The rain band near the equator that determines the supply of freshwater to nearly a billion people throughout the tropics and subtropics has been creeping north for more than 300 years, probably because of a warmer world, according to research published in the July issue of Nature Geoscience.

If the band continues to migrate at just less than a mile (1.4 kilometers) a year, which is the average for all the years it has been moving north, then some Pacific islands near the equator - even those that currently enjoy abundant rainfall - may be drier within decades and starved of freshwater by midcentury or sooner. The prospect of additional warming because of greenhouse gases means that situation could happen even sooner.

Lead author Julian Sachs, associate professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, said:

We're talking about the most prominent rainfall feature on the planet, one that many people depend on as the source of their freshwater because there is no groundwater to speak of where they live. In addition many other people who live in the tropics but farther afield from the Pacific could be affected because this band of rain shapes atmospheric circulation patterns throughout the world.

The researchers found evidence of salt-tolerant microbes buried in lake sediments, corresponding to a period 400 - 1,000 years ago, suggesting a period of reduced rainfall. Additional evidence was provided by ratios of hydrogen isotopes of material in the sediments that can only be explained by large changes in precipitation. The findings are based on sediment cores from lakes and lagoons on Palau, Washington, Christmas and Galapagos islands.

As usual, the folk at JABS were well ahead of the game, cottoning on quickly after the Jeni Barnett blog storm that something sinister was afoot. As three of their top investigative members <a href="
http://www.jabs.org.uk/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3643&SearchTerms=jeni">noted:

Squib: A little bird has told me Bad Science will be seeding the blog-sphere with this story. It would be interesting to find out if this has been at the suggestion of a PR Consultant. If he has employed a consultant, the email will probably included dangling carrots so as to deflect the blogger from independently checking the facts.

Jabba: There is no way all of this could have happened so quickly without Pharma backing.

They have to prove that what they do, keeps the pharma donors happy....

The story began back in 2003. With the MMR controversy in full swing, vaccine manufacturers like Merck were facing the terrifying prospect of plummeting orders from their sinister Health Ministry collaborators. If things didn't turn around soon, they were going to have to release a new brand of painkiller, or create a new type of flu to keep their profits going. In order to avert the crisis, they employed top PR specialists BS Communications an agency with a long and distinguished history of influencing public health policy.

The agency had a plan - to leverage the increasing power of bloggers and create an 'astroturf' movement - but they needed a charismatic leader to inspire others to follow. Step forward Keeping up Appearances actress Patricia Routledge. After the BBC cancelled her popular series Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, the actress was out of work and looking for cash to supplement her pension. BS Communications approached her, and quickly established that a thirty-something male doctor was well within the range of the veteran thespian's abilities. Routledge signed, and the fake character "Ben Goldacre" was born. Some claim that you can see the resemblance in the following publicity photo from the mid-90s.

With the fake 'Ben' character in place, the next step was to recruit a number of sycophantic followers to, well, follow him. I was a freelancer when I was approached, selling bad jokes to comedy birthday card manufacturers. Work had dried up owing to the catastrophic collapse of the comedy card industry as the increasing age of the population meant that most people just wanted cards with flowers and trains and cricket bats on them. In that climate, I was more than happy to oblige. 'Zeno' was an obvious choice, with his Acne Treatment Device sitting in direct competition to many of the qua..., sorry, professionals targetted. Frank Swain came from the militant anti-science wing of the BNP, explaining his almost fanatical campaigning on their behalf ahead of the European Elections, while Gimpy is in fact nothing more than a modified chat bot regurgitating material from a Merck PR library.

With this crack team in place it's easy to see how BS Communications are able to dominate the blogosphere so effectively. Every couple of months, a random-number generator linked to a database of alternative health qua..., sorry, professionals is used to generate a target, technology first used in a more primitive form by the Bush administration's defence staff (they used a dart and a blindfold, although latterly unsuccessful trials with a hunting rifle were conducted). Frank "No-Greens" Swain takes the result and sends an e-mail around telling everyone what to write; BSC make payments to us all via PayPal, Routledge dons her Goldacre wig and visits a pub to talk to drunk people in a sinister brain-washing exercise; and within 24 hours a media storm is created.

If you think about it, you probably should have worked it out all along. I mean, the idea that a diverse and disordered bunch of people around the world passionate about politics and science would actually write these stories of their own free will is just nuts. I'll no doubt be expelled from the collective, but at least now you know The Truth.

Oh, and one more thing - we set up the British Chiropractic Association as an elaborate parody. I mean, come on, did you really think such a daft organization could be real?!

After having the seeds tested by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Kabul, the Guardian reports that officials have acknowledged their error and promised to return the mung beans to their rightful owner.

At the time, Colonel General Khodaidad, Afghanistan's minister of counter-narcotics, claimed the beans were a strain of "super poppy". For your benefit, I've attached images below for comparison.

Can you tell the which is which?

The priest claimed to be tee-total, except for the fact that he had celebrated four masses that day and obviously there's wine in that. Whether there's the amount of wine necessary to put you over the limit (or on the U.K. limit) isn't necessarily the point. Having drunk the wine in some sort of cannibalistic cult ritual rather than in a bar with friends doesn't make you any less dangerous on the motorway. I bet those crackers don't help soak much of it up either.

The premise is pretty simple, as you'd expect from a Mens' Magazine. Scientists do some of the coolest things in the world, yet they don't get the recognition of their rock star peers. So why not set up a kind of weird cultural-exchange buddy system, where scientists pose with rockstars?

Except, what's the logic here? It's eerily reminiscent of the first days of the Blair administration in the late 90s, when a succession of rock stars were invited to Number 10 for... well nobody really knows what for. Is the rock-stariness supposed to somehow rub off on the hapless scientists? Is coolness contagious? How does standing someone next to a rock star in any way promote them or their profession?

So I spoke to some fellow writers and spent some moments in quiet contemplation of the pictures. Ah, the pictures. Here's one of them now.

The rock star, in case you were wondering, is the one in the middle. Sheryl Crowe her name is, and she is unquestionably cool. The other two, the ones who are fawning over the guitar-wielding goddess, are the scientists. As test-tube-wielding goddess Dr. Isis notes, images like this promote rock stars, not scientists. Crowe's expression isn't one of respect, it's saying: "Who are these losers, and why do they have to stand so close to me?"

In fact it's hard to look at the picture and not imagine that you're watching 'first contact' taking place between two species on some even-lower-budget version of Star Trek. Things look to be going reasonably well, but one of the suit-wearing aliens appears to have stolen the blonde alien's guitar pick, and it's probably only a matter of time before the phasers come out.

We get a similar effect from Seal. Here, the photographer artfully plays on racial stereotypes by having Seal pose with a menacing expression, holding the microphone cable as though he's about to strangle somebody with it while the two clever white folk cower in the background. The one of the left bravely does an impression of Seal, with a pose that may get him further fame on a laxatives commercial.

Being serious for a moment, let's just look at the statistics here. GQ assembled 11 scientists, and 5 rock stars. Of the rock stars, two are black, one is a woman. Of the scientists, 11 are middle-aged white males. For a campaign that wants to attract new young people into science in a country where around half of young people are women and probably nearly half are from ethnic minorities, that's just moronic.

But, okay, you've got your middle-aged white guys in suits into the studio and you're ready to take some photos that promote science. It doesn't take a marketing genius to tell you that the scientists should be in the centre, and the rockstars should be fawning over them. I'll repeat the words of Dr. Isis here because she's right and I'm too lazy to bother rewriting it in my own words:

"It seems to me that if you want to have an effective campaign then what you do is put Sheryl Crow in a lab coat and take pictures of those guys teaching her to pipet or culture some cells or use a microscope. Don't take pictures of talented, gifted scientists -- scientists whose talents make them as unique and talented as the rockstars they are pictured with -- trying to be musicians. Take a picture of a musician aspiring to be a scientist."

To paraphrase Marvin the Android, it hurts to think down to the level of the guy that put these photos together.

Patient A, a 41-year-old Taiwanese male, suffered from intermittent dysthymia which presented with minor low mood, insomnia, anxiety, chest tightness, back pain, and subjectively mild occupational difficulty... patient A received a single chiropractic spinal manipulation. The chiropractor noticed a minor deformity in the thoracic spine, and a traction technique was administered. He experienced immediate relief from back pain. The following day he reported complete relief of chest tightness, dysthymia, fatigue, and insomnia, with HAM-D, TDQ, and VAS scores of 0 for all.

“No, no, I'm fine now, no need to do any more chiropractic on me, I'll be off then...”

Reminds me slightly of various Blue Jam sketches. (Meanwhile, proper holistic back-pain suggestions.)

The Campaign for Science & Engineering (CaSE) warmly welcomed the House of Commons' decision to establish the Science and Technology Committee. CaSE lobbied for it to be established following the merger of DIUS and BIS. In today's debate Phil Willis MP commended CaSE's efforts to bring back the Science and Technology Committee.
Commenting Nick Dusic, CaSE's Director, said:

It is great news that the Science and Technology Committee will be able to investigate science and engineering issues that cut right across government, including the science budget.
Today's decision showed that there is strong support for proper scrutiny of science and engineering within Parliament. It is critical that future changes to government do not result in the abolition of the Science and Technology Committee. Today's decision corrects the mistake made in 2007 of abolishing the Committee.
I look forward to working with the Science and Technology Committee in scrutinising the Government's science policies.

The Committee will be able to conduct wide-ranging inquiries, covering the full scope of science policy and related matters including the science budget.

Anyway, it tickles my fancy, if only because it checks the requisite boxes of "post apocalyptic dystopia" and "technopunk machinery". Which is good, because some of the people behind the film have been nice enough to send me these ludicrously high res images of the Fabricator, a factory robot with misfiring synapses that has been building the war machines. Click on the pictures below for full size images - they really are massive.

Here's the beast!

The above image is a down scaled crop from this texture plan:

Underneath the texturing are the bones of the machine, as lovingly illustrated in this artwork:

This is just a detail from the above graphic, and yet it's big enough that I could make it into a desktop wallpaper, just for you:

I've also been given an exclusive piece of artwork showing 3 and 4, two of the small "stitch punks" at the centre of the film's plot. The PR bumf says:

Communicating visually, not verbally, 3 and 4 are the scholarly twins who voraciously catalogue everything they can see and find, recording and building a massive database for the group of the world that surrounds them and the history that led up to their creation.

To which producer Tim Burton adds:

"3 and 4 go back to the original experience of non-speaking characters. I think it works for them, it makes them different from the others, and I can relate to those characters because I didn't speak when I was a child either."

Err, okay Tim. Anyway, click on the below image to see the full artwork. It will be available as a collectible card, my sources tell me that San Diego's Comic-Con 09 would be a good place to start looking for them, if you're into that kind of thing.

Stay tuned - if you like these images I'm sure I'll be able to get you some more.

The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee's report on press freedom, privacy and libel will be published in July, and the staff at Sense About Science are working hard to ensure the authors give consideration to this case and the consequences of Britain's grossly punitive libel laws.