She Blinded Me With Science!

Let 'em play!

2009-02-25T06:36:00.001-08:00

My most recent piece for Scientific American MIND is about the importance of spontaneous free play for kids -- and what might happen as a result of its demise. Parents and schools are letting kids play less and less these days, and this could have implications for the social and emotional health of generations to come. (If you get the chance to peek at the print version, do -- the pictures of kids and animals playing are heart-melting!)

I also talked about this piece (and a few others I've recently written) on New Hampshire Public Radio's Word of Mouth a few weeks ago. You can listen to the segment here.

I know, I know...

2009-02-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted in SO LONG. Mostly because I've been so busy and feel bad just posting links to my new stories. But some people have been asking me to do that anyway, so.... I'll try posting some links to my most recent stories and maybe -- just maybe -- occasionally write up a blog post or two.

Most recently, Popular Mechanics has come out with my feature on 20 Biotech Breakthroughs that Will Change Medicine. Included among them are rocket-powered prostheses, contact lenses that can diagnose glaucoma, spit tests for cancer, and pills that tell you when you've taken them.

You can read the whole story here, or check out their March issue (where the art is much better!).

Word of Mouth

2008-08-26T13:19:00.000-07:00

Today I made my radio debut on New Hampshire Public Radio's Word of Mouth. They invited me to talk about my article on flavor enhancers featured in August's Scientific American. You can download my 8-minute segment here.

I was a nervous wreck, but somehow I held it together. That's despite the fact that when the producer first called, I couldn't hear anything because I had accidentally hit the mute button (I guess it mutes both ways!). Luckily, I figured out the problem fairly quickly -- but not before hanging up on him, too. Heh.

Cellphone Games

2008-08-12T07:19:00.000-07:00

I know. I haven't posted in eons. I've lost all three of my regular readers and I should be ashamed of myself. But alas, I have been busy! Which is a good thing when it comes to, you know, paying rent and stuff like that.

In fact, I have nothing to blog about right now, either, but I will be kind enough to post a link to my latest piece, published in Canada's The Walrus magazine. It's about cover-ups in the telecommunications industry over cell phone safety. I started writing the piece as a student at NYU, and now, three years later, it's finally being published. I couldn't be more thrilled!

Get smarter & save the world

2008-02-12T17:25:00.000-08:00

The website FreeRice.com was started with two goals in mind:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.

2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

Lo and behold, that's exactly what it does. When you arrive at the site, you're asked a vocabulary question (don't worry, you don't have to sign up or anything - no forms, I promise). If you answer it correctly, the site donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program; then you're asked a harder question. With each question you answer correctly, the site gives another 20 grains away. In January, the site donated a total of 4,551,581,980 grains (that comes to more than 150,000 pounds).

The best part is, even if you get an answer wrong, you can still continue to play. And the site keeps track of how much rice you've donated in a cute little ricebowl icon to the right. You can also change your settings so that the site remembers you when you return, keeping a tally on how many grains of rice you've given since you first started playing.

So. Next time you want to procrastinate, why not increase your word knowledge and give a little something to the poor? It's that easy.

(Many thanks to a commenter on the WSJ Health Blog for pointing out the site.)

Must I eat greens to be green?

2008-01-24T11:37:00.000-08:00

Dear science enthusiasts: If you haven't yet been introduced to the fabulous online science magazine Inkling, please, pay it a visit. It's run by a handful of feisty young science writers and is one of the coolest mags around. Lucky for me, I recently had the chance to write a little something for them. Ever wondered what a green meal looks like? I don't mean a plate full of spinach -- I mean an environmentally friendly meal. Well, I did some digging and here's what I found out.

A periodic table of microbes?

2008-01-23T13:57:00.000-08:00

Yes, yes, I'm still alive -- just running around like a mad woman. Sorry for not posting! But I have good news: my very first Nature piece has just been published. I've been wanting to write about viral interactions for ages, and I'm super excited to have had the opportunity to do so for such a great publication. You can read my article here.

The Ecstatic Brain

2007-12-05T20:27:00.000-08:00

No one knows exactly why MDMA -- better known as the drug ecstacy -- makes people feel as wonderful as it does, but the short answer is that it floods the brain with the feel-good chemical serotonin. Although MDMA has typically been associated with, well, partying, a team of South Carolina scientists is currently testing the drug as a potential treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Convincing the FDA to consider the drug for medical purposes has clearly been an uphill battle, but it looks like it's finally getting somewhere. Learn more about it in an endearing story published in this week's Washington Post magazine, and don't miss the Editor's Note, which reveals the writer's long-standing interest in the subject.

Mouse Party!

2007-11-29T16:06:00.000-08:00

Neuroscience has never been this entertaining. The University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center has developed an online game, Mouse Party, designed to teach players how different drugs affect the brain. Why are the effects of LSD so complicated? How come heroin makes you feel like a million bucks? What does an animated stoned mouse look like, anyway? Find out all this and more at the coolest rodent party in town.

Does your name define you?

2007-11-16T09:49:00.000-08:00

You be the judge.

Intellectual Blogging Award

2007-11-06T13:59:00.000-08:00

As bloggers tend to do, I was checking out who'd been to my site recently and saw a couple of hits from An Unquiet Mind, a blog I didn't recognize. Curious, I went to the site and began reading a post about the "Intellectual Blogging Award," an award the blog gives to bloggers who really think on their own. Turns out that someone thinks I do that! Grrlscientist over at Living the Scientific Life, who came to speak to my NYU class one day last year, has nominated my blog for the award. Aw, shucks. I am honored!

And now I will nominate my favorite intellectual blogs. I realize these are very Scienceblogs-heavy, but hey, I used to work at Seed. What do you expect?

1. The Loom - I love microbes. So does Carl Zimmer. Naturally, I love his blog. (I realize he was already nominated, but I can't help it. His was the first that came to mind.)
2. Aetiology - Tara Smith writes a lot about microbes too. She's prolific and excellent.
3. Science Made Cool - A biology-focused blog that I've just discovered and quite enjoy.
4. Bad Science - The Guardian's bad science columnist dissects, well, bad science.
5. The Neurocritic - Picks apart new research findings in neuroscience and psychopharmacology. Very interesting stuff.

Tesla coils dance spritely across stage

2007-11-06T12:06:00.000-08:00

Well, not exactly. But in what is possibly the most wonderful display of dorkese I have ever seen, two self-described "tech coilers" have built solid-state tesla coil systems that lend themselves to audio modulation. The result? Tesla Coils that perform the Nutcracker's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Read more about how they did it here. (Thanks, Michael, for sending me the Youtube link.)

What's in the soil?

2007-11-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered why HIV is so prevalent in Africa? Could it have something to do with the continent's geography? Sounds ridiculous, maybe, but there's at least some evidence to support the idea. Check out my new post on the subject at 60 Second Science...

Sleep for your sanity

2007-11-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

It's no surprise that sleep deprivation is bad for emotional stability -- oh, how it makes you cranky. But until now, scientists haven't really understood why.

In what is the first neural investigation into what happens to the sleep-deprived brain, researchers at UC-Berkeley used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to look how activity in the amygdala, a brain region key to processing emotions, is affected by sleep deprivation. When subjects who had stayed awake for 35 hours were shown negative visual stimuli like mutilated bodies, the amygdala become hyperactive compared to subjects who had gotten a full night's sleep. And when the amygdala goes haywire, it consequently shuts down the prefrontal cortex, an area responsible for logical reasoning, preventing the release of chemicals needed to calm down the fight-or-flight reflex.

The amygdala is also closely connected to depression, anxiety and other psychiatric disorders. It could be that without sleep, the brain reverts back to more primitive patterns of activity, unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses, according to Matthew Walker, director of UC Berkeley's Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory and senior author of the study.

The study's findings lay the groundwork for further investigation into the relationship between sleep and psychiatric illnesses. Clinical evidence, for example, has shown that some form of sleep disruption is present in almost all psychiatric disorders; this is the first set of experiments demonstrating that even healthy people's brains mimic certain pathological psychiatric patterns when deprived of their 40 winks.

Halloween posts

2007-11-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

It's been eons, but yes, I'm still alive -- just busy! Sorry for not blogging for, well, three months, and thanks to those who emailed me asking me to come back. I didn't even realize I had fans!

Over at Scientific American's 60 Second Science blog, I wrote a festive Halloween post about the effects of costuming on human behavior -- i.e., does Halloween make us go a little crazy? Check it out here.

The site has another great Halloween post about what science says about the supernatural. And you can probably guess what that is.

More to come soon, I promise!

Crowd Farm

2007-08-02T17:47:00.001-07:00

According to my good friend and former classmate Andrea Thompson over at LiveScience, a team of MIT graduate architecture students is looking into a new source of energy - us. The students, who just won an international competition with their idea, hope to harness the energy generated by human movement in crowds and turn it into electricity. Thompson writes,

"The so-called 'Crowd Farm' would work something like this: A responsive sub-flooring system would be placed under, say, the platform of a subway terminal. The blocks that make up the system would depress slightly under the force of human footsteps. As the blocks slipped against each other, they would generate power in the form of an electric current.

"That electric current could be used, among other things, to light up signs about the energy created by the pedestrians, the creators say.

"'We want people to understand the direct relationship between their movement and the energy produced,' said co-creator Thaddeus Jusczyk.

"While the Crowd Farm wouldn't work in the home (a single human step generates only enough power to light two 60-watt light bulbs for one second), it could really draw some power from a crowd producing thousands of steps. Some 28,527 steps, for example, could power an entire moving train for a second.

"The Crowd Farm could also be used to harness the head-bashing energy at a rock concert."

Brain Scans Show Meditation's Effects

2007-07-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

I just published a piece suggesting one way in which meditation affects the brain. Meditators sometimes identify the negative emotions they are feeling in order to free themselves of them, and brain scans have recently shown that this process actually calms the part of the brain associated with emotional processing. As I described in the article:

Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don't know why it works.

UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, which scan the brain to reveal which parts are active and inactive at any given moment.

They asked the subjects to look at pictures of male or female faces making emotional expressions. Below some of the photos was a choice of words describing the emotion—such as "angry" or "fearful"—or two possible names for the people in the pictures, one male name and one female name.

When presented with these choices, the subjects were asked to pick the most appropriate emotion or gender-appropriate name to fit the face they saw.

When the participants chose labels for the negative emotions, activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region—an area associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences—became more active, whereas activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional processing, was calmed.

By contrast, when the subjects picked appropriate names for the faces, the brain scans revealed none of these changes—indicating that only emotional labeling makes a difference.

"In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses," Lieberman said of his study, which is detailed in the current issue of Psychological Science.

In a second experiment, 27 of the same subjects completed questionnaires to determine how 'mindful' they are.

Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to "let them go."

When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference—the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions.

"These findings may help explain the beneficial health effects of mindfulness meditation, and suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood and health," said David Creswell, a UCLA psychologist who led the second part of the study, which will be detailed in Psychosomatic Medicine.

Family Ties

2007-06-16T12:01:00.000-07:00

Animals are known to recognize and favor their relatives, but a new study suggests that plants do too, sharing resources like soil and water more readily when situated next to their kin as opposed to strangers.

Susan Dudley, associate professor of biology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, explains that "when plants share their pots, they get competitive and start growing more roots, which allows them to grab water and mineral nutrients before their neighbours get them. It appears, though, that they only do this when sharing a pot with unrelated plants; when they share a pot with family they don't increase their root growth. Because differences between groups of strangers and groups of siblings only occurred when they shared a pot, the root interactions may provide a cue for kin recognition."

The article in ScienceDaily goes on to say,

"Though they lack cognition and memory, the study shows plants are capable of complex social behaviors such as altruism towards relatives, says Dudley. Like humans, the most interesting behaviors occur beneath the surface.

Dudley and her student, Amanda File, observed the behavior in sea rocket (Cakile edentula), a member of the mustard family native to beaches throughout North America, including the Great Lakes."

Medicine for Mania

2007-06-14T12:50:00.000-07:00

According to a new article in The Scientist magazine, the psychoactive plant Salvia divinorum, commonly referred to as Magic Mint or Diviner's Sage, could soon become a promising treatment for mania.

Researchers have found that the plant evokes an apathetic state in rats -- they no longer want sugar rewards, for which they'll usually do anything. The reason for this is that Salvia activates biological receptors called k-opioid receptors that induce a depressed-like state in parts of the brain; when these same receptors are blocked, it is as if rats have taken antidepressants. The article states,

The idea, says McLean Hospital's Bruce Cohen, is that if people who are manic are at the opposite end of the mood spectrum from people with depression, pushing them closer to depression with salvinorin A might deliver them to a healthy medium.

The article points out that there are a lot of issues that would need to be ironed out before Salvia might appear on a list of mania medications -- for instance, the plant acts too rapidly, and is incredibly potent -- but nevertheless, the research provides yet more evidence that some the psychoactive compounds that have long been scoffed at do, in fact, have powerful, potentially beneficial, qualities. Now that these plants are being studied under the guise of "science," people are finally taking notice of them and realizing what others have believed for a long time.

Abu Dhabi sets a green example

2007-06-12T20:31:00.000-07:00

Abu Dhabi might be one of the most oil-rich cities in the world, but that's not stopping its government from going green.

According to a recent article in Gulf News, the government-run Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company (Masdar) is launching a $5 billion initiative to develop a six square-kilometer carbon neutral, waste-free "green city" by 2009. The city is also developing a 100-megawatt solar power plant that could be expanded to power 500,000 homes.

This news comes on the tail of the newest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicts that temperatures in the Middle East will rise by up to two degrees celcius by 2030.

The article quotes Masdar's CEO, Sultan Al Jaber, who said, "What we are trying to do is to set an example not only in the region, but worldwide, for other nations to follow."

Science agrees with Buddha (again)

2007-05-15T23:09:00.000-07:00

Meditation sharpens our attention so that we notice details we might otherwise have missed, according to a new study, one among a number of recent studies that reveal that, yes, Buddhists have been right all along.

The article, published in LiveScience, says:

In recent years, scientists have found meditation affects brain functions. For instance, research into Tibetan monks trained in focusing their attention on a single object or thought revealed they could concentrate on one image significantly longer than normal when shown two different images at each eye. Another study of people who on average meditated 40 minutes daily found that areas of their brains linked with attention and sensory processing became thicker.

"One of the fundamental mysteries that is now becoming better understood as we go along but which is still a breakthrough area of research is neuroplasticity, the idea that we can literally change our brains through mental training," Davidson told LiveScience. "Certain kinds of mental characteristics such as attention or certain emotions such as happiness can best be regarded as skills that can be trained."

Indeed, meditation has recently been a hot topic, and research suggests it does more than just increase our mental acuity.

Science writer Sharon Begley recently published a book (The Mind and the Brain) about brain plasticity in which meditation was featured prominently. (You can also read an excerpt from her book in a recent article of hers in Time.) In it, she discusses how Davidson's research challenges the long-held hypothesis that a person's happiness set-point is unmovable. Davidson (with the help of the Dalai Lama) recruited Buddhist Monks--who had spent more than 10,000 hours meditating--for tests in which they meditated under fMRI scans. The scans showed "dramatic changes in the parts of the brain associated with happiness" as compared to the scans from a group of students who had recently undergone a crash course in meditation.

Who knows what else science will reveal about meditation--I am reviewing a book for the upcoming issue of Scientific American Mind that suggests science will soon have a lot more to say about meditation's power to heal and improve our lives.

But many people have proof enough already, I suppose.

Say goodbye to Jules

2007-04-30T11:19:00.001-07:00

Robots are getting a little tooooo good....I can't help but find this slightly frightening.

Religion, science and hate mail

2007-04-25T19:28:00.000-07:00

My piece about religion and its effects on the development of young children has made its way around the news media and the blogosphere (it's been on Fox News, Yahoo News, the Drudge Report and even Richard Dawkins' website), and boy, have I been getting some hate mail!

I came across this study while going through my usual weekly search for new journal articles. I tend to be attracted to psychology and sociology -- much to my chagrin, since such studies are more esoteric and controversial and generate a lot of opinionated feedback. (My piece on reincarnation elicited some VERY interesting hate mail.)

What's fascinating to me in reading my hate mail is that people overwhelmingly jump to conclusions and make grand assumptions. I have been accused of saying that atheists can't be good parents (I don't recall having said that, nor do I believe it), that I must be a religious fanatic (of course I'm anything but), and that the study I was reporting on wasn't scientific.

I concede it's social science, and that any such research is difficult to conduct and to make concrete conclusions from. But I tried to present the methodology of the study clearly so that people could realize what it entailed and make their own judgments about it. I pointed out some of its weaknesses and limitations and even suggested that the conclusions of the study could be backwards (something that the study's lead researcher wanted me to mention, for those who assume he is a Bible-thumper). But instead of realizing that I was pointing out these details so that people could benefit from them, readers sent me hate mail to the effect of "you must have been too stupid to realize that this study was inconclusive, because after all, you mentioned the limitations X, Y and Z." Guys, don't you think I pointed out X, Y and Z for a reason?

I happen to think that children benefit from religious families mainly because religion provides parents with positive support networks. But the effects of this support, in my opinion, have nothing to do with God or religion. Secular organizations would probably do the same thing -- they're just not as pervasive. But these are my opinions, not science (at least until someone tests them!), which is why I've saved them for my blog.

And don't get me wrong -- some of the mail I've gotten has been thoughful and thought-provoking, and those I really appreciate.

Now, for my favorite hate mail excerpt:

I suppose the moral sewage of the Vatican and the US Bush-God-speaking-with gov't can only be understood, enjoyed, and embraced by deeply brainwashed parasites, or religious people, as you say. I admit I only managed to stomach the first two lines of your mental vomit but it's enough to picture what sort of amazing filth you are to dare concoct such diseased rubbish.

Gore loses major points

2007-04-24T09:57:00.000-07:00

I've always been a fan of Al Gore, but today my admiration took a heavy blow. Apparently he's been adding some new material to his An Inconvenient Truth slide show. PZ Myers says:

The slide I found particularly interesting/shocking/sad, was his new(?) slide containing a graph of human population growth over the past couple hundred-thousand years. It started off good. He pointed at the beginning of the graph, showing the population of humans on Earth from 200,000 years ago, and referred to the "rise of humans."

Cool beans. So he believes that Homo sapiens evolved from other hominid ancestors, right? Nope. In the very same breath, he then continued to explain that according to his religious beliefs, this "rise of humans" was God's creation of mankind — apparently 200,000 years ago. His graph then changed to include the caption "Adam & Eve" above this starting point.

Maybe he's done this because he's decided to run? Even so, it's no excuse. Barf.

The mystery of the sneezy stomach bug

2007-04-08T08:50:00.000-07:00

So, on Friday I woke up at 4am with a bout of what I believe was viral gastroenteritis -- a.k.a. the stomach "flu." Lots of nasty symptoms including vomiting, diarrhea and fever. It was yucky, but luckily I could stay home and rest as I had no deadlines that day.

What I found interesting about the illness was that despite the absence of any other respiratory symptoms, I found myself sneezing a lot more that day than I normally do. Sneezing would be a pretty effective way to pass on a bug like this, so I can't help but wonder whether the virus evolved this sneezing symptom precisely for that reason -- to improve its infectiousness. If I've come down the with same strain that has been all over the news this season, then perhaps this explains why it's been so damn virulent.

Luckily, I feel all better now. Phew.

Science on stage

2007-04-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

I saw a great play last week called Serendib -- I'd say anyone who loves science and lives in New York City should see it. It's playing at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, where actors including Sarah Jessica Parker and Stanley Tucci started their careers. Here's my write-up about the play in The Scientist.

Humans and Monkeys, Center Stage
A new play captures the power struggles that can occur among troops of monkeys and the scientists studying them

A group of monkeys darts across the stage. "Kill, kill, savage him!" A female screams to her mate, Jasantha, encouraging him to attack a member of her own troop. "Savage his ears and face! Go!"

Jasantha jumps up to meet the third monkey face-to-face. "I rule over you!" he yells.

War music pervades the theatre, and a deadly fight begins.

This is a scene from a new play, Serendib, opening this week in New York City as part of the First Light Festival, a month-long celebration of science and technology-inspired theatre supported by the Sloan Foundation.

Written by David Zellnik, Serendib (which refers to the ancient Arabic word for Sri Lanka and the origin of the word "serendipity") is inspired by one of the longest ongoing primate studies in the world. Begun by zoologist Wolfgang Dittus in 1968, the Polonnaruwa project, set in the evergreen forests of Sri Lanka, studies the behavioral ecology, sociobiology, and population biology of toque macaques (Macaca sinica).

Zellnik, who is young, sharp, and exceptionally friendly, first visited Polonnaruwa in 2004 after deciding on a whim to volunteer for the non-profit Earthwatch Institute. He realized there was enough dramatic material entwined in the goings-on of the scientists and monkeys to write a compelling play. (Though the play was inspired by the power struggles Zellnik observed first-hand, he maintains that the plot and characters are entirely fictitious.)

The end result is an entertaining and insightful commentary on the challenges faced by field scientists, the limits of scientific objectivity, and the power struggles that can occur among troops of native monkeys -- and the scientists studying them.

In Serendib, the Polonnaruwa scientists are joined by a documentary film crew. To spice things up, the crew brings along a primate geneticist named Ramsov who is critical of the project's research methods, and he proceeds to charm a female scientist who had been involved with the project's scientific leader. At the same time, a parallel power struggle transpires among the troop of macaques the scientists have been observing.

The play debates the value of long-term observational scientific studies like the one ongoing at Polonnaruwa, as Ramsov argues that the scientists' data are anecdotal, not reproducible, and therefore don't hold up to the rigors of the scientific method. He also accuses them of anthropomorphizing the monkeys to such an extent -- citing their use of "Moonbeam," "Nugget," and "Tulip" as names for them -- that it interferes with their research. Naturally, the other scientists disagree, maintaining that their understanding of the monkeys' behavior is based on years of objective observations.

Although Zellnik has no scientific background, the science and scientific culture portrayed in Serendib are delightfully accurate, down to the detailed scientific references the characters make as they discuss their findings ("females inherit status from their mothers, and then wield it in teams," the lead scientist explains at one point about the monkeys). This is thanks to Zellnik's own meticulous research as well as the input of his two scientific advisors, husband-and-wife team Don Melnick, a professor of conservation biology at Columbia University, and Mary Pearl, a primatologist and current president of the Wildlife Trust. Both provided Zellnik with feedback on evolving versions of the manuscript, and Pearl has worked directly with the actors to ensure that they use their binoculars just as they would in the wild.

"They did a very good job of evoking the atmosphere of the field camp," said Melnick, who spent years at Polonnaruwa in the 1980s and described the tensions arising in such close quarters as "very intense." Pearl pointed out that the questions raised by the characters are "quite realistic."

Portraying the macaques also came with unique challenges. Zellnik chose to incorporate puppets handled by the same cast members who play the scientists, but designing them and choreographing their movements took some time. "I wanted to make sure they had dignity," he said. "They're really fierce, wonderful, soulful animals." Their hard work paid off -- the puppets move realistically and are both graceful and creative.

Serendib runs through April 22 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in Manhattan.

Scientists who rock out

2007-04-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

Sorry for not posting some of these pieces earlier. More to come! A recent piece I wrote in The Scientist:

The Amygdaloids: Scientists who rock out
New York University researchers weave neuroscience and biology into classic rock

A quartet of two young women and two older men takes the stage in the cozy basement of New York's West Village hotspot Cornelia Street Café, famous host to artists ranging from Suzanne Vega to Monty Python. With a serious air about him, New York University neuroscientist Joe LeDoux takes hold of a microphone to introduce the first song, about "one of the great enigmas in the history of civilization" -- the mind-body problem.

The Amygdaloids -- whose name is a play on the amygdala, an oval structure in the brain's temporal lobe involved in emotional behavior -- are a band comprised of LeDoux and NYU biologist Tyler Volk on guitar and vocals, NYU neural science postdoctoral student Daniela Schiller on drums, and Schiller's research assistant, Nina Galbraith Curley, on bass. Their "gimmick," says LeDoux, is that all of their original songs are about science.

"Mind Body Problem" is reminiscent of the Eagles and Bob Dylan -- easygoing classic rock that makes people in the audience tap their feet. "My body wants you so, but my mind just says no," LeDoux sings. At the end of the song, Volk, consistently the most energetic, throws his arms in the air, yelling to the audience in reference to the song's title: "Did that solve it for you!?"

Although the band only formed this Fall, LeDoux and Volk go back a few years. Volk, who was at the time working on a book called What is Death? A Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life, contacted LeDoux in 2002 to learn more about his ideas on how the brain shapes identity. They discovered they both played guitar, and started meeting once a month to jam. After playing a few times for NYU gatherings, they learned that Schiller played the drums and Curley played the bass.

That marked the birth of the Amygdaloids, and the foursome has since performed at Brooklyn's Secret Science Club and the Cornelia Street Café's Entertaining Science, a monthly science and entertainment gathering hosted by Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann. "Right now it's really fun," says LeDoux of being in the band. "I'm just having a good time."

The next two songs in their set are all about fear -- not surprising, since LeDoux is a Principal Investigator at the multi-institutional Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety. In "All in a Nut," an easygoing song with funky guitar effects, LeDoux asks, "Why do we feel so afraid?"

Having written several books about cognitive science for the general public, LeDoux, who speaks modestly about his musical abilities, says that he's enjoying experimenting with music as a new venue for his ideas. "Music is so direct and immediate," he says, noting that, in some ways, it's easier to communicate scientific concepts through music than through books. Volk agrees. Lyrics can, in just a few simple lines, make statements that "really grab people," Volk says. "Responses to music are just so, so strong." But don't expect them to abandon other forms of communication -- LeDoux has authored at least six papers each cited more than 300 times, including one 2000 article that has accumulated more than 1,000 citations.

Volk's song "Extinction" follows next, marking a shift towards evolutionary biology. It's a dark song that Volk sings so seriously, some of the audience members seem unsure how to react. Volk explains that the song serves as a response to people who believe that humans rule the animal kingdom and always will. "[Extinction] could well happen to humans," Volk says.

The band then plays a few cover songs, including a medley consisting of Cream's "Badge" and the Byrds' "Eight Miles High," followed by LeDoux's upbeat "An Emotional Brain" (named after his book of the same name), which is complete with an audience sing-along. Their newest song, "Memory Pill," was written by LeDoux about his recent paper published in Nature Neuroscience in which he and his colleagues found a way to erase single memories in rats. By this point, the band and audience have had a few drinks and everyone's having more fun. "Old girlfriends, algebra, playground bullies and achievement tests," LeDoux wails. "Just give me a pill, wash away my memories." LeDoux says the Amygdaloids plan to stay together for the foreseeable future. He has a few new songs in the works, including a song about crimes of passion inspired by the so-called "amygdala defense" lawyers sometimes use. The band has also been invited to go to San Antonio, Texas in December, to play for the Mind Science Foundation's holiday party -- their first road trip.

You, too, can Havidol

2007-03-23T10:05:00.000-07:00

My most recent piece for The Scientist, about an artist's parody of "lifestyle" drugs and pharmaceutical disease mongering, just went up. Be sure to visit the Havidol site -- it's hilarious.

Posting problems

2007-03-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

Sorry to all of you with a blog reader who might be getting bombarded with re-published versions of my last post. For some reason, the post isn't viewing correctly on the actual blog site, and I'm desperately trying to de-bug it. Apologies!

Oil eaters

2007-03-20T07:17:00.000-07:00

Chinese scientists publishing in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have sequenced and characterized the genome and partial proteome of Geobacillus thermodenitrificans NG80-2, a heat-tolerant bacterium isolated from a deep oil reservoir in China.

Bo-ring. Why should we care? Well, the bacteria can subsist entirely on crude oil, able to break down oil's long-chain alkanes into smaller molecules that they then use as food. This isn't news—scientists previously knew that this strain of bacteria could break down long-chain alkanes—but what these scientists discovered by studying their genome is that they should be able to survive well in, say, oil-contaminated environments, which are frequently warm, starved of oxygen, and contain high levels of toxic hydrocarbons, antimicrobial agents and heavy metals. G. thermodenitrificans appear to have excellent systems to deal with these potential problems, including good nutrient uptake and detoxification systems, tolerance to heat, and the ability to utilize both aerobic and anerobic respiration. They should be more than happy to veg out in oil reservoirs and environments contaminated by oil spills, breaking down and digesting the nasty stuff.

The scientists also isolated and characterized the enzyme that breaks down long-chain alkanes, naming it ladA. This introduces the possibility of being able to manipulate or utilize the single protein—rather than the whole bacterium— for oil clean-up. And since these bacteria are heat-stable, they could also someday be the source of other useful heat-stable enzymes. Lord knows Taq changed our lives.

Lynn Margulis makes jaws drop

2007-03-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

Lynn Margulis, the biologist best known for her theory of evolution via symbiogenesis as well as the Gaia hypothesis—oh, and she also happened to be Carl Sagan's wife—is on a blog tour.

On Monday, she shared her opinion about HIV/AIDS on Scienceblogs' Pharyngula.

Wow.

Just what we need: more arsenic

2007-03-13T11:49:00.000-07:00

Rice grown in Southeastern states contains elevated levels of cancer-causing arsenic, according to a new study published in Environmental Science & Technology. The scientists, who compared rice grown in Southeastern states to rice grown in California, write:

Modeling arsenic intake for the U.S. population based on this survey shows that for certain groups (namely Hispanics, Asians, sufferers of Celiac disease, and infants) dietary exposure to inorganic As [which is considered the most toxic form of arsenic] from elevated levels in rice potentially exceeds the maximum intake of As from drinking water (based on consumption of 1 L of 0.01 mg L^-1 In. As) and Californian state exposure limit.

In other words, people who regularly eat rice and also happen to drink water occasionally could be ingesting a lot more arsenic than the EPA says is acceptable— and even the EPA's limits are a bit lax, as I've written before:

Any increase in Americans’ levels of arsenic exposure is of great concern: The Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates drinking water, considers arsenic a class A carcinogen, meaning that data have definitively shown it to cause cancer. Other health effects from chronic low-level exposure include partial paralysis, blindness and diabetes. Although the EPA tightened its regulations for arsenic levels in drinking water this past January [2006], lowering it from a maximum of 50 parts per billion (ppb) to 10 ppb, this new level still exceeds the agency’s recommendations for exposure to a carcinogen by a factor of 50.

The EPA typically recommends that the amount of a carcinogen in drinking water should not cause more than one person in 100,000 to develop cancer as a result of drinking that water daily. But Americans who are regularly drinking water containing 10 ppb of arsenic are at a 50-fold higher cancer risk than this: in other words, one out of every 2,000 of those Americans is likely to develop cancer because of the arsenic in their tap water. And the EPA estimates that 12 million Americans are currently drinking water containing more than 10 ppb of arsenic—making their cancer risk even higher.

The EPA isn’t meeting its own safety standard for arsenic because the recommended amounts “are set at a level which water systems cannot meet,” according to agency press officer Dale Kemery. After preparing a cost / benefit analysis, the EPA set its arsenic limits at a level that maximized risk reduction while minimizing cost to the consumer, he says.

The bottom line is, the last thing we need is to be ingesting more arsenic. Who knows where else the carcinogen is seeping into our diets. Water, chicken, rice—what's next?

Personality and musical taste

2007-03-12T15:43:00.000-07:00

Over at Scienceblogs' Mixing Memory, Chris has posted a very thorough description of several research studies on musical preferences and what they tell us about personality traits.

Here are the findings, in a nutshell. I found them more than a little amusing:

In short, people who listen to jazz are smart, liberal, adventurous, and poor; people who listen to heavy metal are smart, liberal, adventurous, athletic, and prone to social dominance; people who listen to Madonna or the "Dancing With Wolves" soundtrack are agreeable, conscientious, conservative, rich, happy, dumb, emotionally unstable, and hot; and people who listen to hip hop are extraverted, agreeable, liberal, athletic, and hot. Well, those are the tendencies at least (I've known some smart Madonna fans, though I have to say that they were pretty emotionally unstable).

You can read his entire post here.

I notice they didn't comment on country music fans.... Perhaps better left unsaid?

20% more...salmonella!

2007-03-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

As someone with not one, not two, but THREE jars of peanut butter in her cupboard, I am feeling a bit queasy (heh) about the recent news from the FDA.

The agency first announced on Valentine's Day that consumers who had bought Peter Pan or Great Value brand peanut butters since May 2006 should discard them because they could be contaminated with salmonella. As if that weren't bad enough, the FDA updated its warning two days ago. Now, anyone who's bought jars of this peanut butter since October 2004 could be at risk.

Who knew Peter Pan had it in him? Jerk.

Nerves use sound?

2007-03-11T18:16:00.000-07:00

The CBC reports that, according a group of Danish scientists, some nerves transmit information sonically rather than electrically.

There doesn't seem to be a study associated with this story, nor were the researchers interviewed, so who knows. Still kinda interesting though...

Yes! I'm still alive.

2007-03-01T18:20:00.000-08:00

Alright, alright. I've been slacking on the blogging responsibilities. Sorry. But if you want to know what I've been up to, you can read my latest piece in The Scientist. The zoo comes to SoHo!

And here's my recent Boston Globe story. Who knew metabolism was about more than just counting calories?

Possible Virus X....?

2007-02-22T06:51:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine who read my last post has asked, could our "Virus X" be an obesity bug? And if so, might we already be suffering an epidemic?

Indeed, some research suggests that both viruses and bacteria could play a role in weight control:

A recent study in Nature (there's also a related news story in JAMA) found that the balance of two divisions of beneficial gut bacteria, Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes, seems to be important in determining an individual's propensity for obesity.
Nikhil Dhurandhar, a researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, and Richard Atkinson, a pathologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, are studying the link between human adenovirus AD-36 and obesity (they co-founded the obesity research company Obetech). Dhurandar found that AD-36 causes obesity in chickens and rats, and that some obese people also carry this virus. (He coined the term "infectobesity.")
Another study (co-authored by Atkinson) has found that AD-37, an adenovirus closely related to AD-36, also causes weight gain in chickens.

If the cure for obesity is as simple as immunization against a group of adenoviruses, well, I'll eat my running shoes. In all seriousness, though, the idea that microbes could play a role in weight control is not actually that surprising to me—I recently read a fascinating book that makes me think that perhaps infections play a role in more things than we realize.

What will be our Virus X?

2007-02-18T15:58:00.000-08:00

Looking for a thriller to read? It may have been published ten years ago, but Frank Ryan's Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues is exactly that—what's even more terrifying is that it is non-fiction. If you're interested, you can read my review of it, published a few days ago on Scienceline.

The war against the war against war metaphors

2007-02-17T18:24:00.000-08:00

My first article in The Scientist about the use of war metaphors has prompted some interesting discussion. My piece in a nutshell: some scientists believe the use of such metaphors—examples being the "war against superbugs" and the characterization of "invasive species"—is evidence of a certain way of thinking that might limit how scientists approach particular fields.

Some people felt that my article was "alarmist." While I don't think that someone working to "conquer" cancer will literally think of himself as a soldier in the lab, I do think that the use of military language is sometimes indicative that scientists and doctors are approaching an issue or problem from a limited perspective, and that this could be a big problem.

For example, when it comes to virology, most scientists focus on the microbes that cause disease. The majority of viruses, however, live symbiotically or mutualistically with their hosts, causing no harm. We know very little about these viruses because we haven't studied them, but they could harbor some pretty interesting secrets: for example, studies suggest that symbiotic viruses protect some monkeys infected with SIV, the primate version of HIV, from developing AIDS. So shouldn't we be studying symbiotic viruses more than we are? Not if we're only interested in those that we want to kill.

As the Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg wrote in Science:

Perhaps one of the most important changes we can make is to supercede the 20th-century metaphor of war for describing the relationship between people and infectious agents. A more ecologically informed metaphor, which includes the germs'-eye view of infection, might be more fruitful. Consider that microbes occupy all of our body surfaces. Besides the disease-engendering colonizers of our skin, gut, and mucous membranes, we are host to a poorly cataloged ensemble of symbionts to which we pay scant attention. Yet they are equally part of the superorganism genome with which we engage the rest of the biosphere.

I certainly wasn't trying to create a panic with my piece, but I do think that every once and a while, it's important to re-think how we are approach and perceive issues—so that we can, as they say, think outside the box. Or maybe even realize there is no box at all.

A worthy prize

2007-02-06T20:06:00.000-08:00

A group of researchers led by a Lehigh professor have won a $200,000 prize for coming up with a way to remove arsenic from well water. Let's hope it's viable, because as I've mentioned before, here and here, arsenic is a huge problem--not just in third world countries, but even right in our own backyards.

A day in the life

2007-02-06T19:02:00.000-08:00

Dearest readers of my blog (all 10 of you):

I apologize for not having posted this week. I feel almost a motherly obligation to you, and believe me, each day that passes in which I don't fulfill your needs tugs at my heartstrings.... Okay, enough of that. Seriously, though, I apologize. At least it's for a good reason: I just got my first few freelance gigs last week, so I've been reporting and writing my butt off. Eek!

I don't really have much to say, except about the topics on which I've been reporting, but I figure I can just post a link to the stories once they get published. So instead, I'll do what every blogger is entitled to do every once and a while: babble.

I found more evidence last night that I'm my mother's daughter. My Mom (and sister) suffer from vasovagal syncope, a predilection for fainting that is triggered, in their cases, by discussions about or glimpses of—for lack of a better way to say it—anything subcutaneous (e.g. don't tell them the intimate details of your recent surgery, or they'll pass out). Because of this, they have to lie down when they have their blood drawn, because they usually faint during the process.

I've never had a problem with this, and kind of considered myself the She-Ra of the family because of it. Well, not so fast, my body told me last night. A close friend of mine was telling me the details of a medical procedure she had done yesterday—I'll spare you a recap, especially since doing so could leave me slumped on the floor—and suddenly I felt intensely nauseous. I excused myself and got up, thinking I might throw up, but when I did, I found myself so dizzy I had to lie down instead. Five minutes later, I was fine; but needless to say, I didn't ask her to finish the story.

Very bizarre, that is—especially since the phenomenon is, from what I can tell, entirely psychological (the syndrome itself can have physical triggers; it's just that my familial version seems to be entirely psychosomatic).

Anyway, so that was the most exciting thing that has happened to me in the last 24 hours. I am not infallible!! Dammit.

Isn't my life grand?

Brave Bunny

2007-01-28T01:28:00.001-08:00

Sorry, I couldn't resist. This is great...

The African Way

2007-01-26T05:25:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to see that the piece I wrote for the Dec / Jan issue of Seed has been posted online. It's about the upcoming African Union Summit, which will focus on the role of science in the continent's development.

In case anyone is interested in reading more, Nature published a feature and an editorial about this topic earlier this week as well.

Camel fever!

2007-01-25T13:43:00.000-08:00

Some of you might have read about the recent launch of the EDGE of Existence program in the UK. Designed to improve upon existing conservation strategies that only focus on the number of surviving individuals in a given species (as indicated by the species’ position on the IUCN's Red List), EDGE—which stands for “evolutionarily distinct & globally endangered”—uses a novel metric, basing the need for conservation action not only on a species' extinction status but also on its level of "evolutionary distinction," the amount of evolutionary history a species represents (determined by an examination of its family tree or phylogeny). The idea is that if an endangered species also happens to be one of the only species of its type left on the planet, a disproportionate amount of unique evolutionary history would be lost with its extinction, and conservation efforts should reflect that.

But what I really want to talk about is one of EDGE's ten focal species this year, the wild Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus ferus). These two-humped camels live in the fragile Gobi and Gashun Gobi deserts in northwest China and Southwest Mongolia, and it's estimated that only about 950 remain, making them "more endangered than the giant panda," according to the charity / non-profit organization The Wild Camel Protection Foundation. The foundation, whose patron is Jane Goodall, has recently established a captive wild bactrian camel breeding program in Mongolia to save—and study—these fascinating creatures, for it seems they might be harboring some pretty nifty secrets. First, they have been able to breed normally in an area of Gashun Gobi that has been host to extensive nuclear testing (according to an article first published in the London Independent, China has engineered more than 40 atmospheric explosions in the area in which the camels have lived); they have also evolved the ability to drink salt water slush instead of fresh water, something that domestic Bactrian camels cannot do. And there’s more. According to the foundation,

The immune system of a single humped, dromedary camel is beginning to yield amazing secrets. For example, an increased ability to resist certain types of diseases including diabetes through the consumption of camel milk. As it is possible that the single-humped camels descended from the double-humped camel, scientists have every reason to think that a detailed study of the immune system of the wild Bactrian camel will yield scientific discoveries which will be of benefit to the whole of mankind. For example, how is it that the wild Bactrian camels survived 43 atmospheric nuclear tests and are still breeding naturally without any recognisable deformities? How has the wild Bactrian camel managed to survive on salt water that the domestic Bactrian will not drink?

Getting deeper into the science, here is an excerpt from a ~~2000~~ 2001 article in The Scientist:

Sabah Jassim, who is originally from Nottingham but now works in the UAE, at the Zayed Complex for Herbal Research and Traditional Medicine, is convinced that camels offer new hope for drug companies looking for treatments for hepatitis C and HIV. "There is something really marvelous in their immunoglobulin," he said. His center has carried out an overview of the existing research into the camel's immune system, going back to 1993, and published in the latest issue of the British Institute of Biology journal, Biologist. "The camel is unique, different from any animal in the world," he explained. "The only animal with anything like it is the shark."

And later on:

The camel's antibodies find it easier to penetrate enzyme—active sites than human antibodies. This, and the relatively small size and weight of the immunoglobulin molecule, offer enormous potential, as it could be used to tackle diseases such as salmonella, TB, hepatitis C, skin disease and HIV, argued Jassim. Camel immunoglobulin could be used to neutralize a viral enzyme, he suggested. And it appears to be able to fight off various pathogens.

Camel antibodies are also being studied by Serge Muyldermans, Senior Scientist at the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology in Brussels. He explained that, because a camel immunoglobulin molecule is much smaller than that of a human, it is able to penetrate the dense layer of protein coat around a virus or parasite more easily. His department has been developing ways of cloning immunoglobulin fragments from immunized camels to produce high yields of recombinant protein. The camel antibodies, he argued, have several advantages over conventional antibody fragments, and could be used as enzyme inhibitors, for diagnostic purposes, or even in treating tumors. "The idea is to link the camel antibody to enzymes which will bind to the tumor," he concluded.

The fact that camel antibodies are so light, proposed Jassim, makes them ideal for new clinical compounds. The antibodies have a molecular weight of 100 KDa, much lower than human antibodies, at 150 KDa, while the recombinant version weighs just 15 KDa. "I think pharmaceutical companies are not really aware of this," he said. But he thinks that camel antibodies are set to become big business in the future.

But that article was written back in 2001, so the obvious question is, what have these scientists learned since then? Sadly, I can't find a website for Jassim, and a PubMed search suggests he's published no camel-related papers since then. A look on Muyldermans' website reveals that although he is ostensibly still studying camel antibodies, he hasn't published any related studies since 2003, when he published in Nature that a particular camel antibody fragment inhibits the aggregation of a protein variant of human lysozyme that is involved in the production of amyloid fibrils—the signature of diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. The paper says that "the binding of the antibody fragment achieves its effect by restoring the structural cooperativity characteristic of the wild-type protein...Reducing the ability of an amyloidogenic protein to form partly unfolded species can be an effective method of preventing its aggregation, suggesting approaches to the rational design of therapeutic agents directed against protein deposition diseases."

Sounds exciting, and I'll look forward to hearing more about the medicinal potential of Bactrian camel immune proteins, but I'm not holding my breath either. These substances have barely been studied in the lab, let alone developed into potential therapeutics, where they'd have to undergo further scrutiny in animal and clinical trials. You can’t predict much from research at this stage, but it's certainly fascinating to follow, so I'll continue to do so.

Assuming these camels don't go extinct, of course.

Science, schmience, says the Huffington Post

2007-01-23T16:23:00.000-08:00

I've been setting up my new Google Reader account (I know, I'm probably the last blogger on earth to set up an aggregator) and I was hoping to add Michael Shermer's blog from the Huffington Post to my list. But in trying to do so yesterday afternoon, I discovered that the Post doesn't allow you to choose specific bloggers for your feed; I was, however, happy to see that I could at least choose among a number of topics.

I browsed through these topics—which included "Paris Hilton," "Tom Cruise" and "Yellow Cake"— searching, of course, for "science." Alas, the list jumped from "Samuel Alito" to "scientology."

So...science isn't a worthy topic, but scientology is??

The evolution of cancer

2007-01-23T06:19:00.000-08:00

In a 1976 article in Science, Peter C. Nowell pronounced that "more research should be directed toward understanding and controlling the evolutionary process in tumors." In the thirty years since, what have we learned? Enter Carl Zimmer, who has written a fascinating article on this very topic in January's issue of Scientific American (He also blogged about it, and there is a podcast of a related interview with him here). Zimmer begins by explaining, in a rather novel way, why cancer is so "successful":

Cancer, in other words, re-creates within our own bodies the evolutionary process that enables animals to adapt to their environment. At the level of organisms, natural selection operates when genetic mutations cause some organisms to have more reproductive success than others; the mutations get “selected” in the sense that they persist and become more common in future generations. In cancer, cells play the role of organisms. Cancer- causing changes to DNA cause some cells to reproduce more effectively than ordinary ones. And even within a single tumor, more adapted cells may outcompete less successful ones. “It’s like Darwinian evolution, except that it happens within one organ,” explains Natalia Komarova of the University of California, Irvine.

Then he introduces some potential reasons why the genes that predispose us to cancer might be propagating in the gene pool. The fact that cancer is so common—and that our defenses against it fall short—suggests that perhaps there are evolutionary reasons for it, Zimmer says. (He does rightly point out, however, that natural selection doesn't care what happens to us when we're old. It favors only for those genes that affect our ability to reproduce.)

First, Zimmer describes a potential link between genes that help protect us against cancer (aptly named tumor-suppressor genes) and aging. Research suggests that, though they are at a heightened risk for cancer, mice lacking a tumor suppressor gene called p16-Ink4a do not age as quickly as mice containing normal copies of the gene:

But losing the p16 gene had an upside. When the mice got old, their cells still behaved as if they were young. In one experiment, the scientists studied older mice, some of which had working p16 genes and some of which did not. They destroyed insulin-producing cells in the pancreases of the animals. The normal rodents could no longer produce insulin and developed fatal diabetes. But the ones without the p16 protein developed only mild diabetes and survived. The progenitors of their insulinproducing cells could still multiply quickly, and they repopulated the pancreas with new cells. The scientists found similar results when they examined cells in the blood and brains of the mice: p16 protected them against cancer but also made them old.

Could a missing (or non-expressing) tumor expressor gene, though bad for us in the cancer sense, actually have the hidden benefit of slowing down the aging process? Who knows—mice aren't the perfect models for humans, but it's a possibility. But that's just the start. Another gene that is highly associated with cancer—some cancer cells can't live without its expression—produces a protein called fatty acid synthase, which (again, as its name suggests) synthesizes certain fatty acids. The gene, scientists have found, has undergone big changes since humans first evolved from mammalian ancestors, and while no one can be certain yet why, there is some evidence that the protein helped us evolve bigger and better brains. In other words, then, a gene that potentially increases cancer risk could have been what essentially made us human in the first place.

And there's more. Sperm that divide more quickly (a natural advantage) may be expressing genes that increase cancer risk; and genes that help fetuses grow in the womb could inadvertantly help cancer cells:

Genes that allow cells to build a better placenta, Crespi and Summers argue, can get hijacked by cancer cells—turned on when they would normally be silent. The ability to stimulate new blood vessel formation and aggressive growth serves a tumor just as it does a placenta. “It’s something naturally liable to be co-opted by cancer cell lineages,” Summers says. “It sets up the opportunity for mutations to create tools for cancer cells to use to take over the body.”

Yet even though activation of these usually quiet genes may make cancers more potent, natural selection may still have favored them because they helped fetuses grow. “You may get selection for a gene variant that helps the fetus get a little more from mom,” Crespi says. “But then, when that kid is 60, it might increase the odds of cancer by a few percent. It’s still going to be selected for because of the strong positive early effects.”

Through these examples, Zimmer suggests that looking at cancer through the lens of evolutionary biology may provide some novel insights. As behavioral ecologist Bernard Crespi says in the article, whereas other science tends to focus on the "how" of cancer, evolutionary biology instead investigates the "why." And that question may have some pretty fascinating—not to mention useful!—answers.

10 myths deflated

2007-01-22T07:43:00.000-08:00

Livescience has a list up of the top 10 scientific myths of all time, with explanations for why they are mythical. I'm surprised that some of them actually made the list—do people really think that there is no gravity in space, or that chicken soup cures a cold? Either way, it's a fun read.

One of them on there—that yawning is contagious—surprised me, because I'd always believed it. Turns out that it could, in fact, be true.

And no matter what they say, I'll still use the five-second rule. Especially if it involves crumb coffee cake.

Time does science (hopefully not for the last time)

2007-01-21T15:34:00.000-08:00

When I received the latest issue of Time a few days ago, I was excited to see that the cover story was "The Brain: A User's Guide." (I also got a little sad, because I recently heard from someone who works there that the magazine's ongoing restructuring may mean that there are fewer science cover stories, despite the fact that they sell amazingly well.)

I haven't read all of the articles yet, but here were the highlights from what I've read so far.

There is an article about brain rewiring that is actually an excerpt from Sharon Begley's new book The Mind and the Brain. Among other things, it reports on research that challenges the long-held hypothesis that a person's "happiness set point" is (as implied by the phrase) basically unmovable. A person's happiness, it was thought, returns to approximately the same level even after great tragedy or joy. But recently, Richard Davidson from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (with the help of the Dalai Lama) recruited Buddhist Monks—who had spent more than 10,000 hours of their lives meditating—for tests in which they were asked to meditate under fMRI scans. The scans showed "dramatic changes in the parts of the brain associated with happiness" as compared to a group of students who had recently undergone a crash course in meditation. Begley writes,

But perhaps the most striking difference was in an area in the left prefrontal cortex—the site of activity that marks happiness. While the monks were generating feelings of compassion, activity in the left prefrontal swamped activity in the right prefrontal (associated with negative moods) to a degree never before seen from purely mental activity. By contrast, the undergraduate controls showed no such differences between the left and right prefrontal cortex. This suggests, says Davidson, that the positive state is a skill that can be trained.

For the monks as well as the patients with depression or OCD, the conscious act of thinking about their thoughts in a particular way rearranged the brain. The discovery of neuroplasticity, in particular the power of the mind to change the brain, is still too new for scientists, let alone the rest of us, to grasp its full meaning. But even as it offers new therapies for illnesses of the mind, it promises something more fundamental: a new understanding of what it means to be human.

This I find fascinating. I have never doubted that meditation had positive health effects, but this research implies that meditation—or, more broadly, the practice of particular thought patterns—can rewire the brain.

Begley's article also mentions another interesting finding. Not only does the repeated use of certain muscles—say, by practicing a certain passage on the piano each day—cause the brain to "devote more cortical real estate to it," even just imagining the practicing elicits the effect:

"Mental practice resulted in a similar reorganization" of the brain, Pascual-Leone later wrote. If his results hold for other forms of movement (and there is no reason to think they don't), then mentally practicing a golf swing or a forward pass or a swimming turn could lead to mastery with less physical practice. Even more profound, the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain.

Steven Pinker has an interesting article about the nature of consciousness, in which he describes the so-called "Easy Problem," the difference between conscious and unsconscious thoughts, and the "Hard Problem," or why there is first-person, subjective experience—and why it's so difficult to solve this problem. (I recall being in elementary school and asking my parents how I could be sure that the "green" I saw was the same color that my classmates saw when they saw green. This article gets at just that.) There's also an interesting (and mildly amusing) sidebar by Daniel Dennett that begins, "Suppose Steve Pinker contracts a terrible progressive brain disease..."

Another article by Michael Brunton argues that we may have been giving babies too much credit. Challenging research from the '80s that suggested babies have a certain amount of "built-in knowledge" about the workings of the world, new research suggests that "a baby's fascination with physically impossible events merely reflects a response to stimuli that are novel."

And our memories are heavily driven by emotion, writes senior staff writer Michael Lemonick in his piece, "The Flavor of Memories." He points out something I never knew: the reason that memories grow more inaccurate over time has to do with the fact that when we remember old events, we are not calling up the original memory but the last time we thought about it:

Each time we retrieve and re-store a memory, it can be subtly altered by all sorts of factors. What goes back into our brains is like the new version of a text document, overwriting the old.

And last but certainly not least, there was a very interesting essay by Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Randy Buckner. When people are not performing specific mental tasks that require them to be "in the moment"—like following instructions, or answering the telephone—what are their brains doing? Traveling through time, apparently, either re-living past events or imagining the future. Gilbert and Buckner offer some potential reasons for this:

Why did evolution design our brains to go wandering in time? Perhaps it's because an experience is a terrible thing to waste. Moving around in the world exposes organisms to danger, so as a rule they should have as few experiences as possible and learn as much from each as they can. Although some of life's lessons are learned in the moment ("Don't touch a hot stove"), others become apparent only after the fact ("Now I see why she was upset. I should have said something about her new dress"). Time travel allows us to pay for an experience once and then have it again and again at no additional charge, learning new lessons with each repetition. When we are busy having experiences—herding children, signing checks, battling traffic--the dark network is silent, but as soon as those experiences are over, the network is awakened, and we begin moving across the landscape of our history to see what we can learn—for free.

Certainly some fascinating pieces here—there are more I haven't read yet, too—and most appear to be available for free online, at least for now.

When the clock strikes midnight...

2007-01-18T07:40:00.000-08:00

Those great thinkers mentioned in my last post have garnered more support for their pessimism. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit organization dedicated to global security analysis, has moved its famed Doomsday Clock forward by two minutes for two reasons: the spread of nuclear weapons and climate change. Now it sits just five minutes shy of midnight, the marker for the "end of humanity." You can read more about the Clock and its history here at Nature.

Where are all the optimists?

2007-01-15T18:30:00.000-08:00

Each year, Edge.org, John Brockman’s well-known “Third Culture” website devoted to discussions of scientific and philosophical ideas, poses a question to a chosen number of big thinkers in science, technology, journalism and philosophy. This year, Edge asked its 160 respondents, “What are you optimistic about, and why?” Edge explains,

As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put.

Here's what's interesting. Having read all 160 answers, I noticed that a shocking 21 of the respondents, in describing what they are optimistic about, delineate some very strong caveats. Some go as far as to say that they believe we’re all doomed but that they are "optimistic that they will be wrong" (given that these are some of the world's best thinkers, I don't feel especially comforted). Perhaps considering one side of the coin makes one automatically think about the other; I don’t know. But one thing's for sure: these 21 didn’t seem optimistic about much.

Here is an excerpt from the most decidedly negative of the answers, provided by Nobel Laureate cosmologist George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He opens with this:

A careful assessment and years of experience that show that the long-term future is most bleak: Entropy will continue to increase, and a heat death (actually a misnomer as it means the degredation of usable energy in a dull cooling worthless background of chaos) is the very likely fate of the world. This is the fate that awaits us, if we manage to work our way past the energy crisis that looms as the Sun runs out of fuel and in its death throws expands as red giant star likely to engulf us after boiling away the seas before it collapses back to a slowly cooling cinder eventually to leave the solar system in cold darkness.

A few paragraphs later, it only gets better (worse?):

One cannot live by the Hippocratic dictum "Do no harm". But the best one can hope for is the weak mantra "Do minimal damage". I was often bothered by this inevitable conclusion and tried to see that if one could write a great work of literature, make art, or most optimally a great science discovery could one objectively leave the world better than one found it? Each time I worked out an example, the impact was negligible however great it was found by human culture compared to the damage done by mere existence. The only discovery that would make a difference called for repealing or avoiding the laws of probability or making a whole new universe. Both of these are quite extreme. Perhaps the discovery of extra dimensions would allow some leeway in what otherwise seems an inescapable doom after a long period of unrighteous degradation of the universe. We face a continuous downward spiral of no return. This is not a moral or ethical statement only an engineering evaluation though it is some indication of original sin. So even living one's life as a vegetarian that only eats fruit dropped into one's hand by a willing plant is only going so far as to be very kind and considerate to other beings that are also worsening the universe for the sake of a little more order in their own self.

There’s plenty more where that came from. So: is it unrealistic to be optimistic these days? Are we really heading towards an imminent apocalypse (with two books, here and here, supporting this idea)? Or are brilliant intellectuals just more likely to be pessimists? I certainly don't have the answers, but if you're looking for some interesting ones, you can find them on Edge...

You might, however, want a stiff drink first.

Slackerpedia Galactica!

2007-01-10T19:46:00.000-08:00

At this past week's annual American Astronomical Society meeting, a new astronomy-themed wikipedia was unveiled. Called Slackerpedia Galactica, the wiki is designed to be both informative as well as "loaded with humor, jokes, cheesieness and the absurd." Users can add info to the many existing entries (this one is my favorite) or create new ones; they can also join the Slacker Union to help realize the following four goals:

- To give creative names to each of the Twin Planemos

- To decide on a better third definition of a planet

- To come up with a catchy theme song and a secret handshake

- To find an asterism that resembles the Flying Spaghetti Monster, so that the SU can start to define its own constellations.

Sorry, I think I can only help with the third one, guys...

Snow for sale!

2007-01-02T18:18:00.000-08:00

I was highly amused to read on Physorg.com about one Colorado woman's snow sale on Ebay—yep, that's right, she's selling the snow that fell on her property thanks to the recent blizzards.

Apparently she didn't originally expect to find any buyers—she posted just for a laugh—but as of the time of this blog post, she had received 72 bids on her most recent sale (her Ebay post reads, "1 more time! End of 2006 snow! We're overstocked! All of it must go!," so I'm guessing there have been other successful sales), and the current price was $39.89. Her caveats: absolutely no refunds, and quantities vary. The best part, however, is the shipping details:

Just to be clear...we can ship your snow 1 of 3 ways. 1) For the shipping stated in the auction we'll put snow in a leakproof container (jar or zip lock bag) and ship it in a box. Yes, it will melt. You'll have to refreeze it and shave it to return it to it's natural state. 2) To keep it frozen we need to use dry ice and a foam cooler and ship it overnight fedx. Probably a gallon zip lock bag of snow. That will be a lot more, but you'll get snow. 3) You can come get it...

I particularly love the last option (she also mentions earlier in the post that people who might like to avoid paying shipping charges should feel free to come to her home with a dump truck and shovel). To find people willing to pay you to shovel snow from your driveway? Brilliant.

The erosion of free will ...and freedom

2006-12-29T11:13:00.000-08:00

The Economist has an interesting—yet awfully frightening—article on how neuroscience is challenging the concept of free will. The piece starts with this example:

IN THE late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?

Indeed, it's not such a stretch (and science is continuing to close this gap) to think of any behavior as simply a product biochemical reactions. So, then, if someone commits murder, was it really an act of free choice, or is faulty brain chemistry to blame? Where do we draw the line? By far the most frightening part of the article was this (having seen Minority Report several years back, this gave me chills of déjà vu):

At the moment, the criminal law—in the West, at least—is based on the idea that the criminal exercised a choice: no choice, no criminal. The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed. (...) Such disorders are serious pathologies. But the National DNA Database being built up by the British government (which includes material from many innocent people), would already allow the identification of those with milder predispositions to anger and violence. How soon before those people are subject to special surveillance? And if the state chose to carry out such surveillance, recognising that the people in question may pose particular risks merely because of their biology, it could hardly then argue that they were wholly responsible for any crime that they did go on to commit.

Yikes. I actually worked for one of the biotech companies that was bidding, several years ago, to provide plastic storage tubes for the UK's Biobank Project, and I remember the whispers of my co-workers who, at that point, seemed a little paranoid to me. "Someday they'll use the DNA to track us, or to discriminate," they said. Now they don't seem so paranoid. Add to that the fact that the UK recently passed a law allowing clubs and bars to fingerprint their patrons, and you've got a 1984-esque scene unfolding just over the Atlantic Ocean. How long before it reaches the US?

Molecular biology: A science of exceptions?

2006-12-28T14:48:00.000-08:00

Humans function as well as we do because we are adept at identifying patterns. Without this ability, we would be lost trying to understand such a complicated world. When it comes to understanding ourselves and our biology, then, we assume that patterns exist, and in our search we have found them: we have uncovered many "rules" (take, for instance, the central dogma of molecular biology) from which we have learned a tremendous amount.

But it seems that as time passes, we also find more and more exceptions to our "rules." Last year, French scientists found that RNA, not just DNA, can pass genetic information from generation-to-generation, contradicting (or at least not conforming to) Mendel's laws. Each day we learn more about the significance of epigenetics, the heritable effects that come not from the sequence of genes but from other characteristics and effects, including environmental ones. And finally, just last week, scientists uncovered that "silent" gene mutations, so-called because they do not affect the sequence of amino acids in a protein and thus were thought to have no effect, actually do have a significant effect on the performance of a protein.

Certainly it's the exceptions that we hear about, but I can't help but wonder if, in the future, we will find that biology presents us with more exceptions than conformers to the rules we think we have found.

Sagan Blog-A-Thon

2006-12-20T22:03:00.000-08:00

Today, which marks the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan's death, was also host to a one-day commemorative Carl Sagan Blog-A-Thon. Organized by fan Joel Schlosberg, the event invited bloggers worldwide to write today about Sagan, his work and his influence. I'm sorry I couldn't participate in this celebration—I spent the day flying across the country to be with my family—but here is Schlosberg's promised blog meta-post featuring links to many of the entries.

Sentenced to death

2006-12-19T07:31:00.000-08:00

I'm sad to report that the six medics who were accused of deliberately infecting 400 children with HIV in Libya have been condemned to death this morning, according to the Wall Street Journal, despite scientific evidence published in Nature that gave them a strong alibi: the HIV subtype that infected the kids was known to be present and spreading locally before the medics even arrived in the country in 1998.

You can read more about the history of this issue in Declan Butler's blog (he is a senior reporter at Nature) and also at Scienceblogs. My heart goes out to the medics and their families.

Sound familiar?

2006-12-16T09:09:00.000-08:00

Well, folks, it's happening again—another education-related evolution lawsuit. This time, a 15-year-old student is suing her local education committee because her 10th-grade biology textbook teaches evolution in a way she finds religiously offensive.

This lawsuit, however, is not happening here in America. It's happening in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Her school principal's reaction? He thinks she has no serious religious beliefs. "It seems to everyone that this is stupid and serves no purpose," he said in televised comments. "Pupils and teachers are more amused than concerned about it."

If that's true, and the lawsuit has nothing to do with her religion, then I can't help but wonder if she got the idea from media coverage of our country's infamous Dover trial.

Hydrogen's not the answer

2006-12-14T18:32:00.001-08:00

PhysOrg.com ran an interesting (and very understandable) article on Monday downplaying the idea of a hydrogen-based economy, based on the conclusions of the European Fuel Cell Forum's Ulf Bossel. As quoted in the article, Bossel says,

“More energy is needed to isolate hydrogen from natural compounds than can ever be recovered from its use...Therefore, making the new chemical energy carrier form natural gas would not make sense, as it would increase the gas consumption and the emission of CO₂. Instead, the dwindling fossil fuel reserves must be replaced by energy from renewable sources.”

Hydrogen is a bad idea, Bossel says, because of the high cost and low efficiency associated with electrolysis (the process required to make hydrogen from water), transport, and storage. You can read more of Bossel's thoughts on the issue here. Bossel's solution? We need an “electron economy,” he says, in which energy is distributed by electricity using the shortest route possible. Because such a system would not be bogged down by energy conversions — like from physical to chemical and vice versa — it would be far more efficient than a hydrogen system, he says.

p.s. Sorry I've been AWOL for a while. I'm back now...and I'm a MASTER! Yes, I just finished my degree. Yay!

Don't mess with this guy

2006-09-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

What would you do if your work was cited by people like Ann Coulter as "evidence" against the very phenomenon you had been studying for years?

Earth scientist Peter Doran, who encountered this problem in 2002 after studying how the climate is changing in Antarctica, responded by publishing a bold Op-Ed in the New York Times this summer.

Learn more about Doran and his work by reading my Q&A with him, which was recently published by Seed.

Why do guys get sleepy after sex?

2006-09-26T14:28:00.000-07:00

For many women, the correlation between sex and snoring is one of those annoying facts of life: no matter when passionate encounters occur, men always seem to fall asleep immediately afterwards. Dave Zinczenko, the author of Men, Love and Sex: The Complete User Guide For Women, explained the phenomenon to Huffington Post writer Arianna Huffington this way: “Men go to sleep because women don’t turn into a pizza.”

I doubt I am ever going to become a pizza, and I’ll never have the foresight to order one beforehand. So in lieu of a cure, a better explanation will have to do. Women, too, often feel sleepy after sex. What is it, then, that spirals us into the land of nod? And could it actually be a good thing?

First, the obvious reasons for sex’s somnolent sway: the act frequently takes place at night, in a bed, and is, after all, physically exhausting (often more so for the man than the woman, although this certainly varies). So when sex is over, it’s natural to feel sleepy.

Secondly, research using positron emission tomography (PET) scans has shown that activity in the amygdala, the brain area that controls fear and anxiety, decreases prior to orgasm. University of Groningen doctor Gert Holstege, who led the study, told the London Times that “letting go of all fear and anxiety might be the most important thing, even necessary, to have an orgasm." Doing so, of course, tends to be relaxing and might explain the tendency to snooze.

Then there is the biochemistry of the orgasm itself. Research shows that during orgasm, we release a cocktail of brain chemicals, including norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin, nitric oxide (NO), and the hormone prolactin. The release of prolactin is linked to the feeling of sexual satisfaction, and it also mediates the “recovery time” that men are well aware of—the time a guy must wait before “giving it another go.” Studies have also shown that men deficient in prolactin have faster recovery times.

Prolactin levels are also naturally higher during sleep, suggesting a link between the two. It's possible that the hormone’s release during orgasm leads to drowsiness.

(Side note: prolactin also explains why we are sleepier after intercourse than after masturbation. For unknown reasons, intercourse orgasms release four times more prolactin than masturbatory orgasms, according to a recent study in the Journal of Biological Psychology.)

Oxytocin and vasopressin, two other chemicals released during orgasm, are also associated with sleep. Their release frequently accompanies that of melatonin, the primary hormone that regulates our body clocks. Oxytocin is also thought to reduce stress levels, which again could lead to relaxation and sleepiness.

What about the evolutionary reasons for post-sex sleepiness? This is trickier to explain, and no one really knows. Evolutionarily speaking, a man’s primary goal is to produce as many offspring as possible, and sleeping doesn’t exactly help in his quest. But perhaps since he cannot immediately run off with another woman anyway—damn that recovery time!—re-energizing himself via sleep may be the best use of his time.

And women often fall asleep with the men anyway (or use it for some key cuddling time), which could aid with conception (you know, gravity and all that). And when the two wake up naked together, they just might be ready to go again.

It’s also possible that sleepiness is just a “side effect” associated with a more evolutionarily important reason for the release of oxytocin and vasopressin. In addition to being associated with sleep, both chemicals are also intimately involved in what is called “pair bonding,” the social attachment human mates commonly share. The release of these brain chemicals during orgasm heightens feelings of bonding and trust between sexual partners, which may partially explain the link between sex and emotional attachment. This bond is favorable should the couple have a baby, as cooperative child rearing maximizes the young one’s chances for survival.

The bottom line is this: there are many potential biochemical and evolutionary reasons for post-sex sleepiness, some direct and some indirect—but no one has yet pinpointed the exact causes. One thing, however, is certain: we all better get used to it, because it doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon.

I will leave you frustrated American women with one final thought: if you are upset at the ubiquity of the post-sex snoring phenomenon in your men, remember that things could be a lot worse. A recent survey of 10,000 English men revealed that 48 percent actually fall asleep during sex.

Talk about coitus interruptus!

A version of this story was first published here on September 25, 2006.

Monkeys hate techno, too

2006-09-21T19:16:00.000-07:00

Indeed. I just published this piece about the musical tastes of our evolutionary ancestors on Seed Magazine's website.

Food for chickens, poison for man

2006-09-19T22:49:00.000-07:00

Just published this piece on Scienceline about arsenic in chicken feed. It has been featured on Environmental Health News and the Society of Environmental Journalists website.

Want some ice with that?

2006-09-13T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'm lucky to live in New York, and not just because I share the streets with the likes of James Gandolfini. I have another, albeit less obvious, reason to celebrate as well.

My tap water doesn’t contain detectable arsenic.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve been looking into arsenic levels in drinking water around the country, and what I’ve found is pretty scary. (I will post a much longer article next week on a related topic. Get pumped.) The Environmental Protection Agency classifies arsenic as a Class A carcinogen, known to cause bladder, lung, skin, kidney, liver, and prostate cancers. Long-term exposure to low levels of arsenic also leads to partial paralysis, blindness and diabetes.

Up until this year, the EPA’s standard for levels of arsenic in drinking water were pretty awful. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a non-profit environmental advocacy organization, concluded in 2000 that “drinking water at the current EPA standard could easily result in a total fatal cancer risk of 1 in 100―about a 10,000 times higher cancer risk than EPA would allow for carcinogens in food.”

Thankfully, the EPA tightened its national regulations this past January, lowering acceptable arsenic levels from a maximum of 50 parts per billion (ppb) to 10ppb. But this new level still exceeds the recommendations of the Safe Drinking Water Act by a factor of 42.

The Safe Drinking Water Act was enacted 30 years ago to as the main federal law ensuring the quality of America’s drinking water. It deems that no cancer-causing element should be present in water at levels that will cause more than one person per 100,000 to develop cancer as a result. But Americans who are regularly drinking water conforming to the EPA’s current 10ppb standard are, according to my calculations, at a 42-fold higher cancer risk than this. One of every 2,400 Americans is likely to develop cancer from their drinking water. (The NRDC calculates a more worrying estimate of one in 500.)

One in 2,400 may sound like nothing, but think of it this way: If New York’s drinking water contained arsenic at the legal limit, over 3,300 New Yorkers would be diagnosed with cancer over the course of their lifetime as a direct result of the fact that they drank tap water.

I'm fortunate to live in a city where I can drink water well below the legal limit, but the EPA estimates that 12 million Americans are currently drinking water that exceeds it. Some of the most contaminated states are Texas, Nevada, Arizona, and Arkansas. And who knows about people who get their water from private wells: It’s up to well owners to test the water and ensure that it conforms to health standards (private wells don’t fall under the jurisdiction of the EPA, so legally, anything goes). Twenty percent of the population of New England, for example, drinks water from private wells.

I know what you’re thinking: Bottled water! But in addition to the fact that it’s ridiculously expensive, a study by the NRDC suggests that at least a third of all bottled water contains levels of arsenic comparable to tap water. Although the Food and Drug Administration technically regulates bottled water at the national level, water that is bottled and sold within the same state is exempt from these regulations―and this accounts for up to 70 percent of all bottled water.

For those of you who aren't lucky enough to drink Manhattan's pristine tap water: I'd urge you to check your water arsenic levels by calling your local water utility. If you own a private well, look into having it tested. The Water Systems Council is a non-profit organization designed to help private well owners keep their water safe and healthy.

Because really, no one should be drinking poison. ☼

Will the Ivy League's pillars crumble?

2006-08-09T20:25:00.000-07:00

As someone who took plenty of heat for choosing a Big Ten school over her father's Ivy League alma mater, I have to admit that reading this commentary by Salon's Andrew Leonard brought a smug smile to my face. Thanks to the internet, elite universities may no longer have the right to act so―for lack of a better word―snotty.

Indeed, it makes perfect sense. Historically, the quality of education a school provided (and the quality of research its faculty conducted) used to depend, at least partially, on the school's physical proximity to its resources. Leonard writes:

But the Internet has enabled collaboration without physical proximity. So an up-and-coming new-growth-theory theorist at the University of Florida can coauthor a paper with a Stanford or Harvard or Chicago professor without having to move across the country. This is a great thing -- the democratization of education. As the authors note, "If improvements in communication technology have made low-cost access at a distance possible for production purposes, then firms have lost a powerful instrument to regulate and control the accumulation and utilization of knowledge."

So now that information and communication are just a few clicks away, who needs a fancy diploma and an address in Cambridge, MA to get somewhere? Not me, my friend. Not me.

This was first posted on Scienceline.org.

Does pot lead to cancer and addiction?

2006-08-08T20:34:00.000-07:00

Sadly, I don't have the time these days to compose lengthy, well-conceived blog posts (cue sappy violin playing). But I am perfectly happy to point out interesting stories that other people have written.

I just came across this assuredly controversial piece (what did you expect? It's Slate after all!) that refutes some of the so-called risks of marijuana use. Take it as you will.... if you choose to take it at all (ha ha).

Say that again?

2006-08-06T20:32:00.000-07:00

While I was doing research today, I read the most amazing sentence EVER. This baby was the first sentence of an introduction to a physics paper published in The Astronomical Journal. Ten bucks goes to whomever can explain this (in English!) in under 65 words.

Analysis ofgravitational microlensing observations ofthe quasar Q0957+561 hasoffered strong evidence forthe existence of anintrinsic structure within thisquasar that can onlybe explained by anonstandard luminous quasar modelconsisting of a thinaccretion disk whose interioris essentially empty ofmatter out to aluminous inner edge thatresides at about 70gravitational radii from thecentral compact object andthat is also surroundedby an order ofmagnitude larger outer ring-shapedElvis structure where thebroad blueshifted emission linesare formed.

Elvis structure! I love it.

Martha Stewart on Meat

2006-07-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, we all thought Martha Stewart was the Queen of Things Domestic. But then the fairy tale ended: We realized that she, too, makes (more than) her share of stupid mistakes. Her comments on the Today show last week were no exception.

Tara from Scienceblogs' Aetiology, who stayed home from work on Tuesday to look after her son, came across Martha grilling hamburgers (for breakfast?) on the show. Martha apparently threw a burger on the grill and the anchor asked her how long she was going to cook it. Martha's response?

"For a rare burger, about 3 minutes on a side."

A rare burger? This does not make Tara happy. She writes:

Ground beef. Martha Stewart, cooking icon, telling viewers that they can cook it rare. No mention of using a food thermometer to be sure that the internal temperature is up to 160 degrees F in order to kill any contaminating bacteria. No mention that eating such a burger rare increases one's risk of developing a food-borne illness. Nothing.

This is why public health officials bang their heads against the wall. Who has more influence--your local public health department, already understaffed and underfunded, trying to get the word out about safely BBQ'ing this summer, or Martha Stewart with 5 minutes on the Today show, telling everyone how to cook a rare hamburger?

Granted, we're all willing to take our chances now and then with a rare burger. Some risk-takers (you know who you are!) even prefer them that way. And that's fine: but to go on network television as a trusted source (alright -- we might know better than to trust her, but we are among the minority of Americans who actually, like, read and stuff) and make a mistake that could make millions sick?

Indeed, Martha obviously hasn't been keeping up with food safety news ― for nearly 10 years. The USDA, in guidelines published in 1997, advises cooks to "use a meat thermometer when cooking hamburger -- and not rely on the internal color of the meat -- to be sure that it is safe to eat." An FDA site concurs, "If a thermometer is not available, do not eat ground beef that is still pink inside."

Get with it, Martha ― pink is so, like, 1996!

This entry first appeared on Scienceline.org.

The shortest distance between you and science!

2006-07-12T20:52:00.001-07:00

My science, health and environmental reporting class at NYU (SHERP) just launched our brand-spanking new webzine, Scienceline, last night. Check it out here -- we are quite proud! You can ask questions, vote in our poll, and learn everything you ever wanted to know about cell phones & lightning, the beauty of sediment, disappearing fish, hepatitis epidemics, math & malaria and more...

Bilingual? Are you sure?

2006-07-10T20:07:00.000-07:00

Check out this hilarious interview of Noam Chomsky by the infamous Ali G.

Thanks to Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex (and originally to Andrew Sullivan) for bringing this to my attention. (Jonah's another Seedster, too -- be sure check out his awesome article in the upcoming August / September issue.)

I'm back....

2006-07-09T19:07:00.000-07:00

After a month of juggling classes, a full time internship, mono and strep throat, I have survived and am stronger for it.

I'm coming back, full force, to the blogworld. Not tonight, because I need to sleep. But please -- pretty please -- check back soon.

Nature 1, nurture 0

2006-06-04T19:42:00.000-07:00

In a race between the relative powers of nature and nurture on Saturday, nature won.

Idaho Star and Idaho Gem, two identical mule clones who are the siblings of a champion racing horse, respectively won first and second place — with three hundredths of a second between them — on Saturday in a preliminary round to next week's 20th annual Winnemucca Mule Race, Show & Draft Horse Challenge, according to this article on Breitbart.com.

Observing clones (as well as identical twins) helps scientists determine the relative influences of nature (genes) and nurture (environment). Born out of the Project Idaho collaboration, the 3-year-old mules have been reared and trained separately for the past two years. Because they share the same genes, any differences in physical performance should be attributable to environmental influences.

The fact that the two mules performed virtually identically therefore suggests that genes play a strong role in athletic performance — at least in mules. And because both did so well, the cloning process does not appear to have damaged or weakened them in any observable way, at least at this point.

Stay tuned for more updates after next Sunday's race, during which the clones will compete against six naturally-bred animals.

Not so delightful for the fish

2006-05-19T19:09:00.000-07:00

It seems that Sunny Delight, which always seemed innocuous when I was growing up, is not doing so well these days.

In addition to its recently slumping sales caused by negative media attention — the Children's Food Awards deemed the drink "largely thickened, artificially sweetened, expensive water" — an article in today's Daily Mail reports that 8,000 liters of the drink's concentrates were accidently spilled into tributaries of the Parrett river in Somerset, England, on Wednesday after a tank broke at a nearby Gerber plant. The spill caused the water to turn bright yellow, and soon afterwards, dozens of dead fish were found floating on the surface. The Environmental Protection Agency has labeled the spill a category one incident, the worst kind. I'm guessing this isn't going to help sales.

And do you blame her?

2006-05-16T21:36:00.000-07:00

I just came across this Yahoo! News piece and nearly fell off my chair. You've gotta hand it to her — she's one smart elephant.*

*NOTE: Objects in photo are larger than they appear.

Halliburton solves global warming!?

2006-05-13T19:18:00.000-07:00

Another brilliant Yes Men creation — be sure to check out the photos too.

There's organic, and then there's...organic

2006-05-09T18:57:00.000-07:00

This is my most recent post to Stochastic, the Seed blog.

Organic foods from your supermarket may comply with the requirements of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Organic Program, but are you really buying what you think you're buying?

Many people "go organic" because they want to buy family-farmed, locally-operated produce. But as Steven Shapin points out in the New Yorker, most organic food sold in grocery stores is anything but. Earthbound Farm, a major organic produce supplier for Whole Foods, has projected revenues for 2006 of more than $450 million, and farms more than 26,000 acres. Doesn't sound so quaint anymore, does it.

What's more, one calorie of arugula grown on the West Coast costs 57 calories of fossil fuel to get to the other side of the country. "The growing of arugula is indeed organic, but almost everything else is late-capitalist business as usual," Shapin writes, going on to say that "'Organic,' then, isn't necessarily 'local,' and neither 'organic' nor 'local' is necessarily 'sustainable.'"

In an article in Mother Jones magazine, Michael Pollan chronicles those who go one step further, buying straight from their local farms. It's an interesting (and for most of us, foreign) concept — and while it requires more immediate effort and money than buying from Whole Foods, farmer Joel Salatin tells Pollan that food purchased from farms is, in the long run, cheaper. "Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illness, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water — of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer than make cheap food seem cheap," Salatin says.

There is, in Salatin's opinion, little difference between selling to Wal-Mart and selling to Whole Foods; selling directly to consumers, however, pulls the community together, brings back "pastoral values" and gives customers the satisfaction of knowing exactly what they're feeding their families.

Of course, even if we should buy locally farmed food, many of us won't bother (especially those of us who can hardly find our way to Queens, let alone rural farms). But Pollan argues that if we do, the movement could gain momentum fast. "Already the desire on the part of consumers to put something different in their bodies has created a $14 billion market in organic food in the United States," he writes, and this marketplace was built with no help from the government.

So a successful local food economy, Pollan says, really depends on the evolution of a new kind of eater — one who enjoys finding, preparing, and preserving food. This sounds wonderful, and I can just picture my future children spreading slices of farm bread with locally-farmed strawberry jam. But the whole scene does seem a little unrealistic. Right? Maybe not: Pollan argues that the promise of global capitalism ultimately depends on faith, too — faith that the destruction of certain things we value today will "achieve a greater happiness and prosperity at some unspecified future date." Maybe, then, we should consider sacrificing a little convenience today for a more soul-fulfilling — and gastronomically fulfifilling — tomorrow?

How similar are we?

2006-05-07T20:18:00.000-07:00

Dolphins may call each other names, according to scientists who studied a group of wild bottlenose dolphins for over 30 years.

It has long been suspected that dolphins have a "language" and recognize each other individually — their brains are almost as large and complex as those of humans. And according to this article in today's Sunday Times, research has finally shown that they do.

The scientists, who were from St. Andrew's University in Scotland, studied the social interactions of a group of dolphins and recorded the "signature whistles" they made when greeting one another. When the dolphins listened to synthetic recordings resembling the whistles of various dolphins, they reacted strongly to those of their family members and other associates, but did not react to the whistles of dolphins they didn't know.

These findings come on the heels of controversial research published last week suggesting that starling birds may share certain language characteristics with humans too. You can read Carl Zimmer's article on the subject here.

Look similar?

2006-05-04T22:13:00.000-07:00

The top image shows sand dunes in Africa's Namib Desert, and the bottom reveals similar dunes on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in a photo taken last October by NASA's Cassini probe. According to this article in National Geographic, Titan's dunes came as somewhat of a surprise: Because solar energy drives wind and Titan gets one thousandth as much solar heat as Earth, no one expected to see evidence of such strong currents. So where'd they come from? Scientists think that Saturn's gravity creates tidal winds that do the job.

The power of the mind

2006-05-02T20:28:00.000-07:00

Is there validity to the idea that your mind can cure you? The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), an offshoot of the National Institutes of Health, says yes: There is "considerable evidence" that mind-body interactions can "have positive effects on psychological functioning and quality of life."

Check out today's New York Times article on the subject, which profiles holistic doctor Carl T. Javert, an obstetrician at Cornell University Medical College who died in 1981. Javert, who believed that ailments were often psychosomatically induced by emotional stress, helped pregnant women manage problems and stresses in order to avoid miscarriages and other complications.

Hey guys, you might want to keep track of this stuff

2006-04-25T16:39:00.000-07:00

Last week, two vials of anthrax spores went missing from a New Jersey laboratory, where they had been stored since the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed four in a Hamilton, New Jersey, post office. But health officials don't see this as reason to panic — they admit to FOX News that the loss is most likely the result of a counting error. Oops.

Similarly, last September, a Newark lab lost track of three mice that were suffering from bubonic plague, the disease thought to be responsible for the Black Death. Plague epidemics usually start with rodent infestations, so losing a few infected mice isn't such a swell idea. But again, authorities say we shouldn't worry — it's likely that the mice were either eaten by other animals in the lab without anyone noticing, or that the "loss" is really a paperwork error.

I don't know about you, but I think that potential sources of bioterrorism should be monitored pretty carefully. If facilities don't have the resources to ensure that paperwork is kept up-to-date and that valuable (and dangerous) property is counted properly, then my guess is that no one is taking the time to guarantee that these things don't get stolen, either. ☼

You got somethin' to say to me?

2006-04-22T10:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a friend of mine told me that my settings require you to join blogger.com in order to leave comments. Oops, sorry! I've just changed them so that anyone can comment. Now you have no excuse — fire away!

Is this the beer of tomorrow?

2006-04-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

In 10 years, will we still go out for drinks after work, or will we just pop a designer pill? Check out my post today on Stochastic, the Seed blog. I've just started working at the magazine as an intern and am loving it. If you don't know Seed, check out their website!

And don't worry, dear readers — I won't neglect you. I will post to this blog frequently too. I promise! ☼

He's grown into a pain, all right

2006-04-18T21:55:00.000-07:00

Got a half hour to waste? Check out the video "Science and Evolution," a ridiculous attempt at evolution-debunking starring Growing Pains' Kirk Cameron and New Zealand evangelist Ray Comfort.

The two go about disproving Darwin by grilling strangers about the details of evolutionary theory. Because the people stopped on the street can't rattle off all the answers, Cameron and Comfort conclude that evolution must, of course, be a lie.

What might be even more funny than the video itself is this article about it appearing in the religious magazine Across Pacific. The magazine quotes Comfort as saying that "The graphics on the cover of this DVD have been designed so that there is no indication that it is for evolution or intelligent design, so that readers can watch it with an open mind." An open mind, huh? Ray, the the only type of mind you want watching your video is the stupid and ignorant type.

Thanks to Scienceblogger Ed Brayton,whose post today on Dispatches from the Culture Wars introduced me to this video phenomenon.

Whom can we count on?

2006-04-17T21:13:00.000-07:00

We have all probably wondered what WE would do if a flu pandemic hit — hot-foot it to a deserted island? Pop whatever anti-viral pills we could scrounge from our medicine cabinets and local drug stores?

Researchers recently asked health care professionals — the people we need most at such a time — what they would do during a pandemic. Apparently, over 40 percent of them said they would not show up to help out at all, according to a study released today by scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and Ben-Gurion University in Israel.

"The public health workforce will play a critical role in managing an influenza pandemic, but the workforce is not yet prepared for this crisis. We need more training for public health workers, particularly for those in technical and support roles, so they clearly understand the importance of their work in the event of a pandemic," said Johns Hopkins researcher Daniel J. Barnett in a prepared statement.

Until then, be ready to take care of yourself, I guess. ☼

Carnival of the Godless

2006-04-16T21:41:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited to learn that my post on Intelligent Design, "Nope, Not Science!," has been featured on the 38th Carnival of the Godless — ironically, on Easter Sunday. Check out this week's Carnival picks here.

Star light, Star bright

2006-04-15T15:43:00.000-07:00

Wow. The red star in the center of this beautiful image is the erupting supergiant V838 Monocerotis, surrounded by circumstellar dust. It's located about 20,000 light-years away from earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros (the unicorn), on the outer edge of the Milky Way. During its outburst, the star became more than 600,000 times brighter than our sun.

The fries come from afar, and the orders do, too

2006-04-12T21:32:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought the fast food industry couldn't get any more impersonal: the person taking your drive-thru order may, in fact, be sitting in an office hundreds of miles away. (Not to imply that you, dear readers, are avid fast-food consumers. I daresay most of you aren't.)

Indeed, for the past 18 months, McDonald's has been experimenting with long distance order processing, according to this piece in the New York Times. Specially-trained employees at call centers around the country take and process orders from drive-thru customers and then immediately e-mail them to the franchises, who put together the meals and hand them to their oblivious customers. This system is designed to save a few seconds on each order — and make more $, of course, for Micky D's. ☼

Try to save the earth, and what do you get?

2006-04-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

To reward fuel-efficient drivers, the California government grants them access to carpool lanes, even when they aren't carrying any passengers. But according to an article in today's L.A. Times, other drivers are beginning to get pissed off by the fact that the lanes are frequently clogged by Priuses and Honda hybrids. They also accuse the hybrid drivers of intentionally driving slowly in order to maximize fuel efficiency, and argue that, as a result, the advantages of using carpool lanes have all but disappeared.

I applaud the California government for its attempt to reward environmentally conscious drivers, but I do wonder if there might not be a better solution. Road rage doesn't seem like much of a "thank you." ☼

There's more than just chicken here, my friend

2006-04-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

Preservatives: We rely on them daily to keep our food and medicines fresh. Without them, unwanted microbes would thrive and we would constantly be fighting illness. But preservatives aren't perfect little angels, either. Things that are bad for microbes can be bad for us, too.

For the past few weeks, I've been working on a story about the controversy over the addition of thimerosal, a toxic mercury-containing preservative, in vaccines. While I'm not quite ready to share my story with you yet, check out this New York Times article that my friends Adam and Dave pointed out to me. It covers an eerily similar controversy. So — how much arsenic did YOU eat this week? ☼

Nope, not science!

2006-04-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

Since I started writing this blog, I have struggled with whether to write about Intelligent Design. Many scoff that it shouldn’t be given a voice, and that writing about it does science a disservice.

While it’s true that the issue is not exactly controversial within scientific circles, there is substantial controversy among the American public. So, after having the opportunity last week to interact with one of ID’s strongest proponents, I decided to devote a piece to Intelligent Design and evolution.

Darwin’s theory, as I’m sure we all remember from high school science class, explains the evolution of life via two processes: random mutation, or changes in one’s genes, which give organisms different characteristics; and natural selection, in which those organisms with more useful or adaptive characteristics are more likely to survive, reproduce and pass on those characteristics to their offspring.

Intelligent Design, often referred to as ID, is the controversial “alternative” idea that life is too complex to be explained by Darwin’s theory and that it must have been made by God or some other intelligent cause or designer.

The Intelligent Design movement gained momentum last fall in a landmark court case against the Dover, Pa. school district, which wanted to teach ID alongside evolution in its science classes.

But it suffered a blow when U.S. District Judge John Jones III handed down his ruling last December, saying that Intelligent Design has no place in the science classroom. Jones described ID as “an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion.”

Let me begin by saying that I do not reject the legitimacy of Intelligent Design, or religion, for that matter, as a social construct. I think that ID might, in fact, deserve to be discussed in school — just not in science class. I agree with Joel Cracraft, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, who told an audience at Columbia University in February that there is an unfortunate misunderstanding among Americans that “evolution, in general, threatens people’s religious beliefs.” I don’t think it has to.

But I do firmly believe that Intelligent Design is not science.

As defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, science is “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method.”

I’m sure you at least vaguely remember learning about the scientific method in high school. After a problem is identified or a question is asked, the scientific method requires “the formulation and testing of hypotheses,” or potential answers, via data collection “through observation and experiment.”

The value of science stems from its grounding in the scientific method, which essentially serves as the “check” that keeps science as objective as possible. It also ensures that scientific explanations remain naturalistic and observable.

Let’s therefore think of Intelligent Design as a hypothesis, or possible explanation, for the origin of life. To prove the validity of this hypothesis, the next step would be to create experiments to test it.

So last week, I asked Dr. Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University and decidedly the most famous scientist in support of Intelligent Design — he wrote the bestseller, “Darwin’s Black Box” — about the experiments he conducts in his lab. What has he done, and what does he plan to do, to test the Intelligent Design hypothesis?

“I don’t really do lab work anymore,” Behe replied. He explained that he cannot get funding for scientific research on ID, and admitted that, anyway, “I don’t think anything that I came up with would persuade anybody.”

He went on to say, “There is no magic bullet experiment that shows Design.”

Hmm. Okay.

The crux of Behe’s argument is this: Life on the microscopic level, such as that of the human cell, is too complex to be explained by Darwin’s theory. When something in life achieves a level of complexity that Behe terms “irreducible complexity,” evolution can no longer fully explain how it came to be.

I concede that there are scientific questions about the development of certain systems that we cannot yet answer using the tools of evolutionary biology. If we could, there would be no reason to pursue scientific research today.

Massimo Pigliucci, the associate professor of ecology and evolution at State University of New York at Stony Brook, agrees.

“All scientific theories are incomplete,” said Pigliucci, who spoke at an NYU round table discussion last Wednesday with Behe and New York Times national religion correspondent Laurie Goodstein. “It’s good that they are incomplete, or else I’d be out of a job.”

Behe, however, believes that we will never be able to explain the origins of such complex processes using evolution.

“We infer design whenever parts appear arranged to accomplish a function,” he said. In other words, just by observing a cell’s structure, Behe thinks it is possible to determine that it was designed — and that it could not have evolved.

But Behe is substituting inference for the scientific method. He admits that he cannot design an experiment that would convince anyone of Intelligent Design, so he is instead substituting what he sees as a lack of evidence for one theory (evolution) as proof of another theory (Intelligent Design). But science doesn’t work that way.

“The basic claim [of ID] is that if the theory of evolution fails, there must have been an Intelligent Designer. The point is, if evolution was wrong, it would imply exactly nothing about the existence of a Designer,” Pigliucci told the audience. A hypothesis has to be tested itself before its scientific validity can be determined.

Evolution, on the other hand, is science precisely because a number of experiments have confirmed it, including Darwin’s data, fossil record studies and comparative genetics. Evolution can even be observed directly, when, for example, bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics.

If Intelligent Design is to be considered a scientific movement rather than a religious or social one, then its proponents need to design and carry out experiments to prove its legitimacy (assuming, of course, that’s even possible). Pointing out gaps in our understanding of evolution really does nothing.

Science is based on hard, reproducible experimental evidence, and ID, to this date, has none. Until it does, Intelligent Design won’t merit a moment’s attention from the scientific community. ☼

Mmm, beer!

2006-04-04T14:03:00.000-07:00

I always knew beer was a good thing — and now a new research study agrees with me! Beer may help prevent heart disease and make you happy, according to this article in New Scientist. But, like all things, it's probably best in moderation... *hic*

Could this deadly virus save the earth?

2006-04-03T12:23:00.000-07:00

Something strange appears to have transpired at the Texas Academy of Science last month. University of Texas evolutionary ecologist Eric Pianka, named the Academy's 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist, apparently gave a speech in which he advocated the spread of airborne Ebola to wipe out 90% of the world's population.

Why would he want so many people to perish? It's the only way to save the earth, Pianka told the audience, according to this account by Forrest M. Mims III, the editor of The Citizen Scientist, a webzine published by the Society for Amateur Scientists.

According to Mims, Pianka then suggested that Ebola, the deadly virus from the Congo, would achieve these ends perfectly, since it is estimated to have a 90% fatality rate. (It would also achieve these ends messily; before death, Ebola victims bleed from every bodily opening. Yuck.)

The speech was followed by "loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause," said Mims, who later wrote: "I still can't get out of my mind the pleasant spring day in Texas when a few hundred scientists of the Texas Academy of Science gave a standing ovation for a speaker who they heard advocate for the slow and torturous death of over five billion human beings." ☼

Should you go veggie?

2006-04-01T14:07:00.000-08:00

Vegetarians tend to be healthier than meat-eaters, according to a study published in Nutrition Reviews today.

The researchers, who reviewed and compiled 87 studies on the subject, found that vegetarians weigh between three and 20 percent less than meat-eaters and are less likely to suffer from heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other obesity-linked conditions.

They also found that people who switch to low-fat vegan diets lose about one pound per week, even without changes in exercise habits or limits on portion sizes, calories, or carbohydrates.

"There is evidence that a vegan diet causes an increased calorie burn after meals, meaning plant-based foods are being used more efficiently as fuel for the body, as opposed to being stored as fat," says Dr. Neal D. Barnard, a co-author of the study and member of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, in a prepared statement.

Should you decide to "go veggie," you may want to check out this USDA website, which has suggestions on how to keep up with dietary requirements for nutrients like protein, iron, calcium, zinc, and vitamin B₁₂. ☼

Is prayer powerless?

2006-03-31T12:22:00.000-08:00

Patients who were prayed for by strangers did not exhibit improved recovery after heart surgery, and patients who knew they were being prayed for actually had more post-surgery complications, according to research published yesterday.

The study, published in the American Heart Journal, began ten years ago and involved over 1,800 patients, who were broken up into three groups. The first group was prayed for but not told about it; the second group was prayed for and told about it; and the third group was not prayed for at all.

The researchers asked members of three American church congregations to do the praying. They were given the patients' first and last names and were asked to include the phrase "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" in their prayers.

The researchers followed the patients' recoveries for the next 30 days and found no difference between those who were prayed for and those who were not. They did, however, find that eight percent more of the patients who knew they were being prayed for had complications, like abnormal heart rhythms, than those who did not know.

While no one really knows why this was the case, or even if it was just due to chance, one of the researchers suggested to the New York Times that it may have been a kind of performance anxiety.

"It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?" said Dr. Charles Bethea, a cardiologist and co-author of the study, in this article published today in the Times.

But Bob Barth, a director of a Missouri prayer ministry called Silent Unity, did not find the findings worrisome.

"A person of faith would say that this study is interesting," Barth told the Times, "but we've been praying a long time and we've seen prayer work, we know it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started." ☼

2006-03-31T11:39:00.000-08:00

That's a recent photo of Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, the largest interplanetary spacecraft ever built. It began orbiting Saturn in late June 2004 (after taking nearly seven years to get there!) and will survey the ringed planet and its moons for four years.

(Thanks, Dad!)

UN and parliamentary scientists argue over aftermath of Chernobyl

2006-03-30T07:05:00.000-08:00

A group of European scientists argue that at least 130 times more people may ultimately die from the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear accident than the United Nations estimates, according to an article published in the Guardian newspaper on Saturday.

In a series of reports that will soon be published, the scientists, who were commissed by European parliamentary groups, medical foundations and Greenpeace International, claim that over 500,000 people already have died from the effects of the 1986 disaster and that another 30,000 are expected to die from cancer-related deaths. They have based their estimates on over 50 scientific studies, according to the Guardian.

The UN attributes only 50 deaths so far and estimates that 4,000 people may ultimately die, according to a 2005 statement by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. An IAEA spokesperson told the Guardian,"We have a wide scientific consensus of 100 leading scientists. When we see or hear of very high mortalities we can only lean back and question the legitimacy of the figures. Do they have qualified people? Are they responsible? If they have data that they think are excluded then they should send it."

Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine, says that they sent this data to the UN twice last year. "They've not said why they haven't accepted it," he told the Guardian.

Next month marks the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, which occurred 80 miles north of Kiev in the Ukraine when there was a steam explosion in one of four reactors that led to a fire, a number of additional explosions, and eventually a nuclear meltdown. ☼

Tangled Bank!

2006-03-29T10:46:00.000-08:00

I'm very excited to learn that my piece on tea has been featured on the 50th edition of Tangled Bank, which is, in their words, a "fortnightly showcase of good weblog science writing, selected by the authors themselves." (Yes, I admit, I submitted the piece myself — but I'm thrilled it was actually selected!)

Check out this week's edition here.

Enjoy your morning coffee with a solar eclipse

2006-03-28T12:22:00.000-08:00

NASA is offering people the chance to watch tomorrow's solar eclipse in the comfort of their pyjamas.

The solar eclipse, which occurs when the moon's silhouette completely blocks the sun, will only be directly visible in parts of South America, Africa and Asia, but NASA will be broadcasting it on this website beginning at 5 am EST tomorrow.

If you only want to see the phase of the eclipse known as totality, when the sun is most fully blocked, you have the luxury of sleeping in until 5:55 am. But don't be late, because this will only last for four minutes (and that's longer than usual — normally, totality only lasts for one to two minutes).

During the eclipse, the sky will darken, and the corona, or outer atmosphere of the sun, will be visible (it is usually impossible to see). Astronomers will take advantage of the rare opportunity to measure certain aspects of the corona, which is of interest because it is a lot hotter than the sun's surface and no one really knows why.

Solar eclipses are rare events, because the tilted orbits of the sun, moon and Earth all have to align at the same time. You may want to seriously consider sacrificing your beauty sleep for the amazing view — Americans will have to wait until 2017 for the next directly visible solar eclipse. ☼

Health care, social security and energy: Americans are worried

2006-03-28T11:17:00.000-08:00

The availability and affordability of health care tops the list of issues about which Americans are concerned, with nearly seven out of 10 people citing it as a substantial source of worry, according to an article published in the journal Editor & Publisher today. (See last week's post about how you can voice your health care concerns to the government.)

The next most worrisome issue is social security, followed closely by the availability and affordability of energy.

Results are based on a gallup poll of 1,000 adults conducted several weeks ago over the telephone, according to the article.

2006-03-27T21:53:00.000-08:00

Credit for this beautiful photo goes to my Dad, who has, since retiring, become quite a photographer. Enjoy!

Help keep America healthy

2006-03-26T15:04:00.000-08:00

Frustrated with the state of America's health care system? Wish there was something you could do about it?

The Citizens' Health Care Working Group, created by U.S. congress in 2003 as part of the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act, wants to hear your thoughts on how we can better America's health care system. You can learn more about our current system and how to make a difference here. ☼