Wearable Boredom Detector

Researchers at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab are developing a mobile boredom detector designed to clip onto a pair of glasses and warn the wearer if they are annoying, or even boring the pants off the people they meet. The device is the brain child of MIT's Rana El Kaliouby and she hopes it will make life easier for people with autism who have trouble interpreting the body language of others. It works by relaying images of the facial expressions made by people chatting to the wearer to a handheld computer which analyses the pictures and picks out how the individual is responding to the conversation. Specifically the software focuses on movements of the eyebrows, lips and nose and also tracks nods and shakes of the head, and head tilting, changes in which can be boredom or mood-giveaways. If it spots any of these, the handheld computer vibrates alerting the user to change tack, or draw the conversation to a close. The researchers trained the computer by showing it over 100 eight-second video clips of actors displaying specific emotions. Now, when presented with prevously unseen video clips, the system correctly predict peoples' emotions 90% of the time when analysing actors, and 64% of the time when looking at shots of ordinary people. They're now training their software with footage from movies and webcams, and working on a way to shrink the camera and the handheld computer to a comfortable size.

2nd Apr 2006

Saturn's Lop-sided Satellite

An underground ocean may have caused one of Saturn's moons, Enceladus, to topple over by destabilising its spin. Using data from the Cassini spacecraft, Robert Pappalardo and Francis Nimmo from the University of California in Los Angeles discovered the ocean through the presence of geysers in the moon's icy crust. The geysers are currently at the south pole of Enceladus, but the researchers believe that they began life at the the equator. As the hot, low density ocean water broke through the ice to form the geyser, the moon's spin was disrupted and caused the whole moon to tumble. The result was the geyser finally settling in its present place on the south pole. Luckily this is unlikely to happen on Earth due to its massive size, so Caribbean cruisers can leave their Arctic jackets at home!

2nd Apr 2006

Proof That Einstein Was Right

Dr Simon Rainville from Laval University, Canada

Chris - E=mc^2 is probably the most important equation in the whole of science and it's one scientific equation that most people will have heard. But how do we know that Einstein was actually right? He was a theoretician and didn't do any experiments. For years people have been assuming that he was right, but now they've gone and tested it. Simon Rainville from the University of Laval in Canada along with his colleagues at MIT have actually done the experiments to prove that E really does equal mc^2.

Simon - One of the most famous equations in all of science is E=mc^2. We've all heard of it. This formula was derived by Einstein about 100 years ago. This formula says that mass and energy are equivalent. What we've done is directly tested this relationship. We independently measured mass 'm' and energy 'E', and 'c' which is the speed of light is constant in our system so we don't have to measure it. We compared these measurements of 'e' and 'm' and we actually found that Einstein is correct.

Chris - So in his grave he's breathing a sigh of relief that he was right. But getting down to the nuts and bolts of it, how did you actually do this? What was the experimental protocol that you followed?

Simon - The idea is that the nuclei of atoms are made of protons and neutrons and these are the building blocks of nuclei. If you shoot neutrons at atoms, sometimes the nucleus will absorb one of these neutrons and become a little bigger. When that happens, there is some energy that binds the neutron to its new nucleus in order to hold it together. Because of the relationship that mass is the same as energy, we know that energy has to come from somewhere. This is because energy is conserved and so it comes from the mass. In other words, the mass of the big nucleus is slightly smaller than the mass of the original nucleus plus the neutron when we conserve them separately.

Chris - How did you actually make those measurements? The kinds of tolerance in your experiments shows to the extent of 0.00004% that E=mc^2 is correct. But how did you actually do it?

Simon - For that we had to measure the energy to that level of precision. That was done by measuring the wavelength of the little gamma rays. When the nucleus relaxes from its excited state after absorbing a neutron, the energy is emitted in the form of gamma rays. These have been measured with a very precise spectrometer and that gives you 'E'. Independently out team at MIT measured the small difference in mass. The way we did that was by isolating a single atom or molecule of the two species or nuclei we were interested in. We put them in the heart of our apparatus, which is a big magnet. Believe it or not, this apparatus allowed us to hold on to these single molecules for weeks and then measure their motion in the trap very precisely, which is proportional to their mass. In fact, the measurements that we're presenting in this paper are the world's most precise mass measurements. That's equivalent to measuring the distance between Boston and Los Angeles with an error less than the width of a human hair.

April 2006

Science Update - Antidepressants and Flapping Planes

Chelsea Wald and Bob Hirshon from the AAAS

 

Helen - We're now going to go over to Chelsea Wald and Bob Hirshon from the AAAS for this week's Science Update. This week we'll be finding out whether anti-depressant drugs really stop you feeling blue, and 'is it bird, is it a plane', we look to the sky for a plane that flaps its wings.

Chelsea - For the Naked Scientists this week we'll be learning about a tiny plane that flaps its wing, but first, the use of antidepressant drugs has sky rocketed in the past two decades. But scientists are examining whether those drugs are really curing depression or simply masking it.

Bob - And according to a new study in mice, the roots of depression may lie in parts of the brain that anti-depressants can't get to. It was led by scientist Eric Nestler at the University of Texas Southwest Medical Centre. His team found that when small mice were repeatedly bullied by larger mice, they lost interest in food, sex and socialising like depressed people. Their brains also shut down production of a key protein in the hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in human depression. Anti-depressants temporarily counteracted the problem but didn't fix the underlying cause.

Eric - This could well be one mechanism of why people on anti-depressants for either depression or post-traumatic stress disorder or social anxiety relate syndromes, often have to remain on their medication for years or sometimes a lifetime.

Bob - These findings could point the way towards a more permanent cure.

Chelsea - Bugs and birds flap their wings. Aeroplanes don't. But now there's an exception to this simple rule of thumb.

Bob - And it's called the DelFly. It's a foot-long plane inspired by the dragonfly and developed by engineering students at Delft University in the Netherlands. Team leader Dan van Genickan says the flapping wings allow the plane to fly fast or slow and even to stop and hover. Thanks to a miniature camera that interacts with computers on the ground, the DelFly can be programmed to recognise almost anything, like safety hazards at a construction site.

Dan - You could tell it to send a signal if it sees a crack in a pipe, for example. Then it just flies around and as soon as it sees something that is predefined, it will give a signal to the base station and say that it's found it.

Bob - Of course it could also be a powerful surveillance tool in foreign combat zones or domestic terrorist targets.

Chelsea - Well that's all for this week's Science Update. Next week we'll hear from a scientist who is studying the link between pain and obesity. Until then, I'm Chelsea Wald.

Bob - And I'm Bob Hirshon for the AAAS, the science society. Back to you Naked Scientists.

 

April 2006

When Size Doesn't Matter

Dr Philip Shaw, US National Institute of Mental Health

Chris - Now people often seem to be undecided when it comes to whether size is important. But in the case of the developing human brain, it looks like brighter children, with higher IQs, are that way inclined because their brains are better at re-organising themselves. Philip Shaw, from the US National Institute of Mental Health in Washington DC, has brain scanned large numbers of children over the course of their development and also measured their IQs. Intriguingly, the most intelligent children often started with the least grey matter but also showed the greatest rate of structural changes in different parts of the brain.

Philip - Basically in this study we asked 'do children's brains develop differently according to how clever they are'? I think the key finding was that the smartest kids differed in how fast the thinking part of their brain changes as they grow up. So in the cleverer children, the cortex or the outer crust of the brain thickens more rapidly and for a longer period of time and then thins faster as well. So I think the main message was that brainy children aren't cleverer because they have more grey matter or more brain at any one age. Instead it's that intelligence is related to the way in which the cortex matures. So children who have very flexible or agile minds also seem to have a very flexible and agile cortex.

Chris - You did this using brain scans didn't you?

Philip - Yes. We worked with people from the Montreal Neurological Institute and we imaged 300 healthy children from about the age of six to the age of twenty. We imaged the majority of them more than once. The children were scanned roughly two or three times at two-yearly intervals and everyone also did an IQ test. This is a standard test which measures verbal and non-verbal knowledge and reasoning. We then split everyone into three groups on the basis of their IQ scores and then compared these three groups and saw how their cortex developed as they grew up.

Chris - Were there any regional differences in different parts of the brain in different individuals at different times?

Philip - Yes we found that the different patterns of growth most marked in the pre-frontal are the front bits of the cortex. That's the part of the brain that we think is the seat of reasoning, planning and other very complex thought functions. What think that the later peak thickness which we find in the pre-frontal cortex in children who are the most intelligent might reflect an extended period for the development of brain circuits, which can support very complex thinking.

Chris - What are the big unanswered questions that this has opened up?

Philip - I think one question is what's the role played by genetic factors. The parts of the brain that differed most according to intelligence overlapped to some degree with brain regions that are thought to be under the tightest genetic control. However I think that what exactly is inherited is unclear. Some researchers suggest that it's the way the child interacts with the environment that's inherited. So a clever child might have genes which incline him or her to evoke a very stimulating environment. The rich and varied experience the child has may then mould and sculpt the brain particularly efficiently.

Chris - So it would be quite interesting actually to follow these on and then subject their own children to the same analysis and see if they develop the same way.

Philip - Yes it would. I think other possibilities would be environmental enrichment in terms of education or working with families. Does this have an impact on how the cortex develops?

April 2006

The Science of Pain

Dr Irene Tracey, Oxford University

Chris - Now tell us first of all, why do we have to have pain. What role does it serve?

Irene - Well it's a very important role because pain is obviously something that alerts you to the fact that you're going to damage your tissue so it's a self-preserving phenomenon and therefore a very important one. The body has a pretty complicated set of systems geared up for alerting you that something is painful and you'd better do something about it.

Chris - Let's start outside and work our way in then. What sorts of things do we interpret as painful? I don't mean pinches and punches. What's actually going on inside the body to alert nerve fibres that there's something painful happening?

Irene - We do have a set of nerve fibres that specifically detect pain or tissue-damaging types of signals and we generally divide painful stimuli into three broad categories. One would be a thermal type of stimulus, so noxious or unpleasant heat; one would be mechanical like a pin prick, knife wound or a mechanical crushing type pain; and the other type which is less common is chemical pain. That would be something like an acidic pain or if you've ever chopped chilli peppers and then rubbed your eye, you'll realise that it really really hurts afterwards. We have in our peripheral nervous system underneath the skin we've got these specialised fibres and receptors that pick up those three broad categories of pain inducing stimuli. Basically what they do is start the whole process that we call nociception and that is detecting those stimuli. They then send those signals up to the brain and the brain will then unravel all that and tell you that it hurts.

Chris - How does the body discriminate between a tickle or a rub and a painful stimulus?

Irene - Well in terms of them being sensory stimuli, they're all sensory stimuli, so we're aware of where they came from. Whether it's painful and thus if you should withdraw your hand or need to rub it, that's where the brain kicks in and where the type of object causing the pain in the first instance is very important. We're just really starting to understand the difference between the painful phenomena and non-painful phenomena because we've had the ability to look inside the human brain for the first time with these brain imaging tools. A lot of the work we do in Oxford and in other groups around the world is to take normal healthy people, put them in our scanners and image the brain in action as they're detecting those pain stimuli. So we'll take people and give them painful heat, and pressure pain and see how the different parts of the brain respond to that pain inducing stimulus as opposed to something that's not painful, such as just a rub. And what we're finding is that there's a whole network of brain regions that get activated when the situation's painful versus when it's just something normal sensory. That's what we're basically trying to unravel at them moment.

Chris - What about phantom pain? For instance when someone has a part of their body amputated for various reasons they will sometimes say that they can still feel the missing part of the body and that it's painful.

Irene - That's right and that's a very serious condition. There's a couple of different theories describing what's going on there. The most simple one to explain is that where you've lost the limb, you've obviously got raw nerves that have been cut. Those nerves are sending signals into the brain signalling that a very traumatic event occurred and they've just switched on permanently. What can happen after months and years is that brain areas that respond to these painful signals and tell you that this was painful get hard wired and switched on permanently. That can be devastating for the patient because in effect that pain is now being generated by the brain and is as real as if it was happening from the outside and switched on permanently. This is why we need to understand what's going on in the brain so we can then target the therapies.

Chris - One person has suggested that in the same way as that you get that phantom pain from a missing part of the body, that tinnitus could be caused by a bit of your cochlea that's been damaged. This converts sound waves into nerve signals. The missing cochlea is a bit like the missing bit of limb. So your tinnitus is phantom pain in an auditory sense.

Irene - Yes I think that that's exactly right. It's something that is unpleasant. You can broaden out the concept of pain to a very unpleasant smell or taste. This idea of pain being some sensory phenomenon can be broadened out to all the senses, where it's just got to the level where it's very unpleasant and discomforting. People with tinnitus try many methods to get their brains to ignore the unpleasant stimulus.

Chris - Given that you're able to pin point the parts of the brain that are becoming active in these syndromes and phenomena, are we any closer to understanding exactly what's driving these things and how to get rid of them?

Irene - We've done very well over the past ten to fifteen years in terms of understanding that complicated network of structures that have to activate to give you a conscious perception of pain. Now what we're doing is trying to target them selectively with drugs and surgical therapies using things like cognitive behavioural therapies. Why is it that when you listen to a piece of music, it can take your mind off the pain and make the pain less? Why is it that when you get into the fight or flight situation of a sport event that you support quite a traumatic injury but you don't notice it at the time? Then when the event is over and the situation has calmed down they realise that their leg is cut. So we're starting to understand very well actually what the brain is doing in all those different scenarios. So that where it's important for you not to perceive pain because you need to do something immediately then, you can switch the pain signals off. And in other situations where you need to be alert to the fact that it is painful, you can multiply them and make the pain experience much worse. Those amplification and attenuation processes are starting to be understood at a much better level. This bodes very well for the development of drugs and the development of target areas for surgery and rehabilitation.

April 2006

Brainwashing

Dr Kathleen Taylor, Oxford University

Chris - The science of brainwashing. Is it really possible to make someone do and think things that they don't want to?

Kathleen - Absolutely.

Chris - Tell us how.

Kathleen - Well there are various ways of doing it. I'm afraid for those looking for the Manchurian candidate process X where you press a magic button and it all goes funny, there is no process X. However, what we do have is a set of psychological techniques that have been developed over many centuries but reached a head in the last half of the twentieth century. This is when they started being used on quite large levels to persuade, coerce, bully and sometimes even torture people into changing the way they thought about the world, changing the information thy used to deal with the world and changing the way that they behaved.

Chris - And what sorts of general examples are we talking about here?

Kathleen - Well the word brainwashing was coined in the Korean War. It was coined by an American journalist called Edward Hunter, who was working for the CIA. He wanted a term to describe what happened to America GIs who were kept in Chinese communist prisoner of war camps, and who came out denouncing the American way of life and denouncing imperialist poison. He couldn't understand why these boys who'd gone in good Americans had come out with an apparent complete reversal of their beliefs. He wanted to call that something, so he called it brainwashing.

Chris - Was it unshakeable this new belief they'd taken on? Was it just a matter of persuading them that perhaps they'd got it wrong and needed to rethink what they'd been told over the last few years?

Kathleen - No. They were there often for quite a long time but in some cases the beliefs lasted for quite a long time. The people became fervent communist converts. In other cases they developed very severe mental illness, psychosis, trauma and the effects were really very devastating in a lot of cases.

Chris - So if you chucked these people in Irene's brain scanner, would you be able to see structural changes in the brain which would be a sign of someone having undergone this kind of therapy, for want of a better term?

Kathleen - It's difficult to know because you wouldn't have a previous case to compare them with. You'd have to study them beforehand, so the brainwashing and then study them afterwards. Of course you can't do that because it's totally unethical to brainwash people. So we don't have an answer to that. We would suspect that you might see changes but whether those would be at that level of such big brain regions that you'd be able to detect them on a scanner is unknown for individual beliefs.

Chris - But you can see that people have changed their behaviour when they've been brainwashed. What about if you zoom in on the brain in a brain scanner? Can you actually give some indication about what bits of the brain are being affected and how they're being affected?

Kathleen - Yes. What you might expect to see is that different areas of the brain are activated in response to different stimuli. For example, an American GI might previously have responded very positively to the American flag. Now he might respond very negatively, so you might get a threat response that you previously associated with communism.

Chris - Is this just training then? Is this just like having a mouse in a cage and doing something nasty to it until it stops doing what gave it a nasty shock?

Kathleen - A certain amount of that it true because these are all basic psychological processes. There's no magic involved.

Chris - Why can't you just undo it then?

Kathleen - Because you're using an awful lot of stress and an awful lot of threat, coercion and sometimes torture as well. That is very traumatising in itself and to get over that takes a lot of therapy.

Chris - So it looks like it can be pretty permanent then?

Kathleen - It's a pretty terrible thing to do to somebody, yes.

Chris - If you'd like to know a little bit more about this, Kathleen has written a book about it call Brainwashing: the science of thought control. It's out at the moment from OUP.

April 2006

	Why does a round pizza come in a square box? Lisa via email
	It has to be something to do with stacking them more easily or so they don't roll around in the van! It could also be so that there's somewhere to put the little tub of cheese sauce to dip your crust in afterwards. You need corners for that!
	April 2006

	What are the islets of Langerhans? Why are these areas more richly supplied with blood vessels? Caen via email
	Put simply, those are the cells in the pancreas that make insulin. The islets of Langerhans contain beta cells, which are sensitive to how much sugar or glucose is washing around in the bloodstream. They tailor how much insulin they make. Insulin is a protein that comes out of the cells, and more is produced the higher the glucose levels. The insulin comes out of the cells and enters the bloodstream through the rich supply of blood vessels. It then goes around the bloodstream telling the cells in the rest of the body to turn on a special transporter, which draws glucose inside the cell rather like a vacuum cleaner. Once it's in the cell, the glucose is then turned into other things like fats and a bigger molecule called glycogen.
	April 2006

	How bad does meningitis affect the brain? I had it when I was younger and think it might have affected my ability to remember things. Wynn in Northampton
	There are a couple of issues with this. Meningitis comes in two flavours or two forms. There's a viral flavour and a bacterial flavour and by far and away the most serious form of meningitis is the bacterial form. This is because in this instance you have bacteria physically growing and multiplying in the fluid that surrounds the brain. When they do that they secrete lots of factors that promote intense inflammation and can damage the underlying brain. One of the things they do is cause inflammation around the nerves that flow through that space and these include the auditory nerve that supplies your ears and connects your ears to the brain. If you have a lot of inflammation around those nerve roots, it can unfortunately pinch them off and cause permanent deafness. There are other problems of course. If people aren't treated in time with meningitis it can be very serious and can result in people dying. Fortunately we now have vaccines that have been introduced and this has brought the mortality right down. In the UK for instance in young children, there was a type of meningitis caused by meningitis strain C and that was introduced as a vaccine about five years ago. Since then there's been a dramatic reduction in the number of cases. Among adults the most common form is strain B and this still remains a major problem and there is no consistent vaccine for this, so you should be on the look out for signs and symptoms. These include a non-specific feeling grotty for a few days first, and then you start to get a headache. Then you can start to feel quite sick and get scared of the light and your neck can become very very stiff. Then people start to develop a rash which is non-blanching. In other words if you press on the rash with a wine glass or something and look through the glass, the rash doesn't go away. If you have those signs and symptoms, you ought to maybe get checked out by a doctor. Now the other flavour of meningitis I mentioned is viral meningitis and this isn't necessarily so bad. This is when a virus attacks the membranes that surround the brain and it causes many of the same symptoms but usually these cases are self-limiting, which means they just go away and get better of their own accord. Sometimes if it's caused by the herpes virus which is the same virus that can cause cold sores, then you might need to go into hospital for a while and have a drug called acyclovir which knocks it on the head. But thankfully most of the cases don't have long term sequelae, not like the bacterial form.
	April 2006

	We all know that music can affect mood. Why does it change our mood? Jackson via email
	That's an area that's been looked at with some of these imaging tools because they enable us to look at the human brain in action. Certainly in the context of pain relieving mood when people use music to help relieve a chronic pain syndrome, a very calming pleasant piece of music can not only enable one to be distracted from the pain but it can also induce endogenous opioids. This can be a strategy for cognitive behavioural therapy to help people boost that endogenous system that we've got to get that added benefit. We are less familiar with the actual brain regions that modulate the mood but these are areas that are being looked at in the context of depression and other types of mood disorders and music is one of the areas that is being looked at. We know less about it at the moment.
	April 2006

	Why is it that when you pinch the excess skin on your elbow you don't feel the pain even if you pinch really quite hard? Raphael in California
	Pinching is a classic example of mechanical pain. If you squeeze mechanically with pressure on any part of your body it's actually quite hard to make it painful unless you've got a bruise or some damage there already. What you might like to do is to take a pin and very carefully try the pin on that part of the elbow compared to another part of the body. What you'll probably see is that the perception of pain to that pin prick is actually pretty similar. It's just specific to this mechanical crushing type of pain and feels as though there are no pain receptors in that part of the skin. That's actually not the case.
	April 2006

	Why is it if you see somebody get punched in the nose, you go ouch? Paul in Hertfordshire
	Because it's very important for us to empathise with other people's pain and suffering. It's part of human nature. A very nice experiment was done by Tania Singer just a couple of years ago using imaging. Basically they put women in the scanner and they looked at their brains as they were given a painful stimulus. They then put the women's partners at the end of the scanner and they burnt their partners, but they imaged the women's brains as they watched their partners being burnt. The interesting thing they found in that study was that the areas of the brain that were active when they looked at their partners were pretty much the same areas as those areas active in response to that woman having pain in the first instance. So you basically activate a very similar set of structures, which means you really are having a painful experience yourself watching somebody else. They were very cunning because they actually put women in because they thought that they would empathise better so the control experiment would be to put men in the scanner and see what happens.
	April 2006

	Is there any way we can minimise brainwashing? Katherine in Six Mile Bottom
	Yes there is. There are many ways to do it but basically they all boil down to learning more about it, educating yourself, learning what's going on and looking at the way people are manipulating you. You can practise by looking at examples on the telly, learning what the tricks and techniques are to manipulate your mind and then once you've learnt those you can get to notice them, pick them out and resist them.
	April 2006

	In your Christmas special you talked about why you can't tickle yourself because the brain switches it off while you perform the conscious tickle. Why can't you do the same with pain? If I stick a pin in my finger after telling myself it's not going to hurt, it still hurts? Flavio via email
	Actually you can tickle yourself and Sarah Jane Blakemore did some nice experiments showing how you can do this. What you have to do is get a tickle stick, and when you move it, it has a delay. So from your movement there's a pause between actually when the thing does a tickle on you. You find that that will actually make you laugh. She did some experiments to show why that is. In terms of the pain bit, if you do prepare and block yourself you can boost those endogenous opioids just like in that fight or flight response or in the placebo effect. When you know the pain's coming and you psyche yourself up for it you can actually just take the edge of it and modulate that pain a little bit.
	April 2006

Mixing two fluids of different densities

Make some pretty patterns by mixing different fluids.

What you need

A bowl with fairly smooth sides

Some brightly coloured squash - preferably with sugar.

What to Do

Fill the bowl with water

Gently pour squash down the side of the bowl

watch what happens.

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What may Happen

As you pour the squash down the side of the bowl it will run down to the bottom, slosh around and end up settling at the bottom. While it is moving it does tend to swirl and mix the squash and water slightly. 

 

Once the fluid has stopped moving there is hardly any mixing at all. <img alt="The Bowl at the End" title="The squash ends up under the water © Dave Ansell" src="uploads/RTEmagicC_bowlend.jpg.jpg" style="width: 300px; height: 218px;">

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What is going on?

Squash has a lot of dissolved sugar in it so it is considerably more dense than water, so it will sink in the same way that a dense stone will sink. Once it has sunk there is nothing but molecular vibrations to mix the two liquids, it would probably take literally years for the two liquids to mix together. This is why it never works very well if you add the squash after the water - there is nothing to make them mix.

However when the squash is moving you can see it swirling as in moves next to the water.

This is because the squash next to the water is slowed down which tends to twist the water in the same way that a car will twist if you drive one side into sand because one side will be slowed down.

 This random swirling is known as turbulence very good at mixing fluids and is actually what you are creating when you stir your coffee or when you pour water on top of your squash.

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Written by Dave Ansell