Another
argument against animal testing: they get nervous and
give
the wrong answers.
Some drugs that work in mice don't work in humans, and vice
versa, and chemicals that are dangerous for children may be
harmless to rodents.
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Another
argument against animal testing: they get nervous and
give
the wrong answers.
Some drugs that work in mice don't work in humans, and vice
versa, and chemicals that are dangerous for children may be
harmless to rodents.
The question, in the end, is how (un)reliable the results are: so far, we don't have anything better than animal testing, and nobody wants to be the first test subject for a drug that might cure their arthritis--or might kill them.
Is the
placebo
effect a myth? Two Danish researchers traced all
the specific claims about how effective it is
to a single paper, then started looking for studies that included
a treatment, a placebo, and no treatment.
Diseases naturally wax and wane. And no matter how sick the person is, a truly bad spell will almost inevitably be followed by a period in which the condition seems to improve. What if the natural variation in a disease's course is behind the placebo effect, they asked?Their meta-analysis of past research found no clear difference between placebo and no treatment.
Not everyone is convinced. David Freedman is a statistician who is concerned with the possible errors in this analysis technique: "I just don't find this report to be incredibly persuasive," he said. "The evidence of a placebo effect is maybe a little bit less than I thought it was, but I think there's a big effect in many circumstances. This doesn't change my mind."
Whether they work or not, placebos will still be needed for double-blind studies of new medical treatments, so the sugar pill isn't going to be vanishing any time soon.
In the name of the War on Some Drugs, the
Bush administration is willing to tolerate, even
support,
the enslavement of half of Afghanistan's population by
a regime that is also systematically destroying civilization
and ordering a religious minority to wear
identifying
badges on their clothing.
Or maybe they're just looking for an excuse to support the
subjugation of women.
Update: someone wrote, pointing out that the aid is not being distributed via the Taliban. This doesn't make much difference in practice: a repressive regime that routinely arrests Red Cross and other foreign aid workers isn't going to yield control over aid, even food aid. [24 May]
After noting that the very term "conspiracy" makes people think
of the lunatic fringe, Jon Carroll points out that there have been
real conspiracies--Bay of Pigs, Watergate, Iran-Contra--and
speculates about the possibility of a
serious
conspiracy:
So suppose you were in a conspiracy to cripple the government of the United States. Not destroy it, because it has its uses; just make it weak. Let's not say whom you work for; let's just say that's your goal. What would you do first?How about destroy the FBI? It's in charge of gathering intelligence of the sort that might uncover a conspiracy. ...
A suspicious man might ask: Who benefits from a weak and foolish FBI? Well, here's one idea: people who have illicit business they need to do in private. Lots of business.
This suspicious woman would add that "foolish" may be more important than weak: such an agency would be easy to distract, to send off chasing the innocent or trying to censor the Internet instead of doing its job.
Somebody's going to be embarrassed, no matter how
this turns out: Keith Henson has
requested
political asylum in Canada after a California court convicted
him of
"interfering with religion" for picketing a Scientology film studio.
Jetlag isn't just a nuisance--at least in the short term, it
shrinks
the brain and impairs short-term memory and abstract thought.
This first study looked at only 20 people, but
Brendan Gold, from the Transport and General Workers Union, told the BBC: "We're going to have to look at some more research - perhaps even commission some ourselves, to look at the long term effects on crew, including those who have retired from the occupation."
The headline talks about frequent fliers, but the larger issue is shift workers--anyone who changes from day to night shifts regularly might suffer similar effects.
He holds no elected office, but Cat-Mandu is certainly the
cutest
party leader in the world today.
If that's not enough, his party's Website includes an incredibly
comprehensive list of other
UK
political parties, from the well-known to the obscure--East
Cleveland Independent, anyone?
Female northern cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis
learn
songs three times as fast as male cardinals.
This is the first strong evidence for sex differences
in learning.
Northern cardinals are unusual among temperate-zone birds because both males and females sing. In earlier work, Yamaguchi has shown that the birds can tell the difference between male and female songs. Birds learned songs by copying birds of either sex, but added sex-specific characteristics to them.
The fruit fly genome has been published--
or
has it? After trying to use the genome, produced by
Celera, Samuel Karlin concluded that
as many as half the sequences for genes may contain errors, based on
comparisons with known fruit fly genes. Defending the work,
"I would take 50 per cent
correct as a compliment, not a criticism," says Gerry Rubin of
the US's fly-sequencing programme.
If so, why did it take an outside researcher to point out the
imperfections? And what does this imply for Celera's version
of the human genome? Would
50 percent correct be a compliment there, as well?
Today is National Readers' Day: celebrate with a good book,
or a poem, or a thank-you to your favorite librarian or the
person who read aloud to you once upon a time. The "national"
is the US, but that shouldn't limit it--whoever you are,
wherever you are, find a comfortable chair and something
to read.
Two more years of data collection and analysis still find
very
slight anomalies
in the observed velocities of Pioneer 10 and our other deep-space
probes. Explanations are harder to find: other astronomical data,
ranging from the measured distance from Earth to Mars, to the
"precise timing data for millisecond binary pulsars," rule out many
hypotheses.
The LANL preprint archive has the paper (97 pages in PDF format); the BBC's links on this story are less useful, and googling on things like "pioneer 10 gravity" leads to more weird speculation than actual data.
By
sampling a
stalagmite, researchers have extended
our records of the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the
atmosphere back to 45,000 years ago. They found a
carbon-14 concentration twice what it is today, and two
scientific problems: what caused the difference, and possible
inaccuracies in carbon-14 dates for very old artifacts.
[via Follow
Me Here, which you really ought to be reading.]
Richard Dawkins's
lament
for Douglas Adams.
Walking
protects
the brain. Even an extra mile a week is enough to
reduce elderly women's risk of cognitive decline.
The
Standard
Steam Locomotive Company is a registered charity intended
to do what its name says: build at least one new steam locomotive,
and manufacture and supply spare parts for steam locomotives,
because they like trains and because you can't run a railroad without
engines:
Clearly steam locomotives are a crucial element in the "Preserved Steam Railway" industry, yet the last new steam locomotive to be built for British Railways, Evening Star was built in 1960. Most steam locomotives in use today are older than this; many were built before the Second World War, and indeed several in regular use were built before the First World War. With each year that passes the locomotive stud gets older and whilst dedicated teams work hard to maintain them in working order, this becomes increasingly difficult and expensive.They seem to have a good handle on the engineering requirements of the project. [via Lake Effect]
How the FDA approved
seven
deadly drugs, often over the objections of its own medical experts.
This LA Times story raises serious questions about the
safety of anything one's doctor might prescribe. Separate articles
describe each of the seven killer medicines, and the important
warnings that were left off the labels.
Dating
outside their species: female collared flycathers
Ficedula albicollis in Sweden and the Czech Republic
frequently pair off with males of a related species, the
pied flycatcher (F. hypoleuca). This works in part because
"it turns out that who you pair off with is different to who
fathers your offspring," and in part because females with
other-species mates produce mostly sons, not daughters: female
hybrids are sterile, but males are fertile.
Jessie reports from Cambridge on the Harvard
sit-in
for a living wage. She observes that almost nobody will say
they oppose a living wage, but
Many of the foes of the sit-in argue that it polarizes the student body and works against the goals of the protesters; but you tell me, without the need to oppose the sit-in, would the Harvard Republican Club have written a letter in support of the living wage?...My own favorite sign is "String Theorists for a Living Wage."I have walked through Harvard Yard thousands of times. I have seen it lush with green grass before Commencement; I have seen it festooned with ribbons and balloons, bright with color and echoing with music. It is a lovely, lovely space. And I have never in my life seen it more beautiful than it was yesterday, with cops in front of the antique buildings, gaudy banners with the paint dripping, multi-colored tents killing the grass, faded and wet sheets of paper hanging on the fences, unshaven and unwashed students hanging out of the windows.
erlooked archeology: the ancient oasis
civilization
of Bactria and Margiana rivals those of Mesopotamia and the Indus
Valley. Much of the excavation was done in the 1970s, but overlooked
outside the USSR because few western archeologists can read Russian.
In Bactria and Margiana, there was no natural stone or metal. "It was nothing but sand," Hiebert said, and yet the ruins contained elaborate works in alabaster, marble and bronze. "The oasis people would import materials and manufacture them in their own art style."Lambert-Karlovsky said that many of the artworks, utensils and jewelry were buried with the dead. In an unusual pattern for other early people, the women were buried with more valuables than the men.
Copyright 2001 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
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