-
Come Mr Branson Mon, Tally me Biofuel
A Virgin Atlantic flight between Heathrow airport London and Schiphol airport in the Netherlands made history yesterday, becoming the first commercial flight to be partly powered by biofuel. While three of the 747s tanks contained conventional fuel the fourth contained 20% biofuel. The biofuel was a mix of babassu oil and coconut oil. The Guardian…
-
Neuro-babble
A study published in this week’s issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience finds that including irrelevant neuroscientific information in an explanation can make people more likely to believe that explanation. Three groups of subjects – neuroscience ‘novices’, neuroscience students, and neuroscience experts – were given descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of the…
-
The perils of cheap alcohol
Alcohol abuse in the UK has been escalating for decades, contributing to crime, unemployment, illness and death. Last month, the government reported that alcohol-related deaths in the UK have doubled over the last 15 years to almost 9,000. One prominent factor in these increases is the price of alcohol, which has remained relatively stable despite…
-
Post-mortem punishment and public dissection.
A television report aired in the US last week claimed that bodies used in public anatomical exhibitions might have included executed Chinese prisoners. There have been subsequent denials from exhibitors that any of the bodies currently being shown in Pittsburgh came from prisoners. However one way of interpreting the outcry over the possible source of…
-
Obesity and genes
An interesting new study on the heritability of childhood obesity has been widely publicised. The paper, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found only a modest effect of shared environment on body mass index. The study used the common technique of comparing monozygotic and dizygotic twins; that is, twins who share all or…
-
The Rogue Senator and the Protection of Genetic Information
The editors of Nature have today called for the US Senate to bypass Senator Tom Coburn’s (Republican, Oklahoma ) ‘hold’ the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Bill. The Bill, if enacted “would protect people from being discriminated against by health insurers or employers on the basis of their genetic information” but Senator Coburn has used a procedural…
-
Dangerous ‘drugs’: the war on fake malaria pills
An alternative approach to the problem of fake anti-malaria drugs would be to make such drugs available for free to those who need them in the developing world. It would be a shame if the problem of fake pharmaceuticals became a part of the global war on drugs, and large amounts of money were spent…
-
Earache for teenagers
The BBC today reported calls to scrap an acoustic device designed to disperse crowds of troublesome teenagers. There are 3,500 such ‘Mosquito’ devices in use in England, which work by emitting a sound normally audible only to those under the age of 25.
-
A Knee-Jerk Reaction?
An article was published in Science on Friday (8 February 2008) reporting the results of a study on the generation of energy via an ‘energy harvester’ mounted on the human knee. The authors of the article begin by noting that humans are a rich source of energy. Indeed it seems that the average person stores…
-
Preventing birth to teenage parents is discriminatory
When we make decisions about which future persons will live – children to teenage parents, or children with disability, the types of objections cited above can be expressed. If we think that such objections are convincing, we should not try to prevent the birth of individuals with disability, nor children to teenage parents.