Nature – Where lobbox flows freely and comes ever so naturally.

Got a lot of “science” to moan about today…

Take a look at this from the “periodical” called Nature (27th March)

Link on pic points to: http://www.nature.com/news/specials/water/index.html

And what Nature definately WON’T be looking at is the political/and neoLiberal economics that is largely responsible for half the worlds population not having satisfactory water/sanitation.

 And whoever accused Nature (or the BBC) of MASSIVELY spewing out inflated and grossly proposterous speculation should be ashamed of themselves…

 
http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html

Well OK, maybe not then.

Hey, let’ get in on the act. Let’s point to the latest born baby and say something like “LOOK! The last human!!!”. I mean come on, for pity’s sake!

But wait… There’s more from Nature.

Title: “The appeal of sugar goes beyond taste”  Excerpt:  Researchers have found that mice prefer sugary water even if they lack a gene needed to taste it.  Although the mice could not taste sweets, reward centres in the brain reacted when the mice drank water spiked with sucrose, but not when they drank water mixed with a low-calorie artificial sweetener. The results, published this week in Neuron 1, suggest that mice can detect calories without relying on their taste buds — a finding that could change our understanding of the sugar cravings that can plague dieters and contribute to obesity.
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080326/full/news.2008.692.html 

And of course the worthy scientists knocked out the mice’s nasal receptors so the mice couldn’t smell it. They did knock out the nasal receptors – didn’t they? OOPS! And they visually blinded the mice so there was no chance in the mice being able to detect some kind of difference in refractive index change of the sugar sulution and non-sugar solution. They did blind the mice didn’t they? Oh Dear! And they remembered to sever the remaining oral sensors in the mice to that the mice couldn’t tell from the viscoscity and texture of the solution that it was different from the viscosity/texture of the non-sugar solution. They did destroy all oral sensors didn’t they? Crumbs! And they remembered to remove the nerves from the teeth of the mice, so that the ion balance and electrical conductivity of those nerves on drinking sugar solution wouldn’t help the mice learn which was the sugar solution and which wasn’t. They did remember to destroy the mice’s teeth nerves didn’t they? Doh! And obviously they screened the rest of the mouse’s DNA (a task that took Celera  nearly a year to do) to make sure the alteration to what they thought was solely a taste related gene (becasue they know the exact funcition of every gene you see, and no gene could ever be polyfunctional*) hadn’t caused any effect anywhere else in the mouses genome. — sniff sniff, something’s hit the fan! —

Why is it that the proportion of “science” apprears to be complete junk?

But there’s even more…

 The article goes on to say… “They did not, however, favour water sweetened with sucralose, (I’ve got a feeling we’ve been here before) a low-calorie artificial sweetener. This suggests that the mouse body does not learn from the taste, but rather from the calories in sugar.”

Notice the article of course does not say… “They did not, however, favour water sweetened with sucralose, an man made trichloro organic artificial sweetener. This suggests that the mouse body does not learn from the taste, but rather from the calories in sugar.”

Lesson?

Rodents don’t like sucralose. Food containing sucralose will not be raten by household rodents. Great for all them hungry Indians and Chinese. And sucralose is lower-calorie than sugar. Hourray!

All hail the cleverly named “sucralose” Only it will allow us to consume multiple more nutrients that some sponging Africans, and we won’t get fat.  And get this… sucralose is completely safe, afterall wikipedia says so. Wikipedia also says the case is proved after “110 studies in humans and animals.” – and that will be made up of 110 studies in animals and 0 in humans, or is that 110 studies in humans and 110 studied in animals, or some other combo? – well, it doesn’t say so obviously it’s not important is it?

Some time ago, The CIA were fingered for altering wikipedia pages in order to demonise the Iranial PM, Ahmadinejad. Of course it is unthinkable that sucralose’s (or “Splenda” as is the other name manufacures Tate & Lyle call it) wikipage has suffered a similar fate, what with a piddly sales revenue of $212 million in 2006 (Johnson,Avery, “How Sweet It Isn’t”, Wall Street Journal Marketplace Section, April 6, 2007 p.B1 )

–* sarcasm.

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How may ‘jobs’ has mass murderer and sadist Tony bLiar got?

Crikey blimey!

Surfin’ a few science sites today, I came across this at the BBC’z site:

 

So let me get this straight. The lying, murderering sadistic nasty piece of errmm scum is…

1) The ME peace envoy (who brings no peace whatsoever)
2) The global climate envoy (who does nothing for the ‘climate’ other than false-flagging his way to climates of FEAR)
3) A lecturer of faith at Yale (but knows nothing of faith or the commandments)

Wadda guy!

I want to dance on the grave of mass murderer Tony bLiar.

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A problem with the Solar System.

I like spacey kinda things.

What I don’t like is people saying is that their physical model of the cosmos is correct. All physical models can have rational questions thrown at them which reveal the model really to be a load of rubbish. This is surely inevitable as man cannot posess anything other than limited knowledge so it is very unlikely he can know everything about anything, but rather can learn something and somethings.

I recently came across an article with gave ‘The Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang”

After reading point 3, it got me thinking a little closer to home – the solar system to be precise, and then later, about the earth itself…

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The pic above is kind of how I’ve been told to imagine the formation of the solar system.

Here’s another ‘classical’ diagram..

 

http://www.astro.psu.edu/users/niel/astro1/slideshows/class43/003-solar_system_forming.gif

I’m guessing you too were told of such a model. But if you think about it, does it actually make any sense? (before you answer that, try saying ‘wibble’ rapidly for 30 seconds)

point 1:We are told the ‘dust’ is the most massive part out of the “hydrogen/helium/dust mixture”. As anyone who takes a lot of sugar in coffee will tell you, when stirring (rotating the matter), it is the ‘solids’ i.e. the dust, which accumulates in the centre. The more mobile (less intertia bound) gas, should have accumulated around the dust. Not only that, but gravitationally, the more dense dust would attract to a greater degree than the poorly dense gas. The Sun should therefore have a dust laden core i.e. a non H/He core. Spectral analysis is reported to show mostly hydrogen and helium.

 Even if point 1 is wrong, then why is Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus made of gas? You may reply, it accumulated the residual gas after the sun switched on, but why then Do some of these planets have solid moons? Again, the gas should have coalesced wth the anisotropic density of the dust clouds (to form the solid sphere with a gas cloud or ring)

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point 2: Where did this dust come from in the first place? Looking at the elemental composition of the Earth, it is rich in Fe, Al, Si and O, even radioactive elements such as uranium for example. Where did this come from? Some similar (but not identical and certainly not in the relative abundance as present on earth) elements are said to be in the sun, but absolutely not in the quantities found on the earth. So we are forced to suggest a past star synthesised it.

WMAP says the Age of the Universe is 13.7 +/- 3% bn years old. Our solar system is put at 4.5 bn years old. {Update 26-sept-08… “Earth’s most ancient rocks, with an age of 4.28 billion years, have been found on the shore of Hudson Bay, Canada. ” source(BBC)}  So that means the star which made these elements in the solar system must have

a) managed to have its constituent elements overcome the tremendous explosive velocity of the big bang to allow matter to attract and coalesce.
b) formed (and what did it form from? How long did it take to form?)
c) synthesised
d) died
e) scattered to leave virtually no trace

all within (13.7 – 4.5) billion years = 9.2 bn years. Repeat 9.2 bn years. I mean come on! Not only that but our sun is predicted to be around for 10 bln years (it is 1/2 way through its life right now) yet somehow so we are to believe the massive star which synthesised uranium bunched together, formed, synthesised, died and scattered in just 9.2 years? The numbers are highly iffy!

UPDATE: According to this, Life was previously thought to have begun on earth 2.4 billion years ago, but now scientists in Paris put that figure at 0.6 billion years. Interestingly the article states: 0.6 billion years is one tenth of the worlds age. Putting the age of the earth at 6 bln years, or more than 43% the age of the universe, and laughingly, older than the solar system.!!! Another artricle says “researchers…discovered a new species of organism that lived 540 million years (0.540 bln years) ago. Nothing had yet evolved with teeth or even bones. Multicellular animal life is believed to have arisen around 600 million years ago.” For reference, the burst of terrestrail atmospheric oxygen reported in the same article to have occured 2.4 billion years ago 

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point 3:The clustering of elements and compounds on the earth. What possible force could there be which gives rise to pockets of individual elements and their compounds  on the earth. CaF2 deposits, uranium deposits, seems of gold, tungsten, platinum, lead ores, Iron oxides and so on. It seems to me totally bizzare that an entropic collection of dust could lead to an apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics. (Laws which are not laws at certain energy levels). Bar a few weakly interacting compounds (e.g. gases and liquids), it seems to me that the earth should be a near consistent sludge. 

What’s your take on all this? Should we even be bothering to think about it given the atrocious and utterly unfair way we treat each other on this small wet and rocky ball?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wmap

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang#Timeline_of_the_Big_Bang 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability 

Lead-208 is the most stable element and isotope

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