From the BBC:
The age-old argument over the best way to cook the perfect boiled egg could be a thing of the past thanks to a new hi-tech ink logo going on shells.
After cooking begins, an invisible, temperature-sensitive thermochromic print appears in black to indicate when an egg is soft, medium or hard-boiled.
Read the full article. Cool!
Technorati Tags: eggs, thermochromic, ink, technology
The NY Times has a very interesting article about a new breed of pharmaceuticals companies, ones that don't seek any profits. One of the first such charities is the Institute for OneWorld Health, and its first target is black fever, a disease that kills half a million people world-wide. Thing is, we already have a promising drug to cure the disease, the antibiotic paromomycin identified in the 1960s. Why hasn't this drug been developed yet? Because black fever affects a (relatively) small group of people who are very poor. Since pharmaceutical companies are required to make money, this kind of venture is unattractive.
Enter the new breed of pharmaceutical companies: underwritten by donations from other charities, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, these new charities are working on moving promising but unprofitable drugs into the marketplace. This noble cause is difficult, as you can imagine, taking time, lots of negotiations, working with other charities and groups, and most importantly, working with the big pharma companies that actually identify (and then abandon) promising drugs.
It's a fascinating new idea, and one, I'm sure will take off. People will mock these charities, but there are enough rich people and scientists in this world to care for fellow suffering humans. No doubt, the big pharma companies may get upset by this kind of competition, but the NY Times article hints at ways of working around such problems. Exciting times lie ahead!
Technorati Tags: pharmaceutical, companies, charities, Institute for OneWorld Health, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, medicine
A new study has shown that people judge attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence, and aggressiveness of a facial expression within 100ms, i.e., a tenth of a second. Talk about first impressions!
The research was quite clever: if you show unfamiliar faces to people very quickly (fractions of a second), and ask them to judge some particular trait of that face, you can then compare the judgement to one made without any time constraints. What they found that is that judgements made with 100ms exposures highly correlate to those made without any time limits, suggesting that decisions are made in a tenth of a second.
Multitasking severly limits your learning according to a new study published in PNAS. Looking at the effects on learning while doing two tasks, the researchers found that:
even if distraction does not decrease the overall level of learning, it can result in the acquisition of knowledge that can be applied less flexibly in new situations.
Participants in the study, who were in their 20s, learned a simple classification task by trial-and-error. They were asked to make predictions after receiving a set of cues concerning cards that displayed various shapes, and divided the cards into two categories. With one set of cards, they learned without any distractions. With a second set of cards, they performed a simultaneous task: listening to high and low beeps through headphones and keeping a mental count of the high-pitch beeps. While the distraction of the beeps did not reduce the accuracy of the predictions — people could learn the task either way — it did reduce the participants' subsequent knowledge about the task during a follow-up session.
When the subjects were asked questions about the cards afterward, they did much better on the task they learned without the distraction. On the task they learned with the distraction, they could not extrapolate.
The researchers are quick to note that multitasking can be beneficial sometimes, like listening to music during exercise. The point their research makes is that if you're trying to learn something, concentrate!
Technorati Tags: multitasking, learning, science
Writing in Nature Medicine, scientists report that Gleevec, a very successful member of a new class of anti-cancer drugs, can cause heart failure. The reason? The target of Gleevec is found in cancer cells and in heart cells, allowing side effects leading to heart problems.
Gleevec is a member of a new family of drugs called tyrosine-kinase inhibitors, working to turn off certain enzymes required for cancer cells to grow. The current report started when 10 patients on Gleevec reported to the University of Texas' M.D. Anderson Cancer Center with severe heart problems. By probing for possible links, the researchers, led by Dr. Thomas Force proved that Gleevec also affected enzymes in the heart. As Dr Force explains:
While the cancer is treated effectively, there will be some percentage of patients who could experience significant left ventricular dysfunction and even heart failure from this. Gleevec is a wonderful drug and patients with these diseases need to be on it. We're trying to call attention to the fact that Gleevec and other similar drugs coming along could have significant side effects on the heart and clinicians need to be aware of this.
This part of heart biology is new to us, so we did learn something new from this accident. What we can now do is optimize the drugs to ignore the heart targets and focus better on the cancer cell targets. Luckily, we have a whole new host of drugs from this class in the pipeline, so we can screen them better and assess their toxicity.
Technorati Tags: Gleevec, cancer, heart, tyrosine kinase inhibitors
Two news tidbits about the stem cell debate in the USA. Firstly, the American Association for the Advancement of Science sent a letter to every senator urging them to pass the stem cell research bill. Whether the letter helped or not, the bill passed. All fine and dandy, but a presidential veto has been threatened.
The second news tidbit is an excellent article by the Washington Post about how the progress of stem cells has been slowed by this debate. This is an important point people tend to forget, and the timing of someone raising this point again is perfect.
Technorati Tags: stem cells, USA, AAAS
The New York Times has a very interesting article about giant waves (free sub req'd). The story is like all good science stories: for centuries, scientists didn't believe reports that huge, eight-story high waves existed. It was all made up apparently. Then unquestionable data started to trickle in, and then more data came in. Suddenly, the folklore tales were true: giant waves exist.
So an international collaboration was started, called MaxWave (also see here), and sure enough, rogue waves were actually quite common.
As the MaxWave project summary tells it:
Within the last years a high number of large ships has been lost. The causes of accidents are in many cases believed to be 'rogue waves'. These are individual waves of exceptional wave height or abnormal shape. In this project properties of and forecasting abilities for low frequency wave fields, extreme individual waves and wave groups are investigated for both deep and shallow waters.
This has serious implications: hundreds of lives have been lost because of what we now believe are rogue giant waves. Also, the material damage is extensive, estimated in the billion-dollar range. Current studies are focused on:
Interesting stuff. Read the article and the MaxWave website. It's a fascinating subject!
Technorati Tags: rogue waves, giant waves, MaxWave, sea, science, technology
An interesting article by the authors of the book Freakonomics: Does Obesity Kill?. The article summarizes the latest about the social impact of obesity, its causes, and its effects. Well worth a read.
Technorati Tags: obesity, overweight, science, economics
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