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Scientists have found preliminary evidence that exposure to hairspray during the first three months of pregnancy increases the risk of a common genetic deformity in baby boys.
The team found that the risk of hypospadias - a defect in which the urinary opening forms on the underside of the penis - increased from 4 in 1,000 boys to 9.6 in 1,000 when the mother was exposed to hairspray during her work. The team also found that folic acid, which mothers are advised to take during early pregnancy to avoid neural tube defects, seems to prevent hypospadias. Taking the supplement led to a 36% decrease in risk. Contrary to previous research, the scientists found that a vegetarian diet did not increase a mother's risk of giving birth to a boy with hypospadias.
Prof Paul Elliott, head of epidemiology and public health at Imperial College London, said the study was too preliminary to draw firm conclusions. "My view personally is that people shouldn't be overly worried about this in terms of everyday use [of hairspray]."
His team conducted a telephone survey of 471 women whose sons had been diagnosed with hypospadias and 490 randomly selected women who had given birth to boys in the same period. They asked about occupational exposure to various chemicals and other lifestyle factors such as household income, vegetarianism and smoking.
One theory for why hairspray might affect a child's development involves chemicals called phthalates. The EU banned their use in cosmetics in 2005, after the boys in the study were born.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsI have a cold (and they're worse than you remember when you're well). Throughout the nation, homeopaths and self-declared nutrition therapists are celebrating. More importantly, I know that there is almost nothing I can do, except sit it out, and wait. Vitamin C will shave a few hours off it, at high doses, like 7g a day, which I can happily live without.
Although literally anything I try will appear, to me, to work: because unless I'm seroconverting with HIV (not that I'm prone to hypochondria) I will get better anyway. This is the natural history of the illness, and it's true with most things. When your back pain is at its worst and you visit your doctor - or your friendly local spoonbender - it's bound to get better, because these things come in cycles, or as statisticians say, they "regress to the mean". You can look at regression to the mean mathematically, if you like. On Bruce Forsyth's Play Your Cards Right, when Brucey puts a three on the board, the audience all shout: "Higher!" because they know the odds are that the next card is going to be higher than a three. "Do you want to go higher or lower than a jack? Higher?" "Lower!"
So I could take homeopathy. Or I could, equally stupidly, harass my GP for antibiotics, even though they are ineffective in treating a viral cold.
In one study, prescribing antibiotics rather than giving advice on self-management for sore throat resulted in an increased overall workload through repeat attendance. If a GP prescribed antibiotics for sore throat to 100 fewer patients each year, they calculated: 33 fewer would believe that antibiotics were effective, 25 fewer would intend to consult with the problem in the future, and 10 fewer would come back within the next year.
If you were an alternative therapist, or a drug salesman, you could turn those figures on their head and use them as a blueprint to drum up more trade: because we are all prone to see patterns where there is none, and more than that, to believing that our actions have results. This was demonstrated in a chilling experiment several decades ago. Subjects were recruited to play the role of a teacher trying to make a child arrive on time for school at 8.30am. They sat at a computer, on which it appeared that each day, for 15 consecutive days, a child would arrive at some time between 8.20 and 8.40.
Since this was a psychology experiment, the subjects were lied to: they did not know that the arrival times were entirely random, and predetermined before the experiment began.
Nevertheless, participants thoughtfully deployed punishments for lateness, and rewards for punctuality.
When they were asked at the end to rate their strategy, 70% concluded that reprimand was more effective than reward in producing punctuality from the child. It's a touching testament to their own beliefs about the world.
These people were convinced that their actions had an impact on the punctuality of the child, even though the arrival time was entirely random. The joy is, you have no way of knowing how many areas of your life this experiment might be relevant to. Now I'm going to dangle some goat entrails around my neck and get chanting.
• Please send your bad science to bad.science@guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsRich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.
The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of "neo-colonialism", with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.
Rising food prices have already set off a second "scramble for Africa". This week, the South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics announced plans to buy a 99-year lease on a million hectares in Madagascar. Its aim is to grow 5m tonnes of corn a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres), relying on a largely South African workforce. Production would be mainly earmarked for South Korea, which wants to lessen dependence on imports.
"These deals can be purely commercial ventures on one level, but sitting behind it is often a food security imperative backed by a government," said Carl Atkin, a consultant at Bidwells Agribusiness, a Cambridge firm helping to arrange some of the big international land deals.
Madagascar's government said that an environmental impact assessment would have to be carried out before the Daewoo deal could be approved, but it welcomed the investment. The massive lease is the largest so far in an accelerating number of land deals that have been arranged since the surge in food prices late last year.
"In the context of arable land sales, this is unprecedented," Atkin said. "We're used to seeing 100,000-hectare sales. This is more than 10 times as much."
At a food security summit in Rome, in June, there was agreement to channel more investment and development aid to African farmers to help them respond to higher prices by producing more. But governments and corporations in some cash-rich but land-poor states, mostly in the Middle East, have opted not to wait for world markets to respond and are trying to guarantee their own long-term access to food by buying up land in poorer countries.
According to diplomats, the Saudi Binladin Group is planning an investment in Indonesia to grow basmati rice, while tens of thousands of hectares in Pakistan have been sold to Abu Dhabi investors.
Arab investors, including the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, have also bought direct stakes in Sudanese agriculture. The president of the UEA, Khalifa bin Zayed, has said his country was considering large-scale agricultural projects in Kazakhstan to ensure a stable food supply.
Even China, which has plenty of land but is now getting short of water as it pursues breakneck industrialisation, has begun to explore land deals in south-east Asia. Laos, meanwhile, has signed away between 2m-3m hectares, or 15% of its viable farmland. Libya has secured 250,000 hectares of Ukrainian farmland, and Egypt is believed to want similar access. Kuwait and Qatar have been chasing deals for prime tracts of Cambodia rice fields.
Eager buyers generally have been welcomed by sellers in developing world governments desperate for capital in a recession. Madagascar's land reform minister said revenue would go to infrastructure and development in flood-prone areas.
Sudan is trying to attract investors for almost 900,000 hectares of its land, and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, has been courting would-be Saudi investors.
"If this was a negotiation between equals, it could be a good thing. It could bring investment, stable prices and predictability to the market," said Duncan Green, Oxfam's head of research. "But the problem is, [in] this scramble for soil I don't see any place for the small farmers."
Alex Evans, at the Centre on International Cooperation, at New York University, said: "The small farmers are losing out already. People without solid title are likely to be turfed off the land."
Details of land deals have been kept secret so it is unknown whether they have built-in safeguards for local populations.
Steve Wiggins, a rural development expert at the Overseas Development Institute, said: "There are very few economies of scale in most agriculture above the level of family farm because managing [the] labour is extremely difficult." Investors might also have to contend with hostility. "If I was a political-risk adviser to [investors] I'd say 'you are taking a very big risk'. Land is an extremely sensitive thing. This could go horribly wrong if you don't learn the lessons of history."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsScientists appear to have solved a mystery that has lasted more than 400 years by identifying the skeleton of Nicolaus Copernicus, founder of modern astronomy.
The key to the puzzle were two strands of hair found in Sweden among the 16th-century scientist's papers, and a tooth and femur bone that were taken from the remains of a man found in the chancel of Frombork Cathedral in northern Poland four years ago.
Copernicus was a priest at the cathedral. Reconstruction of the skull found in an unmarked grave showed it resembled portraits of him made during his lifetime and also matched the age when he died.
DNA testing proved the hairs, tooth and bone were from the same person, leading scientists to conclude the remains were, almost without doubt, those of Copernicus.
Copernicus turned on its head the concept held by the establishment for more than 1,000 years that the sun orbited the earth and planets, proving it was the other way round. His theories led to conflicts with the powers of the day that remained unresolved when he died in seclusion in 1543.
Archaeologists dug up the skeleton in 2004 and sent it to forensic experts who reconstructed its facial features. But attempts to match DNA from the skeleton with the remains of Copernicus's bishop uncle Lukas Watzenrode, who was also buried in the church, failed.
The breakthrough came after the discovery of a book with notes made by Copernicus, in which the Swedish geneticist Marie Allen from Uppsala University found two hairs. She was able to isolate the cells that were subsequently matched to genes of the Frombork skeleton.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsBritain may be scorned for refusing to send humans into space, but from next week it will have the next best thing: its own university course on how to be an astronaut.
Staff at Leicester University have called in a former Nasa astronaut, Jeff Hoffman, a veteran of five space shuttles, to teach the course which will offer instruction on how to survive in space, coping with the psychological demands of long-term space travel and how to conduct a spacewalk without dropping your toolbox.
Hoffman, who took part in crucial spacewalks to fix cameras aboard the Hubble space telescope in 1993, will join Leicester as a visiting professor but will maintain his position in the astronautics department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The government is reviewing its long-held opposition to human spaceflight and an announcement is expected weeks before the European Space Agency reveals at least four new recruits to its astronaut team. Britain has never had an astronaut train through ESA because its funding covers only robotic missions and ground-based astronomy.
"There's a strong student interest," Hoffman said. "If Britain continues with that policy, these students will still be able to work in other capacities at the European Space Agency."
Hoffman will draw attention to the future exploration of the solar system, which is likely to see humans working alongside robotic rovers that could be sent out from a moonbase to conduct experiments at remote sites.
The Leicester course begins as the UK prepares for a high-level meeting of European science ministers, at which human space exploration will be discussed.
Martin Barstow, head of physics and astronomy at Leicester, said: "I'm fed up with the way the UK keeps dodging the issue of being involved in human spaceflight. Our students don't need to be loaded with that baggage.
"They still have aspirations to be astronauts and they still want to get involved in the space industry, so why should the UK government's attitude be a handicap?"
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsBritain may be scorned by other nations for steadfastly refusing to send humans into space, but from next week it will have its own university course on how to be an astronaut.
Staff at the University of Leicester have called in former Nasa astronaut Jeff Hoffman – a veteran of five space shuttle missions – to teach the course, which will offer instruction on how to survive in space, coping with the psychological demands of long-term space travel and how to conduct a spacewalk without dropping your toolbag.
Hoffman, who took part in crucial spacewalks to fix cameras aboard the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, will join Leicester as a visiting professor but will maintain his position in the astronautics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The UK government is reviewing its long-held opposition to human spaceflight and is due to announce its conclusions by the end of the year. The announcement is expected weeks before the European Space Agency reveals at least four new recruits to its astronaut corps.
A British astronaut has never trained through Esa because the UK's funding of space only runs to robotic missions and ground-based astronomy.
"There's a strong student interest in this despite the fact that the British government has not supported human participation in spaceflight," Hoffman told the Guardian. "If Britain continues with that policy, these students will still be able to work in other capacities at the European Space Agency."
Hoffman will draw particular attention to the future exploration of the solar system, which is likely to see humans working alongside robotic rovers, which could be sent out from a manned moonbase to conduct experiments at remote sites.
The Leicester course begins as the UK prepares for a high-level meeting of European science ministers at which human space exploration will be discussed.
Martin Barstow, head of physics and astronomy at Leicester, said: "I'm fed up with the way the UK keeps dodging the issue of being involved in human spaceflight. Our students don't need to be loaded with that baggage. They still have aspirations to be astronauts and they still want to get involved in the space industry, so why should the UK government's attitude be a handicap?
"Only a very few people are ever going to become astronauts, even if the UK was fully signed up to human space flight. Most people won't get to do it, but they will become highly qualified physicists and engineers and will get involved in the space industry in different roles. What we want them to come out with is a real grasp of practicalities of living and working in space and what we need to do in the future."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsBees were last night declared the most invaluable species on the planet at the annual Earthwatch debate. The audience heard from five eminent scientists who battled it out for fungi, bats, plankton, primates and bees.
While of course all species are invaluable for our ecosystem, the debate is designed to raise awareness about conservation by asking the audience to vote for just one of the species to receive a fictitious cheque for one trillion pounds to be spent on their conservation.
It comes us no surprise that the audience voted to save the bees. Who would want a world without honey, flowers, and third of everything we eat including chocolate and coffee? Not me.
Some 250,000 species of flowering plants depend on bees for pollination. Many of these are crucial to world agriculture. Bees increase the yields of around 90 crops, such as apples, blueberries and cucumbers by up to 30%, so many fruits and vegetables would become scarce and prohibitively expensive.
In addition, many of our medicines, both conventional and alternative remedies, come from flowering plants. And cotton is another essential product pollinated by the bee, so we could say goodbye to cheap T-shirts and jeans.
But it's not just the human race that would suffer. Spare a thought for the poor birds and small mammals that feed off the berries and seeds that rely on bee pollination. They would die of hunger and in turn their predators – the omnivores or carnivores that continue the food chain would also starve. We could survive on wind-pollinated grains and fish, but there would be wars for control of dwindling food supplies. South America's ancient Mayan civilisation is thought to have died of starvation.
Although other insects and animals do pollinate – such as bats, butterflies and even wasps – none is designed like the bee as a pollinator machine.
There are 20,000 bee species around the world including solitary bees, bumblebees and honeybees. Many are monoletic – pollinate one plant – others like bumblebees and honeybees are polylectic. While bumblebees live in colonies of a few hundred, the sheer number of honeybees in a hive – up to 50,000 in the summer - and their ability to be managed, manipulated and transported by man makes them the most valuable pollinator.
Unfortunately all bees are already under serious Industrialised farming with its monocultures and pesticides has destroyed biodiversity and robbed the majority of bees of their habitat and food. While across the globe, the western honeybee – bred for its gentle nature and prolific honey making and pollination – is plagued by parasites and viruses, and also jeopardised by modern agricultural practices. More than a third of honeybees were wiped out in the US this year by Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious disease which is thought to be a combination of these assailants.
As Dr George McGavin, who was batting for the bees said: "Bee populations are in freefall. A world without bees would be totally catastrophic."
The Earthwatch audience should be applauded for heading his call and voting to save them, and itself as well.
• Alison Benjamin is co-author of A World without Bees
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