Science Ain't So Bad

The Scientific Work Of Amy Bishop

Shoot! No Tenure.

“It didn’t happen. There’s no way … they are still alive.” – Amy Bishop, being taken to jail.

THE DARK SIDE

Amy Bishop (Assistant Professor Of Biology at the University of Alabama) figured out that her colleagues weren’t gonna give her tenure.

So she shot them.

TOO assertive, we think. They say she also shot and killed her brother in 1986, was a suspect in a bombing, may have assaulted someone in a restaurant and, supposedly, had a long history of hinkey behavior.

WHAT KIND OF SCIENTIST WAS SHE?

You, the readers of Science Ain’t So Bad, aren’t the SORT to be titillated by violence.

Or sex, for that matter.

If you’re here, you’re here to read about science and technology and, I’m sure your questions about Dr. Bishop are more about her scientific work.

Proud OF you!

Well, as a published author, Bishop isn’t prolific. R Douglas Fields (Psychology Today) took a look and says the list is short.

Her newest stuff is about nitric oxide, a compound that has multiple and important uses in human (and nonhuman) biology. Her research leads her to a radical view of the causes of MS – a view which is still considered pretty “iffy”. Shooting her colleagues, obviously, might not add weight to her arguments, although, strictly speaking, scientific ideas should be evaluated on their own merits.

Still..

An article in the Boston Herald says Bishop included her minor kids on at least one of her papers.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad thinks that’s nice. If she hadn’t done such awful things and if her contributions were solid, the “kids on the research paper” thing wouldn’t get counted as a foul here.

The article by Fields also describes a system for maintaining neurons in cell culture – an “automated Petri Dish” – for which Bishop had obtained a patent. If the device was getting lost in the noise of all the other patents, that should change now. (No such thing as bad news? Do I believe this?). But Fields sounds dubious about the prospects for the invention.

STUDENT REVIEWS

As far as Bishop’s teaching is concerned, her student reviews didn’t seem bad. Look for yourself.

Nobody’s heartless enough to give a ScienceAintsoBadRating on this one. Instead, we offer our sincere condolences to those who have suffered, including Bishop’s own family and we mourn the almost certain loss of her potential contributions to the scientific world and to the community at large.

Bagged By Machine: A Robot Anesthesiologist?

WORKS GOOD

Anesthesiology: With A Battery Backup

THE INTRO

Has anybody ever put you to sleep?

I KNOW you won’t be dozing while reading MY good-as-coffee articles , but have you ever been put to sleep by a white coated, caring individual who then proceeded to remove your tonsils?

FUN WITH ANESTHETICS

For medical professionals, a visit to the “Ether dome” at Mass General Hospital in Boston’s like a visit to a holy shrine. (MGH is where anesthesia was introduced to the medical world in the 1840s, in case you didn’t know.)

Ether Dome

Try to imagine a modern operation underway with a slug of whiskey dripping down the patient’s chin and four big guys holding him.her down. The doc would have – what? – 30 seconds to drag that old heart out and stuff in the new one?

Not very bloody likely!

Most of the elaborate procedures that are part of medicine, as we know it, require a peaceful sedated patient that can be kept stable for a long time. In fact, many procedures take hours. Some even take days.

Anesthesia is really one of the HUGE successes of our time. Under the command of a doctor or a nurse anesthetist at the head of the operating table, the patient’s signs are carefully monitored and the “anesthetic agents” are carefully controlled. Often, the anesthesiologist manipulates a bag, manually “breathing” for a patient whose lungs are temporarily paralyzed, watching the patient intensely for signs of ”lightening up”.

GOING UNDER

For a fun surgical experience:

1. You don’t want it to hurt (at least I don’t).

2. You don’t wanna know (unconscious).

3. You don’t want to remember it afterwards. and

4. You (or at least your doctors) don’t want you to be jerking around while tissue near nerves and arteries is being cut with great precision. So it is important that your muscles be paralyzed.

Get it all right (as well as the timing of your wake up call in the surgical suite) and, all you need for a SUPER surgical day is a nice recovery without infection. Even better would be if the hospital sends the bill to the wrong customer and – this may be TOO optimistic, the surgeons managed to remove what they were SUPPOSED to, instead of the one on the right side.

If only the surgery were as predictable as the anesthesia.

Deaths from anesthesia happen.Nothing’s perfect. But they’re rarer than typos on Science Ain’t So Baud. Less than 1 in 100,000 procedures. RIDICULOUSLY rare!

From time-to-time, however, things go wrong enough that one of the things I mentioned above ( pain, unconsciousness, recall, or paralysis) aren’t as controlled as they should be and a patient can have a rotten time of it.

There ARE plenty of other issues, by the way, such as “anesthesia brain” which can leave a former patient with mental deficits. However, having scared the crap out of you, that is ENTIRELY off topic. Another time, maybe.

THE MACHINE

Anyway, getting, finally, to the point, a group from the University of La Laguna (it’s in the Canary Islands) is reporting that it has an anesthesia machine that “closes the loop”, monitoring patients and adjusting the anesthetic as needed.

Adding control to an anesthesiology machine isn’t galaxy shaking. The idea’s been around. Cooper and Newbower (Mass General Hospital) were doing this stuff in the 1970′s and Aspect Medical has been selling “Bispectral Index Monitors” for years. (They figure out if you’re sleepy enough).

But closing the loop – letting the machine take control – is a dramatic step.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad doesn’t think’s anesthesiologists will be going out for coffee during the procedure for a few years.

Not if I’m on the damn table!

The way it’s shaping up is this. Computers are better at doing things fast and not losing track of details. But people have got that wisdom thing going and, of course, there’s STILL that Jobs, Jobs, Jobs thing to consider. So, I guess you could think of the anesthesia machine as a truly expensive set of antilock brakes that still need a driver.

This is just a beginning. The machine has only been tried with profol and on a small number of volunteers. But it makes sense medically and scientifically.

It’ll happen.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 7 .

Useful

Credit for the Ether Dome photo: Uploaded by Swampykank to Media Commons.

More On Vitamin D. Forgive Me.

NO SONG LIKE AN OLD SONG

Did I mention that it may help reduce heart disease and diabetes in elders?

Don’t let this study from Loyola fool you though. The science isn’t indisputable.

Just hard to resist.

Take your D.

- MISTER ScienceAintSoBad

Smoking: Now The Tough Cases

What's left?

SMOKING’S BAD

But you already KNEW that, didn’t you.

Of course you did.

Who, other than teenagers, is unaware that smoking ruins your heart, destroys your lungs, wrinkles your skin, and makes you look sophisticated.

Did I say that?

Anyway,you know it’s really, really bad for you and if you could quit, you already did.

Some people are tall and some are short. Some have REALLY blue eyes and some have watery, squinty brown eyes. And, although I’m “just guessing” here, almost surely, some people find it easy to quit and some find it really hard.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad doesn’t want to discourage you from trying, of course, but, if you’re still a smoker after years of trying not to be, you CAN stop beating up on yourself . You’re one of the unlucky ones who finds it very, very hard.

As the President often says, if it were easy, he would have done it already. Ask him about HIS cigs.

Unless you’re a moron who just started in which case you SHOULD feel free to beat up on yourself plus I’m cancelling your subscription to Science Ain’t So Bad. You can go read somebody ELSE’S blog till you get your head on straight.

An article in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology describes some treatments that do seem to work – even, to some extent, for the hard cases. And it talks about some of the segments of the population that’re the most resistant. Course it tends to cluster people by what kind of mental disorder they have.

Don’t get all huffy if you read it. Keep in mind that this is the work of psychologists. If the study had been done by engineers, ease of quitting would, no doubt, have been clustered by type of smartphone.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 5

It’s a useful study if all it does is to remind us that quitting’s harder for some than for others.

Monkeys Aren’t Such Bad People

NOT TOO PROUD TO SHARE

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR: Bananas

You figured bonobos were tightwads.

Sorry.

This study in Current Biology describes bonobos with GREAT food, taking a key and unlocking a door to share it with a buddy.

Would YOU do that? MISTER Science Ain’t So Bad sure ain’t givin’ away HIS bananas.

Don’t even ask.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 6

Probably a good study but the earth didn’t shake.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/justinlindsay/ / CC BY 2.0

Slipping A Little? How About A Spare Brain?

Geriatrics: Project COGKNOW.

TOUCH SCREEN HELP FOR MILD DEMENTIA

Every teenager I know thinks his.her parents are demented.

Knows it for a fact.

But dementia is real, not just a derisive term for parents who don’t “get it”. And, when it happens, it’s always hard. Out, goes the fierce irascible mind you’ve known all your life replaced by hesitation and uncertainty. Someone who NEVER questioned his own decisions, sits around with a fixed stare, writing a science blog and calling himself MISTER ScienceAintSoBad.

Not to make light of it. Because it’s not at all funny when dementia is real.

The Cogknow Project ( Europe – Sweden, The Netherlands, Ireland) did a VERY cool thing.

Its problem: keeping people in the early stages of dementia independent. MISTER ScienceAintSoBad is very impressed by the smart way touch screen devices were deployed, giving confidence and purpose to those who would, otherwise, require full time human assistance.

Creating an effective interface for this population’s kinda impossible. At least, that’s what I THOUGHT till I saw this video.

This project goes in the “technology” bin here at Science Ain’t So Bad. So far, at least, no studies to prove it’s effectiveness.

So what? Not everything requires a peer reviewed article. Did you wait for one before you bought your cell IPhone or your Droid?

Cogknow’s work deserves funding and Science Ain’t So Bad hopes it happens.

Harvard, Ice Cream, and Quantum Mechanics

DEFINING THE ELECTRON

MY PUBLIC

A long, long time ago, Joel, Doug, and MISTER ScienceAintSoBad were in line for an ice cream cone in Harvard Square.

I can’t remember, exactly, why, but Joel said (not for the first time) that “People are morons.”

Mister (not at that time) ScienceAintSoBad sturdily defended you.

“Not all of them.”

“That’s what YOU think. They don’t know crap!”

“You do?”

Three guys in line for ice cream.. You don’t want the whole transcript. However, it led to a “test” (we were young, remember). We decided to ask people in the line about electrons.

We would be easy graders. The interviewee didn’t have to know a lot. The answer could be “part of an atom”, “a tiny something that’s part of stuff”, “a particle”, “some small shmatta from physics” – just some indication that he.she knew what we were talking about.

So we did the survey. We asked ten customers, one by one. And this is what happened.

Nobody knew the answer.

One person – a high school girl, I think – knew it was “something in science” so she got a passing grade.

Everybody else was stumped. Most of them shrugged their shoulders or looked confused or were afraid that they were on Candid Camera.

Why bring this up?

Not because Joel was right about people being stupid. THEY weren’t making idiots out of themselves in an ice cream shop. But if this shop, which was a few hundred yards from Harvard (gasp!) University was even a little representative of the intelligent beings that inhabit our planet, then they (those intelligent beings) certainly didn’t give a lime sherbert’s damn about physics. Or abstract theories. Or natural philosophy. Or what-have-you.

You’re gonna say you have some issues with my methodology. That is wasn’t scientific.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that the “deeper” more abstract things are a hard sell with the average person. It’s just not what people think about.

WHAT I WRITE. WHAT YOU TOLERATE.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad can tell when you’re interested.

You know that little shmagegge on the upper right of the screen? It counts the visitors.

When we do an article about PRACTICAL things like the effects of salt on your health or a new cancer drug or a new breakthrough in hypnotic suggestion that turns teenagers into sweet, docile, uncomplaining saints, that thing GOES! The individual numbers get blurry and it goes whirr, whirr, whirr.

BUT when we do something really INTERESTING, something of PROFOUND SCIENTIFIC IMPORT such as the continuing effort to understand dark matter or dark energy or research into the true nature of the universe (quantum mechanics or string theory, for example), it stutters, hesitates, shivers, and staggers like it’s developed a case of frozen neuron disease.

This tells me that if I want lots of customers (and, by the way, the readership of Science Ain’t So Bad has been growing and thank you) I should stay away from deep science.

Unfortunately, because of a contract I have with myself, that’s not gonna happen so you can either go away with something new or (more likely) just skip the good stuff.

I hope you’ll, at least, give me a chance on the esoterica. It’ll make you a better person.

And, how can you be sure it won’t come up in a job interview?

You’ll be SO happy to learn that I’m adding book reviews to Science Ain’t So Bad and the first review – not finished yet – is going to be Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe.

Which doesn’t have a THING in it that’ll relieve the symptoms of a cold.

Financial Aid For Hearing Aids (and don’t YELL at me!)

DEAF BEATS POOR

Hearing Aid Help

You’re right.

Science Ain’t So Bad is a blog about science. And technology. And where you find the bucks to pay for hearing aids isn’t the big research issue of the century.

But I’m the writer guy and I get to decide. And DAMN this is a good thing to tell people about. So don’t yell at me.

I got my rights!

So, as I was saying, a VERY non-scientific and technical matter of GREAT interest to those of you who wear or need hearing aids is how do you pay for the durn things. The good ones are expensive as hell and, mostly, they’re not covered by your health plan.

The Better Hearing Institute has published a comprehensive “Guide To Financial Assistance for Hearing Aids“. And MISTER ScienceAintSoBad thinks that is mighty cool!

Even if it DOES leave you unfulfilled about the latest results from the Large Hadron Particle Collider.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 10 and no apologies for it.

Freeze Yer Snakes

TASTES LIKE CHICKEN

Nutrition: Reptile Menus

SOME of you are not regular snake eaters.

For the rest of you, a study in The International Journal of Food Microbiology says that you only risk trichinosis, pentastomiasis, gnathostomiasis or sparganosis by eating crocodiles, turtles, lizards or snakes.

Well.

Did I mention there’s also a chance of Salmonella, Shigella, Escherichia coli, Yersinia enterolitica, Campylobacter, Clostridium or Staphylococcus aureus?

I know you like fresh, but freezing’s safer. It tends to kill the very small stuff that shouldn’t be there anyway.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 5. (This study is still preliminary. And, besides. You eat snakes, you deserve what you get.)

Disgruntled Burglars Quitting The Trade. Can’t Compete.

What NEXT?

Criminology: Economics Of Burglary.

According to James Treadwell’s research (University of Leicester), global price pressures – particularly “cheap labor in China” – are RUINING it for decent burglars in the UK.

Commodity pricing in consumer goods such as DVD players has gotten so crappy that you can’t even fence a good home entertainment system anymore and embittered former second story guys are turning to a life of street crime.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 6 (Good entertainment value. Not so sure about the science).