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Homeopathic Pharmacy in India

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A homeopathy company is recalling some products because they may contain traces of a real antibiotic in them.

It's a funny recall because, among other principles, homeopathy is based on the idea of diluting substances to such an extent they're barely detectable—or no longer there at all. They're not supposed to contain active medicines. The company conducting the recall, Terra Medica of Ferndale, Washington, even describes its recalled products on its website as not containing antibiotics or antibiotic substances. (Here's an example.)

There are a lot of things hinging on this idea that homeopathic remedies don't contain any active ingredients in them. One: When manufactured cleanly and correctly, homeopathic remedies should be generally harmless. After all, in the end, they should just be solutions of water and/or alcohol, perhaps mixed into a sugar pill. Two: In part because homeopathic products have been generally recognized as safe, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has mostly chosen not to regulate them. Unless they claim to cure serious conditions, such as cancer, the FDA doesn't ask homeopathy companies to prove their products are safe or effective.

In this case, however, the FDA found that the process Terra Medica used to make six of its products could introduce the antibiotic penicillin into Terra Medica liquids, tablets, capsules, ointments and suppositories. People who are allergic to penicillin might get severe reactions if they use these products. Terra Medica is conducting a voluntary recall affecting 56 lots of its products, according to an FDA statement.

If you've gotten this far, you may be wondering whether homeopathy works. As you can imagine, because there's not supposed to be anything in homeopathic medicines, they don't work. The principles of homeopathy violate basic laws of chemistry and physics. Nevertheless, while many scientific studies of homeopathy have found no effect, some patients do report positive results. That's the placebo effect at work, which can be pretty powerful by itself.

Hat tip to the NeuroLogica blog, which also pointed out the irony of a homeopathy company getting dinged for containing real medicine. 

Every PIcture Tells A Story

By analyzing the mix of colors master artists since 1500 chose for painted landscapes, researchers can accurately reconstruct a record of the particulates in past atmospheres. The data may prove useful to refine contemporary climate change models.

"Sunset," c. 1875, by Winslow Homer/National Gallery of Art

Environmental data is turning up in unexpected places. In the April issue of Popular Science, Katie Peek reports on one such source: the journals of Henry David Thoreau. The 19th-century naturalist and writer wrote down such detailed, comprehensive observations on the flora and fauna around him that a Boston University lab was able to chart the impacts of climate change -- how much much earlier leaves appear, flowers bloom and birds migrate in the early 21st century compared to the Concord, Massachusetts of the mid-1800s -- by comparing Thoreau's notes to present-day conditions.

Visual art also carries a climate signal, it turns out. In a new study, scientists in Greece have verified that the relative intensities of red, blue, and green, or “red-to-green ratios,” in the paints mixed and used to depict sunsets by painters in the Northern Hemisphere, are excellent proxies for determining the levels of aerosols (fine dust particles or liquid droplets in the atmosphere) around the times that the paintings were created. 

As part of their analysis, published March 25 in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, the scientists set up an experiment in which major Greek landscape artist Panayiotis Tetsis painted sunsets during and after the passage of airborne particulates from Saharan dust storms over the Greek isle of Hydra. Tetsis just painted what he saw, with no knowledge about the dust storms, and his red-to-green ratios matched data on aerosol optical depth gathered by sun photometers at the same times and places. Put another way: The more particulates in the atmosphere, the more they absorbed certain spectra of light, changing the color of the sunset to the artist's eye.

The team's latest work builds on a 2007 study in which they analyzed the red-to-green ratio of 554 painted sunsets, created by artists between 1500 to 2000 before, during, and after volcanic eruptions. In that research, the scientists found that the color ratio (“only the parts of the sky over the field of view of the artist near the horizon avoiding clouds were analysed”) correlated closely with how the volcanic ejecta would affect the appearance of light traveling through the atmosphere, and how long that effect would take to taper off.

The red-to-green ratios in these works also document increasing atmospheric pollution since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, from around 1850 through the 20th century.

Along with telling us a lot about the past atmosphere, this climate data embedded in the West's fine art heritage may prove useful in refining the computer models that are used to study and predict the pace and effects of climate change.

[LiveScience]

As the planet warms, the temperatures that trigger spring arrive earlier. But not everything’s adjusting on the same schedule. Flowers open before their insect pollinators come out, and birds return from migration too late to find their usual bug meals. Detailed study of ecological mismatch requires equally meticulous observations of historical timing—and a Boston University lab has found a trove in the journals Henry David Thoreau kept in Massachusetts in the mid-1800s. “They’re probably the oldest detailed records of flower and bird-migration times in the United States,” says Richard Primack, a conservation biologist who runs the BU lab. The diaries, together with more recent data, reveal an ecological system in flux.

1. Leaves appear earlier

In 2012, plants leafed out a full month early in some parts of the Northeast, as measured by satellite images that document levels of foliage. Scientists attribute the premature greening to abnormally warm weather. 

Source: Joshua Gray, Boston University

2. Cherry trees bloom earlier too

More than 1,200 years of cherry-blossom records for Kyoto, Japan, show a trend toward earlier blooms in the past 100 years.

Source: Yasuyuki Aono, Osaka Prefecture University

3. Flowers precede birds

Nearby Boston delivers extra heat to Concord, making the town a case study for global warming in the Northeast. Wildflowers [pink] seem to respond to the new spring temperatures more than migrating songbirds do [green].

Source: Elizabeth Ellwood Et Al., Boston University

4. Birds lag behind bugs

In Concord, insects, too, have responded to warming at a different rate. The BU lab has measured how many days each spring indicator shifts per Fahrenheit degree of warming [boxes]—though individual species vary [bars].

Source: Caroline Polgar Et Al., Boston University

5. The future is uncertain

The wildflowers in Concord bloomed three weeks earlier in 2012 than they did in the 1850s, when Thoreau observed them. Ecologists see three possible futures for how spring may continue to evolve.

Source: Elizabeth Ellwood Et Al., Boston University

Spring temperatures are an average of March, April, and May, except the bird trend line, which is March and April.

This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science.