Archives for category: The Last Word on Nothing

2011 Houdini Awards

December 22, 2011 //

I always thought of Harry Houdini as a master trickster, fooling his audience into believing something had happened when, in fact, it had not happened. That’s not true. Houdini’s tricks — like escaping from a locked packing crate after it had been thrown into New York’s East River — were real. His “magic” was that nobody could figure out how he pulled them off.

In the November 1925 issue of Popular Science, Houdini wrote an essay describing his obsession with the other kind of mystifiers: those who claim to have supernatural powers. Every day of his 35-year career, Houdini wrote, he had been thinking about psychics who supposedly communicate with the dead. He visited dozens of them and, as described at length in the essay, uncovered all of their lazy tricks. To give just one fun example, Houdini showed how mediums, during pitch-black seances, used trumpets controlled by their feet and mouths to produce voices that their audience believed to be ghosts.

Houdini did not consider himself a skeptic, but rather a public servant.

Categories 2011, Blogging, Business and Technology, History, The Last Word on Nothing

Breaking Through

November 29, 2011 //

This past summer, I spent two weeks sitting, working and, once, sleeping next to a hospital bed, trying and failing to communicate with my father.

He had called for an ambulance on the evening of July 25 because he couldn’t breathe. With end-stage emphysema, he often couldn’t breathe, but apparently that night he was frightened enough to call for help. At the hospital, the doctors intubated him and doused him with the sedatives one needs to withstand a hard plastic tube down the throat. My sister and I never knew if he had agreed to the intubation, or if he was too weak or panicked to voice a clear opinion. Over the next few days in the ICU, although still heavily sedated, he sometimes acted in ways that seemed deliberate: he would open his eyes wide, or furrow his brow, or nod to a question or squeeze my hand. But I was never really sure. I wasn’t sure if he would have wanted us to agree to the tracheostomy procedure, on August 2, or remove the ventilator, on August 9.

What if I could have been more sure?

I couldn’t help but think about that a couple of weeks ago while having coffee with Jon Bardin at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, D.C. A few years back, Jon left the science magazine where we both worked to pursue a PhD in neuroscience. He joined the lab of Nicholas Schiff, an expert on the neural basis of consciousness, and began studying the brain activity of people with severe brain injury. And now at the conference, Jon told me, he would be presenting a poster of unpublished data suggesting that brain waves can reveal whether a somewhat conscious person is tuning in when other people speak.

Categories 2011, Blogging, Brain Science, Conference Coverage, Health and Medicine, SfN, The Last Word on Nothing

Alcohol, Retinol and a 50-Year Quest for the Male Pill

November 3, 2011 //

Last Sunday, the day before the world’s population hit 7 billion, I went to a scientific meeting on the future of contraception.

I had expected to hear, and did hear, about a slew of labs trying to develop a birth control pill for men. What I did not expect: one pill was shown to work in men more than 50 years ago.

In the late 1950s, researchers from the University of Oregon and University of Washington tested drugs called ‘bis(dichloroacetyl) diamines’ on inmates from the Oregon State Penitentiary.* The scientists doled out one of three pills — dubbed Win 13,099, Win 17,416 and Win 18,446 — to 26 volunteers once or twice a day for up to 54 weeks, and measured the men’s sperm counts along the way.

The results were stunning: the compounds reduced the amount of sperm in the men’s semen, and sometimes completely wiped it out. The pills didn’t affect libido, and the only reported side effect was bloating and gas. What’s more, within a few weeks of stopping treatment, sperm counts went back up. It was, perhaps, the horny grail: reversible birth control for men, no rubber required.

Categories 2011, Blogging, Health and Medicine, History, Reproductive Biology, The Last Word on Nothing

What Makes a Pun Funny?

October 19, 2011 //

Comedian Jessica Kirson, as captured by the inimitable Brian Friedman

My name is Ginny and I’m an adult pun-lover. When I hear a good one — Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic! — I don’t roll my eyes or smirk. I double over laughing, like a 7-year-old.

What is it exactly that makes a pun funny (at least to those of us who humbly accept the power of the pun)?

That’s the underlying question of a brain imaging study I came across last week. Its pretty pictures don’t answer the question, really, but they’re interesting all the same. And provocative: the data could have way-down-the-road relevance for communicating with people in vegetative states.

The researchers, led by Adrian Owen at the University of Western Ontario, focused on three types of jokes:

Regular joke: Why did Cleopatra bathe in milk? Because she couldn’t find a cow tall enough for a shower.

Funny pun: Why were the teacher’s eyes crossed? Because she couldn’t control her pupils.

Unfunny pun: What was the problem with the other coat? It was difficult to put on with the paint-roller.

Read more at…

The Last Word on Nothing, October 2011.

Categories 2011, Blogging, Brain Science, Journalism and Writing, The Last Word on Nothing

“Reading Minds” with fMRI

October 13, 2011 //

Some of you, I suspect, have read in Time, Slate, NPR, Popular Science, Wired, or dozens of other news outlets that scientists have figured out how to read minds. I hate to always be the neuro-tech downer, but that claim is just false. Laughably false.

That’s not to say that the study behind all of the commotion, published late last month in Current Biology, isn’t impressive and worth talking about. But, as happens all too often with brain imaging studies, this one was hyped, big time. Few reporters* bothered to look for critical, or even thoughtful, comments from experts outside the research team. And so their stories wound up with headlines like, “Scientists Can (Almost) Read Your Mind,” and “Soon Enough, You May Be Able to DVR Your Dreams.”

Read more at…

The Last Word on Nothing, October 2011.

Categories 2011, Blogging, Brain Science, Business and Technology, The Last Word on Nothing

Dear Mom

September 14, 2011 //

My mother is spunky and smart and I love her very much. But she’s got this one trait that drives me crazy: she believes everything she sees on The History Channel.

I visited her in Michigan a few weeks ago. One night at a local brewery, with my sister, Charlotte, and her boyfriend, Greg, in tow, Mom began telling us about why she believes humans came to earth from another planet. “Your evolution theories can’t explain the pyramids,” she said triumphantly.

“How does that have anything to do with aliens?” I asked triumphantly.

Charlotte, who goes out to eat with Mom much more often than I do, looked at Greg and smirked.

“How else would the Egyptians have known how to build them?” Mom said.

“And what evidence, exactly, do you have to support our alien origins?” I said.

“Geometry!” she said.

She then went on and on about latitudes and longitudes and the Maya and alien images in cave paintings. I understood little of what she said, but knew enough to proclaim, too loudly, “That’s such bullshit, Mom!”

For the sake of continuing an otherwise pleasant meal, we dropped it. But I resolved to find out what nonsense she was talking about and eventually set her straight.

So I found out. And it’s as crazy as I thought.

Categories 2011, Blogging, Education, History, Reviews, The Last Word on Nothing

Body and Soul

August 25, 2011 //

I just wrote a story about robots whose brains are based on the neural networks of real creatures (mostly cats, rats and monkeys). Researchers put these ‘brains’ in an engineered body — sometimes real, sometimes virtual — equipped with sensors for light and sound and touch. Then they let them loose into the world — sometimes real, sometimes virtual — and watch them struggle. Eventually, the robots learn things, like how to recognize objects and navigate to specific places.

These so-called ‘embodied’ robots are driven not by a top-down control system, but by bottom-up feedback from their environment. This is how humans work, too. If you’re walking on the sidewalk and come across a patch of gravel, your feet and legs feel the change and rapidly adjust so that you don’t topple. You may not even notice it happening. This embodied learning starkly contrasts with most efforts in the artificial intelligence field, which explicitly program machines to behave in prescribed ways. Robots running on conventional AI could complete that sidewalk stroll only by referring to a Walking-On-Sidewalk-with-an-Occasional-Patch-of-Gravel program. And even then, they’d have to know when the gravel was coming.

Most advocates of embodied AI are motivated by its dazzling array of potential applications, from Mars rovers to household helpers for the elderly. But I’m more curious about the philosophical implications: whether, in loaning robots visual, memory, and navigational circuits from real biological systems, the researchers might also be giving them the building blocks of consciousness.

Read more at…

The Last Word on Nothing, August 2011.

Categories 2011, Blogging, Brain Science, Business and Technology, The Last Word on Nothing

Correcting Hollywood Science: Rise of the Planet of the Apes Edition

August 10, 2011 //

I don’t have a problem with screenwriters fudging scientific truths as long as they: are internally consistent with their made-up science; and manipulate the facts in the name of telling a good story.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which came out on Friday, follows the first rule and tries to follow the second (more on that later), so I’m not upset that it gets a few things wrong about gene therapy. Still, I feel it’s my duty to tell you what was not quite right, and describe a few real advances in the field.

Gene therapy is conceptually simple: researchers use stripped-down viruses as vehicles to carry a healthy gene into cells to fix or replace a broken one. Since its clinical debut in 1990, the approach has cured a handful individuals of rare immune disorders and congenital forms of blindness.

In Apes, James Franco plays an earnest scientist who injects a gene therapy into his father’s bloodstream to try to cure his Alzheimer’s.

Read more at…

The Last Word on Nothing, August 2011.

Categories 2011, Blogging, Genetics, The Last Word on Nothing

The Four Types of Scientists

July 19, 2011 //

I took my first Myers-Briggs personality test in the seventh grade, on the one afternoon of the year my teacher had set aside for us to go ahead and choose a future fulfilling career already. We all sat down at a computer, answered a few hundred multiple-choice questions, and finally discovered which of the 16 types best fit our preferences.

I’m an ISTJ. In the system’s jargon, that’s ‘Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, Judging.’ In plain English, the type is often referred to as the inspectors, the truth-tellers, the ‘Just the facts, Ma’am‘s.

My best-fit careers, the program told me, would be structured, analytic, number-crunching-type things. Then the dot-matrix printer spit out meatier descriptions of specific job possibilities. And for the next couple of years — despite the fact that it had little to do with my interests in chemistry, math or the piano — I really and truly thought of myself as a market researcher in-the-making. That’s right: someone who designs and analyzes surveys.

Later on, when it became clear that this was not the right prescription, I decided that the Myers-Briggs was, at best, psychological nonsense, and at worst, a pernicious tool that is stifling our children’s hopes and dreams.

Read more at…

The Last Word on Nothing, July 2011.

Categories 2011, Blogging, Brain Science, The Last Word on Nothing

2011 Houdini Awards

Breaking Through

Alcohol, Retinol and a 50-Year Quest for the Male Pill

What Makes a Pun Funny?

“Reading Minds” with fMRI

Dear Mom

Body and Soul

Correcting Hollywood Science: Rise of the Planet of the Apes Edition

The Four Types of Scientists

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