The very latest research shows that ketamine, an anaesthetic with hallucinogenic properties, can reduce the symptoms of depression quickly and effectively, and that MDMA (popularly known as ecstasy) can be beneficial to sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder when used in combination with behavioural therapy.

By contrast, new research into the effects of the classical hallucinogens has progressed at a much slower pace, probably because these drugs are categorised as Class A in the UK (Schedule I in the US), and researchers who wish to obtain them therefore face numerous regulatory barriers.

Nevertheless, it now seems quite clear that psychedelic drugs have enormous potential for treating a wide variety of psychiatric conditions. Much still remains to be discovered about exactly how they affect the brain, however.

Amazing what can happen when people quit freaking out.

We are the Rude GMO Critics, bitches.

Great article. His conclusions:

1.) This new found love of lower government spending is politically motivated. It has nothing to do with altruism or love of country. It’s about the November elections. Period.

2.) Government spending has been and always will be part of the the GDP equation

3.) Countries that tried austerity are worse off for it.

4.) Countries that inject massive amounts of the proper stimulus (such as infrastructure spending) grow at high rates.

The facts have a politically progressive bias.

450 pages of sheer blasphemy, the only thing left to do is find a brave publisher.

The science dork DarkSyde over at Daily Kos writes,

In this week’s Research 2000 poll we asked several questions about science and science policy that I’ll have more on later. But here’s one I thought you might find interesting:

QUESTION: Most astronomers believe the universe formed about 13.7 billion years ago in a massive event called the Big Bang. Do you think that’s about right or do think the universe was created much more recently?

Suffice it to say, besides the Gonzo Science option being so in the extreme scientific minority that it is not represented in this poll, it’s nice to see Dems and Independents remain scientifically minded. Whereas the GOP largely believes science is not a valid method of knowing the universe.  The Gonzo Science answer to this poll - the one that outrages both mainstream science enthusiasts and religious whackjobs - is that the Big Bang never happened because the universe has always existed. So: not enough options in your little poll.

A Gonzo Science maxim: if you don’t like science, the solution is better science, not defaulting to religion. I had a religious whackjob argue to me once that since the Big Bang theory was full of anomalies it proved the Bible. Probably a lockstep GOP base voter. But the answer to a theory full of anomalies is a better theory, not a worse one.    At any rate, down with the Big Bang, which mirrors the Biblical creation in large measure because the father of the Big Bang was a Catholic priest who “concluded that an initial ‘creation-like’ event must have occurred.” Yeah right.

Michelangelo, guerilla anatomist:

It is reported that Michelangelo concealed an image of the brain in the first of these last 4 panels, namely, the Creation of Adam. Here we present evidence that he concealed another neuronanatomic structure in the final panel of this series, the Separation of Light From Darkness, specifically a ventral view of the brainstem.

Now available here as a Google Doc.

And when you’re done reading it you can have a nice hot cup of this:

Kind of a niche market for these, but if you dig on heretical astronomer Tom Van Flandern, then you’re going to want to look into these fine items from the Gonzo Science Gift Emporium.

Basically, to suggest that Tom Van Flandern is right is to question the Big Bang, and/or to question the nature of gravity, and/or to support an “exploded planet” origin of the asteroid belt and comets. So, just send a case of these to your local observatory, and then sit back and watch the paradigms collapse. Mwah ha ha ha ha!

Here is our new “Gonzo Science Recommends” page at Amazon, where you can essentially browse the virtual contents of the Gonzo Science library, and if you find you want to buy one of these anomalous tomes, we get a small finder’s fee. Keep checking back as we fill out the ranks with heretical tome after heretical tome. Thank you.

Robert Whitaker on the causes of mental illness.

Levine: So mental illness disability rates have doubled since 1987 and increased six-fold since 1955. And at the same time, psychiatric drug use greatly increased in the 1950s and 1960s, then skyrocketed after 1988 when Prozac hit the market, so now antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs alone gross more than $25 billion annually in the U.S. But as you know, correlation isn’t causation. What makes you feel that the increase in psychiatric drug use is a big part of the reason for the increase in mental illness?

Whitaker: The rise in the disability rate due to mental illness is simply the starting point for the book. The disability numbers don’t prove anything, but, given that this astonishing increase has occurred in lockstep with our society’s increased use of psychiatric medications, the numbers do raise an obvious question. Could our drug-based paradigm of care, for some unforeseen reason, be fueling the increase in disability rates? And in order to investigate that question, you need to look at two things. First, do psychiatric medications alter the long-term course of mental disorders for the better, or for the worse? Do they increase the likelihood that a person will be able to function well over the long-term, or do they increase the likelihood that a person will end up on disability? Second, is it possible that a person with a mild disorder may have a bad reaction to an initial drug, and that puts the person onto a path that can lead to long-term disability. For instance, a person with a mild bout of depression may have a manic reaction to an antidepressant, and then is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on a cocktail of medications. Does that happen with any frequency? Could that be an iatrogenic [physician-caused illness] pathway that is helping to fuel the increase in the disability rates?

So that’s the starting point for the book. What I then did was look at what the scientific literature — a literature that now extends over 50 years — has to say about those questions. And the literature is remarkably consistent in the story it tells. Although psychiatric medications may be effective over the short term, they increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill over the long term. I was startled to see this picture emerge over and over again as I traced the long-term outcomes literature for schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, and bipolar illness. In addition, the scientific literature shows that many patients treated for a milder problem will worsen in response to a drug– say have a manic episode after taking an antidepressant — and that can lead to a new and more severe diagnosis like bipolar disorder. That is a well-documented iatrogenic pathway that is helping to fuel the increase in the disability numbers.

Now there may be various cultural factors contributing to the increase in the number of disabled mentally ill in our society. But the outcomes literature — and this really is a tragic story — clearly shows that our drug-based paradigm of care is a primary cause.

Story here.

Sounds a lot like Fred Hoyle here:

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Nice work if you can get it. Hoyle could never get any recognition for similar ideas, but coming from Hawking of course they are oh so respectable.

Dude’s name is Samuel A. Culvert and he’s also a PhD in clinical psychology. His 2008 WSJ article ”Get Rid of the Performance Review” caused some waves and so he wrote a book with a cheeky website.

This other guy, Frank Nikols, wrote an article in 1997 for Corporate University Review (pp.54-59) called “Don’t Redesign Your Company’s Performance Appraisal System, Scrap it.” Here’s his follow-up paper “Now What? What to do after you scrap the performance appraisal system” (pdf file).

I guess this heretical idea has been around a while. There’s a footnote in the Nikols’ pdf file for a “classic” article from the Harvard Business Review, Douglas Macgregor’s “An Uneasy Look at Performance Appraisals”, from 1957.

Here’s a fun bit from from Culver’s cheeky website:

I’ll never forget Oct 20th, 2008. That’s when the Wall Street Journal printed my exposé of performance reviews. It was a high-visibility article – and the response was electric. The article was the top-viewed piece on the Journal’s online site for days, produced a thousand letters to the editor, a heated debate on the site (with plenty of name-calling), was referenced on more than another hundred websites, generated scores of requests to reprint the article in its entirety and provoked a large number of requests for radio and TV interviews. View it for yourself. Overnight I became a rock star.

I also couldn’t have designed a better experiment to gauge how people feel about performance reviews. It was as if I had enlisted a giant focus group on a topic that everyone feels strongly about and few see much to gain by speaking up. More than 80 percent were supportive – and many of them reacted as if the article had been therapeutic, giving voice to the anger and fear they had long felt.

I sympathize. It was a wow moment for me.

…Here’s another book in the same vein…”Abolishing Performance Appraisals” by Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins, 2000.

…and some Stanford professor saying the same thing. Here’s a successful model:

To Deming’s point, there is one organization I work with — a high tech firm with about 250 employees — that eliminated formal reviews except when people are being considered for a promotion or when they are having serious performance problems and are placed “on plan” (i.e., where the choice is either shape up or be fired). They have about ten different levels in the organization, and everyone at the same level gets the same pay and same sized bonus.  And they have been emphasizing more frequent and lower stakes feedback instead. 

As linked to in this grab-bag post at the great orange satan Daily Kos, this is a strongly worded plea from an athiest for everyone to just get off his back. Money quote:

You know what would be really great? If all the fantastic (and they are fantastic) liberal/left Christians would spend five minutes a day writing angry letters to the Christian right wing about how unchristian they are instead of complaining to atheists about how much bad press you all are getting from the overt bad actions of your co-religionists.

Ouch! This Catholic Church implosion has started to singe even athiests standing too close to it.

And this amazing piece of citizen journalism, “Anatomy of a thrilling GOP disaster“, is just political writing at its most fun to read. Money quote (last lines of piece):

This was a complete GOP disaster. It was a thrill to be part of it.

In true Gonzo style.

This quote from media analyst blog Atrios’ Eschaton is a good one:

…we live in the accountability-free era, where nobody could have predicted except those who did and were right for the wrong reasons. Those who didn’t were wrong for the right reasons and are therefore still Very Serious People in good standing.

It is intended as a sarcastic comment about how the cheerleaders of the Iraq War and the financial crisis still have jobs in many cases, and in many other cases they have actually failed upward - while those who predicted the crisis somehow still remain outsiders.

That’s how politics in science works too. For instance, Fred Hoyle’s ideas are being appropriated under different guises, while his name is still mud. He was right for the wrong reasons, but once his stuff is rebranded, it can safely be used by establishment figures who were wrong for the right reasons. And so it goes.

Around these parts, we are used to disagreeing with that mechanist reductionist dog Richard Dawkins. Liked him a little better as bulldog-athiest-with-a-camera-crew, but it’s still easy to dislike him on style. But whereas I’m sure the Pope won’t be arrested, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say right on dude.

the therapeutically active components in marijuana - the cannabinoids - appear to be remarkably non-toxic to healthy cells and organs. This notable lack of toxicity is arguably because cannabinoids mimic compounds our bodies naturally produce - so-called endocannabinoids - that are pivotal for maintaining proper health and homeostasis.

In fact, in recent years scientists have discovered that the production of endocannabinoids (and their interaction with the cannabinoid receptors located throughout the body) play a key role in the regulation of proper appetite, anxiety control, blood pressure, bone mass, reproduction, and motor coordination, among other biological functions.

Just how important is this system in maintaining our health? Here’s a clue: In studies of mice genetically bred to lack a proper endocannabinoid system the most common result is premature death.

Armed with these findings, a handful of scientists have speculated that the root cause of certain disease conditions - including migraine, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and other functional conditions alleviated by clinical cannabis - may be an underlying endocannabinoid deficiency.

Now THAT’S scientific heresy! Whoo!

Holy crap. And that’s using Big Bang assumptions. Essentially an admission that when it comes to astronomy, everything is up for grabs.

The astronomers carried out two sets of observations in the same region, hunting for light emitted by galaxies born 10 billion years ago.

[Translation for non-Big Bangers: They were hunting for high-redshift objects.]

The first looked for so-called Lyman-alpha light, the classic telltale used to compile cosmic maps, named after its U.S. discoverer, Theodore Lyman. Lyman-alpha is energy released by excited hydrogen atoms.

The second observation used a special camera called HAWK-1 to look for a signature emitted at a different wavelength, also by glowing hydrogen, which is known as the hydrogen-alpha (or H-alpha) line.

The second sweep yielded a whole bagful of light sources that had not been spotted using the Lyman-alpha technique.

They include some of the faintest galaxies ever found, forged at a time when the universe was just a child.

[Translation for non-Big Bangers: they found a bunch of low luminosity, high-redshift objects this way, which rogue astronomers Arp et al. would say is just what they’d heretically expect of matter newly created/ejected from active galactic nuclei (”Moreover, the closest and therefore most recent ejections have the highest relative redshifts, and the lowest intrinsic luminosities.”) , essentially the opposite of the mainstream’s interpretation of the great Rorschach Test in the sky. Based on this and Arp’s observational evidence, we would expect many of these “background” galaxies the mainstream just found to actually be objects ejected from foreground galaxies, but with higher redshifts and so assumed by the mainstream to be background. They will in general tend to be just a few arcseconds away from the foreground galaxies, which will also be criss-crossed with ejection lines of quasars. That’s the smell of pure heresy people.]

The astronomers conclude that Lyman-alpha surveys may only spot just a tiny number of the total light emitted from far galaxies. Astonishingly, as many as 90 percent of such distant galaxies may go unseen in these exercises.

“If there are 10 galaxies seen, there could be a hundred there,” said Hayes.

And we’re supposed to trust them on dark matter?

(Thanks to princelumber for sending along the link.)

In honor of Homo erectus, recently accepted as the first seafarer in the human lineage of hominids and other assorted cavemen.

National Geographic brings the science in this episode of NatGeo Explorer. 

We are published regularly on dead trees in Duluth’s own Zenith City Weekly. This issue: “Cavemen of the Sea”. I’m on a boat, bitch!

Timeline of habitation on the island of Flores just got pushed back 120,000 years, leading to contention:

Many scientists believe the creature evolved from a much larger-bodied species, Homo erectus, that became isolated and shrunk over time. Others point to features in the hobbit’s body - such as the length its feet to the shape of its shoulder girdle - that are very primitive and not what one would expect in dwarfed H. erectus.

These researchers have put forward the idea that H. floresiensis may have evolved from more archaic creatures that left Africa to colonise Asia even before erectus.

“Our discovery at Wolo Sege will certainly open the door to this contentious theory,” said Dr Brumm.

Time to put on the popcorn.

Let me add that all this was total, total heresy just a couple of years ago, and now the archaeology of human origins has basically exploded in a new direction.

The limits of green/renewable energy have been overstated, almost as if its opponents had a vested interest in the status quo.

More in this book.

“Pro Family Values”, anti-gay California state senator Roy Ashburn (R), got popped with a DUI last week leaving a gay nightclub. Finally he came out today, saying, “I’m gay.” Congratulations for stating the obvious, dude. Now about that voting record?

He explained his past voting record saying that’s what his conservative constituents wanted.

How did he explain his voting record to his boyfriends, that’s what I want to know… According to wikipedia,

Ashburn has voted against every gay rights measure in the State Senate since taking office,^[4]

with the caveat that

all of which subsequently passed.^[5][6][4]

That’s probably how he rationalized it. Meanwhile,

His religion is listed as Roman Catholic in the biography for him printed by CSU-Bakersfield.

Political interference with science, UK style: In which the sacking of Professor Nutt causes a kerfuffle, but the proposed remedy itself is a bit of a bother:

Prof Nutt had criticised a government decision to reclassify cannabis, saying it was less harmful than alcohol and nicotine and claiming it had been upgraded to Class B for political reasons.

As a result of his sacking, several other advisers resigned and over 20 scientists called for ministers to sign up to a code of conduct to prevent political interference in the system of scientific advice.

In response, Science minister Lord Drayson published a set of principles in December - one of which stated that scientists and ministers should “work together to reach a shared position”.

But… the last time scientists and ministers worked together to reach a shared position (they) wrongly assured the public (BSE) infected beef was safe to eat.

I say, old chap.

India rejects genetically modified crop. I especially like this paragraph about it from Beyond Pesticides:

Advocates of genetically engineered crops have argued that they are the only way to meet the world’s growing demand for food, and that they reduce the need for pesticides, while increasing yields. Studies have shown these claims to be false. The widespread adoption of GE crops in the United States has actually increased pesticide use but failed to increase yield. Recent studies have also linked GMO consumption to organ failure.

Those are the facts. God forbid the press - and the scientific press - should be so objective.

Now things are getting interesting:

“We think the ev­i­dence is fi­nally show­ing that these [rap­tors] which are usu­ally con­sid­ered di­no­saurs were ac­tu­ally de­scended from birds, not the oth­er way around,” Ruben added.

…University of Kansas sci­en­tists ex­am­ined a fos­sil that showed feath­ers on all four limbs, some­what re­sem­bling a bi-plane. Glide tests based on its struc­ture con­clud­ed it would not have been prac­ti­cal for it to have flown from the ground up, but it could have glid­ed from the trees down, some­what like a mod­ern-day fly­ing squir­rel. Many re­search­ers have long be­lieved that glid­ers such as this were the an­ces­tors of mod­ern birds.

“This mod­el was not con­sist­ent with suc­cess­ful flight from the ground up, and that makes it pret­ty dif­fi­cult to make a case for a ground-dwelling the­ro­pod di­no­saur to have de­vel­oped wings and flown away,” Ruben said. “On the oth­er hand, it would have been quite pos­si­ble for birds to have evolved and then, at some point, have var­i­ous spe­cies lose their flight ca­pa­bil­i­ties and be­come ground-dwelling, flight­less an­i­mals – the rap­tors. This may be hugely up­set­ting to a lot of peo­ple, but it makes per­fect sense.”

I like this guy.

What do you effing know. Well i guess we get a new theory then, right?

“The level is somewhat higher than the most popular models had predicted, and it looks like it is going to increase with energy a little bit more steeply than we expected,” said Roland Gunter, a CMS collaboration scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

“I think it’s not going to be a problem, but it is one of the many things that we need to know as we move toward searches for the most rare particles and new physics,” he told BBC News.

Didn’t think so.

Theory demonstrably wrong = “something we need to know as we move toward … new physics”.

I should say so. GOD FORBID they find the less “popular” theory that predicted the results they actually got, and start using it.

He’ll be amazed to read this science article that attributes the creation of the “holographic universe” theory to these dudes in 1990s. That’s funny to me because Bohm published a vigorous scientific case for the holographic universe, the book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in 1980.

Basically, the 1990s dudes published their work in a peer-reviewed journal, as an offshoot of well-accepted black hole work. So they get official credit. Meanwhile, although Bohm was a giant among quantum mechanics, Wholeness and the Implicate Order was a “popular” book and so doesn’t count, if you can call a book with tons of equations in it “popular.”
Seems like you would give the guy a mention is all.

Happens a lot where the heretical theories become accepted just a few years later, with the heretic not allowed a shred of acknowledgment - certainly not from the scientific press, who really are just mouthpieces for the establishment.

When Bohm said it, it was heretical and involved some “challenges to prevailing views”. Now that we know he was right about the whole holographic universe thing, maybe those challenges should get a second look too.

New research has officially “over turned” the “Primordial Soup” theory of the origin of life. It had an 80-year run where it was the dominant paradigm.

But the geochemical energy of hydrothermal vents is the new hotness:

“Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won’t work at all,” said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. … “It is time to cast off the shackles of fermentation in some primordial soup as ‘life without oxygen’ — an idea that dates back to a time before anybody in biology had any understanding of how ATP is made.”

Someone be sure and tell Tommy Gold, whose eye has been on deep sea vents for some time, in relation to the origin of life. Gold’s “Deep Hot Biosphere” theory (presented in a book of that title based on this paper) argues that life teems at the vents because it is upwelling from deeper inside the planet. Life’s true origin is in the geological depths, by Gold’s reckoning. And Gold is no slouch.

So, glad to see we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty, and this “primordial soup” nonsense doesn’t have to get in the way any more.

Still panspermia to contend with too, re: origin of life. Remember, even if panspermia champion Fred Hoyle was wrong about why the primordial soup idea was incorrect - it turns out it is incorrect anyway. So seems to me that Hoyle’s modern-day panspermia work should be given a second look. Because he wasn’t just criticizing the primordial soup theory, he was also advancing a positive case for panspermia, before it was cool as it were.

[The biographical side note I would offer is that Gold and Hoyle were close associates and shared a similar cognitive style - in that each found it fruitful to simply invert the common idea and see where it leads you. Don’t be too surprised if they turn out to have been right about everything.]

Bonobo group eats dead infant, causes media kerfuffle:

Though uncommon, the behaviour may not be aberrant, says the scientist who witnessed it.

But it does further challenge a widely perceived notion that bonobos are an especially “peaceful” ape species.

Poppycock. We’re with this guy:

However, says Dr Fowler: “I am not sure there are wider implications from a scientific point of view.”

“I don’t see that occasionally consuming dead infants, however distasteful it might seem to us, is a sign of pathology or aberration per se.”

“I don’t think it necessarily says anything about ‘empathy’ or ‘morality’,” he adds.

“It had been suggested in the past that bonobos might feel more sympathy for victims, which is why they didn’t hunt monkeys, for example.

Metaphor

“But we now know they do hunt monkeys. So I think eating an already dead baby says little about bonobos in that respect.

“Bonobos are often used in a symbolic way, held up as the sexy, peaceful ‘Hippy Chimps’.

“The fact that they eat monkeys and consume their own dead offspring may not accord with this view, but I personally don’t see this as a problem.”

“The idea of the ‘Hippy Chimp’ is more a metaphor than a scientific argument,” he continues.

“I think the major implication is that we don’t need to see it as an aberration among other apes.

…i.e., no one should be getting the vapors about this.

The Drake Equation’s variables continue their maddening variability:

Frank Drake, who conducted the first organized search for alien radio signals in 1960, said that the Earth – which used to pump out a loud tangle of radio waves, television signals and other radiation – has been steadily getting quieter as its communications technology improves.

Drake cited the switch from analogue to digital television – which uses a far weaker signal – and the fact that much more communications traffic is now relayed by satellites and fiber optic cables, limiting its leakage into outer space.

“Very soon we will become very undetectable,” he said. If similar changes are taking place in other technologically advanced societies, then the search for them “will be much more difficult than we imagined.”

Didn’t think of that in 1960.

Also, just let me say that the absence of Fred Hoyle’s name in this panspermia-heavy article is deplorable.

For decades, scientists have scanned the heavens in search of extraterrestrial life. Perhaps they should have looked closer to home. Variant life forms – most likely tiny microbes – could still be hanging around “right under or noses – or even in our noses,” Paul Davies, an award-winning Arizona State University physicist, told a group of scientists Tuesday.

“How do we know all life on earth descended from a single origin?” he said, speaking at London’s Royal Society, which serves as Britain’s academy of sciences. “We’ve just scratched the surface of the microbial world.”

Here we’ve got Paul fucking Davies saying what Fred Hoyle got ridiculed for saying 30 years ago. At least give the guy a mention. The fact that Hoyle was wrong about chemical evolution doesn’t make him wrong about evolution from space. At least, when Paul Davies says there’s alien microbes in your nose, it sounds great. But Fred Hoyle, not so much.