The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Mushrooms and meaning.

Johns Hopkins researchers are getting profoundly trippy, PhysOrg reports, in a research project that found psychedelic mushrooms can have long-lasting spiritual effects:

“Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives,” says lead investigator Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor in the Johns Hopkins departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Neuroscience.

In a related paper, also published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers offer recommendations for conducting this type of research.

You can read more from these researchers in a pdf from a presentation they did at the 2007 Mid-Year Research Conference on Religion & Spirituality called “Psilocybin and the Frontier of Experimental Mysticism”. There’s another summary at Science magazine.

Whistles of death and healing.

Wired takes a musical trip to ancient Mexico, with the help of an engineer who has recreated the sounds of the Aztecs and Mayans and their whistles of death and healing:

Noisemakers made of clay, turkey feathers, sugar cane, frog skins and other natural materials were an integral part of pre-Columbian life, found at nearly every Mayan site.

The Aztecs sounded the low, foghorn hum of conch shells at the start of ceremonies and possibly during wars to communicate strategies. Hunters likely used animal-shaped ocarinas to produce throaty grunts that lured deer.

The modern-day archaeologists who came up with the term Whistles of Death believe they were meant to help the deceased journey into the underworld, while tribes are said to have emitted terrifying sounds to fend off enemies, much like high-tech crowd-control devices available today.

Experts also believe pre-Columbian tribes used some of the instruments to send the human brain into a dream state and treat certain illnesses. The ancient whistles could guide research into how rhythmic sounds alter heart rates and states of consciousness.

Among Velazquez’s replicas are those that emit a strange cacophony so strong that their frequency nears the maximum range of human hearing.

Too clean for comfort (or “We’re composed of membranes too.”).

Nature recently published a story that should shock the clean freaks among us. Researchers have found that common disinfectants lower fertility and cause birth defects in mice (full story subscribers-only, free Seattle PI summary here). Which implies that they could do the same thing to us. Dr. Patricia Hunt has also been a key player in the recent dramatic findings about bisphenol A, the bottled-water plastic that mimics estrogen.:

From Nature:
Two chemicals widely used in cleaning agents for homes, offices and hospitals cause birth defects and fertility problems in mice whose cages have been in contact with them, according to Patricia Hunt at Washington State University in Pullman. The quaternary ammonium compounds ADBAC (n -alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride) and DDAC (didecyl dimethyl ammonium chloride) were identified after an exhaustive search for what was causing a massive drop-off in mouse fertility after Hunt moved her research animals to Pullman from Case Western Reserve Medical School in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2005.

From Seattle PI:
Hunt told Nature she’s concerned about the potential effect on humans:

This group of compounds acts on the cell membrane, and does a fantastic job of killing everything. But, you know, we’re composed of membranes too.

For your reading pleasure, here’s the safety sheet (pdf) of the floor cleaner Hunt used. It’s made by Johnson Wax for industrial use. The problem is that the stuff uses two ammonia compounds from a family - the quats - you’ll find in dozens of other cleaners, fabric softeners, spermicidal jellies and shampoos.

Four-legged Fish.

It walks! It has gills, but by goodness it WALKS! The BBC isn’t quite so enthusiastic in describing the discovery of a four-legged fish fossil:

“From a distance, it would have looked like an alligator. But closer up, you would have noticed a real tail fin at the back end, a gill flap at the side of the head; also lines of pores snaking across head and body.

“In terms of construction, it had already undergone most of the changes from fish towards land animal, but in terms of lifestyle you are still looking at an animal that is habitually aquatic.”

Experts believe that Ventastega was an important staging post in the evolutionary journey that led creatures from the sea to the land.

…but maybe it should be.

Science Art: Coelastrum by Andrews

Simon Andrews took this microscopic photograph of a cell cluster of coelastrum algae and submitted it to Wikimedia Commons, where I found it.

Brief: Phoenix on Twitter

How much am I loving the Mars Phoenix tweets?

Very much.

Meditation, Mindfulness and “Untraining” the Brain.

ScienceBlogs has (have?) a piece on an interesting study about ways to make your thinking less hidebound and more creative:

Yet relatively few studies focus on whether thought and behavior can be de-automatized - or, as I might call it if I were asking for trouble, deprogrammed.

What would count as deprogramming? For example, consider the Stroop task, where subjects must name the ink color of each word in a list of color words (e.g., “red” might be written in blue ink, and the task is to say “blue” while suppressing the urge to automatically read the word “red”). Reaction time is reliably increased when subjects name the ink color of incongruent words (”red” written in blue ink) relative to congruent words (”red” written in red ink), presumably because the subjects need to inhibit their prepotent tendency to read the words. But is it possible to regain control over our automatized processes - in this case, reading …?

Those subjects who underwent training met with instructors for 30 minutes each week, and were instructed to train 20 minutes twice daily for 2 months. Transcendental meditation (TM) required the use of a mantra, and other specific techniques, as described in Maharaishi (1969, cited by Alexander et al., 1989). Mindfulness training (MF) involved a structured word generation exercise, in which subjects must think of a word, then think of another word beginning with the last letter of the previous word, and then repeat this process throughout training without ever repeating a word. Subsequently subjects were afterwards simply asked to generate words belonging to specific categories, and then undergo a fairly generic “creative thinking” exercise (think of novel uses for various objects, but don’t daydream). Mental relaxation simply involved focusing on a pleasant or relaxing thought.

Various statistical procedures were also used to equate instructor effectiveness, subjects’ expectancy of benefits, or regularity of practice; the study was double-blind, in that the instructors and the subjects were unaware of the hypotheses being tested. After training, subjects were tested on a variety of cognitive and personality tests, including associate learning, word fluency, depression, anxiety, locus of control, and of course Stroop. Results showed that the TM and MF groups together scored significantly higher on associate learning and word fluency than the no-training and relaxation-training groups. Perhaps most surprisingly, over a 36 month period, the survival rate for the TM and MF groups was significantly higher than for the relaxation and no-training groups (p< .00025). But more to the point, both TM and MF scored higher than MR and no-training on the Stroop task (p<.1; one-tailed test).

So, 1. meditation and mindfulness training both increase a kind of mental efficiency, which is good to know, and 2. here’s a scientist citing the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which is sort of awesome.

The end of the piece is even more fascinating, showing that strong suggestions - either hypnotic or fake-hypnotic - are even more effective at unleashing the mind.

Quick, someone, tell me what to do!

Spray-on skin.

PopSci’s got skin in a can. I mean it. An aerosol. You spray it on burns. It’s skin in a can:

Within the next five years, Atala aims to build a portable version for the battlefield that will print layers of skin tissue directly onto deep flesh wounds. For surface wounds, such as burns, the consortium is developing a handheld spritzer that sprays a thin layer of immature skin cells over the wound. These cells, called keratinocytes, are extracted from the patient’s skin and stimulate healing in the wound. In a recent clinical test of the gun on 16 burn patients, all showed “excellent healing” after one to three weeks. The conventional approach of grafting, in comparison, takes just as long but requires three times as much skin and often results in patchwork scarring.

It’s a simple version of the same technology they’re developing to print new organs with stem-cell inkjets.

Neanderthals About Town.

PhysOrg.com puts on the Ritz with a new discovery about the sophisticated Neanderthals of Great Britain:

“The tools we’ve found at the site are technologically advanced and potentially older than tools in Britain belonging to our own species, Homo sapiens,” says Dr Matthew Pope of Archaeology South East based at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. “It’s exciting to think that there’s a real possibility these were left by some of the last Neanderthal hunting groups to occupy northern Europe. The impression they give is of a population in complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials with a flourishing technology - not a people on the edge of extinction.”

We know they had bigger brains than us. Did they have cuff links and snuffboxes, too?

SONG: All Our Tomorrows

SONG: “All Our Tomorrows” _{(To download: right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “DNA Retrieved from 1,000-Year-Old Vikings”, LiveScience.com, 28 May 2008, as used in the post Viking DNA .

ABSTRACT: Well, I kinda knew I’d go for the Viking story this month because it’s Vikings. I thought this might wind up as a shanty about raiding villages to sell fish, but that would probably be too dorky. So I wrote a song about cloning a Viking maiden to love and squeeze and marry and I will call her Brunhilde and we will be together forever….

When in doubt, I always seem to go creepy. I was really trying for sweet (honest!) and the bit where it goes from that low note on “base” up to the high in “tomorrows” was directly inspired by the vastly more talented vocals of Glen Hansard. Maybe I can clone him, too, and make him sing in my place.

If there’s any doubt about what all the letters at the end of the song are about, they’re the standard abbreviations for the four bases that make up DNA (thus the source of the name of the movie Gattaca). I spent a lot more time writing than recording on this, but did discover one thing I quite liked - I used Reaper’s MIDI stuff for the first time, along with a pretty great mellotron VST plug-in called Tapeworm from Tweakbench. Free to download and very easy to plug in and use even for a MIDI incompetent like me. And it sounds pretty much like a mellotron.