Tag: science

Six patients are suing one of the world’s largest stem cell companies, accusing it of fraud.

9:06 am

Six patients are suing one of the world’s largest stem cell companies, accusing it of fraud.

The patients claim that at RNL workshops they were misled into believing that treatments, still in the experimental stage, had already been proven effective. They allege that Hong told them stem cells would cure all ailments from which they suffered, including diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, back pain and insomnia, and “reverse aging, restore health and virility including sex drive, and rejuvenate their body functions to that of their twenties and thirties.” They all say they have received no benefit from the treatments.

Altogether these patients spent $75,000 for these treatments.

It is very suspicious for any respectable medical institution to charge patients for experimental work. That should have been a red flag from the beginning.

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How the Higgs boson explains the universe.

9:27 am

How the Higgs boson explains the universe.

And what it can’t explain:

The discovery [by the existence of the Higgs boson] that nature is beautifully symmetric means we have very little choice in how the elementary particles do their dance – the rules simply “come for free”. Why the universe should be built in such an elegant fashion is not understood yet, but it leaves us with a sense of awe and wonder that we should be privileged to live in such a place.

Science discovers how the universe operates. Philosophy and religion try to explain why. Thus, it is perfectly reasonable in a rational world to consider the existence of God, and why musings about the possibility of intelligent design do not contradict pure science.

And I speak not as a religious person, but as a secular humanist.

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Astronomers have found four different binary star systems with the stars orbiting so close to each other that they complete their orbits in less than four hours, orbits that astronomers had previously believed “impossible.”

9:09 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have found four different binary star systems with the stars orbiting so close to each other that they complete their orbits in less than four hours, orbits that astronomers had previously believed “impossible.”

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From CERN: The experiments have observed a “particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson.”

8:53 am

From CERN: The experiments there have now observed a “particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson.”

The press release also emphasizes repeatedly the preliminary nature of this result. More details in this article, including this not unexpected punchline if you know science:

Already, the new boson seems to be decaying slightly more often into pairs of gamma rays than was predicted by theories, says Bill Murray, a physicist on ATLAS, the other experiment involved in making the discovery.

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Since 2006 carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. has plunged, almost reaching 1991 levels.

3:59 pm

Since 2006 carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. have plunged, almost reaching 1991 levels.

The key driver for the “shockingly good news” that CO2 emissions will probably fall this year to a two-decade low … is “the shale gas revolution, and the low-priced gas that it has made a reality, especially in the last 12 months. As of April, gas tied coal at 32% of the electric power generation market, nearly ending coal’s 100 year reign on top of electricity markets (see related CD post on this energy milestone). Let’s remember the speed and extent of gas’s rise and coal’s drop: coal had 52% of the market in 2000 and 48% in 2008.”

It is important to note that it is innovation, technology, and capitalism that is making this happen. Without a free market the shale gas revolution would not have occurred.

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A investigation has found that Japanese anesthesiologist, Yoshitaka Fujii, fabricated a 172 scientific papers over the past 19 years.

12:50 pm

A investigation has found that Japanese anesthesiologist, Yoshitaka Fujii, fabricated a 172 scientific papers over the past 19 years.

The panel focused on 212 of 249 known Fujii papers. It tried to review the raw data, laboratory notebooks, and records on the patients or animal subjects involved. Committee members also interviewed relevant people. Among the 172 papers judged bogus, the report claims that 126 studies of randomized, double-blind, controlled trials “were totally fabricated.” The committee identified only three valid papers. For another 37 papers, the panel could not conclusively determine if there had been fabrication. …

The panel said that the responsibility of those co-authors ranges from “serious” to “none at all.” The only one of Fujii’s co-authors specifically named in the summary is University of Tsukuba anesthesiologist Hidenori Toyooka. The report says Toyooka “was not involved in fabrication but bears significant responsibility” since he was Fujii’s supervising professor both at Tsukuba and when they both worked at Tokyo Medical and Dental University. Toyooka is listed as a co-author of many of the papers cited by the 23 journal editors. … At the same time, the investigation found that some scientists were unaware Fujii had included them as co-authors. In one case, two supposed co-authors told the panel their signatures on a submission cover letter were forged. [emphasis mine]

For a scientist to get that many fabricated papers published for that long in peer-reviewed journals strongly suggests that there is widespread corruption in his field, which in this case is anesthesiology.

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The journal Science once again excuses scientific fraud

5:16 pm

Science has once again decided to make excuses for scientific fraud.

The first link is describes Science’s willingness in 2011 to excuse the illegal effort of Phil Jones and Michael Mann to delete emails in the climategate scandal. The second link is Science’s effort today to protect another scientist, social scientist Dirk Smeesters, who — as described in the third link — was forced to resign from his university and retract two papers after being caught fudging data to produce the results he wanted.

This quote below however — from the Science article itself — should have been all a scientific peer-reviewed journal like Science should have needed to know:

Smeesters repeated in the interview what he told the university: That he only engaged in so-called data massaging, a “large grey area” in his field, and that the raw data for some of his experiments were lost when his home computer crashed. Paper records for the studies, he added, also disappeared when he moved his office. [emphasis mine]

A scientist who admits that he fiddled with his raw data to get the results he wants, and then admits losing that raw data so that no one can check him deserves no defense ever from the scientific community. That Science is willing to make such a defense is further evidence that something is really rotten in the established upper echelons of American science.

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Data of the tidal fluxes on Titan by the Cassini spacecraft now suggest that there is a liquid ocean below Titan’s icy crust.

5:09 pm

Data of the tidal fluxes on Titan by the Cassini spacecraft now suggest that there is a liquid ocean below Titan’s icy crust.

The team’s analyses suggest that the surface of the moon can rise and fall by up to 10 metres during each orbit, says Iess. That degree of warpage suggests that Titan’s interior is relatively deformable, the team reports today in Science1. Several models of the moon’s internal structure suggest such flexibility — including a model in which the moon is solid but soft and squishy throughout. But the researchers contend that the most likely model of Titan is one in which an icy shell dozens of kilometres thick floats atop a global ocean. The team’s findings, together with the results of previous studies, hint that Titan’s ocean may lie no more than 100 km below the moon’s surface.

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Scientists have found a previously unknown mineral embedded in a meteorite that crashed to Earth in 1969.

4:55 pm

Scientists have found a previously unknown mineral embedded in a meteorite that crashed to Earth in 1969.

Dubbed panguite, the new titanium oxide is named after Pan Gu, the giant from ancient Chinese mythology who established the world by separating yin from yang to create the earth and the sky. … “Panguite is an especially exciting discovery since it is not only a new mineral, but also a material previously unknown to science,” says Chi Ma, a senior scientist and director of the Geological and Planetary Sciences division’s Analytical Facility at Caltech and corresponding author on the paper.

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The scientific stupidity of the TSA’s security rules.

10:03 am

The scientific stupidity of the TSA’s security rules.

Here’s one example from the article:

Take the Transportation Security Administration’s rules about carry-on electronics, for example. Laptops have to come out of their bags and lie flat in a plastic tub—but not tablets, phones, Kindles, cameras or portable game consoles. Why the distinction? The TSA says that it’s not just about detecting explosives: removing bigger gadgets also unclutters your bag for better x-ray examination. Even so, on close inspection the rules get arbitrary very quickly. For example, according to the TSA, the 11-inch model of the MacBook Air is fine to leave in your bag, but the 13-inch model must be removed.

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More fraud in the social psychology field: A psychologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam has resigned, with two of his papers now retracted.

3:58 pm

More fraud in the social psychology field: A psychologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam has resigned for faking data, with two of his papers now retracted.

[Dirk] Smeesters conceded to employing the so-called “blue-dot technique,” in which subjects who have apparently not read study instructions carefully are identified and excluded from analysis if it helps bolster the outcome. According to the report, Smeesters said this type of massaging was nothing out of the ordinary. He “repeatedly indicates that the culture in his field and his department is such that he does not feel personally responsible, and is convinced that in the area of marketing and (to a lesser extent) social psychology, many consciously leave out data to reach significance without saying so.”

But the university panel goes on to say that it can’t determine whether the numbers Smeesters says he massaged existed at all. He could not supply raw data for the three problematic experiments; they had been stored on a computer at his home that had crashed in September 2011 and whose data his brother-in-law had assured him were irretrievable. In addition, the “paper-and-pencil data” had also been lost when Smeesters moved house. The panel says it cannot establish Smeesters committed fraud, but says he is responsible for the loss of the raw data and their massaging.

That Smeesters considers it perfectly okay to manipulate data to strengthen his conclusions tells us how little he knows about science. That he considers this “common in his field” suggests that we should probably not pay much attention to almost anything published in the field of social psychology, especially considering last year’s scandal.

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