The Reality Check Episode 71

Neurological/Moral Reactions + The G-Spot + Twinkie Shelf-Life

Neurons

Part 1:

So, how does the brain's neurological response to morally objection statements?

When we engage in others or ourselves in exploring beliefs or ideas, we often cannot help being emotionally envolved. Often these reacts are negative. 

The Reality Check is going to cover on the critical thinking part as well. After this part of the podcast, I'm assuming that we will be able to understand people's negative reactions to things because the lack of critical thinking. It will be covering mostly about the neurological side of the responses. 

So, how to do they test for the neurological responses? They use EEG, which is the recording of electrical activity along the scalp produced by the firing of neurons within the brain.

So, the method is having two groups hooked up to the machines that can perform EEG, and then ask them about things that would get them to think and ideas that usually makes people angry.

One group is all hardcore Christians, and the other group is the completely opposite. 

The scientists will present to the group a word by word paragraph, and see which word or part grabs the listener's neurological responses. 

The conclusion is when the people filled out the attitude survey, they found out that most people's neurological systems react fairly quickly around 200 to 400 milliseconds. 

So, the reactions are the true beliefs of the people who filled out the surveys. This technology might be used in the future for security.

Part 2: 

So, does the G-spot exist?

There's this article on the BBC News that was about if it exists or not.

The study made involved 1800 women and found no proof at all. The King's College London team believe the G-spot may be a figment of women's imagination. The term G-spot was coined by a German gynecologist Ernst Grafenberg, and there have been many studies about it since 1981. Sexologist Beverley Whipple is someone who helped popularise the G-spot idea, and said that the experiments are flawed. Of course she would say that, she has been promoting the G-spot for her whole life, and threw in a lot of money. Of course she's going to say it exists. She said that researchers didn't take into the account of lesbian or bisexual women, who have a different kind of love-making techniques than normal people. Another thing she said that people don't even really understand what it is, researchers can't just ask anyone if they have it or not. Co-author of the study Professor Tim Spector said: "Women may argue that having a G-spot is due to diet or exercise, but in fact it is virtually impossible to find real traits. "This is by far the biggest study ever carried out and shows fairly conclusively that the idea of a G-spot is subjective. Colleague Andrea Burri was concerned that women who feared they lacked a G-spot might feel inadequate, which she says is unnecessary. "It is rather irresponsible to claim the existence of an entity that has never been proven and pressurise women and men too." Dr Petra Boynton, a sexual psychologist at University College London, said: "It's fine to go looking for the G-spot but do not worry if you don't find it. "It should not be the only focus. Everyone is different." The Gräfenberg Spot, or G-Spot, was named in honour of the German gynaecologist Ernst Gräfenberg who described it over 50 years ago. It is said to sit in the front wall of the vagina some 2-5cm up. Recently Italian scientists claimed they could locate the G-spot using ultrasound scans. They said they had found an area of thicker tissue among the women reporting orgasms. But specialists warned there could be other reasons for this difference.

Twinkies

Science Myth of the Week:

So, does Twinkies last forever? 

They have stuff in them that make them last longer than most candy, but they still don't last long. The life time of a Twinkie is only 25 days.

The Reality Check Episode 70

Trepanation + Conspiracy Skeptic Interview + New Year Driving Risks

Trepanation

Part 1:

Trephination is a kind of medical intervention where people drill a hole into someone's head, through the skull. It exposes the dura mater in order to treat health problems that are related to intracranial diseases. A trephine is the object that is used to operate on the skull. 

The history of trepanation is not really clear, but we do have some idea how it came to be. We do have 40 trepanation head holes dated back to 6500 BCE in France. Of course, the patients survive, because on all of the skulls, there were signs of skull structure healing. It is the oldest known surgery known to be performed on humans. 

Throughout history, the trepanning tool has been developed dramatically. There are plenty of evidence of this from documents and pictures. Nowadays, it has developed into an electric drill.

When the surgery is being performed, a chunk of skull is extracted. They take note to not damage the dura mater. Then the person's head is bandaged up and eventually the skin will heal over.  The skull does heal, but only a tiny part of it.

The idea is increase the blood flow in the person's brain; it is to increase the level of consciousness as well. It is said that babies have naturally high brain blood volume. When you look at the baby's head, you can actually see the pliant tissue at the fontanel throbbing with the baby's heartbeat, pumping oxygen through the brain. It is said that as you grow up, the soft tissue hardens into bone, and your brain has no proper vent through which to breathe. Pulsation decreases and brain blood volume plummets. Then you get lethargic, depressed, and estranged. Some people say that bey doing this, someone who is middle aged can be restored to a youthful level.

You can't really find anyone who does this for you anymore. Most doctors say it's extremely dangerous, so the people who have done it these years, they must have done it at home without any professional instruments or skill. 

From what I learned in anthropology back in high school last year, I know that this kind of surgery is actually even longer than 6500BCE. Even before we were really "homo sapiens sapiens", we have found evidence of a drilled head with signs of healing. 

So, in conclusion, there are no evidence that it helps with the brain at all. Don't do it at home or anywhere.

Part 2: 

Conspiracy Skeptic Interview with Karl Mamer!

Visit the website here: The Conspiracy Skeptic Podcast

Listen to the Interview here: The Reality Check Episode 70

Science Myth of the Week: 

So, is New Year's Eve/In the morning, the most dangerous time to drive? 

People always said that people are celebrating and drinking, so it would be really dangerous. So, there are studies done on this. 

Turns out the most dangerous time to drive is on the 4th of July in the US.

Picture from Snopes

The Reality Check Episode 69

Santa Claus Origins + Festivus Origins + Snowflake Sameness

St. Nicholas

Part 1:

So, where did Santa Claus come from?

A lot of weird people think that the company Coca-cola invented Santa Claus for some reason. This is not true at all!

St. Nicholas was born in 280 AD, in Patara, a city of Lycia, in Asia Minor. He became the gift giver of Myra. His gifts were given late at night, so that the gift giver's identity would remain a secret. St Nicholas was eventually named the patron saint of children, sailors, Russia and Greece. 

St. Nicholas was a Christian priest, who later became a bishop. He was a rich person, and traveled the country helping people, giving gifts of money and other presents. St. Nicholas did not like to be seen when he gave away presents, so the children of the day were told to go to sleep quickly or he would not come! Nothing has changed and Santa Claus will not arrive this Christmas unless the children go to sleep early. Another thing is that he has a sled pulled by a 8 legged horse. And, on Christmas Eve, it goes around and eats part of shoes from people and leave behind candy. 

The name Santa Claus came from a mispronunciation from another language. So, the word Santa doesn't mean anything at all. 

The person who started the modern day Christmas traditions was in the 17th century, when he wrote a poem about St. Nicholas coming: "Twas the night before Christmas". He named the reindeers, and the story about how he parks the sled on the roof. 

But, Coco-cola did do something that effected the tradition! Back in the 1930s, color printing was really expensive. Coco-cola made the image of Santa Claus, no one knew what Santa looked like before. The red and everything about Santa was given by Coco-cola. That's why the modern day Santa looks completely different from the St. Nicholas.

Robert L. May created Rudolph in 1939 as an assignment for Montgomery Ward. And, it came out after Mickey Mouse, and somehow there was some plagiarism involved. So, now, there is a company that owns Rudolf the Reindeer. That's why you always see 8 reindeers instead of 9 in movies and pictures.

Part 2: 

Festivus is a secular holiday celebrated on December 23.

It wasn't known by anyone at all before the Seinfield episode. And, even when you look up for it online , you can't even really find anything about it. 

This Festivus was actually made up by the writer 's Father of Seinfield. And, they celebrated it in February back in the 1970s. This was the only family that celebrated this tradition. 

Instead of a Christmas tree, they have a pole instead.

At dinner, they don't spread happiness and the other stuff done at Christmas. They share with each other about the things that makes each other angry. 

That's basically it.

Snowflakes

Science Myth of the Week: 

So, are all snowflakes patterns different?

The long answer is a bit more involved -- it depends on just what you mean by "alike," and on just what you mean by "snowflake."  Let's look at the possibilities....

Nano-snowflakes can be exactly alike.  Some things in Nature are exactly alike.  For example, our understanding of elementary particles indicates that all electrons are exactly, precisely the same.  This is one of the cornerstones of quantum physics, and if you think for a bit you will see that this is a profound statement.  Electrons are true elementary particles, in that they have no component parts; thus they are all exactly alike.
A water molecule is considerably more complex than an electron, and not all water molecules are exactly alike.  If we restrict ourselves to water molecules which contain two ordinary hydrogen atoms and one ordinary 16O atom, then again physics tells us that all such water molecules areexactly alike.  However about one molecule out of every 5000 naturally occurring water molecules will contain an atom of deuterium in place of one of the hydrogens, and about one in 500 will contain an atom of 18O instead of the more common 16O.  These rogues are not exactly the same as their more common cousins.
Since a typical small snow crystal might contain 1018 water molecules, we see that about 1015 of these molecules will be different from the rest.  These unusual molecules will be randomly scattered throughout the snow crystal, giving it a unique design.  The probability that two snow crystals would have exactly the same layout of these molecules is very, very, very small.  Even with 1024 crystals per year, the odds of it happening within the lifetime of the Universe is indistinguishable from zero.

Thus at some very pure level, no two snow crystals are exactly alike.  An exception (why does there always have to be an exception?) would be a snow crystal with only a handful of molecules.  If we assemble a crystal of only 10 molecules, for example, then it's not so unlikely that each of the 10 will contain two ordinary hydrogen atoms and one ordinary 16O atom.  Furthermore, a cluster of only 10 molecules will only have a few likely configurations.  So there's a reasonable probability that two 10-molecule snow crystals would be exactly alike.
I might add that even if we restrict ourselves to isotopically pure water molecules, it's still very, very unlikely that two macroscopic snow crystals would be exactly alike.  When a crystal grows, the molecules do not stack together with perfect regularity, so a typical snow crystal contains a huge number of crystal dislocations, which again are scattered throughout the crystal in a random fashion.  One can then argue, like with the isotopes, that the probability of two crystals growing with exactly the same pattern of dislocations is vanishingly small.  Again one has the exception of few-molecule crystals, which can easily be free of dislocations.

Small snow crystals can look alike.   Now let's relax our definition of alikeness, and say that two snow crystals are alike if they just look alike in an optical microscope (the smallest features one can see in an optical microscope are about one micrometer in size, which is about 10000 times larger than an atom).  In this case things are very different.  One can find simple hexagonal prisms falling from the sky, and one can certainly make such simple crystals in the lab.  The picture here shows two such crystals grown using the free-fall method.
Crystals with simple shapes often look similar to one another, and it's not hard to imagine that if you sifted through a reasonable number of Antarctic snow crystals you would find two that were essentially indistinguishable in a microscope.  Since simple crystals are very common (one doesn't notice them much because they're small), it's fair to say that there are a great many natural snow crystals that look pretty much alike.
But that's only for simple hexagonal prisms.  What about more complex stellar crystals?

Larger, complex snowflakes are all different.  The number of possible ways of making a complex snowflake is staggeringly large.  To see just how much so, consider a simpler question -- how many ways can you arrange 15 books on your bookshelf?  Well, there's 15 choices for the first book, 14 for the second, 13 for the third, etc.  Multiply it out and there are over a trillion ways to arrange just 15 books.  With a hundred books, the number of possible arrangements goes up to just under 10158 (that's a 1 followed by 158 zeros).  That number is about 1070 times larger than the total number of atoms in the entire universe!
Now when you look at a complex snow crystal, you can often pick out a hundred separate features if you look closely.  Since all those features could have grown differently, or ended up in slightly different places, the math is similar to that with the books.  Thus the number of ways to make a complex snow crystal is absolutely huge.
And thus it's unlikely that any two complex snow crystals, out of all those made over the entire history of the planet, have ever looked completely alike.

The Reality Check Episode 68

Climategate + How To Be An Expert + Hand Sanitizers

Part 1:

Climate change is usually used more by the denialists, and global warming is usually used by people who support the idea of climate changing. But, climate change is a better term, because it's not really warming, but the climate is changing. 

Climate gate, seems to have taken from the term watergate. In 2009, there were many emails running around about climate gate, confusing everyone. 

Skeptics often say Earth's climate is showing a trend toward stable or even declining temperatures. But they have to cherry-pick data from the climate record to support this argument. For instance, they often take as the starting point for their trend line the unusually warm year of 1998 – the second-warmest year on record, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. If, instead, they started their trend line in 1996, 1997, 1999 or 2000, they'd find it much harder to say warming has stopped. In all those years, the global surface temperature was below what it was in 2003 through 2007.

Oceans cover about 70 per cent of the Earth's surface and strongly affect year-to-year climate. Movement of ocean water can cause short-term undulations in the upward global warming trend. The best-known undulation is the El Nino-Southern Oscillation cycle. When this cycle is in an El Nino phase, the planet is warmer than when it's neutral or in a cool La Nina phase. The El Nino event of 1998 was the strongest in a century, so it's not surprising that the planet's surface temperature was sharply higher than it was in the years immediately before or after. To choose this year as the starting point for a trend line is misleading at best and dishonest at worst. 

Many people still argue about if climate change is really happening or it's an organized conspiracy. 

Part 2:

So, what makes an expert?

Is talent overrated?
"The traditional assumption is that people come into a professional domain, have similar experiences, and the only thing that's different is their innate abilities. There's little evidence to support this. With the exception of some sports, no characteristic of the brain or body constrains an individual from reaching an expert level."

What do you have to do to become the best?
"Successful people spontaneously do things differently from those individuals who stagnate. They have different practice histories. Elite performers engage in what we call "deliberate practice"--an effortful activity designed to improve individual target performance. There has to be some way they're innovating in the way they do things."

Can you explain how deliberate practice works?
"Here's a typical example: Medical diagnosticians see a patient once or twice, make an assessment in an effort to solve a particularly difficult case, and then they move on. They may never see him or her again. I recently interviewed a highly successful diagnostician who works very differently. He spends a lot of his own time checking up on his patients, taking extensive notes on what he's thinking at the time of diagnosis, and checking back to see how accurate he is. This extra step he created gives him a significant advantage compared with his peers. It lets him better understand how and when he's improving. In general, elite performers utilize some technique that typically isn't well known or widely practiced."

So does experience matter?
"Just because you've been walking for 55 years doesn't mean you're getting better at it. It's very hard for older engineers, for example, to stay competitive with young engineers trained with new and improved methods. Those who are successful have to put in a lot of extra time to learn about these new methods. You have to seek out situations where you get feedback. It's a myth that you get better when you just do the things you enjoy."

In conclusion, the evidence shows that expertise only comes from good practice.

Science Myth of the Week:

So, does the hand sanitizers really work? Or is it just a waste of money? 

It does work! But, you still need to wash your hands!

The Reality Check Episode 66

Cameron/Comfort's Origin of Species + Music Therapy + Alcohol Kills Brain Cells Myth

Part 1:

Ray Comfort and I agree that "science is a wonderful discipline, to which we are deeply indebted." We agree that it would be nice for students to get a free copy of Darwin’s best-known book, On the Origin of Species. I'll even go further than he might: The Origin —like Shakespeare and the Bible—should be on every educated person's bookshelf. If you don't understand evolution, you can't be considered scientifically literate. And we agree that students should read the Origin thoroughly.

Unfortunately, it will be hard to thoroughly read the version that Comfort will be distributing on college campuses in November. The copy his publisher sent me is missing no fewer than four crucial chapters, as well as Darwin's introduction. Two of the omitted chapters, Chapters 11 and 12, showcase biogeography, some of Darwin's strongest evidence for evolution. Which is a better explanation for the distribution of plants and animals around the planet: common ancestry or special creation? Which better explains why island species are more similar to species on the mainland closest to them, rather than to more distant species that share a similar environment? The answer clearly is common ancestry. Today, scientists continue to develop the science of biogeography, confirming, refining, and extending Darwin's conclusions.

Likewise missing from Comfort's bowdlerized version of the Origin is Chapter 13, where Darwin explained how evolution makes sense of classification, morphology, and embryology. To take a simple example, why do all land vertebrates (amphibians, mammals, and reptiles and birds) have four limbs? Not because four limbs are necessarily a superior design for land locomotion: insects have six, arachnids have eight, and millipedes have, well, lots. It's because all land vertebrates descended with modification from a four-legged ("tetrapod") ancestor. Since Darwin's era, scientists have repeatedly confirmed that the more recently two species have shared a common ancestor, the more similar are their anatomy, their biochemistry, their embryology, and their genetics.

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," as a famous geneticist said. That's why evolution is taught matter-of-factly in the biology and geology departments of every respected university in the country, secular or sectarian, from Berkeley to Brigham Young. That's why the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science wholeheartedly endorse the teaching of evolution in the public schools. That's why thousands of papers applying, extending, or refining evolution are published in the scientific research literature every year.

But there's no reason for students to refuse Comfort's free—albeit suspiciously abridged—copy of the Origin. Read the first eight pages of the introduction, which is a reasonably accurate, if derivative, sketch of Darwin's life. The last 10 pages or so are devoted to some rather heavy-handed evangelism, which doesn't really have anything to do with the history or content of the evolutionary sciences; read it or not as you please.

But don't waste your time with the middle section of the introduction, a hopeless mess of long-ago-refuted creationist arguments, teeming with misinformation about the science of evolution, populated by legions of strawmen, and exhibiting what can be charitably described as muddled thinking.

For example, Comfort's treatment of the human fossil record is painfully superficial, out of date, and erroneous. Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man—one a forgery, the other a misidentification, both rejected by science more than 50 years ago—are trotted out for scorn, as if they somehow negate the remaining huge volume of human fossils. There are more specimens of "Ardi" (the newly described Ardipithecus ramidus) than there are ofTyrannosaurus —and any 8-year-old aspiring paleontologist will be delighted to tell you how much we know about the T. rex!

But you wouldn't learn any of this from reading Comfort's introduction. He says, "Java Man [a Homo erectus], found in the early 20th century, was nothing more than a piece of skull, a fragment of a thigh bone, and three molar teeth." Well, that was from a single site—excavated in the 1890s. What about the dozens of other sites where fossils of H. erectusare found, from China to Kenya to Georgia? Another whopper: "Java Man is now regarded as fully human." Trust me, if one sat down next to you on the bus, you would know the difference.

In fact, the fossil record for the human lineage is impressive, providing the evidence on which our understanding of the big events of human evolution is based. We and modern chimpanzees shared a common ancestor millions of years ago; the main feature separating us from our chimpanzee cousins is bipedalism, followed by toolmaking, and then brain expansion, and then the substantial elaboration of behavior we call human culture. More fossils will provide more details, but this outline of human evolution is not in serious doubt among scientists.

It's not just human evolution that Comfort misrepresents. His main gripe is the old creationist standby, the supposed lack of transitional forms in the fossil record. (Darwin addressed the objection in Chapter 9 of the Origin, interestingly not included in Comfort's version.) Comfort sneers at the fossil evidence for the terrestrial ancestry of whales and the dinosaurian ancestry of birds. Too bad for him that he has a knack for picking bad examples: There are splendid fossils of dinosaurs that have feathers and of whales that have legs—and even feet. Faced with ignorance like this, I'm reminded of a jeremiad: "Oh foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not."

But if you are willing to use your ears to listen to what paleontologists say about transitional features and use your eyes to look at the evidence described in the scientific literature (as well as displayed in many museums and science centers around the country), you will find transitional fossils galore. There are clear transitional series from aquatic vertebrates to land vertebrates, from primitive land vertebrates to mammals, from dinosaurs to birds, from land vertebrates to whales, and of course a wonderful series of fossils leading to Homo sapiens. A good place to begin is a marvelous website dismissively mentioned (and erroneously described) in Comfort's introduction, the University of California Museum of Paleontology's Understanding Evolution.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, both occasions worth celebrating by anyone who cares about our understanding of the natural world. So it's no surprise that creationists are trying to piggyback on the festivities with cynical publicity stunts like Comfort's. But I have faith that college students are sharp enough to realize that Comfort's take on Darwin and evolution is simply bananas.

- Eugenie C. Scott, Ph.D.

Part 2:

Music therapy is both an allied health profession and a field of scientific research which studies correlations between the process of clinical therapy and biomusicology, musical acoustics, music theory, psychoacoustics and comparative musicology. It is an interpersonal process in which a trained music therapist uses music and all of its facets—physical, emotional, mental, social, aesthetic, and spiritual—to help clients to improve or maintain their health. Music therapists primarily help clients improve their observable level of functioning and self-reported quality of life in various domains (e.g., cognitive functioning, motor skills, emotional and affective development, behavior and social skills) by using music experiences (e.g., singing, songwriting, listening to and discussing music, moving to music) to achieve measurable treatment goals and objectives. Referrals to music therapy services may be made by a treating physician or an interdisciplinary team consisting of clinicians such as physicians, psychologists, physical therapists, and occupational therapists.

Music therapists are found in nearly every area of the helping professions. Some commonly found practices include developmental work with individuals with special needs, songwriting and listening in reminiscence/orientation work with the elderly, processing and relaxation work, and rhythmic entrainment for physical rehabilitation in stroke victims. Wiki

The Reality Check Episode 65

False Pregnancy + Scott Gavura + Cancer Support Groups

Part 1:
False pregnancy or hysterical pregnancy, most commonly termed pseudocyesis in humans and pseudopregnancy in other mammals, is the appearance of clinical and/or subclinical signs and symptoms associated with pregnancy when the person or animal is not pregnant. Clinically, false pregnancy is most common in veterinary medicine. False pregnancy in humans is less common, and may sometimes be purely psychological. It is generally estimated that false pregnancy is caused due to changes in the endocrine system of the body, leading to the secretion of hormones which translate into physical changes similar to those during pregnancy. The underlying cause is often mental.- Wiki

One spring day last year, a young woman walked into the clinic of the Boston Lying-in Hospital. She had the "profile," said Dr. Robert Northwall Rutherford, of a woman five months' pregnant. Proudly she told the doctor about the lively kickings of her unborn child, which her husband had also noticed.
Dr. Rutherford gave the patient a careful examination. She was not pregnant. She had no tumor. He wanted to find out what caused the huge swelling, but "she received the diagnosis of spurious pregnancy with contempt," and marched off to consult another physician.
That and similar cases set Dr. Rutherford to scrabbling around in old records, trying to find out something about "pseudocyesis," or false pregnancy. Last week he reported his findings in the New England Journal of Medicine. Excerpts :
> The condition is by no means rare: hundreds of cases have been reported in medical literature. Most famous case: Mary Tudor, Queen of England. In addition to a distended abdomen, a woman may present other signs of pregnancy such as amenorrhea (absence or suppression of menstruation), full breasts, fetal movements, etc. If a doctor is at all suspicious, a biological test, like the Aschheim-Zondek pregnancy test, will solve the problem. But a few doctors have been taken in by the symptoms.
> Most of the women with spurious pregnancy are in their early 30s, are childless, and eager for offspring. They may go from doctor to doctor hoping for encouragement, even prepare baby clothes. Some of them have later gone through a normal pregnancy; in some cases they started in the midst of a spurious pregnancy.
> Many conditions may cause symptoms of pseudocyesis. Sometimes, in older women, an apron of fat develops over the abdomen at menopause. Other women may have large tumors, or their abdomens may be distended with air. Most common cause is hysteria: an intense psychological desire for a child creates a muscular spasm which pushes the abdomen out. Treatment varies : purges may be helpful, or the muscles may be worked into place while the patient is under an anesthetic. Since most of the cases are hysterical, Dr. Rutherford thinks pseudocyesis is psychiatry's baby. - Time

Part 2:
Interview with Scott Gavura!
Listen to the Interview here: The Reality Check Episode 65

Science Myth of the Week:
Two widely publicised studies have contributed to the myth that the biological progress of cancer can be effectively battled with the power of the mind. Unfortunately these studies - one at Stanford and one at UCLA - have been heavily criticised and subsequent research has failed to back them up.

The headline result of the Stanford study, published in 1989 seemed impressive. Women with metastatic breast cancer who took part in a support programme lived twice as long as the control group ). Both groups were, of course, also receiving normal medical care for cancer.
Later examination of the results, though, revealed telling problems, which Barry Beyerstein and colleagues point out (Beyerstein et al., 2007). The major question-mark was over the control group, who were much more short-lived than would normally be expected. It turned out that the group who had taken part in the support programme had survived for about the average time: it was the control group who had made the treatment look effective.
The UCLA study, published in 1996, also appeared to have impressive results. They found that in melanoma patients, 92% of those given a social support intervention were still alive after 5 years, compared to only 72% of those who weren't (Fawzy et al., 1993).
Closer inspection, though, revealed that this study might have been afflicted by the same problem as the Stanford study. It was the control group whose five-year survival rate was poorer than normal. The survival rate of those given the social support intervention was about average.- PSYBLOG

 

The Reality Check Episode 64

Dark Side of the Moon + 2012 + Start of Spring

Part 1:
So, is the other side of the moon really dark?
The answer is no!
Bad Astronomy: The Moon only shows one face to us because it is not rotating.
Better astronomy: The Moon only shows one face because it is rotating, once every time it revolves around the Earth.
Best astronomy: The Moon does not appear to rotate in the reference frame where the Earth-Moon line is fixed in direction, but it does rotate as seen by an outside observer.

If you go out on several different nights and look at the Moon, you will always see the same features, at about the same position. It looks as if the Moon doesn't rotate! Ah, but it does. This can be seen using a model. Grab two oranges (or apples, or baseballs, or whatever roughly spherical objects you have handy). Mark one with an "X"; this represents a feature on the Moon. Now put the other one down on a table; this is the Earth. Place the Moon model on the table about 30 centimeters (one foot) away with the X facing the Earth model. Now move the Moon model as if it were orbiting the Earth, taking care to make sure that the X faces the Earth model at all times.
Surprise! You'll see that to keep the X facing the Earth model, you have to rotate the Moon model as it goes around the Earth model. Furthermore, you can see you have to spin it exactly once every orbit to keep the X facing the Earth model. If you don't rotate it, the Moon model will show all of its "sides" to the Earth model as it goes around.
Now, I have been a bit tricky here. We are talking about two different frames of reference; one on the surface of the Earth looking out at the Moon, and one outside the Earth-Moon system looking in. You performed the experiment from the latter frame, and saw the Moon rotating. From the former, however, you can see for yourself the Moon does not rotate. What is being argued here is that in one frame the Moon rotates, in another it does not.
We've actually learned three things:
1) the Moon rotates as it orbits the Earth (as seen by an outside observer);
2) it rotates one time for every orbit (to that observer); and
3) if it didn't rotate, we would eventually see all of the Moon as it orbited the Earth.
There is a bit more to this story. We actually can see a bit more than just the one face of the Moon. Because the Moon's orbit is not a perfect circle but actually an ellipse, its spin and rotation don't exactly match up. This means that sometimes the spin lags behind the orbital speed, and sometimes it moves ahead. This in turn means that sometimes we can "peek" around a bit onto the far side of the Moon. This is called "libration". You can see it yourself! If you happen to observe the Moon a week after perigee (closest point to the Earth) and then two weeks later, a week after apogee (farthest point from the Earth) you can see that the face looks like it has rotated a bit. This is easiest to see with binoculars or a small telescope. It's very hard to see with the naked eye, but remember, ancient astronomers knew about this effect long before the invention of the telescope! - BA

Part 2:
So, will the world end at 2012?
The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is a non-repeating, vigesimal and base-18 calendar used by several Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Maya. For this reason, it is sometimes known as the Maya (or Mayan) Long Count calendar. Using a modified vigesimal tally, the Long Count calendar identifies a day by counting the number of days passed since a mythical creation date that corresponds to August 11, 3114 BCE in the Gregorian calendar. The Long Count calendar was widely used on monuments.
To actualy calculate the calendar, there are many events after 2012, so it's actually false that the world will end.
Dec. 21, 2012, won't be the end of the world as we know. It will, however, be another winter solstice.
Much like Y2K, 2012 has been analyzed and the science of the end of the Earth thoroughly studied. Contrary to some of the common beliefs out there, the science behind the end of the world quickly unravels when pinned down to the 2012 timeline. Below, NASA Scientists answer several questions that we're frequently asked regarding 2012.
Question (Q): Are there any threats to the Earth in 2012? Many Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.
Answer (A): Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.
Q: What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?
A: The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved forward to December 2012. Then these two fables were linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012 -- hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.
Q: Does the Mayan calendar end in December 2012?
A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then -- just as your calendar begins again on January 1 -- another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.
Q: Could a phenomena occur where planets align in a way that impacts Earth?
A: There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades, Earth will not cross the galactic plane in 2012, and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. Each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy but that is an annual event of no consequence.
Q: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?
A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.
Q: What is the polar shift theory? Is it true that the earth’s crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days if not hours?
A: A reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. There are slow movements of the continents (for example Antarctica was near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago), but that is irrelevant to claims of reversal of the rotational poles. However, many of the disaster websites pull a bait-and-shift to fool people. They claim a relationship between the rotation and the magnetic polarity of Earth, which does change irregularly, with a magnetic reversal taking place every 400,000 years on average. As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn’t cause any harm to life on Earth. A magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia, anyway.
A: The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs.
Q: How do NASA scientists feel about claims of pending doomsday?
A: For any claims of disaster or dramatic changes in 2012, where is the science? Where is the evidence? There is none, and for all the fictional assertions, whether they are made in books, movies, documentaries or over the Internet, we cannot change that simple fact. There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012.
Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?
A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history.
All the Questions and Answers above are from NASA.
Science Myth of the Week:
So, when does spring start?
Spring only starts on March 21st 36 times every 100 years. Sometimes it's March 20th, and it can even go to March 19th!