Some Very Impressive Swearing in the BMJ!

Ben Goldacre really is a national treasure.  He works tirelessly researching and exposing shoddy and fraudulent science reporting.  For this service to science and society at large he deserves at least a FRS, maybe even a knighthood (they could strip one from a newspaper editor to give to him).  In his latest piece, published in the British Medical Journal, he efficiently skewers a particularly shoddy bit of MMR reporting from The Observer newspaper.  The reason that what Ben is doing is so important is that people can actually die as a result of incorrect beliefs in the field of medicine.  Some  journalists don't seem to understand this.  However, unlike some other campaigners for good causes, Ben appears to have no inlflated sense of self-importance, indeed over at his Bad Science blog he seems more proud of having "got some very impressive swearing into one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals"!

Natural Nuclear Reactors

There are some discovery stories that anyone interested in science should know about.  The discovery of pulsars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell is one of them.  This is another:

In 1972 a French engineer, named Bougzigues, discovered the Oklo natural reactors. Bougzigues worked as an analyst for the Pierrelatte nuclear fuel processing plant which produced fuel for nuclear power plants in Provance, France. During routine mass spectrometry measurements of the value of 235U/238U ratio in U ore samples he observed a tiny change in the isotope ratio (0.00717, compared to a normal value of 0.00720). So precisely known is this ratio that this small difference was sufficient to suggest something strange had occurred.

At first it was thought that some used nuclear fuel had inadvertently slipped into the processing plant. However, this was quickly ruled out because of the lack of intense radiation normally found in spent fuel.

Other possibilities raised included spent fuel from an extra-terrestrial space ship or uranium from an ancient nuclear waste site perhaps even from a past civilization. A careful check on the source materials traced the uranium ore back to a very high concentration uranium deposit present in a mine site in Gabon, a country in South West Africa.

A detailed investigation detected the presence of all the conditions necessary for, and large quantities of ancient (no longer radioactive) fission product waste embedded in the natural uranium ore, confirming that natural nuclear fission reactions had taken place at Oklo some 2000 million years ago.

Read more at WikiNuclear. [I should point out that Gabon is in West Africa rather than South West Africa.]

Herding Behaviour in Children

While on the subject of predators and children I thought I might as well tell this little story.

In Volume 1 of Narrow Roads of Gene Land, in the introduction to his paper Geometry for the Selfish Herd, William Hamilton talks about coming across a copy of Francis Galton's Inquiry into Human Faculty in a second-hand bookshop:

... Re-reading it after my interest (or irritation) over aggregation had been re-stimulated by other more holistic interpretations, I noticed some remarks about cattle in South Africa. These led me to an obscure paper by Galton, which I think few can have read. His argument was on the line I was already inclined to. Galton, I was surprised to be reminded in the book, had personally explored Damaraland in southern Africa and had observed for himself half-wild cattle in a terrain where lions and other large predators were still common. To see is to sympathize, especially when the observed animal is a mammal; moreover Galton probably personally experienced the sensation of safety from surprise attack when walking in the savannah among cows as compared to when walking alone. ...

I have had a rather similar experience to the one described above, not in the wilds of Africa but in central Reading. When my daughter was young I often used to take her and her friends out to play in the field next to our flats (since built on, alas). Usually I would take a ball with me and as soon as we got into the field I would kick it as high and as far as I could, and the children would scamper off after it. Then I would get out a book or paper to read while the children played. For some reason this day we didn't have a ball with us. Instead the children were running around me chasing each other in circles of about 3 to 5 metres radius. This 'electron cloud' of children kept up with me as I walked out towards the middle of the field. Then suddenly, without anything being said, the children were all orbiting within 2 metres of me - right under my elbows. I looked up to see what had caused this. A man with an alsatian dog had just come into the far corner of the field, the dog was off its leash and running up and down along the far hedge. The children must have seen the dog out of the corner of their eyes and subconsciously recognised it as a danger; enough of a danger to adjust the size of their 'orbits' but not enough to stop their game. The dog didn't come anywhere near us but the children continued to play within their smaller orbits until the man and alsatian left the field a few minutes later. 

Pluvialis on Predators and Young Children

A somewhat fragile Helen Macdonald visits a falconry fair and still manages to see things that no one else notices:

The worst moment of the fair, though? Indubitably the golden eagle. A tiercel, but still with killing talons the size and thickness of your index finger, sitting on a bow-perch. He was very chilled. His plumy hackles blew in the wind as he loafed, cocking an eye up to the thermally sky to watch kites, swallows and hobbies passing through, far above. He was surrounded by people, and even I was impressed by how utterly unconcerned he was. A photographer kneeled three feet from his broad mailed chest, pushing a macro lens into his face. About five inches from his face. Wow, I thought. That’s probably not that advisable, because the eagle’s leash gives it, oh, a good five feet leeway. I have been grabbed by an eagle. When you are grabbed by an eagle – mine was by the shoulder – you actually cannot do anything. You become entirely helpless. Not only because an eagle is stronger than you, but because shock cuts in almost instantly. You understand, these birds kill wolves. Read that again. They really do. And deer.

So as I watched this photographer, I was faintly nervous. Another camera appeared, and got even closer. The eagle looked a teeny bit less relaxed. And then, with a shock as if I'd put my hand into a plug socket while jumping waist-deep into an icy pool, I watched a tiny, fair-haired, not-very-good-at-walking eighteen-month old child walk unsteadily between the eagle and the photographer, brushing the front of the eagle as it did so. The eagle started in surprise, and leaned its snaky head forward, hackles risen, to clop at the child. It didn’t mean to touch the child, and it didn’t, but it was a mite hacked off. And I felt sick and dizzy. If the eagle had done what it might have done—grabbed the child—which would to it have been as rapid and as easy as someone putting out a hand to pick up a cup of tea, the child would have been dead in seconds. No-one seemed to notice, or see what had happened. For god’s sake, what is wrong with people? No-one would let a tiny toddler walk in front of a leopard, or a lion? Or would they? When I was in South Africa, many years ago, I visited a game farm where they bred King cheetahs. Which paced the fences, watching the crowds. You’d see families with small kids walking along, and a cheetah pacing elegantly along, just the other side of the chainlink, in step with the smallest and weakest child, eyes fixed, locked on them. “Look, Thomas!” I heard one woman say in delight. “The cheetah likes you best.” Christ.

Come to think of it, maybe she was seeing these things because she was feeling so fragile.

Mystery At M&S

On Friday afternoon I dropped in to Marks and Spencer's to do some shopping on my way home from the station.  At the checkout something happened that I have never come across before.  The operator scanned in a cheese and onion flan and the checkout displayed the message "Not allowed to sell this item".  He scanned it again and then put the flan to one side.  I asked him what was up but all he said was that he wasn't allowed to sell me the flan.  From the attitude of the operator it seemed it wasn't the first time it had happened today. I looked around, several other checkouts had items set to one side. I checked the sell-by date on the flan: it was the 18th of July, so that wasn't the problem. Slightly mystified I packed my bag, paid for the rest of the items and left the shop.

On the walk home it occurred to me that the most likely explanation was that M&S had just learnt that one of their suppliers had a problem with their production process (contamination or temperature control, or something) but that M&S had not yet had time to take all the affected products off the shelves.  However, one thing did not quite fit with this: I had distinctly heard one of the checkout operators asking an assistant to put a handful of what I presumed were set-aside items back on the shelves.  Anyhow, I put it all to the back of my mind and when I got home we had an omelette for tea instead of cheese and onion flan.

Then, on Saturday I heard  on the radio that several branches of Tesco's had been closed for the afternoon.  It wasn't said explicitly at the time, but to me it sounded like this was in response to attempted extortion.  I wonder if the M&S mystery was a result of the same extortion.  The low key of the M&S response would then have been down to their computer system being able to flag suspect items at the checkout.  Tesco's computer system might not have been able to do that, and so they would have had to shut their stores while they searched their shelves.  

Still, this doesn't tie in with the request to put stuff back on the shelves that I overheard.  But maybe that was just a red-herring.  Maybe a customer was so miffed at unable to buy one item that they just abandoned all of their shopping at the checkout.  The operator would then have asked the assistant to put the safe items back on the shelves.