Good News/Bad News: Biology Meets Technology

Or should it really be called good news this week? Because you know, I really couldn’t find two news stories I wanted to talk about this week. I do have a bad news item this week but it’s pretty minor and I’ll probably put it out there now, because I don’t really have a whole lot to say about it.

If you live in the UK (as I do), the promise of an ipad with 4G technology is… debatable…

Not because the ipad doesn’t have the technology to back up the claim, but because of two reasons that are more a question of functionality.

1) 4G systems aren’t widely available over here.
2) When they do they’ll probably work on a different frequency, and therefore will not interact with the ipads that are tuned to US frequencies.

So that sucks if you’re an apple fan/someone with lots of money to throw away.

Take a look for yourself, then we can have a discussion about why there is a product on the market that’s a giant iphone without the phone.

But if you’re excited about the future of tiny, tiny electronics I may have something nice to tell you in regards to utilising the piezoelectric effect and its effects at work on bacteriophages.

For those of you who don’t know what a bacteriophage is from the name alone, you’ll have certainly seen a picture of one at some point. These are viruses that use bacteria for reproduction and metabolism, and are essentially harmless to us because of this specialisation. They look (at least to me) like the Apollo 11 landing module, what with their bulbous heads and spindly legs.

Look them up, they’re awesome.

What’s very interesting, and what the American department of energy discovered, is that when a film of these viruses had an electrical field applied to it, the helical proteins covering the viruses responded by twisting and turning. An interesting phenomena you might say, and I would agree, however, the really cool part was that, using negatively charged amino acid residues they were able to increase the voltage of the virus, an act that was also observed when stacking 20 layers of these viruses.

So, and correct me if I’m wrong, this suggests that we may be able to utilise bigger voltages on a smaller scale using these creatures.

And that’s pretty damn cool.

The IdeoMexico Effect!

So my body’s decided to half shut down on the run up to freshers just to fuck with me.

I come to you ill, from my bedroom, witness the glory of a blocked nose, chesty cough and stomach threatening to burst!

Okay, maybe not threatening to burst but it’s still not very nice either way.

And now for something completely different and on something I touched on maybe a year or half a year ago, something that I like to talk about here.

I put a lot of emphasis on scientific scepticism here, and here’s one of the biggest culprits of this affair.

George Gadd, get out your dowsing rods while Catherine Foresight primes her keyboard for long comments about how she thinks it’s valid.

Yes, it’s dowsing rods being used for bomb detectors in Mexico.

I think I talked about these glorified divination rods being used in the middle east before, but it would seem that even the UK is wising up to this colossal waste of money, offering an official warning to Mexicans planning to use the device to detect bombs.

I suppose sometimes even my own country can make some rational decisions sometimes.

Now why is it that when the house of commons came to a consensus that homeopathy was bollocks did that not get eradicated from pharmacies? hmmmm….

Anyhoo, if you’re still not in the know about dowsing let me hit you with some knowledge.

Here’s a little something about the ideomotor effect.

That should clear a few things up I believe.

So yes, to combant drug runners in Mexico there has been an effort by the Mexican authorities to track down explosives using dowsing rods, similar to those that have been use in the middle ease to the detriment of human lives and the army’s budget.

But money aside, surely something designed to save lives by its very nature should be looked into carefully? A bomb detector should be shown conclusively to be able to do its job, and when confirmation bias is defining what works rather than definitive double blind studies, then it is clear that this initiative is being driven on ideology rather than science.

And when human lives are in danger, this just isn’t acceptable.

Pokémon and Dowsing

For all fans of pokémon, of which there are a surprising number considering how much growing up the original fan base has been doing since 1997, there is an application to the games that is always looked over and seen as but a convenience, from its beginnings as the itemfinder, to its current incarnation as the dowsing machine, this efficient and simple way of finding the game’s hidden items is not just based on simplicity and convenience, but on a real pseudoscience that some people genuinely believe in.

Now dowsing itself is the process in which people hold two ‘dowsing rods’ in their hands that respond to tiny unconscious movements called the idio-motor effect, something which can easily convince people that they are indeed finding what they need through magical means due to the nature of the effect.

Much of the time the rods will follow what you think they should due to their movement’s origin in your brain, in fact, if you hold them loosely, they are sometimes hard to even keep still.

The point of the rods is that they will point in a direction, or sometimes cross in conjunction with whichever objective the user is told they can be used for, perhaps the most outrageous of which was the mass production of dowsing rods for western armed forces to detect bombs, truly a horrific exploitation of human life and gullibility for profit.

When requested the rods were taken apart and the only things inside were those tags you get on the sides of CDs in shops to stop people from stealing them. That’s not going to save people’s lives, if anything it’s going to delay the response and put more people in danger. If you’re sceptical of this, I have the news story at the bottom of the page.

Thankfully however, dowsing machines in pokémon exist and therefore aren’t the nonsensical money-grabber they are in the real world.

A Lesson In The Placebo Effect

“…prescribing placebos… usually relies on some degree of patient deception” and “prescribing pure placebos is bad medicine. Their effect is unreliable and unpredictable and cannot form the sole basis of any treatment on the NHS.”

Yes, it’s time for a lesson in the placebo effect, an umbrella term encompassing various effects that cause patients to reinterpret their illness or symptoms.

This generic term is usually viewed under the guise of a Pavlov’s dogs level conditioning process, wherein instead of dogs salivating at the ringing of a bell associated with food, patients are conditioned by a doctor’s positive attitude and the knowledge that pills are given to improve health when we’re ill, causing a psychological belief that we are indeed feeling better.

There is also a short burst of endorphins associated with this kind of conditioning, these painkillers will cause euphoria and also do what they say on the tin, but only for a very short while. Large pills and coloured pills also potentially work better than small or white pills.

The placebo effect is present in all treatments in some form, and its effects of stress and anxiety relief when working medicine is taken may actually help the fight against illness, however, since this effect is already present when medication is taken, nothing needs to be added to create this aid.

The positive sides of placebo are all well and good, but the same mechanisms that cause the upsides can create the opposite effects, such as with the Nocebo effect.

This occurs when a patient believes they will get negative side effects from an ineffective treatment, leading them to perceive negative effects, however, the implications of this in real life are rare, as bogus therapies generally would not actively seek to give the bad sides of their treatments as with conventional medicine.

The positive outlook of this effect however, does not lessen the spread of disease, and the belief that there is something working to stop an illness may prevent the patient’s ability to recognise symptoms, leading to late diagnoses and a possible increase in the overall harm an illness can cause.

Lesson over.