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Etzel Cardeña, Professor of Parapsychology at Lund

I entered into organised skepticism because of anti-science tendencies in academe. Though a member of the Swedish Skeptics since 1997 and co-editor of the society's journal since 2002, I've never been much of a skeptical activist outside academic archaeology. I've written articles and a few letters of protest. But I've visited no spirit mediums, gone to no New Age fairs, crashed no fundie revivals. I have engaged with Teh Woo only in the manner of a sniper. In fact, I hardly ever meet any true believers apart from my New Age mom. But last night I had two such encounters: first one that was…

Creationist Research: Semi-Technical, Completely Worthless

Bless their hearts. The Creationists over at Answers in Genesis are working their perfectly designed fingers to the bone. Blowing the Discovery Institute out of the water by not only publishing a for-realsies science journal (well, at least once), but also performing 'semi-technical' research! Darwin at the Drugstore? Testing the Biological Fitness of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria While its just adorable to see them working so hard, their crippled understanding of basic science leaves this semi-technical article completely worthless. Problem #1-- Comparing Chihuahuas to Great Danes If *I*…

Expert! Part One.

I know I haven't been around for a while. Sorry about that. A bit of the summer doldrums I guess. But now I have big news to report, for the handful of people who like my chess posts. As big a chess fan as I am, I have been mostly retired from tournament play for a number of years. Sure, I would play in the big team tournament in February, and occasionally I would get the bug and go to the World Open or something like that, but it's been quite a while since I made any serious effort to improve my play. But as I reported previously, some good results in the team tournaments over several…

Crackpots

Did you hear the one about how Charles Darwin wasn't the creator of natural selection? Did you know that other people had had the idea before him? Oh, you did know that? Because anyone who has ever spent five minutes learning about the history of evolutionary thought knows that? Well, tell that to Daniel Engber over at five thirty-eight. Apparently a big-time crackpot named Mike Sutton has made the astonishing discovery that Patrick Matthew, a Scottish farmer, anticipated Darwin in an appendix to an obscure book called Naval Timber and Arboriculture, published in 1831. Of course, the…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 30

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 29 Table of Contents Chapter 31 Chapter 30 Platonic Lust, December 12, 2055 Some women engineer their faces. They have studied celebrity, looked at the beautiful and followed the dictates of fashion. Their faces are uniformly flawless. Eyebrows are perfectly plucked to the prescribed trace. Their eyes are highlighted to take advantage of their natural colouration. Their skin is so smooth it could be plastic. In fact, they have turned themselves into living dolls. The point of the exercise is to raise their market value in the ceaseless and…

Marci Hamilton on the Incorporation of the Establishment Clause

Marci Hamilton has an interesting column on Findlaw about whether the Establishment Clause is incorporated by the 14th amendment, which means whether it now applies to the states or not. The Supreme Court has long held that it does, but at least one justice, Clarence Thomas, argues that it does not. In his opinion in the Newdow pledge of allegiance case, Thomas argued that rather than denying Newdow's standing to bring the suit, the court should have granted him standing and ruled against him, and in the process overturned a number of precedents based upon the incorporation of the…

Amar on Questioning Judicial Nominees

Vikram Amar has an excellent essay on Findlaw debunking this notion that you can't ask judicial nominees about specific cases. He points out that confirmation hearings should dig much deeper than the usual judicial cliches about "legislating from the bench" and "judicial restraint" because those phrases really don't tell us anything meaningful about how a justice will do his job: The problem with the metaphor of judicial legislation is, of course, that no one knows (or at least agrees on) what it means. So too with "judicial activism," "strict construction" and the like. For instance,…

Niobrara

What do you think of when someone mentions the word "Kansas"? Maybe what leaps to your mind is that it is a farming state that is flat as a pancake, or if you've been following current events, the recent kangaroo court/monkey trial, or perhaps it is the drab counterpart to marvelous Oz. It isn't exactly first on the list of glamourous places. I admit that I tend to read different books than most people, so I have a somewhat skewed perspective on Kansas: the first thing I think of is a magic word. Niobrara. Late in the 19th century, there was a stampede to the American West to search for…

The Absurdity of the Anti-Stem Cell Research Position

Both Rusty at New Covenant and Matt at Wheat and Chaff have posted in the last couple days to bash Christopher Reeve for promoting embryonic stem cell (ESC) research. They say that he is selfish and self-serving for promoting "death" to improve his own position. Matt writes: Why are these men regarded as moral heroes when their only cause is to deny life to others for their own benefit? I am sorry for the family of Christopher Reeve, and I'm sorry for the suffering he went through. Likewise for Michael J. Fox. But I do not regard it as a great act of moral bravery that they agitate for a…

More on D'Souza's Ridiculous Book

James Wolcott has another post on Dinesh D'Souza's appalling argument that we should become more like the Taliban in order to make them hate us less. He includes a few quotes from the book that are so stupid they leave your mouth agape as you read them. For instance: "The left doesn't blame America for undermining the shah of Iran, getting rid of Ferdinand Marcos, or imposing sanctions against South Africa." As Wolcott rightly points out, it was the left that argued for imposing sanctions against South Africa and the right that fought against them. Our beloved VP, Dick Cheney, not only voted…

The end of NASA's Education and Public Outreach

"For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return." -Leonardo da Vinci It's been a busy week here at Starts With A Bang, and with the two recent big posts -- one on the eve of Planck and one just after the first big data release -- I certainly wasn't planning on writing one today. After all, there are only so many things one can do in a week, and we've certainly learned some unprecedented things about the Universe just over the last couple of days. Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration…

Physics News Backlog

Every day, a handful of physics news items pass through my RSS feeds, and every few days, one of them looks interesting enough that I check the little box to keep it unread, so I can comment on it later (I don't blog from work if I can avoid it). Of course, most of the time, I don't get around to commenting, so these press releases and news squibs tend to pile up. It's starting to get a little silly, so I'm going to clear them out, and post a brief comment about each one, and why I thought it looked interesting here. This probably tells you something about the state of the field, but mostly,…

Quantum Computing Candidates: Optical Lattices

Last week, I wrote about ion traps as a possible quantum computing platform, which are probably the best established of the candidate technologies. This week, I'll talk about something more speculative, but closer to my own areas of research: neutral atoms in optical lattices. This is a newer area, which pretty much starts with a proposal in 1999. There are a bunch of different variants of the idea, and what follows will be pretty general. What's the system? Optical lattices use the interaction between atoms and a standing wave of light to produce a periodic array of wells in which individual…

Boskone 45 Wrap-Up

Since basically nobody reads my inside-baseball stuff about SF, I'll put the details below the fold. Short version: Kate and I went to Boskone this past weekend, and it was good. Various miscellany: -- During the week, Kate came down with the cold that I had last weekend. As late as Thursday night, she was thinking of not even going, but I convinced her that moping at home would be more depressing than making the trip. She spent most of the con in her room, though. -- This was the second year of Boskone in the Westin Waterfront, which isn't as good a space as the Sheraton at Prudential Center…

DonorsChoose Payoff: Changing Categories

An anonymous donor asks a tricky question, namely: how apparently successful research faculty ... can best make the transition to a small teaching/research institution? This is a tricky question not only because anything relating to academic jobs is tough, but also because I don't have a great deal of experience with it. I've been in on a bunch of job searches, but we've never hired anybody fitting this description. As a result, this is necessarily kind of hypothetical. I think the key bit of advice is the same for faculty looking to switch instituions as for people looking for thier first…

A True Ghost Story, Part 6: But first, since we're talking geology ...

... continued ... Since we are talking about geology, I do not want to give up the opportunity to bring up one of the coolest stories of geology ever, given the present day discussion of science and religion. You will be asking for a source for this story. Look it up in Wikipedia, where all knowledge resides, and you will not find it there. There are things, it turns out, that The Great Knowing Web Site does not know. My source is a combination of primary and secondary documents, written histories, and a documentary that is not generally available. Barney Barneto nee Barnet Isaacs was a…

LightScribe Technology and Why Windows Sucks

I know every computer box needs a CD/DVD reader in order to boot the thing up under adverse conditions (and your system should always be set up so that you can do this, by the way!). But as a matter of actual functionality, maintaining a current and high-functioning version of this sort of device, or two or more of them especially, built into the box is usually a bad idea for me. My computer boxes are not ever conveniently located. For my main computer, I can reach the off on switch with my toe, which is how I start up the machine. (The button is not needed to turn it off, of course.) So…

Amazing Fossil Finding: Proto Whales Gave Birth on Land, not at sea

An article released moments ago in PLoS ONE, by Gingerich et al., describes one of the more interesting fossil discoveries ever. To cut right to the conclusion: We now have reason to believe that the proto-whale Maiacetus inuus, a true transitional form, gave birth on land, not in the water. Artist's conception of male Maiacetus inuus with opaque skeleton overlay. Credit: John Klausmeyer and Bonnie Miljour, University of Michigan Museums of Natural History Maiacetus inuus is a newly described member of a larger group of proto-cetids (proto-whales) that are believed to be largely aquatic…

Global Warming, the Blog Epic ~ 01 ~ Introduction

The IPCC report is out, "An Inconvenient Truth" has been honored by the academy, a sea change is happening in the way that climate change news is being reported, and you can bet the Right Wing and the Ree-pubs are as we speak working up new Talking Points and Spins to deflate the urgency of the issue. It is an axiom that in reporting science, there are two (not one, not three or four, just two) sides to every issue, and one side is the plank nailed to the Democratic Party Platform, and the other side is the plank nailed to the Ree-pub Party Platform. This is a truth as stable and reliable…

You know you are a Minnesotan if ...

The following is actually a Facebook group, but now I'm turning it into a sort of internet meme. I believe this is an accretitive list: People have added to it. You can tell by some of the redundancies. I myself have edited it slightly. I was born and raised in Upstate New York, but lived in "Boston" so long that I became an honorary Bostonian. But now I've lived in Minnesota long enough that I call this home and in fact a large part of this list applies to me. I believe that for the most part, where this list does not apply to a person who lives here, that is true for people who have…

A Human Life is More Than Just a Heartbeat

Consider this profile of NPR reporter Diane Rehm, in which she relates the harrowing story of her husband's final days: His Parkinson's disease had become unbearable. “He just kept getting weaker,” the NPR host told NBC News. “We called in the doctor and John said to him: `I am ready today.' He said `I can no longer use my legs, I can no longer use my arms, I can no longer feed myself.' And knowing with Parkinson's it is going to get worse rather than better, he said `I wanted to die.'” He asked the doctor for help. The answer they got surprised and disappointed both of them. “The doctor…

Modern YEC is Not An Aberration of Traditional Christianity, Part One

I will conclude my series on the World Open in the next day or two, but I would not want readers to think that I have converted this into a chess blog. So let's go back to our more traditional fare by pondering this pamphlet, by philosopher Mary Midgley. It is called, “Intelligent Design Theory and Other Ideological Problems,” and was published in 2007. I will not attempt a full review of the pamphlet (which at forty-three, large print, pages can be read pretty quickly). It is a strange mixture of good points and bad points. Midgley is quite good when she is addressing the substance of…

Jimmy Carter on the Bible

Jimmy Carter has a new book out about the Bible. He discusses it in this short interview over at HuffPo. He takes a straightforward approach to dealing with morally or scientifically troubling passages: Thank you so much for talking with me President Carter. As I warned, I am going to be asking the tough questions. So ... Did God write the Bible? God inspired the Bible but didn't write every word in the Bible. We know, for instance that stars can't fall on the earth, stars are much larger than the earth. That was a limitation of knowledge of the universe or physics, or astronomy at that…

Exasperating Ignorance

Oh George. I dont blame you for being angry. I attacked your profession, your profession is an extension of you, thus you took my comments personally, and completely missed what the hell I was talking about. 1-- I dont know whether she had a bad experience with 'The Wichita Beacon Journal'*... Someone who lives in Santa Fe, a hotbed of pseudoscientific wooshit, is not *exactly* in a position to be making fun of 'Wichita' for being backwards. Someone who is trying to establish that *he* is the better communicator probably shouldnt talk down to an entire segment of the country either. Just…

Monty Hall Deniers?

My account of the big creationism conference will resume shortly, but I really must take time out to discuss this article by Brian Hayes of American Scientist. He is discussing the Monty Hall problem, you see. The story begins with this earlier article by Hayes. He was reviewing the recent book Digital Dice: Computational Solutions to Practical Probability Problems, by Paul Nahin. Having enjoyed Nahin's previous book Duelling Idiots and Other Probability Puzzlers, I suspect this new one is worth reading as well. Hayes writes: The Monty Hall affair was a sobering episode for probabilists.…

Ayala on Evolution and the Problem of Evil

I have often commented that it is the arguments of theistic evolutionists, as opposed to those offered by Creationists, that have convinced me that evolution and Christianity can not be reconciled in any reasonable way. A good case in point is Francisco Ayala. Via Ed Brayton I came across this profile of Ayala from Tuesday's New York Times. In it we find items such as this: Dr. Ayala, a former Dominican priest, said he told his audiences not just that evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory, but also that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God. In fact, he said,…

Godless bloggers vs. Pensacola Christian College: who is more powerful?

Here's an optimistic idea: Personally, I have a great deal of hope that this is going to start to change in the near future. Indeed, this is one area where the blogosphere could actually prove quite powerful. Ten years ago, I'm not sure there was anywhere that your average Christian American was exposed to openly atheistic viewpoints. These days, I'm constantly amazed how many prominent bloggers profess their atheism on a daily basis. On the list, with the help of The Raving Atheist: Daily Kos, Washington Monthly, The Volokh Conspiracy (Jim Lindgren), Pharyngula, Daily Pundit,…

Two Minutes Hate From Barone

Town Hall columnist Michael Barone has a bee in his bonnet about universities: I am old enough to remember when America's colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America's colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society. Fox news pundits like Barone really ought to be more careful describing other institutions as closed-minded and intellectually dishonest.…

The Dawkins-O'Reilly Instatranscript

Well, Richard Dawkins had his little run-in with Bill O'Reilly tonight. No doubt surprised to have an A-list guest on his show, O'Reilly managed to keep the stupidity to a minimum (though, as we shall see, he certainly did not manage to eliminate it entirely). He was also on his best behavior. Since Fox News, unlke MSNBC, does not make transcripts of its shows freely available, I have taken the liberty of providing one for you. Should tide you over until the video turns up. There were places where the two were talking over each other and other places where words were garbled, but I will…

On Productivity

One of the weirder experiences I had at the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers a couple of weeks ago was having people ask me "How are you so productive?" (or the equivalent). That caught me off guard, because I don't feel like I'm especially productive-- in fact, I tend to feel like I'm falling behind on things I would like to get done. And yet, this image is kind of at odds with objective reality, a sort of tenured-white-guy version of Impostor Syndrome. I mean, I'm not Neil de Grasse Tyson, but I've actually got a pretty nice career going as a C-list public intellectual. And, of course…

On Beginning to Write

Over at Xykademiqz, a couple of weeks ago, there was a very nice post about the struggle to get students to write. "Very nice" here means that it's a good description of the problem, not that I'm glad anybody else has to deal with this. I don't face quite the same thing-- my students generally aren't writing research papers for journals-- but getting senior theses written is often a bit of a chore. And I admit, I'm really bad about pushing students to do this in a systematic way. The problem is that, as I know from personal experience back when I was an undergrad and saber-tooth tigers…

Ye Olde “Atheism is a Religion” Canard

Truly there is no end to the vapid inanity the HuffPo Religion section will post. Our latest example comes from David Lose, in an essay titled, “Has Atheism Become a Religion?” Want to take bets on whether the answer is “No”? I don't recall who first said it, but it has been wisely noted that if atheism is a religion then not collecting stamps is a hobby. That ought to be the end of things, but Lose encourages us not to dismiss the question out of hand. He then presents four lines of evidence. Let's have a look. 1) As recently reported in the New York Times, military personnel who…

Monday Math: The Infinitude of the Primes

Last week we saw that every positive integer greater than one can be factored into primes in an essentially unique way. This week we ask a different question: Just how many primes are there? Euclid solved this problem a little over two thousand years ago by showing there are infinitely many primes. His proof was by contradiction. If there are only finitely many primes then we can list them all: \[ p_1, \ p_2, \ p_3, \ p_4, \ \dots, \ p_k \]   We can now define a new number, which we shall call $N$, by the formula \[ N=p_1p_2p_3 \dots p_k +1 \]   That is, $N$ is obtained by multiplying…

Schneider on God

People often tell me that I have a skewed view of religion because of my frequent participation in creationist gatherings. Yes, obviously, the fundamentalists are out of their minds, and it is discouraging that they give religion a bad name generally. But there is also a rich body of serious, probing work in Christian theology that is full of nuance and texture. Or so I am told. I have yet to encounter it, and not for lack of looking. To me it always seems like an awful lot of intellectual energy wasted on a foolish and pointless project. Part of the problem is that often, when I read…

Quantum Switching of Light

Physics World posted a somewhat puzzling story a few days back, headlined Ultra cold atoms help share quantum information: Scientists in the US have demonstrated a novel "light-switch" in an optical fibre that could become a new tool in the communications industry. The device created by Michal Bajcsy at Harvard University and colleagues could be developed to share both classical and quantum information. Quantum information systems could bring a revolution to global data-sharing, by encrypting, processing, and transmitting information using the properties of quantum mechanics. However, as…

Notes Toward a Discussion of "Story of Your Life"

Yesterday's cheery hypothetical came about because I've agreed to do a guest lecture in a Science Fiction class in the English department. I'm going to be talking about Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," whose connection to the hypothetical should be obvious to people who have read it, but is a spoiler for those who haven't. My guest spot will be this Friday, and I sat in on a class last week (where they discussed a Zelazny story and one of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles) to get an idea of what the class is usually like. This will be a different experience for me. It's been fifteen years…

Above the Ant Line

[a guest post by myrmecologist Andrea Lucky] Andrea & her intrepid field team in New Guinea It was a dark and stormy night... ...actually, it was a dark and stormy morning.  The dawn of the 7th day of ceaseless frigid rain to be precise, and I was reminiscing about the grand old days one week before when the sun emerged and for a glorious 10 minutes it was warm enough to splash some water on my arms, legs and neck and wipe away the accumulated grime that is synonymous with field work. I wondered if that lovely burst of sunshine would ever come again (no, it wouldn't), and every time I…

All Aboard for the June Scientiae!

All month the Scientiae train has been loading at platform 37.7*, and now we're pulling out of the station on a wonderful journey on the rails. I'm picturing a Harry Potter-esque train running through the Scottish countryside, complete with cozy compartments and carts full of goodies, comforting tea, and chocolate frogs.** But most importantly, this train is full of amazing people sharing confidences, celebrations, frustrations, and encouragement. Alice and ScienceWoman will be your conductors for this journey, and we're going to drop in on some of the conversations. We'll start up near…

Don't drink the denture cleanser, don't swallow the inhalation capsules

The safety and effectiveness of medicines and other health products is dependent upon their proper use, particularly the proper route of administration. There are reasons why products are labeled as "for topical use only" or "do not swallow" - two recent warnings from the US FDA illustrate these issues. Allergic Reactions with Use/Misuse of Denture Cleansers The FDA recently announced reports of one death and 72 other adverse reactions in individuals who ingested denture cleansers meant to be used in a container with one's dentures removed. A crucial oxidizing agent, salts of persulfate,…

Why cooperation is hard for people with borderline personality disorder

Social lives are delicate things. We've all had situations where friendships and relationships have been dented and broken, and we're reasonably skilled at repairing the damage. This ability to keep our social ties from snapping relies on being able to read other people, and on knowing a thing or two about what's normal in human society. For instance, we appreciate that cheating fosters ill-will, while generosity can engender trust. So cheaters might try to win back their companions with giving gestures. These little exchanges are the glue that bind groups of people into happy and…

Obesity amplifies across generations; can folate-rich diets stop it?

Many measures to curb the obesity epidemic are aimed at young children. It's a sensible strategy - we know that overweight children have a good chance of becoming overweight adults. Family homes and schools have accordingly become critical arenas where the battle against the nation's growing waistlines is fought. But there is another equally important environment that can severely affect a person's chances of becoming overweight, but is more often overlooked - the womb. Overweight parents tend to raise overweight children but over the last few years, studies have confirmed that this…

Unconscious brain activity shapes our decisions

Our brains are shaping our decisions long before we become consciously aware of them. That's the conclusion of a remarkable new study which shows that patterns of activity in certain parts of our brain can predict the outcome of a decision seconds before we're even aware that we're making one. It seems natural to think that we carry out actions after consciously deciding to do so. I decide to start typing and as a result, my hands move around a keyboard. But according to modern neuroscience, that feeling of free will may be an illusion. For over twenty years, experiments have suggested that…

Wired's single-minded take on global warming

Wired magazine's June cover story would have the entire environmental movement drop everything but one campaign. You don't need to see the cover to know they're talking about climate change. Does such single-mindedness make even the slightest bit of sense? Sort of. But not for the reasons the editors provide. First, it should be noted that Wired's attempt to explain why you should "Keep your SUV. Forget Organics. Go nuclear. Screw the Spotted Owl" and instead focus on just one thing: cutting carbon, is accompanied by a counterpart that makes eminently more sense. In his rebuttal, Alex Steffen…

Passing the Nicole Kidman's Grandmother Test

Nicole Kidman says her grandmother, a devout Catholic, would have been happy with her work in the soon-to-be-released The Golden Compass. This even though the book, the first of what producers hope will be a triology of films base on Philip Pulman's His Dark Materials series, begins a story that culminates in the overthrow of religion by humanism. According to a wire story posted on the SciFi Channel website The books have been lambasted as anti-religious and, more specifically, anti-Catholic, for their themes and the depiction of the Magisterium, a powerful and oppressive group that many…

Physician: get over thyself

If any member of the medical profession wonders why more than a few people prefer to seek "alternative" treatments, wonder no longer. While ignorance and gullibility among the lay public are rampant, there is also the very serious problem that people simply don't believe that conventional, accredited doctors always have the patient's best interests at heart. Yesterday I came across a recent study that offers some good justification for that lack of confidence. The paper, in the June 2006 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (subscription required), reports the findings…

Boom-boom-krak-oo - Campbell's monkeys combine just six 'words' into rich vocabulary

Many human languages achieve great diversity by combining basic words into compound ones - German is a classic example of this. We're not the only species that does this. Campbell's monkeys have just six basic types of calls but they have combined them into one of the richest and most sophisticated of animal vocabularies. By chaining calls together in ways that drastically alter their meaning, they can communicate to each other about other falling trees, rival groups, harmless animals and potential threats. They can signal the presence of an unspecified threat, a leopard or an eagle, and…

Do baby faces benefit black business leaders?

A common problem afflicting modern psychology is that it's mainly based on experiments with middle-class white people, often from North America or Europe. Open up the field of inquiry to other cultures, social circles or ethnic groups and different trends come to the fore. Take the effects of a baby-face. Decades of studies have found that rounded, smooth, young-looking faces engender trust and sympathy. People adorned with such youthful looks tend to be treated with more sensitivity and patience, receive more lenient sentences, and make better spokespeople during PR crises. But these…

OCTOPUS bracket: 1st round results are in!

PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS Well, you know it's big when the American Idol gang weigh in with an opening musical number (live at the HIV vs Plasmodium court, and telecast to the others). Not only that, but the crazy reworking of Kelly Clarkson's "Since you've been gone" using the words from Koch's Postulates, was a huge hit. In any event, here are the results below. HIV: 81 Plasmodium: 67 Well, the song must of really inspired the players in the pathogen centric game. HIV and Plasmodium really battled hard. But you know, at the end of the day, there really wasn't any contest.…

How research saved the Large Blue butterfly

In 1979, somewhere in Dartmoor, a butterfly died. That would hardly have been an exceptional event, but this individual was a Large Blue butterfly (Maculinea arion) and it was the last of its kind in the United Kingdom. Over more than a century, the Large Blue's population had been declining and it was finally declared nationally extinct 30 years ago. Now, it's back. A bold conservation effort managed to work out the factors behind the butterfly's decline, and resurrect this vanished species. The Large Blue's reintroduction has been one of conservation's flagship successes and it was the…

Losing Nemo - acid oceans prevent baby clownfish from finding home

In the movie Finding Nemo, the eponymous clownfish grows up in the security of his home reef and must find his way back after being fry-napped by an overenthusiastic diver. In reality, the larvae of clownfish spend their early lives adrift in the open ocean and only after weeks, or possibly months, do they return to the reefs where they were born.  Their journey is guided by several cues that help them navigate home. The sound of a reef may be one of these but it's clear that the most important sense for a returning fish is smell. Young fish have very well developed smell organs and respond…