The other problem with fake vaccine scares —

It's not just that bad information on the "dangers" of vaccines is working to reduce the number of children getting vaccines — a fact that affects herd immunity. Now, there's evidence that the fake scares (and efforts to debunk them) are getting in the way of scientists publishing real evidence about actual problems with certain vaccines. These aren't the kind of broad "vaccines are poison" claims you're familiar with. Instead, we're talking about legitimate science documenting side effects that are usually very rare, but still have an impact on certain subsets of the population and need to be addressed. — Maggie •

What ovarian cancer can teach us about medicine, as a whole —

The New York Times has a story on problems with the treatment of ovarian cancer that holds lessons for many aspects of modern medicine. The big issue here: Local doctors, even local specialists, might not have the information necessary to properly treat patients who come in with problems those doctors don't have a lot of experience with. And those doctors don't always refer patients to people with more expertise. In a world with constantly changing information, how do you get that information to the people patients are most in contact with? In a world with more and more evidence available, how do you change traditions in the medical community that apply treatments based on "what my teachers did" and "what I've always done"? Big questions here, not a lot of answers. — Maggie •

The role of anecdotes in science —

Anecdotes aren't data — but they do make data memorable. — Maggie •

The art and science of searching for water —

The United States Geological Survey has an interesting FAQ report on dowsing — the practice of attempting to locate underground water with divining rods. It's got some interesting history and comparisons between dowsing and modern hydrology. The part on evidence for and against dowsing, though, is pretty sparse. If you want more on that, The Skeptic's Dictionary has some deeper analysis. The basic gist — what little research there has been suggests the successes of dowsing aren't any better than chance. (Via an interesting piece by Mary Brock at Skepchick about dowsing in the wine industry.) — Maggie •

A helpful reminder: Video game consumption is not correlated with gun violence —

The focus on video games as a source of American gun violence is driving me a bit crazy, so I just wanted to toss some evidence out there. Even though most of you have likely long suspected the two things were not related, you'll be happy to know that science agrees with you. Consider this a helpful kit for forwarding to concerned relatives. Here's a 10-country comparison that found no correlation between video game consumption and gun violence. Here's a Harvard Medical School summary that explains why some people claim video games cause violence, and why the studies behind those claims aren't actually telling us that. And here's a PBS FAQ explaining a lot of the same issues. With violent video games (as with everything else) context matters. — Maggie •

A useful blog for people interested in alternative medicine —

Until 2011, Dr. Edzard Ernst was the head of one of the few university departments doing real, unbiased research on the effectiveness and safety of alternative medicine techniques. That's important, because you can't just dismiss weird-sounding stuff out of hand, but you also want somebody other than the practitioners of that weird-sounding stuff conducting research and analyzing the data. Now retired, Ernst recently started blogging, and I wanted to point you to his new home on the Internet. He can be a bit snarky and caustic (especially with chiropractic and homeopathy). But in general he's a fair, reasonable, and knowledgeable source on what works and what doesn't. Definitely worth a bookmark. — Maggie •

The Nobel Prize in Quackpottery —

At The Guardian, blogger GrrlScientist is passing out Nobel Prizes for Quackpottery in the fields of physiology, physics, and chemistry. The prizes are awarded to actual Nobel Laureates who have made deep and long-lasting contributions to undermining their own credibility by latching onto hypotheses they can't back up with evidence and then continuing to promote those hypotheses despite the lack of evidence. It's a nice reminder that scientists are human, and that even very, very smart people are not always rational people. — Maggie •

Is acceptance of climate change on the rise? —

A Yale survey found that 3/4 of Americans believe anthropogenic climate change is really happening. Of course, this comes after an exceptionally hot and drought-y summer and we already know that opinions on climate change oscillate with the weather. To really get a good picture of whether acceptance of climate change is on the rise, we'd have to look at a variety of polls, conducted in different ways by different organizations. And we'd have to look for changes in the trend line over long periods of time, so we know we're looking at an actual, long-term shift. Which all sounds oddly familiar, now that I think about it. — Maggie •

Are pesticides helpful things that allow us to produce more food, and keep us safe from deadly diseases? Or are they dangerous things that kill animals and could possibly be hurting us in ways we haven't even totally figured out just yet?

Actually, they're both.

This week, scientists released a research paper looking at the health benefits (or lack thereof) of organic food—a category which largely exists as a response to pesticide use in agriculture. Meanwhile, Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, which forced Americans to really think about the health impacts of pesticides for the first time, was published 50 years ago this month.

The juxtaposition really drove home a key point: We're still trying to figure out how to balance benefits and risks when it comes to technology. That's because there's no easy, one-size-fits-all answer. Should we use pesticides, or should we not use them? The data we look at is objective but the answer is, frankly, subjective. It also depends on a wide variety of factors: what specific pesticide are we talking about; where is it being used and how is it being applied; what have we done to educate the people who are applying it in proper, safe usage. It's complicated. And it's not just about how well the tools work. It's also about how we used them.

“It is not my contention,” Carson wrote in Silent Spring, “that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge.”

Read the rest

Apply Truth Goggles, learn truths —

Truth Goggles is a web app that highlights facts in the text of a web page or news story and provides a link that tells you whether or not those facts are true. — Maggie •

Over at Download the Universe, Ars Technica science editor John Timmer reviews a science ebook whose science leaves something to be desired. Written by J. Marvin Herndon, a physicist, Indivisible Earth presents an alternate theory that ostensibly competes with plate tectonics. Instead of Earth having a molten core and a moveable crust, Herndon proposes that this planet began its existence as the core of a gas giant, like Jupiter or Saturn. Somehow, Earth lost its thick layer of gas and the small, dense core expanded, cracking as it grew into the continents we know today. What most people think are continental plate boundaries are, to Herndon, simply seams where bits of planet ripped apart from one another.

The problem is that Herndon doesn't offer a lot of evidence to support this idea.

Once the Earth was at the center of a gas giant, Herndon thinks the intense pressure of the massive atmosphere compressed the gas giant's rocky core so that it shrunk to the point where its surface was completely covered by what we now call continental plates. In other words, the entire surface of our present planet was once much smaller, and all land mass.

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of this, figuring out the radius of a sphere that would have the same surface area as our current land mass. It was only half the planet's present size. Using that radius to calculate the sphere's volume, it's possible to figure out the density (assuming a roughly current mass). That produced a figure six times higher than the Earth's current density — and about three times that of pure lead. I realize that a lot of the material in the Earth can be compressed under pressure, but I'm pretty skeptical that it can compress that much. And, more importantly, if Herndon wants to convince anyone that it did, this density difference is probably the sort of thing he should be addressing. He's not bothered; the idea that the continents once covered the surface of the Earth was put forward in 1933, and that's good enough for him.

Read the rest

Fewer options, better healthcare? —

Over at Discover, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn makes an interesting point about flaws in our current healthcare system. Historically, we've put a lot of effort into innovation, and not enough into building solid bases of evidence about which treatments actually work. Her argument: Americans would be better off if we had fewer options when it came to medical care. The assumption she's making (and it's not out of line) is that if we did more of the kind of large-scale, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies that offer useful evidence about effectiveness and safety, then many of the treatments options we now have would turn out to be useless. — Maggie •

This just in: Internet not actually full of sad, lonely rejects —

Personally, I'm about to sprain something from rolling my eyes so hard at all the hand-wringing news stories about how the Internet is disconnecting us from other people and making us more lonely. So it's gratifying to read this piece in the Boston Review that points two key problems with that thesis (besides being fracking obnoxious): First, the evidence doesn't support it; second, humans have apparently been worrying about increasing levels of loneliness since the 1700s. — Maggie •

Science in fiction affects our ability to understand science in real life. For instance, you might already be familiar with the idea that detective shows on TV, particularly forensics shows like CSI, might be influencing what juries expect to see in a courtroom.

This is called the "CSI effect" and it's hotly debated. Some prosecutors think it has a real impact on jury decisions—if they don't get the fancy, scientific evidence they've been conditioned to expect then they won't convict. Meanwhile, though, empirical evidence seems to show a more complicated pattern. Surveys of more than 2000 Michigan jurors found that, while people were heavily expecting to see some high-tech forensic evidence during trials, that expectation probably had more to do with the general proliferation of technology throughout society. More interestingly, that broad expectation didn't seem to definitively influence how jurors voted during a specific trial. In other words: The jury is still out. (*Puts on sunglasses*)

A FRONTLINE documentary that airs tomorrow centers around an interesting corollary on this issue: Whether or not shows like CSI influence juries to expect more technology, they do present a wildly inaccurate portrait of how accurate that technology is. The reality is, many of the tools and techniques used in detective work have never been scientifically verified. We don't know that they actually tell us what they purport to tell us. Other forensic technologies do work, but only if you use them right—and there's no across-the-board standard guaranteeing that happens.

Even ideas you think you can trust implicitly—like fingerprint evidence—turn out to have serious flaws that are seriously under-appreciated by cops, lawyers, judges, and juries.

Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer, was at the center of international controversy in 2004 after the FBI and an independent analyst incorrectly matched his prints to a partial print found on a bag of detonators from the Madrid terrorist bombings.

Dror asked five fingerprint experts to examine what they were told were the erroneously matched prints of Mayfield. In fact, they were re-examining prints from their own past cases. Only one of the experts stuck by their previous judgments. Three reversed their previous decisions and one deemed them “inconclusive.”

Dror’s argument is that these competent and well-meaning experts were swayed by “cognitive bias”: what they knew (or thought they knew) about the case in front of them swayed their analysis. The Mayfield case and studies like Dror’s have changed how fingerprints are used in the criminal justice system. The FBI no longer testifies that fingerprints are 100 percent infallible.

Watch a short video that explains more about the flaws in fingerprint analysis.

The Real CSI episode of FRONTLINE airs tomorrow, April 17th. Check out the FRONTLINE website for more information.

Image: Fingerprint developed with black magnetic powder on a cool mint Listerine oral care strip, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jackofspades's photostream.