You should be thinking about that every time you see anybody talk about the results of a single, new study. Without context, you get situations like this one, described by Travis Saunders on the Obesity Panacea blog:

Earlier this year my friend and colleague Valerie Carson published an interesting paper examining the health impact of various types of sedentary behaviour in a sample of 2500 children and adolescents. They created a clustered risk score (CRS) which took into account a child’s waist circumference, blood pressure, cholesterol, and inflammation, and then examined whether it was associated with 3 different measures of sedentary behaviour – accelerometry (an objective measure of movement), self-reported TV watching, and self-reported computer use.

Here is what they found (emphasis mine): For types of sedentary behavior, high TV use, but not high computer use, was a predictor of high CRS after adjustment for MVPA and other confounders. Here is what the Daily Mail had to say: Watching TV most damaging pastime for inactive children, increasing risk of heart disease.

Last month, our group in Ottawa published another paper (led by Dr Gary Goldfield) looking at different types of sedentary behaviour and heart disease risk factors in a cohort of overweight and obese teens (in contrast, the earlier study was on a sample of nationally representative youth). Interestingly, we found that neither TV time nor computer time was associated with increased risk in this group - in our dataset it was video games that were by far the most important sedentary behaviour.

Why is this a problem? Put yourself in the shoes of someone who just read the Daily Mail article, and who now believes that TV viewing is the single most damaging sedentary behaviour for kids to engage in. What reaction are you going to have when you read a similar article about our new study, suggesting that TV viewing and computer use aren’t important at all, but that video games are actually “the most damaging activity an inactive child can indulge in”?

As the source of this problem, Saunders rightly calls out journalists for pushing every individual study as a "GROUNDBREAKING NEW FINDING". It is, unfortunately, rare to find TV and newspaper coverage that treats new studies in context, rather than as the final word. But to that, I'd add university PR people. The sad truth is, with newspaper layoffs, many of the people writing about science aren't specialists. They cover city council one day, school board the next, and a new research finding after that. The press releases they get (and I know, because I get those press releases, too) push GROUNDBREAKING NEW FINDINGS not research that fits into a larger context. It's the journalists job to know better. But it's also the university's job to not manipulate journalists.

Recoding Innovation is a National Science Foundation-funded documentary that's basically about the anthropology of science and engineering.

If you're a scientist or an engineer, you can participate. How does your culture, values, and beliefs make your work happen? The idea here is that ethics aren't something that hold science back. Instead, applying ethics helps scientists and engineers be innovative. It's a cool idea, and I'm looking forward to watching the finished documentary. The video above includes a short example of the kind of stories the editors are looking for.

Submit your story by January 1.

Video Link

Usually, when that caveat comes up, the person giving it is talking about fundamental differences between mouse biology and human biology. For instance, a mouse might only need one copy of a genetic factor to grow normally. Meanwhile, a human needs to have both copies or risk altered sexual development.

But there are other problems with mice, problems that have more to do with how we select, breed, and raise mouse models. In a fascinating three-part series on Slate.com, Daniel Engber looks at how we undermine the usefulness of our own lab mice, and the risks we take when we do so.

If you put a rat on a limited feeding schedule—depriving it of food every other day—and then blocked off one of its cerebral arteries to induce a stroke, its brain damage would be greatly reduced. The same held for mice that had been engineered to develop something like Parkinson's disease: Take away their food, and their brains stayed healthier.

But Mattson wasn't so quick to prescribe his stern feeding schedule to the crowd in Atlanta. He had faith in his research on diet and the brain but was beginning to realize that it suffered from a major complication. It might well be the case that a mouse can be starved into good health—that a deprived and skinny brain is more robust than one that's well-fed. But there was another way to look at the data. Maybe it's not that limiting a mouse's food intake makes it healthy, he thought; it could be that not limiting a mouse's food makes it sick. Mattson's control animals—the rodents that were supposed to yield a normal response to stroke and Parkinson's—might have been overweight, and that would mean his baseline data were skewed.

Part 1: The unhealthy lives of industrialized lab mice
Part 2: The trouble with focusing so much research on one single mouse species
Part 3: Why the naked mole rat (and the Burmese python) can help

A lot of the time, when you read a newspaper article about a new study in one of those fields, the study hasn't actually yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It's just been posted to arXiv, which sort of becomes a crowd-sourced peer review peer review of its own. Especially for headline-grabbing research making big, bold claims.

That's the background you need to understand what's going on right now with the study that claimed to find neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. That announcement was made in an arXiv paper. Putting those results on arXiv was as much a way of saying, "Woah, we just found something crazy, please tell us if you see something we've done wrong," as it was a formal declaration of scientific discovery.

Since that paper was published in September, there have been more than 80 follow-up papers, also published on arXiv, offering criticism of the original research or proposing theoretical explanations of how that seemingly crazy finding could fit into physics as we know it. And all of this is happening before anybody has gone through the peer-review publishing process.

That's why it's not terribly weird that you're now hearing all sorts of criticism of the original FTL neutrino findings. That's what was supposed to happen. It's also not terribly weird that the original researchers have announced that they're going to re-do the experiment themselves, taking into account some of the big criticisms brought up on arXiv. The BBC explains what will be done differently this time:

The neutrinos that emerge at Gran Sasso start off as a beam of proton particles at Cern. Through a series of complex interactions, neutrino particles are generated from this beam and stream through the Earth's crust to Italy.

Originally, Cern fired the protons in a long pulse lasting 10 microseconds (10 millionths of a second). The neutrinos showed up 60 nanoseconds (60 billionths of a second) earlier than light would have over the same distance.

However, the time measurement is not direct; the researchers cannot know how long it took an individual neutrino to travel from Switzerland to Italy. Instead, the measurement must be performed statistically: the scientists superimpose the neutrinos' "arrival times" on the protons' "departure times", over and over again and taking an average.

But some physicists say that any wrong assumptions made when relating these data sets could produce a misleading result. This should be addressed by the new measurements, in which protons are sent in a series of short bursts - lasting just one or two nanoseconds, thousands of times shorter - with a large gap (roughly 500 nanoseconds) in between each burst. This system, says Dr Bertolucci, is more efficient: "For every neutrino event at Gran Sasso, you can connect it unambiguously with the batch of protons at Cern," he explained.

By taking these criticisms into account now, the FTL neutrino researchers are doing sort of a pre-peer-review peer review. If their new experiment yields the same results, it makes the claim stronger and makes a traditional journal more likely to publish the results. As a bonus: Those results will already have been tested against the most obvious criticisms. If FTL neutrinos make it to a peer-reviewed journal, there will be a much greater likelihood that what's being published is actually worth paying attention to. If they don't, there's a well-established record of how smart people got something wrong—valuable to future researchers, even though it wouldn't be likely to pass muster in a journal.

Meanwhile, because none of these papers had to go through the lengthy (and costly) traditional publishing process, we've been able to see both the weird finding and the critical evaluations far faster than we otherwise would have. And because the weird finding was made available sooner, there will be independent researchers trying to replicate it sooner. In fact, there's a good chance that, if the FTL neutrino researchers decide to go ahead and publish their results in a peer-reviewed journal, several other, independent teams will be well on their way to replicating the results (or not) by the time that paper is printed.

So if there's one thing you should be taking away from all the fuss over FTL neutrinos, it's this: Science benefits when scientists have more than one way to share information with each other.

You may not agree all those ways your tax dollars are spent, but they are all, at least, fairly tangible. When it's time for re-election, your senator can point to a roads project, a school, a saintly grandmother, or a missile silo. Through these projects, Americans are being educated, cared for, and protected.

But it's hard to make that clear cost/benefit analysis for basic scientific research. At least, not on a timetable that matches up with election cycles.

Basic research is often weird, and it's often boring. It's the years spent mapping the neurons of zebra fish, so that future scientists can have a more detailed biological model to work with. It's the chemical analysis that has to happen, so that two decades from now somebody else can discover a new cancer-fighting drug. Basic research is about curiosity, and knowledge for knowledge's sake. By it's very nature, basic research relies on public funding. But by it's very nature, it's hard to explain how the public benefits from the basic research we fund.

Attila Kovacs is one of the scientists who put your tax dollars to work. An astrophysicist at the University of Minnesota, he specializes in the study of space dust. That is, yes, dust. In space. It's the sort of thing that would be very easy to mock. (Imagine Bill O'Reilly making a joke about lemon-scent space Pledge.) But Kovacs says space dust matters more than you think. And he makes a good case for why it's important to spend tax dollars on funny-sounding science.

Maggie Koerth-Baker: You study space dust, but what does that really mean? Is this the same thing as dust on Earth, just in space? Or is space dust something a little different than the stuff that builds up on our bookshelves and end tables?

Attila Kovacs: In some ways it is similar. I like to think of Earth as a giant dust ball. Earth was made of space dust, but it went through a lot of evolution so dust that’s on Earth now isn't exactly the same. We don't actually know the structure of space dust, but we can guess. It probably has metallic core surrounded by a carbon or silicate shell and an ice mantel. They may be shaped like snow-flakes or a crumpled piece of paper. And we know that a typical speck of space dust is about 0.1 microns, about 1 thousandth of the width of your hair. It's hard to get your hands on space dust. We can only get indirect evidence through observation, by looking at the light that goes through the dust.

For instance, we know the size of space dust because light that has a wavelength larger than the particles of dust has come through the dust. We can see how different wavelengths of light either get blocked or go through the dust layers and we can put a size on that.

But what really makes dust interesting to me is its intricate connection to star formation. Dust is produced by stars in their dying phase, and it's also an essential ingredient for making new stars and planets. Interstellar dust is mostly heated by massive young stars less than a million years old. In fact, most of the light from stars is absorbed and re-emitted as heat by dust. So, by measuring the heat contained in dust we can get an accurate picture of the current level of star-formation in galaxies at all ages of the Universe. Through the dust, we can directly measure the complete star-formation history of the universe and get a glimpse at when and how the galaxies and stars came into being. This is what I research.

Yet another interesting aspect of space dust is its role in the chemistry of space. Most molecules, including molecular hydrogen, water, CO, and even some organic compounds that we see in space, have formed on the surfaces of dust grains, which act as catalytic surfaces enabling chemical reactions at the low temperatures and densities of space. There is no other way to make such molecules. All the precursor organic molecules of life on Earth probably formed on dust grains around a dying star, before our Sun and solar system were even born.

A scanning electron microscope image of an interplanetary dust particle. CC licensed, via Wikipedia.

MKB: When did you decide to dedicate your life to studying space dust?

AK: I was drawn to astronomy from a very young age. Soon after I learned to read, my grandmother took me to a bookstore, and told the clerk to get me whatever book I wanted. I told him I wanted a book about astronomy. The clerk got me something appropriate for a child of age 6, with pretty drawings of a smiling Sun and all, but I was very upset. I told him I wanted something much more serious. In the end, we settled on a book that would be your college-level intro astronomy. I loved it. I did not understand it all, but I still loved it. Later my interests turned to physics. But physics was a pretty dry landscape. A lot of the really crazy discoveries go back to the beginning of 20th century. Astronomy is always new and exciting. Every time you turn on a new telescope, there's always something new you’ll discover. That's what drew me back to astronomy.

As for dust, dust is the most prominent thing that you will see in space, even more than stars and star-light. More than half of all the light from galaxies in the universe is radiated as heat from dust grains. It’s also the most critical ingredient in the chemistry of the interstellar medium.

MKB: I’m assuming you’re not the only person studying this stuff. What makes your approach different? What aspects of space dust are you looking at that your colleagues aren’t?

AK: To some degree all of us are doing somewhat different work, but that doesn't mean there's not overlap. But I think it's important to have that overlap. That's where you get the credibility of science. Without that there’s no way to check whether somebody is right or wrong. Redundancy is a cross check.

What I personally do different: We do the same sort of observations. When I get observing time to look at a few galaxies on a telescope, there are people doing similar observations. But what's unique about what I do is the models that I use for analyzing the data and the tools I develop. Most astronomers who observe similar subjects are really users of technology. They use what's there. I, on the other hand, try to think about what will be the next gadget we can bring to the telescope that will enable us to do this research even better. I don't know a lot of people in the “dust” community that do that.

For example, I’ve worked to develop the equivalent of digital cameras for this long wavelength light, that lies between the infrared and radio bands. Essentially, they’re very sensitive thermometers. When you put them on telescopes then the light from the distant galaxy heats up the detector and you notice this very small temperature change. The instruments I helped to build are used on telescopes in Hawaii, Chile and Spain. And more recently I had an interesting idea on how to build an instrument that would split that light into 1000 different colors for each pixel, and then you can take pictures of both the dust and the dominant chemistry in galaxies. You can get a vast amount of information from that because you will be able to detect and map dozens of molecular lines in distant galaxies all at once. I’m hoping to build such an instrument and get it and on a telescope in a few years.

MKB: That sounds expensive. How do you fund this research? Who funds it, and how does that process work for you?

AK: We're relying a lot on government agencies, particularly the NSF (National Science Foundation) or NASA. And there are two ways to get funding. First is through regular grant projects, which are 3-year cycles where you apply for a grant to do specific research. And NASA also provides funding to use their space telescopes. So you can propose to do a specific bit of science with them and if you get observing time then they'll give you some money to help you with that.

The process starts with a proposal. You tell them what you want to do, why it's important, and what you hope to learn. You really have to justify your work. They don't just give you money because it's nifty. The grants are peer reviewed. And your peers decide whether it merits funding or not. They look at what you've done before with funding. They look at the potential impact, and what you'll do to communicate your science to the public. This is how they select who gets the funding. Typically it's for a 3 year cycle. Every 3 years your whole life hangs in the air. And it's far from guaranteed. Most things I apply for, 1 out of 20 or 1 out of 100 proposals are successful. It's far from easy.

Pig at the Minnesota Tax Cut Rally 2011, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from fibonacciblue's photostream.

MKB: How expensive is your work? When you do win these grants, what does the money go toward?

AK: At the bottom level it's the salary. I get around $40,000 and when you add overheads and whatnot that the university pays, it’s maybe $70,000. To do the science we have to build the instruments. We can't just use our eyes on the telescope, and those tools typically cost a few million to develop.

Then there’s the telescopes themselves. A 10 meter radio telescope up on some high mountain, that’s maybe $10 to $15 million to build, and a few millions a year to run. Private donors often pay for the construction of telescopes that will bear their name — like the famous Keck telescopes in Hawaii, paid for by W. M. Keck. A space telescope can be upwards of $1 billion.

That’s expensive. But you have to think of what it costs to the typical taxpayer. With just a single dollar of tax you pay every year, how much can you buy when it’s combined with the $1 everyone else pays? For $1 per person every year, you’re going to pay for 2000 post-doc researchers. That’s 2000 people like me. Or you could buy up to 100 instruments to put on the telescopes. Or your $1 can also buy you a few telescopes a year or one space telescope every few years.

MKB: You do basic research, stuff that’s really driven by curiosity, not by short-term practical goals. In a time of tight budgets, why is that important? In a recession, is space dust really something we can afford to spend money on?

AK: These are difficult times and when the money is tight we have a tendency to ask whether this is practical, and do we really need it. The answer to that is that it's not the need that drives discovery. It's the other way around: discovery drives our needs. You can only need things that you already know about. What basic science does is look for new knowledge. What it will be made of in the future, we don't know. But often it brings us new things that will be very practical.

My favorite example is electricity. Electricity, when it was discovered, wasn't anything useful. But once it's discovered, then you can start thinking about how you'll use it. What you have to think about is this: What is practical is something very short term. Basic science is much more forward looking. Some of it will produce useful things 10 to 30 years from now.

If you’re tight on your own budget how do you trade off on everyday necessities versus saving for retirement? You can't pay for rent and food at the cost of not saving at all for retirement. So when the budget is tight you have to cut back on both ends, rather than eliminating one. And we should do that in science. You can’t sacrifice the future because times are bad now.

MKB: Okay, but is there something you can look at and say, "This is what people will get if they fund me?" Is there anything tangible?

AK: For my work specifically? Well, you never know where it will take you. There are some things you can foresee a little bit. But I’m hesitant to guess. You do get benefits from astrophysics, though. There’s the selfish curiosity of knowing, but in that process we create technologies to detect the light we're analyzing. And a lot of those will be practical in the future.

When you're using your digital camera today, you’re using technology that optical astronomy developed 30 years ago. Today it's in your camera. Lots of technologies from radio astronomy are in your cellphone today. You wouldn't have that without basic science trying to detect light at different wavelengths. You really have no idea where the technologies we develop today will take you in another 10, 20 or 30 years.

MKB: But why government funding? Why not find a private organization or corporation that wants to help you research space dust?

AK: I think there's many sides to this. Right now, private funding tends to be product based. It has to lead to a product within a few years for a private company to be interested. So it may be practical and possible for things with immediate applications, but it's hard for me to see why a corporation would be interested in something long term and uncertain.

Basic research used to be privately funded in the past, like with Bell Labs. That used to be THE place where basic research was happening. But somehow that model has disappeared and I think it's because corporations are looking for more short term goals. There's really no corporation doing basic research in the same way Bell Labs did.

But there are also reasons why you might not want it, even if they were interested. Corporations are interested in proprietary technologies and getting out ahead of another company. They won't share what you discovery and they'll use it exclusively to their advantage. They'll file patents and protect their turf. And that’s fine. But the reason we want public funding is that we want to generate public knowledge. We want to share this with the world. We want it to be immediately available to everyone around us. Science doesn’t have trade secrets. I think public funding is essential to keep it that way.

Main Image: Cosmic dust of the Andromeda Galaxy as revealed in infrared light by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Public domain, via Wikipedia.

Did you know that, with a properly conducted series of clinical trials, it can take upwards of 20 years before a medical discovery makes it from the lab to the hospital?

Judy Stone, an infectious disease specialist who does clinical research, has a guest post on the Scientific American blog network today, explaining the basics of clinical trials—where they came from, and how they can go wrong.

She's going to be publishing a series of posts on this topic, and is looking for input on what you want to know about clinical trials. Disclaimer: As a clinical researcher, Stone has a goal here. She'd like to see more people volunteering for clinical research, and part of what she's interested in is the gaps in knowledge that make people wary of participating, or leave them unaware that they can participate. Your input would be helpful.

Clinical trials seek to learn whether a drug (or device) works as expected—it’s unknown, until tested in people. That’s why early phase trials use only a few people, and more are added as experience is gained. Sometimes unexpected discoveries are made along the way. For example, Rogaine was discovered by an astute clinician researcher during a clinical trial studying high blood pressure. The drug, minoxidil, originally under study as an anti-hypertensive medication, was serendipitously found to have the unexpected side effect of stimulating hair growth, prompting a whole new line of products for baldness.

Similarly, Viagra was discovered by accident. Sildenafil, the generic form, was being studied as a treatment for angina, as it dilates blood vessels by blocking an enzyme, phosphodiesterase (PDE). While not very effective for angina, it was found to prolong erections, stimulating the whole “life-style drug” industry. Fortunately, PDE inhibitors are now being found useful for a host of important medical conditions, ranging from pulmonary hypertension to asthma and muscular dystrophy.

Of course, not all inadvertent discoveries have such rosy outcomes.

For example, Diethylstilbesterol (DES), a synthetic estrogen, was commonly prescribed in the US 1938-1971, to help prevent miscarriages. It was only after many years that DES was found to cause a rare type of vaginal cancer in daughters of exposed women. Later, other types of cancers showed up as well, in small numbers.

Dr. Harold W. Koenigsberg and his colleagues were in the process of studying the causes of panic and anxiety disorders, in hopes of better understanding why some people are prone to panic attacks and others aren't. Part of that research involved determining whether you could have a panic attack while sleeping. They wanted to see whether a panic attack could still happen if the patient wasn't actively thinking about the causes of the panic attack, like they might when awake. Basically, Koenigsberg was trying to figure out how much of a panic attack was attributable to chemistry changes, and how much was related to cognitive processing.

Koenigsberg and company injected sleeping patients with caffeine, to produce the physical symptoms of panic. And that's when they noticed something odd. Two of the patients reported olfactory hallucinations—they smelled things that weren't there. Here's what Koenigsberg wrote in his Letter to the Editor:

Mr. A, a 38-year-old man with no personal or family history of psychiatric disorders, received an intravenous dose of 250 mg of caffeine, delivered as a bolus over a 60-second period during an episode of stage 3-4 sleep. Fourteen minutes after receiving the caffeine, he awakened and reported an “interesting smell or taste-more like a smell.”

Ms. B, a 34-year-old woman with a generalized anxiety disorder, awakened experiencing a smell like that of “plastic or burnt coffee” 3 minutes after receiving a 250 mg bolus of caffeine during a period of stage 3-4 sleep.

Previous research by other people had found that hallucinations like this could happen, but the hypothesis had been that the hallucinations were related to seizures. Koenigsberg's patients had no history of seizures, and they hadn't shown any signs of experiencing seizures when they had their hallucinations.

So Koenigsberg offered a new hypothesis: We know caffeine can work as a taste enhancer. So, maybe, the intravenous caffeine was either causing people to pick up smells and tastes that were normally undetectable, or the caffeine was prompting sensory systems to trick themselves, finding "smells" where none actually existed.

And this is why Letters to the Editor are so nifty. Koenigsberg later published on his panic attack study, but the biochemical function of caffeine on the human sensory system wasn't something he was much interested in. Letters to the Editor allowed him to share a weird finding, which might otherwise have been shoved into a drawer, never to be heard from again.

Instead of being lost, Koenigsberg's finding on caffeine-induced hallucinations went on to influence at least four other studies, including one on migraine hallucinations published last month.

Image: Caffeine fix, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0)image from davemorris's photostream

What does a scientist do all day? The Smithsonian's Matthew Carrano explains his job as a paleontologist, what he hopes to discover, and why he made a career out of dinosaurs.