Is Pluto a Planet? Vote Now!

Pluto was discovered in February 1930, making this month its 80th anniversary. Unfortunately, Pluto is not in such a festive mood as its status was downgraded in 2006 from a fully blown planet to a mere dwarf planet. This is a bit like telling one of your kids that sadly they were adopted and therefore have been left out of the family will. However, the rumblings over a solid definition of a planet have continued to this day, and some people want Pluto back into our family of planets - at which point we could upgrade all the other dwarf planets to full status.

So what defines a planet anyway? Well, I'm going to write a longer article on this very soon, but the thing that got Pluto downgraded is that its orbit not only overlaps with Neptune but is also in a different plane to the other eight major planets. Strangely, NASA still has Pluto in its own planet category and hasn't placed it alongside the other dwarf planets, or planetoids.

Anyway, do you think Pluto should be a planet? You can vote on it during February.

 

The above image (courtesy of NASA) shows the Earth and Moon, with Pluto and one of its moons (Charon) at the bottom, plus Eris and Ceres (both dwarf planets, with Eris being slightly larger than Pluto). The image is to scale. Thus, if Pluto is a planet then so is Eris. Ceres could be a planet but it hasn't cleared its orbit of all the other asteroids. For the moment, all 3 are dwarf planets.

How Your Computer Can Help Map Our Galaxy: Join Milky Way at Home

Since its launch in 2006, over 45,000 people have given their spare personal computing capacity to help map the details of our Milky Way. The sheer volume of data coming from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey meant that some astronomers were going to be waiting light years to process their bit of the cosmos. So the smarts at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute decided to use the crowd computing power of BOINC to speed up the process.

The project, MilkyWay@Home, uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, which is widely known for the SETI@home project used to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. Today, MilkyWay@Home has outgrown even this famous project, in terms of speed, making it the fastest computing project on the BOINC platform and perhaps the second fastest public distributed computing program ever in operation (just behind Folding@home).

With some 17,000 active members, Milkyway@Home is generating highly accurate three dimensional models of the Sagittarius stream, which provides knowledge about how the Milky Way galaxy was formed and how tidal tails are created when galaxies merge.

You too can join MilkyWay@Home.

I See Rude People - The Battle Against Metropolitan Anger

"Buy and read Amy Alkon’s new book "I See Rude People: One Woman’s Battle to Beat Some Manners into Impolite Society". It will be the funniest book you read this decade. " So says Satoshi Kanazawa, evolutionary psychologist at the LSE.

Actually, what caught my attention was the description in the review of why so many people are rude and ignorant in our sprawling metropolises. The idea from evolutionary psychology is that we once lived in small communities in which everyone was somehow related to everyone else. Avoiding perpetual family feuds leads to a kind of social lubricant to keep the community together. In contrast, people from other communities could be raided and abused as needed. Nowadays, few of us live in such incestuous villages but rather we're surrounded by millions of anonymous people who all count as "others". They are not family, so they can be abused with impunity. I can see this in action here in Thailand where any show of emotion is frowned upon and being a fool is tolerated within the villages, but come to Bangkok and pushing people out of the way is the norm if you want to get anything done before sundown.

Blondes Have More Balls

The Sunday Times recently published an article with the headline “Blonde women born to be warrior princesses.” The article reported that “Researchers claim that blondes are more likely to display a “warlike” streak because they attract more attention than other women and are used to getting their own way – the so-called “princess effect.”” The Sunday Times article quotes the evolutionary psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Aaron Sell. Sadly, none of it is true, or at least not according to Sell.

The Scientific Fundamentalist blog written by Satoshi Kanazawa has a field day slamming British newspapers for routinely publishing fiction. Yes, headlines are designed to grab your attention - they may even lure you with a false promise - but the content should still have some link to real news. If journalists can't get a scientist to utter a few sentences on the phone that they can then distort or publish out of context they will just resort to making up stories. The right to free speech seems to be the right to distort reality - anything to sell papers. These are the same people crying over a loss of revenue to the new online media. Your support for them rather depends on whether you want news or fiction.

I have a little experience of British newspapers and my advice to anybody who is on the receiving end of journalistic charm and flattery is to write down a statement and email it to them. Spoken words are ephemeral and you will have a hard time proving that you didn't say something. Write your own press release and if you're still misquoted you'll have a stronger case for the Press Complaints Commission to adjudicate on. As Kanazawa says "[...] it is their job as British journalists to make things up. They don’t care if it’s true or not." Strong stuff... now where's that article about blondes?

Global Warming Scientist Admits No Data For Glacier Alarm

The reputation of the IPCC is melting away faster than a Himalayan glacier. The repercussions rumble on after the discovery that the claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 was pure speculation backed by zero science.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: "It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. [...] It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in."

In other words, this was a political statement masquerading as science. Dr Lal then tries to spread the blame thinly by saying that none of the 500 external reviewers picked up on this bogus claim at the time. This too, appears to be very far from the truth.

Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue. Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter.

Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures. The mud-slinging has started and everyone is running for cover.

The UN report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) won a Nobel Prize - but it wasn't for Literature. Good to see that science has not yet been totally destroyed and become a mere tool to fool the world. The bad news is that nobody has been sacked, and nobody will be as at heart they are political not scientific appointments.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a new body founded by former British Chancellor Nigel Lawson is also entering the fray. Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, said the affair suggested the IPCC review process was ‘skewed by a bias towards alarmist assessments’. More on that coming soon.

Female Teachers Can Transfer Fear of Mathematics to Their Female Students

Female elementary school teachers can pass on their anxiety and stereotypes about mathematics to female students, and girls who adopt this outlook perform worse at mathematics, research at the University of Chicago shows. In contrast, boys seem to be immune from their female teacher's phobia.

The findings come from a paper, “Female Teachers’ Math Anxiety Affects Girls’ Math Achievement,” published in the 25 January 2010 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was conducted in the USA where more than 90% of primary school teachers are women, and I suspect many countries have the same tradition that early years learning is left largely in the hands of women. That is not in itself a problem but it becomes one when so many bring their fears of mathematics and science into the classroom. After all, we're talking here about basic arithmetic and geometry, not calculus courses.

"The authors suggest that elementary teacher preparation programs could be strengthened by requiring more mathematics preparation for teachers and by addressing their issues of math attitudes and anxiety." My own solution would be slightly different. I think a modern school system should finally do away with the view that primary teachers are like nannies with a whiteboard. The idea that one teacher can effectively teach everything merely because the level is low and the children young is completely false. As this study shows, individual teachers have their preferences and few primary teachers do an adequate job of teaching mathematics and the sciences. Those that are good at teaching the sciences should become 'primary science teachers'. Primary schools will often have specialist teachers in subjects such as music, art and sport. I think the solution is to split primary teaching into the sciences and the humanities. Then teachers will convey their enthusiasm and not inflict their prejudices onto their students.

To see what happens when girls are not fed false stereotypes, at the last college in the UK I taught the advanced mathematics and physics classes had an almost 50-50 split between male and female students. Brains are not governed by gender.

How to Help Your Children Avoid Social Rejection

A new study by neurobehavioural researchers at Rush University Medical Center has found three key factors in a child's behaviour that can lead to social rejection. The results have recently been published in the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology.

“Children’s ability to develop positive peer relationships is critical to their well-being,” said Dr. Clark McKown, the study's principal investigator. “Compared to children who are accepted by their peers, socially rejected children are at substantially elevated risk for later adjustment troubles.”

The three factors are:

The inability to pick up on non-verbal or social cues;

The inability to attach meaning to such cues, even if the cues are picked up; and

The inability to reason about social problems and behave accordingly.

Sadly, the press release does not mention the ages of the children in the study. The above factors do seem a lot to expect from, say, a 5 year-old but certainly not from a teenager. However, with some 13% of school age children diagnosed with social-emotional learning difficulties this is a serious problem. Or is it?

If one looks at a classic bell-shaped curve for IQ then it is perfectly natural that the bottom 15% are very different to the top 15% - this is just part of natural variability. If there was an easy way to measure a social-emotional index we may well find a similar variability. This is not to say that those with problems do not need some assistance, just that in a population with variable characteristics it is not so shocking that there are winners and losers, at least in terms of raw abilities rather than any social measure of success.

The researchers hope that such data will lead to fairly simple tests that can pinpoint children at risk and offer help before the problem becomes chronic. I also think that these are precisely the skills that should be nurtured in the home rather than expecting an often chaotic environment such as a school to teach them. Such findings should also help parents in being more sensitive to how their sons and daughters behave.

One other thing strikes me, though: the idea of peers. As adults, we do not see ourselves as part of one huge homogeneous human family. We have all split into various groups based on education, work, background, hobbies and so on. Hopefully, we see others in such groups as peers and our social behaviour largely conforms to that particular group. Some people may even feel uncomfortable stepping outside of their groups. This is not to condone a lack of social graces but to note that being comfortable within one's peer group does not always translate into feeling at ease outside it.

One can see this happening at school too, with groups and cliques forming, sometimes around special interests but also around social clubs - yes, even gangs. Should we expect a child to conform to a group of which they do not want to be members? Before labelling a child with some social-emotional problem I would look very closely as to whether the child is happy to be who they are, and that is the task of the loving parents.

How Drunk Do You Have To Be To Find Me Attractive?

Researchers at Manchester University have been getting drunk in the name of science. How does an alcoholic haze turn the plainest of people into stunning beauties? Although beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder, other factors are also important, such as whether the person is in focus or not, how much smoke envelopes the atmosphere and whether there is any lighting in the bar.

The research was commissioned by eyecare firm Bausch & Lomb PureVision, so they have little interest in selling alcohol or promoting sober driving. Indeed, the highly scientific-looking formula that accompanies the research has four 'visual' parameters and just one for alcoholic consumption. Perhaps in the spirit of the joke X-ray specs the company could also develop bullshit-detector goggles.

Using Pseudo-Scientific Surveys as Linkbait and Marketing

Pseudo-science is the linkbait of the future. In order to gain nationwide publicity for your brand, all you need is a survey, a 'scientist' and a 'formula'. The good people at Fuse Optimisation have compiled a list of their favourite experiments in social gullibility. Squirm at the inane formulas, from the perfect wiggle of the hips to how sexy someone looks when you're drunk. These wouldn't even qualify for the Ig Nobel Prize as they are merely puff pieces with a scientific cherry on top.

This has, of course, been going on for a long time - just take a close look at cosmetics adverts. Even real science is often held hostage by corporate interests as the bottom line over-rides the truth. So just sit back and enjoy these rather harmless ventures in the science of selling. Or not...

Ben Goldacre took a dim view of the "Jessica Alba has the perfect wiggle" research. He was initially asked to prostitute himself as the expert scientist for the study. Although he declined he kept a perverse interest in seeing who would swallow the bait. The story of how the PR company cobbled together the final story is a good example of how scientists should stay clear of lending their name to anything over which they do not have final editorial control. Salvaging one's shattered reputation can take more energy than the consultancy fee could ever cover.

Are Three Eyes Better Than Two?

What factors govern the intelligence of humans and other animals? One theory claims that it is not merely the size of the brain but also the number of inputs - the number of perceptions. Add an extra sensory organ linked to the brain and the brain will create new areas of sensory perception. Similarly, take away one of the senses and that part of the brain will shrivel in significance and possibly be assigned other tasks. This isn't the place to argue about IQ tests and, having taken a few, I think there are some good ones and some poor ones. I feel that intelligence is correlated to the ability to create connections, especially new connections. Memory may help in this but in itself is merely the ability to recall information rather than processing it. Anyway, what's all this got to do with eyes?

Paul Pietsch and Carl Schneider ran some interesting experiments to test the above theory using salamanders and their eyes. You can read Pietsch's own amusing description of the experiments at his website. The idea was to add a third eye to embryonic salamanders and link it to their brain so that it would (hopefully) become functional as the creatures grew. To test all the different scenarios they developed a number of 'hybrids'. The Triclops was the main subject, with two normal eyes plus a third one in its forehead - pretty much where humans have their 'third eye' just in front of the pineal gland. A Cyclops was also created with the third eye but without its two normal eyes, as was a one-eyed version with just one normal eye but without the third one. One normal subject was also used as the base level reactions as well as one totally blind so as to remove effects from light sensations that are non-visual such as heat.

The experiment itself involved using a light source and training the salamanders to avoid the light with small shocks applied then measuring how long this Pavlovian training took to be mastered. The ability to learn was thus taken as a sign of intelligence. Using the normal salamander as the control they translated their data into a numerical value using the IQ scale, thereby fixing the normal creature at 100. Pietsch and Schneider must have felt pretty smug with themselves; the Triclops, with the third eye, achieved an IQ of 117, whereas the one-eyed salamander came in at 80. On the surface it looked as if the theory linking intelligence to sensory inputs was validated. The removal and addition of one eye seemed to correlate strongly with a difference of about 20 points. However, the scientists had one huge shock to contend with - the Cyclops, the salamander with just one central eye, had achieved an IQ of 173!

The salamander with just one eye - and that eye not even being one of its normal ones - had come top of the class. It wasn't a question about whether three eyes were better than two; it seemed like one 'third eye' was the best of the lot! This needed some serious rethinking.

To cut to the chase, it looks as if the brain not only processes our senses but also mediates them. To live in reaction to raw data is to live in permanent over-stimulation. The difference here is between optimum perception and maximum - they are not necessarily the same. I think it would have been interesting if Pietsch and Schneider had continued their experiments to see if the Cyclops would grow to develop its own mental editor, thereby sacrificing its 'raw intelligence' for a more subtle, more adaptive - and yes, perhaps slower - mode of response.

For humans, this mediation of sensory inputs has both positive and negative consequences. The brain tries to filter out what it perceives as unimportant and yet by doing so may miss critical information. Sometimes we need to clear out this mass of feedback mechanisms and return to the raw source. That doesn't mean that we can live in a world bombarded by sensory inputs, but sometimes it is worth flushing out this mental cache so that we can see the world, and ourselves, in a more revealing light.

Sperm Travels Faster Towards Attractive Females

Recent research has added to a growing body of evidence that in promiscuous animals, including humans, the mechanism for successful reproduction is far more subtle than merely hoping for the best. The female of the specie may be picky about their sexual partner but the male may have the last say as the quality and quantity of sperm correlates strongly with how attractive the female mate is perceived to be.

This research was conducted on red junglefowl - an ancestor of the chicken - because female attractiveness is easy to measure and directly related to her fertility. Researchers found that the quantity and speed of the sperm produced by the male were strongly correlated to the attractiveness of the female. The mechanism that triggers this remains a mystery but the method by which the amount of sperm can be altered is known: males have two ejaculatory ducts that can fire independently so that attractive females get a shot from both barrels.

Is intriguing to speculate whether this mechanism is unleashed out of pure excitement or fear that the male is not going to get another chance!

Interview with Forbidden Science Creator: Do Clones Have More Fun?

Forbidden Science is a sexy, late-night series somewhat like a low budget mashup of Flash Gordon campiness and contemporary posthuman scifi. Julia, the clone of a dead woman, searches for her place in a world where you can inherit somebody's identity and memories, but not their property. A sex droid named Max is abused by his demanding owner. And Bethany, a new hire at mysterious clone and android development company 4Ever Innovations, is more than a little disturbed by some her company's secret projects. Meanwhile, chief geek Penny keeps trying to invent the ultimate sexbot (erm... what's the point when there are flesh-and-blood clones?)

This is an interview with Doug Brode, creator of Forbidden Science, currently showing on Cinemax.

Would You Clone A Baby?

The idea of human cloning never seems very far from the news. The reality of cloning a baby is already here, with only a little nudge needed to make the practice 'acceptable'.

Fertility expert Panayiotis Zavos, founder of the Zavos Organization in Lexington, Kentucky, said to The Independent that "the cloned child is coming... There is absolutely no way that it will not happen." You can even watch the video of Zavos creating the embryos before injecting them into the wombs of women wanting cloned babies.

Transferring cloned human embryos into a womb is currently illegal in many countries, such as the UK and USA, but not in many other countries. Italian Severino Antinori told Oggi magazine that there are already three living human clones, all aged nine years old and living in Eastern Europe. The world is thus split on whether human cloning should go ahead or not. However, why would anybody want to clone a human?

The media loves to spread false futures. A picture of a girl killed in a car crash with the headline "The little girl who could 'live' again" spread the myth that a human clone is a perfect copy of a lost child. the loss of a child is tragic, but that unique individual human being has gone for ever. The motivations for cloning can actually be quite bizarre. For example, there are enquiries from couples who are infertile to clone the person with the fertility problem so that the new copy can possibly be fertile and therefore have children naturally. This latter logic is twisted and ironic in the extreme. It is also a very long wait to be legally able to procreate with the clone.

Cloning a dead child is not going to bring that child back. Yes, they may be genetically identical but we cannot, as yet, duplicate a person's mind so that the clone is really the same person. As soon as an embryo is created its development is subject to environmental influences, from the chemicals ingested by the mother to the experiences of childhood and life itself. The clone of a child may look the same but to live with the attitude that it is 'my dead baby come back to life' is to live with a major delusion that could be psychologically harmful to both the parents and the child.

How Much Science Can You Take? The Sorry State of Science Journalism

Every time a science story hits the mainstream media there comes into life a parallel universe where science writers beat their breasts about the woeful state of science journalism.

It just isn't enough to bring the public into the normally incomprehensible world of science; it has to be done with extra sugar and whipped cream on top. What with the 'God particle', the 'God spot' and creationists one could be mistaken for thinking we were in a Medieval theocracy - not yet anyway!

Media corporations just care about eye-balls and advertising revenue - truth is an arcane concept best left to philosophers. Science journalists blame their bosses who desperately want readers, and they blame the public too for being scientifically illiterate and easily bored and confused. The public blames the media because they believe what they read and then feel insulted when it turns out that what they read was rubbish.

Science writers, as distinct from science journalists, try their best to unspin the spin. From what I've seen, the best science writing these days is on the internet in places such as ScienceBlogs.com. Science journalism has become as lazy and partisan as every other form of journalism.

So who's to blame for the spiced-up dumbed-down science news?

Genetically Engineered Puppies Glow In The Dark - You're Next

A team at Seoul National University located in South Korea has successfully created a new breed of beagle capable of fluorescing under ultraviolet light. There's even a video to brighten up your day. Why, you might ask? Some species, such as fireflies and plankton, can create light naturally but genetic engineers have been keen to develop luminescence in other animals. This transgenic canine, named Ruby Red, had a gene inserted into its DNA that creates a fluorescent protein when in contact with ultraviolet light. If placed in the dark with a UV source the puppy glows bright red.

So, apart from possibly creating a fad for luminescent tattoos, is there any real use for this? Do you really need to look for a stray dog armed with a UV ray? Scientists claim that if they could tag various cell types with different fluorescing genes then that could help locate things such as tumours and cancers. Sounds tenuous to me. The most obvious application is in tagging people. Maybe it won't be enough to have a radio frequency microchip implant but just for good measure you could have different classes of people emit a different colour. I'd say it would be impossible for a person to hack into their own genes. Your new fluorescent colour will run much deeper than your mere skin colour.

Draft National Institutes of Health Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research - First Comments

The National Institutes of Health has just released its draft guidelines on future stem cell research in the USA. It is also seeking public debate on these guidelines with a view to establishing firm guidelines for funding bodies giving grants to stem cell researchers.

Here is what seems to be the crucial conclusions of the current stem cell research draft guidelines:

"These draft Guidelines would allow funding for research using only those human embryonic stem cells that were derived from embryos created by in vitro fertilization (IVF) for reproductive purposes and were no longer needed for that purpose. Funding will continue to be allowed for human stem cell research using adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells. Specifically, these Guidelines describe the conditions and informed consent procedures that would have been required during the derivation of human embryonic stem cells for research using these cells to be funded by the NIH. NIH funding for research using human embryonic stem cells derived from other sources, including somatic cell nuclear transfer, parthenogenesis, and/or IVF embryos created for research purposes, is not allowed under these Guidelines."

On first reading, the NIH has tried to placate both the research community and the largely Christian right-wing anti embryonic stem cell research lobby. After all, the arguments are largely about embryonic stem cells but here we find that essentially the same embryonic stem cells from two different IVF sources are treated in two different ways. There seems no logic as to why spare embryos from an IVF clinic should be treated differently to an IVF embryo created specifically for research purposes. It also opens up a way around the proposed legislation by encouraging IVF so as to harvest the resulting embryos rather than primarily for fertility reasons. Shoddy piece of logic and, from what I've seen so far, both sides are up in arms.

Embryonic Stem Cell Research NIH Guidelines Released and Public Opinions Wanted

Stem cell researchers seemed happy when President Obama lifted Bush's ban on certain types of research. However, what Obama did was to instruct the National Institutes for Health to set up stem cell research guidelines. Those guidelines have now been published and there is only a 14-day period to solicit public responses. However, the guidelines are far more conservative than some had hoped, and opponents of the research are systematically flooding the comment process. You too can join in!

here you can find the open letter from the ESCR plus all other relevant links.

Stephen Wolfram on Wolfram Alpha Knowledge Search Engine

Wolfram Alpha will go public in May 2009. It has already been hyped as the first serious challenge to Google and traditional search engines. This may be true in the future but for now Wolfram has set his sights on making his computational knowledge engine do precisely what it claims to do - to turn the raw information on the web into real understandable knowledge.

Wolfram Alpha brings together two of Stephen's most famous products: Wolfram's Mathematica software and his work on cellular automata published in A New Kind of Science. Both are fundamentally about performing computations on formally defined structures - be they mathematical integrals or chaotic cellular systems. What would be really useful is to perform computations on knowledge structures as written in human language. After all, isn't this what computers were supposed to do?

This is where Wolfram Alpha is very different to our current batch of search engines. Rather than being just a sophisticated concordance of the web, this knowledge engine will turn plain text into human language structures, then convert these into computational language structures that can be queried, and finally turn the output back into a readable human form. Answering simple questions has never been so difficult!

Some techie websites have had access to this new Wolfram Alpha and are generally impressed, although keen to stress that this engine will have some limitations at first. The data it uses has been curated and will therefore expand only as fast as this process allows. Because of this, some think this is more likely to be a challenge to the likes of Wikipedia than to Google.

Now, this bit is impressive:"Another query with a very sophisticated result was "uncle's uncle's brother's son." Now if you type that into Google, the result will be a useless list of sites that don't even answer this specific question, but Alpha actually returns an interactive genealogic tree with additional information, including data about the 'blood relationship fraction,' for example (3.125% in this case)."

I, for one, look forward to tryin it out.

Can I Catch Swine Flu From Eating Parma Ham or Salami?

In the grip of this virulent news meme known as swine flu there are some serious dietary questions that need to be considered.

Can I catch swine flu from eating pork products?

Not if you cook them properly, all the way through. The virus is destroyed above 160 F (85 C) so that even boiling it will kill any virus or bacteria that had made a comfortable home lodged in the flesh. The US Center for Disease Control is disingenuous here, firstly flatly stating that one cannot catch swine flu from any pork product, then covering its back saying best to cook it.

Can I catch swine flu from eating cured pork products like Parma ham and salami?

Good question; so much so that the Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma (Parma Ham Consortium) had to issue a public statement reassuring consumers that Parma ham was absolutely safe to eat. You can read it here, if you can read Italian.

The press release gave three reasons why their ham is safe to eat. Firstly, there is no research linking the swine flu virus with transmission through eating pork. True, but see the previous advice. Secondly, the designation "Parma Ham" - or more accurately "Prosciutto di Parma" - is a protected name with many rules and regulations regarding quality control, including the source of the pigs themselves. So, trust us, our pigs are healthy and safe to eat! However, the best reason is saved till last: that the curing process destroys any viruses that may have been present. Parma ham is cured for at least 12 months and from research done viruses die in such an environment after 3 to 6 months. Again, no research has been done on this particular swine flu virus.

So in some respects this is good news for Parma as it trumpets its own superior quality. As to other cured meats just make sure they've been cured for at least 6 months to be safe. Cooking Parma ham is a sheer waste of an expensive delicacy but one can quickly fry salami - slam in a couple of eggs and I've been told it's a popular breakfast in Mexico, of all places! Any product that is on the shelves at the moment is going to have been produced months if not years ago so is almost certainly safe. With regards to any pork product made by Smithfield Foods... erm... the decision is entirely yours!

Just hoping the price of Parma ham drops during this period.

Population Growth and Fertility Controls

This tempered voice from Thomas Kostigen pours some tepid water on the propaganda advocating population control. Sir David Attenborough, the well-known naturalist, came out in support of the Optimum Population Trust - a think tank that believes there are just too many people (themselves excluded, no doubt). Kostigen begs to differ and points out some of the inaccuracies in the models used to sustain what is essentially a neo-eugenics movement masquerading as an environmental cause.

"The Optimum Population Trust is a registered charity funded by membership, donations and bequests. It receives no political or government funding and is independent of political or commercial interests." At £15 a year basic membership that doesn't buy a lot of thinking, but a list of members and hence funders is currently unavailable.

The ghost that haunts this topic is that of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. Although he died in 1834 sadly his treatise "An Essay on the Principle of Population" didn't die with him and is summoned by every innumerate eugenicist ever since. "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second." A better acquaintance with numbers would reveal how hollow the whole treatise is. Note that this is not a scientific theory but a hugely simplistic mathematical model based on... contemporary propaganda.

The Rev Malthus was a clergyman with little faith in humanity and a lot of faith in the power of money. He wanted more money given to the Church so that it could preach to the poor about how worthless they really were, except in the eyes of God. His treatise was to give a scientific veneer to a policy promoting Christian sexual morals - family planning being the current euphemism.

Kostigen challenges the model but not its creator. The infantile mathematical model is just not true. The declining birth rates in many industrialised countries shows how social changes affect population numbers, with much of the numerical growth coming from immigrants rather than indigenous births. The Malthusian "axiom" that populations grow geometrically, is just plainly false.

But the Optimum Population Trust likes to look at the other half of the Malthusian fantasy - the food supply. Even that cannot hope to increase arithmetically forever. One stark statistic noted in the article is that if everyone on the planet consumed as much energy as the average American then we would need five planet Earths! I don't know where the author got that figure from but, suspending disbelief and assuming it were true, surely that calls for a spirit of innovation, not a culling of humanity.

The thing that makes me highly sceptical is that there is a lot of important research on energy that is getting very little funding. I have written before on how Shell has pulled the plug on its alternative energy research. The drive towards biofuels rather than electric or hydrogen cars is taking more and more land away from food production. So is the much-feared food shortage actually being manipulated? Is this population control by stealth? We shall see, but if laws to curb the population were already in place then perhaps you wouldn't be here to read this. Malthus needs to be buried again!