So, if you have a genetic predisposition to aggression, you can get a reduced sentence for murder. In Italy, at least.

As I mention in 13 Things, Patrick Haggard is trying to avoid a similar problem: defence lawyers want to use scientific arguments (such as “he has no free will”) to sway legal judgements. Haggard, an expert on the neuroscience of free will, says he can’t be sure enough of anything that neuroscience is saying to testify about it in court.

What’s more, would we even want him to? I don’t think anybody in their right mind likes the idea of a murderer being released earlier because he is predisposed to aggressive behaviour.  And we feel that way precisely because of what the science says, not in spite of it!

At the risk of repeating myself, this all plays into the same tricky territory as the Nutt case. Who says science is a neutral, implication-free pursuit of the truth, or that we should blindly say that if the scientific evidence says something, that trumps experience, culture and context?

On yesterday's George Lamb show, I mentioned how researchers have discovered that there might be gene variants that can make you a bad driver. Does this mean these people should be excused from prosecution if they kill someone in an accident? Or does it mean that they shouldn’t be allowed to drive?
 

I got a nice mention in the Observer yesterday, in a review of the George Lamb Show on 6 Music. When you do these things, you forget someone might be listening, let alone that someone might be reviewing it.

Anyway, gratifyingly, Miranda Sawyer says George has “interesting guests”, I am the “regular clever bloke”, and I was “fascinating” when talking about the Large Hadron Collider:

“According to Brooks, one of the reasons why the LHC might keep going wrong is because time travel is too problematic to be allowed and someone/thing from the future is coming back to stop the collider working and save us all from broaching the space-time continuum. Yeah!”

Just wanted to throw in a note of clarification. Before any of the world’s physicists turn on me (again) I wasn’t quite saying that. I was saying that a couple of quite respectable physicists have suggested it. It’s appealing, especially when a couple of Russian mathematicians have suggested that the LHC could rip holes in spacetime and allow time travellers from the future to visit. But if that seems far-fetched (fun, though, huh?!), the new idea is just plain crazy. They seem to have forgotten Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is usually the right one. And when you know that a couple of solder joints are the cause of the failure, there’s no need to invoke interference from the future.

The LHC is due to start up again in mid-November. If it fails for some inexplicable reason, then maybe we can invoke Stephen Hawking’s Time Cops. But until then…

I haven’t yet been to see the new Pixar movie Up, but if this review in the New Statesman (of all places!) is anything to go by, it should be worth it.

Coincidentally – at least I think so; the PR people at Disney are good, but surely they’re not that good – there was a story out this week about something in science that Pixar have long known about.

Experiments have shown macaques getting creeped out by CGI macaques who look quite real, but not real enough. Apparently, as you increase the realism in computer graphic renditions of humans (or monkeys), you reach a point where people (or monkeys) don’t like to look at them. It’s known as “Uncanny Valley”. The reasons given for the existence of Uncanny Valley are typical evolutionary psychology generalities: these non-humans look like corpses and remind us of death, and other pish (does anyone buy that?).

Anyway Pixar has long known about Uncanny Valley, and kept their cartoons well away from it. That’s why they give you fantastic creations such as WALL.E , and no creepy Polar Express Tom Hanks-alikes. And as for the weird Sean Bean/Ray Winstone hybrid Beowulf, well - that was even scarier than the monster he had come to kill...

I went dowsing last week – and wrote it up for New Scientist here . Sadly, I didn’t have much space, so couldn’t explore the nuances, but I’m fairly convinced the balance of the piece is right: dowsing is incredibly convincing when you're into it, but that doesn’t make the cut in a scientific appraisal. As James Randi has put it, “these are persons who are genuinely, thoroughly, self-deceived.”

That’s not to say people who believe dowsing taps into something beyond our senses are definitely wrong. Science isn’t powerful enough to make that assertion (which is why, I think, homeopathy survives for now). But I’m not convinced there’s any evidence to back up their claims. It’s all anecdotal. Yes, they are pretty powerful anecdotes – but then they wouldn’t make great stories if they weren’t.

To expand on the article, I’m going to add a couple of things. First, it was all much more plausible when John Baker (not pictured), my dowsing demonstrator was just “finding” stuff. It just got too woo-woo for me when he started asking questions of the rods. Here’s how the story continues beyond what’s in the New Scientist piece:

He asks the rods when the building was first constructed, and the rods respond as he counts through the centuries, then the decades. In 1445, the rods say. It was an agricultural building, and in use until 1520 or so, they say.

“So it’s like a Ouija board?” I say.

 “Don’t go there,” Baker says, frowning. “It’s not like that.”

But it seems like a fair question to me. Talking about “energies” is one thing. Talking about something that knows the meaning of “centuries” and “AD or BC?” is quite another. I can tell Baker is slightly annoyed by this observation, but he admits it must be some kind of human intelligence. The rods channel energies left behind by the collective human intelligence, but the point is that our brains, our subconscious minds, are all connected together in a vast web for which the passage of time is no barrier. If Baker can divine the position of a window on this site six centuries ago, that’s because human minds once registered the window’s presence.

Not that he cares that much about the explanation. It doesn’t really matter how it works, he says. And it doesn’t matter – it doesn’t even surprise him – that dowsing does not work in scientific tests. James Randi has been offering a million dollars to anyone who can show that dowsing works, and it remains unclaimed. “Of course it doesn’t work in scientific tests,” Baker says. “It only works when it’s done for the right reasons. When dowsers get together and hide things in a room, none of them can find anything.”

So, dowsing puts itself beyond scientific scrutiny. How you feel about that depends on your prior belief. Personally, it just makes it pointless to go any further. Just as I don’t have any need or desire to use homeopathy, and so can’t be bothered to try to pin it down, dowsing will remain one of those things I think is “probably rubbish, but what do I care if other people don’t agree?” Let them spend/charge money on/for it. It’s not my problem.

Am I wrong?

Couldn’t help but enjoy this list of science-related music videos, courtesy of Wired. My favourite of these has to be the double whammy of the PCR and CGTA. They’re just funny (to me, anyway). Shame it’s a shameless plug for a piece of lab equipment, but you have to give the company full marks for originality. I’ve seen the LHC rap before. It’s OK, but the follow-up to it is super-lame. Not even gonna link to it.

Another bum rap has reached my ears courtesy of Buzz Aldrin. However, Snoop Dogg’s involvement does lift it out of the trash bin. That line where he says Aldrin announced the idea while they were playing videogames at Snoop’s pad is so slickly done. His milfweed rap on the second series of Weeds was another moment of genius.
 

Weird Science Wednesday again. This week we mostly discussed rollercoaster science on George Lamb’s show (47 minutes in). That’s because I went to Thorpe Park on Monday: thrills all round.

Rollercoaster design is an ongoing, and pretty lucrative (I imagine) scientific discipline. It didn’t start out well, though.

Coney Island's first loop-the-loop coaster made its debut in 1895, but the first intrepid passengers disembarked rather unamused: they had suffered whiplash injuries and broken collar bones on the way round. Loops have to be elliptical, not circular, to ease the forces on the body.

Then, in 1902, Coney Island’s Cannon Coaster came online. The original idea was that the cars would use their momentum to make a death-defying leap over a missing section of track. However, on a breezy day, they often missed.

Today, interestingly, rollercoasters are about as good as they can get, in terms of what kinds of forces the human body can take (and enjoy). But that doesn’t stop researchers trying to go further.

In pursuit of the perfect sensation, researchers have rotated volunteers head over heels while also making them cartwheel or pirouette like a ballet dancer. It turns out that if you move on all three axes of rotation at the same time, even air force pilots are close to blackout when they get off. You can't walk, and you’ll have headaches that last for days. This is not what theme park designers are after.

The Holy Grail, something rollercoaster designers have never managed to recreate in a coaster, is the Coriolis illusion. Kids get it while rolling down a grassy bank. Basically it’s when you tilt the head while spinning with the eyes closed, and suddenly, an intense tumbling sensation. Apparently it’s fascinating, and rather enjoyable. It’s all to do with what the fluid in your inner ear is doing.

The trouble is, when it goes wrong, it’s a nightmare. Aircraft pilots know all about this: when they are doing a big wide turn, if they suddenly look down at their instruments with their head at the wrong angle, they get the sensation of tumbling. It’s like they’re falling out of the sky. Then they automatically try to correct for it, and send the plane into a nightmare spin.

The problem with going further means that the ride of the future is not more demanding physically, but psychologically. The people at Thorpe Park reckon the only way forward is psychological, like the Saw ride. But there are other ways of scaring you: Make it unpredictable: chaotic, where the ride you have will depend on the weight and distribution of the people in your car.

Even worse, though, is the idea of a passenger-decided ride, with switching paths that will depend on how everybody on the coaster votes. Though some people might want to take the easy path, there’ll always be some who want to push things further. At Thorpe Park I discovered my wife to be a total thrillseeker: she sat next to me cackling and whooping while I wore my mask of terror. In a passenger vote system, I’d take the next ride after her…

My thought for the day was short and sweet. Which do you think is the biggest number - the number of cells in your brain or the total number of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way?

The brain wins! I think that’s pretty impressive.
 

Weird science Wednesday again.

This week, Bobby Friction was sitting in for George Lamb, so we did a little Fact or Friction quiz on slippery stuff. You can hear it here, around 1 hr 12 minutes in.

Disclaimer: I’m a bit of a friction anorak, ever since I was sat next to Australia’s leading friction engineer on a 3 hour flight from Melbourne to Townsville.

So, let’s play:

1) There is a liquid that will flow up the side of its container. Fact or friction?

That’s fact: superfluid helium-4. Check it out in this Scientific American story - there's a link to a Polish video with dodgy subtitles too.


2) Teflon is the slipperiest substance. Fact or friction?

Friction: it’s BAM – and it was invented by accident. The "ceramic alloy" is created by combining a metal alloy of boron, aluminium and magnesium (AlMgB14) with titanium boride (TiB2). It is the 3rd hardest material and more than twice as slippery as Teflon.

3) There’s a man at the Health and Safety Executive whose job is to try not to fall over. Fact or friction?

Fact. Scientists test non-slip shoes at the UK’s Health and Safety Executive by strapping a bloke to a ramp coated with glycerol – it’s like sauce or gravy, apparently, and so simulates kitchen spills. Then they tip it up until he falls off.

Interestingly, their tests show that many “non-slip” shoes are nothing of the sort – it all depends on how you test them. No one agrees which is the best test, because it depends on how you’re moving, so there’s no one obvious standard. There’s more on non-slip testing here, if you really need to know more.

4) Slippers are called slippers because they cause you to fall over Fact or friction

Friction, obviously. Slippers can save your life – falls are hugely dangerous to the elderly: breaking your hip means an operation – which is not something elderly people cope with all that well. Trials in England show the number of elderly people falling can be reduced by 60% by giving them slippers. Some NHS trusts even operate a slipper exchange. They will give out pairs of slippers in exchange for over-sized, slippery, or trodden-down pairs.

My thought for the day was about this mockingbird story. A zoology prof in Florida has shown that mockingbirds recognise people who disturb their nests.

In the experiment, one person goes up to a mockingbird nest and touches it. They do it again the next day, wearing different clothes. The third and fourth days, the bird flew at them before they got anywhere near.

On the fifth day, a different person went up and touched the nest, and the mockingbird didn’t attack them.

It seems the bird knew who was the problem – well before they did anything.

The moral is: don’t mess with the birds. They might well know where you live.