It Stands for What?

One hundred years ago, more or less, a fictional character named Tom Swift was first introduced.  He was a young inventor who loved adventure.  Over the years, new series of books have been introduced with this Tom and later his son, Tom, Jr.  

Some of the inventions in the Tom Swift novels include: a photo telephone, a portable movie camera, a rifle with electric bullets, a house on wheels (house trailer), and an electric locomotive.  All of these books with these ideas were published before any real items were invented.

In 1969, a NASA researcher named Jack Cover started developing a new weapon.  He completed the device in 1974 and named it after his childhood hero, Tom Swift.  He called it a Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle, or TASER.  

I have always wondered what that acronym stood for.  It isn't anywhere close to what I imagined. 

Now you have heard something interesting.

Custom made body part

In the medical field, new advances are always being made in the quest to repair and replace broken body parts.  This is the story of one of those new techniques.

Organ transplants have been performed for many decades.  It has always required strong medication to keep the body from rejecting the alien organ.  Until now.

In 2008, a Colombian woman named Claudia Castillo was the first to receive a new procedure in the area of transplantation.  She needed a new trachea.  Her original had been damaged from tuberculosis.  The doctors were able to take a donor trachea, and using chemicals and enzymes, they were able to "wash away" all the cells from it, leaving a tissue scaffold made of cartilage.  Then, taking both cells that lined Castillo's windpipe and her own stem cells (immature cells from bone marrow), they were able to regenerate the trachea into a living organ.  Because the cells came from the recipient, no anti-rejection medicine was needed.  They had tricked her body into believing this new body part was her own.   Only four days after the transplantation, the new windpipe was "almost indistinguishable from adjacent normal airways."

Here is one account of that surgery.

How cool is that?  Think of the possibilities!

In the summer of 2011, surgeons in Stockholm, Sweden, tried a new version of the artificial trachea.  A man from Eritrea had cancer so advanced that emergency surgery was his only chance of survival.  (Where was he from?  Eritrea. I had never heard of it!  It is a small country on the continent of Africa not far from Egypt. They have been independent from Ethiopia since 1991.)

Doctors didn't have time to wait for a donor trachea, so they made a 3D image of his damaged windpipe, and then made a synthetic scaffolding out of polymer plastic.  This was bathed in the recipients own stem cells and in two days was ready to be transplanted.  The size and shape was custom-made for him.  The surgery was a success.

Here is a picture of what it looks like.  

Not every surgery has been successful.  There was another with this artificial scaffolding done on an American.  It seemed to go well, but he only survived four months.  Here is the story from Baltimore.

In the case of a 9-month-old infant born without a trachea, they used a biodegradable polymer scaffold that will dissolve over time as it is replaced with the child's own cartilage.  This way it will grow with her.

Now you have heard something interesting.

Embrace for babies

An incubator can cost up to $20,000 and requires electricity.  Many premature and low birth weight babies born in 3rd world countries live in rural areas with no electricity. Access to a hospital is difficult at best.  In many of these cultures, the babies are not named for the first month because so many of them die, many from hypothermia.  They have no fat on their bodies and cannot keep warm.  The mothers try various ways to keep them warm, from heating towels in the frying pan and wrapping the baby, to holding the child over hot coals.  But still, many die.  Those who survive are faced with a life full of health problems because so much of their energy went to trying to stay warm that their organs suffer. In India, more babies die every year than in any other country in the world.

In 2008, Stanford University put together a unique class.  It was multi-disciplinary and was called Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability.  One of the assignments for the students was to come up with an incubator (one use of an incubator is for warmth) for premature and low birth weight infants that would not only keep them warm, but use no electricity and cost less than $200.
 
Four of the students, Jane Chen, Rahul Panicker, Naganand Murty and Linus Liang, teamed up on the project.  Among the four, their schooling already consisted of a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, an Aerospace Engineer, and a Masters in Computer Science.  What they came up with was sheer genius!

Here it is.

It looks like a sleeping bag for a baby.  A pouch filled with paraffin wax and water is heated - either with an electric warmer or with boiling water being poured over it - and the pouch is slipped inside a pocket in the bag.  The baby is wrapped up inside the bag and the wax keeps the baby warm for 4-6 hours.  The inside of the bag is seamless so that bacteria won't collect, and it can be washed in boiling water.  It took two years of prototypes before this one came about.  The company, Embrace, is currently in India getting the distribution and training under way.  Then they will move to other countries.

It is hoped that over the next 5 years, 100,000 babies can be saved.

Now you have heard something interesting.

Just a personal note....

About a year ago, I signed up for a Netflix account.  Wow, it was fun! Instant movies and tv episodes. This was better than any "on-demand" offer on the satellite tv subscriptions we had in the past. One of my favorite shows was on Netflix.  The old Dick Van Dyke show.  I watched every episode.  Then on to Nova, Murder, She Wrote, and Andy Griffith.

My work is mostly in my basement.  Sewing for a living, and mostly working by myself, makes for a very boring day. In the past I had amused myself by listening to audio books and podcasts.  It was a great mix of learning and earning a living.  Then I got Netflix and it opened a new vista of entertainment.  I was hooked.

When my children were young, I noticed a very strong correlation between electronic games and tv vs. creativity.  When one went up, the other went down.  It was so obvious to me.  We didn't own a gaming system then.  Occasionally we would rent a Nintendo and some games and they would play to their hearts content for a few days. It was for specific days like New Year's Eve or for one of their birthdays.  I am sure they often felt like the odd man out among their friends because we didn't own one.  I am sure other mothers felt like my children were deprived.  One year a neighbor gave my son their used Nintendo when they upgraded.  (I was so proud of him a year or so later at the young age of 13 when he gave it to someone for Christmas who really longed for one.)

Anyway, what has not been so obvious to me is what has happened in the past year.  The movies and tv episodes that I have watched on Netflix have been good shows.  Nothing R rated or that would bring down my attitude.  But just like with my children, when my watching went up, my creativity and learning plummeted.

Yesterday I cancelled my Netflix account. I am excited to experience the rebound of what I have lost.  So many things to learn and books to read.  I'm sure my blog will be affected, too.

I am not saying Netflix is bad, but there needs to be a balance of things in our lives for us to be balanced.  I have an addictive side to my personality, and could not control the amount of time spent watching.  The only solution for me was to quit cold turkey.  Pushing that cancel button was a one-time decision and much easier than making the decision over and over again that I had seen enough for one day.

Now, on to some serious blogging.

The Real Deal

There once was an economics student who, while going to school, would sit in the campus bar at Catholic University in Rio, Brazil with his drinking buddies complaining about the hyperinflation plaguing the country, criticizing those in power who were not doing the right things to solve it.  They were sure that if given the chance, they would have the solution that would reverse the problem.

The inflation problems started in the 1950's when the Brazilian government decided to build a new capital, Brazilia.  There was not enough money in the coffers, so they started printing money. By 1990, the pattern of inflation was so entrenched, the people had lost any hope of the government being able to control it.

The rate of inflation was astounding.  Most years it was above 100%, and some of the bad months it reached 80%!  Between March 1989 and March 1990 it climbed to 5,000%.  A reputable journalist named Joelmir Beting took the official reports, did the math, and calculated that between the years of 1964 and 1994, the total amount of inflation reached 1,000,000,000,000,000% (that is one quadrillion percent)!!

President after president would come up with plans, they would fail, and then he would either be voted out or impeached.  And the cycle continued.

People would spend their paycheck as quickly as they could, sometimes running in front of the man who changed the price stickers on the cans of food so they could grab the can with the old price.

Then in 1992 with a new president came a new Financial Minister.  He didn't know anything about economics, so he called Edmar Bacha, the economist who used to complain in the campus bar.  He was invited to come up with a plan to fix the problem.  Bacha and his drinking buddy's had a plan.  They came up with a crazy one that had not been tried before.  The four friends set about explaining their idea.  First, you have to slow down the creation of money, they explained. But, just as important, you have to stabilize people’s faith in money itself.  People have to be tricked into thinking money will hold its value.

The four economists wanted to create a new currency that was stable, dependable and trustworthy.  The only catch: This currency would not be real.  No coins, no bills.  It was fake.  “We called it a Unit of Real Value — URV,” Bacha says. “It was virtual; it didn’t exist in fact.”

People would still have and use the existing currency, the cruzeiro.  But everything would be listed in URVs, the fake currency.   Their wages would be listed in URVs.  Taxes were in URVs.  All prices were listed in URVs.  And URVs were kept stable — what changed was how many cruzeiros each URV was worth.

Say, for example, that milk costs 1 URV. On a given day, 1 URV might be worth 10 cruzeiros. A month later, milk would still cost 1 URV. But that 1 URV might be worth 20 cruzeiros.  Every night the Central Bank would print a table of the conversion rate between a cruzeiro and the URV.

The idea was that people would start thinking in URVs — and stop expecting prices to always go up.  After a few months, they began to see that prices in URVs were stable. Once that happened, Bacha and his buddies could declare that the virtual currency would become the country’s actual currency. It would be called the real (pronounced hey-ow).

“Everyone is going to receive from now on their wages, and pay for all the prices, in the new currency, which is the real,” Bacha says. “That is the trick.”  And the idea was you would start thinking in URVs. Because just last week you got paid a thousand URVs. Milk costs one URV. Next month, you’d get a thousand URVs again and milk would still be one URV. The exchange into cruzeiros, what you actually handed the clerk would change. But the price in URVs would not.

So on July 1st, 1994, the Central Bank released the new money. Everyone in Brazil, collectively, as a country, tricked themselves into believing that this fake currency was real. More real than the actual physical bill they were holding in their hands. And that made all the difference. That made it real. For money, it’s crazy but that’s all you need; people to believe in it. Our four heroes literally turned Brazil’s economy in the opposite direction with their plan. Brazil went from being an irrelevant, economic basket-case to one of the most important economies out there. The eighth largest in the world.

Cardoso, the finance minister who hired our four heroes after admitting he knew nothing about economics, was elected president. Twice. And the four economists, despite the fact that most people don’t know them by name, really are seen as heroes. These guys made money worth something.

If you would like to listen to the one hour podcast of this story from This American Life, you can find it here.

Now you have heard something interesting.

Did you see that?

Chris Chabris, a psychology professor, and his co-researcher, Daniel Simons, a psychologist, have been conducting experiments on something they call Inattentive Blindness, or Change Blindness.

Here is an interesting YouTube video showing one of their studies. It shows study participants talking to a man behind a counter. The man bends down to supposedly get a packet of info, and another man stands up and finishes the conversation. The two men were wearing different colored shirts and had different colored hair. Chabris and Simons discovered that 75% of those in the study didn't notice the change.

How is this possible? Why would such a large portion of people not see the difference? It is because our senses are surrounded by so much data, we would be overwhelmed if we tried to process it all.  So we generally take in the most important things around us.

One day Chabris and Simons heard the story of Kenneth Conley, a Boston police officer, and decided to take their experiments from the lab to real life.

The story of Conley takes place in 1995. Just like every other police officer in Boston, he was intensely interested in the police radio report that an officer had been shot and the four black suspects were fleeing by car. There were 20 police cruisers involved in the chase all over town. It ended in a cul-de-sac when the four suspects jumped out and scattered in four directions.

The first police officer out of his car was a black officer named Michael Cox. Since he worked under cover, he was dressed in plain clothes. The next officers out of their car mistook him for a suspect and attacked him. They started beating and kicking him.

Conley then arrived on the scene and joined the chase for the suspects. He ran right past Cox who was being beaten. He always claimed he never saw it happening.  Soon after he passed, the mistake was realized and the beating stopped.

He was later convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, because he was not believed when he said he saw nothing. He was sentenced to 34 months in prison. No other officer ever came forward or was ever identified. The official report on Michael Cox's injuries, which kept him out of work for six months, was that he slipped on ice.

Chabris and Simons wanted to find out if Conley was telling the truth The instructions to the participants were simple. Follow a jogger for a certain distance along a path and count how many times he touches his hat. This was to keep the attention on the jogger, just as Conley's attention was on the suspect in front of him. Then a minute into the run, they had three students stage a fight just off the path. With two beating and kicking a third, it seemed obvious that they would be seen.

They conducted the experiment at different times of day with both men and women. They were very surprised to find that during the night hours, the same as the Conley incident, only a third of the participants noticed the fight, and during daylight hours, only 40% saw what was happening.  Chabris and Simons proved that it was possible for Conley to have missed seeing the beating, but by then he had served part of his sentence and the rest was dismissed because of a technicality.

Chabris points out that our inability to absorb visual information coupled with our mistaken belief that we actually are able to absorb a lot of it influences all kinds of behavior.

"This underlies problems with using cell phones while driving and all kinds of situations like that," Chabris says.

There is an interesting video on YouTube that will test your inattentive blindness.  Try it out.

Now you've heard something interesting.

CREEPY!!!

When I first heard about Number Stations on an NPR Story of the Day podcast, I was very curious.  Then I listened to some audio files.  Very interesting.  I started this blog a week ago, but I was home alone and listening to the sound bytes made me so nervous I had to stop.  Now my husband is here in the same room and I can proceed.  (Yes, I am a wimp, and I have never denied it!)

Shortwave radio refers to the HF (high frequency) portion of the radio spectrum.  The waves are shorter than those used in ordinary radio.  They can travel a great distance, even to other continents.  It is often used to communicate to ships and aircraft, or to remote areas where the wired communication is either not available or too expensive.  It became popular in the 1920's with amateurs communicating with each other.

During the cold war in the 1980's, shortwave radio stations came into being that have no call letters and are not identified.  They just broadcast letters or numbers 24 hours a day and some of them have music interspersed.  The music sounds like it is coming from an ice cream truck.  The purpose of these Number Stations, as they are called, is to give information to spies.  They are encrypted with something called a one-time pad, which is unbreakable code.

One-time pads are very mathematical, and are only used one time.  If they are done correctly, they cannot be cracked.  If you want to learn the math behind them, or how to make your own, here is a Wikipedia article to read.

There is a man in Britain who came up with The Conet Project, which consists of 4 hours of recordings of these Number Stations on 4 CDs.  They actually became a cult hit.  If you want to listen to any, this is the web site.  Scroll down a bit and you will find links to many audio files of these Number Stations.  (They all have the name irdail in the title.  This is the name of the company who produced the 4 CDs.)  Of those I listened to, the one I found most creepy is the one called the "swedish rhapsody irdial."  It is first on the list.  In it there is a bit of music and then a little girl counting in German.  

There was a news story done in Salt Lake City, Utah that is on Youtube. If you want to see it, here is the link.  In this newscast, they claim that "according to a British Official, Number Stations are illegal to listen to."

Whether or not they are illegal, they have no pull for me.

Now you have heard something interesting.

Of Migraines and Blind Spots

As an occasional sufferer of migraines, my ears perked up when Chris Smith, host of the podcast "The Naked Scientist," started talking about the pain effect bright lights have on a person with a migraine.  The word is photophobia. It is not a fear of light, but a description of eye discomfort in bright light.

There are blind people who have photophobia when they have a migraine. This intrigued some scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.  They conducted a study and found that the only blind people who could experience photophobia were those who could tell night from day.

At the back of the eyeball is the optic nerve, sometimes called the blind spot, which carries information from the eye to the brain.  This information about light is carried to the brain and causes electrical stimulation there. When there is already pain and disturbance in the brain from a migraine, this extra electrical stimulation increases the pain.

Those whose blindness involves damage to the optic nerve not only cannot distinguish light and dark, but have a hard time regulating their nights and days.  Light sets our circadian rhythm - telling our body it is time to sleep or wake.

Maybe you have taken a "blind spot test" before.  Here is one you can perform at night outside. Look at the moon.  Gently cover your left eye and continue to look at the moon with your right eye.  Slowly move your gaze to the left.  You might have to adjust your gaze up or down slightly. Soon you will not see the moon anymore, but just the halo around it.

Each of our eyes has a blind spot, but in each eye it is off center enough that the loss is compensated for by the other eye.  Our brains do a good job in filling in the details and we don't really notice what we are missing.

If you would like to read more about the study, you can find it here.

Now you've heard something interesting.

What do cats, deer, and wolf spiders have in common?

One of the many podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis is called BrainStuff.  It is well written by Marshall Brain and only lasts 4 or 5 minutes.  There is one episode from October 2010 that really interested me. 

Marshall took a head lamp outside one night.  It was around his head and he turned it on and started looking around the yard.  There was a pile of dirt and it seemed to be sparkling.  Many, many points of light.  He could not figure out what it was.  So he got closer and found that it was many, many wolf spiders.  The light from his headlamp was reflected in their eyes.

It turns out that wolf spiders have the same thing that deer, cats, dogs, and raccoons have in their eyes.  It is called tapetum, a shiny layer behind the retina. Light passes into their eye, hits the retina, reflects from the tapetum and hits the retina again.  This makes things look much brighter, making it easier to hunt at night.  It also makes their eyes seem to glow when light hits it.

The light shining from the head lamp reflected off the spider's eyes and returned again to its source.  If Marshall had been holding a flashlight down by his waist, he would not have seen this reflection. 

(Hmmm.  This is a little like the last post, where light bounces off a corner cube reflector on the moon.)

Have you ever wondered whether a spider is poisonous?  The answer is no. So far as I know, there are no poisonous spiders. There are venomous spiders. Venomous means that the creature's bite or sting is toxic. Poisonous means that it is toxic if you eat it. 

Now you have heard something interesting.

Mirror, Mirror on the Moon

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon more than 40 years ago, I was just a youngster and don't remember it at all.  Most assuredly my mom explained to me the historical event that was happening, but it just didn't stick in my memory banks.  I just learned something about that trip that I had never known before.

Just about an hour before the end of that famous Apollo 11 mission on July 21, 1969, these two astronauts put down a 2-foot wide panel of 100 mirrors. 

 It is called the Apollo 11 lunar laser ranging retroreflector array.

 "Here's how it works: A laser pulse shoots out of a telescope on Earth, crosses the Earth-moon divide, and hits the array. Because the mirrors are 'corner-cube reflectors,' they send the pulse straight back where it came from. 'It's like hitting a ball into the corner of a squash court,' explains Carroll Alley, the projects principal investigator during the Apollo years.  Back on Earth, telescopes intercept the returning pulse--'usually just a single photon,' he marvels."

If you arrange 3 mirrors in a shape like the corner of a rectangular box, with the reflectors on the inside, then any light which hits the reflectors, at essentially any angle, will bounce off each mirror and end up heading back exactly the direction from which it came. This makes such a mirror arrangement very useful, because you always get a nice strong reflection.

Here is another image that shows two different paths of light.  Even though the source is from two different places, the beam is returned to the source of the laser.

Scientists still use these mirrors on the moon.  They have learned some interesting things.  First, that the moon is spiraling away from the Earth at a rate of 3.8 cm per year.  The NASA web site says the ocean tides are responsible.  As the moon orbits Earth, it creates a bulge of water that travels round the planet behind it. This bulge - which we experience as tides - exerts a gravitational pull on the moon, slowing it down as it circles Earth at a distance of 240,000 miles. As a consequence of being held back by this pull, the orbit of the moon becomes altered and it moves slowly away from Earth

Second, it is now believed that the moon has a liquid core.  They have also learned that the universal force of gravity is very stable.

There are a total of five of these mirror arrays.  Apollo 11, 14, and 15 missions each placed one, as well as two Soviet Lunokhod landers.  They don't work as well as they used to work.  Dust has accumulated on them and sometimes light doesn't come back, and when it does it is much fainter.  The mirrors are losing their ability to reflect back laser light precisely, which hinders accurate measurements.

Now you have heard something interesting.

What rhymes with beige? Why, bacteriophage of course!

Bacteriophages are small viruses that infect bacteria and kill them by multiplying and essentially filling the bacterial cell to bursting.  Here is a small animation of the life cycle of one bacteriophage.  The word lytic means that the cell is destroyed by the process.  After the phages reproduce inside the bacteria cell, they burst out and the cell is demolished.  Adsorption is the gathering together of the phage on the surface of the cell.

The bacteriophage has attachment sites on it that correspond with receptor sites on the bacteria.  In other words, they don't attack just any cell, only specific cells.  So a bacteriophage that is meant to destroy e. coli (these are called T4 bacteriophage) will only attach to an e. coli cell and then multiply, destroying the e. coli cell.

These viruses are much smaller than the bacteria that they destroy. Each time a phage invades a bacteria cell, it produces between 50 and 200 new phage viruses within the bacteria cell.  Once the host bacteria are destroyed and are no longer present, the phages die off, too.

Phages are found all over the planet.  Anywhere that bacteria live and thrive phages will be found.  They are especially abundant in water.

Phages have been known since ancient times.  There have been documented reports of river waters having the ability to cure infectious diseases, such as leprosy. In 1896, Ernest Hanbury Hankin reported that something in the waters of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India had marked antibacterial action against cholera and could pass through a very fine porcelain filter.

They have been used for over 60 years as an alternative to antibiotics in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.  They are seen as a possible therapy against multi-drug resistant strains of many bacteria. 

Phages were discovered to be anti-bacterial agents but the medical trials performed in western countries in the early 1900's were poorly conducted and the scientists really didn't understand what a phage was.  Many of the trials were conducted on totally unrelated diseases such as allergies or viral infections.  So phage therapy was ruled as untrustworthy.  Soon antibiotics were discovered and widely used.  They are popular because they can treat a wide range of diseases and are easy to manufacture and then store. 

Development of phage therapy was largely abandoned in the West, but continued throughout the 1940s in the former Soviet Union. It was used for treating bacterial infections throughout the country, including the soldiers in the Red Army.  The literature was published in Russian or Georgian and so it was not available for many years in the United States.  It is still used in the country of Georgia and other Eastern European countries.

In August, 2006 the United States FDA approved using bacteriophages on cheese to kill the Listeria monocytogenes bacteria.  In July 2007, the same bacteriophages were approved for use on all food products.

Government agencies in the West have for several years been looking to Georgia and the Former Soviet Union for help with exploiting phages for counteracting bioweapons and toxins, such as anthrax and botulism.  There are many developments with this among research groups in the US.

There seem to be many advantages of developing bacteriophages for use in many fields, including clinically.  But there are a few downsides, also.  One is getting the phage to the bacteria.  If used orally, some might not pass the stomach acid without being destroyed.  If used as a cream or as an injection, it still needs to get to where it is going without the body's immune system seeing it as a foreign threat.

A more non-scientific downside to the use of phage therapy is that due to intellectual property laws and the fact that currently its use is public, so the technique of phage therapy would not be patentable. The development of drugs is very expensive and larger pharmaceutical companies have no motivation to go through the complicated and costly process if there is no patent protection on the products they may create.

Now you have heard something interesting.

Running and Breathing

On a recent NOVA podcast (09/03/2010 "Chasing Down Dinner"), David Levin talked about the way animals breath.

A quadruped mammal is four legged.  Cows, zebras, and dogs are examples.  In these animals, their stride is synchronized with their breathing.  A stride is one full cycle of leg movement while walking or running..  For instance, in a human, a stride is two steps.  When running, a quadruped's breathing is aided by the movement of the muscles and skeleton.

Here is a picture of a contraption put together by a physiology professor to teach how this happens.  "A" shows the animal moving the front legs forward during running.  The lungs expand at the same time and the animal inhales.  "B" shows the back legs coming forward and the animal would then exhale.  The ratio of stride to breath in a quadruped is 1:1.  One stride, one breath.  When the stride is lengthened, the volume of air into the lungs is increased.

As humans, our natural inclination is to also breath in synchrony to our stride.  But because we are upright and on two feet (bipedal) the ratio is different and can be more flexible.  The normal ratio is 2:1. Two strides to one breath.  A slow run can change that ratio to 4:1.

Humans, as a whole, are better adapted to endurance rather than speed.  Dennis M. Bramble, a biomechanist and vertebrate biologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and Daniel E. Lieberman, a biomechanist and anthropologist at Harvard University, have been studying the history of running in human beings.  They have come to the conclusion that our ancestors had an advantage with this ability to run long distances.  The animals they were chasing could not sustain a long distance.  Quadrupeds cannot pant when galloping, so their bodies would overheat and they would have to stop and try to cool off.  Meanwhile, the humans would continue in the chase and catch up.  The animals would then run again and soon were too overheated to run any longer, making it relatively easy to catch dinner.

Now you have heard something interesting.

http://advan.physiology.org/content/33/4/315.full
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_3_114/ai_n13664996/

And Eye(tooth) for an Eye

Sharron "Kay" Thornton is a sixty-one-year-old woman who lives in Mississippi.  Ten years ago she lost her eyesight due to a rare skin disease, called Stevens-Johnson syndrome, that attacked her eyes, damaged her cornea (the clear window at the front of the eye), and left her blind.  She was not eligible for a cornea or an artificial cornea transplant.  Doctors tried a stem cell treatment, but it was unsuccessful.

Last year, she went to see Dr. Victor L. Perez of the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine.  He decided to try a procedure that was developed in Italy but had never been done in the United States.  It is called modified osteo-odento-keratoprosthesis.

They took out one of her eye teeth, also called canine teeth, and part of the bone above that tooth.  They shaved it down to the proper shape and size and punched a hole in the middle, where an acrylic lens was inserted.  This was implanted into her shoulder for 3 months while they waited for the bone and the lens to fuse. 

The scars from around her cornea were removed and moist cheek tissue was used to cover the eye to rehabilitate it.  When the time was right, the tooth/bone/lens piece was removed from her shoulder and implanted in her eye.  It was carefully aligned with her retina. The bone keeps it from moving out of place. The cheek tissue is still on the eye, but has a hole where the lens pokes out.  She cannot close her eye fully, and the cheek tissue helps to keep it moist.

Here is a graphic from the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute that shows what was done.  When the bandages were removed, she had 20/70 vision!  They expect it will get better with time.

The procedure has been performed on 600 people around the world.  Very ingenious.  It seems to work best for people who have been blinded by chemical burns, thermal burns, rare reactions to drugs, and other cases where normal corneal transplants would not work.



There is another video of a man in the UK who was blind for 26 years.  You can go to youtube to watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4vE7QlbVak  (7:28 min long)

Now you have heard something interesting.

The Paths of Legends

This past week I finished the book That's Not in My American History Book by Thomas Ayres. It was very interesting and had many stories -- some that were familiar and some that were new to me.  Here is one I didn't know.

Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States, was the first president to have an assassination attempt on his life. It happened on January 30th, 1835. President Jackson had just attended a congressional funeral held in the House Chamber of the Capitol. As he exited, Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter, pointed a pistol at Jackson and fired.  The percussion cap exploded, but the bullet did not discharge.

Jackson moved toward Lawrence and started beating him with his cane. During the ensuing scuffle, Lawrence took another pistol out of his pocket and pulled the trigger. But that gun also misfired. Bystanders joined in, wrestling Lawrence to the ground and disarming him. One of them was Rep. Davy Crockett of Tennessee. (For those of you over a certain age, now is the time to start singing, "Davy, Davy Crockett. King of the wild frontier!")

About a hundred years later the Smithsonian Institute examined both of these guns and couldn't find anything wrong that would have made them misfire.

Richard Lawrence was mentally ill. He believed that he was Richard III, rightful heir to the throne of England and that President Jackson was keeping him from it.

The case went to trial. The prosecuting attorney wanted Lawrence to get the death penalty because, he said, any attack on the president of the United States is an attack on the United States. The defense attorney used the reasoning, for the first time in a court of law, that the prisoner should be found not guilty for the reason of insanity.

The jury deliberated for a very short time.  They bought the argument of the defense attorney.  Richard Lawrence spent the rest of his life in mental institutions.  

The prosecuting attorney was very disappointed.  He was the man whom you know as the author of The Star Spangled Banner, written twenty-one years earlier. It was Francis Scott Key.

Now you have heard something interesting.

I Ain't Scared of You

Toxoplasmosis.  If you are pregnant or are planning on becoming pregnant, this is one parasite you should know about and work hard at avoiding. It can pass through the placenta and negatively affect a growing fetus.  The consequences vary from mild to devastating.  It is transmitted to humans through cat feces.  It can be contracted from cleaning a cat litter tray, eating raw or undercooked meat, drinking unpasteurized milk, eating unwashed vegetables, working in the garden without gloves, or from exposure to a child's uncovered sandbox.

Dr. Rober Sapolsky calls it "Toxo."  He is a leading neuroscientist who is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, as well as a research associate in Kenya.  He has received numerous awards for his scientific studies.  Here is an interview with him talking about Toxo.  It is fascinating and about 24 minutes long.  Well worth watching every minute, in my opinion.

In the life cycle of this parasite, it reproduces in the gut of a cat.  The eggs are shed in the feces, which are then picked up by rats and other animals that just might get eaten by a cat.  Toxoplasma forms cysts throughout the rat, including the brain. And yet a rat that is infected with it is perfectly healthy. That makes good sense for the parasite, since a cat would not be particularly interested in eating a dead rat. But scientists at Oxford discovered that the parasite "changes the rats in one subtle but vital way."

Rats respond negatively to the smell of a cat. The stress response in the rat goes up, and his instinct is to avoid the area where the smell was detected.  Makes sense.  When a rat is infected with Toxo, and smells a cat, the fear circuit in the rat does not activate.  Not only is he not afraid of the cat, but the sexual arousal circuit is activated slightly.  Wow!  This parasite has figured out how to get back into a cat so it can reproduce!  Just make the rat want to be around the cat, who will eat him.

When scientists in the UK looked at the genome (the genes and DNA) for Toxoplasma, they were astonished to find two versions of a gene that makes dopamine.  Dopamine is the neurotransmitter in the brain that is all about reward and anticipation of reward.  It is involved with emotional response, and the ability to experience pleasure and pain.  So in other words, this parasite has the gene that allows it to plug into the reward system of the brain.

So what about humans?  Can it affect our brains?  Besides the disaster of Toxo getting into the nervous system of a pregnant woman and her fetus, there are other things that go on in humans.

The first part of the infection might have symptoms like inflammation, sore throat, just not feeling well.  Then those symptoms disappear.  This is when the cysts form in the brain. For a rat, it is when the parasite makes the dopamine and the strange behavior of seeking out a cat occurs.  In men who are infected, their behavior can become impulsive.  Women less so.  There are two different groups, independent of each other, who have studied this and find that men who are affected are 3 to 4 times more likely to be killed in a high risk activity, such as reckless speeding in a car.

The personality of humans being changed by some invading organism is not a rare pattern.  The rabies virus changes both animal and human brains to become more aggressive. It knows how to make the host want to bite someone and pass on the particles of the virus.  And this parasite knows how to perpetuate its existence.

There are other areas that are being studied as having a possible link to Toxoplasma.  One is schizophrenia.  There is too much dopamine in the brain of a schizophrenic, and there is some evidence of a rate of increase to children whose mothers had cats when she was pregnant.  There are also questions about "cat women" being infected.  Scientist are still studying these and other aspects of this condition.

Now you have heard something interesting.

To Feel Nothing

Hansen's Disease, formerly known as leprosy, still exists around the world.  Since the development of medicines for it, it is no longer a fatal illness, nor has is it ever been highly infectious. It is a chronic illness.  The incubation period is anywhere from nine months to 20 years.  That makes it very difficult to pinpoint where or when one has been exposed to the disease.

The bacteria that causes Hansen's Disease prefers the parts of the body that are cooler -- the earlobes, the nose, the fingers and toes, and the eyes, though it can be anywhere on the body.  It resides in the nerves and damages them.  Where the sores are -- there is diminished or no feeling.  The devastating thing about the eyes being affected is that the blink reflex is lost.  Without blinking, the eyes dry out and foreign matter is not washed away.

This is a picture of a Belgium priest named Father Damien who spent sixteen years on the island of Molokai in Hawaii caring for the lepers who had been exiled there. He contracted Hansen's Disease and died in 1889 at the age of 49.

There is a book called "The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai" by John Tayman.  It is a very interesting read.  This quote from the books shows some ingenuity.

"Doctors tried training patients to blink on schedule, using a timer or some other device. The technique worked in some cases, but only if the patient was physically able. Leprosy bacilli also attack the nerve controlling eyelid muscles, creating a condition known as lagophthalmos, in which the person is unable to close the eyelids. In such cases surgeons rigged a thread of muscle from the jaw to the lid, which caused the person to blink as he chewed - doctors then handed them a pack of gum."

Now you have heard something interesting.

Left or Right?

When you pick up an infant, is it more likely for you to hold the child in your left arm or your right?  It has been found that 70-80% of women, regardless of which hand is dominant, hold babies with their left arm. 

Dr. Karl on a Triple J podcast pointed this out.  He said that with the help of physicians, mothers were studied quietly.  After examining an infant, the doctor would return the infant to the mother to the midline of her body.  Not toward the left nor the right.  The majority would take the baby and hold the child in her left arm. 

There are many different studies that I have read.  There seems to be two ideas about why this side preference might occur.  Some state that intuitively and subconsciously moms have figured out that the baby is more calm on the left side.  Before birth the baby can hear the mother's heart beating and it is a familiar, comforting sound. After birth, the baby can hear the mother's heart beat better when being held on the left side. This conclusion has many critics and is not well supported.

Many more studies believe that the left-side preference has to do with holding the baby on the side of the body that connects to the part of the brain which is dominant for processing emotions.  A mother is then better able to read the emotions of the child and react better. 

One of these studies found that mothers who cradle the baby on the right side speak higher and louder to their child than those who hold on the left.  Some mothers go back and forth between holding right and left.  Their pitch and volume went up when holding on the right.

There have also been studies about which side people prefer when hugging or kissing.  The majority of people tilt their heads to the right when kissing, and approach another person's left side when hugging.  Some of these reports think that the left-side baby cradling preference and the left-side approach to hugging are related.

There are many, many sites with this information.  Here are a few links. 

General overview
Do you kiss to the right or left?
Hugging preference
Pitch and volume differences
Left-sided baby cradling preference studies done on great apes.

Being right-handed, I always thought that I held my children on my left hip so that I could use my right hand to do things.  According to these studies, right-handers in general feel the same as I do.  And left-handers say they cradle on the left because that is the stronger arm.  It turns out it all might come down to our subconscious knowing the best way and our conscious mind coming up with a reason.

Now you have heard something interesting.

Can You Hear that Color?

Have you ever heard of synesthesia?  It is an accident of nature that would be fun to have.

Synesthesia is when two different senses are abnormally joined.  For instance, some synesthetes always see a certain color when they hear a certain musical note.  The most common form is colored numbers or letters, but any combination is possible.  There is a report of one man who tasted chocolate when he said his wife's name.  Another man claims that cucumbers taste pink.

Every synesthete experiences things uniquely.  For instance, one who sees an A major chord as purple, always sees it as purple.  But another might see that sound as yellow.

"I could never figure out why I was such a poor student at Math, until I received a 32 color pen for a present. FINALLY NUMBERS WERE THE RIGHT COLOR, 2 was yellow, 3 was green, 4 was orange, 5 was red, and so on. My teacher thought I was nutty, but when she invested in colored chalk, my Math scores SOARED... she just had to get the colors right. Oddly another student and I got into a fist-fight because he thought 3 should be blue, and 8 should be green... I won, and I made him cry, too..."

Estimates of the frequency of synesthesia range from 1 in 250,000 to 1 in 2,000.  Some famous people have this condition.  Most seem to be creative, such as musicians and artists.
Leonard Bernstein
Duke Ellington
Billy Joel
Stevie Wonder
Eddie Van Halen
Jimi Hendrix 
Frank Lloyd Wright
Victor Hugo 

Synesthetes tend to be:
Women: in the U.S., studies show that three times as many women as men have synesthesia; in the U.K., eight times as many women have been reported to have it. The reason for this difference is not known
Left-handed: synesthetes are more likely to be left-handed than the general population.
Neurologically normal: synesthetes are of normal (or possibly above average) intelligence, and standard neurological exams are normal.
In the same family: synesthesia appears to be inherited in some fashion; it seems to be a dominant trait and it may be on the X-chromosome.

The causes of synesthesia remain unknown. Some scientists have suggested that everyone is born synesthetic but that as the brain develops, the different areas become segregated.  It is not known why synesthetes retain these connections.  There might be a biological answer, because the condition tends to run in families.

For further reading, you might enjoy these books.
The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard E. Cytowi
Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia by Richard E. Cytowi

Now you have heard something interesting.

Northern Lights

I have always been fascinated with the Aurora Borealis, also known as the northern lights.  It has been my dream to go to Alaska or somewhere in the northern latitudes and see them someday.  Citizens of Fairbanks, Alaska, at a latitude of 65 degrees north, can see the Northern Lights an average of 240 nights a year!

One night a few years ago, I went outside in my back yard and was a little mystified at what I saw in the sky. It was well past the sunset, but the sky in the West had streaks of red as if the sun were just going down.  And the sky in the East had streaks of red as if the sun was about to rise. It was absolutely beautiful! I just stood outside and gazed in wonder at the spectacle.  In fact, it took me a while to figure out what it was that I was seeing. Those northern lights coasting farther south than usual.

I live in Pleasant Grove, Utah, (about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City) at a latitude of 40 degrees North.  Although it is not normal for the northern lights to drift this far, during very large auroral events, they have been seen as far south as Mexico City.  It is a rare sight there.

There is a podcast that is enjoyable to listen to called The Naked Scientist.  It sounds intriguing, but there is nothing a child shouldn't hear in this podcast.  The other day they described what happens when the northern lights are visible.

The sun has bursts of energy called solar flares.  A solar wind carries these charged energy particles from the sun and they collide with the Earth's magnetic field.

This collision produces the lights.  It generates as much as a million megawatts of electricity.  One megawatt will supply enough power to sustain 1,000 averages households for one year.  So a million megawatts would power one billion average households for one year!  A small part of this electricity causes discharge in the upper atmosphere and creates light much in the same way as a neon sign creates light. The kind of atom in the solar wind determines the color. 

*The aurora in the southern hemisphere is known as the Aurora Australis.  It is almost a mirror image of the Aurora Borealis.
*Auroras have also been observed on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Mars, and Venus.
*The aurora gets its name from the Roman goddess of dawn.

Now you have heard something interesting. 

Vestibular System and Hyperactivity

It is so satisfying to me to learn something new, and then run across a reference to it from some other source.  Today I have a great example.  In my very first blog post in January, 2010, the subject was the vestibular system.  It is the part of the inner ear that does not process sound, but rather helps with balance, movement through space - even in the dark, response to gravity, sense of space, etc.  I loved learning that.

Last month I finished reading a book called "Emergence" by Temple Grandin.  She is a woman who has a Ph.D and has "recovered" from autism.  In one of the stories of her memory as a child, she relates how she went to a fair and ended up on a ride where one stands by an outside curving wall, the ride spins around very quickly, and then the floor falls away.  She described her fear and the overwhelming amount of sensory input.  Then, surprisingly, it became relaxing to her.  One sentence in the story caught my eye.  She referred to a study that has been done recently of the benefits of spinning in an office chair a few times a week for a child who is hyperactive and how it calms them.

Well, that got my attention! But she did not source the study or give any more details.  So I went to the Internet and have been reading many pages on the vestibular system and how it affects us.  I did not find the study that she mentioned, but I did find some interesting things.

"Children with overactive vestibular systems prefer slow movement, avoid risk-taking and avoid activities that require good balance and fast movement. They are fearful of falling, elevators, going up and down stairs and being tipped upside down."



Children with an underactive vestibular system "enjoy fast spinning and swinging. They enjoy jumping, partake in dangerous activity and move while sitting."  This constant movement is the body trying to wake up the vestibular system.



Just some food for thought. Kids who fidget in class are actually doing something good for their learning.

Do you think your vestibular system is just right, overactive, or underactive?  I definitely have an overactive one. I get motion sick in IMAX theaters.  When we went to see Avatar, I was looking at the exit because I was so sure I would need to run to the restroom.  In fact, in reading about this, I came across an article with information about others who have had the same problem.  I also get dizzy if my husband spins me around while we are dancing.

Here are some links for further reading.

http://vestibular.org/vestibular-disorders/symptoms.php
http://spectrumcenter.net/addadhd.html
http://www.smartcoach.us/VestibularandADHD.aspx
http://www.newhorizons.org/spneeds/adhd/nicholls.htm

Now you have heard something interesting.