You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Science’ category.
Well okay, maybe a little.
Homeopathic remedies (also see sugar water) still are ineffective and generally do not work, unless their intended effect is to part foolish people from their money, in that case they are a most excellent product.
“WINNIPEG – Skeptics of homeopathic medicine have downed entire bottles of the remedies at demonstrations in several Canadian cities in an effort to prove the concoctions don’t work.
Gem Newman, who consumed a whole bottle of St. John’s Wort at an event in Winnipeg, says the capsules were mostly comprised of sugar and water and didn’t affect him.”
This is anecdata, but for a more data points please see James Randi as he has been downing homeopathic remedies in quantity for years and is still with us.
“According to the Homepathic Medical Council of Canada’s website, the active ingredients in homeopathic medications are taken in highly-diluted form to avoid toxicity.
But Newman says the product’s heath claims are unproven, and the doses are so small that they are useless.”
It surprises me that in modern countries like Canada the woo peddlers are given so much respect (they have their “medical” council).
Considering the usual abuse of logic and science on the behest of the fetus – fetish crowd, it is really quite unsurprising that on yet another of their talking points – The majority of women who have abortions are emotionally scarred for life – is bunk. The Guttmacher Institute sent this little gem out via email.
“An authoritative new study from researchers in Denmark, noteworthy for its exceptionally strong methodology, confirms what the best scientific evidence has long shown—that there is no causal link between abortion and mental health problems. The new study, “Induced First-Trimester Abortion and Risk of Mental Disorder,” by Trine Munk-Olsen and colleagues, was published in the January 27, 2011, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.”
The study succeeds in addressing several critical limitations that have afflicted some other studies that purport to show causation between abortion and subsequent mental health problems. It can be viewed as unusually rigorous for this type of research for several reasons.”
Wow, correlation does not equal causation. The review of the study continues:
• The sample was very large, comprising 84,620 women who had first-time, first-trimester abortions between 1995 and 2007.
• It did not rely on retrospective self-reports from women, who typically underreport abortions. Instead, it was based on complete patient medical registries, which include virtually all mental health disorders, births and abortions experienced by the Danish population: the Danish Psychiatric Central Register and the Danish National Register of Patients.
• The study has strong controls for women’s mental health prior to abortion, a critical factor that many other studies do not control for sufficiently, if at all.
The study found no higher rate of mental health problems among Danish women in the 12 months following an abortion than in the nine months prior to the procedure.
So, yet another talking point dispatched. Score another for science and truth.
“Not all studies on the mental health impact of abortion are created equal. In fact, according to the American Psychological Association, methodological flaws are “pervasive in the literature on abortion and mental health.” Antiabortion activists often attempt to capitalize on the fact that the public and many policymakers cannot distinguish between studies that allow legitimate conclusions to be drawn about the effects of abortion and those that show only associations between abortion and mental health outcomes.”
The forced birthers not being academically or scientifically honest? Admittedly, there are not many other options to take considering the frail house of cards most anti-choice positions are built on.
“Antiabortion activists have relied on questionable science in their efforts to push inclusion of the concept of “postabortion syndrome” in both clinical practice and law. This latest study strongly confirms the existing body of methodologically sound evidence in clearly refuting the idea that abortion causes harm to women’s mental health. The body of evidence is now so robust that researchers should consider shifting their focus to related issues that might be more valuable to explore, such as the factors that cause women to experience mental health problems in the first place.
Of course, the anti-choicers won’t, as the health and welfare of women are secondary to their mendaciously insipid assault on women’s rights.
Is it the supernatural or just a mere coincidence?
A pox on dust, and a severe reprimand for both (well not really) that are messing with our ability to observe the universe around us.
“Cosmic dust is fogging up attempts to study light left over from the Big Bang, and Canadian scientists aim to clear up the problem. The microscopic dust permeates the universe, producing confusing signals in data collected by the Planck space telescope, which is designed to study distant light originating from the beginning of the universe 13 billion years ago. The dust — mainly sand and soot particles, each about the size of a bacterium — makes up about one per cent of the mass in space, not very much compared with the mass of hydrogen and helium, said University of Toronto astronomer Peter Martin.”
Not exactly a problem a good spring cleaning is going to fix.
“Our cosmologist friends would call it ‘noise’,” Martin said. “It’s not blocking [the radiation]. It’s adding to the signal and therefore confusing what might otherwise be pure cosmological cosmic microwave background radiation.” Martin and his colleagues are trying to figure out what microwave signal the dust produces as it glows so that signal can be subtracted out of the overall data, leaving behind the pure microwave background radiation.”
Hopefully the right algorithm can be concocted to compensate for the dust that is making the data in question hard to interpret. One of the neat side discoveries about the dust itself does provide and interesting tangent.
“In the meantime, they have made some interesting discoveries about the dust itself. Based on the signals they measured, for example, they’ve found that some of the dust particles are spinning billions of times a second.
That was one of the first scientific results gathered using the telescope, which was launched in May 2009. It will continue collecting data until the end of 2011 from an orbit 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, toward Mars.
Martin thinks the dust is fascinating in itself because it is where heavy molecules generated within stars, such as carbon — including the carbon that makes up our bodies — has spent most of its existence over the past five billion years.
“When you’re talking to your friends, you’re talking to people that in an earlier existence used to be this interstellar dust.”
The idea that we are stardust and were outgassed from a star a couple billion years ago is pretty cool. Isn’t science grand?
It is always amazing to witness the clueless try and defend what is indefensible. Water has no “memory” and will not cure you of any sort of disease that requires actual medicine, say for instance Polio. The video on the CBC site had a mother suggest that a homeopathic vaccine for Polio was ‘protecting’ her child. After I stuffed my cortex back into my skull (it runs away from white-hot stupidity) I realized that it was time for another post on the current round of homoeopathic ratbaggery . Please see the science blog Respectful Insolence for more homoeopathic loonery exposed.
I did find a previous video on Youtube from CBC Marketplace on colon cleansing which is another money-sink for ignorant people. Enjoy –
Update: Thanks to Intransigentia for getting the links to the CBC Marketplace show on Youtube. Also see Orac’s generally favorable analysis of how the CBC treated the woo-meisters.
Qualia Soup has a flair for making videos and patience that must be well above the norm as he takes time to answer claims against his first video on Irreducible Complexity.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…