Some of this stuff is just fun. The leafhopper feeds on the sap of the tree. And the Gecko will stop by and wait to be fed. The narrator explains that scientists have not determined why this happens, perhaps the Gecko keeps aware predators? That seems somewhat flimsy as a guess to me but what do I know. The narrator does say that the sweet honeydew is what remains from the sap once the leafhopper has extracted the protein.
Related: Macavity’s a Mystery Cat – Swimming Ants
Now comes yet another sobering reminder that lowering a surrogate marker doesn’t necessarily bring better health. On Feb. 6, the National Institutes of Health announced it was halting a key trial for diabetes. Researchers had hoped the trial, dubbed ACCORD (Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes), would show that more aggressive lowering of blood sugar would significantly reduce deaths. Instead, the opposite happened. More people in the intensive treatment group died than in the group getting standard care. “A thorough review of the data shows that the medical treatment strategy of intensively reducing blood sugar below current clinical guidelines causes harm in these…patients,” says Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute.
Scientific study often results in less than clear conclusions, especially in complex systems. There is great difficulty understanding what is actually going on, what interactions are present, what factors are significant, etc.. One of the great problems with the low level of scientific literacy in the USA is so many people think science is about simple absolute truth.
Scientific inquiry, especially related to health care, must attempt to gain insights from confusing signals. To gain scientific literacy one must understand basics concepts, like data is a proxy for what you aim to understand. To understand yourself you need to accept that science is not math. For a long time we are going to have to do our best to build up our understanding of human health (and other complex systems) as best we can. We need to be able to sort out what are solid conclusion, what are guesses, what seem like reasonable explanation and what level of confidence we can have in statements.
It is not enough to learn facts we need to be able to think scientifically and comprehend the subtleties surrounding the advances in scientific understanding. Some criticize newspapers and popular science for providing too simplistic a view of new scientific knowledge. While this can be a problem I really see the problem much more serious if people read obviously overly simplistic articles and don’t understand that it is just scratching the surface. The reader needs to take responsibility too. I enjoy many great articles that gloss over many of the details but provide a quick view of intriguing new breakthroughs.
Related: New Questions on Treating Cholesterol – Evolution is Fundamental to Science – Contradictory Medical Studies – The Study of Bee Colony Collapses Continues – Antibiotics Too Often Prescribed for Sinus Woes
Mistakes in Experimental Design and Interpretation:
This is an excellent article discussing very common errors in how people use data. We have tendencies that lead us to draw faulty conclusions from data. Given that it is important to understand what common mistakes are made to help us counter the natural tendencies.
Related: Seeing Patterns Where None Exists – Illusions, Optical and Other – Understanding Data – Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data – How to Deal with False Research Findings – descriptive “theory” and normative theory
Do your own experiment on quantum erasing – Quantum Erasing in the Home (for instructions). From the accompanying article, A Do-It-Yourself Quantum Eraser:
Nevertheless, the individual photons that make up the light wave are indeed doing the full quantum dance with all its weirdness intact, although you could only truly prove that by sending the photons through the apparatus and detecting them one at a time. Such a procedure, unfortunately, remains beyond the average home experimenter.
Related: Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids – Particles and Waves
On March 27th a high-pressure test at CERN of a Fermilab-built ‘inner-triplet’ series of three quadrupole magnets in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider failed. Fermilab Director on the test failure:
We need and want to make sure that we find the root causes of the problem and from the lessons learned build a stronger institution. Beyond that, there is no substitute for the commitment each of us makes to excellence, to critical thinking and to sweating every detail.
In a Fermilab Update on Inner Triplet Magnets at LHC they state: “The goal at CERN and Fermilab is now to redesign and repair the inner triplet magnets and, if necessary, the DFBX without affecting the LHC start-up schedule. Teams at CERN and Fermilab have identified potential repairs that could be carried out expeditiously without removing undamaged triplet magnets from the tunnel.”
Related: Fermilab Statement on LHC Magnet Test Failure – Accelerators and Nobel Laureates – Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame
Continue reading
From the excellent xkcd comic – The Difference:
Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).
Why so much medical research is rot:
Dr Austin, of course, does not draw those conclusions. His point was to shock medical researchers into using better statistics, because the ones they routinely employ today run the risk of identifying relationships when, in fact, there are none. He also wanted to explain why so many health claims that look important when they are first made are not substantiated in later studies.
As I said in, Seeing Patterns Where None Exists: “Page 8 of Statistics for Experimenters by George Box, William Hunter (my father) and Stu Hunter (no relation) shows a graph of the population (of people) versus the number of storks which shows a high correlation. “Although in this example few would be led to hypothesize that the increase in the number of storks caused the observed increase in population, investigators are sometimes guilty of this kind of mistake in other contexts.'”
Mystery of the Himalayas Solved:
If not for the surge, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay might have found themselves reaching the “roof of the world” by conquering Aconcagua (6,962m) in Argentina while Everest languished at a mere 6,848m above sea level, 2,000m below its actual peak. The discovery of the missing mantle – the cold, heavy rock beneath the crust – was revealed last week by Professor Wang-Ping Chen at the University of Illinois, whose team used more than 200 super-sensitive seismometers strung across the Himalayas, from India deep into Tibet.
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But some scientists remain sceptical. One geologist at Cambridge, who wanted to remain anonymous because he hadn’t yet read Professor Chen’s paper, suggested that the slab could be the remains of the Tethys Ocean plate. Professor England counters that both the Asian and Indian plates have moved north since then
Related: Water in Earth’s Deep Mantle – Drilling to the Center of the Earth
Besides unraveling some of the mysteries of human variation, the research, which is featured on the cover of the Dec. 16 issue of Science, has implications for understanding a host of human diseases including cancer, diabetes and rickets.