Stentor Protozoa swim the Interwebs

Stentor (protozoa)

Stentor are a group of filter feeders and diggers, a genus of ciliate protozoa, representative of the heterotrichs. The body is generally horn-shaped, hence the association with the Greek herald and the former name "trumpet animalcule", with a ring of prominent membranelles around the anterior "bell" that sweep in food and aid in swimming. Stentor are common in freshwater lakes and streams, usually attached to algae and other detritus. Some reach several millimetres in length, making them among the largest single-celled organisms. Stentor can come in different colors. As in many freshwater protozoans, the stentor has a contractile vacuole. Because the concentration of salt inside the stentor and in the surrounding freshwater is different, the stentor must store water that enters it by osmosis and then discharge it from the vacuole. Stentors can regenerate, and small fragments can grow into full organisms. Stentor can live symbiotically with a species of green algae. The stentor ingests the algae and the algae converts the stentor's waste into nutrients. Stentors react to outside disturbances by contracting into a ball of protoplasm. Stentors have cilia at their tip which they use to move and catch their food. They are classified as heterotrophs, because they cannot make their own food.
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Why we buy crap we don't need.

Subliminal messages are everywhere in pop culture

Posted Thu Dec. 16, 13:02:36 PST 2004
By Gavin Cook of The Campanile

In the late 1950s, an experiment was performed that would affect the world, even though it went relatively unnoticed. In Fort Lee, New Jersey, a movie theater ran the messages "Eat Popcorn" and "Drink Coke" every five seconds throughout the movies they showed. In six weeks, the sales of Coca-Cola went up 18 percent while popcorn sales rose an astronomical 58 percent.

Why would moviegoers accept these advertisements and not simply storm out of the theater, annoyed and resolute not to purchase any soda or popcorn?

The reason is these messages were only flashed for three-tenths of a millisecond, or one 3000th of a second, a time that does not allow the moviegoer to consciously "see" the message.

This was the birth of subliminal messages and the beginning of a new era.

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Why Debt Slaves Act Retarded

IMG SRC
Why play a losing game? Study uncovers why low-income people buy lottery tickets
Science Codex
July 24, 2008

Although state lotteries, on average, return just 53 cents for every dollar spent on a ticket, people continue to pour money into them — especially low-income people, who spend a larger percentage of their incomes on lottery tickets than do the wealthier segments of society. A new Carnegie Mellon University study sheds light on the reasons why low-income lottery players eagerly invest in a product that provides poor returns.

In the study, published in the July issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, participants who were made to feel subjectively poor bought nearly twice as many lottery tickets as a comparison group that was made to feel subjectively more affluent. The Carnegie Mellon findings point to poverty's central role in people's decisions to buy lottery tickets.

"Some poor people see playing the lottery as their best opportunity for improving their financial situations, albeit wrongly so," said the study's lead author Emily Haisley, a doctoral student in the Department of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. "The hope of getting out of poverty encourages people to continue to buy tickets, even though their chances of stumbling upon a life-changing windfall are nearly impossibly slim and buying lottery tickets in fact exacerbates the very poverty that purchasers are hoping to escape."
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Vibrations return to Northern Star

IMG SRC
The Pole star comes to life again
PhysOrg.com
The Northern Star, whose vibrations were thought to be dying away, appears to have come to life again.
An international team of astronomers has observed that vibrations in the Pole star, which had been fading away to almost nothing over the last hundred years, have recovered and are now increasing. And the astronomers don't know why.

[The Pole star comes to life again]
Plot of decrease over 100 years of amplitude of 4-day light variation of Polaris and of the increase since 2000. Observations before 2000 from other work, observations after 2000 from this work.
Click here to enlarge image
The discovery will be announced during the "Cool Stars 15" conference at the University of St Andrews. Dr Alan Penny from the School of Physics and Astronomy will present results of the recovery to around 350 international delegates at the meeting that runs from July 21-25.

The astronomers were watching Polaris in the expectation that they would catch the star switching off its vibrations completely when they made the surprising observation of its revival.

Dr Penny explained, "It was only through an innovative use of two small relatively unknown telescopes in space and a telescope in Arizona that we were able to discover and follow this star's recovery so accurately."
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Man Still Evolving?

From Best Free Documentaries:

Homo Futurus

This is a documentary about a controversial theory regarding the mechanism that drove the evolution of humans from primates to modern man; challenging the presently accepted evolutionary premise. It also speculates on humanity's future evolutionary path.
More Free Documentaries:

Television Under The Swastika

Civilization - The Reich Underground

Decoding Ferran Adria

APS issues Global Warming Gag Order

American physicists warned not to debate global warming
By Andrew Orlowski →
July 21, 2008

Nail down your security priorities. Ask the experts and your peers at The Register Security Debate, September 24 2008.

Bureaucrats at the American Physical Society (APS) have issued a curious warning to their members about an article in one of their own publications. Don't read this, they say - we don't agree with it. But what is it about the piece that is so terrible, that like Medusa, it could make men go blind?

It's an article that examines the calculation central to climate models. As the editor of the APS's newsletter American Physics Jeffrey Marque explains, the global warming debate must be re-opened.

"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion," he wrote.
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What do you mean the aliens can't hear us?

Two-light years and then… enjoy the silence
Mori - forgetomori.com
June 19th, 2008

In the breathtaking opening of the movie “Contact” – adaptation of the even more inspiring original Carl Sagan novel – we travel from Earth, faster than the speed of light and listening to the reverse history of our electromagnetic transmissions through the Universe.

From the Spice Girls (1997…) to the first radio broadcasts, we get farther and father from our Pale Blue Dot, seeing even bigger spaces full of billions and billions of stars in the Cosmos.

The scene is literally poetic, namely it involves a big deal of poetic license, as we listen to transmissions from decades ago while still in the outer solar system – Pluto is not that far. It even has a small joke, as the Face on Mars make a very brief appearance.

But the cold (and perhaps surprising) hard fact is that the scene is impossible. No, not only because it’s impossible to travel faster than light, but because our radio transmissions have a very limited range, and our first radio transmissions are not in some place tens of light-years away. In fact the range of our transmissions is just… well, if you read the title you already know it.

Two light-years for almost all of our transmissions. After that, even ginormous antennas turned exactly to our planet and listening to the right frequencies applying the necessary corrections would not be able to capture an intelligible signal. Even a 3.000 km antenna wouldn’t be enough to capture our TV transmissions from a distance greater than only 0,01 light-years away!
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Astounding lizard evolution 1971-present

From Pharyngula: Still just a lizard

Here's the story: in 1971, scientists started an experiment. They took 5 male lizards and 5 female lizards of the species Podarcis sicula from a tiny Adriatic island called Pod Kopiste, 0.09km², and they placed them on an even tinier island, Pod Mrcaru, 0.03km², which was also inhabited by another lizard species, Podarcis melisellensis. Then a war broke out, the Croatian War of Independence, which went on and on and meant the little islands were completely neglected for 36 years, and nature took its course. When scientists finally returned to the island and looked around, they discovered that something very interesting had happened.

<...>
The transplanted P. sicula thrived and swarmed over the island of Pod Mrcaru, but they were different, and they had evolved in multiple ways.

The original P. sicula were insectivores who occasionally munched on a leaf; approximately 4-7% of their diet was vegetation. The P. sicula of Pod Mrcaru, though, had adopted a more vegetarian diet: examining their gut contents revealed that 34% of their diet was plants in the spring, climbing to 61% in the summer…and much of this diet was hard-to-digest stuff, high in cellulose. This is a fairly radical shift.

There were concomitant changes. The lizards' skulls were wider, deeper, and longer, and they had stronger bites — a necessity for chomping off bits of tough plants, instead of soft mosquitos. Instead of chasing bugs, they're browsing stationary plants, and their legs are shorter and they are slower. Population densities are higher. The Pod Mrcaru lizards no longer seem to defend territories, so there have been behavioral changes.

Still just a lizard, I know.

Now here's something really cool, though: these lizards have evolved cecal valves. What those are are muscular ridges in the gut that allow the animal to close off sections of the tube to slow the progress of food through them, and to act as fermentation chambers where plant material can be broken down by commensal organisms like bacteria and nematodes — and the guts of Pod Mrcaru P. sicula are swarming with nematodes not found in the guts of their Pod Kopiste cousins.

Full Article

Kandel: Short vs. Long-term memory

Science vs. Astrology

Astrologers fail to predict proof they are wrong
Telegraph.co.uk - August 17th, 2003

Good news for rational, level-headed Virgoans everywhere: just as you might have predicted, scientists have found astrology to be rubbish.

Its central claim - that our human characteristics are moulded by the influence of the Sun, Moon and planets at the time of our birth - appears to have been debunked once and for all and beyond doubt by the most thorough scientific study ever made into it.

For several decades, researchers tracked more than 2,000 people - most of them born within minutes of each other. According to astrology, the subject should have had very similar traits.

The babies were originally recruited as part of a medical study begun in London in 1958 into how the circumstances of birth can affect future health. More than 2,000 babies born in early March that year were registered and their development monitored at regular intervals.

Researchers looked at more than 100 different characteristics, including occupation, anxiety levels, marital status, aggressiveness, sociability, IQ levels and ability in art, sport, mathematics and reading - all of which astrologers claim can be gauged from birth charts.

The scientists failed to find any evidence of similarities between the "time twins", however. They reported in the current issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies: "The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success . . . but the results are uniformly negative."
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Top Docs paid to back fraudulent findings

Merck wrote drug studies for doctors
By Stephanie Saul - International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, April 16, 2008

The drug maker Merck drafted dozens of research studies for a best-selling drug, then lined up prestigious doctors to put their names on the reports before publication, according to an article to be published Wednesday in a leading medical journal.

The article, based on documents unearthed in lawsuits over the pain drug Vioxx, provides a rare, detailed look in the industry practice of ghostwriting medical research studies that are then published in academic journals.

The article cited one draft of a Vioxx research study that was still in want of a big-name researcher, identifying the lead writer only as "External author?"

Vioxx was a best-selling drug before Merck took it off the market in 2004 over evidence linking it to heart attacks. Last fall, the company agreed to a $4.85 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits filed by former Vioxx patients or their families.

The lead author of Wednesday's article, Dr. Joseph Ross of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, said a close look at the Merck documents raised broad questions about the validity of much of the drug industry's published research, because the ghostwriting practice appears to be widespread.

"It almost calls into question all legitimate research that's been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry with the academic physician," said Ross, whose article, written with colleagues, was published Wednesday in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and posted Tuesday on the journal's Web site.
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Facial cues for mate selection

Reuters: The image shows a pair of computerised "averaged" facial photographs taken from real people's pictures. According to the research, the face on the right is of someone who is more likely to be interested in a short-term sexual relationship whilst the one on the left is more likely to be interested in a long-term relationship.

LONDON (Reuters) - Members of the opposite sex can spot whether someone is after a one-night stand or something more permanent just by looking at their face, scientists said on Wednesday.

On men, a square jaw, large nose and small eyes are more likely to betray the look of lust than of love.

Women found men with softer features more likely to opt for commitment.

But the Durham University-led research found that while men can judge whether a woman is footloose-and-fancy-free or not, there is no common facial detail to explain it.

About 700 heterosexual people took part in the survey carried out by Durham, St. Andrews and Aberdeen universities.
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----------------
For couples:
Social influence in human face preference: men and women are influenced more for long-term than short-term attractiveness decisions

Abstract
In nonhuman animals, mate-choice copying has received much attention, with studies demonstrating that females tend to copy the choices of other females for specific males. Here we show, for both men and women, that pairing with an attractive partner increases the attractiveness of opposite-sex faces for long-term relationship decisions but not short-term decisions. Our study therefore shows social transmission of face preference in humans, which may have important consequences for the evolution of human traits. Our study also highlights the flexibility of human mate choice and suggests that, for humans, learning about nonphysical traits that are important to pair-bonding drives copying-like behavior.

Discussion
<...>
Mate-choice copying has been proposed to be adaptive when there is a cost, such as energy, to evaluating the quality of potential mates or when discriminating between the quality of potential mates is difficult (Wade & Pruett-Jones 1990). In this way, social transmission may allow individuals to assess a potential mate quickly and efficiently, and perhaps teaches individuals what to look for in a mate. In humans, there are many aspects to a partner other than their physical traits, and potentially, the choices of others can be used to infer positive or negative traits, such as behavior, resources, or intelligence, which are difficult to infer just from physical appearance.

Specificity to long-term preferences implies that social influence is being used to determine nonphysical traits that make a target a good long-term partner. Studies have shown that individuals value physical attractiveness in short-term contexts over other attractive traits such as pleasant personalities (Buss & Schmitt 1993). Judges may then be able to acquire the physical information from a photograph to judge physical attractiveness for short-term contexts, and hence, the extra information from the paired partner is of little relevance. Humans bring two factors to a parenting relationship: a level of parental investment and potential heritable benefits (e.g., genes for high-quality immune systems). Social information may be more useful for judging the former given such information is less readily discernable. Of course, in species without parental care, mate-choice copying likely occurs because individuals are able to acquire information about the genetic quality of a prospective mate (Witte & Ryan 2002), and potentially, this is also true in humans despite our finding of specificity to long-term judgments.

Full Article (requires subscription)

Neutron Star to envolope the world?

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Boffins: Antimatter comes from black holes, neutron stars
'No one could have expected so much unexpectedness'

By Lewis Page - January 15th 2008
TheRegister.co.uk

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Topflight astrophysics boffins believe they may have cracked the tricky problem of how to make antimatter, which would be useful for many purposes: for instance powering relatively practical starships, or - of course - blowing up an entire planet in one go. However, it appears that making antimatter requires the possession of a black hole or a neutron star, so it won't be happening any time soon.

For those few readers who don't know, antimatter is like normal matter but with properties reversed. Thus a normal electron of the type used to publish this article has a negative charge*, but an anti-electron (aka positron) is positive.

The clever thing about antimatter is that when it bumps into normal matter the two annihilate each other completely, converting entirely into energy according to Einstein's famous formula E=mc². This is the most powerful fuel-to-energy generation process possible - it makes an H-bomb look like a cap pistol. Some form of antimatter-powered drive might actually allow humans to travel between the stars within their own lifetimes under Einsteinian physics.

The energy created when electrons and positrons meet is emitted in the form of gamma rays. Back in the 1970s the existence of antimatter in the universe was verified in the obvious way - by sending gamma-ray detectors into the upper atmosphere on balloons.

According to the balloon detectors, there seems to be a large cloud of positrons throughout the centre of our galaxy, about 10,000 lightyears across and giving off the energy of 10,000 suns from constant antimatter annihilation as it reacts with ordinary electrons. But nobody knew why or how the antimatter was being created in the first place.

Now, however, that conundrum seems to have been solved.

"I think I can hear a collective sigh of relief," said Marvin Leventhal, a noted brainbox active in the field.

It seems that an international team of astrophysicists boiled down four years' worth of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) satellite INTEGRAL (INTErnational Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory). They noted that the glowing gamma-ray positron cloud bulged significantly in the direction of Galactic west.

The positron cloud bulge coincided with a region in which there are believed to be a lot of binary star systems containing neutron stars or the even more outrageous black holes. These star systems are known as "hard low-mass X-ray binaries".

According to NASA, this strongly suggests that "these binaries are churning out at least half of the antimatter, and perhaps all of it."

Rival boffins had of late been suggesting that the antimatter was actually created by some process involving dark matter, but NASA's Gerry Skinner pooh-poohed such notions.

"The INTEGRAL results seem to rule out dark matter," he said.

"Simple estimates suggest that about half and possibly all the antimatter is coming from X-ray binaries," added his colleague Georg Weidenspointer of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

Weidenspointer, Skinner and Leventhal published their findings in the current issue of Nature.

Nobody knows exactly how black holes and neutron stars make antimatter, however. Nor is it clear how the antimatter gets away from such massive gravity fields, to drift about the Galactic core getting annihilated.

"We expected something unexpected, but we did not expect this," said Skinner, rather splendidly, suggesting that nobody could have expected so much unexpectedness.

NASA presumes to trump INTEGRAL by launching GLAST, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, this year. The space agency says its new satellite "may help clarify" the business of antimatter production; also that it might allow the detection of other, larger antiparticles rather than just positrons.

Original Article

British announce Human - Animal Hybrids

First British human-animal hybrid embryos created by scientists
The Guardian - Wednesday April 02 2008

Britain's first human-animal hybrid embryos have been created, forming a crucial first step, scientists believe, towards a supply of stem cells that could be used to investigate debilitating and so far untreatable conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease.

Lyle Armstrong, who led the work, gained permission in January from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to create the embryos, known as "cytoplasmic hybrids".

His team at Newcastle University produced the embryos by inserting human DNA from a skin cell into a hollowed-out cow egg. An electric shock then induced the hybrid embryo to grow. The embryo, 99.9% human and 0.1% other animal, grew for three days, until it had 32 cells.

Eventually, scientists hope to grow such embryos for six days, and then extract stem cells from them. The researchers insisted the embryos would never be implanted into a woman and that the only reason they used cow eggs was due to the scarcity of human eggs.
Full Story

Paranoia becoming more prevalent in Britain

British population are 'highly paranoid'
By Bonnie Malkin and agencies - Telegraph.co.uk

11:33am BST 01/04/2008

The British population are highly paranoid, a study into fear on London's underground system has found.

Experts used to believe that paranoid thoughts - often involving exaggerated feelings of persecution or threat - were usually confined to people with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia.

The computer-generated characters breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants

But the new research, involving a "virtual" journey on the London underground, suggests that around a third of people regularly have moments of paranoia.

Dr Daniel Freeman, from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, who developed and led the experiment, said: "Paranoid thoughts are often triggered by ambiguous events such as people looking in one's direction or hearing laughter in a room, but it is very difficult to recreate such social interactions.

"Virtual reality allows us to do just that, to look at how different people interpret exactly the same social situation. It is a uniquely powerful method to detect those liable to misinterpret other people."

In the study, 200 volunteers drawn from the general population wore virtual reality headsets which set them on a computer-generated tube journey.
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During the four minute ride between London underground stops, the volunteers were able to walk around a carriage filled with "virtual" passengers who behaved like real people.

The computer-generated characters breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants. One read a newspaper, while another occasionally smiled if looked at. To add to the realism, a soundtrack of a train carriage was played.

While most volunteers found the computer characters friendly or neutral, almost 40 per cent experienced at least one paranoid thought.

A pre-assessment showed that those who were anxious, worried, pessimistic, or had low self-esteem, were most likely to feel paranoid.

One participant who experienced paranoid thoughts told the scientists: "There's something dodgy about one guy. Like he was about to do something - assault someone, plant a bomb, say something not nice to me, be aggressive."

Another said: "There was a guy spooking me out - tried to get away from him. Didn't like his face. I'm sure he looked at me more than a couple of times though might be imagining it."

The findings are reported today in the British Journal of Psychiatry (1).
Original Story

James Lovelock predicts unstoppable global meltdown

We're all doomed! 40 years from global catastrophe - and there's NOTHING we can do about it, says climate change expert
By SARAH SANDS - Daily Mail

Apocalypse, now! James Lovelock says the world is about to change
The weather forecast for this holiday weekend is wildly unsettled. We had better get used to it.

According to the climate change scientist James Lovelock, this is the beginning of the end of a peaceful phase in evolution.

By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine.

The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain.

We will, he says, have to set up encampments in this country, like those established for the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the conflict in East Africa.

Lovelock believes the subsequent ethnic tensions could lead to civil war.

Crackpot or visionary, the fact is that more and more people are paying attention to Lovelock, and that he, himself, supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the influential group who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former American vice president Al Gore for their campaigns on global warming.

Lovelock also says that Margaret Thatcher and the Queen are "sympathetic" to his views.

He has been proclaiming his Gaia Theory for a generation. This states that the Earth is a living, self-regulating system and that by filling its atmosphere with CO2 (carbon dioxide emissions) we have destroyed the balance and overheated the planet. We are in the phase when the thermometer suddenly shoots up.

Lovelock believes it is too late to repair the damage. Government targets are "futile". Britain contributes such a tiny amount of emissions compared with countries such as China that our self-regulatory measures are pathetic.

"Everyone could burn coal all day and drive around in 4x4s and it would not make a scrap of difference," he says.

It is hubris, he argues, to believe we can prevent the inevitable consequences of mankind's actions. Lovelock reminds us - in case it has slipped our memory - that the Earth has gone through exactly the same correction before.

"It was last as hot as this 55 million years ago. There was a geological accident in the North Sea, near where Norway is. A volcanic layer of lava came up underneath one of the large petroleum deposits. It vaporised the whole lot, putting into the atmosphere about two million, million tons of crude oil.
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Polio vaccine & Simian Virus 40

From the CDC:

Frequently Asked Questions about Cancer, Simian Virus 40 (SV40), and Polio Vaccine

SV40 is a virus found in some species of monkey. Soon after its discovery in 1960, SV40 was found in polio vaccine. More than 98 million Americans received one or more doses of polio vaccine during the period (1955–1963) when some of the vaccine was contaminated with SV40. SV40 has been found in certain types of human cancers, but it has not been determined that SV40 causes these cancers. The majority of evidence suggests there is no causal relationship between receipt of SV40-contaminated vaccine and cancer; however, some research results are conflicting and more studies are needed. For more information, see the fact sheet.

• What is SV40?
• Why is there so much interest in SV40?
• Does polio vaccine being given in the U.S. today contain SV40?
• What about concerns that the testing methods used to screen oral polio vaccines could have missed certain strains of SV40?
• Who received SV40-contaminated polio vaccine?
• Were any other people in the U.S. possibly exposed to SV40-contaminated vaccines?
• Is receiving contaminated vaccine the only way to become infected with SV40?
• SV40 is known to cause tumors in rodents. Have research studies found an association between SV40 and cancer in humans?
• What steps have been taken by the government to see if SV40-contaminated vaccines affected people's health?
• What has research found regarding the health effects of receiving SV40-contaminated vaccine?
• Have research studies looked at the risk of cancer in children whose mothers received SV40-contaminated polio vaccine?
• If I have one of these cancers, does it mean that SV40 caused it?
• Can I obtain a test to see if I am infected with SV40?
• What should I do if I received polio vaccine during 1955–1963?
• Where can I get more information about SV40?

From the SV40 foundation:

SV40 was the 40th virus found in rhesus monkey kidney cells when these cells were used to make the polio vaccine. This virus contaminated both the Inactivated Polio Vaccine (IPV) created by Dr. Jonas Salk and the Oral or "Live" Polio Vaccine (OPV) created by Dr. Albert Sabin.

Children being fed sugar cubes with the oral polio vaccine. Circa 1961.

In 1961, SV40 was discovered by Dr. Bernice Eddy of the National Institute of Health, Division of Biologics when she took the material used to grow polio vaccines and injected it into hamsters. Tumors grew in the hamsters. Her discovery was subsequently validated by Drs. Maurice Hilliman and Benjamin Sweet of Merck.

Upon the discovery that SV40 was an animal carcinogen that had found its way into the polio vaccines, a new federal law was passed in 1961 that required that no vaccines contain this virus. However, this law did not require that SV40 contaminated vaccines be thrown away or that the contaminated seed material (used to make all polio vaccines for the next four decades) be discarded. As a result, known SV40 contaminated vaccines were injected into children up until 1963. In addition, it has been alleged that there have been SV40-contaminated batches of oral polio vaccine administered to some children until the end of the 1990's.

Autism - vaccine link disproven?

Vaccines and autism: The incredible shrinking causation claim shrinks some more

March 28, 2008 9:00 AM,

scienceblogs.com/insolence by Orac

I have good news and bad news for you.

First, the good news. The devastating death crud that has kept me in its grip for nearly a week now appears to be receding. For the first time, "whining" or not, I start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Whether it's due to PalMD's kind offer of Pranic Healing or not, I don't know, but things are on the mend.
<...>
On the other hand, my current not-quite-recovered state puts me in the perfect frame of mind to apply some richly deserved not-so-Respectful Insolence™ to David Kirby's latest bit of antivaccination nonsense published the other day in that repository of antivaccination nonsense, The Huffington Post, entitled The Next Big Autism Bomb.

Suffice it to say that, as usual, the only "big bomb" here is the one that Kirby drops on science and logic. In fact, as per his usual M.O., Kirby carpet-bombs logic and science under a torrent of obfuscating verbiage designed to mask just how weak his arguments are. He probably thinks he's delivered a thermonuclear blast to scientists and skeptics who tell him he's full of crap, but in reality you'd be hard-pressed to hear a ladyfinger explosion there. In fact, I doubt it's the equivalent of a sparkler, even. A wet, sputtering sparkler just before it fizzles out. If anything, it's nothing more than part two of the incredibly shrinking causation claim and another desperate attempt to keep blaming autism on vaccines, despite all evidence failing to find a link.

--------- Moar! -----------

Vox Day: Mindlessly parroting antivaccination myths again

I tell ya, I get sick for a few days, and the antivaccination cranks come out of the woodwork. This time around, it's über-crank Vox Day entering the fray (or, as I like to call him Vox "hey, it worked for Hitler" Day). We've seen him in action before. Be it using the example of Nazi Germany as a reason why we could, if we so desired, round up all the illegal immigrants in the country and eject them, labeling women as "fascists" who shouldn't have the right to vote, or falling hook, line, and sinker for an evidence-free antivaccination claim, when it comes to an inflated opinion of his own knowledge and understanding, coupled with the arrogant belief in his ability to apply them to the real world, no one turn the Crank-O-Meter up to 11 quite as easily as ol' Vox, so much so that he's even been too much of a crank for WorldNet Daily.

That's saying a lot.

This time around, he's unhappy at some recent articles pointing out that parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated are a danger to public health, and in attacking such sentiments he lays down some serious, neuron-apoptosing stupid bombs that reveal just how ignorant he is about vaccines. The proximal target of his wrath is Megan McCardle, who told it like it is about the antivaccination movement, and, consistent with his usual misogyny, Vox can't resist starting out with a sexist insult and then launching into a brain-fryingly dumb rant:

Full Blog

Big Tobacco funding search for cure?

Cigarette Company Paid for Lung Cancer Study
By GARDINER HARRIS - March 26, 2008

In October 2006, Dr. Claudia Henschke of Weill Cornell Medical College jolted the cancer world with a study saying that 80 percent of lung cancer deaths could be prevented through widespread use of CT scans.

Small print at the end of the study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, noted that it had been financed in part by a little-known charity called the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection, Prevention & Treatment. A review of tax records by The New York Times shows that the foundation was underwritten almost entirely by $3.6 million in grants from the parent company of the Liggett Group, maker of Liggett Select, Eve, Grand Prix, Quest and Pyramid cigarette brands.

The foundation got four grants from the Vector Group, Liggett’s parent, from 2000 to 2003.

Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, editor in chief of the medical journal, said he was surprised. “In the seven years that I’ve been here, we have never knowingly published anything supported by” a cigarette maker, Dr. Drazen said.

An increasing number of universities do not accept grants from cigarette makers, and a growing awareness of the influence that companies can have over research outcomes, even when donations are at arm’s length, has led nearly all medical journals and associations to demand that researchers accurately disclose financing sources.

Dr. Henschke was the foundation president, and her longtime collaborator, Dr. David Yankelevitz, was its secretary-treasurer. Dr. Antonio Gotto, dean of Weill Cornell, and Arthur J. Mahon, vice chairman of the college board of overseers, were directors.

Vector issued a press release on Dec. 4, 2000, saying that it intended to give $2.4 million to Weill Cornell to finance Dr. Henschke’s research. Articles in Business Week and USA Today mentioned the gift. No mention was made of the foundation, begun so hastily that its 2000 tax return stated “not yet organized.”

Paul Caminiti, a Vector spokesman, confirmed that the company donated $3.6 million to the foundation over three years. The company “had no control or influence over the research,” he said.

Prominent cancer researchers and journal editors, told of the foundation by The Times, said they were stunned to learn of Dr. Henschke’s association with Liggett. Cigarette makers are so reviled among cancer advocates and researchers that any association with the industry can taint researchers and bar their work from being published.

“If you’re using blood money, you need to tell people you’re using blood money,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. The society gave Dr. Henschke more than $100,000 in grants from 2004 to 2007, money it would not have provided had it known of Liggett’s grants, Dr. Brawley said.

In an e-mail message, Drs. Henschke and Yankelevitz wrote, “It seems clear that you are trying to suggest that Cornell was trying to conceal this gift, which is entirely false.”

“The gift was announced publicly, the advocacy and public health community knew about it, it is quite easy to look it up on the Internet, its board has independent Cornell faculty on it, and it was fully disclosed to grant funding organizations,” they wrote, adding that the Vector grant represented a small part of the study’s overall cost. The foundation no longer accepts grants from tobacco companies, they wrote.

In the Vector press release, Dr. Henschke was quoted as saying that, thanks to the Vector grants, “we have raised the initial funding needed to support this important research and data collection on the effectiveness of spiral CT screening.”

Dr. Gotto said in an interview that Dr. Henschke, Dr. Yankelevitz and another colleague set up the foundation initially without the university’s approval, which he said faculty members are allowed to do. He and Mr. Mahon joined the board some weeks or months after its creation to ensure that the Vector grants were handled correctly, he said.

“If we had been approached, we would not have set up the foundation,” Dr. Gotto said. “We would have accepted the gift directly. We think we behaved honorably. There was no attempt to set up a foundation to hide tobacco money.”

Days earlier, Andrew Ben Ami, assistant secretary of the foundation, said in an interview he would not disclose the source of the charity’s financing at the request of the university.

In another interview before Dr. Gotto agreed to speak, Mr. Mahon, another foundation director, said he did not know the source of the funds.
Article Continues

New Brunswick Sturgeons turning Kraut

N.B. sturgeon begin journey to restock German rivers

Last Updated: Tuesday, January 9, 2007 | 9:34 AM AT

CBC News

Baby sturgeon from the St. John River in New Brunswick are helping to repopulate German rivers where the species has all but disappeared.

Cornel Ceapa owns and operates a sturgeon hatchery at Carter's Point on the Kingston Peninsula outside Saint John.

Sturgeon are plentiful in New Brunswick rivers, and this farmed variety is helping to restock German rivers, where the species has been depleted.
(CBC)

On Tuesday, he packed 1,000 baby fish into coolers and put them on an overseas flight to Germany.

Ceapa said it makes sense to send New Brunswick fish to Europe.

"About 800 years ago, there were two species of sturgeon in the European rivers and one of them was exactly genetically identical with what we have here," he said.

This baby St. John River sturgeon, hatched on a New Brunswick farm, is destined for Europe.
(CBC)

The sturgeon being exported come from eggs taken from wild Atlantic sturgeon caught in the St. John River by fisherman Stan Whelpley, who has been catching sturgeon commercially in the river for more than 30 years.

"This is the only river on the east coast of North America that's got sturgeon in it, any amount," said Whelpley. "I mean there may be a few in some of the others but there's all kinds of sturgeon here."

Full Article

Science Four Two: A new beginning

As I've just gone over the top in my vitriolic spiels over at QSLS Politics, I'm going to try and soften the withdrawal by posting some science Items.

Probably mostly links and articles until I can get my teeth into an issue.
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Science Weekly: The Mind's Eye
3/10/2008 3:08:09 AM [Science Weekly]
James Randerson and the team discuss the new computerised mind-reading technique: is it scary or sensational? Plus, we hear from the government's new chief scientific adviser, John Beddington. And, the crisp company hoping to advertise in space