Category Archives: science & technology

Scientists develop train that can go faster than airplane

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A model Maglev train that can travel as fast as a plane has been successfully developed in a laboratory in Southwest China, but putting the technology to use is still a long way away, an official from the lab told the Global Times Sunday.

Under research conducted by the Traction Power State Key Laboratory at the Southwest Jiaotong University, the vacuum magnetic suspension train model was able to run at between 600 and 1,200 kilometers per hour, equal to the speed of a plane, according to Shuai Bin, vice dean of the university’s Traffic School.

The new technology is expected to be put into operation within 10 years and promoted across the country in 2030, the Shanghai-based Science Pictorial reported Sunday.

Passengers will be able to travel from Beijing to Guangzhou in under two hours. A flight from the capital to Guangzhou takes three hours.

However, Shuai told the Global Times Sunday that the possibility of the technology being put to use is small.

“It’s just an experimental success. Its actual value is slim as there is a great gulf in adopting it for practical use,” he said.

The technology, now being researched in just two other countries – the US and Switzerland – theoretically allows trains to run in vacuum tubes at speeds of up to 20,000 kilometers per hour, according to Science Pictorial.

The report cited a number of other advantages: the technology would use just one-tenth of the fuel that a plane does, and emit almost zero noise.

“All those advantages are just bubbles before a new transport system of vacuum tubes is built across the country, and the cost would be astronomical,” Shuai said, adding that the cost for one kilometer of vacuum tube would be several times higher than that of a subway, which costs over 200 million yuan ($30 million).

The technology only has an experimental significance and is not currently feasible due to its astronomical costs, he said.

Wang Mengshu, a professor at the Beijing Jiaotong University, was skeptical about the technology.

“Developing a vacuum Maglev train is a complete scientific fantasy. It is impossible to develop a vacuum Maglev train at a speed of 20,000 kilometers per hour technically and economically,” Wang told the Global Times, adding that it was very dangerous for people to take a train in a vacuum state at an average speed of more than 350 kilometers per hour.

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South Carolina scientist works to grow meat in lab

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CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) – In a small laboratory on an upper floor of the basic science building at the Medical University of South Carolina, Vladimir Mironov, M.D., Ph.D., has been working for a decade to grow meat.

A developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov, 56, is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering “cultured” meat.

It’s a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat the old-fashioned way … on the hoof.

Growth of “in-vitro” or cultured meat is also under way in the Netherlands, Mironov told Reuters in an interview, but in the United States, it is science in search of funding and demand.

The new National Institute of Food and Agriculture, part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, won’t fund it, the National Institutes of Health won’t fund it, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration funded it only briefly, Mironov said.

“It’s classic disruptive technology,” Mironov said. “Bringing any new technology on the market, average, costs $1 billion. We don’t even have $1 million.”

Director of the Advanced Tissue Biofabrication Center in the Department of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Biology at the medical university, Mironov now primarily conducts research on tissue engineering, or growing, of human organs.

“There’s a yuck factor when people find out meat is grown in a lab. They don’t like to associate technology with food,” said Nicholas Genovese, 32, a visiting scholar in cancer cell biology working under a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals three-year grant to run Dr. Mironov’s meat-growing lab.

“But there are a lot of products that we eat today that are considered natural that are produced in a similar manner,” Genovese said.

“There’s yogurt, which is cultured yeast. You have wine production and beer production. These were not produced in laboratories. Society has accepted these products.”

If wine is produced in winery, beer in a brewery and bread in a bakery, where are you going to grow cultured meat?

In a “carnery,” if Mironov has his way. That is the name he has given future production facilities.

He envisions football field-sized buildings filled with large bioreactors, or bioreactors the size of a coffee machine in grocery stores, to manufacture what he calls “charlem” — “Charleston engineered meat.”

“It will be functional, natural, designed food,” Mironov said. “How do you want it to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design exactly what you want. We can design texture.

“I believe we can do it without genes. But there is no evidence that if you add genes the quality of food will somehow suffer. Genetically modified food is already normal practice and nobody dies.”

Dr. Mironov has taken myoblasts — embryonic cells that develop into muscle tissue — from turkey and bathed them in a nutrient bath of bovine serum on a scaffold made of chitosan (a common polymer found in nature) to grow animal skeletal muscle tissue. But how do you get that juicy, meaty quality?

Genovese said scientists want to add fat. And adding a vascular system so that interior cells can receive oxygen will enable the growth of steak, say, instead of just thin strips of muscle tissue.

Cultured meat could eventually become cheaper than what Genovese called the heavily subsidized production of farm meat, he said, and if the public accepts cultured meat, the future holds benefits.

“Thirty percent of the earth’s land surface area is associated with producing animal protein on farms,” Genovese said.

“Animals require between 3 and 8 pounds of nutrient to make 1 pound of meat. It’s fairly inefficient. Animals consume food and produce waste. Cultured meat doesn’t have a digestive system.

“Further out, if we have interplanetary exploration, people will need to produce food in space and you can’t take a cow with you.

“We have to look to these ideas in order to progress. Otherwise, we stay static. I mean, 15 years ago who could have imagined the iPhone?”

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100,000-year-old human settlement in U.A.E. overturns what we know of our evolution

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armitage3HRHuman artifacts recently discovered in the United Arab Emirates date back at least 100,000 years, which means our ancestors might have left Africa up to 125,000 years ago…twice as long ago as previously thought. What’s going on here?

The tools discovered during an excavation in the U.A.E., located in the southeastern part of the Arabian peninsula, have been reliably dated to 100,000 years ago. Genetic evidence has suggested modern humans did not leave Africa until about 60,000 years ago, but these tools appear to be the work of our ancestors and not other hominids like Neanderthals.

If they are the work of our ancestors, then they’ve been found outside Africa at least 40,000 years ahead of schedule. But, as the paleontologists behind this discovery are quick to point out, the 60,000 year figure is one based on only one strand of evidence, and that’s genetic data. It’s a useful tool, to be sure, but using genetics to reconstruct a species’s history can be tricky – genetic data once said domestic dogs were 120,000 years old, but more recent evidence has shown they’re actually much closer to 20,000 instead.

This find is one of the first major archaeological discoveries that seems to place anatomically modern humans out of Africa – but, helpfully, still close to Africa, so it’s a bit easier to reconstruct their path and timing of migration. That automatically makes this an intriguing find, although we can’t instantly dismiss the old 60,000 years figure. This is an extraordinary claim and, as one of the best scientific maxims points out, it requires extraordinary evidence.

Well, I can’t guarantee their evidence is sufficiently extraordinary, but at a press conference yesterday the researchers involved did lay out some compelling reasons to believe the basics of the find – that modern humans lived in Arabia 100,000 years ago – even if they were reluctant to discuss the wider implications.

They answered a number of questions one might have about this discovery, so let’s dive in:

How do we know anatomically modern humans made these tools?

Paleontologist Tony Marks explains how they identified the likely makers of these tools, which were classified assemblage C:

“There were two possibilities for assemblage C. First, that it was made by local people who’d been there for a long time and who would have left similar artifacts around the landscape. Or second, it was made by people moving into the area. Since assemblage C was 120,000 years old, we looked at what was in southeastern Arabia at that time, there was literally nothing. Long before 120,000 in western Arabia there was what we call the Acheulean, but it had disappeared about a half million years ago, leaving a 400,000 year gap between it and assemblage C. Thus it seemed that assemblage C was made by people coming from somewhere outside southern Arabia, either from the north or from the west.

“A comparison of contemporaneous Paleolithic assemblages from the north showed they totally lacked the bifacial tool production found at assemblage C. Their technique was quite different. Thus, they were unrelated. In east Africa, however, there were contemporaneous Paleolithic assemblages that not only used bifacial techniques to make some of their tools, but also used the other two techniques, blade production and radial (levaloir). An origin in east Africa for assemblage C people therefore was most plausible based on the stone tools and how they were made.”

But couldn’t it have been another hominid species that had already left Africa, such as the Neanderthals?

Marks offers some logical reason why Neanderthals are very unlikely candidates to be behind these tools, even leaving aside the fact that the tools fit the more human style:

We can look at it from a broad point of view. If these tools were not made by modern man, who might have made them? Well, could Neanderthals have made them? Well, at 120,000 years ago, beginning of the inter glacial, Neanderthals had pretty well developed their facial characteristics and body characteristics to be recognizable as Neanderthals and not the yet classic Neanderthals. But they’re mainly in Europe at about the beginning of the last interglacial there’s a movement, a spread of Neanderthals along the temperate zone to the east. That is the Crimea, southern Russian plain out to central Asia. There is no evidence for any Neanderthals south of that temperate zone to the east. It is only in OSI4, that is when it starts getting cold that you have movements of Neanderthals out of the highlands of the temperate zones down into the (levant). Into lower elevations where the environment is better. Here is a group of Neanderthals who instead of going into this temperate zone, which was getting better, they took a turn south, went several thousand kilometers into what at the time was desert, really dry areas, until they reached southern Arabia, which happened to be very good because of monsoons that were coming up from the south. It seems to me a very difficult explanation and one that is – doesn’t follow any reasonable logic.

armitage2HR

If these tools date back to 100,000 years, why then do they think humans left Africa 125,000 years ago?

Adrian Parker explains how ancient climate limited the times when humans could leave Africa, and that about 125,000 years ago was an ideal time to move into Arabia:

We need to go back to where modern humans emerged in east Africa. This occurred approximately 200,000 years ago. The period between 200,000 years ago until 130,000 years ago corresponds to time when there was a global ice age. During ice ages global sea levels fall as water becomes locked up in the vast ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres. When ice ages occur, the world’s major desert belts also expand and thus modern humans would have been restricted to east Africa as the deserts of the Sahara and Arabia posed major geographical barriers that prevented movement out of the region.

By 130,000 years ago global climatic conditions changed and we moved into an interglacial, a period of warmer, global temperatures. At this time, the Indian Ocean monsoon system was forced northwards, bringing rainfall into Arabia. The previously arid interior of Arabia would have been transformed into a landscape covered largely in savannah grasses with extensive lakes and river systems. At the onset of the inter glacial, sea levels in the southern Red Sea were over 100 meters lower than today. this led to a brief window of time when sea levels were still low and Arabia experienced a wetter climate, thus humans would have been able to cross a much narrower Red Sea, perhaps as little as four kilometers wide before sea levels rose sufficiently to make the crossing more difficult.”

Did this particular population of anatomically modern humans then spread out further, or could they have been an isolated population that just died out, with the successful population only leaving at the accepted 60,000 year date?

Lead researcher Hans Pedro Ortun says there’s no real way to know that from just one site, but one can still speculate a little:

“We only can speak about the site that we are dealing with and not with where these people would have gone. But as you can easily imagine the route to the north was easier than the route back to the south because the desserts there would have become worse in that period of time. So the natural answer to your question would be that they moved towards the Persian Gulf which was smaller then, and along the gulf, either towards the north or west into Mesopotamia or towards the east along the Iranian coast and the Indian subcontinent.”

What does this discovery tell us about human migrations?

Again, Dr. Ortun says this pushes the first human migrations back at least 20,000 years, but it also illuminates a lot about their mechanics:

Well, the mechanisms of getting out of Africa should be understood in a different way. Up till now we thought of cultural developments leading to the opportunity of people to move out of Africa. Now we see, I think, that it was the environment that was the key to this and the change from a glacial period into an interglacial opened the other possibility to leave Africa though the southern corridor and this certainly not only happened once, this happened many times during the (quarternerly) and this leaves a lot of possibilities for human migrations and keeping this in mind, might change our view completely. There are not many exits from Africa. You can only exit by the Sinai or by the south. That’s the only – that’s the only points where you can leave it. so either it’s the route that we propose, or it could be the route from Egypt to Sinai and both are possible, both have their problems and in any case, our findings open a second way, which in my opinion is more plausible for massive movements than the northern route.

But how does this fit with the 60,000 year figure produced by genetic data?

As I outlined above, there are some reasons to be cautious about the genetic data, and Nicholas Wade pushes it further. He points out that there may be no genetic evidence to back up their archaeological discovery, but it’s not as though there’s any archaeological data to bad up the genetic claims:

If we take this 60,000 year expansion and we say OK, instead of looking at it from a genetic point of view, let’s look at it from an archeological point of view. what were these people carrying in the way of culture at 60,000 years ago in Africa and can you find it anyplace outside of Africa? And the answer is no, you can’t. There is no archeological evidence for movements at 60,000 out of Africa. Now, it may turn up next year, but at the moment it’s simply not there.

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In the Blink of Bird’s Eye, a Model for Quantum Navigation

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European robins may maintain quantum entanglement in their eyes a full 20 microseconds longer than the best laboratory systems, say physicists investigating how birds may use quantum effects to “see” Earth’s magnetic field.

Quantum entanglement is a state where electrons are spatially separated, but able to affect one another. It’s been proposed that birds’ eyes contain entanglement-based compasses.

Conclusive proof doesn’t yet exist, but multiple lines of evidence suggest it. Findings like this one underscore just how sophisticated those compasses may be.

“How can a living system have evolved to protect a quantum state as well — no, better — than we can do in the lab with these exotic molecules?” asked quantum physicist Simon Benjamin of Oxford University and the National University of Singapore, a co-author of the new study. “That really is an amazing thing.”

Many animals — including not only birds, but some mammals, fish, reptiles, even crustaceans and insects — navigate by sensing the direction of Earth’s magnetic field. Physicist Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proposed in the late 1970s that bird navigation relied on some geomagnetically sensitive, as-yet-unknown biochemical reaction taking place in their eyes.

Research since then has revealed the existence of special optical cells containing a protein calledcryptochrome. When a photon enters the eye, it hits cryptochrome, giving a boost of energy to electrons that exist in a state of quantum entanglement.

One of the electrons migrates a few nanometers away, where it feels a slightly different magnetic field than its partner. Depending on how the magnetic field alters the electron’s spin, different chemical reactions are produced. In theory, the products of many such reactions across a bird’s eye could create a picture of Earth’s magnetic field as a varying pattern of light and dark.

‘N@C60 is quite a sexy, interesting, promising molecule.’

However, these quantum states are notoriously fragile. Even in laboratory systems, atoms are cooled to near–absolute-zero temperatures to maintain entanglement for more than a few thousandths of a second. Biological systems would seem too warm and too wet to hold quantum states for long, yet that’s exactly what they appear to do.

Researchers led by University of California, Irvine physicist Thorsten Ritz (.pdf) showed in 2004 that, although robins had no trouble pointing their beaks toward Africa under the influence of Earth’s magnetic field alone, adding a second, shifting field destroyed their inner compasses. That second field was so weak — less than one-third of 1 percent of Earth’s field — that it could only have influenced a quantum-sensitive system.

“It shouldn’t be the case that the birds would even know that this had happened,” Benjamin said. “If someone changed the brightness of the scene that you’re seeing by a-third of 1 percent, you would struggle to know that it even happened. It certainly wouldn’t muck up your vision.

In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, Benjamin and colleagues built a mathematical model of Ritz’s experiment, including the Earth’s magnetic field, the slight secondary field, and the quantum systems that might make up the birds’ magnetic sense.

They calculated that, in order to be sensitive to such weak fields, entangled states in the birds’ eyes must last for at least 100 microseconds, or 0.0001 seconds.

To put this in perspective, Benjamin introduced an exotic molecule called N@C60, a geometric cage of carbon with a nitrogen molecule inside. This molecule is one of the best-known laboratory systems for maintaining entanglement. “The cage acts to shield the atom, which is storing the information, from the rest of the world,” Benjamin said. “It’s considered to be quite a sexy, interesting, promising molecule.”

But at room temperature, even N@C60 only holds entanglement for 80 microseconds, or four-fifths of what birds appear to be doing.

“I think this is a very nice paper that attacks the problem from an interesting angle,” said Schulten, who was not involved in the work. “They use a hugely simplified model, but they make an interesting point. Entanglement could stay protected for tens of microseconds longer than we thought before.”

“The bird, however it works, whatever it’s got in there, it’s somehow doing better than our specially designed, very beautiful molecule,” Benjamin said. “That’s just staggering.”

Images: 1) The European robin. Courtesy Ernst Vikne/Flickr. 2) Schematic drawing of N@C60. Courtesy Simon Benjamin.

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Figure Out People From Their Words

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by John Kord Lagemann
AFrER a visit from a friend, my mother would review the conversation in her mind, the pauses, inflections and choice of words, then announce the real news the caller never mentioned:
“Henry wants to sell his hous&.”“Frank is going to marry Janie.”“Young Mrs. Cole thinks she’s pregnant but isn’t sure.”
Mother was no mind reader, she was practicing a technique we now call “content analysis.” ft’s a kind of systematic search for the small verbal clues that, when put together, reveal a larger meaning: attitudes, intentions, behavior patterns, underlying strategy. As Ben Jonson wrote more than 300 years ago, “Language springs out of the inmost parts of us. No glass renders a man’s likeness so true as his speech.”
Experts in business and science use highly developed content-analysis techniques to measure changes in consumer attitudes and to diagnose emotional conflicts. Governments keep corps of analysts monitoring other nations’ broadcasts and printed materials to extract useful intelligence. Details that seem trivial by themselves have a way of adding up, when classified and counted, to vital information. I’ve found—as have many other people—that certain tricks of content analysis help you to read between the lines of ordinary conversation.
Fingerprint Words. A word or group of words that recurs frequently is one of the surest clues to who or what is on a person’s mind. As any parent knows, you can easily tell which of your daughter’s boy friends is becoming the new favorite— sometimes before the girl herself is really aware of it-.–simply by counting the number of times the name is mentioned.
But the technique can have more subtle applications. For example, verbal fingerprinting helped a young lawyer handle .a difficult clientwith whom other members of the firm had been unable to get along. The young man collected all letters and memos from the client in his firm’s files. As he read them he was struck by recurrent expressions and allusions typical of a certain period of English literature. Further investigation revealed the client as a prodigiously well-read amateur scholar, a shy man who hid his sensitivity behind a cantankerous manner. With this key to the client’s personality, the lawyer had no trouble in gaining his confidence.
The Big Pronoun. We instinctively notice how often someone says, “I,”“me,”“my” and “mine.” To most of us, excessive use of the first person singular simply means that the person is a bore—but it can mean something more. “When one’s automobile is out of order,” says social psychologist 0. Hobart Mowrer, “one is likely to refer to it oftener. Likewise, when a person’s psychic equipment is grating and squeaking, it is understandable that his attention should be directed toward it much of the time.”
Counts made at the University of Iowa and the University of Cincinnati demonstrate that hospitalized mental patients use “I” oftener thn any other word—about once every 12 words, three times as often as normal people. As these patients recover, their use of “1” and “they” goes down, and their use of “we” goes up.
The Judgment Test. One way ‘1 recognizing a person’s values is by cataloguing the particular adjectives he uses to express approval and disapproval. With one of my friends the fun4amenta1 criterion is practicality: good things he describes as “feasible,”“applicable,”“functional”; things he doesn’t like are “unworkable.”
Several years ago a close friend of ours became engaged to a man whose usual words of praise were “powerful,”“strong,”“overwhelming.” Things he disliked were “weak,”“tiny” or “insignificant.” He seemed to judge everything on the basis of size and power. Our friend, on the other hand, was a woman of artistic interest* ‘whose value judgments were mainly in terms of “beautifur versus “ugly.” it was no great surprise when they found they “did not see eye to eye,” and broke the engagement.
Images and Themes. The metaphors, similes and analo‘gics a person uses not only reflect his life experience but tell you how he thinks. Individuals have certain dominant themes. highly revealing of character. One man I know constantly uses images that suggest he is steering toward a distant landfall through buffeting winds. His main concern is to “Iceep his bearings” and “stay on course.” He urges friends to “state their position” and to be su.re they “know where they arc going.” A nautical background is indicated—but, more than that, a whole philosophy of life.
How Do You Feel? The late psychologist Dr. John Dollard of Yale and Dr. Mowrer devised a sort of emotional barometer by comparing the number of words a person uses expressing discomfort of any kind—ill health, annoyance or boredom— with the number of words which express relief, comfort, fun or satisfaction. They use this “Discomfort-Relief Quotient” to measure progress in the emotional adjustment of a patient undergoing treatment. If in the course of a few minutes’ casual conversation a man has used no comfort words at all but has mentioned the “horrible” weather, the “appalling” headlines, the “dull” plays being written these days and the “aggravating” traffic situation, he doesn’t have to add that he is feeling out of tune with the world.
A similar formula was developed years ago by Dr. Harold Lasswdll• of the Yale School of L..aw. He counted the number of favorable self-rcferences in a person’s speech and the number of self-derogatory references, and used the raio as a measure of self-esteem. Dr. Lasswell also counted the favorable and unfavorable references to others. Comparing the two sets, he found that the person with high self-esteem tends to be well disposed toward others, too.
Grammar Counts. Verb tenses can provide a hint as to how much a person dwells in the past as compared with his concern for the present and his plans and hopes for the future. When the past tense predominates it may indicate melancholy or depression.
Passive versus active is another clue. A decided preference for passive constructions—”l found myself there” instead of “I went there”—may reflect a feeling of impotence, active constructions a sense of power and responsibility. Er… Ah…. A doctor friend told me once that in taking the history of a new patient he sometimes learns as much from the hesitations as from the direct answers. “Occupation?” The
person who’s happy with his job usually answers promptly. A
long pauses a cough, laugh, throat clearing or sniffle may
indicate trouble in that department. “Married or single?” Again,
in this doctor’s experience, a hesitation can be meaningful.
Pauses may indicate tension or anxiety associated with the
words that follow. “1, er, ah, .love you” means something very
different from a forthright “I love you.
Using clues like these, my friends and I have gained a surer
understanding of one another, and even of ourselves. Content
analysis will never replace reason or common sense, of course. But it can supplement them, and sometimes reveal messages we would otherwise miss completely.

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How to Take Charge

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by Sydney J. Hams
I WALKED with my friend, a Quaker. to the newsstand the other night, and he bought a paper, thanking the newsie politely. The newsie didn’t even acknowledge it.
‘A sullen fellow, isn’t her’ 1 commented.
“Oh, he’s that way every night.” shrugged my friend.
“Then why do you continue to be so polite to him?” I asked.
“Why not?” inquired my friend. ‘Why should I let him decide how I’m going to act?”
As I thought about this incident later, it occurred to me that the important word was “act.” My friends acts toward people; most of us react toward them.
He has a sense of inner balance which is lacking in most of us; he knows who he is, what he stands for, how he should behave. He refuses to return incivility for incivility, because then he would no longer be in command of his own conduct.
When we are enjoined in the Bible to return good for evil, we look upon this as a moral injunction—which it is. But it is also a psychological prescription for our emotional health.
Nobody is unhappier than the perpetual reactor. His center of emotional gravity is not rooted within himself, where it belongs, but in the world outside him. His spiritual temperature is always being raised or lowered by the social climate around him, and he is a mere creature at the mercy of these elements.
Praise gives him a feeling of euphoria, which is false, be-cause it does not last and it does not come from self-approval. Criticism depresses him more than it should, because it confirms his own secretly shaky opinion of himself. Snubs bun him, and the merest suspicion of unpopularity in any quarter rouses him to bitterness.
A serenity of spirit cannot be achieved until we become the masters of our own actions and attitudes. To let another determine whether we shall be rude or gracious, elated or depressed, is to relinquish control over our own personalities, which is ultimately all we possess. The only true possession is self-possession.

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Biofeedback-Mind Teaches Body to Heal Itself

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FOR almost seven years. Mrs. Andrews had been unable to move her head. Her condition—known as wryneck—had started with painful muscle spasms, which grew worse until her head was always pulled to the left. After years of going to doctors, including psychiatrists, she was referred to New York’s lCD Rehabilitation and Research Center to learn a new technique of sensory feedback (also called biofeedback) training.
“Now look at me!” Mrs. Andrews said after her fourth treatment. She slowly moved her head from side to side, then held it proudly eyes-forward. “First, the doctors explained that I could learn to relax the major muscle that turns my head. I was skeptical, but willing to try. Electrodes from a small machine were attached to my neck, and the machine made loud clicks. My job was to lower the number of clicks by relaxing my neck muscle. I can’t tell you how I did this, but I did, and the next thing I knew, I could hold my head straight.” Having leaz1ed how to relax this muscle, Mrs. Andrcws is now able to do it without the aid of the machine.
Biofeedback training is based on the premise that we can modify or gain control over a range of bodily functions once thought to be totally automatic. We all use natural forms of feedback to perfect skills. For example, in learning to serve a tennis ball, we throw it in the air, hit it, and watch where it lands. If the ball sails 15 feet past the service line, seeing that constitutes a feedback on our actions. Accordingly, we modify our swing and footwork until we make the ball land where it should. Learning such a skill requires only making an effort, then seeing, hearing or feeling the results.
In many instances—if we want to relax a back muscle at will, or move a paralyzed ann, say—we cannot carry out the intention. Either nature has not provided us with a feedback mechanism, giving us signals we can use to learn that skill, or disease has destroyed a feedback system. Now, however, researchers have developed a host of sensory instruments that can help bridge the gsp.
For example, an instrument called an electromyograph tG) picks up electrical activity within muscles. Other devices monitor galvanic skin response (GsR)— the resistance that skin offers a minute amount of electricity. Other instruments detect minute temperature changes. The signals that are picked up are converted into sounds or visual aids for the patient to hear or see, and to use as signposts in controlling specific processes.
The list of chronic ailments being treated—experimentally, at least—with biofeedback includes asthma, back pain, migraine and tension headache, to name a few. Some favorable results have been achieved in the areas of stroke and, to a lesser extent, epilepsy.
“The potential is quite encouraging, and some results are truly amazing, especially in treating neuromuscular problems,” says Dr. Joseph Brudny, former director of the Sensory Feedback Therapy Unit at the lCD Center. “But I see it as a useful adjunct to our present medical tools, not as a panacea.”
“It may not, always work,” a New York University professor of neurology, Dr. Julius Korein, says. ‘But it doesn’t seem to have any harmful side effects—something you can’t say about many drugs or surgical trcatments.”
Just how the technique works may be seen at Denver’s National Jewish Hospital and Research Center, where researchers arc refining EMO bic feedback to help patients control asthma attacks. Although asthmatics suffer because they arc sensitive to environmental agents like dust, fumes, cold, foods and certain plants. their attacks arc sometimes complicated by their psychological reaction to such potential threats. An asthmatic enrolled in the hospital’s biofeedback program is placed in a
comfortable, soundproof room and electrodes are connected to his forehead, to detect electrical activity in the muscles just above the eyebrow. If relaxed, he hears only slow, lethargic clicks. If he is tense, his forehead muscles knot up, and the machine bursts into frantic clicking.
The patient is asked to visualize flowers, trees, dust—whatever threatens him with an asthma attack. As he reacts instinctively to the image, the biofeedback equipment, reflecting his mounting anxiety, clicks like a Geiger counter. Hearing the crescendo, the patient knows he is laying the groundwork for an intensified asthma attack. Over the course of several training sessions, he learns to keep the click rate slow by keeping his tension down. (Just how he does this, he cannot explain, any more than he can explain exactly how he learns to ride a bicycle.) In time, patients learn to relax even without the machine.
Many doctors, especially those who deal with chronic pain and pain that defies medical analysis, are eagerly embracing biofeedback training as a way of inhibiting nonspecific pain feelings in the brain. One is Dr. Stuart H. Mann, an associate clinical professor in the Department of Rehabilitation at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. After tests are run to rule out a discernible cause for pain (a tumor, for example), the patient is attached to a GSR device, which emits a shrill, piercing sound. “We tell the patient the sound is the pain,” Dr. Mann says. “He has to turn it off.”
In time, a large percentage of Dr. Mann’s patients learn to “think” the sound down. Then, after intensive practice, even without the machine, they are able to sit down when they feel the pain coming and “work it down.” They are very proud when they can get themselves off drugs.
Even the crippling pain of migraine headache has proved amenable to biofeedback training. An instrument, highly sensitive to temperature changes, is attached to the patient’s hand and emits increasingly higher sounds as hand temperature rises—the result of increased blood flow. Patients have learned to increase blood flow to the hand enough to raise its temperature ten degrees in two minutes. As this happens, relaxation takes place—and as a side effect the migraine is aborted. Researchers who discovered this biofeedback technique at the Menningcr Foundation, in Topeka, Kari., helped 80 percetfi of the migraine patients they first treated with it.
Physicians who deal with stroke and paralysis are also using biofeedback to help patients regain muscle function. To move an arm, there must be sensory input to the brain as well as motor output. Without input we cannot monitor our actions. A basketball player who loses his sight, for example, will not be able to make baskets consistently from a set spot on the floor. However, if a buzzer goes off every time the ball goes ‘in. by substituting his hearing fqr his sight he can eventually releai-n the skill. Similarly, for some stroke and paralysis patients with brain injury, whose normal feedback system has been disrupted, biofeedback instruments can serve as a substitute. The patient learns to monitor an activIty through another, undamaged pathway. The instruments are used to pick up muscular electrical activity in the paralyzed limb and make it audible or visible to the patient. The patient works with the signals until he can actually begin to use the muscle.
In an initial study by Dr. Brudny and his colleagues, involving 36 patients with varying degrees of paralysis or other neuromuscular disorders, 34 achieved improvement ranging from meaningful functional gains to full recovery. One patient was a young electrician who had been left seemingly para1yzd from the neck down. With several weeks of painstaking training, .the young man slowly regained use of his arms and hands to the point where he could shave, feed himself, even do leacherwork.
“I wore a leg brace for iwo and a half years,” says a former stroke patient of Dr. Herbert E Johnson, former medical director and a psychiatrist at Casa Colina Hospital for Rehabilitative Medicine in Pomona, Calif. “But I had read about biofeedback training at Casa Colina, and asked to be taught it. I had to practice every day, one hour in the morning and one at night. I would practice starting and stopping the noise from the machine 100 times every ten minutes—about 600 times an hour. In three or four weeks, I had been able to strengthen my ankle and get rid of the brace”
About 1000 medical researchers are now working with biofeedback at some of the nation’s leading medical centers, and many more ire involved in clinical research outside the hospital.
If you think biofeedback may be the answer for your problem, ask your doctor if it can help you. He may be able to refer you to acceptable programs in your area. But avoid any so. called “expert” who uses the devices indiscriminately and shuns proper medical supervision. The Federal Drug Administration cautions that biofeedback devices used for diagnosis or treatment of disease conditions be used only by or after consulting a physician or other licensed practitioner.
Bear in mind that biofeedback is still in its early stages, not a magic cure-all or a substitute for other treatment. It is simply an adjunct which, as one research psychologist points out in connection with asthma, may help the patient feel he is back in the driver’s seat.

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Microwave ovens unsafe for kids: Study

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Microwave ovens pose a serious safety hazard to young children. Researchers from America studied 140 children below 5 years of age who were admitted with scald burns to investigate the mechanism of significant scald burns and to discover insights into prevention, Health News reported.

Two types of patterns of injuries were discovered one was burns due to water heaters and the other due to microwave ovens.

It was found that, out of 140 children with scald injuries, 118 children had unintentional injuries. Of those unintentional injuries 14 were tap water scalds and 104 were non-tap water scalds.

Out of non-tap water scalds, 94 scalds were related to hot cooking or drinking liquids. Nine children between the ages of 18 months and 4 years were scalded after opening a microwave oven and removing the hot substance themselves.

Seventeen children were scalded while an older child 7 to 14 years of age, was cooking or carrying the scalding substance or supervising the younger child.

Efforts to prevent scald injuries focus on asking parents to turn down their water heaters so that water temperature never exceeds 120 degrees.

For injuries caused due to microwave, it was suggested to install mechanisms to prevent children from opening a microwave after something had been heated to prevent injuries. It could be difficult to keep young children away from kitchen hazards, especially if an adult is alone at home and trying to cook dinner.

Tap water scalds represent just a fraction of scald injuries overall; but hot foods or liquids from microwave ovens were the fourth leading cause of scald injuries in children under 5 years old.

The researchers suggested that parents should teach their children that the microwave is a potential source of danger as much as the stove is.

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Fatty food can help improve exam result during exams

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Studying for exams? Remember to load yourself with fatty food before you attempt the test, for a new study says that it could boost your results.

An international team has found that indulging in a fatty meal after studying for exam could help in remembering the facts as fat produces a hormone which aids the brain in cementing short-term memories into long-term ones, BBC TV reported.

Researchers, led by Daniele Piomelli of California University, have based their findings on an analysis of an experiment on rodents.

The team trained rats to complete two tasks — avoid an area that gave them a shock, and find a platform in a pool of water.

Immediately after the training, they injected some of the rats with oleoylethanolamide — a chemical produced in the small intestine of vertebrates which creates a sense of fullness after eating fat.

When the rats were retested one or two days later, the ones that received OEA performed better, suggesting they had stronger memories of their training.

More experiments with the rats showed OEA activates the same areas of the brain that mediate the formation of emotionally charged memories in humans, which are more vivid than typical memories.

“The findings make sense from an evolutionary perspective. When foraging animals find a fatty meal, they do well to remember exactly where and how they found it.

Since humans also produce OEA, there is a good chance that it boosts our memory too.

“OEA is only produced after eating a healthy unsaturated fat called oleic acid, so a cheeseburger after a night of cramming may not work — try food with olive oil or soybean oil,” Piomelli said.

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Swine flu vaccine could be ready soon: US researcher

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A US researcher at work developing a vaccine for the swine flu said Thursday he hopes to have it ready for testing in mice in two to three weeks.

Purdue University professor Suresh Mittal said the vaccine could be ready for production in a few months.

“We would like to have a vaccine in two to three weeks to start testing in mice,” said Mittal, a professor of comparative pathobiology in the School of Veterinary Medicine.

Mittal and collaborators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will use a method he developed for dealing with the H5N1 bird flu to accelerate work on the H1N1 swine flu.

They will use a common cold virus to carry a gene of the H1N1 flu virus and stimulate cells to create both antibodies and cell-based protection that will guard against mutated forms of the flu virus.

“The adenovirus is incapable of replicating and does not seem to cause disease in humans,” Mittal said in a press release.

“That makes it a suitable virus to work with for flu vaccines.”

The vaccine Mittal created for the bird flu worked on three different strains isolated over a seven-year period and was described in papers for the Journal of Infectious Diseases and the journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

A number of different institutions, both private and public, are working on the development of a vaccine for swine flu.

The latest WHO figures show 2,371 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infections have been reported by 24 countries, not including Brazil and Argentina which reported their first cases later Thursday. Forty-six people have died; 44 of them in Mexico and two in the United States.

“If things go well, and we achieve full scale production, it will be several months until the vaccine will be available,” a spokesman for the CDC cautioned.

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