Thinking scientifically with meithy

[keltingmeith]

So I enjoy analysing things with a bit of a scientific lens - particularly when things pop up in my general sphere that are just plain ludicrous. I recently realised that this kind of scientific thinking is now relevant to the VCE study designs of the science subjects* - so, I thought I might share some things here for a bit of fun and to get people thinking scientifically themselves. While most of this topic is going to be me posting things randomly as I feel like, I highly HIGHLY encourage y'all to get involved and discuss things with me. It's the best way to learn, and picking apart bad science is straight up fun.

The pick of today comes from this reddit post I stumbled upon. Yes, I subscribe to r/chemistry, that's how you can tell I'm a nerd.

By fusing two O₂ molecules to create O₄ molecule, OXIGEN water goes beyond hydration.

Now THIS one is a doozy - right off the bat, hopefully physics students have noticed something a bit funny. The idea of "fusion" has nothing to do with making new chemicals - in fact, fusion works on singular nuclei (atoms, essentially), which is why it's referred to as "nuclear fusion". So, let's disregard that - surely the company is just "dumbing down" the language for us? Let's see what's next:

With 100 times more oxygen* than regular water, it instantly replenishes your brain, body and spirit. Who science could be so refreshing?

Okay, wait, time out - now the maths doesn't make sense. O₄ only has 4 times the amount of oxygen as water does, why is it 100 TIMES in this ad? They say it's because of how much of the oxygen is bioavailable, but that's confusing because water itself doesn't have any bioavailable oxygen to begin with - 100 times 0 is still 0. Something doesn't add up here, almost like they're using a bunch of science words to sound smarter than they actually are?

Also, why didn't they use an Oxford comma? Bunch of animals.

Alright, we need to get to the bottom of this. Let's check out their website

OXIGEN contains O4 – two O2 molecules fused together using a proprietary 120-step manufacturing process to create one oxygen super molecule that remains stable in water. That O4 super molecule is bioavailable, which means it enters your bloodstream upon consumption.

Okay, firstly, there's no such thing as a super molecule - that is straight made up. There are supramolecules, but those things are called that because they're big - as in, protein sized**. Four oxygen atoms by themselves ain't gonna cut it. Next point - if the "super molecule" is stable in water, how is your body going to use it? For the appropriate biochemical pathways to take place, your cells need that oxygen in the form of O₂ - but if their O₄ is so stable, how is your body going to turn it into oxygen that it can use? No biochemical pathway is gonna do that if O₄ isn't naturally occurring.

I'm going to ignore the next couple of paragraphs because it's more of them just using science words to sound smart, but the next paragraph is honestly hilarious:

Many waters claim to have electrolytes. But you might want to check their labels. Don’t see it? Maybe that’s because the FDA determined their water had such insignificant “trace amounts” of electrolytes they weren’t allowed to list it. If you check an OXIGEN label, you’ll see electrolytes listed right there. Because OXIGEN water actually contains enough to make a difference. Refreshing, huh?

Seriously, scroll up and have fun in that reddit post - the posted ingredients list literally says nothing about electrolytes.

Oh wait, there's an article here we can analyse. Let's have a look and see what the results say:

Despite no evidence of improved exercise performance, ingestion of OS did enhance post-exercise recovery via increased lactate clearance.

So basically, it doesn't increase bioavailable oxygen, it just increases the reduction of lactate. Look, that's not a /bad/ finding, but let's double check their graphs. Unfortunately, if you scroll to page 4 and look at the bottom, you'll notice those giant lines attached to each dot. Those are error bars, and indicate that there's actually /no significant difference between the placebo group and the OS group/. They're also using the error bars wrong, but we'll ignore that. Funnily enough, they go on to state:

However, this apparent enhancement in lactate metabolism was not detectable during exercise and did not yield an improvement in overall performance

Almost as if there actually ISN'T a significant difference, and you were just talking out your arse, huh?

There's one final thing I want to discuss: at the end of the website, they mention a researcher by name who endorses the product:

“The main finding from the current battery of tests is that ingestion of [ASO®] significantly improved post-exercise recovery from high-intensity aerobic exercise via enhanced lactate clearance. The ability to clear lactate more efficiently and hence recover faster in the early rounds of competition is of clear benefit to an athlete.”
Dr. Neil Fleming, Ph.D.

Department of Kinesiology, Recreation and Sports , Indiana State University

Firstly: that extra comma is annoying me (but not as much as them not using an Oxford comma earlier, grrr)

Secondly, I don't like dragging other people's names through the mud, but also people misquoting and using PhDs to push their products is a big problem, so I'm going to do my best. Firstly, Dr Fleming does not operate at Indiana State University - hell, he's not even in the US. According to that very paper up above, he's from Trinity College Dublin. Nothing wrong there, of course - but I do question if they got the right Neil Fleming, because if you try googling the man lots of different people come up. Secondly, what he's quoted as saying is a bunch of fluff that technically doesn't actually prove their point? He says that ASO increases the degradation of lactate - cool, that's what the paper he says. He then says that metabolising lactate SHOULD benefit someone - he's not even saying that ASO does it. He's using an appeal to common sense (bonus English study, huzzah) to make YOU think that ASO should benefit the person. He never himself says it, and his own paper above even /states/ that there was no improvement to the athletes.

So, what do you all think of the points I've raised? Notice anything else funny in the reddit post or on their website? Did you find anything similar you want me to take an in-depth look at?


* = I do not promise to help improve your score, there's a reason this is in general discussion and not the science help boards. At most, I promise you a laugh and good time. If you're lucky, you might get some use out of this - but also, there's no such thing as too much exposure to general scientific thinking if you're doing a science subject, so maybe that'll help

** = okay, yes, they can be smaller than proteins - but look, four oxygen atoms still aren't going to fit the definition of a supramolecule. Even more important, if the four oxygen atoms are truly "fuse", then they're not supramolecules because they're no longer multiple molecules. If you're gonna fight me on this point, I should warn you that my PhD is on this, it likely won't be a fair fight

[keltingmeith]

No discussion make me sad

So I got inspired by a recent article that was published that claimed to find links between COVID-19 and 5G waves. No, I'm not kidding - this peer review journal published an article titled, 5G Technology and induction of coronavirus in skin cells. Wait a minute, that website says the title is actually RETRACTED: 5G Technology and induction of coronavirus in skin cells, what does that mean?

Basically, if an article is retracted, the journal is basically saying, "we're only human, this shouldn't have been published, we're removing it so that nobody can ever use it again". The problem is that while the article is still out there, even if it's retracted, people still like to use it to their benefit. My personal opinion is that articles like this should still be allowed in circulation, but have a giant "RETRACTED" watermark thrown over it - so that the manuscript can still be held in contempt and analysed so that people can see WHY there's an issue with the paper. Unfortunately, the scientific world isn't governed by absolutes, and apparently some journals DO this, but many that I know don't.



So, instead of analysing that article, here's two more papers I want to talk about that were retracted. The first is titled, ‘Organic synthesis—Where now?’ is thirty years old. A reflection on the current state of affair, and is instead listed as "Withdrawn" - I'm not sure in this case if there's a real distinction between withdrawn and retracted. Seems like an odd title, as well, and not very science-y - so how could it be wrong? Because this article, which was published in a VERY affluent journal, published by some VERY affluent names, had some VERY toxic opinions. There was the usual racism, sexism, undermining of minority groups and claiming diversity is bad, but there was a new take that I find particularly damaging. You see, the discriminatory behaviour I just discussed? Exists in the scientific community, and it's disgusting, but also the scientific community is one of the ones where either you know it exists and trying to stop it, or you don't care, and I don't think this article was going to change anyone's opinions on those. However, one thing it DID suggest, was that chemistry is better off where the researchers play servant to their supervisor master - which is an incredibly toxic view that far too many students actually play along with. The discrimination is just plain disgusting, but likely won't change any minds - the servant/master attitude suggestion, on the other hand, might actually cause some students to enter such a relationship, which is just plain toxic for all involved, and could lead to the changing of people's lives for the worst. I'm really trying to stress that I'm not trying to undermine the disgustingness of the author (who, yes, fits that old white male stereotype disgustingly well) and their take on discrimination being good for science, so please don't interpret my words that way - this article was just bad on every front, so I wanted to try and point out some of the disturbing points you might miss in the overt discrimination.

And finally, the creme de la creme, everyone's favourite retracted article, Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children - but you may know it as the famous "MMI vaccine causes autism" paper. This paper exists because a bunch of lawyers paid out the researchers to prove that the vaccine causes autism so they could win their cases. I'm not even kidding, see here. This paper is famously recognised as an example of bad science, I just HAD to include it, even if it is cliched. We have cherry picking, we have defying Occam's razor, we don't even have statistical significance - the study included TWELVE CHILDREN. TWELVE. As if there aren't LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of vaccinated children in the US. Hell, this website suggests that more than 20,000 kids were vaccinated in the year 1998 alone. After accounting for the households that didn't answer the survey, it'll only take 5 years of kids to reach hundreds of thousands of people. And this guy could only find 12? Does that seriously not raise red flags? Hell, even then, only 9 of the kids even HAD autism. This paper is stinky, and I hate it took so long to be retracted. But, the good news is, it's available for you to read so you can see how disgustingly bad it truly is!


POSTSCRIPT EDIT: After some digging, I did manage to find a link to that first retracted article I wanted to talk about. However, I think I prefer everything I've written here, so instead I'm just going to go spitfire on some of the laughable things in this paper: a, the quality. It looks like it was written by a five year old. My favourite bit is figure 6 - it has the pixelation from using snipping tool, which I know because all of my assignments I wrote for one of my maths units whilst fueled on coffee and alcohol (bad mix, do not recommend) at midnight while still at university has the same marks. b, Half the paper is just a bunch of random equations we have no proof of verifying. I wouldn't be surprised if most of them are made up. It's well known that biologists and mathematics typically don't mix, I think they did this as a scare-tactic to get past the referees. c, No experiments. Seriously, none. They said, " this is our mathematical model, it must be true", then did no tests on it. d, Where did that probability graph come from? It looks like a 5 year old just drew a random curve. It's not smooth enough to be from equation 42, and it looks like it was generated from a smoothing function on some data - but where did they get this data from??? Also, they're using / instead of a decimal point. Never seen that before. It's weird.

Anyway, what does everyone else think of this stuff?