Cheerful Curmudgeon » Science

Are Psycho-Active Drugs Ineffective and Dangerous?

Art Zemon — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 13:28:02 +0000

There seems to be mounting evidence that psycho-active drugs are no more effective than placebos; that they may cause real harm; and that the belief that many mental illnesses are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain has never been proven but has been forwarded by the drug manufacturers.

I was most persuaded by Irving Kirsch’s work. Drug companies only publish the studies which are favorable toward their drugs, though they submit all studies to the FDA. The FDA does not publish the negative studies either, considering them to be proprietary information. Kirsch obtained the studies for six anti-depressant drugs from the FDA through a Freedom of Information Act request. The drugs were Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. He found that these drugs were only slightly more effective than placebos and did not have a “dose response curve,” i.e., that higher doses did not do more that lower doses. That is very unlikely in a drug that actually does something. He then compared these drugs to “active placebos,” things which cause side effects such as a dry mouth but which do nothing more, and found that the drugs were exactly as effective as the active placebos.

It is very troubling that, “a 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 of the shrinks who wrote the American Psychiatric Association’s most recent clinical guidelines [in the DSM] for treating depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies.”

Finally, it is most disturbing that many the psycho-active drugs cause significant side-effects (including shrinkage of the frontal cortex) which in turn cause more psychotic symptoms which are in turn treated with additional psyo-active drugs.

Take a look at two articles that I think are well worth the read. First, Al Jazeera’s Mass psychosis in the US looks at the rising rates of treatment with anti-psychotic drugs in the US. This class of drugs has become the most prescribed in the country, surpassing drugs that treat both high cholesterol and acid reflux. Much of the background for that article comes from the New York Review of Books article, The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?, by a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

I would love to hear your reactions.

Last Shuttle Launch

Art Zemon — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 15:47:44 +0000

Robert Scoble got a beautiful photo of Atlantis’ final launch, STS-135

Atlantis Shuttle Launch, July 8 2011. Photo by Robert Scoble

I am very proud of what we have done and sad to reach the end of this era.

Highlights of 350 Years of Science

Art Zemon — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:20:50 +0000

The Royal Society, as in The Royal Society of the UK, has been around for 350 years and is celebrating, in part, by making available highlights of scientific papers on its Trailblazing web site. It is a nicely done Flash timeline giving you easy access to papers such as Capt. James Cook’s report on preventing scurvy during a sea voyage in 1752-1755, proof that fingerprints are unique in 1891, and, my favorite, Ben Franklin’s 1751 letter describing his kite experiment with electric-fire (don’t try this at home, kiddies).

Safety Drivers

Art Zemon — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 03:15:36 +0000

The reactions to the mid-air collision last month between an airplane and a helicopter over the Hudson River in New York City have me thinking about safety in airplanes and safety in cars. For those unfamiliar with the details, just before noon on August 8, a six person airplane and an eight person helicopter came together in the air over the Hudson River; the nine people on board the two aircraft died in the ensuing crash. This was a terrible tragedy and my heart goes out to the families and friends of the nine people who lost their lives.

Immediately (as in, within a couple of hours) after the accident, the calls-to-action to improve safety in the “VFR corridor,” the name of the airspace where the collision occurred, began. These calls took many forms, from the sensational TV news reporters and politicians who demanded that the VFR corridor be closed and the helicopter tourist business be shuttered to the FAA which convened a New York Airspace Working Group panel to review everything from airspace structure to pilot training to air traffic controller practices. The focus has been on safety much more than on blame, and that’s a good thing.

Compare this to the common reaction to a driving accident: If the accident is big enough to make the news, the key reporting points are a) what happened, and b) who caused it or blame. Rarely do we react to an automotive accident with an urgent need to prevent future accidents in the same place and of the same type. We may well get to this point, of course, but only after several accidents have happened. A city might install a traffic light at an intersection, for instance, but only after several accidents have occurred at the intersection.

According to the Air Safety Foundation, the August 8 collision was the first accident of this type (airplane and helicopter) over the Hudson River in ten years. It may well have been the only accident ever. What is the cultural difference between flying and driving that we demand safer flying, even after a single accident, yet we accept car accidents as the daily norm?

Pilots place safety first. The Federal Aviation Regulations stipulate biennial “flight reviews,” essentially flying tests, by FAA certificated flight instructors. Fail the review and you don’t fly until you get some training and are “passed” by the flight instructor. Beyond that, the flying culture strongly encourage all pilots to participate in on-going training such as the FAA’s WINGS Pilot Proficiency Program. This, in turn, builds on the assumptions that none of us are perfect and that all of us can learn from others’ mistakes and can become better, safer pilots. We actively seek out and study stories of bad situations, not to assess blame but to learn and improve our skills. Even more to the point, most of us regularly fly with a safety pilot, asking the safety pilot to critique our performance. I try to get up once a month, though it is sometimes as infrequently as every three or four months, with either Jack or Linda. On these flights, I expect them to be vocal with me about anything I do that is less than perfect. Some of the training is during the flight; some during a debriefing afterwards. I always come away from these flights having learned valuable lessons.

We act differently with our cars, though. Most of us are deeply offended if anyone suggests that we might need to take either a written test or a driving test when renewing our driver’s license. We never volunteer for recurrent training on driving. One of the best ways to make a friend angry is to suggest that he or she do something differently while driving. Why? I think because driving is more important to us, on a personal level, than safety. We judge that we are “safe enough” that we don’t need to stress about driving safely any more. What is most important is that we preserve our “right” to drive, pretty much at any cost.

I think our priorities are a little mixed up and I have a suggestion. First, bear with my while I share a few figures with you.

In 2005, 43,510 people died in the US in fatal car crashes.
That same year, another 2,699,000 people were injured in the US in car crashes.
In 2005, the latest year for which the NTSB reports aviation statistics, 563 people died in the US in fatal aviation accidents.
That same year, another 723 people were injured in US aviation accidents.

Consider again our reactions as a society to aircraft accidents and to traffic accidents. Now take it to a personal level: How do you react to aviation accidents versus fatal car crashes? Are your reactions congruent with the numbers of people killed and injured in each type of accident?

Here is my suggestion to improve traffic safety, to reduce the number of deaths and injuries.

I’m not a perfect driver. Join me in admitting that you aren’t perfect, either.
Get a friend to act as your safety driver for an hour. Go drive around. As you drive, talk to your safety driver about what you are seeing, what you are thinking, and how you are making your decisions. Invite your safety driver to give you constructive criticism on how you might improve your driving.

It’s that simple. Imagine how many fewer people would die if we took driving safety as seriously as we take flying safety.

Programming Feeds the Mad Scientist

Art Zemon — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:49:36 +0000

I have been writing a new program, having a ball doing it, and it has brought to consciousness something which I have not thought about for years: There is a bit of Dr. Henry Frankenstein in me. I love to create things which do stuff autonomously and, when I create these things, bigger is definitely better.

My current creation has lots of parts, including:

A daemon (I love that word, all the more since daemon’s are useful and not evil at all) which runs all the time and wakes up once a minute to see if anything interesting has happened and decide whether it should do something.
A script which watches for people to click special links in email messages. It leaves a “note” for the daemon, telling it that a human being received the email and did something. Cool; my program is making humans do things!
A script which watches for secret messages sent from another program on another computer. This script also leaves notes for the daemon, telling it that the other computer is set up and running and ready to do a human being’s bidding.

The daemon gets to do all sorts of fun things, including summoning new (virtual) computers into existance and turning them loose on the world. In the end, the daemon even gets to kill off the computers. The daemon spends real money (hopefully, this part does not get out of control!) with a real multi-national company. And as the daemon works, it attracts the attention of people at four different companies, all of which are very interested in what this little beastie is doing.

Not bad for a creation which only exists in the virtual world inside a computer. If you see me walking around with a smug smile on my face, now you know why.

Cool Science: Ruben’s Tube & Non-Newtonian Fluid

Art Zemon — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 12:28:11 +0000

Science is just plain cool. Check out the Ruben’s Tube (a surefire favorite if you are into flame and music) and the Non-Newtonian Fluid (if you are worried about burning down the garage).

Benjamin Franklin’s Electrical Kite

Art Zemon — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:13:11 +0000

We all know the story of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite in an electrical storm. I always thought that it was kind of fanciful, along the same lines as the myth about George Washington cutting down a cherry tree. Guess what: I was wrong. Franklin not only flew the kite in a storm, he held onto the string, and he stuck his hand near the key so that he could fully experience the “electric fire.”

I just finished reading the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, downloaded from Project Gutenberg. At the end, I found a letter Franklin wrote to Peter Collinson in 1752 describing the electrical kite experiment in exquisite detail.

Make a small cross of two light strips of cedar, the arms so long as to reach to the four corners of a large, thin silk handkerchief when extended; tie the corners of the handkerchief to the extremities of the cross, so you have the body of a kite; which being properly accommodated with a tail, loop, and string, will rise in the air, like those made of paper; but this being of silk, is fitter to bear the wet and wind of a thunder-gust without tearing. To the top of the upright stick of the cross is to be fixed a very sharp-pointed wire, rising a foot or more above the wood. To the end of the twine, next the hand, is to be tied a silk ribbon, and where the silk and twine join, a key may be fastened. This kite is to be raised when a thunder-gust appears to be coming on, and the person who holds the string must stand within a door or window, or under some cover, so that the silk ribbon may not be wet; and care must be taken that the twine does not touch the frame of the door or window. As soon as any of the thunder clouds come over the kite, the pointed wire will draw the electric fire from them, and the kite, with all the twine will be electrified, and the loose filaments of the twine will stand out every way and be attracted by an approaching finger. And when the rain has wet the kite and twine, so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle. At this key the phial may be charged; and from electric fire thus obtained, spirits may be kindled, and all the electric experiments be performed, which are usually done by the help of a rubbed glass globe or tube, and thereby the sameness of the electric matter with that of lightning completely demonstrated.

I also love the illustration:

"You will find it stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle"

I think it is certainly fair to say, Don’t Try This At Home.

But if you do… be sure to let me know how it works out!

All About the CERN LHC

Art Zemon — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 13:06:09 +0000

Welcome to today’s world. Physics isn’t just about the things thar normal human beings can understand but you can watch YouTube to catch up on the latest. My hat’s off to Geeks Are Sexy for finding and collecting these two videos, one educational and the other fun and educational. Enjoy.

Is your head hurting? Well just kick back and relax with a bit of rap music by the same science team which build CERN:

You have probably heard me grumble about history repeating itself. The LHC is just another trivial case in point.

We now return you to your regular programming…

Shut Up and Let Me Drive

Art Zemon — Sun, 11 May 2008 15:03:40 +0000

We all know that distractions make driving significantly more difficult and dangerous. Cell phones top the list, at least from lawmakers’ perspectives, and we now have laws in several states which limit cell phone use while driving. Sadly, lawmakers have not found a way to make children stop bugging their parents during car trips. “She’s breathing my air!” and “He’s looking out my window!” make every parent cringe and enhance family outings in immeasurable ways.

Science News, in Shifting Priorities at the Wheel, reports on a new study which demonstrates that simply listening to conversation severely reduces a driver’s ability to safely maneuver a car.

Even a simple form of multitasking â€” driving while listening to someone else talk â€” disrupts the ability to navigate a car safely, a new study finds.

An intriguing neural response underlies vehicular mishaps associated with such distractions, say neuroscientist Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and his colleagues. Attending to what someone says galvanizes language-related brain areas while simultaneously reducing activity in spatial regions that coordinate driving behavior.

This finding suggests that people who combine relatively automatic tasks, such as speech comprehension and car driving, exceed a biological limit on the amount of systematic brain activity they can accommodate at one time, the researchers propose. As a result, the less-ingrained skill â€” in this case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native language â€” takes a neural hit.

Pilots know how distracting simple chit-chat can be. When I am taking off and landing my plane, I ask everybody else on board to stop talking, even to each other; I need to concentrate. If I am flying with several children and they won’t keep quiet, I use the “isolate” switch on my audio panel so that I don’t have to listen to them.

This is a significant enough issue that the FAA formalized it into the Sterile Cockpit Rule in 1981. Wikipedia summarizes it nicely,

The Sterile Cockpit Rule is an FAA regulation requiring pilots to refrain from non-essential activities during critical phases of flight, normally below 10,000 feet. The FAA imposed the rule in 1981 after reviewing a series of accidents that were caused by flight crews who were distracted from their flying duties by engaging in non-essential conversations and activities during critical parts of the flight. One such notable accident was Eastern Air Lines Flight 212, which crashed just short of the runway at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport in 1974 while conducting an instrument approach in dense fog. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that one probable cause of the accident was distraction due to idle chatter among the flight crew during the approach phase of the flight.

It is worth being aware of the biological limits to what our brains can do. When hurtling down the road in a two ton missile, with innocent bystanders on foot nearby, and women and children blithely motoring along in their own cars next to yours, pay attention to the most important task at hand: arriving alive.

Photographs of Mercury

Art Zemon — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:15:35 +0000

This morning the Gee Whiz department brings us photographs of the planet Mercury, taken by the MESSENGER probe on its first fly-by.

I don’t know about you but I grew up in the stone ages, when seeing a planet meant looking at a bright spot in the sky. As a child, I never imagined being able to see such detailed photographs.

What a Job!

Art Zemon — Fri, 11 May 2007 18:21:57 +0000

You’ve got to see this to believe it. And even then, you might not believe it.

glumbert.com – High Power Job

I was dubious until another member of a forum where this video appeared wrote,

My neighbor works for Santee Electric in the transmission line area and he does this. He is 60 year old and still rides up in the heli and walks the lines. He says he would much rather walk the line than ride on the copter. He gets motion sick while riding.

I am also a certified tower climber and I had to put an antenna on a billboard off I95 once and Steve helped me, well I needed to run back to the shop and get a different mount, he was already up the 300 + feet on the billboard. When I got back I could not find him, I ended up climbing up to the top and found him sound asleep on a 4in I-beam. I guess it is all what you get used to.

Sheesh!

Bacteria Use Radioactive Uranium Instead of Energy from the Sun

Art Zemon — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 02:52:53 +0000

Were you looking forward to another boring day on this run-of-the-mill planet Earth?

Researchers from Indiana University Bloomington and eight collaborating institutions report in this week’s Science a self-sustaining community of bacteria that live in rocks 2.8 kilometers below Earth’s surface. Think that’s weird? The bacteria rely on radioactive uranium to convert water molecules to useable energy.

Go read These bacteria use radiated water as food at IU’s web site. Once again, truth is stranger than fiction.

What happens when lightning strikes an airplane?

Art Zemon — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 12:00:43 +0000

What happens when lightening strikes an airplane?

According to Edward J Rupke, senior engineer at Lighting Technologies, Inc., not much. (Image courtesy of Edward J. Rupke and borrowed from Scientific American.com.)

Although passengers and crew may see a flash and hear a loud noise if lightning strikes their plane, nothing serious should happen because of the careful lightning protection engineered into the aircraft and its sensitive components.

I have been asked that question many times and, though I have never heard anything to make me worry much about it, I did not know the details of the answer. You can read the full article at Scientific American. Ask the Experts: Physics: What happens when lightning strikes an airplane?

Amazing Space Shuttle Video

Art Zemon — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 13:54:39 +0000

I’m a space junkie so I was thrilled to read in Slashdot

Jivecat writes: “All those extra cameras NASA has added to the Space Shuttle to watch for debris impacts have yielded what may be the coolest Shuttle launch footage ever. The forward-facing view from the right-hand SRB shows, at about the 2:58 mark, booster separation and Discovery zooming away. Other views are available at the main mission site.”

Geometric Whirlpools

Art Zemon — Mon, 22 May 2006 12:59:04 +0000

Nature.com reports, in Geometric whirlpools revealed – Recipe for making symmetrical holes in water is easy, that it is surprisingly easy to make “holes” in a bucket of water that have all kinds of interesting shapes.

The researchers found that once the plate was spinning so fast that the water span out to the sides, creating a hole of air in the middle, the dry patch wasn’t circular as might be expected. Instead it evolved, as the bucket’s spin sped up, from an ellipse to a three-sided star, to a square, a pentagon, and, at the highest speeds investigated, a hexagon.

Photo credit: T.R.N. Jansson

From talking with my high school aged sons, it sounds like high school science classes have become downright boring. I suspect budgets and fear of liability law suits have chased the hands-on lessons out of the classrooms. That is truly a shame since I fondly remember many experiments from my school physics, chemistry and biology classes. Perhaps this new phenomenon will entertain and educate future generations.

National TBIS Key Exchange Program

Art Zemon — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 07:04:13 +0000

This is really important and the last day of the program. See the web site for complete details.

National TBIS Key Exchange Program

Breaking News

Art Zemon — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 13:15:09 +0000

Exciting, Breaking News, from the Weizmann Institute. Scientists have finally figured out how a material cracks:

Physicists attempting to find a formula for the dynamics of cracking, to allow them to predict how a crack will advance in a given material, have faced a serious obstacle. The difficulty lies in pinning down, objectively, the fundamental directionality of the cracking process: From any given angle of observation or starting point of measurement, the crack will look different and yield different results from any other. Scientists all over the world have experimented with cracking but, until now, no one has successfully managed to come up with a method for analyzing the progression of a forming crack.

Perhaps now someone will be able to bake matzo which actually breaks along the lines.

Deciphering The Mystery Of Bee Flight

Art Zemon — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:39:06 +0000

ScienceDaily reports in Deciphering The Mystery Of Bee Flight that scientists have finally figured out how bees fly.

Their wings beat over a short arc of about 90 degrees, but ridiculously fast, at around 230 beats per second. Fruit flies, in comparison, are 80 times smaller than honeybees, but flap their wings only 200 times a second.

When bees want to generate more power–for example, when they are carting around a load of nectar or pollen–they increase the arc of their wing strokes, but keep flapping at the same rate.

and

“This is one of those cases where you can make a mistake by looking at an animal and assuming that it is perfectly adapted. An alternate hypothesis is that bee ancestors inherited this kind of muscle and now present-day bees must live with its peculiarities,” Dickinson [professor of bioengineering at California Institute of Technology] says.

Maybe “survival of the fittest” may have to be replaced with “survival of the most persistent.”

Seed of extinct date palm sprouts after 2,000 years

Art Zemon — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 03:18:01 +0000

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

When the Romans invaded ancient Judea, thick forests of date palms towering up to 80 feet high and 7 miles wide covered the Jordan River valley from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the shores of the Dead Sea in the south. The tree so defined the local economy that Emperor Vespasian celebrated the conquest by minting the “Judea Capta,” a special bronze coin that showed the Jewish state as a weeping woman beneath a date palm.

Today, nothing remains of those mighty forests. The date palms in modern Israel were imported, mainly from California. The ancient Judean date, renowned for its succulence and famed for its many medicinal properties, had been lost to history.

Until now.

Elaine Solowey, a UCLA-educated botanist, living in Israel and specializing in the study of ancient plants, has successfully germinated 2,000 year-old Judean date seeds which were found on Masada.

Read the article. Imagine being able to touch (and maybe eat) a piece of Biblical history.

Mission to build a simulated brain begins

Art Zemon — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 05:24:39 +0000

New Scientist ran an article on Monday titled, Mission to build a simulated brain begins. It opens with,

An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday.

The â€œBlue Brainâ€ project, a collaboration between IBM and a Swiss university team, will involve building a custom-made supercomputer based on IBMâ€™s Blue Gene design.

The hope is that the virtual brain will help shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness.

On the one hand, it reads like bad sci-fi. “Mission to outer space begins!” or some such grandiose scheme involving peta-hyper-chrono-drive spaceships and (gasp) mechanical brains!

On the other hand, it strikes too close to the heart dismiss lightly. We can get so caught up with fights like evolution vs. creationism that we lose sight of the real mysteries in the universe. The question of how brains actually work has intrigued me for decades.

I remember trying to get a handle on it back in college. I took two 400 level courses at the same time, Artificial Intelligence and Psychology of Thinking. (It took a bit of finagling for me to get into the psych course, since I had not taken any of the prerequisites, so here is a belated thanks to my parents. I told the professor that they had degrees in psych and social work so of course I was prepared for his class. Fortunately, the prof bought it.) But I digress.

I hoped that if I took AI and psychology at the same time, I might learn how our brains work from two perspectives and thereby gain a deeper understanding. I ended up being deeply disappointed. I learned that the shrinks knew more about aphasia than thought, knew a bit about what pieces of the brain were responsible for “vision” or “hearing” or “speech” but didn’t have a clue how any of them worked. From the geeks, I learned how to play go, that they didn’t have any solid ideas about how a brain “knew” stuff, and that the computers of the day weren’t anywhere near fast enough to approach solving the problem.

Today my hope is rekindled. Over the last few months, I have bumped into literature that the brain works more like an orchestra than a digital computer (The Music of the Brain). This seems much more reasonable to me. Rather than try to force the brain to work like the model that we have at hand, we may have found a model which more closely matches reality.

“Blue Brain” may just be a key component in this discovery journey. We may finally have the computing power to actually test our theories.

We’ve come a long way in the 25 years since I was at the University of Michigan. I can’t wait to see how much we know 25 years from now.