UK News

from Jack Shafer:

Horsemeat hysteria

Disgust, the gag reflex and flights to the vomitorium greeted this week's news that horse flesh had breached the beef wall to contaminate burgers and frozen beef meals (lasagna, spaghetti Bolognese, shepherd's pie, meatballs) all over Europe. Some of the "beef" products contained 100 percent horsemeat, and early forensic tests hinted that the contamination might go back as far as August 2012.

Both the British government and the European Union called for "horsemeat summits" to investigate the food scandal, with British officials surmising that a criminal conspiracy would be found responsible for adulterating beef products with cheaper horse. But for all the horsemeat hysteria recorded and amplified by the press, "no risk to consumer health" was posed by the products, as the Food Safety Authority of Ireland reported. The injuries from eating horsemeat were not physical, they were psychological, and where they were not psychological they were anthropological, or else simply nonexistent. According to the Ireland health authority, every beef-and-horse burger it analyzed tested negative for phenylbutazone, a common horse medicine that's banned from the food chain.

Horsemeat — as those who have sampled its pleasures will attest — should not be feared. Looked at rationally, it's merely the other, other red meat, as our French cousins are forever reminding us. It's a domesticated and hooved grass and grain eater with a tail, big eyes and a tannable hide, just like the cattle that most of us consume. That's not to suggest that the folks who were sold horse burgers when they paid for beef burgers have no right to gripe. They were defrauded and deserve refunds, a few pennies’ worth of damages and the satisfaction of seeing the defrauders (if the contamination was deliberate) sent to jail. But that's about it.

Explaining the outrage and media storm over the horsemeat scandal will send many journalists to their lexicons to retrieve the word "taboo" to decode the current panic. But I don't think “taboo” adequately describes the aversion of some people and some cultures to a food that is so similar to one they eat several times a day — and which most of them, as the current scandal illustrates, can't tell from the real thing when smothered in sauce or grilled for a sandwich. "Food Taboos: Their Origins and Purposes," a 2009 article in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine by Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow, notes that most human cultures avoid harvestable or easily slaughtered edible items all the time. The Ache people of the Paraguayan jungle limit themselves to only 50 of the several hundred animal species in their habitat, and only 40 of the available plants, fruits and insects. "Ninety-eight percent of the calories in the diet of the Ache are supplied by only 17 different food sources," Meyer-Rochow writes.

from FaithWorld:

UK astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees wins 2011 Templeton Prize

((A supernova within the galaxy M100 that may contain the youngest known black hole in our cosmic neighborhood, in a composite image released to Reuters November 15, 2010/Chandra X-ray Observatory Center)

British astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees, whose research delves deep into the mysteries of the cosmos, has won the 2011 Templeton Prize for career achievements affirming life's spiritual dimension. The one million sterling ($1.6 million) award, the world's largest to an individual, was announced on Wednesday in London. Rees, master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, is former head of the Royal Society and a life peer.

from FaithWorld:

God did not create the universe, gravity did, says Stephen Hawking

God did not create the universe and the "Big Bang" was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.

In "The Grand Design," co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.

Do you believe homeopathic treatments work?

A panel of scientists and doctors has told MPs that treating patients with homeopathy on the NHS is unethical and a dubious use of public money, arguing that there is insufficient clinical evidence to support such treatments.

“If the NHS  commitment to evidence-based medicine is more than a lip service, then money has to be spent on treatments that are evidence-based, and homeopathy isn’t,” said Edzard Ernst, a professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula medical school in Exeter, quoted in the Guardian.

Testing the limits of animal lab experiments

A mouse that can speak? A monkey with Down’s Syndrome? Dogs with human hands or feet? British scientists want to know if such experiments are acceptable, or if they go too far in the name of medical research.

The Academy of Medical Sciences has launched a study to look at the use of animals containing human material in scientific research.

Was drugs scientist right to speak out?

The government’s attitude towards science is under the microscope this week over accusations that expert advice is being ignored if it fails to fit prevailing political agendas.

The row has been prompted by the sacking of the government’s chief drug adviser, Professor David Nutt, who has been making statements that do not fit in with the government’s hard line on drugs. Two of his colleagues resigned in protest over the weekend and more may follow.

The Mother of Inventions

London’s Science Museum is asking visitors what they think are the greatest ever scientific inventions.

Its own choices include the Model T Ford, Nazi Germany’s pioneering V2 rocket, penicillin and the electric telegraph.  See the Museum’s full list here.

Careful what you think

British neuroscientists have taken the first step toward reading your mind. In an intriguing experiment, they were able to read people’s thoughts simply by looking at brain activity using a scanner. They didn’t find out anything very exciting; just where volunteers were located in a virtual reality computer game, and even that required plenty of practice runs. But the power of functional magnetic resonance imaging, which highlights brain regions as they become active, is startling. The scientists believe their work sheds important light on how the hippocampus region of the brain records memories, which should help with research into diseases like Alzheimer’s. The current technique won’t work as a lie detector because it requires the cooperation of participants. Still, it does pose the question: is the idea of a fully functioning mind-reading machine science or science fiction?

Does science teaching matter?

Should the brightest pupils be required to study extra science subjects?

The Confederation of British Industry wants the 250,000 pupils who get top marks in national science SAT exams at age 14 to be automatically opted in for a two-year “triple science” GCSE course covering physics, chemistry and biology.

The CBI says three-fifths of firms are having trouble recruiting science graduates and blame the problem on a long-term decline in science teaching at schools.