amoebic_vodka

We're back and we can make your PCR work*

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 13:37:34 GMT

Thanks to New Scientist's feedback page, we can now bring you the solution to your PCR woes.

http://www.newscientist.com/backpage.ns?id=mg18925372.900

"Then Barney Gardom may have stumbled across the service you need at http://athanor.firedrake.org. It offers "home and office cleansing" as part of its "curse removal and protection" services. We assume they'll do laboratories too."

As believers in the idea that PCR only works if you use the 'special' water, cross your fingers while setting up the reaction and make sacrifices to the gods of PCR, that it's all down to the Curse of the Thermal Cycler sounds an intriguing possibility.

* okay, we lied...

Pedants' Corner - How much does a white dwarf weigh?

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 16:47:29 GMT

Hubble weighs closest white dwarf says the BBC. Only it didn't. As the first sentence of the article says, it was used to measure the mass.

As weight measures the force of attraction between two objects due to gravity then, especially when talking about space (where the acceleration due to gravity varies), it is not interchangeable.

Update: perhaps unsurprisingly, they've now corrected it.

Alt text silliness

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 14:32:55 GMT

The BBC's article "Scientists face research job cuts" features the usual generic scientist in lab coat holding a pipette. Just in case you didn't realise they use the same kind of picture for many science stories, the alt text confirms it is a photo of a "Laboratory technician - generic" (mouse hover in IE, else look at the source/turn off the images).

It looks like the generic technician gets around a bit. When not losing their job at Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, they have been busy working on parasitic worms in Edinburgh and getting funding for tropical disease research in Dundee.

Still, nothing beats this power cut story for BBC photo silliness.

It's so easy...

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 12:42:28 GMT

New study is boost to homeopathy, reports the BBC. We don't know if/when it was published, so we only have the BBC to go on.

"More than 6,500 patients took part in the study with problems ranging from eczema to menopause and arthritis".

Ooooh, lots of people, must be good...

"Professor Matthias Egger, of the University of Berne, who worked on The Lancet study said the study was weakened by the lack of a comparison group."

No controls? Okay then...someone needs to relearn their year 7 science lessons.

The BBC's token commitment to balance:

"The results contradict a study published earlier this year in The Lancet, which concluded that using homeopathy was no better than taking dummy drugs."

Does comparing one study (with er...no controls) to a review of 110 different papers and implying they are of equal value counts as balanced reporting?

We could be wrong, it could be a well designed bit of research. If someone can point us in the direction of the journal it is published in and it turns out that this is the case, we will phagocytose our hats.*

* we don't have hats, so we'll need you to provide those too

Panic on the streets...

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:47:59 GMT

Time for us to resurrect the sarcasm of the week feature.*

As part of the mass hysteria over bird flu (an advantage to being an amoeba at last!), we bring you this from The Register:

"Gartner has released an essential guide to avian influenza, aka bird flu, aka Black Death II, [...]"

The Register notes:

"Gartner rightly warns that bird flu could be even worse than SARS, which in 2003 killed a chilling 774 of 8,096 people infected worldwide, in the process generating 1.2bn column inches of press hysteria and rating an impressive 7.2 (out of ten) on the international "Imminent Pandemic Apocalypse" scale."

No need to panic everyone, your employer should be setting in place a plan to ensure that in the event that you get it, you can carry on working from your (death) bed. Pointers include:

"Establish or expand policies and tools that enable employees to work from home with broadband access, appropriate security and network access to applications."

Helpfully The Register has come up with a few tips of its own:

"Assign someone in your business to stand on the roof and shoot anything with wings."
"Lock infected employees in their homes with broadband access and then paint a red cross on the door."

Right. Sarcasm over. Let the hysteria continue...

* not actually weekly or a feature

What the...?

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 16:13:50 GMT

Wheeeee, we've found a new science website to ~~waste time on~~ read. It has an interview with Ben Goldacre on it (yes, that's how we found the site in the first place).

He says his favourite scientist is Darwin and also mentions understanding clinical trials.

"[question]You told a recent Spiked survey that you wished people understood the British epidemiologist Austin Bradford Hill's 'criteria for causation'. (Editor's note: Hill pioneered the randomized clinical trial and co-discovered the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.) Does this sort of thing get taught in school?

[answer]It doesn't get taught to kids and it should be. John Durant's work from the early 90s and other major quantitative analyses of the portrayal of science in the media have shown that science, in the media, in terms of the kinds of stories covered, is health. Things like the Bradford hill criteria – how to assess the validity and reliability and usefulness of evidence – are exactly what you'd need to be taught to parse the information on offer when you grow up, especially as it's given out so misleadingly and incompetently by the media."

We don't quote out of context*, so yes that was a bit long. We don't care. Never mind teaching evolution and scientific method in schools. We know of people with biology degrees that were never taught this stuff. Huh? We wonder if it is a good idea to ~~create~~ intelligently design scientists that know little about either of these things...

*er...except when we do.

Trust No-one

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 12:21:32 GMT

We noticed that the Office for National Statistics has published a report on "Public Confidence in Official statistics" (pdf, 66kb). We were going to write that it says only 37% of people questioned believe the figures are generally accurate and that only 17% of people believe the figures are produced without political interference.

However, as they are the organisation that provide official statistics, only 37% of us believed a word of it.

What's this got to do with science?

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 09:35:09 GMT

...nothing, but we thought it was silly.

Snickers Marathon bars. Presumably they're not left overs from the 1980s.

Shampoo is evil

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 12:34:57 GMT

Today's daft label analysis in the G2 features shampoo. For those unfamiliar with the Label Watch section, it basically looks at the ingredients list on the back of various everyday items and goes "oooh that sounds like a nasty chemical name, it must be bad for you".

First on the list is sodium laureth sulfate (or sodium dodecyl sulphate/SDS as it is known everywhere else except ingredient lists).

"SLS is a cheap foaming agent used in shampoos and other toiletries, including toothpaste."

Unsurprising, considering it is a detergent and detergents are useful things to have in a product that is supposed to clean something.

"There have been persistent claims that it is carcinogenic, particularly after it was the subject of an unattributed email alert in the late 1990s."

Hahahahahaha. Yes and people from Nigeria really do want to give us 10 MILLION DOLLARS, clicking the unsubscribe link in spam will result in us getting fewer junk emails and attachments from random people really will contain pictures of naked amoebas.

"But SLS has repeatedly been passed as safe by a number of health agencies around the world. The WHO considers it an "unlikely carcinogen". "

Aaaaah, but it might be. They didn't deny it so it must be true, right?

"The US Environmental Protection Agency says it's been shown that SLS produces skin and eye irritation in concentrations above 5%. (Labelling laws do not require the concentration to be specified.)""

We bet you didn't know that. So (cue sinister music), does shampoo have more than 5% SDS in it? Does it cause eye and skin irritation? This calls for a scientific test, so we made one up. Here's the protocol.

1. Put shampoo on hand (DO NOT DILUTE).
2. Use hand to put shampoo in eye.
3. Note how irritating it is on a scale of 1 to 10.
4. Let us know how your favourite brand of shampoo scored.*
5. It is probably a good idea to rinse the shampoo out of your eye at some point.

* We claim no responsibility for any pointing and laughing that might result from admitting you intentionally put shampoo in your eye.

Oh dear

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 11:02:34 GMT

As the debate over whether "humanities graduate" is an insult or not continues at www.badscience.net, Nature features a letter on the genetics of Harry Potter.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7057/full/437318d.html

"[A previous letter recommends] the use of analogies as tools for introducing young people to scientific concepts. Taking their example from J. K. Rowling's stories about the young wizard Harry Potter, they suggest that wizarding is a monogenic trait, with the wizard allele (W) recessive to the muggle allele (M). We believe the assumption that wizarding has a genetic basis to be deterministic and unsupported by available evidence.

Following Craig and colleagues' analogy, Hermione, as a muggle-born witch, must have WM parents. However, as Rowling fans could point out, Hermione's parents were muggle dentists who lack any family history of wizarding. It's true, of course, that chance may not have thrown up a witch or wizard for many generations, or that any who did have magical powers may have kept them secret to avoid a witch hunt."

Er...how very important. It's one thing to look at the science behind science fiction, quite another to look at the science behind magic in a children's fantasy book. Even if it is the greatest piece of literature ever written.

Just in case we're not being hypocritical enough already, we do note that JK Rowling never tries to explain the genetics behind the inheritance of magical ability in her book. We also noticed that the wizards and witches in the Harry Potter books have different levels of magical ability, suggesting that if it is genetic, the trait is polygenetic (like height) rather than controlled by one gene.

Perhaps we should write to Nature to tell them this rather than putting it in a blog nobody reads? We're not sure if they would print a letter from some drunk single-celled organisms though. Sob.

Peroxide 'helps to fight cancer' - we pick on the BBC again

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:50:10 GMT

Vitamin C 'helps to fight cancer' (in cell culture lines) proclaims the BBC. Okay, so we added the bit in brackets to the headline.

It helpfully explains:

"[...]researchers conducted laboratory experiments which simulated clinical infusions of vitamin C on a range of nine cancer and four normal cells."

That's not a lot of cells is it? We make it 13. PNAS, where the research is published, says:

"[...]the authors found that five of the nine cancer cell lines were sensitive to ascorbate [vitamin C] at concentrations obtainable only by intravenous infusion."

Aaah, now that makes more sense. We thought journalists were supposed to make science easier to understand?

The BBC goes on:

"The effective dose was around four millimoles, a concentration much higher than [blah blah blah]"

Er... millimoles measure the amount, not the concentration of something. That would be millimolar. It may be GCSE chemistry, but surely a science article should be written by someone who has at least a GCSE knowledge of science?

Finally, the BBC says:

"Researchers were unable to explain what caused the results, although they did note the treatment led to the formation of hydrogen peroxide, a chemical known to be toxic to cells."

You evil, evil journalist. You made us read the whole paper. We're not happy amoebas, science papers are very dull. The authors did test to see if the production of hydrogen peroxide was necessary for vitamin C to have an effect, and it was. They also tested to see if hydrogen peroxide alone would have the same effect, and it does. What they didn't know was why it only caused cancer cells to die and not normal ones.

Bad Science jokes

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 13:03:01 GMT

From the mostly dire jokes in this week's Life to an excruciatingly bad pun in New Scientist:

http://www.newscientist.com/backpage.ns?id=mg18725162.400

'Ben Moore [...] was pleased recently to be able to take the opportunity, while being shown a colleague's drawings of a hermaphroditic flatworm, to be able to correctly observe that there was "a vas deferens between the male and female gonads".'

Make them stop. Please.

Serious Interlude

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 16:36:33 GMT

No silliness here, just a link to an article about intelligent design. Written by someone who may count as a scientist, but not a biologist. See, it is possible to write something intelligent about science without working in that field, or even near it.

http://www.qwghlm.co.uk/blog/?p=753

...oh and the Life section is no more. Sob. Bad Science is staying, however. Yay.

Wow, seven links to his blog in this week's Bad Science. That's one way to increase your pagerank...

There's money in molecular biology?

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 13:10:08 GMT

Are you a molecular biologist considering a career switch to a more highly paid job, such as a gas fitter? Perhaps you should consider becoming a tortured artist instead.

The company DNA 11 "creates unique DNA portraits through an extraordinary combination of science and art." Yours to hang on the wall, starting from the bargain price of just $390.

http://www.dna11.com/default.asp

So how do they create such an artistic masterpiece?

They explain:

'The process begins with the DNA being collected using a patented, non-invasive technique: depositing your saliva into a tube.'

'[...] DNA is extracted to create a unique genetic fingerprint, using a technique that takes advantage of the variation that occurs among the DNA sequence of every individual.

'The end result is a group of different sized pieces of DNA (unique per individual), which we "run" on a gel, such that each strand of different sized DNA is separate...'

'TheDNA is then stained with a fluorescent dye and illuminated by UV light, which then glows, giving off a fluorescent signal.'

Er...so that's doing a digest, running a gel and photographing it.

So we thought, how about setting up our own art collective? We did some market research - we asked a few million E. coli that were lying around and they were interested in buying it. They were less keen when they found out how we were planning to obtain their DNA, but sacrifices have to be made in the name of art and the lucky few remaining E. coli now have a ~~gel photo~~ exclusive piece of art to look at.

We thought about expanding our work to include multicellular organisms - they tend to have more money and we have to buy our vodka somehow. The problem is that DNA 11 have patented spitting in a tube, so we need some other source of DNA.* Ahem.

Meanwhile, we've got some spare E. coli art and are running low on vodka. So if anyone's interested...

*Don't worry, there's always Bad Science for a better quality of sperm jokes.

Parents not psychic shocker!!!

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:38:11 GMT

"Two thirds of parents whose children may go to university in the next two years have not saved extra money to help them study, research suggests."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4194572.stm

Really? We aren't sure how parents were supposed to know they needed to save enough to offset top-up fees when the bill to introduce them was only passed a year and a bit ago and would have been scrapped if the Tories had won the general election.

Huh?

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 11:21:22 GMT

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7054/full/4361066a.html

When Nature references wikipedia (to explain RSS), the world has truly gone wierd.

Water no better than water shocker!!!!

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 11:11:09 GMT

Apparently giving patients homeopathic remedies (more commonly known as water) is no more effective than giving them a placebo (presumably water).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4183916.stm

Hmmm, we can usually resist mentioning the readers' comments, but occasinally temptation gets the better of us.

"A somewhat typical report from so-called science. Scientists simply refuse to believe in anything unless there is proof."

Yep, that's scientists for you.

[Insert Boswelox pun here]

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 10:14:27 GMT

We've been wanting to write about Boswelox for ages. Why? We were curious why a compound that L'Oreal wanted to convince us really was anti-aging was named to sound like they were making the whole thing up. The idea that one of their researchers said to the marketing department "We've named it Boswelox because of it's anti-aging properties" and they went along with it made us giggle.

Turns out the most likely reason is that it's anti-wrinkle claims are a load of er...Boswelox. Says the ASA here (pdf, 104kb). It's the usual suspects - using pseudoscience to imply it actually works, extrapolating stuff in a petri dish to real people, that kind of thing.

We particularly like:

"[...]the BACC approved the claim 'counteract skin micro contractions' as long as it appeared with the line ‘scientifically tested on isolated skin cells.’

The clarification appeared in on-screen text while at the same time the visuals focused on Claudia Schiffer pulling a variety of facial expressions. The impression that the product worked on the expression lines on a human face appeared, therefore, to take precedence over the clarification that the text was designed to give."

How about cigarette warning style large font for those kinds of things?

Normal silliness has been resumed - yay for alcoholic fruit flies

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:52:16 GMT

Now here's some proper science - alcoholic fruit flies . No, really. It must be proper science, it's in Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7052/abs/nature03864.html

Fruit flies need a hangover to build up alcohol tolerance. HANGOVER being a gene of course. Any scientists wanting to do experiments involving amoebas and alcohol should contact us. We don't mind.

missing the point by parsecs

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:21:23 GMT

Unsurprisingly, an inquiry into academic recruitment shows there is a problem with recruitment and retention of academics.

"The report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research identified problems with the perceived fairness of pay and promotion decisions."

The solution?

"And among other things, increasing the supply of home-grown talent in the form of having more UK students doing PhDs would help with recruitment and retention of academics."

Huh? Aren't they throwing money at the wrong group of people. Are we missing something?

opinion/news confusion

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 13:07:19 GMT

The Independent's delightful anti-GM opinion piece masquerading as news* is unintentionally funny.

"[T]he Government is launching a charm offensive to stop the media reporting scare stories about GM crops."

Unless they are breaking the law, the government can do nothing to stop the media reporting scare stories about anything.

"Mr Hutton said he wanted to persuade the media to report sensitive issues such as GM crops and foods in a "more balanced" way to prevent crucial decisions being based on emotion rather than scientific opinion."

Nice sentiment, but the media are not interested in the unembellished truth or the consequences of what they write on public opinion. They care about interesting articles that increase sales and ratings. "More balanced" is boring. Headlines that say "One variety of GM crop shown to cross with wild relatives to produce one sterile hybrid that does not persist in the environment" do not sell newspapers, but "GM crops created superweed" does.

Oh, the funny bit. We got carried away. The article finishes with a Friends of the Earth response. There is an implication in the article that this is a direct response to the previous quote from the government. OK, we doubt it was, but go on:

"Rather than telling the media what they should think, the Government should be listening to what people want."

We didn't think people wanted unbalanced reporting or decisions based on emotional responses. But we're just drunk amoebas, we don't understand people sometimes.

Disclaimer: We admit we are biased on this one. We get upset when the media is mean to us, we stole a jellyfish gene when it wasn't looking and put it in some algae. They now we glow green under UV light. It makes our parties a lot more entertaining. Don't worry, we're not going to let the algae escape. Not even if they ask us nicely.

* needs subscription to access after today

We've found our niche

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 13:12:02 GMT

Bad Science is generally reluctant to target the Guardian's science coverage. Whereas we don't care. Mwahahahaha. The Guardian reports on the success of a new way of making low alcohol wine in France. The company seems to make it by removing some of the alcohol from existing normal strength wine. While we were horrified at the idea of removing alcohol from anything, we wondered how it worked.

"Launched five months ago, the jealously guarded and complex 10-step process, dubbed "lirisation", works by molecular separation and involves no chemicals."

Molecular separation involving no chemicals. So that's a process separating alcohol (chemical formula C2H5OH) from wine (main ingredient water, chemical formula H2O) using no chemicals. Impressive.

Contemplating The Futility of Existence

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 09:42:50 GMT

We thought we were the only cellular collective to write a blog mocking science coverage in the media. So we were upset to find out in this week's Bad Science that Ben Goldacre has a blog too (http://www.badscience.net). Though we noticed that despite comments being enabled, he hasn't had any. Oh well, shamelessly advertising his blog in the guardian should sort that out.

So now we feel redundant and miserable. Sob.

*goes off to swim in vodka*

eh? live journal's spell checker doesn't recognise the word 'blog'.

Quoting out of context...

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 10:54:56 GMT

... is such fun. From this New Scientist article on pig disease being spread to people.

'"The organism is carried on the pig’s tonsils and is spread pig-to-pig through nose rubbing or coughing. But it’s only found in small concentration on the pigs’ tonsils, so it’s difficult for a human to catch it that way," says Jill Thompson from the UK’s Veterinary Investigation Centre in Edinburgh.'

What way would that be? We'll leave it to your imagination...

Idiots

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 08:59:49 GMT

Isn't bad science great? Rather than having to put our collective nucleii together to come up with something to say, we will quote from bad science instead.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/story/0,12980,1536986,00.html

"[P]ity William O, a sensitive soul who answers customer queries for a supermarket chain to fund his science career, and so finds himself explaining to baffled angry customers why the quoted number of calories per 100g on the label of powdered soup should go down when you add water (dilution), that GM foods are not radioactive (they're just not), and why the amino acids in shampoo won't burn your scalp. "I feel arrogant and guilty when I get frustrated with these people ... but I just can't help it." This man is a saint."

And here's us thinking GM food was dangerous because it contained DNA that would turn us all into jellyfish.