They lost the vote only a little over five months ago. They lost power only three months ago. But the current state of the Republican Party is such that it’s hard to see them rebounding for quite some time.

That’s not how they’d see it. They’d tell you that’s where they were a month ago. Now, they argue, they’re back. First, they say, Obama is proving to be the great divider. Poll numbers out this week say quite clearly that now, almost more than ever before, Americans absolutely love or fervently hate the President based on whether or not they identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans. In other words, say the GOP, the President, unlike either Bush, or Reagan, or even Bill Clinton, fails to appeal whatsoever to those who support the opposite party.

(The pollsters say that’s only half the story. What has actually happened is that GOP support has shrunk so much, with so few identifying themselves as Republicans, that the new polls only show what we already knew: that the few hardened believers who are still proud Republicans don’t very much like Obama. The real story is that so many people who used to identify themselves as Republicans now do not.)

Next, they argue that they’ve grasped back the agenda. Some Republicans believe that with all their crowing about the plan to close Guantanamo Bay, with their loud opposition to basic equality for homosexuals, with their odd arguments that Obama is a socialist and, most recently (and ridiculously), that he is a fascist (brilliantly ripped into here), that they are really getting through to people.

Of course these arguments are getting through to some people. It’s just that “some people” only includes the most hardened neocons and the most extreme of the social conservatives. Or, to put it another way, the very few Americans who agreed with what they’re saying in the first place.

Here’s the point. They lost the election because what they said and the way they said it (the weird, anti-intellectual quasi-populism of the Joe the Plumber/Sarah Palin variety) increasingly didn’t chime with the American people, only with the Republican base. And yet their post-election strategy has been only to intensify that trend.

By playing to the most fractious, extreme elements of conservative support — those who watch and agree with Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly — they only alienate the rest. And to continue to do so, I think, would be their route to oblivion. As they play more and more to these sorts of opinions, the more they alienate (rather than persuade) the majority, and the less they look like serious people who could be trusted to run the country.

There are many Republicans who recognise that their current path is the wrong one. The problem is that without real leadership in opposition (a consequence, partly, of the American system), it is those who shout the loudest who have the most influence over the direction of the GOP. It is they, not the many moderates within the party, whom the public associate with the Republican brand. It is they who might bring it down.

Senior Congressional Republicans should muster the intelligence as well as the humility to work together to create an alternative picture for the public of what the Republican party is and stands for. And this vision must not be more of the same: The Republican party must change to reflect the changing nature of Americans’ attitudes and needs. Or else, by continuing in the manner of the past few months, it will cease to matter in US politics.

I realise that, running this so soon after the article on electric speed bumps, I’m running the risk of turning this into the Cherwell urban road planning ’blog, but local council transport policies have once again made environmental headlines this week.

The big news is that planners can finally support so-called ‘green waves’ of traffic lights, which use sensors in the road to allow smooth-flowing traffic to surf on a wave of consecutive green lights through towns and cities. This should decrease journey times, drivers’ aggro and, because there will be less braking and accelerating, carbon emissions.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? So, er, why weren’t town councils in favour of these before? Well, it turns out that they are forced to cede to a set of centralised Department for Transport guidelines. The new guidelines endorse the green waves, citing their environmental credentials. So, what was the previous policy? BBC News explains:

Previously the Department for Transport had discouraged the systems which reduce fuel use, resulting in less tax being paid to the Treasury.

I wish I had been sipping coffee when I read that, because I would have literally sprayed it all over the computer. Alas, I was reduced to swearing aloud.

There is obviously a degree of pointlessness in getting irate over guidelines which have just been revoked…but this advice is so egregiously batshit insane that I think it’s worth dwelling on. Official government guidelines explicitly obliged councils to inconvenience the public as much as possible in order to charge them for the privilege.

If the government need to raise taxes, and I am not so naïvely right-wing that I cannot countenance this possibility, then please put a percentage point on income tax—or even fuel duty—don’t waste our time and petrol just to tax us on the latter! Of all the horrendous stealth taxes, this is surely the most triumphantly idiotic. It’s like forcing people to take up smoking in order to boost government coffers. (Ha ha, I am funny. Coffers, coughers, geddit?! Oh, screw you.)

And how late is this advice being repealed? In 2009, after decades of persistent whingeing from environmentalists, the government finally abolishes a policy which actively requires road planners to increase emissions in order to plump up the public purse. What next, encouraging rampant consumerism to boost tax revenue on useless plastic shit? Oh, wait.

I hope you too are seething with resentment at an institution which can set out guidelines mandating public inconvenience and environmental catastrophe in order to scrape together a few extra pennies.

However, though I am glad to see the back of the previous ludicrous legislation in principle, I’m not so sure in practice. These more efficient traffic control algorithms will allow us to squeeze more vehicles onto the road, and the only law in road planning is that no matter how much extra capacity you create, it will be filled. Plus, if you don’t want people to drive in towns, making it as annoying as possible due to perverse, irrational traffic signals could be a good thing: lowering the irritation barrier may mean that those extra spaces on the road are filled quicker than you’d imagine.

Strangely, then, it might well be better to return to the previous, annoying stipulation—but crucially, if we did, it should be on the principle that it advances the greater good. We should add up the pros and cons of the various different solutions—environmental, economic and taxation—and choose the one which makes the World as good as it can be. There must never be a place in government for laws which make things worse in order to reap the tax revenue.

Oxford neuroscience was splashed across the media this week with new research suggesting that atypical brain activity, caused by a high-risk Alzheimer’s disease gene, can be spotted as early as age twenty.

The study was performed in collaboration with Imperial College London and is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. It shows a significant correlation between having the high-risk mutation of the gene in question, ApoE4, and a raised level of activity in the hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in memory formation. The researchers suggest that over-activity may simply wear that part of the brain out, leading to damage, and memory problems, in later life.

Alzheimer’s disease is a headline-grabber, and BBC News, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail (to name but a few) reported the findings accordingly. They detailed how this work could bring us close to a simple method of identifying those at increased risk of dementia early enough to offer prophylactic treatment.

However, these media reports are misleading. Firstly, the most important link that would allow the conclusions above to be drawn has not been demonstrated at all: we do not know whether this increased hippocampal activity is in fact linked to the actual development of Alzheimer’s disease or not.

Of course, it would take an investigation spanning half a century to show whether these mutation-carrying participants with increased brain activity at age 20-30 are more likely to develop dementia at age 70-80. But without evidence of this sort, it is entirely premature to suggest that this increased activity could be a helpful diagnostic tool.

And similarly, without this evidence, it is also premature for both the researchers and the media reports to say that over-activity in the hippocampus could be “effectively wearing it out”.

Secondly, even if it were to be shown that this higher activity is indeed linked to the future development of dementia, the diagnostic brain-scanning of all 20-30 year-olds with the rogue gene (around 25% of them) would be anything but the “simple test” that some of the articles would have you believe. These functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans take about an hour to do and are very expensive: around £1500 a pop, plus the million quid you need to buy the scanner in the first place. Furthermore, these scans would have to exclude many potential participants, such as women who are pregnant, or could be pregnant, and anyone with metal inside their body, from a pacemaker to a surgical staple.

Lastly, even if this were a practical method of screening, an the ethical queston is raised by distinguishing, at an early age, those who are more likely to go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Fair enough, people found to be at risk could be offered early treatment and lifestyle advice. Unfortunately, there is currently no successful “early” or preventative treatment available, and neither do we know which lifestyle factors contribute to increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, beyond the usual “drink less, eat less, exercise more” mantra that we should all be following in any case to avoid obesity and its associated health problems. The benefit of potential protective treatment must outweigh the emotional stress that could follow the discovery that one is at increased risk of a nasty brain disease.

Again, the glossy media portrayal of a medical panacea unravels; but science has acquired another small piece in the puzzle of Alzheimer’s pathology.