I don’t recall much of my high school chemistry classes back in Sri Lanka. Our teacher was a nice old man who enjoyed telling us the history of chemistry and stories about the chemists of long ago rather than about modern chemistry. But he was a believer in experimentation and demonstrations and one that I remember was when he would cut a small piece of solid sodium and drop it into a beaker. It was fun to see the piece foaming and rushing around the container.
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This news report details a case study of how one unvaccinated two-year old triggered a measles outbreak that sickened 19 children and two adults in Minnesota.
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Recently we have had some studies showing the remarkable intelligence of crows as problem solvers and their ability to use tools. Given this information, it was thought that they would also be good at inferring causal relationships. But as often happens, we find that intelligence is not a simple thing and that success in one aspect of it does not necessarily transfer to other areas.
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Science depends on its practitioners behaving ethically. This is important for three reasons. One is because scientists depend upon each other’s work and fraud in one area can really mess up the work of those who use those results. Another is because science has acquired a hard-won credibility with the public that has to be preserved so that those who deny the scientific consensus on important questions like climate change and vaccinations are not given ammunition to claim that science cannot be trusted. And the third is because much of science depends on public funding and that can be threatened by misconduct.
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America seems to be obsessed with the issue of obesity. Hardly a week goes by without this being mentioned as a serious public health crisis and that urgent measures need to be adopted to combat it. One can hardly blame people who do not fit into the perceived body-size norm for feeling beleaguered by society’s pressures and feeling that they have to take all manner of measures, even extreme ones, to try and lose weight. But as I wrote last year, there a lot of myths surrounding weight and weight loss that work against the idea that losing weight and keeping it off is a straightforward matter.
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[UPDATE: Other computer scientists are saying that the computer actually failed the test, and badly.]

People who have interacted with Siri, the helpful guide on the iPhone, are usually impressed with her ability to carry on what seems like a normal conversation. But it is not hard to discover that you are talking to a computer. How good would ‘she’ have to be to completely fool you?
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Scientific detective stories are a lot of fun. So I was intrigued by this article by Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a famous case in the history of psychology that is apparently well known to psychologists but was unknown to me. It has many of the elements that make for a gripping tale.
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