Tag Archives: science

The mummy’s curse: It came from an Egyptian tomb…

Well no, actually, it didn’t. But once a myth lurches into life, there’s no stopping it

…the epidemiologist Mark Nelson from the University of Tasmania, Australia, designed a formal trial of the curse based on protocols for testing the effects of drugs. He compared people who were in the tomb at key times with people who were in Egypt but not in the tomb. His report, published in the British Medical Journal in 2002, concluded that being in the tomb did not significantly hasten death. The ‘participants’ in the study lived on average for more than 20 years after the tomb was opened, whether they visited it or not.

…the mummy’s curse as we know it is a product of 19th-century England. Dominic Montserrat, an Egyptologist from the Open University, traced the first mention to a science-fiction book called The Mummy! (1827) by the little-known novelist Jane Webb Loudon, who was inspired after attending a public unwrapping of a mummy near Piccadilly Circus in London. Loudon set her story in the 22nd century and featured an embalmed corpse who threatened to strangle the book’s hero, a young scholar called Edric.

Now you see it, now you don’t

No Planet of Alpha Centauri B?

Last October astronomers announced big news: the discovery of a rocky, scorching hot, Earth-sized planet circling our closest stellar neighbor, the orange dwarf star Alpha Centauri B just 4.3 light-years away. Exoplanet astronomer Debra Fischer (Yale) told the New York Times that the planet next door was the “story of the decade.” Almost lost in the excitement was the caveat that the planet’s detection was still iffy and required heroic efforts to extract any sign of it from the background noise of the star’s radial-velocity measurements.

Now the plot has become more muddled. A new analysis of the data by an independent researcher has failed to confirm the planet’s existence.

How to resolve this issue: Get a lot more data. Everybody involved agrees on that. This is science at work. Finding a planet in the Alpha Centauri system would be really cool (ask any science fiction fan), but we need to be sure it is really there.

Free the Quarks!

Calculating the strong force

A watershed: the emergence of QCD

We had arrived at a very specific candidate theory of the strong interaction, one based on precise, beautiful equations. And we had specific, quantitative proposals for testing it.

See also the Bag Model of Quark Confinement. Corry Lee gave a great explanation of this in her talk about the Higgs Boson at Chicon 7 last summer.

Epic Fraud

How to succeed in science (without doing any)

Note the first “tip:”

01. Fake data nobody ever expects to see. If you’re going to make things up, you won’t have any original data to produce when someone asks to see it. The simplest way to avoid this awkward situation is to make sure that nobody ever asks. You can do this in several ways, but the easiest is to work only with humans. Most institutions require a long and painful approval process before anyone gets to work directly with human subjects. To protect patient privacy, any records are usually completely anonymized, so no one can ever trace them back to individual patients.