Wonderful medicine:

Two men have been cured of cancer, after being told they had 3-6 months to live. This was done by altering the body’s defence mechanisms so that they attacked cancerous cells:

Dr Stephen Rosenberg and his team isolated T cells from the cancer patients and multiplied them in the lab.

Next they used a virus to carry receptor genes into the T cells. These receptors are what enable the modified T cell to recognise specific cancers - in this case malignant melanoma.

When the modified T cells were transfused into the patients they began to attack the tumour cells.

15 other patients in the trial were not so lucky, but this is apparently a very promising procedure.

Disastrous medicine:

Previously, homeopathic ‘remedies’ were required to say “Homeopathic medicinal product without approved therapeutic indications” on the label. From today, however, the labels can instead claim to ‘treat’ medical conditions. According to Bad Science:

All you need is evidence of manufacturing quality and safety, and “bibliographic evidence that the product has been used in the indications sought”.

What you don’t need, of course, is any evidence that your tablets treat the thing you’re selling them as treating.

Homeopathy is theoretical and demonstrable nonsense. There is no rational argument to the contrary, and it’s unbelievable that this regulatory change has been made. The government body who made the decision to market magic as medicine describe themselves as follows (my emphasis):

[The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency] is the government agency that is responsible for ensuring that medicines and medical devices work, and are acceptably safe. We keep watch over medicines and devices, and we take any necessary action to protect the public promptly if there is a problem. No product is risk-free. Underpinning all our work lie robust and fact-based judgements to ensure that the benefits to patients and the public justify the risks.

That’s clearly untrue.

It’s long been known that with a clear view we can see only 5% of space. By looking at the movements of galaxies,as well as gravitational lensing, we can infer that they have substantially more mass than can be seen by telescopes. It was postulated that this might be taken up by dead stars, but careful surveys in our own galaxy have shown that these make up only a very small proportion. 25% of the universe seems to be dark matter, something only detectable by its gravitational effects. Dark energy makes up the other 70%, and is a different beast altogether - whatever is causing the accelerating expansion of the universe seems to be smoothly distributed, and that’s pretty much all that’s known. Dark matter is at least something we can get a handle on: some kind of particle we haven’t detected yet, presumably.

But what if dark matter isn’t caused by another particle? What if current gravitational theory is wrong for large distances, making it look like there’s far more mass than really exists? This has always been a possibility. However, a new study has revealed positive evidence for the existence of dark matter, a major development for something which could only be inferred up until now. It’s still possible that gravitational theory is wrong, but this seems less likely with confirmation of dark matter’s existence.

Cosmologists looked at two clusters of galaxies which collided 100 million years ago - very recent in cosmological timescales. Most of the visible mass of galaxy clusters is made up of hydrogen between individual galaxies. Dark matter does not, it is thought, collide with normal matter, so it was theorized that in a collision between clusters the gases would slow each other down but leave dark matter untouched, as shown in this animation. Eventually the mass of the dark matter would re-attract the gas, but a recent collision would show a large amount of dark matter offset from the gas clouds. And so it proved. There’s definitely something there.

It’s very cool. Physicists and cosmologists at least know there’s really something to detect, and aren’t worried about a refinement of gravitational theory rendering years of searching pointless.

Cosmic Variance explain it all with much more detail.

Following on from the last post, the podcast also has a logic puzzle, and last week’s question was:

You’re in a boat that’s floating in a pond. You’re holding a cannonball. If you drop the cannonball over the side, will the level of the pond rise, fall or remain the same?

Mr Thinks-he-has-a-good-knowledge-of-physics here got it completely wrong, because I didn’t think it through properly. There’s no trick - cannonballs don’t float or anything - it’s pure science. What do you think? Highlight below for the answer.

Answer: The level of the pond goes down. When in the boat the weight of the cannonball displaces a certain amount of water. But when in the water it’s only the volume that matters - water doesn’t care about the density (and therefore the mass, and therefore the weight) of what’s in it, just the space it takes up. A cannonball is obviously more dense than water, so the volume displaces less water than the weight, so the water level goes down. I fully expected the level to stay the same, thinking that the displacement wouldn’t change. If not that, then maybe it’d go up. Going down was my last choice by a long way.

I very much like the Skeptico blog as it does a great job of annihilating pseudoscience. A couple of recent posts that I thought were excellent:

• In June 2000, an astrologer said ‘avoid terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001′. No trickery - she really said that before the event. Can you guess how she did it?.
• A wide-ranging study that aimed to compare cases of autism with exposure to MMR recently published its results. 28,000 children were watched, and in results directly applicable to the number of autism cases and the amount of exposure in the US, no link was found. Nothing. Of course, this doesn’t please crazy people, who say that doesn’t prove there is no link. I’m going to write to them about the dragon in my garage. Full details.

Learning anything about physics always involves grappling with the problem of scale. Whether incredibly small or ridiculously large, the human brain hasn’t evolved to cope with the kind of extreme number necessary for investigation into nature’s workings. Science writers do their best to think up real-world analogies, but the nature of the number makes this extremely difficult to do.

If you created a scale model of the solar system in which the sun was a metre wide, Earth would be just under 1cm across, 100m away; Jupiter would be 10cm across, 560m away; Pluto would be just over 1.6mm across, 4.5km (2.8 miles) in the distance. This is already getting hard to grasp - the sheer amount of empty space boggles the mind. Outside of the solar system, the nearest star - Alpha Centaurai - would be 29km (18 miles) away. The centre of the milky way? 188,340,398 kilometres away - on our scale model it would be placed about a fifth of the way between Mars and Jupiter. Current estimates are that there exist around 100 billion galaxies within the visible universe.

Time’s just as bad. The best analogy I’ve heard came from Richard Dawkins: if you stretch out your arm and use the distance from the centre of your body to your fingertip to represent the time since the formation of Earth, brushing the edge of your fingernail would wipe away the dust representing the entire period of man’s existence.

At the other end of the size scale are atoms and molecules. The average small glass of water contains about 225 cubic centimetres of water. This works out at 7,525,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water. This is far larger than the number of sand grains in the Sahara, and probably more than there are on the entire planet.

Richard Feynman came up with a good analogy for representing the size of an atom: if you enlarged an apple to the size of the Earth, the atoms would be roughly the size of the original apple. What’s amazing is that we can directly view atoms, in some cases, using electron microscopes. But that’s only half of it, because atoms themselves are almost completely empty, to a staggering degree. This website is a scale model of a hydrogen atom (on most computer monitors). Electrons and protons are close enough in size that they can be visualised in reference to each other, but the distance between them cannot. Make the electron the size of a pixel, and the proton about 1000 pixels across, and there’s still eleven miles of emptiness between the two.

The most insane analogy I ever read was from string theorist Brian Greene, when talking about the relative sizes of the theoretical strings which comprise all matter. He says that a string is to an atom as a tree is to the known universe. Unsurprisingly, nobody’s yet come up with a way to verify the existence of something so small.

Large numbers are sometimes useful for debunkage. Homeopathic ‘remedies’ supposedly increase in potency as they are diluted. A relatively standard amount of dilution is ‘30C’, which means that the amount of ‘remedy’ is to reduced 1 in 100, thirty times over. When you figure it out (I’m going by what somebody tells me on this one, since I keep messing up the calculations) this is equivalent to placing one cubic centimetre of substance into a sphere of water with a radius of 800 light years, stirring until randomly distributed, then taking a cupful. It’s highly unlikely there’ll even be one molecule of the original substance in the cup, and that’s amongst the aforementioned 7 million billion billion molecules. And there are other remedies which claim potencies of 200C.

Hopefully the maths in the above stands up to scrutiny - let me know if I’ve made any silly mistakes! For some reason these numbers are astonishing me even more than usual, today.

Phenomenon of the day is the Fata Morgana mirage, which I heard about this afternoon. Named after Arthurian antagonist Morgana Le Fay, whose home was a floating castle, the mirage creates the appearance of large structures floating in the air. This photo of a phantom city, floating above the ocean, was taken in China earlier this month:

It could be a hoax, but multiple sources have the same kind of image, and the illusion has recognisable characteristics.

Hot air on top of cold ocean water refracts light back downwards and around the Earth, resulting in the appearance of objects that are actually located over the horizon. This has apparently resulted in sailors witnessing actually distant ships floating in the sky towards them. The effect is rarely smooth and commonly results in objects becoming stretched both horizontally and vertically, resulting in what look like spires and towers, hence the Morgana Le Fay link.

The non-smooth refraction can also cause the image to repeat in places, and this can be seen in the above photo. The buildings aren’t really as tall as they seem - if you look closely you can see that there’s a repeating section in their middle.

It’s an example of a superior mirage - superior meaning that the false image is above the actual image - an effect which can be seen at sunrise/sunset, when the sun is visible for a couple of minutes when really below the horizon.

I heard about this from the rather excellent Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast, which I only discovered yesterday.

BBC News and Scientific American report on intriguing results from a recent biology experiment. Researchers found that mice with white patches could produce offspring with white patches but only non-white-patch genes. Assuming that these white patches had the same cause, this flouts the current theory of genetics. Subsequent investigation is hinting that RNA - the bridge between DNA and proteins that affect the body - can act as an arbiter of heredity¹, which is fascinating. The exact method isn’t yet known, but I imagine that this ‘paramutation’ confirmation will be eagerly investigated. There’s already speculation that this may explain the strangely low number of genes found in the human genome.

1. I love that phrase [↩]

This afternoon I finally listened to the Stephen Fry / Christopher Hitchens debate on blasphemy and religious tolerance. It’s 1hr 20mins, but I’d say it’s definitely worth the time. It’s not so much of a debate as the participants only really differ on the extent to which they would fight back, but the points they make are, as you’d expect, intelligent and well articulated. The sheer level of knowledge between the pair of them is something to behold.

An MP3 of the full recording can be found here, but hopefully nobody will mind if I split the last few minutes into a separate file. The audience were allowed to ask questions at the end, and somebody raised the old argument that without religion there is only an ‘atomistic reductivist society’. There is no virtue in the claim, no matter how eleganty phrased, that without religion there is no beauty or wonder. It has been dismantled by greats such as Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman, but Stephen Fry’s response is quite something. The 2.8mb 6-minute MP3 is here.

The Guardian has the direct quotes I referred to this morning:

Dr Peter Fisher, clinical director of the Royal Homeopathic Hospital, told the programme: “I think what this suggestion amounts to is a form of medical apartheid: any therapy which can’t trace its origins to what is called the biochemical model should be excluded from the NHS.”

Then there’s this enlightened chap:

Terry Cullen, chairman of the British Complementary Medicine Association, said Prof Baum’s letter was “frustrating”.

He said: “It’s very frustrating that senior responsible people dismiss complementary medicine for the sole reason that it doesn’t have the definitive scientific proof that other drugs have. There is so much anecdotal evidence that thousands of people gain benefit from using complementary medicines. We shouldn’t dismiss that.”

Yes we bloody well should. The anecdotal evidence was looked at, and experiments were performed to see whether it has any basis in reality. It doesn’t. That’s all there is too it. Now we move on.

Incidentally, I know of a local homeopath who charges £90 per hour-long session, which ‘includes all remedies’. The remedy being, you know, water. I can only assume that the NHS is paying a similar amount.

Unfortunately, this kind of crap isn’t something that can be laughed off. Whether the espousal of complementary medicine is based in genuine belief or simply greed, it’s always insidious and it actively adds to the world’s suffering. No matter how eloquent the words of royalty, the voice of reason must speak louder.

A group of UK doctors has heavily criticised the NHS for investing in alternative medicines. I just heard the head of some UK homeopathic society describe this as ‘medical apartheid’. He trotted out the usual claim that homeopathy has plenty of evidence to support it, and that adherents to the ‘biomedical model’ will always ignore other treatments. As far as I can tell, the ‘biomedical model’ is one of those phrases only used by practitioners of alternative medicine, much like ‘Darwinism’ is only used by creationists. This claim about the evidence behind homeopathy is demonstrably false. It’s like Ben Goldacre says:

I’m talking about huge meta-analyses, summing together vast numbers of little trials, adding all the numbers up, and finding that overall, homeopathy is no better than placebo. That’s not absence of evidence that it works. That’s positive evidence that homeopathy does not work better than placebo.

Before we go any further, I have two special messages for the alternative therapists reading this: firstly, please, if you’re going to write in to the letters page, alluding triumphantly to some single obscure positive homeopathy study, can you at least explain why this string of huge meta-analyses are not valid? It’s getting a bit embarrassing the way you all just pretend they don’t exist. The British Homeopathic Association doesn’t even list them - the biggest, most definitive studies on homeopathy - in its list of research on homeopathy at Trusthomeopathy.org .

And secondly, please, a plea on behalf of the state: it was very expensive to do all these trials, and if you make us do that for every little notion you concoct from your imagination, you will bring the country to its knees. If that was the plan all along then I salute you.

See here, too. The Department of Health isn’t terribly helpful:

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health (DoH) said it was up to clinicians and trusts to decide on the best treatment for a patient.

“We know it is important that as more people turn to these therapies a solid evidence base is developed,” she said.

“Patients rightly expect to have clear information about the range of treatments that are available to them, including complementary therapies.”

No, people have a right to clear information about what’s going to make them better. If I decide that monkey brains are the great cure for all illness, and set up my own British Monkey Brain Association, under the above criteria I could demand that the NHS suggest this as a complementary therapy. You have to go with what works, not whatever’s available.

Nobody’s ignoring evidence. There’s no medical apartheid. It’s just trying to make people better, using anything that works.

Ben Goldacre writes the excellent ‘Bad Science’ column in the Guardian. From his blog:

Dr Chris Malyszewicz PhD, disgraced MRSA “expert” who got false positive results from his garden shed laboratory with his non-accredited correspondence course PhD from America and his lack of microbiology training, and demonstrable (and demonstrated, and admitted) lack of microbiology knowledge, fountain of every single MRSA “undercover swab” scare in every single tabloid, who had never previously made it into a broadsheet newspaper, who I roundly trounced in five consecutive Bad Science columns, and various Radio 4 shows, and who has not appeared in a single newspaper since then, is quoted at length and trumpeted as a major scientific expert today in no lesser paper than…. The Observer!!!

That is pretty much a perfect sentence.

BoingBoing reports that Coventry university is now offering a degree-level course in Parapsychology. From the BBC News article:

The 15 post-graduate students starting the first course this autumn will look at the paranormal using several scientific methods.

For instance, some will investigate haunted houses, looking at statistics on which parts of buildings provide the most sightings.

Extra-sensory perception - where two people seem to communicate without using sound, vision, touch or smell - will also be looked at.

The skeptic side of my brain is suggesting that this is a big waste of time, but even accepting that…

Dr Lawrence said: “We’ve got to look at what people are experiencing.

“No one has bothered to look, so people’s view of the world has been divided into two components: the secular and humanist, and the religious.

That’s manifestly untrue. Of course people have bothered to look. There have been claims of ghosts and ESP since the scientific method was first suggested, and who wouldn’t want to properly investigate ghosts? It’s just that every single time anybody has looked, nothing has been found. Plenty of scientists have looked at both ghosts and ESP, and concluded that the existing evidence is flawed, and nothing supports the claims. The normal response is that mainstream science simply ignores the evidence, but given the sheer number of people convinced of the existence of both phenomena you might have expected a practitioner to seek fame and fortune by providing said evidence on the Internet, for example. Show that ESP exists and that’s a guaranteed nobel prize, an easy $1,000,000, plus nigh-on eternal fame. But nobody has. Of course this doesn’t mean that there’s definitely nothing there, but it does suggest it very strongly, and it’s very different from “no one has bothered to look”.

The psychology of parapsychology is far more interesting to me. To take just one tributary, the best so-called practictioners of ESP are actually experts, whether they know it or not, in cold reading, which often involves picking up on very subtle clues in body language and speech. It turns out that humans are actually very, very bad at hiding their true feelings, for good evolutionary reasons involving the eradication of ‘cheats’ who would fake emotion for their own personal gain. In fact, the Facial Action Coding System details the meanings of involuntary facial muscle reflexes, and trained users can invariably determine when people are lying. This is all wonderful to me. I’d be as happy as anybody if ESP was proven to be real, but with no reason to suspect it beyond hearsay I’m more than happy to follow the evidence.

Last week I mentioned Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the authors of Freakonomics. Their latest article in the New York Times is apparently causing a stir, and it’s not hard to see why. In it they describe the work of psychology professor Anders Ericsson:

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the “Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance,” a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

The full article describes the most effective methods of learning, which appear to be goal-setting and immediate feedback. Given the enormous amount of research that has apparently resulted in the conclusions, I think this should be spread as far and wide as possible.

Nobody, but nobody, could resist linking to this. Why? Let me say only this: sex in an MRI machine.

Kinda like ’snakes on a plane’, only opposite. Btw, the comments are as entertaining as the article itself.

I’d hate to be a weather forecaster. You do an excellent job of understanding weather systems that are inherently unpredictable (chaotic, in fact) using physics that isn’t always very well understood, yet everybody thinks you’re rubbish because the view out of their window isn’t what you said.

Having said that, there are times when the whole thing is a foregone conclusion. The rules should be rewritten: chaotic, but cloudy during eclipses.