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Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

By Betsy Mason |

A new crop of supercomputers is breaking down the petaflop speed barrier, pushing high-performance computing into a new realm that could change science more profoundly than at any time since Galileo, leading researchers say.

When the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so.

These computers aren’t just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they will enable a new class of science that wasn’t possible before. As recently described in Wired magazine, these massive number crunchers will push simulation to the forefront of science.

Scientists will be able to run new and vastly more accurate models of complex phenomena: Climate models will have dramatically higher resolution and accuracy, new materials for efficient energy transmission will be developed and simulations of scramjet engines will reach a new level of complexity.

“The scientific method has changed for the first time since Galileo invented the telescope (in 1609),” said computer scientist Mark Seager of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Supercomputing has made huge advances over the last decade or so, gradually packing on the ability to handle more and more data points in increasingly complex ways. It has enabled scientists to test theories, design experiments and predict outcomes as never before. But now, the new class of petaflop-scale machines is poised to bring about major qualitative changes in the way science is done.

“The new capability allows you to do fundamentally new physics and tackle new problems,” said Thomas Zacharia, who heads up computer science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, home of the second place Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer. “And it will accelerate the transition from basic research to applied technology.”

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DNA finger printing could soon reveal your surname

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

By Richard Alleyne | The laboratory which invented genetic fingerprinting believes the same technique could be refined to reveal the surnames of men.

A study of more than 2,500 men bearing over five hundred different surnames found those with the same family name are highly likely to be genetically linked.

The system works by isolating the Y chromosome of the DNA which - like a surname - is passed down the male line virtually untouched. This is then cross-matched against a proposed database of more than 40,000 names.

Despite many names in this country being hundreds of years old there is still on average a quarter chance that a match can be found, the research suggests.

With rarer names such as Attenborough, Swindlehurst and Kettley there is a higher the percentage likelihood of a match, with up to 87 per cent chance they will share a common genetic inheritance.

Dr Turi Kin of the University of Leicester, who carried out the research, said the technique could help genealogists as well as police investigating crimes.

Dr King said: “In Britain, surnames are passed down from father to son. A piece of our DNA, the Y chromosome, is the one part of our genetic material that confers maleness and is passed, like surnames, from father to son. Therefore, a link could exist between a man’s surname and the type of Y chromosome he carries. A simple link between name and Y chromosome could in principle connect all men sharing a surname into one large family tree.

Dr King said that the system could be a “useful investigative tool”.

“We could take DNA from the scene of a crime and come up with a possible surname for the culprit”, she said.

“It could help prioritise an investigation and point detectives to the right door to knock. The rarer the surname, the stronger the link.”

Dr King works in the Genetics Department of the university where the revolutionary technique of genetic fingerprinting was invented by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys in 1984.

For the research, she recruited more than two and a half thousand men bearing over 500 different surnames to take part in the study including the scientist Sir David Attenborough.

Dr King’s research showed that on average between two men who share the same surname there is a 24 per cent chance of sharing a common ancestor through that name but that this increases to nearly 50 per cent if the surname they have is rare.

Dr King then went on to look at 40 surnames in depth by recruiting many different men all bearing the same surname, making sure that she excluded known relatives.

Surnames such as Attenborough and Swindlehurst showed that on average more than 70 per cent of the men shared the same or near identical Y chromosome types.

Events such as adoptions, name-changes and non-paternities would also confuse any simple genetic link.

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‘Pre-crime’ detector shows promise

Friday, September 26th, 2008

New Scientist | Last year, New Scientist revealed that the US Department of Homeland Security is developing a system designed to detect “hostile thoughts” in people walking through border posts, airports and public places. The DHS says recent tests prove it works.

Project Hostile Intent as it was called aimed to help security staff choose who to pull over for a gently probing interview - or more.

ommentators slated the idea that sensors could spot people up to no good from their pulse rate, breathing, skin temperature, or fleeting facial expressions. One likened it to the “pre-crime” units that predict criminal behaviour in the movie Minority Report.

However, last week, the DHS science unit gave an update on the project, now dubbed the less-hostile-sounding Future Attribute Screening Technologies (FAST) programme. And, if DHS claims are to be believed, the research appears to be getting somewhere.

At an equestrian centre in Maryland, 140 paid volunteers walked through a pair of trailers kitted out with a battery of FAST sensors, including cameras, infrared heat sensors and an eyesafe laser radar, called a Bio-Lidar, that measures pulse and breathing rate from a distance.

Some subjects were told to act shifty, be evasive, deceptive and hostile. And many were detected. “We’re still very early on in this research, but it is looking very promising,” says DHS science spokesman John Verrico. “We are running at about 78% accuracy on mal-intent detection, and 80% on deception.”

That sounds incredibly high at such an early stage in the research - but only tests on vast quantities of real people, rather than eager volunteers, will present any real test.

Questions remain, however, as to how secure the system is. The machines could reveal health conditions like heart murmurs and breathing problems as well as stress levels - which would be an invasion of privacy.

But Verrico says FAST has been through stringent privacy controls (pdf) and that the data is never matched to a name. It is only used to make decisions about whether to question someone, and then discarded.

The trial technology was installed in a trailer because it is planned to be easily transportable, so that FAST trucks can appear at any sports or music event as required. They look set to become as regular a sight at such events as mobile toilets and catering trucks.

But is going to make a real difference? Or will bad guys learn to play the system and render it another piece of what expert Bruce Schneier dubs “security theatre“.

Given that the FAST approach is not much different to the long established - and long established as unreliable - polygraph, that certainly seems plausible.

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How industry money protects killer chemicals

Friday, September 12th, 2008

By David Michaels | It happens almost every time. When a study is published linking a workplace chemical to serious disease, a scientist working for the industry disputes the findings. David Michaels, author of ‘Doubt is their product’, exposes industry’s dangerous tactics to protect its toxic favourites.

This strategy of “manufacturing scientific uncertainty” comes directly from the tobacco industry’s playbook. In fact, many of the same scientists who manufactured doubt for the cigarette companies are now performing that same task for a wide range of other industries.

How did we get here? In the 1950s, when scientists first showed that smokers had hugely increased risk of lung cancer, the cigarette companies ran a sophisticated public relations campaign to raise doubts about the increasingly definitive scientific evidence. The companies realised that if you could argue about the science, then you could avoid having to address solutions: how to help people stop smoking. But even when that didn’t work, Big Tobacco could always fall back on the argument that smoking was a choice – whatever the risk, smokers made the choice themselves, and that it was their right to do so.

That all changed in the 1980s and 1990s, when studies began to demonstrate that cigarette smoke killed not just smokers but their non-smoking spouses and workers employed in smoke-filled environments. Big Tobacco spent millions of dollars employing more and smarter scientists to argue that these studies were flawed.

The result was the creation of an industry of scientific consultants who specialise in “product defence,” and the recognition by corporate spin experts that manufacturing doubt works – do it well and you can stop government regulators, or at least slow them down for years.

In 1969 an executive at Brown & Williamson, a cigarette maker now owned by RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company, unwisely committed to paper the perfect slogan for his industry’s disinformation campaign: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.” Big Tobacco has lost all respect and credibility, but the practices it perfected have proliferated. A growing trend that disingenuously demands proof over precaution in the realm of public health.
Product defence

In field after field, year after year, conclusions that might support regulation are always disputed. Animal data are deemed not relevant, human data not representative, and exposure data not reliable. Whatever the story — workplace chemicals that cause cancer, diesel exhaust, global warming, sugar and obesity, secondhand smoke, plastics chemicals that may disrupt endocrine function — scientists in the “product defence industry” will manufacture uncertainty about it.

The “debate” over global warming is perhaps the most pernicious outgrowth of tobacco’s strategy. We can expect to see the scientists who last year claimed uncertainty about humans’ role in climate change now asserting that there is so much uncertainty about the public health impacts, or the technology required to reduce carbon emissions that we must undertake more research before setting new policy. I call it Denying Climate Change 2.0.

While much of the media has learned to be sceptical about manufactured uncertainty in the climate debate, less public attention is trained on the pervasive use of doubt-for-hire in other industries whose products threaten the health of workers and consumers.

In Doubt is their product: How industry’s assault on science threatens your health I dissect industry’s campaigns to manufacture doubt about a series of important workplace hazards, including asbestos, benzene lead, aromatic amines (dyes and rubber chemicals that cause bladder cancer), beryllium, chromium 6, diacetyl (the artificial butter flavor component that has killed or damaged the lungs of dozens of workers – Hazards 101) and ergonomic hazards. I focus largely on the US, because this country dominates the worldwide standard-setting process. When our regulators allow manufactured uncertainty to weaken or delay protections, workers across the world suffer the repercussions.
Standard response

I have had the opportunity to witness at close range the process of manufacturing scientific doubt. In the Clinton administration, I served as US Assistant Secretary for Environment, Safety, and Health in the Department of Energy (DOE), the chief safety officer for the nation’s nuclear weapons facilities. I ran the process through which we issued a strong new rule to reduce exposure to beryllium, a metal vital in nuclear weapons and now used in consumer products like golf clubs.

Beryllium causes lung disease at extremely low exposure levels, and it causes lung cancer. After leaving the government, I was able to obtain a collection of secret documents which showed that the beryllium industry has run a 30 year campaign industry attacking any study that questioned the old, out-of-date OSHA standard.

Chromium 6 is another industrial chemical featured in Doubt is Their Product. For more than five decades, we have known chromium 6 is a powerful lung carcinogen. But in the US, it has never been regulated as cancer-causing. Secret minutes of the Chrome Coalition [1], the chromium employers’ trade association, reveal that when the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was finally considering a new workplace exposure standard, the chromium industry brought in some of the nation’s top product defense scientists, to design a sophisticated counter attack. The chromium manufacturers also sponsored an important study which showed that chromium 6 caused lung cancer at levels far below the OSHA standard in effect at the time [2], but those results were never revealed until I discovered them.

Deadly tactic

These examples are not exceptional. I report on corporate efforts to manufacture uncertainty about asbestos, lead, vinyl chloride, diacetyl, and a host of other chemicals.

Doubt is their product is filled with never before published documents, like the never-published letter from the medical director of DuPont stating that 100 per cent of the men who made beta-naphthylamine (BNA) at one factory developed bladder cancer [3]. DuPont also produced other bladder carcinogens in that same factory; at least 450 workers at the plant developed work-related bladder cancer [4].

One of the chemicals closely related to BNA made at that plant was ortho-toluidine (OT). Through a series of DuPont letters, reports and papers, the book demonstrates that DuPont managers witnessed this development and growth of this tragic epidemic, yet refused to acknowledge that OT could also cause bladder cancer, shipping the chemical out without proper warnings. As a result, dozens of workers exposed to OT in a plant in Niagara Falls New York, USA, have developed bladder cancer.

For many years, DuPont and other manufacturers have disputed the link between OT and human bladder cancer. Earlier this year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer evaluated OT and reached the same conclusion I did, too late for the Niagara Falls workers: OT is a human bladder carcinogen.

In researching this book, I uncovered a many documents like the DuPont bladder cancer ones. Some of these documents are shocking. To ensure they can be used by activists, public health practitioners and regulators, I have posted every reference in the book, with links to all of the “smoking guns,” at DefendingScience.org.

Doubt is their product powerfully demonstrates that conflicted science is not good science. If a scientist is paid by a polluter or a manufacturer of dangerous products, her or his judgment is inevitably clouded by that financial relationship; this is true even for scientists who have great integrity and who try to be honest. As a result, we cannot rely on the judgment of these scientists when considering how to best protect workers from toxic exposures. Activists, unions and scientists need to demand that our government agencies rely on independent studies conducted by independent scientists, not ones bought and paid for by the producers of the hazards.

The mission of health and safety activists, as well as public health and environmental agencies, is to reduce hazards before people get sick or the environment is irreparably damaged. We don’t need certainty to act. It is time to return to first principles: use the best science available, but do not demand certainty where it does not exist.

 

References

1. Secret minutes of the Chrome Coalition. [pdf1] [pdf2] [pdf3]

2. Collaborative cohort mortality study of four chromate production facilities, 1958-1998, September 2002 [pdf]

3. June 18 1947 letter from the manager at DuPont’s Chambers plant [pdf]

4. 25 October 1991 email from Robert Weiss MD [pdf]

 

This article was first published in Hazards Magazine, 103,  August 2008

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Scientists to study synthetic telepathy

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

UCi | A team of UC Irvine scientists has been awarded a $4 million grant from the U.S. Army Research Office to study the neuroscientific and signal-processing foundations of synthetic telepathy.

The research could lead to a communication system that would benefit soldiers on the battlefield and paralysis and stroke patients, according to lead researcher Michael D’Zmura, chair of the UCI Department of Cognitive Sciences.

“Thanks to this generous grant we can work with experts in automatic speech recognition and in brain imaging at other universities to research a brain-computer interface with applications in military, medical and commercial settings,” D’Zmura says.

The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would “think” a message to be transmitted and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target.

“Such a system would require extensive training for anyone using it to send and receive messages,” D’Zmura says. Initially, communication would be based on a limited set of words or phrases that are recognized by the system; it would involve more complex language and speech as the technology is developed further.”

D’Zmura will collaborate with UCI cognitive science professors Ramesh Srinivasan, Gregory Hickok and Kourosh Saberi. Joining the team are researchers Richard Stern and Vijayakumar Bhagavatula from Carnegie Mellon University and David Poeppel from the University of Maryland.

The grant comes from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program, which supports research involving more than one science and engineering discipline. Its goal is to develop applications for military and commercial uses.

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Planets by the Dozen

Monday, May 12th, 2008

By Dr. Tony Phillips | You know the planets of our solar system, each a unique world with its own distinctive appearance, size, and chemistry. Mars, with its bitter-cold, rusty red sands; Venus, a fiery world shrouded in thick clouds of sulfuric acid; sideways Uranus and its strange vertical rings. The variety is breathtaking.

Now imagine the variety that must exist in hundreds of solar systems. There may be worlds out there that make Venus seem hospitable and Uranus positively upright. Only 20 years ago, astronomers were unsure whether any such worlds existed beyond our own solar system. Now, they’ve found more than 280 of them, each with its own planetary “personality,” each a fascinating example of what a world can be.

Yet the heyday of planetary discovery is only just beginning. This fall, astronomers will start a massive search for new planets by observing about 11,000 nearby stars over 6 years. This number dwarfs the roughly 3,000 stars that astronomers have searched to date for the presence of planets. Scientists estimate that the NASA-funded project, called MARVELS (Multi-object Apache Point Observatory Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey), will find at least 150 new planets—perhaps many more.

“We’re looking in particular for giant planets like Jupiter,” says Jian Ge, principal investigator for MARVELS and an astronomer at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Ge likens big planets to “beacons of a lighthouse” signaling the presence of entire solar systems. “Once we find a big planet around a star, we know that smaller planets could be there, too.”

MARVELS will do much more than just catalogue a few hundred more planets. By surveying the Jupiter-like planets around such a large number of stars, MARVELS aims to give astronomers the data they need to test competing theories for how planetary systems form and evolve.

To look at so many stars, MARVELS will use a telescope that can separately image 60 stars at a time, and this number will eventually be increased to 120 stars. The telescope, which will be housed at the Apache Point Observatory in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico, has a 2.5 meter primary mirror and a wide field of view that covers 7 square degrees of the sky—an area that would appear 35 times larger than the Moon.

An array of 60 fiber-optic threads will carry light from the telescope’s focal plane to highly sensitive interferometers. These instruments can detect tiny changes in the frequency of a star’s light. How does this help find planets? Ge explains: When a star is tugged to and fro by the gravity of an orbiting planet, the star’s light is shifted to and fro in frequency–an effect called the Doppler shift. The powerful gravity of Jupiter-sized planets exerts a big tug on the parent star, making them relatively easy to find using the Doppler shift method.

If Ge and his colleagues see a star’s frequency slowly increasing and decreasing in a repeating cycle over days, weeks, or months, it’s a good bet that a planet is there.

Scientists are keen to learn what kinds of stars have orbiting gas giants. One theory for how these planets form predicts that stars rich in heavy elements such as silicon, oxygen, and nickel should be more likely to have Jupiter-like planets. Imagine a planet-forming disk surrounding such a star: The disk, like the star itself, would be rich in heavy elements. Those heavier elements would form rocky chunks in the disk, and these dense chunks would collide and merge to create a “planet seed” with strong enough gravity to gather gas around itself and grow into a behemoth.

So if MARVELS finds more gas giants around stars containing heavier elements, the survey would support this theory. But some gas giants might not need these heavy elements to form. Another theory suggests that Jupiter-like planets can arise simply because a disturbance in the planet-forming disk starts the gravitational collapse of a region of gas and dust—no seed required.

By examining a large number of stars with a variety of heavy element fractions, MARVELS may be able to distinguish between these two ideas.

Data from MARVELS will also shed light on other questions about planet formation, such as how often the orbits of gas giants migrate closer to their stars, and how planets sometimes end up with highly eccentric orbits instead of the nearly circular orbits predicted by theory. By surveying an unprecedented number of stars, MARVELS could deliver the data scientists need to find patterns about the conditions most favorable for planet creation, knowledge that can guide future, detailed observations of individual stars.

Follow-up observations might eventually use space telescopes powerful enough to make out the rough appearance of those many worlds. The planets we know may only hint at the marvels waiting … out there.

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New CSI Tool Analyzes Antibodies

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

AP | Federal researchers say they’ve developed a human identification test that’s faster and possibly cheaper than DNA testing. It would be a handy new weapon in the arsenal for detectives, forensic experts and the military, though no one expects it to replace DNA analysis - and its promoters say it is not intended to.

The new method analyzes antibodies. Each person has a unique antibody bar code that can be gleaned from blood, saliva or other bodily fluids. Antibodies are proteins used by the body to fend off viruses or perform routine physiological housekeeping.

“DNA is a physical code that describes you … and in many ways so are your antibodies,” said Dr. Vicki Thompson, a chemical engineer at the Idaho National Laboratory who’s been working with other researchers to perfect the test for the past 10 years.

The scientists say an antibody profile can yield results faster and more cheaply and be performed in the field with minimal training. National lab administrators have licensed the technology exclusively to Identity Sciences LLC in Alpharetta, Ga.

The Georgia startup plans to begin rolling out test kits and training to law enforcement, the military and forensic and medical labs around the globe by fall of 2009. Ken Haas, vice president of marketing, says the test is not intended to supplant DNA testing, the recognized gold standard in human identification.

But Haas says the value of antibody profiling is as a screening tool to help make sense of a crime scene, sort out the blood trails or spatter from multiple victims or more quickly identify body parts on a battlefield or at the scene of a disaster like the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

It may also reduce the number of DNA tests required in an investigation, potentially saving time and money and easing the growing backlog, he said. Results from tests on blood serum or dried blood can be ready in two hours, a fraction of the time it takes to run similar tests for DNA matches.

However, a major drawback for now is the lack of a national antibody database. That’s one of the reasons antibody testing is not likely to be used at the outset of an investigation to link suspects to crimes or establish probable cause to justify issuing an arrest warrant.

Company officials say beta testing by forensic scientists at simulated crime scenes at seven locations across the country has produced positive results and reinforced the notion that an eager market awaits. The company declined to say where the testing occurred, citing nondisclosure agreements with participants.

The company has not yet put a price tag on the field kits. But executives say their product will be significantly cheaper than DNA analysis, which can run anywhere from $500 to $3,000 per sample because it requires sophisticated equipment and lab time.

“We don’t see this yet as a product to take to court,” said Gene Venesky, vice president of Identity Sciences. “But we do see this as a way to get the case moving forward toward a final, legal resolution.”

Still, some forensics experts say that kind of scrutiny may be unavoidable, especially if the test takes on a bigger crime-fighting role.

“There is a lot of potential here,” said Lawrence Kobilinsky, a DNA expert and chairman of the Department of Forensic Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “Any time you can develop a quick and easy screen for something … that is a good thing.”

But Kobilinsky and others caution that it takes time for any new forensic test to gain acceptance where it matters most - state and federal courthouses. If the new tests begin appearing in police reports, defense attorneys can be expected to challenge their validity.

“If these tests are going to get to the courtroom, which I think is inevitable, they are not going to be admissible as evidence until they can be proven reliable, accurate” and trustworthy, Kobilinsky said. “My bet is that a crime scene unit is going to be very careful about using this if it’s not going to be of any benefit in litigation.”

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Insects using plants as telephones

Monday, April 28th, 2008

By Roland Piquepaille | A team of Dutch ecologists has found that subterranean and aboveground herbivorous insects use plants to communicate. ‘Subterranean insects issue chemical warning signals via the leaves of the plant. This way, aboveground insects are alerted that the plant is already occupied.’ This means that by using ‘green telephone lines,’ the two kinds of insects can avoid to compete for the same plant, allowing for faster growth for both species. Fascinating, but read more…

You can see above an example of interaction between aboveground and belowground insects, using plant leaves as ‘green phone lines.’ (Credit: Roxina Soler, NIOO-KNAW) Here is a link to a larger version of this picture.

Let’s look first at the short Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) news release. “In recent years it has been discovered that different types of aboveground insects develop slowly if they feed on plants that also have subterranean residents and vice versa. It seems that a mechanism has developed via natural selection, which enables the subterranean and aboveground insects to detect each other. This avoids unnecessary competition. Via the ‘green telephone lines’, subterranean insects can also communicate with a third party, namely the natural enemy of caterpillars. Parasitic wasps lay their eggs inside aboveground insects. The wasps also benefit from the volatile signals emitted by the leaves, as these reveal where they can find a good host for their eggs.”

This research work has been conducted at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) in the Department of Multitrophic Interactions (MTI) of the Centre for Terrestrial Ecology. For those of you who don’t know what ‘multitrophic’ means, please read this page at Wikipedia. You’ll discover that ‘trophic’ comes from a Greek word meaning food or nutrition. “Multitrophic interactions are those which involve more than two trophic levels in a food web. The term is most often applied to interactions among plants, herbivores and predators.”

This particular project was led by Roxina Soler Gamborena, a PhD student at NIOO. Here is how she describes her expertise in plant-insect multitrophic interactions. “Plants and insects are part of a complex multitrophic environment, in which they closely and actively interact. However, a systematic tendency to study mainly aboveground insect interactions limited the ability to develop more predictive models to achieve a better understanding of ecology and evolution in a more realistic frame. In the project I am working in, we are interested in study the interactions between below and aboveground insects, and how they can affect each other.”

Her project, “A multitrophic approach linking below and aboveground organisms,” is described in the MTI’s student subjects page. Here is one part of the introduction. “Recently, there is an increasing interest in studying the interaction of aboveground and belowground compartments as a whole, rather than isolated aboveground studies. It is now acknowledged that insects can interact even when they feed on the host plant in different moments and parts of the plant, and some experiments had been carried out to study the interactions between belowground and aboveground insect herbivores. The main aim of this study is to determine if the oviposition behaviour of aboveground hyperparasitoids (and parasitoids) is affected by feeding damage by herbivores in the soil, as these affect parasitoid host and plant quality, using the follow multitrophic system as target for the study.” The above figure has been picked from this document.

For more information, you can read one of the technical paper co-authored by Soler and published in Functional Ecology under the title “Foraging efficiency of a parasitoid of a leaf herbivore is influenced by root herbivory on neighbouring plants” (Volume 21, Issue 5, Pages 969-974, October 2007). Here is an excerpt from the abstract. “Our results show that the interaction between an above-ground foliar feeding insect and its parasitoid can be influenced by the presence of non-host herbivores feeding on the roots of neighbouring conspecific plants.”

You also can read a paper published in Oikos, another Blackwell Publishing journal, under the title “Root herbivores influence the behaviour of an aboveground parasitoid through changes in plant-volatile signals” (Volume 116, Number 3, Pages 367-376, March 2007). Here is the last paragraph of the abstract. “Our results provide evidence that the foraging behaviour of a parasitoid of an aboveground herbivore can be influenced by belowground herbivores through changes in the plant volatile blend. Such indirect interactions may have profound consequences for the evolution of host selection behaviour in parasitoids, and may play an important role in the structuring and functioning of communities.”

Sources: The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), April 11, 2008; and various websites

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Cambridge University Twin Towers Theory Debunked

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

Dr Seffen Paper Proven Ludicrous

By Mick Meaney
RINF Alternative News

In late 2007 a British academic, Dr. Keith Seffen of the University of Cambridge, published a new mathematical analysis of the collapse of the World Trade Centre – however the paper contains several ridiculous claims. Now a formal request has been made by Mr J A Blacker MSc IMI, who recently debunked the paper, to Dr. Chris Burgoyne, the Head of the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University, highlighting these errors and appealing for the misleading paper to be corrected.

The request points out that Dr Seffen’s paper defies several key laws of physics, i.e. conservation of momentum and conservation of energy.

Mr Blacker’s request also states:

“All the floors offered the same flimsy resistance, when in fact each had different construction characteristics, is beyond any logic as the lower floor core columns were over double the thickness compared to the upper floors.”

Such glaring errors should be an embarrassment to one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities.

Dr Seffen’s paper essentially claims that a falling body can fall through the path of most resistance. Such a claim is ludicrous and defies all logic or honest scientific integrity.

Another inaccuracy in the paper is the fact it does not take into account the energy needed to convert the 300,000 tons of concrete and steel to dust.

“The Seffen analysis is based on the columns being a hollow box construction. What about cross bracing?” states Mr Blacker.

“The Seffen paper claims that burning jet fuel in air can weaken ALL the steel girders evenly (hence symmetrical collapse due to gravity of all columns perfectly), yet both ends of these outer and inner massive columns were outside the fire zone to differing degrees hence heat would have conducted up and down very efficiently at different rates, and many columns were not even subjected to any significant fire. Are we really expected to believe that fire can weaken steel evenly despite the core columns conducting heat efficiently at varying rates away from varied regions of temperature?”

Simply put, for the University of Cambridge to continue supporting this absurd theory is to present a fictional view of physics.

Download the request here in PDF format.

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Scientists discover way to reverse loss of memory

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

By Jeremy Laurance

Scientists performing experimental brain surgery on a man aged 50 have stumbled across a mechanism that could unlock how memory works.

The accidental breakthrough came during an experiment originally intended to suppress the obese man’s appetite, using the increasingly successful technique of deep-brain stimulation. Electrodes were pushed into the man’s brain and stimulated with an electric current. Instead of losing appetite, the patient instead had an intense experience of déjà vu. He recalled, in intricate detail, a scene from 30 years earlier. More tests showed his ability to learn was dramatically improved when the current was switched on and his brain stimulated.

Scientists are now applying the technique in the first trial of the treatment in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. If successful, it could offer hope to sufferers from the degenerative condition, which affects 450,000 people in Britain alone, by providing a “pacemaker” for the brain.

Three patients have been treated and initial results are promising, according to Andres Lozano, a professor of neurosurgery at the Toronto Western Hospital, Ontario, who is leading the research.

Professor Lozano said: “This is the first time that anyone has had electrodes implanted in the brain which have been shown to improve memory. We are driving the activity of the brain by increasing its sensitivity – turning up the volume of the memory circuits. Any event that involves the memory circuits is more likely to be stored and retained.”

The discovery had caught him and his team “completely by surprise”, Professor Lozano said. They had been operating on the man, who weighed 190kg (30st), to treat his obesity by locating the point in his brain that controls appetite. All other attempts to curb his eating had failed and brain surgery was the last resort.

The treatment for obesity was unsuccessful. But, while the researchers were identifying potential appetite suppressant points in the hypothalamus, the part of the brain associated with hunger, the man suddenly began to say that memory was flooding back.

“He reported the experience of being in a park with friends from when he was around 20 years old and, as the intensity of stimulation increased, the details became more vivid. He recognised his girlfriend [from the time] … The scene was in colour. People were wearing identifiable clothes and were talking, but he could not decipher what they were saying,” the researchers write in Annals of Neurology, published today.

The man, who has not been identified, was also tested on his ability to learn lists of paired objects. After three weeks of continuous hypothalamic stimulation, his performance on two learning tests was significantly improved. He was also much more likely to remember a list of unrelated paired objects with the electrodes turned on than when turned off.

Speaking to The Independent yesterday, Professor Lozano said: “His performance improved dramatically. As we turned the current up, we first drove his memory circuits and improved his learning. As we increased the intensity of the current, we got spontaneous memories of discrete events. At a certain intensity, he would slash to the scene [in the park]. When the intensity was increased further, he got more detail but, when the current was turned off, it rapidly decayed.”

The discovery surprised the scientists as the hypothalamus has not usually been identified as a seat of memory. The contacts that most readily produced the memories were located close to a structure called the fornix, an arched bundle of fibres that carries signals within the limbic system, which is involved in memory and emotions and is situated next to the hypothalamus.

Professor Lozano is a world authority on deep-brain stimulation who has undertaken 400 operations on Parkinson’s disease sufferers and is developing the technique as a treatment for depression, for which he has performed 28 operations. He said the discovery of its role in stimulating memory had wide implications.

“It gives us insight into which brain structures are involved in memory. It gives us a means of intervening in the way we have already done in Parkinson’s and for mood disorders such as depression, and it may have therapeutic benefit in people with memory problems,” he said.

The researchers are testing the approach in six Alzheimer’s patients in a Phase 1 safety study. Three have so far had electrodes surgically implanted. The electrodes are attached via a cable that runs below the skull and down the neck to a battery pack stitched under the skin of the chest. The “pacemaker” delivers a constant low-level current that stimulates the brain but cannot be perceived by the patient.

Professor Lozano said: “It is the same device as is used for Parkinson’s disease. We have placed the electrodes in exactly the same area of the hypothalamus because we want to see if we can reproduce the findings in the earlier experiment. We believe the memory circuits we are stimulating are close by, physically touching the hypothalamus.

“It is a very effective treatment for the motor problems associated with Parkinson’s disease and it has been used on 40,000 people. We are in the early stages of using it with Alzheimer’s patients and we don’t know if it will work. We want to assess if we can reach the memory circuits and drive improvement. It is a novel approach to dealing with this problem.”

British researchers welcomed the discovery. Andrea Malizia, a senior lecturer in psychopharmacology at the University of Bristol who is studying deep-brain stimulation as a treatment for depression, said: “If they had said let’s stick an electrode in the hypothalamus to modify Alzheimer’s disease, I would have said ‘Why start there?’ But, if they have had a serendipitous finding, then that is as good. Serendipitous findings are how a lot of discoveries in science have been made.”

Ayesha Khan, a scientific liaison officer at the Alzheimer’s Disease Society, said: “This is very cutting-edge research. It is exciting, but the initial result is in one person. It will need much further investigation.”

How deep-brain stimulation works

Deep -brain stimulation has been used for more than a decade to treat a range of conditions including depression, chronic pain, Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders.

It has been so successful in treating Parkinson’s that 40,000 patients worldwide now have electrodes implanted in their brains driven by pacemakers stitched into their chests.

As the devices become smaller, requiring less risky surgery, and the target areas of the brain requiring stimulation are more precisely identified, demand for the treatment is expected to leap. Although it is expensive, the potential savings in care and treatment costs are immense. It does not lead to dependence on drugs and is reversible.

The electrodes are implanted under local anaesthesia while the patient is awake. Before the operation, the neurosurgeon performs an MRI scan and establishes the target location for the electrodes. He then carries out a craniotomy – lifting a section of the skull – and inserts the electrodes and leads. By stimulating the electrodes and checking the patient’s response, the surgeon can check that they are positioned in the right place.

Different areas of the brain are targeted for different conditions. For Parkinson’s disease, they are placed in the subthalamic nucleus; for depression, in area 25 of the cingulate cortex.

Deep-brain stimulation was developed in France and first licensed by the Food and Drug Administration in the US in 1997 as a treatment for tremor. In the UK, the surgery is performed at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, in Bristol, in Oxford and at a handful of other centres.

The name of the procedure is in some ways a misnomer as it often involves inhibiting electrical activity in an area of the brain rather than stimulating it. The technique is as much about restoring balance between competing brain areas which leads to the tremor characteristic of some types of Parkinson’s disease.

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Scientific Technique and the Concentration of Power

Monday, January 14th, 2008

Brent Jessop

“So long as the rulers are comfortable, what reason have they to improve the lot of their serfs?”- Bertrand Russell, 1952 (p61)

Bertrand Russell in his 1952 book The Impact of Science on Society* he describes the effects of “scientific technique” on the increasing control of societies by an ever shrinking number of people. As we will see, “scientific technique” is much more than just the development and widespread use of new technology, but first some of its effects.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970) was a renowned British philosopher and mathematician who was an adamant internationalist and worked extensively on the education of young children. He was the founder of the Pugwash movement which used the spectre of Cold War nuclear annihilation to push for world government. Among many other prizes, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 and UNESCO’s (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) Kalinga prize in 1957.

Increasing Organization

From Impact of Science on Society:

“This [the telegraph] had two important consequences: first messages could now travel faster than human beings; secondly, in large organizations detailed control from a centre became much more possible than it had formerly been.

The fact that messages could travel faster than human beings was useful, above all, to the police…” - 33

“Electricity as a source of power is much more recent than the telegraph, and has not yet had all the effects of which it is capable. As an influence on social organisation its most notable feature is the importance of power stations, which inevitably promote centralisation… as soon as a community has become dependent upon them for lighting and heating and cooking. I lived in America in a farm-house which depended entirely upon electricity, and sometimes, in a blizzard, the wires would be blown down. The resulting inconvenience was almost intolerable. If we had been deliberately cut off for being rebels, we should soon have had to give in.” - 35

“But what is of most importance in this connection is the development of flying. Aeroplanes have increased immeasurably the power of governments. No rebellion can hope to succeed unless it is favoured by at least a portion of the air force.” - 36

“In industry, the integration brought about by scientific technique is much greater [than agriculture] and more intimate.

One of the most obvious results of industrialism is that a much larger percentage of the population live in towns than was formerly the case. The town dweller is a more social being than the agriculturist, and is much more influenced by discussion. In general, he works in a crowd, and his amusements are apt to take him into still larger crowds. The course of nature, the alternations of day and night, summer and winter, wet or shine, make little difference to him; he has no occasion to fear that he will be ruined by frost or drought or sudden rain. What matters to him is his human environment, and his place in various organisations especially.

Take a man who works in a factory, and consider how many organisations affect his life. There is first of all the factory itself, and any larger organisation of which it may be a part. Then there is the man’s trade union and his political party. He probably gets house room from a building society or public authority. His children go to school. If he reads a newspaper or goes to a cinema or looks at a football match, these things are provided by powerful organisations. Indirectly, through his employers, he is dependent upon those from whom they buy their raw material and those to whom they sell their finished product. Above all, there is the State, which taxes him and may at any moment order him to go and get killed in war, in return for which it protects him against murder and theft so long as there is peace, and allows him to buy a fixed modicum of food.” [emphasis mine] - 44

“The increase of organisation has brought into existence new positions of power. Every body has to have executive officials, in whom, at any moment, its power is concentrated. It is true that officials are usually subject to control, but the control may be slow and distant. From the young lady who sells stamps in a Post Office all the way up to the Prime Minister, every official is invested, for the time being, with some part of the power of the State. You can complain of the young lady if her manners are bad, and you can vote against the Prime Minister at the next election if you disapprove of his policy. But both the young lady and the Prime Minister can have a very considerable run for their money before (if ever) your discontent has any effect.” [emphasis mine] - 45

“The increased power of officials is an inevitable result of the greater degree of organisation that scientific technique brings about. It has the drawback that it is apt to be irresponsible, behind-the-scenes, power, like that of Emperors’ eunuchs and Kings’ mistresses in former times. To discover ways of controlling it is one of the most important political problems of our time. Liberals protested, successfully, against the power of kings and aristocrats; socialists protested against the power of capitalists. But unless the power of officials can be kept within bounds, socialism will mean little more than the substitution of one set of masters for another: all the former power of the capitalist will be inherited by the official. [emphasis mine]” - 47

“As we have seen, the question of freedom needs a completely fresh examination. There are forms of freedom that are desirable, and that are gravely threatened; there are other forms of freedom that are undesirable, but that are very difficult to curb… The resultant two-fold problem, of preserving liberty internally and diminishing it externally, is one that the world must solve, and solve soon, if scientific societies are to survive.

Let us consider for a moment the social psychology involved in this situation.

…The armed forces of one’s own nation exist - so each nation asserts - to prevent aggression by other nations. But the armed forces of other nations exist - or so many people believe - to promote aggression. If you say anything against the armed forces of your own country, you are a traitor, wishing to see your fatherland ground under the heel of a brutal conqueror. If, on the other hand, you defend a potential enemy State for thinking armed forces necessary to its safety, you malign your own country, whose unalterable devotion to peace only perverse malice could lead you to question…

And so it comes about that, whenever an organisation has a combatant purpose, its members are reluctant to criticise their officials and tend to acquiesce in usurpations and arbitrary exercise of power which, but for the war mentality, they would bitterly resent. It is the war mentality that gives officials and governments their opportunity. It is therefore only natural that officials and governments are prone to foster war mentality.” [emphasis mine] - 51

“I incline to think that ‘liberty’, as the word was understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is no longer quite the right concept; I should prefer to substitute ‘opportunity for initiative’. And my reason for suggesting this change is the character of a scientific society.” - 68

More Organization is More Power

“The effect of the telegraph was to increase the power of the central government and diminish the initiative of distant subordinates. This applied not only to the State, but to every geographically extensive organization. We shall find a great deal of scientific technique has a similar effect. The result is that fewer men have executive power, but those few had more power than such men had formerly.” [emphasis mine] - 35

“We have seen that scientific technique increases the importance of organisations, and therefore the extent to which authority impinges upon the life of the individual. It follows that a scientific oligarchy has more power than any oligarchy could have in pre-scientific times. There is a tendency, which is inevitable unless consciously combated, for organisations to coalesce, and so to increase in size, until, ultimately, almost all become merged in the State. A scientific oligarchy, accordingly, is bound to become what is called ‘totalitarian’, that is to say, all important forms of power will become a monopoly of the State.” [emphasis mine] - 56

“In the first place, since the new oligarchs are the adherents of a certain creed, and base their claim to exclusive power upon the rightness of this creed, their system depends essentially upon dogma: whoever questions the governmental dogma questions the moral authority of the government, and is therefore a rebel. While the oligarchy is still new, there are sure to be other creeds, held with equal conviction, which must be suppressed by force, since the principle of majority rule has been abandoned. It follows that there cannot be freedom of the Press, freedom of discussion, or freedom of book publication. There must be an organ of government whose duty it is to pronounce as to what is orthodox, and to punish heresy. The history of the Inquisition shows what such an organ of government must inevitably become. In the normal pursuit of power, it will seek out more and more subtle heresies. The Church, as soon as it acquired political power, developed incredible refinement of dogma, and persecuted what to us appear microscopic deviations form the official creed. Exactly the same sort of thing happens in the modern States that confine political power to supporters of a certain doctrine.” - 57

“The completeness of the resulting control over opinion depends in various ways upon scientific technique. Where all children go to school, and all schools are controlled by the government, the authorities can close the minds of the young to everything contrary to official orthodoxy. Printing is impossible without paper, and all paper belongs to the State. Broadcasting and the cinema are equally public monopolies. The only remaining possibility of unauthorised propaganda is by secret whispers from one individual to another. But this, in turn, is rendered appallingly dangerous by improvements in the art of spying. Children at school are taught that it is their duty to denounce their parents if they allow themselves subversive utterances in the bosom of the family. No one can be sure that a man who seems to be his dearest friend will not denounce him to the police; the man may himself have been in some trouble, and may know that if he is not efficient as a spy his wife and children will suffer. All this is not imaginary, it is daily and hourly reality. Nor, given oligarchy, is there the slightest reason to expect anything else.” [emphasis mine] - 58

What is Scientific Technique?

Scientific technique is much more than just the impact of new technology on the machinations of society. It is the use of science, in its most calculating and inhumane ways, to analyze, control and guide societies in a desired direction. This topic was elaborated on in a couple of talks given by Alan Watt (here and here) particularly through the writings of Jacques Ellul.

The rest of the articles in this series will also elaborate on other aspects of scientific technique, especially its application to education and human breeding. But first, I will examine Bertrand Russell’s views about the stability of scientific societies and the possibility of a scientific world government.

*Quotes from Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (1952). ISBN0-415-10906-X

Note: I first heard about this book from talks given by Alan Watt at Cutting Through The Matrix.com, an individual well worth looking into.

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First Air-Powered Car: Zero Emissions by Next Summer

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

By Matt Sullivan

India’s largest automaker is set to start producing the world’s first commercial air-powered vehicle. The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre for Luxembourg-based MDI, uses compressed air, as opposed to the gas-and-oxygen explosions of internal-combustion models, to push its engine’s pistons. Some 6000 zero-emissions Air Cars are scheduled to hit Indian streets in August of 2008.

Barring any last-minute design changes on the way to production, the Air Car should be surprisingly practical. The $12,700 CityCAT, one of a handful of planned Air Car models, can hit 68 mph and has a range of 125 miles. It will take only a few minutes for the CityCAT to refuel at gas stations equipped with custom air compressor units; MDI says it should cost around $2 to fill the car’s carbon-fiber tanks with 340 liters of air at 4350 psi. Drivers also will be able to plug into the electrical grid and use the car’s built-in compressor to refill the tanks in about 4 hours.

Of course, the Air Car will likely never hit American shores, especially considering its all-glue construction. But that doesn’t mean the major automakers can write it off as a bizarre Indian experiment — MDI has signed deals to bring its design to 12 more countries, including Germany, Israel and South Africa.

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Did White House Censor Science?

Monday, December 10th, 2007

CLAYTON SANDELL

House Democrats and Republicans traded rhetoric Monday over a new report claiming White House officials sought to suppress scientific views of global warming that clashed with Bush administration policies.

The report — originally undertaken as a bipartisan effort — leads to what the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee calls an “inescapable” conclusion that “the Bush administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.”

The report is the result of a 16-month investigation by the committee, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Republicans on the committee quickly dismissed the report as a “political attack” and issued their own findings that question the Democrats’ conclusions and investigative methods. The White House called the allegations untrue.

One of the issues addressed in the report released by the Democratic majority is whether the White House Council on Environmental Quality, or CEQ, required approval of all media requests to interview government climate scientists.

The report states that “by controlling which government scientists could respond to media inquiries, the White House and agency political appointees suppressed dissemination of scientific views that could conflict with administration policies.”

The report repeatedly cites the testimony of Kent Laborde, a career public affairs officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Laborde told the committee that the White House CEQ insisted on approving all news media requests to interview NOAA climate scientists — a practice Laborde said has only recently ended.

“According to Mr. Laborde,” the report said, “climate change was considered a high-profile issue, and anything that was very high profile, anything that related to policy, anything that particularly related to a current policy debate or policy deliberation’ had to be routed through CEQ for approval.”

White House approval for interviews with journalists became more prevalent after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, according to the report; scientists who denied a link between stronger hurricanes and global warming were given approval over scientists who suggested such a link.

Laborde told the committee that climate change seemed to be the only topic that garnered this special attention by the White House, and if the CEQ disapproved of an interview, “it would have not gone forward.”

The Republican minority report criticized Democrats for relying so heavily on Laborde’s testimony.

“A thorough investigation would have sought further evidence to complete the record before drawing conclusions based on the uncorroborated statements of one individual,” the Republican report said.

Keith Ausbrook, the committee’s Republican general counsel, told ABC News the report from Democrats led to conclusions “they had already decided on.”

Ausbrook said the report ignored the role that policymakers play in drafting policy and communicating it to the public.

“These guys are doing science, and that’s what they do,” Ausbrook said of government scientists. “And political appointees and other senior officials are responsible for developing policy and programs and taking that science and doing things with it.”

White House press secretary Dana Perino dismissed the Democrats’ report as “rehashed rhetoric.”

“I think that it’s inescapable that they issued the report on a day where [the] U.S. would be represented at the Bali conference, where we are currently talking about the next step for our framework after 2012, which is when Kyoto would end,” Perino said.

Perino was asked whether the White House told employees at federal agencies like NOAA to suppress climate science information.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Perino said. “I do not believe that is true.”

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Holes in the wall to see PINs in our eyes

Monday, September 3rd, 2007

Daily Mail

Bank customers could soon enter their PIN codes at cash machines just by looking at the numbers in the right order.

The system is designed to beat fraudsters looking over your shoulder to see which keys you press.

The technology, called EyePassword, is being developed in America - and High Street banks in Britain are already interested in using it.

It works by shining an infrared light on your eye. This stays in the same spot on your eye no matter where you look.

As you gaze at the cash dispenser key pad, your pupil moves. When your eye comes to rest on a number, a camera compares the position of your pupil with the fixed light in your eye.

The system is then able to work out which direction your pupil has moved in and how far and, therefore, which number you are looking at.

EyePassword has a three per cent error rate and it can take six times longer to enter your pin.

But Lloyds, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland have expressed an interest in the technology.

However, its inventor, Manu Kumar, of California’s Stanford University, warned: “There are lots of issues to be resolved, probably the biggest one being cost.”

Computer security specialist Dr Jeff Yan, of Newcastle University, said cash dispensers using EyePassword could cost £5,000, £3,000 more than a conventional ATM.

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Lie detectors target benefit claim cheats

Sunday, September 2nd, 2007

The Observer

Benefit claimants and job seekers could be forced to take lie detector tests as early as next year after an early review of a pilot scheme exposed 126 benefit cheats in just three months, saving one local authority £110,000.
Last May, the Department for Work and Pensions asked Harrow council in London to undertake a year-long, £63,000 pilot of the ground-breaking Voice Risk Analysis (VRA) technology.

‘We will wait until the end of the formal evaluation period to make a final decision about rolling the technology out across the country but this early review by the council is very positive,’ said a spokesman for the DWP.

Article continues

‘If our own review comes to similar conclusions to Harrow’s, we would like to see this technology rolled out across Britain as soon as possible.’
VRA technology works by measuring slight, inaudible fluctuations in the human voice known as ‘micro-tremors’ that indicate when a speaker delivers words under stress, and when those moments of stress are generated by an attempt to deceive. Voice patterns are analysed and displayed on a computer.

Normal speech ranges in frequency from 8 to 12 hertz. When they are being honest, the average sound is below 10 hertz. When they lie, the stress causes the frequency to rise to above 10 hertz.

‘This technology is successfully used in the insurance industry and analyses changes in a caller’s voice, giving an indication of the level of risk that they are lying,’ said Richard Sheridan from Capita Group which owns the technology and is helping implementation for Harrow council. ‘These changes are measured against the caller’s “normal” voice which is recorded at the beginning of the phone call, ensuring that nervousness or shyness is not a trigger. If the technology flags up a caller as being suspicious, they will be asked to provide extra evidence to support their claim.’

The technology is being tested on people claiming housing or council tax benefit but will be extended at Harrow Jobcentre for other benefits this year. The government claims the technology also improves services.

‘Operators trained in intelligent questioning and behavioural analysis will use the system to identify suspect cases at the start of the claim process, enabling low-risk claimants to be fast-tracked,’ said a DWP spokesman.

Over the past two years the procedure for claiming benefits has been reformed. The claim often begins with a telephone interview, after which people may need to provide evidence and sign forms.

Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, said the system ‘adds to the demonisation of claimants’.

‘Whatever their views on welfare policy, anyone who cares about science and reason should also be alarmed: lie detectors do not work, they are as likely to finger the innocent but nervous as the genuinely guilty,’ he said. ‘Innocent people will account for a majority of those whose claims are delayed while they provide extra evidence.’

Experts in America, where the most comprehensive scrutiny of the technology has taken place, warn that the technology is far from failsafe.

David Ashe, chief deputy of the Virginia Board for Professional and Occupational Regulation, said, ‘The experience of being tested, or of claiming a benefit and being told that your voice is being checked for lies, is inherently stressful.

‘Lie detector tests have a tendency to pass people for whom deception is a way of life and fail those who are scrupulously honest.’

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