Deep sea treasure in the Thames

How could I resist talking about a story that hit the headlines this week – the discovery that there are seahorses living in the busy waters of the Thames Estuary in London.

Over the past 18 months, researchers from the Zoological Society of London have encountered a population of short snouted seahorses (Hippocampus hippomcampus) – tiny creatures that could lie on the palm of your hand.

They have been seen as far east as Dagenham where the tides are still strong to bring salty water in, since seahorses don’t live in freshwater.

Seahorses have occasionally been spotted in the Thames in the past but only one or two, and never such a healthy population.

The really good news is that these seahorses, along with another British species, the long snouted seahorse (Hippocampus guttulatus) are now protected under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside act, which means it is illegal to take them from the wild and to damage their wild habitats.

Like the arrival of the whale in the Thames a few years ago, Londoners are proud of their newest aquatic neighbours, and it’s a good sign that despite its notoriously mucky and polluted history, the waters of the Thames are much cleaner than they used to be and it is now one of the cleanest big rivers in Europe, home also to porpoises, seals and otters.

Although it could also be that waters are warmer than they use to be with global warming, making them more hospitable to these species that are more normally found further south in the Mediterranean.

13th Apr 2008

Let your mind wander

Scientists have used brain scans to uncover what happens in the minds of jazz and other improv players when their creative juices start flowing.

Writing in the journal PLoS One, US research duo Allen Braun and Charles Limb recruited 6 trained jazz pianists and asked them to play scales, some pre-learned blues music and also improvise in their own styles whilst inside an MRI scanner.  The musicians used a keyboard adapted specially for the scanner and what they played was relayed back to them via headphones.  The aim of the study was to understand the neurological basis of the almost trance-like state adopted by jazz musicians when they improvise.

"They often play with their eyes closed in a distinctive personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm," says Lamb. "It's a remarkable frame of mind during which, all of a sudden, the musician is generating music that has never been heard, thought, practiced or played before. What comes out is completely spontaneous."

To pinpoint the brain regions responsible, the researchers subtracted the scan results obtained when the musicians played scales or learned pieces of music, since they're common to any musical activity, from the pattern of neural activity when they improvised.

The results showed that improvisation was associated with a significant drop in activity in the brain's dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex, an area linked to self-censoring, inhibition and planned actions, such as deciding how to respond at a job interview.  At the same time the medial pre-frontal cortex, which controls self-expression and individuality, increased in activity.

So it seems the musicians are disinhibiting themselves and at the same time boosting their creative brain centres.  "What we think is happening is when you're telling your own musical story you're shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas," says Limb.  He and Braun are now planning to find out whether members of other creative professions, like writers or painters also show the same patterns of brain activity when they go to work.

Let's just hope the work of any poets scans correctly...

2nd Mar 2008

Mind Reading a Reality?

Scientists in Kyoto have reproduced an image based on how the brain responds – effectively reading the brain.

Yoichi Miyawaki and colleagues at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have published a report in the journal Neuron, where they used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to observe the changes in brain activity when a subject is looking at an image.  Using complicated computer modelling, they were able to train the system to recognise what happens in the brain in response to certain images, and the system was then able to accurately reproduce images that the subject had not seen before.

The images were simple, high contrast pictures, a 10 by 10 grid with each ‘pixel’ containing a shade from white to black, on which they could produce random patterns called a contrast map, geometric shapes or letters.  In the training stage, they showed the subject 440 random images for 6 seconds each while observing the fMRI, which recorded brain activity by looking at blood flow in the visual cortex, which is located at the back of your brain.

Their computer model went to work by analysing small, overlapping portions of the fMRI in 3 dimensions, and then putting together the data from each portion to reconstruct how the brain responded to each image.  Using multiple portions allowed them to build up an idea of the brain’s response, with the overlaps reducing the error, as each section was sampled more than once.  Once it was trained on the random contrast maps, they moved on to showing the subject more defined images, such as letters and geometric shapes.

From the fMRI data, the computer model was able to reconstruct the images as seen by the subject, such as spelling out the word Neuron.  It’s only able to work in black and white at them moment, and relies on the images having quite high contrast, but the team think that improving measurement accuracy should enable it to work in colour, and one day may be able to produce images from dreams, or even a direct readout of someone’s feelings.

This is a good start, but they have a long way to go before you can upload your dreams at night to watch later on!

21st Dec 2008

How to give your cheap plonk a boost

The festive season is upon us, many of us will no doubt be raising a glass or two of wine in celebration. And this week there is news of a novel way that scientists have found to give a boost to a bottle of cheap plonk. A revolting young table wine can be transformed into a refined tipple simply by zapping it with electricity.

You might expect it would be the French, the Chileans or perhaps the Californians who have come up with this new bit of wine trickery, but in fact this study was the brain child of Xin An Zeng and colleagues from South China University of Technology in Guangzhou in China, a relative new-comer to the world of fine wine making.

Zeng and his team have been experimenting with Chinese cabernet sauvignon wine, passing it through a pipe with two titanium electrodes hooked up to a electric field and found that the optimum time to do this was for just three minutes – no more, no less.

They can't yet explain just how applying an electric field alters the wine's chemistry but it seems that just this short exposure is enough to make a new wine quaffable. A three month old wine would normally be undrinkable, but after Zeng and his team ran it through an electric field, it passed a taste test with a panel of wine experts.

Normal wine can't be drunk for at least six months, and of course the finest wines keep getting better and better for decades.

Somehow, zapping the wine changes its chemical make up in a similar way that happens slowly over time as wine ages. These changes include the reaction of ethanol with bitter-tasting organic acids in the wine, creating fruity flavoured compounds called esters. Proteins also breakdown to form amino acids, which also contribute to the taste of a good wine and the researchers also measured a reduction in the concentration of nasty-tasting aldehydes.

Just whether or not wine connoisseurs will embrace this new technique remains to be seen, but wine producers in China are already rolling out large scale trials of this new electro-wine treatment. And if you are feeling a bit impatient for a tasty glass of wine this Christmas, please, don't try this out at home.

21st Dec 2008

Earthquake proof bridges

The destruction produced by earthquakes can be devastating in its self, but often the knock on effects of this destruction can be even worse. For example if an earthquake damages a bridge beyond repair there are not just problems for the poeple on and around the bridge. It also means that the emergency services can't get across the bridge to help put out fires, and generally support people on the other side. In the longer term the lack of bridge could slow down the rebuilding  after the disaster.

Engineers at the university of Nevada are trying to reduce this problem by using modern materials. The cause of much of the problem is the steel that is used to reinforce the concrete in the bridges. During a large earthquake this is designed to bend so that it absorbs some of the energy in the vibrations. This is quite effective at stopping the whole structure collapsing catastrophically during the actual earthquake but  afterwards it can mean that the bridge needs really searious repair if not being knocked down to start again.

To reduce this problem the engineers have replaces important pieces of steel reinforcing with Nitinol, an alloy of nickel and titanium which acts as a shape memory metal. This means that it will spring back to its original sape after being bent.

This means that after an earthquake the reinforcement will be the same shape it started as, and although the concrete will still be cracked it should still be able to support loads with minimal if any repair. In the longer term you would have to make some repairs but the clear up of the city could start a lot earlier.

21st Dec 2008

SpaceX

A story from earlier in the year which hopefully will be the start of big things to come was the news that a small california based company called Space X has managed to build a rocket to put a satellite into orbit. This may not sound particularly impressive as governments have been doing this for 50 years, but what is new is that this has been done by a private company without state support.

SpaceX was started by Elon Musk who is a South African entrepreneur who made hundreds of millions from publishing software and then PayPal. When PayPal was sold to ebay he and wanted to do something interesting with his money, first he thought that he wanted to start a mars program, but found that space launch costs were far to high to make it practical even with his immense wealth.

So he decided to try to bring launch costs down to something more reasonable by starting his own space rocket business. This has been tried before and previous attempts have failed, and so did his first 3 launches, but in september at thefourth attempt hs Falcon 1 rocket made it into ortbit. This is capable of launching half a tonne into orbit, but in the new year he is intending on launching his first Falcon 9 rocket which should be capable of putting up to 12.5 tonnes into orbit which is comparable with some of the larger rockets available today.

He is on record as saying that the thing about rocket science is that it is very difficult, so he may not be sucessful with this new rocket first time, but I have to hope that he gets there as if getting into space is cheaper all sorts of exciting scientific possibilities open up, allowing us to go to new places and to look at the universe in new ways.

21st Dec 2008

Bubbles go Straight to your Head

Meera - Fancy cracking open some champagne to welcome in the New Year? It may be worth you noting that the bubbles that make this drink go pop when you open it will get you drunk a lot faster than its wine relatives. I’m with Fran Ridout, clinical research manager for the charity Saving Faces at St Bartholomew’s hospital in London. Fran used to be based at the University of Surrey where she looked into the effects that champagne has on our brains. How did you go about looking into the effect of champagne?

Fran - We used a psychometric test battery which measured people’s reaction time, ability to attend to a stimulus while doing something else, their vigilance, their ability to do something for a sustained time and their short-term memory.

Meera - Who did you test it on and how did you go about getting your samples?

Fran - We actually did the tests on volunteers’ work colleagues. We had 12 people and they had two different drinks. One of the drinks was ordinary champagne and the other drink was champagne where we’d whisked all the bubbles away from with an electric blender. We had people drink both drinks on different occasions a week apart. One week they’d have champagne with bubbles, the next week they would have the champagne without bubbles which they thought was ordinary wine. They didn’t know the purpose of the experiments. Everybody did a baseline test before they’d been drinking. They then drank a measured dose of the champagne or de-gassed champagne according to their body weight. Then they did the tests again 20 minutes after and 60 minutes after drinking.

Meera - What did you find?

Fran - We found that the champagne with bubbles was much more impairing than the champagne without. We found a difference on all the tests between when they did it before they’d drunk anything and afterwards, apart from short-term memory. With the sill champagne the only test that was impaired was a simple test of reaction time.

Meera - You also looked into the actual blood levels of alcohol in the people.

Fran - Yes, we took blood samples after twenty minutes at five minute intervals. We found that the blood alcohol levels of the people drinking the gas champagne were higher for the first twenty minutes suggesting that it had got into the blood stream a lot quicker.

Meera - You’ve actually got some of these psychometric tests set up today. I had a go on two of them earlier this afternoon just to give an idea and get the score for what’s my ability without alcohol. I’m just going to finish off this champagne and then we’re going to have a go on the tests and see if it’s impaired my ability at all.

Fran - An excellent idea!

Meera - Well we actually have two of those psychometric tests. What am I supposed to be doing here again?

Fran - The idea is to keep the centre of the cross on top of the ball as the ball moves randomly from side to side across a screen. The other part of the test is that you have to watch out for yellow balls which will appear in corners every now and then. As soon as you see those you have to click the button on your mouse.

Meera - Ok so I’m having a go on this test again now and trying to follow this grey ball that’s moving around with my green cross. That one’s finished. You’ve got both of my scores up here. Is there a difference between before and after I drank this champagne?

Fran - There are differences between your tracking. You’ve actually got better but that is a practise effect. When we did our study we made volunteers do it half a dozen times before they started to get rid of that as far as possible. One component of the test is your ability to react to peripheral stimuli: the yellow balls. Your time there is actually longer.

Meera - We’ve also got this second test set up which is going to test my movement. I’m just going to start this now but can you just remind me again what the rules are?

Fran - This tests reaction times in two parts. There is a semicircle of lights which come on and you have to move your finger as quickly as possible from across a resting point to turn those lights off. It has two components. One is how quickly you lift your finger up to say I’ve seen the light and the other is how quickly you can get your finger over to put the light out.

Meera - That’s finished now and all the lights have come on so I think I’m going to stop. How did I do here, Fran?

Fran - Well you didn’t do particularly well. Your reaction time for the lights was nearly 100ms slower. Your score at baseline was 362 and after you’d had your drink it was 452ms. 100ms may not sound much but if you’re driving a car it’s extra time it takes before you put your feet on the brake. You could have gone quite a few metres down the road in addition to your normal brake time.

Meera - I guess the key question now really is why this happens. Why does the presence of bubbles in alcohol make it affect our brains quicker?

Fran - In order to affect the brain it’s necessary for the alcohol to get into the blood stream. The way this happens is you drink the alcohol which goes into your stomach. Not much of it’s actually absorbed in the stomach. About 80% of it is absorbed when it carried on into the intestine. The most likely explanation for the champagne having a more intoxicating effect is that it alters gastric emptying – the way that the alcohol or drink goes from the stomach to the intestine in some way. One possible mechanism is that it alters the way that the pyloric valve opens or makes it open more frequently. That’s the part that allows the contents of the stomach to carry on its way to the intestine. Alternatively it could be that the alcohol is absorbed as you’re drinking it through the nose, through the mouth. That’s much less likely. It’s almost certainly something that happens once the alcohol gets into your stomach.

December 2008

Vortex Cannon

If you have ever been too lazy to get up and blow out a candle a few feet away, then we might have the answer.

What you need

What to Do

What may Happen

With a few tries you should be able to blow out the candle from even 2-3m away. Which is far further than you could blow the candle out from.