Better Living Through Electrochemistry

By: | February 9, 2012
Getting a battery-assisted brain upgrade during sniper training

Have you ever wanted to take a vacation from your own head?

You could do it easily enough with liberal applications of alcohol, weed or hallucinogens, but that’s not the kind of vacation I’m talking about. What if you could take a very specific vacation only from the stuff that makes it painful to be you: the sneering inner monologue that insists you’re not capable enough or smart enough or pretty enough or whatever hideous narrative rides you. Now that would be a vacation. You’d still be you, but you’d be able to navigate the world without the emotional baggage that now drags on your every decision. Can you imagine what that would feel like?

Late last year, I got the chance to find out, in the course of investigating a story (in this week’s New Scientist) about how researchers are using neurofeedback and electrical brain stimulation to accelerate learning. What I found was that electricity might be the most powerful drug I’ve ever used in my life. Continue reading →

Sperm Waves

By: | February 7, 2012

Some 40 years ago, researchers at the University of Missouri were searching for an alternative to the condom — a cheap, trustworthy and reversible form of male birth control.

For their first study, published in 1975, they strapped anesthetized rats, face-down, to a plexiglass platform with a cut-out cup full of water for their dangling scrota. The scientists then exposed the animals’ testicles to a variety of things.

Heat, for example, can kill sperm (which is thought to explain why the testes hang outside of the body). So some of the animals got a 140-degree Fahrenheit water bath for 15 minutes. Others received a dose of infrared radiation, or short blasts of microwaves or ultrasound. After treatment, the animals had constant access to females until they impregnated them.
Continue reading →

Pets, Prisoners, and Personhood

By: | February 6, 2012

I never imagined that writing a book about cats and dogs would land me in the Boulder County Jail. But there I was on a Friday afternoon in late September, surrounded by 15 inmates in the middle of Cell Block B—and looking for the exit.

At that moment, I was more cold than afraid. The guards had cranked up the AC, and I stood shivering, my arms crossed tightly against my chest. The cell block was large and sterile, with a drab gray floor, chalky cinderblock walls, and round, convex mirrors hinged to every corner. The only color came from thirty dark orange doors that framed the room, each branded with a large white number and harboring two narrow glass slits for windows. At a signal from a guard a few moments earlier, the doors had swung open, and the prisoners emerged from their closet-sized cells, pouring into the middle of the space in which I was standing. One—heavily-tattooed with a bald head, tan skin, and a long, ragged goatee—headed straight for me. He had something in his hand. Continue reading →

The Science of Mysteries: Shock, Trauma, and the First Real War

By: | February 3, 2012

One bright day last December, certain science bloggers who had happily discovered a shared taste for classic mystery writers, all wrote synchronous posts about the science in mystery books.  These books, we thought, have a surprising amount of good science in them.  So we’re doing it again (for titles, see bottom of post).  This post is about Dorothy Sayers’ Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. 

On Armistice Day, some years after the first World War is over, an old general is found dead, sitting in his usual chair by the fire at his club, the Bellona Club.  Oddly, he’s not wearing in his lapel the usual remembrance poppy.  He’s very old though, he must have died naturally; his body is removed from the club and life goes on.  A number of plot developments later, however, he’s found to have been murdered.  The last person to see him alive was his grandson, Captain George Fentiman, who was in the war and who has been mentally and emotionally unbalanced by shell shock.

George Fentiman is still too sick to hold a job, badly needs money, is his grandfather’s beneficiary, and so is the logical suspect in the murder.  He’s an unpleasant character:  he’s bitter about his service to the country, he berates his wife who has to support them both; he’s nervous and jumpy and picks fights for nothing.  These symptoms of shell shock also make him a suspect.  Once he understands this, he takes one of his “queer fits,” disappears for days, and when he returns, confesses to the murder.  He didn’t do it though, and our detective Lord Peter Wimsey knows he didn’t and uses his confession to reveal the real murderer.

Wimsey in fact was also in the war, also has shell shock, and at times of stress, believes he’s back in the trenches.  So Wimsey knows enough to understand what Fentiman is going through and in particular, what he means when he says that his grandfather, the general, may have been in the Crimea, but had no idea of what real war was like. Continue reading →

Life without beer: part 2 of my beer & running science experiment

By: | February 2, 2012

 

The question came to me at 10-something AM in the morning. I had just hurdled a flaming fire pit, the finish line of a stupidly steep trail run in the desolate cliffs of Western Colorado. Now I was drinking a can of cold beer I’d pulled from the race refreshment cooler. And damn, if that beer didn’t taste good.

Some races give out t-shirts. Finishers of this event earned beer koozies emblazoned with the phrase “I survived the Summit and Plummet.”

I’d caught a ride to the event with a dear friend of mine, a former alcoholic. On the drive home, he casually remarked that he used to chug beer like that too, back in his drinking days. His comment was matter-of-fact, not judgmental, yet I found myself wondering if it was time for some self-reflection.

Continue reading →

Even though I no longer plan to be a biologist… (science music part I)

By: | January 31, 2012

Science education amounts to a Great Winnowing — from millions of school kids fascinated by science down to orders of magnitude fewer actually making a living, or a life, doing it decades later. Whatever the reasons so many flee or are pushed out of science — and there are many, both personal and institutional — I’ve always had a fondness for the dropouts.

Over the years, I’ve taught a lot of science students who fall into that category — the ones who are thinking of getting out apparently have a knack for finding me. While cleaning up some old, old files recently, I happened to find evidence of one of the first. I was a PhD student teaching intro biology. In a quiz, I asked about the Michaelis Menten relationship. One student answered with, “I have no clue … Continue reading →