The rather picturesque yellow-bellied three-toed skink
National Geographic reports:
Evolution has been caught in the act, according to scientists who are decoding how a species of Australian lizard is abandoning egg-laying in favor of live birth.
Along the warm coastal lowlands of New South Wales (map), the yellow-bellied three-toed skink lays eggs to reproduce. But individuals of the same species living in the state’s higher, colder mountains are almost all giving birth to live young.
Here’s a photo of a Tomahawk missile test from 1986:
Head over to Bad Astronomy for an explanation of why it’s iinteresting.
Anopheles gambiae
In PLoSOne, Thierry Lefèvre et al report on an experiment examining the effects of beer consumption on how attractive people are to mosquitos:
We explored the effect of beer consumption on human attractiveness to a natural population of An. gambiae using a Y-olfactometer designed to accommodate total body emanations as a source of odour stimuli. We found that beer consumption not only enhanced the number of mosquitoes that engage in odour-mediated upwind flight (mosquito activation) but also enhanced the strength of their odour-mediated anemotactic response (mosquito orientation). Mosquito activation and orientation are important parts of the natural host-seeking process of An. gambiae and any increases in these behaviours will facilitate vector-human contacts. Water consumption did not affect these mosquito behavioural responses, demonstrating that beer was solely responsible for increased human attractiveness. To the best of our knowledge, this study provides the first evidence that beer consumption increases human attractiveness to An. gambiae, which is the principal vector of malaria in Africa.
The experiment compared subjects that had drunk a sorghum-based beer from Burkina Faso, where the study was conducted, with subjects who had drunk water. Perhaps local researchers should try to replicate this experiment using Australian beers, with liqueur and spirit drinkers as a second control group in addition to the water drinkers, as well as using Aedes aegypti as the mosquito..
In my wanderings online I stumbled onto the US National Institutes of Health ClinicalTrials.gov site. It lists medical trials being conducted around the world for which you can volunteer, including some here in Australia. Here are a couple that caught my eye:
You can follow links from some completed trials to ClinicalTrialResults.org and see how things turned out.
Science Daily reports on a Stanford analysis which looked at the correlation of views on climate change with academic status amongst climate science researchers:
The small number of scientists who are unconvinced that human beings have contributed significantly to climate change have far less expertise and prominence in climate research compared with scientists who are convinced, according to a study led by Stanford researchers.
and
The Stanford team also determined the top 100 climate researchers, based on the total number of climate related publications each had, which produced an even more telling result, Anderegg said.
“When you look at the leading scientists who have made any sort of statement about anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change, you find 97 percent of those top 100 surveyed scientists explicitly agreeing with or endorsing the IPCC’s assessment,” he said.
Read more at Science Daily
The world's most disgusting aquatic creatures?
If you’re a fisherman you’ve almost certainly seen an isopod or two. When I was a teenager I would regularly find them in the mouths of yellowtails, where they had sucked blood from the fish’s tongue for so long the tongue withered and died. The isopod would then live on, replacing the tongue while sharing in the fish’s food.
You probably haven’t met Bathynomus giganteus, their somewhat larger relative (picture at right). Practical Fishkeeping has an article billing them as the world’s most disgusting creatures. The article does not include care instructions, and I suspect they don’t appear in aquarium shops very often. Bathynomus grows to around 75cm in length, and are thought to feed on carcasses that have sunk to the bottom of the deep ocean.
Phil Plait, aka the Bad Astronomer, is coming to the Discovery Channel with a TV show that combines his books Bad Astronomy and Death From The Skies. Pay TV still doesn’t strike me as worthwhile, but it’s looking better. Phil Plait’s Bad Universe should appear on the Discovery Channel soon.
Nature is carrying an interesting article about the recovery of Lake Victoria’s cichlids. I trace my passion for aquariums in general and cichlids in particular back to Tijs Goldschmidt’s book Darwin’s Dreampond: Drama in Lake Victoria, which discussed the evolution of the Lake Victoria cichlids and the catastrophic results of introducing the Nile Perch (which is in the same genus as barramundi) to the Lake.
Recent research suggests some species which survived the arrival of the predator have managed to return to parts of the Lake from which they had been driven.
What caused the cichlids’ return is uncertain, but it is probably a combination of fishing pressures on the Nile perch and some measures taken to reduce pollution in the lake, coupled with the cichlids’ own capacity for adaptation.
Nobody is complacent about the recovery, however. Oliva Mkumbo, a senior scientist at the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organization in Jinja, Uganda, says that the water quality may have stopped deteriorating, thanks in part to the construction of new sewage works, but deforestation and erosion are still major problems. As Seehausen puts it, eutrophication could still “close the show”, resulting in an even more catastrophic collapse of cichlid biomass and diversity.
See http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100707/full/466174a.html
The Commission has determined that the health education service provided by the Australian Vaccination Network on its website provides misleading and inaccurate information on the subject of vaccination.
A decision by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission is getting some attention on the scientific/skeptical blogs around the world at present. Here’s an ABC Lateline report about the decision:
Bad Astronomy has a good brief write up of events, and the report can be read at the Vaccination Awareness and Information Service.
As I previously commented, a story on Channel 9 News recently spruiked Emotional Freedom Technique in treating food cravings. I took a not so wild guess that the study was not properly designed, and lacked an adequate placebo. A brief Google search revealed earlier research by the same author which suffered this well-known and understood flaw. In email correspondence, the author has confirmed my suspicions. Her defence seems to be that others are doing placebo trials and we should wait for those. But this is disingenuous and unnecessary.
Proper trials of meridian based therapies have been conducted many times, particularly for the more fashionable acupuncture. The balance of evidence plainly shows that it does not matter where the needles go. Let’s put this simply: There are no acupuncture points. There are no meridians. There is no chi. Inserting needles into the skin may have a mild local analgesic effect, but this is not acupuncture. Ritualistic tapping on the body can provide a distraction that might aid in overcoming food cravings, but this is not EFT.
One example of the failure of Emotional Freedom Technique is Assessment of the Emotional Freedom Technique: An alternative treatment for fear published in the Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice (Spring – Summer 2003, Volume 2 Number 1) by Wendy L. Waite and Mark D. Holder. Their abstract states:
The effectiveness of the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), a treatment for anxiety and fear, was assessed. One hundred nineteen university students were assigned and tested in an independent four-group design. The groups differed in the treatment each received: applied treatment of EFT (Group EFT); a placebo treatment (Group P); a modeling treatment (Group M); and a control (Group C). Participants’ self-reported baseline and post-treatment ratings of fear were measured. Group EFT showed a significant decrease in self-report measures at post-treatment. However, Group P and Group M showed a similar significant decrease. Group C did not show a significant decrease in post-treatment fear ratings. These results do not support the idea that the purported benefits of EFT are uniquely dependent on the “tapping of meridians.” Rather, these results suggest that the reported effectiveness of EFT is attributable to characteristics it shares with more traditional therapies.
And their conclusion:
In summary, the present study establishes that certain techniques used by EFT may be useful in the treatment of fear. However, this effectiveness appears unrelated to the unique features of EFT and instead derives from components shared with more traditional therapies already established as effective treatments for specific phobia. The clinical significance of EFT, including the duration of treatment effectiveness, still needs to be ascertained.
The Waite and Holder study was a well designed trial with proper placebo groups, and their findings mirror the large majority of such studies. It does not matter where you tap/stick needles/twiddle toothpicks. Given the well known problems with the idea of meridians, it’s the sort of study that Griffith University should have done.
Peta Stapleton and Griffith University have pimped fundamentally flawed studies to the media over the last couple of years, and have unfortunately attracted a fair amount of credulous press. They have done their little bit to cloud the public understanding of science, and provided undeserved credibility to the quacks who promote such bogus therapies.
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