I've talked about the GEcon project before, so this is just a quick update to say they have a new rotating Earth showing the same data. Very cool!

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A new blogSci feature.

While procrastinating keeping up with scientific breakthroughs, I come across several little interesting tidbits that I note but never get round to fully posting about. So I decided to blog about them, but instead of dedicating a full post for each little thing, I'll just collect them all in one go.

This will be a regular feature here, and the collections will be called 'newscis', which is supposed to be the clever derivation of 'news of science' to rhyme with 'blogSci'.

So without further ado, the first newsci roundup:

• What's in a tear? Scientists are surprised when they identify the components of tears.
• Why aren't airlines fighting emission controls? It's all about money, really.
• Where do sloths get their name from? Well, they don't move much, even in the pursuit of science!
• Yorkshiremen out of Africa. A very cool genetic study finding African-specific Y-chromosome markers deep in the north of England. Just shows how intermixed human populations can be.
• What happens to water when it touches a hydrophobic surface? The science has been elusive, but now synchrotron x-ray reflectivity measurements reveal all.

Technorati Tags: science news

A blogosphere initiative.

I'm happy to report that I've signed up to the Week of Science initiative from Just Science. What's that? To quote the proposing blog post:

...we would like to propose a Week of Science, to begin on Monday, February 5, and end on Sunday, February 11. During that time each blogger should post about science only, with at least one post per day. Furthermore, issues which are favored by anti-scientific groups (creationism, global warming, etc.) should be either avoided, or discussed without reference to anti-scientific positions.

So what are the topics I'm going to be talking about? I have three ideas; in no particular order:

• What is parental genetic testing? That is, what is the science behind identifying biological parents?
• The science of information retrieval, which is the technical field of how search engines work.
• Epigenetics. An overview and some examples. I'm really looking forward to this one!

Post below with your suggestions, and check out the list of participating blogs.

Technorati Tags: science blogging

Damage to insula in brain makes people forget to smoke.

An intriguing discovery: people with damage to an area of the brain called the insula are much more likely to quit smoking. The study was largely inspired by a patient who had smoked around 40 cigarettes a day before his insula was damaged by a stroke and then quit immediately after. He told the researchers that his body "forgot the urge to smoke."

The results are very preliminary. Dr. Antoine Bechara of the University of Southern California and his colleagues identified 19 smokers who had experienced some degree of brain damage, resulting in lesions on the insula. Of these, 13 quit smoking. The scientists also identified 50 smokers whose brain injuries did not include damage to the insula, 19 of which quit smoking.

"Participants with damage to the insula were overwhelmingly more likely to experience a true disruption of the urge to smoke, characterized by an almost immediate cessation of smoking with no reported struggles to maintain their abstinence," said Dr. Bechara. The insula receives information from other parts of the body and is thought to help translate those signals into something we subjectively feel, such as hunger, pain, or craving for a drug. We already know from some imaging studies that the insula is activated by drug-associated cues, such as the sight of people doing drugs or drug paraphernalia.

Obviously, no one is suggesting that brain damage be used as a treatment. What can be suggested from this study are two things:

• We can identify/invent ways to disrupt the function of the insula. One approach is to search for insula-targetting drugs, hopefully identifying some (one) that inhibit its function. Another suggestion is what's called transcranialmagnetic stimulation, a technique where weak electrical currents are induced in the brain tissue to disrupt the insula's activity; however, currently, the currents do not penetrate deep enough to reach the insula, and so we'll need more progress before this becomes a viable option.
• More presently, perhaps we can monitor insular activity as a means to track the progress of smokers trying to quit using current methods. If I were a smoker, the thought of weekly visits to an MRI machine would be enough to make me quit

The paper is in today's Science, along with some commentary.

Technorati Tags: smoking, insula, brain

Visualizing π in motion.

One of the harder concepts I grappled with when I was a kid was pi. Where on earth did that number come from? Now, we know the answer to that, but a very good way of visualizing it has surfaced on Wikipedia. In essence, it's an animation of a circle rolling out once. If you measure how many diameters the roll covers on the ground, you get pi.

You're not as fast as you think.

We've talked before about research that showed multitasking impedes learning. A couple of weeks ago, a paper was published that identified a bottleneck in the brain while multitasking.

The experiment went like this: Subjects were given two tasks; one was to press the correct computer key in response to hearing one of eight possible sounds and the other was uttering an appropriate syllable in response to seeing one of eight possible images. The tasks were done while the subjects' brain activity was monitored using functional MRI (fMRI). Notice that the two tasks depended on two different sensory systems to make sure that any observed effects are not artifacts of one system.

The results? There is evidence of a central bottleneck caused by the inability of the lateral frontal and prefrontal cortex, and also the superior frontal cortex, to process the two tasks at once. In fact, it seems a 'queue' is formed when the two tasks are presented with 300ms of each other (i.e., almost simultaneously) where the neural activity for the second task was delayed. If the tasks were presented a second apart (1000ms), no such delay was observed, hence the idea of a queue.

This effect of multitasking is called 'dual-task interference' (always trust scientists to name something well), and will have serious social impact. The biggest example is probably talking on the phone while driving. It's a big no-no in many countries, and research like this backs up such policies and laws.

Technorati Tags: multitasking, dual task interference, brain

This is the classic basic chemistry experiment: a (very!) small piece of sodium is dropped into a water beaker. The violent reaction causes the sodium to ignite and whizz on the surface of the water. The reaction is very exothermic, meaning it releases a lot of heat, and produces sodium hydroxide, which makes the water turn alkaline. This is a dangerous experiment if done wrong.

So post World War II, the USA had a few tons of sodium to dispose of. How did they do it? By dumping it in batches into a lake. The lake was already alkaline, so not (too) much harm there. But the beauty of this is the demonstration of just how violent the reaction between sodium and water is: it's explosive, even if the water is icy cold. With this little intro, I leave you with the video below:

Technorati Tags: science experiments