Karl Popper Falsification Theory (Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4)

8 Feb 07 BBC Radio 4 - from "In Our Time" (click to listen)

Karl Popper is one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th Century, whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day. He strongly resisted the prevailing empiricist consensus that scientists' theories could be proved true. He believed that even when a scientific principle had been successfully and repeatedly tested, it was not necessarily true. Instead it had simply not proved false, yet! This became known as the theory of falsification. He called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called "pseudo sciences" which couldn't be tested. His debunking of such ideologies led some to describe him as the "murderer of Freud and Marx". So how did Karl Popper change our approach to the philosophy of science? How have scientists and philosophers made use of his ideas? And how are his theories viewed today? Are we any closer to proving scientific principles are "true"

Contributors

John Worrall (JW), Professor of Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics

Anthony O'Hear (AH), Weston Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University

Nancy Cartwright (NC), Professor of Philosophy at the LSE and the University of California

KP was born 1902 in Vienna where he obtained a PhD at the University of Vienna. Marxist and Freud & other psychoanalysts (Adler, Jung) treated their theories different from (what Popper called) true scientists like Einstein. In 1919 light passing the sun in a total eclipse of the sun was observed. IF this observation had failed then Einstein would have given up his General Theory of Relativity because the theory would have been falsified.

Marx theory was falsified many times but Marx never gave it up, so Marx was not a true scientist according to Popper.

Psychoanalalysts theories were simply unfalsifiable - Popper called unfalsifiable theories - pseudoscience.

Newton mechanics theories had been confirmed for over 200 years but when it came to the 1919 observations of Einstein theories - some of Newton theories were falsified. This was how science should proceed - it is the criterion of demarcation between science and pseudoscience.

Popper published the Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1930s. Vienna Circle said that you could prove scientific theories by observation & experiment. Popper said you can NEVER PROVE a scientific theory (lots of observations cannot be made and the future might be differant from the past). Scientific theories put themselves up for testing and IF they could be falsified by observation and experiment then these were true scientific theories and not pseudoscience. Uranus was found not to follow Newtonian laws. So Neptune was postulated and then found when telescopes were pointed at where Neptune should have been.

Popper said Science should be a bold imaginative activity - not ONLY systematic fact collecting.

Deductive reasoning is the kind of reasoning in which the conclusion is necessitated by, or reached from, previously known facts (the premises). If the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. This is distinguished from abductive and inductive reasoning, where the premises may predict a high probability of the conclusion, but do not ensure that the conclusion is true.

Deductive reasoning is dependent on its premises. That is, a false premise can possibly lead to a false result, and inconclusive premises will also yield an inconclusive conclusion.

Theory of falsification came from Deductive logic - if premise is true then conclusion must be true. Example: If John lives in London then John lives in South of England (premise). Then we conclude that John MUST live in England. But the problem of Deductive logic is that the conclusions are contained within the premise!

Induction or inductive reasoning, sometimes called inductive logic, is the process of reasoning in which the premises of an argument are believed to support the conclusion but do not ensure it. It is used to ascribe properties or relations to types based on tokens (i.e., on one or a small number of observations or experiences); or to formulate laws based on limited observations of recurring phenomenal patterns. Induction is used, for example, in using specific propositions such as:

This ice is cold.

A billiard ball moves when struck with a cue.

...to infer general propositions such as:

All ice is cold.

All billiard balls struck with a cue move.

Popper said their was no solution to David Hume's Induction logic. Just because their was a pattern of data eg sun rises - we cannot assume (circular thinking) that sun will rise just because it has in the past. Popper said that the Solution was NOT to use induction in science - don't accumulate data then generalise - but do speculate then test. But in practice, scientists DO use inductive generalisations to proceed with science.

Given two alternative theories - use the theory that has not been falsified (YET). Example: Theory of Aerodynamics has survived all the tests. Another theory of flying could be used - but assume that theory has broken down in the past. Anyone in their right mind would sse theory that has not been falsified yet ie. in this case, the Theory of Aerodynamics.

Here's a more cerebral reason to lower your cholesterol

An unhealthy western diet could harm more than just your waistline - it may also increase your risk of Alzheimer's disease.

Earlier work on mice fed high-cholesterol diets found that their brain cells produced more amyloid beta, a protein linked to Alzheimer's. There is also evidence that taking cholesterol-lowering statins makes people less likely to develop late-onset Alzheimer's.

To better understand this link, Brett Garner of the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues used human and animal cells to probe how neurons regulate their levels of cholesterol.

They found that "ABC proteins", which help control cholesterol levels in arterial walls by expelling cholesterol from the immune cells called macrophages where it builds up, were also present in neurons. When the team over-expressed the genes for these proteins in hamster and human cell lines, production of amyloid beta protein fell (Journal of Biological Chemistry, vol 282, p 2851).

The work also showed that an extracellular protein called apoE is extremely good at regulating cholesterol removal from neurons. One form of the gene for apoE is already recognised as the major genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer's disease.

Garner suggests that drugs that increase expression of ABC transporters might slow the progression of Alzheimer's. Such drugs are already being used in cardiovascular research. "A lot of people think there could be converging factors involved in these diseases," Garner says.

From issue 2590 of New Scientist magazine, 08 February 2007, page 15

reposted from: New Scientist
my highlights / emphasis / comments

US School Teachers defend Evolution

by Kristen Philipkoski, with Randy Dotinga and Scott Carney

Saturday, 17 February 2007

Awards Show AAAS's Political Focus
Topic: AAAS Meeting,Evolution

In a story earlier this week for Wired News, I wrote about how the AAAS isn't shying away from confrontations over hotly political issues like global warming. Case in point: the AAAS Awards for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.

The winners -- who will get their awards today -- are all advocates of the teaching of evolution. Eight are science teachers who fought attempts to water down the teaching of evolution in Dover, Pa.

The awardees are Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a prominent pro-evolution advocacy organization, along with Dover High teachers David Taylor, Bertha Spahr, Robert Linker, Leslie Prall, Brian Bahn, Jennifer Miller and Robert Eshbach. Also honored is teacher R. Wesley McCoy, head of science department at North Cobb High School in Kennesaw, Georgia. According to the AAAS, he "took on a public role in opposing a decision by the Cobb County School Board to require stickers on biology textbooks that read, in part: 'Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things.'"

According to an award committee, "each of these individuals has confronted efforts to undermine sound scientific thinking and has defended the integrity of science both locally and nationally."

Posted by Randy Dotinga 10:26 AM

reposted from: http://blog.wired.com/biotech/2007/02/awards_show_aaa.html
my highlights / emphasis / comments

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris - British edition

Bookmarker cards like this one, advertising Sam's book, will be inserted in future reprintings of The God Delusion.

Foreword by Richard Dawkins

Sam Harris doesn't mess about. He writes directly to his Christian reader as 'you', and he pays 'you' the compliment of taking your beliefs seriously: " . . . if one of us is right, the other is wrong . . . in the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, and the other is really going to lose." But you don't (as I can personally understate) have to fit the 'you' profile in order to enjoy this marvellous little book. Every word zings like an elegantly fletched arrow from a taut bowstring and flies in a gracefully swift arc to the target, where it thuds into the bullseye.

If you are part of the target, I dare you to read this book. It will be a salutary test of your faith. Survive Sam Harris's barrage, and you can take on the world with equanimity. But forgive my scepticism: Harris never misses, not with a single sentence, which is why his short book is so disproportionately devastating. If you already share Harris's and my doubts about religious faith and are not part of his target, this book will powerfully arm you to argue against those who are. Or you may be Christian and still not part of the target. This book freely admits that there are Christians who take, as they would see it, a more nuanced view:

. . . liberal and moderate Christians will not always recognize themselves in the 'Christian' I address. They should, however, recognize many of their neighbors—and more than one hundred and fifty million Americans.

And that's the point. It was the menace of those hundred and fifty millions that provoked this book. If your religious beliefs are so vague and nebulous that even well aimed arrows bounce off unnoticed, Harris is not writing for you directly. But you should still care about the emergency that concerns him – and me. Where I, as a scientific educator, am dismayed by the 50 percent of the American population who believe the world is 6000 years old (an error equivalent to believing that the distance from New York to San Francisco is shorter than a cricket pitch), Sam Harris is at least as urgently concerned with other beliefs held by roughly the same 50 percent:

It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if London, Sydney, or New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help humanity create a durable future for itself—socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

The 'Christian Nation' for whom the book was originally written is, of course, the United States. But it would be complacent folly for us to dismiss it as a purely American problem. The USA, at least, is protected by Jefferson's enlightened wall of separation between church and state. Religion is part of Britain's historic establishment, while at this moment our most pious political leadership since Gladstone is hell bent on supporting 'faith schools'. And not just the traditional Christian schools, be it noticed, for our government, egged on by an heir to the throne who wishes to be known as 'Defender of Faith', is actively sympathetic towards the 'us-too' bleatings of other 'faith communities', eager for state subsidy for the indoctrination of their children. Would it be possible to design a more divisive educational formula? More importantly, the world's only superpower is close to domination by electors who believe the entire universe began after the domestication of the dog, and believe that they will be personally 'raptured' up to heaven within their own lifetime, followed by an Armageddon welcomed as harbinger of the Second Coming. Even from this side of the Atlantic, Sam Harris's phrase, 'moral and intellectual emergency' begins to look like an understatement.

I began by saying that Sam Harris doesn't mess about. One of his points is that none of us can afford to. Letter to a Christian Nation will stir you. Whether it stirs you to defensive or offensive action, it will not leave you unchanged. Read it if it is the last thing you do. And hope that it won't be.

Review of 'The Quotable Atheist' by Jack Huberman

In his new book, The Quotable Atheist, author Jack Huberman has collected powerful quotations against organized religion and belief in God from figures such as Richard Dawkins, Phyllis Diller, Frederick Douglass, Michael Moore, Katha Pollitt, and yes, Jerry Falwell.



Reposted from:
http://www.alternet.org/story/47765/
reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,640,n,n
my highlights / emphasis / comments

The following is an excerpt from Jack Huberman's new book, The Quotable Atheist: Ammunition for Nonbelievers, Political Junkies, Gadflies, and Those Generally Hell-Bound (Nation Books, 2007).

The world (not just America) is deeply divided.The main fault line is where the tectonic plates of religion and of reason/secularism/ modernity/science/Enlightenment meet and grind against each other,making an absolutely unbearable noise. It's sort of like ... forget it, I can't describe it.

My aim in compiling The Quotable Atheist was to heal our broken planet, essentially by eliminating the religious part. Not with nuclear weapons or lesser acts of mass murder, no -- that's the religious style, nowadays, in certain quarters -- but through argument, persuasion, and most of all (since I know perfectly well that argument is utterly useless against dumb, blind faith, and just wanted to pay it lip service), the steady application of powerfully abrasive ridicule which will slowly but surely erode away the offending continent. I'm serious. Do I really believe this book will convert believers and turn them from the path of self-righteousness to the path of righteousness? Yes. A few. Three, I estimate. Two for sure. But the point is this:

For years, millions of fine, upstanding American atheists and agnostics have watched and stewed as the religious right expanded its influence throughout public life, and as America closed its mind and opened its heart to angels, aliens, ghosts, psychics, Jesus, astrology, Kabbalah, Genesis, Revelation. ... As Sam Harris wrote in The End of Faith, "Unreason is now ascendant in the United States -- in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world."

Meanwhile, religion continues to be granted far too much respect and too little critical examination in our culture and mainstream media.We need to change the cultural climate so as to make supernatural, occult, and faith-based claptrap feel unwelcome and to make adults ashamed of the blithe surrender of their otherwise sound minds to idiocy.We need climate change. Bullshit levels are rising globally, threatening to submerge intellectually low-lying areas. Much of the United States is already inundated.Temperatures are rising; IQs are dropping. Four of the five stupidest years on record have occurred since 2000.

I would of course have preferred a declaration by the president of the United States -- purportedly God's messenger on earth -- stating that neither God nor WMDs ever existed and that most religious beliefs are untrue and harmful, and urging citizens to bring their minds back up at least to an eighteenth-century stage of development. (I have proposed this plan in a letter to George W. Bush, but haven't heard back yet. They must be hashing out the details.) Failing that, it is up to atheist/secularist groups and individuals to do what we can to stop global worming (people groveling like worms before nonexistent deities). That's where this book comes in.

As a number of these collected quotes say (far more wittily): Religion in general is based on falsehoods -- comforting beliefs in a heavenly parent or big brother; hopes of surviving death -- and on utility or expedience: socially cohesive tribal myths; politically useful codes of law and behavior; divine ordination of rulers (including certain presidents); attempts to explain, influence, or placate nature and the elements; the wish to raise ourselves above (i.e., deny our place among) the animals. Religion may help people feel their lives have a loftier purpose than the mere satisfaction of material wants and sensual desires, but it does it with smoke and mirrors, at the cost of our respect for truth and of our integrity and dignity.

The following quotes are selected from The Quotable Atheist.

Richard Dawkins: Kenyan-born British zoologist and evolutionary theorist.

"Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? ... The afterlifeobsessed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power and danger. It is comparable to a smart missile. ...Yet ... it is very very cheap. ...To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used." - 2001

"[A letter to a U.K. newspaper] says 'science provides an explanation of the mechanism of the [December 2004 Asian] tsunami but it cannot say why this occurred any more than religion can.' There, in one sentence, we have the religious mind displayed before us in all its absurdity. In what sense of the word 'why', does plate tectonics not provide the answer? Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety. Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering."

Phyllis Diller: (1917– ), American comedian.

"Religion is such a medieval idea. Don't get me started. ... Aahh, it's all about money..."

Phil Donahue: (1935-) American talk-show host.

From Donahue's 1985 book The Human Animal:

"Science may have come a long way, but as far as religion is concerned, we are first cousins to the !Kung tribesmen of the Kalahari Desert. Except for the garments, their deep religious trances might just as well be happening at a revival meeting or in the congregation of a fundamentalist TV preacher. ... As we move further from the life of ignorance and superstition in which religion has its roots, we seem to need it more and more. ... Why has religion become a force just when we'd have thought it would be losing ground to secularism?"

Frederick Douglass: (1818-1895), African-American abolitionist leader.

"I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs."

"The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. ... For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done!"

"We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand."

Jerry Falwell: (1933- ), American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and leading excrescence.

"Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions."

Thomas Jefferson: (1743-1826), third U.S. president.

"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies."

"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man. ... perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind ... a mere contrivance [for the clergy] to filch wealth and power to themselves."

"In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty, he is always in allegiance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own. ... History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. ... Political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves [of public ignorance] for their own purpose."

Michael Moore: (1954- ), American documentary filmmaker and author.

"There's a gullible side to the American people. They can be easily misled. Religion is the best device used to mislead them."

Katha Pollitt: (1949- ), American poet and columnist for The Nation.

"For me, religion is serious business -- a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom."

What is junk DNA, and what is it worth?

by A. Khajavinia

Wojciech Makalowski, a Pennsylvania State University biology professor and researcher in computational evolutionary genomics, answers this query.

Our genetic blueprint consists of 3.42 billion nucleotides packaged in 23 pairs of linear chromosomes. Most mammalian genomes are of comparable size—the mouse script is 3.45 billion nucleotides, the rat's is 2.90 billion, the cow's is 3.65 billion—and code for a similar number of genes: about 35,000. Of course, extremes exist: the bent-winged bat (Miniopterus schreibersi) has a relatively small 1.69-billion-nucleotide genome; the red viscacha rat (Tympanoctomys barrerae) has a genome that is 8.21 billion nucleotides long. Among vertebrates, the highest variability in genome size exists in fish: the green puffer fish (Chelonodon fluviatilis) genome contains only 0.34 billion nucleotides, while the marbled lungfish (Protopterus aethiopicus) genome is gigantic, with almost 130 billion. Interestingly, all animals have a large excess of DNA that does not code for the proteins used to build bodies and catalyze chemical reactions within cells. In humans, for example, only about 2 percent of DNA actually codes for proteins.

For decades, scientists were puzzled by this phenomenon. With no obvious function, the noncoding portion of a genome was declared useless or sometimes called "selfish DNA," existing only for itself without contributing to an organism's fitness. In 1972 the late geneticist Susumu Ohno coined the term "junk DNA" to describe all noncoding sections of a genome, most of which consist of repeated segments scattered randomly throughout the genome.

Typically these sections of junk DNA come about through transposition, or movement of sections of DNA to different positions in the genome. As a result, most of these regions contain multiple copies of transposons, which are sequences that literally copy or cut themselves out of one part of the genome and reinsert themselves somewhere else.

Elements that use copying mechanisms to move around the genome increase the amount of genetic material. In the case of "cut and paste" elements, the process is slower and more complicated, and involves DNA repair machinery. Nevertheless, if transposon activity happens in cells that give rise to either eggs or sperm, these genes have a good chance of integrating into a population and increasing the size of the host genome.

Although very catchy, the term "junk DNA" repelled mainstream researchers from studying noncoding genetic material for many years. After all, who would like to dig through genomic garbage? Thankfully, though, there are some clochards who, at the risk of being ridiculed, explore unpopular territories. And it is because of them that in the early 1990s, the view of junk DNA, especially repetitive elements, began to change. In fact, more and more biologists now regard repetitive elements as genomic treasures. It appears that these transposable elements are not useless DNA. Instead, they interact with the surrounding genomic environment and increase the ability of the organism to evolve by serving as hot spots for genetic recombination and by providing new and important signals for regulating gene expression.

Genomes are dynamic entities: new functional elements appear and old ones become extinct. And so, junk DNA can evolve into functional DNA. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and paleontologist Elisabeth Vrba, now at Yale University, employed the term "exaptation" to explain how different genomic entities may take on new roles regardless of their original function—even if they originally served no purpose at all. With the wealth of genomic sequence information at our disposal, we are slowly uncovering the importance of non-protein-coding DNA.

In fact, new genomic elements are being discovered even in the human genome, five years after the deciphering of the full sequence. Last summer developmental biologist Gill Bejerano, then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and now a professor at Stanford University, and his colleagues discovered that during vertebrate evolution, a novel retroposon—a DNA fragment, reverse-transcribed from RNA, that can insert itself anywhere in the genome—was exapted as an enhancer, a signal that increases a gene's transcription. On the other hand, anonymous sequences that are nonfunctional in one species may, in another organism, become an exon—a section of DNA that is eventually transcribed to messenger RNA. Izabela Makalowska of Pennsylvania State University recently showed that this mechanism quite often leads to another interesting feature in the vertebrate genomes, namely overlapping genes—that is, genes that share some of their nucleotides.

These and countless other examples demonstrate that repetitive elements are hardly "junk" but rather are important, integral components of eukaryotic genomes. Risking the personification of biological processes, we can say that evolution is too wise to waste this valuable information.

reposted from: SciAm
my highlights / emphasis / comments

UK bird flu outbreak - who dunnit?

Exclusive

• 18:00 12 February 2007
• NewScientist.com news service
• Debora MacKenzie

On 3 February 2007, confirmation came that the deadly strain of H5N1 had made it to Europe’s biggest poultry plant, the Bernard Matthews turkey farm in Suffolk, eastern England (see H5N1 bird flu outbreak confirmed on English farm). It was the second confirmed case of this strain of the virus in a European Union state in 2007, following an outbreak in Hungary.

The H5N1 virus is known to have infected 270 people and killed more than 160 worldwide since 2003, most of them in Asia, and over 200 million birds have died from it or been killed to prevent its spread. (Find out more in our Bird Flu special report.)

The H5N1 bird flu was found in a turkey production plant with active biosecurity measures – how did it get in and where did it come from? New Scientist investigates (see graphic, right).

Suspect: East Asia

Evidence: The highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu that has killed 166 people so far first evolved in poultry in southern China, and it has spread with poultry across the region. It has become widespread in poultry and has caused the most cases so far in people – Indonesia is now hardest hit.

Verdict: Extremely unlikely to have spread directly from here to the UK. The H5N1 circulating in Europe is descended from a strain first isolated in wild birds at Qinghai Lake in central China in 2005. This is genetically distinct from the H5N1 circulating in poultry in the Far East.

Suspect: Siberia

Evidence: Dabbling ducks can carry H5N1 and stay healthy. Many dabbling ducks now wintering in Europe spent the summer nesting in Siberia. Nesting grounds are where birds contract bird flu most often. 20 kilometres from Holton is a nature reserve where wigeons – gregarious dabbling ducks that summer across Siberia – are wintering. Those ducks could well have nested alongside birds now wintering in Hungary. They all could have carried the same virus from Siberia to both England and Hungary, where it circulated at a low level among other birds. Then some local poultry farm just got unlucky.

Further evidence: Recent H5N1 outbreaks in poultry in Krasnodar on the Russian Black Sea coast, and in eastern Turkey (major destinations for the same ducks) plus suspected human cases in nearby Azerbaijan.

Verdict: Likely. How did H5N1 get from wild birds into “closed” turkey barns? A worker could merely have stepped in duck faeces then walked into a barn, say scientists. Turkeys are incredibly sensitive to H5N1.

Suspect: Hungary

Evidence: Hungary had an H5N1 outbreak in geese in Csongrad on 19 January, and the virus is described as genetically very similar. The British outbreak started on 27 January 2007.

Verdict: Just because one happened after the other, it doesn’t mean the first one caused it. Bernard Matthews, the company that owns the British turkey farm, owns a turkey processing plant at Sarvar, Hungary, which sends 38 tonnes of “partly processed” turkey to the British plant weekly. But Sarvar is 260 kilometres from Csongrad making direct spread unlikely. Some Sarvar turkeys were slaughtered at a plant also handling Csongrad birds, so carcasses might have been some cross-contaminated. A smear of turkey on a worker’s shoe could have got it from processing plant to turkey barn.

Suspect: Scotland

Evidence: Britain’s only previous case of H5N1 was a dead whooper swan in a harbour in Cellardyke, Scotland, in March 2006. Could the virus have persisted in British birds? No other birds with H5N1 have been found in Britain, and officials have suggested that the swan was infected in Germany, and died while migrating over Scotland. But questions surround Britain’s wild bird surveillance. Scientists in Sweden find influenza viruses of all types, on average, in 14% of dabblers tested, with higher levels in autumn after nesting season. But last autumn the British testing programme found influenza in a tiny 0.8% of thousands of dabblers tested. This suggests the methodology is missing infected birds, and potentially H5N1. On the other hand, H5N1 is clearly rare; the best way to detect it might be to leave “sentinel” turkeys outdoors.

Verdict: Likely. The same wild British ducks that infected the Scottish swan may have infected the Bernard Matthews turkeys. A worker could merely have stepped in duck faeces then walked into a barn, say scientists.

reposted from: NewScientist
my highlights / emphasis / comments

ESP laboratory closes its doors

The lab's research drew ridicule from the scientific community

A US laboratory set up to study ESP and telekinesis is to close at the end of the month, ending a strained 30-year relationship with the scientific world.

Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab (PEAR) was set up in 1979 to examine human consciousness and its affects on computers and machines.

Founder Robert Jahn, 76, said the lab, with its ageing equipment and dwindling finances, has done what it needed to.

Many scientists have been dismissive of the Princeton University-based unit.

A typical PEAR experiment had a person sitting in front of an electric box which flashed numbers just above or below 100.

The participant would be told to "think high" or "think low" as they watched the display.

Researchers concluded that people could alter the results in such machines about two or three times out of 10,000.

PEAR says such effects could be "functionally devastating" for people working in aircraft cockpits, surgical facilities and even ICBM missile silos.

'Embarrassment to science'

"Venues that appear to be particularly conducive to such field anomalies include small intimate groups, group rituals, sacred sites, musical and theatrical performances, and other charismatic events," it adds.

Mr Jahn, former dean of Princeton's engineering school and an emeritus professor, told the New York Times: "For 28 year, we've done what we wanted to do, and there's no reason to stay and generate more of the same data.

"If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will."

Funded by private donations rather than grants obtained via peer-reviewed research, the lab had an awkward relationship with the scientific community.

"It's been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton," Robert Park, a University of Maryland physicist, told the NYT.

"Science has a substantial amount of credibility, but this is the kind of thing that squanders it."

A statement on the PEAR website said the lab was to transfer to a nearby non-profit group, the International Consciousness Research Laboratories.

reposted from: BBC
my highlights / emphasis / comments

MySpace Launches Pilot to Filter Videos

By ANICK JESDANUN
AP Internet Writer Feb 12, 11:19 AM EST
NEW YORK (AP) -- The popular online hangout MySpace said Monday it will experiment with a video-filtering system designed to block clips containing copyright materials.

MySpace is licensing technology from Audible Magic Corp., which late last year obtained rights to a system for scanning video clips and looking for signature vectors - such as a unique digital fingerprint - to compare with vectors stored in a database. Video can be blocked from appearing on MySpace when there is a match.

The video system supplements audio filtering MySpace already has in place to block unauthorized music uploads.

In the video-filtering pilot, MySpace said it would block unauthorized music videos and other clips containing Universal Music Group's music, while still allowing the Vivendi SA unit and its artists to circulate promotional audio and video they authorize. MySpace, a unit of News Corp., said the tools would be available for free to other content owners as well.

"MySpace is dedicated to ensuring that content owners, whether large or small, can both promote and protect their content in our community," Chris DeWolfe, MySpace's co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement. "For MySpace, video filtering is about protecting artists and the work they create."

The ability to post video on the site is among the features MySpace offers to encourage visitors to expand their circle of friends and share hobbies and other interests.

MySpace and other video-sharing sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube long have had policies to remove copyright materials, but generally do so only after receiving a complaint from the copyright holder. Users can easily repost the same clip to the sites under a different, free account. If Audible Magic's technology works as promised, MySpace would be able to block any such attempts to repost material already identified as unauthorized.

MySpace officials say the latest offering was unrelated to Universal Music's federal lawsuit in November, accusing MySpace of illegally encouraging its users to share music and music videos on the site without permission. That lawsuit remains pending and seeks unspecified damages, including up to $150,000 for each unauthorized music video or song posted on the site.

On the Net:

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com

Audible Magic Corp.: http://www.audiblemagic.com

reposted from: Wired
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Video: Octopus Mating a Tangled Affair

February 16, 2007—For a male cyanea octopus, finding a mate is all about showing a little "leg."

From sniffing the water for female pheromones to baring their suckers to scare off potential rivals, the creatures must make good use of their eight appendages for a chance to reproduce.

Watch a tense standoff between two competing males, and see the victor learn the harsh lesson that getting a female's attention isn't the same as keeping it.

RELATED

• Common Octopus: Photos, Facts, More
• Video: Octopus Changes Color, Textures
• Video: Giant Octopus Battles Shark

if (caption) { document.write(caption); } reposted from: National Geographic Digital Media
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AAAS Meeting: Libras, Watch Your Pelvises! Study Links Astrological Signs to Disease, But...

by Kristen Philipkoski, with Randy Dotinga and Scott Carney

Friday, 16 February 2007

Libras, Watch Your Pelvises! Study Links Astrological Signs to Disease, But...
Topic: AAAS Meeting

Attention all Libras: Walk carefully. You seem to have a higher risk of fracturing your pelvis than people born under other astrological signs.

Pisces? Heart failure is more likely to hit you than other people. And stay clear of Virgos when they've got a bun in the oven -- they have a higher risk of vomiting during pregnancy.

All right, calm down. This isn't a real scientific study. Or at least, it isn't a serious one. OK, it is serious, but you're not supposed to think that being a Leo or whatever will actually affect your health.

To show how connections can appear in research when they don't actually exist, researchers in Canada found that people born under each of 12 astrological signs were more likely to develop certain diseases. (This all came from an analysis of hospital records of 10 million Ontario residents.)

I wasn't able to attend the session on this earlier today at the annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science here in San Francisco, but here are some details from a press release:

“Replace astrological signs with another characteristic such as gender or age, and immediately your mind starts to form explanations for the observed associations,” says [a researcher]. “Then we leap to conclusions, constructing reasons for why we saw the results we did. We did this study to prove a larger point – the more we look for patterns, the more likely we are to find them, particularly when we don’t begin with a particular question.”...

What he found was that even though each astrological sign had its own unique disorders, his initial results were not reproduced when they were explicitly tested in a second population.

“Scientists take pains to make sure their clinical studies are conducted accurately,” [he says], “but sometimes erroneous conclusions will be obtained solely due to chance.” Statistical chance means that 5 per cent of the time, scientists will incorrectly conclude that an association exists, when in reality no such association exists in the population that the scientists are studying.

One way to reduce the chances of drawing a wrong conclusion is to try and reproduce unexpected results in further studies.

“There is a danger in basing scientific decisions on the results of one study, particularly if the results were unanticipated or the association was one that we did not initially decide to examine,” says Austin. “But when several studies all arrive at similar conclusions, we reduce the risk of arriving at an incorrect outcome.”

Charting our health [press release]

reposted from: Wired blogs
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New Mars Pictures Show Signs of Watery "Aquifers"

Richard A. Lovett in San Francisco, California
for National Geographic News

February 16, 2007

Stunning color pictures from Mars offer new evidence that plentiful groundwater once percolated through Martian bedrock.

The new images, taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, reveal a terrain of banded rocks similar to that found in the southwestern U.S., said Chris Okubo, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

The new pictures show that Martian rocks in this sandy landscape are riddled with small cracks.

These cracks bear telltale signs that fluid—probably water—seeped through them hundreds of millions of years ago.

Prominent riblike structures along the cracks, for instance, suggest that running water dissolved minerals in the Martian soil, forming a kind of cement.

The water also dissolved dark minerals out of the rocks, leaving light-colored "halos" around the cracks.

These findings are exciting, because they suggest that similar water-filled fractures might still exist beneath the Martian surface, scientists said.

"What we see at the surface today are glimpses of what used to be underground," Okubo said.

Okubo presented the new images at a press conference today in San Francisco, California. His team's findings will appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.

Search for Life May Shift

Water is a key component of life as we know it, so the new discovery will be useful in helping scientists hone the search for possible life on Mars, researchers at the conference said.

There is already abundant evidence that early Mars was once water rich, said Stephen Clifford, a Mars hydrologist from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.

But the water has since retreated, presumably underground, and appears to have occasionally reached the surface in large floods.

(Read related story: "Mars's Water Could Be Below Surface, Experts Say" [January 25, 2007].)

Now that it is widely agreed that water once flowed along extensive networks of cracks, a new clue falls into place in a lingering mystery.

"One of the problems [was] how, if the water is underground, you get so much of it to the surface at once," Clifford said.

Other Ingredients of Life

Water appears to have been very common at various times on Mars's surface. So in the search for life it's now time to do more than seek out places where the red planet was once wet, said Tori Hoehler, an astrobiologist with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Instead, scientists need to start thinking about other possible requirements for life, such as energy, Hoehler said.

For example, he said, microorganisms might be able to harness chemical energy from Martian rocks, as some earthly bacteria appear to do.

"This is the next thing we should be looking for on Mars," he said.

But expanding the search for life requires studying the geology in more detail, the scientists said.

NASA's Opportunity rover is currently on the rim of Victoria Crater, where scientists have observed outcrops of rock similar to that seen in Okubo's photos. (Related photos: Mars rovers).

"If we can get to [those outcrops]," Hoehler said, "it would be a great to visit them."

But, Okubo added, "right now, they're on the far side of the craters, so it may take a while for Opportunity to get there."

reposted from: NatGeorgraphic

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Stunning new images from a satellite orbiting Mars reveal that water once snuck along fractures in Mars's layered rocks. The fractures are clearly visible in this view of Becquerel Crater, shooting through both the light- and dark-colored layers that make up the canyon's walls. The blue areas are vast sand dunes, not water. Shot by the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the image also reveals light-colored features, which scientists are calling halos, that cut across the dark bands. The researchers say these are areas where water flowing through the fractures has altered the appearance of rock. Image courtesy Science

Mystery of Galaxies Full of Dark Matter Solved

February 16, 2007 Small galaxies' visible gas may have been scoured away by million-degree coronas of nearby big galaxies By JR Minkel

Image: COURTESY OF STELIOS KAZANTZIDIS GONE DARK? Simulations of galaxy formation indicate that the Milky Way and other large galaxies should be surrounded by numerous smaller galaxies [right]. New work hints that these missing galaxies may be full of dark matter and therefore difficult to spot.

reposted from: SciAm
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Researchers may have explained why a few tiny galaxies around the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies are so rich in dark matter, the invisible stuff that makes up most of the matter in the universe. The key seems to be the bigger, brighter galaxies next door. Simulations indicate that million-degree coronas around these larger galaxies could have scoured away much of the visible gas in their young neighbors while leaving the dark material behind.

Researchers believe that all galaxies large and small should have started out the same—as a ball of dark matter with a disk of visible matter in the center. But some small galaxies, called dwarf spheroidals, are relatively dark for their size; a handful contain roughly 100 times more dark matter per star than the Milky Way and are a million times less luminous. They also tend to cluster around bigger galaxies such as our own. The big question is why.

In new simulations of galaxy formation, Lucio Mayer of the University of Zurich and his colleagues find that, 10 billion years ago, the darkest of today's spheroidals (such as Draco, Ursa Minor and Andromeda IX) were forming around big galaxies from the same mix of visible gas and dark matter, much like planets would form around a star. But they happened to get pulled into orbit around the central galaxy earlier than their counterparts. Once there, according to the group's simulations, shocks from the central galaxy's gravity, and pressure from the hot corona around it, combined to knock loose most of the smaller galaxies' shimmering gas. Only a few remaining stars studded each blob of dark matter. Ultraviolet radiation, which permeated the universe at the time, would have heated the spheroidals' visible gas, leaving it weakly attracted to the little galaxies and thus easy to scrape away, the group reports in this week's Nature. The model is the first to explain why the spheroidals would be both dark and found near bigger galaxies, says co-author Stelios Kazantzidis of Stanford University.

The researchers "do a good job of simulating all of the relevant physics and setting the orbits" of the dwarfs, says astrophysicist James Bullock of the University of California, Irvine. "They make the case that the Milky Way has very likely stripped the gas (and the 'life') out of many of the dwarf galaxies we see around us."

Kazantzidis says the result may also explain why bigger galaxies have many fewer dwarfs around them than the reigning model of "cold," or slow-moving, dark matter would suggest. Other spheroidals may have received a larger dose of the same gas-stripping process, leaving them even less visible and waiting to be discovered.

RELATED LINKS: A Universe of Disks The Search for Dark Matter Does Dark Matter Really Exist? Dwarf Galaxies and Starbursts What's the Matter?