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.

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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.

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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
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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.

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