Alexander Panchin

• PhD
• Russian Academy of Sciences

Classical pheromones are secreted behavior-altering substances found in insects, which are used for communication. Are there any known chemicals that are classified as mammalian pheromones by current scientists? Is there a difference between pheromone and chemosignal?

Why do people believe in the paranormal?

Some recent papers suggest that dopamine generally improves signal-to-noise ratios in the brain (Krummenacher et al, 2010) and that believers favor false alarms over misses. This is in line with an article (Gianotti et al., 2001) that shows believers to adopt a looser response criterion than skeptics when confronted with 'semantic noise'.

Others (Pizzagalli et al, 2000) have found that believers showed relatively higher right hemispheric activation and reduced hemispheric asymmetry of functional complexity. Recently Ken Mogi (2014) showed that belief in the paranormal is associated with the belief in free will. 

Please let me know if I am missing some interesting articles on this topic.

On a relative subject. Do you know of any articles that explain paranormal phenomena with neurophysiology? Here are some examples of what I am looking for: 

Ness RC: The Old Hag phenomenon as sleep paralysis: a biocultural interpretation. Cult Med Psychiatry 1978, 2(1):15-39.

Cheyne JA, Rueffer SD, Newby-Clark IR: Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations during sleep paralysis: neurological and cultural construction of the night-mare. Conscious Cogn 1999, 8(3):319-337.

Jalal B, Ramachandran VS: Sleep paralysis and "the bedroom intruder": the role of the right superior parietal, phantom pain and body image projection. Med Hypotheses 2014, 83(6):755-757.

Mobbs D, Watt C: There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences: how neuroscience can explain seeing bright lights, meeting the dead, or being convinced you are one of them. Trends Cogn Sci 2011, 15(10):447-449.

Lempert T, Bauer M, Schmidt D: Syncope and near-death experience. Lancet 1994, 344(8925):829-830.

I would like your help me solve a dispute on citation ethics. I will not say what side I am on, so I do not bias your decisions with my opinion.

Here is a review from an article, that I have divided into 4 consecutive parts:

«{I} Primate males usually concentrate their reproductive efforts towards females during the period of highest conception probability, i.e. the peri-ovulatory or fertile phase of the menstrual cycle [1–5].

{II}. However, non-reproductive copulations during pregnancy are not unusual among New World (capuchins: [1]) and Old World (sooty mangabeys: [2,] Hanuman langurs: [3], Phayre’s langurs: [4], rhesus macaques: [5], pig-tailed macaques: [6], stumptailed macaques: [7], Japanese macaques: [8], long-tailed macaques: [9], Assamese macaques: [10], Barbary macaques: [11], chimpanzees: [12], bonobos: [13]) primates.

{III}. However, many of these reports were based on observations of mounts, either with or without intromission and ejaculation, collected unsystematically, with inferences made about female reproductive state in the absence of endocrinological confirmation of pregnancy.

{IV}. The results from studies using systematic methods have produced different conclusions for different species; males of some species seem to discriminate pregnancy from the pre-conceptive period to some extent (Assamese macaques: [10], langurs: [4, 14]), whereas in other species pregnancy might be concealed (long-tailed macaques: [9], Barbary macaques: [11]).»

Please read the text carefully and answer the following questions:

1. Is it ok to say "the article says {I}"? Yes or no

2. Does {II} disprove {I}? Yes or no

3. If someone cited this article and reported {II} but did not report {I} or {III} or {IV} would you consider this bad citation practice? Yes or no

Here is the article if more information is required

A hypothetical question. I have two closely related plants. One is suspected to lack a certain protein present in the other. How difficult is it to discover this difference in the following situations:

A.) I know the exact amino acid sequence of the protein that should be lacking 

B.) I have no idea which protein is lacking, I do not know its sequence

The task needs to be completed without the use of transcriptome or DNA analysis, only by the means of proteomics (Mass spectometry, Protein Electrophoresis, Western blot e.t.c) 

Which methods should I use? How reliable are they? How long will it take? 

In what case will this task be the most difficult to accomplish? 

This is a question about science in general, post-publication peer-review and science ethics. A recently published article in BMJ contained (as I believe) numbers that do not add up. I suspected that some error was made during the data preparation. I have done some math and I have reason to believe that if this error was resolved the conclusions of the article would change dramatically.

I could be wrong of course. So I followed these steps:

1. Send an e-mail to the corresponding author: no reply

2. Send an e-mail to another author: I received a reply, but the author did not have an answer to my inquiry and asked me to consult some other member of the team

3. Write a rapid response (comment) to the editor: the comment is viewed by the editor and published on the journal site along with the other comments

4. Despite the comment being published and raising a serious issue with the data integrity of the article: there is no reaction from the journal or the authors confirming or denying if the error is present.

The rapid response for this example can be found in the link below. 

How would you proceed in a similar situation? Or is having a critical comment published alongside an article that may or may not have an error should be enough, even if in the case when the comment is correct the public and the scientific community is strongly misinformed? Is persistance on a case like this a good or a bad thing?