Want to Erase Fear Memories? Put Down the Booze, Pick Up the Pot.

By: | September 10, 2012

Tomorrow marks the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, which killed nearly 3,000 people and traumatized hundreds of thousands of others. One out of four witnesses to that awful scene — fires, blood, flying glass and metal and stone and people — developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), characterized by fearful memories that just won’t recede.

It’s no wonder that many people with PTSD — about 14 percent — try to self-medicate with alcohol. Booze helps us forget, right? The idea lurks in idioms — I might get “trashed” or “wasted,” or “drown my sorrows” — and in Proverbs 31:7, and in the gospel of Dave Matthews: Excuse me please / one more drink / Could you make it strong / ‘Cause I don’t need to think… One drink to remember / Then another to forget…

So I was fascinated by a new study showing the opposite. Alcohol, it seems, helps cement painful memories into neural circuits.
Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | September 8, 2012

September 3 – 7

Sometimes new technology gives you a person who can only compare the moon to a tart. And sometimes it gives you Galileo, or the Beatles. This week, Richard pondered the connection.

For labor day, Ann brought back her famous account of scientists being withering.

Tom got irritated about the science lies in kid lit and nursery rhymes that lay the groundwork for science illiteracy.

Abstruse Goose considered the last light that is all that may remain of lost civilizations.

And Ann considered the plight of the science PhD student: “middle-aged, overspecialized, mentally deranged, depressed and discouraged.” There’s got to be a better way.

I Saw Them Standing There

By: | September 7, 2012

I was watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” the other night when I got to thinking about Galileo. “Ladies and gentlemen, here are The Beatles!” cried Ed, in his imitable style, and the camera cut to curtains flying apart with an abandon that matched the song’s first notes, already slamming away. Then Paul stepped to the microphone and opened his mouth.

“[    ], she was [    ] seventeen, you know what I mean.”

But Paul recovered quickly. He bent closer to the microphone, so that now we could at least make out all the lyrics, even if the instruments were still overwhelming them.

Then John stepped forward toward his own microphone. Was his at the wrong height, too?

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The Sooner You Make It Yours, the Better

By: | September 6, 2012

My nephew-the-biology-graduate-student sacrificed several days and a certain amount of money to come to a family reunion and seemed honestly interested in talking to the relatives, so I thought, ok, maybe this is a little vacation from the lab, maybe he’s relaxing.  Except I’d look over at him sprawled on the couch and say, “What are you reading?” and he’d get a funny look and say, “Oh nothing, just a paper,” meaning a dense, opaque, difficult scientific journal article.  And when I asked him how things were going at school, this normally close-mouthed kid started talking and didn’t stop, and he wasn’t sounding cheery.

Freeman Dyson wrote:  “The average student emerges at the end of the Ph.D. program, already middle-aged, overspecialized, poorly prepared for the world outside, and almost unemployable except in a narrow-area of specialization. . . . I am personally acquainted with several cases of young people who became mentally deranged, not to speak of many more who became depressed and discouraged, their lives ruined by the tyranny of the Ph.D. system.” Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Supernova

By: | September 5, 2012

I don’t know what it is with these young people thinking the violent obliteration of a planet and all its civilizations is cool.  Maybe they grew up with reality being virtual and not the other kind.  Never mind.  Supernova 1987A — the “A” because it was 1987’s first supernova — used to be a blue supergiant star called Sanduleak -69° 202; I mention these things because I like star names.  It  blew up in 1987, though as AG points out, it actually blew up in 166,000 BC, the middle of the Middle Paleolithic.  If the obliterated planet had been Earth, civilization would have gotten only as far as tools, fire, and hunting, so maybe no great loss.

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http://abstrusegoose.com/451

How Kid Culture Tells our Children Lies and Destroys the Future of Science

By: | September 4, 2012

Some parents, especially those with writerly or scientific tendencies, cope with the shock of having reproduced by chronicling every twist and turn as their progeny move from mewling rage ball to drooling tyrant, and beyond. Not for the me the introspection and fearless truth telling of Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, or the abstracted observation of Charles Fernyhough’s A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist’s Chronicle of his Daughter’s Developing Mind.  I much prefer to embrace nature’s memory-wiping balm of exhaustion, distraction and confusion. Continue reading →

Redux: Scientists’ Slippage

By: | September 3, 2012

This post is a re-run from 7/15/2010.  The situation hasn’t improved.

I get this look a lot

I grew up noticing what a writer notices — stories and how things are said — and educated myself accordingly.  So I never learned much science and now, after I’ve unexpectedly turned into a science writer, my questions to scientists are generally English-major questions.

Me:  Why do a tennis ball and a bowling ball fall at the same speed?

Physicist:  Are all your questions like this?

My problem is made worse because I write about the physical sciences which, with the exception of gravity, are rarely part of an English major’s life experience.  Nevertheless, on the whole, scientists are tolerant of my questions.   Maybe they understand the unfathomable distances between their education and mine.  Maybe because they usually teach undergraduates, they are used to such questions.  Or maybe they don’t expect much from me in the first place:  like the dog walking on its hind legs, they think, the wonder is not that she does it well but that she does it at all.

As I ask my questions, I can see them trying to figure out how to answer, how to communicate with this creature from another world, how translate the equations in their heads into words, let alone words about relationships between abstracts.  They’re earnestly trying their best to communicate but sometimes they get tired and give up.

Me:  Can you explain to me the work you did in quantum field theory?

Physicist:  You asked me that the other day and you couldn’t understand what I told you then.  That would still be true. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | September 1, 2012

August 27 -31

This week, guest poster Anne Casselman reported on a fascinating group of new experiments that indicate that a real solution to climate change won’t come from engineering better biofuels as much as it will come from engineering better ways to exploit our own psychological trap doors.

After all, social pressure is our most fearsome weapon: Michelle found that it’s enough to make Chinese politicians drink themselves to death on a drink that tastes like socks with AIDS.

If you’re feeling pressure to procreate because of the recent study about old dads and autism, Ginny set us all straight this week about overinterpreting the findings.

Abstruse Goose brought back my favourite character of God-the-shortsighted-managerial-type (in this week’s episode: 640 k will totally be enough memory for all the laws of physics!).

And Heather remembered an unlikely patron saint of archaeology who marched to the beat of no one’s drum.

Happy weekend, everyone. Enjoy the last bit of summer!