Did you know that you can pick up a homemade EEG kit and the open source software to run it for under fifty quid? I have been irrationally excited by this all week.

Admittedly it does ship from somewhere in Bulgaria as a bare PCB board and comes with documentation explaining that attaching it to humans or animals ‘may result in electric shock or seizure’ – you probably wouldn’t want to mention that to your initial test subjects.

The neuroscientists in Web Publishing have explained to me that EEG can’t actually read your mind as such since the electrical signal it detects isn’t localized. It’s only useful as a general measure of brain activity.

Still, I reckon it’s worth thinking about (or something?). Forget Singstar – at your next house party why not invite some rhesus macaques and hold a monkey vs human mental ping pong tournament? Totally doable with EEG.

We could put the personal touch back into email messages. As you write the EEG records your emotional state and then retroactively formats the message appropriately – so angry sentences are larger and in red, distracted, off the cuff missives are in a scribbly font, calm and collected messages are a cool blue.

From a work perspective you could harness the collective intelligence of entire departments without them actually having to do anything – except wear a silly hat with cables coming out of it that occasionally results in shocks or seizures, obviously. I suggest we hook up all of Nature’s editorial staff and record their brain activity while they are browsing scientific papers, then use the data to automate the ‘Editor’s Picks’ sections of journals, or perhaps create a sort of upmarket scientific Digg…?

Best news story ever?

Colonel John Blashford-Snell, 71 year old professional explorer, has found a living example of a rare breed of two nosed dogs while in Bolivia looking for a giant meteorite. Xingu, the dog in question, is ‘small but aggessive’ with a great sense of smell (naturally). His best friend in the village where he lives is a wild pig called Gregory (again, naturally).

Blashford-Snell, presumably wearing his patent, mosquito repelling refrigerated Explorer Hat, carried ‘a church organ from Dorset’ up the Andes as a gift to the locals to help him find where the meteorite landed.

The Colonel is no stranger to wild and wonderful beasties. He’s honourary life president of the Centre for Fortean Zoology. Two nosed dogs are nothing to him.

I don’t know if any of this is true and frankly I don’t care.

There was a big advert for L’Oréal’s ethnically diverse Women in Science awards scheme (cool) on the back page of the Guardian this weekend. Presumably it was placed there deliberately to counter this story, which was inside (not so cool).

As part of the Women in Science thing L’Oréal and UNESCO run an online forum called Agora. A lot of the content there is from researchers in developing countries. It’s interesting to get an international perspective on the problem of how to get more women into science.

Apparently 55% of L’Oréal’s research staff are women. At first I didn’t think that this was particularly noteworthy. Scientists in all of the labs I knew back in the day (not many, I didn’t get out of the basement much) were predominantly female. Turns out that’s because clinical research – the area in which I worked – is the exception and every other field of scientific endeavour has a startling gender imbalance.

How systemic is the problem? Which is a bigger deal, old boy networks or not being able to balance research lab timetables and outdated working practices with raising a family?

For the record NPG is, again, predominantly female, even within Web Publishing.

On a less serious, more manly note – Gillette, the best Spectral Subtraction Using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy a Man can Get. You’ll have to imagine that last bit sung to the jingle. Who knew that the particle accelerator thing they have in the Fusion advert was actually real? Yes, the (potentially underground) Gillette Research Institute really is owned by Proctor & Gamble and they really do research there.

According to the Telegraph scientists have worked out how to delete your unwanted memories while leaving others intact.

Shockingly it turns out that the Telegraph is exaggerating slightly (just like the Guardian last week), but it’s a really interesting area.

What the research in question actually shows is that giving propranolol – a betablocker aka Inderal – to people who have recently suffered or ‘reactivated the memory of’ a traumatic event reduces their physiologic response the next time they remember the event in question, implying that it has become less of a painful experience.

Preliminary work in humans and rats has been happening for years but I think this is the first trial with actual trauma sufferers (this isn’t my area of expertise, feel free to correct in the comments).

The idea of dampening or removing painful memories raises many interesting questions, some of which were tackled by The President’s Council on Bioethics in a meeting in 2003. They’re quite critical of memory altering drugs, mostly because of the huge potential for misuse.

All of us can think of traumatic events in our lives that were horrible at the time but made us who we are. I’m not sure we’d want to wipe those memories out. Rebecca Dresser, PCoB

Perhaps easier to agree with when you haven’t been a victim of horrific assault or abuse, but Dresser’s point is worth thinking about. Are your raw, emotional memories – however traumatic – valuable because they make you who you are now?

In a way we’ve already made this decision as a society. Inderal is already taken (sometimes prescribed, sometimes not) for stage fright and social anxiety . Does being frightened of performing a clarient solo or attending a job interview make you ‘who you are’? Do you just need to pull your socks up, hit all the bum notes and accept that it in the long run it’ll make you a better person? Apparently it doesn’t, necessarily, and you don’t. How then can we begrudge accident victims or veterans use of the same drug?

This week the ESA announced that it is seeking candidates for a simulated mission to Mars which will investigate the human factors (going insane, becoming suicidally depressed, firing people out of airlocks; that sort of thing, see Sunshine for more) that might affect any future exploration attempts.

This involves being locked up in a special facility outside of Moscow for 520 days and generally pretending that you’re on the real mission – you’ll eat only astronaut food, perform whatever role has been assigned to you… apparently there’ll even be an exploration phase on a mocked up Martian surface.

At first I wondered how many people could possibly want to give up so much of their lives to be locked up in an isolated, closely monitored environment with a bunch of strangers picked on the basis of how ‘interesting’ they are, psychologically speaking. Then… yeah, you see where I’m going with this.

I checked out the application form (luckily physical fitness isn’t a dealbreaker) and was a bit disappointed – many years ago I filled out an application to work at KFC (it was, er, right after the dotcom bust) and the questions were pretty much exactly the same ones as the ESA are asking. Maybe there’s a secret space code hidden in the Word document – take the first letter of each question, it spells out a phone number, say the codeword and you’re in….

Snarky comments aside it’s a worthy experiment, of course, something that has to be done sooner or later. I’m interested to see who gets picked and why they do it – as a selfless act for the good of science or for personal reasons? How many more of the latter than the former are there?

Have you ever risked your physical wellbeing for the good of science?

Near mental breakdowns because you had to work sixty hour weeks and go in on Sundays to check on cell cultures don’t count – everybody does that nowadays. If you can’t hack it I suggest that you take up computational biology instead, then you can check on experiments from home, smoking a pipe while in your underwear.

Anyway: risking wellbeing. I can’t decide if it’s admirable or stupid. Barry Marshall got a Nobel for ingesting H. pylori. Isaac Newton famously poked himself in the eye with a needle to investigate colour perception. Both actions were admirable if slightly unsettling.

But what about what Brady Barr has been doing?

He’s a Texan whose research involves catching wild crocodiles. He also looks suspiciously like the late Steve Irwin and is followed everywhere by a film crew from National Geographic.

You can probably guess the rest of the press release. Get closer to the crocs, less stressful for them than being ‘wrestled and roped’ on cable TV, yadda yadda.

Publicity stunt or brilliant out-of-the-box thinking?

I just finished reading a short story by Greg Egan – ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ – in which a young scientist gets caught up in a religious cult whose figurehead is the eponymous Eve, the common materal ancestor of everybody on the planet.

In Egan’s story science gets hijacked for marketing purposes and things end badly for all concerned.

Anyway, three years after Greg Egan’s story got published Bryan Sykes wrote The Seven Daughters of Eve. You may have heard of it:

The title of the book comes from one of the principal achievements of mitochondrial genetics, which is the classification of all modern humans into mitochondrial haplogroups. Each haplogroup is defined by set of characteristic mutations on the mitochondrial genome, and can be traced along a person’s maternal line to a specific prehistoric woman. Sykes refers to these women as “clan mothers”, though these women did not all live concurrently, and indeed some “clan mothers” are descended from others (although not maternally). All these women in turn shared a common maternal ancestor, the so-called Mitochondrial Eve.

The last third of the book is spent on a series of fictional narratives, written by Sykes, describing his creatives guesses about the lives of each of these seven “clan mothers”. This latter half generally met with mixed reviews in comparison with the first part.
(from Wikipedia)

Sykes owns Oxford Ancestors, who in return for £180 will test your DNA and tell you who your clan mother is.

The seven clan mothers (Xena, Starbucks, Zelda, Paris, Tara, Katrine and Lindsay Lohan) have now been painted by Danish artist Ulla Plougmand-Turner. Not with just paint, though! The relevant ancient DNA was also applied by brush to each canvas.

I took special care to use different brushes for the DNA of the seven individual women in order not to disturb and mix their ‘genetic fingerprints’ during this process.

[..]

My interpretation of the women is symbolical and an embodiment of beauty. My Tara is not just the original clan mother from 17,000 years ago. She is ALL the Taras that have ever lived, those alive now and those who have carried her DNA through the generations to the present day.
(from Ulla-art.com)

I have to say that I’m skeptical. I mean, Sykes is obviously a smart guy and Ulla is a good artist – but this is stupid, right? I don’t mean the painting with DNA thing, either, I mean the whole underlying concept. There weren’t really seven clan mothers who each represented some aspect of modern humanity. If my clan mother was Tara then that doesn’t mean I have any of her characteristics. I’m not linked to her spiritually in any way, at least not any more than I am to anybody else on earth.

I appreciate that the stories made Syke’s book a bit more interesting but perpetuating myths to sell more overpriced DNA kits just seems wrong.

A few days ago Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle reviewed a paper about treating fruit with natural volatile compounds to make it last longer. She included a figure and chart from the paper (the source was cited).

An editorial assistant at the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture – where the paper was published – threatened her with legal action unless she removed the images immediately. You can see how the blogosphere reacted here.

Shelley’s post pointed out that much of the widespread MSM coverage that the paper received had overstated the results. She wasn’t toeing the line. Somebody at the journal threatened to sue her. To some this means that there’s an evil conspiracy at work:

But her article doesn’t fit the spin that the authors/publishers wanted to put on it. So they resorted to legal threats to try to shut her down – Good Math, Bad Math

This was nothing more than intentional intimidation by a large, wealthy corporation against a lone blogger who’s a graduate student and thus unlikely to have the resources to fight back – Orac Knows

I am appalled at the heavyhanded tactics Wiley has decided to use against fellow ScienceBlogger Shelley at Retrospectacle [..] what makes it particularly heinous is the fact that Wiley is in the business of spreading scientific knowledge. – Afarensis

If there’s one lesson to be learned from this debacle (which has aroused the ire of scientists around the world), it’s this: don’t submit your papers to the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, because they will harass and intimidate people who try to do public scholarship with your work – Boing Boing

Whatever their motives, this is a thuggish, cowardly act. They’re supposed to be helping scientists disseminate their findings. They should have been happy about the small bit of publicity Shelley sent their way. – EvolutionBlog

Wiley come into it because they publish journals for SCI, who produce JSFA.

While I agree that the journal is in the wrong I think these comments are all a bit harsh. If it was a matter of policy at SCI or Wiley to crack down on mouthy bloggers then sure, a blog pile-on like this is appropriate.

The fact is, though, the whole thing is most probably down to an editorial assistant in London doing her job a bit too eagerly. Maybe it was six thirty, she’s had a tough day, figures that it’s better to err on the side of caution and send Shelly the stock ‘stop infringing our copyright’ email.

Her name and email address are out there now. She’s inevitably going to get reams of hate mail from freedom of information loving BoingBoingers who assume that there’s an evil corporate conspiracy at work. Imagine looking for a new job when anybody who searches for your name in Google sees pages calling you thuggish and cowardly.

This doesn’t seem like a fair and reasoned response. What happened to writing letters to the editor? Why the near instant transformation into braying mob?

Shame on the journal for sending bloggers threating letters, but shame on the science blogosphere for making it personal, too.

Update: as Sarah mentioned below the issue has now been resolved

There are two topics guaranteed to turn me off a science blog: intelligent design and homeopathy.

Ostensibly this is because I don’t think there’s much interesting debate to be had about either of those subjects. ID is bunk and homeopathic treatments (as opposed to alternative medicine treatments in general) are no better than placebos. I think that most people who have thought about it scientifically are already agreed on those points so what’s left to talk about in a science blog entry? Not much.

(I suspect that the real reason I dislike posts discussing ID or homeopathy might be that the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence to the contrary makes me feel sorry for them. I can’t help it, I’m a sucker for the underdog. The same thing happens if I’m sat in the pub and somebody brings up George Bush (he’s an idiot, should be shot, needs hanging etc.). I start thinking: poor George Bush! Surely he can’t be that bad. Perhaps people hate him now just because it’s fashionable to do so? If you cut him, does he not bleed?)

Brief educational interlude… check out the origins of the word underdog:

The origin of the word “underdog” comes from naval shipbuilding when the planks of wood were sawn for their construction. The logs of wood were placed over a pit on planks of wood called “dogs” (a bit like fire dogs). The senior sawsman stood on top of the plank and he was the overdog. The junior had to go into the pit and saw and of course he got covered in saw dust. He was the “underdog”.

it’s from wikipedia so it must be true .

Anyway, my point is that I don’t like blog posts about homeopathy so it takes a lot to make me write one. Something like this article from last week’s Observer, in fact. I am outraged on many levels and no longer feel sorry for the homeopathic underdog.

”Britain’s leading homeopathic hospital, supported by the Queen and the Prince of Wales, is facing crisis because the medical establishment is turning against the remedies used by tens of thousands of people every year.”

[...]

”The Queen, an advocate of homeopathy, alongside Catherine Zeta Jones and Sir Paul McCartney, always has 60 vials of alternative remedies in a leather carrier when she travels abroad in case she falls ill.”

Firstly: what?! Prince Charles, sure. He talks to plants and makes organic biscuits – but the Queen? I thought that she was better than that. There was me thinking that we had an enlightened, rational monarchy.

Secondly: I think that the article is far too lenient – bloody hippies. Michael Hanlon at the Daily Mail would have written the story up right. I wish they’d stop doing the random word bolding, too.

The thing that really annoyed me, though, was the revelation that some PCTs were funding treatments at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital to begin with. When I first moved to London I encountered the NHS postcode lottery: I had to stop taking a drug for my bad back because my PCT didn’t have the funds to pay for it (I got a letter explaining that they needed the money for cancer treatments instead – how do you argue with that? Maybe that’s their cunning strategy).

Was this because they were contributing to the homeopathic hospital’s £5.5m pound budget?

The Observer calls £5.5m a ‘a tiny sum by NHS standards’ but it would have done me and several thousand other patients nicely, thanks. Instead my quality of life suffered so that some homeopath could hand out 9,000 officially sanctioned glasses of water to Prince Charles and his ilk.

Bah. Make them go private.

I’m pretty busy this week and have little time to spend writing coherent blog posts. Here are some interesting sciencey links. Kindly construct your own humorous commentary using the material provided. Thanks.

• London Zombie Walk
• via Mind Hacks : the ethnobiology of Haitian zombies

drooling, braindead monsters in search of fresh meat, average Friday out in London, your research is boring in comparison to ethnobiology of zombies

• Miracle fruit makes sour foods taste sweet
• Fruit bats get hangovers, prefer fruit to fry-ups

”It was found that ethanol levels measured in fruit bat breath…”, “after consuming Synsepalum dulcificum, rhubarb tastes like a sugar stick and strawberries taste like candy”, your research is boring in comparison to breathalyzing fruit bats and checking to see if pints of bitter suddenly taste like a milkshake

• Unrealistic optimism is to blame for your credit card debt
• Panda porn encourages pandas to breed

”Before, he might have been clumsy and not known how to approach and react to a female panda. Now he will remember and imitate the video”, got your unrealistic optimism right there.

”Hi… I’m, um, here to, ah, fix your fridge?”

.. also, your research is boring in comparison to filming panda porn