I have recently discovered a wonderful science based radio programme on New York Public Radio called Radiolab. Since that first discovery, I have downloaded and listened to many of the podcasts in which Jad and Robert explore the world of science in a unique and thoughtful way. Their genuine curiosity for the topics makes this programme so beautiful, sometimes even touching; and because the topics are often easy to relate to it is not difficult to feel the excitement. I could say a lot more about it but this quote, taken from their website, says it all:
"Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we'll feed it with possibility."
I hope you will enjoy this programme as much as I do!
Saturday, 16 January 2010
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
Birthdays and battle lines
Happy New Year!
This year promises to be an interesting one scientifically, not least in that the venerable institution, the Royal Society, celebrates its 350th birthday which is being marked with a year of events and activities. To start this off, Radio 4 and Melvyn Bragg presented an incisive and in-depth 4-part history of the Society, from its early days in Wadham College here in Oxford when the language had no term for the scientist and instead "natural philosophers" discussed ideas and witness early (and sometimes strange and/or barbaric sounding) experiments, to its present inception.
An interesting counterpoint perhaps can be observed in the travails of another old scientific society, the Royal Institution, and the removal of Susan Greenfield as its director. Away from the politics that appears to be accompanying this, there is an interesting post by Mark Henderson in the Times Online questioning the need for scientific popularisers and mediators between journalists and the researchers themselves.
It is a viable question: does someone who makes a career of explaining science really still have time to conduct research and keep abreast of current developments in their own specialist fields? But equally, can a journalist stay on top of everything from stem cells to quarks and therefore be able to interrogate each new scientific finding without having some kind of expert mediation to suggest the types of questions to pose?
This year promises to be an interesting one scientifically, not least in that the venerable institution, the Royal Society, celebrates its 350th birthday which is being marked with a year of events and activities. To start this off, Radio 4 and Melvyn Bragg presented an incisive and in-depth 4-part history of the Society, from its early days in Wadham College here in Oxford when the language had no term for the scientist and instead "natural philosophers" discussed ideas and witness early (and sometimes strange and/or barbaric sounding) experiments, to its present inception.
An interesting counterpoint perhaps can be observed in the travails of another old scientific society, the Royal Institution, and the removal of Susan Greenfield as its director. Away from the politics that appears to be accompanying this, there is an interesting post by Mark Henderson in the Times Online questioning the need for scientific popularisers and mediators between journalists and the researchers themselves.
It is a viable question: does someone who makes a career of explaining science really still have time to conduct research and keep abreast of current developments in their own specialist fields? But equally, can a journalist stay on top of everything from stem cells to quarks and therefore be able to interrogate each new scientific finding without having some kind of expert mediation to suggest the types of questions to pose?
Friday, 18 December 2009
Messing with the mind ...
This is a wonderful place to procrastinate but learn something at the same time! http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/
Friday, 11 December 2009
Lies, damned lies or statistics?
Here's the link to a thoughtful piece on what really matters in the climate debate: data and not mere presentation or personalities. It seems as if there is frequently a fundamental misunderstanding about the scientific method, with either each experiment individually being characterised as delivering some kind of fundamental truth or it being dominated by personal biases and human failings. The truth, as ever, falls somewhere in between (cf. a possible future post on our incessant desire to dichotomise).
Thursday, 12 November 2009
Muscle aches and vibrators
I am sitting at my desk, my legs are gently aching and I can feel - slowly but surely - that the muscles in my upper body are stiffening as well. As long as I stay absolutely still everything is alright, but as soon as I move my body protests heavily. My condition has a name: delayed onset muscle soreness or DOMS.
This highly common phenomenon usually presents itself 24-48 hours after an intense work-out of muscle groups that are not used to exercise. Though it has a slow onset, DOMS comes with a vengeance: it causes a weakness in the muscles that leaves you to wobble around, it drastically reduces the types of movements you are able to make, and the energy levels in you muscles are lower. What I find most shocking though is that it can last from 4 up to 7 days!
According to popular belief the pains are caused by lactic acid in the muscle, but no scientific proof has been given for this idea. The real cause has still not been unveiled. However, it is generally thought that the damage done to the muscle tissue causes inflammation of the muscle and the inflammation is what gives you pain.
Stretching your arms far away from your body to catch that impossible ball or trying a high kick are likely causes of DOMS. These actions require an extension of the muscle and in an untrained muscle may perhaps result in small tears in the muscle tissue. The weakest, most likely to be affected spots in your body are those places where muscles join tendons, but it is by no means limited to these places alone. In due course the soreness can, and often will, spread through the entire muscle.
What yields for every disease or disorder applies here too: not knowing the mechanisms behind DOMS does not make the search for cures and therapies easy. Many types of treatments have been tried and failed. Some non-steroidal pain killers such as ibuprofen may alleviate the soreness by damping down the inflammation. Massage techniques may, if applied at length, help too. Bathing in ice is – thank goodness – not a scientifically proven method to cure DOMS. There is one glimmer of hope though. An Australian research group at the university of Victoria in Melbourne found that when vibrations are applied to heavily exercised muscles, soreness does still occur, but to a lesser extent.
So, apart from using my vibrator to cause a buzz in my muscles, there is not much I can do. And even if there was, I wonder if I would. In a weird kind of way, I find this pain quite satisfying and addictive.
This highly common phenomenon usually presents itself 24-48 hours after an intense work-out of muscle groups that are not used to exercise. Though it has a slow onset, DOMS comes with a vengeance: it causes a weakness in the muscles that leaves you to wobble around, it drastically reduces the types of movements you are able to make, and the energy levels in you muscles are lower. What I find most shocking though is that it can last from 4 up to 7 days!
According to popular belief the pains are caused by lactic acid in the muscle, but no scientific proof has been given for this idea. The real cause has still not been unveiled. However, it is generally thought that the damage done to the muscle tissue causes inflammation of the muscle and the inflammation is what gives you pain.
Stretching your arms far away from your body to catch that impossible ball or trying a high kick are likely causes of DOMS. These actions require an extension of the muscle and in an untrained muscle may perhaps result in small tears in the muscle tissue. The weakest, most likely to be affected spots in your body are those places where muscles join tendons, but it is by no means limited to these places alone. In due course the soreness can, and often will, spread through the entire muscle.What yields for every disease or disorder applies here too: not knowing the mechanisms behind DOMS does not make the search for cures and therapies easy. Many types of treatments have been tried and failed. Some non-steroidal pain killers such as ibuprofen may alleviate the soreness by damping down the inflammation. Massage techniques may, if applied at length, help too. Bathing in ice is – thank goodness – not a scientifically proven method to cure DOMS. There is one glimmer of hope though. An Australian research group at the university of Victoria in Melbourne found that when vibrations are applied to heavily exercised muscles, soreness does still occur, but to a lesser extent.
So, apart from using my vibrator to cause a buzz in my muscles, there is not much I can do. And even if there was, I wonder if I would. In a weird kind of way, I find this pain quite satisfying and addictive.
Sunday, 8 November 2009
Brains powered by light
In the 1990s Peter Hegemann, a German biologist, discovered that green algae commonly found in ponds respond to light by wagging their tail, an interesting phenomenon given that they do not have eyes. When light photons hit the protein coils packed in the algae's cell membrane, a chemical reaction created a tiny gap, causing an ionic current to be produced and the algae's tail to wag. The protein that allowed this reaction is channelrhodopsin-2.
Some years later, American researchers started to wonder whether a similar mechanism could be used to control brain cells if certain neurons were made to behave somewhat like algae. By genetic engineering these scientists were able to do just this: not to make brain cells move but, using channelrhodopsin, to turn them on or off simply with light. The field of optogenetics was born.
What is so beautiful about this technique is that, by harnessing the cunning of viruses, it is possible to make the channelrhodopsin-encoding gene only be expressed in particular targeted neurons. And so far the results have been startling. Flies have been made to jump, mice made to walk in a certain direction, and both to remember events that never happened, all through the power of light. Optogenetics could therefore open the door to precise therapeutics in diseases such as Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia where presently only drugs or surgery can help, neural sledgehammers compared to the surgical scalpel enabled by light-controlled tools.
If its promise holds up, a bulb over someone’s head may someday be seen in a completely new light.
Thursday, 29 October 2009
A long time ...
It has been a while since I last posted something on my blog thanks to a lovely long holiday in Turkey and a conference in the US, but I am back now and eager to do some more science writing.
I am going to start off gently by just pointing you to an interesting article I read in New Scientist this week about how in a scary situation it can feel like time slows down and the agony suffered seems to last for much longer [than it actually does]. Can it be that, in a scary situation, our brain works faster as a result of flight or fight? Or do we create memories about such events that are much more precise and therefore seem longer?
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, looked into the issue of the slowing of time by letting his colleagues experience a thirty meter free fall - a scary event over which you have no control. Afterwards he asked them to indicate how long they felt the fall had lasted for. All estimated times were about twice as long as the actual duration of the fall. I have uploaded a video to give you a sense of the experiment.
Proving that we perceive time slowing down in such scary situations is one thing, finding out its cause is a wholly different issue, one that is discussed in the New Scientist article 'Timewarp: How the brain creates the fourth dimension'. The mechanism that keeps track of time may well be important for the understanding of diseases where people experience delusion, such as schizophrenia.
David Eagleman's interest in time does not stop in the past and present. In his recent book SUM ('I am' in Latin) he deals with the more existential issues of the afterlive.
I am going to start off gently by just pointing you to an interesting article I read in New Scientist this week about how in a scary situation it can feel like time slows down and the agony suffered seems to last for much longer [than it actually does]. Can it be that, in a scary situation, our brain works faster as a result of flight or fight? Or do we create memories about such events that are much more precise and therefore seem longer?
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, looked into the issue of the slowing of time by letting his colleagues experience a thirty meter free fall - a scary event over which you have no control. Afterwards he asked them to indicate how long they felt the fall had lasted for. All estimated times were about twice as long as the actual duration of the fall. I have uploaded a video to give you a sense of the experiment. Proving that we perceive time slowing down in such scary situations is one thing, finding out its cause is a wholly different issue, one that is discussed in the New Scientist article 'Timewarp: How the brain creates the fourth dimension'. The mechanism that keeps track of time may well be important for the understanding of diseases where people experience delusion, such as schizophrenia.
David Eagleman's interest in time does not stop in the past and present. In his recent book SUM ('I am' in Latin) he deals with the more existential issues of the afterlive.
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