Science

After a years-long review of hundreds of studies, Australia’s top medical research agency has concluded that homeopathy is essentially useless for treating any medical condition.

Researchers with the National Health and Medical Research Council conducted a review of published studies on homeopathy and report that they could not find any good quality evidence to support the claim that homeopathy works any better than a placebo or sugar pill.

Homeopathy is a centuries-old form of alternative medicine that has been dismissed as pseudoscience by many sceptics. It’s based on a premise that like cures like. Practitioners believe that herbs and extracts that cause symptoms such as headaches in healthy people will also cure headaches if they are given in highly diluted forms.

Although several studies have shown that homeopathic remedies have no detectable amounts of the original substance left, homeopaths believe the tinctures retain a memory of the original substance and are thus effective.

The Australian researchers involved in this review sifted through 1,800 research papers from around the world on homeopathy, finding only 225 that were large enough to be worthy of more thorough inspection.

They say they found no reliable evidence that any homeopathic treatment led to health improvements that were any better than a placebo.

And the researchers say the studies that did find homeopathic remedies effective were either so poorly designed, or so poorly conducted, that they were too flawed to be considered reliable — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Five years after more than 11,000 unprocessed rape kits — some dating back to the 1980s — were discovered in a police warehouse in Detroit, cities across the US are working to eliminate their own huge backlogs of untested evidence. Thousands of sexual assault cases are beginning to be resolved.

When Detroit prosecutors and state police toured a large storage warehouse in 2009, they made a startling discovery — more a huge cache of untested rape kits, each representing a report to the police and a lengthy hospital visit to collect evidence.

Armed with a large grant by the National Institute of Justice, prosecutors and Detroit police have now completed testing of 2,000 of those kits and are in the process of testing another 8,000.

The testing, as of October, had produced more than 750 DNA matches to a national database managed by the FBI known as Codis.

Investigations of these matches continue, but so far the Wayne County prosecutor’s office — which includes Detroit — has produced warrants for 23 alleged rapists and convicted 14 of them, with three awaiting trial.

The office, run by the county’s top prosecutor, Kym Worthy, has also identified 188 serial rapists from the processed kits who have committed crimes in 27 other states — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Laser physicists have built a tractor beam that can repel and attract objects, using a hollow laser beam that is bright around the edges and dark in its centre.

It is the first long-distance optical tractor beam and moved particles one fifth of a millimetre in diameter a distance of up to 20 centimetres, around 100 times further than previous experiments.

“Demonstration of a large scale laser beam like this is a kind of holy grail for laser physicists,” said Professor Wieslaw Krolikowski, from the Research School of Physics and Engineering.

The new technique is versatile because it requires only a single laser beam. It could be used, for example, in controlling atmospheric pollution or for the retrieval of tiny, delicate or dangerous particles for sampling.

The researchers can also imagine the effect being scaled up.

The work is published in Nature Photonics — via redwolf.newsvine.com

PHYSICS PRIZE [JAPAN]: Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that’s on the floor.

REFERENCE: Frictional Coefficient under Banana Skin, Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, Tribology Online 7, no. 3, 2012, pp. 147-151.

NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE [CHINA, CANADA]: Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.

REFERENCE: Seeing Jesus in Toast: Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Face Pareidolia, Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, Kang Lee, Cortex, vol. 53, April 2014, Pages 60–77. The authors are at School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Xidian University, the Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, and the University of Toronto, Canada.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [AUSTRALIA, UK, USA]: Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning.

REFERENCE: Creatures of the Night: Chronotypes and the Dark Triad Traits, Peter K Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 55, no. 5, 2013, pp. 538-541.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [CZECH REPUBLIC, JAPAN, USA, INDIA]: Jaroslav Flegr, Jan Havlí?ek and Jitka Hanušova-Lindova, and to David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan, Lisa Seyfried, for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat.

REFERENCE: Changes in personality profile of young women with latent toxoplasmosis, Jaroslav Flegr and Jan Havlicek, Folia Parasitologica, vol. 46, 1999, pp. 22-28.

REFERENCE: Decreased level of psychobiological factor novelty seeking and lower intelligence in men latently infected with the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii Dopamine, a missing link between schizophrenia and toxoplasmosis?, Jaroslav Flegr, Marek Preiss, Ji??? Klose, Jan Havl???ek, Martina Vitáková, and Petr Kodym, Biological Psychology, vol. 63, 2003, pp. 253–268.

REFERENCE: Describing the Relationship between Cat Bites and Human Depression Using Data from an Electronic Health Record, David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan, Lisa Seyfried, PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 8, 2013, e70585.

BIOLOGY PRIZE [CZECH REPUBLIC, GERMANY, ZAMBIA]: Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nováková, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladimír Hanzal, Miloš Ježek, Tomáš Kušta, Veronika N?mcová, Jana Adámková, Kate?ina Benediktová, Jaroslav ?ervený and Hynek Burda, for carefully documenting that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth’s north-south geomagnetic field lines.

REFERENCE: Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth’s magnetic field, Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nováková, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladimír Hanzal, Miloš Ježek, Tomáš Kušta, Veronika N?mcová, Jana Adámková, Kate?ina Benediktová, Jaroslav ?ervený and Hynek Burda, Frontiers in Zoology, 10:80, 27 December 2013.

ART PRIZE [ITALY]: Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot [in the hand] by a powerful laser beam.

REFERENCE: Aesthetic value of paintings affects pain thresholds, Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 17, no. 4, 2008, pp. 1152-1162.

ECONOMICS PRIZE [ITALY]: ISTAT — the Italian government’s National Institute of Statistics, for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and all other unlawful financial transactions between willing participants.

REFERENCE: Cambia il Sistema europeo dei conti nazionali e regionali – Sec2010, ISTAT, 2014.

REFERENCE: European System of National and Regional Accounts (ESA 2010), Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2013.

MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, INDIA]: Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, for treating uncontrollable nosebleeds, using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork.

REFERENCE: Nasal Packing With Strips of Cured Pork as Treatment for Uncontrollable Epistaxis in a Patient with Glanzmann Thrombasthenia, Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, vol. 120, no. 11, November 2011, pp. 732-36.

ARCTIC SCIENCE PRIZE [NORWAY, GERMANY]: Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl, for testing how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears.

REFERENCE: Response Behaviors of Svalbard Reindeer towards Humans and Humans Disguised as Polar Bears on Edgeøya, Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl, Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, vol. 44, no. 4, 2012, pp. 483-9.

NUTRITION PRIZE [SPAIN]: Raquel Rubio, Anna Jofré, Belén Martín, Teresa Aymerich, and Margarita Garriga, for their study titled Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages.

REFERENCE: Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages, Raquel Rubio, Anna Jofré, Belén Martín, Teresa Aymerich, Margarita Garriga, Food Microbiology, vol. 38, 2014, pp. 303-311 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Photo: Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project

A host of previously unknown archaeological monuments have been discovered around Stonehenge as part of an unprecedented digital mapping project that will transform our knowledge of this iconic landscape — including remarkable new findings on the world’s largest super henge, Durrington Walls.

The Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, led by the University of Birmingham in conjunction with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology, is the largest project of its kind.

Remote sensing techniques and geophysical surveys have discovered hundreds of new features which now form part of the most detailed archaeological digital map of the Stonehenge landscape ever produced. The startling results of the survey, unveiled in full at the British Science Festival, include 17 previously unknown ritual monuments dating to the period when Stonehenge achieved its iconic shape. Dozens of burial mounds have been mapped in minute detail, including a long barrow (a burial mound dating to before Stonehenge) which revealed a massive timber building, probably used for the ritual inhumation of the dead following a complicated sequence of exposure and excarnation (defleshing), and which was finally covered by an earthen mound.

The project has also revealed exciting new — and completely unexpected — information on previously known monuments. Among the most significant relate to the Durrington Walls super henge, situated a short distance from Stonehenge. This immense ritual monument, probably the largest of its type in the world, has a circumference of more than 1.5 kilometres (0.93 miles).

A new survey reveals that this had an early phase when the monument was flanked with a row of massive posts or stones, perhaps up to three metres high and up to 60 in number — some of which may still survive beneath the massive banks surrounding the monument. Only revealed by the cutting-edge technology used in the project, the survey has added yet another dimension to this vast and enigmatic structure — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A prominent Australian psychologist has warned Australia is currently raising a generation of spoilt brats, because their parents are crap and never say no.

Dr Michael Carr-Gregg believes today’s parents have a lot to answer for, and there may be serious long-term consequences for Australia.

Dr Carr-Gregg attributes the rise of poorly-behaved children to five major parenting problems.

The first [problem] is that there are too many parents being doormats for their kids. They have got what I call a vitamin N deficiency, which is a failure to say no.

It’s incredibly important that parents set limits and boundaries and I don’t know that that’s happening at the moment.

Dr Carr-Gregg identified the helicopter parent as another model of crap parenting he was targeting in his work.

The high-strung, control-freak parents that want to smother their kids with so much love and attention and monitoring and supervision that they never, ever develop any self-reliance and can’t solve their own problems later on — via redwolf.newsvine.com