1. A tiny bacterium, Herminiimonas glaciei, has been resuscitated “after spending 120,000 years buried three kilometres deep in the Greenland ice sheet.” This puts Jesus’ alleged 3-day resurrection to shame. It seems to survive on very few nutrients and it’s ability to survive such harsh conditions is believed to be largely due to its size, which is. . .
. . .just 0.9 micrometres long and 0.4 micrometres in diameter, about 10 to 50 times smaller than the well-known bacterium, Escherichia coli.
And for those keeping track, that’s 114,000 years before the existence of the whole universe, according to Young Earth Creationists.
2. CRAP paper accepted by journal – I often hear from pseudo-scientists about how all the scientific studies that disagree with them are all part of an evil conspiracy. And while I typically defend the scientific peer-review process, sometimes mistakes are made. Fortunately, science has built-in mechanisms for catching fraud, if not immediately, soon enough.
Linked to above, here is a case where Bentham Science Publishers, which publishes more than 200 “open-access” journals, was the unwitting participant in a test to determine how easy it was to get a complete nonsense published within their journals.
So Davis teamed up with Kent Anderson, a member of the publishing team at The New England Journal of Medicine, to put Bentham’s editorial standards to the test. The pair turned to SCIgen, a program that generates nonsensical computer science papers, and submitted the resulting paper to The Open Information Science Journal, published by Bentham.
The paper, entitled “Deconstructing Access Points” (pdf) made no sense whatsoever, as this sample reveals:
In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].
. . .
Davis and Anderson, writing under the noms de plume David Phillips and Andrew Kent, also dropped a hefty hint of the hoax by giving their institutional affiliation as the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, or CRAP.
Yet four months after the article was submitted, “David Phillips” received an email from Sana Mokarram, Bentham’s assistant manager of publication:
This is to inform you that your submitted article has been accepted for publication after peer-reviewing process in TOISCIJ. I would be highly grateful to you if you please fill and sign the attached fee form and covering letter and send them back via email as soon as possible to avoid further delay in publication.
The publication fee was $800, to be sent to a PO Box in the United Arab Emirates. Having made his point, Davis withdrew the paper.
Mahmood Alam, Bentham’s director of publications, responded to queries from New Scientist by email: “In this particular case we were aware that the article submitted was a hoax, and we tried to find out the identity of the individual by pretending the article had been accepted for publication when in fact it was not.”
“Why hasn’t he attempted to contact me directly in order to determine my true identity?” Davis responds.
It’s shocking that it looks like he could have gotten away with publishing CRAP, but of course oversights do happen even in science. And of course after publication, the journal would no doubt have been swamped with complaints that would have led to a fairly quick correction or retraction to go out. But suffice it to say that we’re told the editorial board that signed off on that has since been significantly “revamped.”
3. A new study of guppies shows that evolution can take place in under 10 years.
Eight years later (less than 30 guppy generations), the researchers found that the guppies in the low-predation environment above the barrier waterfall had adapted to their new environment by producing larger and fewer offspring with each reproductive cycle. No such adaptation was seen in the guppies that colonized the high-predation environment below the barrier waterfall.
Suck it, creationists!
4. A new article in New Scientist takes a look at the evolutionary origins of sex.
1. 800 Nigerian scam websites shut down -
2. Health insurance companies declare past rape a pre-existing condition - After 2 men slipped her a knockout drug, Christina Turner feared she’d been raped. As a precaution, her doctor prescribed a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medicine, which turns out to have made her virtually uninsurable. Several months later, she lost her health insurance. But although she never developed HIV, when considering whether or not to cover her, health insurance companies decided the HIV medication raised too many health questions and told her to come back in 3 years. Where’s the outrage, Sarah Palin?
3. Happy birthday, Creationist Earth -
4. FDA and FTC go after Andrew Weil – Weil is one of the most notorious “alternative” “medicine” conmen working today. Now the FDA and FTC have sent him a warning demanding he stop selling bogus herbal flu remedies containing astragalus on his website. And of course leading Quack Profiteer Mark Adams is very grumpy about this no doubt because he suspects he might be next.
5. Mumps epidemic in Brooklyn -
Posted by mjr256 
Posted by mjr256 
Posted by mjr256 
