Discoblog

NCBI ROFL: St. Paddy’s Day special: Surprise! Drinking makes the Irish more aggressive!

ncbi rofl — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:16 +0000

Cross-cultural comparisons of Irish and American adolescent drinking practices and beliefs.

“The drinking behavior and alcohol expectancies of 168 Irish adolescents aged 15-18 were compared with those of a group of American adolescents matched on age and sex. The Irish adolescents reported less frequent social drinking and less problematic drinking. However, unlike American adolescents, those Irish youth who did drink in a social, frequent manner also reported drinking-related problems. Irish adolescents expect less social benefit, less improvement of cognitive and motor functioning and less sexual enhancement, but greater increase in aggression as a consequence of drinking. These findings are discussed as possible etiological clues to established differences between Irish adult drinking and drinking by adults in other countries.”

Photo: flickr/greyloch

Honoring St. Patrick: Guinness Bubbles Demystified and Why Your Hangover Hurts

Smriti Rao — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:36:57 +0000

Oh, St. Patrick’s Day! Somehow it has become the day of binge drinking, day of doing shots, and the day before contemplating why you spent the last 24 hours drinking your head off. Nonetheless, St. Paddy must be honored, and honor him we shall—with alcohol and some science.

We decided to reach into the past and pull out the wondrous mystery of the Guinness beer bubbles. For years, the mysterious downward flowing Guinness bubbles have confounded both professional scientists and drinkers. When the bartender pulls a pint of most any beer, the bubbles can clearly be seen gushing to the top. When a pint of Guinness is poured, however, the bubbles slyly cascade down the sides of the glass, while the beer mysteriously maintains its frothy layer on top.

So in 2004, scientists Andy Alexander from the Royal Society of Chemistry and Dick Zare of Stanford University decided to find out why the bubbles act the way they do. After preliminary research trips to the local pub proved unfruitful, they decided to move the scene to a lab where they rigged a high-speed camera to take pictures of the Guinness being poured. The camera could zoom in and magnify the images ten times.

The scientists found that the drink’s dynamics can be likened to a mini-tornado. When Guinness is poured into a glass, the bubbles dip downwards as they experience drag–similar to what would happen should you run your finger along a glass surface. When they reach the center of the glass, the bubbles rise to the top, setting up a circulating current.

The Telegraph explains:

Flowing outwards from the surface, the frothy ”head”, the current hit the glass edge and was pushed down. Bubbles held back by dragging on the side of the glass were caught in the circulation and forced to go with the flow – the wrong way, for a bubble.

A spokesman for the Royal Society says:

“Guinness bubbles are small, due to being released at high pressure by the widget and therefore easily pushed around. Also, in lager the gas is carbon dioxide, which is easily dissolved. The gas in Guinness bubbles is nitrogen – not so easily dissolved. Finally, the contrast between the dark liquid and the light bubbles makes them easier to see.”

There! Mystery solved.

And if you’re recovering from an early St. Pat’s day celebration, here’s a video explaining the chemistry of alcohol and hangovers. Enjoy.

Image: Guinness

Is Erectile Dysfunction a Heart Attack in the Penis?

Andrew Moseman — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:20:11 +0000

Men diagnosed with erectile dysfunction probably wouldn’t be too keen to hear that they might have bigger problems, but a new study in the journal Circulation reinforces that unfortunate idea. Given that both ED and heart attacks can result from restricted arteries that prevent blood from flowing freely, doctors have long suspected that they might be connected. Now, the study says, there’s evidence that one precedes the other. From The Los Angeles Times:

The results are probably not too surprising, added Dr. Robert Kloner, a cardiologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, “because arteries in the penis are smaller, so atherosclerosis shows up there sooner,” perhaps three to four years before the onset of cardiovascular disease.

The take-home message, both experts said, is that when a patient seeks treatment for ED, typically from a general practitioner, he should be given a full physical work-up to look for heart disease and referred to a cardiologist.

The guidelines for treating men with ED already state that they should be examined for cardiac problems. Kloner says updated guidelines in a few years could make that recommendation more forceful, so doctors can make sure a penis attack doesn’t become a heart attack.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Had a Heart Attack? Start Eating Chocolate
Discoblog: Erectile Dysfunction Could Signal a Heart Attack

Image: iStockphoto

NCBI ROFL: How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses.

ncbi rofl — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:57 +0000

“Computer mediated communication (CMC) plays a rapidly growing role in our social lives. Within this domain, e-mail addresses represent the thinnest slice of information that people receive from one another. Using 599 e-mail addresses of young adults, their self-reported personality scores and the personality judgments of 100 independent observers, it was shown that personality impressions based solely on e-mail addresses were consensually shared by observers. Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity. This was true for neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism but not for extraversion. Level of accuracy was explained using lens model analyses: Lay observers made broad use of perceivable e-mail address features in their personality judgments, features were slightly valid and observers were sensitive to subtle differences in validity between cues. Altogether, even the thinnest slice of CMC—the mere e-mail address—contains valid information about the personality of its owner.”

Thanks to Robert for today’s ROFL!
Photo: flickr/Perfecto Insecto

Babies Are Born to Bop, Boogie, and Groove

Darlene Cavalier — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:08:34 +0000

Research published yesterday in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests babies are born to boogie.

Researchers exposed 120 infants to a variety of music and recorded their reactions on video, using 3D motion capture technology. The parents holding their infants were given headphones to wear so they wouldn’t influence the babies’ behaviors by, say, tapping toes or bopping to the beat.

The results showed that infants react with rhythmic movement to music more than they do to speech, and that infants do indeed have rhythm (as the tempo was accelerated, the babies’ movements quickened). Finally, the researchers found that the better the rhythm, the happier the jammin’ baby; the better the babies were able to synch their movements with the music, the more they smiled.

Wrote the researchers:

The findings are suggestive of a predisposition for rhythmic movement in response to music and other metrically regular sounds.

Something this baby’s been trying to tell us for more than a year now:

Video: CGElliott09

The Space Debate: When Will NASA Astronauts Explore the Moon, Mars, and Beyond?

Andrew Grant — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:44:01 +0000

When organizers at the American Museum of Natural History in New York decided to set up a debate on the future of manned space exploration, President Obama had not yet announced plans to cancel the NASA program designed to carry astronauts to the moon by 2020 and Mars by 2030. That recent development only served to spice up the proceedings at last night’s Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The main theme guiding the night’s proceedings was supposed to be “Where next?” But based on NASA’s recent change of course, much of the night focused on how to kick the human exploration into gear.

Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, was the idealist and dominant personality on the panel, claiming “we’re much closer sending men to Mars now than we were sending someone to the moon in 1961.” He noted that when factoring in inflation, NASA has about the same budget for manned spaceflight as it did during the Apollo years. He encouraged a bold deadline for reaching Mars to motivate current scientists and inspire future ones.

Yet the Apollo comparisons can only go so far. “We don’t have the Cold War infrastructure that helped build Apollo,” said Paul Spudis, the panel’s moon expert. And during the Q&A session, audience member Miles O’Brien (a space blogger and formerly CNN’s science correspondent) plainly stated, “The nostalgia of the Space Race is not coming back. You can’t just recreate that.”

Most of the panel did agree, however, that NASA needs well-defined incremental goals and deadlines. “It’s a fundamental mistake to give NASA $20 billion and no destination,” Spudis said. “If you’re not working toward something, you’ll get nothing.”

Perhaps the necessary motivation can only come from a modern equivalent of the USSR: Would a Chinese mission to set up colonies on Mars, Tyson hypothetically proposed, act as a modern-day Sputnik? Lester Lyles, a retired Air Force general who served on the Augustine commission, downplayed that threat but admitted that militarily, space “is the ultimate high ground.”

The night also featured lively debate over the most logical destination for future astronauts. Spudis touted that recent research has revealed that humans could use materials readily available on the moon’s surface to produce potable water and rocket fuel. Zubrin cited the carbon and nitrogen on Mars, as well as the clear evidence of past liquid water. Cornell astronomer Steven Squyres favors the asteroids because of their low gravity and abundant metallic reserves, although he says we should make the moon our first stop “before going on to more interesting places,” drawing a glare from Spudis.

Noticeably absent from the discussion was a voice opposing manned exploration, which historically has taken up two-thirds of NASA’s budget despite getting overshadowed by robotic missions such as Voyager and Cassini. Squyres, who is in charge of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars, would have seemed to have been the logical person to make that argument, but he said we can’t send out humans into space soon enough. “Humans could do in one week what the rovers have done in six years,” he said.

Image: NASA / JPL

Wireless Gravestone Tech Will Broadcast Your Awesomeness to Posterity

Andrew Moseman — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:10:38 +0000

For those people seeking some long-term postmortem respect, you could always go the route of the Royal Tenenbaum epitaph and have your hyperbolic greatness engraved upon a headstone. But we all know weather eventually gets the better of those words, and besides: Why settle for one measly sentence when you could speak directly to your descendants from beyond the grave?

The Objecs company has the answer: RosettaStone “technology enhanced memorial products,” which, preloaded with your autobiographical information, will attach to your grave. From Discovery News:

When your great-great-great granddaughter stops by sometime in the next century and wants to know who you were, she’ll touch her NFC-RFID enabled cellphone (or whatever device we’re using by then) to one of those symbols on the granite iPod-looking device on your headstone and she’ll get your note.

NFC stands for “near-field communication” which is a subset of RFID – “radio frequency identification.” You’re probably using this technology already. RFID is what allows you to pay a toll while driving 30 mph by way of the little box stuck to your rearview mirror.

As the above passage notes, the practicality of RosettaStone depends on it working with the cellphone technology of the future that will probably be directly implanted in your head, or perhaps that someone will care enough after you’re gone to drop by the cemetery and upgrade your headstone.

Still, it could work. So please, no stupid text abbreviations in your autobiography. This is for posterity.

Image: Objecs LLC

NCBI ROFL: Best materials and methods ever.

ncbi rofl — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:00:58 +0000

Response of brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis) to human blood

“Ten specimens of Boiga irregularis were presented with clean or bloody tampons. The latter were used by women during menses. Trial duration was 60 sec, intertrial interval was 24 hr, and the dependent variable was rate of tongue flicking (a measure of chemosensory investigation). Bloody tampons elicited significantly more tongue flicking than did control tampons. An additional snake is shown attacking and ingesting a soiled tampon, confirming that chemosensory interest was associated with predatory behavior.”

Bonus figure legend from the main text of the paper (we decided to spare you the actual figure):

“FIG. 1. (A) A brown tree snake investigates a soiled tampon suspended into its cage.
(B) Seconds later the snake bites the tampon. (C) About 2 min following the bite, the
snake is shown with only the string remaining unswallowed. This snake then struck and
swallowed a second soiled tampon.”

Thanks to Aaron for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/jurvetson

Worst Science Article of the Week: The CIA Dosed a French Town With LSD!

Smriti Rao — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:05:02 +0000

The CIA’s experiments with mind-control and hallucinogenic drugs are well documented. It’s hard to forget about programs like Operation Midnight Climax, in which the agency studied the effects of LSD by dosing unsuspecting clients at brothels. But did the agency go so far as to send an entire French village on an acid trip that killed a few people and institutionalized a bunch more? According to The Telegraph, the CIA did just that in 1951.

For years, people familiar with “the incident of the cursed bread” (or le pain maudit) have subscribed to the theory that villagers in Saint-Pont-Esprit in Southern France suffered massive delusions because they all ate bread contaminated by ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus. After eating bread from a local baker, the villagers reported such delusions as the conviction that they were missing body parts or had animals in their stomachs.

Now, The Telegraph reports that the incident was not “ergotism” caused by the fungus, as previously believed, but was actually a bad trip caused by the CIA, which had spiked the village bread with LSD, or maybe just sprayed LSD into the air. Quite a story, huh? Too bad it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

The always credulous Telegraph reports that the discovery was made by investigative journalist H. P. Albarelli Jr., who published a book on the CIA’s research. Albarelli claimed the outbreak was the result of a covert experiment carried out by the CIA and the U.S. army’s top secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at the height of the cold war.

The Telegraph reports:

Mr Albarelli came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of Frank Olson, a biochemist working for the SOD who fell from a 13th floor window two years after the Cursed Bread incident. One note transcribes a conversation between a CIA agent and a Sandoz official who mentions the “secret of Pont-Saint-Esprit” and explains that it was not “at all” caused by mould but by diethylamide, the D in LSD.

The Telegraph’s article immediately drew sharp responses from other journalists, who dismissed the report as bunkum. David Steven of The Global Dashboard points out that Albarelli’s theories were rejected out of hand by Steven Kaplan, a history professor at Cornell University and a noted bread expert who has written a book on the incident.

Terming the report “incoherent and harebrained,” Kaplan told France 24:

I have numerous objections to this paltry evidence against the CIA. First of all, it’s clinically incoherent: LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhabitants showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive ailments or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople.…

It is absurd, this idea of transmitting a very toxic drug by putting it in bread. As for pulverizing it [for ingestion through the air], that technology was not even possible at that time. Most compellingly, why would they choose the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit to conduct these tests? It was half-destroyed by the US Army during fighting with the Germans in the Second World War. It makes no sense.

The report also came under fire for not getting its science right. Derek Lowe, a chemist who has worked in several major pharmaceutical companies, points to the reporter’s assertion that the hallucinations were caused by diethylamide, the D in LSD, as incorrect.

He writes:

Laughter may now commence. For the non-chemists in the audience, diethylamide isn’t a separate compound; it’s the name of a chemical group. And LSD isn’t some sort of three-component mixture; it’s the diethylamide derivative of the parent compound, lysergic acid. (I’d like to hear this guy explain to me what the “S” stands for)

In short, neither the author of this new book, nor the people at the Telegraph, nor the supposed scientific “source” of this quote, knows anything about chemistry. This is like saying that the secret of TNT is a compound called “Tri”. Nonsense.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Whatever Happened To… Mind Control?
DISCOVER: Could an Acid Trip Cure Your OCD?
Discoblog: Worst Science Article of the Week, the archives

Image: iStockphoto

NCBI ROFL: What kind of erotic film clips should we use in female sex research? An exploratory study.

ncbi rofl — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:00:16 +0000

“INTRODUCTION: Erotic film clips are used in sex research, including studies of female sexual dysfunction and arousal. However, little is known about which clips optimize female sexual response. Furthermore, their use is not well standardized. AIMS: To identify the types of film clips that are most mentally appealing and physically arousing to women for use in future sexual function and dysfunction studies; to explore the relationship between mental appeal and reported physical arousal; to characterize the content of the films that were found to be the most and least appealing and arousing. METHODS: Twenty-one women viewed 90 segments of erotic film clips. They rated how (i) mentally appealing and (ii) how physically aroused they were by each clip… RESULTS: The most appealing and physically arousing films tended to exhibit heterosexual behavior with vaginal intercourse. The least appealing and least physically arousing films tended to depict male homosexual behavior, fellatio, and anal intercourse. CONCLUSIONS: Erotic film clips reliably produced a state of self-reported arousal in women. The most appealing and arousing films tended to depict heterosexual vaginal intercourse. Film clips with these attributes should be used in future research of sexual function and response of women.”

Photo: flickr/thebittenword.com