Via Neil Gaiman’s journal, here are 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense from the latest issue of New Scientist:

4 Belfast homeopathy results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions – so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule – worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this “mother tincture” in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. “We are,” Ennis says in her paper, “unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.” If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

Of interest mostly because of Airborne, the oh-so-popular cold remedy — you’re supposed to take this when you feel yourself getting a cold, and it either shortens the cold’s duration or prevents it all together. It’s a homeopathic remedy that is the pharmaceutical industry’s Tickle Me Elmo — it’s so backordered, a Giant Eagle pharmacist told me last week that they’d been waiting for two weeks to be restocked and hadn’t seen any yet.

Most folks will tell you it works, despite not actually containing any real medicine to speak of (apart from a massive infusion of Vitamin C, which is great and all but isn’t what we think of as “medicine”…) (Looks like someone even asked Google.) I’m one of them — I took it the weekend I was starting to get a bad cold (beginning on Saturday) and by Tuesday morning I’d knocked it on its ears. Never left my sinuses, never drained into my throat and lungs — which ALWAYS happens when I get a cold, leading to two weeks of hacking and grossness. Not this year.

Unfortunately, we used the last two tablets in the house last night, after Carl puked his guts out all over himself, the car seat, the bed, his blanket, and other various and sundry items in the house. Anyone know where there’s more to be had in Columbus? I don’t really want to have to resort to Amazon…