godforhire

Machine Means End To Sleepless Nights

2007-05-07T11:33:00-04:00

A new discovery could make it possible to take a "power nap" at the flick of a switch. Scientists have found a way to turn on deep sleep at will using a machine that magnetically stimulates the brain.

A device worn on the head could in squeeze the benefit of eight hours' sleep into just two or three hours.

Scientists in the US used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to induce slow waves - indicative of the deepest phase of sleep and essential for learning ability and mood, in a group of sleeping volunteers.

A TMS device sends harmless magnetic signals through the scalp and skull and into the brain, where it activates electrical impulses.

The researchers found that positioning the TMS machine the right way triggered slow waves that travelled throughout the brain.

Slow wave activity occupies 80% of sleeping hours.

During slow wave sleep, waves of electrical impulses wash across the brain at a rate of roughly one a second.

With each magnetic pulse, the volunteers' brains immediately generated slow waves typical of deep sleep.

"Creating slow waves on demand could some day lead to treatments for insomnia," said study leader Prof Giulio Tononi, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Theoretically, it could also lead to a magnetically stimulated `power nap' which might confer the benefit of eight hours' sleep in just a few hours."

Prof Tononi believes sleep is essential to prevent the brain overloading.

Memory involves strengthening synapses - connections between brain cells formed by learning.

Sleep might allow the connections created during the day to relax at night, according to Prof Tononi.

The research appeared in an early edition of the American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Vitamin D casts cancer prevention in new light

2007-04-30T05:22:00-04:00

For decades, researchers have puzzled over why rich northern countries have cancer rates many times higher than those in developing countries — and many have laid the blame on dangerous pollutants spewed out by industry.

But research into vitamin D is suggesting both a plausible answer to this medical puzzle and a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren't caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations.

A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.

Authorities are implicated because the main way humans achieve healthy levels of vitamin D isn't through diet but through sun exposure. People make vitamin D whenever naked skin is exposed to bright sunshine. By an unfortunate coincidence, the strong sunshine able to produce vitamin D is the same ultraviolet B light that can also causes sunburns and, eventually, skin cancer.

Only brief full-body exposures to bright summer sunshine — of 10 or 15 minutes a day — are needed to make high amounts of the vitamin. But most authorities have urged a total avoidance of strong sunlight or, alternatively, heavy use of sunscreen. Both recommendations will block almost all vitamin D synthesis.

Moving Your Eyes Improves Memory, Study Suggests

2007-04-28T10:24:00-04:00

If you’re looking for a quick memory fix, move your eyes from side-to-side for 30 seconds, researchers say. Horizontal eye movements are thought to cause the two hemispheres of the brain to interact more with one another, and communication between brain hemispheres is important for retrieving certain types of memories.

Previous studies have suggested that horizontal eye movements improve how well people recall specific words they have just seen. But Andrew Parker and his colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University in England wanted to know whether such eye movements might also help people recognize words they have just seen.

Recognition memory differs from recall memory in that people trying to recognize words tend to make false memory errors called source monitoring errors. This occurs when they recognize words but attribute their familiarity to the wrong source—they might think they just read the words, when they had actually heard them in a conversation earlier that day, for example.

Lure test

To test whether horizontal eye movements reduce source monitoring errors in addition to improving how many items people can remember, Parker and his colleagues presented 102 college students with recordings of a male voice reading aloud 20 lists of 15 words. Some of the lists converged around a “lure” word that wasn’t presented.

For example, subjects might have heard words that included “thread,” “eye,” “sewing” and “sharp”—all of which converge around the word “needle,” even though “needle” was never said.

After the subjects heard all of the lists, a third of them followed a computer prompt that initiated side-to-side eye movements for 30 seconds. Another third did the same with up-to-down eye movements, and the final third did nothing.

Then the subjects were handed a list of words and asked to pick out the ones they had just heard. Those who chose the unspoken “lure” words were making source monitoring errors because they couldn’t distinguish having heard the words from having thought the words themselves.

The researchers found that the people who performed the horizontal eye movements correctly remembered, on average, more than 10 percent more words, and falsely recognized about 15 percent fewer “lure” words than the people who performed vertical eye movements or no movements at all.

“The movements could be helping people identify the true source of their memories,” said Stephen Christman, a psychologist at the University of Toledo, who was not involved in the study, published in the April issue of Brain and Cognition.

Eye movements and recall

Christman’s research has independently shown that such eye movements improve recall memory.

Christman said that he first came up with the idea to look at the effects of eye movements on memory after learning that leftward eye movements activate the right brain hemisphere and that rightward movements activate the left hemisphere. He thought that horizontal eye movements might, therefore, improve memory by helping the hemispheres interact.

But Parker notes that the proposed mechanism linking eye movement to memory is still somewhat speculative and that more research will be needed to understand how and why eye movements affect memory.

Christman said he has received many letters from people wondering whether horizontal eye movements could help them in their everyday lives.

“Let’s say you’re leaving a mall after a long day shopping and you realize, ‘Oh God, I can’t remember where I parked my car,’” he said. “Would it help you if you stood there in the parking lot and just wiggled your eyes back and forth for 30 seconds?”

He’s not sure, he said—but it might be worth a shot.

Plasma Converter

2007-02-19T23:05:00-04:00

Joseph Longo's Plasma Converter turns our most vile and toxic trash into clean energy—and promises to make a relic of the landfill

It sounds as if someone just dropped a tricycle into a meat grinder. I’m sitting inside a narrow conference room at a research facility in Bristol, Connecticut, chatting with Joseph Longo, the founder and CEO of Startech Environmental Corporation. As we munch on takeout Subway sandwiches, a plate-glass window is the only thing separating us from the adjacent lab, which contains a glowing caldera of “plasma” three times as hot as the surface of the sun. Every few minutes there’s a horrific clanking noise—grinding followed by a thunderous voomp, like the sound a gas barbecue makes when it first ignites.

“Is it supposed to do that?” I ask Longo nervously. “Yup,” he says. “That’s normal.”

Despite his 74 years, Longo bears an unnerving resemblance to the longtime cover boy of Mad magazine, Alfred E. Neuman, who shrugs off nuclear Armageddon with the glib catchphrase “What, me worry?” Both share red hair, a smattering of freckles and a toothy grin. When such a man tells me I’m perfectly safe from a 30,000˚F arc of man-made lightning heating a vat of plasma that his employees are “controlling” in the next room—well, I’m not completely reassured.

To put me at ease, Longo calls in David Lynch, who manages the demonstration facility. “There’s no flame or fire inside. It’s just electricity,” Lynch assures me of the multimillion-dollar system that took Longo almost two decades to design and build. Then the two usher me into the lab, where the gleaming 15-foot-tall machine they’ve named the Plasma Converter stands in the center of the room. The entire thing takes up about as much space as a two-car garage, surprisingly compact for a machine that can consume nearly any type of waste—from dirty diapers to chemical weapons—by annihilating toxic materials in a process as old as the universe itself. Called plasma gasification, it works a little like the big bang, only backward (you get nothing from something). Inside a sealed vessel made of stainless steel and filled with a stable gas—either pure nitrogen or, as in this case, ordinary air—a 650-volt current passing between two electrodes rips electrons from the air, converting the gas into plasma. Current flows continuously through this newly formed plasma, creating a field of extremely intense energy very much like lightning. The radiant energy of the plasma arc is so powerful, it disintegrates trash into its constituent elements by tearing apart molecular bonds. The system is capable of breaking down pretty much anything except nuclear waste, the isotopes of which are indestructible. The only by-products are an obsidian-like glass used as a raw material for numerous applications, including bathroom tiles and high-strength asphalt, and a synthesis gas, or “syngas”—a mixture of primarily hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be converted into a variety of marketable fuels, including ethanol, natural gas and hydrogen.

Perhaps the most amazing part of the process is that it’s self-sustaining. Just like your toaster, Startech’s Plasma Converter draws its power from the electrical grid to get started. The initial voltage is about equal to the zap from a police stun gun. But once the cycle is under way, the 2,200˚F syngas is fed into a cooling system, generating steam that drives turbines to produce electricity. About two thirds of the power is siphoned off to run the converter; the rest can be used on-site for heating or electricity, or sold back to the utility grid. “Even a blackout would not stop the operation of the facility,” Longo says.

It all sounds far too good to be true. But the technology works. Over the past decade, half a dozen companies have been developing plasma technology to turn garbage into energy. “The best renewable energy is the one we complain about the most: municipal solid waste,” says Louis Circeo, the director of plasma research at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “It will prove cheaper to take garbage to a plasma plant than it is to dump it on a landfill.” A Startech machine that costs roughly $250 million could handle 2,000 tons of waste daily, approximately what a city of a million people amasses in that time span. Large municipalities typically haul their trash to landfills, where the operator charges a “tipping fee” to dump the waste. The national average is $35 a ton, although the cost can be more than twice that in the Northeast (where land is scarce, tipping fees are higher). And the tipping fee a city pays doesn’t include the price of trucking the garbage often hundreds of miles to a landfill or the cost of capturing leaky methane—a greenhouse gas—from the decomposing waste. In a city with an average tipping fee, a $250-million converter could pay for itself in about 10 years, and that’s without factoring in the money made from selling the excess electricity and syngas. After that break-even point, it’s pure profit.

Someday very soon, cities might actually make money from garbage.

How to undo 20 million years of evolution in a few decades? Do what the Chinese do.

2006-12-17T00:32:00-04:00

The first species to be erased from this planet’s great and ancient Order of Cetaceans in modern times is not one of the charismatic sea mammals that have long been the focus of conservation campaigns, like the sperm whale or bottlenose dolphin. It appears to be the baiji, a white, nearly blind denizen of the Yangtze River in China.

On Wednesday, an expedition in search of any baiji, run by Chinese biologists and baiji.org, a Swiss foundation, ended empty-handed after six weeks of patrolling its onetime waters in the middle and lower stretches of the river, the baiji’s only known habitat.

The Yangtze, Asia’s longest waterway and thought to be akin to the Amazon long ago in its biological richness, now has a dominant species: the 400 million (and counting) people busily plying its waters and industrializing its banks.

For some 20 million years, the baiji, also called the white-flag dolphin, frequented the Yangtze’s sandy shallows, using sonar to catch fish in the silty flow.

In the last few decades, the dolphin’s numbers plunged as rapidly as the Chinese economy surged. The Yangtze’s sandy shallows, which the baiji frequented, have largely been dredged for shipping.

The baiji sought fish that have been netted or driven from the river by pollution. And its sonar may have been disrupted by the propeller noise from boats above. A 1997 survey counted 13 baiji in the river. None of the dolphins survive in captivity.

In a telephone interview from Wuhan, China, August Pfluger, the founder of baiji.org, said it was a shame that more attention had not shifted from the oceans’ more abundant cetaceans to the plight of those that live in rivers and are now essentially trapped, unable to escape human activity.

On Wednesday, Mr. Pfluger distributed a news release concluding that the baiji was “functionally extinct.” (Decades must pass before international scientific organizations take the formal step of declaring it officially extinct.)

The name of the document was, simply, “The End.”

Well done China!

Python shrine found in Botswana

2006-12-03T04:40:00-04:00

OSLO, Norway, Dec. 2 A Norway-based archaeologist has found a cave in Botswana that appears to be a 70,000-year-old religious shrine.The cave in the Tsodilo hills has a rock with a marked resemblance to a python's head, The Times of London reported.

The cave in the Tsodilo hills has a rock with a marked resemblance to a python's head, The Times of London reported. The rock has manmade marks on it and a hiding place behind it that could have been used by a shaman appearing to speak for the python.

Sheila Coulson of the University of Oslo said the indentations on the rock in daylight look like scales. In the light of a fire, the snake appears to move.

The shaman would have been able to control everything. It was perfect, Coulson said. If Coulson's find is a shrine, it pushes back the first archaeological evidence of religious beliefs back 40,000 years.The cave also contained artifacts buried in the floor, including red stone spearheads that had the marks of burning on them.It was a ritual destruction of artifacts, Coulson said. There was no sign of normal habitation. No ordinary tools were found at the site.