Category Archives: Science

When people were cat food

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Here’s an interesting piece in The Chronicle Review by anthropologist Donna Hart, who surveys the evidence and makes the claim that early man was mostly prey, not predator. She writes:

Large-scale, systematic hunting of big herbivores for meat may not have occurred any earlier than 60,000 years ago — over six million years after the first hominids evolved.

Meanwhile, we were being hunted by a variety of toothy critters.

My study of predation found that 178 species of predatory animals included primates in their diets. The predators ranged from tiny but fierce birds to 500-pound crocodiles, with a little of almost everything in between: tigers, lions, leopards, jaguars, jackals, hyenas, genets, civets, mongooses, Komodo dragons, pythons, eagles, hawks, owls, and even toucans.

Toucans. Our ancestors were eaten by toucans. I’ll never look at Froot Loops the same way again . . .

You are who you hang with

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Found this morning via Instapundit: a blog about neuroscience and metacognition written for lay people. I’ve just added it to my blogroll after reading a post there about a political blogger’s decision to close comments.

The article argues, based on research on mirror neurons (which I’ve blogged about here) and other phenomenon that avoiding unhappy people, and surrounding yourself with people who exhibit qualities you want to cultivate in yourself, is a highly rational and constructive thing to do.

One piece of advice you often find in self-help books on personal transformation is that sometimes you need to drop your old friends and find new ones. It turns out that bit of folk wisdom may actually have a basis in science . . .

The nose knows

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In this case, it was a Golden Retriever’s nose. Her name is Wrigley, and she knew something wasn’t quite right with her human companion, Steve Werner.

Steve’s doctor hadn’t been able to figure out why he’d been experiencing some troubling symptoms like ringing in his ear and a feeling of unease.

Then in July, Wrigley started to behave strangely.

Every day when Werner would curl up next to his beloved canine at his Brentwood home, she would turn, focus on his right ear and sniff doggedly.

“I thought it was just a friendly sniff,” Werner said. “But after four or five days, I realized she seemed to be focusing on something. At some point, I noticed she was always sniffing at the opening of my right ear. She would set herself up and intently smell my ear.”

One day, Werner was watching TV when a feature about cancer-sniffing dogs grabbed his attention. What he heard propelled him back to his doctor’s office.

A subsequent MRI revealed a non-malignant tumor that has since been surgically removed.

You may have heard similar accounts, or that some people are training dogs to screen people for cancers. The thinking is that cancerous cells emit chemicals that are not present in healthy cells.

I had to laugh at one part of the article, though. It describes a study conducted by the Pine Street Foundation in California. For the study,

[R]esearchers collected breath samples in plastic tubes from 83 healthy volunteers, 55 lung cancer patients and 31 breast cancer patients.

The tubes were numbered and placed in plastic boxes and presented to the dogs, five at a time. If the dog detected cancer, it was trained to sit or lie down. Researchers determined that the dogs were accurate 99 percent of the time in detecting lung cancer and 88 percent of the time in detecting breast cancer.

But then the article goes on to say “Not everyone is wagging their tails about the dog studies.”

The results of the lung and breast cancer study were too good to be true, said Donald Berry, chairman of the department of applied biostatistics and applied mathematics at the University of Texas-M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

“It’s essentially impossible that anything could be that good,” he said.

lol

I dunno, Don. I’ve definitely encountered some things that are that good!!!

The Vitamin Wars

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Tara Parker-Pope, a personal health columnist and reporter at the Wall Street Journal, snagged the front page of the March 20 Journal Report with an article titled “The Case Against Vitamins” (subscription required).

Parker-Pope is The Alt Health Voice of the WSJ. Irony intended. The WSJ is pretty pro-pharma — after all, they’re pro-business and pharmaceuticals make people a ton of money — so of course they aren’t going to bring a rabid alt advocate on board for anything like a regular gig.

Not that she’s overtly hostile. She’s somebody’s idea of the new mainstream. If you have a general physician who nods kindly when you discuss nutritional supplements, even though he/she would never actually suggest you take them, then that’s about the tenor of a Parker-Pope article. She’s grounding, because she reminds you that in many cases the science for alt stuff is on the thin side. But be sure to bring the umbrella if she’s invited to the picnic, if you catch my drift.

Anyway, this case against vitamins thing — first off, the headline was a bit of overhype. Reactionary, really. I mean, if you’re my age or older, you can remember a time when taking vitamins was something that normal people just didn’t do. Now it’s something that everyone does. We’re popping supplements like candy. So naturally, there are going to be some vitamin-bites-man stories, of which the March 20 piece is one.

I won’t list the studies rounded up in the article; if you follow this topic at all, you’ve heard about most of them, anyway. And really, the lesson is quite simple: the human body is mind-bogglingly complex, and our understanding of what’s going on at the biomolecular level is still embarrassingly crude. So no matter if you’re doing mainstream medicine or alt health, when you introduce a particular molecule at high concentrations, the best you can do as far as predicting what happens next is an educated guess.

In mainstream medicine, we call our bad guesses “side effects.” In alt health, we call it quackery.

But here’s what’s heartening: the letters to the editor that the paper published last Friday, in response to Parker-Pope’s article. Here’s one of them:

It is clear that eating a balanced diet rich in whole foods is the best way to obtain vitamins, minerals and other essential nutrients the body needs. Healthful diets appear to protect against the development of chronic diseases like heart disease and cancer. Yet when single isolated nutrients found in such diets are studied in reductionist clinical models, limited or negative effects are often seen, supporting the idea that taken out of their whole food context, dietary constituents don’t behave as predicted. Isolated nutrients don’t exist in a vacuum in human biology, and thus they can’t be meaningfully studied in this way. In whole foods, vitamins and minerals exist in a complex matrix along with many other supporting nutrients and potential health-promoting compounds. Metabolism has adapted to the presence of many interacting factors in the diet, a complexity that isn’t always reducible to pharmaceutical clinical methods of study.

In today’s world we have refined much of the phytonutrient diversity out of foods. As a result, we try to supplement with vitamins and minerals perceived to be missing, but with a poor understanding of their effects. The role of diet and dietary supplements in health is much more than the sum of the parts. That is to say, merely combining the results of clinical studies of single isolated nutrients will almost always present a flawed picture of the complex, multi-factorial role of diet in health, because it ignores the complexity of the synergistic whole food nutrient matrix that itself has multiple effects on health.

The role of nutrition research in the future will be to understand how food constituents interact biologically within the context of total dietary intake and human genomics. While the pharmaceutical clinical model will have a role in this pursuit, we are in need of scientifically sound innovative study designs to address the complex food/health interface.

David Barnes, Ph.D.
Director of Research
Standard Process
Palmyra, Wis.

So okay. Standard Process is a supplement manufacturer. But compare his tone to that of this letter from a “pharmaceutical consultant:”

Your analytical report is to be applauded. Vitamins fall into the category of “nutritional supplements,” for which unbelievable claims are often made regarding their salutary effects. When the makers of such products use the term “clinically tested,” or an equivalent statement, they should be required to state information about the studies, such as the number of participants, or whether they randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled investigations with statistical analyses. In addition to the reliability of the clinical studies that are performed, quality control on the actual material in the bottle should, in my view, be equivalent to that for over-the-counter drugs.

Charles G. Smith, Ph.D.
Pharmaceutical Consultant

Yeah, I bet that’s your view, dude.

Note how vitamin guy’s letter is self-reflective, unlike Mr. Pharma Consultant, who wants to rah rah rah bad vitamin stories while people are dropping dead, daily, from prescription drugs. An estimated 9 million Americans abuse prescription drugs. Prescription drugs kill about 125,ooo of us annually.

So don’t sneer at my supplements, pharma-boy, until you show the grace to admit to the demons in your own closet.

We’ll get there — we’ll get to the place where we really do understand how the body works, and how to use nutrition in more sophisticated ways to heal disease and promote health. We’ll get there. But we have a ways to go, yet.

The future of fingerprinting

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This is amazing:

Prints left on guns and bomb casings tend to be patterns left by human sweat and, as such, are not easy to reveal using established techniques that employ powders and other chemicals.

Instead, Professor [Neil] McMurray measures the tiny electrochemical reactions that result when fingers touch metal.

A device called a Scanning Kelvin Probe is used to measure the tiny changes in electrical potential caused by these reactions.

The technology can be used to find fingerprints on objects like bullets and shrapnel. Wild.

The article also has information on how the chemical signature of fingerprints can be affected by things like a person’s age and whether he uses drugs.

Growing brains

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New research being published by Nature has found that intelligence is correlated to how the brain develops in adolescence.

According to Ker Than, brain scans of 307 children

showed that the cortices of all the children’s brains thickened during childhood before thinning again.

The cortices of the smartest 7-year-olds in the group, as an example, started out thinner than average but thickened until age 11 or 12 before thinning. Cortex thickening in children with average IQ, in contrast, peaked at about age 8, and displayed only gradual thinning afterwards.

This could reflect a longer developmental window for high-level brain circuits, the researchers said.

Isn’t it interesting that we think of the proverbial geek as maturing more slowly than his or her less-intellectually-gifted classmates . . . perhaps there’s a bit of biology behind the stereotype . . .

A case for relying more on self-regulation

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This strikes me as eminently sensible: construct a “skeleton of formal regulation” to keep the true sociopaths in check, but otherwise rely on peoples’ self-regulation — which springs from our innate tendency to empathize with others — to keep our behavior on the straight and narrow.

The article proposing this was written by Anjana Ahuja for the UK Times, and includes the observations of Professor Paul Zak of California’s Claremont Graduate University in California. Zak “cites a fascinating study”

in which two daycare centres adopted different approaches with late parents. One centre merely reminded parents that turning up late inconvenienced the teacher, who had to stay behind. The other centre imposed a $3 fine. After several weeks, the “penalty” centre was reporting more latecomers.

What seems to have happened is that the fine “replaced the social undesirability of inconveniencing the teacher.”

My interpretation, now: People began interacting with the rule and its consequences, instead of managing their relationship with the day care center’s teachers. But it was their relationship with the center’s teachers that had the most potential to influence their behavior.

The use of regulation to curb unwanted behavior often strikes me as a fool’s errand. It makes people feel like they’re accomplishing something, but so often the result is piles of unintended consequences, red tape, stultifying bureaucracies.

There’s probably not a person living in America today who hasn’t encountered some stupid regulation that perhaps seemed to make sense when it was enacted, but is downright bizarre in execution.

So now we add the possibility that such regulations might not even work.

Gets you wondering, doesn’t it?

The grey squirrel of grammar

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Here’s a companion piece to the Eliza Doolittle post I wrote yesterday.

“The grey squirrel of grammar” is the pairing of “there is” with a plural subject, e.g. “there’s five plates on the table.” Like the North American squirrels that now make Britain home, it’s here to stay, says Michael McCarthy, writing in The Guardian. But he’s okay with that. He sees it as an example of acceptable bad grammar — it’s not worth getting fussed about since we all understand what is being said.

He’s a bit tougher, however, when it comes to written language or constructions where bungled grammar interferes with clarity . . .