Month: February 2006

Loud Music Makes Ecstasy Worse

Ecstasy pills

People taking ecstasy at noisy nightclubs could be doing themselves more harm than those who imbibe 3,4 -methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA or ecstasy) at quieter locations.

Research published on February 16, in the journal BMC Neuroscience, shows that brain activity in MDMA-taking rats due to the drug lasts up to five days if the animals are listening to loud music, says a press release from BMC, when they ingest the drug. The drug’s effects wear off within a day when no music is played.

Actually, Michelangelo Iannone from the Institute of Neurological Science, Italy, and colleagues from University Magna Graecia in Catanzaro, Italy, do not report this at all. That’s just what the press release claims. In fact, the rats were exposed to white noise, random acoustic stimulation at 95 db. The press release explains that white noise is sound at a stable frequency that is used in many types of electronic music. Well, it is, usually to simulate the rythmic, “hissy”, bursts of the hi-hat cymbals in a drumkit, but it’s not usually a continuous sound.

Anyway, Iannone’s results show that low-dose MDMA did not modify the brain activity of the rats compared with saline, as long as no music was played. However, the total spectrum of the rats given a low dose of MDMA significantly decreased once loud music was played. The spectrum of rats in the control group was not modified by loud music. High-dose MDMA induced a reduction in brain activity, compared with both saline and low-dose MDMA. This reduction was enhanced once the loud music was turned on and lasted for up to five days after administration of the drug. In rats that had been given a high dose of MDMA but had not been exposed to music, brain activity returned to normal one day after administration of the drug.

Sliding Under

In Issue 33 of PSIgate Spotlight, I discuss new insights into the differences between the subduction zones where the Earth’s tectonic plates slide across each other. The research in questsion could help in earthquake prediction and allow seismologists to discover in advance whether an imminent earthquake will be weaker or as powerful as those that shook Indonesia in 2004, Alaska in 1964, Chile in 1960 and the Pacific Northwest United States in 1700.

Muscle and Musculature

I wrote a report for the UK’s Royal Society some time ago that continues to get a lot of visitors. The original report covers the mechanism of muscle contraction. Oddly though, most readers don’t bother reading parts 2 and 3 of this three-part report. Now, that’s either because they simply didn’t like my writing style or were bored by the article, but I like to think it is neither of those things and that visitors to that page are looking for something else.

What could that something else be? Well, it’s either pictures of people with muscles, or methods for making your own, I’m pretty sure. With that in mind, I searched the web for a decent publication that my readers could download and found this little gem. The book is called “Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle” and as the name may suggest it provides a program of top methods to help you shape up. As a regular gym goer, former squash player, cyclist and swimmer, I thought I knew most of what anyone needs to know about how to stay in shape, but BtFFtM’s author (unlike so many others) practices what he preaches and can back up his book with an impeccable track record, and I reckon anyone can find remove for improvement whatever their fitness level.

I’m only going to leave this link in my blog for a week or so, so if you’re one of the dozens of people looking to shape up those muscles who hit my muscle science pages, then grab the ebook while it’s live.

Download – Burn the fat feed the muscle

Uber Pluto

UB313

New measurements published earlier this month support recent claims that the planetary membership of our Solar System should be extended to include a tenth that is bigger than Pluto. 2003 UB313 was first spotted in January 2005 by Mike Brown’s team at Caltech, but recent thermal emission measurements have recently allowed German scientists to estimate its diameter at approximately 3100 km, some 700 km larger than Pluto. This makes it the biggest object to be discovered in the solar system since the discovery of Neptune in 1846. For comparison, Earth’s Moon has a diameter of about 3500 km.

Get the new spin in my : Spotlight Science News column on PSIgate.

Face Off

Our brains have a specific mechanism for recognising human faces that is separate from the mechanism that allows us to recognise objects like houses, cars, horses or even
parts of the body, according to Brad Duchaine of University College London. In a forthcoming paper in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychology, he shows how we recognise faces by analysing
one man, who cannot tell one face from another.

I assume he’s not generalising from this one case to the whole human race, but it’s an intriguing piece of work nevertheless.

Duchaine said: ‘There have been many theories about whether there is a part of the brain that deals specifically with faces or whether faces and other objects are handled by the same brain areas. We’ve found that there is a different, very separate, bit of the brain that lets you recognise faces. If those cells aren’t working, someone may not be able to tell two faces apart but they
will recognise two horses apart. This indicates that we go about looking at, analysing and recognising faces in a different way from how we recognise objects.

‘There are many theories out there about how we recognise faces and whether there is a separate social bit of the brain. So that we could draw firm conclusions to prove our facial recognition theory, we addressed all the alternatives in a single case study — Edward, a 53 year-old married man with a PhD in theology and physics, who happens to be unable to
recognise faces.’

For more than 35 years, researchers have debated whether face recognition is carried out by face-specific mechanisms or whether it involves more generic mechanisms that are also used for objects. Prosopagnosic patients (people who have difficulty recognising faces) have been some of the most powerful sources of evidence for there being face-specific mechanisms.

Scientists have put forward a number of different theories about why some people can’t recognise faces. One theory states that people with face recognition just have problems with objects that have a lot of curved surfaces (Curvature explanation); another theory states that it’s caused by problems with perceiving distances between parts such as judging the distance between eyes (Configural-processing explanation); another puts it down to a problem in recognising any individual item in a class — objects and faces (individuation explanation); another points to an inability to develop expertise with regularly encountered objects
(Expertise explanation).

But, for each case of prosopagnosia that has been scientifically tested there have always been several untested alternative explanations that could account for the inability to recognise faces. Each of these individuals has not been sufficiently tested to provide conclusive evidence for face-specific processes.

This study addresses all the existing theories that make a case against there being a specific mechanism in the brain that deals just with faces. Duchaine said: ‘We reject each in turn and eliminate all alternative accounts. The results show that face recognition uses mechanisms in the
brain that are different from those used in recognising anything else.’

The tests at UCL were done using a variety of types of objects — horses, guns, cars, greebles (novel objects). Edward performed just as well on as the test group people at differentiating between different objects but he just couldn’t tell faces apart.

Save her heart this Valentines

The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) is asking lovers across the Continent to send an e-card to their sweetheart to show support for women’s heart health this Valentine’s Day.

55% of women across Europe die of cardiovascular disease (CVD), it affects more women than cancer or any other ailment, yet most women are unaware that CVD poses such a big threat to their health nor realise that risk increases with age.

Visit the ESC website today and send an ecard to the woman in your life that shows you really care.

Simple changes in lifestyle – such as quitting smoking, exercising and eating more fruits and vegetables – can reduce the risk of heart disease. The ecards are in the Woman at Heart section of the website.

ADHD Black Box

According to a report from free email newsletter FierceBiotech, a federal advisory panel has told the US Food & Drug Adminstration (FDA) that it should apply its toughest warning label on drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), such as Ritalin. According to Fierce, the recommendation comes as a surprise to the FDA, which usually follows its advisory panels’ advice but is not legally required to do so. At issue are reports that these drugs may have an increased link to heart disease risk.

You can subscribe for free to FierceBiotech for daily updates of bio and pharma news, by filling in a simple form on the Sciencebase site

The path less travelled

Ever wondered why your daily commute seems to feel longer and more boring as the days come and go? Yes? Well, so did a team of scientists at Manchester University, UK. Now, Andrew Compton and his colleagues think they have discovered the reason why.

Crompton’s team asked 140 architecture students from the University to estimate the distance between the student-union building to a familiar destination along a straight road. The research published in Nature today explains that they were effectively asked to guess the length of journeys they would have strolled (or staggered, says the press release!) many times.

First-year students estimated a mile-long path to be around 1.24 miles on average, whereas third year students stretched it to 1.45 miles. [That’s heavy precision, mind you and one can only hope that Manchester architecture students were not so nerdy as to actually give the distance with three significant figure accuracy, Ed.] Anyway, the results matched a theory that distances elongate in our minds because, over time, we begin to notice more and more details about the route.

To test this idea further, Crompton asked a second group of students to estimate 500 metres [they’ve switched from imperial to metric within two paragraphs!] in the cluttered tourist village of Portmeirion, Wales [home of 1960s cult TV show The Prisoner] and again on a road in Manchester city. The village distance seemed further.

The findings could help to explain why the walk to a destination sometimes feels shorter than the journey back. And, notes Crompton, it could help architects design cities that feel more spacious, simply by packing in more details for people to look at.

I’d also like to suggest that the work could make everyone’s daily commute seem much shorter by making us travel in boring smooth-walled tunnels, with very little to read and no interesting stimuli. What? They do that, already? Surely not!

EFF has Google over a Desktop

The Register reports today that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a warning to potential users of Google Desktop (version 3) to configure it carefully.

The program’s “Search Across Computers” means some very private files, such as your web histories, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, PDF and text files in your “My Documents” folder could be held on Google’s servers for up to a month.

The idea is that you would login to your Google space and be able to search your own files from another PC. You can exclude filetypes and folders , but EFF has raised its proverbial eyebrows as the new version of Google Desktop could unleash a whole new set of security problems for non-technical users.

If you need more advice on computer security (and who doesn’t?), I can recommend The Hacker’s Nightmare, which I have mentioned several times in this blog.

Voodoo Insecticide

Regular visitor Rob Bowen emailed to tell me about the TechNeed site. Apparently, these guys want suggestions on how to create a chemical-free way to get rid of pests that won’t stain the carpet.

Well, efforts to find anything that is chemical free are doomed to failure from the off, unless you’re talking some energy form. Presumably, the chemophobics who write the site mean they want a physical method rather than something that relies on a compound acting as insecticide, which is fair enough.

But, Rob reckons the constraints they apply to their request for such a chemical-free pest remover are so tight that the only thing approach left is voodoo.

So, we’ll wait with interest to see if a commercially viable product emerges from this call to arms. I reckon they could cross-market it with those magnetic water softeners you wrap around your standpipe that are supposed to reduce limescale build up.

File under “pseudoscientific claptrap”