Gambling rats

Researchers from the University of British Columbia have created an animal laboratory to study gambling addiction. Rats are given several gambling options with differing payouts of food pellets with accompanied risks of a timeout and no-food period. If they picked and won a high risk option, they would receive more food pellets, but if they failed, they would go hungry for longer. The study found that the drug-induced suppression of serotonin levels impaired impulse control and resulted in more risky gambling behavior while the suppression of dopamine levels had an opposite effect.

The next task is to replicate more complex gambling behavior in our furry friends like loss-chasing (where gamblers follow a loss with with a higher risk gamble) and the near-miss effect (where individuals nearly win a gamble, which may increase subsequent risk appetites) in the animal lab.

I’m a little skeptical about the validity of replicating human, complex behavior in animals, but hey, this article is being published in the prestigious journal, Science. Any thoughts?

Read the full article here.

Verner Panton

It’s been a while since I’ve been at the museum so I’m glad I managed to catch the Verner Panton exhibition at the National Museum today. Verner Panton (1926 – 1998) is considered one of the most influential Danish contemporary designers and his works are so unknowingly ubiquitous. This, for example, is one of his most famously replicated designs, the iconic Panton Chair:

I think a similar design probably even sells at Ikea.

The sun is the coldest it has been in a century

It may be scorching hot outside, but the fact is that the sun has been really quiet of late – no sunspots, very few solar flares. Solar activity usually waxes and wanes in 11-year cycles, but instead of heating up as it should have after a calmer period, the sun mysteriously went cooler instead.

Sunspots (marked by red dots) could be seen in the 2001 picture of the sun, but not in recent pictures

Scientists are now scrambling to figure out why exactly this is occuring. What we do know already though, is that unfortunately, a colder sun isn’t going to help us with the problem of global warming or climate change.

Read more about the cold sun here, here and here.

The most wonderful invention took place in 1887

If I had to pay tribute to one invention that has changed my life, it would have to be the contact lens. Its impact on my life has been profound, and I would not be what I am today if it were not for it. Contact lenses seem wholly like a modern-day concept, but Leonardo Da Vinci had already conceptualized the idea of wearable spectacles way back in the 1500s. While the contact lense as we know it today is the result of developments and improvements made by several people, its invention is usually credited to three wonderful people, Adolf E. Fick, Eugene Kalt and August Muller, who in 1887, independently utilized glass scleral shells for the correction of near and far sightedness.

Early contact lenses were made of glass which covered the entire eyeball and were so uncomfortable that the wearer could not keep it on for more than an hour at a time. The major development came only when Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), a kind of plastic, was invented in 1935. In 1948, Kevin Tuhoy created the first modern-day contact lens out of PMMA which wrapped around the cornea and was smaller than the eye. Since then, we have moved from PMMA (which does not allow oxygen and can cause edema) to silicone-acrylate and florosilicone-acrylate.

In the 1960s, another major breakthrough came when soft contact lens were created. The technology was largely borne out of the research by Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lim on hydrophylic gels which allow oxygen to permeate and reach the cornea.

Read more about the invention of contact lens here, here, here and here.

New element to be included in the periodic table

It doesn’t have a name yet, but within weeks, element 112 (now unceremoniously named ununbium, which is 112 in latin) will be christianed and admitted into the periodic table.

Read more about it here.

Nightmares linked to suidical tendencies

Sleep and mood disturbances are highly correlated with suicide, and depression is the number one predictor of suicide. People with depression and/or sleep problems may have more nightmares, however, researchers from Florida State University have found that even after controlling for depression and insomnia, having nightmares are associated with increased suicidal tendencies. This suggests that nightmares are an independent suicide risk factor.

Read the full article here.

Junk food diet affecting baby crows

It looks like our problems associated with an increasingly fast food nation affects more than just us. While adult crows seem quite happy and healthy feeding on fast food leftovers, suburban baby crows are becoming smaller than their rural brethren as their parents feed them our fast food leftovers. This suggests that fast food was not nutritionally enough for the chicks to grow to their potential size.

Foraging in the dumpsters for leftovers is much easier that the hunt for insects, nuts, or fruits, and mama crows, like some humans, are lazy enough to feed their nestling food that is easier to obtain.

Read the full article here.