for the start of fictional filming to begin, but this will cause murmurs. In real life, the director doesn't call action – it's usually the assistant director – and a lot of other things need to be called and checked between when an actor receives notes from the director and when he starts depicting the pretend events, or saying the made-up words, in front of the camera.

So people suggest that clapperboards should be waved, slate and take numbers read out, the sound recordist's signal of readiness added to the dialogue and so on. Everyone is dreading the thought of depicting their job unrealistically.

This makes no sense to me. In this area, television has nothing to prove: the programme's very existence shows that its makers know how television programmes are made. And yet, in my experience, it's the only aspect of life that TV productions baulk at representing incorrectly. They'll show brain operations done with melon ballers, Napoleon wearing the full dress uniform of a Brazilian police inspector with a chestful of Luftwaffe medals and Judge John Deed before they'll allow the fictional on-camera cameraman not to call "Mark it" at the appropriate time.

The main reason to avoid putting something incorrect or unrealistic-looking in a TV show or film is that it disrupts people's suspension of disbelief. It's still sometimes worth doing this to a tiny minority of the audience in order to tell a story more engagingly to the rest. That's why so many Sherlock Holmes adaptations give him a deerstalker – someone's calculated that the viewers upset by this departure from the books are vastly outnumbered by those who expect to see "a proper Sherlock Holmes hat". They're all Americans obviously, but they have money.

My view is that inaccurately depicting the minutiae of TV shooting also comes into this category. The only people whose ability to suspend their disbelief might suffer are those who work in TV – and they will have lost that ability long ago. When they watch telly, all they can see is the work that's gone into it and the mistakes. It's like taking an Egyptian slave on a tour of the pyramids – he doesn't marvel, he just gets sympathy backache. After a long shoot, I can't watch films, comedies or dramas without seeing an upsetting hotchpotch of continuity errors and scenes that must have been a nightmare to complete. I'm all: "Oh, that cigarette's got longer!" or: "His hair was wetter in the wide shot."

Incidentally, having been required on many occasions to lift or eat things repeatedly on camera, I've stopped minding the obviously empty suitcases that all film and TV characters carry and their reluctance to consume any more than a pea at mealtimes. When you've been shovelling tepid mushroom stroganoff into your mouth for two hours, you conclude than no one's suspension of disbelief is worth what it would take to appear ravenous for another bite. "It's only a sodding story!" you whinge through grey drool as you brace yourself for another fungusy burp.

Being realistic is a storytelling tool, like lighting, music and sexy actresses. If it's not helping, and you won't otherwise be denying the Holocaust or pushing drugs to kids, then you can lose it. I was very happy with that conclusion and was surprised to learn last week that in Hollywood it's now being questioned. Sidney Perkowitz, a professor of physics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, with the backing of eminent figures such as Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Kasdan, has created some guidelines for depicting science in Hollywood fiction, which has, Perkowitz believes, been taking too many liberties with the truth.

The main idea is to limit films to one transgression of the laws of physics each (on screen only, otherwise they'd all go for perpetual motion machines to power the lights). Presumably this is in addition to the one coincidence to which good screenplays are supposed to be restricted. So you can travel at twice the speed of light and bump into an old flame on an alien world, but if she turns out to have laser tits and have met your uncle, you've crossed the line.

Perkowitz cites The Core, in which a nuclear device is detonated at the centre of the Earth in order to get it spinning again, as a film he hated because of its ridiculous pseudo-science, and Starship Troopers as enjoyable but let down by its giant insects which, if they really existed, he says would collapse under their own weight. Well I've seen Starship Troopers and the giant insects are the only thing going for it. If anything in that film is collapsing under its own weight it's the storyline's self-satisfied irony.

How typical of a scientist to try to reduce film-making to a formula. He's noticed that enjoyable science fiction sometimes needs to include the impossible, but streams of implausible events don't make a compelling narrative. He's right but he should have left it at that. The happy medium is found by using judgment not maths.

Star Wars, perhaps the most successful science-fiction film ever made, breaks dozens of laws of physics but has been enjoyed by millions. Its more recent prequels break no more and are, to those of us who grew up with the originals, heartbreakingly worse. Perkowitz's rule would have ruined the former but not saved the latter – only the recovery of their creator's artistic touch could have done that.

Apparently, if a ship blows up in space, it doesn't really make a noise. How silly much of Hollywood's sci-fi output must look to audience members with experience of inter-stellar warfare.

Personally I think it's exciting when things go bang but it would be a ludicrous waste of the one physical impossibility that Perkowitz permits. You'd need to save that for warp speed or all of Kirk's adventures would have to happen on the moon.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 27 Feb 2010 | 5:05 pm

Warming panel, under attack, seeks outside review (AP)

AP - The Nobel Prize-winning international scientific panel studying global warming is seeking independent outside review for how it makes major reports.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 4:04 pm

My bright idea: Robert Winston

The scientist and TV presenter tells us why it's important to check out the dark side of inventions first

Robert Winston, Professor of Science and Society and Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College, London, is one of the best-known popularisers of science in this country and has a reputation for taking a provocative stance on many issues. His latest book, Bad Ideas? (Bantam Press) deals with the dark side of the inventions that have shaped human history, and when he arrives at the Observer offices, this 69-year old doctor, sometime TV presenter and Labour peer is on characteristically punchy form.

Your new book is described as "tracing the fascinating history of our attempts at self-improvement… but also questioning their value". In other words: not every invention is a copper-bottomed good thing. What is the downside of our inventiveness?

The book tries to argue that every aspect of our inventiveness has a downside: that there's a dark side to every advance, and that's not generally recognised at the time.

Nearly all inventions are not recognised for their positive side either when they're made. So, for example, scientists didn't go out to design a CD machine: they designed a laser. But we got all sorts of things from a laser which we never remotely imagined, and we're still finding things for a laser to do. But a laser can be used as a weapon. Where a laser is being used to attempt nuclear fusion, it's in a facility designed to improve nuclear weapons.

A microchip, too, is something we wouldn't dream of being without, but it does bring unforeseen consequences in how we communicate, sometimes adversely in a democracy.

When a discovery is made, a scientist probably only sees the advantage in the small arena of his or her own interest. Is it your point that society finds other uses for that invention years later?

That's right, and [it's an] interesting thing about modern science – very different from what happened before the industrial revolution. Before that, even people like James Watt, who were very focused, were generalists; they had a broad idea of what they were doing. In my lab now we have one person who's very interested in kinase in the cell, for instance, but perhaps won't see the relevance of that work in a bigger context. Science and scientists have tended to have to focus on more and more difficult and defined areas, and quite often we lose that big picture. The other point is [our] responsibility to society. The science I do has always been paid for by the tax-payer, and yet we scientists think of [it being] our science, and we tend to be rather precious about that. We have to be more responsive and recognise that the adverse affects of what we do have an effect on society as much as they do on us. Our ethical responsibility is something we need to think of afresh. Ethics is not routinely taught to science students except in medicine, and I think it should be.

You've mentioned that when you were chairing the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee one of the most interesting aspects of the work was the question of science and society and what limits society might impose on science. But at the moment what we're seeing is the opposite, where science is trying to impose limits on technology to limit climate change and coming under great pressure from society not to impose limits. How would you react to that?

I don't think you can impose limits on science because the very nature of homo sapiens is that he – she – is an inquisitive species. You can't control science. You have to control the effects of science. It's a very interesting question about climate change. I repeatedly refer to climate change in the book but I deliberately avoided making it a book about climate change because the issues I'm interested in are more generic. But, clearly, if we are to combat climate change then a key thing is to have society onside. Without that we've failed. We need to communicate much better with society, and not necessarily trust governments, which may have other agendas. We saw this very clearly at Copenhagen and Kyoto.

Is there the prospect that we never control technology and it wipes us out?

I'm not that pessimistic. Alec Broers, in his Reith Lecture some years ago, argued that technology would solve the problems that technology had created. I'm not sure I go along with him because we should look at the downside of the technology at the very beginning of developing it. But I do think, so far, in the history of mankind, we've continued to improve our lot using technology and we've managed to control the worst aspects of that. I think climate change will be another example of where we're able to do that. Geo-engineering is pretty fanciful stuff. Nonetheless, those technologies are developing so quickly in many universities it would be inexcusable not to take them seriously. I think that somewhere we'll hit the button.

What inventions do you feel most encompass your theme – the idea of threat versus promise?

Big ones, I think. Big technologies like agriculture, which is perhaps the biggest of all because that really changed humankind. It made us much more vulnerable, and it made us live shorter to start with as well. In modern terms the technology of oil is fascinating because we understood early on that oil was not as simple or as useful as it might seem. In the early days of oil, when it was over-produced, it caused immediate economic chaos, for example in Texas. And then it became obvious in the Middle East a long time ago that it was a much bigger source of conflict than we'd given it credence for. And [it] probably still is. You could argue that Iraq and even Afghanistan are in some ways linked to our usage and dependence on oil.

I've avoided that, but I'm [also] pretty hard on medicine. Medicine, which I wouldn't be without, has also been a force for... less good. For example, if you look at our mishandling of the immune system, using antibiotics in children and avoiding infection, we've certainly increased the risk of asthma. And it may be that juvenile diabetes, for example, is [also] much more common as a result.

One of the other things that worries me is that there has been increasingly an impetus to diagnose, to make medicine a more scientific subject, forgetting the patient. I think there is a turnabout now in our medical schools where we are addressing that issue, but we have produced generations of doctors who can't (because of time constraints or bureaucracy) or won't (because of the way they've been taught) actually communicate very well with their patients, and communication is a fantastic healer.

So it's often a case of two steps forward, one step back?

The genome is a good example of a technological innovation which was bruited as being an extraordinary achievement but actually has achieved very little because we don't have anything like the power to implement what we might do with it. On a broader scale, as medicine becomes more complex, more expensive, we are failing to have mature debate about who's going to pay for it in the future... that's a worrying political issue. [You] can't really trust governments, can't trust politicians.

Has any invention been unambiguously good?

There are so many, it's hard to focus on one. I've been thinking of generic technologies which all have a downside. But I'd rather live now than at any time in the past.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 27 Feb 2010 | 3:26 pm

How Long it Takes a Tsunami to Travel Across the Ocean

Estimated travel time for the tsunami generated by the 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 Feb 2010 | 3:20 pm

Kazakhstan hindering Russian space missions: official (AFP)

AFP - Kazakhstan, home of the space base used to launch rockets to the International Space Station (ISS), is interfering with Russian space missions, the head of Russia's space agency said Saturday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 2:29 pm

Tsunami Rushes Ashore in Hawaii On Its Way to Asia

A tsunami triggered by an earthquake in Chile has swept ashore in Hawaii, but there are no immediate reports of damage.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 27 Feb 2010 | 1:07 pm

Indian PM in Saudi Arabia for talks (AFP)

AFP - Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh arrived in Saudi Arabia on Saturday on the first visit by an Indian premier to the oil kingpin in 28 years with energy imports, Middle East peace and Islamic militancy on the agenda.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 11:32 am

Sierra Leone takes steps to save mangroves (AFP)

AFP - Sierra Leone's fragile mangrove ecosystem risks being depleted if steps are not taken, the country's forestry director said Saturday after African countries adopted a plan to save coastal mangrove forests.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 27 Feb 2010 | 11:24 am

Chile Earthquake: Is Mother Nature Out of Control?

The Chilean earthquake is not outside the realm of normal, even though it comes on the heels of other major earthquakes.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 Feb 2010 | 10:35 am

Photo Album: Antarctica, Iceberg Maker

Huge icebergs break off Antarctica. The images are amazing.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 Feb 2010 | 10:17 am

Huge Iceberg Breaks Off Antarctica

Iceberg B-09B crashes into the Mertz Glacier tongue in Antarctica, and a new iceberg is created.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 Feb 2010 | 9:38 am

Tsunami Warning Issued for Hawaii

A tsunami warning has been issued for Hawaii by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 Feb 2010 | 7:46 am

How Tsunamis Work

A major earthquake that struck Chile sent a tsunami out into the Pacific Ocean, prompting a tsunami warning for Hawaii.
Source: Livescience.com | 27 Feb 2010 | 6:49 am

Unreason marches on

As celebrities endorse nonsensical diets and journalists lend credence to anecdote over science, are we heading for disaster?

Will anecdote, rumor and buzz oust science as the basis for individual decision-making and public policy? If so, will it give rise to societal disintegration and disaster? Climate historian and physicist Spencer Weart thinks it's possible

Weart mused recently on what a historian 200 years from now might say about early 21st century discussions of climate change, but his speculations are also relevant to other areas of science.

Weart predicted that a future historian might conclude: "The media coverage [of East Anglia Unversity's controversial climate change emails] represented a new low ... As we know, the repetition of allegations is sufficient to make them stick in the public's mind, regardless of whether they are later shown (or could easily be shown at the time) to be untrue. Thus one more step was taken toward the disintegration and disasters of the late 21st century." Weart adds a disclaimer of sorts: "um, just kidding … I hope …"

I'm not bold enough to make predictions two centuries in the future but the current trends are worrisome. Gullible members of society increasingly are being manipulated by self-serving activists, advocates and hucksters, aided by uncritical journalists who too often lend credence to the nattering of nitwits. Actor Tom Cruise has railed for years against physicians prescribing psychotropic drugs, saying "There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance in a body", while Kate Moss and Oprah Winfrey have advocated extreme diets to "detoxify" your body. Demi Moore has endorsed detoxification by bleeding with "highly trained medical leeches". But diet alone cannot remove toxins (which is normally performed effectively by the kidneys and liver, in any case), and bloodletting was discredited as a medical practice centuries ago.

The polymathic and persuasive Dick Taverne (aka Lord Taverne of Pimlico) warned in his 2005 book, The March of Unreason, about the pervasive influence of these sorts of nonsense. He argued that "in the practice of medicine, popular approaches to farming and food, policies to reduce hunger and disease, and many other practical issues, there is an undercurrent of irrationality that threatens the progress that depends on science and even [threatens] the civilised basis of our democracy," and that we ignore it at our peril.

The undercurrent has now become a torrent, suggesting that Weart's future historian might view Taverne as a true visionary.

Taverne characterised as "a monument to irrationality" the trend toward consumers buying overpriced organic food, promoted by advocates whose "principles are founded on a scientific howler; it is governed by rules that have no rhyme or reason, and its propaganda could have an adverse effect on the health of poor people." In the US, for example, organic standards are process-based and have little, if anything, to do with the actual characteristics of the product. Similarly, because organic farming is far less efficient than conventional farming, organic food costs more and requires that more and poorer quality land – and much more water, an increasingly precious commodity – be devoted to farming. Higher prices mean lower consumption and, consequently, fewer of the benefits conferred by a diet rich in fruits and vegetables.

Finally, organic producers' proscription of the use of genetically engineered, or "genetically modified" (GM), plant varieties prevents consumers of organic products from enjoying many nutritional and safety improvements, as well as lower prices.

Earlier this month, India's environment and agriculture minister denied approval for the commercialisation of insect-resistant aubergine (or eggplant), which would have been the nation's first genetically engineered food crop, in spite of virtual unanimity among the country's regulators and other scientists worldwide that the product is safe and a huge potential benefit to farmers. The extensive field trials suggest that the new variety of aubergine could have doubled yields and drastically reduced the spraying of chemical pesticides.

Whether in two decades or 20, observers may look upon the regulatory delays of and activists' attacks on rice fortified with beta-carotene, the precursor of vitamin A – "Golden Rice" – as one of the great travesties and public health catastrophes of this era. Currently in developing countries 200-300 million children of preschool age are at risk of vitamin A deficiency, which can be devastating and even fatal. It increases susceptibility to common childhood infections such as measles and diarrhoeal diseases and is the single most important cause of childhood blindness in developing countries. Every year, up to 500,000 children become blind as a result of vitamin A deficiency, and more than half of them die within a year of losing their sight.

Only time will tell whether Weart's suggestion of societal "disintegration and disasters" will come to pass, but unreason doth march on.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 27 Feb 2010 | 5:00 am

Roving Mars in Award-Winning Style

How would you like to explore the Martian landscape? Jump aboard the Manned Mars Exploration Rover, a self-contained mobile base designed to deal with the worst the Red Planet can throw at it.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 27 Feb 2010 | 4:34 am

Huge Quake Hits Chile; Tsunami Threatens Pacific

A 8.8-magnitude earthquake rattles Chile on February 27, threatening Pacific Ocean nations with a tsunami.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 27 Feb 2010 | 3:45 am

The old doctrines are not enough | Tom Sutcliffe

The church must provide a valid assertion of truth about life that can stand comparison truths and wisdom drawn from science

On the final day of the recent Church of England General Synod meeting there was a rather worthy debate about how the claims of science are affecting belief in God. At no point did any of the speakers remark on the surely important fact that the public square these days is crowded with religions. Clearly, religious belief is not incompatible with science. However, people in a multicultural society, who respect the beliefs of all, must inevitably observe that all religions are similarly non-scientific in the way they furnish different, often incompatible explanations about the meaning of life, whereas science is systemically consistent. And this must account for the different ways that people treat scientific truths and what are claimed as religious truths.

Science is a method applied to whatever can be tested and observed. It makes no claims save in those terms. Human knowledge, and the science that extends it, is finite. But the boundaries of what is known continue to expand. As the Bible says – "No man has seen God" in a scientific sense. So God seems, in a way, to be diminishing in significance, becoming more remote and much less persuasive. Unavoidably, science now suggests to some – as it always has – that God is not an objective necessity. Wisdom is no church monopoly. Lucretius in De Rerum Natura doubted whether anything humans could do would have any effect on the gods, rather in the same way that one may be at a loss when one seeks a present for somebody much richer who has everything already. A being who cannot be seen or known cannot be tested scientifically.

It is impossible to evaluate the truth claims of different world religions. But they do have one thing in common: they are centred on the human being. Religions perceive the goodness which they acknowledge as the focus of the divine (of which God can seem to be a personalisation) in terms of a profoundly humane vision. Religions, with their mostly overlapping sets of shared beliefs, seem to reflect human culture as much as divine revelation. Perhaps, as has been suggested by some, the human mind is hardwired to resonate philosophically with the idea of God.

But what kind of God do we believe in? – as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has put it, when explaining the various kinds of God he does not believe in. I myself find the leap of faith increasingly difficult. Since I joined the General Synod almost 20 years ago, I have constantly been asking myself whether I should be there at all, something which fellow members may have been asking about me too. I know that my personal idea of Christianity is unorthodox, though I am thankful to find a home in the Church of England which is a national church where the thought-police are not bothered by whatever a lay cradle Anglican does or does not believe. I see that faith stories need to be accepted – just as attending Hamlet or The Ring involves suspending disbelief, and going along with the story. I also appreciate there are many faithful Christians who are blissfully certain about the classic church doctrines: resurrection, incarnation, virgin birth, trinity.

Yet something has changed radically and cannot be restored by traditional services, hymn-singing, or resolute assertive preaching. A very large number of people today, many of them members of Christian churches, some of them Anglican priests, do not believe in the afterlife, heaven, or hell. When I die I may alarmingly discover that death is not the end. I am not an atheist, but I am agnostic about eternity. St Paul felt the promise of an afterlife made all the difference, but I incline to David Jenkins's teaching about the resurrection. Why would God, or we ourselves, benefit from our eternity? For me, much of the doctrinal edifice developed during the decades and early centuries after the crucifixion has crumbled. One life is enough for most, too much for some.

I believe God to be a powerful, dangerous, potentially crucial idea. God exists in the minds of millions of human beings. Perhaps he put himself there. Nobody can wholly agree (save in worked-out, traditional religious positions) who he is or what he or she wants. But that's the whole point. Nobody owns God. God is the discourse of our existence.

What matters is what God would want. And our views about what God should want need to acknowledge what the tradition has maintained about God, since wisdom is distilled by long usage. Yet a belief in God and the afterlife that is unmodulated by proper doubts and questioning can be extremely dangerous. It justified violence and cruelty long before present day jihads.

I continue to be profoundly attracted to the teaching and person of Jesus, and try to follow him as a "living lord" in my own way. He constantly provokes and challenges, as he did in his lifetime. He is, in that sense, risen again – and even sometimes, through his spirit, clearly leading our church which is his resurrection body.

But these are mere words. The challenge for the church is to translate the crumbling edifice of traditional Christian belief into a valid assertion of truth about life that can stand comparison with the equally valid truths and wisdom drawn from scientific perception and deduction. The General Synod debate seemed desperately naive to me because it was around a motion asking for robustness in preaching the compatibility of science and religion without any admission that the plethora of religions in itself renders the claims of all religions implausible and wobbly to most ordinary people – compared with the comparative coherence of what can be scientifically established.

We Christians can only show how our religion adds up through the way we live our lives, and through such interpretations of theological or biblical ideas as ring true. The Bible and Qur'an are there, like Shakespeare and like the theories of science, for human nourishment and freedom – not to imprison us. What matters is what we can believe to be truth. That is what sets us free. Belief systems and doctrines are not an end but a profound means. The command to love what is good and to love your neighbour promotes ideas that are not easy to reconcile. That, nevertheless, is the essence of communion.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 27 Feb 2010 | 3:00 am

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