How Calories Work?

What is a Calorie?

reposted from: http://health.howstuffworks.com/calorie1.htm

A calorie is a unit of energy. We tend to associate calories with food, but they apply to anything containing energy. For example, a gallon (about 4 liters) of gasoline contains about 31,000,000 calories.

Specifically, a calorie is the amount of energy, or heat, it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). One calorie is equal to 4.184 joules, a common unit of energy used in the physical sciences.

Most of us think of calories in relation to food, as in "This can of soda has 200 calories." It turns out that the calories on a food package are actually kilocalories (1,000 calories = 1 kilocalorie). The word is sometimes capitalized to show the difference, but usually not. A food calorie contains 4,184 joules. A can of soda containing 200 food calories contains 200,000 regular calories, or 200 kilocalories. A gallon of gasoline contains 31,000 kilocalories.

The same applies to exercise -- when a fitness chart says you burn about 100 calories for every mile you jog, it means 100 kilocalories. For the duration of this article, when we say "calorie," we mean "kilocalorie."

What Calories Do

reposted from: http://health.howstuffworks.com/calorie2.htm

Human beings need energy to survive -- to breathe, move, pump blood -- and they acquire this energy from food.

Caloric Breakdown 1 g Carbohydrates: 4 calories 1 g Protein: 4 calories 1 g Fat: 9 calories

The number of calories in a food is a measure of how much potential energy that food possesses. A gram of carbohydrates has 4 calories, a gram of protein has 4 calories, and a gram of fat has 9 calories. Foods are a compilation of these three building blocks. So if you know how many carbohydrates, fats and proteins are in any given food, you know how many calories, or how much energy, that food contains.

If we look at the nutritional label on the back of a packet of maple-and-brown-sugar oatmeal, we find that it has 160 calories. This means that if we were to pour this oatmeal into a dish, set the oatmeal on fire and get it to burn completely (which is actually pretty tricky), the reaction would produce 160 kilocalories (remember: food calories are kilocalories) -- enough energy to raise the temperature of 160 kilograms of water 1 degree Celsius. If we look closer at the nutritional label, we see that our oatmeal has 2 grams of fat, 4 grams of protein and 32 grams of carbohydrates, producing a total of 162 calories (apparently, food manufacturers like to round down). Of these 162 calories, 18 come from fat (9 cal x 2 g), 16 come from protein (4 cal x 4 g) and 128 come from carbohydrates (4 cal x 32 g).

Our bodies "burn" the calories in the oatmeal through metabolic processes, by which enzymes break the carbohydrates into glucose and other sugars, the fats into glycerol and fatty acids and the proteins into amino acids (see How Food Works for details). These molecules are then transported through the bloodstream to the cells, where they are either absorbed for immediate use or sent on to the final stage of metabolism in which they are reacted with oxygen to release their stored energy.

Click here for a simplified diagram of these metabolic processes

BMR

reposted from: http://health.howstuffworks.com/calorie3.htm

Just how many calories do our cells need to function well? The number is different for every person. You may notice on the nutritional labels of the foods you buy that the "percent daily values" are based on a 2,000 calorie diet -- 2,000 calories is a rough average of what a person needs to eat in a day, but your body might need more or less than 2,000 calories. Height, weight, gender, age and activity level all affect your caloric needs. There are three main factors involved in calculating how many calories your body needs per day:

• Basal metabolic rate
• Physical activity
• Thermic effect of food

Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the amount of energy your body needs to function at rest. This accounts for about 60 to 70 percent of calories burned in a day and includes the energy required to keep the heart beating, the lungs breathing, the kidneys functioning and the body temperature stabilized. In general, men have a higher BMR than women. One of the most accurate methods of estimating your basal metabolic rate is the Harris-Benedict formula:

• Adult male: 66 + (6.3 x body weight in lbs.) + (12.9 x height in inches) - (6.8 x age in years)

• Adult female: 655 + (4.3 x weight in lbs.) + (4.7 x height in inches) - (4.7 x age in years)

(Note: The first number in the equation for females is, in fact, 655. Strange but true.)

Your Caloric Needs

reposted from: http://health.howstuffworks.com/calorie4.htm

As you now know, there are three main factors involved in calculating how many calories your body needs per day: your BMR, physical activity and the thermic effect of food.

The second factor in the equation, physical activity, consumes the next highest number of calories. Physical activity includes everything from making your bed to jogging. Walking, lifting, bending, and just generally moving around burns calories, but the number of calories you burn in any given activity depends on your body weight. Click here for a great table listing the calories expended in various physical activities and for various weights.

The thermic effect of food is the final addition to the number of calories your body burns. This is the amount of energy your body uses to digest the food you eat -- it takes energy to break food down to its basic elements in order to be used by the body. To calculate the number of calories you expend in this process, multiply the total number of calories you eat in a day by 0.10, or 10 percent. If you need some help determining how many calories you eat in a day, check out these sites:

• USDA National Nutrient Database
• Food Data
• Mike's Calorie And Fat Gram Chart

The total number of calories a body needs in a day is the sum of these three calculations. If you only want a rough estimate of your daily caloric needs, you can skip the calculations and click here.

Calories, Fat and Exercise

reposted from: http://health.howstuffworks.com/calorie5.htm

So what happens if you take in more or fewer calories than your body burns? You either gain or lose fat, respectively. An accumulation of 3,500 extra calories is stored by your body as 1 pound of fat -- fat is the body's way of saving energy for a rainy day. If, on the other hand, you burn 3,500 more calories than you eat, whether by exercising more or eating less, your body converts 1 pound of its stored fat into energy to make up for the deficit.

One thing about exercise is that it raises your metabolic rate not only while you're huffing and puffing on the treadmill. Your metabolism takes a while to return to its normal pace. It continues to function at a higher level; your body burns an increased number of calories for about two hours after you've stopped exercising.

Lots of people wonder if it matters where their calories come from. At its most basic, if we eat exactly the number of calories that we burn and if we're only talking about weight, the answer is no -- a calorie is a calorie. A protein calorie is no different from a fat calorie -- they are simply units of energy. As long as you burn what you eat, you will maintain your weight; and as long as you burn more than you eat, you'll lose weight.

But if we're talking nutrition, it definitely matters where those calories originate. Carbohydrates and proteins are healthier sources of calories than fats. Although our bodies do need a certain amount of fat to function properly -- an adequate supply of fat allows your body to absorb the vitamins you ingest -- an excess of fat can have serious health consequences. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends that a maximum of 30 percent of our daily calories come from fat. So, if you eat 2,000 calories a day, that's a maximum of 600 calories from fat, or 67 grams of fat, per day. However, many doctors and nutritionists now set the maximum number of fat calories at 25 percent of our daily caloric intake. That's 56 grams of fat per day for a 2,000 calorie diet.

Here are some calorie and fat contents that may surprise you:

Food	Serving Size	Calories	Fat Grams
Canola oil	1 cup	1,674	218
Peanut butter	1 cup	1,520	129
Cheddar cheese	1 cup	531	44
Granola	1 cup	270	8
Chocolate syrup	1 cup	837	3
Sugar	1 cup	774	0
Coca-Cola	1 can	140	0

For more information on calories, dieting, nutrition and related topics, check out the links on the next page!

Lots More Information

reposted from: http://health.howstuffworks.com/calorie6.htm

Related HowStuffWorks Articles

• How Food Works
• How Fats Work
• How Fat Cells Work
• How Exercise Works
• How Dieting Works
• Does drinking ice water burn calories?
• How many calories does a person need daily?
• Tips For Using A Slow Cooker
• 6 Suggestions for the Treatment of Gout

More Great Links

• Nutrition Calculators
• CaloriesPerHour.com
• Food For Thought: An Interview with Nutrition Scientist Dr. Paul Saltman
• What a Set of Batteries!: A Commentary on the Origin and Use of Our Body's Energy
• Experiment: Measuring the Number of Calories in Sunlight - PDF

Supernova Destroys "Pillars of Creation"

reposted from: nationalgeographic.com

January 10, 2007—In a thousand years, astronomers predict, people on Earth will see the iconic "Pillars of Creation" get toppled by a supernova, the explosive death of a giant star.

The pillars are dense clouds of gas in the Eagle Nebula, a star nursery in the constellation Serpens, near Sagittarius. They were made famous by a dramatic 1995 Hubble Space Telescope image (inset).

The tricky part is that the forecast is based on evidence that the pillars were demolished by the supernova's shockwave about 6,000 years ago.

"[They] have been destroyed. I use the past tense because the nebula is 7,000 light-years away," said Nicholas Flagey, a French doctoral student working for NASA.

In other words, light from the nebula has taken 7,000 years to reach Earth, and everything we see is that much out of date.

This recent infrared image of the Eagle Nebula shows a bubble of hot, rapidly expanding material directly behind the pillars, Flagey reported on January 8 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.

In the image, taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, a red mass of hot dust warmed by the supernova can be seen behind the ghostly green of the nebula. The pillars are directly in the shockwave's path.

"The pillars are not dense enough to resist" the blast, Flagey said.

The red ball can't simply be gas heated by nearby stars, he added, because only a supernova could generate that much energy.

But the blast isn't entirely bad news. Supernova shockwaves, astronomers believe, help to ignite new stars in the dust clouds that they reach.

—Richard A. Lovett

Will the Standard Model of physics be verified sooner?

reposted from: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/01/the_god_particl.html

Tuesday, 9 January 2007

The God Particle Maybe Loses Some Weight
Topic: physics

Fascinating story today over at Nature's web site (here) on a new calculation for the mass of the W particle, the particle that carries the weak nuclear force—the one that does radioactive decay.

See, you're yawning. But author Jenny Hogan does a fantastic job of putting the W's lighter weight into context.

If the W is lighter, then so must be the much-sought-after Higgs boson, the theoretical particle that is responsible for mass—everything weighs something, and the Higgs is thought to explain why. It's so important that physicists have nicknamed it "the God particle."

And if the Higgs is lighter than physicists thought, then we might not have to wait for the Large Hadron Collider, a brand new, massive particle smasher, to come online at CERN, the European particle physics lab. The LHC is scheduled to start smacking stuff into each other this year. Instead, the folks who run the Tevatron, the big collider at Fermilab in Illinois, might be able to nab the Higgs first.

On 8 January, the estimate was tightened when the CDF [Collider Detector at Fermilab] announced it had pinned down the mass of the W boson, which mediates the weak nuclear force involved in processes such as radioactive decay. The new measurement is in agreement with previous estimates, but towards the upper end of the range. This, along with the added precision in the measurement, brings the upper limit for the Higgs' mass down to 153 giga electronvolts from 166 GeV. Previous experiments have shown that the Higgs must be heavier than 114 GeV.

A lighter Higgs suits the Tevatron, which is only capable of finding the particle if its mass is less than around 170 GeV. The closer a particle's mass is to this upper limit, the harder it would be to find.

Anything heavier than 170 GeV would certainly have to wait for the LHC, which will smash protons together harder to probe higher energies.

So I suppose you might ask, why would anyone believe the Fermilab guys on the new weight for the W when it clearly favors them in the race for the Higgs. And the answer is...um...physics? And the folks at Fermilab readily admit their desire to get there first. But author Hogan rightly points out that finding the Higgs is going to take years of data collection and analysis at both labs (see this Wired story if you want to know more about the LHC's number-crunching plans). She further points out that if the Standard Model of physics, the one that lists all the known and theoretical particles, is wrong, then there might not be a Higgs boson.

That, my friends, is context.

The not-so-simple truth about the divisiveness of religion

by Soumaya Ghannoushi

reposted from & add your comments here: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/soumaya_ghannoushi_/2007/01/is_religion_really_to_blame.html

The popular belief that religion is a divisive force results from a tendency to simplify both religion and socio-political phenomena.

If I got a penny for every time I was told that religion is the cause of all trouble, I'd be a rich woman by now. If only we had John Lennon's religionless world, there would be no war, or conflict and everyone would love their neighbour. If only the theologians, clergymen, mullahs and priests could get on, the world's problems would be resolved at a stroke.

I was, therefore, not surprised to read that the majority of respondents to the recent Guardian ICM poll say that religion is a divisive force. The result was the predictable outcome of a predominant tendency to simplify both religion and socio-political phenomena. No doubt, religion does play a part in many of the crises and conflicts raging around us. But more often than not, these problems take on a religious name and speak through the medium of religion, while having their roots in socio-political factors.

Examples are found in the Northern Ireland dispute as in the Middle East conflict. Though those at loggerheads happen to belong to divergent confessional communities, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Muslims/Christians, they did not come to blows because of their religious affiliations. Their grievances are fundamentally political, even if they hide themselves in the guise of religion and communicate in its language. Religion is often the mirror that reflects worldly tensions. To say that religion is divisive is to attempt no analysis of the problems at hand. It is to stop at the surface making no effort to dig deeper for the underlying problems seething underneath.

Take the orgy of sectarian bloodshed currently raging in Iraq, for instance. Sunnis and Shia are killing each other by the tens on a daily basis. Do not venture into a Sunni dominated area if your name happens to be Hassan, and you have more chance of ending up with a slit throat on some street corner if you suddenly lost your way and found yourself in Sadr city and you were called Omar.

But let us not stop there, let us ask the difficult questions others would rather we left undisturbed. Why do Iraq's Sunni and Shia kill each other today when they didn't a few years back? Why were they able to coexist before, but find that impossible to do today? Every Iraqi tribe and family numbers both Sunni and Shia. They intermingled, intermarried, lived not only side by side but under the same roof, often sharing the same bed. This was the case even under Saddam's despotic rule. Then and before, for centuries Iraq was one of the world's most diverse places, a veritable mosaic of religions, ethnicities, sects and denominations, Muslims, Christians, Sabians, Yazdis, Sunni, Shia, Kurds, Turkmen all peacefully shared the same space.

This was Iraq before. It isn't Iraq today, after the American/British invasion and Bremer's transitional authority, which destroyed Iraq's political order, substituting it for one grounded in sectarianism and ethnic factionalism. National identity was broken asunder, the common torn apart, only narrow group affiliations remained. In the chaos that followed, every splinter group wanted to seize all, leaving the rest with nothing. Forming the security and police forces in the new Iraq along sectarian lines poured oil over fire, equipping one faction with the tools it would later use in its quest to exterminate its rivals.

That the Americans handed Saddam over to their thuggish Shia sectarian clients to execute him on the eve of Islam's holiest festival was no coincidence. It was just another sinister move carefully designed to fan the flames of sectarian strife, and turn all against all in a rapidly disintegrating Iraq.

Shiism and Sunnism are not to blame. Bush, Blair and Bremer are.

Neither are Judaism, Christianity, or Islam responsible for the Middle East conflict. Palestinians and Israelis invoke religious symbols and references in their rationalisation of the dispute, in a space laden with sacred meanings for both sides. But the truth is that this is not a conflict over a mosque, church, or temple, though it has come to be symbolised by such monuments. Primarily, and above all, it is over land, dispossession, settlement, occupation and will to liberation. The relationship is more between occupier and occupied than between Jew and Muslim/Christian. More than the Quran or the Old Testament, it is the Balfour Declaration and the great powers' strategies in the region that have spawned and dictated the course of this long and painful drama.

Many more examples could be cited for the superficiality of explanations of socio-political movements and phenomena in exclusively religious terms, from the Reformation in 16th century Europe, to Islamic radicalism in the 20th. Religion is neither the root of all virtue, nor the cause of all evil. Good conditions spawn good religion, bad conditions bad religion. The evils of reality have a habit of metamorphosing into evil religion.

Humans and societies are not blank pages, but the carriers of a profound cultural, symbolic, and historic heritage, through which they communicate and make sense of reality. This imbedded repository of values, images and references, is inevitably invoked in peace as in war, and more so in war and times of turmoil. Amidst tension, cultural, religious, and national identities are awakened, activated, and intensified. This is not to say, as Marx had done, that religion is a superfluous illusion. It is an integral part of the collective memory and consciousness of groups and individuals. Through it they ascribe meaning to their experiences and justification to their actions. It functions silently unnoticed amidst stability and calm and becomes more vocal, more visible and sometimes more explosive through crisis and turbulence. There is no inherently peaceful religion, and no inherently aggressive religion. Take Christianity, for instance, it inspired asceticism and otherworldliness, just as it ignited the flames of conflict and schism, in the 16th century, wars of religion as in the Crusades. There is no religion per se.

In short, we would do well to avoid peering at reality through the prism of ideas and doctrines. Humans, you see, walk on their feet, not their heads.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Some Comments

Mac105

Comment No. 372629

January 10 9:31

GBR

Quote by Mark Twain: "Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven."

Irrational beliefs are the root of all human evil!

afcone

Comment No. 372630

January 10 9:32

GBR

"Shiism and Sunnism are not to blame. Bush, Blair and Bremer are."

I've never thought we should be in Iraq but this is a load of old hokum. It's all a little bit "white man's burden" if you ask me, in which Iraqis are bit-players, subject to the whim of the West - after all, we can't expect the natives to behave well can we?

tomper2

Comment No. 372652

January 10 9:46

GBR

Rarely is a bad situation not made worse by religion.

130allout

Comment No. 372666

January 10 9:55

GBR

"Why do Iraq's Sunni and Shia kill each other today when they didn't a few years back"

Because Saddam was brutal enough to suppress them and impose a secular authority. Perhaps the 'Allies' should follow his example.

InAbsentia

Comment No. 372678

January 10 10:01

GBR

The majority of atheists are secularists; we don't aspire to a religionless world per se, but one in which religion is relieved of its special status that trumps other considerations. I see no reason why religious ideas should be protected when political or scientific ideas are not. Indeed, it is the lifeblood of rational debate (and hence free democratic society) that ideas are challengeable, as a means of sanity-checking.

Secularists will uphold your right to believe whatever crazy stuff you want, as well as your right to use the democratic process to change things as you see fit. But these changes should be based on merit, and not any special status, regardless of how passionately you may indulge your irrational beliefs.

tarxien

Comment No. 372710

January 10 10:17

Ms Ghannoushi:

You shoe a remarkable ignorance of the recent history of Iraq.

Granted the invasion by US/Britain has made the sectarian situation worse as we all predicted it would.

But I seem to remember that Saddam and his Sunni Ba'athist party have been slaughtering Shia muslims for decades. And what about the 5,000 Kurds he massacred in 1988.

There may have been some political as well as religious reasons for these killings, but the underlying divisions in Iraqi society (as in may places) ARE religious and pre-date Blair and Bush by many centuries.

Waltz

Comment No. 372734

January 10 10:29

GBR

"But more often than not, these problems take on a religious name and speak through the medium of religion, while having their roots in socio-political factors."

Religion isn't *alternative* to socio-political factors. Religions are themselves "socio-political" phenomena. They are human constructs, just like all other ideologies and value systems, and some religions have proved extremely effective as means of creating and policing group identities entirely predicated upon notions of difference to and superiority over other groups. Hence the proselytising, missionary imperatives inherent to the two big desert god monotheisms - Christianity and Islam - and the doctrinal and historical viciousness both display towards dissent (be it in the forms of blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, or simply non-belief).

One fundamental difference between believers and atheists is that believers imagine that their religion comes from god and is subsequently distorted by human beings, while atheists grasp that religions are invented by human beings and therefore contain all the flaws and failings, as well as perhaps some of the better qualities, of humanity itself.

thetrashheap

Comment No. 372809

January 10 10:58

USA

To claim that religion is the route of all evil is undeniably false, and why Dawkins was ever stupid enough to ever agree to call his program "The route of all evil" I'll never know.

But while people will kill over land, power, wealth, race etc, religion is also a huge factor to deny this would be to completely ignore history. I'm from Northern Ireland and while the arguement was primarily about power and land, the dehumanising element was down to religion. The same with Iraq. While they are fighting for power they have dehumanised the enemy by faith.

My experience religion is devisive in that religious people generally socialise within their own groups and the stronger your faith the more segregated the social group.

Rather than attacking the war in Iraq can you give examples of how religion encourages integration?

From my experience it promotes people to marry within their faith, vote according to their faith, school within their faith, socialise within there faith, etc

These are all incrediably devisive. A few joint prayer meetings or joint school trips hardly cancel these policies.

Somniac

Comment No. 372850

January 10 11:16

GBR

It's very naive to think religions are to blame for any conflict. Religions are a tool in some people's hands.
The human race fights about land, resources, sex, money, food, survival, but beliefs??? Never!

doesnotexist

Comment No. 372869

January 10 11:32

AUS

OK, so religion is not the the only divisive force - there are nationalistic and ethnic loyalties and prejudices, socio-political and economic factors and so on.

But it is *a* divisive force, and a bloody big one at that. And it is noteworthy how often religious conflicts flare up when nations and empires are under stress - the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia to add to others mentioned above.

A single religion can be a divisive force within its own domain too, as with the Hindu caste system or the Baptist churches of southern U.S. slave society. Here in Australia a little sect called the Exclusive Brethren has been getting some press for being a divisive force within families - and of course they can cite scripture to support their behaviour.

Frankly, if 82% of Brits have worked out that "religion is a divisive force" there may be hope for the old country yet...

godlovesatheists

Comment No. 372907

January 10 11:50

IRL

What is atheistic survivalism when it's at home? It sounds like something of a straw man to me.

ShatterFace

Comment No. 372946

January 10 12:07

GBR

I've never actually met a 'religious thinker'.

I've met religious people who could mimic the act of thinking but not to the extent that they would pass the Turing test.

I could cobble together a fairly convincing simulation of a religious person in about 3 minutes.

I'd simply programme it to regurgitate the same old crap about how intollerant atheists are.

Funny how few atheists there were preaching hatred of homosexuals outside the House of Lords yesterday.

Intelligent design is a science, not a faith

by Richard Buggs, Guardian

This article is refuted by the many comments here:
Reposted from & add your comments here: http://richarddawkins.net/article,505,n,n
and here:
originally Reposted from & add your comments here: http://www.guardian.co.uk

If Darwinists distinguished between science and their religious beliefs, we'd all be wiser, says Richard Buggs

'It is true that complex things in nature look as if they have been designed. Darwin knew this. But the sublime truth about his theory is that it explains how complex things can come about without design." That was James Randerson arguing that Darwin refuted intelligent design - which, he says, has no place in school science (Here endeth the lesson, December 13).

Darwin made a massive contribution to science, and his ideas still suggest hypotheses today. These provide the starting point for my own research, published in journals of evolution. But despite the brilliance of Darwin's work, it is overoptimistic to claim that his theory explains the origin of all living things.

If Darwin had known what we now know about molecular biology - gigabytes of coded information in DNA, cells rife with tiny machines, the highly specific structures of certain proteins - would he have found his own theory convincing? Randerson thinks that natural selection works fine to explain the origin of molecular machines. But the fact is that we are still unable even to guess Darwinian pathways for the origin of most complex biological structures.

Science has turned lots of corners since Darwin, and many of them have thrown up data quite unpredicted by his theory. Who, on Darwinian premises, would have expected that the patterns of distribution and abundance of species in tropical rainforests could be modelled without taking local adaptation into account? Or that whenever we sequence a new genome we find unique genes, unlike any found in other species? Or that bacteria gain pathogenicity (the ability to cause disease) by losing genes?

But, whatever the limitations of Darwinism, isn't the intelligent design alternative an "intellectual dead end"? No. If true, ID is a profound insight into the natural world and a motivator to scientific inquiry. The pioneers of modern science, who were convinced that nature is designed, consequently held that it could be understood by human intellects. This confidence helped to drive the scientific revolution. More recently, proponents of ID predicted that some "junk" DNA must have a function well before this view became mainstream among Darwinists.

But, according to Randerson, ID is not a science because "there is no evidence that could in principle disprove ID". Remind me, what is claimed of Darwinism? If, as an explanation for organised complexity, Darwinism had a more convincing evidential basis, then many of us would give up on ID.

Finally, Randerson claims that ID is "pure religion". In fact, ID is a logical inference, based on data gathered from the natural world, and hence it is firmly in the realm of science. It does not rely upon the Bible, the Qur'an, or any religious authority or tradition - only on scientific evidence. When a religious person advocates teaching ID in science without identification of the designer, there is no dishonesty or "Trojan horse", just realism about the limitations of the scientific method. If certain Darwinists also had the intellectual honesty to distinguish between science and their religious beliefs, the public understanding of science would be much enhanced.

· Richard Buggs sits on the scientific panel of Truth in Science richard.buggs@cantab.net