In my first year, I had an eclectic physiology lecturer who began his series of classes with the statement, “I’m Professor [name]. The first thing you ought to know about me is that I love to talk about all of my diseases.” And he was right. That constituted a big part of his portion of the course.

Now, at the time, I wasn’t a fan of this lecturer. But now I feel his pain. Because I want to tell you all about my ailment: coeliac disease.

Coeliac disease is caused by a gastrointestinal intolerance to gliadin, which is a prolamin. Prolamins are gluten proteins, and they are found in wheat and other closely related grains. Basically, if I ingest wheat, my body happily digests it down to the protein level, and lets it travel merrily along to my intestine. There, in the lining it finds little cells with ‘fingers’ of membrane that stick out and wiggle to brush food along to where it ought to go. They are called villi and they also provide a larger surface area for nutrients to be absorbed into the bloodstream.

However, when the villi in MY intestine get a hold of some gliadin, they FREAK THEIR FREAK RIGHT THE FREAK OUT. First, they loosen some of the tight junctions that attach the cell to its neighbour, and allow larger polypeptides (what proteins are made of) to pass through into the bloodstream. This creates an inflammatory response. Some of the polypeptides that get through will inevitably be gliadin itself, and my body’s immune system is all:

“Hey red blood cell, doing a good job carrying oxygen there. Hey white blood cell, you catch those pathogens. Hey proteins, how’s the nourishment going?Hey glia- WAIT!”

and gliadin is all

“Whaaaaaat?! Nothing to see here, just some food. Move along officer…”

and my immune system is like

“NO! You are not food. HALT.”

This is most likely because a mutation in my genes causes a slight difference in one of the receptors on the outside of the body’s cells, which makes it bind more tightly to gliadin than the normal (we call it “Wild-type” or sometimes just “WT”) version. The t-lymphocytes of my immune system jolly along and find my cells holding gliadin in a citizen’s arrest and assume that gliadin must have been doing something wrong, otherwise it wouldn’t be bound to this receptor. Simples.

Gliadin can also stimulate an innate response by the immune system, to release interleukins. This in turn generates even more inflammatory response. The inflammatory response disrupts the lining of the gut, and makes nutrient absorption more difficult. Essentially, the bouncers of my gut have had enough of the troublemakers who snuck in, so now they’re closing the bar down to everyone. This can result in malabsorption, and often presents as fatigue, anaemia (both of which I have had) and stunted growth in children (which I, luckily, missed out on).

There is no cure. My body will never get over its phobia of gluten, and in fact there’s some evidence to suggest we are all intolerant of gluten to a certain extent (search for the “paleo diet” if you’re interested). In the meantime, I’ll eat my grain-free dinners, resent my pizza-eating flatmates, and continue to have trouble finding lunch in a world of sandwiches, Gregg’s and salads that all contain pasta.

Here at ScienceWin we absolutely love the chances we get to help the Daily Mail improve their science articles. On the rare occasion that they happen to misconstrue the results of a scientific article (that they forget to link to) we feel it is in their best interests to point out where they could improve.

So lets take a look at THIS article posted yesterday with the very conclusive sounding headline “Violent video games DO make people more aggressive.” The photograph that goes along with this is of a small serial-killer in the making playing grand theft auto. First mistake, this child should never be playing an 18 rated game, that’s just bad parenting.

So the study this article is based on looked at 22 men aged 18-29. Half of these men were put into a control group who didn’t play video games for a week, while the other half played at least 10 hours of violent video games. At the end of the study it was found that the group playing video games had altered brain activity. Not that they had become violent or that their behavior had changed, just a change in brain activity. There is not even a mention of whether this change in brain activity was related to violence or aggression. It was also found that when the gamers stopped playing their activity returned to normal.

To give the Daily Mail credit, they did at the very end of the article reference a different study which was far more relevant to the subject of the article. It was far more conclusive, monitoring 165 young people over three years. The result of this study? “They found no connection between the players behaviour and game playing”

SO WHY DID THEY WRITE THE EXACT OPPOSITE IN THE HEADLINE!?

My advice to the daily mail is to decide what the headline will be AFTER they have read over the science and understood it. If they happen to make mistakes like this regularly they run the risk of people no longer taking their science articles seriously, or worse, being accused of trying to skew the science to fit with their own beliefs, which we all know the Daily Mail would never do.

As a qualified scientist, there are facts about how things work that are almost like second nature to me. So it’s fair to say I find it shocking, if not slightly annoying, when I occasionally overhear someone on the bus or in a coffee shop using ‘false facts’ in there everyday conversation.

So I’ve decided that over the next few weeks I would pick apart the most common ones and (hopefully) clear up the misunderstanding without any of the complicated science-y bits!

So here we go…

Air doesn’t weigh anything.

Seriously?!

This is just as bad as saying “If I can’t see it, it’s not there!”

You’d be surprised how many people think that air (or gas in general) is weightless due to the fact you can’t feel it pushing down on them! Did they learn nothing at school?!

If we got two identical cardboard boxes; filled one with books and one with air. It’s quite obvious which would be heavier.
Books, obviously, are a solid, which means the atoms that make it up are bound tightly together and that there are a LOT of atoms in the box. The weight you feel when you carry box come from the mass of EVERY single atom that make up the books.
Gases are made of elements or molecules that are a lot more spread out. So in the same size of box, you’re going to have a lot less atoms, therefore it won’t be as heavy.
Because in air the nitrogen and oxygen molecules are so spread out in the atmosphere we are able to pass through it without the weight of it putting our backs out.. this is because the density (mass/volume) of gas is so small that we don’t even feel it.

To put it in terms a monkey can understand:
-Gas has a weight, it’s just so light you can hardly feel it.

Seriously… read a book…

This is only one of many misconceptions I’ve heard, and I’ll be explaining some more in weeks to come.
If you want a more in-depth explanation about this, or any other aspect of chemistry you can contact me at
deborah@sciencewin.org

I know. Not the most engrossing of headings. But to follow on from my previous posts, which rely heavily on scientific literature, I wanted to address citations.

Firstly, why cite? In science we use the scientific method, a logical set of guidelines that allow us to make assessments about the world after we have done an experiment. For example, we use controls, where we repeat the experiment without the independent variable (whatever we’re changing to get a result) in order to see if there is anything going on in the system, or in the environment that might affect the experiment. More on the scientific method soon. The upshot of this is that experiments that stick to this method give us more accurate results, and we can more confidently say things about the world, based on them. We assess how “good” science is by submitting our experiments as papers, to peer-reviewed journals, where other scientists (our “peers”) read the paper and decide if the experiment was done well and if the conclusions are valid. These journals are like magazines just for experimental write-ups. Some journals are general, like Nature and Science; and some are specialist, like Trends in Parasitology.

As well as this, if you state something in an article or essay without backing it up, you could be making it up, as we found in that Daily Mail article. Or if you quote someone and don’t cite them, you’re committing plagiarism.

Now at school we had to start putting references/citations in our experimental write-ups at around the age of 15, but no-one taught me how to do it until I got to uni. I would end up with a list at the end of my paper, sometimes in alphabetical order, sometimes not, of names of papers, or textbooks; some with numbers on the end, some without; and for the most part, never any indication in the main text as to which reference I had used. Luckily, it didn’t count much towards my grade at that point.

Let’s imagine we’re doing an experiment on dust monkeys, and in our introduction we want to cite this entirely factual reference:

J. Acad. Dust Bio. Volume 366, Issue 9487, 27 August-2 September 2011, Pages 717-725

doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(00)67176-0

Dust monkeys prefer boys’ rooms.

Dr. Alfred McFakepants¹*, Gina Gradstudent² and Professor Peter Peterson³.

1. Institute of Dust Biology, NY. 2. University of Myths, Mythville, UK. 3. Titled College, Kent, UK.

Dust monkeys (Simius dusticus) and their close relatives the fluff bunnies (Sylvilagus fluffipanti) live in dust accumulations, mostly under beds. They can also live in small, commensal populations in nooks, crannies, and belly-buttons. We found that 75% of all S. dusticus and 92% of all S. fluffipanti tested lived in male accommodation.

*Corresponding author.

Now there’s a lot of information there, so what do we need, and what don’t we?

The exact format varies from publication to publication, university to university, so it’s best to check. But here is a good start.

1. The authors’ names. These should already be in the format [last name] [initials]. No full stops are needed, but it’s up to you really; whatever you think looks nice, providing you’re consistent. Use an ampersand before the last author. Here are our authors:

McFakepants A, Gradstudent G & Peterson P

They should already be in alphabetical order; if they’re not, it’s because someone is important. Leave them in the order they appear in the by-line.

Take out any numbers or symbols denoting their institutions. Nobody cares. If people do, they can go look up the paper. They don’t get their titles here either. It’s not about reputation, it’s about good science: everyone’s on a level playing field.

2. The year the paper was published. Ignore anywhere it says “accepted for publication” or “available online”. See where it says the volume number? That’s where you’ll find the year; in this case it’s 2011. Ignore months. Stick the date in brackets.

(2011).

3. The title of the paper, each word capitalised (but not ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’, ‘of’ etc.) in double quotation marks.

“Dust Monkeys Prefer Boys’ Rooms.”

4. The full name of the journal, in italics. Hmm, the journal here appears to be called J. Acad. Dust Bio. That can’t be right. A quick google search, however, tells us that this should read

Journal of the Academy of Dust Biology

so all is right with the world once more. Same capitalisation rules as before. (Watch out for this. PNAS might look like the title of the journal, but really it’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. It also shows up as Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A and Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. Dicks†.)

5. The volume number, in bold. Some people also put the issue number; I don’t find this necessary, but if you want to, it should not be bold.

366

The volume number tells you how many times this journal has been published (usually one volume per year). The issue number tells you which issue the paper is in; these are sort of like chapters – they’re released periodically through the year and the pages pick up where the last one left off.

6. The page numbers of the paper.

pp. 717 – 725.

“pp” simply means “pages”. “p” would be page, and so the plural is “pp”. I think it has roots in Latin. Species (sing. “sp.” plu. “spp.”) works the same way. *shrug*

And that’s it! Let’s look at our reference.

McFakepants A, Gradstudent G & Peterson P (2011). ”Dust Monkeys Prefer Boys’ Rooms.” Journal of the Academy of Dust Biology 366 pp. 717 – 725.

Now, to reference this in the text you can either:

a) write

“Dust monkeys mostly live in boys’ rooms (McFakepants et al, 2011)”

or embed it into the sentence

“McFakepants et al (2011) found that…”

So long as you have the first author’s name, and then either the second author’s name if there are two, or “et al” (essentially, “and the rest”) if there are 3 or more, and the year of publication, readers can find the right reference in your bibliography. If there are two papers by the same authors in the same year, or two papers from the same year with the same first author, you should denote them “a”, “b”, etc, eg: (McFakepants et al, 2011a).

OR

b) Use a superscript number to denote to which reference you are referring.

“Dust monkeys mostly live in boy’s rooms.¹”

Easy!

Books are slightly different; you have to give the publisher’s location, and an ISBN number. Websites are rarely reliable sources, but if you must cite one it should take the format:

Author(s) of Web Content, (year). “Name of article/website.” http://www.webaddress.com. Date accessed.

I hope that helps. Don’t ever worry about doi numbers, or anything like that. Stick to this, and you won’t be far wrong.

Happy citing!

~C

† PNAS. Dicks. Geddit? P-NAS? Peeee-nassss?

I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m quite looking forward to getting into electricity and magnetism.

Feel free to ask me questions in the comments or on twitter (@8bitglasses)

Alistair