Skeptical reporter @ 2013-07-26

Skeptical Reporter for July 26th, 2013 If you had placed your bet on the gender of Kate and William’s first royal offspring and you looked for the advice of psychics, you probably made a bad investment. Before the birth of the royal baby, on July 9th, 62% of the 50 psychics surveyed at Psychic Source, the most respected psychic service provider, predicted that the royal couple will be welcoming a female heir. Representing the majority of psychics surveyed, Psychic Ricky stated matter-of-factly: “It will be a girl. At least one of her names will be Diana”. In India, homeopathy doctors demanding permission to prescribe allopathic medicines and permanent employment in government hospitals continued their hunger strike at Azad Maidan. Around 100 doctors have been on strike since July 15th.  47 were admitted in Gokuldas Tejpal (GT) hospital. Two were admitted in ICU. Currently, there are around 60,000 homoeopathic doctors in the the state, with 10,000-15,000 in Mumbai alone. Prashant Shinde, an independent practitioner, said, ”Our demands have been pending for almost 35 years. We want removal of the word 'only' from Bombay Homoeopathic Practitioners Act 1959, which states that homoeopathy doctors can only practice homoeopathy and nothing else”. The other demands include appointment in each Public Health Centre, PHC sub-centres and rural hospitals. Conspiracy theorists concerned with intentional weather modification will have to find someone else to blame, because HAARP (the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) has closed. The 35-acre ionospheric research facility in remote Gakona, Alaska shut down in early May 2013. HAARP has an antenna array used by scientists to study the outer atmosphere by zapping it with generated radio waves. HAARP became infamous among conspiracy theorists and some environmental activists, who believed it was responsible for intentional weather modification. Dire events – such as Hurricane Sandy in late 2012 – have been blamed on HAARP by people called “uninformed” by scientists and other commentators. HAARP’s program manager, Dr James Keeney, said in a press release: ”Currently the site is abandoned. It comes down to money. We don’t have any”. The Independent Investigations Group, the international skeptical research and science advocacy organization, has announced the finalists to be honored in their annual awards ceremony recognizing the promotion of science in popular media and arts. These include Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, along with The Onion.com satirical website, the TV series “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” and “The Hamster Wheel”. “The IIG Awards recognize mainstream entertainment for promoting critical thinking and scientific values and dispelling myths and superstition. This has become an important annual event at the intersection of science and entertainment”, said James Underdown, Chair of the IIG. The awards presentation will be held on Monday Jul 29th at the Steve Allen Theater at the Center for Inquiry in Los Angeles. And now let’s look at some news in science. False memories have been implanted into mice, scientists say. A team was able to make the mice wrongly associate a benign environment with a previous unpleasant experience from different surroundings. The researchers conditioned a network of neurons to respond to light, making the mice recall the unpleasant environment. They say it could one day shed light into how false memories occur in humans. Just like in mice, our memories are stored in collections of cells, and when events are recalled we reconstruct parts of these cells - almost like re-assembling small pieces of a puzzle. It has been well documented that human memory is highly unreliable, first highlighted by a study on eyewitness testimonies in the 70s. Simple changes in how a question was asked could influence the memory a witness had of an event such as a car crash.