Science

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

ScienceBlogs Channel : Medicine & Health

6 New Age cures that are (mostly) as full of crap as you think [Respectful Insolence]
Update on the EB 2012 Contest! [Life Lines]
Phew, Salami Is Not Spiced Adipocere [Aardvarchaeology]
A school board president abuses his position to promote an antivaccine movie [Respectful Insolence]

6 New Age cures that are (mostly) as full of crap as you think [Respectful Insolence]

Posted: 21 Mar 2012 01:00 AM PDT

Sometimes you find good skepticism in strange places. One example of this has been Cracked.com. Normally, Cracked.com is a humor site based on the magazine that I used to read sometimes back in 1970s. Unfortunately, the magazine folded several years ago, but the website lives on. For example, Cracked.com once did a snarky article making fun of the "heroes" of the antivaccine movement and contrasting them to "villains" like (of course!) Paul Offit. It even featured for emphasis the infamous "baby eating" poster that Age of Autism ran a couple of years ago that featured Steve Novella, Paul Offit, and other champions of vaccine science sitting around a Thanksgiving feast featuring as its main course a baby. In general, many of the articles in Cracked.com take the form of lists, like 8 New TV Show Ideas Almost as Stupid as 'Grey's Anatomy' and The 5 Most Insane Examples of Chinese Counterfeiting. Unfortunately, some of you forwarded an article of this form with the title 6 New Age Cures That Aren't As Full Of Crap As You Think.

If I see much more of this, I might have to reassess my opinion of Cracked.com as an unlikely seeming place to go for skepticism and critical thinking. Let's just put it this way. Some of "New Age cures" that Cracked.com characterizes as not being "as full of crap as you think" are actually more full of crap than you think. Acupuncture, for example, which is number six on the list (given that these lists usually run from the highest number to the lowest). After starting out promisingly enough characterizing the idea of qi as nonsense, the article veers into the quackademic medicine explanation of how acupuncture "works" that buys into every trope that apologists of placebo medicine use to justify the use of acupuncture. First, though:

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Update on the EB 2012 Contest! [Life Lines]

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 01:25 PM PDT

Thanks to everyone who sent in their feedback about last week's post on Top Reasons for Loving Comparative Physiology. It inspired another reader to send along this humorous photo entitled, "Lining Up to Hear A Talk About Comparative Physiology," alleged to have been taken at last year's EB meeting. Not exactly hard science, but in the spirit of rewarding people for creativity and humor, Mr. N will receive a "What's New in Comparative Physiology?" t-shirt! Have an idea about comparative physiology? Tell us, and get your chance to win. Contest rules are here.

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Phew, Salami Is Not Spiced Adipocere [Aardvarchaeology]

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 06:20 AM PDT

Adipocere / corpse wax:

a wax-like organic substance formed by the anaerobic bacterial hydrolysis of fat in tissue, such as body fat in corpses. ... a crumbly, waxy, water-insoluble material consisting mostly of saturated fatty acids. Depending on whether it was formed from white or brown body fat, adipocere is grayish white or tan in color. ... The transformation of fats into adipocere occurs best in the absence of oxygen in a cold and humid environment, such as in wet ground or mud at the bottom of a lake or a sealed casket ...

Wikipedia

Salami:

Salami are cured in warm, humid conditions to encourage growth of the bacteria involved in the fermentation process. Sugars (usually dextrose) are added as a food source for the bacteria during the curing process ... Lactic acid is produced by the bacteria as a waste product, lowering the pH and coagulating and lowering the water-holding capacity of the meat. The acid produced by the bacteria makes the meat an inhospitable environment for other, pathogenic bacteria ...
Wikipedia

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A school board president abuses his position to promote an antivaccine movie [Respectful Insolence]

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 01:00 AM PDT

A science-based blogger's work is never done, apparently.

I'll show you what I mean in a minute. But first, I just have to make a simple observation. Pseudoscience, be it quackery, evolution denial, denial of anthropogenic global warming, antivaccine nonsense, or other forms of pseudoscience, apparently never dies. No matter how many times it's slapped down, no matter how often and how vigorously it's refuted, it always seems to rise again. In fact, I used to liken pseudoscience and quackery to zombies, but that's a bad analogy. After all, in most zombie lore (as told in books and movies) a head shot will take a zombie out and render it no longer a threat. Not so, pseudoscience and quackery. A detailed deconstruction of the false scientific and evidentiary underpinnings of quackery (i.e., the proverbial "head shot," if you'll allow me to use the metaphor) doesn't take out a bit of quackerry. Indeed, in the minds of its followers, a "head shot" seems to make that quackery strong.

In no area of quackery is this more the case than in antivaccine quackery. If there's one branch of quackery where evidence matters not at all and the lies are impossible to destroy, it's antivaccine lies. More so than virtually any branch of quackery, the antivaccine movement has its own dedicated propaganda machine that is very much like the Terminator. Listen and understand. Antivaccinationists are out there. They can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity (for the children they endanger), remorse (for the children who catch vaccine-preventable diseases because of the dimunition of herd immunity), or fear of anything other than vaccines. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until medicine, science, and reason are dead.

I know, I got carried away, but the original Terminator movie still rocks after all these years. So sue me.

An example of this very phenomenon is the antivaccine propaganda movie The Greater Good. I and a bunch of other bloggers deconstructed the misinformation, pseudoscience, and lies that filled the movie like so much black hole matter packed at such a high density that no light of reason can escape that event horizon. Or, as I put it at the time in my review of the movie:

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

Five abandoned Olympic sports [SciencePunk]
A dentist's dream come true: Some carnivores lack a sweet tooth [Life Lines]
Update on the EB 2012 Contest! [Life Lines]

Five abandoned Olympic sports [SciencePunk]

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 06:31 PM PDT

There is only one truly kosher sport when it comes to the Olympics: athletics. All those ancient Greeks did was run around in the dirt butt naked. It took over fifty years for them to add a second sport: more running, but in a wild twist, a race over twice the distance as before. Over the years more sports were added, including one involving running in full armour, which much have provided much-needed advertising canvas for Classical games sponsors.

After the revival of the games in 1894, various sports have been added, some successfully, whilst others fell by the wayside. Take a tour with me now down the boulevard of broken dreams that is my non-exhaustive list of discontinued Olympic sports.

1. Basque Pelota

The 1900 Olympic Games were held in Paris as part of the World's Fair, somehow stretching 19 events out to 5 months (and there wasn't even an over-scripted opening ceremony to pad things out) . Basque Pelota is a bastard offshoot of tennis, typically played by whacking a ball at an opponent either directly or by rebounding it off a wall. Various tools are on hand, and sometimes the game is simply played on hand, presumably by French peasants too busy eating catgut to make it into a racket. Around 1850 someone thought it would be pretty badass to mould a basket-claw to his hand like some kind of post-Napoleonic Mortal Kombat character, allowing him to throw the ball at astonishing speeds whilst screaming "Liberté, égalité, FATALITIÉ!!!". Only two teams competed in the 1900 event and inexplicably, the event never appeared in the Olympics again, except as a museum piece.

2. Jeu de Paume
Uproariously translated as "game of the palm", this was not in fact a sport dedicated to feverishly masturbating in front of a stadium filled with thousands of cheering spectators, however entertaining that might have been. The preferred English translation is "real tennis", which itself is an abbreviation of "real MAN'S tennis", as once again it was played without the benefit of the rackets those namby-pamby upper class Henrys used whilst trotting like feather-bedded ponies across the perfectly manicured gardens of "lawn tennis". Eventually, all that bludgeoning balls with naked hands led to large swathes of the population crippled by limp wrists which couldn't defend French territory, and bourgeois rackets were grudgingly admitted to the game. Jeu de paume appeared in the 1908 Olympic games held in London, where the plucky Brits set the tone for the next century of olympiad success by losing to the Americans. Displaying the same good sportmanship evident following our defeat to Australia in an early inter-podean cricket match, jeu de paume was struck from the Olympic register and never mentioned again.

3. Roque
Rocky by name and rocky by nature, the 1904 Olympic Games in St Louis were remembered for being the first held in the fledgling nation of the United States of America, and also for being a piss-poor, badly-managed shambles. To pick one example from the generous spread of comedic error on offer: American Frederick Lorz dropped out of the marathon after nine miles, but on seeing him trudge back into the stadium to collect his clothes, officials mistakenly thought he had completed the race and crowned him winner. Less well remembered was the introduction of the "Game of the Century", roque, a form of croquet so derivative that even the name is aggressively uninspired. Displaying the same good sportmanship that would confirm success in wars across the Asian continent later that century, the US was the only country to enter the roque tournament, taking home the gold, silver and bronze medals.

4. Water motorsports
Not to be outdone in the battle for most farcical Olympic event, the British upped the game in 1908 with the introduction of water motorsports. As is the tradition in this country, events were undertaken in spite of the weather, not because of it, and all three boat races were held in the midst of a howling gale. In the first, "open class" event, the Wolseley-Siddely was apparent victor after the only other boat to compete, the Dylan, was forced to abandon the race.

Similarly, only two vessels arrived for the second event, one of which, Gyrinus, had recruited an extra crew member whose sole job it was to bail out the boat. It won after the Quicksilver's crew abandoned the race due to the very technical problem of their boat being full of water. Two more boats competed for the third race, one of which was towed off the course following engine failure. During the afternoon, the British insisted to a skeptical crowd that the weather really had brightened up quite a bit, and the open class race was run again, this time with the Wolseley-Siddely competing against the French Camille. The British boat ran aground on a mud spit, and gold went to the uncontested French.

5. Tug of war

Even today, men and women of the world lie awake at night, tossing and turning, projecting their anguish to an uncaring world, shouting silently: "Oh, how I missed my calling in life! If only, if only tug of war could be recognised for the sport of champions it is, and not relegated to debasing performances by Volvo-driving middle aged men at church fetes and children's parties!" For too brief a shining moment, that world was real, and the principal athletes of the time battled for supremacy over eighty feet of plaited hemp. From 1900 to 1920, tug of war was an Olympic sport. Scandinavian teams in particular did well, with Sweden (no doubt helped by their incredible facial hair) bagging their first ever Olympic gold in this event, after defeating a team put forward by reigning champions from the City of London Police. There is currently a Facebook 'campaign' to reinstate tug of war as an Olympic sport, which has attracted one person fewer than is needed to play tug of war.

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A dentist's dream come true: Some carnivores lack a sweet tooth [Life Lines]

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 04:25 PM PDT

New research conducted by Dr. Gary Beauchamp from the Monell Chemical Sciences Center in Philadelphia has shown that seven of twelve species of carnivorous mammals tested lack taste receptors for sweets. According to the article, Dr. Beachamp and his colleagues identified mutations in the mammalian taste receptor for sweets (Tas1r2/Tas1r3) in animals from the Pinnipedia order (sea lions, fur seals and Pacific harbor seals), bottlenose dolphins, Asian small-clawed otters, Spotted hyenas, fossa (member of the mongoose family), and cat-like banded linsangs. In contrast, normal sweet receptors were found in the carnivorous aardwolf, Canadian otter, spectacled bear, raccoon and red wolf. In functional studies, animals with mutated Tas1r2 had no preference for sugars (Asian small-clawed otters) whereas animals with intact taste receptors exhibited strong preferences for sweets (spectacled bears). Since the types of mutations varied between each of the species, this suggests that the loss of taste receptors for sweets independently evolved multiple times in carnivores.

These cats, however, clearly have intact taste receptors for sweets:

Image Source: www.seriouseats.com

Source:
Jiang et al., Major taste loss in carnivorous mammals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Epub Ahead of Print.

If you are planning on attending Experimental Biology 2012, don't forget to enter the contest to win a free Dr. Dolittle "What's New in Comparative Physiology" t-shirt and try your chance at also winning free coffee at the meeting! To learn more, click here.

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Update on the EB 2012 Contest! [Life Lines]

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 01:25 PM PDT

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ScienceBlogs Channel : Humanities & Social Science

The Personal Benefits of Doing Archaeology: Subversive subsurfaces. [Greg Laden's Blog]
Drift by Rachel Maddow: Chapter 1 [Greg Laden's Blog]
How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog Publicity Update [Uncertain Principles]

The Personal Benefits of Doing Archaeology: Subversive subsurfaces. [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 06:22 PM PDT

In discussing the relevance of archeology to anything, there is an easy answer provided by my friend Peter Wells, a specialist in Culture Contact and the Central European Iron Age. Peter tells his students on the first day of class that "Archaeology is the study of everything that happened anywhere, any time, with any human beings that ever existed or exist now." And if you think that he is exaggerating, you don't know much about Archaeology.

Recently, my friend Elizabeth Reetz has asked a more narrowly defined question: "What are the benefits of environmental education through archaeology?" Elizabeth goes on to ask of her archaeological colleagues their "... thoughts on doing archaeology and how it has provided a greater connection to the outdoors, the environment, natural spaces, and special places ... how has it increased your knowledge about a place, its ecology/environment, academics in general, or how has it increased your knowledge about yourself or your cultural history."

And my response was something like "well, Duh" so she was like "Well, OK then..." and now I seem to be committed to writing a few blog posts on this...

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Drift by Rachel Maddow: Chapter 1 [Greg Laden's Blog]

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 10:03 AM PDT

I just got my copy of Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow (signed by the author!) and I'm reading it with great interest, even though I'm totally swamped with other things. Damn you Rachel Maddow for writing such an engaging book!

I'm just starting it but wanted to share a couple of observations.

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How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog Publicity Update [Uncertain Principles]

Posted: 20 Mar 2012 06:51 AM PDT

A couple of cool items in the promotion of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog:

-- A little while back, I spoke to Alan Boyle, who writes the Cosmic Log blog for MSNBC, who posted a very nice story about the book last night. Mainstream media, baby!

It also uses this very cool picture of Emmy and me in my lab:

(Many thanks to Matt Milless for taking that and a bunch of others.)

-- This weekend (either Saturday or Sunday, depending on where you are), I'll be on the Science Fantastic radio show, talking about relativity with Michio Kaku. There's a lsit of stations that carry it linked from that page, or you can listen online (this site purports to let you stream it, but I haven't tried yet.

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