On Monday night, 9 News ran a story about Power Balance bracelets, the holographic bands that have become wildly popular in recent years.

First question: what are they? Power Balance makes dozens of products that all claim to boost athletic performance. The one thing they have in common is a little circle containing a hologram on a piece of Mylar film.

EFX Power Balance bracelets. (Courtesy of Bioscalar)

And how is that supposed to work? I’ll let them tell you (check out their website).

“POWER BALANCE Performance Technology has been embedded with naturally occurring frequencies found in nature that have been known to react positively with the body’s energy field,” according to the website.

I frowned when I read this, as though a stranger had offered me a weasel. They’re saying they’ve “embedded” a frequency on to a little circle of shiny plastic. But a frequency describes how often an event is happening—an object can’t inherently possess a frequency.

There’s more:

“It’s hard to argue with nature and the fact is that everything in nature resonates at a particular frequency,” the website continues. “That is what keeps it all together. We react with frequency because we are a frequency. Most simply, we are a bunch of cells held together by frequency.”

My reaction quickly changed from “has just been offered a weasel” to “has just been offered a lightly toasted weasel on a bun with cheese.” I’m half convinced that they’re just messing with me now, but I’ll address those points anyway.

Nature is an overarching term for the entire world, and it doesn’t talk, so you can’t argue with it.  That’s a stupid point. On the other hand, it is very, very easy to argue the “fact” that everything in nature resonates at a particular frequency. That’s not true in much the same way that it’s not true that peanuts are capable of time travel.

They could be alluding to resonant frequency, but that’s not relevant here. Crystal structures can have resonant frequencies, but biological structures can’t. That’s why it’s possible to shatter a glass by screaming in just the right tone, while the same does not apply to, say, a cat. I invite you to scream at a cat to test this.

To say that we “are” a frequency doesn’t make sense either. You can’t “be” a frequency because frequency is a quality, like speed or temperature. The same applies to phenomena like light and sound—they can only have frequencies.

Finally, the statement “we are a bunch of cells held together by frequency” is ridiculous. We are a bunch of cells held together by the extracellular matrix. You’re welcome to Google that, but rest assured that it’s very much a physical substance.

There’s more of that kind of language, but I have to move on. You may have seen these products demonstrated on TV or even in person—companies like Power Balance are practically drooling at the chance to show you how their product works.

The basic format is simple: a volunteer is told to hold his arms out straight and stand on one foot. The Power Balance rep pushes down on his outstretched arm, and the volunteer falls over. Then the volunteer puts on a Power Balance product, the rep pushes down again, and the volunteer stays upright, presumably because of vibrations. Or something.

Not so fast. In the first case (without the bracelet), the rep pushes down and away from the body, pulling the volunteer over. In the second test, the rep pushes down and towards the body, keeping him up. People watching can’t tell the difference, and neither can the volunteer, so it’s pretty convincing. Convincing or not, it’s fake.

Of course, someone’s bound to ask, “what’s the harm?” The harm is that these people are making millions of dollars founded entirely on lies. They are preying on the ignorance of the public to charge $60 for a pack of stickers.

Power Balance has endorsements from names like Drew Brees, Blake Griffin, and others in over a dozen professional sports. These massively influential role models are, intentionally or not, spreading deceptive pseudoscientific bullshit. Even our own Buffs have officially licensed Power Balance to use their logo.

I’m afraid my message here is starting to sound repetitive, but it’s an important one. Do the research for yourself. Ask questions. Find third-party information.

None of the research I did for this column is secret information, nor is it difficult to find. The majority of it comes from blogs that I read regularly, but there are dozens of articles out there by brilliant scientists debunking this claim and many, many others.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If someone tells you they just saw a squirrel outside, it’s probably safe to believe them without going to check. If they tell you that they have invented a magic plastic circle that will improve every aspect of your life, maybe you should Google it first.

And if someone offers you a toasted weasel, just walk away.

Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Angus Bohanon at Angus.bohanon@gmail.com

Before the world was a media-addicted mess, citizens didn’t have the option of logging onto the entertainment website of their choice and getting a dose of pop culture. Twitter was not around to send text alerts about various breaking news updates. Back in the day, people had to hop on their dinosaurs and ride a few miles to their neighbor’s house in order to pass along the gossip.

Eventually, newspapers and radios made their debut, and news was made more widely accessible to the public. Oral tradition was no longer relied on since media platforms [like the Internet] allowed people to get their news more conveniently. This coincided with the switch from being able to speak eloquently, to sounding like an idiot when verbalizing anything.

Amanda Seyfried in Mean Girls. (Courtesy of IMDb)

I have a hard time believing that at some point in our educational experience, like, everyone had a strict Valley Girl teacher who would, like, make her students practice inserting “like” into their sentences. I don’t understand where this phenomenon began, but I do know that it makes you sound, like, really stupid.

I can barely focus on what you’re, like, saying because you interrupt the flow of your sentence so much, and then I, like, go to respond and find that I’m just as guilty of committing this linguistic crime. Spare me the handcuffs. I’ll, like, go in peace.

As if your “like” inundation didn’t already have me doubting your credibility, your insistence on making every sentence sound like a question isn’t helping your case. You are telling me declarative statements, but your voice inflection is increasing as the sentence goes on? I’m not sure whether or not to trust the words coming out of your mouth, because even you don’t seem to believe yourself? If you’re going to say something, at least say it with authority. Although the only subject I would grant you authority on in the first place is TMZ.

Instead of reading your fifth article of the day on the Kardashian split, I have a more useful suggestion. Break out the dictionary and look up the meaning of the word “literally.”  My handy online dictionary tells me that “literally” means “without exaggeration or inaccuracy.”

That’s strange, because despite the fact that you just told me your head is literally killing you, I see no sign of struggle or bloodshed. Your statement is full of exaggeration and inaccuracy. That is literally the exact opposite word you want to use. There’s no need to make yourself a compulsive liar just to add emphasis to your story. I probably wasn’t listening anyway.

There’s the problem. Nobody is going to listen to you if you sound like an uneducated fool. During a time when the voice of our youth is so important and impactful to social activism, wouldn’t it be beneficial to have a voice that comes across as confident and intelligent? For the sake of the future of our nation, speak up and speak articulately. Choose your words thoughtfully, and deliver them with power and precision.

All we have is this one voice, and it would be such a shame to, like, waste it.

Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Lizzy Hernandez at Elizabeth.hernandez@colorado.edu.

If you’ve been reading any scientific-oriented news recently, you’ve probably heard about the neutrino experiment in CERN turning up some strange results. If you haven’t, you probably don’t know what neutrinos or CERN are. But hey, nobody’s perfect.

CERN, which stands for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire—or in English, the European Council for Nuclear Research—is a massive complex of physical laboratories in France and Switzerland. It currently has 20 member states and eight observers including the U.S., and has spent a total of about $1 billion as of 2008.

(CU Independent/Josh Shettler)

One of the labs at CERN is capable of creating neutrinos, which are tiny sub-atomic particles that scarcely interact with matter at all. Roughly five thousand trillion have gone through your body in the time it took you to read this sentence, but since they slip through the spaces between atoms, not one of them hit you. Trying to stop them is like trying to keep out mosquitos with a chain link fence.

Luckily, there’s a detector in Italy that can detect them, and recently the speed of a burst of neutrons was measured. The result was deeply concerning.

The problem was that the neutrinos seemed to have gotten there about 60 nanoseconds faster than light would have, which is supposed to be physically impossible.

The good news is that the scientists involved are behaving as cautiously about their results as they should be. The measurements here are incredibly precise, and thus incredibly prone to error.

For one thing, the distance from the neutrino generator to the detector is about 780 kilometers, as measured by GPS. But if that measurement is off by even 10 feet, which is close to the limit of how accurate GPS can be, the results are meaningless. Even things like the tidal force of the moon and sun, which can flex the Earth’s crust by up to a foot, have to be taken into account.

The other issue is timing. CERN says their timing is accurate to 10 ns, which is more than accurate enough to notice a 60 ns discrepancy, but it’s very hard to keep track of exactly when the neutrinos left the generator and arrived at the detector to an accuracy of billionths of a second.

Based on everything we know about physics, this result is probably an error.

“I wouldn’t bet my wife and kids [that it’s wrong] because they’d get mad. But I’d bet my house.” said Chang Kee Jung, a physicist not on the experiment.

And that’s the beauty of science.

These 157 researchers—all of them at the top of their field—aren’t denying that their results are astounding. These numbers are incompatible with every aspect of modern physics, but the researchers aren’t bristling defensively when people like me, and those far better qualified than I am, pick them apart.  They’re asking for help.

They’ve already published a 24-page paper explaining exactly what they did in the hope that someone might catch something they missed. Every particle physicist in the world wants to get to the bottom of this, and everyone’s willing to help everyone else to make that happen.

So what if it turns out to be true? Well, there will be massive and far-reaching repercussions about what we thought we knew; from the way stars work, to the evolution of the universe, to the very nature of the continuity of time.

But that’s the way science goes. We collect evidence and then try to come up with the explanation that best fits the evidence.  If new evidence arises that doesn’t fit, sometimes the explanation needs to be revised.

Science isn’t dogmatic. It’s not a list of facts. It’s a way of finding out how the world works.  When you work in a field that is based exclusively on the evidence you can find, there is no possibility of arrogance or irrational defenses of dead theories.

When the evidence changes, science has to roll with it, no matter how earth shattering it may be. That has happened countless times throughout history, and it may well happen again.

Will this be one of those times? We’ll have to wait and see.

Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Angus Bohanon at Angus.bohanon@gmail.com.

(Courtesy of Eric Wang)

After the shuttle Atlantis landed one final time earlier this summer, space shuttle flights as we know them have seemingly come to an end. A new era of commercialized manned spaceflight is beginning, and CU-Boulder is determined to continue to lead the rapidly evolving industry. Wherever this new era takes the country, The University of Colorado, Boulder’s Aerospace Engineering Sciences department will continuously provide the quality education, hands-on learning, and cutting-edge research that will meet and surpass the needs of the aerospace industry.

Contact CU Independent Multimedia Editor Eric Wang at Jin.wang@colorado.edu and Reporter Jamie Henderson at jmikaela5@gmail.com.

It’s a safe bet that everyone reading this article has a cell phone. It’s also a pretty safe bet that most of you have heard about the potential dangers of using a cell phone.

For years there have been articles about brain cancer being linked to cell phones, culminating recently when the World Health Organization published a press release that made the rounds a few months ago.

The part of that press release that has been cited the most says:

(CU Independent/Josh Shettler)

“The WHO…has classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B), based on an increased risk for glioma…associated with wireless phone use.”

What people kept quoting is “possibly carcinogenic,” and it’s true—that sounds scary. Let’s examine it further. I should warn you, we’re now examining the entire six-page press release, where we’ll find information that none of the eight-figure-budgeted giants like CNN and Fox have bothered to report on.

In the “results” section of the report (the important one), WHO clarifies, “The evidence was…limited among users of wireless telephones for glioma and acoustic neuroma, and inadequate…for other types of cancers.” You can read the long definitions for yourself if you want, but the strongest type of evidence—“limited”—means that “a causal interpretation is considered…to be credible, but chance, bias or confounding could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence.”

In short: maybe, maybe not.

The next aspect that some have pointed out is that Group 2B is the same category as lead and gasoline. Naturally the morning talk shows have taken that to mean that using your phone is the health equivalent of drinking a gasoline slushy with lead sprinkles.

Yes, those things are dangerous, but when you think about lead, the next phrase to spring to mind is probably “lead poisoning,” not “lead cancer.” Lead poisons you. Granted, it might eventually give you cancer, but that’s not your main concern when it’s causing seizures and comas instead.

Gasoline is a similar story. It’s not dangerous because it’s a carcinogen. It’s dangerous because it will literally dissolve your digestive and respiratory tracts. Cancer isn’t a factor when we’re talking about something that’ll poison you to death in a matter of hours.

Nickel, coffee and pickles are also in the Class 2B category with gasoline and lead. Those news outlets didn’t pick lead and gasoline because everyone would recognize them. They picked them because they’re scary. In reality, cell phones are roughly as likely to give you cancer as pickles are. No one’s writing letters to congress to ask for stricter regulations on pickles.

By now you’re probably wondering, how I can be so certain when even the WHO doesn’t seem to be? It all comes back to how cell phones work.

Cell phones communicate using electromagnetic radiation, which comes in the form of photons, or little packets of energy.  For a photon to be able to cause cancer, it has to have enough energy to break the chemical bonds in DNA so that when that cell multiplies, it won’t replicate correctly.  That’s called ionizing radiation.

The energy level of a photon is often measured in terms of its wavelength, where shorter wavelengths have more energy and are thus more dangerous.  Gamma rays are the most dangerous kind of EMR with a wavelength of around a femtometer, or a trillionth of a millimeter.

UV rays, the weakest form of ionizing radiation, have wavelengths around ten nanometers, or a hundred-millionth of a meter.  That’s already ten million times weaker than gamma rays, but the news gets better.  The wavelength that cell phones operate in is 11 to 14 inches.

Think about the numbers there.  The energy of a photon barely strong enough to break a chemical bond is about 1.5 billion times as strong as the ones from your phone.  It’s not as though your phone can almost hurt you. It’s not even close.

There’s one final nail to be put in this coffin. For cell phones to be causing brain cancer, no matter the mechanism, and one thing has to be true. Brain cancer rates have to be going up. We know cell phone usage is rising, so if the incidence of brain cancer is not also rising, then the two cannot be connected. Agreed?

Handily enough, people keep track of things like brain cancer. Between 1990 and 2010, cell phone usage went from 12 million to over 4.6 billion.But when researchers looked at the incidence of brain cancer during that time, here’s what they found.

“Given the widespread use and nearly two decades elapsing since mobile phones were introduced, an association should have produced a noticeable increase in the incidence of brain cancer by now. Trends in rates of newly diagnosed brain cancer cases between 1998 and 2007 were examined. There were no time trends in overall incidence of brain cancers for either gender, or any specific age group.”

So that’s it then. The people who try to argue that there’s a danger are no better off than a man trying to sue Easy-Bake because their oven burned his house down when his house is not burned down.

That means all this paranoia and hype from the media needs to stop.  Cell phones can’t be making cancer worse if cancer isn’t getting worse. You can’t blame someone for causing something if the thing you’re blaming them for hasn’t happened. Check and mate.

Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Angus Bohanon at Angus.bohanon@gmail.com

(CU Independent/Josh Shettler)

The opinions represented in this article do not necessarily represent those of the staff of CUIndependent.com nor any of its sponsors.

It’s September, kids.  The air is getting colder, it’s drizzling, and everyone’s flocking inside to drink tea and pretend to do productive things on their laptops.

In other words, it’s cold season, and since you’re all crammed together inside buildings, you’ll probably catch one. According to BBC health, the average adult gets two to four infections a year, mostly between September and April.  Did I mention it’s September?

Naturally, the first thing you’ll want to know is how to avoid getting the cold, unless you’re some kind of masochist who thinks breathing freely is for the weak-willed. But if you do enjoy respiratory function, I have good and bad news.

The good news is that on Aug. 23, the Colorado Daily published an article titled “Cure it with the earth,” full of advice for treating the most common winter ailments.  The bad news is that it’s not very good advice.

The article is based on an interview with Kathy Thorpe, the owner of Six Persimmons Apothecary in Boulder, which bills itself as “a place where people could come for natural remedies that really work.”

According to Thorpe, “The body is the greatest healer.  Symptoms and illnesses occur because the body is out of balance.  Alternative medicine seeks the root cause, rather than just treating or suppressing symptoms.”

There have been a lot of books written about alternative medicine. I recommend “Trick or Treatment” by Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh.

Most of the remedies listed in the Daily article are homeopathic, incorrectly defined as “a system for the treatment of disease by small doses of natural substances.”  That’s simply not true.  Homeopathic remedies are based on two principles.  The first is that “like cures like,” meaning that a substance that causes a given symptom can also be used to treat that symptom.

The second is that the more diluted an active ingredient is (usually in water or sugar), the stronger its effects become.  This is because the water in which the original ingredient is diluted can supposedly “remember” the characteristics of that ingredient.

Let’s look at one specific example, oscillococcinum.  This is the most common homeopathic drug in the world, manufactured exclusively by one company in France.  It is sold at a strength of 200C.

200C means that the original ingredient is diluted to one part in 100 to the 200th power.  Take a moment to wrap your head around that number.  That’s a number one followed by four hundred zeros. I’d love to put that number in perspective for you, but there is no perspective that can be used.  Even the number of atoms in the entire observable universe is only 10 raised to the 80th power.

This means that there is not a single molecule of the final ingredient in the homeopathic solution, a fact that homeopaths dismiss by reverting to the assertion that water has “memory.” Conveniently, the water seems to have “forgotten” all the digestive tracts it’s run through.

In 110 studies, homeopathy demonstrated no better results than a placebo.  It’s water and sugar.  You could treat your cold with Kool-Aid and it would work just as well, and be tastier and a lot cheaper to boot.

Even the traditional approaches to cold treatment aren’t necessarily useful.  For example, everyone “knows” that taking Vitamin C supplements will help your immune system, right? Sorry.  A meta-analysis of 29 studies involving over 11,000 studies showed that Vitamin C didn’t reduce the incidence of the common cold.  Ready? The news only gets worse.

Echinacea, an herb that’s claimed to boost immune function, doesn’t work. Steam inhalation is supposed to loosen up mucus and kill the virus with heat, but that doesn’t work either. In some cases, it has actually caused severe burns.

So what does work?

A study by the National Institute of Health has shown that zinc supplements have some effectiveness in reducing the severity and duration of the cold. There is really not much that can be done medicinally though.  The unfortunate truth is that you’re almost certainly going to get a cold, and nothing short of a biohazard suit will work with absolute effectiveness.

The nice thing is that the cold isn’t usually that severe and doesn’t last very long.  The best thing you can do for yourself is to try to get enough sleep, stay hydrated, and stay fed.  Make sure your body has the energy to support your immune system, because that’s the best defense you’ve got.

The real problem here is back with our friends at the Daily.  That article was written with only one source, and no background research into the remedies it recommends.  Any author that makes recommendations about people’s health has a responsibility to report accurately and fairly about those recommendations, and this article falls sorely short in that respect.

In this case, the potential consequences are pretty mild.  Worst case scenario: you get a cold anyway. To take the stance that “modern” medicine is bad and that “ancient” or “alternative” cures are always better is plain ignorance towards centuries of medical research, careful studies and the progress of science.  It warns people away from proven remedies and toward alternatives that are often useless, which is irresponsible at best and dangerous at worst.

Take your medical advice with a grain of salt.  Do the research yourself.  It doesn’t take long, and there are dozens of free resources for this kind of information. If you don’t have that option, keep in mind that traditional medications can’t be sold without demonstrating efficacy in clinical trials.  “Natural” remedies have no such restrictions.

When in doubt, trust a doctor.

Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Angus Bohanon at Angus.bohanon@gmail.com