The problem lies in the main tool used to sniff out the man’s supposedly active brain, a technique called facilitated communication. Facilitated communication, in which a helper assists a physically disabled but mentally capable person to type out his or her thoughts, has been widely discredited for decades, after independent tests revealed that the technique is totally unreliable and often the result, conscious or not, of the assistant typing, not the patient. Basically, assistants would often pick up a patient’s hand and jam the patient’s finger into the keyboard, which I think we can all agree is not the most reliable form of communication.

If facilitated communication is part of this, and it appears to be, then I don’t trust it,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s centre for Bioethics. “I’m not saying the whole thing is a hoax, but somebody ought to be checking this in greater detail. Any time facilitated communication of any sort is involved, red flags fly.

Ultimately, there is definitely more brain activity in this particular case than was first thought; the patient, Rom Houben, is able to indicate yes and no with a slight movement of his foot. But the elaborate, heartbreaking and eloquent notes he supposedly wrote through facilitated communication could well be totally bogus. [Wired]

As soon as the email archives’ contents were made publicly available, arguments broke out. Was there proof of data manipulation that could flip the entire climate debate topsy-turvy? Were scientists at the university working to keep works by climate skeptics out of journals? Answers to either question are unclear. According to New Scientist, there was no evidence of actual data manipulation, but some of the email exchanges could be construed as attempts to suppress some research.

No matter how those questions wind up being resolved, in the end the trouble doesn’t seem to be in the contents of the emails or in the data, but in the fact that the Climate Research Unit restricted access to the climate data to those it deemed “bona fide researchers.” Maybe some of the accusations the unit faced could’ve been avoided had the data been more freely shared in the first place. [New Scientist]

Photo by coda

True, here the fMRI is being used by the defence as a means to elude the death penalty, and only in the sentencing portion of the trial – not as a tool of conviction, as a dubious EEG scan was used to convict a woman of murder in India last year. Specifically, the fMRI scan is being submitted as evidence that the defendant Brian Dugan’s brain is abnormal – psychopathic – and so he shouldn’t be subject to the death penalty. The jury disagreed, but took 10 hours to reach the decision that the state should kill Dugan for his crime. Without the scan, Dugan’s defence attorney says it would’ve take them an hour.

It’s kind of hard to grasp, conceptually, looking inside somebody’s brain, literally peering into their mind. It’s something from fiction, something paranormal – mind readers and psychics – as a means of detection, a means of determining right and wrong, truth and lies. Brain scans to determine how much punishment your crime merits logically leads into brain scans that figure out whether or not you committed the crime, into scans that reveal every crime you have committed, a persistent and inescapable confessional. What secrets would your brain spill? [Science Mag via Wired]

From the Earth to the Moon – The Signature Edition: This is one of my favourite TV series of all time. It’s well scripted, acted, filmed and directed, to the point in which you will get glassy eyes at some of the most dramatic and epic moments. My favourite is still the episode in which Apollo 12 arrives at the Moon, perhaps the most anti-climactic moment in the history of space travel. Even if you watched this on TV, each of the 12 episodes are a must to fully understand the titanic scope, knowledge and courage that took humans into their trip from the Earth to the Moon. Prices vary from retailer to retailer.

Lego Saturn V: This one is a given: Saturn V + command module + lunar module + lunar rover + Lego = insane win. I wish it was as big as the gigantic Millennium Falcon, but it’s good enough as it is. Everyone will like the set, and it’s a perfect way to celebrate the 40 Anniversary of humankind’s first trip to the Moon. $US139 [Amazon]

Moonfire: At $US1500, this is one very expensive book. But it has a real lunar rock inside. Not all of them, however: Only 12 of its limited-edition 1969 (numbered from 1958 to 1968). And the moon rock is not from the Apollo mission, but from a certified meteor. Alternatively, you can always buy the beautiful – and a lot cheaper at $US31 – Full Moon. $US1500 [Taschen]

Trip to the Kennedy Space Center to watch a shuttle launch: Going to the Kennedy Space centre is always fun. Going to see a launch and feel the ground tremble below your feet while the sky fires up in Halloween orange and chimney red? Simply amazing. Going to watch one of the last shuttle launches next year? An absolute must. If you give this trip to any space aficionado out there, he or she will love you forever. $US38 adult/$US28 child for the admission ticket, add $US21 adult/$US15 child for guided tour, plus cost of flight and hotel. [Kennedy Space Center]

NASA Flight Jacket: The other day I got a real USAF fighter pilot jacket at a second hand shop. I wish I had that for a perfectly dorky Tom Cruise impression at the Dubai Air Show. This NASA Flight Jacket is the next best thing. Kind of. And it comes with all the patches. You only have to provide the Right Stuff. $US79.99 [The Space Shop]

IMPOSSIBLE Ride in the Space Shuttle: Even if you had all the money in the world, NASA would never let you ride the shuttle. A Soyuz spacecraft, sure, but no space shuttle. Nosir, no big bang for you on top of this Reagan era wonder. You will have to enjoy this video and get over it, because sadly it wouldn’t happen even if you were Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and JesusChrist all rolled into one. Priceless. [NASA]

DON’T BUY Astronaut ice cream: This thing is disgusting. I want to like it every time I try it, but it has the most horrible taste. Die space ice cream, die! Give me Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie any day. $US4 [The Space Shop]

Give us your recommendations in the comments.

All Giz Wants is our annual round-up of favourite gift ideas, including amazing attainable objects and a few far-out fantasies. We’ll be popping guides catered to different interests several times per day for the next week, so keep checking back.

The president also said he’s introducing an annual White House Science fair with the winners of national competitions in science and technology. “If you win the NCAA championship, you come to the White House. Well, if you’re a young person and you’ve produced the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognised for that achievement, too. ”

Students will launch rockets, construct miniature windmills, and get their hands dirty. They’ll have the chance to build and create – and maybe destroy just a little bit – to see the promise of being the makers of things, and not just the consumers of things. [White House via NY Times]

Industry leaders like Sony are launching a nationwide challenge to design compelling, freely available, science-related video games. And organisations representing teachers, scientists, mathematicians, and engineers – joined by volunteers in the community – are participating in a grassroots effort called “National Lab Day” to reach 10 million young people with hands-on learning.

Business leaders from Intel, Xerox, Kodak, and Time Warner Cable are teaming up with Sally Ride, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as the Carnegie Corporation, to find and replicate successful science, maths and technology programs all across America. Sesame Street has begun a two-year initiative to teach young kids about maths and science. And Discovery Communications is going to deliver interactive science content to 60,000 schools reaching 35 million students.

These efforts extend beyond the classroom. Time Warner Cable is joining with the Coalition for Science After School and FIRST Robotics – the program created by inventor Dean Kamen, which gave us the “Cougar Cannon” – to connect one million students with fun after-school activities, like robotics competitions.

According to research done at the Rambam Medical centre in Haifa, Israel, low-intensity shockwaves can actually reverse erectile problems unlike medications which require continued treatment. The actual shockwaves are described as not being painful, yet somehow it doesn’t really sound that way:

Each shockwave applied roughly 100 bar of pressure – some 20 times the air pressure in a bottle of champagne, but less than the pressure exerted by a woman in stiletto heels who weighs 132 lbs. (60 kg).

Youch. It’s creepy and it’s cooky, but until you can grow a replacement, this might be a more reliable way of dealing with malfunctioning equipment than ED medication. [Live Science]

Photo by otisarchives4

In 1983, Belgian engineering student and martial arts enthusiast Houben, then 20, was in a car accident that was thought to have left him in a vegetative state. Doctors relied on the widely used Glasgow Coma Scale, assessing his eyes, verbal and motor responses. What they failed to notice was that Houben was actually conscious – but completely paralysed.

“I screamed, but there was no one to hear,” he says in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. Three years ago, neurologist Steven Laureys used modern scanning techniques to discover that Houben’s cerebral cortex was, in fact, functioning. (The doctor has only just now made Houben’s story public.)

Houben, who communicates via a computer with a special keyboard activated with the slightest movement of his right hand, is now 46. He has spent more than half his life trapped in his own body, and says he only survived this excruciating existence by dreaming himself away. In the interview, this is what he typed:

I am called Rom. I am not dead. The nurses came, they patted me, they sometimes took my hand, and I heard them say “no hope”. I meditated, I dreamed my life away – it was all I could do. I don’t want to blame anyone – it wouldn’t do any good. But I owe my life to my family. Everyone else gave up.

I studied what happened around me as if it were a tiny piece of world drama, the bizarre peculiarities of the other patients in the common room, the entry of the doctors into my room, the gossip of the nurses who were not embarrassed to speak about their boyfriends in front of “the extinct one”. That made me an expert on relationships.

According to Laureys, Houben’s case may be far more common than we’d like to think. The doctor, who leads the Coma Science Group and Department of Neurology at Liege University Hospital, says that while Houben’s doctors were “not good”, he’s not sure better ones using this same coma scale would have detected brain activity either:

In Germany alone each year some 100,000 people suffer from severe traumatic brain injury. About 20,000 are followed by a coma of three weeks or longer. Some of them die, others regain health. But an estimated 3000 to 5000 people a year remain trapped in an intermediate stage – they go on living without ever coming back again.

In his paper, Laureys writes that in about 40 per cent of “vegetative state” cases he has analysed, current brain-scanning techniques reveal signs of varying levels of consciousness. A case is being made, it seems, to stop relying on the Glasgow Coma Scale and start looking more closely at brain-scanning images.

Henry Markram, the Blue Brain guy, says in an email to IBM’s CTO, that the project is not even close to an ant’s brain and that the kind of simulations pulled off by IBM are trivial. He also calls the whole thing “stupid”, and “extremely harmful to the field”. [IEEE via Popsci]

Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments’ calibrations.

1.2 tera-electro volts? Great. So until Christmas you can keep going with your normal beige lives, not taking any chances or risks, typing away in your hamster wheels. Two, remember that life can end at any moment, and get out of the wheel. To a beach. Preferably with another hamster. One with a nice butt and a pretty smile.

These are the computer images showing the first collisions:

Two circulating beams bring first collisions in the LHC

Geneva, 23 November 2009. Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronisation of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the lookout for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb.

“It’s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time,” said CERN* Director General Rolf Heuer. “But we need to keep a sense of perspective – there’s still much to do before we can start the LHC physics programme.”

Beams were first tuned to produce collisions in the ATLAS detector, which recorded its first candidate for collisions at 14:22 this afternoon. Later, the beams were optimised for CMS. In the evening, ALICE had the first optimisation, followed by LHCb.

“This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics and hopefully discoveries after 20 years’ work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance,” said ATLAS spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti.

“The events so far mark the start of the second half of this incredible voyage of discovery of the secrets of nature,” said CMS spokesperson Tejinder Virdee.

“It was standing room only in the ALICE control room and cheers erupted with the first collisions,” said ALICE spokesperson Jurgen Schukraft. “This is simply tremendous.”

“The tracks we’re seeing are beautiful,” said LHCb spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, “we’re all ready for serious data taking in a few days time.”

These developments come just three days after the LHC restart, demonstrating the excellent performance of the beam control system. Since the start-up, the operators have been circulating beams around the ring alternately in one direction and then the other at the injection energy of 450 GeV. The beam lifetime has gradually been increased to 10 hours, and today beams have been circulating simultaneously in both directions, still at the injection energy.

Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments’ calibrations.

Whatever, I’m just happy we are not being sucked by a Black Hole right now. Life is good, my dear boys and girls. Life is good.