Science

Science and Politics

~ Cheryl

There is a particularly sad post on danah boyd’s blog today. Basically danah has run up against the problem that if the results of your research are deemed politically unacceptable you’ll be told to go back and do it again until you get the “right” answer.

I’m used to folks dismissing qualitative work because they don’t understand it, but I’ve never before witnessed so many people reject solid quantitative studies done by reputable organizations that are replicated with different sampling techniques across different studies. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect someone to say to me, “Go find other data.” More frequently, as if in a refrain, folks are trying to reject the studies in this report as “old” and “outdated” even though the report makes it clear that the findings paint a consistent portrait and unreleased data show similar patterns. It’s as if nothing would satiate critics who can’t imagine that the real dangers are different than have been portrayed over the years.

And what are these hideously unacceptable results? That the Internet does not, in fact, get kids into trouble, it just makes it easier for us to see that they are in trouble.

Go read the whole thing yourself. It is a salutary lesson in the way the world works.

Update: Gary Farber blogged about the report last week and nailed what’s going on pretty well.

Politics and Pollution

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I’ve written before about the effect of complex chemical pollutants on the environment, in particular the “feminization” of animals such as fish and amphibians. There is little doubt that significant changes are being seen in many animal populations, and there is no credible explanation other than chemical pollution. However, the exact mechanism is unclear, as is the level of danger to more complex animals such as humans.

Up until now the favorite explanation for this effect has been estrogen. We know that there is a lot more of it going into the water than there used to be, and it is a popular villain chemical in a number of ways. For male journalists, estrogen is a physical embodiment of girl cooties. It allows them to write about how our environment is being polluted by “girl stuff” that is “turning our sons into sissys”. Puritans of various stripes have put the blame on vain women. If people didn’t use hormone replacement therapy, the argument goes, we wouldn’t have this problem. And the Catholic church has leaped at the chance to identify contraceptive pills as a major pollutant.

What does the science say? As usual, it is complicated. But a new study by some UK scientists suggests another potential cause. Estrogen isn’t the only hormone pollutant around, and the new study looked at what are called “anti-androgens” – that is chemicals that block the effects of testosterone. These chemicals are used in the treatment of prostate cancer, and also in fertilizer. They have also been shown in lab work to be important in producing the sorts of feminizing effects seen in nature.

The new study is statistical. That is, it doesn’t demonstrate actual causality, it simply shows that there is a strong correlation between high levels of anti-androgen pollution and high numbers of feminized fish. Nor does it exonerate estrogen – there could well be some complex effect requiring more than one chemical going on here. But the correlation between estrogen pollution alone and feminized fish is a lot lower.

As ever, there is more work to be done. But if there is a lesson here it is that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions simply because they happen to fit our particular prejudices.

I can’t find the original paper online, but you can read the abstract here.

On Traffic Congestion

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Jennifer Ouellette’s latest post takes a physicist’s eye view of traffic congestion and will be interesting reading for anyone who wonders why freeway traffic sometimes slows down for no apparent reason. However, it probably won’t be comfortable reading for Libertarians.

Don’t Believe What You Read

~ Cheryl

I have occasionally complained about the poor quality of science journalism in mainstream newspapers. Here’s an post by Ben Goldacre that illustrates the extent of the problem.

Not only does the Telegraph completely misrepresent the research they were reporting, and quote its author out of context to support their erroneous report, they also blocked his comments when he tried to post a correction.

I’ve become increasingly annoyed at the way that British newspaper web sites use comment threads to allow them to “publish” hate speech that would never be allowed in their original articles, all in the name of “controversy”. Now we discover that when they get things wrong they censor attempts to put them right. Not very responsible, is it?

(The US is, of course, a different matter, as it has freedom of speech legislation.)

Risks of Geoengineering

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

It appears that terraforming is now known as geoengineering. Whether this is because you can only terraform worlds that are not actually dear old Terra, or whether someone decided that they needed a word that was not tainted by association with science fiction, or indeed whether whoever coined geoengineering had never heard of terraforming, I do not know. However:

Because Climate is Complex

~ Cheryl

There’s an interesting article over at Nature on the effect of aircraft contrails on climate. As you may remember, the lack of air travel in the days immediately following 9/11 coincided with a significant rise in average temperatures in the US. This led one group of scientists to speculate that perhaps contrails had a significant effect. No one should have concluded that this proved anything either way, because coincidence does not prove causality, and to be fair to the scientists involved they never said that it did. The media, however, latched onto the story with its customary enthusiasm and lack of rigor.

The right thing to do is, of course, to investigate possible mechanisms, and so another group of scientists has looked at the effect of clouds on climate to try to see if the type of clouds created by aircraft have significant effects. Their conclusion, as Nature reports, is that they don’t.

Note that this does not prove that air travel has no effect on climate. It simply casts doubt on one possible mechanism. But I can see where this will go. Sections of the environmental movement are already convinced that contrails are “Destroying the Planet!!!” and will assume that any evidence to the contrary is simply lies paid for by the airline industry. Meanwhile the PR flacks in that industry will be preparing material explaining how the effect of aircraft on climate has been “proven to be false”. And the people who will suffer most will be the scientists trying to make sense of all this.

Blindsight Proven?

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Well, according to this Guardian article, the experiment was pretty convincing:

A man who was left completely blind by a series of strokes has delighted scientists by negotiating a maze of obstacles without using his cane.

The man, known only as TN, walked around chairs and boxes without knocking into them in an extraordinary demonstration of “blindsight”, a strange ability some blind people have to detect objects they cannot see.

I shall reserve judgment for now because whenever I pass on a report on a scientific experiment from a national newspaper it seems that someone who follows science journals more closely than I do comes back with a story about how the experiment was full of holes, or the journalist completely misrepresented the results, but it is interesting.

An Endangered Gender

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Today’s Independent contains a classic science scare story. It alleges that, because of certain types of chemicals that have been commonly used in recent times, the male gender is under threat, throughout the animal kingdom. Some of this is doubtless traditional journalistic scaremongering, but some of the studies on animals are quite startling, for example:

Research at the University of Florida earlier this year found that 40 per cent of the male cane toads – a species so indestructible that it has become a plague in Australia – had become hermaphrodites in a heavily farmed part of the state, with another 20 per cent undergoing lesser feminisation.

Fish are apparently the worst affected types of animals, but the effects have been noted all through the animal kingdom, including in otters, deer, antelope and polar bears. The report on which the story is based concludes:

Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence. All vertebrates have similar sex hormone receptors, which have been conserved in evolution. Therefore, observations in one species may serve to highlight pollution issues of concern for other vertebrates, including humans.

Hard line feminists will doubtless continue to suggest that there is no biological component whatsoever to gender identity, and I’m not qualified to pronounce one way or another. However, here is an article by a qualified doctor who also happens to be a male-to-female transsexual and who was exposed to one of these “gender bending” chemicals in the womb.

I should note, by the way, that exposure to chemical pollutants is by no means the only possible cause of gender confusion. However, if it happens then it provides firm proof that biological mechanisms can be a contributory factor. And if that is the case then it is further reason to give short shift to those who prefer to believe that all gender variance is a form of sexual perversion.

Evil Capitalist Science

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Here’s an interesting article about public attitudes to science. The researchers at Yale were testing the effectiveness of what they thought was an unbiased informational presentation on nanotechnology. The subjects shown the presentation reacted in sharply different ways, with the division being on cultural grounds. However, the divide was not between religious people thinking that science was bad, and educated people prepared to give science a chance. Rather it was between people with right wing political views, who were keen on new technology creating economic growth, and people with left wing political views who automatically assumed that nanotechnology would be dangerous. So much for science fiction being a hot bed of liberalism, eh?

Avast, Pirates! Deploy The Sonic Laser!

~ Cheryl

No, seriously. A naval security firm is using a “precise beam of sound” as a weapon against Somali pirate attacks. And it is hooked up to an MP3 player as a source. The idea of repelling pirates with blasts of death metal is rather wonderful, although given the advertised effects of the weapon I don’t suppose the pirates will enjoy it much:

It’s very effective up to 1,000 metres and excruciating if you get within 100 to 200 metres if it’s at full power. It would give you more or less permanent hearing damage.

Urk!

Digital OK After All?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Not having a terribly good sense of hearing, I have always taken it on trust when music aficionados tell me that analog recordings are vastly superior to digital. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover from today’s Economist that this isn’t always the case and that the “warmth” of sound on vinyl is often the result of distortions in the recording process.

Of course this doesn’t make any difference as far as poor old MP3 is concerned, because any compression method is bound to produce losses, but thankfully it is still good enough for my useless ears.

Dumbo With Hair

~ Cheryl

Nature is having a celebration: Darwin 200 (although the 200th anniversary of the great man’s birth isn’t until next February – perhaps Nature is making a point about embryos here). There are a lot of good articles on evolution-related issues, but the one that is most likely to catch the eye of the SF reader is “Let’s Make a Mammoth”. There’s lots of serious biology, and also more about elephant genitals than you probably wanted to know.

Update: And with remarkable timing a team at Penn State announces that they have just completed the first successful sequencing of the woolly mammoth genome.

Oceans of MARS

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

No, not the planet, an acronym: Monterey Accelerated Research System. What’s that? A remote-controlled oceanographic research station sitting 3,000 feet down off the California coast. Seriously cool (at least to those of us with a marine science background). Lots more information here. And yes, the sea bed off Monterey really does drop that precipitously. It would be on a par with the Grand Canyon if it were visible.

Plate Tectonics is Awesome

~ Cheryl

It isn’t often that you get so see the Earth splitting at the surface, but right now…

The African continent is slowly splitting apart along the East African Rift, a 3,000 kilometre-long series of deep basins and flanking mountain ranges. An enormous plume of hot, partially molten rock is rising diagonally from the core-mantle boundary, some 2,900 kilometres beneath Southern Africa, and erupting at the Earth’s surface, or cooling just beneath it, in the Afar region of Ethiopia.

Needless to say, it is like a honeypot to geologists. Lots more here.

US Army Deploys Laser Weapon

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

There’s only one in the field right now, and it being used to detonate unexploded bombs, but The Economist has plenty of speculation as to how the technology might develop:

But wars are not won by defence alone. What people in the business are more coy about discussing is the offensive use of lasers. At least one such system is under development, though. The aeroplane-mounted Advanced Tactical Laser, or ATL, another chemical laser being put together by Boeing and the American air force, is designed to “neutralise” targets on the ground from a distance of several kilometres.

Suggestions that the weapons will also be mounted on giant, three-legged “fighting machines” are being strenuously denied.

Science Is Not Enough

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Two news stories have appeared in the past few days on the subject of genetics and sexuality/gender. The first was a piece in The Economist that looks at possible evolutionary advantages for non-conformant gender behavior. The other was a story about some research in Australia that claims to have found a genetic component to transsexuality (reported here and here, amongst many other places outside of the US where the story appears to have sunk without trace).
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