I am reading David Nutt’s book Drugs – Without the Hot Air, which is excellent, although as I will get to later, my timing is not great. Incidentally, as he admits in the book, he is best known as the scientific advisor that the then Home Secretary Alan Johnson sacked a few years ago. He says a number of things in the book, but I can illustrate a key point he is making as follows. Consider two drugs: A and B. Large doses of A can kill you on the spot, it is responsible for damage to society on a huge scale, tens of thousands of deaths every year, and can be addictive. Drug B does not, even in very large doses, kill you directly, although it is harmful. It is also not addictive. If you tell you one of these in legal and the other illegal, can you guess which one is illegal?
Category Archives: Science
A molecular David slaying Goliath
At the start of this week I was at an excellent conference hosted in Cambridge’s Homerton College – the building where we had our meals is shown on the left. It was thoroughly enjoyable, and I learnt a lot. There were some superb talks. I thought the best was one by Prof David Klenerman. It was on the molecular and cell behaviour that underlies Alzheimer’s disease.
Stretching to lose weight
A number of factors contribute to whether you end up carrying some excess weight. Clearly too many cream buns, and too little exercise can contribute to you being a bit plump. But genes are also important. Some people are, due to their genes, a bit more prone to putting on weight than others.
Don’t take liquids for granted
Water is everywhere – we have been inundated with the stuff over the last few months. But maybe we should not take it for granted. In Britain water is everywhere but in the universe as whole liquids of any sort are extremely rare. And even on Earth, water is pretty much the only liquid around.
This post could save you £34.99
While watching Numb3rs on TV I was struck by an ad for Gold Collagen. It showed a woman drinking from a small plastic bottle as if this would change her life. This looked a bit weird. Gold Collagen is some sort of food supplement that contains mainly collagen. Indeed, like the webpage says: “Collagen helps the skin to preserve its firmness and elasticity.” It forms a network that holds the cells together so indeed contributes significantly to the skin’s elasticity.
Availability error and the Daily Mail
I have just started reading a classic book on how we think: Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland. It is 20 years old but has been reissued. As the title suggests it is about how we (all of us) routinely think and make decisions in a pretty dumb way. One of the most commons ways we mess up is due to what is called ‘availability error’. We make decisions based on the most immediate and striking facts available to us, the ones in the forefront of our minds. These striking facts are often unreliable and unrepresentative.
Heart of glass
For the benefit of the younger readers I should say that this is a reference to the classic Blondie song. Video is here, you can click on it and read this post while listening to a real classic. I wrote it while listening to it more-or-less on a loop.
Climate change
On Tuesday I went to one of the general evening physics run by the local group of the Institute of Physics, mainly Paul Stevenson and others on the committee. Future talks here. It was on climate change and the figure that really stood out for me in the talk is above. It is taken from the newly released physical science bit of the 5th report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Basically it shows the temperature averaged over the whole of the Earth and over a decade of time, as a function of time. I.e., the average temperature in the 1980s, in the 1990s, etc. The y-axis is in ºC and is I think the difference in temperature in a decade relative to the average temperature between 1961 and 1990.
Sex equality is a matter of chance and necessity
The two sexes must be equal. This is true in us, the cells in both men and women need the same amounts of the essential proteins that run these cells. It is also true in all other animals. These proteins are made from the genes on our chromosomes and this is called gene expression. For example muscle cells are the same in men and in women – in both their job is to exert forces – and so in both there will be an optimum amount of a protein that needs to be made from a gene.
Chance & Necessity 