Dance Magers

Crucifixion remains a familiar idea, even though it's a punishment from the distant past. It's so familiar that we no longer consider of the physical realities of it. Those realities are some of the most gruesome ever known. Here's how crucifixion actually kills people.

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Over at HuffPo, Jeff Schweitzer serves up a cri de couer against religion. He writes:

Many factors have brought us to this sad state of affairs, but we can no longer ignore the 600 pound gorilla and trumpeting elephants in the room: religion is killing us. While our kids are being taught that god created gravity, children in Zaire are learning about Newton and Einstein. As children in Lichtenstein are being taught about the warping of space-time, American kids are learning that “people who do not believe in god” are incapable of understanding gravity.

Preach it!

American religiosity has become an existential threat, undermining the foundation of our future prosperity by contaminating our educational system with superstition, fable and myth. We see this with evolution, vaccines, climate change, energy policy and a host of critical issues that should be based in science but instead are hijacked by ignorance. We are 17th in the world in science, but instead of improving our education, we continue to fight battles more appropriate to the 16th century. Let’s look at a few specific and tragic examples in which religion has triumphed at the expense of our educational system and with great harm to society.

Amen, brother!

Oddly, many accept the link between autism and vaccinations with no proof, but when it comes to climate change, the demand for proof is never satisfied no matter how convincing such proof may be. Many accept the existence of ghosts with no evidence, but deny the reality of a changing climate with proof before their eyes. This differential deference to evidence is clear indicator that much of the American public lacks the tools to evaluate issues rationally. Without science, reality becomes just an option to be rejected whenever the real world gives us inconvenient truths. In this frightening environment in which fiction becomes fact, the conclusions from years of careful research, scrutinized by competing scientists and published in peer reviewed journals now carry no more weight with the public than the random thoughts of a bloated pundit. Talking heads with no training now have the same authority as highly qualified experts. So global warming is dismissed as a liberal hoax in spite of a preponderance of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. Climate and weather are mistakenly thought to be the same. So with every cold snap in winter we hear, “See, it snowed – I told you climate change was a joke.”

Now we’re cooking with gas!

Riveting stuff, but I’m less sure about this:

And let’s be brutally honest; we can lay the death of every child who dies of this preventable disease directly at the feet of all the parents who chose not to vaccinate their children. Unlike most diseases that require only 85% vaccination to create herd immunity, Whooping Cough, and measles, requires 94% immunization to protect the public. Ignorance, the willingness to dismiss hard evidence when inconvenient, or inversely the readiness to reach a conclusion in the complete absence of evidence are all symptoms of scientific illiteracy growing in the nutritive soup of religiosity.

Religion is certainly a contributing factor behind anti-vaccination hysteria, but it is hardly the only one. There’s a fair amount of crunchy, New Agey, left-wingery going on too. And the libertarians sometimes chime in, outraged that the government would require the to get a shot.

Schweitzer is identified as a “Scientist and former White House Senior Policy Analyst; Ph.D. in marine biology/neurophysiology.” I’m assuming that was the Obama White House. If I’m right, then my opinion of Obama just went up.

The Dark Crystal has always been Jim Henson's creepiest movie, but when it was finally released it was considerably toned down from his and Frank Oz's original vision. YouTube user scoodidabop has spent years re-editing the film, using Henson's original notes and various deleted scenes to create a far, far creepier movie than what you remember.

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“The results of my observation are best explained by the assumption that a radiation of very great penetrating power enters our atmosphere from above.” -Victor Hess

You might think of the largest and most powerful particle accelerators in the world — places like SLAC, Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider — as the source of the highest energies we’ll ever see. But everything we’ve ever done hear on Earth has absolutely nothing on the natural Universe itself! For this week’s Ask Ethan, let’s take a look at the simple question of our reader David Hurn, who asks:

Ever since I was a young reader of the Fantastic Four I have wanted to know all about Cosmic Rays.

Can you help?

So, let’s take a look.

Even before the first human beings ever left Earth, it was widely known that up there, above the protection of the Earth’s atmosphere, outer space was filled with high-energy radiation. How did we know?

The first clues came from looking at one of the simplest electricity experiments you can do on Earth, involving an electroscope.

If you place an electric charge on one of these devices — where two conducting metal leafs are connected to another conductor — both leaves will gain the same electric charge, and repel one another as a result. You’d expect, over time, for the charge to dissipate into the surrounding air, so you might have the bright idea to isolate it as completely as possible, perhaps creating a vacuum around the electroscope.

But even if you do, the electroscope still slowly discharges! In fact, even if you placed lead shielding around the vacuum, it would still discharge, and experiments in the early 20th century showed that if you went to higher and higher altitudes, the discharge happened more quickly. A few scientists put forth the hypothesis that the discharge was happening because high-energy radiation — radiation with both extremely large penetrating power and an extraterrestrial origin — were responsible for this.

Well, you know the deal when it comes to science: you test it! So in 1912, Victor Hess conducted balloon-borne experiments to search for these high-energy cosmic particles, discovering them immediately in great abundance and becoming the father of cosmic rays.

The early detectors were remarkable in their simplicity: you set up some sort of emulsion (or later, a cloud chamber) that’s sensitive to charged particles passing through it and place a magnetic field around it. When a charged particle comes in, you can learn two extremely important things:

• The particle’s charge-to-mass ratio and
• its velocity,

simply dependent on how the particle’s track curves, something that’s a dead giveaway so long as you know the strength of the magnetic field you applied.

In the 1930s, a number of experiments — both in early terrestrial particle accelerators and via more sophisticated cosmic ray detectors — turned up some interesting information. For starters, the vast majority of cosmic ray particles (around 90%) were protons, which came in a wide range of energies, from a few mega-electron-Volts (MeV) all the way up to as high as they could be measured! The vast majority of the rest of them were alpha-particles, or helium nuclei with two protons and two neutrons, with comparable energies.

When these cosmic rays hit the top of the Earth’s atmosphere, they interacted with it, producing cascading reactions which created showers of high-energy particles, including two new ones: the positron — hypothesized in 1930 by Dirac, the antimatter counterpart of the electron with the same mass but a positive charge — and the muon, an unstable particle with the same charge as the electron but some 206 times heavier! The positron was discovered by Carl Anderson in 1932 and the muon by him and his student Seth Neddermeyer in 1936, but the first muon event was discovered by Paul Kunze a few years earlier, which history seems to have forgotten!

One of the most amazing things is that if you hold out your hand so that it’s parallel to the ground, about one muon passes through it every second.

Every muon that passes through your hand originates from a cosmic ray shower, and every single one that does so is a vindication of the theory of special relativity! You see, these muons are created at a typical altitude of about 100 km, but a muon’s mean lifetime is only about 2.2 microseconds! Even moving at the speed of light (299,792.458 km/sec), a muon would only travel about 660 meters before it decays. Yet because of time dilation — or the fact that particles moving close to the speed of light experience time passing at a slower rate from the point-of-view of a stationary outside observer — these fast-moving muons can travel all the way to the surface of the Earth before they decay, and that’s where muons on Earth originate!

Fast-forward to the present day, and it turns out that we’ve accurately measured both the abundance and energy spectrum of these cosmic particles!

Particles with about 100 GeV worth of energy and under are by far the most common, with about one 100 GeV particle (that’s 10¹¹ eV) hitting every square-meter cross-section of our local region of space every second. Although higher-energy particles are still there, they’re far less frequent as we look to higher and higher energies. For example, by time you reach 10,000,000 GeV (or 10¹⁶ eV), you’re only getting one-per-square-meter each year, and for the highest energy ones, the ones at 5 × 10¹⁰ GeV (or 5 × 10¹⁹ eV), you’d need to build a square detector that measured about 10 kilometers on a side just to detect one particle of that energy per year!

Seems like a crazy idea, doesn’t it? And yet there’s an extraordinarily compelling reason that we’d want to do so: there should be a cutoff in the energies of cosmic rays, and a speed limit for protons in the Universe! You see, there might not be a limit to the energies we can give to protons in the Universe: you can accelerate charged particles using magnetic fields, and the largest, most active black holes in the Universe could give rise to protons with energies even greater than the ones we’ve observed!

But they have to travel through the Universe to reach us, and the Universe is filled with large amounts of cold, low-energy radiation: the cosmic microwave background!

The only places where the highest energy particles are created are around the most massive, active black holes in the Universe, all of which are far beyond our own galaxy. And if particles with energies in excess of 5 × 10¹⁰ GeV are created, they can only travel a few million light years – max — before one of these photons, left over from the Big Bang, interacts with it and causes it to produce a pion, radiating away the excess energy and falling down to this theoretical cosmic energy limit, known as the GZK cutoff. (More details here.)

So we did the only reasonable thing for physicists to do: we built a detector that ridiculously large and looked!

The Pierre Auger Observatory has done exactly this, verifying that cosmic rays exist up to but not over this incredibly high-energy threshold, a factor of about 10,000,000 larger than the energies reached at the LHC! This means the fastest protons we’ve ever seen evidence for in the Universe are moving almost at the speed-of-light, which is exactly 299,792,458 m/s, but just a tiny bit slower. How much slower?

The fastest protons — the ones just at the GZK cutoff — move at 299,792,457.999999999999918 meters-per-second, or if you raced a photon and one of these protons to the Andromeda galaxy and back, the photon would arrive a measly six seconds sooner than the proton would… after a journey of more than five million years! But these ultra-high-energy cosmic rays don’t come from Andromeda; they come from active galaxies with supermassive black holes like NGC 1275, which tend to be hundreds of millions or even billions of light years away.

We even know — thanks to NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) — that there are about 10 times as many cosmic rays out there in deep space as we detect here on-and-around Earth, as the Sun’s heliosheath protects us from the vast majority of them!

And that’s the fantastic story of cosmic rays, including my favorite aspect of them: the highest energy particles in the Universe and the cosmic energy limit! So, David, you’re our third contest winner and we’ve got two more to go! If you’ve got a question you want answered (and a chance to win), ask your best ones here, and I’ll see you again for more about the natural wonders of the Universe next week!

Stop what you're doing, set aside three minutes of your time and watch this. This newly released compilation of footage captured by astronauts aboard ISS missions 29, 30 and 31 is simply outstanding.

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Not too long ago, when the media became excited about a study saying genetically modified corn causes tumor growth in rats, ScienceBloggers were quick to point out that the study featured some of the worst science ever.  Now the paper has been officially retracted by its publisher, but to what end?  On Pharyngula, PZ Myers speculates that the study authors avoided statistical analysis of their small, cancer-prone rat packs precisely because there was no statistically significant effect of being force-fed GMO corn.  PZ also says “journalists who got the paper in advance had to sign confidentiality agreements that prohibited them from consulting with experts,” leading to uncritical promulgation of a story well-suited to stoke fear and anti-GMO politics.  Even the rats in the study were treated unethically, forced to live out their tumor-ridden days for the sake of sensational photographs.  On Respectful Insolence, Orac wonders if the paper’s retraction will only fuel the convictions of activists pre-disposed to conspiratorial thinking.  And on ERV, Abbie Smith offers a book of actual science on GMOs compiled by actual scientists and farmers, for free.

Posted to the homepage on December 2, 2013.

You're looking at a newly released 8-frame movie of Saturn's enigmatic "hexagon." It is the highest-resolution footage ever acquired of the massive six-sided maelstrom atop the ringed planet's north pole, and boy howdy is it gorgeous.

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This is the rescue video of Harrison Okene, a Nigerian cook working on the Jascon 4 tug boat when it sank during a tanker-towing operation. Harrison survived three days sitting alone in the pitch black at a depth of 30-meters in cold water and a small air pocket created when the ship sunk. Sadly, Harrison's 11 other crew members perished. Hit the jump for the amazing video, but skip to 5:00 for the rescue to begin. The diver sounds like a chipmunk because he's breathing an oxygen/helium mix. And the guy in charge of the operation, well, he sounds like the exact kind of guy you want in charge of this sort of thing. Thanks to everyone who sent this, almost every single one of which expressed this being their worst nightmare. Same.

There is a lot of discussion about online pornography and its effect on society. In particular, the way women are portrayed in pornography is thought to play a role in how we treat women every day. But not all porn is the same, and there have been very few studies that compare different styles of pornography and how they portray women. These scientists stepped up to fill our knowledge gap by watching "teen" porn that focuses on younger characters, and "MILF" porn that focuses on women with,

Suppose you were a citizen of the Ukraine. Which way would you rather turn: to Europe or Russia? The answer is so obvious its hardly worth asking the question.

Now suppose you’re the rather thuggish Prez of the Ukraine, and that part of turning towards Europe involves cracking down on your own corruption, not to mention being forced to free the previous Prez, who you’ve banged up on spurious charges. Whereas Russia, in the person of Putin, doesn’t give a toss about civil rights or corruption.

And so the scene is set for an exciting clash. Just like in Syria, just like in Uganda, the interests of the people are different from the interests of the leadership. Hopefully the people will win. Hopefully and likely this won’t turn into a civil war. That would be a bad result. See Hobbes, or Brian on Syria or even me on Syria sort of.

Note that blue and yellow are the colours of the Ukrainian flag, so the armband in the pic is their colours, as well as by a happy coincidence those of the EU. The EU flag in the pic is the EU flag, of course. I don’t know what the white flag with the red horizontal stripe is – ideas? [Update: its the political party Batkivshchyna, led by the imprisoned Yulia Tymoshenko; so that makes sense. The white-with-red-cross-and-crosses visible in some other pics is Georgia, another victim of Russia.]

Astonishingly, there’s not a word about this on R4 news tonight. They’re rubbish: leads are some unimportant helicopter crash in Scotland and a similarly unimportant train crash in the USA.

Refs

* Ukraine pro-EU protests: Police forced to flee as 100,000 demonstrators take over central Kiev – Indie
* Clashes amid huge Ukraine protest against U-turn on EU – Aunty
* Ukraine police and protesters clash in Kiev – in pictures – Graun
* Ukraine sees biggest anti-government protests since Orange Revolution – Torygraph

PROTIP: Not on your lunch break. Seen here looking how I felt after Thanksgiving, a dead sperm whale's stomach explodes as some poor bastard pokes it with a knife. The explosion was caused by the build-up of gases in the stomach after the whale died (of natural causes). Can you imagine what that smelled like? Red Lobster! Keeping for the video, in regular speed and slow motion. Thanks to Robert, Chase, jim, Sydney and Eric, who all have normal names for once. And to Whale Boombastic, who absolutely does not.

Yes, most games have never been great at depicting realistic jyggle physics. It's not the best situation, but at this point, many of us are used to that. The breast physics on Ryse, though? I don't even know what is going on there.

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by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA

President Obama’s health reform has been derailed in a collision with health insurance software, but this is hardly a unique experience. In 1995, I was invited to Prague to try to help the Czech Republic reconcile two co-existing public health practice cultures–the hygiene police of the Soviet era and the German tradition of social medicine.

Our delegation found another crisis in the works, around the creation of private health insurance that had started in 1990. Payroll deductions bought private health insurance that covered basic physician and hospital service. But that was just the start.

In Public Health Reports, I asked

“As the United States moves toward managed care and carefully structured incentives to make medical practice efficient, why did the Czech Republic choose private insurance companies and fee-for-service? Part of the answer is that the new system seemed furthest from the old command and control, and closest to pure market economics.” But the Czech Republic did not stop there. “Twenty-two private insurance companies, founded with minimal reserves established with large bank loans, make fee-for-service payments all physicians who care for their policy holders.”

No one seemed “to take responsibility for the decision to replace a Canadian-style fee-for-service system using a single insurance carrier that was in the original [1990] plan with 22 independent carriers.” Why 22 insurance companies, I asked. As we probed, our Czech colleagues finally told us that it appeared that Hewlett-Packard (the US computer firm) had made payments to someone to assure that their software would be used. The H-P insurance software had slots for 24 carriers.

So, with a chance to adopt an efficient single-payer national health insurance system, the profit motives of a software company derailed the Czech plan. Imagine how much the US is wasting two decades later on a complex system that avoids national health insurance and allows software firms and insurance companies to rip-off billions of dollars.

Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA is co-Editor of the Journal of Public Health Policy.  He directed the Vermont Department of Health, the Colorado Department of Health, the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the U.S. National Vaccine Program.

WHOO!

FREE book on GMOs, written by actual scientists and farmers, compiled by a former anti-GMOer who is now convinced of GMOs utility:

The Lowdown on GMOs: According to Science

I found out about this book from two of my friends, Karl Haro von Mogel and Anastasia Bodnar. These two were part of founding Biofortified (The Pandas Thumb of plant genetics) and are actual scientists (not just random people on the internet with an opinion).

But you can learn more about the other authors from David Tribe (another actual scientist and contributor to the book).

In a world where some are willing to torture animals to get graphic ‘GMOS CAUSE TUMORS!!!’ pics for internet sensationalism, and are willing go so far as to threaten to sue publications for retracting papers after post-peer-review analysis, while other anti-GMOers try to get anyone who disagrees with them fired, its refreshing to have such a straight forward, information dense, accessible resource for the general public (including me! I havent done any plant genetics in a looooong time!).

Chinese manufacturers are experts at knocking off just about anything, from "Rat Ban" sunglasses and "Wee" gaming consoles to, yes, "HiPhones." But now it looks like they're very close to copying another American export: They're bootlegging our Boeing 747s.

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Peter Venkman: he's everybody's favorite Ghostbuster. And now you can pretend to BE him with this Venkman Ghostbusters Jacket available from SuperheroStuff ($70). We can all get one then run around pretending to bust ghosts! Don't cross the streams, LOLOL. We're having a great time, aren't we? "I want to go home." God, you were always that kid at sleepovers, weren't you? Thanks to Bria, who, for two tips in one day, will receive a Christmas gift from yours truly. Just send me your address and as much money as you'd like for me to spend.

This is the Liberation Wrapper, a burger wrapper designed by the DENTSU EAST advertising agency for the Japanese fast food chain Freshness Burger. Apparently large, open mouths are frowned upon in Japan. Here in the US they're the standard. "UP YOURS, JACKASS!" See? The wrapper was designed to allow Japanese women to enjoy a hamburger without being viewed as unattractive. Personally, I think watching women eat is sexy. Unless they're eating another person. There's nothing sexy about that. But a lady with a little chili cheese dog dripping down her chin. *shivers* "Did you just...?" If your question has anything to do with a boner the answer's yes. Hit the jump for a video about the burger wrapper. Wow, never thought I'd type that. Thanks to me, who's been eating through a hole cut in a brown grocery bag for years now.

For the weekend: a ridiculously satisfying video of a ravioli can being overtaken by a blob of oozing lava. Not since the disappearing styrofoam have we found ourselves so unaccountably moved by a video so simple (though, admittedly, lava does tend to have this effect on us).

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Literary types often regard Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita as the greatest love story of the 20th century. They're close, but it's actually the '80s cartoon series Robotech.

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Even as we dream of shiny new futures, many of us are captivated by images of crumbling modern buildings — mental institutions that have faded from use, amusement parks reclaimed by nature, houses that will never again serve as homes. But why are we so fascinated by the art and archaeology of the very recent past? And what can we learn about our past and ourselves from looking at pictures of these modern ruins?

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This makes total sense. Physics was unable to deliver us our flying cars or jet packs. But what were we going to do with them anyway? Well, go to the bookstore, of course! Alas, in the absence of advanced space age technology we are forced to drive, or even walk, to the bookstore.

But not any more, because Jeff Bezos at Amazon has promised us … promised … the new “Amazon Prime Air” service. This is where the books (and other stuff we order from Amazon.com) fly to us, encased in small brightly colored boxes that apparently we get to keep after the delivery. They fly attached to the underbelly of a robotic helicopter.

Here it is happening, for real:

Amazing.

There may be a few holes in this story though. For one thing, why are humans packing the brightly colored boxes? I would think that the first thing you’d do if you were creating a robotic delivery system is to replace those humans with much more efficient robots. For another thing, why is the flying robot, which Mr. Bezos has, in a brilliant moment of marketing genius called a “Drone,” dropping the object in the middle of the driveway? My driveway is also a thoroughfare for dozens of middle and high school students going to and from school. That would not work for me. Maybe we need to have tiny heliports on our roofs. For another thing, what about big things, or orders where multiple packages will be delivered at once? Do these flying robots scale up? Will they cooperate when flying in flocks? Also, having delivery of potentially essential items taken out of the hand of the post office for whom “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” with different rules, like airlines have, about flying … I am not sure that I am comfortable with this.

(Below is the 60 minutes segment on which the Drone was announced.)

This is all well and good. Well, actually it is disturbing and evil. Anyway, I’m sticking with my original contention regarding Amazon: It has become, effectively, a public good (for better or worse) like roads and canals and such, but it is a public good owned by some guy. Those things, roads canals and such, were often originally created and maintained by private corporations licensed by the government, until society realized that that would not do. Proper free market competition and fair play (to the extent that those two things sometimes work together) can only happen if the infrastructure is a public good and that which uses the infrastructure mostly isn’t. Jeff Bezos has made clear, explicitly, that he wants Amazon to sell everything to everyone. And, they hold patents to do that sort of thing. And now they intend to take over the sky. Aren’t there rules about that?

The Los Angeles Police Department would like you to be prepared for the real problem with zombies—their desire to steal iPads.

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While Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, and the Mothman might get most of the attention on land, there are plenty of cryptozoological myths surrounding the US's lakes, rivers, and swamps as well. Atlas Obscura has mapped out the Loch Ness-type monsters, webbed hominids, and giant killer sea creatures that, according to legend, lurk beneath the watery surface.

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“Daddy, I wanna play with the robot dog!”

“It’s not a dog, honey, it’s an Imperial walker. An AT-AT. A fearsome armored assault transport used to overwhelm the Rebel defenses in the battle of Hoth.”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“OK, fine, you can play with the robot dog.”

We came down to my parents’ for Thanksgiving this year, because both Kate and I are really busy with work at the moment, and didn’t need the additional stress of planning and hosting a big dinner. On Friday morning, my dad went up into the attic and dug out the bags containing the vast collection of Star Wars toys my sister and I amassed in the late 70′s and early 80′s:

I was right in the prime demographic for this– I was six when the first movie came out– and my sister is four years younger than me, so we had a good long run with Lucasfilm and Kenner. We didn’t quite have a complete set of all the original action figures, but were pretty close. Some of these have gone missing, and the original Lando Calrissian’s head snapped off at some point, but my dad found most of them up in the attic, and then SteelyKid spent a happy hour or so carefully washing two decades worth of dust off them (as seen in the “featured image”), and asking me to name them all (a lot of the character names are totally gone from my memory, though I know when they appeared in which movie). And I still vividly remember how all the ships go together (though a lot of pieces are broken or missing, and some of the springs and catches have worn out). She particularly enjoyed the speeder-bike that blows apart when you press a button on the back.

She’s never actually seen any of the movies, thus the dialogue snippet above, but she’s sort of vaguely aware of Star Wars as a cultural force, thanks to various classmates. The original movie is probably a little too scary for her still, but maybe one of these days…

(Assuming it’s possible to get a version where Han shoots first, that is. I have principles…)

Anyway, I spent a good deal of Friday back in 1981. Hope the end of your week was half as good.

Back in 1989, during the annual Macy's Day Thanksgiving Parade, an actor impersonating Jack Nicholson's Joker from Tim Burton's Batman rode a parade float and sang a little song. Which is pretty fucked up, if you think about it.

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The past is full of buried secrets — and sometimes, it opens its mysteries to us. Lately, thanks to high technology and a lot of luck, some priceless treasures that were lost to time have been found again. Check out a gallery of astonishing artifacts that have been returned to us recently.

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Researchers from MIT have developed a camera that can take pictures in almost total darkness. It works by mathematically reconstructing 3D images from single photons reflected from dimly lit objects. The achievement could result in stealthy spy cameras, or treat eyes that are easily damaged by excess light.

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Since its publication in September 2012, a study that showed rats fed Monsanto’s glyphosate-resistant NK603 maize developed more tumors than controls has been roundly criticized for its poor experimental design and dubious statistical methods. Yesterday, the study was retracted.

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Well, Thanksgiving’s over, and the orgy of consumerism known as Black Friday is in full swing. Personally, I have to work, at least part of the day, and I don’t go anywhere near the stores on Black Friday anyway. I haven’t for years. So we might as well briefly discuss a bit of science today. It won’t be long (by Orac standards), but there was a tidbit of news that hit the blogosphere on Thanksgiving Day that caught my interest. Apparently the execrable study by Gilles Séralini on the effect of using feed made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on rats is heading for retraction. You remember that study, don’t you? It’s one that I dissected in one of my usual 3,000+ word posts. If you want the details of why the study was such horrifically awful science, go there. In the meantime, let’s find out what’s happening, which was originally reported in the French press. Basically, the editor of the journal, A. Wallace Hayes, sent Séralini a letter on November 19 stating that the article would be retracted if Séralini didn’t agree to withdraw it.

Séralini, as you may recall, also tried to do an outrageous end run around the embargo system for pre-publication access of reporters to scientific papers to be published. Basically, he only showed the results to a carefully chosen group of reporters and insisted on a non-disclosure/confidentiality agreement that prevented them from discussing the findings with experts in the field or to get outside comments for use in their stories. From my perspective, this was about as unethical as it gets, a blatant attempt to control the initial press coverage and, as EmbargoWatch put it, “turn reporters into stenographers.” Fortunately, this effect was short-lived, and as soon as the study’s results claiming that long term feeding with GMO-feed led to large tumors growing on these rats were published, critical analysis began. Unfortunately, there was enough of a delay that all the usual suspects in the form of crank websites had free rein to use the study as “proof” of all their imagined evils of GMOs as pure poison.

Here’s the letter:

As you know, several months ago, we began a thorough examination of the data you provided to the journal. The panel looking at the data and its analysis sought to address the questions that had been raised in the Letters to the Editor received in response to your article.

The panel had many concerns about the quality of the data, and ultimately recommended that the article should be withdrawn. I have been trying to get in touch with you to discuss the specific reasons behind this recommendation. If you do not agree to withdraw the article, it will be retracted, and the following statement will be published it its place:

The journal Food and Chemical Toxicology retracts the article “Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize,”1 which was published in this journal in November 2012. This retraction comes after a thorough and time-consuming analysis of the published article and the data it reports, along with an investigation into the peer-review behind the article. The Editor in-Chief deferred making any public statements regarding this article until this investigation was complete, and the authors were notified of the findings.

Very shortly after the publication of this article, the journal received Letters to the Editor expressing concerns about the validity of the findings it described, the proper use of animals, and even allegations of fraud. Many of these letters called upon the editors of the journal to retract the paper. According to the journal’s standard practice, these letters, as well as the letters in support of the findings, were published along with a response from the authors.2 Due to the nature of the concerns raised about this paper, the Editor-in-Chief examined all aspects of the peer review process and requested permission from the corresponding author to review the raw data. The request to view raw data is not often made; however, it is in accordance with the journal’s policy that authors of submitted manuscripts must be willing to provide the original data if so requested.3 The corresponding author agreed and supplied all material that was requested by the Editor-in-Chief. The Editor-in-Chief wishes to acknowledge the co-operation of the corresponding author in this matter, and commends him for his commitment to the scientific process.

Unequivocally, the Editor-in-Chief found no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data. However, there is legitimate cause for concern regarding both the number of animals in each study group and the particular strain selected. The low number of animals had been identified as a cause for concern during the initial review process, but the peer review decision ultimately weighed that the work still had merit despite this limitation. A more in-depth look at the raw data revealed that no definitive conclusions can be reached with this small sample size regarding the role of either NK603 or glyphosate in regards to overall mortality or tumor incidence. Given the known high incidence of tumors in the Sprague-Dawley rat, normal variability cannot be excluded as the cause of the higher mortality and incidence observed in the treated groups.

Ultimately, the results presented (while not incorrect) are inconclusive, and therefore do not reach the threshold of publication for Food and Chemical Toxicology. The peer review process is not perfect, but it does work. The journal is committed to a fair, thorough, and timely peerreview process; sometimes expediency might be sacrificed in order to be as thorough as possible. The time-consuming nature is, at times, required in fairness to both the authors and readers. Likewise, the Letters to the Editor, both pro and con, serve as a post-publication peerreview. The back and forth between the readers and the author has a useful and valuable place in our scientific dialog.

The Editor-in-Chief again commends the corresponding author for his willingness and openness in participating in this dialog. The retraction is only on the inconclusiveness of this one paper. The journal’s editorial policy will continue to review all manuscripts no matter how controversial they may be. The editorial board will continue to use this case as a reminder to be as diligent as possible in the peer review process.

Please contact me as soon as possible to discuss the details of the analysis, and the procedures for withdrawing or retracting this article.

There are a few interesting and potentially controversial parts of this decision as described in the letter above. First, I tend to accept the editor’s assertion that there was no fraud here. What I found in my analysis looked far more like incompetence than fraud. It was basically an incompetence that led to the design of experiments virtually guaranteed to find “positive” results, using rats that are prone to developing tumors, inadequate control groups, large numbers of experimental groups that appeared not to have controls for multiple comparisons, and a very confusing and bizarrely counterintuitive way of presenting the evidence in the form of graphs whose results were nigh uninterpretable. In essence, the paper showed nothing, but the way the data were presented was with maximum spin to make it seem as though GMO feed led to horrific tumors in these rats.

I also agree that this paper should never have been published. Its scientific quality was so riddled with obvious problems and poor design that at the time I wondered how on earth such awful science was published, when it appeared to have been nothing more than a study designed to demonize GMOs. At that, it was quite successful. However, the question of what to do with it after it’s been published is a much less obvious question. Bad science is published all the time. So is science whose authors and their allies abuse it for political purposes, as Séralini’s allies (not to mention Séralini himself) did with gusto. Should all such science be retracted? This is not the same as the infamous case of Andrew Wakefield, where fraud was convincingly demonstrated through reports by investigative journalist Brian Deer. As Séralini himself cites, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) states that the only grounds for retraction of a paper are:

• Clear evidence that the findings are unreliable due to misconduct (eg data fabrication) or honest error.
• Plagiarism or redundant publication.
• Unethical research.

I think that a reasonable argument can be made for #1 in that Séralini’s research was clearly completely unreliable. Whether it is due to fraud or honest mistake doesn’t really matter; let’s assume it was due to honest error, given that the editor couldn’t find any evidence of fraud. It’s still a valid reason to retract Séralini’s paper. If Séralini had a whiff of scientific integrity, he would have withdrawn the paper himself, but he doesn’t, at least not on the issue of GMOs. Similarly, it could also be argued that #3 applies, that the research was unethical because of how the rats were treated, but this is a weaker argument because the use of an animal ethics committee like the ones used in the US gives Séralini cover. Even so, I can see an argument being made that this case isn’t clear enough. Moreover, the editor doesn’t help his case by stating that the data are “inconclusive.” So what? Inconclusive data are published all the time, as well they should be. Perhaps a better approach would have been to leave Séralini’s paper published, but with a disclaimer on the online version that reads much like the letter above, without the statement that the paper was being retracted. It could conclude with an admission and/or apology on the part of the editors that such a bad paper got through peer review.

Unfortunately (and predictably), in addition to his same tired responses to criticism of the paper, Séralini couldn’t resist invoking pharma shill gambit (or, in this case, Monsanto shill gambit) in his response to the retraction notice:

Hayes’ decision to retract the paper follows FCT’s [Food and Chemical Toxicity, the journal that published Séralini's paper] appointment of Richard E. Goodman, a former Monsanto scientist and an affiliate of the GMO industry-funded group, the International Life Sciences Institute, to the specially created post of associate editor for biotechnology at the journal, early this year.[10]

Goodman’s appointment in turn followed an orchestrated campaign by GMO supporters to persuade FCT to retract the study. Some critics even accused Prof Séralini of fraud, without presenting any evidence. Many of the critics had undeclared conflicts of interest with the GMO industry.[11]

After Goodman was installed, FCT withdrew a separate study by Brazilian researchers that also raised questions about GM crop safety. The study showed that Bt insecticidal toxins similar to those engineered into GM Bt crops were not broken down in digestion, as is claimed by the industry and regulators, but had toxic effects on the blood of mice. The Brazilian paper, like Prof Séralini’s, had been peer-reviewed and published by FCT prior to Goodman’s arrival. After Goodman’s arrival, the paper was withdrawn without explanation from FCT[12] – only to be immediately published in another journal.[13]

There is no proof that Goodman was responsible for the retraction of Prof Séralini’s study. But his appointment, coming so soon after the “Séralini affair”, along with FCT’s failure to list the interests of its editors, raises questions about corporate influence on the editorial board at the journal.

I love that last paragraph, which basically is a “just sayin’, ya know” kind of non-disclaimer. Basically, Séralini is insinuating that somehow Dr. Goodman had something to do with his paper’s threatened retraction because he used to work for Monsanto and is now affiliated with International Life Sciences Institute. Actually, ILSI appears to have a pretty comprehensive policy on conflicts of interest and transparency. Séralini needs more than just his insinuations to demonstrate a connection between Goodman’s appointment and his paper’s retraction, but he clearly doesn’t have it. It’s also questionable that one newly appointed associate editor would have the clout right out of the box to influence the editorial board to decide on such a high visibility retraction.

In the end, I remain a bit conflicted about FCT’s decision to retract this paper. There’s no doubt that the Séralini paper is a truly awful piece of agenda-driven science, every bit as bad as any number of papers I could cite from the antivaccine movement, which is why I explicitly compared anti-GMO fear mongering to the antivaccine movement. More recent anti-GMO “research” has been, if anything, even worse than last year’s paper by Séralini. It should never have been published. However, there are a lot of papers that should never have been published out there. Should they all be retracted? I agree with the folks over at Retraction Watch that post-publication peer review is very important, but the devil, as always, is in the details.

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