Cocktail Party Physics

fermentable frivolities

Time flies when you're having fun, per that hoary old chestnut of an adage, but there's a lesser known corollary: time passes even more quickly when you're juggling multiple deadlines with conferences and book promotion, not to mention much-needed home repairs. Fortunately, we're still managing to have some fun amidst the mayhem (and time is therefore passing at near record-breaking rates -- I meant to post this last week). At the AAAS meeting in San Francisco, I got to hang out with Janet Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science and her husband over some tasty Thai food. I also ran into Kristin A. of Radioactive Banana and frequent commenters Alison Chaiken and Louise Riofrio, a.k.a., A Babe in the Universe.

Perhaps because I didn't attend any of the climate change sessions, I kept missing Chris Mooney -- author of The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Storm World -- in 'Frisco. No worries, I caught up with him a few days later: we were both featured guests for a Bookslut-sponsored reading in Chicago, with Deborah Blum, author of Ghost Hunters, rounding out the evening. To the casual observer, it might appear that I am stalking Chris across the country, but really, we live barely a mile apart. It'd be so much easier to stalk him in DC. (Jen-Luc Piquant points out that he did make Wired's "Sexiest Geeks" Top Ten List in 2005, along with our lovely Bookslut hostess, Jessa Crispin. And wasn't there an online debate just last year as to whether he was "sponge-worthy"?)

Chris' manly image suffered a serious blow, however, when he bellied up to the bar after the reading. The event was held at The Hopleaf Bar, touted as one of the best beer bars in the country, with a "beer menu" that runs many pages and features fine fermentables from all over the world. So the bartender might be forgiven for showing some urban-hipster attitude when Chris asked for... a Miller Lite. "We don't have Miller Lite," the bartender sneered. Chris took the disdain in stride and asked for whatever beer was closest to it. "We don't serve lite beers at all," the barkeep huffed. We have no idea what kind of brew Chris ended up with, but he's lucky the barkeep didn't spit into his mug, so deeply ran his contempt.

Beer aficionados will no doubt blanch at the sentiment, but at the most basic level, beer is beer, whether it's Chris' beloved Miller Lite, a pint of Guinness, or a frothy concoction from your favorite local microbrewery. (Hey! Stop menacing me with that barrel of hops and hear me out!) Sure, there are umpteen varieties and a myriad of subtle differences in color, flavor, foaming properties and the like. But the actual brewing process has remained fundamentally unchanged for thousands of years. Not only did the ancient Egyptians brew beer 5000 years ago -- which meshed nicely with their bread-making activities, since both processes are yeast-reliant -- but there's some evidence that the Mesopotamians may have brewed beer 1000 years earlier than the Egyptians.

It's all about the fermentation, according to this handy little article in "What's That Stuff?", a regular online feature of Chemical and Engineering News. (For insights into the foamy properties of beer, check out Sid Perkowitz's Universal Foam, which has an entire chapter devoted to foamy food and drink; beer is prominently featured.) You start with malted cereal (in which the starch and proteins in grain cells have been broken down into simpler compounds). The malt is milled and mashed down at Yon Local Brewery to produce maltose and other fermentable sugars. The whole mess is soaked in hot water, and then the liquid portion -- the wort -- is separated from the grains. The addition of hops lends bitterness (apparently this is a good thing) and aroma, and the concoction is boiled for sterilization purposes.

This is where the yeast comes in. Yeast isn't just a random bread-baking ingredient; it's a living organism. In order to grow and multiply, the yeast cells must feed on the sugars and amino acids contained in the wort, before excreting waste products like ethanol and carbon dioxide. Ewww. Yeast excrement: it's in your beer. Or it would be, except most commercial beers -- like, say, Miller Lite -- undergo a filtration process to remove "impurities." Traditional British ales aren't filtered at all, so the insoluble proteins, yeast and other "suspended matter" are still there. (Jen-Luc has always found British beers to be a bit "chewy.") Perhaps that's why the Hopleaf bartender sneered: real men like their yeast excrement/brewing byproducts intact.

The final step is carbonation, which produces all those pleasing beery bubbles. Like fermentation, carbonation is a natural process: at high pressures underground, spring water can absorb carbon dioxide and become "effervescent." "Seltzer" originally referred to the mineral water naturally produced in springs near a German town called Niederseltsers, although today, it's pretty much just filtered tap water that's been artificially carbonated. We owe the artificial carbonation process to Joseph Priestley, a British scientist best known for discovering oxygen, along with eight other gases, including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide (laughing gas). ("Oxygen is so important," observes Jen-Luc, a veritable mistress of ironic understatement.)

In 1767, Priestley was living next to a brewery in Leeds and started experimenting with the brewery gas using candles and burning pieces of wood. In one such experiment, he placed a bowl of water above the surface of a liquor in the process of fermenting, and found it quickly took on a sweetly acidic taste akin to the famed mineral water of Niederseltsers. The end result was the 1772 publication of Impregnating Water with Fixed Air, which included very simple instructions:

"If water be only in contact with fixed air, it will begin to imbibe it, but the mixture is greatly accelerated by agitation, which is continually bringing fresh particles of air and water into contact. All that is necessary, therefore, to make this process expeditious and effectual, is first to procure a sufficient quantity of this fixed air, and then to contrive a method by which the air and water may be strongly agitated in the same vessel, without any danger of admitting the common air to them; and this is easily done by first filling any vessel with water, and introducing the fixed air to it, while it stands inverted in another vessel of water."

This is the epitome of clear, concise communication in science, and Priestley was writing in 1772! His carbonation process was further refined, and bottled "seltzer water" officially hit the commercial market in 1807, thanks to a Yale University chemistry professor named Benjamin Silliman ("Silly Man"?). The first soda fountain appeared in Philadelphia in 1838, featuring sweetened and flavored carbonated drinks, and by 1891 there were more soda fountains in New York City than bars. Just a few years earlier, in 1886, Atlanta druggist John S. Pemberton sought a remedy for headaches and hangovers, and devised the bright idea of adding kola nut extract to coca extract. The result: Coca-Cola. A century later, the diet version of Pemberton's concoction would get me through many a college all-nighter. The man was a bona fide genius.

Back to this whole fermentation thing, specifically, the bacteria responsible for the breaking-down-into-byproducts process: yeast isn't the only species of bacteria that can do this. There's 400-500 different species and subspecies of micro-organisms in the guts of termites alone. The insects chow down on wood cellulose and convert it into energy. That's why physicist/Nobel Laureate Steven Chu of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been widely quoted as saying that termites could save the world from oil dependence. He was kind of misquoted, or rather, the nuances of his points were lost in the translation to the mass media marketplace. Hey, it happens. But there's some factual basis for the claim.

Chu is one of several scientists pursuing research into more efficient ways to convert biomass into usable energy, and finding some nifty lessons in biological enzymes found in, say, the guts of termites. For instance, the termite can crank out a full two liters of hydrogen by fermenting just one sheet of paper. This makes it "one of the planet's most efficient bioreactors," according to a DOE fact sheet from the Joint Genome Institute. That's why JGI researchers are interested in sequencing all those microbe species, in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the biochemical pathways at play, thereby leading to more efficient conversion of biomass into useful fuels like ethanol. (JGI scientists are also sequencing the DNA of poplar trees and soybeans as other possible biomass-derived fuel sources of the future.)

We've certainly got plenty of biostuff to work with: a 2005 study by the Department of Agriculture found that the U.S. produces about 1.3 billion dry tons of excess biomass a year, 60% of which is agricultural waste. This could be used to produce about 130 gallons of ethanol. Americans consume 140 billion gallons of fuel for transportation each year, so at first glance, one might think hey! We can meet all our transportation fuel requirements through biomass! If only it were that simple. Ethanol doesn't have as much energy content as gas (roughly two-thirds), and most American cars can't run on fuel if it has more than 10% ethanol content. Retrofitting would be needed, and that takes time. Plus, producing cellulose-derived ethanol is both expensive and time-consuming. Maybe the termites can help with that aspect, at least.

Termites have already provided the inspiration for an energy-efficient office building in Harara, Zimbabwe. The Eastgate Building is widely deemed to be one of the best examples of sustainable architecture in the world; it has no air conditioning and virtually no heating system, and uses less than 10% of the energy of a conventional building of comparable size. Architect Mick Pierce based his design on the termite mounds found in the region, which control temperatures to within a single degree Celsius over the course of a day, despite wildly fluctuating temperatures (35 degrees F at night up to 104 degrees F during the day). Termites need that level of control to cultivate the fungus they use as food, which flourish at 87 degrees F. So their mounds feature a series of heating and cooling vents that the insects can open and close as needed over the course of the day.

The Eastgate Building employs a similar approach, and the result is some very real cost savings, for both the Eastgate owners and their tenants (rents are 20% lower than in the new building next door). It's an ingenious design from an ingenious architect who's doing his part to save the planet -- or at least, save us from ourselves. Someone should buy Mick Pierce a beer every time he strolls into a pub. Just don't make it a Miller Lite.

death star supernova

Chaos has reigned chez Piquant this week, as a crew of workmen descended on our quiet DC retreat and proceeded to cover everything in plastic, strip, sand, paint, install new bathroom vanities, and replace the old drafty windows that may very well date back to 1918. So we very nearly missed the chance to wish a happy birthday to the scientists who, 20 years ago today, first detected the explosion of a supernova dubbed 1987A. It's not the catchiest moniker, granted, but at least it's easy to remember. Along with other known supernovae in the universe, 1987A is still being studied by various teams of scientists, still offering a few surprises to prompt us to re-think our working models for how these amazing celestial objects evolve.

Supernovae are essentially exploding stars. On February 23, 1987, a Canadian astronomer named Ian Shelton was manning the telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, taking images of a small galaxy some 167,000 light-years from called the Large Magellanic Cloud.  He noticed an extremely bright star on one of the photographic plates that hadn't been present in prior images of the same region.

Shelton joins a long line of distinguished astronomers who've observed supernovae. For instance, more than 400 years ago, Johannes Kepler spotted a bright new object in the night sky, brighter than the planet Jupiter, so bright it was visible even without a telescope (which had not yet been invented). It stayed that bright for several weeks, gradually dimming. Today we know it as the Kepler remnant. (Jen-Luc wonders if perhaps 1987A might one day bear Shelton's name. It seems only fair.) But until  the light from 1987A's explosion finally reached us, our understanding of the actual mechanisms at work were a bit on the vague side.

The new Conservapedia alternative to Wikipedia (that radical liberal bastion!) has been roundly mocked by science bloggers this past week, and rightly so. I mean, this is a site whose entry on Einstein basically says his work had nothing to do with the development of nuclear weapons. The degree of ignorance required to make that sort of statement simply boggles the mind. Does E=mc2 ring a bell? (If it doesn't, Mark Trodden of Cosmic Variance just wrote a spiffy primer post.) How about the sun? That whole energy/mass conversion thing that Einstein cobbled together in 1905 in his spare time -- when he wasn't doing Nobel-Prize-winning work on Brownian motion, and coming up with special relativity -- is pretty critical to human life, considering it's at the heart of nuclear reactions, and nuclear reactions are what make stars like our sun shine.

Take it from They Might Be Giants: "Oh the sun is a mass of incandescent gas/A nuclear furnace/Where hydrogen is fused into helium/At temperatures of billions of degrees." That energy warms the earth, and also keeps the sun's layers from collapsing down into its core. Eventually the fuel runs out, however, and that's when the fireworks can start. All stars die -- even our sun will die one day -- but really massive ones die in particularly spectacularly ways. Here's the conventional scientific explanation: As the hydrogen runs out, fusion slows down, and gravity causes the core to contract, raising temperatures even further, sufficient to give rise to a brief, shorter phase of helium fusion. What happens next depends on a star's mass. Smaller starts gradually cool to become white dwarfs, and those white dwarfs may turn into Type IA supernovae (like 1987A) if there is a near companion star. 

Much larger stars (greater than 8 solar masses) will create temperatures and pressures so high that the carbon in the star's core begins to fuse once the star contracts at the end of the helium-burning stage.  This halts the core's collapse, at least temporarily, and this process continues, over and over, with progressively heavier atomic nuclei. So the cores of those supernovae begin to resemble an onion, with layers upon layers of elements -- the outermost layer is hydrogen, which surrounds a layer of hydrogen fusing into helium, surrounding a layer of helium fusing into carbon, and so on. In fact, most of the heavy elements in the periodic table were born in the intense furnaces of exploding supernovae that were once massive stars.

Supernovae also make great "standard candles" to help astronomers determine distances in space, because they burn so steadily and brightly -- and predictably. In fact, the use of supernovae as standard candles is what enabled two separate teams of physicists in 1998 to determine that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating... pretty much revolutionizing the field of cosmology in the process, and starting the whole "dark energy" craze.

All kinds of fascinating new results related to supernovae were reported at the 2007 meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting last month in Seattle. For instance, apparently stars can blow bubbles. The powerful stellar winds produced by extra-massive stars push away nearby gas and dust and form low-density cavities inside expanding bubbles. When such a star dies in a big explosion, the energy from its death throes enlarge the bubbles into huge supernova remnants (yes, just like the Kepler remnant.) If enough cavities overlap, they can form a superbubble. Scientists at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana announced their observation of a superbubble in the midst of forming, which could yield new information about the formation of planetary systems among other insights.

Another hot topic at the AAS meeting: a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame reported detection of a light echo from a Type Ia supernova called 1995E. Light echos can occur when light from a supernova is redirected towards the earth by grains of dust in the host galaxy. The explosive event is the direct rays we see, but delayed light echos from a different location because they took a more circuitous route -- much like the delay between a direct flight from LA to New York versus a changeover in Chicago.

As for 1987A, University of California, Berkeley astronomer Nathan Smith announced his alternative theory for the origin of the strange, triple-ring nebula surrounding the object, produced by the star a few thousand years before it exploded. The working theory was that the original red supergiant merged with a companion and started spinning rapidly (ejecting the material that produced the strange shaped nebula), then turned into a blue supergiant and finally exploded. The sticking point for this neat little theory is that red supergiants are just too darn big to spin that fast. Smith argues that the progenitor star of 1987A might have been an unstable blue supergiant (called luminous blue variables). Such stars eject material from their surfaces in recurring eruptions, like volcanoes, before dying in a supernova explosion. His evidence: he recently discovered two such stars that have similar clouds of gas and dust.

Oh, and remember the Kepler remnant I mentioned earlier? Kepler might have lacked even a rudimentary telescope, but thanks to advanced instruments like Hubble and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, astrophysicists are still studying it and learning new things. Chandra in particular announced a stunning new image at the AAS meeting in January, achieving unprecedented details by combining nearly nine days of observations, and determining once and for all that the Kepler remnant is the result of a Type Ia supernova. (There had been some debate about that, since prior conflicting data from radio, optical and X-ray telescopes made it difficult to determine whether it was a Type Ia, or a Type II (which results form the collapse of a single massive star that sheds material before exploding). It could also help astronomers further improve the reliability of using such objects as standard candles -- and hopefully tell us more about that mysterious dark energy.

There's yet another area in which supernovae can help solve some of astrophysics' most puzzling mysteries: neutrino physics. All stars emit these so-called "ghost particles" -- our sun bathes us in billions of neutrinos every day, which interact with matter so weakly that they pass right through us without being noticed. Physicists have built deep underground laboratories that have managed to detect the odd solar neutrino or two, but such events are rare; only a tiny fraction of the sun's neutrinos are detected. Supernovae like 1987A emit 1000 times more neutrinos than the sun will produce in its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. When it was first observed 20 years ago, the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan picked up a few extra neutrinos: 19, to be exact. That's not much compared to how many neutrinos the supernova actually emitted, so it merely provide a few initial clues to the mystery of how supernovae really work.

And 1987A continues to reveal new secrets. NASA issued a press release this morning reporting that the XMN-Newton X-ray telescope has taken images showing that the supernova keeps brightening -- at least since the ROSAT telescope first detected X-rays emitted by 1987A in 1992. Our plucky little Death Star Supernova now outshines all other X-ray sources in its immediate vicinity. Maybe even the curmudgeonly Simon Cowell of American Idol would be impressed.

brain candy

Mmmm, chocolate. Who among us can resist its siren call? Some find it more irresistible than others, it's true, but one would be hard pressed to find someone who didn't enjoy chocolate in some form or another. And that's been true for millennia, apparently, according to this handy historical recap of the consumption of cocoa -- the stuff that makes chocolate, chocolate -- for both pleasurable and medicinal purposes.

For example, the Mayans drank cocoa 2600 years ago (the earliest record of cacao use), but our modern word, "chocolate," derives from "xocolatl"), a combination of "xocolli" ("bitter") and "atl" ("water") in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs. The stuff itself derives from the cacao tree, specifically, the beans contained within large pods. Those beans are harvested, allowed to ferment for several days, then dried quickly to ensure mold doesn't have a chance to grow. The beans are then roasted and ground up. The liquor portion of what results is what's used to make cocoa butter (which in turn becomes, say, a Hershey bar or Godiva truffle), while the residue is cocoa powder. (For a nifty guide to tempering chocolate, go here.)

Around 1590, a Florentine named Bernardino de Sahagun reported that drinking a small amount of cocoa resulted in a general feeling of well being. Even today, chocolate is viewed by many as a mood enhancer, an aphrodisiac, an indulgence or a reward. Others report increased alertness and performance due to a sudden energy boost. (Whether that's from the cocoa or just a sugar rush is debatable.) In some, it seems to have an adverse effect, namely nervousness and restlessness. And for bona fide chocoholics,  it's related to appetite, specifically, desire and cravings. But we're talking about individual, subjective impressions in all such cases. What does the actual science say?

Yes, science has something to say on the matter -- quite a bit by now. The 2000 AAAS meeting in Washington, DC, featured a session on the health effects of chocolate -- specifically the benefits to the cardiovascular system to be gained from certain compounds -- which in turn spurred even more research in this particular area. Now, seven years later, at yet another AAAS meeting (this time in San Francisco), scientists have further enhanced their understanding of what kinds of effects chocolate does and does not have on human beings. The neurobiology of chocolate merited an entire session all its own, and needless to say, Jen-Luc Piquant and I were happy to rise a bit earlier than usual in order to learn a bit more about this fascinating (and sinfully delicious) subject.

Chocolate's reputation for indulgent decadence is related to the high percentage of sugar and fat contained in even a single gourmet truffle. (Mmmm... truffles!) High levels of sugar and fat, it is generally agreed, aren't all that good for you. But when it comes to health benefits, it's all about the compounds in cocoa that are subsequently broken down in the body after being consumed, according to Hagen Schroeter, a researcher formerly with the University of California, Davis, who is now working with Mars, Inc. The company funds quite a bit of research into the health effects of cocoa,  providing researchers with its own high-flavanol cocoa product, Cocoapro (TM). So one might say they have a vested interest.

There's quite a few chemical components to cocoa. First, there's the so-called methylxanthines: caffeine and theobromine. Then there's biogenic amines like tyramine and tryptamine, as well as the by-now-well-known cocoa flavanols (which I always confuse with flavonoids; flavanols are a subclass of flavonoids, but that's as far as my understanding goes), most notably epicatechin. There's also dopamine-related compounds like salsolinol, and certain endocannabinoids like anandamide. All of these are being studied in one way or another for their potential effects on human health, whether it be measurable, direct psychophysiological effects, or acquired behavioral and psychological effects (which tend to be a bit more subjective).

Some of the claimed health effects are slight, nearly non-existent in some cases, and it should come as no surprise that dosage matters, as does rate of absorption, metabolism, and other factors. "The mere presence of a substance does not guarantee psychoactivity," says Schroeter, pointing out that many suspected effects on mood and behavior have yet to be scientifically demonstrated. For instance, consider anandamine, which gets its name from the Sanskrit word for "inner bliss" (ananda). There is some evidence showing that it and other endocannabinoids (like N-arachionoylethanololame) may modulate our pleasure response to food and our sense of eating chocolate as a reward, but only if one consumes between 10 and 15 kilograms of chocolate in a single sitting. The most hardcore chocoholics I know would balk at that prospect, I think -- or make themselves sick to their stomachs, long before the "reward" effect kicked in.

Okay, so what about salsolinol, which might be responsible for chocolate cravings and outright addiction? It's found not just in cocoa powder and chocolate, but also port wine and beer, and in bananas, which have a much higher concentration of the compound that all the others combined. Salsolinol can be found in the dopamine-rich areas of the brain and in the spinal fluid, but Schroeter reports that much higher concentrations than found even in bananas would be needed to result in truly, measurable addictive behavior. Ditto for the biogenic amines. Almost all foods contain them in low concentrations, with higher levels found in fermented foods like wine and cheese, as well as fish and nuts. Scientists are still studying the extent of their absorption and distribution throughout the central nervous system, but a 2003 study found no effects from dietary biogenic amines.

That brings us to caffeine, a substance that does increase cognitive and psycho-motor performance at doses found in food and drink, most notably coffee, tea, and cocoa/chocolate -- which might explain why these are the most popular "ingestants" (to use Schroeter's term) in the world. Falling into the same category as caffeine is theobromine. Finally, we have those flavanols, found in tea, wine and cocoas, which have been shown to have positive benefits on cardiovascular healthy by increasing micro-circulation of the blood.

Henrietta van Praag of the The Salk Institute reported some intriguing results from her latest study on the effects of the cocoa flavanol, epicatechin, on learning and memory. Also found in blueberries, green tea and pomegranate, epicatechin does appear to improve cardiovascular function and increase blood flow to the brain, so van Praag was curious as to whether it could also enhance learning. She performed spatial memory experiments with mice. In one experiment, the mice were fed doses of epicatechin combined with regular exercise, then let loose to find their way through a water maze to test their spatial memory. She found their learning was indeed improved compared to the control group. In a second experiment, the mice were fed epicatechin without regular exercise. Again, she found that the mice learned faster and remembered the task longer than the control group.

So Van Praag concluded that a low to medium dose of epicatechin improves learning and memory. But in science, every answer invariably raises a bunch of new questions. For instance, how does epicatechin achieve this effect? What is the cellular/molecular mechanism at work? The hippocampus is the region of the brain associated with learning and memory, and the working hypothesis is that epicatechin increases blood flow in that area. It may also alter the morphology of nerve cells in a subtle yet significant way, namely by increasing the density of the neuronal "spines" of nerve cells.

There's also strong evidence that regularly drinking cocoa may alleviate -- if not cancel out altogether -- the development of age-related hypertension (high blood pressure), and other associated cardiovascular difficulties. Norman Hollenberg of Harvard Medical School specialized in studies on aging and blood brain flow response. His most interesting findings came from a study of the Kuna Indian population in Panama, specifically, the island-dwelling populace rather than those who had been assimilated into the mainland. The isolated Kuna did not exhibit the typical rising blood pressure as they aged; those who had migrated to the mainland, however, did suffer from age-related hypertension. Hollenberg found that the islanders drank incredible amounts of cocoa, more than 20 cups per week, compared to two or three cups for mainland-dwellers. It was the only unique environmental factor that could account for the largely nonexistent occurrence of hypertension among the islanders.

The key may lie in nitric oxide, an ancient hormone that scientists believe facilitates cell-to-cell communication in living organisms. You know, like the slime mold, an organism made up of single cells that must communicate with each other. Hollenberg was intrigued by prior studies indicating that flavanol-rich cocoa -- the bitter-tasting, unprocessed cocoa, I should note, not the excessively sweetened Swiss Miss variety with mini-marshmallows, which has been stripped of much of its natural flavanols -- can influence blood flow to the brain through the nitric oxide pathway, and conducted his own study on healthy subjects over 50.

He found a striking blood flow response that built up over several weeks of regular consumption of large doses of unprocessed cocoa.  His hope is that cocoa might one day be used to prevent or at least slow vascular-related dementia in the elderly -- a subject of deep personal interest to Hollenberg, since both his aged parents suffered from dementia prior to their deaths. Notably, the island-dwelling Kuna not only live longer than the mainland populace -- 94 years compared to 88 years, on average -- but there are almost no cases of age-related dementia. Nor do they suffer from many of the leading causes of death among the elderly in urban populations: cancer, stroke, and diabetes, for example.

Studies with mice and indigenous people are all very well and good, but can the effect on the human brain be measured directly? Ian MacDonald of the University of Nottingham Medical School figured it was worth a try. He has conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies to determine if there were any measurable effects from a cocoa-flavanol rich beverage -- namely, whether there would be increased activation in certain regions of the brain while performing a complex cognitive task. FMRI is useful in such cases because it's designed to detect increased blood flow; those areas show up as patches of light in the resulting image. In the brain, this is indicative of increased activity, telling scientists which regions are triggered to perform specific cognitive tasks.

MacDonald's study tested 16 young women, who were asked to perform a complex task switching exercise inside an fMRI machine (essentially a whole-body MRI machine).  They were asked to distinguish between vowels and consonants, and between odd and even numbers, pressing a button with either their right or left hands to record their answers. Just to make things a bit harder, the task was color-coded. If the letter-digit pairs were in red, the subjects responded to the letter; if the letter-digit pair was in blue, they responded to the number.

The women got to practice a bit first, until they could perform the switching tasks with less than 5% error rate. This set a handy baseline for the experiment. They consumed one Mars Cocoapro drink per day for five days and then were tested again. After a two-week interval, they were tested yet again, also after five consecutive days consuming a Cocoapro beverage. The final drink was consumed in both cases about 1-1/2 hours before the test.

Task switching cognitive studies invariably result in an increased delay in the subjects' reaction times (known as the "switch cost"). Could cocoa help reduce the switch cost? Apparently not. MacDonald found that the flavanol-rich cocoa beverage had not effect on either the speed or accuracy with which the young women performed the cognitive tasks, which he thinks might be due in part to the fact that they were young and healthy and arguably already performing at peak capability. However, MacDonald did find an "enhanced response" in the fMRI images that indicated an increase in blood flow in specific areas of the brain during the task, an effect that lasts between two and three hours. He believes this is a strong indication that consuming Cocoapro can increase blood flow and enhance brain function for people who are cognitively impaired, whether by sleep deprivation, fatigue, or advancing age. And cocoa flavanols potentially hold promise as a treatment for dementia and strokes, and for maintaining overall cardiovascular health.

To sum up:

• The "reward" effect from eating chocolate is largely psychological, because it require consuming huge amounts of the stuff in a single sitting to have a significant chemical effect.
• Ditto for the possibility of chocolate being chemically addictive; the chocoholic phenomenon appears to be largely behavioral/psychological in nature.
• Like any food or beverage containing caffeine (and in the case of cocoa, theobromine as well), chocolate does temporarily increase cognitive or psycho-motor performance.
• The jury is still out, however, on whether consuming a flavanol-rich cocoa drink improves learning, memory or one's ability to perform complex cognitive tasks.
• The single best reason for consuming a flavanol-rich cocoa drink like Cocoapro, despite the bitterness, is that it can have a significant positive effect on cardiovascular health, reducing one's risk of high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes -- particularly for aging individuals.

And there you have it: chocolate's current standing in the "healthy vs. unhealthy" debate. As R.J. Huxtable wrote in a 1996 article in Nature, chocolate, it seems is "more than a food but less than a drug." I can't wait for the research to shift to the study of how chocolate works in combination with peanut butter. The Reese's folks should be all over that.

the people that science forgot

Margaret Wertheim is my new personal hero. She's the author of Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars, among other things, and she gave a terrific lunchtime talk today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting here in San Francisco, calling for some radical changes in existing strategies for communicating science (all in a charming Australian accent). It's a familiar, well-worn issue, but Wertheim has a take that resonates at the same frequency as my own thoughts on bringing science to a much broader audience.  Ergo, she is a true Sister in Solidarity, and I really must get around to reading the aforementioned book, which has been languishing on my "To Read" shelf for the last six months. (No slight to Wertheim -- I've just been too busy to read much of anything of late.)

Specifically, Wertheim maintains that much of the focus in scientific communication is on the transmitter (scientists and public information officers, for example), but the question of who is actually receiving this information tends to be ignored. Hence the title of her talk: "Who is science writing for?" If the numbers are to be believed, science writing is predominantly for prosperous, well-educated, white males over 40 with healthy incomes who already have a solid foundation in science. That didn't come as a great shock to me. What was a shock was just how disproportionate the readership numbers really are for the top eight science magazines in the country.

Wertheim took the trouble to gather the actual circulation numbers and readership demographics from those leading science magazines (which carefully track such things because those numbers impact their advertising revenue): Popular Science, Scientific American, Discover, Wired, Natural History, Science News, Astronomy, and Science. (SEED is a relative newcomer to the market, and Wertheim's data is from 2002.) Taken together, these publications reach about 21 million Americans every year. Seventy-eight percent of them are men; 21.8% are women. Median ages range from 41 to 49. The high end of that range belongs to Scientific American, which is actually very good news for them, since it wasn't so long ago that their median readers' age was 62. (No doubt there are some grumpy old-timers  still out there complaining about the overhaul of the magazine to target a younger demographic.) The audience demographic numbers for radio and TV science are less readily available, but Wertheim asserts that the same trends are evident there as well.

Arguably, 21 million people reading about science on a regular basis is nothing to sneeze at, but the gender divide is nonetheless distressing -- even more so when one considers that the top eight leading women's magazines combined reach as many as 70 million readers (one assumes most of those are women). Cultural gender stereotypes and social conditioning once again rear their ugly heads. So Wertheim set out to reach those readers, writing a regular science and technology column for Vogue Australia, something she describes as "one of the hardest things I've ever done." It required capturing and holding the readers' attention -- no small feat when the competition is a shocking photo of Britney Spears' newly shaved head -- as well as explaining the science science in the simplest possible terms while using no jargon, and doing it all in 900 words or less.

I feel her pain, particularly since she has experienced the same kind of criticism frequently lobbed at my two books: that the science is simplified far too much, making it inaccurate, potentially misleading, and downright insulting to the reader's intelligence. In fact, one retired scientist sent in a 21-page letter detailing every instance in Black Bodies and Quantum Cats where he perceived there to be a misleading or inaccurate or incomplete statement -- including the Preface and Acknowledgements. (You heard me: he claimed to have found errors in the acknowledgments. Jen-Luc Piquant wonders why he didn't just write his own book in the six months it took to compile his list of my alleged writerly sins.) This might be because I lack a science degree, and am quite open about my former English major background; I might as well just plaster a "Kick Me" sign on my back. But Wertheim holds degrees in both math and physics. This still didn't save her from being bawled out by a prominent scientist for eliding over what he felt was a crucial point in an article she'd written in The New York Times. Imagine what he would have said about the pieces she wrote for women's magazines. (I can't believe she convinced Vogue Australia to run such a column in the first place -- a truly impressive achievement.) 

Invariably, these criticisms come from  older white males with strong backgrounds in science, and they object the most strenuously to simplification of their particular area of preferred knowledge or expertise (where they clearly have a lot invested emotionally). Again, there's nothing surprising about this. That's the traditional demographic for popular science books, you see; and it's also the predominant demographic for the hard sciences, like physics. But those critics completely miss the point, because they're operating in an outdated paradigm. What about all those potential readers who are interested in science but, to cite Wertheim's example, couldn't get past Chapter 1 of A Brief History of Time? Who is writing for them?

These are the people that science writing forgot, but if we're truly serious about communicating science to a general audience, we've got to bring it down to their level. They won't come to us -- I know tons of highly intelligent, well-educated people, of both genders, who would rather be tortured than pick up a popular physics book -- so we must go to them. We need every weapon in the arsenal to do this. More importantly, says Wertheim, we can't just rattle off easy answers; we must provide the broader context, helping them to see why a particular question matters enough for scientists to spend countless hours and millions of dollars to find the answer. Amen. Speak it, sister!

I try to provide a broader context by weaving in pop culture, history, literature, sports, and personal anecdotes to illustrate science. In addition to her stories for women's magazines and mainstream publications like the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, Wertheim founded The Institute for Figuring. It doesn't have much of a physical home: she runs the operation out of her living room. But its activities are very real indeed, including publications, lectures, and museum exhibitions aimed at a broad general audience. For instance, they've sponsored public lectures on the physics of snowflakes (which I blogged about here), tiling and tesselation, knot theory, and the mathematics of paper folding.

The IFF also developed a museum exhibit on the Invention of Kindergarten. It was supposedly was invented by a 19th century German crystallographer -- I didn't catch his name -- around 1850, and featured activities such as paper cutting and folding to rigorously demonstrate abstract geometrical concepts with roots in crystallography. That German scientist believed kids were perfectly capable of understanding abstract ideas -- more so than adults. "Nowadays one must go to grad school to learn about abstraction," Wertheim noted. Not surprisingly, the children from that model, which dominated Europe until 1900, grew up to become innovative scientists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, as well as pioneers of the modern art movement, such as Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian.

Most recently, Wertheim has been working on a project to create a crocheted coral reef -- a miniature replica of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which is in serious danger of extinction within 30 years. It turns out that many marine creatures exhibit some form of hyperbolic structure, since they need to maximize their surface area in a very small volume. (A woman named Daina Taimina came up with the first crochet models for hyperbolic space, but nature has been doing it for hundreds of millions of years.) What I found interesting about Wertheims' description is how a slight change in the code for a basic hyperbolic structure will cause it to evolve into ever-more complex beautiful shapes. It's a point she's been able to communicate quite well to women of all ages who show up to learn how to crochet a sea anemone and pick up a bit of geometry in the process. Placing a daunting topic -- hyperbolic geometry -- into a familiar, non-threatening context, made the subject matter more palatable to them, and also helped them retain that new knowledge.

It's only fitting that I also managed to catch a clip of the forthcoming public television special on Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold, based on the book of the same name by Tom Shachtman. "History continues to be alive in low-temperature physics," Shachtman insists, and the clip he showed illustrates that perfectly. Among other colorful personalities, we heard about Cornelius Drebbel, court magician to King James I, who attempted to air-condition Westminster Cathedral way back in 1620. But the focus of the clip was on James Dewar's race to become the first to liquefy hydrogen -- only to lose the race to liquefy helium to Dutch scientist Heiki Kamerlingh Onnes, who won the coveted Nobel Prize instead. I especially loved the re-enactments of Dewar's famous Royal Academy lectures on low-temperature physics.

The two-part film is slated to air on England's BBC this spring, and on PBS in the US later this year (June or November). Of course, if the audience follows the established statistical trends, only educated white males over 40 will be watching. But I'd like to think that there'll be plenty of women watching as well. Certainly I'll be tuning in....

my funny valentine

For this was on seynt Volantynys day

Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

The above lines were written by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1382, in his poem, Parlement of Foules. It was written to honor the engagement of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia, and is deemed the first recorded association of Valentine's Day with love. Before then, it was a feast day of the Roman Catholic Church honoring Saint Valentine.  Of course, nobody's quite sure who this Valentine dude was, since there were three martyred men named Valentinus in the late third century AD: a Roman priest; a bishop of Interamna (now Terni); and a martyr in the Roman province of Africa. It was a really common name back then, like John, or Steve, or David. (UPDATE: Speaking of common names: "Spartacus." Happy Valentine's Day, Melissa! And congrats for handling a very tough situation with intelligence and grace.)

Nonetheless, in 496, Pope Gelasius I decreed the feast of Saint Valentine to honor this mysterious personage as one of those "whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to god." An 18th century English antiquarian named Alban Butler started the rumor that the whole feast day was merely yet another attempt by the Church to provide the lumpenproletariat of that era with a religious holiday in place of the pagan holiday of Lupercalia, thereby further solidifying Christianity as the official state religion. (Jen-Luc Piquant has always expressed surprise at the effectiveness of this approach in converting the masses to Christianity, a strategy first employed by Constantine. It clearly made little difference to them what particular god they were required to worship, provided they got to throw a big party a few times a year.) Apparently, Butler made it up. But like just about everything associated with Saint Valentine, it makes a darn good story, which might explain why it wasn't debunked until 1981.

Today, of course, Valentine's Day is all about hearts and flowers and sappy Hallmark cards festooned with cheesy lines of verse -- and lots of science stories related to luuurve. For instance, Darksyde has a lovely rumination today on the history of roses. Over at the American Institute of Physics' Inside Science News Service, science writer Davide Castelvecchi describes recent work by Harvard University physicist Buddhapriya Chakrabarti on the physics of curling ribbons (not a skill I possess, alas). And for those who just want to get down and dirty, BuzzSkyline over at the Physics of Sex offers some useful tips to ensure a mind-blowing night of passion.

Not everyone is a fan of Valentine's Day, arguing that the holiday is just a cheap commercial marketing ploy that makes single people feel bad about themselves for not being in a relationship. It's arguably also about imposing artificial and unreasonably high expectations on couples to do something extra-specially romantic, which might explain why many pairs have huge fights around this time of year, when they don't outright call it quits. The naysayers have a valid point in that respect. I'm a bigger fan of spontaneously planning romantic moments throughout the year, because love is not a seasonal phenomenon.

Love might be a drug, however. This is also the time of year when the media resurrects the "love is all in your head, literally" stories: namely, that the body manufactures loads of dopamine and sends to all the regions of the brain associated with love -- the same regions assciated with, um, the rush of cocaine addiction. As for what happens when the initial infatuation wears off, we give you Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love:

"There are two stages of love, the first being attraction. During that stage, you get a brain bath of three chemicals that are natural amphetamines. You can stay up all night and talk till dawn, and feel giddy and euphoric. In time, these wane, and the second stage of love kicks in, attachment, and that's associated with a different brain chemistry, the endorphins, which have natural narcotic-like qualities."

Or, in the inimitable words of the Washington Post's Joel Achenbach: "So, over time, you become narcotized in a relationship. The cocaine buzz of infatuation gives way to a dull, blissed-out heroin addiction." (For more on this topic, see the Neely Tucker article in the Washington Post and check out the wisdom of OmniBrain.)

Ooh, snap! Score one for the Bah-Humbug Brigade. I admit to indulging in V-Day bashing in the past; anyone who's spent long lonely stretches in singledom can relate to feeling, well, a wee bit excluded on a holiday devoted to celebrating romantic love and coupledom. Which is why Pop Candy is offering not only a playlist of commenters' favorite love songs, but also a list of the best break-up songs. And if you mosey on over to Bad Cupid (patron saint of the Bah-Humbug Brigade), you'll find a fine selection of Breakup Haikus.

Personally, I was prone in the past to celebrating my singledom by reading Sir Thomas Wyatt: "Thou blind man's mark, thou fool's self-chosen snare/Fond fancy's scum and dregs of scattered thought..." Now that guy was bitter (at least until you get to the sestet, which turns the entire octave rant on its head, in fine Petrarchan sonnet tradition). John Donne also had his bitter moments, penning such vitriolic lines as "Hope not for mind in women. At their best/ sweetness and wit, but mummy possess'd." (That's from Love's Alchemy, for those who keep track of such things.) In Song, he issues a challenge to find a woman both fair and faithful, concluding that even if a guy did manage to find such a creature, and report back to Donne, by the time Donne reached her she would have "false to two, or three."

But Donne was also one of the Great Hopeless Romantics when caught in the throes of courtly love. Which is why, this year, I find myself perusing his less acrimonious verses, offering the following as a virtual valentine to Future Spouse:

The Good-Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did till we loved. Were we not weaned till then,
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?
'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear
For love all love of other sights controls
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to others worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp North, without declining West?
Whatever dies was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.

 

tongues of fire

There's very little these days that will keep me up past my usual bedtime; chalk it up to one too many all-nighters in college, but unless I get engrossed in a really good novel and just have to see how everything ends, I'll usually opt for a good night's sleep. But Saturday night (or, technically, early Sunday morning), I had the rare opportunity to make my first guest appearance on the Coast to Coast AM radio program with host Art Bell.

I was a bit nervous about the prospect. It had been an especially hellish week, and I was exhausted, physically and mentally. I almost never listen to any kind of radio (no particular reason, I just don't), so I only had a passing acquaintance with Bell's show, and therefore had no idea what to expect. Plus, it meant staying up all night: on the East Coast (where I'll be until April), the show runs from 2 AM to 5 AM. This is not a time frame in which I am at my most cogent and articulate, and Bell likes to talk about some pretty far-out subjects, only some of which I'm familiar with, so it would be a tough gig even when all the neurons are firing. So I was pleasantly surprised to find I genuinely enjoyed the experience, and snagged a good book recommendation in the process (Tess Gerritsen's Gravity).

Much of the credit for this belongs to Bell, who is a gracious, genial host, skilled at putting his guests at ease, without letting them off too easy. I was an obvious outsider -- an avowed skeptic amidst his loyal late-night following. It was a bit like walking into a cocktail party where everyone knows everyone else, and trying to join a conversation that's been in full swing for quite some time. But Bell made me feel welcome, and while neither one of us changed the other's mind about anything, I felt we had a friendly, interesting exchange. Among other things, we discussed my religious upbringing and current agnostic status (a rare area of agreement). It reminded me that I've been meaning to write something about glossolalia -- a.k.a., speaking in tongues -- since last fall, when researchers at the University of Pennsylvania briefly made headlines with the first real-time images of the brain's activity while speaking in tongues.

My first experience with the phenomenon occurred at the age of 9 or so, when my mother took me to a Pentecostal prayer meeting. I was a kid; I was curious; and it sounded kinda cool. But my skeptical tendencies were emerging even then. No matter how much the evangelist laid hands on me and prayed, I just couldn't do it -- even though there were kids running around younger than me, babbling away with wild abandon. My strongest inclination was to kick the evangelist in the shins so he'd stop pressuring me to attempt something I clearly had no affinity for.  But I did wonder about the ease with which those with, say, less cautiously reserved personalities than mine engaged in the activity: they literally seemed able to turn it off and on at will.

For those who might not be familiar with the Book of Acts in the New Testament, the second chapter tells the story of the very first Pentecost,  in which the Apostles gathered together to pray after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Tongues of fire appeared over their heads, and they began speaking in unknown languages, so that other people in the room who spoke foreign languages could understand their words. It was kind of the antithesis of the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament, where god supposedly scrambled the tongues of men to keep them from building a tower to heaven and putting themselves on the same level as god. Or something. (In literary terms, this would be known as hubris).

Even among evangelical Christians, the practice of speaking in tongues tends to be a bit controversial. There are those who think it was a one-time event, not something that should be practiced in modern times, and those for whom it is part of their daily prayer vigil, and people in between. Historically, it's popped up regularly among church practices. For instance, there are references to speaking in tongues in the writings of Justin Martyr (150 AD) and Tertullian (circa 200 AD), and in the 1100s Hildegard of Bingen spoke and sang in tongues. Ditto for the Moravians in the 1300s, a sect of French prophets called the Camisards, and the early Quakers in the 1600s

For all its association with Christianity, the second chapter of Acts is not the first time in the history of the world that such a strange phenomenon has been recorded. The famed Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece housed a female oracle (a pythia) who would make sacred utterances -- a.k.a., "gibberish" -- while in a trance-like state most likely brought on by the inhalation of noxious fumes emanating from faults beneath the temple. There's a lively debate going on between scientists in Rome and Connecticut, as to whether those emissions were carbon dioxide mixed with methane, or ethylene. (The latter stimulates the central nervous system, causing hallucinations, and also emits a sweet odor -- a detail that appears in the writings of Plutarch.) More recently, glossolalia has been observed in Haitian voodoo rituals, and in shamanistic practices, and it can be induced by taking certain hallucinogenic drugs.

Early in the 20th century, psychiatrists linked glossolalia primarily to schizophrenia and hysteria, but that explanation is (a) unfair, (b) overly simplistic, and (c) no longer the widely accepted scientific view. Those who practice speaking in tongues don't generally suffer from mental illness and actually experience less stress, although psychologist John Kildahl observed in 1972 that such people "tend to have more need of authority figures." Nor is it a trance; in fact, it might be an acquired ability to which some people might be more naturally inclined, in the same way that some people pick up sports or knitting more easily than others. (I suspected as much as a child.) But even so, it still requires a bit of practice to achieve the polished, flowing glossolalia.

Around 390 AD Augustine of Hippo mentioned the practice among certain believers who sang god's praises in a way that "may not be confined by the limits of syllables." That turns out to be a pretty accurate description of glossalalia, lingustically speaking. William Samarin is a professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Toronto who has conducted an extensive study of the practice worldwide. His conclusion:

Glossolalia consists of strings of meaningless syllables made up of sounds taken from those familiar to the speaker and put together more or less haphazardly. The speaker controls the rhythm, volume, speed and inflection of his speech so that the sounds emerge as pseudolanguage in the form of words and sentences.

According to Skepticwiki, the inventory of sounds is simple, the sequence highly repetitive, there are almost no predictable structural units or systematic word or sentence meaning. "Glossolalia is language-like because the speaker unconsciously wants it to be language-like. Yet in spite of superficial similarities, glossolalia fundamentally is not language." People want to believe, plain and simple, and no amount of scientific evidence to the contrary will change any True Believer's mind about his/her beliefs, because the experience is very real to them. And no wonder. The University of Pennsylvania imaging results demonstrate that this stubborn mindset might have a scientific basis: "[S]omeone in the throes of glossolalia is having an experience which they find genuinely inexplicable because they are not consciously thinking about the stream of syllables which pour from their tongue."

Heading up the Pennsylvania study was Andrew B. Newberg, director and co-founder of the Center for Spirituality and Neurosciences, and author of Why We Believe What We Believe. He studied the brain activity of five Pentecostal women, all of whom regularly spoke in tongues. To do so, he used a nuclear medicine imaging technique called single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), which detects gamma rays after the patient is injected with a radioactive tracer chemical (usually hexamethylpropylene amine oxime). This enables scientists to "see" which areas of the brain are most active during given behaviors -- in Newberg's case, when his test subjects were speaking in tongues, and when they were singing Gospel tunes (the control activity). A gamma camera takes pictures as it rotates around the subject's head from multiple angles -- this can take 15-20 minutes -- and this data is fed into a computer, which uses it to construct a 3D image. The study results were published in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

Newberg's findings were quite interesting. Specifically, he measured a near-shut-down of the part of the brain (frontal lobe) related to reason and self-control -- indicated by decreased blood flow to that region -- and a sharp increase in activity in that part of the brain (parietal region) which takes in sensory information and tries to create a sense of self relating to the world. In the most simple terms, activity in the conscious language centers of the brain decreased while activity in the emotional centers of the brain increased. This is actually opposite to what happens when people practice meditation: there, the frontal lobe becomes more active, while activity in the parietal region decreases. That's because glossolalia is concerned with giving up control and feeling like the self is relating to god, while meditation is about losing the sense of self and controlling focus and concentration.

The study supports Newberg's basic hypothesis that "we are biologically driven to find meaning and wholeness throughout our lives. In fact, our brains have the capacity to create and maintain a system of beliefs which can take us far beyond our survival-oriented needs." However, he also points out that "we are also born with a biological propensity to impose our belief systems on others." 

Science has a way of off-setting the risk of wishful thinking, which is why I'm such a big fan of the scientific method. I'm as prone as anyone else to self-deception, but Newberg's hypothesis rings true to me -- especially the bit about the pronounced need for those with strong belief systems to impose them on others. That does seem to be a particularly ugly, ingrained aspect of basic human nature. It's not just present among evangelical Christians, either, the current political environment notwitstanding. (And boy, is it prominent in politics!)

For instance, the flurry of emails I've received since my appearance on Coast to Coast (and if I haven't responded to some people, my apologies, but time is tight these days) run the gamut from True Believers who are angry that I don't have more of an open mind and insist on politely pointing out the flaws in their reasoning, and hard-core skeptics who are angry that I wasn't more rudely aggressive in debunking some of the wilder claims because THOSE CRAZY PEOPLE MUST BE STOPPED AT ALL COSTS! (Jen-Luc Piquant sniffs that she is tolerant of almost anything, except intolerance... and yes, she is well aware of the paradox, and embraces it. It's a faux-French thing.) The common thread: their strong personal beliefs result in outrage that someone is expressing an opinion not 100% in agreement with how they would have expressed it. (In fairness, I've received many very nice emails, too, and not just from my parents.)

Fortunately, I've learned a valuable lesson over the years: it's impossible to please absolutely everyone, so you might as well follow your gut instincts and just please yourself. There's no fancy scientific study backing up that particular hypothesis, but as a simple coping mechanism, it works for me. And I stand by what I said on the show: the sharply polarizing extreme rhetoric being employed on both sides of religion vs. science debate (or science vs. pseudoscience, liberal vs conservative, Democrat vs Republication, apples vs. oranges...) isn't helping convince anyone in the long run. Invariably, such people are more concerned with being right and advancing their own beliefs/agenda than they are with actually being heard. Me? I'd rather be heard, even if it's just by one person.

[UPDATE: It's a holiday for godless heathens: welcome to Darwin Day! Darksyde has a nice musing in Darwin's honor over at Daily Kos, while the indefatiguable Coturnix has compiled a terrific list of links here. Where does that guy get his energy?]

pick your poison

Chalk up another casualty to the "mad scientist" stereotype. Network newscasters were chortling merrily earlier this week over the sad spectacle of a distinguished NASA astronaut who became a wee bit unhinged from the severe emotional stress accompanying the dissolution of her marriage, and transferred all that angst onto her rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut. Specifically, Lisa Marie Nowak, 43, donned a trench coat, wig and dark glasses, strapped on a pair of Depends underneath (so as not to have to stop along the way), and drove 950 miles from Houston to Orlando to confront Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman. Then she followed Shipman to her parked car, and when Shipman cracked open her window to answer a question, Nowak sprayed pepper spray into the vehicle -- an act Nowak later admitted "was stupid."

Um, ya think? Nowak clearly needs a better coping mechanism. I'm under an especially intense amount of stress now, too, but you don't see me donning diapers and driving 1000 miles armed with pepper spray. I deal with it by getting a bit shirty with telemarketers and hiding under the bedcovers for an hour or so each day. Regardless, the story certainly didn't warrant the degree of attention it received. Mostly, I feel bad for Nowak, a rare woman in the space sciences who until now has been a perfectly respectable member of the astronautical community. Where were the network newscasters when she was making her own bit of history orbiting the Earth in space? This is not, I'd warrant, how she wants to be remembered, and now it will forever be a footnote to her life's work. (Forty years from now, her obituary could still read, "In 2007, Nowak briefly crumbled under the strain of her failed marriage," etc.)

However it does illustrate that scientists are people too: they  fall in love, marry, divorce, and occasionally develop unhealthy romantic obsessions just like everybody else (except for Jen-Luc Piquant, who swears she is the Bride of Science). Cupid's arrow doesn't discriminate. And while love might make the world go 'round, if it gets too intensely focused, love can also make you do the wacky (to loosely paraphrase the incomparable Buffy).

Nowak's unfortunate 15 minutes in the glare of the media spotlight comes on the heels of a cable TV special I watched a couple of weeks ago, detailing the descent into obsessive madness of a chemist named Alan Chmurny over his pretty young (married) co-worker, Marta Bradley. The episode title? "Mad Scientist." The producers were careful to include lots of scary, close-up shots of Chmurny's eyes, accompanied by ominous music, in an attempt to turn him into Charlie Manson. In reality, the unfortunate Chmurny was slightly eccentric, but perfectly pleasant and unremarkable in appearance. He was no Manson; he definitely needed meds. But his love for Bradley did, alas, eventually turn murderous.

It all began so innocently. Chmurny and Bradley worked together at a biotech firm in Maryland called Oceanix. He was a vice president in the company, but took a liking to Bradley. Among other things, she was a talented classical musician, and he was a classical music buff. They forged an unlikely friendship that inexplicably began to sour as Chmurny began exhibiting "wildly changing moods." He began confiding wild tales to Bradley about his foundering marriage, his diagnosis of stomach cancer (from which he miraculously recovered), a supposed girlfriend named Debbie who was mysteriously killed in a car accident -- most of which turned out to be fabrications.

Bradley instinctively began to pull away, but this only caused his behavior to escalate. Bradley's car mysteriously developed a flat tire. There was a break-in at her home; the intruder stole fancy lingerie plus some jewelry given to her by Chmurny. These items were later returned, by Chmurny, who claimed they'd been left in his office by some unknown person. Inside was a note: "I'm not through with you." Eventually Chmurny's behavior became so erratic that Oceanix was forced to fire him, leaving him ample free time to nurse his paranoid obsession and continue stalking Bradley. Stalking is a nasty, terrifying bit of business; it happened to a good friend of mine, who found, like Bradley, that law enforcement officials couldn't do much to help unless there was an overt act of violence.

It was probably just a matter of time before Chmurny became openly violent in his intentions. (Physicists shouldn't assume their field is immune to this sort of thing, by the way; check out my earlier post about the Alabama physics professor alleged to have strangled his wife.) But Bradley couldn't prove definitely that it was him. Chmurny was smart enough to cover his tracks. Then came the morning in April 2000 when Bradley walked out to her car and found it had been broken into. There were strange, small silver specks all over the console, including the heating/air conditioner vents. It turned out to be liquid mercury. And it was a bona fide murder attempt, since mercury is highly toxic, especially in its gaseous state. Had Bradley turned on her heat, the liquid mercury would have quickly evaporated into a toxic gas and poisoned her. Air saturated with mercury vapor at room temperature has a very high concentration -- many times the toxic level -- and becomes increasingly dangerous as temperatures increase.

Mercury, or quicksilver, as it is commonly known, is a transition metal, one of five elements that are liquid at standard room temperatures. Frankly, it's quite lovely as elements go, its beauty belying its deadly nature -- a veritable l'element fatale. It filled decorative pools and fountains in Islamic Spain, a practice revived by Alexander Calder when he built a mercury fountain for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. That fountain is still on display in Barcelona.

Apart from being decorative, Mercury has historically been used to treat various ailments, before its toxic properties were fully understood. It was certainly known in ancient China; China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di, is believed to have been driven insane and killed by mercury pills. Ironically, he took them in hopes of achieving eternal life, and legend holds he was buried in a tomb containing rivers of flowing mercury to represent the rivers of China. The ancient Greeks used mercury in ointments, and it found its way into Roman cosmetics as well.

Among medieval alchemists, mercury was a required element for the transmutation of base metals into gold (something the alchemists never achieved, but hey, they kept hoping).  During the 1800s, it was used to treat syphilis, (sometimes killing the intended patient), and to treat constipation, depression, and toothaches. In the early 20th century, children were administered mercury every year as a laxative and dewormer. It was also used to refine gold and silver ores, something still practiced by gold miners in Brazil's Amazon basin.  In modern times, it's been used to cool nuclear reactions, as an ingredient in dental amalgams, and before the advent of digital thermometers, the devices were filled with mercury. (I remember my mother panicking when, as a very young child, I accidentally broke such a thermometer. At the time, I didn't understand why she freaked out; and I was mercifully spared any ill effects.)

Marta Bradley was astute enough to call the police when she saw the mysterious silver specks in her car, thereby sparing herself an unpleasant experience with often-fatal mercury poisoning. Many others haven't been so lucky. You know that phrase, "mad as a hatter"? It most likely arose in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the furs used to make beaver felt hats were dipped in mercury compounds to separate the fur from the pelt ad mat it together. The solution produced toxic vapors which adversely affected workers in the felt hat trade. The poisoning caused shaking and splurred speech, symptoms which were lumped under "hatter's disease."

The most potent form of mercury is dimethyl mercury, a neurotoxin that can easily cross the blood/brain barrier and can prove lethal even in minuscule amounts (on the order of a fraction of a milliliter). The compound damages the central nervous system, kidneys, and the endocrine system, and prolonged or heavy exposure results in brain damage and death. Mostly, its effects are cumulative; usually, by the time its effects are noticed, it is too late to save the victim.

Take the unfortunate case of Karen Wetterhahn, a distinguished chemist working at Dartmouth College to study how mercury ions interacted with DNA repair proteins, in hopes of shedding light on the possible role of such heavy metals in causing cancer. In August 1996, she was in the lab, wearing safety goggles and latex gloves for protection. Despite these precautions, a small drop of the compound spilled onto her gloved hand, penetrating the latex in 15 seconds, where it passed through her skin. (It turns out that one must not only wear latex gloves, but also cover them with a pair of neoprene gloves for added protection.) By January 1997, she noted a tingling sensation in her fingers and toes. Her speech began slurring, she struggled with balance, and her vision suffered. She died in June 1997; at the time she had a blood mercury level of 4000 micrograms per liter, 80 times the toxic threshold.

As for Marta Bradley, her ordeal ended in September 2001, when Chmurny poisoned himself with cyanide after a jury found him guilty of assault and reckless endangerment -- which carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. He died the next day. One could hardly say he escaped justice, since death by cyanide poisoning is extremely unpleasant, particularly in the concentrations he must have ingested to fall ill within 15 minutes: high concentrations lead to seizures, apnea and cardiac arrest, often a coma, and death can follow in a matter of minutes.

Actually, not all cyanides are toxic: one of the most potent forms is hydrogen cyanide, a gas that smells faintly of almonds, although 40% of the population can't smell it at all -- a genetic quirk. (In an NCIS episode called "Bloodbath", one of the characters detects that distinct smell minutes before collapsing from the exposure -- clearly one of the lucky 60% able to do so.) Equally toxic are the salts that derive from hydrogen cyanide, such as potassium cyanide and sodium cyanide. The victims of the infamous Jonestown massacre in Guyana back in 1978 drank Kool-Aid laced with potassium cyanide. Being a chemist by trade, Chmurny would have known all too well the type and dosage he'd need to kill himself. He lasted a bit longer than he probably expected, due to the timely intervention of medical personnel -- that, and the fact that he calmly informed his lawyer he'd taken the pills within a few minutes of doing so.

For those would-be poisoners with a particularly strong sadistic streak, there's always polonium, which Wikipedia estimates is around 5 million times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide, weight for weight. Just ask former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. Oh wait, you can't: he tragically died after being poisoned with polonium 210 late last year. Effect Measure has several terrifically thorough posts about the case here, here, and here. And in a bizarre twist to the tale, detectives investigating Litvinenko's case now believe he was administered the poison via a teapot while staying in the Millennium Hotel in Piccadilly, in central London. Ionizing radiation is a nasty thing, especially if polonium is ingested, as in the Litvinenko murder, especially since death takes several weeks.

He's not the first to die from such exposure. Irene Joliot Curie -- daughter of Pierre and Marie -- was accidentally exposed to polonium when a sealed capsule of the stuff exploded on her laboratory bench. It took 10 years, but she eventually died in Paris from leukemia, in 1956. A physicist at the Weizmann Institute named Dror Sadeh was exposed to a radiation leak of polonium 210 in 1957. Sadeh died of cancer, one of his students succumbed to leukemia, and two more colleagues died a few years later, also from cancer believed to have resulted from the leak.

All this is enough to make me never want to drive a car or drink tea again. But if I had to pick a poison, I think I'd choose arsenic. True, it also results in a horrifying unpleasant death via extreme gastric distress. But it's possible to build up a strong resistance to the substance over time with regular, small-dose ingestions. So there's a greater chance of surviving a poisoning (whether accidental or deliberate) -- if you start preparing now. It makes the skin all clear and pretty, too.

now we are one

Exactly one year ago today, I posted my very first blog entry on Cocktail Party Physics, never expecting, in a million years, that anyone other than my mom and a few close friends would ever read my ramblings. Little did I know that I was about to embark on a great adventure that would end up, among other things, completely changing my life. The blog has evolved considerably since those rough, early days -- and so has Jen-Luc Piquant, who began as a funny little decorative afterthought and has since emerged as a full-blown character with her own distinct personality. (She has opted for purple hair today in honor of this auspicious occasion.) And I can sincerely say that I'm honored to have been so warmly welcomed into the lively virtual salon that is the science blogosphere.

We even received some unexpected birthday presents! The first isn't really for us, per se, but it makes us happy, nonetheless, to hear that the uncertain future of Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has been resolved, and the facility will be fully funded for 2007. The Brookhaven press release said also that the National Synchrotron Light Source will be "significantly funded" for this year, which is a bit more ambiguous, but still -- it's cause to celebrate, since there was a very real possibility just a few weeks ago that one or both facilities would have to shut down operations entirely until the budget gridlock in Congress could be resolved. (For those who haven't been following the story, Peter Steinberg has covered it extensively on his Entropy Bound blog.)

The second gift is that we were selected on Saturday as a Typepad featured blog, and were so warmly described  therein that we actually blushed. Should any new readers happen along, I finally got around to compiling "The A List" (see sidebar), a dozen or so of my favorite posts over the last year.

The third gift was receiving a very thoughtful, extensive critique on a May 2006 post exploring the acoustics of concert halls -- specifically, analyzing what might have been happening, acoustically, at a disastrous Jordi Savall concert. Some people might not consider a critique to be much of a gift, but a critique done exceptionally well, with sufficient tact, is very much a gift -- for one thing, it takes a great deal of time (unlike, say, kneejerk criticism). One of the aspects I most appreciate about this blog is the number of knowledgeable readers who stop by occasionally and comment, offering helpful URLs, clarifications, and correcting minor errors. Since I consider the blog my "writer's laboratory," this kind of input is invaluable. But it's rare to get the kind of analysis recently offered by Greg Miller, an acoustical consultant with TALASKE, who co-authors an excellent group blog called Champions of Sound in his (no doubt limited) spare time.

Here's an excerpt from my earlier post:

Alas, the concert was held at St. Paul the Apostle on the Upper West Wide, a small Romanesque-style house of worship whose architectural details added up to a veritable acoustical "perfect storm." Unless one happened to be sitting in the first few rows, the sound was muted, muddy, and each separate part of the complex compositions seemed to reach the audience at different times, so that the percussion always seemed a few beats behind the singers, and/or the instruments. 

Needless to say, the evening was an unmitigated disaster. Several audience members left in disgust, and those who remained to the bitter end were forced to wander forlornly about the sanctuary in hopes of finding one of the "live" spots where the acoustics weren't quite so ruinous. Since it was impossible to fully appreciate the performance, our little group instead found ourselves discussing the scientific aspects of what might be happening to cause the horrific effects.

I made a few minor errors in the post (not an unusual occurrence), most notably equating "resonance" and "reverberation," or at least using the terms interchangeably. That might be okay in a non-scientific setting -- musicians conflate the two all the time -- but to an acoustician, the terms are quite different, with very specific meanings. While we're on the subject of reverb, when talking about the optimal reverberation time of Boston's Fogg Hall, I cited 2.25 seconds. According to Miller, that's perfect for, say, a symphonic space, but not so great for a lecture hall, which would do better with a reverberation time around 1 second. I also talked about the wood floors in St. Paul's (where the concert was held) as absorbing sound, when it was, in fact, reflecting it. An honest mistake: the sound from the musicians was muted and muddy, so I assumed there was absorption going on, and erroneously identified the wood floor as the cause. As it happens, wood is mostly reflective, which explains why so many venerated concert halls have wooden floors.

So, if it wasn't the wood floors, what the heck was going on with the bad acoustics at that concert? It turns out that Miller lived in NYC for a spell and is familiar with St. Paul's, and thus was able to offer some additional insights, which I excerpt in part below (with his permission). The biggest problems probably had to do with timing and directivity; sound reflections must reach the listener's ear with proper timing, and at the Savall concert, they clearly didn't. Per Miller:

"The percussion instruments at the low end of the frequency scale send sound out in all directions fairly evenly. The voices and higher frequency instruments send sound out in one direction more strongly than in all other directions. You were probably hearing strong reflections off the high ceiling from the percussion much later in time than you were hearing the sound from the singers. This could make them seem out-of-time with one another. Musicians also take cues from sound reflected back to them from the room; they may have actually had their timing messed up trying to adjust to one another based on reflections back from the room.

"The sound lacked clarity because there weren't enough surfaces reflecting sound to your ears within the first 1/12th of a second or so. Your ears heard the sound direct from the voice/instrument... then nothing for awhile... then this blur of reverberation. You need to fill in the gap with what acousticians creatively call 'early sound'; your brain naturally merges the early reflected sound with the direct sound to develop your understanding of each note/syllable. This is actually one of the reasons that the subway stations are so nice... lots of early reflections, followed by an audible long reverberation, but it's relatively weak and therefore doesn't mess up the clarity."

As for directionality, Miller ascribes partial blame to the decorative arches along the sides of the church, which he says "can reflect sound out in some very funny directions, with some odd coloration to the sound. I suspect that they have a lot to do with the dead spots you mentioned."

Clearly, Miller knows his stuff, and we thank him again for shedding additional light on what proved to be a distressing concert-going experience. At least we learned something from it. And since acoustics proved central to this blogoversary posting, I leave you with a link to violinist Jon Rose's website, courtesy of the always excellent Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Rose designs all kinds of unusual instruments, but he also travels around the world playing fences -- actual fences -- with nothing but his violin bow. His most recent project is "Great Fences of Australia," and you can see a movie of Rose in action here. Clearly, good fences don't just make good neighbors; they can also make good music.

fighting the forces

Anyone who doubts the existence of entropy has clearly never tried to stage a combined Buffyverse lecture/martial arts demonstration in midtown Manhattan on a Thursday evening. There must be some offshoot of that most fundamental law of physics that dictates an increasing degree of disorder the closer one gets to that midtown area. (Gratuitous side note: we specifically curse NYC's stupid new traffic rules that forbid both left AND right turns along most of 34th Street. A pox upon Mayor Bloomberg whoever is responsible for this.) This in turn greatly lessens how much "work" can be done -- in this case, how much progress can be made in what would normally be a simple task: unloading a bunch of wrestling mats and weaponry at the CUNY Graduate Center. We eventually prevailed, but only by bringing in an enormous infusion of extra energy in the form of a couple of dedicated -- and strong -- guys from my dojo (thanks Jordan and Dave!). The folks who run CUNY's fantastic Science and the Arts program fight off this powerful, constantly encroaching entropy on a daily basis to bring the NYC populace all kinds of fascinating, fun science-related events. I  bow my head in deference to their tireless outreach efforts, because just pulling off a single event completely wiped me out.

Last night's event was the culmination of almost a year of discussion and planning. Following up on the great time we had showcasing martial arts physics last summer as part of CUNY's First-Ever Amazing Science Street Fair, I put together a lecture based on one of the chapters of my new book, The Physics of the Buffyverse, which details some of the underlying basic physics principles of the most common martial arts techniques seen in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff, Angel. Sure, I showed a few clips of fight scenes from the shows -- always a crowd-pleasing approach in pop-culture physics -- but there's really no substitute for live-action violence. So several instructors and students from my former Brooklyn dojo showed up (voluntarily!) to help me demonstrate punches, spinning kicks, breakfalls, fighting stances, and a few crowd-pleasing judo throws, under the watchful eye of Sensei Jordan Dos Santos, who coordinated that aspect of the event. The crowds at both shows were terrific, very engaged, asked thoughtful, probing questions afterwards, and a couple brave souls even attempted a basic hip throw. And oh yeah, we sold a few books, too, because I have no shame. And a mortgage. (Jen-Luc Piquant extends her most gracious "Merci beaucoups" to everyone who bought copies, as it helps her maintain her pixelated perfection.)

So we fought entropy and won... temporarily. I'm sure disorder is creeping back towards the Graduate Center even as I type, because entropy always wins in the end. Let's face it, the laws of physics can be a bit of a buzzkill at times: just think of all the nifty things we could do without all those annoying little insurmountable constraints imposed by entropy. Or energy conservation. Or gravity. On the other hand, scientists continually amaze me with the ingenious ways they find to work around those fundamental constraints, time and time again. Most modern technology -- including the infamous "Moore's Law" in the semiconductor industry, which has yet to reach a fundamental limit, despite decades of warnings -- is the result of scientists refusing to give up in the face of tough obstacles. They don't break the laws of physics, mind you; they work within those "boundary conditions" to find loopholes and come up with clever ways to exploit them.

One has to strike a very fine balance between recognizing what the physical realities are in science and working within those inherent limitations, and refusing to accept the status quo in favor of pursuing innovation and potentially revolutionary breakthroughs. Where would science be if its practitioners weren't constantly pushing the envelope? Yet not all things are possible; those limitations are real. The trick is knowing where you can push, and where you must simply accept reality as it is.

Believe it or not, this has a tie-in to Buffy... and to me. As a woman in the martial arts who trained for seven years in a predominantly male dojo, I had to deal with some very real physical limitations on a daily basis. Invariably, I found myself paired with (or against) someone bigger and stronger -- sometimes MUCH bigger and stronger -- and I literally got my ass kicked more times than I care to remember. I had to learn those inescapable realities and work within my own physical constraints. But there was still room for innovation, for pushing the envelope here and there along the road to becoming a better fighter. And there were some "realities" I found I didn't have to blithely accept, in the form of cultural stereotypes about what girls can, and cannot, do.

There's a popular saying in martial arts circles: "All things being equal, the bigger stronger person will win." As I pointed out in my lecture last night, there's some scientific merit to this statement, because mass is a major part of the equation when it comes to the physics of the fight. Good technique can help a little; I quickly learned lots of little "tricks" to involve even a small amount of additional body mass in my techniques to make them more effective, and for two years prior to my black belt test, I packed on an extra 30 pounds of (mostly) muscle. Not only did I have more weight to throw around, but I could take the hits much better, with a lower risk of injury -- a key factor to consider when you're training full-contact four nights a week.

But sooner or later, we all hit the limit of what our particular "system" (body type) allows us to do. And if we accept that statement about the bigger, stronger person being predetermined to win a fight, why bother training at all? Why not just give up? After all, there will always be somebody bigger and stronger, somewhere, no matter what your size -- unless you're, say, Andre the Giant. That's where Buffy comes in. She's tiny -- very little body mass -- and while the premise of the series is that she has super powers ("Slayer strength") in the form of extra mystical energy (I would like some of that, please!), this only gives her an advantage over mere mortals. The demons she fights have their own super powers, and are usually bigger and stronger. And yet over and over again, she wins.

She wins in part because, well, it's a TV show, and she's the title character. You can't have Buffy the Vampire Slayer without Buffy (although this didn't keep her from dying... twice). But there's more to it than that. She's also trained hard in the martial arts, perfecting her techniques, learning how to get the most bang for her buck, given what she has to work with. But she also realizes, thanks to her practical combat experience, that all things are never equal. She knows she always has a chance -- not necessarily a good chance, but a chance, nonetheless.

See, that statement about bigger and stronger opponents is true, as far as it goes, but it assumes a carefully controlled environment that severely restricts the variables. Specifically, it considers how much force an opponent can  generate to be the sole means of determining the outcome of a fight. That just isn't the case. It's undeniably a major factor: I can say, from personal experience, that being kicked into a wall and bouncing off again instills tremendous respect for the advantages of superior size. However, I prefer a less defeatist attitude. By all means, we must acknowledge that yes, size matters, but  we also need to recognize that it's far from being the whole story. The "real world" (and, clearly, the Buffyverse) is a messy, uncontrolled environment, and there are all kinds of tiny variables that can change the outcome of a fight in a split second. A fight will not play out in reality the way it would in a laboratory simulation.

There's another reason I prefer my version of the "size matters" argument: it's almost always cited by male martial artists as the primary reason why women aren't as "good" at fighting as the men. I was fortunate to train with some terrific guys who always assured me I could succeed, without ever sugar-coating the reality of superior size and strength. One of my instructors memorably told me, early on, "It's not enough to be as good as the men. You have to be better." On the surface, this would seem to be a double standard, but that really wasn't his point. He was a smaller guy. He had to be technically better than the big guys as well. What he was saying was this: the real world isn't fair. There are some undeniable physical realities that a woman (or smaller man) must contend with in a dojo environment, and when size and strength are lacking, superior technique must step in to make up the difference. The deck is stacked to favor size and strength. That doesn't mean a smaller person can't beat a larger one out on the "da street." (Here's just two things missing in the dojo: genuine surprise, and very real pain.)

This should resonate not just with women in the martial arts, but women in physics, or women in NASCAR, or women in any traditionally male-dominated field, because, frankly, the same kind of "innate ability" argument is used in every such arena as a rationale for why more women can't or don't succeed in those fields. Even the success stories are generally viewed with winking condescension.

One of my (many) favorite scenes in Buffy occurs in Season 5, where she is forced to perform a series of pointless tests by the Watcher's Council -- from which she parted ways two seasons earlier -- in exchange for crucial information about her nemesis du jour, the exiled hellgod named Glory. None of the tests favor Buffy's particular, unique strengths; rather, they are designed around an established, traditional criteria dating back at least to medieval times. (It's also criteria that, historically, tend to get most Slayers killed before reaching the age of 20). She gamely jumps through hoop after hoop, with the Council members frowning disapprovingly at her supposedly sub-par performance, causing her to question her own abilities and judgment, finding any means necessary to take away her sense of power so she can be manipulated and controlled. Buffy figures it out, eventually. And she takes her power back. The fundamental situation she faces hasn't changed, just how she chooses to react to it. And that shift in attitude makes all the difference. (Historical note: famed martial artist Bruce Lee had one leg that was shorter than the other. He was told he'd probably never be a great kung fu practitioner because of his physical "disability," but instead of accepting that short-sighted verdict, he designed his own style, jeet kune do, which capitalized on his strengths. Bruce also took back his power.)

That's the real lesson I find in Buffy and the physics of the martial arts, beyond the basic scientific principles. There will always be someone more than willing to tell you how much you suck, why you can't do well at something you love and wish to pursue, why you aren't fit to share the same air as more exalted beings blessed with that elusive "innate ability." They'll try to make you doubt yourself, because some people just can't stand it when others excel. Some people are just mean-spirited that way. That doesn't make them right.  It's important to understand the stark realities of what you face, but if you really, really want to succeed -- whether it's in the martial arts, the sciences, or any other field that ignites your passion, don't let a few naysayers douse your enthusiasm. That's when you set about working within those constraints, addressing those shortcomings that are within your power to change, and figuring out how your particular strengths can work to your advantage. Find your inner Slayer and take back your power.

Yeah, I know. Easier said than done. But that's what Buffy would do. And it's what our greatest scientists do, day after day, pushing the boundaries of what is possible a little bit at a time.