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Mother 'died of a broken heart' after false psychic message

The dramatic rescue of three women kept prisoner for 10 years in a house in Cleveland, Ohio, came too late for the mother of one of them (NZ Herald, 9 May).

Louwana Miller, mother of Amanda Berry, died of heart failure in 2006, aged 44, three years after the disappearance of her daughter, and two years after being told by a psychic that her daughter was dead.

The Plain Dealer reported at the time (18 November 2004) that the psychic was Sylvia Browne. "She's not alive, honey," Browne told Miller. "Your daughter's not the kind who wouldn't call."

With those blunt words, the Plain Dealer wrote, Browne persuaded Miller to accept a grim probability that had become more likely with each passing day. Miller said she believed "98 percent" in Browne.

"Please don't misunderstand me. I still don't want to believe it. I want to have hope but, after a year and a half, what else is there? It seems like the God-honest truth."

Yet nothing in Sylvia Browne's track record should have inspired any sort of confidence. This is not the first time she has wrongly claimed a missing person to be dead (The Guardian, 8 May). She told the parents of missing child Shawn Hornbeck that their son was buried between two boulders. He was found alive in 2007 after being missing for four years. A three-year study of Browne's predictions about missing persons and murder cases by Ryan Shaffer and Agatha Jadwiszczok for the Skeptical Inquirer found that despite her repeated claims to be more than 85 percent correct, "Browne has not even been mostly correct in a single case."

Tiny 'Alien' mummy human after all

A 15-cm humanoid skeleton with a high-pointed skull found in Chile's Atacama Desert has been confirmed as human by genetic testing (Stuff, 8 May).

Dubbed Ata, the diminutive specimen was reportedly found in a ghost town, and has been latched on to by the producers of the film Sirius and others as evidence of alien life. Now immunologist Garry Nolan of Stanford University has examined its DNA. He initially presumed the specimen may have been ancient, and consulted experts who had extracted DNA from bones of the Denisovans, an Asian relative of European Stone Age Neanderthals. It turned out that their protocols weren't necessary: Ata's DNA was modern, abundant, and high quality. Its mitochondrial DNA revealed that its mother was from Chile.

Mysteries remain, however. Ata has only 10 pairs of ribs instead of the usual 12, and the growth plates on the long bones show development equivalent to that of a six to eight-year-old child. So either Ata had a severe form of dwarfism or, more likely, suffered from a severe form of progeria, a disease causing rapid aging. Nolan hopes to resolve this by extracting haemoglobin from the specimen's bone marrow and comparing the relative amounts of foetal versus adult haemoglobin proteins.

"This looks to me like a badly desiccated and mummified human foetus or premature stillbirth," said William Jungers, a palaeoanthropologist and anatomist at Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York. He noted the "barely ossified and immature elements" of the hands and feet, and the wide open metopic suture, where the two frontal bones of the skull come together down the middle of the forehead.

One thing is clear: Ata is not a hoax. X-rays clearly showed it had real bones, complete with arterial shadows, Nolan said. "You just couldn't fake it. Unless you were an alien."

Burger still prime after 14 years?

The NZ Herald (26 April) has run a credulous piece on Utah man David Whipple's McDonald's hamburger, which still looks "good as new" 14 years after it was made. Whipple said he'd originally planned to keep it for two months to show friends how its preservatives would maintain its appearance.

In the Herald's defence, the story was published widely around the world, but it's just the latest incarnation of an urban legend that's been doing the rounds for many years.

In reality, preservatives have nothing to do with it: any small burger will keep its appearance if it's allowed to dry out - it's probably very easy to achieve this in Utah. Kenji López-Alt of aht.serious-eats.com put this to the test in 2010. He found that home-made, preservative-free (and even salt-free) burgers wouldn't rot either, if they were left in the open to dry out. Furthermore, the larger McDonald's Quarter Pounder did rot, and by about the same amount as a home-made version. To complete the study, he put both McDonald's and home-made burgers in zip-lock bags. Both rotted. Now that's science at its best.

Exorcist doesn't believe in "that sort of thing"

The Anglican vicar who was once Wellington's exorcist has told the Dominion Post (23 May) he doesn't believe in all that sort of thing - "it's a load of rubbish."

Father Michael Blain learned exorcism in the 1980s in rural Zimbabwe, where distress was often blamed on curses, demons, or magic. Some families would call for a witchdoctor, but others came to the church.

"… [T]he church staff said it was my job … they see the world in such a way they believe you can help them, and it was my job to help."

It was not about what he believed, he said, it was about what people needed. He would turn up on a motorcycle and perform exorcisms alongside village elders. But he never believed he was casting out Satan.

When he returned to New Zealand he was asked to do the job for Wellington. "My parishioners in Kelburn laughed at me … said they were embarrassed to tell anyone they had a priest who did exorcisms."

He was proud to say he never actually performed the ceremony. If he was asked to do one, he would talk and pray with the person, and would often refer them to a psychiatrist or a doctor.

He said he was concerned about the growth of churches that believe in demons and possession. While every Catholic diocese is still obliged by canon law to have someone available to do exorcisms, Wellington has no appointed exorcist, and Catholic Archbishop of Wellington John Dew said that, as far as he knew, it had never needed one.

Catholic Education Office chief executive Pat Lynch said these things were not in the realm of fantasy. He remembered a house in Auckland in the 1970s, where "people were getting in touch with the Underworld".

The story was that a one-metre hole would open up in the side of a wall, leaving scorch marks around it. While parts of the story may have been embellished, an exorcist was brought in, and the ritual he performed apparently worked, Lynch said. "I have no reason to disbelieve it."

Psychometric tests cost jobs

Longstanding public servants are being asked whether their friends know how to party, if they hate opera and whether they like riddles - and their answers could cost them their jobs (Dominion Post, 5 July).

Psychometric testing is being used in restructuring measures at government departments such as the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and the Department of Conservation, a move employment lawyer Barbara Buckett says is a new and sinister trend.

"It's a cute move they use to get rid of what they classify as 'dead wood'. They can design it to make sure certain people don't pass."

One of her clients, a former public servant, took redundancy rather than complete a test, after deciding that failure could obstruct future employment.

Public Service Association national secretary Brenda Pilott said the association objected strongly to the tests. "We think this kind of dabbling in people's psychological makeup is horribly intrusive, and it's ridiculous - how does liking opera singing make me a good health and safety inspector? I suppose you're meant to say you don't like it, because if you say 'yes' you are some kind of elitist snob, but I don't know." Statements which participants in the tests had to tick True or False included: "The secrets of the universe are objective and knowable", "I can make up stories quickly", and "I would enjoy skydiving".