Are you the 0.04%, i.e., would you cling to the 1 peer reviewed publication out of 2,259? This ties in nicely with my post on the dangerous trio in changing people’s minds.
“I just want to highlight this illuminating infographic by James Powell in which, based on more than 2000 peer-reviewed publications, he counts the number of authors from November, 2012 to December, 2013 who explicitly deny global warming (that is, who propose a fundamentally different reason for temperature rise than anthropogenic CO2). The number is exactly one. In addition Powell also has helpful links to the abstracts and main text bodies of the relevant papers.
“It’s worth noting how many authors agree with the basic fact of global warming – more than nine thousand. And that’s just in a single year. Now I understand as well as anyone else that consensus does not imply truth but I find it odd how there aren’t even a handful of scientists who deny global warming presumably because the global warming mafia threatens to throttle them if they do. It’s not like we are seeing a 70-30% split, or even a 90-10% split. No, the split is more like 99.99-0.01%.” (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2014/01/10/about-that-consensus-on-global-warming-9136-agree-one-disagrees/)
I thought about some of the hot-button topics and how you often can’t change people’s mind, even with overwhelming evidence. There are three things working against changing someone’s mind.
✿Confirmation Bias – the tendency to favor information that supports your existing view.
✿Cognitive Dissonance – action that contradicts reasoning, e.g., continuing to smoke when you agree it is unhealthy.
✿Motivated Reasoning – accepting information that supports what you already believe and giving extra scrutiny to information that is against what you believe.
Here’s a good blog to summarize these three concepts.
Psychology’s Treacherous Trio: Confirmation Bias, Cognitive Dissonance, and Motivated Reasoning
There is a biological component too. Chris Mooney writes that emotion kicks in before you have a chance to reason. Evolution has lead animals to react quickly for survival. It makes sense that when we react quickly, we rely on what we believe first.
The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science
How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.
The Mooney piece has many examples of the treacherous trio. I would suggest reading the McNerney blog first. This isn’t my area of expertise so I’m hoping Zuleyka Zevallos or Chris Robinson can chime in.
For those that like science, I’m sure you can appreciate the value of having real scientists on G+ share their knowledge. Zuleyka Zevallos does an excellent job addressing 3 issues that I also work on:
Correlation does not equal causation
Sensationalized headlines are dangerous
Science outreach without jargon is important
The study itself is fascinating and her discussion of it puts a different emphasis on it that helped me gain more from it. I naturally focused on the imaging aspect.
The images that they show are volume differences from one group to another. The very complex part of it, is that you have to use a brain atlas to make sure you are comparing the hippocampus in subject A with the hippocampus in subject B, for example. The atlas is necessary because, as the study demonstrates, not everyone has the same size substructures of the brain. John Csernansky is one of my boss’s collaborators, so I can talk to him about the study.
This is why we stress in our community that posts should summarise the science behind an article in detail. The link should be there for people who want to read further (and if you write a good post, people will be more willing to click on a link!).
I’ve talked about sensationalized headlines and science outreach before:
Why Correlation is not Causation: Cannabis Use & Schizophrenia
As so often happens, a post from Science on Google+, a community I help moderate, has got me thinking about how easy it is for headlines to quickly lead to #ScienceMediaHype . A post with a link to a news story has the headline, “Teen Marijuana Use Linked with Schizophrenia” (http://goo.gl/w09d7L). As a sociologist with an interest in mental health, this sets off alarm bells. The discussion on our community quickly turned into a debate about the correlation presented in the headline. As a few of our community members pointed out, correlation does not equal causation. My post provides a summary of the actual study and I discuss the sociological problems associated with media coverage of mental illness.
Study on Working Memory
The linked article does an okay job of describing the study but the headline and its focus over-extends the study’s findings. This is the problem with media stories: headlines can shape the way the public understands scientific findings. Journalists present quotes from scientists that fit the angle of their story, putting less emphasis on other aspects of the research.
The study is published in Schizophrenia Bulletin. The sample includes 44 healthy controls, 10 people with a history of cannabis use disorder (CUD), 28 schizophrenia participants with no history of substance use, and 15 schizophrenia patients with a CUD history (http://goo.gl/EQQx2K). Ninety percent of the participants who had schizophrenia already had a CUD history prior to their mental illness. Most of the cannabis users were heavy users, smoking cannabis daily or at least weekly, and most also smoked cigarettes heavily, a variable that the researchers wanted to test.
The study actually tests working memory deficiency not the cause-effect relationship between schizophrenia and cannabis use. Participants were given memory activities and then brain imaging was used to see their brain patterns. I’ve included the three images from the study. Neuroscience is not my area of research, but I include the diagrams in case other researchers should be interested.
The researchers note that without substance abuse, schizophrenia inhibits cortical development. They note less is known about how cannabis affects brain symmetry, though it is known to disrupt the hippocampus, which is related to our limbic system. The hippocampus is linked to information retention for both short and long-term memory as well as other functions like spatial navigation.
The study finds that use of cannabis at an early age impacted memory function. The sample had an average age of 24, so patterns associated with longer-term development need further study.
The study observes that cannabis users and the participants living with schizophrenia both have problems with memory tasks. At the same time, the researchers not that the brain asymmetry observed when carrying out memory tasks may be linked to a” neurobiological vulnerability” among schizophrenia sufferers. That is, that the observed pattern may be the outcome of a predisposition to substance abuse. For example, the researchers note that similar brain patterns are found amongst cocaine users. So, to put it another way, schizophrenia users may be drawn to substance abuse. More on this below.
Finally, the authors conclude what many of our community members had been discussing: that there is no direct cause and effect relationship. “Although our data may be compatible with a causal hypothesis, the cross-sectional data do not allow us to test causal relationships or reject alternative explanations. Thus, the shape differences could be explained as either due to the effects of chronic cannabis abuse or the presence of biomarkers that characterize a vulnerability to the effects of cannabis.”
Their research notes that with laws changing, cannabis may be more readily available to youth with a predisposition towards schizophrenia. This makes their research all the more pivotal. This is both in terms of better understanding how brain development is affected by schizophrenia and the social, health and subjective reasons why youth may engage in cannabis use at different stages of their disease.
Research on Correlation
There are many studies that have linked self-reported cannabis use in early adulthood to an increased risk of developing schizophrenia later in life. One of the most widely cited studies involves Swedish conscripts of 1969, with a follow up study confirming the results (http://goo.gl/7uw0hK). Nevertheless, the direct association between cannabis use and schizophrenia is disputed. For example, there is more to be learned about the relationship between the time that someone starts using cannabis and their first schizophrenic episode (http://goo.gl/waOgfR).
There are three hypotheses to explain why young people with schizophrenia use cannabis (http://goo.gl/ZOSk7H).
1) Cannabis triggers the disease in people with a predisposition, as is suggested by the study at hand.
2) People with schizophrenia use cannabis as a way to self-medicate or manage their experience of the disease. The research does not support this strongly, though cannabis use may give sufferers a perception of control over their disease. This is not something to be dismissed and requires further research. One study from 2012 suggests that one component of marijuana, cannabidiol, may be used to treat schizophrenia. This component does not contain THC which is responsible for the intoxication effects of traditional marijuana. Instead, cannabidiol may reduce the symptoms of psychosis, but further research is needed to fully test this treatment (http://goo.gl/NPGKjm).
3) Cannabis use can trigger schizophrenia through confounding variables. This is the prevailing medical view, though the association is not so neatly weaved together.
Problems with Media Coverage of Mental Illness
The article that covered this story went for a shock value headline. Headlines prime audiences about what they should expect from a scientific article. Sensationalised headlines invite personal opinion based on individual experience. This may range from “I smoke pot and I’m fine” to disparaging comments about “crazy” people. This is the problem with the way in which news headlines shape public discussions of science. Should people read an article before discussing the soundbite? Of course. Does this happen in practice? Not as much as it should. The idea that sensational headlines “sell” is flawed. Shock headlines sometimes get people to click on a link. On a social media site like Google+, some people will go off the headline and the text in a post. In fact, most of the social media research shows that people rarely want to click away from the social site they’re currently on (more on this in another post). This is why we stress in our community that posts should summarise the science behind an article in detail. The link should be there for people who want to read further (and if you write a good post, people will be more willing to click on a link!).
While research suggests that people are sceptical of media reports, not everyone is trained to think about research the way scientists do. Paywalls also stop people from reading the study for themselves (as well as the technical language used in academic journals). This is why scientists need to step up and debunk bad science journalism.
Moving Beyond Individual Speculation
The research has established a correlation, but causation is disputed. The evidence strongly suggests that cannabis compounds schizophrenia and the gravity of this finding cannot be reduced. Nevertheless, media stories that run with a causation headline only serve to spread misinformation.
Bad science writing invites cannabis users to say: “I use it and I’m fine!” It also serves to reinforce a cultural stereotype that people with mental illness may have avoided their condition if they’d only stayed away from recreational drugs. In the end, the causation narrative does more damage and serves only to stigmatise both cannabis users and schizophrenic sufferers as deviants. People living with schizophrenia are doubly stigmatised as their cannabis use makes it seem as if they are wilfully contributing to their illness. Research is seeking to better understand why some people with schizophrenia rely on cannabis.
Mental health is a serious matter. It shouldn’t be reduced to an alarmist headline. Mental illness is part of the human condition. Addressing the treatment of schizophrenia requires compassion, not judgement. Most of all it needs solid scientific research, not dismissive condemnation based on personal or social conjecture.
Late for #ScienceSunday but there’s #ScienceEveryday . I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?) by Ylvis. This video by Animalist explains what the fox actually says.
Extracting DNA from a 50,000 years ago, that suggests inbreeding among hominins is pretty fascinating. Progress in genomics reminds me of computer technology. The technology keeps getting smaller and faster.
I’ll have to go through Mark Bruce’s SciSun digests to see which news article is my favorite for 2013.
#ScienceSunday
Originally shared by ScienceSunday
Top 10 Science Stories of 2013
Here’s Scientific American’s top ten science stories of 2013.
What happens when you look through a double convex (converging) lens? If the object is farther away than the focal point, the image will be inverted. This is due to how the rays of light are refracted by the lens. For more details see (http://goo.gl/G4hpmM). So why isn’t the image inverted, i.e. upside down? The glass of water forms a cylindrical convex lens with only one lateral curved surface. So the image should be inverted laterally (left-right). If the glass had a spherical bottom, it would also be vertically inverted. See the example of the tulip glass. Not knowing where the focal point is, we can’t guess if the image should be magnified or not. However, it appears as if the mountain range is taller on the right hand side, both inside and outside the glass. I’m assuming that the image is photoshopped and the “artist” forgot to laterally invert the image.
As C.A. Palma and Asrulfeezam Haniffa pointed out, the birds at the very bottom (base) of the glass give you another clue. The base should be a compressed composite of the entire view, not a continuation of it. Rajini Rao noticed that the lime does not appear to have any distortion from the glass. The glass itself seems to have a little reflection on some surface, but appears to otherwise be floating (also noted by Lionel Lauer and Jun C).
Here are some things that I noticed that are more indicative of photoshop and not so much as clues from optics.
The edges of the glass on the left and right appear very jagged (noticed by many). Lionel Lauer points out that the inner edge of the glass has a strange white light. Many noticed that the top of the water is not flat, yet the image is very sharp. Christopher Dreyer had an interesting idea that the liquid could really be a gel with a high refractive index. That would be very interesting. However, the other clues still lead me to think this is photoshopped.
I don’t know the definitive answer because I couldn’t find a good source for the image. This evening, I’ll tell you my guess and why. If you know anything about optics, you’ll probably guess the same as me.
For #caturday and #ScienceEveryday , here’s a video showing research from Prof Daniel S. Mills at University of Lincoln in the UK. He’s working on research to determine if cats are securely attached to their owners like dogs are. So far, his research has shown that dogs behave similar to infants with respect to a parent. Conversely, his research so far, shows that cats could care less. I mean, cats don’t behave in the same manner.
This is a fantastic post about underwater noise pollution. It’s been going on for years and still does not receive enough attention. I had been planning on my own post with the links below but Samantha Andrews did such a tremendous job, I’ll simply echo her post.
Most of us have been there. You’re in a pub or a club trying to have a conversation but the music…it’s just too loud to hear what the other person is saying. You shout louder and louder, the listener has their ear up close to your mouth but alas, the conversation doesn’t flow as it would do if you could both hear each other easily. Now imagine that sound wasn’t just important for having a conversation, but for seeing. And imagine that that loud noise preventing you from hearing properly wasn’t just in the pub, but occurred throughout your day-to-day activities.
Noise pollution is a problem for cetaceans because they use echolocation to ‘see’ and hear. It’s quite a nifty technique because often the ocean is too murky or too dark for your eyes to see very far in, but sound can still travel. Thanks to evolution, cetaceans have echolocation down to a fine art. Not only can they figure out that something is there, but they can work out what it is. But when it’s too noisy, the echolocation process can be disrupted and activities like hunting, navigation, and pod communication can become difficult to impossible. Noise has even been linked to stress, and increased energy expenditure in our aquatic brethren. One of the problems with figuring out just how noise pollution is affecting cetaceans is a lack of baseline data – to a large extent we don’t know the status of cetacean populations inhabiting different areas. When we do get around to taking measurements of noise, we don’t have a good handle on how noisy different areas were in the first place to know if the noise has increased. This lack of baseline data includes in conservation areas designated as important marine mammal habitat – just like the Moray Firth up in Scotland.
The Moray Firth is home to a well-studied population of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncates), but it also has strategic importance, forming a base for North Sea oil and gas exploration and potentially in the future, a base for an offshore wind farm. Noise is likely to increase but to figure out by just how much Nathan Merchant of the University of Bath, alongside Enrico Pirotta, Tim Baron, and Paul Thompson of the University of Aberdeen decided to get some baseline data before developments begin. Once that data is in place, they argue, more accurate correlations between noise and effects of marine mammals can be determined.
During the summer of 2012, Nathan and his team placed two underwater noise monitors – both in deep narrow channels popular with the dolphins for foraging, as well as prime shipping traffic routes. They then monitored the noise on a cycle of 1 minute every 10 minutes and tied that data up with Automatic Identification System (AIS) ship-tracking data. For the other 9 minutes recordings still took place, primarily to provide more analysis of noise events of interest. And of course, this sound recordings also picked up the bottlenose dolphins as well as other marine mammals, but the team also deployed C-Pods – recorders dedicated for marine mammal noise – at the sites. Conditions like rain and wind can also create noise in the Firth so meteorological data was also collected.
The acoustic data confirmed that the dolphins were using the two site quite heavily, with recordings of their clicks at both sites being made every day. The two sites differed a fair bit in their baseline noise levels, with one generally much noisy than the other, with shipping traffic appeared to be the main source of noise pollution. The researchers hypothesise that increase in noise levels at the already noisy site may be less damaging to the dolphins than increases at the quieter site, because the noisy site has already suffered noise-related habitat degradation to which the dolphins have already become accustomed. Indeed the Moray Firth population size is showing signs of being stable, and is perhaps even increasing which is a positive sign. However, the dolphin vocalizations overlapped both in frequency and amplitude with the shipping traffic. This is concerning because it means that there is a higher risk of the dolphin’s vocalization being masked out by increases in shipping traffic. Just how much shipping noise is too much is still unclear.
I had not heard of Crystallofolia before Michael O’Reilly’s post. It’s beautiful and interesting.
From Latin crystallus ice [itself from Greek κρυσταλλος; cf. κρυος ‘frost’]and folium leaf. These elegant formations have been given many names, metaphorical in nature, most commonly ‘frost flowers’ (or ribbons), a formation which is neither frost nor a flower. These common names, however, are easily confused with terms describing true frost from condensation on a cold surface as well as any picturesque ice formation. These frost metaphors are of fairly recent origin, not current with 19th Century treatments of the subject (e.g., ‘frost freak’ was used by several scholars). I thus propose folium, leaf, as a more appropriate metaphor, since like leaves these formations emerge laterally from the stem, and the enormous diversity of forms finds better matches with leaves than with flowers and ribbons — although this is perhaps less poetic. Perhaps more significantly, the physical process by which water moves to the ice formations is analogous to the transpiration that brings water from the roots to the leaves. My perspective is not new: German botanists in the 19th Century used the term ‘Eisblatt’ (‘ice leaf’).
Read the source below for more information about this phenomenon.
Last night we had our first hard freeze of the year, and the frostweed in our yard put on a little performance. Basically the water inside the frostweed freezes and extrudes from splits in the stem in fascinating ribbons and whorls. Here’s a shot of one of the splits with the ice curling around the stem. The ribbons are unbelievably thin, and it makes a pretty effect. A couple of the sections were over a foot tall, with the ice going in several directions.
