What's New by Bob Park Friday, May 1, 2009
1. IT'S STILL COLD: BUT DO I STILL THINK IT'S SCIENCE? A month before CBS aired the 60 Minutes program on cold fusion, I commented in WN that "I think it's real science." I still do. That doesn't mean I think it's good science. Science is conditional; everything is open to further examination. Some scientists think the community was too hasty in writing off the claims of cold fusion in 1989. They believe there may be important truths yet to be revealed. They have searched for those truths for 20 years and have every right to continue doing so. However, I think the likelihood of success is extremely low and, if asked, I would recommend against the use of public funds for that purpose. Their case is not helped by embracing any scientific sounding nonsense that purports to show excess energy -- which brings us to Irving Dardik. 2. SUPERWAVE: IT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING -- BUT PREDICTS NOTHING. Written as SuperWave it seems to be a registered trademark. What exactly is it? Anything you want it to be. Irving Dardik was in sports medicine, a specialty notoriously prone to alternative medicine. He treated sports injuries with rhythmic exercise, and invented a catchy name, LifeWaves. This led to an epiphany: you can explain everything by wave interference. The French mathematician Fourier, figured that out in the 18th century, but Dardik doesn't do math. Even solid matter is waves, he concluded, i.e. SuperWaves. Is this big? Louis de Broglie won a Nobel Prize for that idea in 1929, and Irving Schrodinger won the Nobel Prize in 1933 and transformed the world by putting wave theory into an equation. But Dardik doesn't do equations. Instead he hired a flack, Roger Lewin, to gush endlessly about him in a 2005 book, Making Waves, with a Forward by, uh, Michael McKubre. So the CBS “science buzz” consists of one chemist? 3. OUT OF AFRICA: PINPOINTING THE DEPARTURE POINT. The discovery in 2003 by Tim White of UC Berkeley of a 160,000 year old partial skeleton of Homo sapiens in Ethiopia was the strongest evidence yet that we did indeed come out of Africa. A young molecular anthropologist at the University of Maryland, Sarah Tishkoff, saw that the mapping of the human genome provides a new tool for tracking the out-of-Africa migration of Homo sapiens: footprints in the DNA of living humans. Now at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, Tishkoff' s team, which included linguists as well as geneticists, narrowed the origin of modern humans to the inhospitable borderland between Angola and Namibia. Their study, published yesterday in Science, took researchers into remote regions to sample the bloodline of more than 100 distinct populations. The exit point was in Northeast Africa at about the midpoint of the Red Sea. 4. SCIENCE BUDGET: THE OUTLOOK IS INTOXICATING. The President and Congress have actually been collaborating on the federal investment in science. President Obama talked of an increase of more than 3%, an almost mythic figure that has never been attained. Not surprisingly, the biggest winner was energy, slated to receive an increase of 21% over FY 2008, compared to the Bush figure of less than 1%. Even in agriculture, where science had been expected to lose about 10%, it will instead climb by more than 5%. But before you begin to hyperventilate, bear in mind that this is only an asking budget, which seems to mean less each year. With record deficits expected, these numbers are sure to drop before the first dollar is appropriated in October.
