One CAN teach an old dog new tricks

... if you give it the right drugs!!!

Scientists and researchers from the University of Texas (Dallas) have recently demonstrate a potential new neurological drug which prevents newly born brain cells from dying. One may not appreciate this discovery (as I didn't!) until one realizes that when a number of brain cells are born the typical survival rate into maturity is less than 40%!!! By directly injecting the chemical they are calling P7C3 into the rats brains, they have dramatically increased the survival rate of neuron cells and shown several other positive results including:

• Corrects hippocampal deficits in healthy mice (i.e., long-term memory, spatial skills?)
• Allows rats to continue learning well into old-age
• May prevent age-related neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., Alzheimer's, etc.)
• May also prevent age-related physically degenerative conditions

This last point is demonstrated by the fact that, not only did the older P7C3-quaffing rats learn and remember better than their placebo-quaffing counterparts, they also showed higher body weights and less frailty as they aged!!! This may be because the drug works on the mitochondria of cells, which are not exclusive to those in the brain. The authors are quick to point out that they have not yet identified the mechanism, only the results (as commonly comes first with biological research!).

What is even more remarkable about this work is that it is the result of a combinatorial or a broad screening research method.... What a colleague of mine at a USAF research facility calls "The Dumb Guy Approach". That is, they eschewed the traditional approach of working up a theoretical mechanism ab initio (from first principles) and choosing a drug accordingly--this process is akin to carefully crafting a perfectly aerodynamic dart and throwing it at the center of your dartboard a.k.a. the hypothesis. Instead they took a library of 1000 possible chemicals (suggested by theoretical chemists who pared down a list of 200,000 to a fairly representative sample) and tried ALL of them--akin to taking a giant box full of darts and throwing them all at the board at once, then checking to see which one stuck. And it WORKED!

Now if you're excited about this drug and want to know when it'll become available, hold your horses. It is not even out of the animal testing phase, which means it will have to be picked up by a drug company and the research effort will be handed off from academia to industry before human trials can begin. Then it will probably be several years (3-5) before the FDA can pass it through the approval process (assuming the results are just as good for humans!). But it certainly bodes well for future generations!!!

Link to news article
Link to research article
(^ for those who can access the journal Cell, by institutional subscription or otherwise)

Talking to yourself doesn't mean your crazy (... if you're doing math!)

So I have always been a fan of talking aloud to work out problems. In high school I caught a few odd stares from students and teachers alike, and in college people just thought I was crazy. That is until I joined a study group where we talked out the problems (increasingly more difficult!) together, aloud. When it was under the guise of a conversation, I supposed, it didn't seem so odd. When I did it alone in my office in grad school, my colleagues just thought I was a little crazy (or maybe just an eccentric academic).
But new research at the University of Granada indicates that talking aloud improves both speed AND accuracy when solving math problems. They took several graduating seniors who majored in mathematics and recorded them solving difficult problems. Those who spoke aloud to themselves (as well as those who drew pictures to represent the problem) were more likely to find the solution, and did so in a shorter time, than those who didn't!!!
The paper doesn't appear to be published yet in the Electronic Journal of Research in Educational Psychology (and I can't seem to find Revista de investigación psicoeductiva), after an exhaustive search of the internet I can only seem to find press releases and news articles about the finding. But I will update this post with a link when the publication is available on the web...
SciAm: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=find-x-and-say-your-work-09-12-28
Guardian: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6866135/Thinking-out-loud-helps-solve-problems.html
RedOrbit (more detailed): http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1801621/talking_aloud_helps_to_solve_mathematical_problems_more_quickly_according/index.html

Drive less, Eat fewer Hamburgers!!!

A recent issue of Scientific American revealed that beef consumption is a disproportionate way of contributing to the production of greenhouse gases.  And NO, it's not about the methane from flatulent grain-fed cows (though methane is a notably powerful greenhouse gas, with 23x the greenhouse effect of a CO2 molecule)...

The article describes the entire process of generating beef (clearing very large tracks of land, feed and 'care' of the animals, transportation, etc) and arrives at the following statistics.  Producing one pound (1 lb) of beef generates the same amount of greenhouse gases as producing (either):

*4 lb's of pork

*13 lb's of chicken

*36 lb's of asparagus, OR,

*57 lb's of potatoes!!!

So if you are concerned about greenhouse gas emissions (AND [formerly] high gas prices) you might already be cutting your annual mileage by a few hundred miles by using public transportation or walking/biking.  But remember this statistic: cutting out all the beef in the average American's diet is equivalent to *not* driving the average car 1,800 miles/year!!!

Now before you post some anti-vegetarian comment below, chillax a second... I'm not suggesting you go vegetarian (if I did, I'd be a hypocrite).  I'm not even suggesting you cut out beef all together, being an avid fan of the occasional In'n'Out burger and Korean BBQ!

But being engaged to a vegetarian HAS taught me a few things I never would have known as a carnivore: (1) When I have a vegetarian dinner, I DO NOT get hungry afterwards because of a 'lack of protein'; (2) When I eat meat that came from a small (local) farm I can TASTE the difference; and, (3) When I notice I haven't eaten meat in a few days it's such a pleasure to treat myself with it again!!!

So once again, DON'T go out and become a vegetarian right away (unless you really want to!); but DO think about how much beef you eat and where it comes from, and try to reduce your intake!!! Do we Americans really need to eat an average of almost 100lb's a year of beef?!?

[Note: I obtained the 92 lb/person/year statistics from 2007 statistics of the USDA, and the US Census Bureau.]

SciFri Video: Election Map

With all the excitement and interest in the recent US Presidential elections, it is not surprising that science and technology have been applied to political questions recently.  Now there are probably few U.S. citizens who haven't seen the electoral map with blue and red states colored (in the lines) to indicate which nominee received their electoral votes.  And many of you have, like me, seen the more detailed CNN map showing the counties which went blue and red (notably, only the major population centers of blue "island" states NM and CO).

But Prof. Mark Newman, a physics professor at the Univ. of Michigan, has combined these maps with demographic information such that the newly distorted map more accurately depicts the number of votes, rather than geographic size, a particular location has to offer.  The results are, as CNN and other media outlets have described qualitatively: There are large "islands" of urban and high population density which are blue, surrounded by red concentric circles, outwardly expanding and coalescing in regions of lower population density. These "islands" appear much larger on the new map because of their disproportionately large populations.  This map demonstrates not only how Obama was able to win the nation (despite the very red-looking map when observing county poll results), but also how much more balanced we are as a nation in terms of red and blue! Now if only we couldd start seeing some GREEN in there... ;)

I've added a video section on the right where I will be embedding interesting Sci Fri videos as they appear.  Science Friday is a production of NPR, their homepage is here.  The original cartogram video is located here.

Plasma - The Origin of *In*organic Life?

Plasma, like we get at the hospital (or give at the blood bank)?
No, no, no, not that plasma... We're talking about plasma like the ones generated by lightning, in each pixel of your plasma TV, or on the surface of the sun. (As you may know, I work with such plasmas doing engineering research...)
Well apparently there is some recent evidence that inorganic materials may be 'coaxed into life', for lack of a better metaphor, by exposure to plasma, and culturing under the right conditions. Don't worry, nobody has made an insect out of silicon (or even a paramecium), yet...
But the work published by researchers from the Russian Academy of Science indicates that "space dust" which interacts with a plasma ("space lightning") can undergo self-reorganization to form helical structures which strongly resemble a little something called DNA... And not only do these structures form on their own, but they can COPY themselves. The paper goes on to suggest that the plasma is acting as an evolutionary catalyst ("evolyst"?), intimating that lightning or the aurora borealis (or some other terrestrial plasma) may have had quite a big hand in furthering evolution of organic life on Earth!

Plasma is so cool...