Astrologers fail to predict proof they are wrong

Good news for rational, level-headed Virgoans everywhere: just as you might have predicted, scientists have found astrology to be rubbish.

Its central claim – that our human characteristics are moulded by the influence of the Sun, Moon and planets at the time of our birth – appears to have been debunked once and for all and beyond doubt by the most thorough scientific study ever made into it.

For several decades, researchers tracked more than 2,000 people – most of them born within minutes of each other. According to astrology, the subject should have had very similar traits.

The babies were originally recruited as part of a medical study begun in London in 1958 into how the circumstances of birth can affect future health. More than 2,000 babies born in early March that year were registered and their development monitored at regular intervals.

Researchers looked at more than 100 different characteristics, including occupation, anxiety levels, marital status, aggressiveness, sociability, IQ levels and ability in art, sport, mathematics and reading – all of which astrologers claim can be gauged from birth charts.

The scientists failed to find any evidence of similarities between the “time twins”, however. They reported in the current issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies: “The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success . . . but the results are uniformly negative.”

Analysis of the research was carried out by Geoffrey Dean, a scientist and former astrologer based in Perth, Australia, and Ivan Kelly, a psychologist at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Dr Dean said the results undermined the claims of astrologers, who typically work with birth data far less precise than that used in the study. “They sometimes argue that times of birth just a minute apart can make all the difference by altering what they call the ‘house cusps’,” he said. “But in their work, they are happy to take whatever time they can get from a client.”

The findings caused alarm and anger in astrological circles yesterday. Roy Gillett, the president of the Astrological Association of Great Britain, said the study’s findings should be treated “with extreme caution” and accused Dr Dean of seeking to “discredit astrology”.

Frank McGillion, a consultant to the Southampton-based Research Group for the Critical Study of Astrology, said of the newly published work: “It is simplistic and highly selective and does not cover all of the research.” He added that he would lodge a complaint with the editors of the journal.

Astrologers have for centuries claimed to be able to extract deep insights into the personality and destiny of people using nothing more than the details of the time and place of birth.

Astrology has been growing in popularity. Surveys suggest that a majority of people in Britain believe in it, compared with only 13 per cent 50 years ago. The Association of Professional Astrologers claims that 80 per cent of Britons read star columns, and psychological studies have found that 60 per cent regularly read their horoscopes.

Despite the scepticism of scientists, astrology has grown to be a huge worldwide business, spawning thousands of telephone lines, internet sites and horoscope columns in newspapers and magazines.

It seems that no sector of society is immune to its attraction. A recent survey found that a third of science students subscribed to some aspects of astrology, while some supposedly hard-headed businessmen now support a thriving market in “financial astrology” – paying for predictions of trends such as the rise and fall of the stock market. Astrology supplements have been known to increase newspaper circulation figures and papers are prepared to pay huge sums to the most popular stargazers.

Some of the most popular figures in the field, such as Russell Grant, Mystic Meg and Shelley von Strunckel, can earn £600,000 or more a year.

A single profitable astrology website can be worth as much as £50 million.

When the Daily Mail discovered that its expert on the zodiac, Jonathan Cainer, was about to leave the newspaper in 1999, it reportedly offered him a £1 million salary and a £1 million bonus to stay. He still preferred the offer at the Daily Express: no salary but all the money from his telephone lines.

The time-twins study is only the start of the bad news for astrologers, however. Dr Dean and Prof Kelly also sought to determine whether stargazers could match a birth chart to the personality profile of a person among a random selection.

They reviewed the evidence from more than 40 studies involving over 700 astrologers, but found the results turned out no better than guesswork.

The success rate did not improve even when astrologers were given all the information they asked for and were confident they had made the right choice.

Dr Dean said the consistency of the findings weighed heavily against astrology.

“It has no acceptable mechanism, its principles are invalid and it has failed hundreds of tests,” he said. “But no hint of these problems will be found in astrology books which, in effect, are exercises in deception.”

Dr Dean is ready for a torrent of criticism. He said: “I’m probably the most hated person in astrology because I’m regarded as a turncoat.”

Study shows bananas make baby boys

LONDON, England (CNN) — Women can influence the gender of their child with what they eat before they conceive, according to new research that lends scientific support to age-old superstitions about pregnancy.

The study of 740 women showed that higher calorie intake led to a higher probability of a male birth.

The discovery shows higher calorie intake prior to conception can significantly increase the chances of having a son while women on restricted diets are more likely to produce daughters.

Scientists at Britain’s Oxford and Exeter Universities, who studied eating habits of 740 women during their first-time pregnancies, say that their findings seem to back certain traditional links between diet and gender while disproving others.

“We were able to confirm the old wives’ tale that eating bananas and so having a high potassium intake was associated with having a boy, as was a high sodium intake,” research leader Fiona Mathews, a specialist in mammalian biology at Exeter University, told the Guardian newspaper.

“But the old take about drinking a lot of milk to have a girl doesn’t seem to hold up. In fact, more calcium meant they were again more likely to have a boy.”

Mathews said the study pointed to a simple technique to influencing the chances of a male birth: Eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast.

“If you want a boy, eat a healthy diet with a high calorie intake, including breakfast,” she told New Scientist magazine.

“Of women eating cereals daily, 59 percent had boys, compared with only 43 percent who bore boys in the group eating less than a bowlful per week.”

The researchers said that a higher calorie intake prior to conception can increase the chances of having a son from ten to 11 boys in every 20 births, according to the study published in the Proceeding of the Royal Society B.

They said it could explain why male births in richer countries are experiencing a slight reduction

Throw Energy Out the Window With Thermique Heated Glass

Ooooh, there is nothing lovelier than a floor-to-ceiling window, and there are few better ways to waste energy, given the low R-value of most glass. Until now, that is, when you can throw electricity out the window with Thermique. This new invention burns up to 25 watts of electricity per square foot by turning the glass into an electric heater . They say it is more energy efficient because it eliminates drafts, and the conventional heating system doesn’t have to work as hard.” With heated windows, you can lower the set-back temperature for your HVAC system without changing the indoor temperature. The greater the total window area, the more dramatically you can alter the set-back temperature.”

It used to be that there was a limit on the size of windows in an Aspen ski chalet; it got uncomfortable when the windows got too big and created too much of a draft. Now the hedge fund jockeys can just install this coal-fired glass and have no discomfort at all.

No matter that a good portion of it is just being thrown away to the outdoors, or that the appropriate solution is to use smaller windows that frame the view or get a set of drapes. Now we can hook each picture window up to its own circuit breaker (about what it would need) and enjoy the view.

The Thermique page at Sweets Catalog and the company’s website make all kinds of cases for the comfort and efficiency provided by this technology, that it can “provide welcoming warmth without increasing your energy bills.” Yet somehow I can’t believe it, this is such a contradiction of every rule of energy-efficient design. It seems fundamentally wrong in this day and age to solve a design problem by electrifying it.

search for a volunteer willing to die for art.

PRIZE-winning German artist Gregor Schneider has caused an uproar by launching a search for a volunteer willing to die for art.

The enfant terrible of the German cultural scene is looking for someone whose dying hours will be spent in an art gallery with the public admiring the way the light plays on the flesh of a person gasping for the last breath. 

The 39-year-old artist has been concerned with death for much of his career. He gained critical acclaim for a sculpture, Hannelore Reuen, of a dead woman.

He has been hatching his latest idea since 1996, and now has a pathologist and art collector to help to find a candidate who wants to become a work of art in the final days of his or her life.

“The dying person would determine everything in advance, he would be the absolute centre of attention,” said Mr Schneider.

“Everything will be done in consultation with the relatives, and the public will watch the death in an appropriately private atmosphere.”

Death is commonly seen as the last taboo, although artists have been trying hard to demystify it.

Gunther von Hagens, nicknamed Doctor Death, has been travelling the world with an exhibition of plastinated corpses, showing genuine human bodies in living poses, playing chess or on horseback. The Wellcome Collection in London has an exhibition of portraits of people pictured before and after death by two German photographers.

The Schneider project, however, seems to have gone too far. It is being compared with watching executions in the US.

The influential gallery owner Beatrix Kalwa spoke for many German curators who rule out the idea of giving space to Schneider’s artistic endeavour.

“Existential matters like death, birth or the act of reproduction do not belong in a museum,” she said.

“There is a fundamental difference between portraying these acts in an art form, and showing them in actuality.”

The head of the German hospice foundation that provides care for the terminally ill, Eugen Brysch, said: “This is pure voyeurism and makes a mockery of those who are dying.”

But Schneider argues that death is already undignified and that his aim is to restore its grace.