23 week babies

In the programme 23 Week Babies broadcast on BBC2 this evening (on iPlayer here) raised the following question of what one should do with premature babies born in the 23 week of pregnancy. The odds are that only 1 in 100 will reach adulthood without a disability. Some argue that it is better not to devote the considerable resources needed to attempt to sustain such a baby through to a state of self-sufficiency. Indeed, it reports that in Holland, doctors do not resuscitate such babies. Dr. Daphne Austin, a health trust advisor in the West Midlands likewise argues against a policy of using the limited resources of the NHS on such infants.

The ethics of triage are complex and a topic for a much longer post. Apart from simply drawing your attention to the programme whilst it is still on, I also draw your attention to the failures of reasoning that such issues typically raise. On the documentary maker Adam Wishart's page and - to no-one's surprise at all - on the comments page of this familiar tabloid rag - people display a range of fallacies and ignorance that highlight why it really is important to listen to your Critical Thinking teachers and do their homework.

The new science of connectomics

This five-minute video introduces you to some incredible research into the structure of the brain. Starting with a very simple creature - a nematode worm - scientist were able to trace the connections or 'wiring diagram' between all 302 of its neurons. They have now started on a much-bigger project: mapping the visual system of a mouse. The video shows how painstaking analyses of tiny slivers of a mouse retina have enabled them to show how cells selectively respond to moving light and how those cells project onto cells in the visual cortex. The goal is to study not just the connections as a fixed structure but the activity of those connections in a living and working brain.

What comes across very clearly is just how astonishingly complex even the mind of a little mouse is and how there is so much work to do. Students of the mind-body problem familiar with the many 'gap' arguments purporting to show the irreducibility of mental to physical phenomena might wonder whether our ignorance of the workings brain does make the gap an epistemic one of understanding rather than the claimed fundamental one in nature.

Ad hominem

To argue against someone's point ad hominem is to argue against it by attacking the arguer and not the argument. It is a familiar tactic pulled by a weak opponent and, to be fair, by pretty much anyone when the debate gets a bit heated. For example:

Bill (aged 18): It is not fair to charge students high tuition fees because society benefits from being better-educated and high tuition fees could put off poorer but intellectually able students whose benefits to society could only be realised by a university education.

Ben: (aged 40): You are, I think, rather too young to understand the economic realities.

However, too often, the charged of ad hominem! is used inappropriately simply to dismiss someone's argument. This little article explains what the ad hominem fallacy is in more detail.

The elements

I should have put this up some time ago but it is not as if it will date. Last year, Slate had an excellent blog on the elements that make up the periodic table. (Well, 29 of them, at least.) Each entry discussed some of the chemical properties of the element but mainly discussed such things as the history of their discovery and their uses. Accompanying it is a nice slide-show of what the elements look like.

Attack of the zombie ants!

What's cleverer - an ant or a fungus? The answer seems obvious: the ant. And that's the right answer, as an ant displays many more complex behaviours than a fungus. And yet there is a curious and fascinating way in which, albeit in a deliberately stretched sense of the term, certain fungi outsmart ants.

They do this by infecting ants that cross their path and affecting their nervous systems. The ant is made to direct itself onto (say) a plant where it will end its life by clamping its mandibles around a vein in a leaf at the top of the plant. Meantime, the fungus has been growing inside the ant. When the ant dies and decays high up on the plant, the spores are released into the wind to fall onto the ground to grow into fungi that can infect new ants.

This recent article reports the discovery that such ants have been discovered in Brazil and this older one (both are from The Guardian and have links to more detailed articles) reports that fungi have been pulling this trick for at least 48 million years.

International Women's Day and Science

A (too) short selection of photographs and (much too) short biographies of scientific breakthroughs by women over the last hundred years put together by The Guardian as part of International Women's Day.

Sun and Moon

First, the sun. Here's a fantastic picture of the sun taken by the photographer Alan Friedman with some background and links to his site.

Second, the moon. It's been known for a very long time that the distance of the moon from the Earth varies over the month. The apparent size of the moon varies ever so slightly as a consequence. It so happens that the moon will be at its closest point to the us for nineteen years. A cause for concern? If you glance at The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Metro or The Telegraph, you would think so. Chaos will ensue! If you have any time for the scientific facts, then no. You can relax. Sometimes I am tempted to put up every bad bit of science-related reporting in the British press up here but you really would end seeing nothing else but posts like this.