You Are What You Hear

iPod users, do those pesky earpad cords get tangled when you dance? Tired of the incessant banging and tickling of the cords against your sensitive skin as you air-guitar? Do your wireless Bluetooth earphones keep getting interference? Well never fear! Now through the miracle of low-level electrocution, you can send the music right through your body from your mpeg player to your ears!

Story: http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/dn10663

Patent: HERE

Throw away those cords! Now Sony has developed a system where audio signals are sent through a conductive cloth pad directly into your skin. At a few millionths of an amp, the signal travels through the capacitor – your body – to come out at specially-designed earpads. The 500 kHz -3 MHz signal can carry 48 kilobytes per second. Frankenstein's monster only received life from the electricity sent through him. You can have the Rolling Stones! You won't feel a thing except rockin' rhythms as you dance to your body-conducted tunes. Look, Ma, no wires!

Order now!

The Medicinal Power Of Moonlight and Pig Bladders

My mom is a firm believer in New Age beliefs. She wrote a book on Nostradamus, reinterpreting his verses for predictive ability (HERE is a link to her book). She also wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Power of Crystals," as in quartz crystals having energy of their own that can be tapped for special supernatural uses. I can't say I always share her beliefs, but they are at least entertaining and certainly point to her open-mindedness. She's a regular reader of this blog, after all (but, then, doesn't everyone's mom read their kids' stuff, even if it's dreck like this?). I must admit a good deal of fascination in "alternative" views of reality, including UFOs, ghosts, and predictions, with a degree of irrational belief. If even 1% of it is true, most of these things would be groundbreaking and mindwarping.

I can't scoff at my mom, though. When I was a teenager I had a nasty wart growing on a finger for more than a year. One night, when there was a full moon, she convinced me she could remove it by casting a sort of spell. Smiling, we went outside, and in the light of the moon she rubbed the wart in some special way. I can't remember if she said anything while doing this (Mom, maybe you could leave a comment and describe the procedure!). Laughing, I went back to whatever I was doing. But within a couple weeks the wart sloughed off and never came back. Coincidence? The scientist in me says yes, but I admit a certain degree of bewilderment.

A recent news report describes something less magical, but just as interesting. Think, for a minute, of shaman remedies where a wound is treated with extract from some forest plant, and you'll be on the right path.

Animals such as salamanders are able to re-grow limbs and tails that have been cut off. Even human fetuses have a similar regenerative ability. Science is still figuring out how. Then one day a researcher was trying to replace a dog's aorta with a piece of intestine. The wound healed amazingly fast and the intestine re-formed into a sort of aorta. After years of study, it became apparent that extracellular matrix from the intestine had guided regeneration of the tissue. Extracellular matrix (ECM) of this sort is found in a number of other organs, such as bladder. Because ECM is cell-free, it isn't rejected by the body's immune responses.

As a result of research, ECM patches have been used for a number of years to help heal torn rotator cuffs, hernias, and in veterinary medicine. Now there is a report describing how ECM is able to grow back missing tips of fingers by applying extract of pig bladder:

here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070219/ap_on_sc/regrowing_fingers_4

A company called ACell, formed by the researchers who first discovered the technique, is testing the product for many such uses. A brother of one of ACell's founders accidentally cut off the tip of his finger in 2005 by sticking it into a moving hobby plane propeller. In his words, "I pointed to it and said, 'You need to get rid of this engine, it's too dangerous.' And I put my finger through the prop." Oops! Talk about dumbass mistakes.

Doctors told him his fingertip was lost forever, but he went to his brother at ACell and received a paste of ECM from pig bladder, which he applied to his finger tip every two days for four weeks. Now the finger tip has grown back. In fact, the nail grows at twice the rate of the other fingers, and the skin on the tip doesn't crack from cold weather like his other fingers!

Now the military is testing this technique on missing fingers of soldiers from Iraq. If they can manage to grow back even a slight stump or digit to pinch with, their lives will be far better than the alternative: http://webreprints.djreprints.com/1646641311092.html.

It ain't magic, but certainly it is the application of something we still don't fully understand. In the words of Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," but I would add that those technologies need not be "advanced" in the sense of novel physics or computer power. Sometimes the most advanced technologies are reapplications of what nature has already given us, or what our forebears already figured out and modern society forgot.

So is there a scientific explanation for my Mom's wart-removal technique, or is it just hocus-pocus? Will science one day re-embrace the old "eye of newt and bladder of pig" philosophy of Medieval medicine? In any case, Mom, keep letting me in on your alternative views. Science, shaman magic, and New Age beliefs all have one thing in common, they constantly revisit and re-adjust our concept of reality in search of the elusive truth.

By the way, if you've got any warts, the next full moon is March 3rd ….

Critical Thinking And LEGO Robots

It's amazing what can happen if people think.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of watching some local school kids demonstrate their LEGO robots. They were part of a team from an area middle school. These bright, culturally-diverse 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th grade boys (and a girl) competed on a state level and won awards for their ability to build a robot of their own design to perform specific tasks that the competition demanded (such as traveling a short distance to trigger devices or drop an object into a specific location), all out of parts from LEGO robotics kits. Though the obstacles the robot had to overcome were pre-defined, their robot design and programming was formulated on their own, with minimal assistance from the team coach and high-school kids who acted as mentors. Maybe they could have learned something by being told exactly how to build and program the robot from a specific blueprint, but I guarantee they learned more about robotics and, generally, critical thinking, by coming up with their own design and testing it.

Beats the hell out of the "spaceships" I built with LEGOs at their age!

Education is a marvelous thing, as it gives you a toolbox of knowledge from which consider the world (like a box of LEGO blocks), but that knowledge is useless if you can't learn to apply it creatively (like making a friggin' robot out of them). I think back to my organic chemistry classes as an undergrad, for instance, where I was forced to memorize very complex chemical reactions and structures, only to regurgitate them on the next test before cramming my brain with more information. Within a year or two of taking the class I doubt I could have remembered even 10% of what I learned. A decade later I might have recalled only a few bits and pieces. As a scientist, I have been taught to think critically, not just about science questions, but about all things. It's in my nature to question things (even if it makes me look cynical in the process), but as my Organic Chem class illustrates, even science has obstacles to overcome.

Recently, a professor at Ohio State University tested the role of critical thinking on his introductory-level biology students:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070221093213.htm

The 300 or so students were taking a lab class on the role of enzymes in biology, and fell into two groups. The first group of students was given prepared enzymes and step-by-step instructions on how to test them. The second group was given a raw turnip from which they had to extract the enzymes themselves and then come up with a plan of their own to test them, exercising their critical and creative thinking. In the end, they were asked a simple question, "Where do enzymes occur in nature?" The correct (and simplistic) answer: "In living tissue." Only 23% of the "step-by-step" group got it correct, compared to 83% of the "critical thinking" group.

Said the professor, "The students in the first group were just as intelligent as those in the second group. They just lacked confidence. No teacher had ever asked them something as simple as how do they want to display what they saw in the experiment. They had always been told how to do that. Educators thought they were doing students a wonderful favor by giving them step-by-step instructions."

And that was at the college level! How often do you think the average grade school student in America is asked to think critically about the information they are taught? How much is rote memorization? In this day of standardized testing, I'm doubtful critical thinking raises its shy head, even in science classes.

And we wonder why people adhere to horoscopes, latch onto the latest fad diets, or believe anything presented on the evening news as undeniable fact. Come on, folks! Critical thinking and creativity drive innovation and reveal the truth behind the veils of ignorance. Think back to your favorite class in school. I'd bet my left thumb that it was one where you got to be creative and didn't have to cram your brain with memorized details, yet learned a lot.

When I saw those kids and their robots, hope sprang eternal. Will they now apply the abstract lesson they learned and raise their hands more in class, questioning why the teacher said what she did?

The 8^th-grader in me is dying to get one of those LEGO robot kits.

African-American Scientists: Daniel Hale Williams

For the last of my Black History Month tributes to African-American Scientists, I spotlight Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a pioneer in turn-of-the-century surgery and sterile procedure, founder of early African-American and integrated hospitals, and instructor of medicine.

A good bio from which much of this was taken:

http://www.blackinventor.com/pages/danielwilliams.html

Williams was born to a mixed-race family in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, January 18, 1856, the fifth of seven children. His father, also named Daniel Williams, a white man, was an active abolitionist. Daniel's mother was a free Black woman, Sarah Price Williams. Daniel's father was a barber and moved the family to Annapolis, Maryland but died shortly thereafter of tuberculosis, when Daniel was 11.

Although some members of the family lived as whites, and he could also have done so, Daniel refused to "pass" and actively identified himself as Black. Soon after his father died his mother sent her children to live with different relatives, except Daniel, who was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Baltimore, while she went to live in Illinois. After a while Daniel left his apprenticeship and followed her, but although the reunion was happy, his mother soon moved to Maryland with his sisters to rejoin the other children, and Daniel elected to stay in Illinois.

For the next several years he worked and lived with various cousins, but when he was 16 he struck out on his own and moved to Wisconsin, where he became a barber, living very happily with his employer's family, and also attended high school. His employer-cum foster father later financed his medical training at Northwestern University Medical School (known at the time as the Chicago Medical College). Initially, Williams was apprenticed to a well-known Civil War surgeon for the Union, Dr. Henry Palmer. Williams graduated in 1883.

Because of primitive social and medical circumstances existing in that era, much of Williams early medical practice called for him to treat patients in their homes, including conducting occasional surgeries on kitchen tables. In doing so, Williams utilized many of the emerging antiseptic, sterilization procedures of the day and thereby gained a reputation for professionalism. He was soon appointed as a surgeon on the staff of the South Side Dispensary and then a clinical instructor in anatomy at Northwestern. In 1889 he was appointed to the Illinois State Board of Health and one year later set for to create an interracial hospital.

On January 23, 1891 Daniel Hale Williams established the Provident Hospital and Training School Association, a three story building which held 12 beds and served members of the community as a whole. The school also served to train Black nurses and utilized doctors of all races. The hospital's success rate was phenomenal considering the financial and health conditions of the patient, and primitive conditions of most hospitals. Much can be attributed to Williams insistence on the highest standards concerning procedures and sanitary conditions.

Williams is perhaps best known for a surgery he performed at Provident Hospital in 1893. Internal surgery was almost unheard of at the time due to the high risk of infection. When a man came in who had been stabbed in the chest, Williams took the initiative to open the chest and perform surgery, suturing a cut through the pericardium (sac around the heart), then applying antiseptic procedures before closing. Cured, the patient walked out of the hospital 51 days later and lived another fifty years. Technically this isn't an open heart surgery, and similar surgeries had been performed in Europe on at least a couple occasions over the hundred years prior, yet Williams is often credited with "the first open heart surgery."

In February 1894, Daniel Hale Williams was appointed as Chief Surgeon at the Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C. and reorganized the hospital, creating seven medical and surgical departments, setting up pathological and bacteriological units, establishing a biracial staff of highly qualified doctors and nurses and established an internship program. Recognition of his efforts and their success came when doctors from all over the country traveled to Washington to view the hospital and to sit in on surgery performed there. Almost immediately there was an astounding increase in efficiency as well as a decrease in patient deaths.

During this time, Williams married Alice Johnson and the couple soon moved to Chicago after Daniel resigned from the Freedmen's hospital. He resumed his position as Chief Surgeon at Provident Hospital (which could now accommodate 65 patients) as well as for nearby Mercy Hospital and St. Luke's Hospital, an exclusive hospital for wealthy White patients. He was also asked to travel across the country to attend to important patients or to oversee certain procedures.

When the American Medical Association refused to accept Black members, Williams helped to set up and served as Vice-President of the National Medical Association. In 1912, Williams was appointed associate attending surgeon at St. Luke's and worked there until his retirement from the practice of medicine.

Upon his retirement, Daniel Hale Williams had bestowed upon him numerous honors and awards. He received honorary degrees from Howard and Wilberforce Universities, was named a charter member of the American College of Surgeons and was a member of the Chicago Surgical Society.

Williams died from a stroke on August 4, 1931, in Idlewild, Michigan, having set standards and examples for surgeons, both Black and White, for years to come.

Plugging The Volcano

Oh man! Do you remember my post about the mud volcano in East Java, where a natural gas-exploration company used faulty practices in their drilling and wound up creating a mud-spewing volcano that has since displaced 13,000 people and buried four villages? Well, make that 15,000 people, and the mud is still spreading. It has now threatened a major railway.

Even though leading geologists have published a report showing the catastrophe was caused by faulty drilling techniques, and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has ordered the company to pay restitution, the drilling company, PT Lapindo Brantas, and Indonesian welfare minister Aburizal Bakrie, whose family owns the company, still claim the company is innocent and that the catastrophe is due to natural causes. Efforts to divert the mud flow to a local river have failed.

Here is a YouTube video of the volcano and the attempts to build diversion levees:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJdjcL4aPD4

Geologists suggest further attempts to divert the flow, to the sea, but the Indonesian government has other plans: Plug the hole!

http://www.physorg.com/news91194086.html

That's right. Their plan is to lower 2,000 high-density concrete balls into the hole of the volcano, thinking that the balls will slow the flow by 50 – 70%. A local geologist says it is doomed to failure and that the balls will likely be pushed back out.

Seems sorta like the story of the Dutch boy putting his finger in the dike, eh?

It May Be Safer To Lick The Office Toilet Seat Than Your Messy Desk

Let's face it, people are slobs. Even at work, most of us aren't the picture of organizational and hygienic excellence. Take MY office, for instance. I've got stacks of lab books, experimental notes, research journals, and assorted paperwork piled on either side of my computer. Occasionally I have to shove it out of the way just to make room for my mousepad. There are a few areas, such as the space behind my monitor (which sits on the joint of my L-shaped desk) where dust settles and hasn't been cleaned since the government had a budget surplus. I usually eat at my desk, so there are sometimes crumbs laying around. I usually have one or two empty cans of Pepsi sitting on the desk, and I have my share of snacks in my desk drawer, including some tea bags, a box of Raman noodles (for an emergency lunch option), some packaged fruit leather strips, and Altoids ("curiously strong" for my curiously strong bad breath). It's been at least a couple months since I wiped down my keyboard and mouse with an alcohol wipe, and that was just because I had been sick and had to share my computer with someone one afternoon.

Despite my organization and hygiene, I'd still rank myself as about average (well, okay, maybe a little worse than average). Most of us keep snacks in our desks and have at least one good stack of unfiled paperwork. Being an office-eater does take some skill, though I prefer eating out when possible (as I've remarked before: HERE).

Recently a study came out that found the average office desk has a higher bacterial count than the average office toilet:
http://www.physorg.com/news90749958.html

That's right. Swabs of office equipment and belongings have more bacteria than the porcelain throne. Personally, I find it a bit alarming that my desktop has 400 times more bacteria than the spot where I and my colleagues plant our naked, pimply asses.

Interestingly, though women's desks were more organized, they were three to four times more bacteria-laden. The authors believe this is due in part to the fact that women were more likely to have snacks in their desks than men (75% of women), had cosmetics and hand lotions which could harbor bacteria, and were more likely to interact with young children (which, as I can assure you from personal experience, are little illness-incubators). But before us men can become too cocky about this result, we should note that the study found men's wallets to be the single worst item for bacterial concentration.

So far I haven't learned what species of bacteria were found. I'd say there's a pretty good chance most of them are benign. Remember, not all bacteria are "bad" bacteria.

The authors went on to report that desks that are regularly disinfected have 25% fewer bacteria. They suggest disinfecting once a day. Not likely, given my hectic schedule, but at least once a month would be a step up for me.

So the next time I head to my second office (the one with the flushable office chair and tiled floor), I'll remember this report. Maybe it will spur me to clean my office more often.

Or maybe I'll just eat my Raman noodles in the bathroom stall.

African-American Scientists: Shirley Ann Jackson

Continuing my celebration of Black History Month, this week's featured African-American scientist is Shirley Ann Jackson, a theoretical physicist, world expert in nuclear regulation, and current president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

A good profile: http://www.rpi.edu/president/profile.html

Dr. Jackson is the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate from M.I.T. — in any subject. She is one of the first two African-American women to receive a doctorate in physics in the U.S. She is the first African-American to become a Commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She is both the first woman and the first African-American to serve as the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and now the first African-American woman to lead a national research university. She also is the first African-American woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Shirley Jackson was born in Washington, D.C., in 1946. Strongly supported by her parents, she excelled in school, attending accelerated classes in math and science, and graduating in 1964 as valedictorian. She immediately entered M.I.T., studying theoretical physics while volunteering at the Boston City Hospital and the YMCA. Four years later she graduated with her bachelors degree, writing her dissertation on solid-state physics (which was at the forefront of theoretical physics at the time). Although accepted at Brown, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, Jackson decided to stay at MIT for her doctoral work, because she wanted to encourage more African American students to attend the institution. She earned her Ph.D. in elemental particle theory in1973.

In the '70s, Jackson focused on high-energy particle physics, including work at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. In the '80s and early '90s she worked on a wide array of physics including energy superlattices, superconductors, neutrino research, quantum physics, and opto-electronic materials, preparing or collaborating on over 100 scientific articles.

From 1991 to 1995, Dr. Jackson was professor of physics at Rutgers University, where she taught undergraduate and graduate students, conducted research on the electronic and optical properties of two-dimensional systems, and supervised Ph.D. candidates. She concurrently served as a consultant in semiconductor theory to AT&T Bell Laboratories

By the mid-'90s Jackson increasingly became affiliated with politics and nuclear policy. In 1995 President Bill Clinton appointed Dr. Jackson to serve as Chairperson of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), continuing until 1999. As Chairperson, she was the principal executive officer of and the official spokesperson for the NRC. While in this role, Jackson worked with a number of world organizations and served as a liaison between our nation and others for nuclear issues, including the International Atomic Energy Agency. Jackson served 10 years as a member of the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology, appointed by the governor.

Jackson holds an amazing 40 honorary doctoral degrees, including at Harvard University, and holds more awards than I could reasonably list here. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1998 for her significant and profound contributions as a distinguished scientist and advocate for education, science, and public policy. She was inducted into the Women in Technology International Foundation Hall of Fame (WITI) in June 2000. WITI recognizes women technologists and scientists whose achievements are exceptional.

Since 1999, Shirley Jackson has served as the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York. Dr. Jackson is married to Dr. Morris A. Washington, also a physicist. They have one son, Alan, a graduate of Dartmouth College.