From MSNBC:

Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.

Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo biloba for memory. Glucosamine and chondroitin for arthritis. Black cohosh for menopausal hot flashes. Saw palmetto for prostate problems. Shark cartilage for cancer. All proved no better than dummy pills in big studies funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The lone exception: ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea.

As for therapies, acupuncture has been shown to help certain conditions, and yoga, massage, meditation and other relaxation methods may relieve symptoms like pain, anxiety and fatigue.

However, the government also is funding studies of purported energy fields, distance healing and other approaches that have little if any biological plausibility or scientific evidence.

Taxpayers are bankrolling studies of whether pressing various spots on your head can help with weight loss, whether brain waves emitted from a special “master” can help break cocaine addiction, and whether wearing magnets can help the painful wrist problem, carpal tunnel syndrome.

More here. [For Aditya Dev Sood.]

Bani at Iranian.com:

The youth in the streets are mostly demanding social liberties and less oppression, and I'm not sure why they believe that Moussavi actually defends these wishes. It may be because he has the official support of ex-president, Mohammad Khatami, who is still a strong symbol of reform for people, but I sense a more complex ideological game that is proving successful, despite the loopholes.

The fact is that these young supporters of Moussavi are not in a state of revolt. The chanting, the slogans, and the antagonism are not directed at the state, but towards their adversaries, the supporters of Ahmadinejad who have gathered across the street to counter their joyous campaign enthusiasm. As the Moussavi supporters laugh, sing and cheer together, Ahmadinejad's followers stand transfixed and speechless, holding Iranian flags and photos of the current president kissing the Supreme Leader's hand, hoping to intimidate the reformist crowd with their grim appearance. They also use intimidation techniques like riding their motorbikes through the joyous crowd or making faces. Here and there, they are joined by older Bassijis (Islamic militia) who are dressed in plain clothes, or by agents of the secret service whose Iranian-made polyester suits and earpieces make them hard to miss. The Bassijis walk around monitoring the situation, as the secret service systematically photographs each and every demonstrator, surely saving these images for a rainy day.

Representing the most traditional and conservative line of thought in the country, this pro-Ahmadinejad crowd has become completely frustrated and angry these last few nights.

More here. [Thanks to Zara Houshmand.]

There have been two ring wing terrorism incidents in less than two weeks: the murder of women's health care provider George Tiller and yesterday's shooting at the Holocaust museum by a neo-Nazi activist. There are reasons to consider these acts of terrorism. Lindsay Beyerstein on whether Tiller's assassin will be charged with terrorism, in the Huffington Post:

The Oklahoma City bombers were investigated by the FBI and tried under a 1994 federal anti-terrorism statute, and that was before the PATRIOT ACT, which presumably makes it even easier to prosecute terrorism as a federal crime today.

Tiller's murder was terrorism by any reasonable definition of the term. It was a politically-motivated act of conspicuous brutality, designed to suppress abortions through fear. The feds will probably stop short of investigating Tiller's murder as a terrorist attack. That designation would unleash vast federal powers to investigate large swathes of the radical anti-choice movement and hold accountable anyone who gives them the slightest aid and comfort. The feds are simply not prepared for the political fallout that would ensue if, say, Operation Rescue were officially designated as a terrorist organization.

But Tiller's assassination seems to be working as an intimidation tactic. On Tuesday, Dr. Tiller's family announced that his clinic, one of only three facilities of its kind in the country, will close its doors forever. Tracy Clark-Flory writes in Salon that the terrorist got exactly what he wanted:

A lesson in the effectiveness of terrorism: Dr. George Tiller's Kansas clinic is closing permanently,according to his family's lawyers. In a statement Tuesday, the family said: “We are proud of the service and courage shown by our husband and father and know that women's healthcare needs have been met because of his dedication and service.” They will continue to honor his memory “through private charitable activities” — in other words, the type of activism that is less likely to get a person killed.

Of course, the intimidation won't stop at a single act.

Ryder Street in the City of Westminster might not currently seem a site to conjure with, but in 1943, when Section V of MI6 moved to offices there, it stood as the core of Anglo-American chicanery and cozenage. If you came to work early enough you could see, from the upper floors, the employees of Quaglino’s restaurant recycling its garbage from the night before. Counter-intelligence, the concern of the office members, is also a mode of recycling. The task is not to detect and remove the enemy’s agents: quite the reverse. Counterintelligence aims to collect and master the enemy’s intelligence in order to turn it against him. By sifting and ordering the information that the enemy’s agents transmit, it analyses the questions they are aiming to answer, obtains evidence of their plans and intentions as a result, and then tries to influence or supplant these by the answers that it carefully supplies. Rather than execute spies, counterintelligence aims to “turn” them. This proved a handy skill when Russia threatened India, the jewel in the British Empire’s crown, and Kipling’s novel Kim offers a fitting memorial to what was called the Great Game. An updated scheme called the “Double Cross” later emerged from Whitehall as a way of dealing with the subsequent threat from Hitler’s Germany. When the American allies arrived in London in 1942, they were so impressed by the massive British card index of agents that they modelled the system of their own Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on it.

more from Terence Hawkes at the TLS here.

From Mauka to Makai:

In other awesome science writing news, the latest edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the Public) is now up. Check it out here.

We’ll be hosting the next edition of this science blog carnival right here at Mauka to Makai on June 15. To submit science, nature or medical writing email it to ScientiaBlogCarnival [at] gmail [dot] com or use this automated submission form. Remember, this blog carnival celebrates science writing for the PUBLIC—save your uber-technical essays and pseudoscience gobbledygook for another carnival. (To see past editions of Scientia Pro Publica, go here.)

More here.

For Morgan:

Jina Moore in Search magazine:

Neurologically speaking, forgiveness is not one event. The brain doesn’t choose to forgive without first assessing the forgivability of an offense. Usually, we consider this a matter of morality or justice—how wrong was the wrong, and what does the person who perpetrated it deserve? Our brains may be decoding the answer to this question independent of our conscience.

Neuroscientists Tom F.D. Farrow and Peter W.R. Woodruff at the University of Sheffield have found that our brains may make neurological distinctions that we have tried to blur, with ethics or religion, when it comes to our behavior. The part of the brain most active when we practice empathy, for instance, is not the same part of the brain that assesses whether or not the person we are empathizing with deserves to be forgiven. It’s too early to say so definitively, but Farrow and Woodruff write that the research “suggest[s] that attempting to understand others (i.e., empathizing) is physiologically distinct from determining the forgivability of their actions.” They also write that there is evidence, from neurological studies of empathy and other social judgments, that “we [may] more easily forgive people we like.”

Cases in Rwanda support this: It took a week of prayer and soul-searching before Alice decided to forgive Emmanuel. She says forgiveness was possible only with God, but if the neurologists are right, it’s plausible she came around in part because she liked Emmanuel. They had built up a friendship working together on community projects, and their comfort with and admiration for each other is easy to feel. They speak with an ease, almost an intimacy; they are quietly protective of each other, empathizing with each other as they tell the story of their relationship. When Emmanuel explains that he was taught to hate Tutsis from the time he was a child, Alice chimes in and talks about the discrimination she experienced as a girl in school. The story suggests what she does not say: I know how it happened, and where it came from, and I can understand it.

B. Raman in Outlook India:

The Arabs constitute a minority in the Islamic world. Non-Arab Muslims living in countries such as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia constitute the majority. The issues, which agitate them, are different from the issues which agitate the Arab world. Osama bin Laden understands this better than Obama and his advisers. That was why in his audio message released through Al Jazeera a day before Obama’s Cairo address, bin Laden focused on issues of immediate concern to the non-Arab Muslims in the Af-Pak region such as the large-scale displacement of Pashtuns from the tribal areas of Pakistan. By focusing on their plight and by holding the Americans responsible for it, he sought to make it certain that the anti-American anger in the Af-Pak region will increase rather than decrease.

Outside India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia, the attitude of the Muslims towards the US is characterized by feelings of hostility or anger or scepticism. There is hardly any feeling of empathy or warmth. There are various reasons for the negative feelings towards the US. Some are country-specific, some are region specific and some are ethnicity specific. The negative feelings of the Arabs towards the US may be due to the Palestine issue and the perceived US support for Israel, but Palestine and Israel are not such burning issues in the non-Arab Islamic world.

Obama’s address seemed to have been constructed around the belief that the Muslims constitute a monolithic community and that their actions are motivated by certain issues of common concern to all the Muslims of the world. This is a wrong belief. The Muslims are not a monolithic community and there is no common thread uniting the anger motivating the Muslims in different countries and different regions. There are Muslims and Muslims and issues and issues.

If Obama wanted to address the Muslims of the world, Cairo was the wrong place from which to seek to do so.

Steve Connor in The Independent:

Steven Chu, the US Secretary of Energy and a Nobel prize-winning scientist, said yesterday that making roofs and pavements white or light-coloured would help to reduce global warming by both conserving energy and reflecting sunlight back into space. It would, he said, be the equivalent of taking all the cars in the world off the road for 11 years.

Speaking in London prior to a meeting of some of the world's best minds on how to combat climate change, Dr Chu said the simple act of painting roofs white could have a dramatic impact on the amount of energy used to keep buildings comfortable, as well as directly offsetting global warming by increasing the reflectivity of the Earth.

“If that building is air-conditioned, it's going to be a lot cooler, it can use 10 or 15 per cent less electricity,” he said. “You also do something in that you change the albedo of the Earth – you make it more reflective. So the sunlight comes down and it actually goes back up – there is no greenhouse effect,” Dr Chu said.

When sunlight is reflected off a white or light-coloured surface much of that light will pass through the atmosphere and back into space, unlike the infrared radiation emitted from the Earth's warmed-up surface, which is blocked by greenhouse gases and causes global warming. “What we're doing is that, as we put in more greenhouse gases, we're putting in more insulation for infrared light. So if you make white roofs and the sunlight comes in, it goes right through that [insulation],” said Dr Chu.

The principle could also be extended to cars where white or “cool colours” designed to reflect light and radiation could make vehicles more energy efficient in summer.

A Mayfly
Paul Muldoon
………………………

A mayfly taking off from a spike of mullein
would blunder into Deichtine’s mouth to become Cú Chulainn,
Cú Chulainn who had it within him to steer clear
of a battlefield on the shaft of his own spear,
his own spear from which he managed to augur
the fate of that part-time cataloguer,
that cataloguer who might yet transcend the crush
as its own tumult transcends the thrush,
the thrush that’s known to have tipped off avalanches
from the larch’s lowest branches,
the lowest branches of the larch
that model themselves after a triumphal arch,
a triumphal arch made of the femora
of a woman who’s even now filed under Ephemera.

In Irish mythology, Deichtine was the sister of Conchobar mac Nessa
and the mother of Cúchulainn, a hero of ancient Ulster and the Old Irish
literary saga An Táin.

From CBC:

For centuries the human brain has been thought of as incapable of fundamental change. People suffering from neurological defects, brain damage or strokes were usually written-off as hopeless cases. But recent and continuing research into the human brain is radically changing how we look at the potential for neurological recovery. The human brain, as we are now quickly learning, has a remarkable ability to change itself – in fact, even to rewire itself. The Brain that Changes Itself, based on the best-selling book by Toronto psychiatrist and researcher Dr. Norman Doidge, presents a strong case for reconsidering how we view the human mind. Dr. Norman Doidge travels across North America to meet some of the pioneering researchers who made revolutionary discoveries about the plasticity of the human brain. He also visits with the people who have been most affected by this research – the patients whose lives have been forever changed – people once thought of as incurable who are now living normal lives.

Known in scientific circles as “neuroplasticity,” this radical new approach to the brain provides an incredible way to bring the human brain back to life. Some of the cases that we meet are:

• Roger Behm, a blind man who is now able to see via his tongue (and can throw a basketball into a garbage can to prove it).
• Cheryl Schiltz, who was written-off by doctors when she lost her sense of balance due to a drug's side effect. Once sentenced to a lifetime of wobbling, her brain rewired itself through a seemingly simple therapy, and has now regained her balance and returned to a normal life.
• Michelle Mack, one of the greatest examples of the brain's ability to adapt: she was born, literally, with just half of her brain.
• Michael Bernstein, who suffered a debilitating stroke in the prime of his life, paralyzing the left side of his body. He's now back to his former life, as his brain functions have been rerouted and re-invigorated.

More here.

From Science:

T. S. Eliot got it wrong. The world could indeed end with a bang, not a whimper, as the poet prophesied. New supercomputer simulations predict that, in 3 billion to 4 billion years, there is a slight chance that Venus or Mars will slam into our planet thanks to the subtle gravitational interactions between Jupiter and Mercury. Although the solar system seems placid and stable, catastrophic collisions and other violent events helped shape it. Scientists think our moon condensed from the debris of a Mars-sized world that smacked into the very young Earth. Uranus rotates on its side, probably because of a planetary collision. And Jupiter's great mass ensures that only asteroids occupy the orbit between it and Mars; anything larger gets ejected from the area by the gas giant's gravity.

Jupiter's gravitational reach also has a slight chance of destroying Earth someday, say astronomers Jacques Laskar and Mickael Gastineau of the Institut de Mecanique Celeste et de Calcul des Ephemerides in Paris. The researchers ran more than 2500 simulations based on a model they developed that projected the precise orbits and interactions of the entire solar system over the next 5 billion years. In tomorrow's issue of Nature, the team reports that in 99% of the simulations, the solar system continued to operate smoothly for this length of time. But in 1% of the cases, things got messy. The culprit was Mercury's orbit. If its trajectory is altered by as little as 0.38 millimeters over the course of the next 140 million years, explains Laskar, that incredibly tiny difference would be magnified steadily by repeated encounters with Jupiter's gravity, growing by a factor of 10 about every 10 million years. By about 1.7 billion years from now, Laskar says, “Mercury's [orbital] eccentricity increases to large values,” and by 3.34 billion years, there could be “a complete destabilization of the inner planets.” As a result, Mars or Venus might ram into Earth. On the bright side, Laskar says, “one is ensured that nothing will happen [in the next] 100 million years.”

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, plus we have added a seventh “wildcard” entry which we thought was a deserving nominee that didn't make it past the voting round. Thanks again to all the participants. There was a lot of interesting stuff, and we discovered many interesting and great blogs through this contest. I hope our readers did too.

Once again, South Tyrolean graphic artist Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our seven finalists may choose to display on their own blogs.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Professor Steven Pinker, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name)

1. Bad Astronomy: Ten Things You Don't Know About Hubble
2. Daylight Atheism: Bands of Iron
3. Mauka to Makai: The Ocean's Big pHat Problem
4. Observations of a Nerd: The End of the Age of Man?
5. Southern Fried Science: The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna
6. Tetrapod Zoology: Passerine birds fight dirty, a la Velociraptor
7. The Primate Diaries: Male Chauvinist Chimps or the Meat Market of Public Opinion?

We'll announce the three winners on June 21, 2009.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best science posts out of the semifinalists, and added one other that we liked very much.

Phil Plait in Bad Astronomy:

As I wrote last week, the British Chiropractic Association is suing science journalist Simon Singh for saying that chiropractors practice “bogus” medicine. Instead of defending what they do with research and testing, they are acting to silence Singh and chill anyone else who may want to expose what they do.

This attack on free speech has been rippling outward over the past few days, and now there is an ironic twist: the McTimoney Chiropractic Association has strongly warned its practitioners to take down their websites and replace any information on their techniques with just brief contact information. Why would they do that?

Because of what we consider to be a witch hunt against chiropractors, we are now issuing the following advice:

The target of the campaigners is now any claims for treatment that cannot be substantiated with chiropractic research. The safest thing for everyone to do is […] [i]f you have a website, take it down NOW.

Heh. Gee, why the heck would anyone want to make sure that a chiropractor — a person who will be futzing around with your spine — be able to substantiate their claims with (gasp) RESEARCH?

More here.

From CNN:

English contains more words than any other language on the planet and added its millionth word early Wednesday, according to the Global Language Monitor, a Web site that uses a math formula to estimate how often words are created.

The site estimates the millionth English word, “Web 2.0” was added to the language Wednesday at 5:22 a.m. ET. The term refers to the second, more social generation of the Internet.

The site says more than 14 words are added to English every day, at the current rate.

The “Million Word March,” however, has made the man who runs this word-counting project somewhat of a pariah in the linguistic community. Some linguists say it's impossible to count the number of words in a language because languages are always changing, and because defining what counts as a word is a fruitless endeavor.

Paul J.J. Payack, president and chief word analyst for the Global Language Monitor, says, however, that the million-word estimation isn't as important as the idea behind his project, which is to show that English has become a complex, global language.

More here.

Catherine Clabby in American Scientist:

A new discovery in a red alga is challenging some conventional wisdom about plant evolution.

As ancestors of land plants abandoned their aquatic nurseries for life on shore, they needed the means to seal in water and hold themselves up to thrive. Lignin, a strengthening and stiffening polymer common in woody plant cells, contributes to both extremely well.

Lignin production for those tasks was considered a key adaptive achievement of vascular plants, which descend from green algae. Now a University of British Columbia botanist and some highly specialized chemists have strong evidence for lignin in a red alga called Calliarthron cheilosporioides.

The finding suggests that a biological building block fundamental to the success of land plants has roots that stretch back far deeper—and maybe wider—through evolutionary time than was known.

More here.

Outraged at Prospect of 'More Balanced Approach,' Peled Calls to Intervene in Congressional Races

Jason Ditz in AntiWar.com:

In particular, Israel would begin shifting military purchases, the bulk of which come from the US, to other nations, and offering influence to other nations willing to get involved in the peace process in a way more in keeping with Israeli interests. Incredibly enough, Peled, a member of the ruling Likud Party, also proposes political actions which seem to amount to an attempt at regime change in the US.

Peled suggests that the Israeli government become directly involved in next year’s US congressional elections, intervening against Democratic Party candidates in the hopes that the candidates would pressure Obama to adopt a more universally pro-Israel stance.

A course of action that seems more at home on the websites of conspiracy theorists, the revelation that an Israeli minister, in the ruling Likud Party no less, would come out so explicitly in support of taking measures against the US is nothing short of astonishing. The prospect has reportedly concerned US Jewish leaders, who fear an attempt to meddle so directly in American policy might provoke a backlash.

More here.

Can Alexandria's ancient lighthouse, considered to be one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, be rebuilt to shine as it did before?

Nevine El-Aref in Al-Ahram:

Since its construction between 285 and 246 BC on the island of Pharos off the Eastern Cape (which was connected to the mainland by means of a man-made dyke seven stadions long and hence known as the Heptastadion — thus giving Alexandria city a double harbour) the lighthouse built by the Greek architect Sastrotus of Cnidus during the reign of Ptolemy II has been famous one way or another. After it had ceased to be a beacon of light indicating the harbour to homecoming sailors, it remained in universal memory as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Now there is talk of recreating this epitome of a landmark.

The ancient Alexandria lighthouse played an important role in guiding sailors and navigators across the Mediterranean. In its day it also captured the imagination of the known world, and soon became the symbol of Alexandria. Soon after it was built, the building itself acquired the name of the island. The relationship between the name and the function became so ingrained that the word “pharos” is the root of the word “lighthouse” in several languages.

For nearly 15 centuries the Pharos continued to guide seafarers approaching the coast of Egypt into the city harbour. It was the prototype of many such buildings, and was classified by Antipater of Sidon on his list of ancient wonders. It was a propaganda tool demonstrating the power and strength of the Greeks who ruled Egypt.

More here. [Thanks to Daupo.]

The didactic poetry of the end of the eighteenth century often put the ideas of doctors and philosophers into verse. It wanted on the one hand to spread admiration for the conquests of science, to invent the De rerum natura of the new learning, while on the other hand it was not slow to sound the alarm about the disenchantment of the world caused by the successes of meas ure ment and calculation. The truths of science being universal, commonplaces were established at a time when scientific knowl edge itself remained indebted to poetry. So it was with the knowledge that was formed under the sign of the neologism “nostalgia,” an amalgam of two Greek words (nostos, return, and algia, pain), proposed in a Basel medical thesis of 1688, defended by Andreas Hofer of Mulhouse and presided over by Johannes Jacob Harder of Basel. This term gave a learned warranty to the popular notion of “homesickness” (Heimweh), [1] and gathered in the memory of a poetic tradition going back to Homer. But the medical cases cited told of recent observations. The malady, the author affirmed, most often affects students and soldiers, illustrative examples of those who are separated from their birthplace by constraint. These were “modern” examples, which took over from the older examples of the exile and the prisoner. The medical neologism, nicely fashioned into a feminine trisyllable, was gradually introduced into current vocabulary. A whole European tradition, of religious or Platonizing inspiration, had developed the motif of the soul’s exile. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with their long-distance journeys some times imposed by force, a sharper awareness of the diversity of social conditions involving uprootedness and the loss of freedom allowed the motif to be brought up to date—to be laicized.

more from Jean Starobinski at The Hudson Review here.

Rome, November 30, 1820. John Keats, who at the age of twenty-five has less than three months to live, is writing to his friend Charles Brown in England:

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been—but it appears to me—however, I will not speak of that subject.

The word that rotates, “but,” is rounded upon, in its turn, by the word “however.” Keats, with a courage that is something better than unflinching (for the unflinching may be not so much courageous as foolhardy), declines to speculate on what might have been his prospects in love and in art, and on what those prospects now are, here and hereafter. He makes deeply real, within real life, a line of thought that has become the shallowest of modern injunctions: Let’s not go there. His unwavering decision, painful and pained, is to treat his friend with the utmost, the uttermost, decorum.

more from Christopher Ricks at the NYRB here.