Self-Aggrandising Pseudoscience Castigated - Wakefield Struck Off By GMC


Following the longest medical misconduct inquiry ever held in the U.K., Andrew Wakefield has been struck off by the GMC, the General Medical Council.  The GMC, an independant charitable organisation, is responsible in the UK for the registration of medical doctors and for the supervision of their conduct.  The GMC enjoys a global high reputation for its ethics and integrity.

Brian Deer has exposed much wrongdoing by Wakefield and has been the subject of a (withdrawn) libel suit by him.  He reports in the UK's Sunday Times, 31st Jan 2010:

W bosons are amazingly interesting objects. Almost thirty years after their discovery -by Carlo Rubbia and his collaborators of the UA1 experiment at CERN- they continue to provide critical information on the theory of electroweak interactions. The front of particle physics has moved quite a bit further from 1983, and yet the weapons we use todat to try and conquer unexplored land have not changed much. Today I wish to summarize one particular search that has been done by the CDF experiment at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider, one which tries to catch W bosons as they decay in a very uncommon way.

King Coal And The Heat Values Of Fuels


A Potted History Of The Human Use Of Coal

The term 'coal' covers many different materials with a common property: they are materials high in carbon which were formed from plant residues under pressure and over geologically long periods.

BCE 13,000 - black amber, or jet, is known to have been used¹ for ornamental purposes in Britain.
BCE 2 - 3,000 - natural outcrop coal used for fuel in Britain.
CE 200 - 400 - exploitation of surface coal fields on, by modern standards, a small scale.
CE 1200 - 1300 - trade has developed in coal; mining is in development.
CE 1600 - 1700 - experiments with steam engines, leading to

We scientists have a desperate need to make our science interesting to everyone-- including ourselves. Our terminology reflects this. In astronomy, we have the Big Bang. In comp sci, computers Crash. In engienering, "Test to Destruction".

But at some point, usually when I'm in a classroom, my science audience wants me to do something extreme. Mix chemicals until they explode. Shatter a rose in liquid nitrogen. Fire off a rocket. Something 'kinetic', in the sense of lots of fragments of something once whole being rent a'sunder.

As usual, parody best covers the dilemma, as with this week's "The Onion" science headline: Science Channel Refuses To Dumb Down Science Any Further.

What kinds of genetic changes are required to evolve significant changes in body shape and size? The availability of affordable, state-of-the-art DNA sequencing and array technology has made it possible to study evolution at a level of molecular detail inaccessible just a decade ago.