13 Things That Do Not Make Sense

thpr writes "New Scientist is reporting on 13 things which do not make sense. It's an interesting article about 13 areas in which observations do not line up with current theory. From the placebo effect to dark matter, it's a list of areas in need of additional research. Explanations could lead to significant breakthroughs... or at least new and different errors in scientific observations. Now there are 20 interesting problems for Slashdotters to work on, once you combine these with the seven Millennium Problems!"

Comments

The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Eric Smith]

There was a study not that long ago that concluded that the placebo effect doesn't really exist. How did they test that? Did they give some patients a placebo, and others (the control group) a fake placebo?

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Shachaf]

Possibly they gave one group real medicine, and the other nothing at all, and got the same results as giving one group real medicine, and the other a placebo.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Eric Smith]

Here's the Slashdot story on the study that seemed to discredit the placebo effect.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[daveo0331]

Two groups of test subjects. Tell Group A the usual story, some people are getting placebos while others are getting the real thing and no one knows who's who. Tell group B everyone's getting a placebo. Give everyone placebos, and see if the pills being taken by group A have any effect.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[bryanthompson]

I think an effective use of a placebo is when addicts of some types of drugs continue going to methadone clinics, even after the physical addiction is gone... Even if the dosage is so small it doesn't matter, or even if the dosage is a placebo by that time, it makes them feel better to go.

I think it's also one reason why some people feel the need to have a disorder of some kind. It's something like what a hypochondriac feels, but different. I'm not a doctor, but from my understanding, hypochondriacs make themselves sick and need to feel sick, whereas someone who feels the need to have a disorder of some kind needs the attention, or the feeling they get from treatment. I guess it's more like fight club.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Eric Smith]

I think an effective use of a placebo is when addicts of some types of drugs continue going to methadone clinics, even after the physical addiction is gone...

That would be a great example, except that methadone is addictive. The reason it is given to heroin addicts is that it doesn't get them high. It's unclear to me exactly why that is considered an improvement.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Surye]

Wouldn't be the first time a slashdot story discredited something/someone. Only this time that was the intent.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the war on drugs, dude.

The constitution guarantees the PURSUIT of happiness. It doesn't say anything about getting it. You're guaranteed to always be chasing it, never catching up.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Nasarius]

Argh. No it doesn't. Why don't you try actually reading the Constitution?

"Pursuit of happiness", a reference to Locke's "pursuit of property", was a principle stated in the Declaration of Independence, a document that has no bearing on US law.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Martin Blank]

Methadone will get them high, just not as high, and the effects last longer, so a new high isn't sought quite as fast. It's also deliverable via tablet for the same effect, which is much safer and less expensive than intravenous delivery. However, it is, as you mention, extremely addictive, and it's important to watch patients closely, as withdrawal from it is still extremely painful, and can last longer than heroin withdrawal.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that you'd also need a group C - where you tell them that they're all getting the medicine (but they're not).

This way you test all three cases for completeness:

A - unsure what they're getting.
B - knowing that that they're not getting it.
C - believing they're getting the real thing.

(when, of course, nobody actually has any medicine).

The problem with group A is that it doesn't correct for optimistic / pessemistic attitudes in the test group (ie: results depend entirely on their subjective view of the test conditions).

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Citizen of Earth]

Give everyone placebos, and see if the pills being taken by group A have any effect.

Also get Group C and tell them they are all getting placebos and give them the real pills and get Group D and tell them they are all getting the real pills and give them placebos. With Group A, the patients will have some uncertainty about what they are getting and that may affect the effect.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you forgot to mention that methadone cause permanent organ damage (unlike pure heroin). It's only better than heroin really because it is legal if you are already addicted to heroin. Which is to say the only real danger of heroin is that it is illegal (or misuse).

Which is to say many of the problem of illegal drugs is that those drugs are illegal. Solutions can come from appropriate education (do you jump off your roof if it's too high?) and reasonable regulation (not today's modern prohibition).

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Eric Smith]

The only study I've ever heard of on that subject had the opposite conclusion. It was found that people high on marijuana were more careful drivers, presumably because they were afraid of being caught.

I'm not trying to condone driving while stoned, I'm just pointing out that we shouldn't assume a priori that being high on a particular substance necessarily causes people to exhibit antisocial behavior. We should study it.

Of course, our wonderful set of elected representatives has banned spending any federal money on studying the possibility that marijuana may have beneficial effects. "We don't know, and we don't want to know."

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Anonymous Coward]

Methadone causes organ damage. Taking it is a death sentence.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[dumdeedum]

Two groups of test subjects. Tell Group A the usual story, some people are getting placebos while others are getting the real thing and no one knows who's who. Tell group B everyone's getting a placebo. Give everyone placebos, and see if the pills being taken by group A have any effect.
~
Also get Group C and tell them they are all getting placebos and give them the real pills and get Group D and tell them they are all getting the real pills and give them placebos. With Group A, the patients will have some uncertainty about what they are getting and that may affect the effect.

Then get Group E and tell them they are getting real placebos and give them random pills and then get Groups F through J and give them pills on the second Tuesday of every month and tell them you're uncertain about what the pills are and then get Group K to distribute fake placebos, real placebos and small slices of toast to Groups A, D and G respectively and then tell Group L they're not needed and should just take whatever pills they find at home or on the street. This ensures that Groups B, C, E and J but not C know what they're taking but not really and that people in Group A will think they're in Group D.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Eric Smith]

If it was legal for the clinic to administer heroin, it would be a habit which could be supported without committing crimes. So again I ask, how is methadone better?

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> B - knowing that that they're not getting it.

I think B would be the appropriate choice here for most /.ers.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

Because it *IS* legal you god damn dirty hippie. Go back to Vancouver.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Eric Smith]

Oh. In other words, there isn't any real reason. It's just that methadone is politically correct and heroin is not. That's basically what I expected.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[runderwo]

Used to be delivered by bottle. As in cough syrup.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[runderwo]

Of course, our wonderful set of elected representatives has banned spending any federal money on studying the possibility that marijuana may have beneficial effects. "We don't know, and we don't want to know."

They already know. They've been trying to forget the 13 federal medical marijuana patients for years, because proof of marijuana's beneficial effects, and a contradiction of WoD dogma of the past 35 years, is something that the public should not know about. Nixon's advisory board recommended that marijuana be decriminalized. Reagan's recommended the same. Instead, we have the worst drug prohibition in history, for no particular good reason, and to no particular useful effect.

For some reason, people continue to believe that the status quo is better than the boogeyman world of the drug warriors, where everyone is running around stoned out of their minds on something or other and society as we know it ceases to exist. Never mind that before 1913 when opiates were banned and before 1937 when marijuana was banned, we didn't seem to be having all too many problems keeping society together. Maybe it has something to do with not persecuting people for how they choose to utilize their freedom.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[FCAdcock]

That and wrecks at 12MPH tend to do much less harm than wrecks at normal speeds.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[FCAdcock]

How can pot make you have antisocial behavior? That's absurd. I smoked pot when I was a teenager and it had the opposite effect. It was something that brought our friends closer together. We'd sit and smoke and play video games/ guitar/ cards or whatever and talk. To this day I'm still good friends with all of my ex-pot smoking buddies even though we no longer smoke.

But when we DID smoke, we were all much closer friends.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[LittleBigLui]

Never mind that before 1913 when opiates were banned and before 1937 when marijuana was banned, we didn't seem to be having all too many problems keeping society together.

When looking at those numbers i just realized something.

1913 opiates banned
1914 WWI starts
1937 marijuana banned
1938 WWII starts

I see a pattern, don't you?

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[niittyniemi]

> It's unclear to me exactly why that is considered an
> improvement.[methadone over heroin].

It is not seen as an improvement by honest doctors ie. doctors who take their hippocratic oath seriously and don't do their governments bidding.

I was treated in a mental hospital about 10 yrs ago for alcoholism (UK) and there were a number of heroin addicts in there being treated with methadone. They said the methadone was disgusting in every possible way. (They became the living dead on it).

The consultant psychiatrist wanted to treat his patients with heroin. People with a heroin addiction can lead perfectly normal lives, those on methadone can't. Yet the government wouldn't allow him for purely political reasons: red top newspapers screaming "Junkies get heroin on National Health Service Scandal!"

The psychiatrist (Dr Marks) made a fuss about it, saw that he would make no progress in changing attitudes and then pissed off to Switzerland where they have an enlightened drugs policy:

* Needle exchange (no Aids or hep)

* Heroin prescription (no stealing or shitty side effects)

The UK eventually solved all their mental health problems: it's called "Care in the Community" also known as "do fuck all for them and if they break the law chuck them in prison".

I'm currently doing my bit by lobbying my MP but I feel I will make no progress either and will follow Dr. Marks' in going abroad to a country where mental health problems equates to a trip to hospital and not prison. One needs to protect ones family, right? (Alcoholism and other mental health problems have a genetic component).

Sorry to be OT but people need informing of what is exactly going on in their name and the public disgrace that is mental health provision in large parts of the Western world.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[ZeroExistenZ]

How can pot make you have antisocial behavior?

It really depends from person to person. You might've felt more social and relaxed smoking pot. There are others however who react differently to pot where it amplifies certain emotions or at least puts more focus on it.

Imagine someone who's a bit shy, slightly sociophobic, or being socially rather inept, that person wouldn't suddenly buddy up. Au contraire.

As well, you have these people who withdraw themselves alot while being stoned for a whole array of reasons. Main for being in their "own world" while stoned.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[runderwo]

How can pot make you have antisocial behavior? That's absurd.

Of course, "antisocial" is loaded here. Being labeled as such usually just means that you don't conform to the rules and/or expectations of society. Which is obvious, if you are a known pot smoker - you are both breaking the law openly and engaging in an activity which many people find to be a sign of weakness rather than something positive.

Usually, the claimed effect by drug warriors is "psychosis" or "psychotic symptoms". This sounds terrible at first and has fueled many a hysterical rant at the podium. It is further bolstered by the common drug warrior association of marijuana use with onset of latent schizophrenia (no cause and effect has been established here, though a correlation is always good enough for drug warrior usage). As for the psychosis claim, the evidence quoted is one of two studies, one done in the UK and one in NZ. Unfortunately, neither of these studies can be fact checked by the layman, since they are published in journals to which access is restricted to professionals in the field. However, both of them have been refuted when someone knowledgeable about cannabis eventually gained access to the studies.

The problem is that the studies used questionnaires to collect their data, instead of relying on diagnoses of psychosis by medical professionals. I can't recall the exact questions that were asked (and a link is eluding me at the moment), but some stick out in my mind:

• Do you feel like you and society do not have much in common?
• Do you sometimes feel like you are being persecuted?

Point being, the questions were loaded, and anyone who has used cannabis would recognize the "psychotic symptoms" indicated as normal effects of cannabis use.

Of course, these "scientists" were likely well paid for their work. Again, all a drug warrior needs is a vague association to continue to push their propaganda. If they are ever called out on it, they can innocently claim they were misinformed rather than that they were lying. Of course what they would like you to ignore is that they used your money to pay for vacuous studies specifically crafted to support their lies.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[toadlife]

Colic. Another one of those things that doesn't really exist.

Baby's tooth hurts - must be 'colic'
Baby's tummy hurts - must be 'colic'
Baby's got a headache - must be 'colic'

I can definitly see how Heroin would help cure 'colic'.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[NoData]

The Hrobjartsson meta-analysis (the story that you ulitmately link to) is intetersting, but in the end it shows that placebo does not resolve people's sysmptoms (it doesn't actually make people get better), which is not surprising, since we know placebo does not actually have any curative powers! They were looking at placebo in disease state, and we know the basis of disease is almost never something can be wished away,even if you believe the placebo is working.

But whether or not the placebo effect actually alters people's perception is another matter, and not one that I'm convinced has been discredited. Some of my colleagues took this seriously and performed a brain imaging study and found that placebo actually changed the way people's brains perceive pain (they examined placebo analgesia) in those people subject to the placebo effect (report less pain with placebo). Namely, people show less activity in pain-related areas and more activity in "control" areas that may be overriding or dampening pain processing. Mind over experience.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[lucat]

Hmmm... this would actually prove that the real medicine is ineffective... imo...

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[wpiman]

I read an article about women who cook and eat the placebo after they give birth. Very, very gross.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Drooling Iguana]

The problem with group A is that it doesn't correct for optimistic / pessemistic attitudes in the test group (ie: results depend entirely on their subjective view of the test conditions).

Make the test group large enough and that shouldn't be a problem. The optimists and pessimists will balance each other out.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[_w00d_]

Bruce Lipton has done research on people's perception and how it changes their internal physiology (i.e. elevated immune response, hormonal changes, etc.). His work may explain the physiological changes some people experience after taking placebos, possibly due to perceptive changes.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[budgenator]

Normarly they take a population and tell them they will be divided into groups;
1. one group get the test medication,
2. one group get the "old-stand-by" medication
3. one group gets an inert plecebo

the meds are packaged to look the same and have the same taste as much as possible. Everybody knows and consents to be treated with the test med, the old med, and the plecebo med with out their knowege of what they'll really be getting.

if the primary researcher knows what meds are given to who, it's called a single-blind experement because the patient is blind to what they are getting.

if the primary researcher doesn't know, as well as the patient, it's called double-blind. who got what is only revealed after the experiment is over.

There is usualy a mercy clause in the experiment where if it becomes obvious that one group is recieving irrefutable benefits from what they are taking, everybody gets it.

I saw an interesting program on tv about homeopathic remedies, essentialy even when sceptical and respected researchers conducted homeopathic experiments, even on cells in vitro, the homeopathic remadies worked in every single blind experiment. When the same researchers repeated the same experiments in the double-blind method, they always failed. The researcher's knowelege of experiment and control groups even effect the results obtained in cell cultures in test tubes, and analysed with automated test equipment, very strange results in deed.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Martin Blank]

Yes. We need to say that you don't know what you're talking about.

Methadone was discovered in Germany in 1937, but it was during a search for a more effective surgical analgesic, not as some Nazi-inspired plan. Believe it or not, even in Nazi-controlled Germany, there were good people doing things for good reason.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Russ Nelson]

Instead, we have the worst drug prohibition in history, for no particular good reason, and to no particular useful effect.

Worse than that, people who need pain medication aren't getting it. If doctors prescribe them enough opiates to block their pain, they will be threatened with the loss of their license to practice medicine. The War on Drugs is incredibly harmful to American society.
-russ

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Russ Nelson]

Pot just makes you want to eat more and makes you paranoid ( and more careful ).

Pot by itself doesn't make you paranoid. It's the chemicals that THEY spray on the pot that make you paranoid.
-russ

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[DerWulf]

I hear some nazis where using telephons ... Is there anything more to say?

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[David's Boy Toy]

Anyone with any experience in the Leather Scene (S&M) knows that pain perception is highly subjective. Its not at all surprising that the placebo effect works quite well on pain.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[Ohreally_factor]

There are several definitions of "antisocial", but when I hear the word, I usually think if it in the technical sense, as in Antisocial Personality Disorder.

But back to the matter at hand, the idea that smoking pot will make you a safer driver is a crock of shit. While it may make a person "more careful", it will most definitely cut down on reaction time and lower cognitive ability, even days later.

The Robbe Study is often cited as proof that marijuana makes drivers safer, but it doesn't show what some pot smokers think it does. The Robbe study concluded that impairment from THC was less than alcohol or not greater than medicinal drugs. Somehow, "not greater than" becomes "safer than" becomes "safe, no impairment".

The results of the studies corroborate those of previous driving simulator and closed-course tests by indicating that THC in inhaled doses up to 300 g/kg has significant, yet not dramatic, dose-related impairing effects on driving performance (cf. Smiley, 1986). Standard deviation of lateral position in the road-tracking test was the most sensitive measure for revealing THC's adverse effects.

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial

[dr_canak]

"What is "normal"? Seems today to be "work 9 til 5, eat, watch TV, sleep". Fuck that! Seriously! I'll take the Hunter S Thomson style parties anyday over that depressing life. "Normal"?"

Well, certainly "normal" is subjective. And I never try to move a person to a life that I would consider "normal." Different strokes for different folks.

What I try to do is ensure that the person's life is fulfilled to the degree that they think their life should be fulfilling. When you really sit down with someone who is addicted, and focus on how that addiction has impacted their quality of life, it is almost always the case that the person can identify ways that their life has fallen short of their expectations as a result of their addiction. Not 100% of the time, but very close.

"Are they the ones snapping up all the anti-depressants spat out by the drug industries?"

Not all, but unfortunately you are right in that antidepressant prescriptions are written at a much higher rate than they probably should be. And yes part of it is because of the pharmaceutical companies. They are certainly prescribed at a higher rate than the base rate of mental illness in the population.

"Remember also that you are seeing a biased sample. They people you interact with need your help. Would it be safe to assume that a certain percentage of adicts are below your radar because they are weathy, successful and otherwise healthy?"

Yes and no. There is no question my clinical sample is biased, and you can get very jaded that there are no "normal" people left in the world. And certainly the overwhelming majority of addicts are under my radar since I don't see every addict ;-). With that said, I know plenty of people who have substance abuse issues (friends, family, acquaintances) that would be "healthier" in the abscence of that abuse/addiction. I honestly can't think of a situation where a person would be no more healthy in the abscence of an addiction.

"An addition need not be life impacting. Smokers don't seem to have a problem, and the vast majority of them are addicts."

I've yet to meet a smoker who doesn't have some problem, or who won't develop a very serious problem later in life. The cost alone of smoking 1ppd can run well over $1000.00 and it's climbing rapidly. So if nothing else, there is a financial cost that wouldn't otherwise be there. And a cost that a true niccotine addict will find impossible to avoid. Not to mention having to structure their day around opportunites to smoke (going out at lunch, on breaks, etc...). Now of course the impact will be for individuals, but nevertheless the impact is still there.

"If the drug does not affect your ablilty to function, then it's not a problem."

Diagnostically speaking, that is true in that if the use/abuse does not impair a person's day-to-day function, then technically speaking it's not an addiction and the person is not addicted to the substance. And I totally agree that there can be casual users of street drugs (just as there are casual gamblers that make 2 trips to vegas) that get along just fine. There are three points I would make: (1) they are not addicts and so don't necessarily qualify for the discussion, (2) generally speaking, people's lives are better in the absence of addictive substances, and (3) I honestly don't think there is any such thing as a casual, non-addicted heroin user.

"However, if you can function in society, hold down a job, have an active social life (moreso that your average /.'er I might add!), then it's not a problem."

Exactly, and these people aren't addicted. Substance use/abuse exists on a continuum. From abstinence to addiction. Technically / diagnostically speaking, there is no difference from one continuum to the next. In other words, the continuums for alcohol, cocaine, heroin, nicotine etc... are all the same. I tend to operate on the assumption that these continuums are of different lengths, and one can mor

And number 11..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider: this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now, think about that. That does not make sense! Why would a Wookiee -- an eight foot tall Wookiee -- want to live on Endor with a bunch of two foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more importantly, you have to ask yourself: what does that have to do with science? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with science! It does not make sense! Look at me, I'm posting on slashdot in response to an article about science, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense. None of this makes sense. And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation... does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense. If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests

Re:And number 11..

[halivar]

Oh great. Now we can add the "Chewbacca defense" to the same illustrious group of overquoted "instant +5 funny" personalities as Yakov Smirnov, CATS, Kent Brockman, and the Beowulf cluster guy.

I can't wait for someone to mention that in Korea, only old people use the Chewbacca defense. /me shoots self

Re:And number 11..

[trendyhendy]

The AC parent is quoting the Chewbacca Defence.

Re:And number 11..

[mbrewthx]

No but as an ewok I welcomed our eight foot tall also hairy like us overlord!!!!

Re:And number 11..

[Anonymous Coward]

Or that in Soviet Russia, the Chewbacca defense uses YOU.

Oh, whoops.

Re:And number 11..

[fraudrogic]

This coming from the one who has the over used "Insensitive Clod" sig.

so in the spirit of the post i give the following:

1) Create Slasdot post ridiculing overquoted and overused +5 funny jokes
2) Subtley put said overused humor vehicle in sig
3) ???
4) Profit!

Re:And number 11..

[themusicgod1]

Oh great. Now we are seeing add the guy making a smartass comment about a "guy complaining about how overquoted pop culture references that have something to do with the topic getting an instant +5 funny" getting modded as insightful" getting ignored by mods. What's next? Will we see the guy who makes a reference to the guy making a smartass comment about a "guy complaining about how overquoted pop culture references that have something to do with the topic getting an instant +5 funny" getting modded as insightful" getting +5 Insightful?! What is the world coming to?!

Re:As I did not RTFA

[weighn]

no -- that makes a LOT of sense. Particularly when trying to get an early post.
Doesn't it say in the FAQ -- post early, post often?

Body Just needs to think it's getting morphine?

[filmmaker]

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.

That's really interesting. The body and/or the brain releases the THIQ (I would presume) as if herion were present, but only if the morphine blocker isn't used in combination with the placebo.

This suggests that as long as we think we're getting morphine, our bodies will respond accordingly. If the phenomenon could be isolated...combine that with some VR, and you've got the opium dens of the digital age. But no opium.

Re:Body Just needs to think it's getting morphine?

[Timesprout]

Great, then I will have to tell my boss I was missing for a couple of days because I thought I was on a bender.

Re:Body Just needs to think it's getting morphine?

[goombah99]

Morphine works because it is an analog of some natural molecule in the body and affects the same receptor. Naloxone presumably works because either it binds morhpine or it binds the morphine receptor. Thus it might be reasonable to assume that naloxone would also inhibit the natural molecule as well. This does not explain why saline induces the same effect as morphine but I think it explains why naloxone could seem to increase the pain.

Re:Body Just needs to think it's getting morphine?

[Joe Tie.]

In this case, my totally uninformed guess is that the patients subconcious became trained to associate opiates with an IV. The brain gets its "time for opiates" call when the needle was inserted, and when it doesn't get any morphine, takes that as a cue to churn out some of its own opioids - which would then be blocked by the naloxone.

Re:Body Just needs to think it's getting morphine?

[flyingsquid]

This suggests that as long as we think we're getting morphine, our bodies will respond accordingly.

I think I'm getting morphine... I think I'm getting morphine... I think I'm getting morphine...

Shit, nothing!

Maybe Saline is more powerful than we think

[Andyvan]

Maybe saline solution is not completely inert after all, and so is not a good placebo.

-- Andyvan

Re:Maybe Saline is more powerful than we think

[lambent]

They should probably just use air in the syringes, then.

Re:Maybe Saline is more powerful than we think

[izomiac]

I wonder what would happen if someone injected saline solution into someone who thought they were getting a lethal injection?

Re:Maybe Saline is more powerful than we think

[fireman sam]

I was listening to JJJ the other day and Doctor Karl was talking about placebos. He mentioned that a patent had come in to the hospital in which he was working in great pain (kidney stones or similar). The nurse was sent to get the pain killers (morphine?) which were located about 10 minutes away at the other end of the hospital. Dr Karl (mad scientist he is) was about to flush the "whatever they flush" with saline, and decided to try a placebo experiement.

Just before he injected the saline, he told the patient that he was giving him the pain killer. To the doctor's surprise, the pain went away quickly.

The interesting thing was, the nurse returned with the medication and it was administered. The patient then showed the symptoms of an overdose. His heart rate plummeted, his breathing changed dramatically (can't remember if it was slower of faster). But after a short while, (about 20 seconds) his heart rate returned and the man slept the remainder of the night.

Very interesting.

Thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

Just great, like I really needed 13 more things to worry about.

Hey, why wasn't my wife on that list?

Re:Thank you

[Maserati]

And I honestly have no idea how she ended up on mine.

How about this...

[templest]

I have emough thimgs that dom't nake semse im ny life so as to worry about that. For exanple, why the fuck does ny keyboard type "n" whem I clearly hit the "m" ke... wait, mvn... forgot to put the keys back right. Okay, i'll give those problems a whirl now.

Re:How about this...

[Anonymous Coward]

For exanple, why the fuck does ny keyboard type "n" whem I clearly hit the "m" ke...

Because you're a norom?

Mind over matter.

[gimpynerd]

The brain is a very powerful thing. I don't know what is so hard to believe. Pain originates in the brain so it isn't that hard to believe that you can deceive it.

Re:Mind over matter.

[QuantumG]

I have a better theory. If you're in pain your body starts synthesising drugs to reduce your pain. The fact that the body isn't producing enough of these drugs is caused by a lack of feedback at a chemical inhibitory level. So your doctor gives you morphine. Now your body and stop synthesising pain releaving drugs and redirect its energies elsewhere. Now you take the morphine away. The pain receptors start screaming bloody murder which wakes up the inhibitory pathways and results in massive drug production.

Re:Mind over matter.

[GeckoX]

So then, our governments are actually killing smokers? I've always suspected them of adding the most dangerous shit into cigarettes, but making them kill us simply by telling us it will...Genious!

I've got to get a new tin-foil hat ;)

Homeopathy.

[Petter3]

"And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial.

But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on."

Excellent. If tests suggests something's going on, let's test it further.

"We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon."

I hope she and others keep testing it, since this is the first time I've ever heard of homeopathy even being remotely true. I won't hold my breath though.

Re:Homeopathy.

[Feneric]

After reading the article I find myself wondering if homeopathy and the placebo effect are in any way related regarding what makes them work...

Is a solution so weak that it probably doesn't even contain a single molecule of the active ingredient any different from a solution that isn't an active ingredient at all? In both cases it seems the key factor is that the patient believes it's an active ingredient.

Re:Homeopathy.

[RollingThunder]

I thought the homeopathic test was performed on white blood cells in a solution - not in a body, leaving no possibility for the mind to affect it.

Re:Homeopathy.

[Xoro]

If the homeopathy study has any validity, it should have been replicated independently several times by now. Has it? (I don't know, I'm just askin'). I'm surprised that the article didn't comment on the importance of this.

FTFA:

The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine.

Re:Homeopathy.

[blonde rser]

I don't know... White blood cells that believe in homeopathy? They sound pretty stupid to me.

13 or so

[ICECommander]

The whole "WOW" signal does not lead to the existence to extraterrestrial civilization. The researchers that discovered the event said that it very well may have been a terrestrial signal that bounced off the atmosphere. This one should have renamed the New Scientist to Pseudo Scientist. :-P.
Here is something else that does not make sense (or for which there is no standing theory): Tachyons, or particles that travel faster than the speed of light.

When observation matches up with theory...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

...nobody must be looking at the data.

During the dark ages people were absolutely convinced that theory was correct. And anything that disagreed with the theory was burned, as were the heretics who observed it.

Re:When observation matches up with theory...

[ErikZ]

You know, jobs in the science would really open up if we started burning heretics again.

#1 Skill for a successful career in science: Try not to look flammable.

Re:When observation matches up with theory...

[jhurshman]

During the dark ages people were absolutely convinced that theory was correct. And anything that disagreed with the theory was burned, as were the heretics who observed it.

Do you have a specific example of an "observer" being burned for disagreeing with the prevailing theory? Or are you perhaps engaging in hyperbole?

I'm not a historian of science, but I'm not aware of any executions, let alone burnings, in the "dark" ages over divergence from prevailing scientific theories.

Of course, there were those who were burned for disagreeing with prevailing theological/religious theory, but I doubt that's what you're referring to, since you use the word "observed", hardly an appropriate term in the theological arena.

Re:When observation matches up with theory...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Giordano Bruno (1600)

Lucilio Vanini (1619)

And that's in the first page of "Scientists Burned at stake" search on Google.

Re:When observation matches up with theory...

[Bastian]

The more interesting medieval cases were where laymen knew more about the real world than so-called intellectuals.

A great example is projectile motion. I'm sure most any archer could have told you that the arrow takes a curved path. The official intellectual story at the time, though, was that the arrow went straight up into the sky at an angle, then somehow stopped and instantaneously began falling vertically back down to earth. This motion had to be the case because all motion occurs in straight lines.

Maybe it would be more fitting to call them the Dim Ages.

Re:When observation matches up with theory...

[teromajusa]

Are you sure about that? Medieval theory of motion was based on Aristotle. The idea was that straight is the natural motion for all earth bound things, not that earth bound things always move straight. Read about Aristotle's theory of motion here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/GreekScience/Students /Tom/AristotleAstro.html

Medieval intellectuals were not stupid, they just started from some faulty premises. Try reading Aquinas some time. Its not easy stuff. And they did not freely ignore obvious physical phenomena, as can be seen by the complexity of some of the Ptolemaic models of the solar system.

Re:When observation matches up with theory...

[jhurshman]

[S]omeone observing something is NOT science. They have to test the observation against a theory, write about how it did or didn't, and be published. THAT is science.

From what I have been able to find about Bruno and Vanini, neither would qualify as scientists under that definition. Again, take Bruno's contention of an infinite number of inhabited worlds. What observation could he be have been testing, and against what theory, which would have yielded that conclusion?

One possibility is:

1. The Earth is inhabited.
2. The Earth is a planet.
3. There are other planets in the universe.
4. They are inhabited too.
5. There are many other planets in the universe beyond the ones I have observed.
6. The universe is infinite.
7. Therefore, there are infinitely many planets in the universe.
8. Therefore, there are infinitely many inhabited planets in the universe.

Of the above premises, only 1 through 3 are what we would call observations. All the rest of the premises were for Bruno pure speculation (some of which subsequent observation has disproven).

Perhaps another account of Bruno's thought can be reconstructed that fits your definition of science, but I feel his work is much more speculative/philosophical than "scientific" on your definition.

Had [Galileo] not recanted, he would have been executed for publishing a theory that the sun was the center of the solar system....

Um, no. At least, not according to this:

Galileo's belief in the Copernican System eventually got him into trouble with the Catholic Church. The Inquisition was a permanent institution in the Catholic Church charged with the eradication of heresies. A committee of consultants declared to the Inquisition that the Copernican proposition that the Sun is the center of the universe was a heresy. Because Galileo supported the Copernican system, he was warned by Cardinal Bellarmine, under order of Pope Paul V, that he should not discuss or defend Copernican theories. In 1624, Galileo was assured by Pope Urban VIII that he could write about Copernican theory as long as he treated it as a mathematical proposition. However, with the printing of Galileo's book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo was called to Rome in 1633 to face the Inquisition again. Galileo was found guilty of heresy for his Dialogue, and was sent to his home near Florence where he was to be under house arrest for the remainder of his life. In 1638, the Inquisition allowed Galileo to move to his home in Florence, so that he could be closer to his doctors. By that time he was totally blind. In 1642, Galileo died at his home outside Florence.

On this account, Galileo did not recant Copernican ideas, and all he got for it was house arrest.

Missing option

[Turn-X Alphonse]

What about "Why do people believe whatever politicians say?". I've never seen a single one not lie out his ass every chance he gets just to win votes then 6 months later deny all knowledge. We're ment to be a smart race yet we repeatedly fall for the same scams and tricks day in and day out.

Might not be "why is the universe breaking laws we know apply to everything in it", but it's something which might effect our lives unlike a few of the things mentioned.

Re:Missing option

[Joe Tie.]

That's a good question, and one I always find myself wondering whenever the usual Democrat VS. Republican arguments break out here. I think some, certainaly not all but at least a portion of it comes down to humans having some inate need to believe in a higher power. One which has a greater knowledge than the individual and can provide another group of people to hate. Couple hundred years back it would have been preachers telling of the danger posed by witches and heathens, now it's politicians preaching about the evil ways of their oposing party. A lot of folks would be quick to believe anything, provided it gave an easy target to explain why things are going wrong. It's them darn liberals/It's them darn conservitives! From what I've heard, even the politicians themselves are trapped in it, pretty quickly finding their former views lost and replaced by whatever their peers particular view is.

Re:Missing option

[ballpoint]

The problem is that in such a democracy you wouldn't be able to stand out of the crowd as a beacon of wisdom, and you'd lose your advantage and/or high self-esteem. It's all relative.

Then again, there are times where I wish I were just plain stupid myself. It must be an easy life, especially in the "Land of the Herd, Home of the Weak" socialist utopia where I live.

Re:Missing option

[iwadasn]

That seems a little simplistic. There are real differences of opinion within the country, and though neither party perfectly represents anybody, they do tend to align into groups that are fairly evenly matched. The adversarial system produces adversaries, who knew!

Yes there is corruption (even in my party), but that has always been the case. Look back at the early days of New York (Tweed), and you'll see how far we've come. The corruption now is dramatically less than the corruption 100 years ago, so perhaps we're making a little bit of progress, though we seem to have backslid a little in the last few years.

The Placebo Effect

[prakslash]

I guess I might as well buy those enlargement pills after all.

Hey, you never know...

/. readers do the 14th all the time

[FunWithHeadlines]

The 14th thing that makes no sense: Not reading the article that is posted right there in the submission and easily reachable to inform the reader, and yet feeling fully qualified to write something as a comment without that knowledge.

Such as this comment...

Re:/. readers do the 14th all the time

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

You must be old here. The current fashion in slashdot is that not even editors RTFA. We are currently working on SNRTFA, that is, Submitters Not Reading the Fucking Article, maybe next year ...

Look at this monkey....

[Cumstien]

Look at this monkey.... [Head asplode] That does not make sense.

Belfast homeopathy study?

[rdwald]

Why not include the Columbia prayer study? Oh, yea, because it's been thoroughly discredited. Just like the Belfast study will be soon enough.

One million dollars says homeopathy is a placebo. Do you want to argue with it?

Re:Belfast homeopathy study?

[vistic]

I don't get how they can claim that stuff like spider venom can be diluted in water to the point where the sample likely doesnt contain a single molecule of spider venom... but that it left an "imprint" on the water, whatever the hell that is.

If this were true, then what about the other things which got into the water and "imprinted" those water molecules over the years? Where do they get the water from to dilute in? How can they be sure the water they are using isn't "imprinted" with something bad... or is there some way to de-imprint the water before they imprint it with whatever they're selling...

This is nonsense that requires very, very minimal thought to realize it's flawed very fundamentally. If this stuff which isn't even present in the water, imprinted it... then what about all the other stuff which has touched the water over the years?

Re:Belfast homeopathy study?

[Glowing Fish]

Guessing the results of research before it is through?
Give me an a priori reason why homeopathy can't work. Why would you predict a study isn't going to work?
If you think homeopathy isn't going to work because the mechanics of it don't make sense to you, that means it doesn't jibe with your metaphysical ideas. And I really don't care about your metaphysical ideas.
I can't find words to express how dangerous your monument to non-existence is.

Yay, the placebo effect is biochemical.

[porcupine8]

Why do they make it sound like it's a suprise that the placebo effect is biochemical and that the "mind can affect the body"?? The mind is pretty much defined as the product/functions of the brain. The brain is biochemical and part of the body. This wouldn't surprise the middle schoolers I'm currently teaching psychology too, it shouldn't suprise any scientists.

Yes, the placebo effect is still not completely understood, if it exists at all. But that article made it sound like things that are pretty common knowledge are new and shocking.

Re:Yay, the placebo effect is biochemical.

[KingJoshi]

It's not new that placebo effect exists. It's the fact we don't understand it. That's why it's on the list. Why does it work for some and not others? What limitations are there on the mind influencing the biochemical of the body? It's #1 on the list because it's so powerful, we've known about it for a long time, it's so pervasive, yet we know so little.

It's not like some programming changing the bits in memory. Or is it? What is our "mind"? Is there a non-materialistic creation out of the biochemical that can influence the materialistic world? This whole range of questions in regards to the placebo effect is huge, interesting, important and very little understood. And regardless of knowing about it, just like the phrase, "The more you know, the more you know you don't know", the placebo effect can still leave many educated thinkers amazed.

Re:Yay, the placebo effect is biochemical.

[roshi]

Yes, but the point here is that the placebo effect is more than just a subjective assessment of "feeling better," it is more than just a psychological effect (which is also biochemical in origin, but that's a meta-level that we're just not talking about here). It is associated with real, measurable, biochemical differences in the patient. What's more, these differences show therapeutic specificity.

Consider the example given in TFA, in which morphine is replaced with a placebo and pain is deadened nonetheless. That's not the interesting part. The interesting part is that when the placebo is not saline, but an opioid (morphine) blocker, the placebo effect does not occur. This suggests that it's not a matter of the brain saying "OK, I've received a painkiller, therefore I expect the pain to subside, therefore my subjective experience of the pain will be lessened," but rather a matter of the body somehow producing morphine-like molecules, based merely on the expectation, or perhaps the learned experience. That's a startling conclusion.

The Parkinson's example is similar, in that, not only were symptoms reduced, but the specific neurons associated with the disease showed the same sorts of positive changes associated with a genuine Parkinson's drug.

It's not just a matter of the "mind can effect the body." Why don't you continue the quote: "the mind can affect the body's biochemistry." That's a profoundly different statement.

more then we think

[courseB]

just recently heard michio kaku talk about trying to measuring minute changes in gravity to show that 'parallel worlds' are right around us and ties it in with dark matter.

as far as the placebo effect goes, when i am happy- i feel good!

Assholes

[Renraku]

14. Why Being An Asshole Gets You Chicks

Its true. Go to any mall and you'll see a not-so-attractive man walking around with a beautiful, well-endowed lady in tow while he's making fun of her to his friends, or is putting her down. He never calls, he never does the dishes, he never puts the seat down, and most of all, he's getting some.

Re:Assholes

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, that's easy. Chicks want to be mistreated (many of them, at least). I'm not trying to be funny or anything. I honestly suspect that it's some evolutionary hold-over from when we lived in caves. When you show her that you are in charge, it shows you have good genes and are a good choice for breeding. If you treat her right, she might keep you around, but she will fuck other guys behind your back and then make you take care of their children. I've read that that happens in at least 10% of all marriages.

Re:Assholes

[Renraku]

I actually tested this theory one day. I dressed like a whigger (backwards baseball cap and all) and started talking to your typical overdone-tan chick at the mall and after an hour she was wanting me to come and hang out with her. Then I was like, "No, I'm actually a nerd. I just wanted to prove something. Sorry."

Re:Assholes

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he's confident, he doesn't put her on a pedestal, and doesn't let her walk over him, unlike the hundred other guys who turned into idiots when they saw her.

Re:Assholes

[XanC]

So... You're an even bigger asshole than you were pretending to be. Is there a bell curve here? Is there an optimum level of asshole-ness?

Re:Assholes

[Renraku]

Yeah, that's what I see. I see there are two types of guys in a lot of women's eyes. The kind you fuck and the kind you go crying to when you can't get to a guy you fuck. The later type is also the one you put in charge of fixing your car, raising your kids, and providing general emotional support.

Re:Assholes

[thefirelane]

Seriously, this is not a troll, read this:

Why 'Nice guys' are such losers

Re:Assholes

[QuantumG]

I figured this out once, but you have to be a bit cynical to get it. First of all, this is only true for some types of women. Most women hate assholes. So who are these women who like assholes and why? Well, I believe they are women who drive men crazy. You described them as well-endowed.

If you're a perfectly normal guy who has ever happened to land himself a hot chick who usually dates assholes you probably know what I'm about to say. They expect and demand that you act like a prick. If you don't they dump you cause you're "not a man". But, surely you say, you havn't addressed why they date assholes in the first place?

Well, I think that comes down to women going after the "hot guy". It really doesn't matter if there are an equal number of nice hot guys as there are hot guys who are assholes. What matters is that women who can have any man they want tend to pick the most famboyant hot guy at some point. This guy might not even be an asshole, but at some point he comes to realize that no matter how he treats his woman he can get away with it cause he's hot. The hot girl doesn't want to leave him because what if her next boyfriend isn't as hot? How will that look to her friends? So she sticks with him no matter how bad he treats her, thus estabilishing in her mind what a "real man" is.

Of course, that's coming from the perspective that the hot chick wasn't predisposed to assholes in the first place. If she had an asshole father, then obviously she will seek out a man who is also an asshole -- that's just basic psychology. But there's more than one path to hot women becoming obsessed with dating assholes.. and frankly, I don't know what you can do to fix it (maybe act like an asshole, get the hot chick and then wien her off her obsession, but don't try to go too fast or she'll dump you for not being "a man".)

Re:Assholes

[StikyPad]

Yup.. Double Your Dating..

Worked for me.. it really quintupled it. You don't have to mistreat women, just be a man and show that you're in charge and not scared of her or trying to kiss her butt. Women, like most men really, want someone else to be in control. They want other people to tell them the right way to do things, etc. That's not true all of the time, of course, but the majority of the time. Don't believe me? Post a personal ad saying how you want a woman who is beautiful, intelligent, self confident, and self sufficient but believes that it's a man's responsibility to be the leader in a relationship. You'll get tons of responses.

Teasing women shows them that you're not intimidated by them, or that if you are, you're at least not going to act like it. Unless they've got horrible self confidence, they'll see through it anyway and know you're joking.. it just makes things fun. As does playing hard to get, and teasing them that they're not your type or not good enough for you. People enjoy challenges.. don't make yourself unenjoyable.

Romance is something that was invented in a time where men were all "chauvinist," so it was rare and appreciated. Romance is greatly appreciated by women.. if you make it a rarity.

Bottom line -- don't be a wuss.

David DeAngelo is the man.

I'm sure I'll get modded down for being offtopic.. for some reason we nerds don't like to talk about how to be successful with women. Probably for the same reason most people don't like talking about technology.. because it makes them feel inadequate.

Re:Assholes

[bje2]

here's a good test of the a-hole vs. nice guy routine...not sure if it's 100% real or not...but it makes for an interesting read...

http://www.galaktek.com/cgi-bin/index?page=deffect 2.html

Re:Assholes

[josh3736]

Chicks want to be mistreated ... I honestly suspect that it's some evolutionary hold-over from when we lived in caves.

Actually, take a Sociology class. Gender inequality is the least in hunting and gathering societies and ramps up to be the greatest in industrial society. When we lived in caves, men and women shared equal resposibilities with each other and neither sex was dominant over the other.

Read the link in this guy's post for an interesting editorial on the subject of "why the asshole gets the girl."

Re:Assholes

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually tested this theory one day. I dressed like a whigger (backwards baseball cap and all) and started talking to your typical overdone-tan chick at the mall and after an hour she was wanting me to come and hang out with her. Then I was like, "No, I'm actually a nerd. I just wanted to prove something. Sorry."

note: may not have happened

Re:Assholes

[bje2]

that link got messed up...just go here and select the "Deacon Effect"...

Re:Assholes

[Joe the Lesser]

Sheesh, what a stupid bitch.

Oh wait, now she's likes me...

Re:Assholes

[Anonymous Coward]

You, sir, went to a kinder, gentler, college than I did.

Re:Assholes

[AsmCoder8088]

Someone hasn't read their Richard Feynman - he devotes a whole section in his autobiography "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman", a story about how he managed to get a date by acting disinterested at a bar.

Re:The Placebo effect is controversial

[shanen]

Yeah, we know you're in a hurry to post quickly, but the result is an entire thread with your hurried spelling mistake (not copied above).

Anyway, the counterexample in the article is easy enough to explain, in that the counter-placebo actively prevents some secondary effect, where it is the secondary effect that is closer to the true cause of the perceived pain reduction. The the morphine or the original placebo are just acting somewhere higher in the chain. Given how little we know about the nature of the mind (including our perception of pain), the results are not nearly as suprising as they proclaim.

The whole topic of "truth" just seems so passe these days. Faith-based politicians aren't going to worry about any of it, anyway. They don't need or want better science or more facts--they already know what they believe, and they're going to structure the world around their beliefs, no matter how crazy. The whole notion of truth is under attack.

So many examples, it's hard to know where to start. The two that are on my mind right now are the new UN ambassador who is pledged to destroying the UN, and appointing the master planner of the Iraq fiasco to the World Bank.

Conflict of what??

[StikyPad]

Point 1) Placebos have an effect, except when they don't, such as when a drug is replaced with another which counteracts the original's effects.

Point 4) A placebo controlled study showed that homeopathic remedies are effective.

That does not make sense.

Re:Conflict of what??

[Xoro]

Point 1) Placebos have an effect, except when they don't, such as when a drug is replaced with another which counteracts the original's effects.

Point 4) A placebo controlled study showed that homeopathic remedies are effective.

It doesn't say that the studies in point 4 was "placebo controlled". It sounds more like the cells they were testing were in a pitri dish, not in a person. It does mention that no large-scale placebo-controlled study of homeopathic remedies has been shown to be effective.

I remember once...

[CaptainPotato]

...getting a guy completely trashed on water, because he thought he was drinking vodka. Sure, he'd had a few vodkas already (only a few), but once the bottle ran out, he still wanted more, so I filled up the bottle with water, and he and I sat down and kept drinking the 'vodka'.

I acted as if I were drinking vodka (the flinching at the strength of it, and pretending to be feeling the effect), until he became so drunk on about 350ml of water (and the perhaps 100ml of vodka that he'd drunk earlier) that he couldn't stand and was passed out, and was out of action for almost a day.

After this, with the d*ckh**d out of the way, I finished my good deed for the party, and everybody else had a great time from that point onwards at the party... it only took about 40 minutes for this to work.

So, yes, I can believe that the placebo effect works - and even more effectively on fools like the guy in my anecdote.

Re:I remember once...

[ultramk]

A couple of thoughts... (possible complications)

1. Maybe he had more actual booze than you were aware of. I remember at that age having a few *before* the party, to loosen up. Remember too, that alcohol takes a while to metabolize under some circumstances.

2. Perhaps he was just a lightweight, all it took was a couple to push him over the edge. Case in point, my wife (this was last year, btw) went out for drinks and a movie with her mom, her aunt, and some ladies from her bookgroup. She's not a tiny thing, and she's not incapable of holding her drink. However, on this particular day, she hadn't had anything to eat, and was slightly dehydrated. She had 2 martinis, and literally passed out 30 minutes later at the theatre. Either because of her lack of eating that day, blood sugar weirdness, or whatever. (I picked her up, and drove her home. She didn't wake up for 2 hours. I would have taken her to the emergency room, but her mom's a nurse, and suggested that she just needed to sleep it off. She was right.) If you're wondering, she hasn't had a drink since.

3. He could have been on some medication/recreational drug that amplified the effects of the alcohol he DID have.

I'm not saying any of those things had to be the case, but the effects of alcohol vary so widely, from person-to-person, and even from day to day depending on diet etc, that it's hard to quantify an anecdotal account, and use it as proof of an actual physiological effect. Just a thought.

What would be more convincing to me would be a double-blind study with a rigorous testing method. It would probably even be fun to do! Any volunteers?

Interesting story, though.
m-

An embarassment to physics?

[munpfazy]

From the article:

>IT IS one of the most famous, and most
>embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998,
>astronomers discovered that the universe is
>expanding at ever faster speeds.

Embarrassing? Since when is being able to study something qualitatively new and unexpected an embarrassment? One would expect cosmologists to jump for joy at their luck. (And among those whom I know, everyone does!)

If anything, dark energy is a triumph of experimental science. An experimental groups found something no one expected, and within a hand full of years, armed only with careful data analysis, they convinced not only themselves but everyone else that it was genuine and radically changed our picture of the universe. Since then we've accumulated even more convinging data, and found independant evidence to confirm the existance of dark energy. There is a vigerous community studying the problem and proposing new tests, and theorists everywhere proposing new and interesting ways to accomodate the data. One couldn't hope for a more perfect example of science working in the way we all like to believe it does.

Cold fusion, on the other hand, is a *real* embarrassment for physics - dozens of seemingly reputable scientists have spent millions of dollars and decades of work and produced diddly squat. The experimental case isn't bulletproof - it's just so riddled with holes that no one notices when new bullets pass through it. The story is now so thick with poor experimental practice, unprofessional behavior, and overt fraud that few legitimate researchers will touch the subject for fear of being associated with all the hucksters and frauds who haunt it.

Re:An embarassment to physics?

[khallow]

If anything, dark energy is a triumph of experimental science. An experimental groups found something no one expected, and within a hand full of years, armed only with careful data analysis, they convinced not only themselves but everyone else that it was genuine and radically changed our picture of the universe. Since then we've accumulated even more convinging data, and found independant evidence to confirm the existance of dark energy. There is a vigerous community studying the problem and proposing new tests, and theorists everywhere proposing new and interesting ways to accomodate the data. One couldn't hope for a more perfect example of science working in the way we all like to believe it does.

Maybe the state of things has changed. But a number of things still bug me. First, how do they know the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate rather rather than decelerating at a slower than expected rate. The distance measurements I recall seeing were rather crude to determine acceleration. Second, if fundamental physical constants can vary over time, then perhaps so can things that depend on those constants like the brightness of the supernova types that are used to calibrate distance scales.

Ultimately, and I think this is a reasonable view, we shouldn't count "dark energy" as a solid theory until we observe it locally in our labs where we have far more control over observations and the experiment.

Re:An embarassment to physics?

[R1ch4rd]

I know little of the subject at hand and the research you talk about, but still I feel that 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' are inventions used when theory failed. This has happened many times in the past and a new theory was developed that dealt away with these inventions.
On the other hand you may be right and there is some form of energy and matter which is still 'dark' to us.

Re:An embarassment to physics?

[Anonymous Coward]

One would expect cosmologists to jump for joy at their luck. (And among those whom I know, everyone does!)

Among the cosmologists I know, they break out in hedonistic orgies when they find something new.
Oh, wait.
All the cosmologists I know personally are imaginary.

lasers faster and slower than light speed.

[hedley]

I think these recent experiments are interesting and require some explanation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/841690.stm

and also

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/655518.stm

Hedley

Re:lasers faster and slower than light speed.

[PxM]

The part about sending something faster than light is just bad reporting. Einstein says that no information can travel faster than light. If I point a laser beam at the moon and move it quickly, the dot on the moon will move around faster than light. However, no information is sent so there is no problem. The same applies to this experiment except it involves group and phase velocities of light. The concept is very hard to explain in words so I'll just point you to this Java applet with a moving picture:
http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109N/more _stuff/Applets/sines/GroupVelocity.html

The part about light moving slower isn't anything special. It has been known for a while that light slows down in a medium (ie anything other than a pure vacuum) at a rate dependent on the type of medium. This includes normal glass.

Re:lasers faster and slower than light speed.

[mankei]

This is a common misconception among undergraduates taught by clueless professors, that the group velocity cannot be larger than c. Actually the group velocity in certain materials can become larger than c, when the light frequency is near the resonance of the atoms in the medium. This still does not violate special relativity, because the group velocity is just the speed of the peak of the pulse, which doesn't carry the first bit of information. The real velocity at which the first bit of information travels is called the signal velocity, which is how fast a waveform shaped like a heaviside step function travels. It has been theoretically proven about fifty years ago by Sommerfield and Brillouin that this signal velocity is always c regardless of the dispersion of the medium. Interest in this topic was re-ignited recently only because technology nowadays allows the experimental observation of exotic group velocities, but theoretically the problem was solved long ago.

Re:lasers faster and slower than light speed.

[mankei]

My knowledge of the proof comes second-hand from a book called "Modern Optics" by Robert Guenther, which does a qualitative explanation of the proof that is supposedly contained in a book called "Wave Propagation and Group Velocity" by Leon Brillouin. For more recent research, look for papers by Raymond Chiao from Berkeley, who seems to be the leading researcher on superluminal propagation.

Paradigm shift?

[wronski]

(one of) The exciting thing(s) about dark matter/dark energy/Pioneer anomaly is that they smell like new fundamental physics. A bit like in the early 20th century, when people had everything pretty much figured out, except for a few nagging problems such as the UV catastrophe and Michelson-Moreley's failure to detect changes in the speed of light. Which of course led respectively to quantum theory and relativity.

We assume DM and DE are there because according to general relativity we need something to clump visimble matter, something to accelerate the universe today (and another something to accelerate the universe in the past if inflation is to be believed), and a bunch of something to make the universe (very nearly) flat. Postulating all these weird stuff is a bit contrived. Or we can heve some new physics.

This probably what the Wow aliens were trying to tell us...

PS: The 4neutron stuff and changing constant *are* new physics, if true. Right now they are just plain weird, IMHO.

On cold fusion

[Avumede]

This article sort of looked like bullshit to me, especially the cold fusion part. Notice how they hint that cold fusion has been replicated, but don't actually go out and say so. Then they quote an "Engineer" saying the evidence is strong, like they couldn't find any scientist that would support their claim. So I asked at the Straight Dope Message Board about the cold fusion, and got some interesting answers. What I learned basically confirmed that (to the knowledge of that fairly well informed board), yes, cold fusion still is unlikely and unreplicated.

Re:On cold fusion

[Jace Harker]

I actually read the final report of the DOE committee that recently reviewed cold fusion research. Contrary to what this article implies, the committee concluded that most of the new research on "cold fusion", while of much higher quality, was still as inconclusive as the old evidence. They identified a couple specific physical phenomena that were both unusual and well-documented, and suggested further investigation of those.

In all I thought the committee's conclusions seemed reasonable, pragmatic, and scientific, without being strongly prejudiced for or against the "cold fusion" effect. However, in the media (such as this article) the final report has been painted with much broader strokes. I find that disturbing.

Slashdot covered the DOE report here.

Re:On cold fusion

[Ibag]

There have been recent, successful (i.e. highly reporoducible, statistically significant) experiments with cold fusion, or at least with something that doesn't seem explained by other known science. I know people at MIT who are currently working on cold fusion research, and apparnelty there are at least two commercial ventures that are underway to make products out of some of this research. However, nothing is going to be released till people are damned sure this is the real thinng, because the social and political risks are too big if it isn't.

The probleme with cold fusion is not that it doesn't work (which it may or may not, as I haven't actually looked at the research), but that because of the bad science that has been done on cold fusion, there aren't many reputable scientists working on it. Of course, 90% of the crap you read might be completely irreproducible, so if you were to try to just look into the field you'd find a lot of crackpots and poor results. However, you should not confuse what you will most likely find with what you might find.

Of course, on the other hand, if the results that people are finding really are examples of workinig cold fusion, the experiments should be at a level that cannot be ignored very soon. It follows that *if* this is the real thing, we will know soon, and if it is not, we will know that the current batch of research isn't fruitful. I trust my friends, so I think there is something to look forward to, but its really hard to say what will happen. Its imporant that we have people working on this kind of research, though, because the benefits will far outweight the costs if things do prove fruitful. The trick is keeping it in the realm of science.

Re:On cold fusion

[jc42]

In all I thought the committee's conclusions seemed reasonable, pragmatic, and scientific, without being strongly prejudiced for or against the "cold fusion" effect. However, in the media (such as this article) the final report has been painted with much broader strokes.

The media does want to portray it as a possible new energy source. They're interested in useful science, not just interesting science. One of the possibilities is that "cold fusion" is something real but not very useful.

For a parallel, consider the old claim that "bumblebees can't fly", which you still hear now and then. What this really meant, of course, was that the equations used by aeronautical engineers couldn't explain how bumblebees developed lift. They don't use "aerodynamic lift", and no other mechanism was fully understood. Then, a couple of decades ago, someone decided to investigate the topic. They figured out pretty quickly how bumblebees develop lift, and it was by a totally different mechanism than birds or airplanes use. It's understood fairly well now.

The important part for the current topic is that the lift-generating method used by small insects doesn't scale. It depends on treating air as a collection of particles, and at larger scales air acts like a fluid rather than particles. It's very powerful for a gnat, but its effect falls off quickly with size, and doesn't work for an object much bigger than a large insect. So we can't use it in our airplanes or helicopters.

There were a few breathless reports about this in the media at first, about scientists discovering a new kind of flight, and speculating about it resulting in much more efficient flying machines. But this coverage died quickly, as the news got through that it's useless for lifting a creature much bigger than a gram. It's interesting to scientists, but not to the media, because it's not useful (so far) to us large animals.

Similarly, it's possible that "cold fusion" is something that only works on a microscopic scale, and can't be scaled up to human size. Maybe it only happens in tiny bubbles, but too many bubbles disrupt the fluid medium. If so, it may be of interest to the nanotech crowd. But it's difficult for media folks to get their minds around something like this.

There have been proposals to make tiny flying machines that fly like insects. It could be interesting if a bee-size machine, powered by "bubble fusion", could house a camera and a network link ...

"doesn't mean it's not aliens"

[Mysteray]

The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found nothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens.

Gotta love those wacky New Scientists . . .

counter Proof that homeopathy works

[goombah99]

1) take a slashdot comment
2) reply to it
3) reply to the reply
4) each reply containing less information and insight
5) ????
6) profit!

The final comment still has the same amazing powes of useless drivel the first had.

Re:counter Proof that homeopathy works

[vigour]

To be honest I used to be very sceptical about homeopathy myself. I've suffered from ME for many years now, with nothing helping me (I won't bore you with the details you already know, here's a link to an excellent account of someone else with ME). I tried everything to bring me out of it, traditional medicine, health programmes, queried mental health issues (was I depressed because I was so sick, or was I sick because I was so depressed? I didn't think so, but how could I know), Chineese medicine (worked partially for a while, but I collapsed again), and finally homeopathy.

I'm a hard nosed physicist so I was very skeptical about the whole process, and theory behind it. I can't (or won't) speak for anyone else, but for me homeopathy worked. It was slow process, and a lot of hard work, 5 months with one homeopath making very progress, but after about 9 months with another one, I have never been this physically good.

I wasted so much time being trapped in bed, or forcing myself to do things and suffer the consequences for weeks after. Now I swim every day for an hour, cycle 10km (over xmas I had more time so I did 22km every day for about 6weeks, except for 25th dec :P) and living & enjoying my life the way I should be.

While homeopathy has brought me this far, I have to maintain it more carefully than a normal person, if I slide even a little, I'll drop right back down.

I don't know how homeopathy works, how it really works. They say things like energy from the molecules you are diluting leave an imprint on the energy of the tincture, or that diluting down to infinestimal quantities makes the solutions more powerful. But sure as most of ye know people are trying to get rid of the infinites in our theories of nature, that they are not a true part of nature, and you can't dilute something to infinity.

More proper, impartial studies need to be done to investigate the phenomenon, not try to prove/disprove it. When politics or agendas get involved in science, it can (only saying can) result in loaded results, and hence bad science. Since there is no theory than can explain it (just like the fact that BCS theory can't explain high temperature superconductors, or new interesting research showing our entire outlook on magnetism, the M-J paradigm, might be wrong) any theories on how it works are derived from interpretations of the experimental results, and hence the experiment, or the interpretations need to be unbiased.

Number 13 is a big disappointment!

[vortex2.71]

Wow, the inclusion of cold fusion as number 13 in this list is a big disappointment! Cold fusion took the bang out of legitimate fusion efforts many years ago and it just won't die. Nagel's claim that "The experimental case is bulletproof, [y]ou can't make it go away." is a load of garbage. Even adamant proponents of cold fusion will agree that the experimental evidence is pretty shoddy at best is rife with irreproducibility. It is precisely this lack of reproducibility that makes the "effect" so hard to swallow. I would have preferred to see coronal mass ejections or the enhanced temperature of the Sun's corona listed as number 13.

Re:Number 13 is a big disappointment!

[angel'o'sphere]

Nagel's claim that "The experimental case is bulletproof, [y]ou can't make it go away." is a load of garbage.

I think most people on /. simply have in mind the 1986/1987 publications.

Yes, there have been problems in duplicating them. But that was 17 years ago. Researchon cold fusion did not stop during the last 17 years.

There are new results and new experiments. When Nagels is saying: "The experimental case is bulletproof" he is reffering to the established working experiments of the previous 5 yeas. And not to the old Pons/Fleischmann claims.

Further more: exepriments with "hydrogen" on "low pressure" interacting with probes leading to transmutations (where a trasmutation of H + D is considered a "fusion") are meanwhile nearly 100 years old.

There are PLENTY of historical experiments of meanwhile less well known physics researchers. The point is, the winners write history: Meissner, Röntgen, Fermi, Bohr, Pauli etc. won the race into the established science.

So the our days thinking is: they are right and the others are wrong. I'm very convinced that both are right. That at both ends of the energy spectrum: high energy and very low energy, transmutations and fusions can happen.

There are even pretty easy explanaitions how cold fusion can happen:

a) Cooper Pairs
Like electrons building Cooper pairs in super conductors, H atoms difussed into a latice build "Cooper" pairs. As Cooper pairs no longer fall under the Pauli exclusion principle they can come close enough to fuse.

b) Brown Movement
If the "gass" of deuterium and hydrogen inside of the latice of the electrode is "dense" enough, collisons amoung them or with the fabrice (or with electrons?) lead to a wide distributed energy spectrum amoung the H/D atoms. If two of them with high enough energy collide, then its not even "cold" fusion but ordinary hot fusion.

So, what now? The second explanaition is likely nonsense. As hot fusion implies (as we know today) by products like neutrons.

The most anyoing thing about "cold fusion" rejecters, especially if they are scientists is, instead of trying to find an explanaition HOW it could happen they simply reject it on the terms: does not fit into working theory.

So:
The evenly distributed background radiation we see in the univere, we accept.
The unexplainable acceleration of the Pioneer probes, we accept.
The idea of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, we accept -- at least as a interims name until we can translate/incorporate it into the formulars and constants.
The super fast cosmic rays, we accept (albeit the number of researches having found them is much smaller than the researchers working on cold fusion .... or how it is called today: Low Energy Nuclear Reactions)

I suggest you google for LENR or the complete term and look for the publications over the last decade ragarding this topic :D Or you glanse trough the old publications from 1930 to 1950, especially from Italy and Japan.

angel'o'sphere

Obvious

[No Such Agency]

I grow as weary of explaining this as I am of being an example of it*. "Assholes" get chicks because they go out there to meet women, with confidence and at least the illusion of interest. They don't stay in griping about being single on Slashdot, while thinking "no hot girl will ever like me".

* an example of the latter, not the former

Placebo quandaries:

[wew]

Here are a couple of questions raised by the placebo effects for enthusiasts of the scientific method:

1. If the placebo effect relies on the conviction of the patient that their treatment is going to help them, then aren't medical systems with a simpler-to-understand and more immersive theoretical foundation, such as various traditional and new-age therapies, going to be more effective (ceteris paribus) than scientific, Western medicine?
2. For the same reason, is research intended to debunk traditional and new-age therapies likely, if successful, to reduce the overall health of society?
3. Finally, is scepticism therefore bad for your health?

Just wondering...

Depend on the test

[aepervius]

For an a normal drug test there are two types of test. The one you do in labor (first on cells culture then later on cobaye animals) and later the one you do under hospital condition (on human). I am roughly simplyfying here. Those hospital test mostly consists in double blind experiment if possible (the patient do not know what they get, some get nothing (water/sugar) other get the substance, and neither the patient nor the experimentor at the starts know who is given what, only after the experiment is finished the experimentor can check from a reference number that this was the drug or sugar), or in the case where it is not humanly possible (for example cancer drug) where a live depends on it, then a simple hospital trial.


In the case of homeopathy this NEVER depend on life, but since this is only sugar (for any dilution beyond Avogadro number) they do not need the labor trial and can be tested directly on double blind. Fact is, all study I know of in double blind , the group getting the drug and the group getting nothing did not show any statistical difference. In other word their body reacted as if they got nothing (which they did... Since beyond 20CH I think , you have no active molecule). In other word in double blind nobody has yet of today proved that homeopathy worked. Ever.


Now there are a serie of controversial experiment where ONE attempt to dilue some allergen substance, and then after enough dilution to ahve nothing of the alergen in the end liquid, attempt to make it react with Basophile (the so called bevenist experiment). Up until now all of those experiment yelding positive result where either downright fraud, or sloppy experimental design (forget to clean up, or bad dilution processes). And seriously I doubt any new results will change that. This would be a MAJOR news for all physiker (physicist?)...

The horizon problem? WTF?

[SpacePunk]

Its temperature remains uniform because there is no other structure near enough to either inject or extract energy. The temperature in any given direction is the same as the temperature in any other given direction because any observer is theoretically in the center of the universe (don't let your head asplode, that all gets into expansion/motion cosmology).

If 'inflation' happened like they think then the universe is actually younger than the 14 billion years that is the current measure.

But, then again, all our theories and measurements could be fundamentally flawed to the point where all our theories and assumptions are completely wrong. In that case it doesn't matter.

My take on Placebo

[lawpoop]

I think the placebo effect is because of our evolution as a social animal. People live in a group, and a healthy person receives attention. If you aren't getting attention, your health suffers. If a doctor is treating you, that means that someone values you enough to keep you alive, and your health will improve because of some psychosomatic recognition of your standing in the community.

It's like the opposite of 'bone-pointing'. In some aboriginal cultures, a medicine man could kill people just by pointing some bone or small object. People would really die if they got bone pointed -- not only because they believed that death was certain, but also because everyone else in the community treated them as a walking corpse. No food, no conversation, no medicine. An invisible.

13 Things that don't make sense

[Vaystrem]

- George Bush's Re-Election
- Paul Wolfowitz as Head of the World Bank
- The US Intervention in Iraq
- The Structure of the U.N. Security Council
- Voting Structures of the Bretton Woods Institutions
- 'West is Best' Mentality in Development and Aid Agencies [This is admittedly shifting]
- Current Price of Oil and the inability of America to reduce its dependency upon it.
- The DMCA
- RIAA efforts against file-swappers and its inability to adapt in the face of change.
- Health Spending (as a % of GDP [2001]) is 0.3% less in the United States than in Canada and its free here.
- The State of Public Education in North America
- The 'CNN Effect' [short term intense immediate media coverage reduces long term awareness of issues] e.g. When was the last time you heard about the Tsunami?
- The Health and Wealth Dispairites between the Developed and Developing world.

Re:13 Things that don't make sense

[Elf-friend]

You missed the newest one: the House of Represenatives Committee on Government Reform (what the Hell this has to do with Government Reform I can't fathom) wasting something like six hours this afternoon and evening grandstanding about the steroid problem in baseball. I mean, yeah, I do care about that, but Congress getting involved ain't gonna fix it, and they have got way more important things to spend their time, and our tax money, on. They even contemplated making changes to the whole of collective-bargaining law just to sort out baseball. Talk about making mountains out of mole hills.

Re:13 Things that don't make sense

[JohnnyCannuk]

Gee spend the money through taxes and get free, UNIVERSAL, equal access to health care or spend it directly to a for-profit HMO or Insurance comapny and not be able to choose your doctor, your hospital and STILL have to pay more if shit isn't covered.

Hmmm, I'll pay the taxes thanks. Nobody in Canada is "uninsured" and must go to second rate charity hospitals.

BTW, up unitl about $60K, the tax burden is the same in both contries. While we continue to tax our rich, you let them keep their money, which, after more than 25 years, doesn't seem to be "trickling down".

Did I mention we had a $9 Billion dollar SURPLUS last year? How is that trillion dollar deficit anyway?

Re:13 Things that don't make sense

[AK Marc]

its free here.

no...health care is financed by your outrageous taxes

You must be one of those morons that runs around in the other threads claiming that letting a friend borrow a CD is "theft." Lets look at the definition of the word. Do you pay for the care when you receive it? No. Do you receive a bill for the care you received? No. Why? Because it is free. By your definition of "free" there is nothing free. "Free" peanuts at the bar are not free because they are subsidized by the beer sale. "Free" 0% financing on a car isn't free because the inflated purchase price covers the cost. "Free" Slashdot isn't free because they have all those annoying adds.

Why not just say that "free" is a word you believe has no meaning, rather than implying that you think it is a usable word that just doesn't apply in this one and only one instance?

Re:13 Things that don't make sense

[japhmi]

I believe you are referring to Terri Schiavo, a tragic case.

Congress has subpoenaed her to appear, simply meaning that they can't kill her (no law has been passed).

removing the woman's feeding tube and letting her die in peace

I don't think dying from starvation and/or dehydration would be considered 'in peace' by most people.

according to her doctors, she's in an irrecoverable coma

Well, it depends on which doctors you're talking about. Most say she's in a 'persistent vegetative state,' although most neurologists would say that you shouldn't do such a diagnosis without ever having done an MRI or a PET scan (CT/CAT scans were done over a decade ago, but they aren't good for this kind of brain injury). Besides, the fact that she can respond to stimuli proves that she's not in a persistent vegetative state.

Oh, and she's not on life support. She's disabled to the point where she can't swallow, but they haven't tried therapies that may help - her husband won't pay for them. She can respond somewhat, and she has responded negatively when asked if she wants her feeding tube removed. The state courts in Florida are intent on helping her husband to kill her.

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Alpha, Pioneer, Horizons

[Rocketship Underpant]

[The following may be the inane ramblings of someone who has read too many books about quantum physics but has no actual formal training.]

If I'm not mistaken, much of our knowledge of relativity, cosmology, and quantum physics comes from the assumption that c (the speed of light) is a constant. Einstein, if I recall correctly, came up with his remarkable theories of relativity and gravity after trying to imagine what the universe would be like if light-speed was constant in all frames of reference.

However, if the constant c is not actually constant, but a variable - perhaps a function of mass or space-time itself on a galactic scale - then at certain scales or under certain conditions, the weak mass/energy interaction we call gravity might be a little different than presently calculated. Perhaps different enough, on a galactic scale, to account for the "missing matter" that dark matter has been contrived to explain.

It could also explain variations of Alpha, unexpectedly constant background radiation (particularly if c is slowing down), and the acceleration of space probes as they leave the solar system.

Perhaps now that variations of the double-slit experiment are demonstrating the non-locality of some phenomena, it's time to stop regarding c as necessarily being a constant and a universal speed limit.

Do any actual physicists care to shoot holes in my wild suppositions?

where are the women?

[themusicgod1]

They are too busy watching television and working, it seems.

Personally I'm not single because I don't show confidence or interest

I'm single because I'm poor*. What's the point of falling in love when you cannot afford to feed yourself, nevermind a loved one or children?

Re:where are the women?

[Valdrax]

I'm single because I'm poor*. What's the point of falling in love when you cannot afford to feed yourself, nevermind a loved one or children?

Not that I honestly think that money should have anything to do with love, but...

Two incomes. One roof, one mortgage, one set of utility bills, shared insurance benefit discounts, tax rewards, better credit, etc. There are a lot of savings that can be had when married. Find someone who doesn't care that you're poor and who will work with you to help you both make something of each other. Kids can come later when you're ready.

Mind over biochemistry

[Russ Nelson]

Um, no, you don't comprehend the experiment. The body, upon receiving the placebo saline, acts as if it's getting the morphine unless the placebo contains a morphine inhibitor. One conclusion: the body is generating actual morphine on its own.

Hey, my roommate in college claims that I have a THC gland.
-russ

That's no mystery,

[KalvinB]

girls like dicks.

Re:That's no mystery,

[rsadelle]

I'm a lesbian, you insensitive clod.

Re:2) The horizon problem - SOLVED!

[KtHM]

Ah, the "we can't explain the Big Bang, therefore Jesus is the messiah" argument. I admire your ability to delude yourself.

You forgot logic

[glpierce]

"If the placebo effect relies on the conviction of the patient that their treatment is going to help them, then aren't medical systems with a simpler-to-understand and more immersive theoretical foundation, such as various traditional and new-age therapies, going to be more effective (ceteris paribus) than scientific, Western medicine?"

Western medicine cures many diseases and can remedy or improve many medical conditions. Mental states can influence health and well-being. Your conclusion is that mental states are therefore more effective than Western medicine. Please explain.

BBC & James Randi & BBC & Dr. Ennis al

[tlambert]

The BBC program "Science and Nature" had an episode on BBC Two, which was called "Homeopathy: The Test" which first aired last year on Tuesday 26 November, 9pm.

The results of a controlled, random, double-blind study were that the effect did not actually exist.

Here's the link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/homeopat hytrans.shtml

I think what we are seeing here is a six month editorial lead time on articles in New Scientist (giving their research department the benefit of the doubt).

-- Terry

read closer....

[roshi]

Point 4 showed that homeopathic remedies are effective in vitro, on specific human white blood cells.

No chance for the placebo effect to come into play.

Life was so much easier then

[MavEtJu]

1977, it was called the Wow! signal.

2005, it would have been the WTF! OMG! LEET! signal.

Re:Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Alpha, Pioneer, Horiz

[mbrother]

The last test I saw for a time-variable alpha was John Bahcall looking at the ratio of [O III] 4959 to 5007 emission in Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasars, which found no change. The high-z absorption line studies by the Australian group failed to convince me anything was really going on. Shouldn't have been one of the 13.

Re:The Placebo effect is controversial

[JavaRob]

Hey, have you heard about Placebo Domingo, Placido's younger brother? He looks just like his brother and gets great press, but he actually can't sing worth a damn.

Heh heh. Hoo, tough crowd tonight...

A very interesting list...

[podom]

As chance would have it, I just read James P. Hogan's latest book, Kicking the Sacred Cow, in which he touches on alternative (and often scoffed at) theories that seek to explain some of these mysteries.

Hogan's list of recommended reading on Astronomy, Cosmology and other subjects is here. I picked up Eric J. Lerner's and Tom van Flandern's books (The Big Bang Never Happened and Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets, respectively), and they make for some fascinating reading.

Lerner, for example, proposes (or perhaps expands upon) a completely different set of theories for the formation of the universe in which plasma electrodynamics is one of the primary shapers and the universe is much older than suggested by the big bang theories. This theory eliminates the need for inflation, dark matter and energy, etc., and I think it's worth taking a serious look at.

Another interesting area that more people here may be familiar with is the research of Immanuel Velikovsky, whose most well know and controversial theory is that Venus was formed very recently and may have actually been thrown off by Jupiter. Some of Velikovsky's books are also listed on Hogan's site.

One of the things that I think is most important to realize about science is that YOU DON'T HAVE TO BELIEVE ANY OF IT! It's not religion; if something doesn't quite work, and there are other theories out there, we should be willing to consider them.

-podom

Re:Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Alpha, Pioneer, Horiz

[mbrother]

Here is the URL to the Bahcall paper: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0301507

The point being?

[jesterzog]

Go to any mall and you'll see a not-so-attractive man walking around with a beautiful, well-endowed lady in tow while he's making fun of her to his friends, or is putting her down. He never calls, he never does the dishes, he never puts the seat down, and most of all, he's getting some.

Really, though, would you want a partner like that?

I had one once, and it was awful -- she was so convinced that she was useless and constantly putting herself down. I felt really sorry for her because somewhere along the line she'd been seriously messed up, but I also wouldn't wish her on anyone. In any case it lasted for a matter of weeks before I dumped her (or she interpreted it that way) because I just couldn't stand it any more.

The way that she acted a lot of the time suggested that she was expecting to be beaten for some of the things she did, no matter how much I constantly told her that there was nothing wrong and I wasn't going to treat her like that. She never actually listened to me, and all the time she was assuming I was someone I wasn't. Honestly, it wasn't until I'd met her that I understood how it's possible that some women put up with that kind of crap from guys. She was practically inviting it, and with someone else she would've gotten it. (No, I didn't oblige.)

It took me a while to get over that, but my current girlfriend, who took a while to find, is very assertive. If she doesn't like something I say or do, she'll make sure I know straight away, and I do the same for her. It's a whole lot better.

Homeopathy test results

[Cycnus]

I find it strange that they mention the Belfast homeopathy test in their list.

Not long ago (in 2002), there was a very good, very scientific test done by Horizon on the BBC using the very same technique.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2512105.stm

It seems that part of the problem in the Belfast findings may be due to the fact that the cells that had a reaction were manually counted, possibly introducting a bias known as "the experimenter effect", of which little is really known apart from the fact that it exists (a bit like the placebo effect).
There is little doubt that the experimenter acted in good faith, but the fact was that the very controlled experiment commissioned by the Horizon (involving the Royal Society and a number of specialists in various relevant fields) ended up showing a statistical no-greater-than-chance result.

Now, before you say "how can you trust a TV show", I'll say that Horizon is no ordinary TV show. It's probably the best, most balanced and scientific accurate show ever to grace the screen. Those who are lucky enough to be able to watch it will probably agree.

There is another large scale experiment being done at the moment on homeopathy, invoving both homeopaths, scientists and people like James Randi.
Randi predicted that the experiment will show no more than we already know today, that homeopathy is not worth much as a medical practice, but that most believer will be undeterred by any amount of evidence.
The real question to test a practitionner of alternative medecine is to ask: what would it take you to admit that it doesn't work?
For many, nothing will.

But it's worth investigating anyway, I'm ready to consider that there is some benefit to it if tangible, undisputable proof was found. It would certainly help to use homeopathy if its field of action -if there is any- was actually well known, and if it is doing better there than other types of medecine. http://www.homeowatch.org/

Re:Homeopathy test results

[Cycnus]

Your point is silly.
Randi doesn't try to convince you to believe in what he says: either his observations are right and accurate or they aren't.

Randi, as a stage magician, is able to see where there could be potential issues in an experiment where the state of mind of the experimenter could influence the outcome of what he is researching.
You need a good grasp of human psychology to be able to detach yourself from those very human flaws (at least as far as scientific enquiry goes).

Guys like Randi may not always be liked as they are more artists than scientists themselves, but science is intrinsically unable to deal with deception as trust in your fellow scientists and your human subjects is paramount to the scientific endeavour.
Having people like Randi around is actually very beneficial to science as they can point out those pesky human flaws that can jeopardize any good experiment.

Whether you like him or not is irrelevant: he's helping real scientists devise real experiments that have reliable and replicable results.
His actions in that field of human enquiry speak for themselves.

Re:Homeopathy test results

[vigour]

I felt I had to reply to this directly after reading it (I just posted a message on homeopathy just now) I normally don't take things on a faith basis, but after my experience with homeopathy I will admit I'm a believer.

After years of suffering from ME, and going nowhere with treatments (no quacks, I wouldn't waste my money, time, or ruin my hopes yet again) I've seen a massive turnaround over the last 9 months I've been on a homeopathic treatement programme. Yes there could have been other factors involved that I am unaware of. That they were coincidental with my treatement makes them unlikely but still possible. I don't know how I'm better, I just know that after following my homeopath's programme I am healthy again.
I don't like not knowing, but I attribute it to homeopathy.

You are bang on the mark with the bias in the experiments, and with other "believers". I don't think practictioners will ever admit to it not working, but beyond the research done so far, I don't know what else can be done in a scientific way to prove that it doesn't work.

Re:Homeopathy test results

[Cycnus]

I'm glad to learn that homeopathy had a positive impact on you but that should not detract anyone from the biggest picture.

A treatment is not confirmed to be working on the basis of testimony alone. There are good reasons for that and in particular the fact that following a new treatment also includes a change in lifestyle and without knowing which parameters count and which do not, you can't infer that any progress is attributable to the treatment alone.
Another reason is the lack of properly measurable quantity to actually define improvement. For some it will be subjective, for others it will be objective, but what counts is to quantify that improvement and verify it over a large sample of people being treated for the same symptoms folowing the same methods.

Honest people have come to believe very strongly in all sort of stuff because it worked for them, however it is very hard to shake the notion that it isn't enough to confirm actual effectiveness.
Would you take a treatment that was found to work in only 1% of cases?
Such a treatment wouldn't even be considered interesting, especially if others exist that have a better success rate.
Now if you're one of the 1% for which that treatment was effective -for whatever reason-, then you too would be a strong believer in that treatment because it worked for you, but that doesn't translate in it being an effective treatment that should be recommended.

The fact that homeopathy was born out of thin air 200 years ago at a time when medical science was in its infancy, and that it has not changed its practices even though progress in other sciences have been unable to find any trace of supporting evidence to those practices should be a big red signal that there is something off with homeopathy.

Homeopathy is armless (http://www.homeowatch.org/articles/jaroff.html) except that it may detract people from the treatment they actually need.

That being said, if it works for you, then by all mean use it. However, dont be too quick to see your homeopath before seing actual doctors next time you have something: Medecine's goal is to actually help patients using methods that are proven to work most of the time.

There is no such thing as "alternative medecine": medecine will use whatever works for real, that's why it actually progresses. Alternatives have to call themselve that way simply because they have not been able to make a sufficiently strong case for themselves, otherwise they would be embraced. That's the difference between herbalism and pharmacognosy for instance: the former can't prove effectiveness and is rooted in unwavering faith for "traditional wisdom" and the latter actually uses the plants that are proven to work to help people.

Re:Homeopathy test results

[vigour]

Thank you for your measured response! I know it would have been easy to attack my previous posts.

And yes you are completely right on many points. After I posted that second comment I realised I missed my own point, about being impartial.

The greatest conflict for me is between the scientific method (which has had a profound effect on my way of thinking), and my first hand experiences of myself, and other people I know. Those experiences I had upset that paradigm I am still (I hope) in, especially compared with the professional, scientific experiments carried out indicating the homeopathy has no effect.

From my own experiences, conventional medicine had no effect (and they will admit themselves that there is no know cure, yet, for ME), but I would never advocate homeopathy as a standalone treatment. The homeopaths I know, all advise their patients to stay with whatever treatments their GPs have them on, and keep them informed about the homeopathy.

At the end of the day, I want to believe in homeopathy, while wanting to analyse it properly and go "Hey, what about all this evidence!". Which are fundementally opposed to each other. I don't know if there is a way to "prove" homeopathy, all the evidence suggests otherwise. Then again that could be due to fundamental flaws in the approach to the experiments, (like the studies of brownian motion before Einstein's treatement of it in his 1905 paper, the researchers were getting nonsensical results for the velocities of the particles, which would increase as you measured at smaller and smaller scales!) but that is unlikely. I once read a book trying to explain the physics behind it, it was hilarious. The author brought in ideas from QED, and string theory (primarily the energy from the molecules in solution being transferred and stored in higher dimensional elements of the water molecules!), it had no founding in reality (I suppose you could argue the same with string theory, m-theory and the like).

Indeed you are quite right about the origins and practise of homeopathy. I only know a certain amount about it (I wanted know more about what I was putting into my body, and where the techniques came from), but its methodology is something that any chemist/pharmacist would hate.

I wouldn't brand Chinese medicine with the same stick though. They had a fully developed system thousands of years before western medicine, and it was only codified after a long history of medicine before that.

(As an aside, I have heard -so it's only word of mouth- from chinese friends that one of the biggest problems with chinese medicine, in China anyway, is that in the past they kept the best remedies and knowledge within their families)

And it's a system that works, in principle yes medicine should take whatever works, and works safely to help improve/save peoples lives, but it's not always the case. There is still a lot of arrogance in the west about chinese medicine, and herbalists. The old remedies your granny might suggest most likely have been refuted, or more effective solutions discovered (there are the nuggets of gold though), but herbalism (at least those that are licenced, and have had training up to the required standard for their governing bodies) is not as voodoo-hoodoo as it normally thought.

Damn, I will have to stop there, I've a date in an hour :P which I need to get ready for.

(PS I'm trying to find an article that was in an Irish Pharmaceutical magazine about research indicating that active molecules could be more effective if left bonded to larger molecules, as found in plant and herb remedies, as opposed to the isolated molecules in equivalent conventional medicines. Of course I haven't supplied any evidence to prove this article exists yet, so it can't be treated as being true - yet, hopefully!)

Problem with HTML

[SiliconEntity]

The markup on that page uses for superscripts. But it's supposed to be <sup>. The result is we read things like inflation blowing up the universe by "a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds". That's supposed to be a factor of 10 to the 50th power in 10 to the -33rd power seconds. It's surprising to see a professional outfit like New Scientist making such an important and fundamental error.

Or is it a problem in my browser? Are they doing something so that <UP> should be treated as a synonym for <SUP>, and Firefox isn't handling it right?

How does it display for other people?</sup>

Functional Knowledge, Not Absolute

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading through this thread, although no one may see this being posted so late in Slashdot time (First post! Hell yeah!), I find it interesting amid all the Intelligent Design/Complete Randomness and current science is great/bullshit debates (some of which are quite good, although I say that as an educated layperson), we seem to be missing something.

Science, folks, is really just a way of thinking about the world. It is ONE way of thinking about the world. You can certainly make a very good argument for why it is a better way of looking at the world than say, religion, or astrology, or mysticism, or anything else, but we need to understand science does not offer Truths any more than any other perspective. You can also make an argument, often just as good, for why any other perspective is more "true" than science. Science is the Western World's current High Truth Giver, which every culture seems to need in one form or another. We assume that the ideas that science gives us are "facts," but they're really not in the way we think of facts as irrefutable and immutable; facts are nothing more than a given culture's agreed upon foundations at a given time. 500 years ago Western Culture had a very different set of foundations (but still similar, certainly). 500 years from now, the foundations the Western World's world view will be built on (assuming the Western World still exists in any sense) will be very different from what we think now. In the early days of modern empirical science, there were many who argued for different sorts of empirical science, and many of their ideas are still valid criticisms (Goethe is a good example of this, although his actual scientific ideas are rather silly now; a good critic doesn't necessarily have to be a good creator).

This article really points out nothing more than the fact that our current understanding of the world is limited. It will ALWAYS be limited. When scientists of any group come across empirical evidence that points to "embarrassing holes" in our current theory and knowledge of the world, it is the universe's way (whether you consider the universe to be a cold flux of energies or a grand design by some conscious maker doesn't matter here) of reminding us that it is far more complicated than our current theories account for. If you look at Western Thought, from a certain perspective, it is nothing more than a continuously more and more complex "understanding" of the universe. If the universe is infinitely complicated, then there is no "absolute" knowledge, only an infinite recession of models and theories and perspectives, none of which are ever any closer to an Absolute Truth than any other, only, perhaps, more functional in their explanations of the empirical evidence we encounter.

So when we come across empirical evidence that suggests that our current thinking is limited, massively flawed or just flat out wrong, we shouldn't be looking to previous models and saying "ha ha, we were right all along!" but instead trying to develop the next perspective. That may be more spiritual than our current one, or less, or something entirely new and outside our current thinking, but either way we should use our always present lapses in knowledge to drive us forward, not backward.

Outer Space A Source Of Trouble

[nimblebrain]

I'm sure they're subject-shopping, but it's interesting that there are so many weird things going on out there.

It does feel like there are a few things about to tease themselves apart in cosmology...

Gravity seems to be behaving oddly, with things like the Pioneer acceleration and the anomalous in-track acceleration of the LAGEOS satellites.

The limited age of the universe is being stretched to strange proportions of late with observations of the early universe looking more developed than expected. Observations by the Spitzer may throw even more confusion on the fire.

Add to the pile interesting oddities like Quantized Redshift, originally proposed by Tifft and still observed, that would see to put us at the center of the universe (we shouldn't see the equivalent of even "shells" from our point of view). The Fingers of God is an interesting graphic interpretation.

Association of high-redshift quasars with low-redshift galaxies rounds off the plate.

Actually, a number of these controversies have been around since the mid-80's, but the power and spectrum spread of our telescopes has been getting better. It's been hard to get time to observe the controversial objects - the allocation committees tend to turn such proposals down - but there are plenty of controversies left in the skies, even when we don't go looking for them :)

Personally, I'm excited by the possibilities. It feels like there's something just around the corner, if only we can get some research time in on it.

Confidence and wit.

[carlmenezes]

Get these two and get out there. Leave the rest to the girls :)

"No bearing"?

[Grendel Drago]

I think "no bearing" is a little harsh. The Declaration of Independence is the mission statement on which the country was founded. It contains a rejection of the divine right of kings, and recognition that rights are inherent in humans, not handed down from the government. No, it's not a document with the force of law, but it certainly stated a number of principles on which our law is based. It certainly doesn't have "no bearing" on that law.

--grendel drago

Re:"No bearing"?

[Nasarius]

Yes yes, I know. I tried to find a wording that would prevent just that misinterpretation, but evidently I failed. But really, "all men are created equal"? Not for a long time after the Declaration. The Constitution is a much better reflection of both the ideals and the necessary compromises that the nation was founded on.

It's just disappointing to me that so many people, even many of those who think the Constitution is a great thing, have no clue what's actually in it. It's not a long document. Grab an annotated version (for clarity) and read it.

Re:"No bearing"?

[Jonner]

I saw a PBS documentary on the restoration of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. One major point of the documentary is that the Declaration has taken on much greater importance to US citizens since the Civil War. It may have been largely the result of Abe Lincoln's quoting of it in the Gettysburg Address.

Re:"No bearing"?

[operagost]

But really, "all men are created equal"? Not for a long time after the Declaration.

All men ARE created equal. However, all men do not treat each other EQUALLY. The government exists only at the consent of the governed -- therefore, the rights still exist even if the governed fail to keep their government in line.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

No one says that everyone is born with the same financial status or physical and mental abilities. However, we are all born with the same rights, and must exercise them using our free will. Others will oppose you, and you must fight them, whether it is by force as the American patriots did or by peaceful means as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Re:2) The horizon problem - SOLVED!

[nickco3]

You post is inaccurate because:

* It invokes The "God of the Gaps" Argument.

This argument has the form:

* There is a gap in scientific knowledge.
* Therefore, the things in this gap are best explained as acts of God.

This is not based in logic. It is simply a statement of pessimism about the future progress of science.

Down through the centuries, science has eliminated a great many of its gaps. People who had used the Gap argument were embarrassed, since their God shrank in power with each new scientific advance. For example, after the work of Galileo and Newton, it was no longer thought that angels pushed the planets across the heavens.

Full ANOVA Design

[CedgeS]

You need to incorporate the product of the following conditions:

Patient's certainty:
Uncertain
Certain and correct
Certain and incorrect

Getting the drug:
Yes
No

This would leave us with the following groups:
Not sure and recieving drug
Not sure and not recieving drug
Certain of recieving drug and recieving drug
Certain of not recieving drug and not recieving drug
Certain of not recieving drug and recieving drug
Certain of recieving drug and not recieving drug

Then you need many replicates, include all the interactions in your ANOVA (i.e. do it the simple, correct way with none of the monkeying around that bad statisticians will prescribe), and report the results that pass Ficher's LSD (the most powerful detector of significant difference), and possibly also include results passing more stringent significance tests.

Then we will have the answer. Wait 4 years for people to do it with other drugs and make more complicated expirements with more degrees of freedom and it will be canon.

And yes, you will have to LIE to and DECIEVE your patients. This is considered unethical, so this simple basic expirement will never be done in the "developed" world. There can be no waiver of "you may or may not recieve medication" because if introduced it would place everyone in the group "Uncertain." If the patients have a bias towards believing that a medical experiment does not medicate as stated then the patients must not know that they are participating in the experiment.

Re:Full ANOVA Design

[MindStalker]

Yes, but if I tell you that you are getting a placebo and give you real medicine or visa vera there is real harm. No real harm was done in the shock thing, either way the shock experiment may even provoke lawsuits in the current state of medicine. And no waiver could exist as it would tip off the patients.

Re:Full ANOVA Design

[DarkSarin]

erm,
nice try, but the Milgram studies have generally been thought to be unethical. I don't think that there is a single ethics review board that would approve that study today.

It is considered unethical, not because of the deception (which is fine), but because significant emotional trauma can occur as a result of the deception.

So, in short, even though YOU might not find it unethical, review boards would, and you have a snowball's chance in [very warm place] of getting such a study approved these days.

Re:Full ANOVA Design

[pla]

nice try, but the Milgram studies have generally been thought to be unethical.

True, they do seem unethical in hindsight.

But they also revealed an absolutely amazing area of human psychology that we couldn't have discovered any other way - That our normal concept of "conscience" completely vanishes in the interaction between an authority figure and a subordinate.


Kinda funny that a lot of the most important findings in psychology (and medical science as well) count as "unethical" by today's standards.

Myself, I interpret that as the entire human race having turned into a culture of whiners. "Oh, boo-frickin' hoo, I feel bad about having thought-I-did-but-not-actually zapped that guy"... "Oh, I feel violated, I must now sue you because you said you would give me caffeine but you actually gave me a sugar pill".


At the risk of sounding like a Trekkie, sometimes the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. I say "sometimes" because you could use the same argument to justify torturing prisoners. When dealing with a minor inconvenience to the few, no problem. When "breaking" someone into saying whatever they think you want to hear, the criteria for "justifiable" become quite a lot more strict, if even possible to satisfy.

Re:Full ANOVA Design

[DarkSarin]

I won't argue with any of that. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that you are right.

Also, very sadly, there are certain advances in medicine that *might* not have happened as early as they did without the holocaust and Hitler's experiments on live humans. I don't think that we can safely say that they were worth it, however--and that is the crux of the problem.

Sometimes the good of the many does outweigh the good of the few. The trouble is, however, that it becomes difficult, on occasion, to tell where that line is. Thus was born the Ethics Committees and Review Boards who object to some very strange things at times, but generally do good work.

Are studies involving deception possible? Absolutely. Are they difficult to get approved? Yes, and with good reason.

You do bring up a good point, though. It does, occasionally, seem as though all the major discoveries happened because a researcher (at least in psychology, and to a lesser extent, medicine) was willing to do things to subjects that were more than a little questionable.

I would argue, however, that it simply requires more effort and ingenuity to set up an experiment to test the same thing without crossing that line. IIRC, the Milgram studies have been replicated to show that the effect exists, but in a more humane way.

The horizon problem

[asjk]

OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old

This one has me so puzzled I'm sure I won't even understand someone's kind effort at an explanation. Wouldn't one expect the horizon edges to be exactly twice the distance from the center? I mean the BigBang happens and spreads out in all directions. 14 billion years later the edges are 28 billion light years apart--14 light years along one radius and 14 along the other. What am I missing?

Wait a second! Maybe I solved it! Stoopid fizzassits.

Open questions in Physics

[S3D]

John Baez, quantum gravity reseacher have an exellent list on his site of Open questions in Physics
It includes:
sonoluminescence - plasma core in the bubbles of liquid
high temperature superconductivity
turbulence and Navier-Stokes equations -mathematic of chaos
what is meant by a "measurement" in quantum mechanics? Does "wavefunction collapse" actually happen as a physical process ?
What happened at or before the Big Bang?
Why is there an arrow of time; that is, why is the future so much different from the past?
dark energy
dark matter
The Horizon Problem: why is the Universe almost, but not quite, homogeneous on the very largest distance scales
When were the first stars formed, and what were they like
Is the Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis true? Roughly, for generic collapsing isolated gravitational systems are the singularities that might develop guaranteed to be hidden beyond a smooth event horizon?
Why are the laws of physics not symmetrical between left and right, future and past, and between matter and antimatter?
Why is there more matter than antimatter, at least around here?
Is there really a Higgs boson, as predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics?
Why do the particles have the precise masses they do? Or is this an unanswerable question?
Are there important aspects of the Universe that can only be understood using the Anthropic Principle?
The Big Question(TM)
This last question sits on the fence between cosmology and particle physics:
* How can we merge quantum theory and general relativity to create a quantum theory of gravity? How can we test this theory?

Re:The Pacebo effect is controversial-OT

[Anonymous Coward]

as a doctor working in the field of substance misuse i need to clarify this:
Methadone does come in an injectable form but the oral preparation is safer in terms of number of fatal overdoses
Methadone also doesn't give people the euphoria that heroin gives them.
Some people develope an addiction to heroin specifically becoause they get addicted to the euphoria, others develop their habit because they don't like the withdrawal effects. This second group tend to achieve maintenance and reduction of the chaos in their lives on methadone and once they have achieved the necessary psychological and social infrastructure necessary to withdraw then they can have their doseage reduced to zero. Those who seek the euphoric affect tend to use methadone to remove the withdrawl effects but continue to use illicit drugs on top of this in order to achive their high. This group may well be able to have their addiction controlled more successfully with injectable diamorphine (heroin). Various european countries are exploring this option and 2 pilot projects have been set up in the UK in order to research this very point. Once the results of these have been audited then policy as a whole will change. Almost all substance misusing people who approach drug dependency services do so with the aim of coming off drugs but it has to be done in a safe and controlled manner to attempt to try and put mechanisms in place for them to address the reasons why they became addicted in the first place.

Don't Try This At home?

[Havenwar]

From the article:

1 The placebo effect
DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

What do you mean do NOT try this at home? Oh... yeah... I see now. You are absolutetly right, I would also much rather stick with the morphine.

On an unrelated note, ever had a parent dying of cancer or something similar? Ever noticed how amusing it can be to talk to them while they are on morphine? Well, apart from the sad parts then. My mother died a week ago or so, and the last time I met her I couldnt stop laughing.

Glad she wasnt on saline. ;)
This way we got a happy last meeting.

Yay for drugs!

Methane on Mars

[iammrjvo]

Can someone answer the question as to how prevalent hydrocarbons are in our universe? I'm interested in knowing if the existence of methane on Mars supports a theory that I've heard regarding the origin of hydrocarbons on earth. The theory goes that many natural hydrocarbons were trapped in the earth as the planet formed and that oil is not a product of decaying animals but rather is a product of chemical reactions from these natural hydrocarbons. Proponents say that, for one thing, there's just too much oil and gas to have been formed from fossils.

If there's methane on Mars, but no life on Mars, then could it just be the product of hydrocarbons that naturally fill the universe? Can anyone answer the question as to how much hydrocarbon is naturally found in the universe as a whole?

Re:Methane on Mars

[RayBender]

Can someone answer the question as to how prevalent hydrocarbons are in our universe? [..]The theory goes that many natural hydrocarbons were trapped in the earth as the planet formed and that oil is not a product of decaying animals.

If by "Hydrocarbons" you mean long (>3 carbons) chains of C and H then the answer is that they are exceedingly rare. However, methane (one carbon) is relatively common in the atmospheres of the outer planets (and the moon Titan). Hydrogen, by itself, is the most abundant element in the universe, and carbon is also quite common (it's a product of stellar fusion). But you rarely if ever find conditions where the two will bind together in long chains.

The theory of an "abiotic" origin of oil is pretty shaky, to the point of being wrong. It came from two observations: 1) loud bangs heard off the east coast of the U.S. which somehow led to the idea that it was caused by methane seeps (it was the Concorde. I kid you not!) 2) The observation that most hydrocarbons associated with life (things like ear wax and various fats) are made up of odd numbers of carbon, while oil has equal abundances of even and odd-numbered chains.

There several lines of evidence against the abiotic theory: 1) we understand how temperature and time can change the odd/even ratio in hydrocarbons, 2) people tried drilling for "deep oil" (look up "Siljan" in Sweden) and found nothing. 3) various other isotopic abundace ratios are consistent with life.

For a really excellent discussion of where oil comes from (including a dicussion of the abiotic hypothesis), read "Hubberts Peak" by Kenneth S. Deffeyes.

As for methane and life on Mars; things are still too uncertain to know. There are ways to explain small amounts of methane without life. It's harder to explain more short-lived species like formaldehyde and (I believe) methanol. Stay tuned on that one...

The solution to ALL of these

[gosand]

The answer to all of these questions is obvious: Jesus did it.

Does not bode well for your future...

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

If she doesn't like something I say or do, she'll make sure I know straight away...

Run.

Very fast.

Do not look back.

explanation of dark energy measurement

[Doctor Fishboy]

First, how do they know the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate rather rather than decelerating at a slower than expected rate. The distance measurements I recall seeing were rather crude to determine acceleration. Second, if fundamental physical constants can vary over time, then perhaps so can things that depend on those constants like the brightness of the supernova types that are used to calibrate distance scales.

Well, over the past few years the initial results from 1998 have been confirmed with more measurements. Two groups were independently making this measurement, and the discovery of this acceleration was so unexpected, both groups didn't publish for a few months and in the end agreed to publish in the same journal with back to back articles.

So how did they do it? It turns out that a certain type of star explosion (a type 1a supernova) has a very distinct and specific brightness when they go off. these supernovae can shine as bright as their host galaxies for a few days, and so by looking at lots of galaxies, every so oftern they see the distinct brightness of a supernova going off. They then intensively monitor the light curve as the supernova fades over many tens of days, which gives a good indication of the physical distance to the supernova.

They then measure the redshift of the host galaxy, which gives the speed of recession for that supernova (the supernova system is moving within the galaxy), and you plot a form of these two quantities against each other. The resultant curve implied that only accelerating universe models fit. This was such a suprise that many astronomers started up more intensive searches for really distant supernovae, and these confirmed what the intial experiments suggested.

Now, there are sertain systematic errors to take account of - how do we know that all supernovae go off with the same brightness of explosion? What happens if there's lots of dust that makes supernovae appear dimmer (and thus farther away than they physically are?) I'd be happy to explain if you want, so send a reply to this post and I'll talk some more.

The short version (THIS is short?!) is that many effects that could give a false signal have been ruled out - exceptional results require excepconal evidence (sorry, Prof. Sagan!) so 99% of astronomers believe these results.

Ultimately, and I think this is a reasonable view, we shouldn't count "dark energy" as a solid theory until we observe it locally in our labs where we have far more control over observations and the experiment.

Sorry to be pedantic, but dark energy is an observed phenomenon. WHAT dark energy is, is the reall million dollar question. We'd love to see it in the lab, but when you work out what the typical effect of dark energy would be over omething the size of the solar system, it is a fantastically miniscule effect that we could not detect, never mind trying to detect it in a lab.

Hope this helps (and that you'll still be around to read this some 8 hours later....)

Dr Fish

Sorry, can't see that far

[lildogie]

> Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other

You can't see from one edge of the visible universe to the other.

You can only see from the center to the edge.

That's because Hubble expansion coupled with the limiting speed of light define the edge of the visible universe from the position of the observer.

Change the position of the observer to the edge of the visible universe and the edges will move.

Number 14: Why science reporting is so bad

[radtea]

This article contains a host of issues.

The Dark Matter problem is actually the Dark Matter problemS, plural. Galactic dark matter is only the tip of the iceberg, and can be explained by baryonic matter. Dark matter (or energy) on larger scales is a different kettle of fish. A better heading would have been: "Large scale dynamics of the universe", which would take in the horizon problem, the dark matter problem and the dark energy problem.

The article in this regard is a bit like a software requirements document written by a user: it's in terms of projected solutions rather than actual problems. The actual problem is that we don't understand the large-scale dynamics of the universe. The solution may be anything from exotic particles to weird properties of space to alternative dynamics. We just don't know.

The things about alpha changing and tetra-neutrons are cool, but far more likely to be mistakes than new phenomena.

The stuff about high-energy cosmic rays is probably the most interesting, and in fact there are a wealth of phenomena that have been observed by large detectors such as SNO and Kamiokande over the years that really don't make sense. The possibility of new physics at high energies, or entirely novel particles (magnetic monopoles, for example) is quite real, and some of the anomalies observed in these detectors may be indicators of these things.

--Tom

Number 14: Sonoluminescence

[antispam_ben]

This is a high-school level science expeiment (directions on how to do it are in the Amateur Scientist column of Feb. 1995 Scientific American, if you're interested you can get ALL the AS columns on CD at http://brightscience.com/), and has been known of for decades, but the exact cause is a mystery.

But there is recent speculation and evidence that this basement-science experiment generates nuclear fusion:

http://www.scispot.org/archives/physics/sonolumine scence_lights_up_fusion_research.html

Oh, and from that page, one of the "Selected sonoluminescence resources on the web" is no less an authoritative science source than...http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/03 /1833245!

Re:From the center?

[kps]

What puts us in the center of the Universe?

Nothing. We're in the centre of the visible universe. We're in the centre of what we can see, because we can see equally far in all directions. (This is pretty trivial, and is not one of the problems on the list.)

Re:Did anybody consider...?

[The MESMERIC]

"Did anybody consider that homeopathy = placebo effect?"

er ..
how can a culture of human white cells, isolated in a container, be prone to placebo effects?

"You must belieeeeeeeve!" - says one cell to another.

Re:Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Alpha, Pioneer, Horiz

[mbrother]

I'm a professional astronomer and with expertise in quasar spectra, the basis for the claims and counter claims for a time-variable fine structure constant. I am more qualified than the article writer on this topic. Count me on the side of Patrick Petitjean and other skeptical astronomers who think the case unproven.

Is it wrong for me to share my expert opinion here? Should people only agree with articles or make jokes about them?

If there was consensus that alpha had changed, this should be on this list, because there would then indeed be a big gap in our understanding. Right now the gap seems more likely to me to be one of techniques of data analysis. If the Australian group is right, we'll get there, but we're not there yet.

Homeopathy (item 4) proven BS once and for all

[gammelby]

The BBC made a brilliant documentary that once and for all should shut up anybody that keeps talking about the marvelous effect of homeopathy. The Ennis woman from the article also appeared in that program, presenting her claims in some scientific way. The BBC program then arranged and monitored a study performed by a bunch of high-profile scientists that concluded it was utterly BS - and the only way Ennis could have reached her interesting results were due to either manipulation or plainly bad laboratory work.

Ulrik