Pseudoscience And The Natural History Museum

I've blogged before about eyebrow-raising items on sale in the NHM shop. I know and appreciate that the retail department is entirely separate from the science departments. However, this is no excuse for what I saw on sale on Friday night:


There, in between decent scientific guides to gemstones, minerals and fossils (note the British Mesozoic Fossils and British Cenozoic Fossils books on the right hand side), is The Crystal Bible. Now, it could just be a term to indicate that it is a detailed reference guide, right?


Wrong. "500 crystals to heal your body, mind and spirit."


Among the amazing things this book claims is that crystals will help "find love" and "reduce workplace bullying". The author also claims to be a "psychic researcher" and "paranormal expert".

To add insult to injury, the book isn't just tucked away in a dark area of the museum shop - it's also displayed prominently on the counter next to the minerals:


By offering this book for sale, particularly alongside genuine science books, the Museum is giving credence to this pseudoscientific bullshit. The public trust the NHM to give them accurate, interesting scientific information, and I don't believe this should stop the moment we enter the bright lights of the retail environment.

Retail and science may not mix at the NHM, but they bloody well ought to, for this very reason. Museums join teachers in having a duty to educate and inform. Crystal "healing" suggests that silicates can cure physical illnesses through some supposed mystical energy. This isn't just harmless rubbish - where pseudoscience claims to cure disease (apparently it will "help to relieve a headache"), there is a real risk that people will use these bogus therapies over genuine medical attention. While in mild cases this may simply be a case of a tax on human stupidity, the potential for harm is evident.

The stocking of this book in the shop of the most prominent museum in the country is up there with my biology lecturer colleagues who think evolution is fictional, the head of physics who says the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and the chemistry lecturer who follows homeopathy. It is incongruous, an abuse of trust, and just a whole big barrel full of wrong.

Cutting Up Students - For Science!!

Though it isn't on the Edexcel specification, I like to teach my students the difference between a light microscope and an electron microscope (not always obvious for them...), and then the difference between scanning and transmission electron microscopes.


Light microscope, at the Science Museum, London, June 2010
So a light microscope is great because entire cells can be seen in colour, but of course we don't get to see details of organelles. The transmission electron microscope (TEM) is ace for this, but you only get one slice through a cell at any one time, so the image may seem rather abstract.

Even for apparently bright A-level students, that concept is rather complicated, so I like to use a more visceral example. It's good to pick the one student who's really been pissing you off all lesson, probably talking while you're talking or something. Bring them up to the front and get a 1m ruler. Hold it diagonally across their body from shoulder to waist (trust me, you do not want to take any other angle). Then ask the assembled, if now rather amused, masses the following:

"If I were to take a sword and cut a slice through this student at this angle, which organs would I pass through and what would the surface look like?"

An animated discussion will now ensue as the students come up with increasingly bloodthirsty ideas about which organs will be visible.


Transverse section through L1, from Gray's Anatomy
Once they've discussed the many and varied ways in which the victim could be made to suffer, follow up with:

"Would this give you a good idea of the human body overall?"

Hopefully the unanimous response would be "no". So then, they can exercise their higher level thinking skills and come up with a way of getting an idea of the structure of the whole from thin slices. Some of them might even be aware of the Visible Human Project, which did just that. Or, perhaps more in keeping with how a TEM actually works, they could come up with a ballpark figure of how many other students would have to be sliced through at different angles to build up an image of the whole human body...

Incidentally, Google really should be clever enough to exclude all images of the popular US drama "Grey's Anatomy" when I'm looking for the anatomical textbook "Gray's Anatomy". And there should be an "assume user is not a bloody idiot" option, so that it doesn't say "Showing results for Grey's Anatomy. Search for Gray's Anatomy instead?".

A Coincidence

When two or more palaeontologists are in the same room, it is inevitable that one will suggest going for an alcoholic beverage of some description. So when real cider-lover Dave Hone stopped by for a chat and to inspect the gecko, I suggested we hit the Red Lion, home to real ales, real cider, the European pork scratchings mountain, and Eddie the cross-dressing dog. And, it would appear, pterosaurs:


It's a model of the Pterodactylus gargoyle on the front of the Natural History Museum, part of an exhibit by a local artist, Mac, who had died earlier that year. Shown, of course, with Dave for scale.

There was another Pterodactylus closer to the bar, but it was wearing a pink feather boa and wasn't so exciting (or maybe we'd just had too many pints by that point). Still, something of a fortunate coincidence to be able to take a pterosaur palaeontologist to a pub with a few pterosaur models kicking around.

Museum Shop Items

Yesterday, Paul and I went into London to see the "Private Eye: The First 50 Years" exhibition at the V&A Museum, followed by the "Wildlife Photographer of the Year" and "After Hours" at the Natural History Museum. All were excellent, of course.

However...

Being an advocate of avoiding stereotypes, especially for younger children, I was distinctly unimpressed to see this in the V&A gift shop:


The "Good Things for Girls" pack contains a skipping rope, colouring pencils and a knitting doll. The "Good Things for Boys" pack contains dominoes, juggling balls and a boat. Now, to my mind, there is no reason why boys can't enjoy skipping, colouring and knitting, nor why girls wouldn't appreciate dominoes, juggling or sailing a toy boat. However, they have been neatly packaged into the "traditional" roles.

I do bang on about this, but I have real trouble with an organisation that advocates itself as an academic institution (there are strict eligibility criteria for the use of the .ac.uk domain), which happily sells items that do not promote equality of opportunity for all children.

On a different note, there were no gender issues at the NHM, but there was a nice bit of taxonomy-fail:


Echinoids being confused for trilobites? Crinoids being confused for ferns? I think someone had a long day.

As an aside, we saw the newly-refurbished dinosaur gallery at the NHM. It's still dark, still dingy, still impossible to take a photo of an entire skeleton, still utterly inferior to pretty much every single dinosaur hall I have ever seen at a museum (I'm sure someone made a point about this a few weeks ago but I can't find the blog post to credit them). I don't know what they did in the refurb - there were a couple of new panels, and a bit of new CGI. The science is still mostly good, but bland and uncontroversial enough that it's good for a few more decades I suppose (!). It wouldn't even need so much high-tech stuff - just specimens, clean, well-lit, accurately mounted, with information about them. Or is that not enough of a money-spinner these days?

The Best Bits

Events over the past few days have triggered a few trips down memory lane for me. Submitting an extremely late UCAS entry today, going for a drink with the A2s on Monday and dinner with the BTECs last Friday, and generally watching these little baby birds spread their wings and fly away. A few of them have asked me what university is like, and what my fondest memories of university were. Sadly many of these events took place before digital cameras were around, and I haven't scanned half the incriminating photos associated with this, so imagination it is then.

• The cleaner in my first-year halls of residence, who looked after me like I was her own daughter when I got gastroenteritis
  
• The engineering student from upstairs who carried me from his room to my own and put me to bed, before sleeping in my armchair, the night I drank enough to die
  
• Being able to do a full evening's studying and go out clubbing at 11pm
  
• Soup with an absorbance of 1%, salmon en croute with sultanas and desserts constantly served with condensed milk because the chef did not like his puddings being "adulterated" with custard
  
• One of the geologists having their birthday during our Dorset fieldtrip, and the DJ in the "Ace Disco" in the basement of the hotel in Weymouth playing "You'll Never Walk Alone" for the happy scouser.
  
• The demonstrators' risk assessment for Tintagel, Cornwall, which warned of the dangerously high cholesterol levels associated with the Cornish pasty shop at the top of the hill
  
• Experimental sandwiches from hotels and B&Bs, such as beef and cranberry, or cheese and stuffing
  
• Cycling against the bracing Cambridge wind, whichever direction we were going in ("Nothing between here and the Urals")
  
• Working in the Sedgwick Museum with "Uncle Rod", a kindly curator who bore more than a passing resemblance to Hammond in Jurassic Park
  
• Enjoying a 46oz margarita in New Mexico on fieldwork
  
• Skinny-dipping in the Gulf of Evvia (Greece) in mid-December, after way too much retsina
  
• Getting to work on a real dinosaur fossil for my MSci project (still amazes me)
  
• Being taken seriously as a scientist by other scientists
  
• Certain undergrads from the year above me chucking cuddly Pokemon toys around the library when the librarian wasn't looking, and playing LaserQuest after dark in the department
  
• Coming out of our final exam and hearing the champagne corks pop
  
• Some cute LLM student from another college asking me to marry him at my May Ball

Let's hope equally fond memories await the matriculating class of 2011!

A Bit Of Maternal Pride

I've had a very busy and stressful fortnight (today I noticed I now have a full-on streak of grey hair at the front, which although not caused by the stress seemed an apt visual accompaniment...). Another member of staff and I joined up to organise our college's participation in National Science and Engineering Week. We had trips up the wazoo - to a "Chemistry In Action" event, to a criminology workshop, to the Science Museum and to the Natural History Museum.

I would like to apologise firstly to the staff in the Sexual Nature exhibit for the large drawing of a penis left on the comment board. I shall encourage them to draw it more anatomically correct next time...


My BTEC students have been taking part in I'm A Scientist: Get Me Out Of Here!, in the Space Zone. If any of you think that the vocational students are unable to deal with complex theoretical ideas, then check out my lad "waveicle" and some of the questions he's asking - every time I see a new question from him I get a swell of pride.

Great friend of mine Dave Hone very kindly agreed to come and give a talk on feathered dinosaurs, which was attended by about 50 or so students ranging from pre-GCSE up to A2. All I was able to offer him in return was one of the chef's more "experimental" recipes in the staff canteen, but there'll be a nice big pint of cider with his name on it down the Town Wharf come the summer. And he did say the students were better behaved than some of his undergrads, which is always nice to hear (even if I did have to give a couple of girls the hairdryer treatment later for being physically incapable of not speaking for more than ten seconds)...

And finally, the AS science students, admittedly with some degree of inertia, undertook some Science Busking activities, which drew absolutely massive crowds. The nice thing about objects with a lot of inertia is that, while it is really difficult to get them moving, once they're moving they really go! These guys were no exception. Since my video footage is up on the officially sanctioned YouTube channel, I can at last show you the little darlings in action:


You'll see me hamming it up pretending to be all nervous that the water balloon was going to burst, and the absolute highlight of the entire video is when the boys levitate the Principal from 2:30 or so onwards. So I'm incredibly proud of my students - they've risen to a lot of challenges in the past week and shown that they're growing and developing into very insightful, communicative scientists. I wonder if any of them will get a Nobel Prize?

(Of course this now means that I've told you where it is I work, so a) please don't come and stalk me, and b) if you look back at any of my blog posts and find I've done something stupid like call a manager a nobber, please let me know.)

More Cuts In Palaeontology

When I was an undergraduate, there was one subject that could fill me with dread (at least once I'd dropped all the hard rock geology and left myself the option of working on nice, soft rock stuff). It was micropalaeontology. I despised the practicals. The only thing that made spending two hours picking those pissy little foraminifera (forams) up with a moistened paintbrush bearable was knowing that the next week I'd be able to watch them being crushed up and shoved through a mass spectrometer. Result.


It took some time for their significance to sink in. But to put it very simply, forams in particular are very good at telling us about the environment in which they were living. The proportions of ¹³C and ¹²C, and the proportions of ¹⁸O and ¹⁶O, which they absorb as they form their shells, are related to the temperature of the water at that time. You want to know what the deep ocean temperature was? You need to pick out species of benthic forams. What about the surface temperature? Find certain species of pelagic forams. It's okay, you can crush them up later in revenge. Some species only lived in shallow seas. Some species only lived below a certain depth.

Microfossils are essential if we are to understand past climates and environments and to react to how our climate is changing at the moment. And although it makes me sick up a bit to say it, microfossils are more important than dinosaurs in terms of the range of information obtained and their use to different geoscience disciplines. Sorry dinosaurs. You're still more awesome.

How do you tell the difference between them all? Buggered if I know. That's why there are micropalaeontologists. And they are ace. Not only because they can pick forams (and count the little buggers) for twelve-hour shifts if necessary, when I was bellyaching after half an hour of staring down the microscope, but because they can look at two seemingly identical blobs less than 1mm across and tell which one is Globigerina bulloides and which one is Globigerina glutinata...

 
Images from University of Southampton
So it is distressing to see that the Natural History Museum is closing its Micropalaeontology Division. It was announced just under a fortnight ago via the PaleoNet listserver. It's also troubling to see that the person who made the decision is Norm MacLeod, the Palaeontology Department Keeper, who is... a micropalaeontologist.

There is a Facebook group. There is a petition (doing pretty well at 1069 signatures as of the point where I signed). Can widespread dismay across the community do anything to reverse the decision? Really, can any action do anything to reverse the decision? I'm hoping so, which is why I'm posting these links. I have, on a good day, over 250 subscribers. If you all kicked up a fuss, that would add a decent amount of weight to the campaign.

Millennium Vulture

This is a brief post to celebrate International Vulture Appreciation Day 2009.


Back in March of this year, I spent 10 days in northern Spain as a driver for a UCL fieldtrip. The primary focus of the fieldwork was the brilliant sedimentology, structural geology and sequence stratigraphy of the area. I was also fascinated by the botany of the region, and some of the other drivers were keen birdwatchers. I deliberately hadn't brought my SLR camera with me, and rather regretted it, as I'd probably have been able to borrow the other guys' lenses and get some better shots than this one with my digicam:


I think these are griffon vultures (Gyps fulvus). But to be honest this was as close as we got to them! What I would have loved to see was a Lammergeier (Gypaetus barbatus), known locally as a quebrantahuesos, but we never went high enough into the Pyrenees to see them. On a free morning, I visited the Eco Museum in Ainsa Castle, home to the Fundación para la Conservación del Quebrantahuesos (the site was down when I visited just now - maybe it'll come back online later), where a skeleton was on display:


I bought a cuddly quebrantahuesos (I prefer the Spanish name - it rolls off the tongue), named it Billy, and stuck it in the front of my van so the students could spot our vehicle amid the other identical ones. And because I had a fair percentage of the UCL Sci-Fi Society in my van, by the end of the week the seven-seater Renault Espace had been renamed "The Millennium Vulture". Which beats "The Vomit Comet" and "Clutch Lady's Car", its previous incarnations...

Sometimes Humanity Sucks

The Natural History Museum isn't just the South Kensington site - its bird collection, for example, is housed north of London in Tring, Hertfordshire. Many of the non-British readers might have been unaware of this; unfortunately the thieves who broke into the collection on 24th June and stole several rare bird skins were not ignorant of this fact.

A statement from the Museum is online here. Professor Richard Lane, the Director of Science at the NHM, said:

"The birds that were stolen formed part of the nation's natural history collection, painstakingly assembled over the last 350 years. The 70 million specimens looked after by the Natural History Museum are a resource of international importance in the development of scientific knowledge. Our ornithological collections are amongst our most heavily used and are consulted by researchers throughout the world, who either visit Tring or request loans from us. The knowledge gleaned from these collections can help protect endangered species and answer questions about the biodiversity of the world around us."

In this technologically advanced age, Hertfordshire Police now have an official YouTube channel, and released this video:


I didn't know we had a National Wildlife Crime Unit, but I'm pleased they exist and are involved in the investigation. One thing is clear - this is not the sort of thing that opportunistic burglars steal. These bird skins haven't been nicked in order to fund a crack habit. To my mind (uneducated as it is in criminology) this is far more organised - stealing to order, for rich private collectors perhaps. If that is the case, then perhaps there will be more leads than one gets with the average house burglary (although as I discovered, not even the irrefutable DNA of the burglar left in our house could make up for the incompetence of Ealing Police - ask me about that sometime...). I'm sure we'll all be hoping to hear shortly that the birds have been found and the thieves caught.