It’s the headline dedicated smokers have been waiting for: their disgusting habit is good for them. At least under certain conditions, though this doesn’t mean you’d be wise to reach for a pack of Players – the benefit is far outweighed by the danger of cancer.

Smokers are less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder of the nervous system that often affects motor skills and speech, according to researchers at the Mayo Clinic and the European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano in Italy. But the link is not a simple one. The researchers hypothesise that a genetic disposition combines with environmental factors to protect smokers from the disease.

At last, some good news about tobacco

Maurizio Facheris, a neurologist at the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Bozen/Bolzano, and his colleagues studied 1228 subjects while working as a research fellow at the Mayo Clinic. “We asked the interviewees to tell us about their relationship with smoking and then compared this data with the presence or absence of variations in the gene CYP2A6, which encodes the enzyme responsible for metabolising nicotine,” said Facheris.

One variant of the gene, when combined with smoking, considerably reduces the risk of Parkinson’s, they found, although it is not clear whether this is due to the presence of the gene variant, or by cotinine, the derivative of nicotine it produces. “If this second hypothesis is confirmed, producing a cotinine-based drug would be a means to reduce exposure to the disease”, said Facheris.

Such a drug could be one of the first to arise from the new field of pharmacogenetics, in which patients will be genetically tested before being given personalised medicines.

Most creatures that use sound do so for communication, to find a mate, warn off rivals or warn of predators. Bats, and a few other creatures, such as cetaceans, use it differently. Their calls are designed to locate obstacles, prey and each other in space. Or so scientists thought.

Bats can, it turns out, distinguish between calls made by members of their own species and others, even those that are closely related and inhabit similar ecological niches, according to research by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology (previously part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, which was renamed in honour of the quantum physicist after the Second World War).

Horseshoe bats can hear foreign accents.

Bats living in similar environments tend to use similar echolocation calls to orient themselves and search for food. But in a paper in this month’s American Naturalist, Maike Schuchmann and Bjorn Siemers at the institute’s facility in Seewiesen, Austria, were able to prove that echolocation calls carry more information than assumed.

Horseshoe bat species in Bulgaria were used for the behavioural experiments, in which scientists played the calls of three different species through ultrasonic speakers and analysed the animal’s responses. Both the Bulgarian bat species showed signs of being able to distinguish the calls, although the effect was clearer with calls that were in a clearly separate frequency band from their own.

Siemers reasoned that it would be advantageous for bats to get out of the way of competitively superior species in hunting grounds. And if the other species roosted in similar roosting requirements, identifying them could help the bats find new shelters. The institute’s scientists hope to do follow-up experiments to see whether either of these hypotheses explains the new-found ability.

“No kidding, kid has grown new kidneys,” declared The Sun last week. That the child’s name is “Angel” didn’t do anything to dampen the miraculous tone of this and similar articles.

But her condition, duplex kidneys, is not that unusual, existing in about 1 per cent of the population.
Doctors say they didn’t notice the extra organs on Angel Burton’s scans before her operation three years ago to repair a failed valve that had caused her kidney infections. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve grown since. Thankfully, she’s unlikely to be subjected to a lifetime of intrusive tests as science tries to figure out her “secret”.

Regeneration in humans is rare. Children under 10 can regrow fingertips, though sans fingerprints, and even adult livers can recover from as little as 25 per cent of the original organ.

There seems to be an inverse relationship between the complexity of an organ and its ability to replace itself.

Amphibians such as newts can regenerate limbs after amputation, and when some worms are chopped in half, they can grow into two new creatures.

In newts, the cells in the stump of the amputated limb turn into undifferentiated stem cells as it starts to grow back, a clue which has inspired researchers in the field.

Regeneration scientists at Stanford University in the US and the New York University Langone Medical Center demonstrated a year ago that they could grow stem cells on a scaffold made out of blood, fat and bone tissue from rodents.

Geoffrey Gurtner, an associate professor of surgery at Stanford, and his colleagues harvested a piece of tissue containing blood vessels, fat and skin from the groin area of rodents and used a bioreactor to provide nutrients and oxygen to keep it alive. Then, they seeded the extracted tissue with stem cells before it was implanted back into the animal. Once the tissue was back in the animal, the stem cells continued to grow and were not rejected. This suggests that if the stem cells had been coaxed into becoming an organ, the organ would have “taken hold” in the animal’s body.

“The ability to provide stem cells with a scaffold to grow and differentiate into mature cells could revolutionise the field of organ transplantation,” said Gurtner.

Vincent Van Gogh famously combined genius and madness, and evidence for a link between these two characteristics is mounting.

Both highly creative people and schizophrenics are able to make unusual or bizarre associations, and highly creative skills are more common among people who have mentally ill relatives. They are also at a slightly higher statistical risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Self-portrait of Van Gogh with ear cut off

Now scientists have proposed a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have shown that the way dopamine works in highly creative people is similar to the pattern seen in schizophrenics.

“Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box,” said Dr Fredrik Ullen, an associate professor in the department of women’s and children’s health at the institute.

“We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia,” he said.

The study measured the creativity of healthy individuals by giving them a “divergent test” – a task for which they had to find many different solutions.

“Creative people who did well on the divergent tests had a lower density of D2 receptors in the thalamus than less creative people,” Dr Ullen said. “Schizophrenics are also known to have low D2 density in this part of the brain, suggesting a cause of the link between mental illness and creativity.”

The thalamus sits between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain. It relays sensations and motor signals and is involved in consciousness, sleep and alertness. The cortex in turn is responsible for cognition and reasoning.

“Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus,” Dr Ullen said. This, he argued, could explain why creative people see so many possible solutions to problems, as well as the bizarre associations formed in the minds of the mentally ill.

One of the Milky Way’s closest neighbours just became a bit clearer thanks to an infrared image taken by the European Southern Observatory.

The Messier 83 galaxy, seen in infrared for the first time, reveals its hidden structure and hordes of previously obscured stars.

Messier 83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, just 15 million light years away in the Hydra (Sea Serpent) constellation, is 40,000 light years wide, about 40 per cent the size of our home galaxy.

But despite it’s closeness, much of its internal structure and many of its stars were obscured by clouds of dust.

But most dust becomes transparent at infrared frequencies, allowing astronomers to get a better look at it with the Hawk-I (High-Acuity Wide-field K-band Imager) instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The Paranal Observatory is run by the ESO, which includes the UK. Brightly lit gas surrounding hot young stars in the galaxy’s spiral arms also fades in infrared pictures.

This clear view is important for astronomers looking for clusters of young stars, especially those hidden in dusty regions of the galaxy, one of the main objectives of the latest observation.

Messier 83 is one of the brightest, if blurrier, galaxies, and can be seen using binoculars. It is famous for sharing the record for having the most supernovae – six stars exploded there in the past century.

It was discovered from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa by Pierre Mechain discovered in 1752 but was named after Charles Messier who added it to his catalogue of nebulous objects in 1781.

The VLT’s huge mirror, its large field of view and sensitivity combined with the good observing conditions at ESO’s Paranal Observatory makes Hawk-I, which began operation in 2007, one of the most powerful, and sought after, near-infrared imagers in the world.

If it were up to me, magic would work. Much of my teens were spent in an imaginary land full of elves and dwarves, steeped in the lore of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Who could resist the idea that waving a wand or drinking a potion could solve life’s problems?

As an adult, though, I found that magic doesn’t work, and science does. Yet the NHS, an institution that should be a bastion of science, continues to spend millions of pounds a year – for remedies, staff and the upkeep of four specialist hospitals – on homeopathy, a practice with no scientific basis whose origins lie in Renaissance alchemy. At best, homeopathy is an expensive placebo, but in leaching scarce resources from treatments that are effective, and by distracting patients from seeking proper medical care, it causes real harm. That kind-hearted Britons are being encouraged to give money to pay for a group of homeopaths to go to Haiti to treat earthquake victims is scandalous.

Let’s be clear. Homeopathy is not the same as herbalism, which has some scientific merit. Its main principle, that “like-cures-like”, dates back to Paracelsus, a 16th century physician, astrologer and occultist who believed that if you suffered from, say, stomach cramps, the cure should be something that causes stomach cramps. The problem – obviously, you might think – was that this “cure” often made things worse. Two centuries later, Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, realised that diluting the like-cures-like medicines reduced their toxic effects, though not, he claimed paradoxically, their efficacy.

And so homeopathy was born. Minute doses of the active ingredients are diluted so much that your chance of finding even one atom of it in your pricey sugar pills could be as low as one in a trillion. Exotic explanations for this vary widely, often involving the sort of pseudoscientific gobbledygook that is the stock in trade for Star Trek scriptwriters. One common idea is that water can “remember” which active ingredient used to be present (though apparently it forgets the myriad other contaminants that have been removed). As David Colquhoun, a professor of pharmacology at University College London, put it: “If homeopathy worked, the whole of chemistry and physics would have to be overturned”. Even some of the purveyors of these snake oils don’t have much faith in them. Paul Bennett, the professional standards director at Boots, one of the country’s biggest homeopathic retailers, admitted in November that “I have no evidence before me to suggest that they are efficacious.”

The Commons Science and Technology Select Committee – which reported on 22 February on its investigation into this “alternative therapy” – concluded that public funding for this hocus pocus should be cut. Even research into it should be abandoned as a waste of money. The MPs should go further. Homeopaths should be held legally responsible if they prescribe their placebos for conditions which demand proper medical attention. In Australia, two homeopaths, husband and wife, were jailed last autumn for gross criminal negligence over the death of their nine-month-old baby in 2002. The baby had severe eczema and died of septicaemia after her parents tried to treat her homeopathically. Even the placebo effect doesn’t work on babies.

Homeopaths will counter that they have several centuries worth of experience during which they’ve given their tonics to patients who have subsequently recovered. The flaw here is clear. Just because a treatment precedes a recovery does not mean it caused the recovery. Often patients seek help when their symptoms are worst, when the only way they could change is to get better. The argument that, in a free country, people should be allowed to choose what therapies they take is stronger, but only if patients are told the facts about those nostrums. And once they know that they’re getting a placebo, its effectiveness will mostly crumble. It has also been suggested that homeopathy helps GPs divert chronic time-wasters. Convenient, perhaps, but dishonest; like magic potions, lies have no place in a doctor’s black bag.

“What do you think the impact of the internet will be?” asked the editor of New Scientist during a job interview I had there in the mid-1990s. It was my cue to expound on Marshall McLuhan’s theories about “the media is the message” and my own about how the internet would change the way we work. When I paused for breath, the editor said: “It’s just a fad.” So much for that job.

It isn’t a fad, and it has changed the way we work. This was drilled home today (18 May ’10) in a seminar with blogger Ed Yong, author of Not Exactly Rocket Science. Yong was talking about the use of links and their importance in modern journalism, providing transparency and ensuring accuracy. It got me thinking.

Ed Yong: Not hyperlinking produces a strawman fallacy. Picture credit: The people from the Tango! Project

When I started as a journalist, almost all of the information that went into my stories came from interviewing people, with perhaps a bit of background from the cuttings file (a physical folder with cut out bits of the newspaper stuck to sheets of A4). Of the information I collected during a day, I would discard 80 per cent because it was irrelevant, repeated or just didn’t fit the story I was writing.

Now when I start to work on a story, my first stop is Google, and I’m quickly wallowing in thousands of times as much information as I could possibly use. Gathering information is easier, filtering it harder. When you’re interviewing someone, you can ask specific questions and interrupt them if they meander. If you get much of your information online, you have to be good at refining your search terms, fast at skim reading or both.

Among other techniques I’ve tried to manage this flood with are printing out documents and using a highlighter or copying long web pages into Word so that I can search them for keywords. But I almost invariably end up with a couple of dozen tabs open on my desktop by the time I start writing. Wading through all this material leaves me less time to write, and less time to check.

The last piece I co-wrote, about the WHO reaction to swine flu, was almost immediately attacked online by Gimpy for not providing evidence to back up its assertions. My initial reaction to this was: “Tough, it’s a newspaper article not an academic journal. We don’t do footnotes and we don’t have the blogger’s luxury of links. And we’re under much greater pressure to make our body text interesting.”

But then Yong chose an Indy story to illustrate his point about old-journalism’s lack of links. Tim Luckhurst began his piece by setting out his unnamed opponents’ argument. I saw this as a rhetorical device, common among the commentariat. Yong saw it as a straw man fallacy. Either way, it was weaker than if the writer had been specific.

What hit me, though, was that the piece Yong showed us was the online version. So was the version of the WHO article attacked by Gimpy. Why don’t the web versions of these articles have links? One of my fellow students said that at the Financial Times, where he’s doing an internship, all stories are written as if for the internet, with links. This makes sense.

I’ve resolved that from now on this is how I’m going to work too, even for stories that never make it online. It will at least help me deal with the flood, if not the critics.