mouse

Torturing more mice in the name of antivaccine pseudoscience: PubPeer versus antivaxers

oracknows — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 05:00:40 +0000

Torturing more mice in the name of antivaccine pseudoscience: PubPeer versus antivaxers

Last week, an antivaxer "challenged" me to look over a paper purporting to show that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause inflammation of the brain and therefore contribute to autism, a paper that she would be "citing frequently." Being someone who lives by the motto, "be careful what you wish for," I looked it over in detail. Not surprisingly, my conclusion was that the experiments were poorly done using obsolete and not very quantitative methodology and that the results do not support the conclusions made by the authors. I was not alone in this conclusion. Skeptical Raptor was, if anything, even harsher on the paper than I was.

The paper in question came out of the lab of Christopher Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic in the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of British Columbia. As I note every time I examine a paper by these two warriors for antivaccine pseudoscience, both have a long history of publishing antivaccine “research,” mainly falsely blaming the aluminum adjuvants in vaccines for autism and, well, just about any health problem children have and blaming Gardasil for premature ovarian failure and all manner of woes up to and including death. Shaw was even prominently featured in the rabidly antivaccine movie The Greater Good. Not surprisingly, they’ve had a paper retracted, as well.

Given the authors' history and a paper that I and others found completely consistent with that history of publishing bad science in the service of antivaccine views, you might reasonably ask: Why am I writing about it again? It turns out that I was indeed far too kind the first time around. You see, I didn't look at all the DNA gels and Western blot films closely enough. I confess that sometimes I don't, particularly when the images provided by the journal online are relatively low resolution. Fortunately, however, there are others with a much sharper eye for photos of DNA gels and films of Western blots than I am, and, if what these people are saying is correct, I rather suspect that Shaw and Tomljenovic might well be cruising for their second retracted paper. Before I explain why, it's necessary for me to briefly explain two things for nonscientists not familiar with the methodology used.

In last week's post, I complained that the authors had basically ground up mouse brains and used semiquantitative PCR to measure the level of messenger RNA for each immune cytokine examined. There's no need for me to go into how this method is only roughly quantitative or how there are much better methods available now. I did that last time. What I do need to point out is that, after the PCR reaction is run, the PCR products (DNA fragments amplified by the PCR reaction) are separated by placing them in an agarose gel and running an electrical current through it. This gel electrophoresis works because DNA migrates towards the positive electrode and, once it solidifies, agarose forms a gel that separates the DNA fragments by size. The gel can then be stained with ethidium bromide, whose fluorescence allows visualization of the bands, which can be assessed for size and purity. Photos of the gel can be taken and subjected to densitometry to estimate how much DNA is in each band relative to the other bands.

To measure protein, Western blots work a little differently. Basically isolated cell extracts or protein mixtures are subjected to polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) with a denaturing agent (SDS). Again, like DNA, protein migrates towards the positive electrode, and the gel forms pores that impeded the process, allowing separation by size and charge. The proteins are then transferred to a membrane (the Western blot) and visualized by using primary antibodies to the desired protein, followed by a secondary antibody with some sort of label. In the old days, we often used radioactivity. These days, we mostly use chemiluminescence. Blots are then exposed to film or, more frequently today, to a phosphoimager plate, which provides a much larger linear range for detecting the chemiluminescence than old-fashioned film. Just like DNA gels, the bands can be quantified using densitometry. In both cases, it's very important not to "burn" (overexpose) the film, which pushes the band intensity out of the linear ranger) or to underexpose them (noise can cause problems). It's also important how the lines are drawn around the bands using the densitometry software and how the background is calculated. More modern software can do it fairly automatically, but there is almost always a need to tweak the outlines chosen, which is why I consider it important that whoever is doing the densitometry should be blinded to experimental group, as bias can be introduced in how the bands are traced.

So why did I go through all this? Hang on, I'll get to it. First, however, I like to point out to our antivaccine "friends" that peer review doesn't end when a paper is published. Moreover, social media and the web have made it easier than ever to see what other scientists think of published papers. In particular, there is a website called PubPeer, which represents itself as an "online journal club." More importantly, for our purposes, PubPeer is a site where a lot of geeky scientists with sharp eyes for anomalies in published figures discuss papers and figures that seem, well, not entirely kosher. It turns out that some scientists with sharp eyes have been going over Shaw and Tomljenovic's paper, and guess what? They've been finding stuff. In fact, they've been finding stuff that to me (and them) looks rather...suspicious.

One, for instance, took figure 1C of the paper and adjusted the background and contrast to accentuate differences in tones:

It was immediately noted:

A clear and deliberate removal of the Male 3 Control TNF result. This isn't an unacknowledged splice, as there is no background pattern from a gel contiguous with either band, left or right.

Removal of the left half of the Male 1 Control IFN-g. Dubious also about Male 3 Control IFN-g, as the contrast highlight shows boxing around the band.

What appears like an unacknowledged splice in ACHE blot, between AI Animal 2, Control Animal 3

Comparing this representative blot to the densitometry accompanying it, they score from 5 independent experiments IFN-g fold change from control to AI, relative to actin, as on average 4.5, with an SEM ranging from ~2.7 to 6.5. This seems too good to be true.

Look at the band. It's the second from last band. It looks as though the band has been digitally removed. There is an obvious square there. The edges are clear. Now, this could be a JPEG compression artifact. Indeed, one of the commenters is very insistent about reminding everyone that compression artifacts can look like a square and fool the unwary into thinking that some sort of Photoshopping had occurred.. However, I do agree with another of the PubPeer discussants this is enough of a problem that the journal should demand the original blot.

On this one, I'll give Shaw and Tomljenovic the benefit of the doubt. (Whether they deserve it or not, you can judge for yourself.) That might be a compression artifact. Other problems discovered in the gels are not so easily dismissed. For instance, there definitely appears to be the ol' duplicated and flipped gel bands trick going on in Figure 2A:

Spotting these takes a little bit of skill, but look for distinctive parts of bands and then look to see if they show up elsewhere. It's also necessary to realize that there could be multiple different exposures of the same band, such that the same band can appear more or less intense and mirror-imaged. You have to know what to look for, and I fear that some readers not familiar with looking at blots like these might not see the suspicious similarities, even when pointed out. Still, let's take a look. There are more examples, for instance, these two bands in Figure 4C:

And Figures 4B and 4D, where bubbles on the gels serve as markers:

You can look at the rest of the PubPeer images for yourself and decide if you agree that something fishy is going on here. I've seen enough that I think there is, as is pointed out near the end:

Great to see such rapid progress being made: Band duplications firmly established for gels in Figs. 2 and 4. Perhaps we can add some RT-PCR from Fig. 1 too? In Fig. 2, seek out the band marked above that looks like a sailing boat with mast and forestay. Now look for it in Fig. 1A. And then perhaps check for any other duplications?

Others note that Shaw and Tomljenovic have engaged in a bit of self-plagiarism, too. Figure 1 in the 2017 paper is identical (and I do mean identical, except that the bars in the older paper are blue) to a paper they published in 2014. Basically, they threw a little primary data into one of their crappy review articles trying to blame "environment" (i.e., vaccines) for autism, this one published in 2014 in OA Autism. Don't take my word for it. Both articles are open-access, and you can judge for yourself.

Some comments from PubPeer:

As far as I can see figure 1 is identical in the two papers? But in the 2014 paper hisograns are described as means +/- SEM from three independent experiments and in 2017 as means +/- SEM of five independent experiments? http://www.oapublishinglondon.com/article/1368

And:

Brazen self-plagiarism of the open access 2014 paper’s Fig. 1 is a key find by the human commentator. Especially since it is not in PubMed (though it is Ref. 166 here). This means that they have used certain elements of a single gel four times in three years: Nice work if you can get it.

Here is the direct link to 2014 Fig. 1

http://www.oapublishinglondon.com/images/html_figures/1368_346.png

The licence for the 2014 paper states “Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY)”. Unfortunately, the 2017 recycling of Fig. 1 is neither creative nor is it attributed.

What this means is that Elsevier were misled regarding the copyright situation and the originality of the work. So this finding surely gives the 2017 publisher a get out of jail card. If they choose to play it, they can now unilaterally withdraw this embarrassing Anti-vaxxer concoction on these grounds alone.

Don’t forget to archive the two papers for your records: They might disappear from the publishers’ web sites at some point.

And that's still not all. Let's take a visit to our scaly friend, Skeptical Raptor, where he notes that The Mad Virologist and the Blood-Brain Barrier Scientist jointly analyzed the paper and found:

But there are six other key points that limit what conclusions can be drawn from this paper:

They selected genes based on old literature and ignored newer publications.

The method for PCR quantification is imprecise and cannot be used as an absolute quantification of expression of the selected genes.

They used inappropriate statistical tests that are more prone to giving significant results which is possibly why they were selected.

Their dosing regime for the mice makes assumptions on the development of mice that are not correct.

They gave the mice far more aluminum sooner than the vaccine schedule exposes children to.

There are irregularities in both the semi-quantitative RT-PCR and Western blot data that strongly suggests that these images were fabricated. This is probably the most damning thing about the paper. If the data were manipulated and images fabricated, then the paper needs to be retracted and UBC needs to do an investigation into research misconduct by the Shaw lab.

Taken together, we cannot trust Shaw’s work here and if we were the people funding this work, we’d be incredibly ticked off because they just threw away money that could have done some good but was instead wasted frivolously. Maybe there’s a benign explanation for the irregularities that we’ve observed, but until these concerns are addressed this paper cannot be trusted.

I note that they go into even more detail about the problems with the images that have led me (and others) to be suspicious of image manipulation, concluding:

These are some serious concerns that raise the credibility of this study and can only be addressed by providing a full-resolution (300 dpi) of the original blots (X-ray films or the original picture file generated by the gel acquisition camera).

There has been a lot of chatter on PubPeer discussing this paper and many duplicated bands and other irregularities have been identified by the users there. If anyone is unsure of how accurate the results are, we strongly suggest looking at what has been identified on PubPeer as it suggests that the results are not entirely accurate and until the original gels and Western blots have been provided, it looks like the results were manufactured in Photoshop.

I agree. Oh, and I agree with their criticism of the use of statistics. I even brought up their failure to control for multiple comparisons, but Shaw and Tomljenovic also used a test that is appropriate for a normal distribution when their data obviously did not follow a normal distribution.

So, my dear readers, it turns out that Orac, as Insolent as he can be when slapping down bad science by antivaxers, was not nearly Insolent enough in this case. Mea culpa. I should have known better, given Shaw and Tomljenovic's history. Not only do we have poorly done and analyzed experiments, but we also have self-plagiarism and, quite possibly, scientific fraud. Only releasing the full resolution original images from the original experiments (which are now probably four years old) can put these questions to rest.

Science matters. I hate to see it abused like this, particularly when experimental animals are killed in the service of such awful science.

oracknows Wed, 09/27/2017 - 01:00

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biology

medicine

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Well, for all we know now, they may have never touched a mouse, but just copied their gels together from something they found on the web. This looks really bad.

Oh man. I used to check images like these for a journal, and this, uh, looks suspicious. I can't believe no one queried these images before publication.

So not only are the methods and statistical analysis flawed but there might be evidence for outright fraud (sounds like another retracted paper we all know). Yet places like the National Vaccine (Mis)Information Archive are spreading this as definitive evidence.

A. If there was manipulation of the images, the university should respond.

B. Shaw, Meehan - is there any link between ophthalmology and being anti vaccine? I expect that's unfair to most ophthalmologists, but wonder.

Orac writes,

Not only do we have poorly done and analyzed experiments, but we also have self-plagiarism and, quite possibly, scientific fraud.

MJD says,

This is, quite possibly, Orac's best re-review!

In summary, when discovered and placed in the public domain, circumstantial evidence (e.g., questionable DNA gels and Western blot films) of scientistic fraud can damage or end the careers of researchers who, without a doubt, have been shown to engage in it.

It's my understanding that Shaw is a tenured full professor at UBC. It's also my understanding that one of the grounds for revoking tenure is academic fraud.

Just sayin"...

It’s my understanding that Shaw is a tenured full professor at UBC. It’s also my understanding that one of the grounds for revoking tenure is academic fraud.

It tends to get pinned on the most junior researcher. (I note that Yongling Li seems to have departed Shaw's group, as well.)

Shaw, Meehan – is there any link between ophthalmology and being anti vaccine? I expect that’s unfair to most ophthalmologists, but wonder.

I don't know who Meehan is, but Shaw does not have an MD and is in no respects an ophthalmologist. Anyway, antivaccinosis can strike indiscriminately. For instance: pediatrics (Sears, Mendelsohn), Gastoenterology (Wakefield), Neurosurgery (Blaylock), Pathology (Sin Hang Lee).

It tends to get pinned on the most junior researcher.

One would think that a succession of junior researchers pinned with academic fraud after having collaborated with the same senior researcher would be a great big red flag for any junior researcher who actually wants to have a future in the field.

Given Shaw's research interests, I'm tempted to think that perhaps he was bestowed upon the Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences department by means of a lateral transfer from another department that didn't want to keep him.

When it comes to poor quality images, particularly when compression artifacts are quite apparent, I'm perfectly happy to wish a pox on both houses - the authors for submitting crap or failing to take the publisher to task for wrecking that which was good when submitted, and the publisher for doing the latter or failing to take the author to task for submitting crap. I'da thunk someone in a dep't with "Visual Sciences" in the name might be a little hyper-vigilant regarding such matters.

We seem to have made a transition from the days when "white space" was regarded as sacred and actual useful content profane to an age of just plain incompetence and/or indifference.

While poor images are set in stone (or a polymer coating a sheet of aluminum) for printed publications, there is simply no excuse for allowing them to persist in electronic publications. Decent digital images can make rather large files, but I doubt that many journal articles are delivered via dial-up.

Of course fabulous images don't make up for poor research.

"2.The method for PCR quantification is imprecise and cannot be used as an absolute quantification of expression of the selected genes."

That is the first thing I thought. 20 years ago, there might be a reason for doing gels (heck, 10 years ago I was doing syber green in an academic lab, because probes were too expensive but gels are too imprecise), but these days, qRT-PCR machines have been around for a long time, and probes are absurdly cheap ($1.20 a reaction for a basic Taqman). Most if not all of those genes are off-the-shelf assays.

Not that I'd trust these fooks to do qRT-PCR correctly.

Or run a negative control. If they did it in this paper, they didn't mention it.

Or use actin as a housekeeper, ffs.

And using a paired T-test for so dizam many comparisons.

Yeah, lousy paper even from just skimming it.

I should have said "when compression artifacts are detrimental" instead of "... apparent" - some a just ugly but don't mask important content.

Orac,

Thanks

Just plain thanks for all you do

(I note that Yongling Li seems to have departed Shaw’s group, as well.)

Yongling Li coauthored the 2013 paper with behavioural results for the same mice, but wasn't involved in the 2014 "OA Autism" paper. OTOH, Dan Li was coauthor in 2014 and 2017... also yet another review-shaped self-plagiarism:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25428645
"Are there negative CNS impacts of aluminum adjuvants used in vaccines and immunotherapy?"
[Contains Figure 1 again]

The Acknowledgements could be read as a CYA positioning of the lab staff to take any blame:

We are also grateful to Agripina Suarez and other laboratory members for their assistance.

It's on Researchgate if anyone wants to quantify the degree of self-plagiarism:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268880246_Are_there_negative_C…

That band removed is not a compression artefact. Compression artefacts don't quite look like that. That is a clear case of photoshop. Photoshopping gels bands should lead to immediate retraction. Let's see what the journal editor does.

But what gets me is why bother with all the copying and pasting of bands. If they were going to just make it up, they could go the Judy Mikovits approach and just rename the bands as they wished.

In response to T. Bruce: Dr. Meehan is an Oklahoma doc trained in ophthalmology whose antivax views got taken down here:

https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/jim-meehan-anti…

Let's not forget the most prominent ophthalmologist who's encouraged antivax idiocy - Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

I wondered the same thing, Chris. Maybe they did both?

The Photoshop is easy to see (once you start to look for it), but other that trying to replicate the study, how could you prove or disprove something like renaming (or, to call it what it is, flat out lying)?

I'm glad to know I wasn't imagining things when I looked at the bands and thought, "They look like the same sample to me."

Orac is too kind when he calls this science. This isn't science. It's science fiction.

Off topic, so you can delete this when you see it, but I know you will be most pleased with this news from Australia:

"Fake wellness blogger Belle Gibson has been ordered to pay a fine of $410,000 after being found guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct earlier this year.

The Federal Court in Melbourne found she misled her readers when she claimed her brain cancer was cured through alternative therapies and nutrition.

It was later revealed she never had the disease."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-28/disgraced-wellness-blogger-belle-…

I wondered the same thing, Chris. Maybe they did both?

The Photoshop is easy to see (once you start to look for it), but other that trying to replicate the study, how could you prove or disprove something like renaming (or, to call it what it is, flat out lying)?

Well it was all made up, but given how easy detecting photoshopping of gels has become, why risk that. I suppose if you are inventing stuff already, you don't think of these things.

The renaming of lanes is in fact really hard to work out unless you have expertise with those specific genes/proteins. Mikovits' paper didn't pass the smell test when I read it, but it was really hard to put your finger on where the fraud was. A clear indication of a problem was that numbers of individuals in the paper and the supplementary information didn't match, and didn't match with Judy's public statements, but what did that mean?

It was only when Judy decided to use the same photo in a conference presentation with different labels on the lanes that it became obvious the sort of chicanery in operation and that the photo in the paper wasn't what they claimed it was. In the end it turned out that the blot was something else again and had been repurposed twice.

Meehan is an anti-vaccine loon who deserves to lose his medical license for the voluminous amount of dangerous stupid he spews. On the bright side, he overstepped his big mouth last year attacking physicians who promote vaccines and Meehan now has a libel case pending against him brought by a physician he slandered.

Shaw et al made stuff up about their control mice, too. In Table 1 they state that control mice received their saline injections on Days 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, 17 -- same as the Al-exposed group. The trouble is that in Table 2 of the earlier 2013 report of the same experiment, the controls only received five injections, on 2, 4,, 9, 11, 16.

In Table 1 they state that control mice received their saline injections on Days 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, 17 — same as the Al-exposed group. The trouble is that in Table 2 of the earlier 2013 report of the same experiment, the controls only received five injections, on 2, 4,, 9, 11, 16.

What is a day between friends?

Oh and Dan of Vaccine Papers tells me Shaw is going to retract the paper.

Perhaps it has got too embarrassing.

Elsevier management were already talking to the journal editors about minimising damage to their reputation, so one way or the other, the paper will not be around for long,

Even without the fakery it was a crap paper.

It just doesn't stop. In the original 2013 description:

The general development of mice was monitored by systematic recording of their weights from week 1 till the time of sacrifice (week 34).

In the 2017 account:

At 16 weeks of age the mice were euthanized and the brain tissues were collected for gene expression profiling experiments.

If you don't know whether your mice were 16 weeks or 34 weeks old when you killed them, it could be time to change careers.

I'd like to think that maybe not as many mice were needlessly killed for Shaw's current paper, but more likely they killed at least as many as stated in the paper before deciding to fake it all up.

@ #28 Chris Preston

Oh and Dan of Vaccine Papers tells me Shaw is going to retract the paper.

One can only hope a withdrawn publication full of falsified data and even self-plagiarising still counts as fraud.

If you don’t know whether your mice were 16 weeks or 34 weeks old when you killed them, it could be time to change careers.

Well, maybe they went the whole hog fraud-wise, and they didn't even use let alone kill mice in the first place, but just made things up over a few beers kale smoothies or so...

Anyway, if this is a fraud (and so far, it sure smells like one), it once again emphasizes the sheer stupidity of antivaccine people, even the ones with a sort of higher education. Did they really think that they would get this kind of clumsy mess past the science crowd unnoticed? And about this particular subject? They may as well put on bullseye pants and hand out shotguns...

Once again a study shows that vaccines improve health:

Contact: CDC Media Relations
(404) 639-3286

New study shows Tdap vaccination during pregnancy can prevent whooping cough in babies Less than half of pregnant women in the United States take advantage of vaccination
A new CDC study published today in Clinical Infectious Diseases reported that vaccination with whooping cough vaccine, Tdap, during the third trimester of pregnancy prevented more than three out of four (78 percent) cases of whooping cough (also known as pertussis) in babies younger than two months. However, only 49 percent of pregnant women who delivered between fall 2015 and spring 2016 received the vaccine. CDC recommends women get Tdap during each pregnancy to provide critical short-term protection to babies when they are most at risk for this life-threatening illness.
The study used data from 2011 through 2014 on babies younger than two months from six states. It found that mothers whose babies had whooping cough were less likely to have received Tdap during pregnancy. The study reported that, in addition to being 78 percent effective at preventing whooping cough, Tdap vaccination during the third trimester was 90 percent effective at preventing serious cases of whooping cough that require hospitalization.
“Women have such a great opportunity to help protect their babies before they enter the world by getting Tdap vaccine while pregnant,” said Nancy Messonnier, M.D., director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “This study highlights how babies can benefit when their mothers get the vaccine and reinforces CDC’s recommendation for women to get Tdap vaccine in the third trimester of each pregnancy.”
Read More Here

Orac is correct. The paper was a fraud.

Of course, there should be an investigation ASAP.

I can't believe anyone actually takes anything written by Shaw and Tomljenovic seriously anymore.

VP@36, That is a laudable admission. Will you now scrutinise Shaw et al.'s other studies and consider the criticism leveled at those?

In April 2016 the 10th Int.Congress on Autoimmunity took place in Leipzig -Germany.

http://autoimmunity.kenes.com/2016#.Wc-yO9FpGM8

Within this event the 4th International Symposium on Vaccines took place- sponsored by the antii-vaccine Dwoskin-Family Foundation and their CMSRI -"research" Institute.

The programm of this symposium can be found here

http://autoimmunity.kenes.com/Documents/4th%20International%20Symposium…

Chaired by C Dwoskin and Chris Exley (The Aluminium "expert" ) they also had a panel discussion with Lucia Tomljenovic and C Exley with the following questions:

"1.Why do you think that the authorities are trying to hide the truth?
2.What is the objective evidence that HPV vaccination is not justified?
3.What do you think, are the mechanisms by which vaccine can induce autoimmunity?"

So all authorities on this globe are hiding the truth- such wording is typical for any conspiracy theory in this case it is the anti-vaccine movement including their fraudulent "publications"

Will you now scrutinise Shaw et al.’s other studies and consider the criticism leveled at those?

In particular, his two 2014 publications -- in OA Autism and Immunotherapy -- which used the same Figure 1 with all its problematic features (such as the statistical absurdity of adding standard-error bars and applying t-tests to samples involving only three measurements). Do you find them convincing? Would you include them in the Vaccine Papers archives? Would you advise Shaw to retract them?

In April 2016 the 10th Int.Congress on Autoimmunity took place in Leipzig -Germany.

And Mark Geier was there, having abandoned his mercury / chelation grift in order to climb aboard the aluminium scamwagon. I would have thought that the other panelists would have felt slightly abashed to be sharing the podium with such an out-and-out charlatan, but evidently one must abandon all sense of shame to batten onto Dwoskin money.

Just received an email:
"The paper by Shaw and co-workers is being retracted jointly by the authors and the editor.

John Dawson, JIB Editor"

Pleased it'll be retracted; frankly gutted it was ever published...
Cheers!

The Orbital Laser Cannon of Pubpeer Correction is firm but fair.

#42 Magdalen -
Thanks.
I 1st saw news of the retraction via RtAVM:
https://www.facebook.com/RtAVM/posts/1715728805163788
who cited a guest post by Smut Clyde at Leonid Schneider's blog:
https://forbetterscience.com/2017/09/29/the-rise-and-fall-of-an-antivax…
.
At the very bottom is this update:
Update 8.10.2017. The Editor-in-Chief John Dawson wrote me back, with this signed one-liner (no “Dear Dr Schneider”, or “Hi Leonid”):
- “The paper by Shaw and co-workers is being retracted jointly by the authors and the editor.
— John Dawson, JIB Editor”"
.
Now the question remains as to what is going to happen to the authors of this scam. I predict UBC will defend their right to publish alternative facts.

Good news on the retraction and here is hoping a certain anti vac tenured pseudoscientist at ubc gets sacked

I wonder how they will explain this particular retraction.

It is gratifying to see that Clare Dwoskin et al. are getting exactly what they paid for. Although it's a shame that benefactors would rather fund sloppy, fraudulent science than bestow their largesse on worthy autism causes.

Per RW: "We immediately did our own analysis. Indeed, some images have been altered. How that happened, we don’t know."

Don't worry, Christopher, you'll "figure it out" in short order. And republish in OMICS or something.

Someone here said the post-doc would be thrown under-the-bus:

Shaw said that first author Dan Li, a former postdoc who performed the molecular biology and gene expression analysis for the study, has agreed to the retraction but not yet offered an official explanation about the data. Shaw told us:

"She denied that anything had been manipulated, or that anything was amiss".

http://retractionwatch.com/2017/10/09/journal-retract-paper-called-anti…

Worth the read as Shaw's Pollyanna routine is maddening.

It would be xmas come early if it turned out Dan Li absconded with the original data (that wasn't fraudulent) to CYA for the two studies that were published with fraudulent data by Shaw and Tomljenovic.

I didn't know where to put this.
http://www.cracked.com/article_25057_6-conspiracy-theorists-who-got-own…

Benefits to being furry, but not fat, in a cold environment

dr. dolittle — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 23:01:30 +0000

Benefits to being furry, but not fat, in a cold environment

Image of a genetically obese mouse (left) from Wikipedia.

To deal with cold environments, mammals have several options. They could produce heat by increasing metabolism or shivering or they could conserve heat by constricting blood vessels in their skin or snuggling with a friend or insulating materials. With this in mind, researchers wondered how varying levels of insulation (obesity, fur) in mice affected heat loss and how much energy the animals used to maintain body heat. Their thinking was that more insulation would prevent heat loss and lower energy needs. Sounds logical, right?

This reasoning was indeed logical for the amount of fur an animal had. Mice with shaved fur did have increased metabolism compared to those with normal body hair. What was surprising to the researchers was that obesity was not at all related to preventing heat loss in the mice. In fact, obese mice lost just as much heat as non-obese mice.

Source:

Fischer AW, Csikasz RI, von Essen G, Cannon B, Nedergaard J. No insulating effect of obesity. American Journal of Physiology - Endocrinology and Metabolism. Published 5 July 2016 Vol. 311 no. 1, E202-E213 DOI: 10.1152/ajpendo.00093.2016

dr. dolittle Thu, 08/24/2017 - 19:01

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What computer mouse is best?

gregladen — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 09:24:30 +0000

What computer mouse is best?

I did some research on mice, and I thought I'd pass it on. First, though, let me suggest that you get some of this stuff. Use it to paint a symbol on each of your wireless mice that matches a symbol on each of your mice dongles. It will help keep you sane. You'll still find yourself constantly in possession of mice and dongles that do not match, but at least they will have these pretty little symbols you drew all over them.

There is some interesting and exciting stuff going on with mice.

Best but most expensive small mouse for general mobile use

The Logitech MX Anywhere 2 Wireless Mobile Mouse, Long Range Wireless Mouse is over fifty bucks, but it has some excellent features. It is small and portable and normative in shape and design. It works on any surface, is highly precise, nice to use, all that. It is a Laser tracking mouse. It has an internal rechargeable battery.

This mouse uses a small USB dongle or bluetgooth (Bluetooth Smart Ready). You can pair up to three different devices. It has hyper-speed scrolling.

The Most Magical of Mice: Flow technology

There are several mice in this category ranging across price. One of them is the Logitech MX Anywhere 2S Wireless Mouse with FLOW Cross-Computer Control and File Sharing for PC and Mac - 910-005132, which is close to 80 bucks, and is like the MX Anywhere 2, but has the additional magical capability of controlling multiple devices, including managing a cross-device clipboard. You pair the mouse up with each computer, then you tie it into the same local network both computers are on. Here's a video from Logitech:

This supposedly works on Linux, Macs and Windows.

Super Ergonomic

I am suspicious of the whole ergonomic thing. Ergonomic, in mice and similar devices, seems to be "we fit your hand so well you will only move one or two muscles ever," which seems a bad idea. I think a mouse should require more movement and adjustment by the hand in order to Not cause repetitive motion syndrome. Note that this is entirely my non-expert opinion and I may be quite wrong.

Anyway, one of the top rated and coolest Ergonomic mice is probably the Anker 2.4G Wireless Vertical Ergonomic Optical Mouse which is extreme in its design and intended to minimize RSS. The same company makes a variety of products, and note, these are generally not expensive.

General all round mouse

The affordable Logitech M720 Triathalon Multi-Device Wireless Mouse pairs with multiple devices, has fancy buttons, has hyper fast scrolling capability, and uses a single AA battery. It uses bluetooth.

Glows in the dark

I have a keyboard that glows in the dark. Maybe I need the ASUS ROG Gladius II Aura Sync USB Wired Optical Ergonomic Gaming Mouse with DPI target button. This $100 computer critter is a high end gaming mouse, and note that the interface is a wire. Proof that new technology (in this case, wireless interface to mouse) is sometimes inferior, and the old technology gets you more.

Other mice

The Logitech M330 Silent Plus Wireless Large Mouse is a large size mouse that makes no noise and is inexpensive (and wireless, but not bluetooth)
The super accruate, wired, Corsair Gaming M65 Pro RGB FPS Gaming Mouse, Backlit RGB LED, 12000 DPI, Optical is for gamers and has lots of buttons.

The mouse I need is probably the one I hope to find over at Goodwill; I need a plug in USB mouse to allow quick access to any computer any time without needing a dongle dangling off the back of something.

gregladen Sat, 07/29/2017 - 05:24

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You may be suspicious of the whole ergonomic thing, but as someone who has had very painful hand problems for 20 years, I think rather differently. I finally got roller ball type mice which are extremely helpful. Since my right hand is the most painful, I put the unit on the left side and use my leftmost finfgers to control it. It is not necessary to grip the unit at all, saving my thumbs. Having worked for years at the Harvard School of Public Health occupational health department, and followed those faculty members who established the Work Envirioment Department at UMass Lowell, I was very well placed to keep track of ergonomics for years. I have been retired for some years, but still use a computer for writing and design.

Microsoft Starck mouse.

Mary, it sounds like you are doing exactly what I would have recommended. The main thing you did was to switch hands, which totally obviates the elimination of variables, of course. Having a loose grip is hugely important. If you look at the grabby full handed ergonomic mice being sold, I think you might agree that they are not built for a light touch with fingertip control.

As a harvard trained biological anthropologist (we have to study skeletal and muscular systems) I'm certainly not suggesting that the research is suspect. I'm suggesting that the use of "ergonomic" in the advertising of certain products is suspect.

MikeN, do you like that mouse? It tends to get very mixed reviews.

I second the observation that ergonomic mice (mouses?) are good stuff and not just hype. I use the Evoluent Vertical mouse (evoluent.com), which is similar to the one you suggested. It is significantly more comfortable on the long term than a regular mouse, and also comes in a left-handed variant (I alternate semiregularly between hands, which also helps). Basically, switching hands lets your "bad" hand rest while the other works; using an ergonomic mouse lets you go longer before you need to switch.

You missed another important thing when it comes to buying mice:

Don't simply order one online, no matter how good the reviews are. Make sure you actually get your hand on one, either at a store or a friend's.
This will let you find out that the "best but most expensive small mouse for general mobile use" would be a constant annoyance for you because the size and proportions of your hand will result in constant inadvertent button presses.

I did like the Starck mouse.

On the topic of Ergonomics and RSI - I started developing RSI from mouse use a few years ago, and eventually saw a specialist.
The point he stressed to me was the need for variety, and not simply use the same muscles fixed in the same tiny range of movement day in and day out.
His advice at the time was to buy 100 mice and alternate between them.
My solution was to buy an adjustable mouse and adjust its configuration daily.
Still doing so, and now on my 3rd MadCatz RAT7, and still pain-free.

The obese marathon mouse

dr. dolittle — Wed, 11 Jan 2017 23:41:06 +0000

The obese marathon mouse

Dummerstorf marathon mouse, Image from Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology

As the name implies, Dummerstorf marathon mice are bred to run. If allowed to be sedentary, these animals can build up quite a bit of fat within their peripheral tissues even if they do not overeat. If given an exercise wheel, however, they burn fat very quickly.

In a new study published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology - B, researchers discovered that the livers of these mice have an increased ability to not only store fat but to also rapidly mobilize fat when necessary for exercise. If they are able to identify genes or proteins that can turn on (or off) similar signaling pathways to promote fat mobilization and utilization in humans, the research may be relevant to the treatment of obesity or perhaps non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Source:

Ohde D, Brenmoehl J, Walz C, Tuchscherer A, Wirthgen E, Hoeflich A. Comparative analysis of hepatic miRNA levels in male marathon mice reveals a link between obesity and endurance exercise capacities. Journal of Comparative Physiology B.186(8): 1067-1078, 2016.

dr. dolittle Wed, 01/11/2017 - 18:41

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Skipping breakfast is another reason that prevents you from burning belly fat. Research has shown that people who skip breakfast have a tendency to store abdominal fat. When you skip breakfast, you activate your body’s starvation response.

Discovery of a mouse that menstruates

dr. dolittle — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 11:02:18 +0000

Discovery of a mouse that menstruates

Image of a spiny mouse. Credit: Clive Druett/Getty

Although laboratory rodents are used to study estrogen-related disorders, they are different from humans in that they do not menstruate. Therefore, they are not used to understand or develop treatments for disorders related to menstruation, like endometriosis, premenstrual syndrome (PMS) or some fertility disorders.

Researchers from Monash University (Australia), have now reported they've discovered a rodent that actually has a menstrual cycle similar to humans. The spiny mouse (Acomys cahirinus) has about a nine day cycle that includes three days of bleeding (shedding of the endometrium and evidence of blood in the vaginal canal), which is a similar ratio to the human cycle. This was discovered by flushing the vaginas of spiny mice as well as other species that were known not to have menstrual cycles and looking for evidence of blood. They are continuing to examine the uterine structure and changes in gene expression throughout the menstrual cycle to see how similar these are to humans. This is a very interesting finding as reportedly only 1.5% of mammals have a menstrual cycle and as you can imagine, most are primates. In fact, baboons are currently used as a model for endometriosis.

Sources:

biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/03/056895

Scientific American

dr. dolittle Tue, 06/14/2016 - 07:02

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Cure to fear of cats discovered

dr. dolittle — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 18:49:53 +0000

Cure to fear of cats discovered

...for rodents and men at least.

A team of researchers at UC Berkeley have discovered that mice infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii lose their innate fear of cats, even months after the infection is cleared. In fact, infected mice were mildly attracted to the odor of cats. This side effect likely evolved because the parasite can only sexually reproduce in a cat's gut necessitating ingestion of the parasite. Incidentally, other researchers have described the same side effects in rats and men (but not women). The findings suggest that the parasitic infection causes permanent changes in the brain.

Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled organism that causes the infection toxoplasmosis, considered by the CDC to be the leading cause of foodborne illness-induced death. In humans Toxoplasma infection is also associated with behavioral changes and the development of schizophrenia in some people. In fact, studies have suggested that people with schizophrenia are more likely to have at one time been infected with the parasite compared to the general population.

The behavioral effects of the parasite have been attributed to microscopic cysts that form in the brain of infected individuals leading to increased production of the neurotransmitter dopamine. However, since the behavioral effects in the current study were found to persist even after the infection was considered cleared, the behavioral changes may not be due to cyst-induced dopamine production, but rather to some form of "re-wiring" in the brain.

It should be noted that other researchers suggest mice may not be the best model for studying Toxoplasma infections. Although an advantage to mice is that there are genetic tools available for studies with mice that are not available with other species. Some researchers also question whether the parasite causes schizophrenia in humans or whether people with schizophrenia are simply more likely to contract the parasite.

Sources:

Ingram WM, Goodrich LM, Robey EA, and Eisen MB. Mice Infected with Low-Virulence Strains of Toxoplasma gondii Lose Their Innate Aversion to Cat Urine, Even after Extensive Parasite Clearance. PLoS ONE 8, e75246 (2013).

Nature News

dr. dolittle Thu, 09/26/2013 - 14:49

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What do flies, fish, mice and worms have to do with biomedical science?

dr. dolittle — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:15:08 +0000

What do flies, fish, mice and worms have to do with biomedical science?

Image of common model organisms from European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).

A recent article posted in the BBC News provided a good explanation of why scientists commonly study these organisms as models for human diseases and conditions. Model organisms are chosen because their physiology is similar to other animals, including humans, in addition to other reasons:

Visit the BBC News to see why researchers most often use flies, fish, mice and worms to understand the mechanisms of disease and health.

Did you know that ~70% of the genes in a fruit fly are homologous to human genes? Zebrafish have genes that are homologous to those involved in ~75% of genetic-related human diseases.

Top Image: EMBL, Explore Model Organisms

dr. dolittle Tue, 06/18/2013 - 07:15

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I would suggest that everyone objectively read the writings of Dr Spetner and Dr Alvin Radgowsky..both highly respected scientists....not kooky creationists by any means... Look at the probability calculated that an aeomeba formed itself by chance....humans have 92 chromsomes yet worms have over 100? They only use scientific data and mathematics to clearly show how improbable this

@James #1 -- This is off topic from the post. Anyone except a kooky creationist would understand that any such "probability calculated" is utter and complete nonsense. Please feel free to peruse any number of past postings in Lifelines, EvolutionBlog, or elsewhere on this site to learn why.

When studying a gene that is new for me, I immediately want to know if a homolog exists in mouse, bird, fish, fly, worm, yeast, and how similar it is. If it's conserved down to yeast, we know it's pretty ancient. Yeah, we believe in common decent, partly cause it gives us ideas that have proven useful in the past and we figure it'll help again on today's gene. We're so crazy we want to know what other proteins interact with this protein in yeast. It's almost never useless information.

Many years ago I had a serious head injury, I have found over the years that the brain can heal itself, however slowly, even years afterwards. Though not completely so, it is much, much better now than at the time of injury and even several years after.

Fish, mice, flies and moles have the same physiological mechanism as humans and this the reason that most of the experiments are performed on them.

An Archival Treasure: Singing Mice?

jgoldman — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 09:00:00 +0000

An Archival Treasure: Singing Mice?

Sometimes, when trolling through your institution's journal subscriptions online, you wander into a treasure trove. I happened upon such a treasure trove recently: the Journal of Animal Behavior, which was published for just six years, between 1911 and 1916.

The studies described in this journal were being conducted at a time when experimental psychology was just emerging as a serious scientific discipline. In 1881, for example, Wilhelm Wundt organized the first scientific journal devoted to psychological science. The first laboratory for experimental psychology was established at Yale University by George Trumbull Ladd in 1879. Thirty years on, some of the early giants of animal behavior were publishing in the eponymous journal - scientists like Robert Yerkes (renown ethologist/primatologist), Karl Lashley (of engram fame), and John Watson (considered by many the founder of the school of behaviorism). To put this into perspective, Ivan Pavlov's experiments on the conditioned reflex in dogs were conducted in 1901, just a decade prior to the first issue of this journal.

And so it is in the Journal of Animal Behavior that we find one Charles A. Coburn, a graduate student at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. He writes,

In the literature of animal behavior appear several references to the production by mice of sounds of musical quality. The "singing" of mice is described variously by different writers. Lee states that it consists of a series of chirps at the rate of three or four per second. At the beginning of the series, the chirps are low but gradually they become louder. The "song" of one mouse this author likens to the sweet and varied warbling of a canary. Every note was "clear and distinct."

In referring to the same phenomenon, the naturalist Brehm attributes the following descriptions to various observers. One informant states that the "song" is an irregular mixture of chirps and trills with here and there a snarling, smacking sound followed by a low murmur. Another describes it as a twitter which is a mixture of long drawn squeaking and piping sounds which may be heard at a distance of twenty paces.

One observer noted the phenomenon only in the case of a female mouse while giving birth to young, while another observer states that only the male sings.

It is not unusual, of course, for animals such as mice to emit sounds, but what was particularly interesting to Coburn was the musical quality of these chirps. What conditions would lead mice to vocalize in this way? Some scientists had assumed that the dulcet tones of these mice had to be due to some sort of disease or distress affecting the lungs or the any of the vocal organs, but others had blamed pregnancy or liver parasites.

Many scientific observations are the result of luck or happenstance, and on the evening of December 1, 1911, the young Mr. Coburn simply happened to be in the right place at the right time.

He describes his experience in the third person:

The writer desires to add to the observations already reported an additional record of "singing" mice. About the first of December, 1911, while working one evening in his study, he heard a series of sounds which seemed to come from above the ceiling. At the time, they were thought to resemble the soft chirp of a bird.

Shortly afterward, some wild mice were needed for breeding experiments and, by means of a trap, two mice, a male and a female, were captured in the room.

These animals, while being taken to the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, produced sounds like those previously heard in the room and they continued to do so at intervals after being placed in a laboratory cage.

Unfortunately for Coburn, but somewhat fortuitously for the critter, the male mouse escaped, which meant that the female singing mouse was mated with a domesticated lab mouse. The singing diva subsequently produced thirty-three offspring in five litters. None of her progeny ever sang as their mother did, nor did any of her grandmice nor great-grandmice.

As far as Coburn could tell, the enigmatic singing female mouse was an ordinary house mouse (Mus musculus). He noted that she was "extremely active and savage, and her mate always bore the marks of her teeth." There was not any reliable way to predict when the singing would occur, though a pattern seemed to indicate that she would sing starting three to four days prior to the birth of her litter, through the sixth or seventh day following. "It was observed, also, that the individual 'sang' sometimes when frightened."

Coburn took pains to describe in detail the singing of his little rodent performer:

The quality of the tone resembled somewhat that of a fife or flute, but each tone ended with a slight throaty click. The tones were uttered at the rate of four or five per second in groups of varying size. Sometimes, a group occupied one second, some- times as long as ten seconds. As a rule, the tones of a group were not clear and distinct but, instead, were-uttered so rapidly as to seem connected. The throaty click was more noticeable in the case of the last tone of a group. Often the "singing" would be continued for a period of ten or fifteen minutes with rests between groups.

He wrote, "The sound is best described as a rapid whole-toned trill involving the tones c and d," as in this notation, the only image in the paper.

The incredible singing mouse kept singing through June of 1912, but no further singing was heard following the first of July that year. In August, she died, likely of old age. But the following May, singing was again heard in Coburn's study: the very same room in which the singing mice had first been captured. Was it the escaped male mouse, singing the blues, mourning the loss of the other half of his crooning duo? Or was it perhaps the restless spirit of the deceased female mouse, reminding Coburn of the enduring mystery of the singing mice?

Science will likely never know.

Charles A. Coburn (1912). Singing Mice Journal of Animal Behavior, 2 (5), 364-366

Image source.

jgoldman Mon, 12/13/2010 - 04:00

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mammals

mouse

nyt

Unfortunately for Coburn, but somewhat fortuitously for the critter, the male mouse escaped, which meant that the female singing mouse was mated with a domesticated lab mouse.

Of course, had the male mouse known that all that was expected of it in captivity was singing and mating, it might not have tried that hard to escape.

Dear Jason,

An interesting find! We've learned that there are historical precedents for this observation dating back at least to the 1850s, in publications ranging from Zoologist (Farr, 1857), Nature (Sidebotham, 1877), Ripley's Believe it or Not (1931), and Time Magazine (1936). There was a good review written by Dice in 1932 (J. Mammalogy).

This work seems to have been largely forgotten. In more recent times, a few people (notably GD Sales, J Zoology, 1972) started looking at what was thought to be a separate phenomenon: ultrasonic vocalizations. More recently, we (at the time unaware of these early reports about singing mice) showed that these ultrasonic vocalizations are indeed songs (Holy & Guo, PLoS Biology, 2005).

You can hear some of these ultrasonic songs, shifted into the hearing range of humans, on our website: http://holylab.wustl.edu.

Interestingly, the 1877 publication in Nature (which is not a scientific paper, it is an anecdotal account of a stay in a hotel room with a singing mouse) includes speculation that perhaps all mice sing, but at ultrasonic frequencies. It seems that rare mice sing audibly; to my knowledge, the differences between these individuals and "normal" mice are not yet understood.

Smell a lady, shrug off flu - how female odours give male mice an immune boost

edyong — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 11:00:26 +0000

Smell a lady, shrug off flu - how female odours give male mice an immune boost

Sex might be fun but it's not without risks. As your partner exposes themselves to you, they also expose you to whatever bacteria, viruses or parasites they might be carrying. But some animals have a way around that. Ekaterina Litvinova has found that when male mice get a whiff of female odours, their immune systems prepare their airways for attack, increasing their resistance to flu viruses.

Litvinova worked with a group of mice that were exposed to bedding that had previously been soiled by females in the sexually receptive parts of their cycle. She compared them to a second more monastic group that were isolated from female contact.

Male mice use smells to track down females who are ready to mate. They'll follow markings of faeces and urine and when they actually find the female, they'll continue sniffing her nose and genitals. Each of these nasal encounters could be a source of infection. She then pitted both groups against a flu virus. Influenza doesn't affect wild populations of house mice, so the virus in this case is acting as more of an indicator of the animals' defences, rather than a representative of a real threat.

Both groups of mice lost a bit of weight, but at certain doses of virus, those that had been exposed to female aromas kept more of their grams on. They also fared better in the long run - just 20% of them died, compared to 46% of those that had only smelled male odours.

Their lungs revealed the secret behind their resistance. After sniffing the female bedding, the males had conscripted white blood cells to their airways - some of the most potent defences against respiratory infections. This flood of new recruits led to a defensive force almost three times as strong as those marshalled by isolated males. The arrival of white blood cells into the lungs can sometimes cause inflammation, which hampers a mouse's lung capacity. But Litvinova found that the bedding sniffers weren't affected in this way. Their aerobic abilities were normal.

Of course, mouse bedding is a smorgasbord of different chemicals and it isn't exactly free of infectious viruses and bacteria itself. Perhaps when males sniffed the bedding, these resident microbes triggered an immune response that allowed them to resist the later flu attack? Litvinova doesn't rule out this possibility, but she thinks that it's an unlikely explanation. After all, the male mice were all housed in groups. Even those that were isolated from females still got to sniff the bedding of other males, and they weren't significantly protected against the flu.

Instead, she thinks that it's a sensible strategy for mice to get an immune boost if they smell the scent of a sexually receptive female. With mating and close-quarters contact on the cards, it's worth giving yourself better odds of warding away any pesky infections that might transfer alongside those bodily fluids. However, the best test of this hypothesis is one that hasn't been carried out yet - to see if males get different degrees of protection if they smell females at different parts of their sexual cycle.

Reference: Litvinova, E., Goncharova, E., Zaydman, A., Zenkova, M., & Moshkin, M. (2010). Female Scent Signals Enhance the Resistance of Male Mice to Influenza PLoS ONE, 5 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009473

Photo by Rama

More on immune responses:

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp

edyong Sun, 03/07/2010 - 06:00

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What happens when mice are housed communally? According to this hypothesis the males would exhibit chronic hyper immune activity. That should be easy to determine. Even with divided housing the bedding would be same, and if it is a chemical, and not microbial, response you should see the same result. If the immune response cycles with the female's receptivity, you have your answer.

A better test would be to isolate the causative agent "mouse bedding is a smorgasbord of different chemicals and it isn't exactly free of infectious viruses and bacteria itself"

The best part of further research would be to see if a similar thing happens in humans! Let's get some ethics approval and DO IT!

Remember, there are three Fs that stress readies us for. Not only fight and flight but also fornicate. Furthermore, the fight can occur at the microscopic level.

I would suggest that as the male mouse goes into "heat" an increase in dopamine levels would occur as they do in other anticipatory conditions. Devoino showed as early as 1984 that dopamine stimulates cytokines associated with the cellular immune system (Th1) while serotonin suppresses them. She could not use current terminology for it had not yet been described and her concepts of the thymus and adrenal may be more Selye than 2010.

The monoamine systems take part in the mechanisms of immunomodulation: the dopaminergic one accelerates and the serotoninergic system inhibits the development of immune response, the final result being determined by their interaction. The immunomodulation is actualized by the dopaminergic system through the thymus and by the serotoninergic one--through the adrenals

The rat would be primed to combat viral and bacterial infections. Of course, if there is excessive allostatic load, the immune system falls apart. Best example, AIDS.

As Ader, Cohen and many others have shown, one can not separate emotions from the immune system. IMHO, every psychotropic is an immunomodulator.

Rodent Activated Detection and Riddance

bleimanb — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:31:01 +0000

Rodent Activated Detection and Riddance

A UK-based company recently unveiled a new mousetrap that utilizes technology rather than Monterey jack to capture and then slaughter adorable mice. The company, Rentokil (nope, not kidding), has developed a contraption that looks like the opening to a tunnel, preying on mice's natural curiosity that any dark hole may have delicious food waiting inside. Upon entering the hole, however, the mice trigger an infrared beam, which closes the door behind them. Once the doors are shut, the trap releases carbon dioxide until the mice pass out and then die of asphyxiation. The time of capture to the time of death? 20-40 seconds!

The device is called Rodent Activated Detection and Riddance (RADAR).

Who wouldn't want to kill these disgusting little pests?

Says Jed Kenrick, Rentokil's managing director in this article in the India Times, "It is James Bond technology. We have used the strategies applied by the security industry for dealing with intruders in buildings, but this trap is just 10 inches long."

Kendrick went on to detail plans for their next version of the mousetrap, a satellite-mounted, laser that vaporises mouse from space, using Google Earth as a tracking system.

It's a trick....get an axe.

For more details, http://www.uk.rentokil.com/services-and-solutions/service-solutions/mou….

bleimanb Fri, 10/12/2007 - 05:31

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mouse

Maybe it would be OK if they didn't use carbon dioxide, which triggers a panic response in mammals. The little creatures would die in terror. How long is 40 seconds to such a small creature? Could they use one of the noble gasses with an anaesthetic effect?

Even worse are the "glue traps" in which the poor thing basically dies of thirst and exhaustion.

Benny, I've lived in a mouse-infested flat. It's true, they are precious wee tiny cute things. Still: we didn't want them pissing and shitting along the floorboards under our children's beds. Hantavirus and leptospira aren't as cute as the mice that bear them.

Mousetraps, of the traditional cartoon variety, helped a bit. After all, each one tripped means one mouse fewer. We learned to listen for that satisfying KLAP! each night as we dozed off.

Nobody likes to kill mice for the killing's own sake, though, and anyway, traps have at best a reducing effect. You really need to go through your place and stuff every concealed gap, no matter how small-seeming, with steel wool; then cover it with duct tape. This will keep the mice from getting into your place to begin with.

Mind you, we did have a space round the pipes coming up from the cellar to our kitchen sink that was too big to stuff with steel wool. Here we used glue traps. They took their effect over a weekend while we were away. A long, summer weekend. Glue traps are effective, but the result is not pleasant.

Alternatively, get a cat. If you live in a terraced house, the mouse colony will not be destroyed; but it will bother your neighbours, not you. Downside: for this to work well, you need to let the cat piss the place up a bit.

Otherwise, I agree with decrepitoldfool. This trap sounds a bit higher-tech than it needs to be, but assuming one wants to use this sort of thing, would it be that much more expensive to use a gas that sends the animals off into oblivion without suffering rather than making them spend a spell in terminal terror?

MME Tilden, I didn't mean to come across quite as anti-mouse killing activist as I did in that post. I just thought it was a particularly cute picture of mice that I found to accompany the article about their destruction.

It is true that the only mouse traps I use are have-a-hearts which capture the mice without doing them harm. Generally, I then set the mice free outside my neighbors' houses instead of my own.

I, however, don't really care if other people are killing mice. I just wish there was a way to actually use the laser beams to do the killing.

Argon would have been a more humane gas to use. CO2 is the gas that triggers panting/asphyxiation response (it's not the lack of oxygen that does it).

We used argon to dispatch large rats in a live trap, and they showed no signs of distress at all. It's a quick, painless, and relatively dignified way to go. Heck- food, cozy live trap, painlessly fading from consciousness- those rats probably enjoyed their last few minutes. Argon is not that expensive, and it's very easy to find.

oh my god

i own mice as pets how could you do such things? mouse proof your hopuse if you don't want them! what is wong with you people humane traps are less messy and you can release them elsewhere disgustiong excuses for human beings is what people are who enjoy killing a mouse

how horrible! mice are like any other animal, they were around before we were! we took away their home. now does it sound fair to just kill them? they aren't coming into our homes and killing us? they just need to find a replacement since a bunch of cement walls and floors were placed on theirs. mouse proof your house if you dont want them! send them out into the wild away from your home, but dont kill them! & this picture justifies how cute they are not.."Who wouldn't want to kill these disgusting little pests?" honestly the human race disgust me!

You people have no idea what you are talking about. The worst form of disposing of a rodent is the use of an anti coagulant.This causes every vein to rupture, slowly. The animal dies in agony over 5 days, but they do it silently and away from our eyes, so no one notices.

Well... I appreciate the info. I have been overrun by the little creatures. Tried all kinds of "humane" traps and such and the little buggers keep coming in droves.. and getting brave. I havent tried sprinkling black pepper around areas we see them yet (we see them all over) but the oil of peppermint on the cotton balls worked.. you have to use real peppermint oil from health food store which cost about $20 US per bottle but husband had allergic reaction with edema and had to cease use. They were still around, we just didnt see much evidence. Guess they had enough dog food stored to survive the 3wks of use cause they came back like they never ever left. So weighing the alternatives of the bacteria and disease from the fleas they leave around, I appreciate a method of disposal. However, if some of you bleeding hearts want to come over, trap them alive and take them off premises, I welcome you, otherwise they are going to be dealt with. It is pretty bad when you see 3 or 4 scampering openly nightly. Mouse poop all over my counters searching for food I have in tight lid containers. I have containers for everything cuz they eat through the packages of cookie mix, indivi popcorn packs inside the box, etc.. they are of All colors, I have brown, black, tan and some with white markings on feet. Some have regular ears, some have very large ears. Speak your peace, cuz if this pepper method doesnt work and another rodicide i've been told about is too costly, gonna acquire the services of a professional exterminator. Cute, yes. Destructive, definitely. I hate frigerated bread and it has come to that. You want em.. let me know.

Why should we be able to gas to innocent mice? They did it to people in WW2 and i think every one remembers the response to that.