Posts Tagged ‘science’

Make-up deadly injurious to skin, eyes, body

Belladonna eye-drops causes blindness, Wax make-up melts face, Ceruse make-up is deadly

Make-up worn by fashion-overconscious women can be very injurious to the skin and body. Belladonna eye-drops applied as deadly nightshade to make the pupils dilate so as to give a wide-eyed look, does increase the heart rate, blurs vision and causes glaucoma and blindness.

Wax make-up once used to hide the scars of chickenpox and smallpox did in fact melt the face when too close to a fire. Ceruse make-up that has been used to whiten skin complexion raises the blood pressure, causes loss of hair, impotence, loss of sleep, loss of hearing, kidney damage and even death.

Heroin addiction drug – Bayer’s heroic wonder cure

German heroic miracle painkiller cure for pneumonia, tuberculosis from Wright, English heroic

Heroin was made a popular addiction drug by Bayer Pharmaceutical Products, the German firm that synthesized the drug and marketed it as a miracle painkiller and a wonder cure for pneumonia and tuberculosis in 1897 when these illnesses still had a high death toll on human population.

Invented in 1874 by C.R. Wright, an English chemist, heroin as drug was tested on workers at Bayer’s where it was claimed that it made people feel heroic. Hence they gave it the trade name ‘heroin‘, and marketed it as a substitute for morphine and codeine.

Surprisingly enough, professional medical journals all accepted and helped propagate the huge scheme across Europe, the USA and the rest of the world. Thanks to some alert medical doctors, the American Medical Association declared heroin to be a habit-forming and therefore an addictive drug in 1906, paving the way for its prohibition by US law in 1924.

Despite that law, Bayer continued to make huge profit from heroin as other manufacturers pitched in to supply the world. Meanwhile, Bayer brought another so-called miracle drug – aspirin into the market.

Discrimination scares quadroon investigator

Paul du Chaillu - explorer of Gabon forest Gorilla, anthropology

Discrimination Gorillas are now well-known in zoos around the world, and from films like King Kong. Until the latter half of the 19th century, stories of their existence were taken as a myth about some strange ghost of super-human size and strength lurking in deep tropical forests. The one man who contributed largely to dispelling that myth was Paul du Chaillu – a devoted explorer of nature in the equatorial forests of Gabon in West Africa.

His investigations brought samples of several exotic, hitherto unknown animal species, and reported many accounts of animal and local ritual practices whose study became known as anthropology. Though without scientific education himself, many scientists could only dream of enjoying a fraction of the popular admiration he got for his reports and his wide collection of samples of species. Much of that is now a delight of National Geographic. Every claim he made in his reports was meticulously checked by academically versed scientists and confirmed to be true; except one thing – his own real origin.

His passion for those investigations arose while living in Gabon with his father – a white, colonist, slave master of plantations in an age (1863) when Africans were reported to be unintelligent cannibals, and some were displayed as zoo samples in cages in Europe. That meant that anything black or non-white in anybody’s blood made that person suspect of being less than human and thus be taken as hardly better than an ape. Among his father’s servants and maids was a half-cast woman – a mulatto, as such of very fair, well-tainted complexion.

As Paul grew up in Gabon without sophisticated schooling facilities, but with access to guns for defence against natives who it was feared might want to eat him up, he got accustomed to daring to reach deep into the jungles, assisted by teams of Africans. He also became very aware of the strong notion of the assumed inferiority of non-whites, including the mulatto.

He boldly sought deep into the forests of Gabon, found and brought back clear evidence of the gorilla and other animals. The remains, chopped-off hands, sculls and feet of gorillas killed and eaten by other groups of gorillas or by native Africans were obtained as illustrations of African ritual cannibalistic practices. To be personally accepted with his reports, and to gain access to needed funding of his projects, Paul claimed that he was born in the USA; thus creating the impression that he was white and not of the unintelligent race – African. In reality he was what at the time Whites called a quadroon. Never heard of the term quadroon?

The child of a white parent and a black parent is called a half-cast for being of half-black blood. The child of a half-cast parent and a white parent is called a quadroon – meaning a quarter-black in the blood. Once identified as such, half-casts and quadroons were and today are still discriminated against just like blacks. That meant that half-casts and quadroons were thought incapable of logical thinking, lacked originality and could not be scientific in any way.

Paul’s mother was in fact the beautiful, half-cast house-maid servant of his father serving the man’s white wife too. Being only quarter black in his skin, and leaving in tropical equatorial Africa where any white person easily tans into a brown skin, Paul had no difficulty in posing socially to be white as his father was. But out of strong, well-founded fears of rejection by white-dominated society, he had to camouflage his partly coloured blood and report himself as a white.

Fraud in product packaging

sand as anti-radiation for mobile phones - abuse of science

Fraud is often behind fanciful product packaging, not just ordinary commercial marketing. A good example of such fraud is a box of ordinary sand covered inshimmering hologram paper,  with a simple lamp attached to it and sold for €800 a piece by a German company that deceptively claims that it has anti-radiation effect that neutralises health danger from the electromagnetic waves given off by mobile phones. In reality, nobody has a scientific cure for such radiation from mobile phones and their network of antennas.  This fraud is an abuse of science.

World Population 7 billion

accelerating overpopulation

World Population accelerated and reached 7 billion today 31 October, 2011. It hit 6 billion around 1998, and 5 billion around 1988. It first reached a billion around the 1820′s.

China and India each have more than a billion population.

Knowledge corruption

private companies corrupt Dutch university research into dairy quality

Knowledge corruption became systematic when private companies started to sponsor university research with a view to propaganda on the quality of their own products. Dutch university of Wageningen did research into the quality of milk products with funds provided by the dairy sector, resulting in reports that are too biased when controlled by independent researchers.

Nurse jailed for uncommitted murder

Nurse jailed for murder not committed
Dutch paediatric hospital nurse Lucia de B was accused of serial murder by poisoning of seven babies who were found dead in cribs in her ward during her hours of duty over a number of years. She insisted on being innocent. Other than the coincidence of the deaths with her hours of duty, no other evidence implicated her with the deaths and nothing pointed at murder. Yet, news coverage quickly painted her on Dutch TV and in newspapers as the very devil itself, depicting her as bewitched. On the various rounds of court cases that lasted years, she was declared guilty of  premeditated serial murder and sentenced to the maximum jail term without parole for , and without the slightest consideration of any alternative explanations for the deaths of the babies, such as crib death. Such narrow mindedness and gross negligence by police and prosecutors is terrible especially as no poison was found.

Then after she had served six and a half years in jail, a number of medical researchers established independently of each other that in relation to the total number of babies in her hospital ward, the number of baby deaths was certainly statistically insignificant. That means that on pure chance alone, more baby deaths (crib death) were to be expected without any murderer being at work. In other words there needed be no murderer, and Lucia de B was indeed innocent as she always claimed. She was a victim of unfounded accusation. Her pleading to be freed was frustrated by police pride and police shame to be found unthorough in their earlier investigation that had so successfully prosecuted her.

She languished further in jail until from different scientific corners, pressure built up confirming her innocence, and she eventually won an appeal to the highest court asking for retrial. Her cases of murder are now being retried at last, with the intention to get her freed. Meanwhile, her reputation has been so badly damaged that her career is destroyed for good, and no neighbourhood will accept her as resident. She therefore has to start out with a whole new identity altogether. Hers is a case of gross miscarriage of justice.

Eggs call out before hatching

Eggs communicate? Experiments on the eggs of Nile crocodiles as reported by the Times of London show that before hatching, eggs in a nest call out to other unhatched eggs, and so synchronize their hatching to within minutes of each other, apparently for higher security. The calls of some eggs were recorded and later played back elsewhere to some other eggs in another nest. The eggs exposed to the playback hatched within 10 minutes of each other, while eggs excluded from the playback hatched farther apart than that. Egg communication has also been noticed in bird nests.

Universe Dark matter Energy

Do you know that despite all of modern man’s science and knowledge, there is still some 95% of the material and energy in the universe is still undetectable to our instruments. We are not yet able to sense, measure or access that much, which therefore is totally beyond our understanding as to what it is? For now, it is called Dark Matter. 22% of the universe is dark matter, 74% is dark energy, and only 4% is normal matter that we know about and have studied.

It is therefore not wrong to say that what we call normal in our universe is abnormal, and what we call abnormal is normal. Literally, this is a strange world.

Clever Trees mangroves baobab

Tree cleverness can be inferred from the survival strategies adopted by many trees against extreme conditions such as cork formation against fires, foliation and poison to attract certain animals and repel others, the forms, textures, tastes and durability of fruits, the height and straightness of trunks, and the very fractal forms in their arboreal (leaf-bundle form). Plant reproduction, fruit dispersal and cleavage to rocks and soils are another evidence of clever design. That plants can learn is suggested by the direction of growth of tree branches towards or away from noisy road traffic, high-tension electricity cable lines and antennas. Some plants are even carnivorous in setting out to and actually catching insects and small animals using chemical solutions.

A highlight of plant genius is in mangrove trees which grow in sea water; some developing salt-filtering root surface, depositing that salt in old leaves to drop away, some absorbing the salt only to secret it through special glands in their leaves. The cannonball mangrove bears large round fruits that explode to disperse seeds which could germinate far away. It is almost a miracle how in all the sea tides and waves those seeds develop even in brackish water, and with roots in waves that would drown most other plants.

Perhaps the most stubborn survivor of all trees is the baobab with its gigantic swollen stem, sparse leaves, looking like a huge root turned upside down. The baobab easily survives fires, tough periods of harsh drought, reviving from near complete destruction, even from roots sunk into rocky soil. Its flowers bloom only at night for just a few hours, its fibrous trunk and roots store huge volumes of water, its nuts are edible, egg-shaped and reach 25 by 15 centimetres. Its very pattern of vitality announces the seasons to some natives including the Australian aborigines who call it baob.