Science, Technology & Health: September 2006 Archives

Seth Roberts of the University of California, Berkeley, has published a paper with ten "new ideas" about how sleep, mood, health, and weight relate to each other. From the abstract:

Little is known about how to generate plausible new scientific ideas. So it is noteworthy that 12 years of self-experimentation led to the discovery of several surprising cause-effect relationships and suggested a new theory of weight control, an unusually high rate of new ideas. The cause-effect relationships were: (1) Seeing faces in the morning on television decreased mood in the evening (>10 hrs later) and improved mood the next day (>24 hrs later), yet had no detectable effect before that (0–10 hrs later). The effect was strongest if the faces were life-sized and at a conversational distance. Travel across time zones reduced the effect for a few weeks. (2) Standing 8 hours per day reduced early awakening and made sleep more restorative, even though more standing was associated with less sleep. (3) Morning light (1 hr/day) reduced early awakening and made sleep more restorative. (4) Breakfast increased early awakening. (5) Standing and morning light together eliminated colds (upper respiratory tract infections) for more than 5 years. (6) Drinking lots of water, eating low-glycemic-index foods, and eating sushi each caused a modest weight loss. (7) Drinking unflavored fructose water caused a large weight loss that has lasted more than 1 year. While losing weight, hunger was much less than usual. Unflavored sucrose water had a similar effect. The new theory of weight control, which helped discover this effect, assumes that flavors associated with calories raise the body-fat set point: The stronger the association, the greater the increase. Between meals the set point declines. Self-experimentation lasting months or years seems to be a good way to generate plausible new ideas.

Although Connie Bennett is freaking out about fructose and claiming it's dangerous, fructose is a natural sugar that's found in many foods, such as "honey; tree fruits; berries; melons; and some root vegetables, such as beets, sweet potatoes, parsnips and onions".

Here's more of the theory on "What makes food fattening?".

(HT: Tyler Cowen.)

When people first hear that time is considered to be a fourth "dimension" akin to the three dimensions of space, they often get confused and think that because it is useful to consider time and space together that they're the same. In fact, there are many differences between time and space, and perhaps the most important is that time is not symmetrical and has a very definite directionality. What I mean is this: if you look at a picture it's impossible to know if the image you see is the original or if it's been reversed.

Space is symmetric in that if you consider any of its dimensions in reverse it doesn't affect the rationality of your perceptions. Space appears to be symmetric in every way. A car that gets 30 mpg driving north will get 30 mpg driving south, east, or west. A box two feet long, three feet wide, and four feet tall has the same volume as a box three feet tall, two feet wide, and four feet long.

Time is different in that it is directional, a property commonly referred to as time's arrow. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that some events are irreversible in that once they have occured the universe cannot be put back to the way it was before. (In fact, almost every event is irreversible.)

Consider the situation in which a large container is filled with two separated liquids, for example a dye on one side and water on the other. With no barrier between the two liquids, the random jostling of their molecules will result in them becoming more mixed as time passes. However, if the dye and water are mixed then one does not expect them to separate out again when left to themselves. A movie of the mixing would seem realistic when played forwards, but unrealistic when played backwards.

If the large container is observed early on in the mixing process, it might be found to be only partially mixed. It would be reasonable to conclude that, without outside intervention, the liquid reached this state because it was more ordered in the past, when there was greater separation, and will be more disordered, or mixed, in the future. ...

The thermodynamic arrow of time is provided by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that in an isolated system entropy will only increase with time; it will not decrease with time. Entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder; thus the Second Law implies that time is asymmetrical with respect to the amount of order in an isolated system: as time increases, a system will always become more disordered. This asymmetry can be used empirically to distinguish between future and past.

If you had two complete snapshots of the universe it would be possible to determine which was taken before the other by calculating the amount of entropy in each snapshot; the shot with less entropy was taken first. Thus, time is not symmetric, and traveling forward through time (as we all do) is very different from traveling backward.

Despite claims that everyone has AIDS I'm not sure that HIV tests for everyone is the best strategy for combating the disease.

All Americans between the ages of 13 and 64 should be routinely tested for HIV to help catch infections earlier and stop the spread of the deadly virus, federal health recommendations announced Thursday say. ...

"We know that many HIV infected people seek health care and they don't get tested. And many people are not diagnosed until late in the course of their illness, when they're already sick with HIV-related conditions," said Dr. Timothy Mastro, acting director of the CDC's division of HIV/AIDS prevention.

"By identifying people earlier through a screening program, we'll allow them to access life-extending therapy, and also through prevention services, learn how to avoid transmitting HIV infection to others," he said.

But the vast majority of people are not at risk for getting HIV, so advocating widespread testing seems more like a proxy for politically incorrect but more useful strategies.

Some physicians also question whether there is enough evidence to expand testing beyond high-risk groups, said Dr. Larry Fields, the president of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

"Are doctors going to do it? Probably not," Fields said.

But the recommendations were endorsed by the American Medical Association, which urged physicians to comply.

"This is important public health strategy to stop the spread of HIV," Dr. Nancy Nielsen, a Buffalo, N.Y.-based physician who sits on the AMA's governing board, said in a statement.

Maybe the AMA and the CDC should put more effort into convincing people not to have anonymous gay sex while shooting heroin. Just a thought.

Considering my recent rants against weathermen, reader JV forwarded a link to Forecast Advisor, a site that compiles statistics on weather forecasts and will tell you which service has been the most accurate for your particular zip code. Very cool stuff.

(Indirect hat-tips also to Lifehacker and Clicked.)

I guess this should go in the "science" category, even though it sometimes sounds more like science fiction. Still, people are putting money where their mouths are: Peter Thiel, co-counder of PayPal, has pledged up to $3.5 million to Aubrey de Grey's Methuselah Foundation and its research into "negligible senescence" -- that is, the elimination of aging.

San Francisco -- Peter A. Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of online payments system PayPal, Founder and Managing Member of Clarium Capital Management, a San Francisco-based hedge fund, and angel investor in social networking site Facebook, has announced his pledge of $3.5 Million to support scientific research into the alleviation and eventual reversal of the debilities caused by aging, to be conducted under the auspices of the Methuselah Foundation, a charity co-founded and Chaired by Dr. Aubrey de Grey.

Mr. Thiel commented "Rapid advances in biological science foretell of a treasure trove of discoveries this century, including dramatically improved health and longevity for all. I'm backing Dr. de Grey, because I believe that his revolutionary approach to aging research will accelerate this process, allowing many people alive today to enjoy radically longer and healthier lives for themselves and their loved ones.

To me, the most interesting endeavor of the Methuselah Foundation is its M-Prize that seeks to reward research that delays or reverses aging in mice. Significantly, the focus is on treatments that work when applied not just to young mice, but to middle-aged mice, which is a much more difficult prospect.

Here's an article from 2001 about how modern science is finally beginning to solve the mystery of how Antonio Stradivari crafted such extraordinary instruments.

THE secret of why the sounds of Stradivarius violins have never been surpassed may be hidden in their maker's unwitting attempt to protect them against woodworm, a scientist has discovered.

Joseph Nagyvary, a biochemist at Texas A&M University in College Station, has devoted his life's work to finding out why instruments made by a semi-literate boy in 17th century Cremona are so dramatically better than anything built since. ...

Now Dr Nagyvary believes he has discovered the secret. The answer is borax, the preservative Stradivari used to protect his wood. Whereas wooden artefacts from other northern Italian cities were riddled with woodworm, those from Cremona and Venice had very little. ...

At a recent symposium in Texas, Zina Schiff, a noted violinist, played a Stradivarius and a violin made by Dr Nagyvary, switching between the instruments throughout the performance.

Dr Nagyvary's violin was cut by a computer-controlled carving machine and used wood soaked in brine to emulate Stradivari's wood supplies. "There is a lot of historical evidence that all the logs came down a waterway, and they were stored in the Bay of Venice, sometimes for a very long period."

Miss Schiff said after the performance that she doubted whether anyone could tell the difference between the Stradivarius and Dr Nagyvary's violin.

The phenomenon of Stradivarius instruments has always fascinated me, not because of their musical qualities (which I'm not qualified to appreciate) but because of the anthropology behind their preservation. I wonder how long the instruments will be playable and maintainable?

Scientists are discovering the source of human genius and getting close to the point that brain scans will be capable of evaluating intelligence. Mere appearance of the organ isn't enough:

"If I showed you two brains side by side, one with an IQ of 150, one with an IQ of 75, I can't tell the difference," says Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health, one of the most experienced researchers in the field.

But brain scans can do better.

But Jung and his colleague Dr. Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine, claim they are on the verge of refining imaging techniques to a point that would make traditional intelligence tests obsolete.

"We can make quantitative assessments of how much gray matter they have in every single area, and we can use that to predict what their IQ might be," Haier says. "This is in the very early stage, and I think this is going to be very interesting."

Brain imaging remains in some ways as crude a tool as simply cutting open the brain and looking inside. Haier and Jung use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure various parts of the brain. Then they compare the pictures to intelligence scores on a verbal or pen and paper test.

So far, says Haier, he has found a strong correlation between intelligence and the size and shape of certain brain structures -- including parts of the superior parietal lobe (involved in sensory perception) and parts of the prefrontal cortex (associated with complex thinking, personality, planning, coordination).

Intelligence research is full of surprises. For example, the brains of smarter people, as measured by IQ, tend to be less active but more efficient, Haier says.

The final paragraph quoted above dovetails nicely with a Scientific American article from July about "The Expert Mind" which argued that Chess Grandmasters don't simply think more moves ahead than lesser players, they "chunk" more efficiently and thereby create more useful heuristics that let them solve more difficult chess problems with the same amoung ot brainpower.

In the context of chess, the same differences can be seen between novices and grandmasters. To a beginner, a position with 20 chessmen on the board may contain far more than 20 chunks of information, because the pieces can be placed in so many configurations. A grandmaster, however, may see one part of the position as "fianchettoed bishop in the castled kingside," together with a "blockaded king's-Indian-style pawn chain," and thereby cram the entire position into perhaps five or six chunks. By measuring the time it takes to commit a new chunk to memory and the number of hours a player must study chess before reaching grandmaster strength, Simon estimated that a typical grandmaster has access to roughly 50,000 to 100,000 chunks of chess information. A grandmaster can retrieve any of these chunks from memory simply by looking at a chess position, in the same way that most native English speakers can recite the poem "Mary had a little lamb" after hearing just the first few words.

So here are some questions: if the results were to be published, would you submit yourself to a brain-scan intelligence test? If there were a private organization that performed the tests and everyone believed they were reasonably accurate, would they become as standard as the SAT? Would they have more affect on society than SAT scores?

I'm not sure how much better this mini nuclear survival shelter would be than just hiding in the basement, but it's still pretty cool that something like this could be built for as little as $1500. Do any of my readers have disaster shelters?

I suppose I'm mostly intruigued by the possibility of building other things out of metal than the shelter described.

Update:
Or why get the mini version when you could install an Earthcom 70-128 Earth Berm Shelter to save 200 of your closest friends?

Lockheed won the Orion contract, and most of the reaction is pretty negative.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- NASA on Thursday gave a multibillion dollar contract to build a manned lunar spaceship to Lockheed Martin Corp., the aerospace leader that usually builds unmanned rockets.

The last time NASA awarded a manned spaceship contract to Lockheed Martin of Bethesda, Maryland, was in 1996 for a spaceplane that was supposed to replace the space shuttle. NASA spent $912 million and the ship, called X-33, never got built because of technical problems.

The article continues in that vein for quite a while, and Rand Simberg notes that the announcement may be particularly grating for people who worked on previous space programs, again due to the X-33 fiasco.

On further reflection, I should add that this is a bitter pill for Boeing (not legacy Boeing people, but the former McDonnell-Douglas and Rockwell folks), because they remember the X-33 program, when Lockmart conned NASA, and pissed away a billion dollars of taxpayer money, while devastating prospects for reusable vehicles for years (something from which the agency hasn't recovered, given its current launcher development choices). I'm sure that a lot of them are thinking that this just happened again. The difference, of course, is that this isn't a technology development program, but I can understand the bitterness, if it exists.

T.L. James at MarsBlog works for Lockmart and sees the contract win from a different perspective.

I'm not sure if this is his intention, but taken with the first paragraph, he seems to suggest that LM is the wrong choice for Orion and NG-Boeing is the right choice, because LM has no manned space experience while NG and Boeing have all the past heritage. Again, given how long it's been since those manned spacecraft programs occurred, is that heritage experience really relevant? If LM decided to re-enter the commercial passenger jetliner business, would the L-1011 experience from thirty-odd years ago be relevant today?

All-in-all, as a space enthusiast myself, I tend to sympathize with the opinion expressed by commenter Edward Wright where he writes:

Okay. So, what are the positive aspects of a program that will result in astronaut layoffs, higher-cost space transportation, fewer manned spaceflights, and higher taxes?

I can see why this anouncement is good news for Lockheed employees, but what are the rest of us supposed to cheer for?

The same could be said no matter who won the contract... hopefully the future of spaceflight will be private and commercial, rather than government-funded.

It shouldn't be a surprise that people are getting fatter. Increased wealth and technology lead to more easily available food, and people, like dogs, will typically eat whatever is put in front of them. Only a leftist who has never had to struggle for survival would see this as a bad circumstance crying out for government intervention.

Obesity has reached pandemic proportions throughout the world and is now the greatest single contributor to chronic disease, an international conference was told here.

"This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world," Australia's Monash University professor Paul Zimmet, chair of the 10th International Congress on Obesity, said on the opening day of the conference. ...

Zimmet said the problem needed urgent solutions -- not just widespread changes to diet and exercise but the rethinking of national policies on urban and social planning, agriculture policy, education, transport and other areas.

How about if governments just leave us all alone to get as fat as we care to and to die from whatever cause we want?