Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

In the realm of scientific weirdness, researchers are always on the lookout for ways to make your life better in unexpected ways.

For example, a device that can let you see a 360° field of vision in total darkness... with your tongue!

I actually posted about this some time ago, but they've moved on since then.

According to this article, they're going to start testing it out on Navy SEALS for night diving.

Raj has carried out research using Navy divers. A narrow strip of red plastic from the Brain Port is connected to the diver's tongue, where some 144 microelectrodes transmit information through nerve fibers to the brain. It was established during the tests that the divers could process information through their tongues instead of looking at compasses and other bulky devices.

Raj explained the whole objective is to keep the Navy divers' hands and eyes free. As the eyes will be freed, they will be able to do what they really want to -- may be look for mines and see shapes that are coming out of the muck.

I think it's only a matter of time before they bridge the technological gap to provide the ultimate super-soldier!

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Top Scientist tries to calm bird flu fears

“It is entirely conceivable that this virus is inherently programmed that it will never be able to go efficiently from human to human,” Fauci said. “Hopefully the epidemic (in birds) will burn itself out, which epidemics do, before the virus evolves the capability of being more efficient in going from human to human.”

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“It won’t be what you see in countries in which there is no regulation, in which there is no incentive to compensate farmers, in which the people, who are so poor, when they see their chickens are getting infected they immediately sell them or they don’t tell anybody because they don’t want them culled. That is a critical issue that is fundamentally different than what we see in Western Europe and that we will see in the United States,” Fauci said.

Thank you, thank you for finally injecting some sense into this whole issue which has been so ridiculously out of proportion.

Yes, it's a potential risk, and it could kill a lot of people, but we're hardly talking the end of civilization here, and it may not happen at all!

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Check it out.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older women who say talk shows and soap operas are their favorite TV programs tend to score more poorly on tests of memory, attention and other cognitive skills, researchers reported Monday.

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He said it's not possible to tell whether the programs somehow contribute to cognitive decline or whether women in the early stages of decline gravitate toward those shows. Preferences for daytime TV could also be a marker of a sedentary, homebound lifestyle, and research suggests that staying physically and socially active can help stave off mental decline.

But regardless of the reasons, a preference for talk shows and soaps "is a marker of something suspicious," Fogel said.

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"This doesn't mean 'Oprah' is bad for you," Fogel said. However, an older woman's fondness for the show could signal a possible problem, according to the researcher.

Read that again. Basically it's saying: Daytime TV doesn't rot your brain, but if you like it, your brain might be rotten.

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Check this out... o_O

Robotic 'pack mule' displays stunning reflexes

A nimble, four-legged robot is so surefooted it can recover its balance even after being given a hefty kick. The machine, which moves like a cross between a goat and a pantomime horse, is being developed as a robotic pack mule for the US military.

BigDog is described by its developers Boston Dynamics as “the most advanced quadruped robot on Earth”. The company have released a new video of the robot negotiating steep slopes, crossing rocky ground and dealing with the sharp kick. View the impressive clip here (28MB Windows media file).

Link thanks to Dean's World
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Why?

Well, because I was reading an article about the FDA clamping down (finally) on so-called "dietary supplements" that claim to be able to treat avian flu.

It's been a banner season for unproven influenza remedies. Each fall and winter, the Internet abounds with offers of face masks, creams and pills - all touted as effective flu fighters - that have escaped the notice of mainstream science. This season, miraculous, anti-flu nostrums seem to have proliferated even more wildly.

Small wonder. Bird flu has been a mainstay in headlines, but not a single case has been reported in the United States. The seasonal flu arrived earlier than usual in some spots. And "pandemic" has become one of the top words looked up by readers of online dictionaries.

So irritated has the Food and Drug Administration grown that it decided to clamp down on some of the flu claims. Last month, the agency warned PRB Pharmaceuticals, Vitacost, Bodestore and six other companies to stop making claims about avian flu and other forms of influenza or face possible seizure of their products.

Now, I'm a big skeptic when it comes to "all-natural" supplements or treatments. By skeptical, I mean that they could work, but that the only evidence that they actually do work is sketchy or anectdotal.

So when they were interviewing Dr. Schaffner, the chairman of preventative medicine at Vanderbilt University, he was essentially pointing out both that there are virtually no scientific studies to show the effectiveness of these supplements, and also that many of these supplement manufacturers have serious quality control issues.

So that makes me like him, but why is he my hero? Well because he ended his statements with this:

"All of us would like to believe that there is a nostrum, a miracle ingredient that would either prevent everything or cure everything," he said. "In God we trust. All others must provide data."

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Hey, remember Olestra? That fat substitute that everyone joked about because it could potentially cause diarrhea?

Well, the reason we haven't heard about it in a while is not because it went away, but rather because the FDA decided that the side-effects were sufficiently minor that food manufacturers don't have to label their products as containing it anymore. They ruled that, although it causes "minor increase in bowel movement frequency" when compared to regular fat, the effects were not any worse than those created by eating fruit or fiber. Essentially, it turned out to be a total non-story, so people forgot about it.

Not everyone apparently: CSPI sues Frito Lay over fat replacer olestra

Snack firm Frito Lay is to face a law suit for deceptively marketing its ‘Light’ potato chip range in order to trick consumers into believing the products do not contain the controversial fat substitute olestra, said the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

Except here's the thing. Frito Lay followed all the FDA rules for product labeling and then some. They even kept the Olean logo on the bag for crying out loud! That was more than they were legally required to do anyway.

So basically, this woman was either just not paying attention when she bought the chips or she DID notice and just didn't care until she got sick.

And because the effects of the olestra have been shown to be pretty mild compared to other foods, the fact that this woman got as sick as she did suggests that she probably ate the whole bag in a single sitting, if not more. In fact, nearly all the complaints that have been made about olestra can be traced back to overconsumption.

This is my opinion everybody. Olestra is a fairly tasty fat alternative that can produce lower-fat snack foods, but that doesn't make them good for you. Clearly you should still be eating them in moderation.

If someone buys a bag of "light" potato chips thinking that it means they can sit and eat the whole bag in one afternoon with no repercussions, then they are just stupid. I won't say that they deserve to get sick, because I don't want to wish that on anybody, but still, how about taking some personal responsibility?

Frito Lay markets and sells a product that people want and follows all the FDA's rules and regulations for doing so. Olestra has been extensively studied, (more than any other food additive in history, believe it or not,) and it is safe unless you overdose on it. Clearly the problem here is a woman made herself sick, wants someone to blame for it, and there's Frito-Lay with their deep pockets.

This reminds me of the people who assume that anything with the words "all natural" on the label are automatically good for you, whereas anything that is has manmade compounds in it is automatically bad.

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Oh, I don't mean that it isn't a significant medical advance, just that this whole "controversy" about it just seems pretty stupid to me.

Okay, so according to this article, the primary issues of controversy are that one or both of the people involved (donor and recipient,) may have tried to commit suicide.

The reason that this is (apparently) a big deal is because some doctors have expressed concern that such a "psychologically challenging" operation was being done on a woman who may have questionable emotional stability.

But that just makes me think, oh, so leaving her with a terribly disfigured face with no lips or nose and you can see her teeth and jaw moving when she talks, that's better? Gosh, that wouldn't be a problem at all.

Think about it, whether or not the initial injury was the result of a suicide attempt, who WOULDN'T be unstable after having their freaking lips chewed off? If the transplant can help, then what's the problem?

I think that what this really all boils down to is that a lot of people are very squeamish about their faces, and there is somehow this perception that changing part of her face will give her problems with her self-identity, but frankly I don't see how it would.

After all, how we look can have an impact on how we see ourselves, but is anyone really going to have a serious psychological identity crisis because now their nose and lips look a little bit different? You don't even see it unless you look in a mirror. It's not like a brain transplant or something, it's not like she's an identical twin of the other woman now. The facial features are largely determined by the bones behind the skin anyway, so even if she had received a full-face transplant, she wouldn't look just like the other woman.

Okay, so rant over, it just irritates me that people who claim to be "expressing concern for the mental stability" of the patient are doing that by turning the whole thing into a circus.

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Mona Lisa "Happy", computer finds

A computer has been used to decipher the enigmatic smile of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, concluding that she was mainly happy.
The painting was analysed by a University of Amsterdam computer using "emotion recognition" software.

It concluded that the subject was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry, journal New Scientist was told.

You know, I hear they also used a sophisticated computer model to determine that, before the arms broke off, the Venus de Milo was actually flipping the bird.

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Alleged footprints of early Americans found in volcanic rock in Mexico are either extremely old - more than 1 million years older than other evidence of human presence in the Western Hemisphere - or not footprints at all, according to a new analysis published this week in Nature.

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Check this out: Jabs don't work on big-bummed girls

Injections may not work on some people because their bottoms are too big, researchers have said.

Many vaccines and other medications are administered by a jab in the rear, but doctors have found that needles cannot penetrate the excess bottom fat of many patients, particularly women. To be effective, the drug has to be injected into the underlying muscle.

Boy, those British headline-writers aren't subtle, are they?

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Check this out! Over at Furthermore on Wired.com, they point out that some recent studies are showing a link between schizophrenia and a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, which is commonly found in cats.

They identified 63 people who developed schizophrenia and compared them with 123 similar "controls" without schizophrenia. The researchers tested stored blood samples, obtained from the mothers while they were pregnant, for Toxoplasma antibodies. Antibody levels were classified as negative, moderate, or high.

A high Toxoplasma antibody level, indicating heavy infection around the time of pregnancy, more than doubled the likelihood of schizophrenia in the adult offspring.

So a connection between cats and insanity? Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

P.S. To all cat-lovers, I like cats too. I'm just not surprised to learn that they make people crazy.

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No time to explain, it can be anything! Just leave it in a comment!

Thanks!

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The Independent Online asks "How Toxic is your bathroom?"

On average, we each use nine personal care products a day containing 126 different ingredients. Such "safety" testing as exists looks for reactions, such as skin redness, rashes or stinging, but does not investigate potential long-term problems for either humans or the environment. Yet the chemicals that go into products such as shampoos and hand creams are not trace contaminants. They are the basic ingredients.

Absorbed into the body, they can be stored in fatty tissue or organs such as the liver, kidney, reproductive organs and brain. Cosmetics companies complain of unfounded hysteria, but scientists are finding industrial plasticisers such as phthalates in urine, preservatives known as parabens in breast-tumour tissue, and antibacterials such as Triclosan and fragrance chemicals like the hormone-disrupting musk xylene in human breast milk. Medical research is proving that fragrances can trigger asthma; that the detergents in shampoos can damage eye tissue; and that hair-dye chemicals can cause bladder cancer and lymphoma. An even greater number of substances in personal care products are suspected to present potential risks to human health from this known effect on animals.

The discussion regarding the unknown consequences of the "cocktail effect" made me think of "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" where exposure to Galaxy Glue on top of shampoo, laundry detergent, orange juice, etc. makes Lily Tomlin shrink to miniature proportions.

Say, maybe they could market it for weight loss!

Seriously though, this is a perfect example of the problems that can be caused by a lack of animal testing! As horrible as animal testing can be, is it really worse than not testing at all? Or testing on people, who will almost exclusively be poor people participating for the money? *shrug* It's a difficult problem.

Oh, and this month is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but even though it's not typically a problem getting men to be breast aware, they may be looking in the wrong places!

The cancer fund's Amanda Mullins says while men make up a very small percentage of new patients each year, they have to understand that it can happen to them. "Breast cancer can occur in men as well, men at any age can develop breast cancer... So male breast cancer makes up less than 1 per cent of all cases of breast cancer, but we still very much encourage men to be breast aware."

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There is an excellent editorial by Michael Balter, who writes for Science at his website, and an excellent debate about it at Dean's World.

I won't elaborate in detail here, because the debate in the Dean's World Comments pretty much covers everything that I would say.

The gist of it, however, is that the adamant insistence that Intelligent Design be left out of classrooms altogether may well do more harm than good to the proponents of evolutionary theory, by bypassing the actual scientific process by which the theory was developed.

My take has been for a long time that I agree with Intelligent Design, but that it isn't science. That said, the way Evolution is often taught these days isn't science either. It is dogmatic "facts" presented as though science requires unquestioning blind belief in whatever your teacher tells you.

Anyway, check out the comments. Great stuff.

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Beer mat knows when it's refill time

Two German students have created a device that will stop beer lovers having to get out of their seats for a refill.

The "smart" beer mat, created by Matthias Hahnen and Robert Doerr from Saarland University in Saarbruecken, southwest Germany, can sense when a glass is nearly empty, sending an alert to a central computer behind the bar so waiters know there are thirsty customers.

Leave it to those crafty Germans to streamline the beer-drinking experience with advanced technology.

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Okay, so they've finally got images of a living Giant Squid!



I actually spotted this story on Monday, but when they were first put up, they didn't actually have the images to go and look at, and what freakin good is that?

Anyway, you can go and see some pictures now. In fact, they have a little video too, though that should not be confused with a video of the squid itself. Despite what some stories were reporting, what they have is a series of stills taken 30 seconds apart, not "video footage".

Regardless, very very cool!

Although it kind of sucks that they injured it. A hook on the camera ended up tearing off a 20-foot piece of tentacle! I'm sure it wasn't totally intentional, and it did allow for genetic testing to confirm that it was in fact a giant squid and not some other species. Still, we finally find a living healthy specimen and we rip one of its tentacles off?

UPDATE! D'oh! Maybe I could actually post the link, eh?

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First it was sponges, and now this...

Armed and Dangerous - Flipper the Firing Dolphin Let Loose By Katrina

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Experts who have studied the US navy's cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying 'toxic dart' guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet's smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.

Thanks for the link to Matthew Dessem at PolySciFi, who also points out that not everybody is quite so willing to imagine Rogue Dolphin Commandos. Apparently, the source of the story has pulled the media's collective legs before.

Still, how could this not be true? It's only a matter of time before they start teaching other dolphins, and soon, we could be facing an entire army of poison-dart-bearing aquatic mammals! I, for one, will be buying some extra canned goods at the grocery store tonight, just in case.

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I'd heard of this study before and it actually has some surprising things to say about visual cognition and the ability of the human mind to focus.

Okay, so before the discussion, go watch this video and pay careful attention.

Count the number of times a white shirted player passes the ball to another white shirted player. The black shirted players are just a distraction. See if you can count them correctly.

Click here to watch the video.

Once you've watched it, come back and click below for the answer and the discussion.




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Dean's World has a great post and discussion going about the subject of Intelligent Design, and a petition that states the following:

"We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

There are a lot of great comments there, but here is a repost of a pretty long one that I posted there:

This is a subject that I have, over the years, spent a lot of time and mental energy on, believe it or not, on both sides of the issue. (warning, this is going to be long)

I did not grow up Christian, I was a lazy agnostic until high school. (By that, I mean my attitude was: "I don't know if there's a God, but I don't care enough to think about it very hard.")

I'd always liked science (still do), and to me, when I heard the arguments in favor of creationism, they seemed bizarre and nonsensical. In retrospect, I realize that my position then was based as much on faith as the creationist one. (Faith in what my teachers had told me, rather than, say, faith in the Bible.) I had not done my own research or subjected the matter to any critical thinking. I just took it for granted that what my science teachers had told me was true.

In my junior year of high school, I became a Christian, and I'll spare you all my testimonial here, (though I'm more than willing to share it with anyone who is interested,) but through my new church, I was exposed, for the first time, to some of the more sophisticated creation science arguments. (i.e. Ones not expressed by my 16-year-old classmates)

It was a revelation, not so much because I agreed with everything they said, but the very idea that one of the so-called scientific "truths" I had been taught actually could be wrong. I did a lot of research and spent the next few years feeling vaguely angry and betrayed by the scientific community.

I switched sides in the debate, though mostly I was defending creationists as not being ignorant and stupid rather than defending any specific version of creationism. You see, I was not altogether persuaded by creationism, but it seemed to me that they had a number of legitimate points and questions about evolution that, as far as I could tell, had never been satisfactorily answered.

In college, I majored in biochemical engineering, and had plenty of opportunity for debates on the subject, and frequently they would get heated.

Then, I reached a sort of epiphany. My belief in God does not depend on the answer to the evolution question. It was a huge relief. Suddenly, this problematic issue that had been giving me such mental anguish was now just an interesting puzzle.

The fact, (perhaps the only real one in this whole debate,) is that we will never know with 100% certainty how exactly life originated. Whether it was people created from dust, or self-replicating RNA that came down on an asteroid, or whatever, we will only ever be able to look at the after-effects, and speculate.

That is not to say that these speculations aren't useful. I think that the desire to learn as much as is possible about this world and the universe at large is the intersection between philosophy and science.

My own take is that a God-assisted process of evolution seems the most likely explanation. Note, by the way, that it is the "evolutionists" who won't let me into their club for that reason, not the ID folk.

In college, I did a lot of advanced study in this field, even an entire semester course devoted exclusively to the subject. The current "official" theory of evolution insists that it is based on random changes, constrained by a few rules imposed by natural selection. I was specifically told by my professor that you cannot believe in scientific evolution and God at the same time. According to him, they are mutually exclusive.

I think that's a load of bulls#!t, but the fact remains that a great many scientists feel that way, and they are the ones leading the charge against Intelligent Design.

The Intelligent Design movement has its own problems of course, not least of which is the presence of literalist creationists among their ranks. I'm not saying that the literal Genesis account couldn't have happened, only that it doesn't seem the most likely explanation to me, and also that I don't think seven literal 24-hour days are required for creation to be a miracle.

Still, for most people, the only possible intersection evolution has with their day-to-day lives is the debate regarding how to teach it in schools.

Frankly, I'm not that concerned with evolution being taught in schools. What really irritates the hell out of me is that, in most schools, it's being taught wrong!

I don't mean that they should be teaching ID alongside it, I mean that they are not even teaching the actual scientific theory properly!

As a few people have mentioned above, science classes today are not being taught science. They are being taught facts. "This is the way things are, and you should believe it because I said so."

I don't know how any of you were taught eveloution in school, but for me, it went basically like this.

"Life gradually evolved from simple life forms to complex ones because of 'survival of the fittest', and we know it because of X, Y, and Z"

Where X, Y, and Z would be examples of natural selection rather than evolution.

A couple of examples of misunderstandings continually perpetuated by bad science teachers:

Note: These are all based on actual scientific evolutionary theory, not ID or anything weird.

1. Natural Selection is NOT the same thing as "Survival of the fittest."

The problem with "fittest" is that it assumes a level playing field. A great many examples of natural selection have nothing to do with "fitness". Example: you've got two populations of squirrels or something, each on one side of a river. The squirrels on the left side have less food and so they have to compete harder to survive, thus over time, they get smarter and stronger, etc. than the squirrels on the right side of the river. "Survival of the fittest" would suggest that the smarter, stronger left-side squirrels would survive, because they are "more fit" than the right-side squirrels.

But then there's a forest fire on the left side of the river and all the left-side sqirrels are burned up, leaving only the dumber, weaker right-side squirrels. That's an example of natural selection, but not of survival of the fittest. Evolutionary theory states that natural selection that is the driving force, not "fitness."

2.Proportional changes in population is not the same thing as evolution.

When I was in school, one of the examples we were given to support evolution was the story of white moths and gray moths near an industrial city in England. The tree bark there was mostly white, so white moths had an advantage over the gray moths, because they were harder to see by their predators. As a result, the white moths were far more plentiful than the gray moths. But then, as the air got polluted by the factories, the white tree bark started turning gray. (Observe also how there is a buried environmentalist message in this story.) With the darker tree bark, the gray moths began to have an advantage over the white moths, and thus, they grew in numbers until they were plentiful, and the white moths were rare.

Now, that is evidence of natural selection, but it is not evidence of evolution in any respect. Think about it, at the beginning of the story, we have white moths and gray moths. At the end, white moths and gray moths. The only thing that changed is their proportions. (This is sometimes called micro-evolution.)

There is no question that natural selection occurs, because we can observe it, as with the above example. Now if this story had been merely used as an example of natural selection, that would have been one thing, but instead, that story was presented as proof that evolution had occurred! And it wasn't just my teacher, this was right out of my textbook.

So I'm not going to insist that creationism or ID be taught alongside evolution in schools, (though I don't see how anybody is hurt by a disclaimer like: "Some people think that life is too complicated to have arisen just through random changes, but we don't have any way to test that.")

What really gets to me though, is not the teaching of evolution, but rather when it's taught wrong.

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Parkinson's Treatment Linked to Compulsive Gambling

They've discovered through a scientific study of certain Parkinson's drugs known as dopamine agonists that the treatments can, in some cases, trigger compulsive gambling behavior!

The human brain really is an amazing organ, and the influence chemicals can have on the way we think and feel is really pretty incredible. Don't believe it? Have a couple of beers and then think about it. Now with things like alcohol, for the most part, we have a pretty good understanding of its effects.

With all of these new medications, especially the ones specifically intended to affect the brain, the side effects can be a great deal more subtle. I know this first hand. (Note: I'll be posting a bit later with updates to some of the personal things I've been dealing with recently.)

Yet this one is especially surprising, as it suggests that certain compulsive behaviors can really be more biochemical than we even realized before. The good news about this, is that the people who were displaying this symptom can solve the problem by simply reducing their dosage. Furthermore, this sort of surprise finding could lead to advances in the way we understand and treat things like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

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