Improbable Research

There is a new method for assessing the value of prayer. It was developed by practical people who generously share their tricks-of-the-trade. Their latest work appears in an April 26, 2006 press release from the Christian Communication Network:

Clergy in the Nation’s Capital and Across the Country Pray for Lower Gas Prices

Event planned for Thursday, April 27, 2006 from 12:00 Noon to 2:00PM, on Pennsylvania Avenue between North Carolina Avenue and 4th Street SE, and on Pray Live www.praylive.com, 1-888-PRAYLIVE…. People who have seen God show up in their lives as a result of prayer know that God answers prayer.

The same accounting method was applied recently to people who underwent heart surgery. A formal study summed up the what and how:

“Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer,” H. Benson, et al., American Heart Journal, vol. 151, no. 4, 2006, pp. 934-42.

(Thanks to Investigator Christina Broyles for bringing this to our attention.)

How does a lad become a scientist? Perhaps the case of Dr. Gerald Schatten, vice chair for research development and professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences and cell biology and physiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, is typical. Perhaps not. An August 28, 2003 report about him in The Guardian explains that:

By his own admission, Schatten was an atypical child. Growing up a few streets from New York city’s east river in the 1950s, he spent hours of solitary delight poking around the river’s banks, looking for creatures that had become stranded at low tide. Whatever he came across, he would take home and examine. He’d find giant jellyfish and horseshoe crabs. In the basement of his parents’ house, he learned how to extract their sperm and eggs, which he would study down a brass microscope that sat on a butcher’s block his dad brought back from work one night.” Masturbating a horseshoe crab takes a special technique, but it’s worth learning. The sperm are amazing,” he says….

Is our criminals learning? A new study called Mentors and Criminal Achievement tries to find out.

The study is a natural follow-on to the question famously raised by George Bush during his first campaign to become president of the US. On January 11 2000, looking down at a select audience in the city of Florence, South Carolina, where the crime rate is 3.4 times the national average, Bush asked: “Is our children learning?”

For Bush, learning is a lifelong challenge….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

Dr. Ava Cadell, who is a loveologist, has a certificate from the American College of Sexologists, which has stringent membership requirements.

Investigator Michael Steiner, of the Institute of Clinical Chemistry & Laboratory Medicine at Rostock University, writes:

Consider bringing these two remarkable Analytica Chimica Acta 2006 papers how bad some of my fellow European chemist are doing. They seem to fear that they are being paid either cocaine-contaminated banknotes or faked ones alltogether. The citations are:

“Determination of cocaine contamination on banknotes using tandem mass spectrometry and pattern recognition,” Sarah J. Dixon, et al., Analytica Chimica Acta, vol. 559, no. 1, 10 February 2006, pp. 54-63.

“Development of a fast and non-destructive procedure for characterizing and distinguishing original and fake euro notes,” A. Vila, et al., Analytica Chimica Acta, vol. 559, no. 1,16 February 2006, pp. 257-63.