The UK (well okay, Britain; let’s leave Northern Ireland out of this statement) is a relatively secular place to live, with religion kept as largely a personal matter. School children don’t have to swear loyalty to a beard in the sky, and churches aren’t the local-business hub they seem to be in the US. Which makes this news all the stranger: the British General Medical Council (GMC) has decided to review its rules, which currently ban doctors from discussing their religious views with patients during consultations.

::::Ways This Could Go Wrong #1: a Jehovah’s Witness doctor advises his stabbing-victim patient against accepting a blood transfusion because “it would displease the Sky Beard”. ::::

In a decision which we many people (well alright, just us) are calling “absolutely disgraceful why don’t they tell the damn churches they have to discuss evolution during every Sunday service“, the GMC (a select group of clinical boffins who oversee all medically-licensed people and activities) have announced they will look into their rule which bans discussing their religion during patient consultations.

::::Ways This Could Go Wrong #2: a male Muslim doctor refuses to treat a female patient because she is baring her face to him. “It would displease the Sky Beard”. ::::

This comes on the heels of a decision by the GMC earlier this year to give an official warning to Richard Scott, a General Practitioner who suggested to a young patient that perhaps believing in Jesus could relieve his medical condition. The patient’s mother (not present during the consultation) was told, and she lodged a complaint.

Just in case you’re thinking this is atheist propaganda, here is the audio of an interview with Dr Richard Scott, conducted by the BBC. We have transcribed the initial portion of the interview below the video. The transcribed portion fully describes the words used during the medical consultation, as remembered by the clinician.

Selected transcription:

Interviewer: Good morning, Dr Scott.
Dr Scott: Good morning to you.
Interviewer: It’s very nice to have you on the program [DS: Thank you] so we can clarify all this. What did you say to this patient?
Dr Scott: The consultation took place over, initially, twenty minutes, where we looked at the standard medical issues, and I could see that he’d had these things approached in the past by several doctors, and that he was still stuck in a rut. So I followed my normal principle, which is that after doing the standard medicine, I said to him: “look, there is something else that could help you here: if you’d like, we can discuss how faith could be an advantage for you in this case and could help you move forwards and give you some hope for the future“. So at that point we discussed my faith as a Christian, I discussed his faith – which was an alternative faith to Christianity – questions backwards and forwards, and at the end of it he obviously chose not to take up what I suggested. Which is absolutely fine, his right.

What.

A crock.

Of shit.

::::Ways This Could Go Wrong #3: a Catholic doctor advises a child who claims to have been sexually abused that he should talk about it with a priest. “That would please the Sky Beard.”::::

The interview only gets worse. We intend to post a full transcription soon.

Here is the terrifying short version of the interview: I reviewed my patient’s medical history, saw that a few other doctors had not successfully cured him, and so decided that the best treatment would be a good dose of religion. My patient was not a Christian, so I attempted to convert him in the hopes that he may be saved from hell eternal.

This is a terrifying vision of the future: doctors ignoring scientifically proven treatments in favor of prayer, incense burning and goat sacrifices. The head of the GMC, Niall Dickson, should be hanging his head in shame at having announced this decision to review the rules.

Because if we allow religion to gain an officially sanctioned role in medical treatment, where will we end? We’ll show you where. Here: homeopathic Emergency Room. Enjoy!

We at SlantedScience feel pretty confident in our arithmetic skills. We can easily keep mental track of grocery bills, bar tabs, and Kardashian sisters.

It is perhaps this which makes us so freaking annoyed by mathematical puzzles. You know, those simple-yet-impossible tricks which you simply CAN NOT understand. Well, here’s one of them: a lovely little mathemental fry-your-brain-with-its-simplicity sneak attack on your brain.

Enjoy, frustrate, hate: have fun.

The iPhone and similar mobile devices have changed our lives with their apps. For the better: we can now see the progress of a house-moving storm headed in our direction. For the worse: we can now annoy the hell out of of movie theater patrons by checking on the progress of a house-moving storm headed in our direction every thirty seconds during Harry Potter.

But SlantedScience is here to help. Our new series will introduce you to the ways in which iPhone apps can assist you in living a healthy life.

If you want to be a dick and use them in a movie theater, that’s entirely up to you.

Tattoos: they’re for criminals, bikers, and drunk girls on spring break, right?

Wrong.

Smartphones: they’re for emergencies, playing Angry Birds and viewing porn without your wife seeing the history on the home computer, right?

Wrong.

See, today we bring you news of how these two disparate entities are about to converge in an amazing way. It’s all down to a combination of research by Heather Clark at Northeastern University (published in the journal Integrative Biology), and the emergent camera technology that is being linked with the iPhone 5.

Clark and her colleagues injected a collection of tiny sensors (100 nanometers in diameter), suspended into an oil solution, under the skin of mice, just like a traditional tattoo. These sensors are capable of binding several substrates, including glucose and sodium. Binding causes the sensor to fluoresce, and this increased fluorescence can be detected by lab equipment (in the case of the experimental mice) or, hopefully, by an iPhone camera. Here’s the kind of image the scientists got from their experiments: a mouse implanted with sensors which have been activated:

See the row of red/yellow dots down its spine? Those are areas where the sensors tattoos have been made.

Applications are obvious: diabetics could be able to monitor glucose levels, and athletes could monitor their blood electrolyte concentrations, simply by taking a photograph of their forearm.

As profitable as these approaches may be, if the boffins are listening could you please also make a test for blood alcohol levels? In a rare serious moment, we sure would appreciate anything which could help stop dicks driving while drunk.

That Usain Bolt, eh? Fastest human in the world, 100m in 9.58 seconds, and the first man ever to hold 100m and 200m records at the same time. This guy’s legs must move faster than a hummingbird’s wings, right?

Wrong. New research shows that “Lightning Bolt” Usain’s leg speed is actually not the determining factor in his unique speed. It’s all to do with force applied, and pressure, and other cool science stuff.

So cheer up, fatty: you could be the first human to break the 9.5 second 100m.*

*No, you couldn’t.

Usain Bolt is the current World and Olympic champion. His accomplishments are legendary. Surely, as the world’s fastest human, his legs must be moving in a blurred whirl of speedy rotation? Surely, as he runs, the only sound to be heard is a faint “meep meep” as he vanishes into the distance?

Wrong: scientists have just announced data showing that leg speed is not a determining factor in Bolt’s uncanny running ability.It turns out that the difference between mortals and Usain Bolt is a combination of pressure moving through the foot as it lands on the ground, and the amount of time that foot spends on the ground. Larger and less, respectively, provide the optimal speed.

Boffin Peter Weyand of the Southern Methodist University describes his findings:

The amount of time to pick up a leg and put it down is very similar. It surprised us when we first figured it out.

Those of us who fancy ourselves as okay runners tend to have a foot on the ground for 0.12 seconds, and are able to push 500lbs of force through it. Olympians like Usain Bolt, however, leave their foot static for just 0.08 seconds, and push a bone-stressing 1,000lbs of force through it. This allows Jamaican Bolt to cover 100m in just 41 strides; the average for his Olympic competitors is 44.

So, if you want to improve your sprinting, remember this: just kiss the ground with your foot, but while it’s there make sure you are pushing through with everything you have.

Essential Safety Announcement: Please ensure your running path is free from obstructions. Educational video follows.

This story comes to you from The American Institute For Thieving Hypocrites. See, the town of Salem in Massachusetts has – because of its historical association with witches – become home to many people selling “psychic readings” and similar bullshit as a way of stealing money from gullible tourists.

Just as the Christians in Lourdes give donate use little bits of wood and water to steal money from desperate people, so this colony of filth in Salem spend their days conning the cash from innocents.

Sadly,  some of these greedy liars in Salem are now getting upset that there are too many psychics setting up shop in the city, taking a share of their hard-earned income. Oh, how we weep. Read on for details of ways in which you can help these poor people in their desperate campaign for proper regulation of psychics cold, hard cash.

The problem is that 4 years ago, the city of Salem’s rulers lifted a cap they had placed on the number of charlatans able to receive an official “psychic license” (aka “license to defraud people overcome with grief“).

Here’s an eyewitness account of the horrors being inflicted upon the established psychic community within Salem. Here is the vomit of words which poured from the mouth of Barbara Szafranski, a “psychic license holder” in Salem who can’t believe that the city is planning to allow  an influx of improperly trained mystics and other liars:

It affected me 75%. I lost business because many stores opened up that were not in this field. They just opened up because they wanted to get the money from the readings.

It just becomes a bunch of gypsies.

Holy fuck! Who would have thought that there were people opening up psychic reading stores just to make money. That is so completely opposite to the long-standing psychic readers of Salem, who selflessly dedicate their lives to charging sad people money to hear a few platitudinous lies about their deceased relatives.

And gypsies? Ugh!

Who wants a band of gypsies entering their town and mercilessly extracting money from mentally unstable people while operating under official license from the town council and pretending that they are actually helping the unbalanced weepers? Surely, says Barbara Szafranski, that should be left to those of us callous bastards and bitches who got in on this scam years ago?

In short: Salem, Massachusetts is trading on its history of witches and witchcraft (sidenote: those terms really mean “abuse of women and girls by the town’s men“, but let’s not allow historical accuracy get in the way of a good scam) in order to bring money to the local economy from people missing their dead relatives. The town issues licenses to frauds, the frauds take money from people, the town takes money from the frauds. And now the frauds are upset that too many other frauds are muscling in on their lucrative business of lying and deceiving desperate people.

Well here’s our message to the frauds:

YOUR ARE REPUGNANT FILTH, WHO KNOWINGLY CON/SCAM/DEFRAUD MONEY FROM PEOPLE SO BLINDED BY GRIEF THAT THEY ARE DESPERATE FOR THE TINY AMOUNT OF SOLACE YOU UNCARINGLY HAPPEN TO GIVE THEM. YOU ARE LIARS, YOU ARE CHARLATANS, YOU HAVE NO “PSYCHIC ABILITY” AND YOU CARE ONLY FOR MONEY MADE FROM THESE DECEPTIONS.

Fuck, but we hate psychics.

There are three areas of scientific research in which the tiniest discovery can be inflated into a huge press release: cures for obesity, cancer and old age.

Here’s an example of the third: scientists in Boston have published a paper which shows that – within a specific mouse model of aging – switching on our old friend telomerase gave anti-aging (even aging-reversal) benefits.

Sadly, everybody reporting this has gone with a Benjamin Button reference.

Pfft. As if we would be so obvious.

Here’s the real deal: mice which have been genetically engineered to produce no telomerase protein age prematurely. That was known.

Ronald DePinho and colleagues at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute bred somewhat different mice, which had “conditional” copies of the telomerase gene. This meant that no telomerase protein was produced in these mice until the scientists fed it a chemical which allowed protein production. The upshot: these mice age prematurely, because they don’t produce telomerase.You can think of them as a bunch of mice which become Larry King at the age of twenty

The scientists’ question was: what would happen when they gave the chemical and the mice began producing telomerase?

And the answer: the mice’s intestines regained their youthful vigor. Their patchy hair began to fill in, and their shriveled testicles swelled and became fertile once again. It’s the anti-aging elixir! Benjamin Button can be cured!

Remarkable, eh? Well, maybe. Other scientists are claiming that the fact these experiments were performed in a “faked” system (mice lacking telomerase from birth) negates – or at least reduces – their applicability to humans. See, we’re born with our cells expressing the telomerase gene; it just gets less effective as we age. So it remains to be seen whether this research has any relevance to real life.

Sorry, Benjamin Button, but you ain’t been saved yet.

]]> http://www.slantedscience.com/2010/11/29/scientists-discover-anti-aging-drug-copious-references-to-benjamin-button-inevitably-follow/feed/ 2 http://www.slantedscience.com/2010/11/19/scientists-create-genetically-engineered-bacteria-to-fill-holes-in-concrete/ http://www.slantedscience.com/2010/11/19/scientists-create-genetically-engineered-bacteria-to-fill-holes-in-concrete/#comments Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:25:24 +0000 SlantedScientist http://www.slantedscience.com/?p=328

Cracked concrete is a big problem, being both unsightly and dangerous. We’ve done a few scratch calculations and have come up with a fairly definitive figure for the amount spent worldwide on the problem each year: “A shitload”.

Well holes in concrete may soon be a distant memory, as English scientists are reporting the creation of a genetically engineered strain of bacteria (dubbed, hilariously, BacillaZilla) which they claim is able to thrive within holes in concrete, and then as they die create a mineral-rich pseudo-concrete as strong as the original.

You’ll no doubt have experienced the effects of cracked concrete: the potholes in roads that can dent a car’s wheel and screwup its suspension; the sidewalk holes big enough to swallow a child.

And how do the men and women of city and town government respond to these concrete afflictions? Generally by waiting a couple of years to see if the concrete will somehow repair itself, then waiting another couple of years  so they can make it through an election cycle on budget, and finally by sending out a crack team of alcoholic workmen who will stand around for a few days drinking liquor from thermos flasks before finally dumping a few shovels of wet concrete on top of the problem and hoping it lasts for week so they can get their paycheck before being fired.

Well, no more: scientists at the University of Newcastle in England have announced their creation of BacillaFilla, a bacterium which they have genetically modified to be able to repair these concrete cracks and holes.

What happens is this. The bacteria have been genetically programed to thrive at the pH found in concrete. Once in there, they infiltrate throughout the tiniest cracks, proliferating until they reach a certain density. Then, they begin producing and excreting calcium carbonate. The bacteria are programed so that at this point they die, thus preventing any kind of horror-film scenario in which they cover all of our lovely parks and sports fields in concrete.

The calcium carbonate structure they produce is, researchers say, as strong as the concrete it heals. Don’t forget, limestone is also primarily a calcium carbonate stone.

We are very much into the idea of using GM bacteria for jobs like this, and for clearing oil spills, and producing pharmaceuticals, and..the list is endless.

In fact, the only “person” we can see who doesn’t benefit from this is Godzilla. Imagine it: as the big green guy is rampaging through Tokyo or New York, blowing holes in skyscrapers, he’s followed by a swarm of these little critters, sealing up all of his destructive work.

Poor Godzilla. Poor, unemployed Godzilla.

This is not a problem which has ever affected us, thank the gods. But apparently, some people are allergic to wine.

Can you imagine it? The absolute horror of getting an allergic reaction to wine? Of being at a dinner party or wedding, with the booze flowing free, and having to decline because it would set you off sneezing and sniffling?

There is surely no worse allergy IN THE WORLD. Well, now scientists believe they have identified the molecules responsible, and the hope is that these poor people may one day be freed from their intolerable condition.

We sense a Telethon coming on…

According to scientists, an incredible eight percent of people are allergic to wine. Imagine that: 8 out of every 100 people you see during a day are unable to enjoy a glass of vino for fear of…well, actually it’s just stuffed-up noses and a bit of a headache. Which we all experience after drinking wine, right? But for these poor folk, the symptoms are instantaneous, not a delayed reaction to toxins.

Hell. On. Earth.

But hope is at hand, sad allergy folk, because scientists have just announced they know what’s causing your nasal distress.

It’s not sulfites – chemical compounds added by winemakers to improve storage, and known to be responsible for just one of the eight percent of allergy sufferers’ misery.

Scientist Giuseppe Palmisano and colleagues have analyzed Italian chardonnay, and identified 28 glycoproteins (those are proteins with carbohydrates chemically attached to them) which they claim are partly or wholly responsible. Some of the glycoproteins have chemical structures similar to known allergens, including those in latex and ragweed.

What this research does is allow the development of wines lacking these allergenic glycoproteins, which could thus be safely be consumed by those poor, sick individuals who cannot currently enjoy Nature’s best gift.

And what greater mission can science have than that?

In December’s GQ, the magazine introduces this year’s “Rock Stars Of Science”, a campaign funded by the Geoffrey Beene Foundation in order to bring scientists to the public’s attention.

The theory is that kids are losing interest in science, and their parents aren’t encouraging them much any more. So, because we all know that scientists are boring and ugly and smell of poo, the GQ campaign pairs them with people who are cool and attractive and smell of money and bling: rock stars, in other words.

We’re really into this campaign: science is cool. It’s just scientists that are a bit of a mess. So perhaps these photos of rock stars posing with scientists will encourage a few more of the cool kids to keep on studying their biology instead of…whatever it is that cool kids do. We’ve no idea, quite frankly.

Then again: maybe not. After all, one of the stars shown posing is Sebastian Bach, and we’re pretty sure that the last time he was anything approaching cool was 1987.

Other featured rock stars include Timbaland, Jay Sean and…Heart. Hang on, that Heart? The two mannish-looking ladies Heart?

We retract our stated interest in this campaign: it’s quite obviously being run on the cheap. The website for those interested is: www.rockstarsofscience.org. But who cares, because rock stars posing with scientists is nothing new, as our exclusive pictures below show:

You might expect Christmas tree science would come from labs in Norway, or Finland, or Canada.

This, though, is from North Carolina State University. Scientists there have been looking at the problem of deer eating or otherwise damaging fields of commercial Christmas trees, and discovered a new (less costly) method of doing the job.

This should mean cheaper trees for all of us, so do feel free to quote this research at the gypsy who tries to sell you a pine branch for $25 later this year.

It was news to us, but apparently there’s a thriving Christmas tree-growing industry in North Carolina. And they have a large problem: deer.

Yes, the local deer are attacking the pine growers’ product. They nibble, gnaw and otherwise damage the green bounty by beating against them with their mighty horns.

Current methods for dealing with the problem include fences, commercial deterrents and massive weaponry. All are time consuming and/or expensive.

What the scientists at North Carolina State University have found is that certain food byproducts – including dried blood and egg powder – are just as effective at scaring off the deer as commercial products, but are available at 1/10th the cost.

The researchers, led by Jeff Owen, say that:

When you take the commercial deer repellent that you find at your local hardware store and use it on a farmwide basis, you see growers  budgeting as much for deer repellents as most of their other pesticides. Commercial deer repellents are so costly that Christmas tree growers use them at half-strength to be able to afford using them at all.

So, great news for both farmers and buyers of Christmas trees. Now the hard-handed workers can bring us city softies our trees at a lower cost, by scaring away the deer with blood and egg.

The only downside is that presumably Santa won’t be able to deliver gifts to the Christmas tree workforce, as Rudolph and co will be repulsed by the smells.

We can live with that.