Who are the Children of the 90s?

If you were down on Bristol Harbourside this weekend you may have noticed an event at MShed, or heard mention of ‘Children of the 90s’. Who are these children, and what were they doing at the museum? The answer involves a journey more than 20 years back in time, and the vision and foresight of Bristol Professor Jean Golding.

It’s demography stupid!

The protestors on the streets of London, New York, Madrid and Tel Aviv do not understand the economic and political problems they face.  The developed world is suffering from a demographic crisis.  Railing against financiers and the richest 1% misses the underlying cause of the crisis: the costs of paying for their own parents' and grandparents' retirements.

First Class Mutations

Beasts on a plane!

It almost feels like a fool’s errand to isolate something that can help us make light of ourselves from the litany of improbable happenings taking place in X-Men: First Class. Any film with a sapphire coloured beast piloting a stealth fighter jet will struggle to poignantly frame questions about the evolution of humanity. But if you squint a little, the band of ‘mutant’ heroes, whose variety of supernatural traits are powered by a single mutation in the fictitious ‘X gene’, actually epitomise a core mechanism central to the field of population genetics.

Alcohol: ‘more harmful than heroin’, or all in the mind?

If you’ve been following reports in the media recently, you may be a little confused about alcohol and its’ effects. A year ago, the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs published a report on drug harms in the Lancet. They calculated harm scores, to an individual and to society as a whole, and found that alcohol was more damaging than heroin or crack cocaine. And only this week the Royal College of Physicians released a report about alcohol. It provides evidence that our livers need three days alcohol free per week, if we have more than one or two drinks per day. If you drink heavily one evening, you should have a couple of days off before you drink again. From this evidence, it seems that alcohol is bad news.

Dynamite Money

Housing Genius: the Nobel Museum, Stockholm

#1: The Growling Bear

Since this week happens to be the time of year when small bands of elite academics (and sometimes spurious accessories, like Barack Obama) are ushered into the scholarly Hall of Fame, this seems the perfect time to start a new column here on Sifting The Evidence: I'll aim to profile the life and graft of one Nobel Prize winner every month. 


This will span three of the five categories, so anyone from physics, chemistry or physiology/medicine is eligible, but I won’t feature winners of the literature or peace prizes (for, in the eyes of this blog, these are domains of beatniks). And economics also squeaks in, despite its unofficial status. The prizes have been awarded for a diverse array of amazing theories, discoveries and innovations, from radioactivity to IVF, and are given to personalities of every shade, from the outspoken to (perhaps predictably) the somewhat autistic. But first, we’ll start with the Growling Bear himself: Alfred Nobel. 

One of the concerns frequently expressed about climate change policies, is that if we reduce and restrict carbon emissions in the UK, then energy intensive manufacturing will simply shut down and move to other countries.

Some fascinating research, via Ryan Avent, suggests that this may not be the case.

Ralf Martin, Laure de Preux, and Ulrich Wagner published a really interesting paper investigating the effects of the UK’s climate change levy (CCL) and climate change agreements (CCA) on manufacturing firms production of goods, energy use and carbon emissions.

They used data on individual firms from the Office of National Statistics, and found:

Global warming, carbon emissions and hyperactive government policy: when less is more.

How much progress has the UK made in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions?

A little?  Just about kept emissions from increasing?

Why we should be wary of the tobacco companies

There have been reports today that five tobacco companies are trying to sue the USA Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over new laws that will come in to place in September, forcing them to display graphic health warnings on their products. These are similar to warnings used here in UK, and in many other countries around the world.

Putting aside for a moment their farcical suggestion that this removes their constitutional right to free speech, it has brought a more alarming fact to my attention; namely that this is the first legal change to cigarette packaging in 25 years. How has the USA government allowed them to get away with so much for so long? Of course a large part of the answer is the financial control that these companies have; their lobbying has funded campaigns to keep shop displays of smoking products, and allegedly funded grass-roots organisations denouncing governmental smoking laws as ‘nannying’.

Lies, damn lies and public sector deficits

Across the western world,  governments are struggling with high public debt.  After much melodrama the US congress increased the amount of money the US government can borrow.  In the UK net public sector debt has increased from 37.5% of GDP in 2007 to 61% of GDP in 2011.  The coalition has set itself the target of eliminating the public sector deficit over the next four years.  They claim that there is no alternative to cutting government spending, and unless government spending is reduced, the UK may be unable to afford to pay its debts and may risk default on its debts.

These claims are false. It remarkably simple to check whether a country,  a company or individual is likely to default.  When borrowers’ likelihood of default increases the interest rate they are forced to pay on their debt goes up.  For example, Greece is currently teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and currently it must pay 14% on its government debt.  So what has happened to the interest rate on British government debt? 

What Didn't Kill Mozart

Not one for bronzing up

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may have been stricken with many ailments, but if you were to believe recent reports, it was vitamin D deficiency that principally led to him to an early grave.

It’s not to be denied that Mozart could have been as ivory in complexion as the keys that he struck to earn his keep: the man lived at a northerly latitude—where the winter sun isn’t strong enough to induce the synthesis of vitamin D in the skin—and if his personality were to be put in musical terms, he was allegedly something of a nocturne.  Unlike other vitamins, there’s no vitamin D in most food sources, and the majority is obtained from exposure to sunlight. At the time of Mozart’s death (1791), there was little knowledge of vitamin D, let alone ways of measuring his status, so for all we know he could well have had insufficient or deficient levels of the vitamin. But there are two big ambiguities that should temper unsubstantiated chatter about Mozart having succumbed to his dappled lifestyle.

Generation F?

Those born in 1983 will pay on average £187,000 to the government over their lives, net of the benefits and services they receive.  Conversely, those born in 1933 will receive an average £150,000 in payments and services over their lifetime, net of benefits and services.  This was highlighted in the fiscal sustainability report recently published by the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR).

The figure below charts how much people will give or receive from government, adjusted for inflation, over their lifetimes.  People born before 1953 are net beneficiaries.  In contrast, people born after 1953 will pay more in taxes than they receive in services and benefits.

Raise A Glass To The Birth Cohort

In yesterday’s post, Suzi pointed out how Children of the 90s has helped her research, and last Friday, BBC Breakfast had a feature on a study that is already a couple of years old, yet remains very much in its infancy. As with Children of the 90s, ‘Born in Bradford’ is a longitudinal cohort: a study which recruits a group of participants, sometimes well before their birth certificates are signed, and follows them during the course of their lives (often alongside their parents and/or other relatives). Herculean efforts are put in to record buckets of information about them along the way. Such a study is an immensely rich and important resource.

Studies begin with certain goals in mind and develop over time to address new research questions and shifting paradigms in medicine. For example, early work from Children Of The 90s helped to resolve contention about which way we should lie our babies at night to lower the risk of cot death (that’s face up, new parents!). Nowadays, the participants are collectively entering their third decade walking this earth, and continue to help us answer questions about the incalculable complexities of maintaining good health in the 21^st century.

Many types of information and measures are recorded by cohorts (all with the consent of participants, of course). These can range from simple questionnaires about things like family income and leisure activity preferences to in-depth measures taken at medical examinations, including blood samples used to measure various biochemical properties. Since the advent of the human genome project in 2003, we are increasingly being able to survey the genetic information of participants to explore what effects our DNA can have on our propensity for developing certain traits or diseases.

Pot Luck – does smoking cannabis really increase your chances of becoming psychotic?

Paranoia. You’re being watched. The people on the street are not who they seem; they’re following you. You’re sure you’ve seen that man before, he must be a spy. It might sound like James Bond’s inner monologue, but these are some of the sensations you can feel while intoxicated after smoking cannabis. They’re also some of the symptoms of psychosis, a disorder of the mind which has been linked to cannabis use. Feeling paranoid when you’re high is not the same as developing a condition like psychosis. The effects of intoxication are gone after a few hours; psychosis as a disorder can involve episodes like this lasting for days, or longer. Currently the government believes that cannabis use as a teenager increases a person’s risk of developing psychosis, but the scientific evidence is not so clear cut.

Although cannabis is illegal, it is a widely used drug. A 2004 report from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction found that two in five 15 year olds in the UK had tried cannabis, and one in ten had done so more than 50 times the previous year. Because of this, you might expect there to be lot of youngsters with psychosis, but it’s a very rare disorder. David Nutt, the ex-government drug advisor, has pointed out that although the use of cannabis has increased dramatically over the last few decades, the number of people with psychosis over the same time period has not increased at the same rate. If there was a direct link between cannabis use and likelihood to develop psychosis, you would expect to see both either increase or decrease together. If there is a link between cannabis use and psychosis it is likely to be complicated, and it is still not clear in which direction an effect occurs. It may be that the link is seen because people with psychosis find that smoking cannabis alleviates some psychotic symptoms, such as social anxiety, so they self medicate.

Why is the UK growing so slowly?

In the second quarter of 2011 the UK grew at an annualised rate of 0.2%.  This compares to an average growth rate of GDP from 1992 to 2006 of 1.9% per year.

A closer look at the GDP figures (Table B1) suggests that all service sectors of the economy now have higher output that 2006.  The fact that total output is still below 2006 is due to falls in oil and gas production, farming, energy production and manufacturing which are down 31.3%, 12.6%, 6.8% and 11.4% respectively since 2006.

It is notable that each of these sectors is highly energy intensive.  This is consistent with an energy supply shock.  The government has frequently argued that these are the sectors of the economy that will provide future economy growth.  However, the latest set of GDP figures appear to be consistent with an economy rebalancing away from heavy industry and primary resource production towards services.  It is not immediately obvious that the production sectors are areas in which the UK is likely to have a comparative advantage in the future.

Indeed, as economist Larry Summers recently observed for the US:

The reality is that manufacturing employment has been trending downwards for 50 years.
… the fraction of all the workers in the United States who are engaged in manufacturing production right now, is less than a fraction of the workers who were engaged in farming in the late 1950's, and it's a very similar phenomenon.

Summers goes on to suggest that the future growth of developed economies is unlikely to come from manufacturing and production: it will come from knowledge and innovation.  Role models should now be the ubiquitous ARM chip designers or Dyson, rather than production magnates like Corus.

This raises a number of further questions: firstly, to what extent can fiscal policy, government spending or tax cuts offset falls in output due to energy intensive production industries?  And what effects will further rounds of monetary easing have on output and inflation if a significant proportion of output falls as the UK has experienced, and the slow current growth is due to specific industries such as oil and gas?

Clearly policy makers’ best response to these issues depends on the answers to these questions.  Unfortunately, these questions will only be resolved with time, and reams more data and research.  Until then, we’re more dependent on luck than judgement.

Press Releases

The NHU "are the best in the world"
but there's room for improvement

Last week, the BBC released the review addressing the impartiality and quality of its science coverage. Overall, the corporation fared very well. To satisfy one peculiar British duality, we subject the BBC (along with the NHS) to equal measures of scorn and adulation, and most reviews commissioned by the Trust offer juicy reading. 

The review, conducted by UCL’s emeritus professor of genetics Steve Jones, offers up lapping praise for the corporation’s output but with the flattery, he highlights several weaknesses. It is a sprawling piece, so this post addresses one area which (to our knowledge) hasn’t been reported widely elsewhere in the mainstream press: namely, the failure of journalists to utilise sources of science beyond press reports. 

Admittedly, the press release can be a useful tool to rely upon for finding scoops. But Jones doesn’t place as much emphasis as he should on the dangers of such a dependency. An analysis which the report cites suggests 75% of news stories cover only material listed in press releases. It is painfully apparent to the industry insiders when journalists haven’t searched any further into the story than the veneer represented by the press release, even if lay readers are unaware.