This past Friday, I listened to an interesting story on National Public Radio about the science of what some considered to be near-death experiences. It focused on the account of one woman, Pam Reynolds, who underwent surgery to remove a leaking aneurysm on her brain stem. Because of its size and location, her surgeon, Robert Spetzler of Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona, chose to place her in “cardiac standstill” during the operation– after lowering her body temperature to 60 degrees, she would flat-line, allowing the doctors to drain the blood from her head and remove the aneursym. According to Spetzler, Reynolds was “as deeply comatose as you can be and still be alive.”

After being placed unconscious, Reynolds remembers hearing a noise and suddenly feeling like she “popped out of the top of her head.” After observing some of the details of her surroundings– the number of doctors, the instruments they were using, and a conversation about the arteries in her groin– she noticed a tunnel and a white light, which appeared around the time doctors lowered her body temperature. She then conversed with her dead uncle and grandmother, who later brought her back to her body. Upon re-entry, she heard “Hotel California” playing in the hospital waiting room.

Afterward, Reynolds assumed she had been hallucinating. After all, her eyelids were taped shut the whole time, and speakers had been placed in her ears that made noises as loud as a plane taking off (these allowed surgeons to monitor her brain stem activity).

However, in a discussion with Spetzler years later, she discovered that her hallucination matched his memory of the actual operation. Michael Sabom, a cardiologist who researches near-death experiences, later examined the details of Reynolds’ account against hospital records. Again, every detail down to the conversation about her arteries, matched.

So how is this possible, when Reynolds couldn’t hear or see? Can a person really be “conscious” outside of their physical body? (Read more…)

In 1957, Terence Boylan, a budding 9 year-old scientist, wrote a letter to the National Institutes of Health requesting $10 to build a rocket ship. (Read more…)

A news story broke a few weeks ago (courtesy of a study by McAfee, the virus protection software company) pertaining to the global energy costs of email spam. The study outlined a very thorough breakdown of the life-cycle of spam, from creation and dissemination to filtering and viewing. The energy usage per year for each step was analyzed for each major country and also generalized over the global scale. The conclusion: over 33 billion kilowatt-hours (KWh) of electricity are used globally each year as a result of spam. According to McAfee’s numbers, this is equivalent to the electricity usage of 2.4 million homes in the U.S., and equals the GHG emissions of 3.1 million passenger cars. Not a small amount.

This story reflects a burgeoning trend by companies to spin their products in a way that shines favorably on the environment. We probably never thought about the impact of spam on CO2 emissions, but thanks to McAfee, we can now feel good about buying their product. This is all well and good, and simply reflects the very positive cultural and societal movement towards cleaner and more efficient energy production and usage in order to reduce our environmental imprint. However, as with all science, it is necessary to analyze studies like this in detail, and to be cognizant of any conflicts of interest that may exist. In the case of corporate advertising, the vested interest of the company in producing data which leads to more sales is glaring.

The most interesting part of the McAfee study is that about 80% of the energy associated with spam comes from the user end: viewing and deleting spam, manually filtering, and searching for false positives (scanning the spam folder for valuable emails accidentally filtered from the inbox). The energy associated with each of these categories is defined as “user hours,” calculated by multiplying the time spent for these acts by the average power required by the computer.

It is in the application of these “user hours” that McAfee confuses and distorts the issue, and inflates the environmentally deleterious impact of spam presumably for its own economic benefit. The energy associated with user hours is only a factor if, in lieu of viewing and filtering spam, the computer would have been off. It is the difference in energy between normal non-spam behavior and behavior with spam, the opportunity cost (to use a business term), that should be used in the analysis. The only scenario where the McAfee analysis is correct would be where the computer is on an extra amount of time due to the user time spent dealing with spam. If you spend 15 minutes a day dealing with spam, do you stay an extra 15 minutes at work, or at home on the computer, AND do you turn your computer on and off each time you use it? It is safe to say that most people’s computing behavior does not follow this pattern. (Read more…)

In my last post, I researched the process of donating blood and the restrictions that apply to it in preparation for me to give on Friday. Well, I did it!

My experience with giving blood was a remarkably positive one. I walked into the center and read through their eligibility requirements (again) just to make sure I could give. I signed a form, then was taken to one of a number of canvas enclosures constructed for privacy.

A nurse took my vitals; apparently I have very iron-rich blood. The girl in the enclosure next to me, though, wasn’t able to give because of an iron deficiency. She was justifiably upset; your iron levels fluctuate on a day-to-day basis. She would have to wait 24 hours before giving, and the drive was only on campus for one day only.

I then was directed to a laptop, where I answered their eligibility questions. After being asked about my “yes” answers (I’ve been out of the country and am on antibiotics), I was directed to a waiting area. My trepidation mounted as I saw a girl faint when they started the procedure. When she lost consciousness, the nurses immediately started to flit around her with concern, though she woke up soon after. Apparently needles aren’t for everyone, so keep that in mind before you decide to give.

When a chair was open (they’d set up folding lawn chairs for the donors), I sat down. After rubbing my arm with iodine to sterilize it, they found and marked a vein on the inside of my elbow while I squeezed an apple-shaped stress ball to make it more visible. They pumped up a blood-pressure reader near my shoulder to serve as a tourniquet.

Then, they brought out the needle.

I was expecting it to be big, but I still did a bit of a double-take when I saw the thing. You’re going to stick THAT into THERE? Fainting didn’t seem like a bad option at this point. Nevertheless, machismo dictated that I would keep a carefree smile plastered on my face at all times, so I cheerfully gave the nurse the go-ahead and focused on not wincing too much.

As it turns out, my fear was largely unfounded; there wasn’t nearly as much pain as I had expected. The small needle they used to test my iron levels almost hurt more. I was a bit worried, though, when the tube didn’t start filling immediately — while the discomfort wasn’t huge, I wasn’t ready for another round of the psychological buildup. Fortunately, after they probed a bit, the dark liquid started shooting through with prodigious speed.

I kept squeezing my little stress ball, and eventually I’d filled their little bag. They clamped my tube, filled a couple containers for testing, and finally took out the needle. I kept pressure on the hole, but when I finally lifted the gauze, I saw that the hole had already partially filled and was rather small by then. I was given a bandage and told to take it easy for the next day. I’d replenish the fluid in 24 hours; no heavy lifting till then. I felt a little bit drained, but I was good to go after a good meal and a quick nap.

So really, the inconvenience of blood donation was pretty minimal. I’ll probably give in the future, though I don’t know if it’s feasible every 56 days (the maximum frequency with which one can donate). I hope I’ve convinced you — try it at least once. If you’re not a needle person, you don’t have to do it again, but at least give it a shot (pun very intended).

Compared to many other battery technologies out there, the EESU battery has advantages in many areas, especially in terms of charge time and weight. Typically, electric cars, laptops, cell phones, and all manner of portable electronics are now powered by lithium ion batteries. The problem with these batteries is several layers deep.

One, Li ion batteries can be bulky when designed to power something like a car; for a typical laptop, to get about 5 hours of battery life, you need a reasonably large battery, bigger than the standard one they come fitted with. Two, li-ions have a finite number of discharge cycles – this means that as they are used over time, their charge capacity (how long they last) degrades, until they die. The more they are used, the faster they die, leaving a near useless husk of toxic chemicals. There are some agencies that take in old batteries and recycle them, but the fact remains that reliability over time must go down.

What this means for electric cars, is that a typical unit designed to power them would keep the range of the car limited between recharges, with that range constantly decreasing, until the large battery would need to be removed and replaced. This is seen in cell phones often – their batteries typically last a couple of years, just long enough in most contracts to be eligible for a phone upgrade. This leads to a massive amount of cell phone trash – instead of buying new batteries, which are nearly as expensive as the phones themselves, people just get new phones and throw their old ones away.

The way EESUs work is quite different. (Read more…)

Yesterday the New York Times featured a nice article on Northwestern researcher Dirk Brockmann’s efforts to model the spread of H1N1 flu.

What makes Brockmann’s model especially clever is that he uses population migration data gleaned from a website designed to track dollar bills as they are handed off from one person to another.

Here’s Brockmann explaining his work:

As the hoopla about swine flu continues to dominate the front pages and airwaves, let me draw your attention for a moment to a tiny story hidden away at the back of today’s New York Times.

It seems the gentleman infected with drug-resistant TB who ignored public health warnings and got on a series of airplanes in 2006 so he could go on his honeymoon is suing the Centers for Disease Control.  The agency released his medical records back then in an effort to find and stop him before he infected anyone else.  Apparently, the stress caused by the damage this did to his professional reputation and marriage (which ended in divorce) are worth some undisclosed amount.

Let’s try not to laugh too hard at this irony, lest we uncover our mouths in public.  And here’s to all who exhibit personal responsibility and restraint to help improve public health!

Now, I must go wash my hands for a full 20 seconds.