Category: Unsettled Science

What Would We Do Without Peer Review?

Science Unsettled Science 3 Comments

The British Journal of Psychiatry has retracted a June 2013 paper by Malafosse and his colleagues on the genetics of bipolar disorder in children because Malafosse allegedly fabricated key data in the study.
The article, “Childhood maltreatment and methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene NR3C1 in bipolar disorder,” purported to find that people with bipolar disorder who had experienced more, and more severe, abuse early in life were more likely to show epigenetic changes.

Deniers, take heart! There’s a warrant for his arrest.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Climate Cult climategate2 Unsettled Science 10 Comments

The Cook et al. (2013) 97% paper included a bunch of psychology studies, marketing papers, and surveys of the general public as scientific endorsement of anthropogenic climate change.
Let’s go ahead and walk through that sentence again. The Cook et al 97% paper included a bunch of psychology studies, marketing papers, and surveys of the general public as scientific endorsement of anthropogenic climate change.

This one’s a stunner.
h/t Douglas

The Sound Of Settled Science

Science Unsettled Science 12 Comments

Via Judith Curry;

Take Katherine Flegal, a statistician at the US Centres for Disease Control. Last year, she and her colleagues published a systematic review of 97 studies in The Journal of the American Medical Association and concluded that mild obesity produced no extra mortality risk and being merely overweight resulted in a small reduction in mortality risk.
Despite being supported with a ream of data, the study was savaged by the public health lobby.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 18 Comments

A remarkable new study says European explorers weren’t the first to bring tuberculosis to the Americas, as has long been suggested.
An earlier strain of the disease existed long before Christopher Columbus’s arrival — brought from Africa by seals and sea lions, it says.
“It was a surprise for us, too,” said Anne Stone, professor of human evolution at Arizona State University and a co-author of the study, which was published this week in the journal Nature. “We had not thought about seals.”

h/t nv53

The Sound Of Settled Science

Genetics Unsettled Science 15 Comments

More than just X and Y: New genetic basis for sex determination

The team found that miRNAs are essential for sex determination even after an animal has grown to adulthood. “They send signals that allow germ cells, i.e., eggs and sperm, to develop, ensuring fertility,” Fagegaltier explains. “Removing one miRNA from mature, adult flies causes infertility.” More than that, these flies begin to produce both male and female sex-determinants. “In a sense, once they have lost this miRNA, the flies become male and female at the same time,” according to Fagegaltier. “It is amazing that the very smallest genes can have such a big effect on sexual identity.”
Some miRNAs examined in the study, such as let-7, have been preserved by evolution because of their utility; humans and many other animals carry versions of them. “This is probably just the tip of the iceberg,” says Fagegaltier. “There are likely many more miRNAs regulating sexual identity at the cellular and tissue level, but we still have a lot to learn about these differences in humans, and how they could contribute to developmental defects and disease.”

DON’T EAT THE CANNED FOOD!!!!!!

Climate Cult Unsettled Science 20 Comments

CFact;

Thirteen members of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) were trapped and in danger of freezing to death when their base, Halley VI, lost power. Power went down on July 30th and is now partially restored. The BAS waited to report the incident until power came back up, however now reports that the incident was so serious that all science activities have been suspended and emergency contingency plans to abandon some of Halley’s eight modules and attempt to shelter in a remaining few have been prepared. […]
One Survey member, Anthony Lister, managed to send a out a “tweet” when power came back up, reporting that the outage occurred while the station was experiencing record cold temperatures of -55.4° C (-67.72° F).

…”record cold”? Must be a typo.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 2 Comments

Via WUWT;

A paper published in the Journal of Climate finds from 800,000 observations a significant decrease in longwave infrared radiation from increasing greenhouse gases over the 14 year period 1996-2010 in the US Great Plains. CO2 levels increased ~7% over this period and according to AGW theory, downwelling IR should have instead increased over this period.

So long as we’re still to blame. From the comments;

Maybe, just maybe there is a fundamental problem with using sheets of glass or plastic enclosing a space as an analogy for a free flowing gas of a planetary atmosphere …

The Sound Of Settled Science

Penis News Unsettled Science 7 Comments

The most unkindest cut of all:

Men with vasectomies may be at an increased risk for the most lethal form of prostate cancer, researchers have found. […]
The lead author, Lorelei A. Mucci, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, emphasized that a vasectomy does not increase the risk for prostate cancer over all. “We’re really seeing the association only for advanced state and lethal cancers,” she said.

So that’s reassuring.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 3 Comments

The “Science Publishing Complex”;

Using the entire Scopus database, we estimated that there are 15,153,100 publishing scientists (distinct author identifiers) in the period 1996-2011. However, only 150,608 (<1%) of them have published something in each and every year in this 16-year period (uninterrupted, continuous presence [UCP] in the literature). This small core of scientists with UCP are far more cited than others, and they account for 41.7% of all papers in the same period and 87.1% of all papers with >1000 citations in the same period.

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