The best place to find "aliens" might be Comic-Con (2008, credit; Jim Merithew/Wired.com, via Wired Photostream on flickr)

A 2010 poll found that one in four Americans (and one in five people worldwide) believe that aliens have visited our planet. And many of these people believe that the evidence of these visits has been covered up by the government. Area 51, Roswell, mutilated cows in Colorado—there’s got to be some truth in that, right? And so two petitions were created on the White House We The People site, one calling “for the President to disclose to the American people the long withheld knowledge of government interactions with extraterrestrial beings” and the other asking the President “to formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.”

The petitions easily reached the threshold of 5,000 signatures needed to get a response from the White House. But the signers are likely to be disappointed. Phil Larson, who works on space policy and communications at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, wrote in the response:

The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.

He gives a few examples of ongoing and planned research—SETI, Kepler, the Mars Science Laboratory—that may lead to the discovery of alien life and then reminds us that the odds of finding alien life are probably pretty slim:

Many scientists and mathematicians have looked with a statistical mindset at the question of whether life likely exists beyond Earth and have come to the conclusion that the odds are pretty high that somewhere among the trillions and trillions of stars in the universe there is a planet other than ours that is home to life.

Many have also noted, however, that the odds of us making contact with any of them—especially any intelligent ones—are extremely small, given the distances involved.

While reading this, I was reminded of a conversation I had with Cassie Conley last year when I was reported a story about what will happen should we actually find alien life. Conley is NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer; she’s the one who makes certain that NASA missions don’t contaminate other planets and that any sample return missions don’t harm us here on Earth. She told me that after she took the NASA job, some people befriended her in the hopes of ferreting out NASA’s secrets about aliens. “I was dropped as an acquaintance immediately upon their realizing that, in fact, I didn’t have any secrets,” she said. “They were disappointed when they found out there weren’t any.” (But at least she had a good attitude about it all: “It was rather entertaining,” she said.)

I will admit that it is possible that some grand conspiracy exists, that a government or corporation could be hiding this information from us all. (I can’t disprove a negative.) But keep in mind what Conley says: “If you think the U.S. government is that good at keeping secrets, you’ve got a lot higher opinion of them than I do.”

In addition, such a conspiracy would necessitate excluding the scientists most interested and most qualified in this area, and all of them have committed to making a discovery of alien life public. “I think there’s a big misconception in the public that somehow this is all a cloak-and-dagger operation,” says Arizona State University astrobiologist Paul Davies. “It’s not. People are quite open about what they are doing.”

Even the White House.

The skeptics were not happy and immediately claimed that the study was flawed.

Also in the news last week were the results of yet another study that found no link between cell phones and brain cancer. Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Denmark looked at data from 350,000 cell phone users over an 18-year period and found they were no more likely to develop brain cancer than people who didn’t use the technology.

But those results still haven’t killed the calls for more monitoring of any potential link.

Study after study finds no link between autism and vaccines (and plenty of reason to worry about non-vaccinated children dying from preventable diseases such as measles). But a quarter of parents in a poll released last year said that they believed that “some vaccines cause autism in healthy children” and 11.5 percent had refused at least one vaccination for their child.

Polls say that Americans trust scientists more than, say, politicians, but that trust is on the decline. If we’re losing faith in science, we’ve gone down the wrong path. Science is no more than a process (as recent contributors to our “Why I Like Science” series have noted), and skepticism can be a good thing. But for many people that skepticism has grown to the point that they can no longer accept good evidence when they get it, with the result that “we’re now in an epidemic of fear like one I’ve never seen and hope never to see again,” says Michael Specter, author of Denialism, in his TEDTalk below.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you think I’m not talking about you. But here’s a quick question: Do you take vitamins? There’s a growing body of evidence that vitamins and dietary supplements are no more than a placebo at best and, in some cases, can actually increase the risk of disease or death. For example, a study earlier this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that consumption of supplements, such as iron and copper, was associated with an increased risk of death among older women. In a related commentary, several doctors note that the concept of dietary supplementation has shifted from preventing deficiency (there’s a good deal of evidence for harm if you’re low in, say, folic acid) to one of trying to promote wellness and prevent disease, and many studies are showing that more supplements do not equal better health.

But I bet you’ll still take your pills tomorrow morning. Just in case.

This path has the potential to lead to some pretty dark times, as Specter says:

When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science, you end up in a place you don’t want to be. You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS. Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease.

If you don’t think that can happen here, think again. We’re already not vaccinating children against preventable diseases, something that will surely lead (and probably already has led) to lives lost. We have big problems to address in the coming decades—even greater changes to temperature, weather and water as the planet warms; a growing population—and we need to start putting our trust back into science, into the process that has brought us to where we are today, with longer lives, cleaner water and skies, more efficient farming. Because you have to admit, this is a pretty great time to be alive and it’s science that got us here.

Adolescents sometimes fight like cats and dogs (courtesy of flickr user Ninja M.)

Conventional wisdom says that it’s the most troubled kids that resort to bullying. Not so, say two University of California at Davis sociologists in this month’s issue of the American Sociological Review. Home life, grades, academic achievement, sports—they all have little to do with who bullies whom. Instead, it’s where you fall on the social ladder that counts.

That won’t be a surprise to many of us, including anyone who watched the movie Mean Girls, but with bullying occasionally turning deadly, it’s important to know who’s doing what and why. The sociologists used a survey of 3,722 students from the 8th, 9th and 10th grades in North Carolina to analyze patterns of bullying (defined as anything from hitting to name-calling to spreading rumors). They found that the higher up someone was in the social hierarchy, the more aggressive they were as a bully.

Up to a point, that is. The top two percent of kids in the social hierarchy were among the least aggressive on the bullying scale, on par with the kids at the very bottom. “The ones at the bottom don’t have the social power or as much capacity to be aggressive whereas the ones at the top have all that power, but don’t need to use it,” says study co-author Robert Faris. If those at the top were to bully their peers, it could be a sign of weakness, Faris says. “And, it’s possible that, at the highest level, they may receive more benefits from being pro-social and kind.”

Students in the 98th percentile of the social hierarchy—the ones that just don’t make it to the top—victimize others at a rate 28 percent greater than those on the bottom and 40 percent greater than those on the top. “Our findings underscore the argument that—for the most part—attaining and maintaining a high social status likely involves some level of antagonistic behavior,” Faris says.

Girls were less often physically aggressive than boys, and they were more likely to bully boys than boys were to bully girls. But when girls and boys developed friendships, aggression levels decreased. The exception was when romance was involved; dating leads to an increase in bullying.

How different are apples and oranges? (courtesy of flickr user kokopinto)

The phrase “comparing apples and oranges” is often invoked when a person compares two items that are thought to be so different as to make any comparison invalid. But are apples and oranges really that different? According to TimeTree.org, Malus x domestica (the apple) and Citrus sinensis (the navel orange) are separated by about 89.2 million years of evolution, but they are both fruit trees. Surely there are valid comparisons that can be made. So where are the differences, and is a comparison between them truly invalid, as the idiom says?

To make my comparisons, I will draw from my own experience and several online sources, including a dietician’s analysis of the juices of the two fruits and a published study: “Comparing apples and oranges: a randomised prospective study,” by James Barone, which appeared in the British Medical Journal in 2000. Here are just a few characteristics:

As we can see from this small list, it is quite easy to compare apples and oranges. And they are remarkably similar in many ways. Although they may look and feel very different, the two fruits have a similar size and weight, and their juices have a similar caloric content and levels of vitamin C. However, they differ widely in fiber content of the fruit and in the potassium and folate levels of their juices.

In an earlier study (“Apples and Oranges—A Comparison,” published in the Annals of Improbable Research in 1995), Scott Sandford produced a spectrograph from dried samples of a Granny Smith apple and a Sunkist navel orange. He concluded that not only was it easy to compare the two, but the two fruits were remarkably similar. “Thus, it would appear that the comparing apples and oranges defense should no longer be considered valid. This is a somewhat startling revelation,” Sanford wrote. “It can be anticipated to have a dramatic effect on the strategies used in arguments and discussions in the future.” Well, he didn’t get that right, but perhaps we should consider dropping the use of this idiom.

A lifeboat from the Titanic, photographed by a passenger from the Carpathia (source: National Archives)

Name of ship: RMS Titanic

• Passengers and crew: 2,207
• Sunk: April 14, 1912,  collided with an iceberg
• Time to sink: 2 hours, 40 minutes
• Deaths: 1,517
• Survival rate: 31.3%

Name of ship: RMS Lusitania

• Passengers and crew: 1,949
• Sunk: May 7, 1915, torpedoed by a German U-boat
• Time to sink: 18 minutes
• Deaths: 1,198
• Survival rate: 38.5%

The tragic voyages of the RMS Titanic and RMS Lusitania have provided a group of economists with an an opportunity to compare how people behave under extreme conditions. (Their article appears in PNAS.) Despite the different reasons for sinking, the tales of the two ships carry some remarkable similarities: Both ships carried a similar composition of passengers and were unable to accommodate everyone aboard on the lifeboats. (In the case of the Titanic there simply were not enough boats for everyone. On the Lusitania, the ship listed to starboard after being struck by the torpedo and the crew was unable to launch all of the lifeboats.) Both captains ordered that women and children be given first priority on the boats. And both ships had a similar survival rate.

The composition of the survivors was very different, though. On the Titanic, women aged 16 to 35 (child-bearing age) were more likely to survive than other age groups, as were children and people with children. On the Lusitania, both women and men aged 16 to 35 were the most likely to have lived through the incident. There were class differences, too. First-class passengers fared the best on the Titanic but the worst—even worse than third-class passengers—on the Lusitania.

What happened? The researchers say it all comes down to time.

The passengers of the Lusitania had less than 20 minutes before their ship sank, and in such a life-and-death situation, social scientists say, “self-interested reactions predominate.” It didn’t matter what the captain ordered. The ship was going down and people reacted selfishly, and in such a situation, it would be expected that people in their prime (16 to 35) would be the most likely to win a seat on a lifeboat. In addition, because there were difficulties in launching those boats, people in that age group would have had an additional advantage because they were more likely to have had the strength and agility to stay on board a rocking boat or to climb back in after falling into the water.

The Titanic, though, sank slowly enough for social norms to hold sway. The passengers generally held to the rule of “women and children first” even though they could have easily overpowered the crew. And first- and second-class passengers may have benefited from the extra time in which they may have had earlier or better information from the crew or had other advantages.

Would you take this pill? (courtesy of flickr use steveb_ohio)

In the United States, there are “drugs” and there are “dietary supplements.” Each are chemicals intended to improve your health, but they are held to very different standards of regulation: Before drugs can be sold, a company must prove to the Food and Drug Administration that their product is safe and effective. Dietary supplements, meanwhile, do not need approval from the FDA before they are marketed; companies do not need to prove that these substances are safe or effective before they are sold. If a supplement proves harmful, though, the FDA can ban the substance, like it did with ephedra in 2006.

The Zicam warning issued last week by the FDA reveals a little-known third class of chemicals marketed for your health—homeopathic drugs. These are technically drugs, but they do not have to go through the long approval process; they receive automatic approval from the FDA as long as the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia Convention of the United States adds the substance to their list. No long trials, no science needed.

On its face, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem, because homeopathic drugs shouldn’t have any active ingredients in them. Yes, you read that correctly. See, homeopathy is a type of alternative medicine in which a compound is put through a series of dilutions until little, if any, of the compound remains. It has been proposed that homeopathic drugs work by “water memory,” which is a load of bunk. But at least if the “drug” doesn’t have any pharmacologically active substances left in it, then it shouldn’t have any side effects, either. The biggest risk by taking them should be that of not having taken something that would actually work.

But Zicam, which fell under the homeopathic drug label, wasn’t diluted to the point where it was indistinguishable from water. It contains biologically active levels of zinc. And it’s that zinc that is suspected to be behind reports of a decrease or loss of smell in Zicam users. The FDA has now asked Zicam’s maker to “submit a new drug application to demonstrate safety and efficacy.”

Herbal supplements and homeopathic drugs are just a couple of examples of the perils and popularity of alternative medicine. People who do not smoke, do eat organic food and drink only bottled water have no problem consuming substances that are completely unregulated, even in place of pharmaceuticals with strong trial evidence to back up their claims. Where is the sense in trying out random chemicals from unknown sources just because someone told you that it might make you feel better or lose weight or sleep more soundly?

We all want the magic cure, but it isn’t going to come from a homeopath or the herbal supplement industry or any other of the purveyors of woo. But what’s really sad is to see people, children sometimes, that modern medicine could help but who are sidetracked by this quackery.

(Hat tip: Science-Based Medicine)

XKCD tells it how it is.

In 2005, when then-president of Harvard (and current Obama advisor) Larry Summers posited that biological differences might be one reason why women have not been as successful as men in math and science careers, he was only the latest man to make that suggestion. Back in 1887, George Romanes declared that mental abilities were secondary sex characteristics related to brain size (i.e., girls were stupid because their brains were too tiny).

I wasn’t the only person who thought that Summers was nuts in 2005, even if his theory had such a long tradition.

A new study in this week’s PNAS adds to the evidence that girls’ brains are just fine. Psychologist Janet Hyde and oncologist Janet Mertz of the University of Wisconsin set out to answer three questions: Do gender differences in mathematics performance exist in the general population? Do gender differences exist among the highly mathematically talented? And do females exist who possess profound mathematical talent?

The answer to the first question is “no.” There are no longer any differences in math performance between girls and boys in the United States and several other nations.

For the second question, the answer is “sometimes.” There is a gender gap between males and females in the top percentiles of math performance, but it is not found in some ethnic groups and nations. The presence of a gap, they write, “correlates with several measure of gender inequality. Thus, it is largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors, not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes.”

As for the third question, all the researchers had to do was go out and find some of the top-performing female mathematicians. And they didn’t have to look very hard.

The conclusion: girls can do math just as well as boys.

The timing of this study is interesting, because I’m currently reading Women in Mathematics, a 1974 book by Lynn M. Osen, and a gift from my mom, a math teacher. Women have been mathematicians as long as men, and it’s really only women’s circumstances throughout history (mostly uneducated, often unseen) that prevented all but a few from pursuing the field:

In almost any age, it has taken a passionate determination, as well as a certain insouciance, for a female to circumvent the crippling prohibitions against education for women, particularly in a field that is considered to be a male province. In mathematics, the wonder is not that so few have attained proficiency in the field, but that so many have overcome the obstacles to doing so. We can only speculate about the multitude who were dissuaded from the attempt—the Mary Somervilles who never had a fortunate accident to discover their talent, the Agnesis who lacked a mathematically trained parent to nurture their genius, of the Mme du Châtelets who were seduced completely by a frivolous salon life.

But perhaps the larger tragedy is that, even today, we can find remnants of the elitist (or sexist) tradition that has so often surrounded mathematics in the past. It should be acknowledged that during the present century, there have been many women who have achieved remarkably successful careers in fields drawing heavily on mathematics, but to use these women as exemplars of what is possible for any woman who “really tries” is one of the crueler sports of our day. That so many of the resolute do survive speaks to their capabilities and circumstances, as well as the caprice of luck and nature. Far too many fail even to see the reasons they were dissuaded from the effort.

Girls can do math. Can we now move on to making sure that career opportunities are the same for each? That’s a tangible, fixable, problem.

More Earth Day tips for your home, your laundry, your kitchen and your computer — after the jump.

24. Use a programmable thermostat.
25. Turn down the thermostat during the winter.
26. Turn off the heat when you’re not home.
27. Turn up the thermostat during the summer.
28. Turn off the air conditioning when you’re not home.
29. Use a ceiling fan.
30. Open a window.
31. Wrap your water heater in insulation.
32. Insulate your hot water pipes.
33. Set your water heater to 120 degrees.
34. Turn off your water heater during the day.
35. Maintain your furnace.
36. Caulk your windows and doors.
37. Install storm doors and windows.
38. Install a low-flow showerhead.
39. Get an energy audit.
40. Use compact fluorescent lights.
41. Better yet, use LED lights.
42. Turn off the lights.
43. Use natural light.
44. Live in a smaller home.
45. Use solar energy.
46. Use wind energy.
47. Use geothermal energy.
48. Go off the grid.
49. Wash your clothes in cold water.
50. Wash in full loads.
51. Choose concentrated laundry detergents.
52. Clean out the dryer’s lint trap.
53. Hang your clothes to dry.
54. Wear things more than once.
55. Keep your freezer full.
56. Run a full load in the dishwasher.
57. Don’t use the heat dry setting on your dishwasher.
58. Try reusable coffee filters.
59. Try a French press for coffee.
60. Reuse a mug at your favorite coffee shop.
61. Buy fair-trade.
62. Eat less meat.
63. Use a toaster oven instead of your oven.
64. Use a slowcooker.
65. Use your microwave.
66. Use a solar cooker.
67. Bring your own bags to the shops.
68. Read the label.
69. Look for the energy star.
70. Buy in season.
71. Buy a share in a CSA (community-supported agriculture).
72. Don’t buy bottled water.
73. Buy a good water bottle.
74. Buy vintage.
75. Buy antique.
76. Shop online
77. Don’t get catalogs you don’t use.
78. Buy used.
79. Buy local.
80. Buy sustainable.
81. Buy in bulk.
82. Buy the item with less packaging.
83. Buy less.
84. Recycle.
85. Reuse.
86. Borrow.
87. Share.
88. Unplug appliances when they’re not in use.
89. Use a laptop instead of a desktop computer.
90. Use an LCD monitor.
91. Set up your computer to turn off the monitor after 20 minutes of non-use.
92. Skip the screensaver.
93. Turn off your computer if you’re going to be away for two hours or more.
94. Turn off your computer at night.
95. Don’t print your emails.
96. Don’t print this out.
97. Turn off your computer and go outside.

My freshman year of high school, when the teacher reached the section about evolution, he began by telling us that though there may be alternative explanations, they were not science and would not be discussed in class. He would be happy, however, to speak with any students about them after class. The evolution chapter then proceeded like any other lesson, with lectures and labs and an exam at the end.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that my experience may have been somewhat rare, particularly for conservative Indiana. I once met an elementary school teacher who feared being asked questions about evolution and wouldn’t answer them, telling her students to ask their parents instead. One friend’s high school skipped over the topic completely. But by this point in my life, I wasn’t surprised by these stories, having seen efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution in Georgia, Kansas and Pennsylvania (and since then Louisiana). Avoiding the topic seems somewhat mild compared with efforts to foist creationism or its cousin, intelligent design, on students.

The battle has now moved to Texas, where this week the state’s Board of Education is considering requiring teachers to instruct high school students on the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, particularly evolution. Weaknesses, though, is simply code for “evolution is wrong.” Those who pull out that argument do not argue for science; they want creationism or intelligent design taught in its place, though they have learned to be circumspect about their goals. You can see from this liveblog of the board’s meeting this week, by a Houston Chronicle reporter, that several of the people who spoke out on the first day for the “strengths and weaknesses” language had a religious agenda. And they have half of the board on their side, including the board chairman, who believes the earth is only 6,000 years old.

You would think that a board of education would have education (i.e., teaching children things that are not false) be their first priority, but it appears that the Texas board, or at least part of it, does not. Of course, the really scary bit of all of this is that where Texas goes in textbooks, so does much of the country. Because it’s such a big market, textbook publishers try to make their books fit Texas’s standards. If Texas requires weaknesses to be included, those false arguments could end up in your child’s schoolroom, even if you live thousands of miles away.

So, Texans, speak up. Teach your children about the wonder of evolution. Tell the board to leave out that silly “strengths and weaknesses” line. If you live elsewhere, keep a lookout for efforts like these.

Some resources:
National Center for Science Education
Evolution Resources from the National Academies
Science, Evolution and Creationism (free PDF download)

I know that there are a lot of creationists in this country. But creationism is religion, and the museums are about science. Many creationists seem a bit surprised when the Smithsonian Institution (and this magazine—you should see the letters we get!) does not treat “creation science” (or its brother, intelligent design) in the same way as it does evolution. Smithsonian Institution spokesman Randall Kremer:

“Evolution is the unifying principle for all the biology, past and present, in our halls,” Kremer said. “That is the foundation of the research we conduct at the museum.”

The Liberty University professor mentioned in the Post article brings his creation studies students to the museum each year to expose them to the other side (i.e., evolution) and to strengthen their belief in creationism. But the students still seemed somewhat surprised that religion played no part in the museum’s displays of how animals came to be:

[I]n the hall of mammals, which reopened in 2003 after a $23 million renovation, evolution assumes center stage, and the Liberty students grew a bit more subdued. They openly admired the well-lighted, meticulously designed dioramas. But they lamented that the texts and videos give no credit at all to a higher power for the wondrous animal variety on display.

The visit didn’t change any minds, according to the article, which I find a bit sad. Evolution is an incredibly fascinating area of science, and it opens the door to all of biology.

The article reminded me of another visit to the “other side,” when a secular group from Indiana University visited the Creation Museum. But do they seem to be having more fun than the students in the Post story?

SAIU trip to the Creation Museum from Secular Alliance on Vimeo.