aads

First quarter moon comes April 3

Karl Diefenderfer in Quakertown, Pennsylvania caught the moon when it was nearly first quarter.

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A first quarter moon shows half of its lighted hemisphere – half of its day side – to Earth.

First quarter is April 3, 2017 at 18:39 UTC. It’s a waxing moon, in the sky each evening when the sun goes down. Next full moon is April 11.

We call this moon a quarter and not a half because it is one quarter of the way around in its orbit of Earth, as measured from one new moon to the next. Also, although the moon appears half-lit to us, the illuminated portion of a first quarter moon truly is just a quarter. On the night of first quarter moon, we see half the moon’s day side, or a true quarter of the moon. Another lighted quarter of the moon shines just as brightly in the direction opposite Earth!

And what about the term half moon? That’s a beloved term, but not an official one.

A first quarter moon rises at noon and is highest in the sky at sunset. It sets around midnight. First quarter moon comes a week after new moon. Now, as seen from above, the moon in its orbit around Earth is at right angles to a line between the Earth and sun.

When the first quarter moon sets around midnight, the sun is below your feet. See? Good time to get a 3-D sense of the moon as a world in space, always half-illuminated by the sun. Animation created from images of setting first quarter moon, June 12, 2016, by Peter Lowenstein in Mutare, Zimbabwe.

When the first quarter moon sets around midnight, the sun is always below your feet. Good time to experience the moon and Earth as worlds in space, always half-illuminated by the sun. Setting first quarter moon by Peter Lowenstein in Mutare, Zimbabwe.

As the moon orbits Earth, it changes phase in an orderly way. Follow these links to understand the various phases of the moon.

Four keys to understanding moon phases

Where’s the moon? Waxing crescent
Where’s the moon? First quarter
Where’s the moon? Waxing gibbous
What’s special about a full moon?
Where’s the moon? Waning gibbous
Where’s the moon? Last quarter
Where’s the moon? Waning crescent
Where’s the moon? New phase



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Karl Diefenderfer in Quakertown, Pennsylvania caught the moon when it was nearly first quarter.

Help EarthSky stay an independent voice! Donate here.

A first quarter moon shows half of its lighted hemisphere – half of its day side – to Earth.

First quarter is April 3, 2017 at 18:39 UTC. It’s a waxing moon, in the sky each evening when the sun goes down. Next full moon is April 11.

We call this moon a quarter and not a half because it is one quarter of the way around in its orbit of Earth, as measured from one new moon to the next. Also, although the moon appears half-lit to us, the illuminated portion of a first quarter moon truly is just a quarter. On the night of first quarter moon, we see half the moon’s day side, or a true quarter of the moon. Another lighted quarter of the moon shines just as brightly in the direction opposite Earth!

And what about the term half moon? That’s a beloved term, but not an official one.

A first quarter moon rises at noon and is highest in the sky at sunset. It sets around midnight. First quarter moon comes a week after new moon. Now, as seen from above, the moon in its orbit around Earth is at right angles to a line between the Earth and sun.

When the first quarter moon sets around midnight, the sun is below your feet. See? Good time to get a 3-D sense of the moon as a world in space, always half-illuminated by the sun. Animation created from images of setting first quarter moon, June 12, 2016, by Peter Lowenstein in Mutare, Zimbabwe.

When the first quarter moon sets around midnight, the sun is always below your feet. Good time to experience the moon and Earth as worlds in space, always half-illuminated by the sun. Setting first quarter moon by Peter Lowenstein in Mutare, Zimbabwe.

As the moon orbits Earth, it changes phase in an orderly way. Follow these links to understand the various phases of the moon.

Four keys to understanding moon phases

Where’s the moon? Waxing crescent
Where’s the moon? First quarter
Where’s the moon? Waxing gibbous
What’s special about a full moon?
Where’s the moon? Waning gibbous
Where’s the moon? Last quarter
Where’s the moon? Waning crescent
Where’s the moon? New phase



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Milky Way and zodiacal light

Milky Way, left. Zodiacal light, right. Looks to me like the zodiacal light is brighter. What do you think? Photo taken in March 2017 by Yuri Beletsky Nightscapes.

Yuri Beletsky, who is based in Chile, posted this wonderful photo of the Milky Way and the zodiacal light to EarthSky Facebook. The Milky Way is, of course, the edgewise view into our own galaxy. We see it as the combined light of billions of years, interspersed by dark clouds of dust in which new stars are forming. The zodiacal light, meanwhile, is part of our own solar system. It’s sunlight reflecting on dust grains that move between the planets, in the flat solar system plane.

Two very different night sky phenomena, both very beautiful. Thank you, Yuri!

Read more: What is the zodiacal light?

Read more: How long to orbit the Milky Way’s center?



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Milky Way, left. Zodiacal light, right. Looks to me like the zodiacal light is brighter. What do you think? Photo taken in March 2017 by Yuri Beletsky Nightscapes.

Yuri Beletsky, who is based in Chile, posted this wonderful photo of the Milky Way and the zodiacal light to EarthSky Facebook. The Milky Way is, of course, the edgewise view into our own galaxy. We see it as the combined light of billions of years, interspersed by dark clouds of dust in which new stars are forming. The zodiacal light, meanwhile, is part of our own solar system. It’s sunlight reflecting on dust grains that move between the planets, in the flat solar system plane.

Two very different night sky phenomena, both very beautiful. Thank you, Yuri!

Read more: What is the zodiacal light?

Read more: How long to orbit the Milky Way’s center?



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Moon near Gemini stars on April 3

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Tonight – April 3, 2017 – the moon is at or near its first quarter phase and in front of the constellation Gemini the Twins. The two brightest stars in Gemini are Castor and Pollux. The other bright star on the other side of the moon is Procyon, the brightest in the constellation Canis Minor the Lesser Dog. The king planet Jupiter, which outshines all the bright stars, lies to the far east of tonight’s moon. Look for the moon to meet up with Jupiter on or near April 10.

By the way, the moon reaches its first quarter phase on April 3, at 18:39 Universal Time. For United States’ time zones, that translates to to 2:39 p.m. EDT, 1:39 p.m. CDT, 12:39 p.m. MDT and 11:39 a.m. PDT.

Beyond the fact that both Castor and Pollux are respectably bright stars, they don’t really look alike. Pollux is golden in color, and Castor is pure white. If you have binoculars, they’ll help you to more easily distinguish the contrast of color.

If you have a dark sky, notice that 2 nearly parallel streams of stars extend from Castor and Pollux. These stars likely gave early stargazers – in various cultures around the world – the idea of twins. Every December, the Geminid meteor shower radiates from near star Castor in Gemini.

Castor and Pollux are different kinds of stars. Castor is a hot, white-colored star that is well known for its multiple personality. It consists of three pairs of binary stars – or six stars bound together in an intricate gravitational dance. Pollux is a cool and bloated orange-colored star, said to be the closest giant star to Earth. A star swells up into a giant in its old age.

These two stars – Castor and Pollux – were seen as twins in the star lore of many civilizations. Regardless of the seeming connection between these two stars, Castor and Pollux are not close together or physically related. They happen to reside along the same line of sight.

EarthSky astronomy kits are perfect for beginners. Order today from the EarthSky store

Castor and Pollux mark the starry eyes of the Gemini Twins. Image via Wikipedia.

These stars are extremely noticeable in the night sky. No other two such bright stars appear so close together. Of course, many myths explain their proximity. In most cultures, these two stars were seen as twin stars, usually as heroes.

In Greek and Roman mythology, Castor and Pollux were the twin sons of Jupiter and Leda and brothers of Helen of Troy. They sailed with Jason as two of his Argonauts.

Pollux, represented by the brighter star, was immortal, but his brother Castor was not. When Castor was killed in a fight, Jupiter wanted the two to remain together, so he decreed that they each should spend some time in the underworld and some time in the heavens. This is a fanciful way of explaining why the constellation is above the horizon for part of each day and below the horizon for the rest. Castor and Pollux are sometimes said to represent brotherly love.

Meanwhile, in China, these two stars were associated with water, as part of constellations representing rivers. They were sometimes also seen as the complementary elements of yin and yang.

The moon passes in front of Gemini for a few days every month. The sun, on the other hand, passes in front of Gemini for one month each year, from about June 21 to July 20.

You can see the comparative size of the star Pollux and our sun in this image, as well as some other stars.

You can see the comparative size of the star Pollux and our sun in this image, as well as some other stars.

Bottom line: The April 3, 2017 moon is near the stars Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini the Twins. These stars represent twins in many cultures. Look for tonight’s moon and contemplate the Gemini Twins! They will become your friends for life.

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Help EarthSky stay an independent voice! Donate here.

Tonight – April 3, 2017 – the moon is at or near its first quarter phase and in front of the constellation Gemini the Twins. The two brightest stars in Gemini are Castor and Pollux. The other bright star on the other side of the moon is Procyon, the brightest in the constellation Canis Minor the Lesser Dog. The king planet Jupiter, which outshines all the bright stars, lies to the far east of tonight’s moon. Look for the moon to meet up with Jupiter on or near April 10.

By the way, the moon reaches its first quarter phase on April 3, at 18:39 Universal Time. For United States’ time zones, that translates to to 2:39 p.m. EDT, 1:39 p.m. CDT, 12:39 p.m. MDT and 11:39 a.m. PDT.

Beyond the fact that both Castor and Pollux are respectably bright stars, they don’t really look alike. Pollux is golden in color, and Castor is pure white. If you have binoculars, they’ll help you to more easily distinguish the contrast of color.

If you have a dark sky, notice that 2 nearly parallel streams of stars extend from Castor and Pollux. These stars likely gave early stargazers – in various cultures around the world – the idea of twins. Every December, the Geminid meteor shower radiates from near star Castor in Gemini.

Castor and Pollux are different kinds of stars. Castor is a hot, white-colored star that is well known for its multiple personality. It consists of three pairs of binary stars – or six stars bound together in an intricate gravitational dance. Pollux is a cool and bloated orange-colored star, said to be the closest giant star to Earth. A star swells up into a giant in its old age.

These two stars – Castor and Pollux – were seen as twins in the star lore of many civilizations. Regardless of the seeming connection between these two stars, Castor and Pollux are not close together or physically related. They happen to reside along the same line of sight.

EarthSky astronomy kits are perfect for beginners. Order today from the EarthSky store

Castor and Pollux mark the starry eyes of the Gemini Twins. Image via Wikipedia.

These stars are extremely noticeable in the night sky. No other two such bright stars appear so close together. Of course, many myths explain their proximity. In most cultures, these two stars were seen as twin stars, usually as heroes.

In Greek and Roman mythology, Castor and Pollux were the twin sons of Jupiter and Leda and brothers of Helen of Troy. They sailed with Jason as two of his Argonauts.

Pollux, represented by the brighter star, was immortal, but his brother Castor was not. When Castor was killed in a fight, Jupiter wanted the two to remain together, so he decreed that they each should spend some time in the underworld and some time in the heavens. This is a fanciful way of explaining why the constellation is above the horizon for part of each day and below the horizon for the rest. Castor and Pollux are sometimes said to represent brotherly love.

Meanwhile, in China, these two stars were associated with water, as part of constellations representing rivers. They were sometimes also seen as the complementary elements of yin and yang.

The moon passes in front of Gemini for a few days every month. The sun, on the other hand, passes in front of Gemini for one month each year, from about June 21 to July 20.

You can see the comparative size of the star Pollux and our sun in this image, as well as some other stars.

You can see the comparative size of the star Pollux and our sun in this image, as well as some other stars.

Bottom line: The April 3, 2017 moon is near the stars Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini the Twins. These stars represent twins in many cultures. Look for tonight’s moon and contemplate the Gemini Twins! They will become your friends for life.

Enjoying EarthSky so far? Sign up for our free daily newsletter today!

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Did cannabis oil save Deryn Blackwell’s life? [Respectful Insolence]

It’s been a while since I’ve written about the burgeoning business of selling marijuana as a cure for whatever ails you. As I’ve written before, there exists a mystical faith that is very much like herbalism that marijuana is a magical plant that can cure, well, almost anything, including cancer, glaucoma, autism, ADHD, and many other conditions, when in fact the evidence is rather shaky for most, if not all, of these claims. Regarding cancer, the usual claim is not that smoking marijuana cures the disease, but rather that cannabis oil isolated from marijuana cures cancer, a claim that Rick Simpson has profited from after claiming to have cured his skin cancer with cannabis oil in 2003.

Over the years, I’ve examined a number of “cannabis cures cancer” (or, truth be told, “cannabis cures” this or that condition) testimonials (e.g., Stephanie LaRue’s story). Like most alternative cancer cure testimonials, when you take a closer look, inevitably the case being made that it was the cannabis oil (or whatever derivative from marijuana was used) cured the cancer (or saved the patient’s life after complications of therapy) is nowhere near as convincing as the advocates making the testimonial claim. Usually, there is another explanation for how well the patient is doing and/or the link between starting cannabis oil and clinical improvement is not nearly as convincing as it seems on the surface. As with the case of the belief that vaccines cause autism, human beings mistakenly attribute correlation to causation. Add to that a dash of confirmation bias, something we human beings all suffer from, and it’s very easy to come to develop an unshakable belief in a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in which something they observed or did before something else happened must have caused that something else to happen, be it vaccines “causing” autism or cannabis “curing” cancer.

I bring this up because there is a new “cannabis cures” testimonial going around the UK that was brought to my attention yesterday. It was about a boy named Deryn Blackwell, who beat leukemia and the very rare Langerhans sarcoma through multiple bone marrow transplants (BMT). The cannabis comes in during his last BMT, when his mother gave him cannabis oil to relieve his symptoms as his transplant appeared to be failing and was overjoyed when her son recovered after having been in hospice for over a month. Her story portrays cannabis oil as being responsible for bringing Deryn back from the brink of death. Predictably, the British tabloid media is portraying his story as a “cannabis cures cancer” story, even though, even taken at face value, it is not. I had already started a post on another topic when I saw this, and it grabbed my attention to the point where I abandoned what I was writing before to take a look at this testimonial. On the surface, it is a very convincing testimonial, which is why I decided, as Seth Myers would put it, to take a closer look.

The story of Deryn Blackwell, as told in the media

Deryn Blackwell is a 17-year-old boy whose story appeared in The Daily Mail a week ago in an article entitled (at the time) “I gave my little boy CANNABIS to help cure his cancer: Mother reveals how her teenage son who was given days to live made a miracle recovery when she gave him the drug behind his doctors’ backs.” (As an aside, besides its being a tabloid rag, it’s always irritated me how The Daily Mail loves ridiculously long headlines.) Other papers featured basically the same story with long similarly long headlines like “‘I GAVE MY BOY CANNABIS’ Mum reveals she gave her cancer-stricken son CANNABIS in bid to ease his pain… and now he’s made a miracle recovery.” Basically, Deryn’s story was all over the UK press over the weekend. The Daily Mail story is an excerpt from a forthcoming book (of course) chronicling Deryn’s battle with cancer entitled The Boy In 7 Billion, by Callie Blackwell with Karen Hockney, to be released on April 6. The description of the book reads:

The powerful and moving true story of a remarkable relationship and a tenacious fight for survival. Callie reveals her son’s struggle through the physical and mental torment of battling cancer against impossible odds, and the truth behind her son’s ‘miraculous recovery’ that she has held secret for years.

And it’s true. Deryn’s story is indeed remarkable, as you will see. The “secret” that Callie Blackwell has never revealed—until now!—is that it was cannabis that saved her boy when he was on the brink of death due to a failing bone marrow transplant. But was it? Let’s take a look at that excerpt. It starts out with this heart-rending description of Deryn as he got sicker:

The pain was getting worse. The tips of my son Deryn’s fingers were hard and black from a superbug infection. His nails were peeling away and any remaining live flesh was covered in weeping sores.

Every day, he begged me: ‘Please tell them to cut my hand off, Mum. I can’t take this any more.’

Deryn was nauseous and, worse, had become addicted to his anti-sickness drugs. He was allowed a dose every seven to eight hours but within an hour of being given some, he would press the buzzer to call the nurses back in.

What mother wouldn’t be utterly distraught watching her son suffer like this? What mother wouldn’t start to consider things that she normally wouldn’t, if only she could ease her son’s suffering. So Callie Blackwell did this:

Deryn had suffered enough. In 2010, when he was just ten years old, he had been diagnosed with leukaemia.

Eighteen months later, he was told he had a secondary cancer, the extremely rare Langerhans cell sarcoma. Only 50 cases have ever been recorded and only five people in the world currently have it. But no one had ever been found to have the two cancers combined, making Deryn unique. One boy in seven billion people.

By 2013, after nearly four years of hospital treatment, it seemed that the only thing left for him were opiate drugs to ease the pain as he reached the end of his life.

Like any mother would be, I was desperate to find something to alleviate his suffering.

I spent hour after hour researching on the internet, and that’s where I came across reports of a substance called Bedrocan, a cannabis-based painkiller that wasn’t available in the UK. Surely Bedrocan had to be a better option than mind-numbing morphine?

But the doctor told me that while it was effective, it had not been tested on children and she couldn’t prescribe it.

So Simon and Callie Blackwell, in an effort to ease their son’s suffering, sought out cannabis. Simon nobly took responsibility for obtaining some marijuana, using the rationale that if anyone were to go to jail for this he wanted it to be him and didn’t want Callie to be away from their son. The two of them did what most people who’ve decided to use alternative treatments do and read extensively on the Internet, where they learned to make cannabis extract suitable for a vaporizer pen using a rice cooker and vegetable glycerin, noting that in 2013, when they first decided to use cannabis:

Back at the hospital, meanwhile, our son’s latest bone marrow transplant had failed. Staff were giving up on him. It seemed Deryn’s death was a done deal and now all we could do was wait until he drew his final breath. If there was no improvement in two weeks, he would be placed in palliative care.

So what happened? Callie Blackwell went through with her plan. She brought her son the vapor pen:

Deryn sucked on the pen, breathed in and blew out a massive cloud of vapour – and we frantically waved our hands around trying to disperse it, although there wasn’t the smell of cannabis. It smelt more like popcorn. After ten minutes, Deryn said that the pain had decreased a little and he felt more relaxed – the words we had been longing to hear.

Alas, his condition continued to worsen. By December 2013, Deryn had moved out of hospital and into a hospice, where he planned his own funeral. His bravery attracted national attention and some of his favourite celebrities, including Paul Hollywood, Pauline Quirk and Linda Robson came to meet him.

I note that, here, despite Ms. Blackwell having started to sneak a cannabis vapor pen to her son for an unclear number of times, her son continued to deteriorate, and the vapor pen was only providing him with modest relief from the pain. He went to hospice, as far as I can reconstruct, two weeks after his mother started to sneak him puffs of cannabis. This is hardly the sort of “cannabis saved my child” story that sounds promising, at least not to this point.

Further deterioration…and then a “miracle”

What happened next is that, as Deryn’s condition continued to deteriorate during the two weeks after Callie Blackwell started to give him cannabis oil. Because he complained that he didn’t want any more morphine because it made him “feel like I’m not here,” she wanted to provide better relief and started wondering whether she could achieve a higher dose of cannabis by giving it to him orally. In actuality, she was almost certainly providing him a higher dose through the vapor pen, but she nonetheless decided to try. So on New Year’s Eve in 2013, roughly five weeks by my reckoning after she started sneaking her son cannabis oil by vapor, she tried it:

I was sitting next to him, a nightly vigil, and held his hand. Once again, the situation seemed quite desperate. What would happen, I wondered, if I gave Deryn a small amount of golden cannabis tincture directly in his mouth? The vaporiser had brought him some relief but could a higher dose have better results?

I took a small, empty syringe from the medicine cupboard in the hospice and quickly checked that there was no one outside. It was New Year’s Eve so staff levels were minimal. I drew up 5ml of the honey-like substance, which had a sweet, floral flavour.

Still sobbing uncontrollably, Deryn opened his mouth and I popped the syringe underneath his tongue. Deryn held it for a minute before swallowing. Half an hour passed. He was no longer having a panic attack. He looked peaceful. I asked him how he was feeling.

‘I feel relaxed,’ he told me. ‘I’m aware of everything. I just feel at peace, Mum. It’s beautiful.’

It’s a powerful story. No wonder it’s so compelling. Indeed, it’s an archetypical story, that of the parents who will go to any length to save their child from a deadly disease and succeed in doing so. Ms. Blackwell further relates that, after he swallowed the 5 ml of cannabis oil, he refused a dose of cyclizine, the antinausea drug upon which he had become dependent and that he virtually never refused. If there’s one part of this anecdote that puzzled me, it was the part about the cyclizine. Basically, cyclizine is painted as this powerful, addictive antinausea medicine when in reality it’s a histamine blocker and anticholinergic that is pretty well tolerated, with the usual adverse events of anticholinergic drugs, like dry mouth, and, less commonly, constipation, urinary retention, and double vision. Yet in this excerpt, the drug is painted as if it were a powerful, addictive opioid.

Be that as it may, the story certainly makes it sound as though 5 ml of cannabis oil beat cyclizine for nausea, although certainly there could be significant placebo effect here given his mother’s care and her giving him something new. Convinced it was working, Ms. Blackwell continued to give her son cannabis oil whenever he “felt a twinge somewhere.” Then, one evening:

One evening, I heard Deryn yell: ‘Mum – look!’ The bandage on his middle finger had worked its way loose and completely come off, showing his third finger – which had been blackened and dead – had now healed. How on earth had a child with no immune system and no way of fighting infection managed to heal himself after being off medication for more than three weeks?

I called Deryn’s team to tell them what had happened. Not one of them could give me any answers.

We knew his bone marrow wasn’t functioning and it was not scientifically possible for his wounds to heal. Deryn had spent months in isolation because a common cold could be fatal – yet, somehow, he had overcome three catastrophic infections.

Hundreds of people had been praying for Deryn, blessing him in their own ways. Was this a miracle?

Later that evening, the hospice doctor arrived. ‘We’re no longer sure Deryn is dying,’ she admitted.

The doctors were not sure whether or not the hospice was now the best place for us.

The story sure makes it seem like a miracle. One can only imagine the delight and relief, mingled with confusion and fear, that the Blackwells experienced, as their son, to whom they were preparing to say goodbye forever, made a sudden and unexpected recovery. Human nature being what it is, not surprisingly, Ms. Blackwell started looking for a cause for her son’s good fortune, and, human nature being what it is (and confirmation bias being what it is in all of us), she soon found one:

When we’d arrived four weeks earlier, he’d been given three days to live. Now here he was a month later, in far better health than when he’d left his hospital room. They had no idea how this was possible.

Then it dawned on me. Only one thing had changed since Deryn started to recover: the cannabis tincture. I couldn’t tell the doctors what we’d done.

Now, three years later, she’s revealing to the world what she did, and presenting it as a case of cannabis saving her son’s life. But did it? There is considerable reason to doubt. Those of you who are regular readers can probably identify the issues in this testimonial that make it less than convincing as evidence that cannabis salvaged Deryn’s failing bone marrow transplant. See if you can identify them before reading the next section.

The forthcoming book based on Deryn’s story aside, I’m very happy to report, Deryn returned to school and appears to be doing quite well now. Until now, his story popped up every so often as a human interest story in the UK press of a boy who beat what seemed like insurmountable odds to beat two different forms of cancer after “four failed bone marrow transplants,” while religious groups present him as a miracle. He even wants to study biochemistry, although he still suffers from sequelae of his disease:

“Deryn still struggles with mobility a bit and he gets very tired.

“But the main reason for going back was so he can develop emotionally and socially in that way teenagers, particularly boys, need to at that age.

“He has spent two years in a room by himself with just a nurse or me around, so it is good for him to just be normal for a while.”

Even after defeating cancer Deryn has had to confront other serious threats such as aplastic anaemia.

The family has also set up a charity, Do Everything, although currently the website is listed as Under Construction.

Did cannabis save Deryn’s life? It’s doubtful.

Remember how Ms. Blackwell discussed visits by celebrities to see Deryn around December 2013, as things looked very grim and doctors thought that Deryn’s final days were upon him? The beauty of his brief celebrity back then was that there are contemporaneous accounts of what was happening then that we can compare to Ms. Blackwell’s account today. It also turns out that Deryn and his family had a fairly robust social media presence (for 2013 back then, with a Twitter feed, Facebook page (which appears to be no longer there), and website. Although the website turns up as “Under Construction,” fortunately the almighty Wayback Machine lets us see what was on it as recently as 2015, which will be helpful in my discussion. Deryn’s Twitter feed has no Tweets since this one:

Perusing this Twitter feed and Ms. Blackwell’s recently set up author Twitter feed, I didn’t see any mention of cannabis until this flurry of weekend stories. For instance, the announcement of the book didn’t mention cannabis:

I found all this very curious, how Ms. Blackwell said absolutely nothing about cannabis until this weekend, even when her book release was announced and as she provided updates on her progress on her personal Twitter feed. Maybe the publisher made her keep it a secret. Be that as it may, I found it instructive to fire up the almighty Wayback Machine and look at what the Do Everything Foundation website said. Helpfully, it provided a timeline, which was not nearly as clear in the book excerpt published by The Daily Mail. I think it’s worth posting the entire timeline from his last bone marrow transplant, which encompasses the time when Deryn went into hospice:

On 17th October 2013, his own cells failed because of extremely rare complications.

Thankfully Deryn had one more chance left, he had one more bag of his own cells.

The Dr’s gave Deryn more chemotherapy and on the 29th of October 2013, Deryn has his own and final bag of cells transplanted into his body.

Three days after the transplant, Deryn trapped his fingers and suffered TWO catastrophic infections in his hand.

He had Cellulitis and Herpes whitlow in his hand and he also had Klebsiella in his mouth, another catastrophic infection.

40 days after a bone marrow transplant, the Dr’s told us that it is highly unlikely that someone will graft if they haven’t already – after 50 days there is no way someone can graft.

In their experience, no one has ever grafted after 50 days.

On December 11th 2013, at day 46, we were moved to a hospice where it was expected that Deryn would die within a few days.

We were told that Deryn’s fourth and final transplant had in fact failed and there was nothing more they could do, it was believed that once they took away the life supporting drugs that Deryn would leave us very quickly.

Deryn had NO immune system and NO way to fight off even a simple cold.

After two Christmases, one New Year’s Eve and quite a few worrying moments, on day 78 Deryn’s bandages accidentally came off his fingers and he was – infection free!

Deryn continued to improve and he started to produce his own blood products.

On day 104 – Deryn officially engrafted!

Not one Dr can explain how Deryn fought off THREE catastrophic infections with NO immune system and then went on to engraft with what recent tests said was empty bone marrow!

On February 25th 2014, Deryn had his line removed from his chest and was officially ‘Off treatment.”

After coming to terms and accepting that he was going to die, Deryn was finding it harder to accept that maybe he wasn’t.

It all happened so quickly.

His future is still very uncertain and he is still poorly.

BUT

We are for the first time, starting to plan for a future with Deryn.

Thank you so much for visiting Deryn’s page and for reading his wonderful story.

** Miracles do happen and dreams can come true **

It’s not entirely clear exactly when Ms. Blackwell started giving Deryn cannabis oil, but it was clearly some time before he went into hospice on December 11, 2013. In the excerpt above, in the context of giving Deryn his first dose of cannabis, that the doctors would give him two weeks to improve and then, if he didn’t, move him to hospice, which suggests that she started dosing him in late November 2013. Then, by her own account, she didn’t start giving Deryn oral cannabis until New Year’s Eve 2013. Day 78 after his transplant would have made it January 15, 2014 when the bandages came off his fingers and revealed that he had healed much of his ulcers, and Day 104 would have been February 10, 2014.

One can see how this timeline might have led Ms. Blackwell to think that what had saved her son was the cannabis oil. She started giving him oral cannabis oil about two weeks before the ulcers on his hands unexpectedly healed. However, there are a number of reasons to doubt that it was the cannabis. For one thing, from this account we have no idea what strain of cannabis was used, making it difficult to estimate the cannabinoid content of the oil and therefore how much and what types of cannabinoids were in the actual oil Ms. Blackwell used. We don’t know the cannabis to oil ratio. We don’t even know the regularity of the dosing except that she gave it to her son “whenever he had a twinge.” Given the experimental data I’ve discussed before that shows that the various cannabinoids only have a modest anti-cancer effect, it’s hard to conclude that the doses Ms. Blackwell was giving her son were high enough to have had such a dramatic effect. For another thing, what Ms. Blackwell is claiming is not so much that “cannabis cured her son’s cancer,” but rather that cannabis somehow fired up his immune system so that it could fight off the infection and his cells could actually engraft after three times the length of time it normally takes. In reality, the evidence regarding cannabinoids and the immune system is mixed, with at least one study showing that they can suppress immune function. Indeed, cannabinoids are being studied more as a potential treatment for autoimmune diseases rather than as any sort of means of increasing immune cell engraftment. Basically, it’s not very plausible at all based on what we know about cannabis that Ms. Blackwell’s secret treatment of her son resulted in such a dramatic turnaround.

So what happened? Did cannabis really rescue Deryn Blackwell’s bone marrow transplant?

What probably happened is that Deryn Blackwell was a highly unusual case in which his last stem cell infusion took a far longer amount of time to engraft than the doctors at the hospital treating him had observed before. It just so happened that, as Deryn was deteriorating, his mother, anguished at watching him suffer and desperate to do anything possible to alleviate his suffering, decided to give vaporized cannabis oil a try to help his symptoms. Unfortunately, her son continued to deteriorate and entered hospice. She decided to give him the cannabis oil by mouth three weeks after he entered hospice, and it seemed to relieve his symptoms somewhat more effectively. Two weeks later, the “miracle” occurred, and the bandages fell off. Deryn’s rare and unexpected recovery, happily, manifested itself. The rest, as they say, is history.

Deryn’s recovery was unexpected, but unexpected and rare recoveries do occur in medicine. Given what we know about cannabis oil, its rather modest effect on cancer, and the tendencies of cannabinoids to be, if anything, immunosuppressive, it strains credulity on a strictly scientific basis to attribute Deryn’s turnaround on homemade cannabis oil. That’s not to say it’s impossible that cannabis oil was responsible for Deryn’s recovery, only that it’s incredibly improbable. Remember, we know a fair amount about cannabinoid activity against cancer and its activity in the immune system, and what we know doesn’t support the plausibility of Ms. Blackwell’s testimonial. However, as is the case with a lot of other alternative cancer cure testimonials, the all-too-human tendency to want to attribute cause, combined with the form of selective memory known as confirmation bias, which leads all of us to tend to remember what confirms our beliefs and to forget what does not, has led to a conclusion that is almost certainly not correct. Remember again, Ms. Blackwell seems not to remember the several weeks she was giving her son cannabis oil via vapor stick and he was continuing to deteriorate to the point of entering hospice. I repeat that again because it is important. This testimonial is almost certainly a case of confusing correlation with causation.

But what about this claim:

Yet there was a direct correlation between Deryn having the cannabis tincture and his improved blood counts. Whenever he didn’t have it, they dropped. It was enough hard evidence to suggest that cannabis tincture was playing a vital role in his recovery. I hadn’t imagined in my wildest dreams that it could have saved Deryn’s life.

Without very detailed record keeping in which Deryn’s counts were listed by date and then correlated contemporaneously with whether or not he was taking cannabis oil and at what dose, it’s impossible to support or refute this claim. It’s probably more confirmation bias.

Be happy for Deryn Blackwell, but be skeptical

Although I highly doubt that cannabis oil had anything to do with Deryn Blackwell’s “miraculous” recovery, I am very happy that he did recover. Nothing pains me more than seeing children die of diseases like cancer. I can also understand why Callie Blackwell and her husband Simon have come to believe that cannabis cured their son. They are human. They have all the cognitive quirks that lead humans to incorrect conclusions that we all have, and those tendencies are only magnified when it is someone they love deeply that is the object of their hopes and prayers. Confirmation bias is a very powerful thing indeed under these circumstances. Unfortunately, the timeline that I have been able to reconstruct is thin gruel indeed to support Ms. Blackwell’s belief that cannabis oil saved her son by somehow helping his immune cells engraft in his bone marrow.

Unfortunately, what I fear is that a combination of love for Deryn, confusing correlation with causation, and confirmation bias have led the Blackwells to become true believers on the order of Rick Simpson, but with an even more dramatic story in which cannabis is portrayed as having literally pulled their son back from the brink of death. Consider this. Deryn’s story is quite inspirational without the cannabis angle. Yet what excerpt did the publisher decide to release first as part of the book’s publicity campaign? Yes, it released the part describing how Callie Blackwell surreptitiously dosed her son with cannabis oil, and the Daily Mail and the rest of the UK tabloid media responded predictably with stories portraying Deryn Blackwell as proof that cannabis can cure cancer, even when his story shows nothing of the sort. If you want to get an idea what I mean, check out this interview last week in The Mirror in which Deryn’s story is used as a starting point to tout medical marijuana as a treatment for multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, epilepsy, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety disorders, stroke, inflammatory bowel disease, and cancer. In fairness, Ms. Blackwell didn’t say any of these things, but The Mirror spun her son’s story this way. This is intentional.

In case you don’t believe that it was intentional from the beginning to spin Deryn’s story as a “cannabis cures cancer” testimonial and sell it to the media that way, consider Ms. Blackwell’s co-author, Karen Hockney. It turns out that she’s heavily into the woo herself. After undergoing conventional surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy for breast cancer, she became an advocate of the “alkaline diet” to treat her cancer. Why would Ms. Blackwell’s publisher choose such a co-author for a neophyte author if the plan wasn’t to emphasize the cannabis all along?

Unfortunately, the narrative that is being spun has the potential to influence patients with cancer and parents to try unproven and quack treatments, like cannabis for cancer and who knows what else. In seeking to do good, I fear that the Blackwells could actually make it less likely that future Deryns actually survive their cancers. It saddens me to say it, but it has to be said.



from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2os0lQS

It’s been a while since I’ve written about the burgeoning business of selling marijuana as a cure for whatever ails you. As I’ve written before, there exists a mystical faith that is very much like herbalism that marijuana is a magical plant that can cure, well, almost anything, including cancer, glaucoma, autism, ADHD, and many other conditions, when in fact the evidence is rather shaky for most, if not all, of these claims. Regarding cancer, the usual claim is not that smoking marijuana cures the disease, but rather that cannabis oil isolated from marijuana cures cancer, a claim that Rick Simpson has profited from after claiming to have cured his skin cancer with cannabis oil in 2003.

Over the years, I’ve examined a number of “cannabis cures cancer” (or, truth be told, “cannabis cures” this or that condition) testimonials (e.g., Stephanie LaRue’s story). Like most alternative cancer cure testimonials, when you take a closer look, inevitably the case being made that it was the cannabis oil (or whatever derivative from marijuana was used) cured the cancer (or saved the patient’s life after complications of therapy) is nowhere near as convincing as the advocates making the testimonial claim. Usually, there is another explanation for how well the patient is doing and/or the link between starting cannabis oil and clinical improvement is not nearly as convincing as it seems on the surface. As with the case of the belief that vaccines cause autism, human beings mistakenly attribute correlation to causation. Add to that a dash of confirmation bias, something we human beings all suffer from, and it’s very easy to come to develop an unshakable belief in a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in which something they observed or did before something else happened must have caused that something else to happen, be it vaccines “causing” autism or cannabis “curing” cancer.

I bring this up because there is a new “cannabis cures” testimonial going around the UK that was brought to my attention yesterday. It was about a boy named Deryn Blackwell, who beat leukemia and the very rare Langerhans sarcoma through multiple bone marrow transplants (BMT). The cannabis comes in during his last BMT, when his mother gave him cannabis oil to relieve his symptoms as his transplant appeared to be failing and was overjoyed when her son recovered after having been in hospice for over a month. Her story portrays cannabis oil as being responsible for bringing Deryn back from the brink of death. Predictably, the British tabloid media is portraying his story as a “cannabis cures cancer” story, even though, even taken at face value, it is not. I had already started a post on another topic when I saw this, and it grabbed my attention to the point where I abandoned what I was writing before to take a look at this testimonial. On the surface, it is a very convincing testimonial, which is why I decided, as Seth Myers would put it, to take a closer look.

The story of Deryn Blackwell, as told in the media

Deryn Blackwell is a 17-year-old boy whose story appeared in The Daily Mail a week ago in an article entitled (at the time) “I gave my little boy CANNABIS to help cure his cancer: Mother reveals how her teenage son who was given days to live made a miracle recovery when she gave him the drug behind his doctors’ backs.” (As an aside, besides its being a tabloid rag, it’s always irritated me how The Daily Mail loves ridiculously long headlines.) Other papers featured basically the same story with long similarly long headlines like “‘I GAVE MY BOY CANNABIS’ Mum reveals she gave her cancer-stricken son CANNABIS in bid to ease his pain… and now he’s made a miracle recovery.” Basically, Deryn’s story was all over the UK press over the weekend. The Daily Mail story is an excerpt from a forthcoming book (of course) chronicling Deryn’s battle with cancer entitled The Boy In 7 Billion, by Callie Blackwell with Karen Hockney, to be released on April 6. The description of the book reads:

The powerful and moving true story of a remarkable relationship and a tenacious fight for survival. Callie reveals her son’s struggle through the physical and mental torment of battling cancer against impossible odds, and the truth behind her son’s ‘miraculous recovery’ that she has held secret for years.

And it’s true. Deryn’s story is indeed remarkable, as you will see. The “secret” that Callie Blackwell has never revealed—until now!—is that it was cannabis that saved her boy when he was on the brink of death due to a failing bone marrow transplant. But was it? Let’s take a look at that excerpt. It starts out with this heart-rending description of Deryn as he got sicker:

The pain was getting worse. The tips of my son Deryn’s fingers were hard and black from a superbug infection. His nails were peeling away and any remaining live flesh was covered in weeping sores.

Every day, he begged me: ‘Please tell them to cut my hand off, Mum. I can’t take this any more.’

Deryn was nauseous and, worse, had become addicted to his anti-sickness drugs. He was allowed a dose every seven to eight hours but within an hour of being given some, he would press the buzzer to call the nurses back in.

What mother wouldn’t be utterly distraught watching her son suffer like this? What mother wouldn’t start to consider things that she normally wouldn’t, if only she could ease her son’s suffering. So Callie Blackwell did this:

Deryn had suffered enough. In 2010, when he was just ten years old, he had been diagnosed with leukaemia.

Eighteen months later, he was told he had a secondary cancer, the extremely rare Langerhans cell sarcoma. Only 50 cases have ever been recorded and only five people in the world currently have it. But no one had ever been found to have the two cancers combined, making Deryn unique. One boy in seven billion people.

By 2013, after nearly four years of hospital treatment, it seemed that the only thing left for him were opiate drugs to ease the pain as he reached the end of his life.

Like any mother would be, I was desperate to find something to alleviate his suffering.

I spent hour after hour researching on the internet, and that’s where I came across reports of a substance called Bedrocan, a cannabis-based painkiller that wasn’t available in the UK. Surely Bedrocan had to be a better option than mind-numbing morphine?

But the doctor told me that while it was effective, it had not been tested on children and she couldn’t prescribe it.

So Simon and Callie Blackwell, in an effort to ease their son’s suffering, sought out cannabis. Simon nobly took responsibility for obtaining some marijuana, using the rationale that if anyone were to go to jail for this he wanted it to be him and didn’t want Callie to be away from their son. The two of them did what most people who’ve decided to use alternative treatments do and read extensively on the Internet, where they learned to make cannabis extract suitable for a vaporizer pen using a rice cooker and vegetable glycerin, noting that in 2013, when they first decided to use cannabis:

Back at the hospital, meanwhile, our son’s latest bone marrow transplant had failed. Staff were giving up on him. It seemed Deryn’s death was a done deal and now all we could do was wait until he drew his final breath. If there was no improvement in two weeks, he would be placed in palliative care.

So what happened? Callie Blackwell went through with her plan. She brought her son the vapor pen:

Deryn sucked on the pen, breathed in and blew out a massive cloud of vapour – and we frantically waved our hands around trying to disperse it, although there wasn’t the smell of cannabis. It smelt more like popcorn. After ten minutes, Deryn said that the pain had decreased a little and he felt more relaxed – the words we had been longing to hear.

Alas, his condition continued to worsen. By December 2013, Deryn had moved out of hospital and into a hospice, where he planned his own funeral. His bravery attracted national attention and some of his favourite celebrities, including Paul Hollywood, Pauline Quirk and Linda Robson came to meet him.

I note that, here, despite Ms. Blackwell having started to sneak a cannabis vapor pen to her son for an unclear number of times, her son continued to deteriorate, and the vapor pen was only providing him with modest relief from the pain. He went to hospice, as far as I can reconstruct, two weeks after his mother started to sneak him puffs of cannabis. This is hardly the sort of “cannabis saved my child” story that sounds promising, at least not to this point.

Further deterioration…and then a “miracle”

What happened next is that, as Deryn’s condition continued to deteriorate during the two weeks after Callie Blackwell started to give him cannabis oil. Because he complained that he didn’t want any more morphine because it made him “feel like I’m not here,” she wanted to provide better relief and started wondering whether she could achieve a higher dose of cannabis by giving it to him orally. In actuality, she was almost certainly providing him a higher dose through the vapor pen, but she nonetheless decided to try. So on New Year’s Eve in 2013, roughly five weeks by my reckoning after she started sneaking her son cannabis oil by vapor, she tried it:

I was sitting next to him, a nightly vigil, and held his hand. Once again, the situation seemed quite desperate. What would happen, I wondered, if I gave Deryn a small amount of golden cannabis tincture directly in his mouth? The vaporiser had brought him some relief but could a higher dose have better results?

I took a small, empty syringe from the medicine cupboard in the hospice and quickly checked that there was no one outside. It was New Year’s Eve so staff levels were minimal. I drew up 5ml of the honey-like substance, which had a sweet, floral flavour.

Still sobbing uncontrollably, Deryn opened his mouth and I popped the syringe underneath his tongue. Deryn held it for a minute before swallowing. Half an hour passed. He was no longer having a panic attack. He looked peaceful. I asked him how he was feeling.

‘I feel relaxed,’ he told me. ‘I’m aware of everything. I just feel at peace, Mum. It’s beautiful.’

It’s a powerful story. No wonder it’s so compelling. Indeed, it’s an archetypical story, that of the parents who will go to any length to save their child from a deadly disease and succeed in doing so. Ms. Blackwell further relates that, after he swallowed the 5 ml of cannabis oil, he refused a dose of cyclizine, the antinausea drug upon which he had become dependent and that he virtually never refused. If there’s one part of this anecdote that puzzled me, it was the part about the cyclizine. Basically, cyclizine is painted as this powerful, addictive antinausea medicine when in reality it’s a histamine blocker and anticholinergic that is pretty well tolerated, with the usual adverse events of anticholinergic drugs, like dry mouth, and, less commonly, constipation, urinary retention, and double vision. Yet in this excerpt, the drug is painted as if it were a powerful, addictive opioid.

Be that as it may, the story certainly makes it sound as though 5 ml of cannabis oil beat cyclizine for nausea, although certainly there could be significant placebo effect here given his mother’s care and her giving him something new. Convinced it was working, Ms. Blackwell continued to give her son cannabis oil whenever he “felt a twinge somewhere.” Then, one evening:

One evening, I heard Deryn yell: ‘Mum – look!’ The bandage on his middle finger had worked its way loose and completely come off, showing his third finger – which had been blackened and dead – had now healed. How on earth had a child with no immune system and no way of fighting infection managed to heal himself after being off medication for more than three weeks?

I called Deryn’s team to tell them what had happened. Not one of them could give me any answers.

We knew his bone marrow wasn’t functioning and it was not scientifically possible for his wounds to heal. Deryn had spent months in isolation because a common cold could be fatal – yet, somehow, he had overcome three catastrophic infections.

Hundreds of people had been praying for Deryn, blessing him in their own ways. Was this a miracle?

Later that evening, the hospice doctor arrived. ‘We’re no longer sure Deryn is dying,’ she admitted.

The doctors were not sure whether or not the hospice was now the best place for us.

The story sure makes it seem like a miracle. One can only imagine the delight and relief, mingled with confusion and fear, that the Blackwells experienced, as their son, to whom they were preparing to say goodbye forever, made a sudden and unexpected recovery. Human nature being what it is, not surprisingly, Ms. Blackwell started looking for a cause for her son’s good fortune, and, human nature being what it is (and confirmation bias being what it is in all of us), she soon found one:

When we’d arrived four weeks earlier, he’d been given three days to live. Now here he was a month later, in far better health than when he’d left his hospital room. They had no idea how this was possible.

Then it dawned on me. Only one thing had changed since Deryn started to recover: the cannabis tincture. I couldn’t tell the doctors what we’d done.

Now, three years later, she’s revealing to the world what she did, and presenting it as a case of cannabis saving her son’s life. But did it? There is considerable reason to doubt. Those of you who are regular readers can probably identify the issues in this testimonial that make it less than convincing as evidence that cannabis salvaged Deryn’s failing bone marrow transplant. See if you can identify them before reading the next section.

The forthcoming book based on Deryn’s story aside, I’m very happy to report, Deryn returned to school and appears to be doing quite well now. Until now, his story popped up every so often as a human interest story in the UK press of a boy who beat what seemed like insurmountable odds to beat two different forms of cancer after “four failed bone marrow transplants,” while religious groups present him as a miracle. He even wants to study biochemistry, although he still suffers from sequelae of his disease:

“Deryn still struggles with mobility a bit and he gets very tired.

“But the main reason for going back was so he can develop emotionally and socially in that way teenagers, particularly boys, need to at that age.

“He has spent two years in a room by himself with just a nurse or me around, so it is good for him to just be normal for a while.”

Even after defeating cancer Deryn has had to confront other serious threats such as aplastic anaemia.

The family has also set up a charity, Do Everything, although currently the website is listed as Under Construction.

Did cannabis save Deryn’s life? It’s doubtful.

Remember how Ms. Blackwell discussed visits by celebrities to see Deryn around December 2013, as things looked very grim and doctors thought that Deryn’s final days were upon him? The beauty of his brief celebrity back then was that there are contemporaneous accounts of what was happening then that we can compare to Ms. Blackwell’s account today. It also turns out that Deryn and his family had a fairly robust social media presence (for 2013 back then, with a Twitter feed, Facebook page (which appears to be no longer there), and website. Although the website turns up as “Under Construction,” fortunately the almighty Wayback Machine lets us see what was on it as recently as 2015, which will be helpful in my discussion. Deryn’s Twitter feed has no Tweets since this one:

Perusing this Twitter feed and Ms. Blackwell’s recently set up author Twitter feed, I didn’t see any mention of cannabis until this flurry of weekend stories. For instance, the announcement of the book didn’t mention cannabis:

I found all this very curious, how Ms. Blackwell said absolutely nothing about cannabis until this weekend, even when her book release was announced and as she provided updates on her progress on her personal Twitter feed. Maybe the publisher made her keep it a secret. Be that as it may, I found it instructive to fire up the almighty Wayback Machine and look at what the Do Everything Foundation website said. Helpfully, it provided a timeline, which was not nearly as clear in the book excerpt published by The Daily Mail. I think it’s worth posting the entire timeline from his last bone marrow transplant, which encompasses the time when Deryn went into hospice:

On 17th October 2013, his own cells failed because of extremely rare complications.

Thankfully Deryn had one more chance left, he had one more bag of his own cells.

The Dr’s gave Deryn more chemotherapy and on the 29th of October 2013, Deryn has his own and final bag of cells transplanted into his body.

Three days after the transplant, Deryn trapped his fingers and suffered TWO catastrophic infections in his hand.

He had Cellulitis and Herpes whitlow in his hand and he also had Klebsiella in his mouth, another catastrophic infection.

40 days after a bone marrow transplant, the Dr’s told us that it is highly unlikely that someone will graft if they haven’t already – after 50 days there is no way someone can graft.

In their experience, no one has ever grafted after 50 days.

On December 11th 2013, at day 46, we were moved to a hospice where it was expected that Deryn would die within a few days.

We were told that Deryn’s fourth and final transplant had in fact failed and there was nothing more they could do, it was believed that once they took away the life supporting drugs that Deryn would leave us very quickly.

Deryn had NO immune system and NO way to fight off even a simple cold.

After two Christmases, one New Year’s Eve and quite a few worrying moments, on day 78 Deryn’s bandages accidentally came off his fingers and he was – infection free!

Deryn continued to improve and he started to produce his own blood products.

On day 104 – Deryn officially engrafted!

Not one Dr can explain how Deryn fought off THREE catastrophic infections with NO immune system and then went on to engraft with what recent tests said was empty bone marrow!

On February 25th 2014, Deryn had his line removed from his chest and was officially ‘Off treatment.”

After coming to terms and accepting that he was going to die, Deryn was finding it harder to accept that maybe he wasn’t.

It all happened so quickly.

His future is still very uncertain and he is still poorly.

BUT

We are for the first time, starting to plan for a future with Deryn.

Thank you so much for visiting Deryn’s page and for reading his wonderful story.

** Miracles do happen and dreams can come true **

It’s not entirely clear exactly when Ms. Blackwell started giving Deryn cannabis oil, but it was clearly some time before he went into hospice on December 11, 2013. In the excerpt above, in the context of giving Deryn his first dose of cannabis, that the doctors would give him two weeks to improve and then, if he didn’t, move him to hospice, which suggests that she started dosing him in late November 2013. Then, by her own account, she didn’t start giving Deryn oral cannabis until New Year’s Eve 2013. Day 78 after his transplant would have made it January 15, 2014 when the bandages came off his fingers and revealed that he had healed much of his ulcers, and Day 104 would have been February 10, 2014.

One can see how this timeline might have led Ms. Blackwell to think that what had saved her son was the cannabis oil. She started giving him oral cannabis oil about two weeks before the ulcers on his hands unexpectedly healed. However, there are a number of reasons to doubt that it was the cannabis. For one thing, from this account we have no idea what strain of cannabis was used, making it difficult to estimate the cannabinoid content of the oil and therefore how much and what types of cannabinoids were in the actual oil Ms. Blackwell used. We don’t know the cannabis to oil ratio. We don’t even know the regularity of the dosing except that she gave it to her son “whenever he had a twinge.” Given the experimental data I’ve discussed before that shows that the various cannabinoids only have a modest anti-cancer effect, it’s hard to conclude that the doses Ms. Blackwell was giving her son were high enough to have had such a dramatic effect. For another thing, what Ms. Blackwell is claiming is not so much that “cannabis cured her son’s cancer,” but rather that cannabis somehow fired up his immune system so that it could fight off the infection and his cells could actually engraft after three times the length of time it normally takes. In reality, the evidence regarding cannabinoids and the immune system is mixed, with at least one study showing that they can suppress immune function. Indeed, cannabinoids are being studied more as a potential treatment for autoimmune diseases rather than as any sort of means of increasing immune cell engraftment. Basically, it’s not very plausible at all based on what we know about cannabis that Ms. Blackwell’s secret treatment of her son resulted in such a dramatic turnaround.

So what happened? Did cannabis really rescue Deryn Blackwell’s bone marrow transplant?

What probably happened is that Deryn Blackwell was a highly unusual case in which his last stem cell infusion took a far longer amount of time to engraft than the doctors at the hospital treating him had observed before. It just so happened that, as Deryn was deteriorating, his mother, anguished at watching him suffer and desperate to do anything possible to alleviate his suffering, decided to give vaporized cannabis oil a try to help his symptoms. Unfortunately, her son continued to deteriorate and entered hospice. She decided to give him the cannabis oil by mouth three weeks after he entered hospice, and it seemed to relieve his symptoms somewhat more effectively. Two weeks later, the “miracle” occurred, and the bandages fell off. Deryn’s rare and unexpected recovery, happily, manifested itself. The rest, as they say, is history.

Deryn’s recovery was unexpected, but unexpected and rare recoveries do occur in medicine. Given what we know about cannabis oil, its rather modest effect on cancer, and the tendencies of cannabinoids to be, if anything, immunosuppressive, it strains credulity on a strictly scientific basis to attribute Deryn’s turnaround on homemade cannabis oil. That’s not to say it’s impossible that cannabis oil was responsible for Deryn’s recovery, only that it’s incredibly improbable. Remember, we know a fair amount about cannabinoid activity against cancer and its activity in the immune system, and what we know doesn’t support the plausibility of Ms. Blackwell’s testimonial. However, as is the case with a lot of other alternative cancer cure testimonials, the all-too-human tendency to want to attribute cause, combined with the form of selective memory known as confirmation bias, which leads all of us to tend to remember what confirms our beliefs and to forget what does not, has led to a conclusion that is almost certainly not correct. Remember again, Ms. Blackwell seems not to remember the several weeks she was giving her son cannabis oil via vapor stick and he was continuing to deteriorate to the point of entering hospice. I repeat that again because it is important. This testimonial is almost certainly a case of confusing correlation with causation.

But what about this claim:

Yet there was a direct correlation between Deryn having the cannabis tincture and his improved blood counts. Whenever he didn’t have it, they dropped. It was enough hard evidence to suggest that cannabis tincture was playing a vital role in his recovery. I hadn’t imagined in my wildest dreams that it could have saved Deryn’s life.

Without very detailed record keeping in which Deryn’s counts were listed by date and then correlated contemporaneously with whether or not he was taking cannabis oil and at what dose, it’s impossible to support or refute this claim. It’s probably more confirmation bias.

Be happy for Deryn Blackwell, but be skeptical

Although I highly doubt that cannabis oil had anything to do with Deryn Blackwell’s “miraculous” recovery, I am very happy that he did recover. Nothing pains me more than seeing children die of diseases like cancer. I can also understand why Callie Blackwell and her husband Simon have come to believe that cannabis cured their son. They are human. They have all the cognitive quirks that lead humans to incorrect conclusions that we all have, and those tendencies are only magnified when it is someone they love deeply that is the object of their hopes and prayers. Confirmation bias is a very powerful thing indeed under these circumstances. Unfortunately, the timeline that I have been able to reconstruct is thin gruel indeed to support Ms. Blackwell’s belief that cannabis oil saved her son by somehow helping his immune cells engraft in his bone marrow.

Unfortunately, what I fear is that a combination of love for Deryn, confusing correlation with causation, and confirmation bias have led the Blackwells to become true believers on the order of Rick Simpson, but with an even more dramatic story in which cannabis is portrayed as having literally pulled their son back from the brink of death. Consider this. Deryn’s story is quite inspirational without the cannabis angle. Yet what excerpt did the publisher decide to release first as part of the book’s publicity campaign? Yes, it released the part describing how Callie Blackwell surreptitiously dosed her son with cannabis oil, and the Daily Mail and the rest of the UK tabloid media responded predictably with stories portraying Deryn Blackwell as proof that cannabis can cure cancer, even when his story shows nothing of the sort. If you want to get an idea what I mean, check out this interview last week in The Mirror in which Deryn’s story is used as a starting point to tout medical marijuana as a treatment for multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, epilepsy, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety disorders, stroke, inflammatory bowel disease, and cancer. In fairness, Ms. Blackwell didn’t say any of these things, but The Mirror spun her son’s story this way. This is intentional.

In case you don’t believe that it was intentional from the beginning to spin Deryn’s story as a “cannabis cures cancer” testimonial and sell it to the media that way, consider Ms. Blackwell’s co-author, Karen Hockney. It turns out that she’s heavily into the woo herself. After undergoing conventional surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy for breast cancer, she became an advocate of the “alkaline diet” to treat her cancer. Why would Ms. Blackwell’s publisher choose such a co-author for a neophyte author if the plan wasn’t to emphasize the cannabis all along?

Unfortunately, the narrative that is being spun has the potential to influence patients with cancer and parents to try unproven and quack treatments, like cannabis for cancer and who knows what else. In seeking to do good, I fear that the Blackwells could actually make it less likely that future Deryns actually survive their cancers. It saddens me to say it, but it has to be said.



from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2os0lQS

Comments of the Week #155: From Pure Energy To Earth’s Twin [Starts With A Bang]

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.” -Woodrow Wilson

It’s been another fantastic week here at Starts With A Bang, and I’ve got to laud all of you for doing your best to make it a good one! Let’s get right into what this past week held:

I’m sure you’ve caught our new Starts With A Bang podcast, on why Pluto isn’t a planet anymore, like 1,000 other people. What you may not know is, thanks to our generous Patreon supporters, we’re going to be constructing a history-of-the-Universe poster unlike anything you’ve ever seen before! Can’t wait!

I also wanted to thank everyone for keeping it more civil and adult in the comments than we’ve had it here in a long time. Keep it up, and nobody will need the banhammer any time soon. With that out of the way, let’s get right on into our comments of the week!

Global sea level rise since 1992 hits past the 8 centimeter mark in the AVISO altimetric graph. Image source: AVISO.

Global sea level rise since 1992 hits past the 8 centimeter mark in the AVISO altimetric graph. Image source: AVISO.

From Denier on, you guessed it, denying that global warming and its consequences are a concern: “First of all, the ocean has been rising for the past 22,000 years. You’re not going to stop it no matter what you do. It is currently rising at around 1.8 mm per year. Some places go a little faster and some go slower but 1.8 mm / year is the average. That comes to around 3.5 inches of rise in 50 years. Sooo Scary! Let’s destroy the economy immediately.”

Yes, melting ice and warming temperatures will cause the ocean level to rise. The current rate of rising is about double what you state, as you are giving a centuries-long average for the rise; it is rising faster now. Why? Due to the increased temperatures caused by humans. Yes, we have “only” increased by about 1 degree Celsius in the past 130 years or so, but about 0.8 degrees of that have come in the past 50 years.

Hotter temperatures melt ice faster; warmer oceans experience thermal expansion; melting ice adds to the mean ocean volume. But the biggest effect will happen in jumps, when ice sheets calve, fall into the ocean or otherwise cause a discontinuous jump in sea level. You talk about 8 meters in over ten thousand years, and I’m more worried about that first meter — or even a half meter — happening within centuries. Your lack of concern comes from a point of ignorance, either willful or not; I can’t say, that’s up to you. But your data is out-of-date. At least revise and resubmit.

Image retrieved from conspiracyuk.co.uk, you irony-savorers.

Image retrieved from conspiracyuk.co.uk, you irony-savorers.

From Ragtag Media on Judith Curry: “@ Dingaling dean. Sooo when Judith Curry was a globull Nut Job climate change is real you loved her. Now that she has come to her senses for the climate scam going on you despise her.”

So I know it’s unlikely you’ve been following Curry in the level of detail I have, so let me give you a recap: in the mid-2000s, Curry, a hitherto respectable climate scientist, invested heavily in her “stadium wave” theory of climate models. She claimed there was an undiscovered natural variation in the climate, and that a periodic “waving” up-and-down was going to be discovered, as a flat and then cooling period would happen. Of course, the Earth continues to warm unabated, and her model has been thoroughly discredited.

She has since engaged in blatantly inappropriate data analysis — known as lying or fraud in a scientific field — and continues to argue her discredited case over and over, changing nothing even as the data continues to not support her claims. So there is fraud going on, but “the scam” has not been correctly identified by you.

Heat-trapping emissions (greenhouse gases) far outweigh the effects of other drivers acting on Earth’s climate. Source: Hansen et al. 2005, Figure adapted by Union of Concerned Scientists.

Heat-trapping emissions (greenhouse gases) far outweigh the effects of other drivers acting on Earth’s climate. Source: Hansen et al. 2005, Figure adapted by Union of Concerned Scientists.

From eric on a number in much more agreement with actual sea level rise: “Here is the current Goddard satellite data, which shows that that old estimate was about half of what we are experiencing – instead of 1.7mm/yr, the observed rate is more like 3.4mm/year.”

Thank you. And there’s an important add-on to this, because temperatures continue to rise, driven by increased CO2 concentration, which also continues to rise. It’s 3.4 mm/year. And accelerating.

Even the United Federation of Planets facepalms for this!!

Even the United Federation of Planets facepalms for this!!

From Ragtag… “So I guess you are correct in me not finding any wisdom or common sense in that grey matter of yours no matter how hard I look because it simply does not exist.”

and Wow… “Just your average blithering idiot.
That WAS what you were waiting for, right, ragbag?”

This has not gone unnoticed. Knock it off. You were doing so well, and I like to think this is part of the backsliding behavior that you can’t help yourself about. But help yourself. This is the ban-worthy stuff I’m trying to eliminate.

And now, enough commenting about comments. Let’s get into the science!

Empty space with no matter, energy, curvature, gravitational energy, etc. Image credit: Amber Stuver of http://ift.tt/1Wcny3S.

Empty space with no matter, energy, curvature, gravitational energy, etc. Image credit: Amber Stuver of http://ift.tt/1Wcny3S.

From John on dark energy and the other forms: “This distinction between Dark Energy and the other forms energy assumes is intriguing.”

I absolutely agree with this. When it comes to all the other known forms of energy, they are particle-dependent. Gravitational, electrical, nuclear, etc., all rely on fundamental interactions. Chemical energy relies on more derived combinations of electromagnetic interactions and discrete quantum states. But dark energy appears to be tied to a fundamental field itself, with no particle equivalent. Is dark energy tied to a particle at some level? Is it related to the inflaton field? Is it changeable over time, depending on the Universe’s conditions?

I still hope that the 21st century will reveal some answers here.

Visualization of a quantum field theory calculation showing virtual particles in the quantum vacuum. Image credit: Derek Leinweber.

Visualization of a quantum field theory calculation showing virtual particles in the quantum vacuum. Image credit: Derek Leinweber.

From Patrice Ayme on dark energy and energy creation/destruction: “If energy can be created ex-nihilo, independently of wave-particle transfers, as apparently observed, why couldn’t energy be DESTROYED during, because of, and AS the usual wave-particle transfer?”

It is important to recognize that only in the strictest sense — where energy is not defined in General Relativity — is the conservation of energy violated. If one imposes the work/energy theorem on the expanding Universe, then energy is conserved even in the case of dark energy; it’s just that we have no right to impose it in General Relativity.

Image credit: Sean Carroll via Steve Hsu of http://ift.tt/LGfxm5.

Image credit: Sean Carroll via Steve Hsu of http://ift.tt/LGfxm5.

From CFT on how dark energy affects particles… without interacting with them: “It is silly to speculate that actual particles of our universe can not access/interact with imagined dark energy, while at the same time proposing that the dark energy is having an affect on those same said particles by accelerating them.”

I don’t understand where the silliness comes in here. If you’re on a trampoline and I don’t touch you, but I do touch the trampoline, can you see where I affect you, even though you and I never interact? Dark energy affects the fabric of the Universe where the particles reside; the particles are affected by the Universe’s fabric, but not by dark energy directly. It’s pretty straightforward.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/N. Evans (Univ. of Texas at Austin)/DSS; Spitzer Space Telescope.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/N. Evans (Univ. of Texas at Austin)/DSS; Spitzer Space Telescope.

From PJ on cosmic dust’s redshift, quantified: “How much of the red shift in distant galaxies, etc., will this account for after calibration?”

It depends on where you look, but the amount of “redness” versus what’s expected otherwise can be very severe if you look in the galactic plane itself. One of the potential problems with looking at an object is that you only see the photons that reach you, and so if you see a red color in an object, you won’t know why it’s red: is there dust or is it redshifted?

But Wow‘s comment, “PJ Dust doesn’t cause redshift, it blocks blue. The light curve is totally different.” is germane and relevant. It causes an effective reddening, but not a red shift. If you use spectroscopy, you will see no additional shift; the ambiguity comes when you take photometric measurements only. If you know what the intrinsic light from your star/galaxy looks like, you can measure and quantify the dust present, which is what Pan-STARRS did.

Image credit: Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial.

Image credit: Ned Wright’s cosmology tutorial.

From Michael Kesley on tired light: “You may be interested in reading the Wikipedia article on “tired light”, which was one of the desperate attempts to explain away the observed cosmological expansion. The last second, “specific falsified models,” has useful details on dust reddening vs. proper redshift.”

Two of my favorite facts about tired light are that it would cause a non-blackbody CMB (above), grotesquely ruled out by the observations, and that it was proposed in 1929 by Fritz Zwicky, who then spent the rest of the paper trying to discredit the idea. It was an awesome way to propose a cosmological alternative: to throw it out there, make the case for it, and then talk about how to rule it out.

When you're at the optimal distance to measure the Earth's curvature, a buoy's bottom will be visible right on the horizon line. For a human at sea level, that will never be as much as six kilometers from the buoy. Image credit: mark_az of Pixabay.

When you’re at the optimal distance to measure the Earth’s curvature, a buoy’s bottom will be visible right on the horizon line. For a human at sea level, that will never be as much as six kilometers from the buoy. Image credit: mark_az of Pixabay.

From Wow on why Americans call it ‘boo-ee’ instead of ‘boy’: “Is this why americans pronounce it “booey”?”

Apparently, there once were two ways of pronouncing the word in England, one of which took hold in the colonies and one of which took over in England. In the book A Practical Grammar of English Pronunciation by Benjamin Humphrey Smart (London, 1810), he writes:

Bw, in the words
(9) Buoy, buoyance
is represented by bu. They should never be pronounced boy, boyance.

Unfortunately, it seems that Shaq has not taken my challenge.

The two ways Earth could cast a circular shadow on the Moon: by being a spherical object (bottom) or a disk-like object (top). Image credit: Windows to the Universe Original (Randy Russell), under a c.c.a.-s.a.-3.0 unported license.

The two ways Earth could cast a circular shadow on the Moon: by being a spherical object (bottom) or a disk-like object (top). Image credit: Windows to the Universe Original (Randy Russell), under a c.c.a.-s.a.-3.0 unported license.

From Michael Mooney on special relativity and a pancake Earth: “The science of relativistic observational differences and “equal validity for all frames of reference” (SR) insists that a pancaked Earth is an “equally valid” description. Maybe it’s time to address length contraction as applied to Earth, Ethan.”

I am afraid that there is no amount of rational thought that will get you to change your mind on this. If you move fast enough to contract Earth, then you effectively contract all the other spherical objects and the distances between them as well, and all the physics will work out equally well in that reference frame as it does in this one.

You have been all over the internet for a long time, if I’ve pegged you correctly, telling the tales of your misinterpretation of special relativity and “paradoxes” that are easily resolved.

After all, this is you, isn’t it?

The identical behavior of a ball falling to the floor in an accelerated rocket (left) and on Earth (right) is a demonstration of Einstein's equivalence principle. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Markus Poessel, retouched by Pbroks13.

The identical behavior of a ball falling to the floor in an accelerated rocket (left) and on Earth (right) is a demonstration of Einstein’s equivalence principle. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Markus Poessel, retouched by Pbroks13.

From Frank on negative gravitational masses: “As far as I know creating particles with negative mass requires negative energy. Also negative energy known to exist but it is unknown if it can be created artificially.”

If you want to create a particle with negative mass, according to the presently accepted physics we have, you need negative energy. Antimatter is known to require a positive energy to create it, and to release positive energy when destroyed. However, that is a measure of its inertial mass, and it is only an assumption of the equivalence principle that inertial mass and gravitational mass must always be the same. This is true — as demonstrated experimentally — for matter, but not necessarily for antimatter. We still have work to do to know for certain.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Stefania.deluca.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Stefania.deluca.

From Denier on a possible explanation for dark matter: “CERN Physicist Dragan Hajdukovic theorized that anti-gravity explained the MOND effect on galactic rotation curves. In one aspect at least it absolutely does explain an effect attributed to dark matter.”

I can’t blame you for misinterpreting this study too much, because it’s pretty deep into the weeds. What he’s claiming is that if you run standard quantum field theory but attribute a negative gravitational mass to antimatter, then creating particle/antiparticle pairs will create a “gravitational dielectric,” where the vacuum can be gravitationally polarized. This is similar to electromagnetic polarization, where a “medium” in between two parallel plates in a capacitor will increase the capacitance of the space in there, by effectively changing the permittivity and permeability of free space.

One of the thing that’s long been noted about MOND is that if you changed Newton’s laws by adding a non-zero dielectric medium throughout space, a minimum acceleration in galactic rotation is an emergent phenomenon. Hajdukovic’s paper basically puts these two effects together. A measurement of the gravitational mass of antimatter would kill this.

The gravitational behavior of the Earth around the Sun is not due to an invisible gravitational pull, but is better described by the Earth falling freely through curved space dominated by the Sun. Image credit: LIGO / T. Pyle.

The gravitational behavior of the Earth around the Sun is not due to an invisible gravitational pull, but is better described by the Earth falling freely through curved space dominated by the Sun. Image credit: LIGO / T. Pyle.

From Michael Mooney on curved space and orbits: “Why is there no discussion in physics about the mechanics of “curved space” as a medium which guides planets in their orbits, applying force to keep them from flying off out of the solar system?”

Because when physicists do discuss these things, we discuss the mathematics governing them and the observational consequences. Those are physically interesting things to discuss. “Ontological interpretations of relativity” aren’t typically interesting to physicists, since they don’t teach us anything about our Universe, but rather our intuitive preconceptions. We must work to overcome those, not give into them.

You claim to challenge the assumptions of the math associated with relativity… but if you don’t understand the math itself, what makes you think you understand the underlying assumptions and their implications? Philosophy is useful for a tremendous number of things, but can you point me to even one scientific advance that happened because of a philosophical contribution?

Kepler's Platonic solid model of the Solar system from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). Image credit: Johannes Kepler.

Kepler’s Platonic solid model of the Solar system from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). Image credit: Johannes Kepler.

From Denier on five flamebait comments designed to troll scientists: “Scientists highly value being right. Their self-worth is often tied up in their knowledge and being seen as wrong translates in their mind to devaluing them personally. It is human nature to fill in the unknown parts of other people with your own traits, but that isn’t reality. Although every likes to be correct, it isn’t nearly the driving motivation in society that it is to academics.”

I would argue that this is highly contrary to… let’s say, 97% of the evidence. The overwhelming majority of scientists will change their mind on any issue when presented with persuasive, robust evidence. This happened in astrophysics with dark matter and dark energy; this happened in climate science with global warming; this happened in gravitational wave astronomy with the first LIGO detection; this happened in particle physics with the discovery of the Higgs boson at 126 GeV. Your psychological evaluation of scientists is suspect, and your comparison with scientists to the rest of a society that has been proven to Dunning-Kruger themselves at every turn is… well, let’s say lacking in evidence.

On the plus side, the UK just did the very thing you told me would be legally indefensible and highly unconstitutional in the USA.

Image credit: ESO Photo Ambassador Gianluca Lombardi.

Image credit: ESO Photo Ambassador Gianluca Lombardi.

From Wow, earlier today, crossing the line: “OK, so since you seem to think that compassion against you is insulting, I won’t bother, mooney. Or you”re just a whiney little asshole.
No, that is an apt description. Not an insult.
So, absent that whining, you still have nothing about proving your claim that science has nothing but contempt for psychology?
Because that’s an insult too.
Oh, I get it, you only care about people not being super special nice to you, amirite?
Aw, snowflake, nobody gives a rats ass. Either put up or shut up.”

This comment literally happened after I began writing this article today.

Sad!

Enjoy your week off, Wow. See you next Sunday.

A Minkowski diagram of the contracted ladder from the relativistic "ladder paradox" problem. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Life of Riley.

A Minkowski diagram of the contracted ladder from the relativistic “ladder paradox” problem. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Life of Riley.

From the not-very-blameless Michael Mooney: “Same goes for length contraction if Ethan continues to refuse to address his distinction between contracted physical objects (not physical shrinking) and contracted distances between stars (“real.”)”

Did you seriously the Comments of the Week from two weeks ago where I addressed this at length and gave you a link to the Wikipedia page that discusses that exact paradox in depth, complete with resolution?

Image credit: Ant Schinckel, CSIRO.

Image credit: Ant Schinckel, CSIRO.

And finally, from Frank on searching for non-carbon-based forms of life: “Few years ago I had read that hundreds of famous scientists sent a signed letter to NASA to not just search for carbon-based life, search for other kinds of life too.
But I don’t if they suggested any practical way how exactly such a search can be done.”

The life we’re searching for is the life we know how — or have conceived of how — to search for. This includes not only direct biological/biochemical signatures, but signals from all over the electromagnetic (and now gravitational wave) spectrum. If we find something promising, you’ll hear about it. If not from the entire world, then surely from me.

Have a great week, everyone, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow!



from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2o0Xop9

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.” -Woodrow Wilson

It’s been another fantastic week here at Starts With A Bang, and I’ve got to laud all of you for doing your best to make it a good one! Let’s get right into what this past week held:

I’m sure you’ve caught our new Starts With A Bang podcast, on why Pluto isn’t a planet anymore, like 1,000 other people. What you may not know is, thanks to our generous Patreon supporters, we’re going to be constructing a history-of-the-Universe poster unlike anything you’ve ever seen before! Can’t wait!

I also wanted to thank everyone for keeping it more civil and adult in the comments than we’ve had it here in a long time. Keep it up, and nobody will need the banhammer any time soon. With that out of the way, let’s get right on into our comments of the week!

Global sea level rise since 1992 hits past the 8 centimeter mark in the AVISO altimetric graph. Image source: AVISO.

Global sea level rise since 1992 hits past the 8 centimeter mark in the AVISO altimetric graph. Image source: AVISO.

From Denier on, you guessed it, denying that global warming and its consequences are a concern: “First of all, the ocean has been rising for the past 22,000 years. You’re not going to stop it no matter what you do. It is currently rising at around 1.8 mm per year. Some places go a little faster and some go slower but 1.8 mm / year is the average. That comes to around 3.5 inches of rise in 50 years. Sooo Scary! Let’s destroy the economy immediately.”

Yes, melting ice and warming temperatures will cause the ocean level to rise. The current rate of rising is about double what you state, as you are giving a centuries-long average for the rise; it is rising faster now. Why? Due to the increased temperatures caused by humans. Yes, we have “only” increased by about 1 degree Celsius in the past 130 years or so, but about 0.8 degrees of that have come in the past 50 years.

Hotter temperatures melt ice faster; warmer oceans experience thermal expansion; melting ice adds to the mean ocean volume. But the biggest effect will happen in jumps, when ice sheets calve, fall into the ocean or otherwise cause a discontinuous jump in sea level. You talk about 8 meters in over ten thousand years, and I’m more worried about that first meter — or even a half meter — happening within centuries. Your lack of concern comes from a point of ignorance, either willful or not; I can’t say, that’s up to you. But your data is out-of-date. At least revise and resubmit.

Image retrieved from conspiracyuk.co.uk, you irony-savorers.

Image retrieved from conspiracyuk.co.uk, you irony-savorers.

From Ragtag Media on Judith Curry: “@ Dingaling dean. Sooo when Judith Curry was a globull Nut Job climate change is real you loved her. Now that she has come to her senses for the climate scam going on you despise her.”

So I know it’s unlikely you’ve been following Curry in the level of detail I have, so let me give you a recap: in the mid-2000s, Curry, a hitherto respectable climate scientist, invested heavily in her “stadium wave” theory of climate models. She claimed there was an undiscovered natural variation in the climate, and that a periodic “waving” up-and-down was going to be discovered, as a flat and then cooling period would happen. Of course, the Earth continues to warm unabated, and her model has been thoroughly discredited.

She has since engaged in blatantly inappropriate data analysis — known as lying or fraud in a scientific field — and continues to argue her discredited case over and over, changing nothing even as the data continues to not support her claims. So there is fraud going on, but “the scam” has not been correctly identified by you.

Heat-trapping emissions (greenhouse gases) far outweigh the effects of other drivers acting on Earth’s climate. Source: Hansen et al. 2005, Figure adapted by Union of Concerned Scientists.

Heat-trapping emissions (greenhouse gases) far outweigh the effects of other drivers acting on Earth’s climate. Source: Hansen et al. 2005, Figure adapted by Union of Concerned Scientists.

From eric on a number in much more agreement with actual sea level rise: “Here is the current Goddard satellite data, which shows that that old estimate was about half of what we are experiencing – instead of 1.7mm/yr, the observed rate is more like 3.4mm/year.”

Thank you. And there’s an important add-on to this, because temperatures continue to rise, driven by increased CO2 concentration, which also continues to rise. It’s 3.4 mm/year. And accelerating.

Even the United Federation of Planets facepalms for this!!

Even the United Federation of Planets facepalms for this!!

From Ragtag… “So I guess you are correct in me not finding any wisdom or common sense in that grey matter of yours no matter how hard I look because it simply does not exist.”

and Wow… “Just your average blithering idiot.
That WAS what you were waiting for, right, ragbag?”

This has not gone unnoticed. Knock it off. You were doing so well, and I like to think this is part of the backsliding behavior that you can’t help yourself about. But help yourself. This is the ban-worthy stuff I’m trying to eliminate.

And now, enough commenting about comments. Let’s get into the science!

Empty space with no matter, energy, curvature, gravitational energy, etc. Image credit: Amber Stuver of http://ift.tt/1Wcny3S.

Empty space with no matter, energy, curvature, gravitational energy, etc. Image credit: Amber Stuver of http://ift.tt/1Wcny3S.

From John on dark energy and the other forms: “This distinction between Dark Energy and the other forms energy assumes is intriguing.”

I absolutely agree with this. When it comes to all the other known forms of energy, they are particle-dependent. Gravitational, electrical, nuclear, etc., all rely on fundamental interactions. Chemical energy relies on more derived combinations of electromagnetic interactions and discrete quantum states. But dark energy appears to be tied to a fundamental field itself, with no particle equivalent. Is dark energy tied to a particle at some level? Is it related to the inflaton field? Is it changeable over time, depending on the Universe’s conditions?

I still hope that the 21st century will reveal some answers here.

Visualization of a quantum field theory calculation showing virtual particles in the quantum vacuum. Image credit: Derek Leinweber.

Visualization of a quantum field theory calculation showing virtual particles in the quantum vacuum. Image credit: Derek Leinweber.

From Patrice Ayme on dark energy and energy creation/destruction: “If energy can be created ex-nihilo, independently of wave-particle transfers, as apparently observed, why couldn’t energy be DESTROYED during, because of, and AS the usual wave-particle transfer?”

It is important to recognize that only in the strictest sense — where energy is not defined in General Relativity — is the conservation of energy violated. If one imposes the work/energy theorem on the expanding Universe, then energy is conserved even in the case of dark energy; it’s just that we have no right to impose it in General Relativity.

Image credit: Sean Carroll via Steve Hsu of http://ift.tt/LGfxm5.

Image credit: Sean Carroll via Steve Hsu of http://ift.tt/LGfxm5.

From CFT on how dark energy affects particles… without interacting with them: “It is silly to speculate that actual particles of our universe can not access/interact with imagined dark energy, while at the same time proposing that the dark energy is having an affect on those same said particles by accelerating them.”

I don’t understand where the silliness comes in here. If you’re on a trampoline and I don’t touch you, but I do touch the trampoline, can you see where I affect you, even though you and I never interact? Dark energy affects the fabric of the Universe where the particles reside; the particles are affected by the Universe’s fabric, but not by dark energy directly. It’s pretty straightforward.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/N. Evans (Univ. of Texas at Austin)/DSS; Spitzer Space Telescope.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/N. Evans (Univ. of Texas at Austin)/DSS; Spitzer Space Telescope.

From PJ on cosmic dust’s redshift, quantified: “How much of the red shift in distant galaxies, etc., will this account for after calibration?”

It depends on where you look, but the amount of “redness” versus what’s expected otherwise can be very severe if you look in the galactic plane itself. One of the potential problems with looking at an object is that you only see the photons that reach you, and so if you see a red color in an object, you won’t know why it’s red: is there dust or is it redshifted?

But Wow‘s comment, “PJ Dust doesn’t cause redshift, it blocks blue. The light curve is totally different.” is germane and relevant. It causes an effective reddening, but not a red shift. If you use spectroscopy, you will see no additional shift; the ambiguity comes when you take photometric measurements only. If you know what the intrinsic light from your star/galaxy looks like, you can measure and quantify the dust present, which is what Pan-STARRS did.

Image credit: Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial.

Image credit: Ned Wright’s cosmology tutorial.

From Michael Kesley on tired light: “You may be interested in reading the Wikipedia article on “tired light”, which was one of the desperate attempts to explain away the observed cosmological expansion. The last second, “specific falsified models,” has useful details on dust reddening vs. proper redshift.”

Two of my favorite facts about tired light are that it would cause a non-blackbody CMB (above), grotesquely ruled out by the observations, and that it was proposed in 1929 by Fritz Zwicky, who then spent the rest of the paper trying to discredit the idea. It was an awesome way to propose a cosmological alternative: to throw it out there, make the case for it, and then talk about how to rule it out.

When you're at the optimal distance to measure the Earth's curvature, a buoy's bottom will be visible right on the horizon line. For a human at sea level, that will never be as much as six kilometers from the buoy. Image credit: mark_az of Pixabay.

When you’re at the optimal distance to measure the Earth’s curvature, a buoy’s bottom will be visible right on the horizon line. For a human at sea level, that will never be as much as six kilometers from the buoy. Image credit: mark_az of Pixabay.

From Wow on why Americans call it ‘boo-ee’ instead of ‘boy’: “Is this why americans pronounce it “booey”?”

Apparently, there once were two ways of pronouncing the word in England, one of which took hold in the colonies and one of which took over in England. In the book A Practical Grammar of English Pronunciation by Benjamin Humphrey Smart (London, 1810), he writes:

Bw, in the words
(9) Buoy, buoyance
is represented by bu. They should never be pronounced boy, boyance.

Unfortunately, it seems that Shaq has not taken my challenge.

The two ways Earth could cast a circular shadow on the Moon: by being a spherical object (bottom) or a disk-like object (top). Image credit: Windows to the Universe Original (Randy Russell), under a c.c.a.-s.a.-3.0 unported license.

The two ways Earth could cast a circular shadow on the Moon: by being a spherical object (bottom) or a disk-like object (top). Image credit: Windows to the Universe Original (Randy Russell), under a c.c.a.-s.a.-3.0 unported license.

From Michael Mooney on special relativity and a pancake Earth: “The science of relativistic observational differences and “equal validity for all frames of reference” (SR) insists that a pancaked Earth is an “equally valid” description. Maybe it’s time to address length contraction as applied to Earth, Ethan.”

I am afraid that there is no amount of rational thought that will get you to change your mind on this. If you move fast enough to contract Earth, then you effectively contract all the other spherical objects and the distances between them as well, and all the physics will work out equally well in that reference frame as it does in this one.

You have been all over the internet for a long time, if I’ve pegged you correctly, telling the tales of your misinterpretation of special relativity and “paradoxes” that are easily resolved.

After all, this is you, isn’t it?

The identical behavior of a ball falling to the floor in an accelerated rocket (left) and on Earth (right) is a demonstration of Einstein's equivalence principle. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Markus Poessel, retouched by Pbroks13.

The identical behavior of a ball falling to the floor in an accelerated rocket (left) and on Earth (right) is a demonstration of Einstein’s equivalence principle. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Markus Poessel, retouched by Pbroks13.

From Frank on negative gravitational masses: “As far as I know creating particles with negative mass requires negative energy. Also negative energy known to exist but it is unknown if it can be created artificially.”

If you want to create a particle with negative mass, according to the presently accepted physics we have, you need negative energy. Antimatter is known to require a positive energy to create it, and to release positive energy when destroyed. However, that is a measure of its inertial mass, and it is only an assumption of the equivalence principle that inertial mass and gravitational mass must always be the same. This is true — as demonstrated experimentally — for matter, but not necessarily for antimatter. We still have work to do to know for certain.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Stefania.deluca.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Stefania.deluca.

From Denier on a possible explanation for dark matter: “CERN Physicist Dragan Hajdukovic theorized that anti-gravity explained the MOND effect on galactic rotation curves. In one aspect at least it absolutely does explain an effect attributed to dark matter.”

I can’t blame you for misinterpreting this study too much, because it’s pretty deep into the weeds. What he’s claiming is that if you run standard quantum field theory but attribute a negative gravitational mass to antimatter, then creating particle/antiparticle pairs will create a “gravitational dielectric,” where the vacuum can be gravitationally polarized. This is similar to electromagnetic polarization, where a “medium” in between two parallel plates in a capacitor will increase the capacitance of the space in there, by effectively changing the permittivity and permeability of free space.

One of the thing that’s long been noted about MOND is that if you changed Newton’s laws by adding a non-zero dielectric medium throughout space, a minimum acceleration in galactic rotation is an emergent phenomenon. Hajdukovic’s paper basically puts these two effects together. A measurement of the gravitational mass of antimatter would kill this.

The gravitational behavior of the Earth around the Sun is not due to an invisible gravitational pull, but is better described by the Earth falling freely through curved space dominated by the Sun. Image credit: LIGO / T. Pyle.

The gravitational behavior of the Earth around the Sun is not due to an invisible gravitational pull, but is better described by the Earth falling freely through curved space dominated by the Sun. Image credit: LIGO / T. Pyle.

From Michael Mooney on curved space and orbits: “Why is there no discussion in physics about the mechanics of “curved space” as a medium which guides planets in their orbits, applying force to keep them from flying off out of the solar system?”

Because when physicists do discuss these things, we discuss the mathematics governing them and the observational consequences. Those are physically interesting things to discuss. “Ontological interpretations of relativity” aren’t typically interesting to physicists, since they don’t teach us anything about our Universe, but rather our intuitive preconceptions. We must work to overcome those, not give into them.

You claim to challenge the assumptions of the math associated with relativity… but if you don’t understand the math itself, what makes you think you understand the underlying assumptions and their implications? Philosophy is useful for a tremendous number of things, but can you point me to even one scientific advance that happened because of a philosophical contribution?

Kepler's Platonic solid model of the Solar system from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). Image credit: Johannes Kepler.

Kepler’s Platonic solid model of the Solar system from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). Image credit: Johannes Kepler.

From Denier on five flamebait comments designed to troll scientists: “Scientists highly value being right. Their self-worth is often tied up in their knowledge and being seen as wrong translates in their mind to devaluing them personally. It is human nature to fill in the unknown parts of other people with your own traits, but that isn’t reality. Although every likes to be correct, it isn’t nearly the driving motivation in society that it is to academics.”

I would argue that this is highly contrary to… let’s say, 97% of the evidence. The overwhelming majority of scientists will change their mind on any issue when presented with persuasive, robust evidence. This happened in astrophysics with dark matter and dark energy; this happened in climate science with global warming; this happened in gravitational wave astronomy with the first LIGO detection; this happened in particle physics with the discovery of the Higgs boson at 126 GeV. Your psychological evaluation of scientists is suspect, and your comparison with scientists to the rest of a society that has been proven to Dunning-Kruger themselves at every turn is… well, let’s say lacking in evidence.

On the plus side, the UK just did the very thing you told me would be legally indefensible and highly unconstitutional in the USA.

Image credit: ESO Photo Ambassador Gianluca Lombardi.

Image credit: ESO Photo Ambassador Gianluca Lombardi.

From Wow, earlier today, crossing the line: “OK, so since you seem to think that compassion against you is insulting, I won’t bother, mooney. Or you”re just a whiney little asshole.
No, that is an apt description. Not an insult.
So, absent that whining, you still have nothing about proving your claim that science has nothing but contempt for psychology?
Because that’s an insult too.
Oh, I get it, you only care about people not being super special nice to you, amirite?
Aw, snowflake, nobody gives a rats ass. Either put up or shut up.”

This comment literally happened after I began writing this article today.

Sad!

Enjoy your week off, Wow. See you next Sunday.

A Minkowski diagram of the contracted ladder from the relativistic "ladder paradox" problem. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Life of Riley.

A Minkowski diagram of the contracted ladder from the relativistic “ladder paradox” problem. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Life of Riley.

From the not-very-blameless Michael Mooney: “Same goes for length contraction if Ethan continues to refuse to address his distinction between contracted physical objects (not physical shrinking) and contracted distances between stars (“real.”)”

Did you seriously the Comments of the Week from two weeks ago where I addressed this at length and gave you a link to the Wikipedia page that discusses that exact paradox in depth, complete with resolution?

Image credit: Ant Schinckel, CSIRO.

Image credit: Ant Schinckel, CSIRO.

And finally, from Frank on searching for non-carbon-based forms of life: “Few years ago I had read that hundreds of famous scientists sent a signed letter to NASA to not just search for carbon-based life, search for other kinds of life too.
But I don’t if they suggested any practical way how exactly such a search can be done.”

The life we’re searching for is the life we know how — or have conceived of how — to search for. This includes not only direct biological/biochemical signatures, but signals from all over the electromagnetic (and now gravitational wave) spectrum. If we find something promising, you’ll hear about it. If not from the entire world, then surely from me.

Have a great week, everyone, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow!



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How flocking birds move in unison

We’ve all seen flocks of birds wheeling and swooping in unison, as if choreographed. How do they do this? Zoologists say they aren’t simply following a leader, or their neighbors. If they were, the reaction time of each bird would need to be very fast – faster than birds actually do react, according to scientists who have studied the reaction times of individual birds in laboratory settings. The classic research on how flocking birds move in unison comes from zoologist Wayne Potts, who published in the journal Nature in 1984. His work showed that bird in flocks don’t just follow a leader, or their neighbors. Instead, they anticipate sudden changes in the flock’s direction of motion.

And he said, once a change in direction begins in the flock, it then “spreads through the flock in a wave.”

View larger. | Red-winged Blackbirds, over Mattamuskeet Lake in Hyde County, North Carolina from EarthSky Facebook friend Guy Livesay.

The propagation of this manoeuvre wave, as he called it, begins relatively slowly but can reach speeds three times faster than would be possible if birds were simply reacting to their immediate neighbors. Potts called this ability among flocking birds the chorus line hypothesis. That is, he said, birds are like dancers who see an approaching leg kick when it’s still down the line, and anticipate what to do. He said:

These propagation speeds appear to be achieved in much the same way as they are in a human chorus line: individuals observe the approaching manoeuvre wave and time their own execution to coincide with its arrival.

Potts used high-speed film – and a frame-by-frame analysis – of flocks of red-backed sandpipers (Calidris alpina) to conduct his study. He found that the flock typically responded only to birds that banked into the flock, rather than away from it.

That makes sense, since flocking among birds serves the purpose of protecting birds from predators (although there are other purposes as well; for example, when one bird finds food, others in a flock eat, too). Individual birds, those who are separated from the flock, are more likely to be picked off by predators.

Red-winged blackbirds at sunset via Wikipedia

Bottom line: According to Wayne Potts, a zoologist who published in the journal Nature in 1984, birds in flocks are able to change direction quickly not just because they are following a leader, or their neighbors, but because they see a movement far down the line and anticipate what to do next. Potts called this the chorus-line hypothesis for bird movement.

Want more about flocking birds? Read this article from Audubon.org



from EarthSky http://ift.tt/RHS1bg

We’ve all seen flocks of birds wheeling and swooping in unison, as if choreographed. How do they do this? Zoologists say they aren’t simply following a leader, or their neighbors. If they were, the reaction time of each bird would need to be very fast – faster than birds actually do react, according to scientists who have studied the reaction times of individual birds in laboratory settings. The classic research on how flocking birds move in unison comes from zoologist Wayne Potts, who published in the journal Nature in 1984. His work showed that bird in flocks don’t just follow a leader, or their neighbors. Instead, they anticipate sudden changes in the flock’s direction of motion.

And he said, once a change in direction begins in the flock, it then “spreads through the flock in a wave.”

View larger. | Red-winged Blackbirds, over Mattamuskeet Lake in Hyde County, North Carolina from EarthSky Facebook friend Guy Livesay.

The propagation of this manoeuvre wave, as he called it, begins relatively slowly but can reach speeds three times faster than would be possible if birds were simply reacting to their immediate neighbors. Potts called this ability among flocking birds the chorus line hypothesis. That is, he said, birds are like dancers who see an approaching leg kick when it’s still down the line, and anticipate what to do. He said:

These propagation speeds appear to be achieved in much the same way as they are in a human chorus line: individuals observe the approaching manoeuvre wave and time their own execution to coincide with its arrival.

Potts used high-speed film – and a frame-by-frame analysis – of flocks of red-backed sandpipers (Calidris alpina) to conduct his study. He found that the flock typically responded only to birds that banked into the flock, rather than away from it.

That makes sense, since flocking among birds serves the purpose of protecting birds from predators (although there are other purposes as well; for example, when one bird finds food, others in a flock eat, too). Individual birds, those who are separated from the flock, are more likely to be picked off by predators.

Red-winged blackbirds at sunset via Wikipedia

Bottom line: According to Wayne Potts, a zoologist who published in the journal Nature in 1984, birds in flocks are able to change direction quickly not just because they are following a leader, or their neighbors, but because they see a movement far down the line and anticipate what to do next. Potts called this the chorus-line hypothesis for bird movement.

Want more about flocking birds? Read this article from Audubon.org



from EarthSky http://ift.tt/RHS1bg

Asteroid close encounter on April 2

View larger. | Asteroid 2017 FU102 on April 2, 2017 as captured by the Virtual Telescope Project.

The near-Earth asteroid 2017 FU102 was discovered by the Mt. Lemmon Survey in Arizona (USA) on 29 March 2017. Today (April 2, 2017), it will have a very close, but safe encounter with the Earth (about 0.6 times the mean distance of the moon).

At Virtual Telescope Project, we captured 2017 FU102 while it was safely approaching us. For this, we remotely used a telescope in Arizona, made available to the Virtual Telescope by Tenagra Observatories, Ltd. Above is an image coming from the average of 60-seconds exposure, unfiltered, taken with the 16″-f/3.75 Tenagra III (“Pearl”) unit. The robotic mount tracked the fast apparent motion (120″/minute) of the asteroid, so stars are trailing. The asteroid is perfectly tracked: it is the sharp dot in the center.

On April 2, 2017 at 20:18 UTC (4:18 p.m. EDT; translate to your time zone), this ~10 meters large rock will reach its minimum distance from us of 143,000 miles (230,000 km). That is a bit more than half of the mean distance of the moon.

The observatory is placed at 4,265 feet (1,300 meters) above the sea level, in the Sonoran desert, providing one of the best skies in the world. This image was taken as part of a cooperation between the Virtual Telescope Project and Tenagra Observatories, Ltd., which will be announced soon.

Visit Virtual Telescope’s Solar System page

Help support The Virtual Telescope Project!

Bottom line: Photo from Virtual Telescope Project of 2017 FU102, an asteroid that will sweep close to Earth on April 2, 2017.



from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2oxclgK

View larger. | Asteroid 2017 FU102 on April 2, 2017 as captured by the Virtual Telescope Project.

The near-Earth asteroid 2017 FU102 was discovered by the Mt. Lemmon Survey in Arizona (USA) on 29 March 2017. Today (April 2, 2017), it will have a very close, but safe encounter with the Earth (about 0.6 times the mean distance of the moon).

At Virtual Telescope Project, we captured 2017 FU102 while it was safely approaching us. For this, we remotely used a telescope in Arizona, made available to the Virtual Telescope by Tenagra Observatories, Ltd. Above is an image coming from the average of 60-seconds exposure, unfiltered, taken with the 16″-f/3.75 Tenagra III (“Pearl”) unit. The robotic mount tracked the fast apparent motion (120″/minute) of the asteroid, so stars are trailing. The asteroid is perfectly tracked: it is the sharp dot in the center.

On April 2, 2017 at 20:18 UTC (4:18 p.m. EDT; translate to your time zone), this ~10 meters large rock will reach its minimum distance from us of 143,000 miles (230,000 km). That is a bit more than half of the mean distance of the moon.

The observatory is placed at 4,265 feet (1,300 meters) above the sea level, in the Sonoran desert, providing one of the best skies in the world. This image was taken as part of a cooperation between the Virtual Telescope Project and Tenagra Observatories, Ltd., which will be announced soon.

Visit Virtual Telescope’s Solar System page

Help support The Virtual Telescope Project!

Bottom line: Photo from Virtual Telescope Project of 2017 FU102, an asteroid that will sweep close to Earth on April 2, 2017.



from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2oxclgK

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