Science thread

[MrsMcGahan]

Republican Scientists Claim Gravity a Scam

November 27, 2008


WASHINGTON — The Republican National Committee’s Scientific Advisory Board today issued a report negating claims of an “invisible force that pulls things toward the center of the Earth.”

“Sheer nonsense,” said the director of the board, Dr. Johann Brouhah, PhD. “Al Gore and his so called ‘Scientists’ are so sure that gravity exists, yet they completely ignore the fact that heavy things just naturally drop.”

In testimony made before the Pismo Beach Chamber of Commerce, Dr. Brouhah said, “There is no gravity. For the past ten thousand years, Earth has gone through a period where heavy things fall downward. Every home-schooled child knows that. There is no invisible force. These fairy-tale promoting, everybody-should-have-health-care liberals would have you believe in some supernatural mumbo-jumbo that the larger the planet, the more powerful this mythical, pseudo-scientific pulling effect.”

“I have personally made over seven thousand mathematical calculations,” he continued, “and none of them supports this alleged ‘Theory of Gravity’ — something that was first proposed by a tree-hugger named Isaac Newton over 400 years ago. Applying this ancient mysticism to today’s world are the same feed-the-hungry, shelter-the-homeless progressives who keep ruining our economy. If these gun-controlling, protect-the-rain-forest freethinkers spent more time locating places to drill for oil and less time watching ‘Star Wars,’ this country would be a lot better off.”

Dr. Brouhah ended his testimony by telling officials that his goal for the rest of his life is to “stamp out this whimsical fantasy of gravity” so that after he dies, his spirit will “float up into heaven, where I will be met with a chorus of singing angels who will lead me on a shimmering path to visit my deceased relatives.”

[McCloud]

Seems that there are plans to produce a documentary on the father of modern submarines Irishman John Holland

[Boo-boo]

Republican Scientists Claim Gravity a Scam

November 27, 2008


WASHINGTON — The Republican National Committee’s Scientific Advisory Board today issued a report negating claims of an “invisible force that pulls things toward the center of the Earth.”

“Sheer nonsense,” said the director of the board, Dr. Johann Brouhah, PhD. “Al Gore and his so called ‘Scientists’ are so sure that gravity exists, yet they completely ignore the fact that heavy things just naturally drop.”

In testimony made before the Pismo Beach Chamber of Commerce, Dr. Brouhah said, “There is no gravity. For the past ten thousand years, Earth has gone through a period where heavy things fall downward. Every home-schooled child knows that. There is no invisible force. These fairy-tale promoting, everybody-should-have-health-care liberals would have you believe in some supernatural mumbo-jumbo that the larger the planet, the more powerful this mythical, pseudo-scientific pulling effect.”

“I have personally made over seven thousand mathematical calculations,” he continued, “and none of them supports this alleged ‘Theory of Gravity’ — something that was first proposed by a tree-hugger named Isaac Newton over 400 years ago. Applying this ancient mysticism to today’s world are the same feed-the-hungry, shelter-the-homeless progressives who keep ruining our economy. If these gun-controlling, protect-the-rain-forest freethinkers spent more time locating places to drill for oil and less time watching ‘Star Wars,’ this country would be a lot better off.”

Dr. Brouhah ended his testimony by telling officials that his goal for the rest of his life is to “stamp out this whimsical fantasy of gravity” so that after he dies, his spirit will “float up into heaven, where I will be met with a chorus of singing angels who will lead me on a shimmering path to visit my deceased relatives.”

Heavy!

[NiallGK]

I think we are in 'Freddy Star ate my Hamster' and 'WWII bomber found on the Moon' territory here.

[Old Dog]

I think we are in 'Freddy Star ate my Hamster' and 'WWII bomber found on the Moon' territory here.

That 4 year old article's provenance supports your thesis!

[mr chips]

In the absence of a link (tut-tut Ian), I did jump to the conclusion that this was an article from The Onion or somesuch.

EDIT - I see I was right!

[i_like_cake]

[MrsMcGahan]

Looks weak.

[Hellboy]

[Piquet]

Sheldon and the boys had something similar

[Hellboy]

Another one probably already shared.
Well, take this, Mitt Romney the Republican ! Ha !

[MrsMcGahan]

And to think it all came about out of nothing just by accident.

[Hugged Rugger]

anyone watch horizon how big is the universe? thought the multiple universe theory was interesting with the possibility that they collide fasinating. pity it was only a small part of the show

[99_oK?]

And to think it all came about out of nothing just by accident.

Heretic....!

Everyone knows that the earth was not created by accident.

And earth's birthday is coming up in a few weeks (it coincides with another great covenant...)

Remember that all this has been measured (e.g. see post #301) or is written down.......

[FORWARD....]

99_oK?- Thanks to your frog protection link-separate thread, I came across this fantastic video of the Saturn 11 launch narrated by Neil Armstrong.
http://vimeo.com/4366695

[Drick]

BBC HD horizon - how small is the universe? On now

[sewa]

anyone watch horizon how big is the universe? thought the multiple universe theory was interesting with the possibility that they collide fasinating. pity it was only a small part of the show

The sewa in this universe is a big fan of this theory, its impossible as yet (as far as I know) to disprove, it also gives me multiple excuses for my behaviour

[Eamo]

http://www.slate.com/articles/health..._debates_.html

Interesting article about consciousness and ethical implications thereof.

[Hellboy]

Wanna see it in colors ?


Voyager's now a big boy, leaving slamming the door.

[Evil Omer]

Wanna see it in colors ?


Voyager's now a big boy, leaving slamming the door.

I thought people being orange was a modern chav thing

[mr chips]

I tend to find myself disagreeing with Monbiot often enough (either his ideas or his tendency to self-righteous preaching) but I think this article is worth reading. There were a few threads this could probably have gone in, but I thought it belonged here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...trophic-effect

Alzheimer's could be the most catastrophic impact of junk food

There is evidence that poor diet is one cause of Alzheimer's. If ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, this is it

• George Monbiot

• guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 September 2012 20.30 BST

Because regulation is light, the industry can kill off the only effective system for telling us how much fat, sugar and salt food contains. Photograph: Brownstock Inc/Alamy

When you raise the subject of over-eating and obesity, you often see people at their worst. The comment threads discussing these issues reveal a legion of bullies who appear to delight in other people's problems.
When alcoholism and drug addiction are discussed, the tone tends to be sympathetic. When obesity is discussed, the conversation is dominated by mockery and blame, though the evidence suggests that it may be driven by similar forms of addiction.
I suspect that much of this mockery is a coded form of snobbery: the strong association between poor diets and poverty allows people to use this issue as a cipher for something else they want to say, which is less socially acceptable.
But this problem belongs to all of us. Even if you can detach yourself from the suffering caused by diseases arising from bad diets, you will carry the cost, as a growing proportion of the health budget will be used to address them. The cost – measured in both human suffering and money – could be far greater than we imagined. A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer's is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it: they call it type 3 diabetes.
New Scientist carried this story on its cover on 1 September; since then I've been sitting in the library, trying to discover whether it stands up. I've now read dozens of papers on the subject, testing my cognitive powers to the limit as I've tried to get to grips with brain chemistry. Though the story is by no means complete, the evidence so far is compelling.
About 35 million people suffer from Alzheimer's disease worldwide; current projections, based on the rate at which the population ages, suggest that this will rise to 100 million by 2050. But if, as many scientists now believe, it is caused largely by the brain's impaired response to insulin, the numbers could rise much further. In the United States, the percentage of the population with type 2 diabetes, which is strongly linked to obesity, has almost trebled in 30 years. If Alzheimer's, or "type 3 diabetes", goes the same way, the potential for human suffering is incalculable.
Insulin is the hormone that prompts the liver, muscles and fat to absorb sugar from the blood. Type 2 diabetes is caused by excessive blood glucose, resulting either from a deficiency of insulin produced by the pancreas, or resistance to its signals by the organs that would usually take up the glucose.
The association between Alzheimer's and type 2 diabetes is long-established: type 2 sufferers are two to three times more likely to be struck by this form of dementia than the general population. There are also associations between Alzheimer's and obesity and Alzheimer's and metabolic syndrome (a complex of diet-related pathologies).
Researchers first proposed that Alzheimer's was another form of diabetes in 2005. The authors of the original paper investigated the brains of 54 corpses, 28 of which belonged to people who had died of the disease. They found that the levels of both insulin and insulin-like growth factors in the brains of Alzheimer's patients were much lower than those in the brains of people who had died of other causes. Levels were lowest in the parts of the brain most affected by the disease.
Their work led them to conclude that insulin and insulin-like growth factor are produced not only in the pancreas but also in the brain. Insulin in the brain has a host of functions: as well as glucose metabolism, it helps to regulate the transmission of signals from one nerve cell to another, and affects their growth, plasticity and survival.
Experiments conducted since then seem to support the link between diet and dementia, and researchers have begun to propose potential mechanisms. In common with all brain chemistry, these tend to be fantastically complex, involving, among other impacts, inflammation, stress caused by oxidation, the accumulation of one kind of brain protein and the transformation of another. I would need the next six pages of this paper even to begin to explain them, and would doubtless get it wrong (if you're interested, please follow the links on my website).
Plenty of research still needs to be done. But, if the current indications are correct, Alzheimer's disease could be another catastrophic impact of the junk food industry, and the worst discovered so far. Our governments, as they are in the face of all our major crises, seem to be incapable of responding.
In this country, as in many others, the government's answer to the multiple disasters caused by the consumption of too much sugar and fat is to call on both companies and consumers to regulate themselves. Before he was replaced by someone even worse, the former health secretary, Andrew Lansley, handed much of the responsibility for improving the nation's diet to food and drink companies – a strategy that would work only if they volunteered to abandon much of their business.
A scarcely regulated food industry can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals that would otherwise prompt people to stop eating. It can bombard both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we discovered yesterday) use the freedom granted to academy schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now banned from sale in maintained schools. It can kill off the only effective system (the traffic-light label) for informing people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating the products it sells. This is class war, a war against the poor fought by the executive class in government and industry.
We cannot yet state unequivocally that poor diet is a leading cause of Alzheimer's disease, though we can say that the evidence is strong and growing. But if ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, here it is. It's not as if we lose anything by eating less rubbish. Averting a possible epidemic of this devastating disease means taking on the bullies – both those who mock people for their pathology and those who spread the pathology by peddling a lethal diet.
Twitter: @GeorgeMonbiot A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com

[Evil Omer]

query I'd have with that chips is that the first sufferers (recorded at least) of Alzheimers in UK (for example) were from a generation for whom junk food was not the norm.

[mr chips]

Fair point, although junk food and highly processed food are not always considered to be the same thing - e.g. the promotion of high sugar and salt content breakfast cereals as a "healthy" choice has been around for decades, going back to the 1960s. The concept of referring to Alzheimer's as "type-3 diabetes" is completely new to me, which is why I posted it in this thread. Obviously I didn't pick up on it at the time, as Monbiot says the concept was first proposed in 2005. He also makes what I consider to be quite valid political points regarding the paucity of regulation, but of course that's not the purpose of this thread.

[Evil Omer]

Fair point, although junk food and highly processed food are not always considered to be the same thing - e.g. the promotion of high sugar and salt content breakfast cereals as a "healthy" choice has been around for decades, going back to the 1960s. The concept of referring to Alzheimer's as "type-3 diabetes" is completely new to me, which is why I posted it in this thread. Obviously I didn't pick up on it at the time, as Monbiot says the concept was first proposed in 2005. He also makes what I consider to be quite valid political points regarding the paucity of regulation, but of course that's not the purpose of this thread.

that bit about processed and junk got my attention as well, I wondered was it just my personal view that I wouldn't see the two as the same. I know the old theory was the quality or lack of in cans and cookery utensils (pans etc) in the past as the belief was it was specific to the generations growing up when tinned food and cheaper cookery items were the norm. But that diabetes bit sounds both interesting and concerning.

[Hellboy]

I thought people being orange was a modern chav thing

So wild rovers too.

[rathbaner]

New York City bans supersize sodas


New York City has approved the first US ban on large-size sodas and other sugary drinks being sold in restaurants and other eateries.Continue reading the main story
The measure was passed by eight members of the city's mayoral-appointed health board, with one member abstaining.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has called for the ban as a way to reduce obesity and its related health problems.

[Hellboy]

Major discovery by Alain Connes matching with the Higgs and the LHC recent news to come.

Something in relation with the non commutative geometry formerly abandonned in 2008 but matching with the Higgs properties, that could definitely make it a Higgs, and could look like a Unification theory, that could still match with the M Theory.
But catch an aspirin first.

[Evil Omer]

Interestingly I'd bet that of the last 2 posts, Rathbaners will have greater significance for human kind.

[mr chips]

Here's an excellent, if lengthy, article from Ben Goldacre (as an aside - relating to a discussion in another thread, he is one of the main reasons I tend to favour the Guardian). Worrying stuff though ....
NB this will have to be split across four posts due to the 10000 character limit ...

The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal

The doctors prescribing the drugs don't know they don't do what they're meant to. Nor do their patients. The manufacturers know full well, but they're not telling.

• 
  
  • Ben Goldacre
  • The Guardian, Friday 21 September 2012 23.00 BST
  
  

Drugs are tested by their manufacturers, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that exaggerate the benefits. Photograph: Photograph: Getty Images. Digital manipulation: Phil Partridge for GNL Imaging



Reboxetine is a drug I have prescribed. Other drugs had done nothing for my patient, so we wanted to try something new. I'd read the trial data before I wrote the prescription, and found only well-designed, fair tests, with overwhelmingly positive results. Reboxetine was better than a placebo, and as good as any other antidepressant in head-to-head comparisons. It's approved for use by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (the MHRA), which governs all drugs in the UK. Millions of doses are prescribed every year, around the world. Reboxetine was clearly a safe and effective treatment. The patient and I discussed the evidence briefly, and agreed it was the right treatment to try next. I signed a prescription.

But we had both been misled. In October 2010, a group of researchers was finally able to bring together all the data that had ever been collected on reboxetine, both from trials that were published and from those that had never appeared in academic papers. When all this trial data was put together, it produced a shocking picture. Seven trials had been conducted comparing reboxetine against a placebo. Only one, conducted in 254 patients, had a neat, positive result, and that one was published in an academic journal, for doctors and researchers to read. But six more trials were conducted, in almost 10 times as many patients. All of them showed that reboxetine was no better than a dummy sugar pill. None of these trials was published. I had no idea they existed.
It got worse. The trials comparing reboxetine against other drugs showed exactly the same picture: three small studies, 507 patients in total, showed that reboxetine was just as good as any other drug. They were all published. But 1,657 patients' worth of data was left unpublished, and this unpublished data showed that patients on reboxetine did worse than those on other drugs. If all this wasn't bad enough, there was also the side-effects data. The drug looked fine in the trials that appeared in the academic literature; but when we saw the unpublished studies, it turned out that patients were more likely to have side-effects, more likely to drop out of taking the drug and more likely to withdraw from the trial because of side-effects, if they were taking reboxetine rather than one of its competitors.
I did everything a doctor is supposed to do. I read all the papers, I critically appraised them, I understood them, I discussed them with the patient and we made a decision together, based on the evidence. In the published data, reboxetine was a safe and effective drug. In reality, it was no better than a sugar pill and, worse, it does more harm than good. As a doctor, I did something that, on the balance of all the evidence, harmed my patient, simply because unflattering data was left unpublished.
Nobody broke any law in that situation, reboxetine is still on the market and the system that allowed all this to happen is still in play, for all drugs, in all countries in the world. Negative data goes missing, for all treatments, in all areas of science. The regulators and professional bodies we would reasonably expect to stamp out such practices have failed us. These problems have been protected from public scrutiny because they're too complex to capture in a soundbite. This is why they've gone unfixed by politicians, at least to some extent; but it's also why it takes detail to explain. The people you should have been able to trust to fix these problems have failed you, and because you have to understand a problem properly in order to fix it, there are some things you need to know.
Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don't like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug's life, and even then they don't give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion.
In their 40 years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works ad hoc, from sales reps, colleagues and journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are, too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it's not in anyone's financial interest to conduct any trials at all.
Now, on to the details.
In 2010, researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug – antidepressants, ulcer drugs and so on – then measured two key features: were they positive, and were they funded by industry? They found more than 500 trials in total: 85% of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50% of the government-funded trials were. In 2007, researchers looked at every published trial that set out to explore the benefits of a statin. These cholesterol-lowering drugs reduce your risk of having a heart attack and are prescribed in very large quantities. This study found 192 trials in total, either comparing one statin against another, or comparing a statin against a different kind of treatment. They found that industry-funded trials were 20 times more likely to give results favouring the test drug.
These are frightening results, but they come from individual studies. So let's consider systematic reviews into this area. In 2003, two were published. They took all the studies ever published that looked at whether industry funding is associated with pro-industry results, and both found that industry-funded trials were, overall, about four times more likely to report positive results. A further review in 2007 looked at the new studies in the intervening four years: it found 20 more pieces of work, and all but two showed that industry-sponsored trials were more likely to report flattering results.

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[mr chips]

It turns out that this pattern persists even when you move away from published academic papers and look instead at trial reports from academic conferences. James Fries and Eswar Krishnan, at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, studied all the research abstracts presented at the 2001 American College of Rheumatology meetings which reported any kind of trial and acknowledged industry sponsorship, in order to find out what proportion had results that favoured the sponsor's drug.
In general, the results section of an academic paper is extensive: the raw numbers are given for each outcome, and for each possible causal factor, but not just as raw figures. The "ranges" are given, subgroups are explored, statistical tests conducted, and each detail is described in table form, and in shorter narrative form in the text. This lengthy process is usually spread over several pages. In Fries and Krishnan (2004), this level of detail was unnecessary. The results section is a single, simple and – I like to imagine – fairly passive-aggressive sentence:
"The results from every randomised controlled trial (45 out of 45) favoured the drug of the sponsor."
How does this happen? How do industry-sponsored trials almost always manage to get a positive result? Sometimes trials are flawed by design. You can compare your new drug with something you know to be rubbish – an existing drug at an inadequate dose, perhaps, or a placebo sugar pill that does almost nothing. You can choose your patients very carefully, so they are more likely to get better on your treatment. You can peek at the results halfway through, and stop your trial early if they look good. But after all these methodological quirks comes one very simple insult to the integrity of the data. Sometimes, drug companies conduct lots of trials, and when they see that the results are unflattering, they simply fail to publish them.
Because researchers are free to bury any result they please, patients are exposed to harm on a staggering scale throughout the whole of medicine. Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give. Does this drug really work best, or have I simply been deprived of half the data? No one can tell. Is this expensive drug worth the money, or has the data simply been massaged? No one can tell. Will this drug kill patients? Is there any evidence that it's dangerous? No one can tell. This is a bizarre situation to arise in medicine, a discipline in which everything is supposed to be based on evidence.
And this data is withheld from everyone in medicine, from top to bottom. Nice, for example, is the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, created by the British government to conduct careful, unbiased summaries of all the evidence on new treatments. It is unable either to identify or to access data on a drug's effectiveness that's been withheld by researchers or companies: Nice has no more legal right to that data than you or I do, even though it is making decisions about effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness, on behalf of the NHS, for millions of people.
In any sensible world, when researchers are conducting trials on a new tablet for a drug company, for example, we'd expect universal contracts, making it clear that all researchers are obliged to publish their results, and that industry sponsors – which have a huge interest in positive results – must have no control over the data. But, despite everything we know about industry-funded research being systematically biased, this does not happen. In fact, the opposite is true: it is entirely normal for researchers and academics conducting industry-funded trials to sign contracts subjecting them to gagging clauses that forbid them to publish, discuss or analyse data from their trials without the permission of the funder.
This is such a secretive and shameful situation that even trying to document it in public can be a fraught business. In 2006, a paper was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama), one of the biggest medical journals in the world, describing how common it was for researchers doing industry-funded trials to have these kinds of constraints placed on their right to publish the results. The study was conducted by the Nordic Cochrane Centre and it looked at all the trials given approval to go ahead in Copenhagen and Frederiksberg. (If you're wondering why these two cities were chosen, it was simply a matter of practicality: the researchers applied elsewhere without success, and were specifically refused access to data in the UK.) These trials were overwhelmingly sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry (98%) and the rules governing the management of the results tell a story that walks the now familiar line between frightening and absurd.
For 16 of the 44 trials, the sponsoring company got to see the data as it accumulated, and in a further 16 it had the right to stop the trial at any time, for any reason. This means that a company can see if a trial is going against it, and can interfere as it progresses, distorting the results. Even if the study was allowed to finish, the data could still be suppressed: there were constraints on publication rights in 40 of the 44 trials, and in half of them the contracts specifically stated that the sponsor either owned the data outright (what about the patients, you might say?), or needed to approve the final publication, or both. None of these restrictions was mentioned in any of the published papers.
When the paper describing this situation was published in Jama, Lif, the Danish pharmaceutical industry association, responded by announcing, in the Journal of the Danish Medical Association, that it was "both shaken and enraged about the criticism, that could not be recognised". It demanded an investigation of the scientists, though it failed to say by whom or of what. Lif then wrote to the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty, accusing the Cochrane researchers of scientific misconduct. We can't see the letter, but the researchers say the allegations were extremely serious – they were accused of deliberately distorting the data – but vague, and without documents or evidence to back them up.
Nonetheless, the investigation went on for a year. Peter Gøtzsche, director of the Cochrane Centre, told the British Medical Journal that only Lif's third letter, 10 months into this process, made specific allegations that could be investigated by the committee. Two months after that, the charges were dismissed. The Cochrane researchers had done nothing wrong. But before they were cleared, Lif copied the letters alleging scientific dishonesty to the hospital where four of them worked, and to the management organisation running that hospital, and sent similar letters to the Danish medical association, the ministry of health, the ministry of science and so on. Gøtzsche and his colleagues felt "intimidated and harassed" by Lif's behaviour. Lif continued to insist that the researchers were guilty of misconduct even after the investigation was completed.
Paroxetine is a commonly used antidepressant, from the class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs. It's also a good example of how companies have exploited our long-standing permissiveness about missing trials, and found loopholes in our inadequate regulations on trial disclosure.

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