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Alzheimer’s disease
Alzheimer’s disease
Possible causes of Alzheimer’s diseases
We currently don’t know the cause of all forms of Alzheimer’s disease. There may be more than one cause. But today we have increasingly strong evidence that many cases are caused by a combination of a genetic mutation and Herpes virus.
Prions
Two proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions—misshapen proteins that spread through tissue like an infection by forcing normal proteins to adopt the same misfolded shape—according to new UC San Francisco research.
Using novel laboratory tests, the researchers were able to detect and measure specific, self-propagating prion forms of the proteins amyloid beta (A-β) and tau in postmortem brain tissue of 75 Alzheimer’s patients. In a striking finding, higher levels of these prions in human brain samples were strongly associated with early-onset forms of the disease and younger age at death.
by University of California, San Francisco
Alzheimer’s disease is a ‘double-prion disorder,’ study shows
Herpes virus
Alzheimer’s: The heretical and hopeful role of infection
David Robson writes
…. The “amyloid beta hypothesis” has inspired countless trials of drugs that aimed to break up these toxic plaques. Yet this research has ended in many disappointments, without producing the desired improvements in patients’ prognosis. This has led some to wonder whether the amyloid beta hypothesis may be missing an important part of the story. “The plaques that Alzheimer observed are the manifestation of the disease, not the cause,” says geriatrics scientist Tamas Fulop at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada.
Scientists studying Alzheimer’s have also struggled to explain why some people develop the disease while others don’t. Genetic studies show that the presence of a gene variant – APOE4 – can vastly increase someone’s chances of building the amyloid plaques and developing the disease.
But the gene variant does not seal someone’s fate as many people carry APOE4 but don’t suffer from serious neurodegeneration. Some environmental factors must be necessary to set off the genetic time bomb, prompting the build-up of the toxic plaques and protein tangles.
Early evidence
Could certain microbes act as a trigger? That’s the central premise of the infection hypothesis.
Itzhaki has led the way with her examinations into the role of the herpes simplex virus (HSV1), which is most famous for causing cold sores on the skin around the mouth. Importantly, the virus is known to lie dormant for years, until times of stress or ill health, when it can become reactivated – leading to a new outbreak of the characteristic blisters.
While it had long been known that the virus could infect the brain – leading to a dangerous swelling called encephalitis that required immediate treatment – this was thought to be a very rare event. In the early 1990s, however, Itzhaki’s examinations of post-mortem tissue revealed that a surprising number of people showed signs of HSV1 in their neural tissue, without having suffered from encephalitis.
Importantly, the virus didn’t seem to be a risk for the people without the APOE4 gene variant, most of whom did not develop dementia. Nor did the presence of APOE4 make much difference to the risk of people without the infection.
Instead, it was the combination of the two that proved to be important. Overall, Itzhaki estimates that the two risk factors make it 12 times more likely that someone will develop Alzheimer’s, compared to people without the gene variant or the latent infection in their brain.
Itzhaki hypothesised that this was due to repeated reactivation of the latent virus – which, during each bout, invades the brain and somehow triggers the production of amyloid beta, until eventually, people start to show the cognitive decline that marks the onset of dementia.
Itzhaki says that her findings were met with a high degree of scepticism by other scientists. “We had the most awful trouble getting it published.” Many assumed that the experiments were somehow contaminated, she says, leading to an illusory result. Yet she had been careful to avoid this possibility, and the apparent link between HSV1 infection and Alzheimer’s disease has now been replicated in many different populations.
One paper, published earlier this year, examined cohorts from Bordeaux, Dijon, Montpellier and rural France. By tracking certain antibodies, they were able to detect who had been infected with the herpes simplex virus. The researchers found that the infection roughly tripled the risk of developing Alzheimer’s in APOE4 carriers over a seven-year follow-up period – but had no effect in people who were not carrying the gene.
“The herpes virus was only able to have a deleterious effect if there was APOE4,” says Catherine Helmer at the University of Bordeaux in France, who conducted the research.
To date, the most compelling evidence for the infection hypothesis comes from a large study in Taiwan, published in 2018, which looked at the progress of 8,362 people carrying a herpes simplex virus. Crucially, some of the participants were given antiviral drugs to treat the infection. As the infection hypothesis predicted, this reduced the risk of dementia.
Overall, those taking a long course of medication were around 90% less likely to develop dementia over the 10-year study period than the participants who had not received any treatment for their infection.
“It’s a result that is so striking, it’s hard to believe,” says Anthony Komaroff, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a senior physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who recently reviewed the current state of the research into the infection hypothesis for the Journal of the American Medical Association. Although he remains cautious about lending too much confidence to any single study, he is now convinced that the idea demands more attention. “It’s such a dramatic result that it must be taken seriously,” he says.
Komaroff knows of no theoretical objections to the theory. “I haven’t heard anyone, even world-class Alzheimer’s experts who are dubious about the infection hypothesis, give a good reason why it has to be bunkum,” he adds. We simply need more studies providing direct evidence for the link, he says, to be able to convince the sceptics.
– from Alzheimer’s: The heretical and hopeful role of infection, BBC Future, David Robson, 6th October 2021
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Alzheimer’s disease: mounting evidence that herpes virus is a cause, The Conversation US, Oct 19, 2018
Ruth Itzhaki, Professor Emeritus of Molecular Neurobiology, University of Manchester
More than 30m people worldwide suffer from Alzheimer’s disease – the most common form of dementia. Unfortunately, there is no cure, only drugs to ease the symptoms. However, my latest review, suggests a way to treat the disease. I found the strongest evidence yet that the herpes virus is a cause of Alzheimer’s, suggesting that effective and safe antiviral drugs might be able to treat the disease. We might even be able to vaccinate our children against it.
The virus implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV1), is better known for causing cold sores. It infects most people in infancy and then remains dormant in the peripheral nervous system (the part of the nervous system that isn’t the brain and the spinal cord). Occasionally, if a person is stressed, the virus becomes activated and, in some people, it causes cold sores.
We discovered in 1991 that in many elderly people HSV1 is also present in the brain. And in 1997 we showed that it confers a strong risk of Alzheimer’s disease when present in the brain of people who have a specific gene known as APOE4.
The virus can become active in the brain, perhaps repeatedly, and this probably causes cumulative damage. The likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease is 12 times greater for APOE4 carriers who have HSV1 in the brain than for those with neither factor.
Later, we and others found that HSV1 infection of cell cultures causes beta-amyloid and abnormal tau proteins to accumulate. An accumulation of these proteins in the brain is characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.
We believe that HSV1 is a major contributory factor for Alzheimer’s disease and that it enters the brains of elderly people as their immune system declines with age. It then establishes a latent (dormant) infection, from which it is reactivated by events such as stress, a reduced immune system and brain inflammation induced by infection by other microbes.
Reactivation leads to direct viral damage in infected cells and to viral-induced inflammation. We suggest that repeated activation causes cumulative damage, leading eventually to Alzheimer’s disease in people with the APOE4 gene.
Presumably, in APOE4 carriers, Alzheimer’s disease develops in the brain because of greater HSV1-induced formation of toxic products, or less repair of damage.
New treatments? The data suggest that antiviral agents might be used for treating Alzheimer’s disease. The main antiviral agents, which are safe, prevent new viruses from forming, thereby limiting viral damage.
In an earlier study, we found that the anti-herpes antiviral drug, acyclovir, blocks HSV1 DNA replication, and reduces levels of beta-amyloid and tau caused by HSV1 infection of cell cultures.
It’s important to note that all studies, including our own, only show an association between the herpes virus and Alzheimer’s – they don’t prove that the virus is an actual cause. Probably the only way to prove that a microbe is a cause of a disease is to show that an occurrence of the disease is greatly reduced either by targeting the microbe with a specific anti-microbial agent or by specific vaccination against the microbe.
Excitingly, successful prevention of Alzheimer’s disease by use of specific anti-herpes agents has now been demonstrated in a large-scale population study in Taiwan. Hopefully, information in other countries, if available, will yield similar results.
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Corroboration of a Major Role for Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 in Alzheimer’s Disease
Ruth F. Itzhaki, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Front. Aging Neurosci., 19 October 2018, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2018.00324
Strong evidence has emerged recently for the concept that herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV1) is a major risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This concept proposes that latent HSV1 in brain of carriers of the type 4 allele of the apolipoprotein E gene (APOE-ε4) is reactivated intermittently by events such as immunosuppression, peripheral infection, and inflammation, the consequent damage accumulating, and culminating eventually in the development of AD….
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How an outsider in Alzheimer’s research bucked the prevailing theory — and clawed for validation
Sharon Begley, Stat News, 10/29/2018
Robert Moir was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. The Massachusetts General Hospital neurobiologist had applied for government funding for his Alzheimer’s disease research and received wildly disparate comments from the scientists tapped to assess his proposal’s merits.
It was an “unorthodox hypothesis” that might “fill flagrant knowledge gaps,” wrote one reviewer, but another said the planned work might add little “to what is currently known.” A third complained that although Moir wanted to study whether microbes might be involved in causing Alzheimer’s, no one had proved that was the case.
As if scientists are supposed to study only what’s already known, an exasperated Moir thought when he read the reviews two years ago.
He’d just had a paper published in a leading journal, providing strong data for his idea that beta-amyloid, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, might be a response to microbes in the brain. If true, the finding would open up vastly different possibilities for therapy than the types of compounds virtually everyone else was pursuing.
But the inconsistent evaluations doomed Moir’s chances of winning the $250,000 a year for five years that he was requesting from the National Institutes of Health. While two reviewers rated his application highly, the third gave him scores in the cellar. Funding rejected.
Complaints about being denied NIH funding are as common among biomedical researchers as spilled test tubes after a Saturday night lab kegger. The budgets of NIH institutes that fund Alzheimer’s research at universities and medical centers cover only the top 18 percent or so of applications. There are more worthy studies than money.
Moir’s experience is notable, however, because it shows that, even as one potential Alzheimer’s drug after another has failed for the last 15 years (the last such drug, Namenda, was approved in 2003), researchers with fresh approaches — and sound data to back them up — have struggled to get funded and to get studies published in top journals. Many scientists in the NIH “study sections” that evaluate grant applications, and those who vet submitted papers for journals, have so bought into the prevailing view of what causes Alzheimer’s that they resist alternative explanations, critics say.
“They were the most prominent people in the field, and really good at selling their ideas,” said George Perry of the University of Texas at San Antonio and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. “Salesmanship carried the day.”
Dating to the 1980s, the amyloid hypothesis holds that the disease is caused by sticky agglomerations, or plaques, of the peptide beta-amyloid, which destroy synapses and trigger the formation of neuron-killing “tau tangles.” Eliminating plaques was supposed to reverse the disease, or at least keep it from getting inexorably worse. It hasn’t. The reason, more and more scientists suspect, is that “a lot of the old paradigms, from the most cited papers in the field going back decades, are wrong,” said MGH’s Rudolph Tanzi, a leading expert on the genetics of Alzheimer’s.
Even with the failure of amyloid orthodoxy to produce effective drugs, scientists who had other ideas saw their funding requests repeatedly denied and their papers frequently rejected. Moir is one of them.
For years in the 1990s, Moir, too, researched beta-amyloid, especially its penchant for gunking up into plaques and “a whole bunch of things all viewed as abnormal and causing disease,” he said. “The traditional view is that amyloid-beta is a freak, that it has a propensity to form fibrils that are toxic to the brain — that it’s irredeemably bad. In the 1980s, that was a reasonable assumption.”
But something had long bothered him about the “evil amyloid” dogma. The peptide is made by all vertebrates, including frogs and lizards and snakes and fish. In most species, it’s identical to humans’, suggesting that beta-amyloid evolved at least 400 million years ago. “Anything so extensively conserved over that immense span of time must play an important physiological role,” Moir said.
What, he wondered, could that be?
In 1994, Moir changed hemispheres to work as a postdoctoral fellow with Tanzi. They’d hit it off over beers at a science meeting in Amsterdam. Moir liked that Tanzi’s lab was filled with energetic young scientists — and that in cosmopolitan Boston, he could play the hyper-kinetic (and bone-crunching) sport of Australian rules football. Tanzi liked that Moir was the only person in the world who could purify large quantities of the molecule from which the brain makes amyloid.
Moir initially focused on genes that affect the risk of Alzheimer’s — Tanzi’s specialty. But Moir’s intellectual proclivities were clear even then. His mind is constantly noodling scientific puzzles, colleagues say, even during down time. Moir took a vacation in the White Mountains a decade ago with his then-6-year-old son and a family friend, an antimicrobial expert; in between hikes, Moir explained a scientific roadblock he’d hit, and the friend explained a workaround.
Moir’s inclination toward unconventional thinking took flight in 2007. He was (and still is) in the habit of spending a couple of hours Friday afternoons on what he calls “PubMed walkabouts,” casually perusing that database of biomedical papers. One summer day, a Corona in hand, he came across a paper on something called LL37. It was described as an “antimicrobial peptide” that kills viruses, fungi, and bacteria, including — maybe especially — in the brain.
What caught his eye was that LL37’s size and structure and other characteristics were so similar to beta-amyloid, the two might be twins.
Moir hightailed it to Tanzi’s office next door. Serendipitously, Tanzi (also Corona-fueled) had just received new data from his study of genes that increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Many of the genes, he saw, are involved in innate immunity, the body’s first line of defense against germs. If immune genetics affect Alzheimer’s, and if the chief suspect in Alzheimer’s (beta-amyloid) is a virtual twin of an antimicrobial peptide, maybe beta-amyloid is also an antimicrobial, Moir told Tanzi.
If so, then the plaques it forms might be the brain’s last-ditch effort to protect itself from microbes, a sort of Spider-Man silk that binds up pathogens to keep them from damaging the brain. Maybe they save the brain from pathogens in the short term only to themselves prove toxic over the long term.
Tanzi encouraged Moir to pursue that idea. “Rob was trained [by Marshall] to think out of the box,” Tanzi said. “He thinks so far out of the box he hasn’t found the box yet.”
Moir spent the next three years testing whether beta-amyloid can kill pathogens. He started simple, in test tubes and glass dishes. Those are relatively cheap, and Tanzi had enough funding to cover what Moir was doing: growing little microbial gardens in lab dishes and then trying to kill them.
Day after day, Moir and his junior colleagues played horticulturalists. They added staph and strep, the yeast candida, and the bacteria pseudomonas, enterococcus, and listeria to lab dishes filled with the nutrient medium agar. Once the microbes formed a thin layer on top, they squirted beta-amyloid onto it and hoped for an Alexander Fleming discovery-of-penicillin moment.
How an outsider in Alzheimer’s research bucked the prevailing theory — and clawed for validation. Stat News
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The science wars: postmodernism as a threat against truth and reason
The science wars was an intellectual war between scientific realists and postmodernist critics.
The debate was about whether anything that humans could learn or talk about actually has meaning – or whether all words (even for science and math) ultimately only conveyed internal biases and feelings. Thus, in this view, nothing could ever be objectively said about the world.
Misunderstanding the debate
The science wars were often misunderstood by observers. Outsiders imagined that the debate was whether the intellectual paradigms of a culture affected the way data was interpreted. After all, it is noted, the same data can cause the investigator to reach different conclusions based on their internal biases.
However, this had nothing to do with the science wars. Scientists acknowledge that all people operate within intellectual paradigms, and that this of course affects how people might interpret data.
Rather, in the science wars, deconstructionists and postmodernists went much further: Many held that science tells us nothing about the real world. Some said things such as “DNA molecules are a myth of Western culture;” “the idea that 2 + 2 = 4 is white colonialist thinking,” etc. Some in this group denied that math and science had any more existence or legitimacy than “other ways of thinking” about subjects.
Ironically, this kind of thinking was foreseen by George Orwell.
In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.
– George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Scientific realists (such as Norman Levitt, Paul R. Gross, Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal) understand and explain that scientific knowledge is real.
In contrast, many postmodernists and deconstructionists openly reject the reality and useful of science itself. Many openly reject scientific objectivity, the scientific method, Empiricism, and scientific knowledge.
Postmodernists and deconstructionists interpret Thomas Kuhn‘s ideas about scientific paradigms to mean that scientific theories are only social constructs, and not actual descriptions of reality.
Some philosophers like Paul Feyerabend argued that other, non-realist forms of knowledge production were just as valid. Therefore, for example:
a Native American thinking about nature would come up with his or her own ideas that are different from ideas in supposed “colonialist” science textbooks, and that those ideas – even when never backed by experiment – would literally be just as “true” as the ideas found by science (ideas which actually have been tested, and found to be true no matter the ethnicity of the person involved.)
a woman thinking about nature would come up with her own ideas that are different from ideas in supposed “male” science textbooks, and that those ideas – even when never backed by experiment – would literally be just as “true” as the ideas found by science (ideas which actually have been tested, and found to be true no matter the ethnicity of the person involved.)
There were attempts to bring postmodernism/deconstructionism into science back in the 1990s. There is a new attempt to do so today in the 2020s under the misleading motto “decolonize the curriculum.”
Some of these postmodernist attempts to do so at first look like a parody, but it turns out that the authors are serious.
For example, an increasing number of postmodernists claim that math itself is “colonialist.” The example shown below is becoming increasingly common.
Can you imagine what would happen if we allowed people to “decolonize” math, science, and engineering practices? Every piece of technology created by people indoctrinated with this view would be dangerous.
In the 1990’s, Scientific realists were quick to realize the danger. Large swaths of deconstructionist and postmodernist writings rejected any possibility of objectivity and realism. This not only undercut the entire idea of mathematics, and all of science, but also of philosophy and human rights.
The works of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard and others claimed to say something about reality, but realists (scientists and anyone who believed in rational thought) recognized that such postmodern writings were deliberately incomprehensible or meaningless.
Example of how postmodernists understand basic logic
Some people misunderstand (or deliberately misrepresent) images like this to promote the idea that “truth is relative.” They say things like “The object is a triangle when viewed by one person, but a square when viewed by someone else, and a circle when seen by yet another person. So reality is relative, not absolute.”
The problem of course is that their claims are not only false, they are irrational.
In this example there is an actual three dimensional object (a fact in the real world.) The geometric projection of this object contains only a small part of information about the object as a whole.
Thus, a viewer who only looks at the object from one direction only receives some of the information, and does not yet know about the rest. Yet that lack of knowledge doesn’t change the reality of what the three dimensional object actually is.
If a postmodernist concluded, “I see a circle, therefore it is a circle” and then make a mathematical model of the object as a circle or sphere, their model would have predictions which immediately turn out to be wrong. Not “wrong” from one culture’s point of view, or from one religion’s point of view, or one gender’s point of view, but actually objectively wrong in reality.
News
Related articles on this website
Why does science matter?
Relativism Truth and Reality
Science denialism
Suggested reading (articles)
Campus Craziness: A New War on Science, Skeptic Magazine, Volume 22 Number 4
Suggested reading (books)
Science Wars: The Next Generation (Science for the People)
Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, 1994
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, 1999
In 1996, Alan Sokal published an essay in the hip intellectual magazine Social Text parodying the scientific but impenetrable lingo of contemporary theorists. Here, Sokal teams up with Jean Bricmont to expose the abuse of scientific concepts in the writings of today’s most fashionable postmodern thinkers.
From Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva to Luce Irigaray and Jean Baudrillard, the authors document the errors made by some postmodernists using science to bolster their arguments and theories. Witty and closely reasoned, Fashionable Nonsense dispels the notion that scientific theories are mere “narratives” or social constructions, and explored the abilities and the limits of science to describe the conditions of existence.
Book reviews
Richard Dawkins’ review of Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.
Angiosperms and Gymnosperms
Plant life that exists on land is classified as Embryophyta.
Such life can be divided into vascular and non-vascular plants.
Land plant life can be divided into plants that produce seeds and plants that don’t produce seeds.
Seed plants create soils, forests, and food.
For most people these are the most familiar kinds of plants. (Seedless plants like mosses, liverworts, horsetail are often overlooked because of their size or appearance.)
Conifers are seed plants; they include pines, firs, yew, redwood, and many other large trees.
Other major group of seed-plants are the flowering plants, including plants whose flowers are showy, but also many plants with reduced flowers – such as the oaks, grasses, and palms.
Here we look specifically at vascular plants with seeds. They come in two families – the angiosperms and gymnosperms.
Angiosperms
These produce flowers, develop seeds in a fruit, have an endosperm within their seeds.
The most diverse group of land plants. With 416 families containing 300,000 species.
Includes all plants that we call flowers. Includes Fruits, grains, vegetables, trees, shrubs, grasses and flowers
They make up around 80 percent of all the living plant species on Earth.
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Dicots
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monocots
Angiosperm resources PBS Natureworks: Angiosperms
Gymnosperms
Gymnosperms were the first plants to have seeds.
They have naked seeds (no shells)
The seeds develop on the surface of the reproductive structures of the plants, rather than being contained in a specialized ovary.
These seeds are often found on the surface of cones and short stalks.
They do not have flowers or fruits.
They are pollinated by the wind.
Groups
Cycadophyta, the cycads, a subtropical and tropical group of plants.
Ginkgophyta, only has one living species of tree left, genus Ginkgo.
Pinophyta, the conifers, cone-bearing trees and shrubs. pines, firs, yew, redwood
Gnetophyta, woody plants in these genera – Ephedra (shrubs, vines, and a few small trees), Gnetum ( tropical evergreen trees, shrubs and woody vines.)
Examples include conifers
Gymnosperm resources
Education Portal: Gymnosperms
Study.com gymnosperms-characteristics-definition-types
Monocot versus dicot
Here we break down the angiosperm plants into monocots and dicots.
Let’s look up close at monocot and dicot seeds:
Let’s watch the two types sprout:
Grass (monocot) sprouting on left. The cotyledon remains underground and is not visible).
Compare to a dicot sprouting on the right.
{ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocotyledon }
What kinds of plants come from these different types of seeds?
Monocot plants versus dicot plants
Comparison chart
Learning Standards
Massachusetts Science and Technology/Engineering Curriculum Framework
Life Science (Biology), Grades 6–8.
Classify organisms into the currently recognized kingdoms according to characteristics that they share. Be familiar with organisms from each kingdom.
Biology, High School
5.2 Describe species as reproductively distinct groups of organisms. Recognize that species are further classified into a hierarchical taxonomic system (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) based on morphological, behavioral, and molecular similarities.
Benchmarks for Science Literacy, American Association for the Advancement of Science
Students should begin to extend their attention from external anatomy to internal structures and functions. Patterns of development may be brought in to further illustrate similarities and differences among organisms. Also, they should move from their invented classification systems to those used in modern biology… A classification system is a framework created by scientists for describing the vast diversity of organisms, indicating the degree of relatedness between organisms, and framing research questions.
Evolution and diversity: Origin of life, evidence of evolution, patterns of evolution, natural selection, speciation, classification and diversity of organisms.
Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science, National Academy Press (1998)
Biological classifications are based on how organisms are related. Organisms are classified into a hierarchy of groups and subgroups based on similarities which reflect their evolutionary relationships. Species is the most fundamental unit of classification.
Lenz’s law
Lenz’s law demonstration
Lenz’s law is named after the physicist Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz (pronounced /ˈlɛnts/) who formulated it in 1834.
The direction of the electric current induced in a conductor by a changing magnetic field is such that the magnetic field created by the induced current opposes the initial changing magnetic field.
It is a qualitative law that specifies the direction of induced current.
This law tells us nothing about the current’s magnitude.
Lenz’s law predicts the direction of many effects in electromagnetism, such as:
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the direction of voltage induced in an inductor or wire loop by a changing current
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the drag force of eddy currents exerted on moving objects in a magnetic field.
Lenz’s law is not really a law of physics on its own. It is a phenomenon which can be predicted from a more general law of physics, Faraday’s law of induction.
Faraday’s law of induction itself is a subset of the even more fundamental MAXWELL’s EQUATIONS.
Step-by-step explanation
Take a copper tube (conductive but non-magnetic.) Drop a piece of steel down through the tube.
The piece of steel will fall through, as you might expect.
It accelerates very close to the acceleration due to gravity.
Only air friction and possible rubbing against the inside of the tube prevent it from reaching the acceleration due to gravity.
Now take the same copper tube and drop a strong magnet through it
Neodymium or other rare earth magnets work the best. Now the magnet falls very slowly.
This is because the copper tube experiences a changing magnetic field from the falling magnet.
This changing magnetic field induces a current in the copper tube.
The induced current in the copper tube creates its own magnetic field ,
one that opposes the magnetic field that created it!
This lesson has been archived ScienceJoyWagon and from regentsprep.org, Oswego City School District, NY.
TBA – create link to this in Electromagnetic Induction
Boardgames, Eurogames, and Science Oh my!
Eurogames – also called designer games, or German style boards games – are all the rage. Adults play them for fun at home, with friends, and even at board game cafes.
Eurogames are different from abstract strategy games, like Chess, Go, Pente, Checkers or Othello. They are also different from typical American board games, which usually are based on conflict between players, eliminating people from a game, and have a significant degree of luck.
Eurogames are tabletop gaming experiences, with artfully designed physical components. They emphasize strategy and downplay luck. Conflict is downplayed, as these games keep all the players in until it ends.
We can even use them to teach science and history.
What subjects can we use these games for?
Biology & Ecology
Evolution, by North Star Games.
Lets you create and adapt their own species in a dynamic ecosystem with hungry predators and limited resources. Traits like Hard Shell and Horns will protect you from Carnivores, while a Long Neck will help you get food that others cannot reach. With over 12,000 different species to create, every game becomes a different adventure. So gather your friends around the table and see who will best adapt their species to eat, multiply and thrive!
Dominant species by GMT games (Evolution by natural selection)
This game recreates the encroachment of an Ice Age and what that entails for the living creatures trying to adapt to the slowly-changing Earth. Each player assumes the role of one of six major Animal groups – Mammal, Reptile, Bird, Amphibian, Arachnid or Insect. Each begins the game in a state of natural balance with regards to one another.
But that won’t last: It is indeed “survival of the fittest.” Through wily Action Pawn placement, players will strive to become Dominant on as many different Terrain tiles as possible… Players will be aided in these endeavors via Growth, Migration and Domination actions, among others. All of this eventually leads to the end game – the final ascent of the Ice Age – where the player with the most Victory Points will have his Animal crowned the Dominant Species.
Cytosis: A Cell Biology, Board Game
Players take turns placing workers on available organelles within a human cell in order to collect resources (such as Carbohydrates or ATP!) or take actions (such as purchasing Cell Component cards or translating mRNA into Proteins.)
Players use their resources to build Enzymes, Hormones, and Hormone Receptors and also to help detoxify the cell – all of which score health points. The player with the most health points at the end of the game wins!
Linkage: A DNA Card Game by Genius Games
In Linkage, each player links RNA cards side by side to build their own RNA strand, attempting to copy the shared DNA Template. Players must choose between BUILDING on their own RNA strand, REPAIRING their RNA strand, or Mutating an opposing strand. Players earn points based upon how accurately their RNA strands match the DNA template.
Peptide: A Protein Building Card Game, by Genius Games
Players make thoughtful selections from a number of openly available Organelle Cards creating an interactive open‐card‐ drafting mechanic. Selected Organelle Cards award players with either resources or actions. Each player uses their resources and actions to link Amino Acid cards side‐by‐side, in an effort to build the protein chain worth the most points!
Ecology and Environment
Planet, by blue orange
A world is taking shape in the palm of your hands. Take on the role of super beings and compete to create perfect worlds with the ideal conditions for wildlife to flourish. In this very unique game, each player’s board is a 12-sided 3-dimensional planet core.
Throughout 12 turns, select landscape tiles representing oceans, deserts, mountains or frozen lands, and arrange them on your planet to create the best ecosystems. Win Animal Cards while fulfilling your own ‘’Natural Habitat’’ objective and create the most populated planet in the universe.
Photosynthesis, by blue orange
“Take your trees through their life-cycle, from seedling to full bloom to rebirth, and earn points as their leaves collect energy from the revolving sun’s rays. Carefully pick where you sow and when you grow, as trees in the shadows are blocked from light, and from points.”
Evolution: Climate (Stand-Alone)
North Star Games
Evolution: climate takes the evolution to the next level by introducing an ever-changing and often unforgiving climate into the mix. Give your species a long neck to get food that no one else can reach, evolve a coat of heavy fur for protection against the bitter ice age, or feed at night with nocturnal to avoid the heat of the cruel desert sun. With amazing new traits, extraordinary new challenges, and over 200,000 ways to adapt your species, evolution: climate is the most diverse, strategic, and rewarding evolution version yet.
Biology: Diseases, Viruses
Pathogenesis, by WIBAI Games
Pathogenesis is a deck building game in which players take the role of bacterial pathogens attacking the human body. The game was developed in partnership with scientific illustrator somersault1824. Based on real science and the mechanics were created to mimic how real biology works.
Pandemic, by Z-Man Games
Four diseases have broken out in the world and it is up to a team of specialists in various fields to find cures for these diseases before mankind is wiped out. Players must work together playing to their characters’ strengths and planning their strategy of eradication before the diseases overwhelm the world with ever-increasing outbreaks.
For example the Operation Specialist can build research stations which are needed to find cures for the diseases. The Scientist needs only 4 cards of a particular disease to cure it instead of the normal 5. But the diseases are out breaking fast and time is running out: the team must try to stem the tide of infection in diseased areas while also towards cures. A truly cooperative game where you all win or you all lose.
Plague, Inc.
A strategic game of infection, evolution and extinction for 1-4 players lasting 60-90 minutes. Each person takes on the role of a deadly disease competing against their friends in a battle to be the first to infect and wipe out the world!
Virulence An Infectious Card Game
by Genius Games
Learn about viruses from a science game! Play as a virus to take over the host cell and collect helicals, icosahedrals, genomes, spherical envelopes just like in biology class.
Physics
Antimatter matters
An elbowfish game. Teaches modern physics
Explore the strange and wonderful world of quantum physics, where a handful of tiny particles interact to form the atoms that make up ourselves and everything we experience in the world around us. As the lead scientist on an orbiting space laboratory, you are in charge of humanity’s first attempt to construct ordinary matter from individually captured elementary particles.
Encounter hazards like quantum entanglement, antimatter collisions and solar flares messing up your instruments, while facing the actions of other player-scientists racing toward the same goal. Will you be the first to collect the right particles and successfully build an atom? The game balances strategic choices with interactions with other players and the unpredictable nature of the universe. Simple rules-10 minutes to learn.
Visual design uses double-coding to make it accessible to gamers with color-blindness and to those with limited vision or fine-motor skill.
Tesla vs. Edison, by Artana
You control a start-up company in the early days of the U.S. electric industry. In the beginning you only have your lead inventor, some shares of preferred stock, and some money. Over the course of the game you will be hiring other famous technicians and business people to work for you. Each luminary or inventor has their own special abilities.
There are four focuses in the game: claiming electric projects on the map, advancing up a tech tree, investing in public relations to improve public opinion of your company or the technologies it uses, and buying and selling stock on a dynamic market.
Physics Laws: Discovering STEM – Inertia, Friction, Circular Motion and Energy Conservation Building Set
Laser Maze, by Thinkfun
Board games for physics classroom from Boardgamegeek.com
Games listed on educationaltoolsportal
Chemistry
Chemistry Fluxx (Looney Labs)
Learn how elements combine and interact as you try to match the current goal and win. Students and adults can both play and remain competitive. Elements are listed with their Atomic number and their bohr Atomic model, and are color coded by Type: alkaline earth metals, transition metals, noble gases, etc.
Covalence: A Molecule Building Game, by Genius Games
In covalence, players work together to accurately build a number of secret Organic molecules. One player has knowledge of the molecules, while all other players must deduce what these secret molecules are, based upon a limited number of clues given to them by the knower.
Compounded, by Greater Than Games
Compounded is a game about building chemical compounds through careful management of elements, a fair bit of social play and trading, and just a bit ok luck. In Compounded, players take on the roles of lab managers, hastily competing to complete the most compounds before they are completed by others – or destroyed in an explosion.
Ion: A Compound Building Card Game
Genius Games
players select from a number of available ions and noble gases, with the goal of forming neutrally charged compounds or sets of noble gases. Players score additional points for creating compounds found on the goal cards each round.
Valence Plus
by Science Ninjas
Build elite teams out of elements from the periodic table to find molecules and win the game! But be careful – opponents might attack you with acid squads, reducing your bases to worthless salt and water! It’s all here – molecule formation, acids and bases, chemical reactions, even advanced concepts like secondary oxidation states.
Engineering
Gizmos, by CMON
Players look to create the most magnificent of machines, taking on the role of inventors at the Great Science Fair. By utilizing four different types of energy marbles, taken from the innovative 3D marble dispenser, they will purchase and construct new additions to their Gizmos. The best Gizmos will be able to chain-reaction off of new additions as they’re made, giving players multiple results from taking a single action.
Engino Discovering STEM Mechanics Gears & Worm Drives
Discover how gears can reduce or increase speed and learn how Worm drives are used to change rotational speed. Build 12 working models such as a helicopter, vise, hand drill, scissor lift, and more.
Polydron Engineer, hand2mind
Students build and explore various shapes, enabling them to see links between mathematics, design, and technology. Construct realistic models that demonstrate engineering principals and the workings of simple machines. Comes with triangles, squares, rectangles, gears, work cards, lesson plans, and more.
History of science & the scientific method
Progress: Evolution of Technology, NSKN Games.
Each player takes his civilization from early antiquity and learns various technologies, moving progressively to the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution, and Modern Times and ending with today’s Internet or Social Welfare.
The 210 technology cards in the game are divided into three ages (Ancient, Middle Ages, Industrial) and three types (Military, Science and Culture). With every advancement on a path, you gain easier access to its more advanced technologies and you’ll end up opening the door to the next age.
The New Science, Conquistador games
In The New Science you play as Isaac Newton, Galileo or one of three other great minds from the scientific revolution in 17th century Europe. You are in a tense intellectual race with your opponents, attempting to publish your remarkable scientific discoveries first in order to gain prestige, be seen as the finest mind of your era, and consequently be appointed the first President of the Royal Society.
You achieve this by first researching, then experimenting on, and finally publishing new discoveries. But you need to carefully decide what and when to publish: while the only way to win is publishing to gain prestige, all other scientists will read your books and gain the same knowledge, costing you a key advantage. A fast-playing worker placement and area control game for 2-5 players.
Astronomy & Space
Xtronaut: The Game of Solar System Exploration
by Xtronaut Enterprises
Captures the real-world science, technology, and challenges of planetary exploration. Easy to learn, gives 2 – 4 players ages 7 and up the chance to develop space missions, build authentic rocket systems, and explore the solar system. Designed by NASA scientists. Exposes players to space science concepts related to planning and undertaking a real space mission.
Terraforming Mars Board Game, by Stronghold Games
In the 2400s, mankind begins to terraform the planet Mars. Giant corporations, sponsored by the World Government on Earth, initiate huge projects to raise the temperature, the oxygen level, and the ocean coverage until the environment is habitable. As terraforming progresses, more and more people will immigrate from Earth to live on the Red Planet. Experience ‘Science Future’ as you compete to be the most successful corporation on Mars.
Mad Science
SPECTRE: The Board Game from Modiphius Entertainment
Compete to become Number 1 of the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion (SPECTRE)
Are you simply in the game to acquire gold bullion, or are your aspirations more philosophical, safe in the knowledge that the world would be better off with you running it
Implementation
Most students need an entire class period of playing the game in order to fully grasp the concepts and strategy. Using games would thus be most productive if they were scheduled as part of the curriculum, with several sequential days set aside for playing the game/class experience.
Learning standards
Facts and Fiction of the Schumann Resonance
This has been excerpted from Facts and Fiction of the Schumann Resonance,by Brian Dunning, Skeptoid Podcast #352
It’s increasingly hard to find a web page dedicated to the sales of alternative medicine products or New Age spirituality that does not cite the Schumann resonances as proof that some product or service is rooted in science. … Today we’re going to see what the Schumann resonances actually are, how they formed and what they do, and see if we can determine whether they are, in fact, related to human health.
In physics, Schumann resonances are the name given to the resonant frequency of the Earth’s atmosphere, between the surface and the densest part of the ionosphere.
Image from nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/gallery
They’re named for the German physicist Winfried Otto Schumann (1888-1974) who worked briefly in the United States after WWII, and predicted that the Earth’s atmosphere would resonate certain electromagnetic frequencies.
[What is a resonant frequency? Here is a common example. When you blow on a glass bottle at a certain frequency, you can get the bottle to vibrate at the same frequency]
from acs.psu.edu/drussell/Demos/BeerBottle/beerbottle.html
This glass bottle has a resonant frequency of about 196 Hz.
That’s the frequency of sound waves that most efficiently bounce back and forth between the sides of the bottle, at the speed of sound, propagating via the air molecules.
Electromagnetic radiation – like light, and radio waves – is similar, except the waves travel at the speed of light, and do not require a medium like air molecules.
The speed of light is a lot faster than the speed of sound, but the electromagnetic waves have a lot further to go between the ground and the ionosphere than do the sound waves between the sides of the bottle.
This atmospheric electromagnetic resonant frequency is 7.83 Hz, which is near the bottom of the ELF frequency range, or Extremely Low Frequency.
The atmosphere has its own radio equivalent of someone blowing across the top of the bottle: lightning.
Lightning is constantly flashing all around the world, many times per second; and each bolt is a radio source. This means our atmosphere is continuously resonating with a radio frequency of 7.83 Hz, along with progressively weaker harmonics at 14.3, 20.8, 27.3 and 33.8 Hz.
These are the Schumann resonances.
It’s nothing to do with the Earth itself, or with life, or with any spiritual phenomenon;
it’s merely an artifact of the physical dimensions of the space between the surface of the Earth and the ionosphere.
Every planet and moon that has an ionosphere has its own set of Schumann resonances defined by the planet’s size.
Biggest point: this resonated radio from lightning is a vanishingly small component of the electromagnetic spectrum to which we’re all naturally exposed.
The overwhelming source is the sun, blasting the Earth with infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet radiation.
All natural sources from outer space, and even radioactive decay of naturally occurring elements on Earth, produce wide-spectrum radio noise. Those resonating in the Schumann cavity are only a tiny, tiny part of the spectrum.
Nevertheless, because the Schumann resonance frequencies are defined by the dimensions of the Earth, many New Age proponents and alternative medicine advocates have come to regard 7.83 Hz as some sort of Mother Earth frequency, asserting the belief that it’s related to life on Earth.
The most pervasive of all the popular fictions surrounding the Schumann resonance is that it is correlated with the health of the human body.
There are a huge number of products and services sold to enhance health or mood, citing the Schumann resonance as the foundational science.
A notable example is the Power Balance bracelets. Tom O’Dowd, formerly the Australian distributor, said that the mylar hologram resonated at 7.83 Hz.
When the bracelet was placed within the body’s natural energy field, the resonance would [supposedly] “reset” your energy field to that frequency.
Well, there were a lot of problems with that claim.
First of all, 7.83 Hz has a wavelength of about 38,000 kilometers. This is about the circumference of the Earth, which is why its atmospheric cavity resonates at that frequency. 38,000 kilometers is WAY bigger than a bracelet!
There’s no way that something that tiny could resonate such an enormous wavelength. O’Dowd’s sales pitch was implausible, by a factor of billions, to anyone who understood resonance.
This same fact also applies to the human body. Human beings are so small, relative to a radio wavelength of 38,000 kilometers, that there’s no way our anatomy could detect or interact with such a radio signal in any way.
Proponents of binaural beats cite the Schumann frequency as well. These are audio recordings which combine two slightly offset frequencies to produce a third phantom beat frequency that is perceived from the interference of the two.
Some claim to change your brain’s encephalogram, which they say is a beneficial thing to do. Brain waves range from near zero up to about 100 Hz during normal activity, with a typical reading near the lower end of the scale.
This happens to overlap 7.83 — suggesting the aforementioned pseudoscientific connection between humans and the Schumann resonance — but with a critical difference. An audio recording is audio, not radio. It’s the physical oscillation of air molecules, not the propagation of electromagnetic waves. The two have virtually nothing to do with each other.
[Other salespeople claim] that our bodies’ energy fields need to interact with the Schumann resonance, but can’t because of all the interference from modern society [and so they try to sell devices that supposedly connect our body to the Schumann resonance.]
It’s all complete and utter nonsense. Human bodies do not have an energy field: in fact there’s not even any such thing as an energy field. Fields are constructs in which some direction or intensity is measured at every point: gravity, wind, magnetism, some expression of energy.
Energy is just a measurement; it doesn’t exist on its own as a cloud or a field or some other entity. The notion that frequencies can interact with the body’s energy field is, as the saying goes, so wrong it’s not even wrong.
Another really common New Age misconception about the Schumann resonance is that it is the resonant frequency of the Earth. But there’s no reason to expect the Earth’s electromagnetic resonant frequency to bear any similarity to the Schumann resonance.
Furthermore, the Earth probably doesn’t even have a resonant electromagnetic frequency. Each of the Earth’s many layers is a very poor conductor of radio; combined all together, the Earth easily absorbs just about every frequency it’s exposed to. If you’ve ever noticed that your car radio cuts out when you drive through a tunnel, you’ve seen an example of this.
Now the Earth does, of course, conduct low-frequency waves of other types. Earthquakes are the prime example of this. The Earth’s various layers propagate seismic waves differently, but all quite well. Seismic waves are shockwaves, a physical oscillation of the medium. Like audio waves, these are unrelated to electromagnetic radio waves.
Each and every major structure within the Earth — such as a mass of rock within a continent, a particular layer of magma, etc. — does have its own resonant frequency for seismic shockwaves, but there is (definitively) no resonant electromagnetic frequency for the Earth as a whole.
So our major point today is that you should be very skeptical of any product that uses the Schumann resonance as part of a sales pitch.
The Earth does not have any particular frequency. Life on Earth is neither dependent upon, nor enhanced by, any specific frequency.
Source: skeptoid.com/episodes/4352
Scientists argue that addiction is not a disease
Addiction is not a disease
A neuroscientist argues that it’s time to change our minds on the roots of substance abuse, Laura Miller, for Salon. 6/27/15
A psychologist and former addict insists that the illness model for addiction is wrong, and dangerously so.
The mystery of addiction — what it is, what causes it and how to end it — threads through most of our lives. Experts estimate that one in 10 Americans is dependent on alcohol and other drugs, and if we concede that behaviors like gambling, overeating and playing video games can be addictive in similar ways, it’s likely that everyone has a relative or friend who’s hooked on some form of fun to a destructive degree. But what exactly is wrong with them? For several decades now, it’s been a commonplace to say that addicts have a disease. However, the very same scientists who once seemed to back up that claim have begun tearing it down.
Once, addictions were viewed as failures of character and morals, and society responded to drunks and junkies with shaming, scolding and calls for more “will power.” This proved spectacularly ineffective, although, truth be told, most addicts do quit without any form of treatment. Nevertheless, many do not, and in the mid-20th century, the recovery movement, centered around the 12-Step method developed by the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, became a godsend for those unable to quit drinking or drugging on their own. The approach spread to so-called “behavioral addictions,” like gambling or sex, activities that don’t even involve the ingestion of any kind of mind-altering substance.
Much of the potency of AA comes from its acknowledgement that willpower isn’t enough to beat this devil and that blame, rather than whipping the blamed person into shape, is counterproductive. The first Step requires admitting one’s helplessness in the face of addiction….
…. Another factor promoting the disease model is that it has ushered addiction under the aegis of the healthcare industry, whether in the form of an illness whose treatment can be charged to an insurance company or as the focus of profit-making rehab centers.
….The recovery movement and rehab industry (two separate things, although the latter often employs the techniques of the former) have always had their critics, but lately some of the most vocal have been the neuroscientists whose findings once lent them credibility.
One of those neuroscientists is Marc Lewis, a psychologist and former addict himself, also the author of a new book “The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease.”
Lewis’s argument is actually fairly simple: The disease theory, and the science sometimes used to support it, fail to take into account the plasticity of the human brain. Of course, “the brain changes with addiction,” he writes. “But the way it changes has to do with learning and development — not disease.” All significant and repeated experiences change the brain; adaptability and habit are the brain’s secret weapons. The changes wrought by addiction are not, however, permanent, and while they are dangerous, they’re not abnormal.
Through a combination of a difficult emotional history, bad luck and the ordinary operations of the brain itself, an addict is someone whose brain has been transformed, but also someone who can be pushed further along the road toward healthy development. (Lewis doesn’t like the term “recovery” because it implies a return to the addict’s state before the addiction took hold.)
“The Biology of Desire” is grouped around several case studies, each one illustrating a unique path to dependency. A striving Australian entrepreneur becomes caught up in the “clarity, power and potential” he feels after smoking meth, along with his ability to work long hours while on the drug. A social worker who behaves selflessly in her job and marriage constructs a defiant, selfish, secret life around stealing and swallowing prescription opiates. A shy Irishman who started drinking as a way to relax in social situations slowly comes to see social situations as an occasion to drink and then drinking as a reason to hole up in his apartment for days on end.
Each of these people, Lewis argues, had a particular “emotional wound” the substance helped them handle, but once they started using it, the habit itself eventually became self-perpetuating and in most cases ultimately served to deepen the wound.
Each case study focuses on a different part of the brain involved in addiction and illustrates how the function of each part — desire, emotion, impulse, automatic behavior — becomes shackled to a single goal: consuming the addictive substance. The brain is built to learn and change, Lewis points out, but it’s also built to form pathways for repetitive behavior, everything from brushing your teeth to stomping on the brake pedal, so that you don’t have to think about everything you do consciously. The brain is self-organizing. Those are all good properties, but addiction shanghais them for a bad cause.
As Lewis sees it, addiction really is habit; we just don’t appreciate how deeply habit can be engraved on the brain itself. “Repeated (motivating) experience” — i.e., the sensation of having one’s worries wafted away by the bliss of heroin — “produce brain changes that define future experiences… So getting drunk a lot will sculpt the synapses that determine future drinking patterns.”
More and more experiences and activities get looped into the addiction experience and trigger cravings and expectations like the bells that made Pavlov’s dogs salivate, from the walk home past a favorite bar to the rituals of shooting up. The world becomes a host of signs all pointing you in the same direction and activating powerful unconscious urges to follow them. At a certain point, the addictive behavior becomes compulsive, seemingly as irresistibly automatic as a reflex. You may not even want the drug anymore, but you’ve forgotten how to do anything else besides seek it out and take it.
Yet all of the addicts Lewis interviewed for “The Biology of Desire” are sober now, some through tried-and-true 12-Step programs, others through self-designed regimens, like the heroin addict who taught herself how to meditate in prison. Perhaps it’s no surprise that a psychologist would argue for some form of talk therapy addressing the underlying emotional motivations for turning to drugs. But Lewis is far from the only expert to voice this opinion, or to recommend cognitive behavioral therapy as a way to reshape the brain and redirect its systems into less self-destructive patterns.
Without a doubt, AA and similar programs have helped a lot of people. But they’ve also failed others. One size does not fit all, and there’s a growing body of evidence that empowering addicts, rather than insisting that they embrace their powerlessness and the impossibility of ever fully shedding their addiction, can be a road to health as well.
If addiction is a form of learning gone tragically wrong, it is also possible that it can be unlearned, that the brain’s native changeability can be set back on track. “Addicts aren’t diseased,” Lewis writes, “and they don’t need medical intervention in order to change their lives. What they need is sensitive, intelligent social scaffolding to hold the pieces of their imagined future in place — while they reach toward it.”
Further reading
The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous
Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments more effective. By Gabrielle Glaser, The Atlantic 4/2015 The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous, The Atlantic
The Surprising Failures of 12 Steps
How a pseudoscientific, religious organization birthed the most trusted method of addiction treatment. By Jake Flanagan 3/25/2014
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/the-surprising-failures-of-12-steps/284616/
Why the Disease Definition of Addiction Does Far More Harm Than Good.
Among other problems, it has obstructed other channels of investigation, including the social, psychological and societal roots of addiction. By Marc Lewis on February 9, 2018
…Viewing addiction as pathology has other, more direct detriments. If you feel that your addiction results from an underlying pathology, as implied by the brain disease model, and if that pathology is chronic, as highlighted by both NIDA and the 12-step movement, then you are less likely to believe that you will ever be free of it or that recovery can result from your own efforts. This characterization of addiction flies in the face of research indicating that a great majority of those addicted to any substance or behavior do in fact recover, and most of those who recover do so without professional care.
Why the Disease Definition of Addiction Does Far More Harm Than Good. Scientific American.
Addiction and the Brain: Development, Not Disease
By Mark Lewis, Neuroethics, April 2017, Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 7–18
I review the brain disease model of addiction promoted by medical, scientific, and clinical authorities in the US and elsewhere. I then show that the disease model is flawed because brain changes in addiction are similar to those generally observed when recurrent, highly motivated goal seeking results in the development of deep habits, Pavlovian learning, and prefrontal disengagement. This analysis relies on concepts of self-organization, neuroplasticity, personality development, and delay discounting. It also highlights neural and behavioral parallels between substance addictions, behavioral addictions, normative compulsive behaviors, and falling in love. I note that the short duration of addictive rewards leads to negative emotions that accelerate the learning cycle, but cortical reconfiguration in recovery should also inform our understanding of addiction. I end by showing that the ethos of the disease model makes it difficult to reconcile with a developmental-learning orientation.
Addiction and the Brain: Development, Not Disease. Neuroethics (journal)
The chronic disease concept of addiction: Helpful or harmful?
Thomas K. Wiens & Lawrence J. Walker. Addiction Research & Theory, Volume 23, 2015 – Issue 4
This study provides empirical support to the notion that framing addiction within a biological conceptualisation, as opposed to a psychological and social framework, weakens perceptions of agency in relation to drinking. Likewise, no evidence was found to support the common assertion that the disease model reduces feelings of stigma and shame.
The chronic disease concept of addiction: Helpful or harmful?
Probability and predictors of remission from lifetime nicotine, alcohol, cannabis, or cocaine dependence
Results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions
By Catalina Lopez-Quintero, M.D., M.P.H., Deborah S. Hasin, Ph.D., […], and Carlos Blanco, M.D., Ph.D. Addiction. 2011 Mar; 106(3): 657–669.
Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It: Why Is This Widely Denied?
By Maia Szalavitz, Addictionblog.org 6/22/2015
The idea that addiction is typically a chronic, progressive disease that requires treatment is false, the evidence shows. Yet the “aging out” experience of the majority is ignored by treatment providers and journalists.
Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It: Why Is This Widely Denied?
Most of Us Still Don’t Get It: Addiction Is a Learning Disorder
By Maia Szalavitz
Addiction is not about our brains being “hijacked” by drugs or experiences—it’s about learned patterns of behavior. Our inability to understand this leads to no end of absurdities.
Most of Us Still Don’t Get It: Addiction Is a Learning Disorder
5 Addiction Myths. A book review of Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction. Laurel Sindewald, Handshake Media, 6/20/2016
Learned behavior model also explains wide array human behaviors, including political anger
Author David Brin writes
“For years I’ve followed advances that investigate reinforcement processes in the human brain, especially those involving dopamine and other messenger chemicals that are active in mediating pleasure response. One might call this topic chemically-mediated states of arousal that self-reinforce patterns of behavior.
Of course, what this boils down to — at one level — is addiction. But not only in the sense of illegal drug abuse. In very general terms, “addiction” may include desirable things, like bonding with our children and “getting high on life.” These good patterns share with drug addiction the property of being reinforced by repeated chemical stimulus, inside the brain…
Consider studies of gambling. Researchers led by Dr. Hans Breiter of Massachusetts General Hospital examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which brain regions activate when volunteers won games of chance — regions that overlapped with those responding to cocaine!…
Moving along the spectrum toward activity that we consider more “normal” — neuroscientists at Harvard have found a striking similarity between the brain-states of people trying to predict financial rewards (e.g., via the stock market) and the brains of cocaine and morphine users.
… researchers at Emory University monitored brain activity while asking staunch party members, from both left and right, to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. “We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, Emory’s director of clinical psychology. “Instead, a network of emotion circuits lit up… reaching biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted. Significantly, activity spiked in circuits involved in reward, similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix,” Westen explained.
Addicted to Self-Righteousness? An Open Letter to Researchers In the Fields of Addiction, Brain Chemistry, and Social Psychology
Indignation, addiction and hope — does it help to be “mad as hell?”: David Brin at TEDxUCSD
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Organelles in depth
Cell membrane
Made of 2 layers of lipids (fats); aka lipid bilayer.
We sometimes see simplified 2D drawings of this.
This drawing shows a small section of the lipid bilayer: 2 layers of lipids and some proteins floating in these lipids.
Cell membrane lipid bilayer Regents diagram http://www.hobart.k12.in.us/jkousen/Biology/cell.htm#plcell_dia_ans
A more accurate visualization would be to show this in three dimensions:
We sometimes see simplified 2D drawings of this. This drawing shows a small section of the lipid bilayer: 2 layers of lipids and some proteins floating in these lipids.
Cell membrane lipid bilayer Regents diagram http://www.hobart.k12.in.us/jkousen/Biology/cell.htm#plcell_dia_ans
Cytoplasm
A thick viscous liquid filling the cell.
All the organelles float in it.
Filled with millions of enzymes, dissolved salt ions, and other chemicals.
Here is a (false color) visualization of proteins floating in a cell’s cytoplasm. Densely packed!
Nucleus
The command-and-control center of the cell.
Chromosomes (made of DNA) are stored in here. In this animation we see DNA in the nucleus, and a copy of it (RNA) leaving the nucleus and going out into the rest of the cell.
Here we see a more realistic image of the nucleus (lower left); we see mRNA copies of DNA coming out of the nucleus through nuclear pores.
Nucleus to ribosomes to ER GIF from NPR: Protein synthesis
Chromosomes
If we magnify a cell we see chunks floating in the nucleus called chromosomes. They are made of a chemical called DNA.
Here we see a cell nucleus being lysed (broken open) and all the chromosomes are spilling out on the right.
The color was added by hand to make it easier to tell them apart. We cut-and-paste each of the chromosomes, number them, and line them up (lower left.)
In humans we find 23 pairs of chromosomes in every cell.
These X shaped chromosomes are not solid; they are like objects made of wound-up yarn.
A chromosome could be unwound into a long, thing string.
This string is made of DNA molecules.
Each section of the chromosome has difference sequences of DNA.
A complete sequence of DNA is called a gene; it is an instruction on how to build a protein.
Mitochondrion
Plural is mitochondria.
Converts energy from food molecules into a form usable by the cell.
Jay Swan http://www.slideshare.net/jayswan http://www.slideshare.net/jayswan/honors-biology-cellular-respiration
and
Jay Swan http://www.slideshare.net/jayswan http://www.slideshare.net/jayswan/honors-biology-cellular-respiration
Ribosomes
Little organic machines that take in amino acids (from our food) and turn them into proteins.
They are very tiny compared to the size of a cell – often seen as mere dots.
Here we see the ribosomes picking up RNA, and using that instruction to build a protein.
Nucleus to ribosomes to ER GIF from NPR: Protein synthesis
Ribosomes struck on an organelle
On the right we can just barely see the ribosomes as small dots stuck to the ER (endoplasmic reticulum.)
On the left we see the ER magnified.
The ribosomes are a bit clearer here (although we still don’t see their details.)
When the ER is covered with ribosomes we call it the “rough ER.”
Darryl Leja, NHGRI Rough endoplasmic reticulum and ribosomes
Other ribosomes float freely in the cytoplasm.
Here we see mRNA copies of DNA coming out of a cell nucleus, and moving to a ribosome floating nearby.
Here’s how we remember this:
ER (endoplasmic reticulum)
This manufactures lipids and proteins.
Like an assembly line which makes our products.
Next, molecules from the ER are packaged into vesicles, and transported to the Golgi apparatus.
Golgi body
This organelle packages proteins into vesicles, tags them with an “address” and send them to their destination.
another image will be here:
Details of Golgi bodies function and organization
From The Cell: A Molecular Approach, 5th ed. Cooper & Hausman. 2009
The Endomembrane system
Here we see the while system, from products leaving the nucleus, going to the ER, then to the Golgi, and then secreted as a vesicle.
In this case the products are going out to the cell membrane (“plasma membrane.)
From Biotech Review YouTube channel.
More details: The endomembrane system is composed of the different membranes that are suspended in the cytoplasm within a eukaryotic cell.
Endomembrane system by Mariana Ruiz Villarreal, LadyofHats
Cytoskeleton
These thin protein tubes give the cell its shape and mechanical resistance to deformation.
With the right stains, one can take a beautiful photo of the cytoskeleton.
Lysosome
Contain enzymes that can break down virtually all kinds of biomolecules. Garbage disposal.
Vacuoles
A lipid bag that can store organic molecules.
Chloroplasts
In this movie of plant cells, we some small, green discs moving around: these are chloroplasts.
They contain a light-absorbing pigment (colored molecule), chlorophyll.
This molecules captures the energy from some wavelengths of light.
The plant cell stores this energy in chemical bonds. The plant builds ATP and sugar molecules which store this energy.
In this image we see some chloroplasts floating within a plant cell.
Here we see a single chloroplast, vastly magnified with a TEM (transmission electron microscope.)
We see that there is quite a bit of detail within them.
Cell wall
Note that animal cells don’t have this organelle. Only plants and bacteria have it.
Made of cellulose – a special sugar used to provide structure, and not used for energy.
If the cell membrane is like a balloon, then the cell wall is like a cardboard box around the balloon, protecting it.
Gives strength and support. Allows plants like bamboo and trees to grow tall.
Here we see a typical boxy shaped plant cell, clearly showing the cell wall (green) and the lipid bilayer (yellow, aka plasma membrane.)
Plant cell has a wall adapaproject
Large central vacuole
A membrane that stores watery bags of food or waste molecules.
How do we know what these organelles really look like?
Visualizing cells and organelles in 3D
Sample questions
Feb 2016 MCAS: Which of the following types of organisms have cell walls composed of cellulose?
A. amoebas B. birds C. grasses D. worms
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Feb 2016 MCAS. Antibiotics are medicines used to treat bacterial infections in humans. Some antibiotics work by interfering with the bacteria’s ribosomes. Other antibiotics work by interfering with the bacteria’s plasma membrane.
a. Describe the function of the ribosomes and explain why interfering with the ribosomes would kill the bacteria.
b. Describe the function of the plasma membrane and explain why interfering with the plasma membrane [lipid bilayer] would kill the bacteria.
Medicines called antifungals are used to treat infections caused by fungi. One way antifungals work is by targeting cell parts that are present in fungal cells but not in human cells.
c. Identify one cell part other than a ribosome or a plasma membrane that human cells and fungal cells have in common.
d. Describe what would happen to a human cell if the cell part you identified in part (c) were affected by an antifungal. Explain your answer based on the function of the cell part.
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External resources
Can we stop a hurricane
Can we stop a hurricane? Sounds like something out of science fiction, a proposal fitting of mad scientists, right?
Remember Hurricane Katrina? August 2005. It was a destructive Category 5 Atlantic hurricane that caused over 1,800 fatalities and $125 billion in damage. Damaged the are of and around the city of New Orleans. What if there had been a way to shift its course, or reduce its intensity?
In Hurricane Forcing: Can Tropical Cyclones Be Stopped? by Christopher Mims, Scientific American, October 23, 2009, we read
This past June, a plan to reduce the severity and frequency of hurricanes leaked to the public in the form of a patent application under Bill Gates’s name (along with many others), resuscitating speculation about a scheme that has been proposed off and on since the 1960s. The core of the idea remains the same: mixing the warm surface waters that fuel tropical cyclones with cooler waters below to drain storms of their energy. But now Stephen Salter an emeritus professor of engineering design at the University of Edinburgh proposes a new—and possibly more realistic—method of mixing.
Salter has outlined in an engineering paper the design for a floating structure 100 meters in diameter—basically a circular raft of lashed-together used tires (to reduce cost). It would support a thin plastic tube 100 meters in diameter and 200 meters in length.
When deployed in the open ocean, the tube would hang vertically, descending through the warm, well-mixed upper reaches of the ocean and terminating in a deeper part of the water column known as the thermocline, where water temperatures drop precipitously.
The point of this design is to transfer warm surface water into the deeper, cooler reaches of the ocean, mixing the two together and, hopefully, cooling the sea surface. Salter’s design is relatively simple, using a minimum of material in order to make the construction of each of his devices cheap (millions of used tires are thrown away each year, worldwide); his scheme would also require the deployment of hundreds of these devices.
Using horizontal wave action at the ocean surface, passive no-return valves would capture energy by closing after a wave has passed through them, allowing the circular interior of each device to raise the level of the seawater within the device by, on average, 20 centimeters. The weight of the gathered warm water would thereby create downward pressure, pushing it down the tube.
The idea is that hundreds of these floating wave-powered seawater pumps would be deployed year-round in areas, such as the eastern tropical Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, where hurricanes typically spawn or grow in intensity. (The devices would not, as widely speculated, be deployed only in the path of a hurricane that already formed.) …
In Can Science Halt Hurricanes? we read
Until recently, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been investigating whether seeding storm clouds with pollution-size aerosols (particles suspended in gas) might help slow tropical cyclones. Computer models suggest that deploying aerosols can have “an appreciable impact on tropical cyclone intensity,” writes William Cotton, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University. He and his colleagues recently reviewed such work in the Journal of Weather Modification. In fact, human pollution may already be weakening storms, including August’s Hurricane Irene. “[Computer] models all predicted that the intensity of Irene would be much greater than it was,” Cotton notes. “Was that because they did not include aerosol effects?”…
In The Insider, Kelley Dickerson writes
Engineers could stop hurricanes with the ‘sunglasses effect’ — but it’d require a huge sacrifice
According to new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, if we pumped sulfate gases into our planet’s upper atmosphere, we could cool down our oceans enough to cut the number of Katrina-force hurricanes in half over the next 50 years. It’d require about 10 billion tons of sulfates to get the job done, which is tens or hundreds of times the sulfates a typical volcanic eruption can form.
From Stanford University we read
Computer simulations by Professor Mark Z. Jacobson have shown that offshore wind farms with thousands of wind turbines could have sapped the power of three real-life hurricanes, significantly decreasing their winds and accompanying storm surge, and possibly preventing billions of dollars in damages…. he found that the wind turbines could disrupt a hurricane enough to reduce peak wind speeds by up to 92 mph and decrease storm surge by up to 79 percent.
The study, conducted by Jacobson, and Cristina Archer and Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware, was published online in Nature Climate Change….
Taming Hurricanes With Arrays of Offshore Wind Turbines (Nature Climate Change, 2014)
In this intriguing discussion, science fiction writers look into the real physics of the question, What would be need to stop a hurricane? What would we need to stop a hurricane? Worldbuilding @ Stackexchange
Also see these great topics at Hurricane Research Division NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Tropical Cyclone Modification and Myths
Organic food and farming
Organic food
“People got in their head, well, if it’s man-made somehow it’s potentially dangerous, but if it’s natural, it isn’t. That doesn’t really fit with anything we know about toxicology. When we understand how animals are resistant to chemicals, the mechanisms are all independent of whether it’s natural or synthetic. And in fact, when you look at natural chemicals, half of those tested came out positive [for toxicity in humans].” –Bruce Ames
Organic food is food produced by organic farming, a set of techniques that mixes scientific knowledge of soil depletion and enrichment with anti-scientific beliefs and myths about nature and the natural.
A key belief of groups like the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) and the Soil Association, which oppose conventional farming in favor of organic farming, is that pesticides and fertilizers are so harmful that they should be avoided unless they are “natural.”
This belief is contradicted by the vast majority of scientific studies that have been done on these subjects (Morris and Bate 1999; Taverne 2006; NCPA study). The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has put in place a set of national standards that food labeled “organic” must meet, whether it is grown in the United States or imported from other countries.
“USDA makes no claims that organically produced food is safer or more nutritious than conventionally produced food. Organic food differs from conventionally produced food in the way it is grown, handled, and processed.”*
Harm from bacterial contamination is a much greater possibility from natural fertilizers (Stossel 2005: 194). (For those of you who hate John Stossel, read the newspaper. The most dangerous bacteria in America’s food supply is E. coli, which is found in abundance in cattle manure, a favorite “natural” fertilizer of organic farming.)
The residues from pesticides on food, natural or synthetic, are not likely to cause harm to consumers because they occur in minute quantities.* (This fact does not make either kind of pesticide safe for those who work with them and are exposed to large quantities on a regular basis. I refer to residues on foods you and I are likely to find on fruits and vegetable we buy at the store or market.)
Using natural biological controls rather than synthetic pesticides is more dangerous to the environment (Morris and Bate 1999). The amounts of pesticide residue produced by plants themselves or introduced by organic farmers are significantly greater than the amounts of synthetic pesticide residues.
Almost all of the pesticides we ingest in food are naturally produced by plants to defend themselves against insects, fungi, and animal predators (Ames and Gold 1997). The bottom line is that fresh fruits and vegetables are good for you and it doesn’t matter whether they’re organic.
Over 30 separate investigations of about 500,000 people have shown that farmers, millers, pesticide-users, and foresters, occupationally exposed to much higher levels of pesticide than the general public, have much lower rates of cancer overall (Taverne 2006: 73.)
Groups like IFOAM refer to synthetic pesticides as “toxic,” even though the amount of pesticides people are likely to ingest through food are always in non-toxic amounts.
Many toxic substances occur naturally in foods, e.g.,arsenic in meat, poultry, dairy products, cereals, fish, and shellfish, but usually in doses so small as not to be worthy of concern. On the IFOAM website you will find the following message:
Although IFOAM has no official position on the quality of organic food, it’s easy to conclude that the overall nutritional and health-promoting value of food is compromised by farming methods that utilize synthetic fertilizers and toxic pesticides.
It’s easy to conclude—as long as you ignore the bulk of the scientific evidence that is available.
the myth of organic superiority
The evidence for the superiority of organic food is mostly anecdotal and based more on irrational assumptions and wishful thinking than on hard scientific evidence. There is no significant difference between a natural molecule and one created in the laboratory. Being natural or organic does not make a substance safe* nor does being synthetic make a substance unsafe.
Organic food does not offer special protection against cancer or any other disease. Organic food is not “healthier” than food produced by conventional farming, using synthetic pesticides and herbicides. Organic farming is not necessarily better for the environment than conventional farming. There is scant scientific evidence that most people can tell the difference in taste between organic and conventional foods. The bottom line is: fresher is better. Organic produce that travels thousands of miles to market is generally inferior to the same produce from local farmers, organic or not.
Is there any difference between organic and conventional fruits and vegetables? According to one scientific paper, there are several differences:
Based on the results of our literature review and experiment we conclude that there are substantial differences between organic and conventional fruits and vegetables. They differ with respect to production method, labeling, marketing, price and potentially other parameters.
You don’t need to do a scientific study to know that organic foods are produced differently from conventionally farmed foods. Anyone who has been to the market knows that you will pay substantially more for food labeled “organic.”
… The aforementioned scientific study did find that the literature provides evidence for one nutritional difference between organic and conventional foods: vitamin C was found to be higher for organic food.
coddling by the media
The way the media treat “green” issues accounts for one reason that the organic-is-better myth is pervasive. Here’s an example from BBC News:
Growing apples organically is not only better for the environment than other methods but makes them taste better than normal apples, US scientists say.
The study is among the first to give scientific credence to the claim that organic farming really is the better option.
The researchers found organic cultivation was more sustainable than either conventional or integrated farming, which cuts the use of chemicals.
The scientists, from Washington State University in Pullman, found the organic apples were rated highest for sweetness by amateur tasting panels.
They reported: “Escalating production costs, heavy reliance on non-renewable resources, reduced biodiversity, water contamination, chemical residues in food, soil degradation and health risks to farm workers handling pesticides all bring into question the sustainability of conventional farming systems.”
The headline for the story reads: Organic apples tickle tastebuds.
Most people might stop reading the story after five paragraphs of nothing but positive statements about organic farming and the mention of a number of problems ahead for conventional farming. For those who persevere, however, the following bits of information are also provided:
…organic farming systems were “less efficient, pose greater health risks and produce half the yields of conventional farming”.
…the tests “found no differences among organic, conventional and integrated apples in texture or overall acceptance”.
…Growers of more sustainable systems may be unable to maintain profitable enterprises without economic incentives, such as price premiums or subsidies for organic and integrated products.
Apparently, the measure used to determine that organic farming was “better for the environment” was based on physical, chemical, and biological soil properties. The scientists created their own index and found that organic was better mainly because of the addition of compost and mulch.
Certainly, there are going to be some organic farms that use methods of composting and mulching that improve growing conditions. But there are also methods conventional farmers can use to accomplish the same thing.
Finally, there are some organic farmers who used methods of composting and mulching that don’t improve anything except the chances of bacterial infection. Only a “green” journalist or scientist could turn being less efficient, posing greater health risks, no different in texture or appearance, and producing half the yields of conventional farming into “better than conventional farming.”
I’ll provide just one more example of how the media and scientists with agendas distort the results of scientific studies that compare organic with conventional agricultural practices. In 2003, Alyson Mitchell, Ph.D., a food scientist at the University of California, Davis, co-authored a paper with the formidable title of “Comparison of the Total Phenolic and Ascorbic Acid Content of Freeze-Dried and Air-Dried Marionberry, Strawberry, and Corn Grown Using Conventional, Organic, and Sustainable Agricultural Practices.”
The article was published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society. The article got some good press from “green” journalists, who proclaimed that the study showed that organic foods have significantly higher levels of antioxidants than conventional foods.
(Examples of glowing press reports can be found here and here.) There is a strong belief among promoters of organic foods that there is good scientific support for the claim that diets rich in antioxidants contribute to significantly lower cancer rates.
The data, however, do not support this belief. “Study after study has shown no benefit of antioxidants for heart disease, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or longevity” (Hall 2011).
The study compared total phenolic metabolites and ascorbic acid in only two crops, marionberries and corn. Both crops were grown organically and conventionally on different farms. The organic berries were grown on land that had been used for growing berries for four years; the conventional berries were grown on land that had been used to grow conventional berries for 21-22 years.
The crops were grown on different soil types: the organic soil was “sandy, clay, loam”; the conventional was “sandy, Ritzville loam.” The soil for the conventional corn had been used before for wheat; the soil for the organic corn had been used for green beans. The conventional farm used well water; the organic farm used a combination of well and creek water. (I don’t mention the strawberry listed in the title of the article because no organic strawberries were tested.)
As you can tell from the title of the article, the metabolites measured were not taken from fresh berries or corn but from samples that had been freeze-dried and air-dried. Though not mentioned in the title, the scientists also compared samples that were simply frozen.
The data provided by the authors in their published study shows clearly that there was not enough measurable ascorbic acid (AA) in either of the marionberry samples to compare the organic to the conventional. As already noted, no organic strawberries were studied. There was not enough measurable AA for the freeze-dried or air-dried corn to be compared.
So, the only data on AA is for the frozen corn: organic had a value of 3.2 and conventional had a value of 2.1. You can read the study yourself to find out what these numbers represent, but whatever they represent they do not merit the conclusion drawn by the authors of the study: “Levels of AA in organically grown … samples were consistently higher than the levels for the conventionally grown crops.”
The study also compared what it calls “sustainable agricultural practices” to organic and conventional practices. Sustainable practices in this study included the use of synthetic fertilizers.
“Our results indicate,” the authors write, “that TPs [total phenolics] were highest in the crops grown by sustainable agricultural methods as compared to organic methods.” Dr. Mitchell is quoted in the press as saying that their study “helps explain why the level of antioxidants is so much higher in organically grown food.” Yet, her study clearly states that the evidence for this claim is anecdotal. In fact, the authors write of the comparative studies that have been done:
These data demonstrate inconsistent differences in the nutritional quality of conventionally and organically produced vegetables with the exception of nitrate and ascorbic acid (AA) in vegetables.
distortion of evidence by scientists
One thing these “green” advocates are good at is distorting data to make lead appear to be gold. Another study led by Mitchell claims that organic tomatoes have “statistically higher levels (P < 0.05) of quercetin and kaempferol aglycones” than conventional tomatoes. The increase of these flavonoids corresponds “with reduced manure application rates once soils in the organic systems had reached equilibrium levels of organic matter.”
In fact, the study suggests that it is the nitrogen “in the organic and conventional systems that most strongly influence these differences.” The authors suggest that “overfertilization (conventional or organic) might reduce health benefits from tomatoes.” The argument is that the flavonoids are a protective response by the plants and one of the things they respond to is the amount of nitrogen in the soil.
In any case, the thrust of these and similar studies is that both organic and conventional crops can be manipulated to yield higher levels of antioxidants. At least one study has found “organic food products have a higher total antioxidant activity and bioactivity than the conventional foods.”* That study, however, involved only ten Italian men, aged 30-65 years.
I have to say that I am underwhelmed by the studies I have reviewed that claim to have found organic foods are more nourishing or healthy than conventional fruits and vegetables. At present, there is no strong body of scientific evidence that supports the contention that organic fruits and vegetables are superior to conventional produce.
A best case scenario for the organic folks would be that to achieve the recommended nutrients from five helpings a day of fruits or vegetables you might have to eat four or five more conventionally grown strawberries or two or three more baby carrots to get the same amount of vitamins, minerals, or antioxidants as provided by organic fruits and vegetables. But I’m not sure the evidence supports even that weak position.
History of the term “organic”
The term ‘organic’ as a descriptor for certain sustainable agriculture systems appears to have been used first by Lord Northbourn in his book Look to the Land (1940).
“Northbourn used the term to describe farming systems that focused on the farm as a dynamic, living, balanced, organic whole, or an organism.”* T
he term ‘organic’ was first widely used in the U.S. by J. I. Rodale, founder of Rodale Press, in the 1950s. “Rodale failed to convince scientists of the validity of his approach because of his reliance on what were perceived to be outrageous unscientific claims of organic farming’s benefits.”*
The USDA standards for organic food state:
Organic food is produced without using most conventional pesticides; fertilizers made with synthetic ingredients or sewage sludge; bioengineering; or ionizing radiation.
These standards capture the essence of the organic mythology:
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Conventional pesticides should be avoided.
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Synthetic fertilizers should be avoided.
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Food should not be genetically altered.
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Food should not be subjected to ionizing radiation.
The bit about sewage sludge is there because some organic farmers follow the “law of return” as proposed by Sir Albert Howard (1873-1947), a founder and pioneer of the organic movement. He advocated recycling all organic waste materials, including sewage sludge, in farmland compost. The practice of adding human and animal feces to the soil is an ancient practice found in many cultures even today.
The fact that these cultures developed their practices without benefit of modern knowledge of such things as bacteria or heavy metals is trumped by the romantic notion that farm life was idyllic in those times and places when life expectancy was half that of today.
Rudolf Steiner, the founder of a set of superstitious agricultural practices known as biodynamics, also advocated using manure as fertilizer but it had to be prepared according to a magical formula based on his belief that cosmic forces entered animals through their horns. Steiner also romanticized farming. Commenting on some peasants stirring up manure, he said:
“I have always had the opinion … that [the peasants’] alleged stupidity or foolishness is wisdom before God [sic], that is to say, before the Spirit. I have always considered what the peasants and farmers thought about their things far wiser than what the scientists were thinking.”*
Steiner gave lectures on farming, but did no scientific research to test his ideas.
A central concept of these lectures was to “individualize” the farm by bringing no or few outside materials onto the farm, but producing all needed materials such as manure and animal feed from within what he called the “farm organism.”
Other aspects of biodynamic farming inspired by Steiner’s lectures include timing activities such as planting in relation to the movement patterns of the moon and planets and applying “preparations,” which consist of natural materials which have been processed in specific ways, to soil, compost piles, and plants with the intention of engaging non-physical beings and elemental forces. Steiner, in his lectures, encouraged his listeners to verify his suggestions scientifically, as he had not yet done.*
Steiner opposed the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, not on scientific grounds but on spiritual grounds. He claimed there were “spiritual shortcomings in the whole chemical approach to farming.”* He had a mystical idea of the farm as an organism, “a closed self-nourishing system.”*
This article has been excerpted from The Skeptic’s Dictionary, http://skepdic.com/organic.html
KaiserScience 
