New Scientist 13 things that do not make sense – Features Great article outlining 13 scientific anomalies that have everyone baffled. A couple of examples below.
1 The placebo effect
DON’T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it’s not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
10 The Kuiper cliff
IF YOU travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the frigid wastes beyond Pluto, you’ll see something strange. Suddenly, after passing through the Kuiper belt, a region of space teeming with icy rocks, there’s nothing.
Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density of space rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seems to be a 10th planet. We’re not talking about Quaoar or Sedna: this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept the area clean of debris.
via M. Cuthbertson
Lots of stuff doesn’t make sense.
Check out this.
GOP.COM Creative Commons redirect
http://w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=creativecommons
Google Ad Words Relevancy
http://migs.paraz.com/w/index.php?p=108
It’s fascinating to consider that we could be dealing with the galactic equivalent of a Hoover vacuum cleaner. We’d better get the Hubble working on it before this national treasure stops working and falls ingloriously into the ocean.
More and more frustrating — in an age when technology better assists research and questioning — is the Taliban logic of those ignorant of scientific skepticism. The are no unaswerable questions — only questions not yet answered. It is a property of material reality.
“The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.” –H. L. Mencken
Ed writes “The [sic] are no unaswerable [sic] questions.”
Okay, then tell the me the precise position and momentum of an electron!
The placebo effect has bugged me for years. I believe in the healing power of positive thinking but the typical number of the placebo effect is so high!
Then I read an article (sorry no link) which said that part of the placebo effect is a statistical problem because the placebo effect INCLUDES those patients who naturally would have normally have self-healed.
In any sick population, a fairly high percentage would just naturally recover. Once you remove this number, the placebo effect is a much more believable number.
Hank