April 27, 2007 12:41

Hawking Goes into Space

OK, slightly misleading headline. Stephen Hawking, the British astrophysicist who ponders the deep mysteries of time and gravity from within a body that's been totally paralyzed for several decades, didn't really go into space yesterday. He took a ride on a space-simulator: a Boeing 727 that flew up to an altitude of almost five miles, then plummeted for half a minute in a free fall that reproduces the sensation of orbiting the Earth. But it was a necessary walk-up, or float-up, to the suborbital space flight he plans to take in 2009 aboard a Virgin Galactic ship...assuming Richard Branson's most ambitious project to date actually takes off.

Hawking endured no fewer than eight plunges, and evidently wished he could have done more.

But actually, the headline is misleading in another way. Hawking has already been in space, aboard the Starship Enterprise.

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April 19, 2007 12:06

Looks Like it Really Was the Hormones

Back in December, a team of cancer experts reported on a rather startling drop in new diagnoses of breast cancer in American women between 2002 and 2003. Their hypothesis: in 2002, researchers found that hormone-replacement therapy, or HRT, didn't help prevent heart disease, as everyone thought, but actually increased the risk. In the wake of that discovery, lots of post-menopausal women stopped taking estrogen and other hormones. These hormones are known to fuel the growth of some breast cancers, so it made sense--but it was still no more than a plausible idea.

Now it's looking a lot more plausible. The numbers are in for 2004, and as an article in the New England Journal of Medicine makes clear, and the rates continued to stay relatively low for that year too. The 2003 drop, in other words, was not a fluke.

Could there be another explanation? Possibly, but nobody has offered any.

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April 17, 2007 4:05

Kids, Antidepressants and Suicide

The controversy over whether children and teenagers should take antidepressants has been simmering for several years now—as you'll see in stories here, here and here. Several studies have shown that a small number of young people develop suicidal thoughts when on the drugs; as a result, the FDA has asked the makers of antidepressants to put warning labels on their products.

But suicide is also an all-too-frequent outcome of untreated depression—which puts the parents of depressed kids in a terrible position.

Now comes a new study, released minutes ago by the Journal of the American Medical Association that may help a little. In a so-called meta-analysis—an overall study of 27 individual studies—doctors at Ohio State conclude that while there is indeed a risk of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts when kids go on these drugs, the risk is very small (there were no actual suicides in any of the studies).

The benefits, they conclude, are much greater—although interestingly, the benefits are greatest for kids with anxiety disorders, somewhat less for kids with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and least for kids with major depression.

One way to reduce the risks of antidepressants, the experts agree, is to make sure the prescribing doctor has some knowledge and experience with them. Unfortunately, the law says any medical doctor can prescribe any non-controlled medication—and a physician who's unfamiliar with antidepressants might also not know that it's really important to monitor any patient, especially a young one, in the first few weeks when the danger of increased suicidal thoughts is greatest.

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April 10, 2007 3:13

Are Darwinists Afraid to Debate?

That's the burning question asked by two representatives of the Discovery Institute in an op-ed in today's Dallas Morning News.

It seems that the supporters of Intelligent Design are running a conference at Southern Methodist University on "Darwin vs. Design." Some on campus apparently don't want it to happen. And most SMU scientists aren't planning to show up. Censorship! cry the Discoverists. An assault on academic freedom! What are the Darwinists afraid of, hmmm?

Give me a break. All this proves, once again, is that while the Discovery Institute doesn't have the first clue about actual science, it's very adept at the techniques of propaganda. The Institute is much too cagey to aim its spin at scientists, who actually know something about science, but rather at the average reader, who probably doesn't. What the DI does is present a long list of half- and quarter-truths and hope nobody will notice.

I noticed. First, it's always a bad idea to try and prevent free speech, no matter how dubious it is. Bad, bad SMU scientists. I think everyone should be allowed to speak, no matter how questionable their theories are. I was present in 1972 or so when Immanuel Velikovsky spoke at Harvard. It's a reasonable comparison, actually, because while scientists think Velikovsky's theories were absurd, nobody protested--but nobody was interested in debating him either.

Why? Because there was nothing to debate, just as there isn't with ID. It's not a scientific theory (the DI's protests to the contrary). Or rather, it is, but only if you admit, as leading ID proponent Michael Behe did on the stand at the Dover, PA school board trial, that science should also include "supernatural explanations."

I don't call that science, and neither to the vast majority of scientists. Most of ID consists of mostly untestable assertions (the few that have been tested have been refuted) that point to unexplained aspects of the natural world and say, in essence, "can't explain it at the moment, therefore some Intelligent Designer intervened."

If the DI had been around when people thought lightning was stuff the gods threw when angry, we might still not have electricity.

So the answer to your question, fellas, is that the Darwinists are afraid of two things. The first is giving you folks a shred of credibility by appearing in the same room with you. The second is that your piles of half truths will actually make people more ignorant.

Hope that clears things up for you.

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April 9, 2007 4:00

Big Medical News! Do not read!

Just moments ago, the Archives of Neurology released a new study that shows an intriguing link between smoking, coffee-drinking and Parkinson's disease. When researchers at Duke University Medical Center compared people with Parkinson's with family members who didn't, the Parkinson's patients were half as likely to report they'd ever smoked, and a third as likely to be current smokers. They also were less likely to report being heavy coffee drinkers.

All of which means...well, nobody has the first clue. It's a relatively small study, with a few hundred subjects in each group. And there's no proof of cause and effect. It certainly doesn't mean you shouldn't stop smoking—or that you should start, if you don't. As the researchers carefully point out, smoking is really, really bad for you in all sorts of ways.

And this is why medical "news" can be so misleading if you don't know how to read it. The significance of this study is simply that it may, someday, give a clue as to the actual cause of Parkinson's. It hasn't done that yet. It doesn't offer any advice on behavior. For a scientist, it's useful. For the public, it's quite useless—or worse than useless, actually, since it will inevitably lead people to believe something that isn't true.

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April 7, 2007 2:49

Nuclear Power Returns

Just three days ago, I was looking down into a deep pool of water at an unearthly blue glow. It was coming a collection of spent fuel rods from a nuclear reactor--but not just any reactor. This is the Advanced Test Reactor, in the middle of a magnificent desert landscape, surrounded by towering snow-capped mountains, about 50 miles west of Idaho Falls, at the Idaho National Laboratory. This is arguably the epicenter of what enthusiasts call the Nuclear Renaissance. Thanks partly to global warming and partly to rising prices of other energy technologies, many people (including a co-founder of Greenpeace) think we're going to be getting a significant amount of power from nukes.

INL is where the world's first power reactor was built (it's now a funky museum--they've even got engine prototypes for an atomic-powered airplane that was a serious idea in the 1950s). And it's where components for the so-called Generation IV Nuclear reactor are being designed and tested.

To my surprise, it turns out that these new reactors, designed to operate at over 900 degrees C, aren't primarily for generating electricity--it's their amazing heat output that makes them valuable (we already have some pretty reliable designs for electricity-making reactors, and nobody wants to reinvent that particular wheel). The idea is that industrial processes that use lots of heat, like oil refining and the creation of hydrogen--also used in refineries, and also for making fertilizer--burn natural gas to get it. And that funnels huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Get the heat from nukes and you use less fossil fuel.

Today's nuke-boosters are much too sophisticated to think nuclear power doesn't carry dangers--but they're convinced the danger can be managed. I have to admit, they make a reasonable case.

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April 1, 2007 12:22

Science vs. God, Redux

You may remember that last fall Time published a debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins. Both are respected scientists, but Dawkins is a militant (to put it mildly) atheist and Collins a born-again Christian—but one who has no trouble with evolution or other areas of science that some believers denounce.

Well, this past week, both Dawkins and Collins were guests on public radio's Fresh Air program, with Terry Gross (memo to Terry: have me on your program sometime. I'd be a terrific guest). In back-to-back shows, the two essentially recapitulated the arguments they'd made for an audience of editors for Time, and also in their respective books, Dawkins' The God Delusion and Collins' The Language of God.

In listening to them, I realized something that had only tickled at the fringes of my consciousness when I read the debate. And that is that, since both men are scientists, the whole disagreement boils down to a very simple question, which is embodied in Carl Sagan's famous dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. For Dawkins (and I'll admit, for me as well), the claim that there's an omnipotent, supernatural, invisible being that knows what I'm thinking and can perform miracles is absolutely extraordinary. You can't disprove it (which is why I'm not an atheist)—but it's
way more extreme than the claim that, say, aliens crashed at Roswell. So for Dawkins an d me, you'd better come up with some pretty extraordinary evidence to convince me.

But it's clear listening to Collins that he doesn't see it as an extraordinary claim at all. And once you posit a God—based either on your own personal experience of something or on your parents' instruction—then all the rest, including miracles and noticing tiny sparrows falling from nests and so on—is pretty easy to swallow.

That, it seems to me, is the fundamental disconnect between the two camps—and I don't really see how it can be bridged. What do you think?

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