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cryonics offers almost eternal life. To its critics, cryonics is pseudoscience; the idea that we could freeze someone today in such a way that future technology might be able to re-animate them is nothing more than wishful thinking on the desire to avoid death. Many who battle nonsense dressed as science have spoken out against it: see for example Nano Nonsense and Cryonics, a 2001 article by celebrated skeptic Michael Shermer; or check the Skeptic’s Dictionary or Quackwatch entries on the subject, or for more detail read the essay Cryonics–A futile desire for everlasting life by “Invisible Flan”.

And of course the pro-cryonics people have written reams and reams of material such as Ben Best’s Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice on why they think this is exactly as plausible as I might think, and going into tremendous technical detail setting out arguments for its plausibility and addressing particular difficulties. It’s almost enough to make you want to sign up on the spot. Except, of course, that plenty of totally unscientific ideas are backed by reams of scientific-sounding documents good enough to fool non-experts like me. Backed by the deep pockets of the oil industry, global warming denialism has produced thousands of convincing-sounding arguments against the scientific consensus on CO2 and AGW. T

Nano Nonsense and Cryonics goes for the nitty-gritty right away in the opening paragraph:To see the flaw in this system, thaw out a can of frozen strawberries. During freezing, the water within each cell expands, crystallizes, and ruptures the cell membranes. When defrosted, all the intracellular goo oozes out, turning your strawberries into runny mush. This is your brain on cryonics.This sounds convincing, but doesn’t address what cryonicists actually claim. Ben Best, President and CEO of the Cryonics Institute, replies in the comments:Strawberries (and mammalian tissues) are not turned to mush by freezing because water expands and crystallizes inside the cells. Water crystallizes in the extracellular space because more nucleators are found extracellularly. As water crystallizes in the extracellular space, the extracellular salt concentration increases causing cells to lose water osmotically and shrink. Ultimately the cell membranes are broken by crushing from extracellular ice and/or high extracellular salt concentration. […] Cryonics organizations use vitrification perfusion before cooling to cryogenic temperatures. With good brain perfusion, vitrification can reduce ice formation to negligible amounts.

The Templeton Foundation claims to be a friend of science. So why does it make so many researchers uneasy?

With a current endowment estimated at US$2.1 billion, the organization continues to pursue Templeton's goal of building bridges between science and religion. Each year, it doles out some $70 million in grants, more than $40 million of which goes to research in fields such as cosmology, evolutionary biology and psychology.

however, many scientists find it troubling — and some see it as a threat. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, calls the foundation "sneakier than the creationists". Through its grants to researchers, Coyne alleges, the foundation is trying to insinuate religious values into science. "It claims to be on the side of science, but wants to make faith a virtue," he says.

An earthquake hit L’Aquila, Italy on April 6th, 2009, killing 309 people. Prior to this event, six scientists and one government official were assembled into a task force charged with deciding whether recent “increases in seismic activity in the area” were putting citizens in any danger. The events are a little muddled, but the gist is this: the task force relaid some potentially positive feelings to the “deputy technical head of Italy’s Civil Protection Agency” who then made a statement to the press. The statement was “The scientific community tells me there is no danger because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favourable.”

The official felt this positive outlook was the message the committee wanted to relay, yet the committee obviously states that they didn’t say anything conclusive — after all, earthquake science isn’t exact. In general, the whole affair sounds pretty confusing, with the lawyers “in some cases implicitly blaming each other’s clients.”

is building codes that should be re-examined, but perhaps the best thing to do is to combine both solutions: consider better building practices while at the same time urging those in the lab to err on the side of caution — heavily — when human lives are at stake.

Mr Smedley was such a private man that none of those friends had known in advance that he had planned his own assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, where he drank poison and died on Dec 10 last year. A few days after Mr Smedley's death, his close friends found individually-written letters from him in their post, telling each one how much they had meant to him.

They were in for a greater surprise when they were joined at his memorial service by Sir Terry, the author and campaigner, and the BBC crew that had filmed Mr Smedley's final moments. Unknown to all but his closest family, Mr Smedley invited Sir Terry to accompany him and his wife Christine, 60, to the clinic in Switzerland. Moments before he died, said Sir Terry: "I shook hands with Peter and he said to me 'Have a good life', and he added 'I know I have'." When a clinic worker asked him if he was ready to drink the poison that would end his life, Mr Smedley said: "Yes" and added: "I'd like to thank you all." After Mr Smedley died, said Sir Terry: "I was spinning not because anything bad had happened but something was saying', A man is dead... that's a bad thing,' but somehow the second part of the clause chimes in with, 'but he had an incurable disease that was dragging him down, so he's decided of his own free will to leave before he was dragged'. So it's not a bad thing."

Last year, for example, coal mining accidents killed 4,233 in China alone, while coal pollutants killed an estimated 13,200 Americans. And while you may remember a few of the 25 worst energy-related disasters of 2010, most went unnoticed by Western media and the public.

When you actually do the math, coal kills somewhere on the order of 4,000 times more people per unit of energy produced than nuclear power. Or to put it another way, outdoor air pollution, caused principally by the combustion of fossil fuels, kills as many people every 29 hours as will eventually die due to radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, according to World Health Organization figures (Source: nuclear; air pollution).

Yet since coal-related deaths have a much lower profile than nuclear disasters, and because they largely occur in the conveniently far-away obscurity of the developing world, they tend to be severely underreported by the mainstream media in the West.

The dangers are clear. As PR becomes ascendant, private and government interests become more able to generate, filter, distort, and dominate the public debate, and to do so without the public knowing it. “What we are seeing now is the demise of journalism at the same time we have an increasing level of public relations and propaganda,” McChesney said. “We are entering a zone that has never been seen before in this country.”

Michael Schudson, a journalism professor at Columbia University, cjr contributor, and author of Discovering the News, said modern public relations started when Ivy Lee, a minister’s son and a former reporter at the New York World, tipped reporters to an accident on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Before then, railroads had done everything they could to cover up accidents. But Lee figured that crashes, which tend to leave visible wreckage, were hard to hide. So it was better to get out in front of the inevitable story. The press release was born. Schudson said the rise of the “publicity agent” created deep concern among the nation’s leaders, who distrusted a middleman inserting itself and shaping messages between government and the public. Congress was so concerned that it attached amendments to bills in 1908 and 1913 that said no money could be appropriated for preparing newspaper articles or hiring publicity agents.

But World War I pushed those concerns to the side. The government needed to rally the public behind a deeply unpopular war. Suddenly, publicity agents did not seem so bad.

It now appears that, in Belgium, it's acceptable to film the dead from Waterloo but not from WWI.

Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.

somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).

So what exactly are tomorrow’s protectors of biodiversity watching? Everything from the weirdly adorable, like a slow loris being tickled, to the shocking, like an eagle throwing a goat off a cliff, to the oddly fascinating, like a hamster pretending, on cue, to get shot and die, to the graphically sexual — I’ll leave these to you to discover — to the hilarious and disturbing, like one in which the violent sneeze of a baby panda panics its huge mother. If all of this just looks like a lot of time-wasting silliness, ask yourself: Could flash cards more effectively acquaint children with the slow loris? Could there be a more memorable illustration of the “apparent death” response than the performance of this Oscar-worthy hamster? And could anything make you feel more connected with giant pandas, the whole species, than watching one comically startle at the sound of its cub’s crazed sneeze?

If the Internet is unavoidable and ubiquitous — and it is — then nature is following right along with it, shining out through screens everywhere. Young people are knowledgeable about organisms in a global way we could never have been as children. They may not often wander the local patch of forest — we won’t let them most of the time anyway — but they wander the natural world through the Internet.

American magazine the Atlantic lobs an intellectual grenade into our culture. In the summer of 1945, for example, it published an essay by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineer Vannevar Bush entitled "As We May Think". It turned out to be the blueprint for what eventually emerged as the world wide web. Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?".

Carr wrote, "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going – so far as I can tell – but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

Carr's target was not really the world's leading search engine, but the impact that ubiquitous, always-on networking is having on our cognitive processes. His argument was that our deepening dependence on networking technology is indeed changing not only the way we think, but also the structure of our brains.

leaving aside the fact that from the figures given by Prof Feng, about 80 per cent of obese people are NOT "perfectly healthy with normal cholesterol and blood sugar", and 70 per cent of people who die suddenly of heart attacks ARE obese (see my take on the 'fat but fit' argument here), and that Prof Feng has written in a previous letter of obesity being "a serious medical problem and [that] studies in the United States show that obesity will be the No. 1 public health problem and cause of death in five years' time", I am amused by Prof Feng's definition of good health as "not a number... [but] a sense of well-being physically, mentally, socially and spiritually".

much of what we do in "medicine" today is about numbers. Your "weight, body mass index, how often you jog or the number of kilometres you run", your "cholesterol and blood sugar", your smoking, alcohol intake, exercise, sexual behaviour, diet and family history are all quantified and studied, because they give us an idea of your risk for certain diseases. Our interventions, pharmacological or otherwise, aim to modify or reduce these risks. These are numbers that translate to concrete events in real-life.You may argue that one can have bad risk factors and still have a sense of "physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being", in which case you don't need a doctor or drugs to make you feel better - but that doesn't mean you are not going to die of a heart attack at 40 either.

The problem with using the term "well-being" in defining something as important as healthcare or medicine, is that it is a vague term (a weasel word, I like to call it) that allows quacks to ply their trade, and for people to medicalise their problems of living - and that is something Prof Feng disapproved of, isn't it?Do I have a better definition for "health"? Well, not yet - but I certainly don't think my job is only about giving people "a sense of well-being".

My recent post “The War Over ‘Nice’” (describing the blogosphere’s reaction to Phil Plait’s “Don’t Be a Dick” speech) has topped out at more than 200 comments.

Many readers appear to object (some strenuously) to the very ideas of discussing best practices, seeking evidence of efficacy for skeptical outreach, matching strategies to goals, or encouraging some methods over others. Some seem to express anger that a discussion of best practices would be attempted at all. 

No Right or Wrong Way? The milder forms of these objections run along these lines: “Everyone should do their own thing.” “Skepticism needs all kinds of approaches.” “There’s no right or wrong way to do skepticism.” “Why are we wasting time on these abstract meta-conversations?”

I kicked off a recent episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast on the topic of transhumanism by defining it as “the idea that we should be pursuing science and technology to improve the human condition, modifying our bodies and our minds to make us smarter, healthier, happier, and potentially longer-lived.”

Massimo understandably expressed some skepticism about why there needs to be a transhumanist movement at all, given how incontestable their mission statement seems to be. As he rhetorically asked, “Is transhumanism more than just the idea that we should be using technologies to improve the human condition? Because that seems a pretty uncontroversial point.” Later in the episode, referring to things such as radical life extension and modifications of our minds and genomes, Massimo said, “I don't think these are things that one can necessarily have objections to in principle.”

There are a surprising number of people whose reaction, when they are presented with the possibility of making humanity much healthier, smarter and longer-lived, is not “That would be great,” nor “That would be great, but it's infeasible,” nor even “That would be great, but it's too risky.” Their reaction is, “That would be terrible.”