“Replication is to the scientific process what water is to a swimming pool: without it, you’ve just got a lot of people in safety goggles angrily beating the floor with their fists. It is a simple enough principle. If your experiment says a certain effect should follow a certain cause, then anybody replicating that cause… Read More
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), affects approximately 250,000 people in the UK (Coghlan, 2017). Women are 2-4 times more likely to be affected than men and prevalence ranges between 0.2% and 2.6% of the population. However, varying definitions and classifications of ME/CFS have impacted on reporting and diagnosis of the condition.… Read More
“Did writing this book make other writing seem overly complex? It definitely made me notice more when I came across complicated words. I read a paper recently about surveying a moon from an orbiter and it said they detected a number of lacustrine depressions. I lloked it up and it means lake-like. So what they… Read More
Introduction Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is one of the most important life-saving techniques in an emergency, especially when there is no portable defibrillator around. Emergencies can include drowning accidents or a heart attack where someone has stopped breathing. Bob Trenkamp, a teacher of CPR and the President of the cardiac arrest and stroke charity Saving Lives,… Read More
“…what gives music its power to induce euphoria? The brain’s natural opioids could be key.” Research by Robin Dunbar, University of Oxford, suggests that actively engaging with music (e.g. singing, dancing or drumming) will raise a person’s pain threshold more significantly than being passive (i.e. just listening). Tom Fritz and Daniel Bowling, of the Max… Read More
I recently read an article by David Amodio (2015), a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, in the New Scientist writing about prejudices which made for fascinating reading. Although the ‘case study’ material is not immediately relevant to the world of recruitment and training (white US police officers shooting black US… Read More
I thought these two replies by Rosemary Sharples and Jan Horton, writing in the New Scientist, about diet and weight loss were interesting and quite apt: Rosemary writes: Once again, scientists working on ways to make it easier for people to lose weight are concentrating entirely on appetite (20 June, p.14) as though this and… Read More
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