New Scientist magazine recently published an article of 13 things that do not make sense. These are 13 things which so dramatically violate the laws of physics and chemistry as we know them that we might find ourselves reconsidering the universe. For example, does cold fusion work? In 1989 an experiment said it did. 200 US Navy experiments later and we’re not sure one way or the other. What about Dark Matter – the stuff that supposedly makes up 90% of the mass of the Universe and is the only thing that prevents galaxies from spinning apart. According to our understanding of physics, it MUST exists, but no probe or telescope has EVER seen a single sign of it, aside from the fact that it MUST exist!
My personal favorite is from the medical field, concerning the placebo effect:
“DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.”
This means we might be able to make real medicine from nothing! Also consider this one:
“Belfast homeopathy results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.”
This means we might make water think that it is some kind of medicine!
Check out the entire article: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg18524911.600
— Matt Ranlett