Silver Jacket

Category: Science

  • When Ledes Mislead

    CuckoosnestGood science writing for a popular audience needs to be (at least) two things: entertaining and informative. Starting your article with a catchy headline and a snappy opening is always good, as long as they’re not misleading. Yesterday I encountered a prime example of snap over substance.

    It’s an article in Wired News about an emerging treatment for depression.

        The hed: "Shock Therapy, Version 2.0"

        The lede: "Shock treatment for depression is making a comeback, and it no longer resembles a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest."

    Here’s the thing: The article is NOT ABOUT SHOCK TREATMENT.

    It’s about repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, or rTMS. In rTMS, a device that causes a focused magnetic field is held against the head.

    Shock treatment is electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. In ECT, an electric current is briefly applied to the head to induce a seizure. (The therapeutic aspect actually results from the seizure, which lasts 30 seconds, not the jolt of current that triggers it, which lasts half a second. Originally, from 1933-1938, the seizures were induced by injecting chemicals.)

    The article says rTMS and shock treatment are "based on the same therapeutic principle." But they are very different. rTMS: magnets. Shock treatment: seizures. rTMS is not the "comeback" of shock treatment. It is a replacement for shock treatment.

    ShocktherapyI might also note that shock treatment has already had a comeback–the comeback began in the 1970’s, and ECT is still in wide use. To boot, it has not resembled the scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest since the early 1950’s. Patients are now given an IV carrying an anesthetic and a muscle relaxant, so they’re not awake, and their bodies don’t shake.

    Now, why would rTMS replace ECT? Both are safe and effective. In the short term they’re even better than Prozac. But ECT has this nasty side effect of memory loss and confusion.

    My mom had several sessions of rTMS in 1999 (with Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, the leading American researcher in the field), and I could sit in the room and talk with her during her appointments.  Shock treatment, on the other hand, fucks you up. Between 1997 and 1999 my mom had 28 ECT sessions. In 1997, she had six sessions after doing her Christmas shopping for the year. Christmas morning, we would open gifts from her and she would say, with genuine surprise, "What a great gift! Who gave you that?" We could only grin and say, "You did, Mom. Thanks."

    Actually, it was quite funny.

  • Frozen Dinner

    HufuLast night PBS broadcast an episode of NOVA titled "Deadly Ascent." The NOVA crew climbed Denali (Mt. McKinley) in Alaska with a team of researchers and mountaineers to figure out why our bodies break down at high altitudes and low temperatures.

    The team carried lots of extra food in their packs, because a storm could pin them down for days. To make matters more volatile, the team included one Dr. Howard Donner. I could see it in their eyes: no one wanted to run out of munchies in the wilderness with a Donner.

    Of course, their fears may have been unfounded. Last week a pair of archeologists revealed that they could find no evidence of cannibalism among the Donner Party. Using electron microscopes and DNA tests, they analyzed thousands of bone fragments at the Alder Creek campsite where the Donners spend 4 winter months in 1846-1847, but, alas, none of the bones belonged to people. The undramatic findings do not bode well for the archeologists’ negotiations with CBS regarding the upcoming series CSI:Alder Creek.

    Even without people eating people, the NOVA episode contains some level of adventure. But my favorite Denali account remains Art Davidson’s autobiographical tale of the peak’s first winter ascent. Even the book’s title gives me the chills: Minus 148 Degrees. (That’s with windchill, but still…)

    [I feel somewhat odd categorizing a post about the Donner Party under "Travel" and "Food and Drink," but what’s done is done.]

  • Voyage to Uranus (For Adults Only)

    RidingrocketsEver wanted the inside scoop on the NASA shuttle program? This month, astronaut Mike Mullane, who’s gone spaceborne three times, reveals some of the dirty details in his new book, Riding Rockets. Reuters published an interview with him today.

    On the business side of things, he claims the shuttle is "the most dangerous manned spacecraft ever flown, by anybody." (Obviously he hasn’t experienced Captain Whizbang’s Olde Time TNT Caboose to the Stars.) On the whimsical side of things, he provides TMI regarding the depth of his preparation for astronaut selection. "I was determined when the NASA proctologist looked up my ass, he would see pipes so dazzling he would ask the nurse to get his sunglasses." Hallelujah.

    Today, that level of preening might designate Mullane a metrosexual. But in close quarters, internal hygiene is not so trivial. In an account by astronaut Harrison Schmitt of his 1973 trip to the Moon, Schmitt describes a stinky side effect of lunar life support:

    All of us had to live with hydrogen gas in the water used to reconstitute various foods (basically the same as today’s trail foods)… Although the convenience of having a continuous supply of fresh water should be obvious, hydrogen going into our guts with the food had to come out, much to the discomfort of crew mates.

    (Overall, accommodations suited Schmitt better than some of the camps on his geological field trips in Norway and Alaska. "Certainly you had no black flies or mosquitoes to bother you on the Moon," he told me recently.)

    On Mullane’s website, we find the following bold announcement: "Riding Rockets is written for adult readers. It is inappropriate for children." For a more tame tale, check out Sally Ride’s To Space & Back, written for young readers. (Full disc: I work for her.) But, as it turns out, kids are interested in poop too. (Who knew?) Sally’s book has a full-page photo of a shuttle shitter. And when she speaks to kids, the most popular question is, "How do you go to the bathroom in space?" Very carefully.

  • Robots Are People Too

    ImethimatAnother thought on Natalie Angier’s exegesis of cuteness. (Recall: "The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby…")

    The anthropomorphism of robots is especially revealing of our instincts and cognition. Eight years ago I went to a talk titled  "Emergent, Situated, and Embodied: alternative AI and the aesthetics of behavior." (I got a woody from the title alone. I know, I’m dork.) Here’s what I wrote about it afterward:

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  • Mirror Mirror

    MirrorDiscovery News reported last month on a Japanese robot that’s been designed to recognize itself in a mirror and to imitate other robots. I had to blink a couple times when the reporter threw in this WTF comment from the researcher (emphasis mine):

    "Imitation, said Takeno, is an act that requires both seeing a behavior in another and instantly transferring it to oneself and is the best evidence of consciousness."

    Well, um, apparently not.

    Okay, presumably Junichi Takeno doesn’t believe his aping Aibo is conscious. But one of the aims of his group’s research is to model and understand human consciousness by developing self-aware robots. The article says the Roomba reproduction has "artificial nerve cell groups built into the robot’s computer brain." Whatever that means.

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  • Bootstraps or Leather Straps? Your Call.

    BouncerDo people with better memories store more information in their brains? Maybe not. Last month a cognitive neuroscientist (Edward Vogel at the University of Oregon) published a paper in Nature showing that certain types of memory capacity may have less to do with how much raw data you can store than with how selective you are at letting in relevant information. (Here‘s a press release describing the experiment.)

    Notably, Vogel describes the brain filter that keeps the bad stuff out as a nightclub bouncer. Regrettably, I think my brain hires bouncers from a temp service. Sometimes I get the "come one, come all" circus caller who will let in hobos, Hiltons, and stray cats ("Hey look at that piece of lint! Oh, wow, tin foil!") and sometimes I get the off-duty SWAT team member ("I’m sorry, did you just say something?").

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  • Fractals Aren’t Just for Hippies

    GdfractalI was struck today by the similarities between two essays encouraging interdisciplinary science education. These excerpts are both worth the read, but if you’re in a rush, just compare the parts in bold. The first:

    General science education, often an afterthought, needs to be reconsidered, because scientific literacy is more important than ever. It’s not just essential to being a competent citizen who can understand, for example, why hydrogen fuel cannot solve energy shortages, or that a child who swallows a pencil lead will not get lead poisoning. Science is also critical because it is blending with the other realms of human knowledge.

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  • To Sleep, Perchance to Kick Some Ass

    PunchoutSunday’s New York Times Magazine carries an essay by D.T. Max on literary Darwinism, the use of evolutionary psychology to analyze the behavior of characters in literature. Near the end, it takes a moment to ask, "What can the purpose of literature be, assuming it is not just a harmless oddity?" Some possibilities:

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  • Don’t bogart the happy pills, human!

    HappydogGiving psychoactive meds to pets has become a pretty common practice, but I never considered whether zoo animals need them too. Apparently they do, as National Geographic documents. I only question one of Nat Geo’s examples:

    "Polar bears are notorious for pacing," explained zoo veterinarian Doug Whiteside. "They wander in the wild for long distances and probably have this internal drive to walk, and zoos can’t provide them with the huge distance."

    Whiteside said Misty significantly reduced her pacing when she was given the drug [Prozac] in 1995. She only had to stay on it for five months to cure the disorder. [emphasis mine]

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  • Crank It Up, Beaker!

    BeakerdollThe question I encountered earlier about whether we can slow hurricanes with ice  reminded me of when I worked in the public affairs office of Fermilab, a national physics lab outside Chicago. The lab is home to the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, but people would occasionally call us with wildly non-particle-physics-related questions and suggestions. I fielded one call by a man arguing that we should look into preventing cases of summer heatstroke. His idea: store up snow during winter and give it to those without air conditioning in the summer. Now, I’m not a physicist, but I had some immediate ideas as to why this scheme might not be the panacea he suggested–collecting, refrigerating, and redistributing millions of tons of snow would prove intractably difficult and expensive–and I naively tried to share my reasoning with the caller (who apparently was a regular.) He remained unconvinced, and I promised to pass along the enterprising imagineer’s insights.

    My favorite call at Fermilab went like this:

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