Tag Archives: Science

We will restore science to its rightful place

I’m “reporting” from Ukraine today. I’m not as well-connected to the ‘net and to the doings of Science, so I don’t have much in the way of news for you.

I said before at some point that I wanted to avoid politics in this project. But I think I will skirt that line again today.

The New York Times wrote up a little thing headlined “Scientists Welcome Obama’s Words.” I think the article quite decently summarized the attitude of the scientific world, at least as I’m familiar with it.

Party loyalty and the scientific world’s liberal lean aside, I think it’s fair to say that the Bush administration was pretty hard on the scientific community. Back a few years ago, when the U.S. had money, they did some good things for the science budget. But when push came to shove, those were not fleshed out, and programs that got a good start had to struggle for the last few years.

It’s a funny thing: when the NIH budget doubles, more then twice as many people show up to ask for money. And even more strange: if they get it, they are hoping for more next year, too!

Obama said in his in his Inaugural Address: “We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.”

Well, that might be rhetoric, but it’s refreshing, anyway.

-Peter

TV makes kids fat, but not the way you think.

I think it will come as no surprise that young couch potatoes tend to be overweight. What I think might come as a surprise is that a few hours per day of sedentary vegetation is not the problem. According to the National Academies, it may well be the advertisements that the kids are watching that’s causing it rather than the actual time of inactivity.

And I get it. If you want to make lots of money, you need to buy low and sell high. That means buying corn syrup (cheap) and effective advertising (kids are the easiest) and selling it for ten times the market price. Now maybe advertising  could convince kids that orange juice was awesome. The problem is that the value added is not all that high. Special name brand orange juice probably can’t be driven up in price by a factor of 10 because nobody will bay $20 for a bottle of OJ (Or so I once thought…). Name brand sugar water, on the other hand, certainly can because the price was so low to start.

Where does that laeve us? Kids want crap because they see crap on TV. Value added foods like cola and flavored tortilla chips (both derived from corn, interestingly) make money.  Kids get fat, somebody gets rich. And who are to say that’s not just fine and dandy?

-Peter

How long before they can tell what a person is dreaming?

Alert reader Robert “sent in” an article from Neuron this month (actually, he just walked over and showed it to me since we’re in the same lab). It is in keeping with the string of “brain chip” articles that The Big Upshot has been pleased to bring to the table. Miyawaki et. al. report in their article, “Visual Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity using a Combination of Multiscale Local Image Decoders” that they have successfully used fMRI brain scanning to reconstruct a person’s visual field.

Let me be perfectly clear. The Japanese can scan a person’s brain and determine what that person is seeing. How long before they can tell what a person is dreaming?

My grandmother told me that, years ago, people were worried about being hooked up to an electroenceephalogram. They would ask “you can’t read what I’m thinking, can you?”

Of course not. The EEG was far too low-resolution. But this… well… you don’t have anything to hide, right?

To be fair, the reconstituted image quality is not great. So at best these dream images would be of voyeur-tabloid quality. I don’t know if that makes the whole scenario better or worse.

-Peter

 

Fringey science

This article at Esquire paints a fascinating picture of Dr. Mark Roth. The way this article tells the story, Dr. Roth went into the Fringe and came back with an interesting research subject. He figured out how to put mice into a state of near suspended animation.

Another scientist, Dr. Luca Turin gave a TED talk about the Science of Scent. I found it fascinating for several reasons, not the least of which is it iconoclasm. The accepted view on receptor-ligand interactions (that happen when you smell something) is based on the shape of the molecule. Dr. Turin suggests something quite different. He suggests that the interaction is (in a sense) spectroscopic/vibrational. And it sounds vaguely like some ideas from homeopathy which are pretty fringey.

That leads to the my real topic for today: what is to be done with an idea that is interesting, worth investigating, but that sounds like quackery? The danger of the fringe is that the majority is crap. It’s the kind of thing that will capture a scientist’s imagination and take them on a never-ending wild goose chase. That’s called pathological science. And it’s worth avoiding. The people who chase it get a bad reputation.

These two gentlemen, Dr. Roth and Dr. Turin risked madness and explored potentially career-ending hypotheses and came out on the far side successful. As Morgan Freeman put it, they crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.

-Peter

Wasabi receptor is the ammonia receptor: Lysol Sushi anyone?

So, according to this guy, Prof Makoto Tominaga, the wasabi receptor is the same as the alkaline/ammonia receptor. So… does that mean lemon lysol a good substitute on sushi?

“It has the first report showing molecular entity for the alkali-sensor. You could feel pain when you eat too much WASABI with Japanese Sushi. We found that this pain sensation is the same with that caused by ammonia”, said Prof Tominaga.

For those of you who have never had whiff of ammonia or tasted wasabi, there is a remarkable, nasal clearing similarity. I had read some time ago that the active chemical was an isothiocyanate and wikipedia backs me up. I gather that info comes from Wasabia. In any case, don’t snort it. If you really want to see a bad decision in action, feel free to watch the mistakes of others.

-Peter