Why we stick to false beliefs: Feedback trumps hard evidence

People's beliefs are more likely to be reinforced by the positive or negative reactions they receive than by logic, reasoning and scientific data.

Ever wonder why flat earthers, birthers, climate change and Holocaust deniers stick to their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

New findings from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, suggest that feedback, rather than hard evidence, boosts people's sense of certainty when learning new things or trying to tell right from wrong.

Developmental psychologists have found that people's beliefs are more likely to be reinforced by the positive or negative reactions they receive in response to an opinion, task or interaction, than by logic, reasoning and scientific data.

Their findings, published today in the online issue of the journal Open Mind, shed new light on how people handle information that challenges their worldview, and how certain learning habits can limit one's intellectual horizons.

"If you think you know a lot about something, even though you don't, you're less likely to be curious enough to explore the topic further, and will fail to learn how little you know," said study lead author Louis Marti, a Ph.D. student in psychology at UC Berkeley.

This cognitive dynamic can play out in all walks of actual and virtual life, including social media and cable-news echo chambers, and may explain why some people are easily duped by charlatans.

"If you use a crazy theory to make a correct prediction a couple of times, you can get stuck in that belief and may not be as interested in gathering more information," said study senior author Celeste Kidd, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

Specifically, the study examined what influences people's certainty while learning. It found that study participants' confidence was based on their most recent performance rather than long-term cumulative results. The experiments were conducted at the University of Rochester.

For the study, more than 500 adults, recruited online through Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, looked at different combinations of colored shapes on their computer screens. They were asked to identify which colored shapes qualified as a "Daxxy," a make-believe object invented by the researchers for the purpose of the experiment.

With no clues about the defining characteristics of a Daxxy, study participants had to guess blindly which items constituted a Daxxy as they viewed 24 different colored shapes and received feedback on whether they had guessed right or wrong. After each guess, they reported on whether or not they were certain of their answer.

The final results showed that participants consistently based their certainty on whether they had correctly identified a Daxxy during the last four or five guesses instead of all the information they had gathered throughout.

"What we found interesting is that they could get the first 19 guesses in a row wrong, but if they got the last five right, they felt very confident," Marti said. "It's not that they weren't paying attention, they were learning what a Daxxy was, but they weren't using most of what they learned to inform their certainty."

An ideal learner's certainty would be based on the observations amassed over time as well as the feedback, Marti said.

Read more at Science Daily

'Alternative Facts' Have Plagued Science for Decades

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, used the phrase "alternative facts" earlier this year during a "Meet the Press" interview, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the size of the crowd at Trump's inauguration. While the phrase is newly infamous as a result, the phenomenon that it describes has a long history in both politics and science, according to an analysis presented today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

Public radar tends to be up for demonstrably false or implausible claims made by politicians and their spokespeople, but researchers say many people were duped in the past by alternative scientific "facts," and that the problem persists today.

"My main message is that, just as we need to be on the lookout for false or misleading information about politics and pop culture, we also need to be on the lookout for false or misleading information about science," Kevin Elliott, who conducted the analysis, told Seeker.

"Living an hour away from Flint, Mich., I'm especially cognizant of the ways that the lead industry tried to downplay the hazards of lead almost a hundred years ago in order to promote the use of lead in drinking water pipes and in gasoline," said Elliott, an associate professor at Michigan State University and the author of the book "A Tapestry of Values: An Introduction to Values in Science."

He and others contacted by Seeker focused on four general areas where alternative facts concerning scientific matters have been especially prevalent and damaging: the tobacco industry, the drug industry, the manufacturing industry and climate change.

Tobacco

In the 1950s American tobacco producers created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, whose purpose was to cast doubt on independent scientific research that was increasingly showing the harms of cigarette smoking, said Erik Conway, a historian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who co-authored, with Harvard's Naomi Oreskes, the book "Merchants of Doubt."

"They did this by funding critiques of academic or government science," Conway said, "by funding research programs designed to blame other activities for smoking's health effects, and even by publishing their own 'scientific' journal to have an apparently independent venue to publish their misleading studies in."

"They were successful in fending off tobacco regulation this way for nearly 70 years."

The effort led to what was later called "The Tobacco Strategy" by Oreskes and Conway. The strategy, she explained, involved creating uncertainty about the science behind smoking and health, stating that health claims were exaggerated, arguing that medical innovations and technology could solve any related problems, and emphasizing that there was no need for government interference.

Conway said that the tobacco industry even created "Bad Science: a Resource Book," to help other industries understand "how to play the game."

Drugs

Sergio Sismondo, a professor at Queen's University who has long studied the drug industry, told Seeker that certain players within the pharmaceutical industry "have supported and promoted alternative facts to cloud issues about how effective and safe certain products are, and about the structure of the drug industry as a whole."

As examples, he mentioned a diabetes drug that was introduced in 1999, even though "internal documents already showed that the drug carried heart risks." Sismondo said that several years later, in 2007, the company making the drug "engaged in a quick campaign to cloud the issue."

More generally, he shared that every decade or so, a university's drug development center publishes a figure for the cost of developing a prescription drug. The most recent from 2014, he said, was $2.6 billion.

"The research is supported and then promoted by the drug industry, which uses figures like that to justify high prices, long patents and more, but the figure is grossly misleading, because it rolls in various costs that could be seen as marketing and other business costs," Sismondo said. He added that the figure also focuses on new molecules at the center of research efforts, when actually many companies incur "much lower costs when they repurpose molecules."

Manufacturing

Problems related to the promotion of misleading or false claims extend to some manufacturers of other products too, Elliott said. For example, he said the known health hazards related to asbestos and vinyl chloride, in addition to lead, were withheld from the public so that the manufacturers "could promote false information about the safety of their products."

Like the tobacco industry, these companies became experts about "manufacturing doubt" over scientific evidence challenging the safety and health risks associated with their products. David Michaels, former head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, addressed the subject in detail in his book "Doubt Is Their Product."

A recent instance involved German automaker Volkswagen, which Elliott said cheated on emissions tests by installing a device in diesel engines that could detect when a test was being administered, and could change the way the vehicle performed to improve results. The device, he explained, allowed the company to sell its cars in the U.S. while its engines emitted pollutants up to 40 times above what's accepted by the Environmental Protection Agency. The automaker last month admitted guilt and agreed to pay $4.3 billion in criminal and civil penalties, reported CBS News.

Climate Change

Elliott, Oreskes, Conway and many others believe that "The Tobacco Strategy" continues to be followed by big oil companies in response to science concerning climate change. Heather Douglas of the University of Waterloo prefers the expletive "bullshit" instead of "alternative facts," since the phrase popularized by Kellyanne Conway "suggests a possible equivalency between one set of facts and another, and this is just not the case," she told Seeker. "Fact-checking by the media and tracking down sources readily reveals what is reliable and what is not, and the suggested equivalence is illusory.

"There are lots of things to disagree about in the realm of climate change — what are the regional climate projections, what energy policies should we adopt to mitigate the problem, etc. — but whether humans are a substantial cause is no longer one of them."

Polls and regulation concerning smoking of tobacco products indicate that most people now believe smoking cigarettes poses health risks. A Pew poll last year, however, found that nearly three-quarters of American polled do not trust that there is a large "scientific consensus" among climate scientists on human activities being the cause of client change. In response, Erik Conway said, "No one wants to believe that he or she, personally, is helping to destroy the world's ecosystems, and unlike smoking — a personal choice that can be reversed — no one in the industrialized world can stop emitting, because we're trapped in an infrastructure that leaves us no choice."

"So we live in denial instead," he said. "That's one reason the denialist message resonates so powerfully."

The Problem May Be Getting Worse

Although problems associated with misleading or false science are nothing new, several factors appear to be drive the current use of "alternative facts." One is the political climate, particularly in the U.S., Elliott said. "It's possible that our hyper-partisan political climate and our polarized use of social media has made us all more susceptible to accepting questionable scientific claims when they appeal to our political preferences."

Douglas agrees. She said that "the echo-chambers of social media exacerbate the problem of bullshit."

Genuine disagreement among scientists is an important, inherent part of the discipline, and is critical to the evolution of scientific knowledge. It can therefore be challenging to distinguish legitimate scientific debate from statements made by those who continue to follow "The Tobacco Strategy" or similar deceptive tactics.

"We need to look at who supports different facts," Sismondo said. "When one side of a disagreement is supported primarily by (self)-interested parties, whether directly or indirectly, that should lead us to discount that side. We can never completely discount challenges to accepted facts, but we should also recognize that sometimes the challenges are motivated by greed. These challenges can nitpick away at accepted knowledge, but often this nitpicking is scientifically frivolous."

Read more at Discovery News

Vaccine Fears Not New - Here's Why

There has been a lot of discussion and controversy about vaccinations over the past few months. In February the Toronto Star issued — and later retracted — a sensational front-page investigation suggesting that vaccines were dangerous; the next month talk show host Jimmy Kimmel encouraged his audience to get their kids vaccinated and ribbed vaccine-averse parents with a mock PSA from exasperated doctors.

All this happened as a measles outbreak that began in December 2014 at Disneyland unfolded; 147 people became infected with the disease before the outbreak ended in April. Many who fell ill were not immunized against measles, and spurred in part by public concern over the episode California governor Jerry Brown introduced (and last week signed) a law requiring all school-attending children to be vaccinated for public safety.

The law does not require childhood vaccinations for every child — only those enrolled in California public schools. Parents are not required to vaccinate children who go to private home schools or are home-schooled.

The move was widely praised by doctors but had many detractors. For example actor Jim Carrey took to social media to claim that Brown’s “fascist” law would “poison more children with mercury and aluminum.” During his rant Carrey used a photo of an autistic boy, without his family’s permission, suggesting that his condition had been caused by vaccines; Carrey later apologized. With passionate advocates on both sides of the issue the debate is far from over.

Anti-Vaccination Efforts

Why do some people doubt vaccine safety and efficacy? One reason is that their effectiveness cannot be proven on an individual basis. For example even people who are effectively vaccinated against a specific disease can still catch it (no vaccination is completely effective, and you might catch a different virus strain than the one you were inoculated against). This can lead people to doubt the usefulness of vaccines: if it’s possible to catch a disease with or without a vaccination, what’s the point?

But this position misses that fact that vaccinated people are far less likely to get the disease in the first place, and if they do happen to get it the symptoms will be less severe and more survivable.

A specific person’s experience with a specific vaccine (or any other medicine) is not a valid measure of the overall effectiveness. However the institutions best equipped to conduct the necessary large-scale studies (i.e., governments and big drug companies) are also those that the public often distrusts, leading to conspiracy theories.

Indeed one reason the anti-vaccination theme is so persistent is the strong conspiracy theory element to it. Conspiracy theories are of course notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to disprove. Many people distrust the medical establishment and “Big Pharma” almost as much as they distrust the government. The assumption is that the dangers and risks of vaccines are being intentionally hidden from the public by doctors and drug companies, in collusion with the government, for big profits.

Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, in their book “American Conspiracy Theories,” note bluntly that “Conspiracy theories about vaccines are partially to blame for decreased rates of vaccination and an increased incidence of disease.”

Andrea Kitta, an Associate Professor at East Carolina University and author of “Vaccinations and Public Concern in History,” notes that “The content of vaccines, especially in the case of preservatives, is a widely debated issue. Ingredients such as thimerosal, formaldehyde, mercury, and others, are frequently linked [in anti-vaccination claims] to the causation of diseases… All of these ingredients, regardless of whether or not they have been linked to an actual disease, are to blame because they are considered not ‘natural’.”

Many of the claims about “natural” versus “unnatural” chemicals used in vaccines have been thoroughly debunked. A USA Today article notes, for example, that “Vaccines have never contained methyl mercury, the toxic metal that can cause brain damage” and that while it’s true that vaccines contain aluminum, “babies get far more aluminum from food, including breast milk, than from vaccines.”

Given the current controversy some may think that protests about vaccinations are a recent phenomenon, but in fact the concerns date back centuries. There was resistance to the first smallpox vaccine, created in the late 1700s. Parents and the public — unfamiliar with medicine and how vaccination works — were horrified and disgusted when they learned that the vaccine was created by taking pus from the wounds of infected cows. Nevertheless, that procedure, as unappetizing as it may be, was effective and saved countless lives.

A British Anti-Vaccination League was created in 1853, asserting that the smallpox vaccine was dangerous, ineffective, and an infringement on personal rights by the government. Over 160 years later that theme continues to resonate strongly with anti-vaccination activists. Medical folklorist Kitta told Discovery News that “People who choose not to vaccinate truly believe their rights are being violated and believe they are in danger of further violation… Some people will now reject vaccines solely on the basis that they feel their rights are being violated—not because they necessarily oppose or are even uncertain about vaccination.”

Read more at Discovery News

How to Get Silicon Valley’s Anti-Vaxxers to Change Their Minds

There’s been a lot of shaming and blaming of the anti-vaccination crowd in response to the Disneyland measles outbreak (even we did it). And when we released our investigation of vaccination rates at Silicon Valley preschools, people were justifiably angry: Every unvaccinated kid at those schools threatens the greater community’s protection against disease. But yelling at anti-vaxxers won’t change their minds—which is what we need most to prevent more outbreaks. That begs the question: What can turn them around?

After writing about how vaccinated people got measles in California, I read the comments posted about it on Facebook. Among the anti-vax commenters, there were a few science-hating, vitriol-slinging, homeopathy-hawking kooks. But the vast majority were…reasonable. Take this person, for example:

Someone strong enough to get the vaccine (and thus be conferred limited immunity for 2-10 years) is likely strong enough to handle the disease and consequently have real life-long immunity, which is what is really needed for “herd immunity” to actually work.

This person is wrong, of course, but there’s some science—or at least some attempts at using science—in there. It’s worth repeating, clearly: Refusing vaccines is a bad choice, but anti-vaxxers aren’t evil for making that choice. Every parent who turns down a vaccine is simply trying to make the right decision for their kid. As long as that motivation exists, there’s a chance that a parent can be convinced that vaccination is the safest choice—for their child, and those around them.

To figure out how to turn that “no” into a “yes,” it’s important to know how that decision occurred in the first place. As Amy Wallace explained in a WIRED cover story, vaccine refusal comes down to one emotion: fear. Or, in the current environment, the lack of it.

Thanks to the success of vaccination programs, many Americans have never seen a single case of measles—they didn’t get it themselves, and probably don’t know anyone who’s had it. That interferes with how they process fear in two ways.

Number one, we get responses like this one (from that same story, on Facebook):

Measles is not a dangerous disease, it is just a normal childhood disease, it’s safer to get antibodies from the actual virus than from vaccines. Unvaccinated children have higher and stronger immune systems, so they fight it fast…

Measles has, for many, become a hypothetical disease. And a hypothetical disease isn’t scary. “People become desensitized to the seriousness of the disease when they’re not exposed,” says Kristin Hendrix, a pediatric researcher at Indiana University School of Medicine. Measles was eradicated in the US in 2000, so even if you’ve seen a case, you probably haven’t met someone who pulled the short straw: The one person in 10 who gets an ear infection, potentially resulting in deafness, or the one in 20 who gets pneumonia, or the one in 1,000 who develops encephalitis—or dies.

Which leads us to number two. The risk of vaccines—the one in 3,000 chance of seizure for the MMR, or the one in more than a million chance of a serious allergic reaction—starts to seem much bigger in comparison to those fading memories of measles past. “Parents can be scared very easily by hearing about potentially negative consequences,” says Gary Freed, a pediatric researcher at the University of Michigan. And the act of stabbing your kid in the arm with a needle far more immediately threatening than the potential exposure to measles, especially if you’re counting on her not being exposed to the disease in the first place.

My husband nearly died from the tetanus vaccine when he was a kid.

Fear is a powerful, often irrational emotion. No matter how many times you drive home the statistical near-impossibility of a negative vaccine reaction, it’s often overlooked in the face of a personal anecdote. If someone has a relative who had a bad reaction to a vaccine—or even a great-aunt on Facebook whose friend’s daughter became withdrawn after one—the immediacy of that story will carry more cognitive weight than numbers. Humans are big on narrative. Science (usually) is not. So now, medical professionals and researchers must figure out how to use information—cold, impersonal facts—in a way that can counteract the power of that primal (and inaccurate) risk calculation.

That job is far harder than it used to be. Doctors once were the primary source of medical information, but now it’s everywhere online—some of it true, some of it not, and the vast majority somewhere in between. That’s a problem, because humans suffer from a major case of confirmation bias. “We seek out and gravitate toward information that confirms what we know to be true,” says Hendrix. Sometimes confirmation bias is so extreme that it even turns positive messages into negative ones: One paper last year found that while pro-vaccine information corrected some misperceptions about vaccines—like the fallacy that it causes autism—reading it actually made some resolutely anti-vax parents even less likely to vaccinate.

Unfortunately, recent research has shown that presenting provaccine messages and evidence to anti-vaxers only makes them become more ingrained in their misguided beliefs.

Researchers don’t have any great ideas about how to change the “stickiness” of bad information once it gets that distorted. But there’s hope. There always have been a certain number of staunchly anti-vaccine parents—researchers estimate about 2 percent of parents fall into that camp, and that number isn’t changing much. It’s a second group of parents and patients—the so-called vaccine-hesitant—that are the ones fueling the fire of vaccine refusal. But they’re also the ones that still may be open to change.

Doug Opel is a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital working to target those fence-sitters with individually tailored information. “Parents themselves can have a hard time knowing where they are, or they don’t fully disclose what they think about vaccines in an appointment,” says Opel. “That turns a pediatric appointment into a chess match.”

Opel’s shot at a solution is a 15-question survey that gives parents a score on a scale of 0 to 100—over 50, and you’re much less likely to vaccinate. He’s most interested in targeting parents in that 50-to-80 range, by addressing their specific concerns in one-on-one conversations instead of relying solely on an impersonal Vaccine Information Statement from the CDC.

It’s not an easy job: Any conversation he has with a patient is going head-to-head with personal horror stories from Facebook friends and anti-vaccine celebrities. “We know that personal narratives and anecdotes that are emotionally laden are very persuasive,” says Hendrix, “and that people play into fear-based information more than positive information.”

Read more at Wired Science

TV Medical Show Claims Not Backed by Science

Most people know that they can’t believe everything they see on TV, though many assume that talk shows featuring well-known medical doctors are giving them valid health information.

However a new article in the British Medical Journal examining the medical advice given on TV talk shows finds that many of the claims are unproven or unsubstantiated. The researchers examined 40 randomly-selected episodes for each of the two most popular medical shows, The Dr. Oz Show and The Doctors, to examine and rate their content. From those episodes they randomly selected 80 of the stronger recommendations from each show and researched what evidence was available in the published, peer-reviewed literature to support those recommendations.

The results are sobering for anyone who heeds advice from these shows:

“We could find at least a case study or better evidence to support 54% of the 160 recommendations (80 from each show). For recommendations in The Dr Oz Show, evidence supported 46%, contradicted 15%, and was not found for 39%. For recommendations in The Doctors, evidence supported 63%, contradicted 14%, and was not found for 24%.”

Dr. Oz and the Magic Beans

Perhaps the most famous example of the sort of problems that the study describes emerged in 2012 when celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz endorsed green coffee bean extract as a “magic weight-loss cure” on his show. Oz was reprimanded by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., on Capitol Hill for promoting dubious and discredited supplements and treatments. Dr. Oz acknowledged of the products he features and promotes on his show: “I recognize that oftentimes they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact.”

The example of coffee bean extract was raised: “Green coffee bean extract, which Dr. Mehmet Oz promoted on his show as a ‘magic weight-loss cure,’ had one scientific study backing up the extract’s purported effects … When asked specifically about the green coffee bean extract, Oz cited a study that found people who took the supplements did lose weight. However, that study was funded by the product’s manufacturer,” according to LiveScience.com.

Scientific consensus, of course, cannot be built on a single study, no matter how well designed. For doctors to determine that a drug or therapy should be used by patients — it is safe and effective, its benefits can be demonstrated beyond placebo and outweigh its side effects, and so on — dozens of studies should be consulted.

Any single clinical study, or even handful of studies, may be wrong for any number of reasons ranging from poor research design to faulty statistical analysis. The fact that the single study demonstrating the efficacy of green coffee bean extract in weight loss was funded by its manufacturer does not, by itself, discredit its results. Many perfectly valid studies are paid for by companies with a financial interest in the results. But it does mean that any potential conflicts should be noted — which they were not.

Read more at Discovery News

Viral Video Claims to Prove 'Chemtrails' Conspiracy

For many years conspiracy theorists claimed the government conducts top secret chemical testing in the skies above us. As evidence they point to “chemtrails” — actually ordinary airplane contrails, or condensation trails — that, it’s claimed, have some sinister purpose.

In his conspiracy book “Above Top Secret,” Jim Marrs notes that “No one in a position of authority will admit that they exist, much less who is responsible, and what purpose they may serve. Unlike many mysteries, this one is visible to anyone who cares to look up on the days that large jets weave narrow and continuous vapor/chemical trails through the sky.”

It’s odd conspiracy theorists are so certain they exist but can’t even agree on what, exactly, they are or what they do. Some say it’s a sinister government mind-control experiment. Others say the trails are a form of weather control. Still others insist that experimental drugs are being tested on unsuspecting urban populations.

Hard evidence of the existence of these chemtrails has been elusive, but earlier this week a video surfaced that claims to provide proof. It shows a plane landing in a fog, with what are claimed to be jets of chemicals spewing from the wings.

According to the breathless description on one web site:

“A pilot of a commercial airliner made a mistake that irrefutably PROVES the existence of ‘CHEMTRAILS’—by forgetting to turn them off before he landed! We have video of the plane landing while still spraying CHEMTRAILS as it hits the runway. This is the first empirical evidence to back-up claims made (by) people, smeared as ‘conspiracy-theorists,’ who claimed airlines are being used by government to spray aerosols into the air without the knowledge or consent of the people being sprayed. With proof like this, the public now has legal standing to file lawsuits, utilize subpoenas and force discovery of evidence.”

This is not the first time that someone has claimed to have found hard evidence of chemtrails. In “Above Top Secret,” Marrs offers this evidence:

“One Louisiana TV station in late 2007 took upon itself the task of testing water captured under a crosshatch of aerial trails. According to investigative reporter Jeff Ferrell, ‘KSLA News 12 had the sample tested at a lab. The results: high level of barium, 6.8 parts per million, (ppm). That’s more than three times the toxic level set by the Environmental Protection Agency.’”

However, David E. Thomas, a physicist writing in Skeptical Inquirer science magazine, took a closer look at the KSLA report. Thomas notes:

“The actual video clearly shows 68.8 ug/L (micrograms per liter), or 68.8 ppb (parts per billion)…. 68.8 millionths of a gram per liter corresponds to 68.8 parts per billion, (and) the reporter was off by a factor of 100 because he read the ’68.8′ as ’6.8.’ Ferrell overestimated the amount of barium in the test report by a factor of 100…. The test result was not ‘three times the toxic level set by the EPA’; it was around thirty times less than the EPA’s toxic limit.”

So the alarming levels of barium that conspiracy theorist Jim Marrs cited as evidence of chemtrails was in fact a mistake created by a TV reporter’s poor math skills.

What about the new video showing explosive proof of chemtrails? There are several problems with this theory — aside from the fact that no one has ever shown that chemtrails are real. First of all, it seems very unlikely that passenger airlines at commercial airports like the one seen in the video would be used in top-secret military experiments. Any passenger seated in a dozen or more window seats behind the airplane wings would have a clear view of any supposed “spraying” going on — which kind of defeats the purpose of having a super-secret conspiracy spraying plan no one can know about.

Secondly — despite claims to the contrary — the video does not show anything being sprayed from the wings; instead the “mysterious” trail is merely created by the air disruption as the plane’s wings flying through the fog.

Read more at Discovery News

How Belief in Magic Spreads HIV in Africa

In many countries throughout the world belief in witches is common, and black magic is considered part of everyday life. A 2010 poll of 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa found that over half of the population believe in magic. Witch doctors are consulted not only for healing diseases, but also for placing, or removing, curses or bringing luck.

One human rights activist in the small African country of Malawi, Seodi White, has been fighting for years to stem many traditional beliefs that help spread HIV, especially among poor and underprivileged women.

According to a CNN story, widows in some parts of southern Africa are expected to engage in unprotected sex in order to “cleanse” them. The belief is that the husband’s spirit will return otherwise, cursing the family.

“It’s a mindset issue,” White told CNN. “Even the widows, they’ve told me, ‘I don’t want to die, I don’t want a curse to come to my husband.’ They cry to be cleansed.”

Because this spiritual cleansing involves unprotected sex — just as sex with the deceased husband was assumed to have been — the widows are placed at increased risk of contracting HIV, which is endemic on the continent. There are even professional “cleansers” who charge high prices for their services, which the widows are often eager to pay to avoid a curse on their families.

In her book “The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back”, Nicoli Nattrass, director of South Africa’s AIDS and Society Research Unit, notes that there “is a rich South African literature suggesting that many black people believe that HIV may have spiritual causes, notably witchcraft attacks or loss of protection from ancestors through violating cultural taboos. As Adam Ashforth observes, ‘a disease or complex of symptoms better suited to interpretation within the witchcraft paradigm than AIDS would be hard to imagine.’ This is because the symptoms of AIDS — diarrhea, tuberculosis, and wasting are also the classic symptoms of poisoning through witchcraft. Thus, even where people accept that AIDS is caused by a sexually transmitted virus, suspicions of witchcraft may be retained as potential explanations for the ultimate reason behind the infection.”

Read more at Discovery News

Gnarly Mummy Head Reveals Medieval Science

In the second century, an ethnically Greek Roman named Galen became doctor to the gladiators. His glimpses into the human body via these warriors' wounds, combined with much more systematic dissections of animals, became the basis of Islamic and European medicine for centuries.

Galen's texts wouldn't be challenged for anatomical supremacy until the Renaissance, when human dissections —- often in public -— surged in popularity. But doctors in medieval Europe weren't as idle as it may seem, as a new analysis of the oldest-known preserved human dissection in Europe reveals.

The gruesome specimen, now in a private collection, consists of a human head and shoulders with the top of the skull and brain removed. Rodent nibbles and insect larvae trails mar the face. The arteries are filled with a red "metal wax" compound that helped preserve the body.

The preparation of the specimen was surprisingly advanced. Radiocarbon dating puts the age of the body between A.D. 1200 and A.D.1280, an era once considered part of Europe's anti-scientific "Dark Ages." In fact, said study researcher Philippe Charlier, a physician and forensic scientist at University Hospital R. Poincare in France, the new specimen suggests surprising anatomical expertise during this time period.

"It's state-of-the-art," Charlier told LiveScience. "I suppose that the preparator did not do this just one time, but several times, to be so good at this."

Myths of the middle ages

Historians in the 1800s referred to the Dark Ages as a time of illiteracy and barbarianism, generally pinpointing the time period as between the fall of the Roman Empire and somewhere in the Middle Ages. To some, the Dark Ages didn't end until the 1400s, at the advent of the Renaissance.

But modern historians see the Middle Ages quite differently. That's because continued scholarship has found that the medieval period wasn't so ignorant after all.

"There was considerable scientific progress in the later Middle Ages, in particular from the 13th century onward," said James Hannam, an historian and author of "The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution" (Regnery Publishing, 2011).

For centuries, the advancements of the Middle Ages were forgotten, Hannam told LiveScience. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it became an "intellectual fad," he said, for thinkers to cite ancient Greek and Roman sources rather than scientists of the Middle Ages. In some cases, this involved straight-up fudging. Renaissance mathematician Copernicus, for example, took some of his thinking on the motion of the Earth from Jean Buridan, a French priest who lived between about 1300 and 1358, Hannam said. But Copernicus credited the ancient Roman poet Virgil as his inspiration.

Much of this selective memory stemmed from anti-Catholic feelings by Protestants, who split from the church in the 1500s.

As a result, "there was lots of propaganda about how the Catholic Church had been holding back human progress, and it was great that we were all Protestants now," Hannam said.

Anatomical dark ages?

From this anti-Catholic sentiment arose a great many myths, such as the idea that everyone believed the world to be flat until Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas. ("They thought nothing of the sort," Hannam said.)

Similarly, Renaissance propagandists spread the rumor that the Medieval Christian church banned autopsy and human dissection, holding back medical progress.

In fact, Hannam said, many societies have banned or limited the carving up of human corpses, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to early Europeans (that's why Galen was stuck dissecting animals and peering into gladiator wounds). But autopsies and dissection were not under a blanket church ban in the Middle Ages. In fact, the church sometimes ordered autopsies, often for the purpose of looking for signs of holiness in the body of a supposedly saintly person.

The first example of one of these "holy autopsies" came in 1308, when nuns conducted a dissection of the body of Chiara of Montefalco, an abbess who would be canonized as a saint in 1881. The nuns reported finding a tiny crucifix in the abbess' heart, as well as three gallstones in her gallbladder, which they saw as symbolic of the Holy Trinity.

Other autopsies were entirely secular. In 1286, an Italian physician conducted autopsies in order to pinpoint the origin of an epidemic, according to Charlier and his colleagues.

Some of the belief that the church frowned on autopsies may have come from a misinterpretation of a papal edict from 1299, in which the Pope forbade the boiling of the bones of dead Crusaders. That practice ensured Crusaders' bones could be shipped back home for burial, but the Pope declared the soldiers should be buried where they fell.

"That was interpreted in the 19th century as actually being a stricture against human dissection, which would have surprised the Pope," Hannam said.

Well-studied head

While more investigation of the body was going on in the Middle Ages than previously realized, the 1200s remain the "dark ages" in the sense that little is known about human anatomical dissections during this time period, Charlier said. When he and his colleagues began examining the head-and-shoulders specimen, they suspected it would be from the 1400s or 1500s.

"We did not think it was so antique," Charlier said.

But radiocarbon dating put the specimen firmly in the 1200s, making it the oldest European anatomical preparation known. Most surprisingly, Charlier said, the veins and arteries are filled with a mixture of beeswax, lime and cinnabar mercury. This would have helped preserve the body as well as give the circulatory system some color, as cinnabar mercury has a red tint.

Thus, the man's body was not simply dissected and tossed away; it was preserved, possibly for continued medical education, Charlier said. The man's identity, however, is forever lost. He could have been a prisoner, an institutionalized person, or perhaps a pauper whose body was never claimed, the researchers write this month in the journal Archives of Medical Science.

Read more at Discovery News

Anti-Wi-Fi Activism 'Fear Mongering'

A report from Bad Science Watch, an independent non-profit consumer protection watchdog and science advocacy group in Canada, found that claims of health problems associated with Wi-Fi and electromagentic fields (EMFs) are not supported by science, and often promoted by “fear mongering” activists.

From their report:

Many activists blame Wi-Fi networks’ low level radio signals for a broad variety of medical problems, from mild headaches and fatigue to chest pain and heart palpitations, claiming those who suffer from them have ‘Electromagnetic-Hypersensitivity,’ or EHS. These claims are not substantiated by the scientific literature and have little acceptance from medical professionals and the scientific community. This activism therefore amounts to nothing more than fear-mongering by misguided special interest groups who are attempting to have these networks removed… As a result many school boards, libraries, and town councils across Canada have been called on by concerned citizens to limit or remove Wi-Fi networks.

Jamie Williams, Executive Director of Bad Science Watch, noted that “Some of the most prominent anti-WiFi scaremongers are tied to the sale and promotion of bogus products to ‘block’ Wi-Fi.”

Indeed, there is a burgeoning market for so-called “EMF shields” that can be inserted into cell phones that allegedly block harmful electromagnetic waves (though consumer groups say there’s no evidence they are effective).

The report notes that the fear mongering surrounding Wi-Fi is not just an academic matter but has real consequences for the public: “Those who stand to suffer from these efforts the most are students (especially from low-income families) who rely on wireless networks for access to the Internet and education resources, and taxpayers who will have to pay for the expensive reversion to wired networks. In addition, families are being been misled into believing that their children are suffering from EHS and may miss an opportunity for early diagnosis of real and serious health problems in their children.”

Last year an Albuquerque, New Mexico, anti-WiFi activist named Arthur Firstenberg sued his neighbor claiming that her use of wireless devices including her cell phone and computer caused health problems including hip pain and heart damage. According to an Albuquerque Journal story, District Judge Sarah Singleton ruled that scientific evidence does not support electromagnetic sensitivity.

In her ruling, the judge stated, “Studies have failed to provide clear support for a causal relationship between electromagnetic fields and complaints of EMS.”

Singleton relied extensively on the position of the World Health Organization, which concluded that “well controlled and conducted double-blind studies have shown that symptoms do not seem to be correlated with EMF exposure… these symptoms may be due to pre-existing psychiatric conditions as well as stress reactions as a result of worrying about believed EMF health effects, rather than EMF exposure.”

Determining whether or not Wi-Fi and EMFs have an immediate effect on health — as Firstenberg claimed — should be very simple using a blinded scientific testing protocol: the Wi-Fi would be randomly turned on or off (unbeknownst to Firstenberg), and he would state whether or not he had hip pain; either the pain appears when the WiFi is on, or it does not.

Unfortunately for Firstenberg the judge found that he could not reliably tell when the Wi-Fi was on and “cannot discern or discriminate the effects of anxiety caused by a testing situation or the presence of electromagnetic stimulus.” The case was dismissed.

Concern over the effects of EMFs (via power lines) have been around since the 1970s, and resurfaced in the past 10 years as cell phones have become ubiquitous. Though there’s little evidence that they pose a health threat, many people remain concerned. However that fear has done little to stem the popularity of those products.

Read more at Discovery News

The 5 Most Outrageous Hoaxes

Charismatic Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o may have just sealed his place in the history books, not for his impressive victories on the field, but for being involved in (knowingly or not) a widespread hoax involving a dying girlfriend who, it turns out, never existed.

In interviews last year, Te'o spoke about the personal obstacles and tragedies he'd overcome on his way to football excellence — most notably the deaths of his beloved grandmother and his girlfriend and love of his life, Lennay Kekua, within the same day. Te'o talked about the pain of losing both so close to him, as well as Kekua's emotional struggle — and finally losing battle — with leukemia. Though Te'o never met Kekua, the pair communicated mainly through e-mails and text messages.

Information is contradictory and details remain murky: Was Te'o in on the hoax, capitalizing on a crowd-pleasing sympathetic rags-to-riches story? Or was he himself the victim of a cruel hoax by someone sharing her (or his) fictional but emotionally moving life story? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between?

There are of course many different types of hoaxes. For example author James Frey wrote a 2003 novel about drug addiction recovery, claiming it was a memoir; homeowners in Amityville, N.Y., created a hoax in 1977 by claiming that their house was haunted by demons; and in 1996 physicist Alan Sokal submitted a gibberish article that was accepted and published in "Social Text," a respected cultural studies journal.

A hoax that costs money, embarrassment, or inconvenience may be merely a nuisance. But some of the most damaging and outrageous hoaxes are those that manipulate people's emotions and outrage the world. Here are a few of the most outlandish.

Flight of the Balloon Boy

In 2009 a 6-year-old boy named Falcon Heene was said to be in grave danger as he floated through Colorado skies in a silvery weather balloon created by his inventor father. His family claimed that he had climbed aboard the homemade balloon and launched, triggering a nationwide police search and rescue mission. It turned out that Heene, who became known as balloon boy, was in fact safe at home, and the family was suspected of staging the event in hopes of getting a reality TV show.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Perhaps the most malicious religious hoax in history, "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" is a book supposedly revealing a secret Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. It first appeared in Russia in 1905, and though the book has been completely discredited as a forgery, it is still in print and remains widely circulated. Many people have endorsed this religious hoax, including actor Mel Gibson, Adolf Hitler, and automaker Henry Ford, who in 1920 paid to have a half-million copies of the book published.

The Tawana Brawley Attack

In 1987 America was riveted by the tragic news story of a young black girl named Tawana Brawley, who said she had been gang-raped by six white men, including several police officers. Rev. Al Sharpton and others fanned racial tensions and accused police of a cover-up. The following year, after an extensive investigation (and revelations about contradictions in Brawley's story), a grand jury concluded that the girl had hoaxed the incident. A New York prosecutor successfully sued both Brawley and Sharpton for defamation in a case whose racial legacy remains today.

The Innocence of Muslims

The trailer for the 2012 film "Innocence of Muslims" led to riots over its depiction of the prophet Muhammad as a womanizer, child molester and criminal. Several Americans were killed in protests linked to the film. To date it's not clear that the finished film actually exists, though a trailer for it does (it appeared on YouTube, sparking the riots). The producer hoaxed the actors and crew, later dubbing inflammatory lines that insulted Islam over their real dialogue. Whether or not the infamous anti-Muslim film exists, many around the world were led to believe it did, and people died because of it.

Read more at Discovery News

When Is the Next Doomsday (Not) Going to Happen?

Take a deep breath; Dec 21, 2012 is behind us. The Mayan calendar end-of-world debacle is over: zip, zilch, gone!

The silliness, anxiety, and paranoia leading up to the predicted end of times was so bad that on Dec. 21st -- the appointed doomsday -- a worried citizen left a message on my office phone that accused me of skipping town to escape Armageddon.

If history is any example, the next cosmic doomsday prediction is always right around the corner. The Mayan blowout was just the latest in many centuries of bad calls by prognosticators who have the audacity to think they can divine the End of Everything.

So, to be a little preemptive, let's look at just three cosmic events that might start another pop culture panic. Thankfully these aren't born out of mythology, psychics, and misinterpreted archeoastronomy. They are real events that will inevitably be embellished by the imaginations of modern day soothsayers.

The Comet of the Century

Last September, the International Scientific Optical Network (ISON) near Kislovodsk, Russia, discovered comet C/2012 S1 (ISON). Though its closest approach to Earth is a year away, the celestial visitor is already billed as the "comet of the century." That's because it may be a first-time visitor to the solar system that will warm and then erupt with a lot of outgassing from pristine ices.

On Nov. 28, 2013 the comet will skim above the sun's surface at a distance slightly greater than the separation of the Earth and moon. Not doubt there will be pseudoscience predictions of the comet wreaking havoc by raising tides on the sun. The exact opposite will be the case. The sun's tidal pull could tear apart the comet into small pieces, as has been the case for previous sungrazer-class comets.

Comet ISON is due to pass within 37 million miles of Earth in January 2014. I'm expecting to see all types of outrageous claims that the object's feeble gravity will yank on Earth to trigger volcanoes and earthquakes.

Comet ISON has been compared with the Great Comet of 1680 (in above illustration) which, according to contemporary accounts, caused New Yorkers to be "overcome with terror at a sight in the heavens such as has seldom greeted human eyes." A day of fasting and humiliation was set-aside in order that "the wrath of God might be assuaged."

Likewise, soothsayers will quickly note that the comet will be at it brightest one month before Christmas 2013. "This comet, if it lives up to its billing, certainly could point to the glorious soon coming of the Lord Jesus Christ from heaven!" predicts one religious website.

The fact that the comet is anticipated to get as bright as the moon will only fuel religious and mystical speculation about its timing and significance as an omen. Chill out folks, it's just another 4 billion year-old primeval chunk of ice from the solar system's deep freeze, the Oort cloud.

Asteroid Apophis

NASA keeps cataloging more Earth-threatening asteroids every year. But the asteroid Apophis, named after the Egyptian spirit of evil and destruction, is legendary because it will be a record-breaker.

On April, Friday the 13th of 2029 Apophis will skim below the orbits of communication satellites and briefly be a naked-eye object scooting over the mid-Atlantic ocean.

Earth's gravity will deflect the comet's trajectory. The worst-case scenario is that the chances of it striking Earth on its return on April 13, 2036 will increase to 1 in 5,500.

Apophis is the length of over three football fields. It packs enough kinetic energy to wipe out 10 million people with the power of 100,000 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs. Even in this worst case scenario a direct hit would not obliterate all life on the planet. But it certainly would not be a good day for the human race.

People will get very squeamish over the possibility of Apophisgeddon despite the best low-probability collision estimate from astronomers. Parallels no doubt will be drawn to Biblical prophecy. This is especially true because the potentially destructive path of the asteroid crosses Middle East. South America and the west coast of Africa are also along the ground track.

Congress might even debate if steps should be taken to deflect the asteroid. But given that so many legislators are tone-deaf to global warming, I wouldn’t expect any preemptive actions to be funded.

Planetary Grand Alignment

Like clockwork so-called planetary grand alignments have taken place in 1962, 1982, and 2000. This does not mean that the planets line up like pearls on a string. But they sort of gang up on one side of the sun within an angle of roughly 10 to 30 degrees -- so the definition is a but mushy.

The uneventful year 1128 A.D. saw one of the tightest planetary alignments. The doomsday best seller The Jupiter Effect in 1982 spelled out an improbable chain of events that would be triggered by the planets' tug-of-war with the sun: tides raised on the sun's surface would increase sunspot activity, build up the solar wind, that would effect Earth's weather, and subsequently, Earth's spin rate, which would then trigger earthquakes.

No geological disasters happened in 1982 short of a 6.0 magnitude earthquake that killed 1,500 people in Dhamar, northern Yemen. In fact the celestial alignment allowed for NASA to pull off the Voyager 2 "grand tour" of the four outer gas giant planets from 1979 to 1989.

Jupiter contains more mass than all the other planets combined, and yet it is still less than 1 percent of the sun's mass. Therefore Jupiter's influence on the sun is inconsequential.

Alien astronomers could measure Jupiter's gravitational tug as an insignificant 270 mile-per-hour cyclic change in the sun's radial velocity over the planet's 12-year orbital period. Only if Jupiter was moved so close to the sun that its orbital period was measured in days, would some serious tidal effects be seen. This is observed with so-called "hot Jupiters," the exoplanet WASP-18 being the most extreme case.

Read more at Discovery News

How Did the Oracle at Delphi Really Prophesize?

The Oracle at Delphi is referenced throughout Greek myths and history. Supposedly she was rendered psychic by Apollo. Realistically, she was off her skull on gas that seeped out of the fissures of the temple in which she lived. Here is the scientific explanation for what caused this woman to utter her confused prophecies.

Even during the Oracle at Delphi's time, it was widely known that the Oracle's visions had a practical cause. Gas seeped out of the cracks in the cave where she sat, causing her to talk nonsense. This nonsense would then be interpreted by priests around her. Some of the predictions were surprisingly accurate, according to legend. Croesus, the richest man of his time, performed a kind of scientific test on oracles, when he had messengers go out to all of them and ask what he would be doing on a certain date. Delphi got the only correct answer -- cooking a tortoise in a pot. (Bold choice. I wouldn't think of the richest guy in the world doing his own cooking.)

Modern archaeologists weren't convinced -- not about the tortoise and not about the gas. They inspected the geology of the area for volcanic activity that might vent gas, and found nothing, not even in the distant past. Later, however, they took another look and found two fault lines converging just under the temple of Delphi. Perhaps the mystic "vapors" that the Oracle breathed in had seeped through these. In interdisciplinary team found that dissolving limestone along those lines gave off gas and spiked the local water.

The main components found in the water were ethane, methane and ethylene. Most think that it's ethylene that is the key component. Ethylene was one of the early painkillers used during medical procedures. It packed more of a punch than nitrous oxide. It smells a bit like flowers, and renders the sniffer euphoric, but extremely out-of-it. It's not especially bad for people (although various compounds of ethylene can be very harmful), and its main danger is that of suffocation. It displaces air and makes people too high to notice. The combination of extreme anesthesia, euphoria and lack of oxygen can make a person say all kinds of things.

Other scientists argue that ethylene wasn't the chemical that made the Oracle talk, though. Methane, which decidedly doesn't smell like flowers, can also cause hallucinations if inhaled in high enough doses. The methane theory isn't without its faults. Methane can kill people a lot faster than ethylene, particularly if it's being burned, or otherwise decomposing, to produce carbon dioxide. A by-product of the conversion is carbon monoxide, which attaches itself to red blood cells more readily than oxygen does. Too much can smother a person, but not before they often experiences confusion and hallucinations. Carbon monoxide is a regular by-product of burning fuels, though, and so there's no reason why the ancient Greeks, who surely had mastered fire, would consider the gas and its effects so special.

Read more at Discovery News

'Channeling Spirits' Shuts Down Parts Of Brain

During a trance-like session of psychography, experienced mediums in Brazil allow themselves to become receptive to spirits or dead souls. Then they write automatically, channeling the voices of those they believe to be speaking to them.

As these mediums communicate with the dead, found a new study, parts of their brains involved in language and purposeful activity shut down, alongside other patterns of increased and decreased activity.

The findings add to our limited understanding of how the spiritual brain works, though for now, science cannot speak to the existence of the spirit world.

"I don't think this does anything to make (the experience) less real or less profound or to make it less important in the moment," said Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

"At some point, maybe we will design the perfect study that can prove there were not spirits there and this is just a fascinating way that the brain works," he added. "At the moment, all we're really doing is saying that this is what happens in the brain when you do this particular practice."

In an attempt to understand how the human brain experiences spirituality, Newberg and colleagues have studied a range of practices, including yoga, meditation, prayer and speaking in tongues.

This time, he turned to psychography, one of a variety of practices associated with mediums, who lose their own sense of self as they connect with external souls.

Of the ten Brazilian psychographers considered in the study, five were experts who had been practicing for an average of 37 years and conducted an average of 15 sessions per month. The other five were novices who had been practicing for far less time and practiced with much less frequency. All were well adjusted and mentally healthy.

Each medium entered a trance state and began writing. After 10 minutes, the scientists injected them with a radioactive tracer that traveled to the brain, where it essentially got locked in place, reflecting how blood was flowing to various parts of the brain at the moment of injection. When the session was over 15 minutes later, a scanner illuminated that moment for the researchers.

Compared to times when they were simply writing about their thoughts, sessions of psychography induced a number of brain changes in experienced mediums, the researchers report today in the journal PLoS ONE. Specifically, activity decreased in six areas, including the left hippocampus, the left anterior cingulate and the right superior temporal gyrus.

The parts that shut down while the spirits moved their hands are areas normally involved in actively writing, concentrating and processing language, Newburg said. Similar trends showed up in a previous study of people who spoke in tongues. Both groups shared the common belief that spirits moved through them to be heard.

Novices in the new study showed the opposite pattern, with increased activity in the same parts of the brain that shut down in the advanced practitioners, suggesting that training improves the ability of the brain to enter a spirit-channeling state.

To Newburg's surprise, experienced psychographers also consistently produced more complex language on the page when they entered a trance state.

"You would expect this to mean that language areas were more active because they were making more detailed writings," he said. "In fact, it was just the opposite. The less active the brain was and the more expert the person was, the more complex the writing was."

With so few studies done on the brains of people involved in spiritual activities, the new research is a helpful contribution to the field of neurotheology, said Patrick McNamara, a neuropsychologist at Northcentral University in Prescott Valley, Arizona.

More research might eventually reveal reliable patterns of brain activation that occur across spiritual disciplines, eventually offering insight into the roots of religion and why some people are more devout than others.

"Then we can ask the big questions," McNamara said. "Is that activation of the brain state necessary to enter into the spiritual experience? Or is the spiritual experience key to activate those brain areas?

Read more at Discovery News

Pick Your Favorite Doomsday

Volcanoes are giving asteroids a run for their money in the case of the biggest mass extinction event in Earth's history. The latest case has been made at the Geological Society of America meeting in Charlotte this week.

The researchers report they have found new evidence that the worst extinction event ever -- the end-Permian mass extinction some 250 million years ago -- was caused by a severe bout of global warming created by greenhouse gases released by a series of super-massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia. A similar case has been studied for several years now as a major contributor to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (the suspect gases at that time were released by gigantic Deccan Traps eruption in India).

I'm not going to analyze the science behind these hypotheses. But I do want to point out how curiously well mass extinction theories they mesh with popular thinking at any given time.

Right now there is a great deal of interest in climate change as a driver of major extinction events. Why? One reason is that we have a lot of people studying paleoclimates trying to learn as much as possible about the past so we can better understand our planet. Another reason is that the biggest threat to our planet and survival right now is anthropogenic climate change. But the story goes back much further than that.

In the 1980s climate change wasn't in the news yet and the asteroid impact hypothesis was gaining ground as the primary cause of at least the end-Cretaceous, dino-killing event. The scenario went like this: the asteroid crashed down and stirred up so much dust that Earth experienced a few dark years of what's called a nuclear winter. That winter disrupted the food chain and dinosaurs were wiped out. Of course, the important sociopolitical context for the asteroid impact hypothesis in the 1980s was the horrific "nuclear winter" that threatened humanity due to our proliferation of nuclear arms during the Cold War. However, this isn't the end of the story.

Before the 1980s, the idea of an asteroid impact would have been considered absurd. It went against a 19th century geological concept known as uniformitarianism or gradualism, in which the majority of Earth's changes happen very, very slowly over enormous periods of time. Gradualism was a dominant tenet of geological thinking almost to the end of the 20th century. But we still have one more twist to this tale.

Before gradualism took over, there was something called catastrophism, which was originally based on the Old Testament and considered the Earth young and the geological record we see today as the product of a series of divinely-inspired catastrophes (of course many religious fundamentalists still hold this view, although today it is blatantly anti-scientific). Once catastrophism was supplanted by science and gradualism, any scientist who talked about global catastrophes raining down from the heavens came off sounding like a throwback. That's why it was an uphill battle for hypotheses like asteroid impacts and supervolcanoes to get traction in the late 20th century.

Read more at Discovery News

Mayans Pissed Off Over Doomsday 'Deceit'

The 'golden age' of the Mayan civilization may have occurred over 1,000 years ago, but more than half the population of the Central American nation of Guatemala are of Mayan descent and many still celebrate ancient customs. So, as we approach Dec. 21, 2012, it's little wonder they're pissed that one of their calendars has been hijacked and misinterpreted as a prophet of doom.

But this time, the anger isn't directed at the West's "messianic thinking," Maya leaders have accused the Guatemalan government of perpetuating the myth that the Mayan Long Count calendar predicts the end of the world for financial gain.

"We are speaking out against deceit, lies and twisting of the truth, and turning us into folklore-for-profit. They are not telling the truth about time cycles," Felipe Gomez, leader of the Maya alliance Oxlaljuj Ajpop, told the AFP news agency.

The entire "Mayan doomsday" nonsense centers around the mistaken belief that the ancient civilization had some magical ability to foretell the Apocalypse. But they didn't. In actuality, it focuses on a calendar cycle that runs out this year. This calendar, the Long Count, is a wonderfully complex system that spans around 5,200 years and is of huge spiritual significance to the Maya people. The final cycle of the calendar -- the 13th b'aktun -- will complete on Dec. 21.

Obviously this means the world will come to an end... Right?

Wrong.

In a statement released by Oxlaljuj Ajpop, the end of the cycle simply "means there will be big changes on the personal, family and community level, so that there is harmony and balance between mankind and nature."

To some crazed doomsayers desperately trying to make money from selling their nonsensical books of doom, this "harmony and balance" means the Universe it going to char broil the planet, killing everyone who isn't 'prepared' (i.e. those poor unfortunate souls who ignored their warnings).

The Mayan descendents don't quite see "harmony and balance" in the same way.

But when seeing an opportunity to profit from the West's insatiable desire to watch second-rate doomsday flicks and Indiana Jones version of archaeology, the Guatemalan government has embraced the inevitable surge of tourism December will bring. But the way in which it is being handled has frustrated groups like Oxlaljuj Ajpop.

The Culture Ministry is hosting a massive "doomsday" event in Guatemala City and many tourism groups have seen the opportunity to create "doomsday tours." Gomez has criticized this "show", pointing out that it is disrespectful to the Mayan culture.

Read more at Discovery News

Bigfoot Vandalizes a Winnebago

A Pennsylvania man who accused Bigfoot of vandalizing his 1973 Winnebago earlier this month is just one of a long history of people who have blamed the hairy humanoid for attacking personal property and dwellings.

John Reed, a Bigfoot enthusiast, claims that during a camping trip he and his girlfriend saw a tall, dark, hairy figure walk past their camper window at night. According to one news story, Reed said the Bigfoot "threw rocks at his mobile home's outside light to escape discovery."

This explanation doesn't make sense; if the Bigfoot didn't want to be noticed, it presumably wouldn't have walked right past the Winnebago's window with two people inside, nor thrown rocks at the camper. The creature could simply have avoided the campsite, or kept walking into the darkness if it did not want to be detected, instead of standing and throwing rocks at an exterior light.

Perhaps the strangest part of the story is that Reed, who founded a Bigfoot hunting group and claims to have seen it twice before, did not photograph the creature.

Reed is not alone

As odd as this story seems, Reed is not the first to claim to find traces and evidence of what they assume must have been a Bigfoot, though not clearly seeing or photographing it at the time. The logic goes like this: I don't know what else it might have been, so it must have been Bigfoot.

It is well known that wild animals attack vehicles such as car and RVs — especially if they can smell food inside. And many animals, including bears and raccoons, can be very clever and persistent in trying to get into vehicles and other containers. Trashcans in national parks have specially designed latching mechanisms to thwart feral intruders.

There have been other cases where unknown creatures attack vehicles, though those attacks have typically occurred at night and/or while the occupants were away. Strangely, Bigfoot are never credibly accused of attacking people; just about every other animal in the world has been known to attack humans at some point, including cats, dogs, deer, moose, bear, boar, elk, cougar, birds, fish, and so on. Not so for Bigfoot — a fact that raises suspicion among many skeptics.

Bigfoot have been claimed to vandalize not only dwellings but also trees. In October 2011, Bigfoot researcher and biologist John Bindernagel visited western Siberia to examine evidence of the Yeti (the Russian version of Bigfoot). He claimed to have found evidence that the creature broke trees and branches. "Twisted trees like this have also been observed in North America and they could fit with the theory that Bigfoot makes nests," Bindernagelsaid in an interview with the British tabloid "The Sun."

In another mysterious incident that some attribute to Bigfoot or another unknown creature, in 2008 a South Carolina couple claimed that something vandalized their vehicle, leaving mysterious bite marks and ripping out part of the fender on their 2002 Dodge Grand Caravan.

Famous 1924 Bigfoot Attack

The most famous case of a Bigfoot attack allegedly occurred at a place called Ape Canyon, near Mount St. Helens, Washington. In 1924, a group of five miners working at the site were besieged by a group of "ape men." One of the miners, a man named Fred Beck, claimed that they sighted a group of Bigfoot high above them on the edge of the canyon. The miners then spent a terrified night holed up in their cabin, during which the Bigfoot bombarded the cabin with rocks, and, they claimed, even tried to break the door in. The miners couldn't get a good look at the Bigfoot—partly because it was dark and partly because they could only see outside through small cracks in the door and walls.

The incident was cited for years in Bigfoot lore as a classic Bigfoot attack, and the details were exaggerated with each retelling. For example a few dozen fist-size rocks that rained down on the roof and walls became "giant boulders" in some versions of the story. Later research found that the famous Ape Canyon Bigfoot attack was not a hoax — but nor was it real: it was instead a combination of a prank and misperceptions.


Read more at Discovery News

Two Months Until the Mayan Doomsday Nonevent

For some reason, people really want to remind the world that today (Oct. 21) marks two months before the biggest nonevent in recent history. Even more perplexing is the fact that others seem to really want the world to end in 61 days time.

If the doomsayers are to be believed, on Dec. 21, 2012, the Universe will unleash a maelstrom of inexplicable fiery carnage on our planet. At best, we'll undergo some kind of rapid planetary change; at worst, a weird cosmic alignment will cause the sun to turn the planet, and all of civilization with it, into toast.

Why do these strange individuals want us to believe in this nonsense? Some have a book to sell, while others have a horribly-edited YouTube video they want to share. Others are just plain odd. But regardless of the intent, the result is confusion and fear. Sadly, it is often people who would have otherwise gotten on with their lives peacefully who have swallowed the doomsday nonsense and become needlessly worried about the end of the world.

The current 2012 doomsday nonsense focuses on an ancient civilization that somehow had the divine ability to predict the future. I am, of course, referring to the Mayans, who had a wonderfully complex culture throughout Central America that peaked between A.d. 250-900. They had a calendar, you may have heard about it, called the "Long Count." Apart from being an ingenious means of recording dates, it has another, rather odd attribute -- it "runs out" this year.

But like any calendar, many Mayan scholars agree that the Mayan civilization, if it existed today, would have probably begun a new calendar cycle. Unfortunately we're not going to find out as the Mayans, as a civilization, disappeared centuries ago. Archaeologists have even found evidence deep in the Guatemalan rainforest that the ancient Mayans mentioned dates after Dec. 21, 2012, in texts. Although there are a handful of mentions of the calendar end date, there's no reference to the end of the world. If you ask me, that's a pretty rubbish "prophesy."

But wait! There are still Mayan descendents who live in Central America. Are they currently digging bunkers and stocking up on canned "Apocalypse-ready" baked beans? Um, no. Why's that then?

The Mayans never predicted doomsday! The end of a calendar cycle doesn't mean it's doomsday. The calendar wasn't a magic calendar, it was just a way to document time, remember future dates and record past events. That's what calendars do. Lacking a culture to renew the Long Count, it looks like the final cycle -- the 13th bak'tun -- will come to an end... and that's about it.

All the hype surrounding marauding celestial bodies (Planet X, Nibiru, errant asteroids and comets), weird cosmic occurrences (killer solar flares and galactic alignments) and crazy Earth-shattering events (polar/geomagnetic shift), is just that, hype. They're about as real as the tooth fairy.

The Mayans, on the other hand, are real and their descendents are planning on having a big party on Dec. 21. It is a reason for celebration, a time to remember the last cycle of a wonderful calendar system that represents the last breath of an ancient civilization.

There are many mysteries in this universe and many unexplained phenomena, but don't let that fact cloud your judgement when it comes to Dec. 21; science really does have this covered.

There are no cataclysmic events predicted to happen. There are no coverups. I am not covering up the coverups of some large government coverup. No, NASA isn't hiding anything. No doubt that Dec. 21 will have its fair share of turmoil, but there's no more turmoil predicted to happen on that date than on Dec. 22. Or tomorrow, or next week, or a week next Thursday. The Mayans were advanced for their time and had wonderful astronomy skills, but they did not foretell doom and gloom hundreds of years into the future.

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Pop Star Claims Sex With Ghost

Artists and musicians are always seeking inspiration for their work, and in a recent radio interview with Ryan Seacrest, pop star Kesha talked about the inspiration for her new song "Supernatural." While many singers like Taylor Swift and Adele produce heartfelt songs about love and loss, Kesha's was a little different.

"There are so many weird topics on this record from having sexy time with a ghost to getting hypnotized and going into past lives. I just really wanted the theme of this record to be the magic of life," she told Seacrest.

Yes, "having sexy time" means what you think it means: Her song is about the time she had sex with a ghost. "I had a couple of experiences with the supernatural. I don't know his name! He was a ghost! I'm very open to it....I was in Africa rehabilitating baby lions. I went diving with great white sharks, and just went on this crazy spirit quest. I got hypnotized, and I just really wanted this record to be really positive, really raw, really vulnerable and about the magic of life."

While this may seem like a bizarre (or publicity-savvy) revelation, Kesha is not alone; in fact many people have reported similar sexual experiences with spirits... and psychologists may have an explanation.

Succubi, Incubi, and Psychology

This phenomenon is not new, and is the basis for medieval legends about male and female demons (incubus and succubus respectively), who sexually attack people at night in their sleep. In centuries past, a woman claiming to have had sexual relations with an unseen spirit would likely have been accused of witchcraft. Indeed, the notorious 1486 witch-hunting text "Malleus Maleficarum" contains a section titled, "Here follows the Way whereby Witches copulate with these Devils known as Incubi," in which the authors explain that sex with the unknown is inherently evil and a clear sign of congress with Satan.

In his book "The Terror that Comes in the Night," folklorist David J. Hufford estimates that about 15 percent of people experience being assaulted in their sleep by an unknown entity at some point in their lives.

These attacks -- sometimes scary, sometimes sexy, but always realistic to the person experiencing them -- are the result of normal brain misperceptions and illusions. Last year a British grandmother complained of being sexually assaulted by a ghost while in bed. She felt "a creepy pair of hands" groping her as she tried to sleep, though no one else was around.

Kesha did not elaborate on the circumstances behind her exciting encounter with the anonymous phantom paramour, but it's likely she experienced it in bed either while sleeping, or going into or out of sleep. Psychologists know that this is a time when people are vulnerable to common (and harmless) hallucinations -- including sexual experiences.

Read more at Discovery News

Controversial ESP Study Fails Yet Again

A study published last year in a scientific journal claimed to have found strong evidence for the existence of psychic powers such as ESP. The paper, written by Cornell professor Daryl J. Bem, was published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and quickly made headlines around the world for its implication: that psychic powers had been scientifically proven.

Bem’s experiments suggested that college students could accurately predict random events, like whether a computer will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. However scientists and skeptics soon questioned Bem’s study and methodology. Bem stood by his findings and invited other researchers to repeat his studies.

Replication is of course the hallmark of valid scientific research—if the findings are true and accurate, they should be able to be repeated by others. Otherwise the results may simply be due to normal and expected statistical variations and errors. If other experimenters cannot get the same result using the same techniques, it’s usually a sign that the original study was flawed in one or more ways.

Last year a group of British researchers tried and failed to replicate Bem’s experiments. A team of researchers including Professor Chris French, Stuart Ritchie and Professor Richard Wiseman collaborated to accurately replicate Bem’s final experiment, and found no evidence for precognition. Their results were published in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Now a second group of scientists has also replicated Bem’s experiments, and once again found no evidence for ESP. In an article forthcoming in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers Jeff Galak, Robyn LeBoeuf, Leif D. Nelson, and Joseph P. Simmons, the authors explained their procedure: “Across seven experiments (N = 3,289) we replicate the procedure of Experiments 8 and 9 from Bem (2011), which had originally demonstrated retroactive facilitation of recall. We failed to replicate that finding. We further conduct a meta-analysis of all replication attempts of these experiments and find that the average effect size (d = .04) is no different from zero.” In other words there was no evidence at all for ESP. The paper, “Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi,” is available on the web page of the Social Science Research Network.

Anomalous Results And Replication

So far it’s not looking good for scientific evidence of psychic powers. There are many examples of anomalous studies and experiments that—if true—promise to revolutionize the world but turn out to be wrong. In March 1989 two chemists at the University of Utah, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, announced that they had discovered a technique for creating cold fusion, a potentially limitless source of free energy. Pons and Fleischmann insisted that their research was valid, though in the past quarter-century no one has reproduced their findings; Fleischmann died last month never having been vindicated.

Last year worldwide headlines crowed that a new experiment may have found particles moving faster than light, disproving a fundamental physics premise posited by Albert Einstein. Follow-up studies and experiments failed to replicate the original results.

As the authors of the new study conclude, “[Philosopher of science Karl] Popper defined a scientifically true effect as that ‘which can be regularly reproduced by anyone who carries out the appropriate experiment in the way prescribed’... Though decades have passed, that is still the operational definition of scientific truth. An effect is not an effect unless it is replicable, and a science is not a science unless it conducts (and values) attempted replications. No matter the outcome, it is indisputably admirable for Bem to encourage and facilitate the independent replication of his experiments. It is, by definition, what any scientist should do.”

Of course, the two studies so far do not completely invalidate Bem’s findings; there is no fixed number of failed replications that proves that an original experiment was fatally flawed. However with each study it becomes more and more likely that the claimed scientific evidence for psychic powers was never real.

There is no shame in proposing a wrong hypothesis or offering evidence of an effect that turns out not to be true; in fact it is exactly that self-correcting mechanism that makes science so robust and fruitful. No experiment is perfect, and there is always a margin of error. The problem is not in making mistakes, but in refusing to acknowledge those mistakes.

Read more at Discovery News

Homeopathy Takes Some Hits

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently uncovered significant violations at one of the world's largest manufacturers of homeopathic products. It is only the latest in a long line of blows to the homeopathy industry, both in Europe and the United States.

For example a major medical insurance company in the U.K. recently stopped paying for homeopathic treatment, citing no evidence that homeopathy is effective.

Homeopathy was invented around 1796 by a doctor named Samuel Hahnemann. He believed (contrary to the principles of physics) that homeopathic medicines become more effective the more they are diluted.

Homeopathic solutions are often so literally watered-down that they don't contain a single molecule of the original medicine or substance: the patient is drinking nothing but water. Homeopathic medicines have not been shown to work better than placebos, yet many people use and endorse homeopathy.

In 2009 the British Science and Technology Select Committee conducted a comprehensive study into whether homeopathy has any scientific validity. The report was devastating:"homeopathy is not efficacious, and explanations for why homeopathy would work are scientifically implausible."

Even professional homeopathic practitioners admitted that basic claims made about homeopathy have never been tested nor proven.

Homeopathic products from A Nelson & Co., a British company that manufactures many products including Nelson's line of pain relievers, digestion aids, emotional aids, energy, acne products and Bach Rescue Remedies sold in America were inspected by the Food and Drug Administration and the conclusions are alarming.

FDA Homeopathy Investigation

In a July 26, 2012, warning letter the FDA informed Nelson's that:

During the inspection, the [FDA] investigator observed glass fragments present during the manufacture... Your firm failed to implement adequate measures to prevent glass contamination and had no documentation to demonstrate that appropriate line clearance and cleaning is conducted following occurrences of glass breakage, which has been a recurring problem.

While the presence of glass in any drug or food is alarming, what should be of bigger concern is that because the manufacturer's dispensing machine was broken, one in six bottles in a sample batch of the homeopathic preparation was never even filled with the product they were selling -- yet not a single homeopathic practitioner or patient noticed!

The investigator also observed for Batch #36659 that one out of every six bottles did not receive the dose of active homeopathic drug solution due to the wobbling and vibration of the bottle assembly during filling of the active ingredient. The active ingredient was instead seen dripping down the outside of the vial assembly. Your firm lacked controls to ensure that the active ingredient is delivered to every bottle.

Imagine if an error was made in the manufacturing of an important life-saving drug, and one out of six pills had no active ingredient at all: Doctors and patients would quickly realize that there was something terribly wrong. But because most homeopathic medications literally have no active ingredient in the first place, any pain relief is attributable to the placebo effect. It makes perfect sense that no one would notice that there was no active ingredient in the preparation, since there's no active ingredient in the medicine even when the bottles are correctly and properly filled.

Skirting Drug Regulations

Most manufacturers of homeopathic preparations sold in the United States try to get around the law requiring that they prove their products are safe and effective. One method is to include a legal warning on the packaging that any statements about what the product does be followed in fine print with the disclaimer: "This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."

By explicitly referring to alternative medicines and homeopathic preparations as dietary supplements instead of drugs, manufacturers avoid any legal obligation to prove that what they sell works. In addition to the other problems, the FDA found that Nelson's had made claims about their products that would classify them as drugs:

Your product labeling documents the intended uses of your products including, but not limited to the following: Arnica: "Homeopathy, such as the homeopathic remedy Rhus tox and Arnica, has been traditionally used to help relieve the symptoms of rheumatoid and osteoarthritis." Arnileve: "Apply Arnileve Arnica Cream liberally to the affected area in order to reduce inflammation and hasten recovery time." Based on the above labeling and claims, these products are drugs...because they are intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease in man, and...because they are intended to affect the structure or any function of the body.

In one strange effort to avoid scrutiny from public health officials, a leading manufacturer of homeopathic remedies is considering marketing their (supposedly efficacious) homeopathic pills and preparations as candy. Any "medication" which can simply and accurately be re-labeled as "confectionary" is no medication at all.

Read more at Discovery News