kisma Johnson's blog: "Life science"

We are so used to living in a material world, ruled by pragmatism, relying solely on the individual, and leaving knowledge to science alone, that we forget that more collective psychologies may have a bearing on our lives. Indeed, I’m convinced that ‘mechanisms’ exist throughout human experience that are just as prevalent today as in the past. It is just that our worldview is so short sighted that we do not even consider such esoteric elements. Researchers such as Jung and Campbell knew this. greek-warrior1 In their work on myths and archetypes, they identified specific personality traits that exist in myth. But more than this, they also appeared in our dreams. Myths, it seems, were our dreams writ large – the first ‘media’, as it were. And the relationship between myth and us does not stop here. Indeed, it is fundamental to who we are. Why did myths have such an effect on people? Because those archetypal gods were actually aspects of our own psychology. In heroes such as Hercules we see an exaggerated form of the striving of the human. Hence, myths get under our skin, because we intuitively know they are us. In some myths, such as Oedipus, we even find great human drama played out, and in this way, they become symbols of taboo. This is the power of myth in action. Through the storyteller, elements of our psychology and action are symbolised, and they become powerful controlling devices – moral theatre, to be exact. But myths are even more than this. For instance, if myths out human psychology, then we can assume that the elements of myth should be eternal. After all, we seem to have been peculiarly human for a long time. delta-woman I think they actually are eternal. And this transfers from early myth-media to the modern. Change is not fundamental, but simply culture deep. We can see this in the mythological expression of womanhood. In the deep past she was Aphrodite, a sexual and fertile being. The sexuality was taken away in the Virgin Mary. In modern times, the archetype was reborn in the Marilyn Monroe type, and we see the image still in the supermodel. What we see here is a continual psychological controlling model using a definite archetype, changed only by the culture expressing it at a particular time. And in each case, womanhood aspired to be as the myth-media expressed it. Hence, there are continually created cultural gods, or superbeings, refashioned for every age, which control so many elements of our action and psychology. Yet this powerful force is ignored by academe. As such, we have no idea of correctly gauging just how virulent their influence really is. But we do have an indication from the latest myth-media ’superbeing’ – an archetype that seems to live in an ‘other world’ to us, constantly revered, and making us aspire to be like them. We call them celebrities.

This is from The Colonoscopy Journal: I called my friend Andy Sable, a gastroenterologist, to make an appointment for a colonoscopy. A few days later, in his office, Andy showed me a color diagram of the colon, a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis . Then Andy explained the colonoscopy procedure to me in a thorough, reassuring and patient manner. I nodded thoughtfully, but I didn't really hear anything he said, because my brain was shrieking, 'HE'S GOING TO STICK A TUBE 17,000 FEET UP YOUR BEHIND!' I left Andy's office with some written instructions and a prescription for a product called 'MoviPrep,' which comes in a box large enough to hold a microwave oven. I will discuss MoviPrep in detail later; for now suffice it to say that we must never allow it to fall into the hands of America 's enemies. I spent the next several days productively sitting around being nervous. Then, on the day before my colonoscopy, I began my preparation. In accordance with my instructions, I didn't eat any solid food that day; all I had was chicken broth, which is basically water, only with less flavor. Then, in the evening, I took the MoviPrep. You mix two packets of powder together in a one-liter plastic jug, then you fill it with lukewarm water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a liter is about 32 gallons.) Then you have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because MoviPrep tastes - and here I am being kind - like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon. The instructions for MoviPrep, clearly written by somebody with a great sense of humor, state that after you drink it, 'a loose, watery bowel movement may result. ' This is kind of like saying that after you jump off your roof, you may experience contact with the ground. MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. I don't want to be too graphic, here, but: Have you ever seen a space-shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet. After an action-packed evening, I finally got to sleep. The next morning my wife drove me to the clinic. I was very nervous. Not only was I worried about the procedure, but I had been experiencing occasional return bouts of MoviPrep spurtage. I was thinking, 'What if I spurt on Andy?' How do you apologize to a friend for something like that? Flowers would not be enough. At the clinic I had to sign many forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the heck the forms said. Then they led me to a room full of other colonoscopy people, where I went inside a little curtained space and took off my clothes I then put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts, the kind that, when you put it on, makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked. Then a nurse named Eddie put a little needle in a vein in my left hand. Ordinarily I would have fainted, but Eddie was very good, and I was already lying down. Eddie also told me that some people put vodka in their MoviPrep. At first I was ticked off that I hadn't thought of this, but then I pondered what would happen if you got yourself too tipsy to make it to the bathroom, so you were staggering around in full Fire Hose Mode. You would have no choice but to burn your house. When everything was ready, Eddie wheeled me into the procedure room, where Andy was waiting with a nurse and an anesthesiologist. I did not see the 17,000 foot tube, but I knew Andy had it hidden around there somewhere. I was seriously nervous at this point. Andy had me roll over on my left side, and the anesthesiologist began hooking something up to the needle in my hand. There was music playing in the room, and I realized that the song was 'Dancing Queen' by ABBA. I remarked to Andy that, of all the songs that could be playing during this particular procedure, 'Dancing Queen' had to be the least appropriate. 'You want me to turn it up?' said Andy, from somewhere behind me. 'Ha ha,' I said. And then it was time, the moment I had been dreading for more than a decade. If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like. I have no idea. Really. I slept through it. One moment, ABBA was yelling 'Dancing Queen, feel the beat of the tambourine,' and the next moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood. Andy was looking down at me and asking me how I felt. I felt excellent. I felt even more excellent when Andy told me that it was all over, and that my colon had passed with flying colors. I have never been prouder of an internal organ. With that, out came a huge fart that melted the paint on the walls and blew poor Andy across the room. After he got up and straightened himself up, he said I could go home now. We're still friends, but I'll always wonder what he thought at that moment.

High atop a hill behind his family’s home, Derli Grimm knelt and took a sip from a thin black tube leading from a natural spring. Cândido Godói is a farm town. Like so many in this farming town, populated almost entirely by German-speaking immigrants, Mr. Grimm, 19, believes that something in the water — a mysterious mineral, perhaps — is responsible for the town’s unusual concentration of twins. “It can’t all be explained by genetics,” said Mr. Grimm, himself a twin. Geneticists would like to disagree with him, but even they have no solid explanation for the 38 pairs of twins among about 80 families living in a one-and-a-half-square-mile area. The mystery has persisted for decades, attracting international attention and inspiring books and investigations by geneticists. It is one reason locals are in no hurry to try to prove their water theory. They are too busy posing for journalists and marketing their town to tourists as the “twins capital of the world.” Some researchers have suggested the darker possibility that Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician known as the Angel of Death, was involved. Mengele, residents say, roamed this region of southern Brazil, posing as a veterinarian, in the 1960s, about the time the twins explosion began. In a book published last year, an Argentine journalist, Jorge Camarasa, suggested that Mengele conducted experiments with women here that resulted in the higher rate of twins, many of them with blond hair and light-colored eyes. The experiments, locals said, may have involved new types of drugs and preparations, or even the artificial insemination Mengele claimed to know about, regarding cows and humans. But neither Mr. Camarasa nor any other adherent of the Mengele theory has been able to prove the escaped Nazi conducted any experiments here. Mengele, who died in Brazil in 1979, was notorious for his often deadly experiments on twins at Auschwitz, ostensibly in an effort to produce a master Aryan race for Hitler. “People who are speculating about Mengele are doing so to sell books,” said Paulo Sauthier, a historian who runs a museum here. “He studied the twins phenomenon in Germany, not here.” A sign at the entrance to Cândido Godói says, “Garden City and Land of Twins.” More than 80 percent of its 6,700 residents are of German descent. They began arriving around World War I, lured by the prospect of cheap land, an agreeable farming climate and incentives from the Brazilian government to colonize the area. The twins phenomenon is centered in the 300-person settlement of São Pedro, the part of Cândido Godói where the Grimms live. Mr. Sauthier, a twin, was born here in 1964. His mother, a Grimm, comes from one of the eight original families to settle São Pedro in 1918. Even today they live a relatively isolated existence. Oxen still drag farm machinery. Residents speak a German dialect to one another. It was in the early 1990s that the high proportion of twins was widely noticed. Soon, camera crews were rolling in from all over. Town leaders declared São Pedro to have the highest concentration of twins in the world. (A spokesman for Guinness World Records could not confirm that claim, saying Guinness did not keep track of the category.) Today, residents relish the attention. Last year, at São Pedro’s sixth biennial twins party, they erected a statue of a woman holding a boy in one arm and his twin sister in the other, and installed a moat-like “fertility spring” that lights up at night. Like many twins here, Fabiane and Tatiane Grimm, 22, have been posing for twins-seekers since they were babies. When a journalist and a photographer showed up unannounced, their mother ushered them from a barn into the house to shower before posing for pictures. “It’s not too much of a mystery to me,” said Fabiane, whose family has five pairs of twins. “My brother married his third cousin. There are lots of cases like that, people marrying their cousins or other close family members.” But to some, the mystery remains. A decade ago, Anencir Flores da Silva, a town doctor and former mayor of Cândido Godói, set out to solve it, and he has since interviewed more than 100 people. He said he believed that people were holding back information about Mengele. “In a region full of Nazis, there are some that remain silent, who are scared,” Dr. da Silva said. “It is important that we discover the truth.” A book he helped write about the twins, published in 2007, tells of several visits Mengele made to the region, using false names. “I am convinced that Mengele was in the region and was observing the twins phenomenon,” Dr. da Silva said. He said a man identifying himself as Rudolf Weiss attended women with varicose veins and sometimes performed dental work. And some residents told him a German man was driving from home to home in a mobile laboratory, collecting samples and ministering to women. Mr. Sauthier, the historian, said that the assertions lacked proof and that the German community did not deserve to be associated with “a criminal like Mengele.” “There are no Nazi sympathizers in this region,” he said, although he acknowledged a historical interest in Nazi artifacts, including a 1937 metal milk can with a swastika in his museum and a 1936 photo of schoolchildren in Cândido Godói holding swastika flags that was included in Dr. da Silva’s book. Geneticists say the most likely explanation for the twins is genetic isolation and inbreeding. Ursula Matte, a geneticist in Porto Alegre, found that from 1990 to 1994, 10 percent of the births in São Pedro were twins, compared with 1.8 percent for the state of Rio Grande do Sul. There was no evidence of the use of contraceptives or fertility drugs among the women, nor of any genetic mixing with people of African origin, who have higher twinning rates than caucasians, Dr. Matte said. But the rate of identical twins here, at 47 percent of all twin births, is far higher than the 30 percent that is expected in the general population, she found. While identical twins are generally thought to occur randomly in the population, independent of genetic factors, the remarkable discrepancy in the frequency of identical twins has led Dr. Matte to conclude that Sao Pedro is an "isolated phenomenon" where unknown genetic factors must be at work. So the speculation continues. Mr. Sauthier said he believed private water sources like the one Derli Grimm enjoys contain a mineral that affects ovulation. “To this day, no one has tested that water,” he said, noting that in the past decade the town switched to underground well water, a possible explanation for a recent decline in twin births. Testing the spring sources would be expensive and, Dr. Matte said, would require some hypothesis about what the research was looking for. She doubts the town will ever push seriously to do a study. “They like to maintain the mystery,” she said. To clarify these are fraternal not identical twins

Forget waiting for ET to call -- the most likely place to find an alien message is in our DNA, according to an expert in Australia. Professor Paul Davies, from the Australian Center for Astro-biology at Macquarie University in Sydney, believes a cosmic greeting card could have been left in every human cell. The coded message would only be discovered once the human race had the technology to read and understand it. Writing in New Scientist magazine, Davies said the idea should be considered seriously. For more than 40 years astronomers have been sweeping the skies with radio telescopes hoping to catch a signal from an alien civilization. So far the search has been in vain. But Davies believes it is wrong to assume that extraterrestrials who may be hundreds of millions of years ahead of us technologically will have chosen to communicate by radio. Leaving artifacts for humans to find once they are sufficiently evolved -- like the obelisk in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey -- might be a more attractive strategy, he said. But ensuring the survival of such an artefact over possibly millions of years would be difficult. A better solution would be to incorporate information into the human genome, allowing it to be copied and maintained over immense periods of time. One way to do this might be to deliver alien viruses which could infect cells with message-laden DNA, said Davies. Scientists have recently discovered large sequences of "junk" DNA that contain no genes and appears to be very stable. "If ET has put a message into terrestrial organisms, this is surely where to look," said Davies. A computer could be used to find obvious attention-grabbing patterns within these stretches of DNA, he said. If a sequence of junk units of DNA were displayed as an array of pixels on a screen and produced a simple image "the presumption of tampering would be inescapable". The DNA code was easily big enough to contain a decent-sized novel or a potted history of the rise and fall of an alien civilization. Davies added: "Trying to second-guess alien communication strategies is fraught with uncertainty, so we should try everything we can afford. The truth may be out there somewhere. Or it could be a lot closer to home."

But it's the kind of Dr Strangelove you could see governments really using." That's how one expert describes geo-engineering - the idea that we can use a kind of technical quick fix to cool the planet if global warming accelerates. Plans for geo-engineering can sound bizarre. They range from placing millions of tiny mirrors in space to reflect back some of the sun's rays, to using rockets to launch tons of sulphur into the stratosphere to create a kind of planetary sun shade. That plan was inspired by watching what happened after the eruption of the Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines in 1991. Sulphur ejected into the atmosphere spread around in subsequent months to create a layer believed to have had a temporary cooling effect as it blocked some of the sun's warmth. Other suggestions include spraying sea water into the atmosphere to make it cloudier, or pumping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or out of the oceans. Until recently, policymakers have dismissed this as science fiction, a complete distraction from the fight against global warming. Now, attitudes seem to be changing. "I think we're faced with such an enormous problem that we need to do all the research we can to see if there are any geo-engineering proposals which work through to the marketplace," says Professor Sir David King, until recently the government's chief scientific adviser. There are still many scientific doubts about geo-engineering. What might the side effects be? Are such schemes irreversible? Plan B: But as there is now so much pessimism about whether governments will ever agree to reduce carbon emissions enough, more and more scientists say we need to know exactly what our other options are.

THE case of a man whose heart stopped beating for 1-1/2 hours only to revive just as doctors were preparing to remove his organs for transplants is fuelling ethical debates in France about when a person is dead. The 45-year-old man suffered a massive heart attack and rescuers used cardiac massage to try and revive him without success before transferring him to a nearby hospital. Due to a series of complex circumstances, revival efforts continued for longer than usual for a patient whose heart was not responding to treatment, until doctors started preparations to remove organs. It was at that point that the astonished surgeons noticed the man was beginning to breathe unaided again, his pupils were active, he was giving signs that he could feel pain — and finally, his heart started beating again. Several weeks later, the man can walk and talk. “This situation was a striking illustration of the questions that remain in the field of re-animation … and what criteria can be used to determine that a re-animation has failed,” says a report on the case, published online by an ethics committee. The case has stirred debate among medical professionals and daily newspaper Le Monde on Tuesday dedicated a full page to the subject under the headline: “The organ donor wasn’t dead”. “What is under consideration here is the status of a person, whether they are a patient who can be re-animated or a potential (organ) donor,” said the ethics committee report. The hospital where the man was treated is one of only nine in France that are allowed to perform organ transplants on patients in cardiac arrest, in very specific conditions, under a pilot programme launched in 2007. Elsewhere, organ transplants are possible on other categories of patients under older rules. The programme, which was approved by the French agency in charge of bio-ethics, aims to help reduce the number of people waiting for a transplant by making it possible to take organs from new categories of patients. Le Monde said more than 13,000 people were waiting for transplants in France and 231 people died last year as a direct result of the lack of a donor. The newspaper said the pilot programme had already yielded an extra 60 organs. Assistance Publique-Hopitaux de Paris (AP-HP), a body that runs public hospitals in the Paris region, has set up a committee specifically to discuss ethical issues arising from the practice of transplants on people in cardiac arrest. The committee, made up of medical professionals involved in the revival of heart attack patients as well as organ transplants, held lengthy discussions on the case of the man on Feb. 19 and a summary was later published on the AP-HP website. “During the meeting, other re-animators … spoke of situations in which a person whom everyone was sure had died in fact survived after re-animation efforts that went on much longer than usual,” say the minutes of the committee meeting. “Participants conceded that these were completely exceptional cases, but ones that were nevertheless seen in the course of a career.”

University of queensland researchers have unlocked new evidence that could help them get to the bottom of our most common phobias and their causes. Hundreds of thousands of people count snakes and spiders among their fears, and while scientists have previously assumed we possess an evolutionary predisposition to fear the unpopular animals, researchers at UQ's School of Psychology may have proved otherwise. According to Dr Helena Purkis, the results of the UQ study could provide an unprecedented insight into just why the creepy creatures are so widely feared. "Previous research shows we react differently to snakes and spiders than to other stimuli, such as flowers or mushrooms, or even other dangerous animals….or cars and guns, which are also much more dangerous," Dr Purkis said. "[In the past, this] has been explained by saying that people are predisposed by evolution to fear certain things, such as snakes and spiders, that would have been dangerous to our ancestors. "[However], people tend to be exposed to a lot of negative information regarding snakes and spiders, and we argue this makes them more likely to be associated with phobia." In the study, researchers compared the responses to stimuli of participants with no particular experience with snakes and spiders, to that of snake and spider experts. "Previous research has argued that snakes and spiders attract preferential attention (they capture attention very quickly) and that during this early processing a negative (fear) response is generated… as an implicit and indexed subconscious [action]," Dr Purkis said. "We showed that although everyone preferentially attends to snakes or spiders in the environment as they are potentially dangerous, only inexperienced participants display a negative response." The study is the first to establish a clear difference between preferential attention and the accompanying emotional response: that is, that you can preferentially attend to something without a negative emotional response being elicited.

Human beings spend on average one third of their lives asleep. We know we need to sleep but most of us have never really given a whole lot of thought to why. Why do we spend seven or eight hours a night immobile and unconscious? What really happens inside our brains and bodies while we're sleeping? We've known the purpose of our other biological drives for hundreds of years: we eat to give our bodies energy, we drink to keep hydrated, we procreate to perpetuate the species - among other things. But what is the biological purpose of sleep? It turns out no one really knows for sure. As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, why we sleep is one of the biggest unanswered questions in all of science, which is why researchers all over the country are doing studies and coming up with some new and intriguing discoveries. "We don't sleep just to rest our tired bodies?" Stahl asks Matthew Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. "Well, that's been one of the long-standing theories. But I think what we're starting to understand is that sleep serves a whole constellation of functions, plural," Walker explains. One thing that's clear, says Walker, is that sleep is critical. In a series of studies done back in the 1980s, rats were kept awake indefinitely. After just five days, they started dying. Walker says they started dying from sleep deprivation. "In fact, sleep is as essential as food because they will die just about as quick from food deprivation as sleep deprivation. So, it's that necessary," he says. And it's not just rats: every animal studied so far needs sleep, from the elephant right down to the fruit fly. But that's as far as the similarities go. Some animals sleep 20 hours a day, others only two or three. And still others sleep with half their brains at a time, all making it hard to figure out what exactly it is about sleep that makes it so essential, and that, in terms of evolution, makes it worth the risks. "You wonder why we developed this if survival is the whole point.

If extraterrestrial life exists in the solar system, there is a good chance that it will be discovered as frozen remains trapped in a block of ice. Mars’s ice caps are one possible location. Another is the surface ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which scientists believe harbors an ice-capped ocean.Scientists dream about bringing ice sample from Mars or Europa back to Earth for study. A robotic unmanned mission would return a small sample – possibly a five-pound block – that would have to be decontaminated to remove any terrestrial organisms on its surface that could confound the search for alien microbes. But how would researchers handle the sample when it was returned?Answers to that question could come from Antarctica’s Lake Vostok, which is buried nearly two miles beneath the southern polar ice sheet. In 1998, a US, French and Russian expedition conducting paleoclimatological studies drilled into this glacier ice, and returned an intriguing ice sample from just 200 meters above the surface of Lake Vostok.The ice comes from the water of the lake, deposited long ago by an unusual water cycle. In the northern region of the lake, ice from the overlying glacier slowly melts, adding water to the system. In the southern part of the lake, surface water slowly freezes, accreting to the bottom surface of the glacier. This latter process creates something of a time capsule, as the accretion of ice produces layers that date to perhaps as far as 15 million years in the past. The ice contains bacteria that were trapped at the time it formed. The result is a sort of inverse stratigraphy. In normal geological or archeological samples, the bottom layer is the oldest. In the accreted ice, the bottom layer is in fact the youngest.Craig Cary, who is a professor of marine biosciences at the University of Delaware, has been preparing these samples for a genetic analysis of the entrapped bacteria, to be carried out by colleagues at the University of California at Riverside and the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute.

The Wild West provided many horror stories. But few can beat the fate of George Donner's wagon train, taking new settlers to California. In August 1846 it took a wrong turn and got lost in the Sierra Nevada. Starving, the 26 men, 14 women and 44 children decided on a new method of staying alive. They ate each other. The settlers became cannibals - and they are not alone. Cases of cannibalism: During Napoleon's retreat from Russia in 1812 some 12,000 men perished at Vilna in December. Over three days the cold and starvation got so much that many began to eat parts of the already dead. Some four years later - in July 1816 - the French frigate Medusa ran aground off Senegal. Some 151 men built a raft and attempted to escape. Starvation, drowning and eventually murder led to ten surviving. Many of them had been eaten. One of the worst modern cases concerned a Uruguayan plane en route to Chile in the winter of 1972, with 45 people onboard. It crashed in the Andes. Slowly they began to die of cold and starvation. After ten days it was decided to eat the recently dead in order to survive. Although eight died in an avalanche, only 19 of the original 45 survived. Cannibals of the past: In the above cases we can see people turning to cannibalism in order to survive. But there is much more to cannibalism than this. The practice seems to be ancient indeed. Engravings of early Native Americans depict them eating limbs. Many African tribes were cannibal, bringing us the stereotypical image of placing the missionary in the pot. Remains of Peking Man, discovered in 1972 near Choukoutein in China, and possibly half a million years old, show evidence of human skulls split open and their brains extracted. The Christian St Jerome wrote of cannibalism in Scotland in the 4th century AD. Greek historian Strabo said that tribes in Ireland practised it. As a normal tribal practice, it survived longest in Borneo and the Amazon basin - areas where Christian missionaries were wary of going.