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Petrol prices in all comparison countries were lower than British prices. The average price in the UK today is around 107-109 pence per litre. Looking abroad, petrol was cheapest in US cities (under 40 pence per litre in Dallas) and most expensive in Italy (114 pence per litre).

Standard Unleaded Petrol Prices Australia Price (Pence per Litre) Adelaide 68p Brisbane 69p Melbourne 70p Perth 63p Sydney 69p New Zealand Price (Pence per Litre) New Zealand 81p Canada Price (Pence per Litre) Calgary 51p Toronto 55p Vancouver 61p Montreal 59p United States Price (Pence per Litre) Las Vegas 42p Miami 42p Washington 42p Dallas 39p Los Angeles 46p Seattle 42p Europe Price (Pence per Litre) France 112p Spain 96p Italy 114p Greece 95p

Comment by Jason on 11 April 2010: I’m from Michigan, USA. Fuel prices here are about $3.00/gal right now. Although this is really hard to afford, because of the absence of real public transportation and the need to drive your own vehicle to work, it has recently become harder because of the downturn of the economy. If you’re planning to move to the US, be prepared for the high prices, and low wages…

perhaps the reason stem cells managed to lodge themselves so deep in the public psyche was not just because of their awesome scientific potential, or their ability to turn into the treatments of the future.

For years, stem cells dominated all other science stories in newspaper headlines because they framed an ethical conundrum – to get to the most versatile stem cells meant destroying human embryos.

Research on stem cells became a political football, leading to delays in funding for scientists, particularly in the US. Not that the work itself was straightforward – the process of extracting stem cells from embryos is difficult and there is a very limited supply of material. Inevitable disappointment followed the years of headlines – where were the promised treatments? Was it all over-hyped?

astrobiologists, working with oncologists in the US, have suggested that cancer resembles ancient forms of life that flourished between 600 million and 1 billion years ago.

Read more about what this discovery means for cancer research.

The genes that controlled the behaviour of these early multicellular organisms still reside within our own cells, managed by more recent genes that keep them in check.It's when these newer controlling genes fail that the older mechanisms take over, and the cell reverts to its earlier behaviours and grows out of control.

Today’s cell phones are, essentially, extremely sophisticated radios and, as such, emit electromagnetic waves. Much like the vast majority of radiation that surrounds us—from visible light to AM and FM radio waves—electromagnetic waves do not possess enough energy to interact directly with the tissues in our bodies in a way that can cause direct damage. “The radiation that cell phones emit is nowhere near the kind of radiation that x-ray machines, for example, emit,” says Perras. “X-rays […] have much, much shorter wavelengths. Consequently, [they] carry much more energy and thus have much more penetrating power, which is required to be able to image the interior of the human body.”

X-rays and other “hard” waves are called ionizing radiation because they can interact with the human body in a way that leads to the creation of chemical compounds called free radicals that can, in turn, be responsible for mutations and the incidence of cancer.

The focus of much of the currently-ongoing scientific research, then, is on whether the radiation emitted by cell phones is focused enough to be absorbed into the body and cause heating, which could, in the long run, damage human tissue and eventually lead to cancer.

In the past 6 months, Skeptic North has run several articles about WiFi, cell phones and the purported health effects that radio-frequency electro-magnetic fields (RF-EMF) may or may not have on the brain and body.  Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the controversy remains to be a popular story in the media, perhaps because of the ubiquitous nature of cellular technology and the popular meme of the hidden dangers of modern life.

over the news this week were reports of a new study purporting to show a link between cell phone EMF radiation and increased brain metabolism.  The study was conducted by a well-respected group of NIH researchers conducting tests at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US.  The study is available in abstract for free here, but you have to pay to have access to the full text version.  Reporters all over network news told a simplified story of the paper by Volkow et al, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and drew conclusions outside the scope of the study, inflaming an already overly effulgent debate.

 I and others have continued to insist that there is no good evidence of any effect by the microwave radiation emitted by cell phones, cell towers and other electronics on the brain and other body systems, let alone that this radiation causes cancer or other serious illnesses.  The syndrome referred to as electro-hypersensitivity remains un-proved and unfounded, but it seems like there is new evidence that shows that the normal levels of radiation emitted by a cell phone can effect neuronal cells in the brain.

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.

he “weight of evidence” approach to evaluation of causality is often vilified by cell phone and WiFi scare mongers as being an inadequate way to judge the evidence – often because it disagrees with their own sentiments about the science.  If you can’t disqualify the evidence, then you can go after the method of evaluation and disqualify that, right?  Of course, the weight of evidence approach is often portrayed as a dumbshow of putting all the “positive” trials on one side of the scale and all of the “negative” trials on the other and taking the difference in mass as the evidence.  This is how Dr. Phillips characterised it in his paper on electromagnetic fields and DNA damage, as well as his appearance on CBC Radio.  Of course, the procedure is much more like a systematic review, where all of the papers, regardless of their outcomes, are weighed for their quality. (The higher quality studies will have good internal and external validity, proper blinding and randomisation, large enough sample size, proper controls and good statistical analysis; as well as being reproduced by independent investigators.) Then they are tallied and a rational conclusion is offered as to the most likely state of the evidence (of course, it is much more involved than I am stating, but suffice it to say, it does not involve a scale.)   This is standard operating procedure and, in fact, is what we all do when we are evaluating evidence: we decide which studies are good and we pool the evidence before we make a decision.

Earlier models, Kleinberg explains, indicated the danger of what economists call information cascades. “If you have a few crucial ingredients — namely, that people are making decisions in order, that they can observe the past actions of other people but they can’t know what those people actually knew — then you have the potential for information cascades to occur, in which large groups of people abandon whatever private information they have and actually, for perfectly rational reasons, follow the crowd,”

“The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. Like the viceroy butterfly imitating the monarch, we humans are imitating the best adapted organisms in our habitat. We are learning, for instance, how to harness energy like a leaf, grow food like a prairie, build ceramics like an abalone, self-medicate like a chimp, create color like a peacock, compute like a cell, and run a business like a hickory forest.”

A more recent example of biomimetics in action is a biological laser created by two physicists at Harvard Medical School. Malte Gather and Seok Hyun Yun placed a single cell, genetically engineered to produce green fluorescent proteins originally found in jellyfish, into a cavity with two parallel mirrors on either side. When they exposed the cell to pulses of light, it emitted green fluorescent light that focused into a laser beam with the aid of the parallel mirrors. As Gather and Yun pointed out in their paper, the single-cell biological laser avoids the use of “artificial or engineered optical gain materials, such as doped crystals, semiconductors, synthetic dyes and purified gases.”

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.

Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.

On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.

LONDON - Scientific advances including techniques allowing patients to grow new joints inside their own bodies will allow the elderly to remain active well beyond their 100th birthdays, researchers claim. British scientists are working on a system which should allow the elderly to buy body parts "off the shelf" and even regenerate their own damaged joints and hearts. Their ultimate aim is to fix up the body with customised replacement parts grown to order. They have already carried out human trials on heart valves which are still working four years after they were transplanted. At the University of Leeds, Britain's biggest bioengineering unit and the world leader in artificial joint replacement research is coordinating a project that aims to give people 50 active years after the age of 50."It is the rise of the bionic pensioner," said Professor Christina Doyle, whose company is working with the university to develop the new technologies. "The idea is when something wears out, your surgeon can buy a replacement off the shelf or, more accurately, in a bag."The university is spending £50 million ($114 million) over the next five years on the new project. The main thrust of the research centres on a method of tissue and medical engineering which the university is at the forefront of developing. Led by the immunologist Professor Eileen Ingham, they are pioneering a technique of stripping the living cells from donor human and animal parts, leaving just the collagen or elastin "scaffold" of the tissue. These "biological shells", which could be for knee, ankle or hip ligaments, as well as blood vessels and heart valves, are then transplanted into the patient whose own body then invades them replacing the removed cells with their own. The technique, which could be available within five years, effectively removes the need for anti-rejection drugs. It is similar to the recently developed system of using stem cells to regrow organs outside the body, but costs about a tenth of the price.

There is a growing anti-science streak on the American right that could have tangible societal and political impacts on many fronts — including regulation of environmental and other issues and stem-cell research.

The right-wing populism that is flourishing in the current climate of economic insecurity echoes many traditional conservative themes, such as opposition to taxes, regulation and immigration. But the Tea Party and its cheerleaders, who include Limbaugh, Fox News television host Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who famously decried fruitfly research as a waste of public money), are also tapping an age-old US political impulse — a suspicion of elites and expertise.

Denialism over global warming has become a scientific cause célèbre within the movement. Limbaugh, for instance, who has told his listeners that “science has become a home for displaced socialists and communists”, has called climate-change science “the biggest scam in the history of the world”. The Tea Party's leanings encompass religious opposition to Darwinian evolution and to stem-cell and embryo research — which Beck has equated with eugenics. The movement is also averse to science-based regulation, which it sees as an excuse for intrusive government. Under the administration of George W. Bush, science in policy had already taken knocks from both neglect and ideology. Yet President Barack Obama's promise to “restore science to its rightful place” seems to have linked science to liberal politics, making it even more of a target of the right.

University of Michigan in Ann Arbor

Vipul Bhrigu, a former postdoc at the university's Comprehensive Cancer Center, wears a dark-blue three-buttoned suit and a pinched expression as he cups his pregnant wife's hand in both of his. When Pollard Hines calls Bhrigu's case to order, she has stern words for him: "I was inclined to send you to jail when I came out here this morning."

Bhrigu, over the course of several months at Michigan, had meticulously and systematically sabotaged the work of Heather Ames, a graduate student in his lab, by tampering with her experiments and poisoning her cell-culture media. Captured on hidden camera, Bhrigu confessed to university police in April and pleaded guilty to malicious destruction of personal property, a misdemeanour that apparently usually involves cars: in the spaces for make and model on the police report, the arresting officer wrote "lab research" and "cells". Bhrigu has said on multiple occasions that he was compelled by "internal pressure" and had hoped to slow down Ames's work. Speaking earlier this month, he was contrite. "It was a complete lack of moral judgement on my part," he said.

A recent editorial in the New York Times by Nicholas Wade raises some interesting points about the nature of basic science research – primarily that its’ risky.

As I have pointed out about the medical literature, researcher John Ioaniddis has explained why most published studies turn out in retrospect to be wrong. The same is true of most basic science research – and the underlying reason is the same. The world is complex, and most of our guesses about how it might work turn out to be either flat-out wrong, incomplete, or superficial. And so most of our probing and prodding of the natural world, looking for the path to the actual answer, turn out to miss the target.

research costs considerable resources of time, space, money, opportunity, and people-hours. There may also be some risk involved (such as to subjects in the clinical trial). Further, negative studies are actually valuable (more so than terrible pictures). They still teach us something about the world – they teach us what is not true. At the very least this narrows the field of possibilities. But the analogy holds in so far as the goal of scientific research is to improve our understanding of the world and to provide practical applications that make our lives better. Wade writes mostly about how we fund research, and this relates to our objectives. Most of the corporate research money is interested in the latter – practical (and profitable) applications. If this is your goal, than basic science research is a bad bet. Most investments will be losers, and for most companies this will not be offset by the big payoffs of the rare winners. So many companies will allow others to do the basic science (government, universities, start up companies) then raid the winners by using their resources to buy them out, and then bring them the final steps to a marketable application. There is nothing wrong or unethical about this. It’s a good business model.

Here’s a little piece I wrote for Nature news. To truly appreciate this stuff you need to take a look at the slideshow. There will be a great deal more on early microscopy in my next book, probably called Curiosity and scheduled for next year.

The first microscopes were a lot better than they are given credit for. That’s the claim of microscopist Brian Ford, based at Cambridge University and a specialist in the history and development of these instruments.

Ford says it is often suggested that the microscopes used by the earliest pioneers in the seventeenth century, such as Robert Hooke and Antony van Leeuwenhoek, gave only very blurred images of structures such as cells and micro-organisms. Hooke was the first to record cells, seen in thin slices of cork, while Leeuwenhoek described tiny ‘animalcules’, invisible to the naked eye, in rain water in 1676. The implication is that these breakthroughs in microscopic biology involved more than a little guesswork and invention. But Ford has looked again at the capabilities of some of Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes, and says ‘the results were breathtaking’. ‘The images were comparable with those you would obtain from a modern light microscope’, he adds in an account of his experiments in Microscopy and Analysis [1].

Google would use 57 signals – everything from where you were logging in from to what browser you were using to what you had searched for before – to make guesses about who you were and what kinds of sites you'd like. Even if you were logged out, it would customise its results, showing you the pages it predicted you were most likely to click on.

Most of us assume that when we google a term, we all see the same results – the ones that the company's famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other pages' links. But since December 2009, this is no longer true. Now you get the result that Google's algorithm suggests is best for you in particular – and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google any more.

In the spring of 2010, while the remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig were spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, I asked two friends to search for the term "BP". They're pretty similar – educated white left-leaning women who live in the north-east. But the results they saw were quite different. One saw investment information about BP. The other saw news.