Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts

Jan 29, 2014

you are going to die

You are going to die.

Don't be scared. (Unless you are Shakespeare's greatest waffler.)

There are two basic options, vis-à-vis the outcome.

a. You'll stop existing as your body returns to the earth. If you live on, it's in your offspring, others' memories, history books, legacies, ineradicably embarrassing blog posts, and the repurposed carbon fragments for which the future thanks you and your corpse.

b. You'll continue existing as your soul departs for the afterlife you deserve. Actually, maybe you should be scared.

Regardless, you are going to die.

So don't worry whether your children's produce is organic.

Aug 23, 2011

not for the squeamish

Though it gets flippant when discussing the philosophical implications, Jesse Bering's piece is a nice (nice? not the right word at all) introduction to the many and diverse kinds of parasitic twins.

Jun 21, 2011

nobody likes a whiner

Whining is more annoying than a buzz saw, says a recent study...
In raw numbers, people made more mistakes per math problems completed when listening to the whines than any of the other speech patterns or noises (though the only statistically significant differences were between whining, the table saw and motherese).

And people completed fewer subtraction problems when listening to the whining, crying and baby talk than when it was completely quiet.
...that will soon be posted on refrigerators and in teacher's lounges all across the country.

May 31, 2011

today's science links



Mars rover Spirit is gone for good? Probably.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome caused by a rodent virus?? Probably not.

Government funds ridiculously wasteful research??? Not exactly.

Cell phones cause cancer???? Uh, insufficient evidence, thanks.

Washington teen discovers that diaper powder increases crop yields????? You better believe it.



Added: Now with a panda tie bonus.

May 29, 2011

Evergreen's Science Carnival: more science than carnival

Yesterday's Science Carnival at The Evergreen State College brought a lot of science, and a little bit of carnival, to the public. The Olympian sent reporter Rolf Boone to cover the story:
Elementary school students descended on the campus Friday as part of school field trips, while more children – this time with their parents – attended Saturday.

Over the two days, more than 150 science presentations were primarily presented throughout three buildings on campus, with an emphasis on hands-on activities.
I sampled some natural soda (dandelion blossoms should not, under any circumstances, be carbonated), saw how bacteria can power a fuel cell, and learned how oyster mushrooms are crucial to mycoremediation. The only disappointment: the cancellation of the 1:00 showing of "That's a Chicken?!" I never did learn what the putative quasi-chicken was, or what it all meant.

The carnival closed with Mentos/Diet Coke fountains set to "Thus Spake Zarathustra," which mostly made a mess of Red Square and the students manning the event.

Oh, and to Jimmy S., the commentator on the Olympian's website who claims that "The words science and Evergreen do not belong in the same sentence," you are obviously right. Clearly, an institution that sponsors cutting-edge phage research, has a "Research Ambassador Program" to connect science to the community, gets high school teachers involved in lab work, and has several top-notch programs in various scientific fields (with unparalleled opportunities for undergraduates to participate in research!) , and, for goodness' sake, HOSTS A SCIENCE CARNIVAL, has nothing to do with science.


Added: Science!

May 27, 2011

identity in duality: craniopagus twins

The story first caught my attention in November. Now, in a humane and insightful piece, the NY Times magazine gives the incredible, philosophically- and neurologically challenging tale of craniopagus twins the long-form treatment.
The explanation Cochrane proposes is surprisingly straightforward for so unusual an outcome: that visual input comes in through the retinas of one girl, reaches her thalamus, then takes two different courses, like electricity traveling along a wire that splits in two. In the girl who is looking at the strobe or a stuffed animal in her crib, the visual input continues on its usual pathways, one of which ends up in the visual cortex. In the case of the other girl, the visual stimulus would reach her thalamus via the thalamic bridge, and then travel up her own visual neural circuitry, ending up in the sophisticated processing centers of her own visual cortex. Now she has seen it, probably milliseconds after her sister has.

The results of the test did not surprise the family, who had long suspected that even when one girl’s vision was angled away from the television, she was laughing at the images flashing in front of her sister’s eyes. The sensory exchange, they believe, extends to the girls’ taste buds: Krista likes ketchup, and Tatiana does not, something the family discovered when Tatiana tried to scrape the condiment off her own tongue, even when she was not eating it.

Even knowing about the tests and what Cochrane believed, I listened to the family’s stories with some amount of skepticism. Perhaps they were imagining it or exaggerating for the sake of a good story. Then in one of the many idle moments of the five days I spent with the family, the girls were watching television, and I absent-mindedly gave Tatiana’s foot, which Krista could not see, a little tickle. She turned to me and smiled, and then Krista spoke: “Now do me,” she said. Had she felt the sensation but wanted the emotional experience of knowing that she, too, was receiving that kind of playful attention?
If you TL;DR this one, you're going to miss out.

May 22, 2011

attention

I.
Earlier this year, I recommended Lawrence Rosenblum's See What I'm Saying, which explores the lesser-known aspects of sensation and cognition. What I didn't mention was that I had two of my English classes read an excerpt, then head out into the halls to test our echolocating skills. Since we had so little practice, we were terrible at it--but we could hear the possibilities. Navigational failure was a pedagogical success.

I was reminded of that experience when pointed by Maggie Koerth-Baker to this blog entry by neuroscientist Bradley Voytek.
We're used to thinking of our senses as being pretty shite: we can't see as well as eagles, we can't hear as well as bats, and we can't smell as well as dogs.

Or so we're used to thinking.

It turns out that humans can, in fact, detect as few as 2 photons entering the retina. Two. As in, one-plus-one.

It is often said that, under ideal conditions, a young, healthy person can see a candle flame from 30 miles away. That's like being able to see a candle in Times Square from Stamford, Connecticut. Or seeing a candle in Candlestick Park from Napa Valley.

Similarly, it appears that the limits to our threshold of hearing may actually be Brownian motion. That means that we can almost hear the random movements of atoms.
Voytek calls humans "inattentive superheroes," our skills fundamentally underdeveloped in a world full of noise. We underestimate the value of silence, of darkness, of time spent alone. We'd like to be more focused, but we don't know how--and we keep filling our lives with more things that siphon attention away.


II.
Much of the siphoning is well-intentioned, an attempt to remind us--to alert us--to pay attention. You're rolling through a residential neighborhood, at the wheel of a two-ton death machine. In the corner of your eye, a yellow warning: "Children at Play." It's a safety measure that can be--and will be--easily ignored. And probably should be torn down.
The National Cooperative Highway Research Program, in its "Synthesis of Highway Practice No. 139," sternly advises that "non-uniform signs such as "CAUTION--CHILDREN AT PLAY," "SLOW--CHILDREN," or similar legends should not be permitted on any roadway at any time." Moreover, it warns that "the removal of any nonstandard signs should carry a high priority."

One of the things that is known, thanks to peer-reviewed science, is that increased traffic speeds (and volumes) increase the risk of children's injuries. But "Children at Play" signs are a symptom, rather than a cure--a sign of something larger that is out of whack, whether the lack of a pervasive safety culture in driving, a system that puts vehicular mobility ahead of neighborhood livability, or non-contextual street design. After all, it's roads, not signs, that tell people how to drive. People clamoring for "Children at Play" signs are often living on residential streets that are inordinately wide, lacking any kind of calming obstacles (from trees to "bulb-outs"), perhaps having unnecessary center-line markings--three factors that will boost vehicle speed more than any sign will lower them.
If, at our best, we're "inattentive superheroes," at our worst, we're overly confident, cognitively-deficient supervillains.
As is often the case in driving, when we meet the enemy, it is us. You want difficulty in judging spatial relations? Consider the research, by Dennis Shaffer, that showed people reporting 10-foot-long highway stripes to be two feet long. You want difficulty estimating speed? Consider this study, which found drivers underestimating their speed in the presence of children by upwards of 50 percent. You want exceeded sensory abilities? Consider the widespread phenomenon of "overdriving" one's headlights. You want trouble estimating distance? Ask any driver how many feet they'll need to stop, driving at 65 mph. You want impulsive? Who's reaching across the seat for that buzzing BlackBerry?

If "Children at Play" signs are ineffective at capturing our attention--or doubly ineffective when they do--what about other supposedly helpful road signs: speed limits, "Road Narrows," "Koala Crossing?" (We'll leave aside "One Way" for now.) What if they were gone--all gone? John Staddon points toward a possible future:
So what am I suggesting—abolishing signs and rules? A traffic free-for-all? Actually, I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that. A few European towns and neighborhoods--Drachten in Holland, fashionable Kensington High Street in London, Prince Charles’s village of Poundbury, and a few others--have even gone ahead and tried it. They’ve taken the apparently drastic step of eliminating traffic control more or less completely in a few high-traffic and pedestrian-dense areas. The intention is to create environments in which everyone is more focused, more cautious, and more considerate. Stop signs, stoplights, even sidewalks are mostly gone. The results, by all accounts, have been excellent: pedestrian accidents have been reduced by 40 percent or more in some places, and traffic flows no more slowly than before.
Of course, all of this could be moot once automobiles become truly auto. And then we can turn our attention toward more important things.


III.
For some, it's even harder than usual to block out the tumult of the everyday. In the fourth part of a fascinating series, Marie Myung-Ok Lee describes how her autistic son was finally able to learn how to ride a bike.
After my husband and I bought him a bike with training wheels, he would sometimes sit on it for a minute or two, try to pedal, and then have a tantrum, hurling the bike in frustration. His classroom bike-riding lessons weren't going any better. At a school meeting, the consensus among his teachers and other professionals was that independent bike riding was something he'd probably never learn.
They probably would have been right, were it not for Lee's persistence in seeking out a remedy: high-grade marijuana.
[C]annabis not only mitigates J's pain, it also seems to help him to focus... [M]arijuana's effect on short-term memory allows a user to focus intently on a single sensation (that "Whooooaaaa, man... look at that flower" feeling). One feature of autism is a heightened, disordered, nondiscriminating sensitivity, so that autistics seem to see and feel and hear and smell everything at the same time.... But with cannabis (which also regulates anxiety and stress), I noticed that J had a much higher tolerance for activities that involve multiple steps, like unloading the dishwasher.

Bicycling, when you think about it, involves myriad functions: coordination of gross motor movement with the vestibular, visual, and proprioceptive systems that regulate balance. On a nice weekend I brought J, his bike, his helmet, and a wrench to a nearby private school that has a bunch of wide, paved paths. I removed the training wheels from his bike, put him on it, and gave him a push, figuring that once he realized how good it felt to bike--to move along on his own power--he was going to love it. He pedaled and immediately tipped over, laughing, as he was expecting the training wheels to be there holding him up. But after a few tries, he started to get it. And before the afternoon was over, he was biking independently.
Lee's story is inspiring and infuriating; our federal government's increasingly bizarre insistence on persecuting medical marijuana users made her take unnecessary personal and medical risks. In a saner world, her doctor would have been able to prescribe a standard, fully-tested treatment, and her son's triumph would have been heartwarmingly ordinary.

It may tax your 21st-century attention span, but start with the first part and keep going until you're done.



Asides
When I was young, I could get so wrapped up in a book (or so focused on my Legos) that I'd shut out the world. Maybe that's why I've never been interested in trying pot: that "Whooooaaaa, man..." sensation may not sit well with a brain perfectly comfortable managing its own focal point.


When we let someone else sort the signal from the noise, we risk missing the whole signal. Call it a "filter bubble," algorithmically facilitated attention-narrowing.


Just because you can see a photon from space, doesn't mean you should drive without your glasses.


Driverless cars? Soon. But not quite yet.

May 9, 2011

the happiness gene

On some level, it's obvious that happiness is genetic. Your ability to think and feel come from the brain you own (and that owns you), and the basic instructions to build a brain are found in your genes.

On another level, though, the complex interplay of environment, culture, genetics, and development means there's no gene for happiness.

Survey says: sort of.
The happiest people tended to have a long variant of a gene called 5-HTTLPR. This gene makes a transporter molecule for serotonin, a chemical that brain cells use to communicate with each other, and the long variant helps to recycle serotonin faster and more efficiently than the short one.

De Neve extracted his data from the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which has been following the same set of adolescents for 13 years, from 1995 to 2008. Genomic information in this study allowed him to distinguish respondents who had two long versions of 5-HTTLPR from those who had two short versions, or one of each.

Twice as many respondents with two long versions said they were very satisfied with life compared with carriers of two short versions.

Conversely, 26 per cent of those with two short versions of the gene said they were dissatisfied with life, compared with 20 per cent of people carrying two long variants.
Since there's not yet a truly objective way of measuring happiness, one wonders if 5-HTTLPR is just the gene variant for optimistic self-delusion. Or so says my skeptical gene.

Apr 15, 2011

no mercy on an empty stomach

Is a hungry judge a merciless judge?
Jonathan Levav of Columbia Business School in New York and his colleagues analyzed 1,112 parole hearings for inmates of four Israeli prisons, made by eight judges over a ten-month period.

Judges' days were divided into three sessions broken by two meal breaks -- a morning snack and lunch. Judges decided when to break, but had no control over the ordering of cases, which was determined by when a prisoner's attorney arrived.

At the beginning of a session, a prisoner had a 65% chance of being paroled, the authors found. This declined to almost zero by the end of a session, and leaped back to 65% after a break.

The severity of the crime, the time served in prison, any previous incarcerations, and the availability of rehabilitation programs were not enough to explain the effect on the probability of parole, and the nationality or sex of a prisoner made no difference. The findings are published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The article, as all scientific articles do, includes the appropriate dose of skepticism. And it's obviously wrong to presume that the judges are too harsh when they're hungry; after all, they might be too lenient when full.

Still, it makes one wonder what would happen if courts instituted mandatory snack breaks.

Apr 11, 2011

do vegan androids dream of electric tomatoes?

Science brings us the sunless hyperfarm:
In their research station, strawberries, yellow peppers, basil and banana plants take on an eerie pink glow under red and blue bulbs of Light-Emitting Diodes, or LEDs. Water trickles into the pans when needed and all excess is recycled, and the temperature is kept constant. Lights go on and off, simulating day and night, but according to the rhythm of the plant - which may be better at shorter cycles than 24 hours - rather than the rotation of the Earth.

In a larger "climate chamber" a few miles away, a nursery is nurturing cuttings of fittonia, a colorful house plant, in two layers of 70 square meters (750 sq. feet) each. Blasts of mist keep the room humid, and the temperature is similar to the plants' native South America. After the cuttings take root - the most sensitive stage in the growing process - they are wheeled into a greenhouse and the chamber is again used for rooting. The process cuts the required time to grow a mature plant to six weeks from 12 or more....

Meeuws says a building of 100 sq meters (1,075 sq. feet) and 14 layers of plants could provide a daily diet of 200 grams (7 ounces) of fresh fruit and vegetables to the entire population of Den Bosch, about 140,000 people. Their idea is not to grow foods that require much space, like corn or potatoes. "We are looking at the top of the pyramid where we have high value and low volume," he said.
At this point, why stop with "natural" plants? Using them as a template, throw together some genetic engineering and 3D printing, and you can create more efficient vascular and metabolic systems to grow foodstuffs in a sci-fi agricultural dreamscape.

Also, I'm hungry. Vic's Pizza, anyone?

Mar 16, 2011

the squishy self

If V.S. Ramachandran has a new book out, you can bet your sweet occipital lobe I'm going to link to Colin McGinn's review.
Why is neurology so fascinating? It is more fascinating than the physiology of the body--what organs perform what functions and how. I think it is because we feel the brain to be fundamentally alien in relation to the operations of mind--as we do not feel the organs of the body to be alien in relation to the actions of the body. It is precisely because we do not experience ourselves as reducible to our brain that it is so startling to discover that our mind depends so intimately on our brain. It is like finding that cheese depends on chalk--that soul depends on matter. This de facto dependence gives us a vertiginous shiver, a kind of existential spasm: How can the human mind--consciousness, the self, free will, emotion, and all the rest--completely depend on a bulbous and ugly assemblage of squishy wet parts? What has the spiking of neurons got to do with me?
I disagree with McGinn: neurology isn't any more fascinating than physiology, because as Lawrence Rosenblum's See What I'm Saying compellingly argues, neurology and physiology are blissfully codependent.  You are the mind your body builds, and the body your mind conceives.

Mind-body problem solved.  Wasn't that simple?

Dec 10, 2010

imagine your cravings away

I spent a good thirty minutes imagining blogging about this article, and yet, sadly, the desire to blog about it only grew stronger.

Well, at least it works for food.

Nov 17, 2010

Vlatko Vedral and the demon machine

I've blogged about demons from time to time, and I've blogged about physicist Vlatko Vedral from time to time, too.

And now, two of my favorite topics are together at last, in an article about a demon-powered bead.

Masaki Sano, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues have demonstrated that a bead can be coaxed up a 'spiral staircase' without any energy being directly transferred to the bead to push it upwards. Instead, it is persuaded along its route by a series of judiciously timed decisions to change the height of the 'steps' around it, based on information about the bead's position. In this sense, "information is being converted to energy", says Sano....

Vlatko Vedral, a quantum physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, says that it will be interesting to see whether the technique can be used to drive nanomotors and artificial molecular machines. "I would also be excited to see whether something like this is already at work in nature," he says. "After all, you could say that all living systems are 'Maxwell's demons', trying to defy the tendency for order to turn back into randomness."
If you're a living system--and let's hope you are--as Cake would put it, Satan is your motor.

Nov 7, 2010

yours, mine, and ours

Thoughts, we imagine, belong to us. Even when we share them (speaking, writing, smiling, Facebook-liking) or when others can divine them (ESP, brain scans, Spock-like mind-melding), the origin of our thoughts, geographically speaking, is local. In the other direction, we resist efforts to implant unwanted thoughts in our minds (indoctrination, propaganda, brainwashing, manipulative sales tactics) and get uncomfortable at the prospect of Inception-esque thought implantation.

In the physicalist account of consciousness, nothing would theoretically prohibit the direct transmission of thoughts from one brain to another, given the right wiring--perhaps complicating the notion of my thoughts versus your thoughts.

Nature, of course, has the proof of concept.
They are the rarest of the rarest of the rare. Tatiana and Krista are not just conjoined, but they are craniopagus, sharing a skull and also a bridge between each girl’s thalamus, a part of the brain that processes and relays sensory information to other parts of the brain. Or perhaps in this case, to both brains. There is evidence that they can see through each other’s eyes and perhaps share each other’s unspoken thoughts. And if that proves true, it will be the rarest thing of all. They will be unique in the world.

They have been drawing international attention, both public and scientific, since before their birth. Dr. Douglas Cochrane, a neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital, is part of the team that has been watching over them since they were in the womb. Last year he conducted tests in which one twin looked at an object while he measured the brain activity in the other. “Their brains are recording signals from the other twin’s visual field,” he cautiously concluded. “One might be seeing what the other one is seeing.”
It's not just a neurologist's theory:
The family regularly sees evidence of it. The way their heads are joined, they have markedly different fields of view. One child will look at a toy or a cup. The other can reach across and grab it, even though her own eyes couldn’t possibly see its location. “They share thoughts, too,” says Louise. “Nobody will be saying anything,” adds Simms, “and Tati will just pipe up and say, ‘Stop that!’ And she’ll smack her sister.” While their verbal development is delayed, it continues to get better. Their sentences are two or three words at most so far, and their enunciation is at first difficult to understand. Both the family, and researchers, anxiously await the children’s explanation for what they are experiencing.
As do the rest of us amateur philosopher-types.


[via Cory Doctorow]

Oct 31, 2010

the most destructive drug

Mentioned in an article that may be of interest to students debating the current LD resolution, a new Lancet study has determined the overall most destructive drug.

Hint: most places, it's legal.
When drunk in excess, alcohol damages nearly all organ systems. It is also connected to higher death rates and is involved in a greater percentage of crime than most other drugs, including heroin.

But experts said it would be impractical and incorrect to outlaw alcohol.

"We cannot return to the days of prohibition," said Leslie King, an adviser to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and one of the study's authors. "Alcohol is too embedded in our culture and it won't go away."

King said countries should target problem drinkers, not the vast majority of people who indulge in a drink or two. He said governments should consider more education programs and raising the price of alcohol so it isn't as widely available.
Non-rhetorical question: Why not take the same approach to all drugs?


Added: Sullum (linked above) highlights and critiques the study.

Sep 15, 2010

coercion plus contamination equals confession

Ever since the landmark work of Elizabeth Loftus, psychologists have warned of the pernicious effects of implanted false memories. It turns out that a similar process--sometimes unconscious on the part of the perpetrator--can lead to false confessions.
Professor Garrett said he was surprised by the complexity of the confessions he studied. “I expected, and think people intuitively think, that a false confession would look flimsy,” like someone saying simply, “I did it,” he said.

Instead, he said, “almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable,” rich in telling detail that almost inevitably had to come from the police. “I had known that in a couple of these cases, contamination could have occurred,” he said, using a term in police circles for introducing facts into the interrogation process. “I didn’t expect to see that almost all of them had been contaminated.”
Suspects, worn down through persistent interrogation interspersed with facts of the crime (the classic Law and Order-esque "gotcha," one imagines) or even taken to the crime scene, became adept at recounting the "details" of the crime.

Of course, there was perhaps a more important factor: none of the convicted innocents had a lawyer present during the interrogation.

And the truly frightening part:
Proving innocence after a confession, however, is rare. Eight of the defendants in Professor Garrett’s study had actually been cleared by DNA evidence before trial, but the courts convicted them anyway.
This is mind-boggling, given the justice system's overwhelming--and vastly overconfident--faith in DNA evidence to convict defendants, even though it's far more fallible than CSI would have you imagine.

How culpable are the police officers who elicit false confessions?
Jim Trainum, a former policeman who now advises police departments on training officers to avoid false confessions, explained that few of them intend to contaminate an interrogation or convict the innocent.

“You become so fixated on ‘This is the right person, this is the guilty person’ that you tend to ignore everything else,” he said. The problem with false confessions, he said, is “the wrong person is still out there, and he’s able to reoffend.”
Well... that's one of the problems. The other, perhaps worse, is that an innocent is convicted of a crime. "Better that ten of the guilty go free...."

Right?

Aug 26, 2010

free weight loss tips

1. Drink 2 cups of water before eating.
"We are presenting results of the first randomized controlled intervention trial demonstrating that increased water consumption is an effective weight loss strategy," said Brenda Davy, Ph.D., senior author on the study. "We found in earlier studies that middle aged and older people who drank two cups of water right before eating a meal ate between 75 and 90 fewer calories during that meal. In this recent study, we found that over the course of 12 weeks, dieters who drank water before meals, three times per day, lost about 5 pounds more than dieters who did not increase their water intake."
2. Exercise.
By a simple food-in/energy-out model, a run on the treadmill or swim in the pool should make you want to eat more. But recent findings have suggested that exercise can actually help to slow overeating. And a new study presents evidence that the body's physiologic response to exercise can help retune the nervous system's cues and make the body feel less hungry, rather than more so.

Appetite is a strange, strange thing, and only partly a function of how much you actually need to eat. Take advantage.


Note: I am not a doctor, and none of the preceding should be construed as medical advice. Free advice is free for a reason. Or, as the Romans would say, caveat dietor.

Jul 2, 2010

vectors and victors

Longtime readers of the blog know that every now and then I feature the latest speculation about Toxoplasma gondii and its potential influence on human behavior, and... the World Cup?
Rank the top 25 FIFA team countries by Toxo rate and you get, in order from the top: Brazil (67 percent), Argentina (52 percent), France (45 percent), Spain (44 percent), and Germany (43 percent). Collectively, these are the teams responsible for eight of the last 10 World Cup overall winners. Spain, the only one of the group never to have won a cup, is no subpar outlier—the Spaniards have the most World Cup victories of any perpetual runner-up.

What is going on here? Does Toxo really make people better at soccer?

The relationship is neither linear nor foolproof. Italy managed to win the World Cup in 2006, despite its relatively average infection rate of 33 percent. Certain African countries plagued with public health problems have astronomical Toxo rates. Yet the heavily infected players of Ghana, Gabon (71 percent), and the Ivory Coast (60 percent) have not yet managed to win a single cup. On the other end, England (6 percent), the U.S. (12 percent), and Japan (6 percent) are pretty OK at soccer yet have some of the lowest rates in the world.
Read the whole thing for the rest of the nuances and caveats.

Speculation is speculation, and this one, I'll say, kicks its hypothesis a little too far past the post.

Although something has to explain Bill Simmons' recent unabashed and unabated soccer love.

Jun 7, 2010

Luke... I might not actually be your father.

Oops:
Imagine receiving the results of a genetic test that suggests that your son is not your son. Was there a mix-up in the maternity ward?

Fortunately, in this case it was a slip-up in the genetics lab contracted by personal genomics company 23andMe to process its customers' samples. But the news that the Californian firm has supplied 96 people with someone else's results will add to the pressure for more regulation of this emerging industry.
When privacy advocates argue that non-felons' DNA should be kept out of government databases, this is one of the crucial reasons why. You can't simply regulate away errors, human or silicon.