This is an extract from Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, published by Harper Perennial 2009. You are free to copy it, paste it, bake it, reprint it, read it aloud, as long as you don’t change it – including this bit – so that people know that they can find more ideas for free at www.badscience.net

The Doctor Will Sue You Now

This chapter did not appear in the original edition of this book, because for fifteen months leading up to September 2008 the vitamin-pill entrepreneur Matthias Rath was suing me personally, and the Guardian, for libel. This strategy brought only mixed success. For all that nutritionists may fantasise in public that any critic is somehow a pawn of big pharma, in private they would do well to remember that, like many my age who work in the public sector, I don’t own a flat. The Guardian generously paid for the lawyers, and in September 2008 Rath dropped his case, which had cost in excess of £500,000 to defend. Rath has paid £220,000 already, and the rest will hopefully follow.  Nobody will ever repay me for the endless meetings, the time off work, or the days spent poring over tables filled with endlessly cross-referenced court documents.

On this last point there is, however, one small consolation, and I will spell it out as a cautionary tale: I now know more about Matthias Rath than almost any other person alive. My notes, references and witness statements, boxed …

A while back I came across the Debian Neuroscience Repository (NeuroDebian). The aim of this project is to provide a comprehensive repository of open-source neuroscientific software. Kind of like an app store for neuroscientists. The list of software includes everything from visualization of EEG data to speech analysis and synthesis. And I'm proud to say that OpenSesame is listed as well.

As the name suggests, the repository is exclusively for the Debian family of Linux systems, which includes the well known Ubuntu Linux. But fortunately they also provide a Virtual Machine. This means that Windows and Mac users can try NeuroDebian without having to go through the trouble of installing an unfamiliar operating system.

Just take a look at their list of software. Chances are that you will find something interesting!

P.S. As a totally random aside, while typing this post I noticed that the Firefox spell checker suggests that I change "neuroscience" to "pseudoscience" and "neuroscientific" to "nonscientific"!

When you are dealing with a threatening situation, you need to do some serious risk assessment. Depending on your chances of survival, fear can make you run away or it can make you fight. This is the well known fight or flight response. But fear can also elicit the opposite response: If threat is relatively low, it’s better not to act at all. For example, a rat that encounters a predator usually shows freezing behavior, in which all movement except breathing is suppressed. This behavior improves the rat's chances of staying undetected and prepares it to act if necessary.

So what do humans do when they encounter mildly dangerous yet threatening events? In a recent study in Psychological Science, Roelofs, Hagenaars and Stins measured body sway while participants were standing on a force platform and viewed emotional faces. Their crucial finding was that passive viewing of angry faces (compared to neutral and happy faces) caused a significant reduction in body mobility: If you see an angry face, you sway less. This reduced mobility was accompanied by a reduced heart rate. Thus, involuntary bodily responses to social threat cues involve freeze-like behavior in humans, just like in animals. Interestingly, they also found that freezing behavior is most pronounced in people who are naturally anxious.

It seems like it doesn’t take much to get us ‘glued to the spot’. The next time you notice a poor little animal trying to be invisible, remember that you are probably doing the same …

Conclusion In “The Grand Design”, Hawking and Mlodinow discuss the big questions of modern physics. The subject matter is engrossing, but the hurried presentation leaves the reader unsatisfied.

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”

There is a definite ring of truth to this famous statement, but because my chances of becoming a physicist are slim, the best I can do is occasionally pick up a popular science book. And, of course, no one has popularized physics like Stephen Hawking, the enigmatic disabled genius.

A great deal has been made of Hawking's newest book, “The Grand Design”, which he has written together with Leonard Mlodinow. Especially the superfluous statement that there is no God (or something to that effect) caused a small stir in the press, even in our not particularly pious country.

Unfortunately, “The Grand Design” does not live up to the hype. The book is entertaining, but there is little to set it apart from the competition. Hawking and Mlodinow start out with a very brief introduction to the philosophy of science. From there they fly by quantum mechanics, glance over string theory, and, a mere 150 pages later (large font, lots of pictures), they arrive at the grand conclusion. In this conclusion they appear to say something important, perhaps even brilliant, about how the total energy of the universe is zero, which would allow the universe to appear out of nothing (or something along those lines). But the problem with the conclusion, and the book in …

This month, the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced Scientific Reports, a new online, open access journal. The new journal is reminiscent of PLoS One, which has the same liberal criteria for acceptance: All original and technically valid papers are accepted.

This move is a little surprising, because in the past Nature has accused PLoS One of relying on "bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals." Perhaps their change of mind has something to do with the recent uprise against NPG's increased subscription fees, in which the University of California threatened to boycott all Nature journals.

Nevertheless, I think it's a very good thing that one of the most distinguished publishers in the world has joined in the open access movement.

And now we can all have a Nature publication!