... themselves as we see that creatures that are very much alike genetically may be radically different morphologically. In this vein, C. Ventner asserts that all higher vertebrates have roughly the same genes. The animals that result from these re-markedly similar genomes depend upon when specific genes are turned on and off. Ventner says, "We have the same number of genes as cats and dogs, but differently regulated." The genes themselves are supposed to be simply protein factories. Somehow, they are turned on and off (" expressing" themselves) in just the right sequences to help build the target animal. In a far-stretched analogy, the genes are the instruments in an orchestra and the proteins they produce are the notes in a symphony. But where are the symphony's score and its conductor? Very similar orchestras, it seems, can play radically different symphonies given different scores as interpreted by a maestro. Each living thing is likewise a symphony of proteins, each played by the genome at just the right time. But just where are the score -- doubtless an immense store of bytes -- and the conductor? Does the genome really hold all the information required to make a human rather than a mouse? The foregoing paragraphs are doubtless naive, but what better place to express doubts about paradigms? The two articles referenced below merely stimulated the contrary musings; they were not blasphemous in themselves. (Cohen, Philip, and Coghlan, Andy; "Less Is More," New Scientist, p. 6, February 17, 2001. Ackerman, ...

... Project Sourcebook Subjects Mind-bending the velocity vectors of marine algae From the referenced paper's abstract: "A consciousness experiment in which the Doppler shift of He/Ne laser light was used to describe changes in the velocity and vector of a marine alga, Dunaliella, was reported by Pleass and Dey in 1985. Because the subject of the consciousness experiment is living, we expect strings of baseline velocity and vector data which are, at some level, inextricably time-variant. This complicates the statistical procedures which must be used to analyze the data. "This paper examines the variation in baseline data strings, and describes two alternative statistical procedures which have been used to determine the probability of consciousness effects. Two levels of control are applied, allowing global comparison of frequency distributions of experimental scores with similar distributions derived artificially from baseline data. In both cases the null hypothesis is that there is no psi effect. The data quite strongly suggest the rejection of the null hypothesis, although the distributions of run scores contain several values beyond 3 sigma and are nonnormal. This limits the definition of probabilities." (Pleass, C.M ., and Dey, N. Dean; "Finding the Rabbit in the Bush: Statistical Analysis of Consciousness Research Data from the Motile Alga Dunaliella," The Explorer, 3:6 , no. 2, 1986. The Explorer is a publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration.) Comment. Scientifically, these experiments seem to far transcend guessing Zener cards. From Science Frontiers #50, MAR-APR 1987 . 1987-2000 ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 61: Jan-Feb 1989 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Remote, extrasensory description of mineral samples "A series of remote viewing experiments were run with 12 participants who communicated through a computer conferencing network. These participants, who were located in various regions of the United States and Canada, used portable terminals in their homes and offices to provide typed descriptions of 10 mineral samples. These samples were divided into an open series and a double-blind series. A panel of five judges was asked to match the remote viewing descriptions against the mineral samples by a percentage scoring system. The correct target sample was identified in 8 out of 33 cases; this represents more than double the pure chance expectation. Two experienced users provided 20 transcripts for which the probability of achieving the observed distribution of the percentage score by chance was 0.04." (Vallee, Jacques,; "Remote Viewing and Computer Communications - An Experiment," Journal of Scientific Exploration , 2:13, 1988.) From Science Frontiers #61, JAN-FEB 1989 . 1989-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 64: Jul-Aug 1989 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Sheep circles!Britain has been plagued lately with circular areas incised in fields of cereal crops. G.T . Meaden has collected scores of such events, some of which he has published in his Journal of Meteorology. On the theory that one kind of circle might somehow be related to another kind of circle (the same reasoning biologists employ to draw the Tree of Life), J.C . Belcher submitted a most interesting letter to Meaden. "By their very nature sheep tend to be stubborn self-willed animals exhibiting individual characteristics not suggestive of good group co-ordination. For example, when disturbed by a potential predator, a flock of sheep tends to mass protectively in a group of irregular outline, the group being formed of individual groups of small numbers of sheep. When grazing undisturbed, sheep tend to fan out from a given point, sometimes following a dominant group leader. Progress is usually uncoordinated and ragged. In general, patterns presented by sheep en masse are seen to be haphazard, indeed, generally random in nature. If follows that any suggestion of flocks of sheep forming geometric patterns would appear to be highly improbable, since this would call for group coordination only to be found in such as wolves and wild-dogs. In view of this it would appear that certain exceptional observations made on Sunday 21 August 1988 would be worthy of recording. "Out on an afternoon drive M. Belcher ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 31: Jan-Feb 1984 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects At last: someone who can predict the future!Most psychics claiming to know what's ahead down the road of time draw up rather long lists of predicted events. They may score a hit or so, but their records are generally very poor. The present article records the astounding performance of Emory Royce, a New Zealander. "The whole thing is preposterous," says Richard Kammann, the author and noted skeptic. Royce made four predictions, and four only, on a radio talk show. Some of the predictions were a bit vague on details, but the overall outcome was unbelievable: all four events occurred! The predictions were Brezhnev's death (very close timewise); naval disaster in the Falklands (prediction made well before the surprise invasion by Argentina); a New Zealand political scandal; and the completely unexpected cancellation of a New Zealand aluminum factory. (Kammann, Richard; "Uncanny Prophecies in New Zealand: An Unexplained Scientific Anomaly," Zetetic Scholar, no. 11, p. 15, August 1983.) From Science Frontiers #31, JAN-FEB 1984 . 1984-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 44: Mar-Apr 1986 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The moon, the stars, and human behavior We humans have an inherited penchant for observing the heavens and wondering if the stars can affect our daily lives. Secular humanists hate astrology with a passion because, like Cassius in Julius Caesar, they believe we are masters of our own destinies. Nevertheless, astrol-ogy columns are still prominent in most newspapers. In the scientific press, however, we have to score a big plus for the anti-astrologers. First, Nature has just published a detailed analysis of the predictive power of astrology, and astrology has come up very short. The Nature study is by S. Carlson, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. At the end of seven data-packed pages Carlson concludes: "We are now in a position to argue a surprisingly strong case against natal astrology as practised by reputable astrologers. Great pains were taken to insure that the experiment was unbiased and to make sure that astrology was given every reasonable chance to succeed. It failed. Despite the fact that we worked with some of the best astrologers in the country, recommended by the advising astrologers for their expertise in astrology and their ability to use CPI (California Personality Inventory), despite the fact that every reasonable suggestion made by the advising astrologers was worked into the experiment, despite the fact that the astrologers approved the design and predicted 50 per cent as the 'minimum' effect they would ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 66: Nov-Dec 1989 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Globular Clusters Upset Theory Of Galaxy Formation A spherical cloud of globular clusters surrounds the Milky Way galaxy. Each cluster is itself a spherical groups of stars. Through the telescope, globular clusters are beautiful spherical aggregations of bright stars that seem to get ever denser toward the cluster's center. Globular clusters harbor many anomalies (AOB4 and AOB17 in Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos); here, we mention two involving spatial distribution and age. Many spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, spin ponderously in the center of a spherical cloud of scores, even hundreds, of globular clusters (see sketch). Not only do the globular clusters surrounding us display a different spatial distribution (spherical rather than flat-spiral), but their individual ages undercut galaxy theory. All of the Milky Way's globular clusters were supposed to have been formed when our galaxy was created. Yet, the ages of these clusters vary by as much as 5 billion years. (Dayton, Leigh; "Globular Clusters Upset Theory of Galaxy," New Scientist, p. 34, May 13, 1989.) Comment. We cannot resist mentioning still another cluster anomaly: The globular clusters do not participate in the galaxy's general rotation. Where did these oddballs come from? Reference. The catalog volume: Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos, mentioned above, is described here . From Science Frontiers #66, NOV-DEC 1989 ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 79: Jan-Feb 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Crop circles: if some are hoaxes, are they all hoaxes?One could almost hear a sigh of relief among the skeptics of unusual natural phenomena when two Britons admitted to manufacturing scores of crop circles. After all, the crop circles are about as outrageous as UFOs and toads-entombedin-stone. However, the crop circles have not gone away. In fact, plant and soil samples from the circles seem to point to bizarre, highly energetic processes at work. This aspect of the phenomenon has been discussed by R. Noyes, Secretary of the Center for Crop Circle Studies (CCCS). First, though, Noyes has asserted that hoaxes cannot explain the large numbers of circles that have been counted -- about 1000 between 1980 and 1989. He con tinued as follows: "The events of 1990 and 1991 (totalling about a further 1000 over the two years) certainly present a puzzle. Hoax is beyond doubt in some cases, but it seems very unlikely as a general explanation. Many events have been very large and very elaborate; they have occurred widely about the country (sometimes several on the same night in counties far from each other); there have been very few cases of detection of hoax, despite massive surveillance in the Mariborough/Devizes area, where so many of the events took place; circles (including a dumbbell formation) occurred within visual and radar range of a hi-tech ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 81: May-Jun 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Mutant Molecules Fight For For Survival Under ASTRONOMY, we saw how universes might mutate and evolve. Shifting dimensions by just a few-score orders of magnitude, from the cosmological to the molecular, we find that molecules, too, may mutate and evolve. A group of scientists at MIT, led by J, Rebek, believes that it has discovered the chemical equivalent of biological evolution. This is the same team that claimed the synthesis of the first self-replicating molecule in 1990. "Now the same chemists have carried out experiments with two more selfreplicating molecules, and discovered that they can cooperate, catalysing each other's formation. Furthermore, when one of the molecules is exposed to ultraviolet light and is 'mutated', it becomes 'aggressive' and takes over the system. According to Rebek and his colleagues, this is evidence that evolution can be modelled at the molecular level." (Emsley, John; "How 'Mutant' Molecules Fight for Survival," New Scientist, p. 22, February 29, 1992.) Comment. We wonder if the "passive" molecules are "uphappy" about being bullied in this way! From Science Frontiers #81, MAY-JUN 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Science And Bubblegum Cards " Summary . -- 139 professional baseball players who appeared on Topps bubble gum cards (copyright 1987) were subjects. The players, whose printed eye colors could be identified from their photographs, were sorted into three categories of 45 dark-eyed white players, 27 light-eyed players, and 67 black players. The statistics on the backs of the cards were dependent measures and included: Games, At Bat, Runs, Hits, Second Base, Third Base, Home Runs, Runs Batted In, Stolen Bases, SLG, Bunts, Strike Outs, and Batting Average." The researchers then performed analyses of variance with these data. The most important findings were that black players scored more triples, stole more bases, and boasted better batting averages. Eye color did seem to be an impor tant factor!!" (Beer, John, Beer, Joe; "Relationship of Eye Color to Professional Baseball Players' Batting Statistics Given on Bubblegum Cards,: Perceptual and Motor Skills , 69:632, 1989.) Facetious Comment. Why must we spend billions on the Supercollider and Space Station when the equipment for important scientific research can be had for pennies at the corner store? From Science Frontiers #73, JAN-FEB 1991 . 1991-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... According to W. Haseltine, who heads Human Genome Sciences, "They're reading smudged text through foggy glasses." Haseltine's company claims to have found more than 90,000 human genes. Two other organizations have identified between 60,000 and 65,000 genes. A research group at Ohio State University at Columbus analyzed the same data used by the public consortium and estimates that there are actually human 80,000 genes! In fact, this groups avers, the public consortium's software seems to have missed 850,000 gene segments for which there already exists protein or RNA evidence. The human genome map seems to harbor many terrae incognitae. So, we best not draw profound conclusions just yet. (Kintisch, Eli; "So What's the Score?" New Scientist, p. 16, May 12, 2001.) Errors. The genome-mapping efforts of both the public consortium and private company (Celera) depended heavily upon computers and software. That errors may have crept into Celera's map of the human genome via their software is suggested by analysis of Celera's earlier map of the fly genome. The same "shotgun" approach was employed in both efforts. When S. Karlin, at Stanford, began using the fly genome map he spotted many errors. He has said, More than 60 per cent of their quences were in substantial disagreements [with known sequences], and this got me a little bit angry. (Coghlan, Andy; "Shotgun Wedding," New Scientist, p. ...

... , Rachel; "Brain Center Linked to Perfect Pitch," Science, 267:616, 1995) Comment. Perfect pitch is nice to have, but why should it have evolved at all seeing it has little survival value? What good is perfect pitch -- or any kind of musical talent -- in tracking animals or grubbing for tubers? Women vs. men. In another application of magnetic resonance imaging, B. Shaywitz and colleagues at Yale compared the inferior frontal gyrus areas of the brains of men and women engaged in language tests. Specifically, they were being asked whether or not two nonsense words rhymed. Men, they found, use only the left inferior frontal gyrus area, but in women both left and right areas were activated. Conclusion: women, who regularly score better than men in linguistic tests, may acquire this extra capability by harnessing both halves of their brains. (Aldhous, Peter; "Why Women Are Better with Words," New Scientist, p. 10, February 18, 1995) From Science Frontiers #99, MAY-JUN 1995 . 1995-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... of a cryptic nature, connecting humans to the environment in PEAR's psychokinesis and remoteviewing experiments. In describing his model of this information channel, Jahn writes: "Like physical light (energy) and elementary particles (mass), consciousness (information) enjoys a wave/ particle duality that allows it to circumvent and penetrate barriers and to resonate with other consciousnesses and with appropriate aspects of the environment. Thereby it can both acquire and insert information, both objective and subjective, from and to its resonant partners." (Ref. 2) The immense body of empirical data amassed by Jahn's PEAR laboratory certainly suggests the existence of an allpervading information-transfer medium that is independent of space and time. Persinger relies upon a different corpus of research: neurological experiments as well as scores of his own studies of the effects of the geomagnetic environment upon human perception and consciousness. Both Jahn and Persinger write of information flow. The ideas of brain matrices and resonances are not too dissimilar. Persinger relies upon the electromagnetic medium; Jahn's is not specified. Jahn and Persinger are visionary regarding their research. It is perhaps well to reproduce Persinger's warning: "Within the last two decades, a potential has emerged which was improbable but which is now marginally feasible. This potential is the technical capability to influence directly the major portion of the approximately six billion brains of the human species without mediation through classical sensory modalities by generating neural information within a physical medium within which all member of the species are immersed." (Ref. 1) Can Orwell's ...

... an animal's brain (a cat's brain here) seems to be active even when an animal is sleeping deeply but not dreaming. It seems that during an extremely quiet phase of sleep, when researchers thought that nothing much was happening in the [cat's ] brain, groups of cells involved in the formation of new memories signal one another. The signals, discovered only a few years ago, allow cells in many parts of the brain to form lasting links. Then, when a few cells are stimulated during waking hours, the links are activated and an entire memory is recalled. Deep, dreamless sleep has long been thought to be of little value to an animal. Apparently this is not the case. Deep sleep seems to be valuable in memory activation. Score one for sleep. (Blakeslee, Sandra; "Researchers Link Deep Sleep to Memory Recall," Austin American-Statesman, December 2000. Cr. D. Phelps.) Rats rerun mazes in their dreams. Rats apparently can't escape the rat race, even when they're sound asleep. Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they have entered the dreams of rats and found them busily working their way through the same lab mazes they negotiate during the day. The MIT maze-running rats were hooked up to equipment that recorded the neuron-firing patterns in the rats' hippocampus where memories are processed. The patterns were the same when the rats were dreaming and when running the maze during waking hours. From the patterns, it was even possible to tell ...

... use their fingers to test for warmth coming out of the silverware or to feel the metal surface become sticky. Everyone felt pretty silly, sitting there holding the silverware, until the head of a fork being held by a boy (age 14) bent over all by itself! Almost everyone in the room saw this happen and experienced an instantaneous belief system change. Then the silverware in the hands of many people in the room became soft. They easily bent and twisted the silverware into unusual shapes. The period during which the metal remained soft was between five and twenty seconds. Everyone was shouting and extremely excited. During the next hour, nineteen of the party attendees had experienced the metal getting soft and being easily formed into any shape." Such PK 'parties' have been held scores of times since 1981, leaving trails of damaged kitchenware and popped soy beans. It's all a lot of fun. The people attending "feel good" about themselves and their shared experiences. (Houck, Jack; "PK Party History," in Proceedings of a Symposium on Applications of Anomalous Phenomena, C.P Scott Jones, ed., Kaman Tempo, Alexandria, Virginia, 1984.) Comment. Is mass delusion the foundation of PK parties? Is the above article serious? Houck's paper is in a long collection of rather standard parapsychological fare presented at a conference held under the auspices of Kaman Tempo. The phenomena of PK parties are similar to the audible effects produced by a Toronto group a few years ago. In their case, the participants ...

... ). In this device 9,000 3/4 -inch polystyrene spheres cascaded down through an array of 330 nylon pegs into 19 bins. According to chance a Gaussian distribution of spheres should be found in the bins. The operators were asked to mentally try and skew the distribution to the right or left, or construct a baseline, as with the REG. Once again, there was statistically significant evidence of a mental influence. Jahn's group also engaged in remoteviewing experiments, in which subjective factors were suppressed as far as possible. An excerpt from the report's Abstract summarizes this phase of the work nicely: "Quantitative analysis of a large data base of remote perception experiments reveals similar departures from chance expectation of the degree of target information acquired by anomalous means. Digital scoring techniques based on a spectrum of 30 binary descriptors, applied to all targets and perceptions in the experimental pool, consistently indicate acquisition of substantial topical and impressionistic information about remote geographical locations inaccessible by known sensory channels." In some trials, the percipient was asked to describe the remote scene even before the location was selected or visited! (Jahn, R.C ., et al; "Engineering Anomalies Research," Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1:21, 1987.) Cumulative deviations from chance for higher numbers of counts (PK +), lower numbers (PK-), and baseline (BL). The low probabilities obtained from more than 250,000 trials are very significant. Each operator had curves with distinctive shapes, or "signatures". From Science ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 105: May-Jun 1996 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects English Muddles The Brain "A boy who struggles to read English primary-school storybooks yet has no trouble with university physics textbooks in Japanese is challenging current thinking on dyslexia. The 17year-old boy, known as AS, is the first person shown to be dyslexic in one language but not another." AS has English-speaking parents but lives in Japan, where he attends Japanese primary school. He scores poorly in reading English, even lagging behind his Japanese schoolmates, but he understands English like a native. AS is also taught to read the Japanese form of writing called "kanji", in which the symbols carry meaning but have no phonetic value - unlike written English. Curiously, AS reads kanji easily, exhibiting no problems in his visual processing skills. He also does well with the other type of Japanese writing called "kana", where symbols do correspond to certain sounds. Written English is the problem! AS presents psychologists with two enigmas: If, as currently believed, a specific part of the brain is reserved for reading, and a person has trouble with one language, it seems logical that he should have difficulties with all languages. The conventional theory of dyslexia asserts that it is associated with visual processing. If so, AS should find kanji even more troublesome than English. (Motluk, Alison; "Why English Is So Hard on the Brain," New Scientist, p. 14 ...