| Faith in science is not enough – people deserve proof | Alom Shaha Education must be at the heart of science communication, or else we are simply asking people to 'believe'I am an evangelist. But instead of spreading the gospel or any other religious message, I spend my time trying to share the knowledge of what I believe to be humanity's greatest cultural achievement: science. There is a more mundane term for what I do – "science communication". It's a horrible term, smacking of exactly the kind of thing that turns some people off science. It covers a wide range of activities – from science film-making to working for medical-research charities to going into schools and throwing liquid nitrogen around in a desperate attempt to convince teenagers that "science is fun". Funnily enough, it's not used to describe those who teach science, even though science teachers arguably do more "science communication" than anyone else.The UK's best known science communicator is probably Professor Brian Cox. He's doing a great job of making science seem cool and sexy to the public and, in my opinion, deserves the accolade of modern-day Carl Sagan for his contribution to the cultural status of science. I've known Brian for years and worked with him before his celebrity status went supernova. I would love to say "I told you so" to all the TV commissioning editors who rejected my suggestions to use him as a presenter. I suspect Brian finds it as ironic as I do that TV companies now regularly put out adverts looking for "the next Brian Cox".As much as I love Brian's work, I don't think we need any more like him at the moment. Instead, we need more really good science teachers, and here's why: I don't want to see science become something that people "believe" is important and cool and sexy without understanding why. I don't want people to mindlessly buy into the geek scene in the same way that they might have bought into the alternative lifestyle scene, had they encountered it first in the right circumstances. But that's what I've seen happening – people attending the lectures, events and festivals organised by "science communicators" and going home convinced that science is the "right" way to look at the world, without really understanding why science is special. I've encountered people who are desperate to hang out with the science in-crowd (yes, there really is such a crowd), and even "science communicators" who struggle to explain what it is they think is special or important about science. When I ask them why they want to be science communicators they invariably talk about wanting to share their love of science with the world. Perhaps this is not so different from people who want to share their love of Jesus, Muhammad or Krishna.It seems to me that many of these people are looking for an identity, something to believe in, and they've "found" science in much the same way that others find religion or spirituality. Some of these science groupies are scarily reminiscent of the kids who were in the Christian Union at school.As a child, it would frustrate me that my friends would bang on about how great Islam was and how the Qur'an was this amazing book with the Truth in it – when they had little idea what the Qur'an really said or what the details of the Islamic faith were. Recently, I've been feeling a disconcertingly similar sense of frustration when talking to people who are part of the "sceptic" movement, or the geek scene.Sure, science by its very nature requires us to take things on faith – we cannot individually verify every scientific statement ever made, heck, few of us know how to prove that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way round, but without ensuring that education is at the heart of science communication, we are simply asking people to "believe" in science. If we can't do better than that, than we're no better than the religious leaders that so many self-proclaimed geeks are contemptuous of.I have encountered priests who seemed simply to want to increase the numbers of their flocks, and I've met others who genuinely want to pass on their understanding of god. There is a parallel with science communicators – there are ones who think that getting people to believe "science is fun / important" is what matters and there are others who want people to understand why this is so. It's a subtle but important distinction – the latter is more difficult to do and my feeling is that the best place to do it is in the classroom.My friend Jonathan Sanderson, a science communicator I admire hugely, has pointed out that it looks like I am advocating a return to the "empty vessel" model of communication. I'm not sure he's wrong, but I'd happily concede that, particularly with adult audiences, we need a range of approaches, from saying "this is how the greenhouse effect works" to "take a look at this, you might find it interesting". But Jonathan agrees with me that, "most science communicators would have a dramatically larger impact over their lifetimes if they quit the scene and took teaching jobs". I'm not disparaging the good work that many science communicators do, but some of the most talented, creative people I know work in this peculiar field and I just wish more of them would aspire to become teachers instead of dreaming of becoming the next Brian Cox.Science policyScienceReligionAlom Shahaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Lab Quits Research After Video of Animal Treatment It was alleged that workers cruelly treated dogs, cats and rabbits at a North Carolina research facility where animal care products were tested. feeds.nytimes.com |
Hypnosis reaches the parts brain scans and neurosurgery cannot No longer a mere vaudeville routine, hypnosis is being used in labs to cast light on the innermost workings of the brainVaughan Bell blogs at Mind HacksWhenever AR sees a face, her thoughts are bathed in colour and each identity triggers its own rich hue that shines across her mind's eye. This experience is a type of synaesthesia which, for about one in every 100 people, automatically blends the senses. Some people taste words, others see sounds, but AR experiences colour with every face she sees. But on this occasion, perhaps for the first time in her life, a face is just a face. No colours, no rich hues, no internal lights.If the experience is novel for AR, it is equally new to science because no one had suspected that synaesthesia could be reversed. Despite the originality of the discovery, the technique responsible for the switch is neither the hi-tech of brain stimulation nor the cutting-edge of neurosurgery, but the long-standing practice of hypnosis.The surprising reversal of AR's synaesthesia was reported in a recent study by psychologist Devine Terhune and his colleagues at Lund University in Sweden. The researchers showed photos of colour-tinted faces to AR and asked her to identify the onscreen hue while electrical activity was measured from her brain using scalp electrodes. When the colour of the onscreen face clashed with the colour that appeared in her mind's eye, she reacted slowly, as if trying to read traffic lights through tinted glasses. Meanwhile, the electrical measurements showed her brain struggling to resolve the conflict. But after hypnotic reversal, she glided through the colour naming, reacting as quickly as people without synaesthesia, and showing none of the tell-tale neurological signs of trying to resolve competing mental demands. Hypnosis had not only altered her experience but had modified the workings of specific brain pathways in ways that we cannot usually manage through conscious will alone.In a growing number of labs around the world, hypnosis is being used as an experimental tool to allow researchers to temporarily unpick our normally integrated psychological responses to better understand the mind and brain.Synaesthesia is an automatic psychological association that occurs only in a very few people, but we are blessed (and, indeed, cursed) with minds that mostly operate on autopilot. Take words, for example. As you read the words in this text, you are not consciously identifying each letter, joining them together in your head, and matching the collection to a memory of what it means, it just seems to happen automatically when you see each one.In an analogy to AR's colour-clash face task, if I ask you to name the colour that the word green is highlighted in, I hope you would say red. It turns out that you are slightly slower at naming the highlight colour when it clashes with the word (like in red, green and blue) than when the colours and the words match (as in red, green and blue) because we can't decide not to read the words when we see them – it happens automatically – and this interferes with trying to name the ink colour. This interference is known as the Stroop effect and, along with the normal brain responses that accompany it, have also been reversed with hypnosis by "switching off" automatic word reading.If you're not familiar with hypnosis, I suspect you might be entertaining visions of a Victorian gentleman in a three-piece suit swinging a pocket watch in a brain scanner, but there is no magic to the procedure – it simply requires that someone concentrates on your voice. Even the relaxation part has been found to be optional after an innovative study managed to hypnotise people while on exercise bikes. Perhaps the most important thing to know about hypnosis is that not everyone is hypnotisable to the same extent: countless research studies have shown that we each differ in our susceptibility. Most people can experience their arm feeling light or heavy at someone else's suggestion, a few less can feel as if movement is being prevented on command, and only a minority – about 10% of the population – experience changes in the workings of perception, memory and thought. For those who are "low hypnotisable", being hypnotised is often like listening to one of those slightly dull relaxation tapes that go on for too long, but for high hypnotisables, known as "virtuosos" in the scientific literature, the effects are compelling.We don't know why we have this tendency, but we do know it is partly genetic, that it's influenced by specific genes, and has been linked to differences in the structure of the brain. The trait seems to be normally distributed throughout the population and no reliable methods have been found to alter how hypnotisable we are. Most likely, some people have it, while others do not. This trait is usually described as "suggestibility" but it is nothing to do with gullibility or being easily led. People susceptible to hypnosis are not more naive, trusting or credulous than anyone else, but they do have the capacity to allow seemingly involuntary changes to their mind and body. The key phrase here is that they "have the capacity to allow" because hypnosis cannot be used to force someone against their will. It's a bit like watching an emotional movie. If you want, you can turn away, ignore what's going on, or play sudoku in your head, but if you engage with the story you don't consciously decide to feel joy or sadness as the story progresses, you just react. Hypnosis works in a similar way – some people just seem to have the capacity to get more "caught up in the story".When a suggestion is successful, the experience of it seeming to "happen on its own" is key and this is exactly what neuroscientists have been working with – by suggesting temporary changes to the mind that we wouldn't necessarily be able to trigger on our own. In the case of the two experiments that managed to temporarily "switch off" the Stroop effect in highly hypnotisable people, the suggestion was that the words appeared as "meaningless symbols". This avoided a clash between the colour and the word because the text suddenly appeared to be gibberish. These studies have been useful because they have found that the brain's system for resolving conflicting demands, part of our system for managing attention, seemed to go offline. Hypnotic virtuosos apparently have the capacity to put this system on standby when they need to, something that low hypnotisables lack. Neuroscientists Amir Raz and Jason Buhle suggest hypnosis is really when we allow suggestions to take over from our normally self-directed control of attention that deals with mental self-management, allowing science an exciting tool to "get under the hood" of the conscious mind.As well as allowing us to better explore the nuts and bolts of the mind and brain, hypnosis is also being used to simulate experiences that normally cause people problems, such as hallucinations or loss of control over the body. Because the effects of suggestions are only temporary, hypnosis can be used to trigger these experiences without distress and for only a few minutes at a time. "Virtuosos" are now highly sought after for brain scanning experiments where researchers look at patterns of brain activity when, for example, they are asked to hear illusory music or feel as if they can't move their hand.Several research groups have shown that hypnosis seems to emulate these experiences very closely and that the effects on the brain are different from when participants are asked to fake or imagine the same thing – both important comparisons because we can't tell just from what someone says that they are genuinely experiencing the effects (as parents of school-shy youngsters with mysteriously timed stomach aches could attest).Our own research group is using hypnosis to simulate changes in control of the body, in part to examine whether similar brain processes are involved both in hypnosis and a condition called conversion disorder – where what seem to be neurological symptoms appear, like paralysis or blindness, despite there being no damage to the nervous system that could explain them. So far, there seems to be similarity between the disorder and the effects of hypnosis in that the frontal lobe attention systems seem to be taking other brain areas offline. What we're not sure of, is why this is only temporary in hypnosis but long-term in conversion disorder.But perhaps even more mysterious is why we have the capacity to be hypnotised at all. As a species, about 10% of the population can have their reality profoundly altered simply by tuning in to suggestions made by someone else – something that is deeply weird when you think about it. Virtuoso hypnotisability has never been reliably linked to any problems or difficulties and it has been suggested that, on the contrary, it actually reflects a more efficient control of the brain's attention systems. It could be a side-effect of other benefits, but we still don't have any good theories. If you have any suggestions, do let me know.Vaughan Bell blogs at Mind HacksNeurosciencePsychologyMedical researchguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Rocket with US-Russian crew blasts off By NATALIYA VASILYEVA 2010-10-08T16:51:55ZBAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (AP) -- A Russian rocket with a U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts onboard blasted off successfully early Friday for the International Space Station, with flame-haired Russian spy Anna Chapman making an unexpected appearance at the cosmodrome to wave them goodbye.... hosted.ap.org |
The International Space Station: a giant science laboratory The experiments that can only be conducted in spaceThe International Space Station arose when the US, Russia and other countries merged plans for independent space projects in 1993. The Russian Zarya (Star) module was the first to be lofted into orbit in November 1998.The station was designed as an orbiting science laboratory and researchers have already carried out more than 400 experiments on board.Science on the space station follows broad themes, including human research, biology, physics and materials science, technology, earth and space research and education.Humans are affected by weightlessness and cosmic radiation in space, so many projects look at bone and muscle wastage, heart function, the behaviour of genes, and how the nervous and immune systems react to life in orbit.The outside of the European Columbus module is used to expose organisms to the harsh environment of space. Experiments with lichen have found they survive well, despite the vacuum and constant bombardment of cosmic rays and UV light from the sun. Other experiments are investigating how plants and other organisms use gravity to decide which direction to lay down roots.The space station is a major base for Earth observation. Cameras on board monitor crop growth, atmospheric greenhouse gases and lightning strikes.In February next year, the space shuttle is set to deliver a piece of equipment called the alpha magnetic spectrometer. The giant drum-shaped device will survey the skies to answer questions such as: where do cosmic rays come from? Are there far away galaxies made of antimatter? And what is dark matter made of?International space stationSpaceNasaEuropean Space AgencySpace technologyIan Sampleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |