"Persistent
vegetative state" may not be a single thing: a few researchers have found
evidence
for some level of awareness, at least intermittently, in such patients.
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
"Persistent
vegetative state" may not be a single thing: a few researchers have found
evidence
for some level of awareness, at least intermittently, in such patients.
The data include patients' responses to questions, and MRI scans. Joseph Giacino, a neuropsychologist, has proposed the category of "minimally conscious state" to describe these people; other scientists question the category as well as the label. In most cases, if patients don't recover quickly, medicine gives up, because there's no way to predict which patients will regain consciousness, and no known treatment to help them do so. Nursing homes aren't equipped to notice the intermittent responses that might indicate that there's still someone in there.
High-level thought -- like language and memory -- occurs in networks of neurons located at the surface of the brain in a thin layer of tissue called the cortex. These networks also form loops, however, that dip deep within the brain, where they converge and then return to the surface. According to a theory proposed by Rodolfo Llinas of New York University, a special set of neurons deep in the brain synchronizes the activity of the loops of higher thought. The harmony of all the different thought processes gives rise to a coherence that we call consciousness. Schiff and his colleagues say they suspect that when a number of these loops or the region that synchronizes them is damaged, the brain slips into a vegetative state. Yet even after extensive brain damage, they argue, some of the loops may still function, though in isolation -- like fragments of mind.
Today at APOD, pictures of
Hurricane Isabel and
the Whirlpool Galaxy, both logarithmic spirals.
The Internet
Architecture Board has published an explanation of
how Verisign's
wildcard redirects broke the Internet, and how they violate the Principle of
Least Astonishment. It's slightly technical, but clearly written, and explains
both bugs in Verisign's implementation of the wildcards and why the change
would be a bad idea even if bug-free.
Problems include valid mail getting lost, incorrect error messages, problems with security and privacy, and a single-point-of-failure that could be a target for denial of service attacks.
The LA Times
has a good article on the
effects
of non-native earthworms on North American forests. Our northern forests had
settled into a slow cycle in which leaves fall and slowly decay as "duff". When
worms are introduced, they devour the duff, the worm population explodes, and
some native species--including redback salamanders and many native understory
plants--decline or vanish altogether.
Escher's Relativity
in Lego.
[Thanks, rysmiel.]
It's not just the
human inhabitants of North America who wandered west to visit the Grand
Canyon: Half the
sandstone making
up the canyon walls came from the Appalachians; only a quarter is from the
Ancestral Rockies, and the rest is from Canada. The researchers who
dated and traced the rock suggest that rivers carried the sand to a
now-vanished shoreline in Wyoming, where the wind picked it up and
carried it to sand dunes, which hardened into rock that the Colorado
River would later cut through.
The government of Shanghai has decided to
limit new
skyscraper construction--because the hundreds of tall buildings are
causing parts of the city to sink 1.5 centimeters/year. Shanghai is built on
drained marshland.
Joshua Micah Marshall
invites his readers to
"set aside
whatever you might think of Arafat" and analyze the likely effects of
Israel's decision to expel him.
Look, Mr. Eves, your election machine
fucked
up. Sometimes it's worth apologizing:
"Dalton McGuinty," the statement said. "He's an evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet."[via Mactavish]Conservative Leader Ernie Eves blamed the release on a staffer who apparently "had too much coffee this morning ... too much time."
But he refused to retract the statement.
"I'm not apologizing, but I am acknowledging that it certainly went over the top."
The coolest
thing in the Universe: at 450 picokelvin, sodium atoms slow to one
millimetre per second.
The
debris pile
at Ground Zero two years ago "acted like a chemical factory", according to a
study from UC Davis.
"When the towers burned and collapsed, tons of concrete, glass, furniture, carpets, insulation, computers and paper were reduced to enormous oxygen-poor debris piles that slowly burned until 19 December.This is the air that the Republican-run EPA assured us all was perfectly safe."In that hot pile, some of the constituent elements combined with organic matter and abundant chlorine from papers and plastics and then escaped to the surface as metal-rich gases.
"These then either burned or chemically decomposed into very fine particles capable of penetrating deeply into human lungs."
Emergency
glow-in-the-dark lightbulbs. The idea is that
if the power goes out, these special bulbs will glow long enough to let people
walk down stairs, find flashlights, and so on. The company also claims that the
frequencies they emit will help people's eyes adapt to the darkness more quickly.
I'd rather have a flashlight, but not everyone carries one in their pocket. The downside, of course, is that these bulbs are more expensive than the regular kind, and that, since they will glow for hours after being turned off, you probably don't want them in your bedroom. [via Andy Hickmott]
Michael Swanwick
remembers Warren Zevon. This was published before Zevon died, but after he'd
told us all that he had little time left.
[via Arthur Hlavaty]
It's
looking like questionable science day over here: the paper
claiming that a single dose of Ecstasy could cause Parkinson's
has been
retracted after the researchers discovered that they had given their
experimental animals the wrong drug.
A critic credits them for making the retraction, but argues that the researchers should have been more suspicious of their original results, because of the high mortality rate among the animals in the study.
"It's not relevant at all if one out of five died," because that death rate is not seen in people taking ecstasy.
The
cold
fusion researchers are still chugging along, producing results that nobody else
even wants to look at anymore. Steven Jones at Brigham Young University claims to have
low-temperature fusion but without the excess heat; 80% reproducibility doesn't convince
me, but it's hard to put down to experimental error.
[via the Potsmaster]
An Agatha Christie spy
thriller, Chimneys, is having a premiere in Calgary this fall.
The producer had heard, somewhere, that there was an unproduced Christie
play, so he wrote to her family. They had never heard of it, but they knew
who to ask, and the British Library had a copy, because Christie had
registered the copyright.
Christie's grandson speculates that the play was forgotten because the public, and theatre producers, expected her to write whodunits, and didn't want anything else from her.
A
researcher at the National Cancer Institute has wandered slightly off-topic
and found a
strong correlation
between handedness and hairstyle. Specifically, more than 95% of right-handed people
have hair that curls clockwise; in left-handed and ambidextrous people, it's
about a fifty-fifty split.
Amar Klar gathered data by looking at short-haired people in malls and airports. He hypothesizes that there may be a single gene controlling both traits, with the forms "right" and "random": people with two "random" genes would be right-handed as often as left-handed, and either form of hair, both at random. Klar is now looking for this gene.
Other researchers believe there are multiple genes involved; all agree that the issue will be resolved only by finding the gene or genes in question. Klar points out that his hypothesis would explain why left-handed parents often have right-handed children.
Brave women: Janis Ian and Patricia Snyder,
who got married Wednesday, are
honeymooning at the Worldcon. Yes, it's handy to have both the wedding and
the honeymoon in Toronto, but a Worldcon is overwhelming enough already.
Congratulations!
Laurie Garrett explains the
actual health
effects of breathing New York air after the 9/11 attacks, and the systematic way
the EPA lied about it.
Many of the lies consisted of announcing that they knew it was safe, when they hadn't
even taken air samples. The White House also ordered cautionary statements removed from
EPA press releases, and reassuring ones inserted. Based on that, people went back to
work, and to apartments near Ground Zero.
The new EPA administrator doesn't even manage an actual denial, only "Why would we purposely mislead people about a national tragedy?" A good question: my cynical answers range from "because they just wanted to get back to 'normal'" to "because it's in their interests to discredit the EPA."
The herb
sage lives up to
the other meaning of its name: a modern placebo-controlled study confirms old
herbalists' statements that it improves memory.
I swore aloud when I got to the part of
the current Astronomy Picture
of the Day that explains that
this gorgeous
picture of another planet was taken from Earth orbit.
I like being a member of a technological species with extra bandwidth.
Misia has written a wonderful, sensual piece about
ripe peaches.
"Nothing
says 'I love you' like an idealized buzzard", and other delights of the
turkey vulture.
Copyright 2003 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.
