Posts tagged science

Medicine has never been better; our overall health, however, is worsening.

— David Gratzer, MD

That, my friends, is the simple truth of modern life in America. Health is less and less about what doctors can do for you, but what you can do for your health. However, The System’s responsibility is to arm you with the easily accessible and affordable tools to help you optimize your health via fresh food, safe activity, and communities that provide real relationships and strong social support from family, friends, and neighbors.

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(via jayparkinsonmd)

#discuss

kevinmd.com

Interesting………… So What If You Don’t Get Enough Sleep? Actually, you’ll die earlier, be fatter, and be worse at your job. How many times have you told yourself (especially when you’re up at 2 a.m. on a Sunday night): “Eh, it’s just sleep.” Is it just sleep, though? What happens to your health when you’re not sleeping enough? This infographic designed by FFunction for Zeo, a company that makes an electronic “sleep coach,” is less of a real data visualization than a set of illustrated facts. But the facts are pretty gobsmacking. For example, we, as a nation, seem pretty tired all the time: Only 7% of people get eight hours of sleep a night. But the effects of this might be calamitous: Getting less sleep is associated with a 200% rise in cancer, a 100% rise in heart disease, and a 20% rise in the likelihood you’ll be dead in 20 years. Not only will you be less healthy, you’ll be fatter. People who sleep an hour more each day lose 14.3 pounds per year. (?!!). And 1 in 3 women find themselves too sleepy for sex: Scientists are inching closer to an explanation of how all this might be the case. (It really does seem that the lack of sleep itself is the problem, rather than lack of sleep being merely correlated with some other thing, such as alcohol consumption, which is causing all the problems.) Studies have shown that sleeping too little effectively puts the body on “high alert,” creating increased stress hormones and chemicals associated with inflammation. That said, what the infographic doesn’t tell is that sleeping too much can be almost as a dangerous as not sleeping enough. If you sleep over nine hours a day, you’re more likely to be fat, diabetic, depressed, and have heart disease. So get eight hours, but no more.

Interesting…………

So What If You Don’t Get Enough Sleep?

Actually, you’ll die earlier, be fatter, and be worse at your job.

How many times have you told yourself (especially when you’re up at 2 a.m. on a Sunday night): “Eh, it’s just sleep.” Is it just sleep, though? What happens to your health when you’re not sleeping enough?

This infographic designed by FFunction for Zeo, a company that makes an electronic “sleep coach,” is less of a real data visualization than a set of illustrated facts. But the facts are pretty gobsmacking. For example, we, as a nation, seem pretty tired all the time: Only 7% of people get eight hours of sleep a night. But the effects of this might be calamitous: Getting less sleep is associated with a 200% rise in cancer, a 100% rise in heart disease, and a 20% rise in the likelihood you’ll be dead in 20 years. Not only will you be less healthy, you’ll be fatter. People who sleep an hour more each day lose 14.3 pounds per year. (?!!). And 1 in 3 women find themselves too sleepy for sex: Scientists are inching closer to an explanation of how all this might be the case. (It really does seem that the lack of sleep itself is the problem, rather than lack of sleep being merely correlated with some other thing, such as alcohol consumption, which is causing all the problems.) Studies have shown that sleeping too little effectively puts the body on “high alert,” creating increased stress hormones and chemicals associated with inflammation.

That said, what the infographic doesn’t tell is that sleeping too much can be almost as a dangerous as not sleeping enough. If you sleep over nine hours a day, you’re more likely to be fat, diabetic, depressed, and have heart disease. So get eight hours, but no more.

bit.ly

Could Science Leave the University?

infoneer-pulse:

Does science need the university? Not so much that it won’t go looking for a better place to stay if things get ugly. If I were starting a career in the sciences today, I would pay a lot more attention to what private industry and the entrepreneurs have to offer than to the possibility of an academic post. If I were planning a line of research that is likely to take hundreds of millions of dollars and decades to consummate, I’d also think about how to find or invent an institutional setting beyond the university. It’s been done before.

This is not an eventuality I welcome. I’d rather see university science continue in something like its current form. My fear is that our nation’s shaky commitment to fundamental science on one hand and our overgrown and withal exploitative system of higher education on the other hand have created a situation that puts that historical partnership in jeopardy. All the current emphasis on STEM education in secondary schools and NSF-funded programs to encourage more Americans to major in science fields won’t repair the basic situation.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

infoneer-pulse

Interactive Brain Structure

Pretty sweet infographic…..

nationalgeographicmagazine:

Making sense of the brain’s mind-boggling complexity isn’t easy. What we do know is that it’s the organ that makes us human, giving people the capacity for art, language, moral judgments, and rational thought. It’s also responsible for each individual’s personality, memories, movements, and how we sense the world.

nationalgeographicmagazine

What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain

Lifehacker, coming strong today. Excerpt below, follow the link for full piece. Fascinating.

Right off the bat, it’s worth stating again: the human brain, and caffeine, are nowhere near totally understood and easily explained by modern science. That said, there is a general consensus on how a compound found all over nature, caffeine, affects the mind.

What Caffeine Actually Does to Your BrainEvery moment that you’re awake, the neurons in your brain are firing away. As those neurons fire, they produce adenosine as a byproduct, but adenosine is far from excrement. Your nervous system is actively monitoring adenosine levels through receptors. Normally, when adenosine levels reached a certain point in your brain and spinal cord, your body will start nudging you toward sleep, or at least taking it easy. There are actually a few different adenosine receptors throughout the body, but the one caffeine seems to interact with most directly is the A1 receptor. More on that later.

What Caffeine Actually Does to Your BrainEnter caffeine. It occurs in all kinds of plants, and chemical relatives of caffeine are found in your own body. But taken in substantial amounts—the semi-standard 100mg that comes from a strong eight-ounce coffee, for instance—it functions as a supremely talented adenosine impersonator. It heads right for the adenosine receptors in your system and, because of its similarities to adenosine, it’s accepted by your body as the real thing and gets into the receptors.

What Caffeine Actually Does to Your BrainMore important than just fitting in, though, caffeine actually binds to those receptors in efficient fashion, but doesn’t activate them—they’re plugged up by caffeine’s unique shape and chemical makeup. With those receptors blocked, the brain’s own stimulants, dopamine and glutamante, can do their work more freely—”Like taking the chaperones out of a high school dance,” Braun writes in an email. In the book, he ultimately likens caffeine’s powers to “putting a block of wood under one of the brain’s primary brake pedals.”

It’s an apt metaphor, because it spells out that caffeine very clearly doesn’t press the “gas” on your brain, and that it only blocks a “primary” brake. There are other compounds and receptors that have an effect on what your energy levels feel like—GABA, for example—but caffeine is crude way of preventing your brain from bringing things to a halt. “You can,” Braun writes, “get wired only to the extent that your natural excitatory neurotransmitters support it.” In other words, you can’t use caffeine to completely wipe out an entire week’s worth of very late nights of studying, but you can use it to make yourself feel less bogged down by sleepy feelings in the morning.

These effects will vary, in length and strength of effect, from person to person, depending on genetics, other physiology factors, and tolerance. But more on that in a bit. What’s important to take away is that caffeine is not as simple in effect as a direct stimulant, such as amphetamines or cocaine; its effect on your alertness is far more subtle.

Blogging the Periodic Table of Elements

FromS late, via PGP.

Pretty high on the Nerd Factor, but Slate has somehow managed  to make this demon-spawned invention sort of interesting. If nothing else, it will help you find new ways to debunk the plots of superhero movies and find another excuse to say, “Spider Man 4 is sooooooooo unrealistic!” (because all superhero movies are inherently meant to be judged in this way).

In some sense, what you might have suspected from the first day of high-school chemistry is true: The periodic table is a colossal waste of time. Nine out of every 10 atoms in the universe are hydrogen, the first element and the major constituent of stars. The other 10 percent of all atoms are helium. That’s already 100 percent. The rest of the periodic table, Elements 3 through 118, lithium through ununoctium, barely register on a cosmic scale. The rest of the universe, you and I included, is a rounding error.

Lunchtime Read- The Other U.S. Energy Crisis: Lack of R&D

Chew on this with your lunch. The US is doing its best to get lapped by our “friends” abroad. Unless we make a course change, this won’t end well. Excerpt below, click this link for the full story…

#clickclack #uh-oh #wemustprotectthishouse

BP (BP) says it’s throwing its best people at stopping the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Nevertheless, it took an outsider—Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who has a Nobel Prize in physics—to come up with the idea of peering inside the malfunctioning blowout preventer with high-energy gamma rays. BP tried Chu’s idea—after a few snickers and Incredible Hulk jokes, according to the Washington Post—and lo and behold, it worked. The probe was “crucial in helping us understand what is happening inside the BOP [blowout preventer] and informing the approach moving ahead,” said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

The gamma ray incident is symptomatic of a problem that’s bigger than London-based BP: Energy companies worldwide are far less science-oriented than one might expect from an industry that is heavily dependent on technology for safety and profit. In the U.S., energy companies’ spending on research, development, and deployment amounts to just 0.3 percent of sales. That’s barely more than a tenth what the auto industry spends as a share of sales and is dwarfed by the pharmaceutical industry, which spends nearly 19 percent of sales. (American Petroleum Institute chief economist John Felmy says R&D measures understate his industry’s “overall investment for the future.”)

Many economists argue that government needs to step in when the private sector isn’t providing the socially optimal amount of something like research. But government R&D spending on energy has been scarce, too. It was less than 0.03 percent of U.S. gross domestic product as of 2007, about one-third the share in Japan. The dearth of investment in energy R&D helps explain why the world is still getting its energy by punching holes in the sea floor rather than from safer, renewable sources such as the sun and the wind.

The drive for more energy R&D is up against formidable obstacles, starting with the budget deficit. Representative Ralph Hall, the ranking Republican on the House Science & Technology Committee, tried in May to cut about $40 billion from the $86 billion sought by House Democrats for the America COMPETES Act, which funds federal research and math and science education. “We must be mindful of our spending if America is to continue to compete globally,” Hall said then. The House eventually voted to reauthorize the act without Hall’s cuts, while the Senate hasn’t yet acted. Even if Congress agrees to authorize the full $86 billion, funding could still be cut in the appropriations process.

Money isn’t the only problem. On the right, many Republicans say the federal government should be involved only in basic science, not steps toward commercialization. On the left, many Democrats hope to kick-start research and investment in green energy via measures such as carbon caps that would make coal and oil more expensive.

The American Energy Innovation Council argues that ARPA-E merits $1 billion a year. Majumdar says he’d be happy just getting the requested $300 million given the big budget deficit. On the other hand, Energy’s Chu testified last year that China is spending $9 billion a month on clean energy investments. Says Energy Under Secretary Kristina Johnson: “We’re competing with some very fierce competitors that are throwing everything they have behind being successful in this clean energy economy.”

The bottom line Lack of R&D is limiting development of new energy technologies, and prospects for a big increase remain cloudy.

Let’s lighten the mood up a bit…… From Gizmodo: Chances are, as a kiddywink, you looked up to your Mom or Dad and asked “why is the sky blue?” Just in case you’ve forgotten, or your parents told you a whopping fib, io9 has come to the rescue. For the full explanation, you’d be best off heading over to our sister-site io9 now, but if a summary is what you’re after, stay put right here. The brief explanation is to do with the sun—specifically, the “Rayleigh Scattering” of the light. It also explains why sunsets are red, with the term coined by English physicist Lord Rayleigh in 1871. When the sunlight hits smaller particles of oxygen and nitrogen in the air, the light then “scatters” in various directions. The blue light, causing a lovely blue sky, comes from light wavelengths smaller than 400 nanometers, and red light for sunsets occurs when the wavelengths are around 700 nanometers in size. Looking above you, the whole sky appears blue because so much scattering is being done. It’s not constrained to just the area around the sun, because so much scattering is happening that the whole sky is filled with the blue light. This happens until the early evening, when the sun dips and there’s less light in the air. [HowStuffWorks and Science Encyclopedia via io9]

Let’s lighten the mood up a bit……

From Gizmodo:

Chances are, as a kiddywink, you looked up to your Mom or Dad and asked “why is the sky blue?” Just in case you’ve forgotten, or your parents told you a whopping fib, io9 has come to the rescue.

For the full explanation, you’d be best off heading over to our sister-site io9 now, but if a summary is what you’re after, stay put right here.

The brief explanation is to do with the sun—specifically, the “Rayleigh Scattering” of the light. It also explains why sunsets are red, with the term coined by English physicist Lord Rayleigh in 1871. When the sunlight hits smaller particles of oxygen and nitrogen in the air, the light then “scatters” in various directions. The blue light, causing a lovely blue sky, comes from light wavelengths smaller than 400 nanometers, and red light for sunsets occurs when the wavelengths are around 700 nanometers in size.

Looking above you, the whole sky appears blue because so much scattering is being done. It’s not constrained to just the area around the sun, because so much scattering is happening that the whole sky is filled with the blue light. This happens until the early evening, when the sun dips and there’s less light in the air. [HowStuffWorks and Science Encyclopedia via io9]