Tag Archives: science

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Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Popular Science archive available online

Retro covers from Popular Science MagazineHere’s a heads-up for anyone of a geeky bent – Wired reports that Popular Science has scanned nearly 140 years of its archived back issues and put them up for viewing on the intertubes, complete with all images and the original period advertising material. For free.

You can’t go directly to an issue to browse, but once you have arrived somewhere by search, there are no restrictions on scrolling around. You’ll also find a properly hyperlinked table of contents in each magazine. The early years are a little dry: I browsed an issue from 1902, and it made the average math textbook look like a Dan Brown novel (only better paced), so I’d recommend starting in the optimistic, tech-loving 1950s.

Of peripheral interest is the fact that PopSci has done this in partnership with Google Books…

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The better we get at medical studies, the more wrong they become

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How’s that for counterintuitive, eh? But it’s a genuine problem, as Ars Technica explains:

The problem is that our statistical tools for evaluating the probability of error haven’t kept pace with our own successes, in the form of our ability to obtain massive data sets and perform multiple tests on them. Even given a low tolerance for error, the sheer number of tests performed ensures that some of them will produce erroneous results at random.

[…]

The problem now is that we’re rapidly expanding our ability to do tests. Various speakers pointed to data sources as diverse as gene expression chips and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which provide tens of thousands of individual data points to analyze. At the same time, the growth of computing power has meant that we can ask many questions of these large data sets at once, and each one of these tests increases the prospects than an error will occur in a study; as Shaffer put it, “every decision increases your error prospects.” She pointed out that dividing data into subgroups, which can often identify susceptible subpopulations, is also a decision, and increases the chances of a spurious error. Smaller populations are also more prone to random associations.

In the end, Young noted, by the time you reach 61 tests, there’s a 95 percent chance that you’ll get a significant result at random. And, let’s face it—researchers want to see a significant result, so there’s a strong, unintentional bias towards trying different tests until something pops out.

Especially when money and funding gets involved, I’m sure. There’s no conspiracy involved, just the psychic momentum of a human institution trying to maintain the status quo. A sort of collective mental flywheel, if you like; the same thing happens with political parties all the time, but they don’t have the same self-checking instinct that science does.

Between this and the rising efficacy of the placebo effect, I’ll bet it’s a weird time to be a medical practitioner… not to mention a patient.

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Garage ribofunk redux – DIY biohacking gaining popularity

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While we’re on the subject of garage industries, here’s a piece at pop-transhumanist organ H+ Magazine on the expanding field of garage biotech [via GlobalGuerrillas; image by mknowles]. We’ve covered DIY biohackers and ribofunkers here before, but the H+ writer has a cautious optimism about the scene’s potential once the dabblers have fallen by the wayside:

It‘s not just enhancement technology that can benefit from DIYbiology. As the popular distrust of doctors grows, people will want to understand and monitor their own body. Likewise, as personalized medicine becomes a reality, we will probably see a rise in the number of hobbyists who treat their own bodies as machines to be worked on — like a radio or a car — branching out from personalized genomics to things like DIY stem cell extraction and manipulation, DIY prosthetics, DIY neural prosthetics and sensory enhancements (infrared vision, anyone?), immune system testing, and general tweaking of whatever system strikes the hobbyist‘s fancy. This hacker‘s paradise has not yet come to pass, but it is, perhaps, our exciting future.

[Given that most distrust of doctors that I’m aware of is based in religious beliefs, I’m not sure the demographics are going to overlap quite that much… though the idea of the First Church Of Jesus Christ Geneticist is an appealing story hook.]

The road to true DIYbiology will not be easy. It‘s not a magic bullet. It will probably not produce the next Bill Gates, at least not for a long time. Biology is hard, messy, and failure is more common than success. The knowledge required takes time and effort to acquire, and even then, so-called textbook knowledge is being revised almost daily. Many are attracted by the glamour of it all. They‘re drawn to the romance of being a wetware hacker — the existential thrill of tweaking life itself. They tend to become quickly disappointed by the slow, tedious, difficult path they face.

I’m struck again by the similarity between DIY biotech and Chris Anderson’s recently-mooted maker-manufacturer revolution; the latter is much closer to reaching some sort of real economic escape velocity, granted, but the essential concepts and culture behind both movements are very alike.

Personally, I’m all for the ability to mess with my meat-machine, but I think I’ll wait until the field is a little more mature before getting my wetware tweaked. After all, if a hack-mod of my computer or car goes wrong, I can always switch off and try again, or – if the worst comes to the worst – replace the broken device; to the best of my knowledge, that facility doesn’t yet exist for the human body.

However, that’s not going to stop people more desperate than myself from turning to black clinics in the hope of fixing problems that the medical establishment won’t mess with. Hell, people already fly to Eastern Europe for cheap no-questions-asked cosmetic surgery… so when some back-street lock-up in Chiba City starts promising a fix for a congenital illness, a failed organ, a missing limb or just the ravages of ageing itself, the customers will come.

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Interpreting facts as failure: the neuroscience of science

There’s a fascinating essay at Wired UK about a guy called Kevin Dunbar, who studies the science of science. The philosophy and theory of science – the seven-step method you had drilled into you at school, for instance – is very elegant, but it doesn’t reflect the way that real science gets done, and it doesn’t take into account our innate propensity to misinterpret anomalous results, so Dunbar went out and researched the way real researchers research. The results are an interesting mix of the obvious and the counterintuitive:

The reason we’re so resistant to anomalous information — the real reason researchers automatically assume that every unexpected result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

Well worth a read, especially in light of the aspersions cast on science by the climate change debate. Individual scientists may make mistakes, but science as a system – as a communal project, as an evolving body of knowledge – turns those failures into new theories. [image by Horia Varlan]

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The Exhumation Factor: just when you thought reality TV couldn’t get any weirder…

… you find a story that says the UK’s Channel 4 is seeking terminally ill volunteers who are willing to undergo embalming and mummification, Ancient Egyptian style, after they’ve died. [image by broma]

Granted, the piece is in the Daily Mail, whose knee-jerk revulsion toward such unpatriotic and liberal notions as truth and objectivity is almost a legend in its own right, but the absence of any blame being pinned on asylum seekers, homosexuals, single parents or Muslims (or some unholy combination of the four) suggests they may actually have dug up (arf!) a real story here. Curtain-twitching outrage is a certainty, though I can’t really see it as being any different to leaving one’s body to medical research… and if the subject gets paid enough to ease the discomfort of their last days, I guess everyone’s a winner.

It does make you wonder where reality programming will run out of steam, though. This mummification idea at least has genuine novelty by comparison to much of the current crop… though I might hold out for the commisioning of Celebrity Mummies Come Dancing on Ice in the Jungle Idol Factor.