More from the New Scientist about the recent attacks on scientists using animal testing:
[The scientists] study how the brain develops, not in the bigger mammals most of us feel some kinship towards, but in mice and fruit flies. “I’m 99% sure that the public doesn’t care about the wellbeing of fruit flies,” says Frankie Trull, president of the Foundation for Bioethical Research in Washington, DC.
ArsTechnica has an excellent article examining the reasoning behind the violence used by the animal extremist movement.
The issue at its simplest is that animal rights extremists believe that animals are as deserving of the same rights and protections as humans, and that the use of animals in scientific research is deeply immoral. Since animals can’t speak for themselves, the extremist groups use violence on their behalf. Animal rights activists often claim that the use of any animals in research is unnecessary, implying that the researchers who perform such studies are therefore doing it because they must enjoy causing distress.
Other parts of the article are worth quoting at length:
Unfortunately, that argument breaks down under even the simplest scrutiny. As imperfect as animal models are when applied to human biology and disease, putative replacements such as computer simulations remain decades away. We can’t even accurately model the behavior of a single cell on the molecular level due to the thousands of different (but interrelated) biochemical pathways contained within. If a single cell is out of the question, you can imagine that being able to model organs or complete organisms is several magnitudes harder.
And finally:
Perhaps the problem is our complex relationship with animals. We use them for food, for clothing, as beasts of burden, but also as companions. The habit of anthropomorphizing projects human emotions onto creatures that in many cases are incapable of them; when your dog cranes its head to one side, is it really considering your question thoughtfully, or is it just being a dog?
It’s hard to fathom how passionately misguided you must feel about an issue to resort to inflicting such extreme violence, and in such respects I find little difference between the mentality and goals of religious extremists and animal-rights extremists.
Charlie Brooker on the pseudoscience behind Brain Gym:
Confuse fantasy with reality and you might find yourself doing crazy things, like trying to wave hello to Ian Beale each time you see him on the telly, or buying homeopathic remedies - both of which are equally boneheaded pursuits.
Equally:
Look at the accredited practitioners of the art: top of their list of qualified Brain Gym “instructor/consultants” is a woman who is apparently also a “chiropractor for humans and animals”. That’s nothing: I read tarot cards for fish.
CERN are being sued to stop using their new $8 billion Large Hadron Collider.
Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”
A contestant on the US edition of Who Wants to be a Millionaire manages to win $500,000 purely by using his knowledge of cognitive neuroscience.