Blue Smoke Blues


The dangers of cigarette smoking are a constant topic to which most of us nod wisely and switch off, whether we’re smokers or non-smokers. The stress on cancer, heart disease and pulmonary problems dominates. But we should remember that the ingestion of nicotine is an addiction and that its affect on the brain is at least as relevant.

 With a nod in that direction, Yu et al have stuffed three-quarters of a pack of heavy smokers into the big magnet (1). They used a similar number of controls, of course. The “heavy” designation meant that the chronic smokers smoked a pack of 20 each day and had been smoking for at least 15 years.

The gray and white matter volumes were recorded for the various regions of the brain. The heavy smokers had less in the cerebellum but more in their putamen. The blood flow in the cerebellum of each heavy smoker increased after smoking indicating an increase in activity.

Remember that the gray matter is made up of the neurons with the axons or tails which transmit the signals being the white matter. So a smaller volume wouldn’t seem to be a good thing. The cerebellum is associated with your motor control, so smoking to help you concentrate on that fine painting or assembly task puts you in an interesting quandary. The stimulated activity indicated by the blood flow looks good, but overall the progressive volume reduction may be a high price.

The putamen has high dopamine (a pleasurable hormone) content and a larger amount of material here may make you grin a little more. This region also seems to be involved with your dislike of people and the way you react to them so you might end up smiling for a few minutes before returning to your usual grouchy, hard-bitten personae. Ah, time for another cigarette!

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0027440

Toddler Training


For a long time the TV has been a child minder for young children and there is some attempt to provide programs  with some educational value. Computers have also moved into this role and would seem to have more potential than the TV as they can be interactive. Touch screens seem to be at natural form of input to 3 and 4-year olds as the finger marks on the screens in the homes of youngsters will attest to.

A paper by Subial et al entitled “The Ghosts in the Computer: etc.” grabbed my attention and became a must read (1). It was, however, focused on a study of young kids chasing pictures around a touch screen monitor in the order that the computer wanted them too. They were rewarded with flashing lights; no candy or toys were handed out as prizes.

If the kids had some verbal training, they did pretty well. But on the other hand if they had to figure out what would gratify the computer without any training, they could be classed as dismal failures.  If a human demonstrated what they had to do, they got it in one.

The conclusion was that kids learn better from an adult than a computer. Good news for teachers as it doesn’t look like replacing them with an iPad is going to be effective. 

Like all good social psychology experiments, the trials had to be followed by surveys of all the participants. There was a strong consensus that the computers weren’t simply inanimate objects but that there was a degree of animacy lurking inside lurking inside.

I know exactly how they feel sometimes when my computer deletes the wrong file or my word processor corrects a word that I’ve just typed into something quite inappropriate without any input from me. Just like the majority of users, I know that training me isn’t the answer. What I need is a good reliable method to exorcise the ghosts in my computer.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026429

K9 Dyadics


Leaving aside the old adage that “a man’s best friend is his mother”, we often hear our doggy friends referred to as “man’s best friend” and we know that they hang on every word we utter. It has been shown that some dogs can understand a limited range of words in terms of names of toys that they are asked to fetch.

Empathy with their owners is also one of their strong suits, and a tolerance at being dressed up in silly clothes so they “look cute” seems to be almost limitless. I can understand why they don’t care how they look, but why don’t other dogs care?

Today I watched a young women walking briskly along with her dog wearing a jacket with a gray background sporting wide pink and yellow stripes. The colors clashed with the violet jogging pants of its walker. My first thought was that it’s just as well that dogs don’t perceive the colors at the red end of the spectrum. Their evolution sacrificed that faculty in favor of improved night vision, or so the cyber-knowledge base has it.

However, back to “walkies” and how other dogs react when they meet and become in the technical jargon of the sociologists, ‘a dyad.’ Discovery News (1) pointed up a newly published study of just this issue by Řezáč et al (2) studying almost two thousand dogs out and about in public. They report on the dyadic interaction dependence of leash state, size and gender of both the walker and the walked.

The conclusions were that dogs of similar size preferred to play together and that females were more playful than males. That last behavior is probably not species specific. When restricted by a leash, dogs were twice as likely to feel threatened in a dyadic encounter. Of course, they also noted that puppies were playful and old dogs couldn’t be bothered.

Saving the best tidbit till last though – dogs with men walking them were four times more likely to bite other dogs than when both dogs were dogs walked by women. This suggests a new study for the behaviorists. Some group needs to analyze the body language and facial expressions of dog walkers as the encounter each other.

Also, we should remember that our pheromones are dependent on testosterone levels and a dog’s nose knows you know!

  1. P. Řezáč, P. Viziová, M. Dobešová, Z. Havlíček, and D. Pospíšilová, Applied Animal Behaviour Science,  134, 170, (2011)
  2. http://news.discovery.com/animals/dog-walking-behavior-111103.html

A Very Wee Dram


These days, counterfeit goods are a large problem around the world. Cheap CD items such as movies, music, or books we call pirated and the quality may be poor reflecting the quality of the copying process.  Branded goods where we all rush to part with cash just for the name can be a different matter in terms of quality. The quality of the manufacture of the counterfeit can be high in many cases.

If it’s a watch and it doesn’t tell the time accurately or isn’t waterproof, then we can see it’s a poor quality counterfeit. If the quality is high, how do we know then? Many items can have markers such as unique serial numbers on them, but that doesn’t work for what we eat or drink.

Single malt Scotch is a popular tipple around the world and some brands with long sojourns in the cask are sought after and demand prices outside the capabilities of my wallet. These are prime targets for counterfeiters, but how would we of the uncultured palate know?

Ashok et al from the U of St. Andrew’s have come to our aid and have designed a Scotch Fake Detector on a tiny microfluidic chip that only steals a drop of Scotch from your closely guarded glass (1).  This portable device connects up to a Raman Spectrometer. So won’t fit into our messenger bag with our iPad and our wallet recovering in darkened seclusion from the shock of paying for the glass of hooch that your suspicious about.

As the Raman pattern is due to the inelastically scattered light from the vibrational states of the molecules in the whisky, the complex molecular blend that gives your chosen tipple its characteristic nose and flavor will give a unique Raman pattern, ­ like your fingerprints.

The problem is there are strong peaks from the ethanol that is in the whisky and that can vary slightly for different brands, but that isn’t enough. More exciting though is the analysis of the fluorescence background. The age of a Glenfiddich could be clearly estimated and a 12-year old separated from a 15-year old with an 18-year old being very different again.

The Glenmorangie distillery enjoys using different wine casks for ageing and again the background indicated very clearly if sherry, port, sauternes or simple old oak casks had been used.

For this to be a good anti-counterfeiting method a very large central library of spectra would have to be built up. Collecting samples from all over would leave the lab with a surplus sample disposal problem that I may be able to help with.

  1. P.C. Ashok, B. B. Praveen & K. DHolakia, Optic Express, 19, 22982, (2011).

Facing The Music


A visit to the colonoscopist’s studio to make that personal video is probably towards the bottom of most peoples rainy day activities list, ranking along with going to the dentists to get those pesky wisdom teeth removed.

The purpose of the exercise is not the entertainment value of the video, but to aid in the great adenoma hunt. Those pre-cancerous polyps have to be harvested. They are not always easy to spot and detection rates can vary depending on who is driving the endoscope.

There is a folk myth called the “Mozart Effect” which indicates that people’s performance at their favorite function is enhanced when music written by the maestro is pumped into their shell-like appendages. O’Shea and Wolf of Texas U decided to put this to the test with their local endoscope artistes(1).

The report published by UPI.com, whose banner stresses that they have over 100 years of journalistic excellence so this is “the goods, ” reports that the competition between two endoscopists, each with 1,000+ colonoscopies under their belts where baselined at detections rates of 21% and 27%. 

Results? Endoscopist A  hit a success rate of 67% with Mozart and then slipped to a mere 30% sans Mozart. Clearly a “Mozart effect.” Endoscopist B hit 37% with Mozart lending a helping hand but peaked to 40% when working without his help. Clearly a “non-Mozart effect.”

Now this is all very exciting and perhaps says nothing more than Mozart fans may work better when plugged in to their faves, and folk myths are just that, myths. The BIG questions that I have are
i.              what is the pass rate for a successful detector of potential cancer – even 67% doesn’t seem to be a passing grade,
ii.            who determined the adenoma numbers that corresponded to 100% and how did they do it. Perhaps it's their technique that should be explored rather than the music selection on the operator’s iPod Touch.

  1. http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2011/10/31/Mozart-may-improve-doctors-colon-results/UPI-95761320114725/?spt=hs&or=hn
  2. http://www.improbable.com/  for Nov.1, 2011

CAD Ears


3-D printing is one of the most fun tech innovations of the last few years. It is will become an important and widespread manufacturing technique and I’m constantly surprised at the new items being printed.

The latest that caught my fancy was the Bonassar’s printed ears featured in a webcast from Cornell U (1). The ink consists of a bio-gloop with viable live cells and the printer prints out an ear. The raw ear is then incubated for two months to let the cells do what live cells do and then an ear-shaped piece of cartilage is ready to be implanted for the tissue to grow around. Home printed cartilage is much more likely to last longer and work better than silicon-based plastics. 

The lab scans someone’s head the get a digital image of their ear, which is then fed to the printer. At this point questions bubble up. For example, what would they have done with van Gogh? Would the have scanned his other ear and digitally inverted it? He would then have been in possession of a pair of perfectly matched ears, a very unusual situation.

The thoughts move on to would there be a demand among cosmetic surgery junkies seeking perfection to have their ears changed to scanned versions of George Clooney’s or Britney Spears? Would the old Star Trek fans be clamoring for Vulcan ears?

Once we move into ideas for doggy cosmetic surgery our imaginations could run riot, but there is, of course, some important possibilities. I heard a BBC news item about how a tail-less dolphin was coping with an artificial tail. Dolphin tail-trouble is not as rare an occurrence as might be imagined. In Japan, the vets persuaded Bridgestone tires to make a rubber tail for Fuji as far back as 2004 (2).

  1. http://www.cornell.edu/video/?videoID=1750
  2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4021993.stm