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UK may force charities to prove complementary therapies work

By New Scientist

UK charities that provide complementary and alternative medicines fear losing their charitable status over possible measures that will raise the bar for proving their therapies work.

A final decision on what standard of evidence will be needed to gain charitable medical status in future will be issued in three or four months’ time by the government’s Charity Commission for England and Wales, which closes a public consultation on the matter this week.

Campaign groups such as the Good Thinking Society, which backs robust scientific evidence in healthcare, prompted the commission to hold the consultation. These groups hope the commission will apply measures to force providers of complementary medicine to offer stronger evidence of benefits.

“We think it’s great the charity commission is looking at this issue,” says Tracey Brown, director of the campaigning group Sense about Science. “One reason quackery succeeds is because it wears so much of the garb of medicine and of legitimate medical charities. So we’re very interested in a peer-review system using existing medical standards bodies such as the royal colleges to help the commission to evaluate.”

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Beads made from meteorite reveal prehistoric culture’s reach

By Traci Watson

Blackened and irregular, the prehistoric beads found in a centuries-old Illinois grave don’t look like anything special. But the latest analysis1 shows that they were fashioned from an exotic material: the shards of a meteorite that fell to Earth more than 700 kilometres from where the beads were found.

The link between the Anoka meteorite, which landed in central Minnesota, and the Illinois beads confirms that “2,000 years ago, goods and ideas were moved hundreds of miles across eastern North America”, says Timothy McCoy, co-author of the analysis and curator-in-charge of meteorites at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

The beads were made by people of the Hopewell culture, which flourished in the US Midwest from 100 bc to 400 ad — spreading from its epicentre in Ohio to as far as Mississippi. The culture is known for sprawling ceremonial earthworks and for objects made of non-local materials such as mica. The iron beads were discovered in 1945 in a Hopewell grave near Havana, Illinois, alongside more than 1,000 shell and pearl beads. Together, they indicate that the grave’s occupant was of high rank, says archaeologist Bret Ruby of the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Chillicothe, Ohio, who was not involved with the analysis. “You’ve got to open a lot of clams to find 1,000 pearl beads.”

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Students Want Apology from Missouri Administrator Who Preached Christianity at Graduation

By Hemant Mehta

A Missouri public school administrator deciding to turn a graduation ceremony into a church service over the weekend. Willard High School’s Superintendent Kent Medlin should have talked about the students’ future; instead, he gave a sermon.

“He asked students to stand up and pray as a Christian, quoting the Bible numerous times throughout. Many students felt extremely ostracized by the situation, when choosing not to pray,” said Ashlynn Bradley, a senior. “Dr. Medlin, the superintendent, even invited students to his office for coffee to discuss ‘the Lord.’ This was incredibly inappropriate.”

It’s not that he tried to exclude them. It’s that he assumed everyone would be just fine with him talking about Christianity at a time when they should’ve been celebrating their high school careers and looking to the future.

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Ransomware attack hits 200,000 computers across the globe

By Matt Reynolds

Countries around the world are still dealing with an ongoing ransomware attack that hit institutions and businesses worldwide, including hospitals in the UK, the Russian interior ministry and universities in China.

The outbreak started on Friday and spread quickly across the world, infecting around 200,000 computers in 150 countries. In the UK, the malware invaded at least 60 NHS trusts, preventing doctors from accessing patient records and forcing them to cancel non-urgent procedures. Europe and Russia were hit particularly hard, before its advance was slowed when a security researcher in the UK stumbled on a web domain hidden in the malware’s code. When he registered the domain it triggered a “kill switch” that prevented many instances of the virus from spreading.

Dubbed WannaCry, the malicious software was a form of ransomware. The first computers were infected by people unwittingly clicking links in phishing emails. But from each patient zero the software then spread through computer networks by itself. Once installed on a machine, the malware encrypted all of the files it could find, locking them away from users. The first most people knew of the infection was a pop-up screen informing them that the contents of their computer would be deleted after seven days unless they paid a bitcoin ransom equivalent to $300.

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March for Science responses split down party lines, says new Pew survey

By Lindzi Wessel

News flash: Citizens of the United States are divided over politics. And that divisive spirit was not shaken by the tens of thousands of people who participated in last month’s March for Science, according to a new Pew research poll. The survey—of about 1000 U.S. adults several weeks after the march—found that 48% supported its goals, 26% opposed them, and 26% “don’t know” their position.

Overall, responses were split down major party lines. Sixty-eight percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents supported the goals of the march, compared to just 25% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. And though 61% of Democrats expect the marches to lead to greater public support for science, 60% of Republicans expect they’ll make no difference.

When it came to hurting public support for science, 7% of all respondents agreed the march was damaging, compared to 44% who said it would help public support and 44% who said it would make no difference. Among Americans between ages 18 and 29, the majority said the march would help raise support for government funding of science and encourage scientists to be more active in civic affairs.

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Ebola vaccine could get first real-world test in emerging outbreak

By Amy Maxmen

An outbreak of the Ebola virus has emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the World Health Organization (WHO) said on 12 May. Congolese authorities have reported nine suspected cases of Ebola infection in the past three weeks; the WHO has confirmed one, and tests are pending on others. Now health officials are considering whether to deploy an experimental Ebola vaccine against the outbreak, for the first time since the WHO gave it preliminary approval in April.

The aid group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders) is discussing a potential vaccination campaign with the Congolese government, an MSF spokesperson says. That would require the approval of the WHO, which has not decided whether to call on the approved experimental vaccine or others in development, says WHO spokesperson Tarik Jašarević. Still, he says, “we are taking this [outbreak] seriously because Ebola is always serious”. The most recent outbreak of the virus, in West Africa from 2014 to 2016, killed 11,325 people; there have been several known outbreaks in the DRC, but none has been as severe as the West African one.

There are now 12 candidate Ebola vaccines in development. None is yet approved for sale, in part because the candidates were not ready for testing until the West African Ebola crisis was on the wane. But on 27 April, the WHO’s advisory group on immunization recommended that an experimental vaccine called rVSV-SEBOV be deployed promptly should an Ebola outbreak arise.

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Humans Have a Poor Sense of Smell? It’s Just a Myth

By Joanna Klein

By shoving her nose against a fire hydrant, your terrier may be able to decipher which pit bull in the neighborhood marked it before her. But that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s a superior sniffer.

Still, it’s conventional wisdom that humans’ sense of smell is worse than that of other animals — dogs, mice, moles and even sharks.

This belief isn’t based on empirical evidence, but on a 19th-century hypothesis about free will that has more in common with phrenology than with our modern understanding of how brains work. In a review published Thursday in Science, John P. McGann, a neuroscientist who studies olfaction at Rutgers University, reveals how we ended up with this myth. The truth is, humans are actually pretty good at smelling our world.

“We’re discovering, to our delight, that the human smell system is much better than we were led to believe,” he said. It may be different than other mammals’ “but actually in ways that suggest that it could be more powerful than mice and rats and dogs.”

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Richard Dawkins: ‘When I see cattle lorries, I think of the railway wagons to Auschwitz’

This portion of the article has been posted here with permission.

Dawkins has a new book out called Science in the Soul, a collection of writing and speeches. While ostensibly an anthology, it would be wrong to say this does not include new work. On some pages, the footnotes he has added on re-reading his old writings take up more space than the original material. . . .

There is a geniality to Dawkins that does not come through sometimes on the page. In 2013 he debated with Lord Williams of Oystermouth, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, at the Cambridge Union, and it was an extremely civil affair. The two get on very well. “He’s a delightful man. So nice, it’s almost impossible to argue with him. It was never actually clear to me why he disagreed with me.”

Yet when the quotes appeared in the paper they felt anything but genial. Talking of the theology of crucifixion, the central, holiest, moment of Christianity, he asked why “the architect of the universe, the divine mathematician, deviser of the laws of physics, of quantum mechanics, of the carefully tuned physical constants, this paragon of superhuman intellect, was unable to think of a better way to forgive the sins of one species of African ape than to have himself tortured and killed as a blood sacrifice?”

Is he worried that his stridency puts people off? “If you are concise in what you say it can sound aggressive. I don’t think I am personally hostile most of the time. Part of it is that people identify so closely with their religion, they take it as a personal attack. They take offence in the same way as if I said, ‘You have an ugly face’.”

As if to prove he is not all about argument, he turns to a favourite passage in the book, a pastiche of P G Wodehouse, and gives an impromptu reading. Its premise is that Bertie Wooster has come across a bendy bus and is quizzing Jeeves. “‘I say, what about these buses?’ ‘Sir?’ ’You know, the buses. The what-is-this-that-roareth-thus brigade? The conveyances with the kink amidships’.”

It is really rather good. It is also, I discover, as he continues reading, an imagined response to a 2009 secularist advertising campaign in which buses displayed the message: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

And so, via Wodehouse, we are back to God. Was there not a moment, even if he viewed it as weakness, when, after his stroke, he thought it might be nice to have faith in a higher power? Did it cause him to re-evaluate his views? “No, no, no. It’s caused me to take blood pressure medicines.”

Richard Dawkins appears at the Cheltenham Science Festival on Sunday, June 11

cheltenhamfestivals.com/science

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Polar bears shift from seals to bird eggs as Arctic ice melts

By Thom Hoffman

Polar bears are ditching seafood in favour of scrambled eggs, as the heat rises in the Arctic melting the sea ice. A changing coastline has made it harder for the predators to catch the seals they favour and is pushing them towards poaching goose eggs.

This is according to a team led by Charmain Hamilton of the Norwegian Polar Institute that monitored the movements of local polar bears and seals before and after a sudden decline in sea ice in 2006, which altered coastal areas in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

The researchers attached tracking devices to 60 ringed seals and 67 polar bears overall, which allowed them to compare their movements before and after the ice collapse.

Before the melt, when they were hunting on stable sea ice, the polar bears had a big advantage over their favoured prey. “Both sexes of all age classes successfully hunt seals by stalking or ‘still hunting’,” says Hamilton.

However, on a melting coastline punctuated by broken-up icebergs, the odds become stacked in the seal’s favour.

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Hear the roar of the lionfish recorded for the first time

By Sandrine Ceurstemont

Hear them roar. Lionfish have been recorded making sounds for the first time.

Decoding these sounds could create an insight into secret lives of this voracious invasive species – and help us keep tabs on it spread.

Many fish produce sounds to communicate with each other as low-pitched noises travel far underwater. “It’s a dominant mode of communication,” says Alex Bogdanoff at North Carolina State University.

Bogdanoff and his team decided to investigate the lionfish’s ability to produce sound after hearing reports from several divers that they make noises. This invasive species has been spreading through the Caribbean and east coast of the US. They often devour several organisms at a time, which is drastically reducing some native fish populations and altering ecosystems.

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