Juvenal
semper ego auditor tantum? numquamne reponam
vexatus totiens rauci Theseide Cordi?
impune ergo mihi recitaverit ille togatas,
his elegos?
…
difficile est saturam non scribere.
Am I always a listener only? Shall I never strike back,
so often annoyed by the Theseid of rasping Cordus?
With impunity therefore shall that one have recited to me dramas,
this one his elegiacs?
…
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Every year, the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden, announces up to three winners each in the scientific disciplines of chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine. As of this morning, since 1901, 780 individuals have joined the hallowed ranks of Nobel laureates in these and other categories. And every year, there are murmurings—some louder than others—about the Nobel-worthy scientists who were overlooked. In 1974, when Jocelyn Bell Burnell was left out of the physics prize, her fellow astronomer and Nobel reject, Fred Hoyle, told reporters it was a “scientific scandal of major proportions.” Physician-inventor Raymond Damadian famously took out full-page newspaper ads protesting his omission from the 2003 Nobel for MRI technology. This year, some will be asking questions about Robert Gallo, who did not share today’s Nobel for medicine or physiology with Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi.
Nobel committee proceedings are notoriously shrouded in secrecy, so it’s impossible to know all the details behind how each prizewinner is chosen, especially the more recent ones. But, according to Nobel historians, most award exclusions seem to relate to one or more of these criteria: limited slots available (Nobel rules limit the number of recipients to three for each category); ambiguity over who made the crucial contribution; and lack of experience and/or reputation within one’s research community.
As we enter the 2008 Nobel season, there are sure to be other alleged snubs. Needless to say, the noble Nobel process is inherently subjective. Still, going through Nobel history, there are a few cases that stand out.
Louis J. Sheehan
Hand gestures amplify the impact of spoken words, rather than serving merely as embellishment for speech, say Emily S. Cross and Elizabeth A. Franz, both of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. People recall more of what they hear if the speaker communicates with relevant hand gestures, the researchers find. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com
Cross and Franz studied 120 college students. Each volunteer viewed three blocks of 27 video clips of a woman saying phrases such as “peel the banana” or “the square box.” In each block of clips, the speaker used gestures that paralleled phrase content, irrelevant gestures, or no gestures. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com Listeners named as many phrases as they could recall after each block.
Participants remembered a majority of phrases spoken with relevant gestures. Recall slumped substantially for gesture-free phrases and was even worse for phrases accompanied by irrelevant gestures. Students who themselves frequently use gestures as they speak remembered fewer irrelevant-gesture phrases than did those who rarely add gestures to their speech. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
In parts of what’s now Peru, the Nasca and other prehistoric civilizations collected heads as spoils of war. Victorious warriors cut off the heads of vanquished enemies, drilled holes in their skulls to extract the brains, and modified these trophies for display and ritual use.
Trophy heads took a surprising twist, however, at a central Peruvian site inhabited by members of the Wari society from around A.D. 600 to 1000. A newly discovered stash of skull remains once used as trophy heads came mainly from children and from men too old to have served as warriors, says Tiffiny A. Tung of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Wari finds include pieces of trophy heads from at least 24 adults�most identifiable as male�and seven children, as well as 84 human-finger bones. All of these specimens had been intentionally burned and were found in two structures that had been used for ritual ceremonies. Most skulls contained holes drilled at the front and back of the braincase, as well as in the jaw, where a cord was apparently inserted.
Many skull pieces also exhibited worn edges, suggesting that they had been repeatedly handled, probably during rituals, Tung says. http://www.Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca
The Wari specimens contain few of the warfare-related scars that have been observed widely on skeletal remains of Nasca trophy heads. For now, the story behind these macabre Wari relics remains a mystery, Tung says.
Louis J. Sheehan
Many things stimulate our brains’ reward centers, among them, coordinated movements. Consider the thrill some get from watching choreographed fight or car chase scenes in action movies. What about the enjoyment spectators get when watching sports or actually riding on a roller coaster or in a fast car?
Scientists aren’t sure why we like movement so much, but there’s certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest we get a pretty big kick out of it. Maybe synchronizing music, which many studies have shown is pleasing to both the ear and brain, and movement—in essence, dance—may constitute a pleasure double play.
Music is known to stimulate pleasure and reward areas like the orbitofrontal cortex, located directly behind one’s eyes, as well as a midbrain region called the ventral striatum. In particular, the amount of activation in these areas matches up with how much we enjoy the tunes. In addition, music activates the cerebellum, at the base of the brain, which is involved in the coordination and timing of movement.
So, why is dance pleasurable?
First, people speculate that music was created through rhythmic movement—think: tapping your foot. Second, some reward-related areas in the brain are connected with motor areas. Third, mounting evidence suggests that we are sensitive and attuned to the movements of others’ bodies, because similar brain regions are activated when certain movements are both made and observed. For example, the motor regions of professional dancers’ brains show more activation when they watch other dancers compared with people who don’t dance.
This kind of finding has led to a great deal of speculation with respect to mirror neurons—cells found in the cortex, the brain’s central processing unit, that activate when a person is performing an action as well as watching someone else do it. Increasing evidence suggests that sensory experiences are also motor experiences. Music and dance may just be particularly pleasurable activators of these sensory and motor circuits. So, if you’re watching someone dance, your brain’s movement areas activate; unconsciously, you are planning and predicting how a dancer would move based on what you would do.
That may lead to the pleasure we get from seeing someone execute a movement with expert skill—that is seeing an action that your own motor system cannot predict via an internal simulation. This prediction error may be rewarding in some way.
So, if that evidence indicates that humans like watching others in motion (and being in motion themselves), adding music to the mix may be a pinnacle of reward.
Music, in fact, can actually refine your movement skills by improving your timing, coordination and rhythm. Take the Brazilian folk art, Capoeira—which could be a dance masquerading as a martial art or vice versa. Many of the moves in that fighting style are choreographed, taught and practiced, along with music, making the participants more adept—and giving them the pleasure from the music as well as from performing the movement.
Adding music in this context may cross the thin line between a killing machine and a dancing machine.
Louis J. Sheehan. Some children develop motor or vocal tics, obsessions, compulsions, or combinations of these symptoms shortly after a streptococcal infection, such as strep throat. Researchers call such cases PANDAS, an acronym for pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
In the first study of its kind, scientists have found elevated rates of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and tic ailments, including Tourette’s disorder, in the parents and siblings of children with PANDAS. These results support the theory that some families carry a genetic susceptibility to OCD and tic disorders that gets activated by childhood strep infection, according to a team led by social worker Lorraine Lougee and psychiatrist Susan E. Swedo, both of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md.
In this theory, which the researchers describe in the September Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, as-yet-unspecified genes direct strep-induced antibodies to attack brain areas involved in movement and monitoring for potential danger.
“This is groundbreaking work that could lead to new insights into the causes of at least some cases of childhood OCD and tic disorders,” remarks psychiatrist James F. Leckman of Yale University School of Medicine.
Prior investigations have linked strep infections to between 5 and 15 percent of childhood OCD and Tourette’s disorder cases, Leckman notes.
About 2 percent of the people in the United States suffer from OCD at some time in their lives, although it’s unclear how many cases begin in childhood. The condition revolves around obsessive thoughts that impel compulsive actions, such as checking door locks over and over for hours for fear of letting in a burglar. Tourette’s disorder, marked by severe motor and vocal tics, afflicts 4 or 5 out of every 10,000 people. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
The NIMH group recruited 42 boys and 12 girls, whose ages ranged from 6 to 12, who had developed OCD or tic disorders, or had experienced a dramatic worsening of those conditions, during the few weeks or months after a strep infection. Medical records, as well as biological tests for the presence of strep infection or elevated antistreptococcus antibodies, confirmed that PANDAS was the correct diagnosis in these cases.
In addition, Lougee and her coworkers conducted psychiatric interviews with 100 biological parents and 39 biological siblings of the children.
Fourteen kids with PANDAS had at least one immediate family member with OCD, the researchers report. A total of 15 parents and two siblings received an OCD diagnosis.
Moreover, 21 children had at least one family member with a history of a motor or vocal tic. Most affected parents told the scientists that their OCD symptoms or tics had begun in childhood or adolescence. One parent had Tourette’s disorder and several others had severe tics that fell just short of that condition.
The new study finds that OCD and tic disorders run in the families of children with PANDAS to about the same extent as had been found in previous studies of people with OCD and tic disorders. However, those investigations didn’t identify people whose ailments had a link to childhood strep infection.
The NIMH investigators are currently evaluating the safety and effectiveness of plasma exchange and immunoglobulin treatment for children with severe strep-triggered OCD and tics.
Physicians are aware that strep infections can cause heart problems in children, says psychiatrist Pierre Blier of the University of Florida School of Medicine in Gainesville. “We should be just as concerned about the possibility of psychiatric complications,” he concludes. Louis J. Sheehan
There are plenty of good ideas for moving the world beyond fossil fuels, but most of them aren’t practical with current technology or don’t scale well. (You would have to build something like 10 million conventional windmills to produce 100 percent renewable electricity in the United States.) A few years back, a group of West Coast engineers were puzzling over a practical way to tackle the problem, looking for a hydrocarbon-free, clean, and renewable energy system that required no major technical breakthroughs and could be put to work in the next few years. The result: the start-up Cool Earth Solar, now based in Livermore, California, and its new-think technology, an inexpensive plastic-film balloon a bit over eight feet tall. Millions of these balloons could hover low over the landscape, each concentrating sunlight onto a photovoltaic cell inside, and pumping out electricity more cheaply than power from fossil fuels, the company says. DISCOVER spoke with Cool Earth Solar CEO Rob Lamkin to hear about his solar strategy.
How did you come up with this design?
If you’re going to replace hydrocarbons with solar, you’re going to need a lot of collecting surface. Eric Cummings, our chief technical officer and founder, thought, what would that collecting surface be? What covers lots of area cheaply? Thin plastic film is one possibility. Plastic film is something we have readily available, and we can make it quickly. All right, so what can you do with film? Cummings saw that you could cover the film with a thin layer of aluminum and shape it to concentrate sunlight on a photovoltaic cell.
Now it all comes together. Since you’re concentrating solar rays, you need only a fraction of the [expensive] photovoltaic materials that would be required for flat panels. And because film is so light, you can use cheap infrastructure; in this case the balloons are supported by wire cables strung between vertical wood poles.
The bottom line is that today we can generate electricity as cheaply as, or more cheaply than, we do natural gas—and we expect to pass coal soon.
How does a balloon concentrate solar energy?
We take the thin plastic film, cut and seal it to create a balloon shape, make the bottom half reflective and the top half transparent, inflate it with regular air, and then monitor it to keep the pressure at the right level. It turns out to be easy to get a shape in which the focal point [where the reflected rays converge] is internal to the balloon, which makes it perfect for concentrating sunlight. We didn’t invent this form so much as discover it. The material just wants to pop into the right shape.
Why is solar power a better energy source than wind, geothermal, biofuels, and nuclear? Don’t we need them all?
Solar seems to have the best economics. It certainly has all the energy we need and will need for a long time.
What are the potential problems with solar balloons?
It would be nice to put this out in the field and have it last 30 years. But the thin film won’t last that long, so we intend to replace it every couple of years. On a 1-kilowatt concentrator, that’s a couple dollars’ worth of plastic, so it’s not something that hurts us.
Any other concerns?
I worry some about kids with BB guns.
How close are you to proving that the technology works?
Right now we are working on a quarter-million-watt demonstration plant in Livermore and a 1.5-million-watt commercial plant in the central part of California, in the town of Tracy. By this time next year, we hope to start building a series of standardized plants, each consisting of thousands of balloons and about 10 to 30 million watts in size. [A 30-million-watt plant would have about 30,000 balloons.] The goal would be selling electricity directly to utility companies. A few years from now, we would like to be adding hundreds of megawatts of capacity every year. Louis J. Sheehan
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Dinosaurs‘ long reign on Earth may have had more to do with lady luck than with superiority, according to a study published today in Science. The study challenges the old notion that dinosaurs out-competed their reptilian contemporaries.
It is a longstanding mystery why dinosaurs became and remained so plentiful for more than 180 million years. The traditional theory: dinosaurs suddenly replaced other land animals because of special traits that gave them an evolutionary advantage, such as being warm-blooded, nimble and able to occupy varied habitats. This new research presents a fresh mathematical analysis of previous fossil data that indicates that ancestors of modern-day crocodiles had as diverse body types as early dinos, with whom they co-existed for some 30 million years.
Although the data doesn’t directly contradict the idea of dinosaur superiority, the authors say it is likely that these crocodilians were even more successful than dinosaurs, the latter of which may have survived major extinctions due to sheer luck.
“If you dissect the past, you can see that luck is a big part of everything in the grand scheme of evolution,” says lead author Stephen Brusatte, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History.
The idea that dinosaurs lived at the same time as similar reptile species is nothing new. And data from the past few years has many paleontologists rethinking whether dinosaurs were really so special after all. The fossil record shows that dinos lived alongside comparable groups of reptiles for millions of years without overtaking them.
For example, the early dinosaurs were contemporaries of crurotarsans, croc ancestors, during the late Triassic period about 230 to 200 million years ago. This reptilian group ranged from quick predators to two-legged vegetarians to leisurely grazers. Then, as the Triassic turned into the Jurassic, the creatures roaming the planet changed drastically. Most crurotarsans disappeared from the fossil record. But many dinosaurs survived—and flourished, diversifying into meat-eating giants, armored warriors and winged aviators. http://www.Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca
Brusatte and researchers from the University of Bristol in England expanded this research by analyzing the existing fossil record to show crurotarsans may have even been more successful than dinos. First, the team constructed a new family tree to separate the dinosaurs from the croc ancestors. They then assembled a database of 65 dinosaur and crurotarsan species that included over 400 skeletal features, such as whether they had beaks or shorter arms than legs.
If dinosaurs were more fit for the environment, they should have had a higher rate of evolution and more diverse body types. Instead the researchers found that the two groups evolved at similar rates and that the crurotarsans had a wider range of body types, suggesting that they had actually adapted to more lifestyles and ecological niches. http://www.Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca
The authors argue that because dinosaurs and crurotarsans were living parallel lives together for so long, it is unlikely the dinosaurs necessarily ruled. If you could travel back to the Triassic, Brusatte says, you would have guessed that the crocodilians would have won out. “There’s no way you could argue that dinosaurs were superior to them,” he says. Instead, he thinks an extinction event at the beginning of the Jurassic some 205 million years ago—like runaway global warming or an asteroid crash—may have just been bad luck for the crurotarsans.
Many paleontologists consider these findings a major step in dinosaur science. “It’s really refreshing,” says Kristi Curry-Rogers, a dinosaur paleontologist at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn. “It definitely challenges the standard story of dinosaur evolution…. In the world of dinosaurs, we see a lot that portrays them in ways that science doesn’t really follow.”
But not all experts agree. “I think that the conclusions of the authors aren’t warranted,” says Kevin Padian, a dinosaur paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Good luck isn’t an evolutionary force…. Extinctions aren’t random.” He believes that dinosaurs are different enough from crurotarsans that they may have had a competitive edge.
Whether dinosaurs rose to fame from fitness or a roll of the dice should become clearer as paleontologists discover more fossils to fill in the sparse record of dinosaurs’ early history and elucidate what caused the extinctions at the end of the Triassic. Rogers says that Brusatte’s analysis will probably challenge people to support their claims of dinosaur superiority with stronger evidence. “It gives people something to shoot at that is based on data,” she says, “and not just assumption.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan. Between 4 months and 6 months of age, babies parlay their visual experience into the insight that objects exist as permanent entities, even when hidden from view, a new study finds. http://louis-j-sheehan.info
The results challenge the influential notion that such knowledge is innate. Advocates of the innateness hypothesis argue that babies up to 6 months old can’t systematically track objects with their eyes, even though babies of that age do realize that, say, a ball that rolls behind a screen should be visible when the screen is removed.
According to Scott P. Johnson of New York University and his colleagues, however, 4-month-olds indeed monitor moving objects and learn from these experiences to expect that moving objects will emerge from behind barriers.
The researchers tested 48 4-month-olds and 32 6-month-olds. Each child sat in a parent’s lap and watched an animated computer scene as an infrared camera tracked the baby’s eye movements. On the screen, a green ball moved horizontally, periodically disappearing behind a blue box and then reemerging.
Although 6-month-olds frequently looked at the box’s opposite side in expectation that the ball would reappear there, 4-month-olds rarely did so, at least at first.
If allowed to watch a ball move across an otherwise clear screen for a few minutes, 4-month-olds subsequently shown the scene with the blue box often looked to where the hidden ball was about to emerge. This tactic hastened the process of learning about the permanence of objects for younger infants. Louis J. Sheehan
Louis J. Sheehan. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may share more than a propensity for wreaking havoc on mental life. These severe psychiatric disorders, each of which occurs in about 1 in 100 adults, rest on identical flaws in a set of genes that produce a protective covering for brain cells, a new study suggests.
The critical genes are active in brain cells called oligodendrocytes, say neuroscientist Sabine Bahn of the University of Cambridge in England and her colleagues.
Oligodendrocytes produce fatty myelin molecules that coat brain cells and influence their transmission of electrical impulses.
More than a dozen proteins that oligodendrocytes use to make myelin occurred in unusually low concentrations in the preserved brains of 15 people with schizophrenia and 15 people with bipolar disorder, Bahn’s team reports in the Sept. 6 Lancet. Several other proteins, which regulate the genes that code for the myelin-making proteins, also exhibited low concentrations in both groups of brains. No such disturbances appeared in the preserved brains of 15 people who had had no mental disorder.
“Our findings raise questions about myelin’s role in these psychiatric illnesses,” Bahn says. She’s now directing an analysis of myelin-related proteins in 150 preserved brains from people with schizophrenia, bipolar illness, or no mental disorder.
If the results hold, they will indicate that disrupted myelin production may set the stage for psychosis, a warping of one’s sense of reality that often occurs in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and brain ailments such as Alzheimer’s disease, Bahn suggests.
Signs of schizophrenia include apathy, disorganized behavior, and psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions. Bipolar disorder, sometimes called manic depression, features swings from severe depression to a type of agitated euphoria called mania. Psychotic delusions, say of being invincible, are a common element of mania.
Earlier studies linked schizophrenia to disturbances in myelin-producing genes in specific brain regions. Further work needs to examine whether the same regional effects characterize bipolar disorder, say Kenneth L. Davis and Vahram Haroutunian, both psychiatrists at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, in a commentary published with the new report.
Psychiatrist Elliot S. Gershon of the University of Chicago calls Bahn’s report “very interesting and exciting news.” In the May American Journal of Human Genetics, Gershon and his coworkers reported that alterations of two other genes, found on chromosome 13, frequently occur in people with either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. The functions of those genes are poorly understood.
Accumulating data also suggest that additional genes, located on chromosome 8, contribute both to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia (SN: 9/5/98, p. 151), Gershon adds.
However, any potential link between these two mental disorders is controversial. For instance, a study led by Pekka Tienari of Finland’s University of Oulu found that having a biological mother with schizophrenia didn’t increase rates of bipolar illness and other mood disorders in nearly 400 adults who had been adopted as infants. These results, published in the September American Journal of Psychiatry, clash with the notion that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder share genetic influences.
The two disorders stem from various influences, some shared and some unique, Bahn contends. “It’s like inflammation,” she says. “There can be many causes for the same symptoms.” Louis J. Sheehan
