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Science

(Yet) Another Year End List 346

Posted by Hemos from the if-kansas-is-said-"kan-zize"-why-isn't-it-"ar-kanzize" dept.
gordonb writes "New Scientist has yet another of those endless end-of-year lists, "13 things that do not make sense", including such topics discussed on Slashdot this year as the placebo effect, dark energy, and the ever-popular cold fusion. I know there are a lot more than 13 things that don't make sense, such as free markets, but, oxymorons aside, this is an interesting list, nevertheless."
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(Yet) Another Year End List More

(Yet) Another Year End List

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  • Research mistakes or conundrums? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dada21 ( 163177 ) * <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:16PM (#14378797) Homepage Journal
    The placebo effect does work! A friend of the family is a hypochondriac (I used to be a BAD one), and always has the same cold or disease as someone else. I told her that the trick to fending off hypochondria is to gently tap the underside of her chin 5 times slowly and the symptoms will go away.

    Guess what? It worked. I just made it up but I told her I heard about it on a medical show. The power of the mind is amazing, but it has taught me how easily duped we humans are. I guess this means don't trust anyone until you know what their end desire is.

    This is an interesting article, but it seems common for them to say that these unknown "problems" might all boil down to bad research -- and I believe that could likely be the answer for many. "Bad research" covers all science conundrums: either you misread the results, or previous bad research gave you an incorrect theory.

    Problems solved :)
    • My sister had insomnia. I told her that I heard on a medical show on the radio that hitting oneself over the head with a hammer tends to help with sleeping. No more insomnia! I just made that up. Who said placebos don't work?

    • Re:Research mistakes or conundrums? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:33PM (#14378911)

      That's not proving the placebo effect, because hypochondria's a mental state. The placebo effect is when a real illness is treated with a placebo, not when imaginary ones are treated with a placebo.

      Think about it - there's nothing odd about make-believe cures being able to affect make-believe illnesses. It's like when you are kids, and your make-believe bulletproof vest stops your friends' make-believe bullets shot from their make-believe guns. The placebo effect is like when those make-believe bulletproof vests stop real bullets.

      • The placebo effect is like when those make-believe bulletproof vests stop real bullets.
        The difference being that study after study shows the placebo effect to work, whereas the only extensive use of real bullets on make-believe armour [wikipedia.org] found the placebo armour to be sadly ineffective...

      • Re:Research mistakes or conundrums? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Leontes ( 653331 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @01:29PM (#14379236)
        Mental illnesses are real illnesses and have hard, acute neurological expression in the brain. There is nothing "make-believe" about something that is chronic, repetitive and deeply seated. Depression is not just something that can be snapped out of, nor can PTSD be ignored into dissipating, the fear and desperation of hypochondria comes is real. These illnesses are not merely coming from a person who is playing a casual game of make-believe who needs to get a grip. Mental illnesses are the flipside of the placebo effect: It's when your make-believe bullets pierce your real bulletproof vests.

        This isn't even looking at somatoform disorders (physical ailments that come from the toll of being in a mental illness). The truth is that the human mind is far more of a powerful, persuasive instrument than we are normally led to believe and the state of mentality is very much a physical rather than imaginary thing. Placebo effects likewise are not usually effective in helping such mental disorders, so the grandparent's point that it works is meaningful and should not be dismissed. Most likely, the tapping repetition forced the client to breath, and take note and prevent the panic that is prevalent in most anxiety disorders, which in turn backed the person away from their usual repetition compulsion, bypassing the worse part of her illness.

        • Re:Research mistakes or conundrums? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Mr. Slippery ( 47854 ) <tms&infamous,net> on Monday January 02, 2006 @03:07PM (#14379826) Homepage
          Mental illnesses are real illnesses and have hard, acute neurological expression in the brain.

          Certainly some people have strong difficulties in their lives. And certainly some people have deformities or injuries to their nervous system. But the idea that "mental illnesses" such as depression have direct neurological expression is not as supported [time.com] as SSRI makers would like you to believe. (Another link: here [intenex.net].)

          Labeling psychological difficulties (other than neulogical illness or injury) is questionable [reason.com]. It has strong legal and social consequences that we ought to consider.

          The DSM, the official defintion of mental health and illness, has its roots in a military effort to decide who was too crazy (or not crazy enough?) to be a soldier. It's critera for listed condtions are famously vauge. And who decides which condtions are "illnesses"? Just a few decades ago, homosexuality was a "mental illness" according to the DSM.

          These illnesses are not merely coming from a person who is playing a casual game of make-believe who needs to get a grip.

          I agree, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should use the word "illness" to describe these states.

      • In the article they talk about pain relief by a placebo, so pain is not a totally real bullet either: pain is quite influenced by the mind even without placebo.
        Once I shielded me for the pain of a dying nerve in a tooth by reading a book, and a dying nerve in a tooth is *quite* painful, granted this is quite different from a placebo more similar with the use of hynosis to shield a patient from pain during a surgery.
      • And think about it some more: there's nothing odd about a placebo curing a real illness either. The brain is highly connected to the body, and if you believe you are getting cured, there's an obvious pathway for that to have an effect. What would be surprising would be if people who thought they were receiving no treatment, but were being snuck a placebo in some way reacted differently from people who believed they wre receiving no treatment and were not receiving placebo.

    • Re:Research mistakes or conundrums? (Score:4, Funny)

      by CODiNE ( 27417 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @02:51PM (#14379739) Homepage
      Hey THANKS! I feel a lot better already. :D
  • Why would a Wookie, an eight-foot tall Wookie, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does NOT MAKE SENSE! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does NOT MAKE SENSE! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, 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
  • FTFA: But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen.

    I was under the impression that Inflation is caused by a certain energy value of the Higgs field. Did I miss something and Higgs field is no longer the savior of Inflation?
    • The Higgs Boson has never been observed experimentaly. A small number of events were recorded by the LEP experiment (CERN), and these could be interpreted as resulting from Higgs Bosons, but the evidence is inconclusive.
      The Large Hadron Collider, currently under construction (also at CERN), is expected to eventually confirm or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson with a few months of experiments once completed. At this point, we have only indirect experimental evidence. We can't t

    • Re:Inflation caused by Higgs field? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by judmarc ( 649183 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @01:48PM (#14379357)

      Bit more complicated than that -

      Inflation could have been caused by a phase change in the Higgs field, but this is a necessary-not-sufficient part of the explanation for the observed features of the universe. Then one also has to find a reason for the phase change and why it happened to have the precise characteristics needed (there's some fine tuning of parameters required in order for what we see today to pop out the other end of this process).

      Then there's of course the root question of whether the Higgs field itself exists, though a lot of the Standard Model would have to be junked in order for it not to exist.

  • Wow, even year-end lists can be outdated. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:20PM (#14378826)
    This article is from March.

  • obligatory (Score:5, Funny)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:21PM (#14378838) Homepage
    "13 things that do not make sense"

    Why would a Wookie, an eight-foot tall Wookie, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does NOT MAKE SENSE! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does NOT MAKE SENSE! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, 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 deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, [approaches and softens] 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.

  • End of year list? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by edgr ( 781723 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:22PM (#14378844)
    Take a look at the date on TFA.
    13 things that do not make sense

    19 March 2005
    NewScientist.com news service
    Michael Brooks
    Doesn't seem so end of year to me.

  • Dupe (Score:5, Informative)

    by DaHat ( 247651 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:24PM (#14378857)
    Not only that... it's not much of a year end list... being published in March of 05 after all.

    Heck, this was even on /. around the same time 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense [slashdot.org]

  • Snide (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dun Malg ( 230075 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:25PM (#14378861) Homepage
    I know there are a lot more than 13 things that don't make sense, such as free markets, but, oxymorons aside, this is an interesting list, nevertheless."

    All right! Always room for a little mindless, irrelevant editorializing, right?

    • Taken at face value the term "free market" is an oxymoron, because a market is a place where things are bought and sold and so cannot be free in that sense. "Fair markets" or "Information-neutral markets" would be more correct, but there is no direct connection between information neutral markets and freedom: the term itself is loaded politically. In any case (and someone won a Nobel prize in economics for showing this) free markets are rarely free in reality because the large players always seek to make th

    • Re:Snide (Score:3, Funny)

      by Surt ( 22457 )
      Indeed, and history has shown just how much more sense slave markets make, right?

  • Too bad nothing on this list has changed... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:25PM (#14378864)
    Since the last time [slashdot.org] it was posted on /.

  • Ooo, clever (Score:3, Funny)

    by Staplerh ( 806722 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:25PM (#14378869) Homepage
    I know there are a lot more than 13 things that don't make sense, such as free markets, but, oxymorons aside, this is an interesting list, nevertheless.
    Ooo... a clever way to stir the pot without seeming too trollish... Why don't we cue the requisite libertarian free-market crusader and then we can have one of those fun debates that the poster seems to be so keen on initiating?

    • Re:Ooo, clever (Score:3, Funny)

      by dada21 ( 163177 ) *
      I specifically made no mention of anything :)

      Do I get +1 ThankGodHeShutUp now?

  • This whole article reminds me of Sagan's book (Score:5, Interesting)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:34PM (#14378913) Homepage Journal
    "Demon Haunted World"(well, techincally "Science as a Candle in the Darkness") which I am currently slogging through. He discusses a lot of there same "phenomenon" such as placebos and this, my personal favorite:
    IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says

    Actually, earlier than even the "WoW" signal(sometime in the 60s IIRC) a bunch of Soviet scientists convened a conference to discuss how they swore they found intelligent life because they found a long, continuous perfect sine wave somewhere out in space. Turns out it was a quasar, a hithero unkown phenomena, but the Soviets made laughing stocks out of themselves by assuming first it was aliens instead of a more mundane explanation...

  • Sceptical (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aepervius ( 535155 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:34PM (#14378916)
    Firstly as somebody pointed out at the FIRST line and last lien it is writte "19 march 2005"... That is quite the start of the year. Second, as 4th position again some homeopathic non reproducible experiment, and cold fusion (13th). This rather sound like "unreproducible" research rather unexplicable stuff. I think jsut for a kicker I will have a look around to see what happenned as follow up from those... But since the only stuff we heard recently on homeopathy was the lancet(?) study, and since homeopath would jump on the gun for any study proving homeopathy works, I won't hold my breath. Probably again badly washed up test tube. I tell you, experiment on basophile are cursed :).
  • The placebo effect does work! A friend of the family is a hypochondriac (I used to be a BAD one), and always has the same cold or disease as someone else. I told her that the trick to fending off hypochondria is to gently tap the underside of her chin 5 times slowly and the symptoms will go away. I don't think it's a question of whether the placebo effect works or not. Scientists know that it works; it's just an inexplicable phenomenon. My first /. post :)
  • Anyone else notice the growing trend of people finding a cute little way to troll in their submittal paragraphs? I'd think this sort of blatant trolling wouldn't be allowed by the editors, hopefully they notice this trend and start trying to reverse it.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:52PM (#14378995)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I'm not a big fan of unregulated free markets (since I've seen what they lead to),

      An unregulated free market didn't lead to Microsoft, because we don't *have* an unregulated free market
      in the United States. In a real unregulated market, without things like patents, and the bazillions of dollars worth of government restrictions and regulations required to start a business, there would be a lot more competition for MS. It would actually be much harder for monopolies like MS to become overwhelmingly powerful in a real free market, because it would be much easier to set up shop and compete with them on a level playing field.

      Of course some people say that there would be no innovation without patents... I contend that such an assertion is not true, and that the lack of artificial government granted monopolies (patents) would result in a constant "arms race" situation where companies would be forced to innovate constantly or die. Look at how military technology advances... the US is forced to constantly work on developing better battle technology exactly because there is no way to prevent our competitors from using what has already been invented. I mean, it's not like we could patent the nuclear bomb and keep Russia, China, India, Pakistan, etc. from using it...

      Give us a real free market sometime, and let's see what happens... until then it's all just speculation, because we damn sure don't have anything approaching a free market now.
      • > Of course some people say that there would be no innovation without patents... I contend that such an assertion is not true, and that the lack of artificial government granted monopolies (patents) would result in a constant "arms race" situation where companies would be forced to innovate constantly or die.

        The US drug companies are always on television telling you how important their profits are to continued research, but outside observers say they spend 10x as much on advertising as they do on researc
    • On topic, since the discussion was started by the Slashdot editor: U.S. Federal Deficit by Political Party [futurepower.org].

  • Our kids need to see more articles like this! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tsar ( 536185 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:53PM (#14379010) Homepage Journal
    We need more journalism like this in the popular media, to teach our kids that we don't know everything, and that some frontiers of knowledge haven't yet been pushed beyond their reach.

    The evolution/creation/intelligent-design debate has taken on the nature of trench warfare; the opponents believe that the least enemy victory will spell doom for their way of life, so they dig in and protect every axiom of their belief system no matter how fragile or poorly supported. As a result, young people are told that nothing in their religion's official interpretation of Holy Writ is open to question. In school they are told the same thing about the current geological, paleontological and cosmological dogma.

    I'm sure that many church leaders honestly believe that if kids are encouraged to doubt and question, they will lose their nascent faith, and perhaps discourage others. Likewise many educators assume that students who doubt and question current scientific beliefs will never become scientists, and undermine others who might.

    The contemptible response is that those who question religious doctrine are branded as nonbelievers, and those who question scientific doctrine are dismissed as ignoramuses. Nothing goes so far to discourage the development of the scientific and spiritual leaders of the next generation.

    Healthy skepticism, not jaded cynicism, should be encouraged everywhere if there is to be true advancement in any field. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and neither are knowledge and wisdom.
    • As a result, young people are told that nothing in their religion's official interpretation of Holy Writ is open to question. In school they are told the same thing about the current geological, paleontological and cosmological dogma.

      They are? When? Where? Any decent scientific education always shows that scientific view change. I would be interested to see a report of any school scientific teaching that states that any current theory is unquestionable dogma.

      Likewise many educators assume that students
      • The only way to question science is via the scientific method.

      • They are? When? Where? Any decent scientific education always shows that scientific view change. I would be interested to see a report of any school scientific teaching that states that any current theory is unquestionable dogma.

        I remember in a junior high science class being asked the following true/false question: Did birds evolve from reptiles? This was a straight forward, black-and-white question that left no room for doubt whatsoever, and it was indicative of the public education I received. When I

    • Others have commented that questioning science is the only way to advance science (Einstein questioned science regularly), so I'll leave that alone.

      I do want to bring up that there seem to be some religions on this planet which do promote questioning and doubting, and learning about other religions. I always wondered why such tolerance didn't take over the religio-sphere, so to speak, since it should be more encompassing, more welcoming, more interesting.

      But, I suppose that just plays into your point:

    • Great post. One thought:

      the opponents believe that the least enemy victory will spell doom for their way of life

      I dunno. This is totally subjective but I think it's more than a defensive initiative. It smells to me like a "they should do things our way" busybody approach. Especially given the "poor us, persecuted American Christians" bullshit that is so often spouted.

      Food for thought.

  • Late addition! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Klowner ( 145731 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @12:59PM (#14379040) Homepage
    Women.
  • Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

    I don't get this. Maybe a Physics geek can clue me in. Why would we expect to see different temperatures? If the big bang exploded in a completely uniform way, I would expect the "shrapnel" to behave in a completely uniform way in every direction. What exactly would cause on

    • Re:Uniform temperature (Score:3, Insightful)

      by chill ( 34294 )
      I don't get this. Maybe a Physics geek can clue me in. Why would we expect to see different temperatures? If the big bang exploded in a completely uniform way, I would expect the "shrapnel" to behave in a completely uniform way in every direction. What exactly would cause one direction to be hotter than another direction?

      It would only then look uniform if you were are the center of it, and it all spread out from where you were.

      If you were on one side, it would look hotter on the side it came from and cooler
    • The light from the nearer horizon is younger, that light is from the horizon as it was in more recent times and so should seem to come from cooler matter.
    • > > Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

      > I don't get this. Maybe a Physics geek can clue me in. Why would we expect to see different temperatures? If the big bang exploded in a completely uniform way, I would expect the "shrapnel" to behave in a completely uniform way in every direction. What exactly w

  • #2 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by manavendra ( 688020 )
    Hmm, inflation eh? Here's another wild idea - What if during the big-bang the energy released was so much that it actually *increased* the speed of light itself, till it finally slowed down and settled..? :-)
  • CERN Courier says it could all be an error in calculation: http://www.cerncourier.com/main/article/45/8/8 [cerncourier.com]

  • Cosmic Rays (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @01:38PM (#14379297) Homepage
    I'd like to see someone explain the process that created a cosmic ray (reference [fourmilab.ch]) with energy (51 Joules) comparable to a brick being dropped on your foot.

  • natural nuclear reactors, built by bacteria (Score:4, Informative)

    by rheotaxis ( 528103 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @01:45PM (#14379341) Homepage
    This article states that "A recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon..." in the question about constants. I never knew about this, so off to google. According to one web page, bacterial life-forms [ecolo.org] were involved in the process of running these reactors. This idea isn't mentioned in the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]. Well, at least the wikipedia article does mention about the alpha constant, and says, "there is no physical reason why it should be exactly constant."

  • 9 Dark energy

    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. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of

  • Viking results and Martian life (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chemicalscum ( 525689 ) on Monday January 02, 2006 @02:36PM (#14379649) Journal
    Gilbert Levins labelled release (LR) results from the Viking expedition, indicating the presence of microbial life on Mars makes more and more sense. The arguements against it from the chemistry experiment on the expedition don't hold up. The experiment used a mass spectrometer (MS), the set up was designed by Klaus Bieman one of the most distinguished mass spectrometrists in the world. When they got negative results and the biology experiment got positive results, they were not going to accept it and they carried out an organized campaign to discredit the LR results proposing all sorts of experimentally unreproducible hypotheses to show that the LR results were a false positive.

    Well I am a chemist and a mass spectrometrist who in my youth used to regard Bieman as an almost godlike figure. Well he was wrong. The MS results were of limited sensitivity. The most likely form microbial life in Martian soil would take is to be dormant spores waiting for the rare periods when liquid water becomes available. These spores could be in a very low level in the Martian soil well below the level that would produce sufficent quantities of organic compounds to be detectible by MS.

    The LR experiment is very sensitive. Levin was able to use it to show the presence of microorganisms in Antarctic ice cores, which could not be detected chemically, but which could be confirmed by the standard microbiological procedures of plating out. Lunar rock from the Apollo mission gave no false positives in the LR experiment.

    All the recent results from Mars probes showing both evidence for the existance of liquid water on the surface of Mars in the past and for evidence of the presence of water now, all serve to support the claim that the original Viking biology results provide a strong indication that microbial life is present on Mars. There is a case to answer. Now is the time for NASA to invest in sending a chiral LR experiment to Mars to further investigate and hopefully come up with some conclusive answers.

  • "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."

    28 billion? Closer to 100 billion if my memory serves me - they forgot to take into account expansion. Journalists shouldn't guess scientific data...
  • From the article...
    Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?

    Bird droppings.
  • If you read the older literature, it seems that placebos are very powerful treatments for many conditions, with a substantial fraction of subjects showing a positive response to placebo. The effect of placebos has been attributed to patient expectation. Some studies showed that patient expectation could override known pharmacological effects of drugs; patients given a stimulant but told that it was a sedative exhibited signs of sedation, and vice-versa. On the other hand, modern studies (e.g. this study [nih.gov] su
  • The fundamental idea behind cold fusion is the same as that for Muon catalyzed fusion - reduce the size of deuterium atoms and the nuclear attraction can be increased to the point that fusion occurs.

    Palladium will hold more deuterium per unit volume than the same volume of liquid deuterium will. This means that the nuclei are closer to each other than they are in liquid deuterium. With the proper molecular structure of Palladium this increased density is enough that the deuterium will fuse. This does not re

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