Cocktail Party Physics

FROM THE ARCHIVES: zap that fat!

Still zero time to blog, and my co-bloggers are equally silent, so here's another blast from the past, about an awesome potential application for free electron lasers: replacing liposuction as the procedure of choice for discriminating folks desiring to rid themselves of excess baggage. Literally.

In a perfect world, bad things wouldn't happen to good people. There would be no pain, no suffering, no sickness -- and no calories. Those obnoxious little units, first introduced in the nutritional, food-related sense in the 1890s, have caused more grief for the human waistline over the ages than, say, girdles or whalebone corsets (although the latter were known to sometimes damage internal organs). Most women and -- let's be honest, now -- many men waste a fairly considerable amount of time worrying about unwanted stores of fat globules. It's no coincidence that one of the most popular features of Judgment City -- a sort of waiting room for the afterlife in the 1991 Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life -- is the fact that during your stay there, you can eat whatever you like without gaining an ounce. (That's where Jen-Luc Piquant is going for her next vacation: hello, Judgment City!)

I'm happy to report that there may be new hope for expanding waistlines and flabby thighs. Scientists at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (known affectionately as "JLab") have demonstrated that a laser can heat (read, "burn away") fat in the body without scorching the over-lying skin. This in turn could lead to revolutionary new laser therapies to treat such chronic bugbears as severe acne, artery plaque, and -- you guessed it -- unwanted cellulite. These very exciting results were presented this morning in Boston at the 26th annual meeting of the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery (ASLMS). I was not actually there, alas, to witness this historic announcement in person, but I was among the many proud recipients of the JLab press release last Thursday, and have only been prevented from sharing the news with you all until now because of a compulsory media embargo. (We try to always respect the embargo here at Cocktail Party Physics. It'd just be rude to do otherwise.)

First, a few words about lasers. The question of who actually invented this useful little device is a thorny one, and the subject of many nasty lawsuits over several decades, but most would agree that the underlying fundamental physics comes to us courtesy of good ol' Albert Einstein. It was just a little idea he was developing on the side for a lark to take a break from the rigors of general relativity -- a side project that ended up spawning a multi-billion-dollar industry. In 1917 he published a paper that broached the possibility of something called "stimulated emission." (Yes, I know: it's an unfortunate choice of words. But that's what it's called, so try to keep the snickering to a minimum, 'kay?)

At the heart of a laser is a "lasing medium" -- usually a crystal of some sort, like ruby -- and if you pump the atoms in that material (oh, stop it!) with intense flashes of light or electricity, it will eventually emit the excess energy as photons. I won't go into all the complicated details here; you can find more details here and here. But the end result is a tightly focused beam of light in which all the photons are traveling in the same direction, rather than diffusing outward all willy-nilly, in every direction at once. So "laser" is short for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation." (We're offering a brand new physics cocktail, called the Laser Beam, in its honor. See sidebar.)

The problem with conventional lasers is that by their very nature, they only emit light at one given frequency, which is determined by whatever material one is using as the lasing medium. JLab  pioneered  free electron lasers (FELs), which emit intense, powerful beams of laser light that can be tuned to whatever wavelength (color) of the electromagnetic spectrum one needs for the purpose at hand.  This makes an FEL incredibly flexible and therefore useful for a broad range of applications, including processing plastics, synthetic fibers, electronics components, and all kinds of cutting-edge materials with unique properties. And it can do so far more cheaply than more traditional manufacturing tools. That tunability also means the instrument can be tailored to three infrared wavelengths where -- the researchers found -- fat heats up more efficiently than water, making it possible to selectively heat fat tissue with infrared laser light. They tested this capability first on actual human fat (obtained from "surgically discarded normal tissue"), and then on skin-and-fat tissue samples taken from pigs.

Jen-Luc Piquant, for one, is delighted that the good folks at JLab finally got around to addressing the dire need for new ways to get thinner thighs in 30 days -- preferably ones that don't involve any actual effort. It's about time we brought out the big guns. Just look at the size of that thing! And that's only one of the system's many components... This country may or may not be facing an "obesity epidemic," depending on which conflicting study one chooses to believe, but a quick look around  the average suburban mall would offer quite a bit of anecdotal evidence in favor of the "pro"-epidemic view. Of course, excess flab isn't a new problem for the human race. Far from it. Among other notable historical figures, the English poet Lord Byron struggled mightily with his weight, despite being the quintessential ladies' man (club foot and all), and routinely went on "slimming" regimens like liquid diets.

So fad diets predate Dr. Atkins. In the early 20th century, Horace Fletcher -- a.k.a. "the chew-chew man" -- advocated controlling food consumption by chewing one's food until it was liquid. Shortly before he died in 1919, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters published the first bestselling diet book, Diet and Health, which was also the first to promote the idea of counting calories to control weight -- then quite a new concept. It had only been 20 years or so since the chemists Wilbur Atwater and Russell Chittenden came up with the notion of measuring food as units of heat that could be produced by burning it. That's all a "calorie" really is: the amount of heat energy produced when the food is burned to ashes, under controlled laboratory conditions. It's not something that's actually "in" food.

The success of Peters' book spawned an entire industry. Think the Atkins and South Beach Diets were innovative and original? Think again. The emphasis on "food combinations" dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. William H. Hay, for example, believed proteins, starches and fruits should be eaten separately to avoid "acidosis." It's unclear to me what this is, but apparently it "drained vitality and led to fat." (Jen-Luc reminds me -- somewhat unkindly, I think -- that I have had boyfriends who could be considered the human embodiment of acidosis.) He also recommended a daily enema to "flush out the poisons" -- an approach that can still be seen today in the popularity (in certain elite circles) of "colonics."

With his book, Look Younger, Live Longer, Gaylord Hauser drew the admiration of the likes of Greta Garbo and Paulette Goddard with his emphasis on Vitamin-B rich foods like brewers yeast, yogurt, wheat germ and blackstrap molasses. He was also one of the first to develop his own line of special foods and supplements in accordance with that diet plan. Then there was the so-called "magic pairs" diet, extolling the supposedly increased fat-burning properties of certain food combinations, like (we kid you not) lamb chops and pineapple. Plus ca change.... We're still looking for that "magic bullet."  When it comes to fad diets, there is truly nothing new under the sun. And they aren't any more or less effective than they were back then.

We bandy about the word quite promiscuously, but a "calorie" is not as tangible as one might think. In the realm of science (specifically, thermodynamics), calories apply to anything that contains energy, such as a gallon of gasoline. The calories in food are technically "kilocalories," according to how the units are strictly defined in science. For scientists, a calorie is simply the amount of energy (heat) required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), and 1000 calories is equivalent to 1 kilocalorie. So that Power Bar I just consumed for breakfast contained 270 food calories, which translates into 270,000 regular calories. And that four miles I'll be running this afternoon should burn 400 "food calories"; it sounds like a much more impressive amount when transposed into 400,000 regular calories.

For weight management purposes, it's sufficient just to burn up the calories. But all that energy released when calories are burned can also be harnessed to do some kind of useful task. For instance, prisoners in 19th century New York prisons were forced to walk on treadmills as punishment, and that energy was used to grind grain for the inmates' daily bread. I found an interesting comparison chart at How Stuff Works. It turns out that the calories contained in five pounds of spaghetti would yield enough energy to brew a pot of coffee, while those in a single slice of cherry cheesecake would operate a light bulb for an hour and a half. And if you need to drive 88 miles to visit friends or relatives, you'd need to burn the calories contained in 217 Big Macs. (Talk about carb-loading. Better start chowing down the night before.)

Back in February, I stumbled upon a fascinating short article in Wired about creative ways to harness the energy from gym exercise to perform useful functions. An artist named Laurie Palmer began musing about all the wasted energy being produced in gyms all across the country, by Americans on stationary bikes, elliptical machines, or treadmills. So she set up the online "Notions of Expenditure" project a year ago, in which people can contribute their ideas for turning exercisers into generators of energy. Unfortunately, unless you're Lance Armstrong, it's not a lot of energy: most people on a stationary bike only produce between 75 and 150 watts.

It all seems like a great deal of work, for very little payoff, doesn't it? Hence the appeal of the JLab approach: no muss, no fuss, no obsessively writing down every morsel that passes one's lips in a little "food diary." No special meals or supplements, elaborately orchestrated food combinations, or those telltale minute surgical scars from conventional liposuction -- just one really big free electron laser facility that hunts down fat and zaps it away without damaging one's outer layer of skin. Needless to say, Jen-Luc Piquant is ecstatic at the prospect, and is preparing to indulge in large bowls of her favorite virtual penang curry over coconut sticky rice, among other rich and calorie-laden delicacies. It's almost as it JLab's FEL has turned our world into one giant Judgment City where we can eat whatever we want with no dietary consequences. "Go ahead," she exhorts, a bit irresponsibly. "Indulge in that over sized blueberry scone. Why bother watching what you eat when you can just zap that fat away whenever you feel like it?"

As usual, Jen-Luc is letting her enthusiasm over-ride her common sense. Operating an FEL isn't cheap, nor is scheduling time at the facility as easy as scheduling a doctor's appointment -- or a visit to one's local Liposuctor. And let's not forget that for now, at least, it's just proof of principle. Commercial development of any application takes a lot more time. And money. So tempting though it may be to throw dietary caution to the wind, I think I'll stick with my tried and true Thermodynamics Diet: you know, that one where you have to burn more calories than you consume to lose weight. Sure, it lacks the guilt-free ease and panache of those flashier fad diets, and requires far more actual effort. On the other hand, it has withstood the test of time.

blood rituals

It's All Soul's Day, and Jen-Luc is proudly sporting her vampire look for the occasion, eschewing the usual Halloween festivities last night. She embraces the notion (popularized on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) that vampires and other nasty things actually take the night off on Halloween -- because they find the whole spectacle beneath their Evil Dignity or something. I'm especially reminded of the episode where a semi-reformed Spike joins the "Scoobies" in warding off a group of vampires who decide to flout the tradition. Mid-fight, one of the vamps asks Spike, "What's your problem, man?" Spike reminds him of the tradition, to which the vamp blusters, "Yeah, well, I'm a rebel." Which causes Spike -- never the most patient of vampires -- to roll his eyes and stake the poor bastard, declaring, "No, I'm a rebel. You're an idiot." Also? A big pile of dust.

Naturally, I'm a vampire fan -- but only because I'm pretty confident the creatures don't exist. Okay, maybe there are some rare albino folks out there with a serious melanin deprivation, making them ultra-sensitive to sunlight. (And what was the rare disease that supposedly afflicted the unfortunate children in The Others? Oh right, xeroderma pigmentosum.) The hereditary disease known as porphyria has become associated with vampirism, with historians speculating that the legends arose from early sufferers. This is a disease in which the body doesn't produce enough heme, an iron-rich pigment in the blood, making victims sensitive to sunlight, sometimes with reddish mouths. (Remember the Master in Buffy? He had "fruit-punch mouth.") There are different varieties of porphyria; the rarest, and most severe, leads to blistering and scarring of the skin, with the lips and gums becoming so taut that teeth protrude like fangs.

In all of recorded history, there have only been 200 or so documented cases of the most extreme forms of porphyria, although it's popping up more and more on prime time TV. For instance, I distinctly recall an episode of C.S.I. where Grissom builds a case against a nutritionist who, it transpires, suffers from porphyria. She has trained her large dog to attack random joggers so she can harvest their blood-rich organs, puree them in the blender, and drink it up to keep her disease at bay. Drinking fresh blood is erroneously believed to be a kind of folk remedy for porphyria. In reality, the chemical enzymes in the blood that the sufferers require can't survive the digestive process; the best way to treat porphyria is through blood transfusions.

There have been a few historical figures rumored to have an especially powerful bloodlust, even in earlier, more violent ages where slow-lingering painful executions were the order of the day. Take Vlad the Impaler, a Wallachian prince (also known as Vlad Tepes or Vlad Dracula) from the mid-1400s believed to be the partial inspiration for Bram Stoker's horror classic, Dracula. He earned his nickname for his penchant for impaling his enemies on long wooden spikes.

Per Wikipedia, this was called "bung poling," i.e., "dropping a person upright onto a sharpened tree trunk starting from between the legs, the weight of the person forcing the tip of the trunk through the chest cavity or neck." Women were not exempt from this punishment, particularly those Prince Vlad deemed unchaste. Actually, by the time he got around to impaling such unfortunate females, it would have been a merciful release, given the sorts of atrocities inflicted upon them beforehand. Maybe Vlad wasn't an actual vampire, but he most certainly was a monster.

When Francis Ford Coppola filmed 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula, he presented the vampire as actually being Vlad the Impaler, not just inspired by him. This was a highly romanticized portrayal of a sympathetic monster, driven to embrace vampirism by the suicide of his beloved wife, who threw herself out of a castle window into the river hundreds of feet below. Something very like this seems to have happened with Vlad's first wife (name unrecorded) during a siege of his castle in 1462. She jumped out of the castle tower, vowing that she "would rather have her body rot and be eaten by the fish of the Arges (River, flowing below the castle) than be led into captivity by the Turks." (The tributary is, indeed, known as "the Lady's River" or "the Princess' River," as Coppola's film declares.) Considering the Turks were only slightly less barbaric than her own spouse, it was probably a wise choice. What's lacking in this account is any evidence that Prince Vlad was all that upset over the loss of his lady. Life was cheap back then. He married another princess in between various imprisonments and reigns (it was a volatile period), siring a few sons in the process.

Then there is Elizabeth Bathory, a late 16th century Transvylvanian noblewoman of extraordinary beauty who was known as "the bloody countess" because she was rumored to bathe in the blood of young women (more than 600 victims in all) to preserve her youthful appearance, even drinking the blood of the especially pretty ones. Think of it as an especially heinous form of alternative medicine. Local villagers reported hearing screams emanating from the Castle Csejthe, and young peasant girls who went to work as maidservants for the countess never seemed to return. She got away with her diabolical practices for a good long while, until King Mathias of Hungary could ignore the rumors (and missing young girls) no longer. Around Christmas in 1609, he sent a raiding party to the castle to investigate. TruTV has this account of what they found:

"On the cold stone floor of the great hall lay a pale, partially clothed young girl. She failed to move. They wondered if she might simply be asleep or drunk so several men went toward her. Still, she made no effort to rouse herself. One reached down to touch her and shook his head. He told the others she was dead. They turned her over and saw how pale she looked. She appeared to have been drained of blood.... Just a few paces away was another girl, sprawled face up but still alive. The men discovered that her body had been pierced in many places. She was also pale, as if from severe blood depletion. It was clear to them that she would not last long."

The raiding party also found a female corpse chained to a post, also mostly drained of blood, having clearly been beaten, whipped, and burned while still alive. Deeper within the castle, they found prison cells filled with women and children, scarred from frequent repeated blood-lettings -- and greatly relieved to be released, since they were bound for the same fate as the three dead young women found earlier. Oh, and in the private upper chambers, they found "evidence of a drunken holiday orgy, complete with torture." Because really, what's a Christmas party without a spot of ritualistic blood-letting? 

The countess herself was nowhere to be found, having already fled the premises. But they tracked her down and arrested her soon after. After all that hard work collecting fresh blood to maintain her youthful complexion before the Age of Botox and chemical peels, Elizabeth Bathory continued to age, and died in 1614 in her early 50s while imprisoned for her crimes in her own castle, deep in the Carpathian Mountains. See? Alternative medicine doesn't work.

In the 1940s, England caught and executed a serial killer named John George Haigh, nicknamed the "Acid Bath Murderer" because he attempted to dispose of his victims' remains by dissolving their corpses in tubs of concentrated sulphuric acid. He was convicted of killing six people, although he confessed to nine, showing zero remorse in the process. His primary motive seems to have been fraud: he was a compulsive gambler, who had trouble holding a steady job -- he kept getting fired and/or imprisoned for silly things like theft, embezzlement and fraud -- and his murders always seemed to coincide with a particularly low point in his personal finances. It was during one of his prison stints that he dreamed up the "perfect murder": he figured that by destroying a body by dissolving it in acid, there would be no corpse, and thus no evidence with which he could be convicted, which is why he cheerfully confessed to the murders, convinced he couldn't be prosecuted. Such is the convoluted logic of the criminally insane.

Unfortunately, Haigh wasn't nearly so thorough in disposing of his victims' possessions: when they searched his workshop on Leopold Road, police found various personal items belonging to the missing persons (papers, coats, hatboxes, pawn slips for jewelry, etc.), along with the tools of Haigh's nefarious trade. They also found all the acid sludge he'd carelessly dumped in the yard. The acid hadn't quite eaten everything away. The team of pathologists probably deserved some sort of special award of merit for sifting through the stuff, but their efforts paid off. They recovered 28 pounds of human body fat; three gallstones; part of a left foot; 18 bone fragments; a hairpin; and an intact upper and lower dentures, the handle of a red plastic bag and a lipstick container.

The dentures were especially damning, as they matched the dental records of Haigh's last victim. Apparently sulphuric acid doesn't erode plastic quite as easily as human remains. The forensic team performed their own experiments to prove it, putting various items in sulphuric acid. Acid works at varying speeds, depending in part on how much water is present. Human fat is more resistant to the acid; his final victim, Mrs. Durand Deacon, has been quite a heavy woman and her weight helped preserve the items recovered from the sludge

In short: Haigh was busted. He had a handy insanity defense at the ready, though, which is why he's included in this blog post: he claimed that he drank the blood of the victims, and that his killings were prompted by a recurring dream cycle. ("From each of them I took my draught" he said.) A car accident in 1944 supposedly triggered his blood fetish; he suffered a head wound, which bled into his mouth, and thereafter, he claimed, he craved blood, and this would periodically drive him to murder.

There are rare cases of clinical vampirism documented in the medical literature: those with a compulsion to drink blood periodically, often deriving sexual satisfaction from the act, and usually in the belief that they can prolong their lives by doing so. But this is a psychosis, not evidence of supernatural monsters -- or, in the case of a prison inmate trading sexual favors for the chance to drink other inmates' blood, an ill-devised strategy for gaining access to a relatively comfy hospital room rather than his cell. There are also vampire-like cults scattered around the world, and definitely on the Internet, wherein participants can meet, share their vampire fantasies and even drink small amounts of each other's blood. Some have been known to file their teeth into fangs for added verisimilitude to the group fantasy.

(Sidenote: Author Eric Nuzum sought out one such "vampire cult" while writing his book, The Dead Travel Fast. He found a rather pathetic group of social misfits with delusions of psychic powers, rather than any actual blood-fetishists, which had to be a bit disappointing. His book is still a fun read. He attends a Dark Shadows convention, tours Romania with the actor who played Eddie Munster, plays a vampire in the local haunted house, and even tries to drink his own blood, with vomitous results. Good times!)

The serial killers Peter Kurten and Richard Trenton Chase were dubbed "vampires" by the tabloid press when it was discovered they really had drank the blood of their victims. Haigh, however, probably didn't suffer from clinical vampirism. He was just looking for a handy way to avoid being executed for his crimes. There was something a bit too calculated about how he went about luring and killing his victims, forging paperwork to take over their homes and other belongings, pawning their jewelry, and so forth. Nobody really believed he was insane, although he certainly lacked any moral compunction. He was hanged on August 10, 1949, and good riddance to bad rubbish, seemed to be the prevailing popular consensus of the day.

The upshot: those prone to fantastical wishful thinking and rare cases of psychosis notwithstanding, there's no such thing as vampires. The one place where vampires really do seem to exist is in the animal kingdom -- not just vampire bats, but according to the guys at Deep Sea News, there's also a vampire squid. It has certain bioluminescnent capabilities, producing a faint pulsing light to attract prey, the better to eat your face off. Now that's the stuff of All Soul's Day nightmares. I'm guessing Edvard Munch had his share of them, too, judging by his own depiction of a ravenous vampiress devouring her prey:

karma chimera

When I was just a wee young thing, my grade school teacher assigned us all reports on a specific animal. I got the duckbilled platypus. Can I just say? I thought my teacher was having me on at first. I mean, come on: it had a bill like a duck, a body like a beaver, and it was venomous like a snake! It could have popped right from the pages of the fantasy stories and ancient myths I devoured so regularly at that tender age. Among other tales, I was fascinated by the myth of the Chimera, a Greek fire-breathing monster described in Homer's Iliad as having a lion's head, goat's body, and serpent's tail, and the platypus seemed eerily similar in concept, if not appearance. But I dutifully did my library research -- this was pre-Internet, so we had to actually look stuff up on paper and use old-fashioned, musty card catalogs and everything -- and sure enough, the animal was very real indeed. I've had a fondness for the platypus ever since. Its very existence made the world seem that much more magical.

My old friend the platypus made for big science news this past week: scientists have just completed the full sequence of the platypus genome. It's a lazy Sunday, and I'm still mulling over all the excellent comments on my last post, so I'll let Juan Nunez-Iglesias, another New Voice from K.C. Cole's science writing class, weigh in with his own thoughts on the matter:

Last year I attended the 2007 conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) in Oakland, California. By far the most entertaining talk was given by Jennifer Marshall Graves of the Australian National University in Canberra. Graves talked about the platypus and how weird it is, not just in its appearance, but in its genetics.

For example, one of the first principles of genetics is that of independent assortment of chromosomes. We have two full copies of our genome in every cell in our bodies: one from our father, and one from our mother. Each copy consists of 23 chromosomes, separate pieces of DNA. When a germ cell divides, it splits our own double-copy genome in two and places each half into one daughter cell -- to pass on half of our genome (per offspring) to the next generation. The principle of independent assortment states that each of our 23 chromosomes has a 50% chance of ending up in one or the other daughter cell, independent of where the other 22 end up.

This principle was first formulated by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century, and has been shown to hold for every organism ever tested -- save the platypus. The platypus has 5 sex-determining chromosomes from each parent, and all its sex chromosomes stay together generation after generation. A platypus's young will inherit all the sex chromosomes from that platypus's father or from its mother. But never a mix of the two, as happens with all the other chromosomes.

Well, the weirdness doesn't stop there. Researchers announced [last week] the release of the complete sequence of the platypus genome, publicly available online. [Jen-Luc Piquant notes that this would be a fine time to create your own cloned pet platypus, boys and girls!] Down at the single-base pair level, the platypus continues to be weird. Half of its genome looks like a reptile's, half like a mammal's. It also has genes to make venom, which not surprise you after hearing the reptile thing, but... surprise! The platypus venom genes evolved independently of the reptile ones; they are completely unrelated and unique. You can read all this and much more in this excellent article in Nature News. Definitely an exciting time to study genomics.

That sounds suspiciously like a chimera-like creature at the genetic level, doesn't it? Except it isn't. Let me just say that right up front before PZ Myers gets all medieval on my ass. Seriously, PZ's frustration with the media coverage of our friend the platypus inspired him to write this terrific post explaining why the platypus is not the the same as a chimera:

"Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is 'weird' or 'odd' or worse, they imply that the animal is a chimera.... No, no, no, a thousand times, no; this is the the wrong message.... What's interesting about the platypus is that it belongs to a lineage that separated from ours approximately 166 million years ago, deep in the Mesozoic, and it has independently lost different elements of our last common ancestor, and by comparing bits, we can get a clearer picture of what the Jurassic mammals were like, and what we contemporary mammals have gained and lost genetically over the course of evolution."

Got that? The platypus is not a chimera. Take it from someone who really knows this stuff. Okay, but do chimeras really exist? I'm so glad you asked. Certainly the mythological Greek monster isn't real, but there is a genetic anomaly that gives rise to a rare condition known as chimerism. Per Wikipedia, "A chimera is an animal that has two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated in different zygotes." (Genetically distinct cells originating from the same zygote produce a related condition called mosaicism.) In humans, it's long been believed to be an exceedingly rare condition, with fewer than 40 reported cases.

One of the most famous is Lydia Fairchild, the subject of a documentary called The Twin Inside Me. She separated from her husband while pregnant with her third child, and took a DNA test to prove her husband's paternity, as required to qualify for welfare support. He was, indeed, the father, but according to the test, she wasn't the children's mother. She was taken to court for fraud. She was only exonerated when she gave birth to her third child, with a judge-ordered witness present to take blood samples from mother and infant for testing. And those DNA tests revealed she wasn't the mother of that child either. Except she was. I mean, court-appointed eye witnesses watched her give birth. If she was a fraud, she was a damned good one, on a par with the world's best illusionists. 

A similar thing happened (without the charges of fraud) to Karen Keegan in 1998, a Boston-area teacher who needed a kidney transplant. She had three grown sons who were tested to see if they could be donors, but the DNA showed that two of them weren't her biological children. This time doctors did additional testing on Keegan, drawing samples from other areas of the body, and discovered she had two sets of cell lines with two separate sets of chromosomes -- a mix of two individuals, fraternal twin sisters who fused in the womb and developed into a single infant. Fairchild's lawyers heard about the case, and arranged for their client to undergo more testing as well. She, too, turned out to be a chimera. For instance, the DNA in Fairchild's skin and hair didn't match that of her children, but the DNA from her cervix did.

Now that's weird -- weird enough to inspire episodes of both House and C.S.I. In "Cane and Abel," House treats a young boy who suffers from seizures and believes he was abducted by aliens; the hallucinations turn out to be caused by the "alien" brain tissue from the twin brother who had merged with the boy in the womb. The C.S.I. episode ("Bloodlines") involved a rape victim who correctly identifies her attacker, only to have him exonerated by DNA evidence, although it demonstrated her rapist was related to the original suspect, who had many brothers -- none of whom proved to be a positive match. The suspect turns out to be a chimera: two different sets of DNA. Grissom discovers the suspect's unique condition when he notices visible Blaschko's lines while photographing said suspect's torso for evidence.

Bizarre though it sounds, according to this 2003 article in New Scientist, chimerism might not be as rare as previously believed; in fact, some researchers are beginning to think there might be a little bit of the chimera in all of us. Most cases simply aren't detected. Usually, there aren't many outward signs or symptoms: eyes of slightly different coloration, for example, hair growing differently on opposite sides of the body, even hermaphroditism (having both male and female genitalia -- the subject of another memorable House episode in which a beautiful young female model turned out to have testicular cancer). Male tortoiseshell tabbies are examples of chimerism. It takes a DNA test to reveal the chimerism, and usually more than one, with samples taken from different parts of the body.

A more common variant is blood chimerism, when fraternal twins share part of the same placenta and exchange blood, which settles in the bone marrow, so each twin is genetically separate -- except for their blood which has two distinct sets of genes and two distinct blood times. Some 8% of fraternal twins are blood chimerism, and the number could rise given the increase in multiple births, thanks to in vitro fertilization. Fairchild and Keegan are much rarer cases.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before scientists started creating chimeras in the lab -- yes, just like the infamous South Park episode where the local mad scientist created creatures with multiple derrieres. Okay, not like that, but in 1984 scientist combined a embryos from a goat and sheep to form a "geep." Others have made rat/mouse and rabbit/human chimeras (2003), as well as pigs with human blood flowing through their bodies. Most were created not with the intention of creating living hybrids, but for the purpose of harvesting stem cells for further research. And in 2007, scientists at the University of Nevada's School of Medicine created a sheep with 15% human cells. In the UK, researchers are attempting to insert human DNA into a cow's egg using the same technique that successfully cloned Dolly the Sheep. Last I heard, they hadn't yet succeeded.

Sheesh. Truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes. A creature from Greek mythology has a counterpart in modern 21st genetics. Next scientists will be telling us that vampires and werewolves are real. Which means we might be in need of a Slayer or two. Any takers?

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering." -Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke, one of the Golden Age science fiction writers who fired the imagination of would-be space explorers everywhere, died today in his home in Sri Lanka. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey was probably one of the most influential novels in the genre, along with the Stanley Kubrick movie made from it. His creation Hal  was an early model (good and bad) for AI constructs, along with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. From his first novel, Prelude to Space, which foreshadowed the Apollo missions to the moon, to The Fountains of Paradise, in which he described the construction of a space elevator now in the planning stages, Clarke, an engineer, was a practical visionary whose predictions had a habit of coming true. In 1945, he sketched out in a published paper the utility of geosynchronous satellites for communications purposes almost ten years before the folks at Bell Labs launched the Telstar and Echo satellites. Though he was by no means the originator of the idea, he was certainly a popularizer and active proponent of it, as he was of technology in general, and space exploration in particular.

Though his characters could be two-dimensional, his science was generally impeccable and inspiring. No one in my childhood reading made space or the possibility of "slip[ping] the surly bonds of earth" seem so real to me, not even Star Trek. It was Clarke who taught me what geosynchronous orbit and LaGrange points are, proving that a spoonful of fiction helps the mathematics go down, at least to people like me. That inspiration wasn't confined to interesting kids in science fiction. “I’m rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books,” Clarke once said. I can only imagine how many engineers and other space scientists he inspired.

Aside from his novels, Clarke was best known for his three laws of science and technology:

1. "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
2. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
3. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

While the first two are important for egging on inventions and new discoveries, it will be useful to remember the third law should we ever meet an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization face to face, since far too many of us are prone to worship what we don't understand, as Clarke also illustrated in his Rama books. Generally dismissive of religion, Clarke was still painfully aware of the necessity of some kind of guiding morality. "As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying," Clarke said in 1967. It's still a timely message.

Thanks for years and volumes of inspiration and great Saturday afternoons. RIP.

[Don't blame Jennifer for this. It's one of Lee Kottner's insidiuos posts, cross-posted from Spawn of Blogorrhea with Jennifer's consent.]

hot capillary action

Most science history buffs are familiar with William Herschel, the famed astronomer who discovered the planet Uranus in the 18th century. His son, John, is less well known, perhaps because his scientific interests ranged more broadly than his father's. He loved the stars, it's true, but he also found wonder much closer to home. Evidence of that can be found in a January 12, 1833, letter printed in Philosophical Magazine, in which John Herschel describes going for an early morning walk (what folks today would consider a hike) several winters before and noticing "a remarkable deposition of ice around the decaying stems of vegetables." A few days later, he found a similar strange ice formation, this one seeming "to emanate in a kind of riband- or frill-shaped wavy excrescence."

Herschel's letter is one of the earliest recorded observations of the phenomenon of "frost flowers" (sometimes called ice flowers or ice ribbons), in which thin layers of ice curl out from long-stemmed plants in the wee morning hours of late autumn or early winter. Those ice layers often form intricate curling patterns, looking for all the world like flower petals. Herschel could only hypothesize about the cause of these formations, but he intuited that they correlated with specific atmospheric conditions and particular kinds of plants, although he couldn't explain why that might be the case, concluding, "It is for botanists to decide."

Well, botanists and physicists, perhaps; the demarcations between scientific disciplines weren't nearly so rigid in Herschel's day. Many others were inspired by Herschel's letter to relate their own discoveries of frost flowers. In 1850, a physician name John LeConte of the University of Georgia described his observed ice flowers thusly: "At a distance they present an appearance resembling locks of cotton-wool, varying from four to five inches in diameter, placed around the roots of plants, and when numerous the effect is striking and beautiful." Thirty years later, the Duke of Argyll described similar ice formations in the January 22 issue of Nature, requesting a scientific explanation, prompted a lively exchange offering various possibilities.

In March 1884, Nature reported that one Professor Schwalbe, at a meeting of the Physical Society in Berlin, had succeeded in producing his own ice flowers from withered and rotten twigs he'd brought with him to the conference from the Harz Mountains. He simply moistened the twig thoroughly so that no water dropped off, then let it cool slowly in what's described rather vaguely as "a cold preparation."

Schwalbe was the only one on record to systematically grow ice ribbons/frost flowers until 1914, when a physicist at the National Bureau of Standards named William Coblentz observed frost flowers while strolling in Washington, DC's Rock Creek Park. (He's actually buried in Rock Creek Cemetery; I once visited his tombstone during a bike ride through the park.) Coblentz was best known for his research on spectroscopy and infrared radiometry; for instance, he made measurements of the infrared radiation emitting from over 100 stars and the planets of Mars, Venus and Jupiter. But like Herschel, Coblentz's curiosity ranged further afield: he held a patent for an early solar cell, and also dabbled in bioluminescence and, um, parapsychology. So it's not surprising that when he observed his first frost flowers, he started experimenting to understand the physical mechanisms behind their formation.

He cut off stems, inserted them in moist soil and test tubes, recorded how quickly water moved up the dry stems, and figured out how to grow ice ribbons in the lab. Among other findings, he conclusively demonstrated that the roots of plants aren't necessary for frost flowers to form, and that the water that makes the ice comes from within the stem, rather than being deposited from moisture in the air. (For those sufficiently intrigued to want more comprehensive details about frost flowers -- including more history and where and when you're most likely to spot them -- James Carter, a professor emeritus of geography and geology at Illinois State University, has an entire Website devoted to the history and science and his own personal sightings of frost flowers and ice ribbons. A Google search will turn up many more sites by nature enthusiasts.)

We know much more today about frost flowers thanks to the efforts of men like Coblentz, although they're still a little mysterious. They tend to happen in early winter, when the ground is not already frozen; basically, the "first freeze." The ground temperature has to be warm enough so that the plants' root systems are still active, and the air temperature has to be cold enough to freeze water.

Plants hold water in their stems, and water expands when frozen, so long thin cracks can form along the stem. Water is drawn through those cracks and freezes upon contact with the air. Water continues to flow out, past that first layer, freezing and forming a second layer, and so on, until the telltale thin "frozen petal" shape emerges. Intriguingly, this has only been observed in a few species of plants: the white crownbeard (Verbesina virginica, a.k.a., frostweed), yellow ironweed (Verbesina alterifolia) and Helianthemum canadense. If we're talking about woody plants and tree branches, the seeping water freezes into long strings of ice that look like strands of hair: "frost beard." 

That's cool and all, but just what is causing the water to flow through those cracks in the stems? It's kinda flowing upward, you see, which doesn't seem like it should be possible. You'd think gravity would make it flow down. We can thank a little something called capillary action or capillary force for all those pretty floral ice arrangements. The technical definition isn't very illuminating: "the ability of a substance to draw another substance into it." Capillary action "occurs when the adhesive intermolecular forces between the liquid and a substance are stronger than the cohesive intermolecular forces inside the liquid. The effect causes a concave meniscus to form where the substance is touching a vertical surface."

Huh? I find it easier to opt for visualization. Basically, it's the same thing that causes a sponge (a porous material) to soak up liquids from a surface. You can witness capillary action for yourself with a simple vertical glass tube open at either end. Place the lower end in a glass of water, you'll notice that the water rises up to a certain point and then stops. Surface tension basically pulls the liquid column up until the mass of the liquid is large enough so that gravity can overcome the intramolecular forces. You know when a drop of water forms on the spigot of your tap and suspends there until you touch it? Capillary forces hold it there. Plants use this as a transport mechanism for water, nutrients, and so forth, so it's not surprising that this same capillary action also gives rise to the frost flower phenomenon. Similarly, the reason groundwater moves from wet areas of soil to dryer areas is capillary action: the water molecules are attracted to soil particles and naturally seek them out; if a patch of soil gets too wet, the water molecules will move to dryer patches where the dry soil particles are more plentiful.

Capillary action is behind a colorful bit of superstition known as the "Hindu Milk Miracle." Just before dawn on September 21, 1995, a Hindu worshiper at a temple in New Delhi made the traditional offering of milk to a statue of Ganesha. He held up a spoonful of milk from the bowl, and was astonished when the liquid disappeared, seemingly consumed by the statue. Apparently, Ganesha had a milk craving, perhaps to supplement a calcium or Vitamin D deficiency. As abruptly as it started, it stopped: by noon, Ganesha was no longer "drinking" the milk.

When other devout Hindu people heard, they offered milk to their own statues in other temples, all over the world, and lo and behold, many  of those also lapped it up. The World Hindu Council declared it a miracle, and sales of milk in areas with large Hindu communities skyrocketed. (I can see the dairy ads now: a statue of Ganesha with the telltale white mustache and the caption, "Got milk?") Finally, scientists from India's Ministry of Science and Technology came to New Delhi and determined that the "miracle" was actually due to capillary action: the surface tension of the milk pulled the liquid up and out of the spoon before gravity caused it to run down the front of the statue. Not that true believers cared about science: hordes of people still rushed to the temples with their offerings of milk in hopes that the statue would accept their offerings.

There's so much we couldn't do without capillary forces. In chemistry, for example, there's a common technique called thin layer chromatography, in which capillary action is exploited to move a solvent vertically up a plate, usually taking dissolved solutes with it. Bounty paper towels -- the "quicker picker upper" -- also utilize capillary action to absorb liquid; it's porous, like a sponge, and those pores act like small capillaries, much like the tube-like stems of plants, so that fluid on a surface is transferred to the paper towel. Much of my workout gear employ "wicking fabrics," which use capillary action to "wick" sweat away from the skin, thereby avoiding undue chafing during strenuous workouts. More importantly, our eyes wouldn't be able to drain away tear fluid efficiently without capillary action. (Our eyes produce tears constantly via the lacrymal ducts in the inner corner of the eyes.)

Capillary forces are equally important in microfabrication self-assembly, as I learned when perusing a press release last week about a new kind of contact lens with built-in circuitry that's being developed by scientists at the University of Washington. (It was announced at last week's meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' international conference on Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMs). I didn't go, but Jen-Luc Piquant popped over to browse the virtual press room.) It's pretty cutting-edge stuff: the engineers have combined a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights (in the form of red light-emitting diodes), so the user would see whatever the "display" is generating superimposed on the world outside. They've tested prototype lenses on rabbits, who showed no ill effects after 20 minutes of wear.

Why haven't we seen this kind of thing before? Because it's a bitch to fabricate, if you'll pardon my French. Anything that goes inside the body -- or, in this case, on the outer part of the eye -- has to be made with chemically inert materials that won't trigger an attack response by the body's immune system. The lens uses flexible organic materials.

But the circuitry requires microfabrication, which is usually done with inorganic materials and involves scorching temperatures and often toxic chemicals. Self-assembly (and capillary forces) to the rescue! The UW researchers built layers of metal a few nanometers thick, and LEDs that were just one-third of a millimeter across. They end up with a kind of grayish powder that is actually hordes of electrical components. The powder is sprinkled onto a a flexible plastic substrate, and the shape of each component determines where it can attach. Capillary forces pull the components into their positions.

So there you have it. Thanks to all that hot capillary action, no longer will we need cumbersome head-mounted displays or special sunglasses to experience virtual reality, or to surf the Web and download the latest sports scores while pretending to listen to our boring dinner companion. We'll be able to use our "bionic eyes" to zoom in on a distant landscape -- a very attractive feature, given my worsening near-sightedness -- or hold a target in our virtual crosshairs... if we were professional hitmen, that is. The prototype doesn't even correct vision at this point; they're just trying to make sure it's safe and all. But it could be used for vision correction, and plans call for the addition of wireless capability to and from the lens in future prototypes, powered by teensy solar cells (also mounted on the lens). Even with all that added gadgetry, vision won't be obstructed.  Or so they say. Personally, I might find all that extra display imagery distracting.

Basically, reality need never intrude overmuch into our existence again, and any information that can be downloaded, can be accessed anywhere, anytime. Even better, no special surgery would be needed to have a bionic eye; we could just pop it in as easily as a contact lens. I bet the "Six Million Dollar Man" would have appreciated that option. Dude had to go and blow himself up [note much-needed correction] to get that nifty enhancement.

by the sword

We're back! All tanned, rested, and ready to tackle whatever life chooses to hurl our way. It was tough to drag ourselves away from the palm trees, sandy beaches, fruity tropical drinks by the pool, haute cuisine, and luxurious on-site spa, not to mention our own private butler (who seemed disappointed that we didn't need him very much). But the sound of a lonely cat, meowing in the empty Los Angeles apartment, drew us back -- that, and the fact that there were bugs. Big ones, small ones, and (most distressingly) bitey ones. After waking up two mornings in a row with fresh raised welts on my arms, I learned to keep the windows closed, even though I liked listening to the waves crashing on the shore at night.

I have no idea what kind of bug was doing the biting while I was blissfully slumbering, but I'll bet Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands would know. She was honored last week with the 2007 Ig Nobel Biology Prize for her work taking "a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, germs and fungi with whom we share our beds each night." Apparently there's a whole teeming ecosystem of insects in Netherland beds, at least the ones van Bronswijk studied. Her research wasn't alone in being, um, honored with an Ig Nobel Prize. For instance, the Chemistry Prize went to Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan "for developing a way to extract vanillin --vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung." A Cambridge ice cream shop called Toscanini's created a new flavor in Yamamoto's honor: "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist." No word on whether the vanilla flavoring was derived from cow dung.

But by far my favorite of this year's Ig Nobel honorees was the Medicine Prize, awarded to Brian Witcombe, a consulting radiologist at Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust in England, and Dan Meyer, who heads the Sword Swallowers Association International, based in Antioch, Tennessee. They were honored "for their penetrating medical report, 'Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects,'" which was published to almost no fanfare last December in the British Medical Journal -- maybe because it was Christmas and people were too busy swallowing Yorkshire pudding and opening prezzies to pay much attention to the findings.

For all its long history, very few published reports exist of related injuries from the practice of shoving sharp steel blades down one's throat -- perhaps there are only a little more than 100 sword swallowers worldwide, out of a population of some 6.6 billion people. So Witcombe set out to explore the various techniques and side effects of sword swallowing, with Meyer's help. Forty-six SSAI members participated in the study, having swallowed a combined 2000 swords over the prior three months. More than half (25) had swallowed more than one, five managed to swallow at least ten swords at a time, and one person achieved the whopping feat of swallowing 16 swords simultaneously.

This sort of thing can't possibly be free of peril. A news release last December reported that Witcombe and Meyer found, "Sword swallowers are more likely to sustain an injury -- such as a perforation of the esophagus -- if they are distracted or are using multiple or unusual swords." Mostly, the respondents suffered from a sore throat (or as they call it, "sword throat," such wags, those guys), generally from the multiple sword stunts, or swallowing odd-shaped blades such as curved sabers rather than straight ones. Lower chest pains were another common complaint -- the only remedy being not swallowing any swords for a few days. Sixteen had suffered some form of intestinal bleeding, and three had undergone surgery to repair injuries to their necks. One lacerated his pharynx, another slashed his esophagus -- he claimed to have been distracted by a misbehaving macaw on his shoulder -- and one unfortunate belly dancer suffered a major hemorrhage when three blades lodged in her esophagus unexpectedly "scissored," after an appreciative bystander shoved some dollar bills in her belt. His donation didn't come close to covering her medical expenses, which came close to $70,000. Not surprisingly, most sword swallowers have higher than average health care and medical costs. All it takes it one tiny slip-up, after all.

These injuries are quite real, and quite serious, because unlike many other sideshow novelty acts, sword swallowing is not a magician's illusion -- although there is a trick to it (more on that later). As the x-ray at left attests, sword swallowers really do maneuver that sharp metal blade down the hatch, past all kinds of vital organs. (You can see a really cool in-real-time x-ray here, and watch Meyer do his thing here and here -- at the latter link, he swallows seven swords at once! My throat hurts just thinking about it.)

Sword swallowing is an ancient art dating back to India before 2000 B.C., where it was used primarily as "a demonstration of divine union and power," per Wikipedia. Modern-day Indian fakirs still perform such feats, along with eating burning coals, swallowing snakes, and stopping their own pulse or raising their body temperatures through sheer will -- although not all such feats are genuine; many are illusions.

The art spread to China in the 8th century, then to Japan, where it found a home in Sangaku, that nation's acrobatic theater. It also found its way to Greece and Rome, and finally into Europe in the early Middle Ages, where it became a fixture of street performers. It languished a bit during the Dark Ages, in part thanks to persecution from the Inquisition, resurged briefly in the early 1800s, and then died out again as people lost interest in street theater. But a featured exhibition of sword swallowing at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago brought sword swallowing mania to America, where a whole new generation of performers emerged, making some fascinating innovations along the way: multiple swords, bayonets, hot swords, and glowing neon tubes, among other feats. Meyer is one of the best-known contemporary sword swallowers.

It takes practice, sometimes over many years, to develop sufficient skill for safe (relatively speaking) sword swallowing. The term is a bit of a misnomer, since swallowing is actually the last thing you want to do with a sharp blade, since it involves contraction of numerous muscles; instead, the idea is to completely relax the throat and turn it into one long "living scabbard." Essentially, sword swallowers have to figure out how to carefully align a sword with their upper esophageal sphincter -- a ring of muscle at the top end of the throat-- and straighten the pharynx, commonly achieved by hyper-extending the neck by tipping the head waaay back.

The practitioner must then move his tongue out of the way and consciously relax his throat as he "swallows" -- not an easy thing to do because of our involuntary gag reflex, the body's defense mechanism against swallowing foreign objects. Basically, there are nerve endings lining the back of the throat that can detect any intrusive, non-chewed-food objects, generating nerve impulses which neurons carry to the brain stem. The brain responds by using motor neurons to instruct the throat muscles to contract. The end result: you retch, sometimes vomiting, as the body attempts to force the unwanted object out of the throat and mouth.

On the way down, the sword straightens out the curve of the esophagus and nudges certain organs out of the way. Per the book Bizarre Medical Abnormalities, published in 1897:

"The instrument enters the mouth and pharynx, then the esophagus, traverses the cardiac end of the stomach, and enters the latter as far as the antrum of the pylorus, the small cul de sac of the stomach. In their normal state in the adult these organs are not in a straight line, but are so placed by the passage of the sword. In the first place they head is thrown back, so that the mouth is in the direction of the esophagus, the curves of which disappear or become less as the sword proceeds; the angle that the esophagus makes with the stomach is obliterated, and finally the stomach is distended in the vertical diameter and its internal curve disappears, thus permitting the blade to traverse the greater diameter of the stomach."

The same book also notes that sword swallowers proved vital to studying the human digestive system in the 19th century. Specifically, a Scottish physicist named Stevens had an assistant sword swallower down small metal tubes with holes in them, filled with pieces of meat. After a set interval of time, the acrobat would "disgorge" the tubes, and Stevens could study how much the meat had been digested. Also, in 1868, a sword swallower visited Freiburg, Germany, so impressing a local doctor named Keller that he examined the man's throat with a laryngeal mirror. His colleague, one Dr. Muller, is credited with first suggesting that such acrobats would make terrific subjects for esophagoscopy, because of their ability to voluntarily relax all the muscles in the throat at the same time. Another colleague, Adolph Kussmaul, actually performed the first successful esophagoscopy on the visiting sword swallower using a rudimentary endoscope (basically a straight tube), mirrors, and a gas lamp for illumination. The results were a bit disappointing because of the poor illumination, but it did lead to further improvements in the technique.

A famous sword and snake swallower of the mid-1800s, called Sallementro, claimed he learned his art at 17 from a friend; it took him three months. He tried starting with full-sized swords, but discovered "it made my swallow sore, very sore, and I used lemon and sugar to cure it." Apparently he was unable to eat anything, and subsisted on a liquid diet for two months until he'd mastered the trick. Knives, he found, were easier than swords because of the shorter length.  "It was tight at first, and I kept pushing it down further and further." He recommended resisting the urge to cough (duh), and also oiled the blade to reduce the abrasion as it slides down the throat.

Snakes proved less tricky, although Sallementro was careful to "cut the stingers out, 'cos it might hurt you." He used 18-inch serpents, cleaned by scraping them with a cloth because otherwise the things tasted nasty. Unlike swords, snakes are quite helpful to the process, naturally inclined to seek out a dark hole down which to disappear -- unless the swallower coughs too much, in which case the snake seeks to escape back up the hatch. Sallementro said that  swallowing snakes "tickles a little, but it don't make you want to retch." Speak for yourself, buddy.

Like Sallementro, Witcombe and Meyer's study found that many of the respondents had desensitized their gag reflex by starting with smaller objects and increasing the size over time. They started with their own fingers, then upgraded to spoons, paint brushes, knitting needles, bent wire coat hangers, and so forth, before attempting short knife blades and, finally, swords. Per Cecil Adams of Straight Dope fame, I learned that Dan Mannix, a retired carnival sword and flame swallower, wrote a memoir of his experiences in 1951, and reported that he definitely threw up the first few times he tried to overcome the involuntary gag reflex. Then he struggled with getting a sword down his throat because he couldn't... quite... relax. (Hmmm. Wonder why?) Eventually he succeeded, but said that he had to bend forward a bit halfway through the sword's passage to get it past his Adam's apple. He also occasionally struck his own breast bone with the sword, which apparently felt like a blow to the solar plexus, from the inside.

Many have emulated Sallementro and figured out that lubricating the blades with saliva or butter made it easier to slide them down their throats, although one admitted to retiring from the sport after developing a chronic "dry mouth" condition. The sides of the swords aren't sharp, but the tips are, as those who suffered ruptured stomachs (with the resulting peritonitis) can attest. Adams -- recognizing that there's always someone stupid enough to try this sort of thing at home, despite cautionary words -- recommends wiping the blade before and after swallowing: the first, to remove any dust which could trigger the gag reflex, and afterwards to remove stomach acid, which could corrode the blade's metal. (Neon tubes, by the way, have an added risk of shattering inside the throat, with seriously disabling and sometimes fatal effects.)

The gag reflex is also an impediment to aspiring competitive eaters, sometimes called "gurgitators." (Here's a video clip on the topic.) Back when I lived in New York City, every fourth of July, on Coney Island, Nathan's held its annual hot dog eating contest, which garnered a good share of TV coverage. Maybe it was a fascination with the sight of all those people stuffing hot dogs in their faces in such a short span of time, because for five years' running, the outcome was almost a given. The winner all five of those years was Takeru Kobayashi, an internationally renowned gurgitator who holds the world record for eating hot dogs: 53-3/4 hot dogs with buns,consumed in a mere 12 minutes. That's a staggering 12,500 calories in a single sitting. Compare that to the USDA recommended caloric intake for an adult male: 2300 calories. Kobayashi won the event from 2001 to 2006, only being deposed this past summer by some guy named Joey Chestnut. But there are lots of other eating competitions held all over the world every year, many of them sponsored by the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOCE).

Gurgitators have some specific strategies, such as dipping contest food in a glass of water, thereby softening and lubricating it so it does down that much easier -- similar to how some sword swallowers lubricate their blades before swallowing. It's also advisable to break food into smaller pieces before eating it, so you can fit more in your mouth and cut down on chewing time. Kobayashi breaks a hot dog in half and stuffs both halves into his mouth at once (buns are always eaten separately). But ultimately, the best competitive eaters seem to have an innate ability -- if such is the word -- for over-eating, thanks to suppression of the gag reflex, better stomach elasticity, and (more mysteriously), suppressing the usual signals the stomach sends out to indicate it is full.

Like sword swallowers, competitive eaters are able to relax all the muscles that line the esophagus simultaneously, turning it into a hollow pipe. Another key is stomach elasticity: it's not the size of someone's stomach, but how much it can expand in order to adapt to the huge amount of food coming in. So gurgitators often "train" by chugging gallons of water in a short period of time to stretch the stomach, or eat huge amounts of cabbage (low-calorie, high-fiber) because it stays in the stomach longer before breaking down. Thats also why fatter isn't necessarily better. The prevailing theory is that excess fat pushes against the stomach and limits how much it can expand. So the best competitive eaters tend to be on the thinner side. It shouldn't be surprising that, as with sword swallowing, there are inherent dangers to competitive eating: vomiting (which damages the esophagus and tooth enamel from the stomach acids that arise), heartburn, gas, and high risk of choking, stomach rupture, or swallowing bones, which can injure the intestines. The IFOCE discourages "training," in part because drinking those huge amounts of water can perforate the stomach lining, or lead to a potentially fatal condition known as water intoxication.

When food empties into the small bowel, this triggers a hormonal stimulus telling the brain that it is sated, making it very uncomfortable to continue eating beyond that point -- unless you have a natural (or learned) ability to dampen or block those signals. That seems to be the case with the best competitive eaters, which is why gastrointestinal specialists are interested in studying such people in hopes of applying the new knowledge to combat over-eating and obesity. It could also lead to breakthroughs in treatment for chronic dyspepsia, in which people feel bloated and in pain after eating only a modest meal because something triggers the stomach to send a discomfort signal to the brain prematurely. and it could help with treating more serious compulsive eating disorders, such as that featured in an episode of C.S.I.: a man feels so compelled to eat that he must be kept chained to a chair and watched at all times, because once he starts eating, he is incapable of stopping. One day he escapes, and after placing second at a local eating competition, finds his way to one of the many Vegas casino buffets, and literally eats himself to death: his stomach distends so much that it crushes the rest of his internal organs, and he dies in a back alley -- with, it must be said, a big smile on his face. Sated at last, albeit in death.

I eagerly await an Ig Nobel worthy study of the gastrointestinal effects of competitive eating; it'd be a nice complement to the whole sword swallowing thing. But in the meantime, congrats to physicists Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg for winning this year's bona fide Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the giant magnetoresistance effect -- about which we will be blogging about in the next couple of days.

to mars!

Say this to a physicist, you'll get one of two reactions: "Yeah, go for it!" or "Utter waste of perfectly good research funds." Say it to any science fiction fan and, depending on their age, one of several books immediately spring to mind: Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, or Kim Stanley Robinson's more recent Mars trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. All are ripping good yarns of space exploration and colonization, some more technically astute than others, some with a more cultural bent, some focusing on the foibles of the explorers. My favorite of this group is Bradbury's Martian Chronicles for its humanism. But my real favorite is one that seldom gets mentioned, by my old standby Robert Heinlein: The Green Hills of Earth. This is because it's dead romantic. And that should make the naysayers pay attention.

Before you all go "Yuck! What's that got to do with Science?", let me steal a minute from the admitted romance of Seanifer (or "Jean" as El Finster calls the happy couple) to remind you that science is an endeavor of exploration. Exploration is inherently romantic, whether its equipment is pipettes, positron emitters, or pitons. It often doesn't seem very romantic or glamorous when you're pipetting solutions, calibrating instruments, or clinging to a cliff-face thinking "I'm gonna dieeee!" And you know, it's not. Sweat is not glamorous, whether it's intellectual or literal. It's the discoveries that are glamorous, and that shine rubs off on both the discoverer and the slog that led up to it.

Exploration and discovery have more than just tangible benefits. More important than the actual knowledge or invention, sometimes, is just the fact of the attempt, including the ignominious failures before the final success. The thing about discoveries and exploration is that they're never just an individual effort. All those guys who get credit for being the first? They didn't get there alone. In the background pushing their buttocks up the mountain were loving wives and husbands, parents, Sherpas, earlier researchers, financial backers, grant agencies, universities, graduate students, journalists, poets, and novelists.

Yes, poets and novelists. Cue "The Green Hills of Earth." First printed in the Saturday Evening Post in 1947 and later collected as part of Heinlein's "Future History" stories in an eponymous anthology and later in The Past Through Tomorrow, "The Green Hills of Earth" uses one of the oldest of tropes, the blind minstrel, to give readers a snapshot of "spacer" culture in an age when Mars is settled, asteroid mining is common, and even Venus is being homesteaded. When I say this is an old trope, think Homer and the Odyssey. "Green Hills" has the same kind of helpless longing for home coupled with hopeless fate-driven wanderlust. It romanticizes the most exotic type of travel imaginable: into the unknown. There's a long tradition of exploration literature, of blind minstrels singing about mad explorers going off half-cocked and ill-prepared only to come home fabulously wealthy for having seen unspeakable wonders. The Old English poem/poet Widsith gives us a catalog of his traveling companions that includes Offa and Attila, and the Israelites and the Egyptians. Okay, so he exaggerates a little. Think of it as a metaphor. But before giving us his long list of travels, Widsith (literally "far traveled") says,

Therefore I passed through many foreign lands
and through spacious ground.  Good and evil
there I became acquainted with while my native country was remote,
tho my kinsman's spirit followed from afar.

It's that last line that sums up the importance of exploration. It explains why thousands of people line the streets of New York for the marathon every year to cheer on the runners. Every time someone attempts something extraordinary, whether it's a physical or mental feat, that attempt and the eventual success shines a little reflected glory on all of us, makes us stand up a little straighter, try a little harder, think a little more about what we might leave as a legacy. Great accomplishments inspire us. Every time there's a shuttle launch, I'm there in spirit screaming "Go baby go!" as the rockets fire because a part of me goes with its occupants.

Heinlein was a former naval officer himself and knew very well that the siren call of the sea was both a literal hankering for new sights and sounds, and a metaphor for the human restlessness and curiosity that drives the survival of our species (and sometimes seems to be helping us into extinction, along with the rest of the planet). "Green Hills" takes its title from a song written by "Noisy" Rhysling, the story's blind singer, one of the few tunes mentioned that Heinlein bothered to flesh out. It's Kiplingesque in style and tone, and yet not by any means doggerel. The stanza that always chokes me up is this one:

Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet ---

It was the first thing I thought of when the Challenger exploded and again when we lost Columbia. Those two disasters are usually the strongest part of the arguments made against going to Mars. It's not safe. We don't have the technology. It's too risky. What crap! I'm sure that's been said to every explorer from Odysseus to Admiral Perry. In just over twenty years, we have lost two shuttles and their crews. For a sobering comparison, check the worldwide shipwreck list at Wikipedia. One database has documented 100,000 wrecks in North American waters alone over the last 400 years, an average of 250 per year. Safety is a poor argument to stay home. Most of us would never get out of bed if that were truly an issue, let alone leave the house. If you compare our levels of past and current technological sophistication, we basically went to the moon in glorified tin cans. What's stopping us now?

The waste-of-money part, perhaps? Look, we've all got our pet projects, our turf we want to protect, discoveries that are just around the corner, that need just a little more time and money to make, and it's never easy apportioning the limited dollars, especially in this grossly anti-science milieu. One way to counter this problem is to invite everyone else on board. I don't think the US should be the only ones going to Mars. It should be an international scientific commission planning it, and it should solicit commercial investment. For a start, talk to Sir Richard Branson of Virgin. He's into funding big new projects. He's already got dibs on SpaceShipOne's X Prize technology for Virgin Galactic. Mars seems like a good destination. And tourism is a great way to fund the scientific research bonanza that Mars colonization represents. Some of the best R&D has come out of commercial ventures like Bell Labs.

For that matter, we all know that some great developments have come out of the space program itself. I have a bad habit of thinking of space exploration as "pure" research, which it isn't. It's much more akin to applied research. Launching a rocket into space, getting it to its destination, keeping its crew alive and healthy while they explore, and then getting them home all present a series of problems to be solved. Many of those problems have applications to existing problems on earth, and have resulted in advances in everything from medical technology to new engine lubricants.

But again, that's not the main reason to go. The main reason to go is the view. Many of the Apollo and shuttle astronauts have talked about the effects of seeing the whole globe at once, and I've often thought it should be a requirement that any newly elected leader take a little trip into space to, uh, broaden his or her horizons. Talk about a radical change in perspective. It won't by any means solve all our problems, but it would be a sobering experience at worst. (And there's more than one politician I'd like to ship to Mars permanently. After a couple hundred years as a penal colony, maybe they'd all turn out okay after all, like Australians. And of course, there's all that inspiration, too, which I still maintain is the most important part of exploration.

So would I go?  In a heartbeat. After all, they're going to need somebody who knows from poetry and fiction. Besides, I figure it's my best chance of losing weight. Sign me up. I'm gone.

the joke falls flat(ulent)

We don't seek out potentially disgusting topics, truly we don't. But occasionally we stumble upon them quite by accident, and feel the need to share with our readers as a form of intellectual catharsis. You know, to expunge the trauma and promote psychological healing. Such is the case with today's post. You can blame Spike TV if you're offended. They're the ones who followed their fantastic CSI marathon on Labor Day with back-to-back airings of a new reality series called Raising the Roofs. The online review at Pop Matters sums it up as "a kind of reality-TV version of Beverly Hillbillies, with bowel movements and body odor.... It plumbs the depths of fat-drunk-and-dumbness."

The Pop Matters reviewer is being far too forgiving -- and I say this as one who enthusiastically watched several seasons of Survivor, at least until it went and got all racist to boost sagging ratings. Plus, I'm a huge fan of Celebrity Poker Showdown, and adored the first two seasons of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. In short, I am not automatically contemptuous of reality TV. Nonetheless, one must have standards of basic decency, and Raising the Roofs violates the bare minimum of those standards.

I did not, it must be admitted, watch more than five minutes of this miserable excuse for a series -- and then only because I was feeling too lazy to change the channel right away, although that attitude quickly changed to a proactive scrambling for the remote: "Argh! Make it go away!" Even that short exposure so horrified Jen-Luc Piquant that she spent the next few days watching earnest documentaries and tasteful British mysteries on public television. It doesn't take much to grasp the gist of the show, which prides itself on catering to the lowest common denominator. The premise couldn't be more simple: Michael Roof Jr. is a young, reasonably successful actor in LA whose moronic, redneck relatives -- his father Michael and Uncle Stevie, specifically -- come to visit and proceed to wreak havoc wherever they go. They are crass, crude, and rude, prancing in front of the camera in their tattered underwear, blubbery beer bellies jiggling with abandon. Their idea of haute cuisine appears to be beer and the finer cuts of roadkill, and as for humor, well, they think it's hilarious to let one rip in the other's face.

So, why even bring up such a horrific example of the depths to which popular culture can sink? One word: methane. That's right, the Roof family's preoccupation with flatulence provides a handy segue into today's topic of unusual renewable energy sources. Environmental engineers at the University of California, Davis, are building a full-scale anaerobic digester capable of converting any type of "solid organic waste" into electricity via methane, a byproduct of the conversion process. It's a broad definition that includes leftovers from local restaurants and institutions -- like the university itself, which no doubt has tons of uneaten scraps to feed into the digester from its on-campus eateries. In fact, leftover food accounts for some 18% of a landfill's content, and one ton of leftover food can produce enough fuel to power 18 homes for an entire day.

Anaerobic digestion is a naturally occurring decomposition process involving the work of various types of bacteria that thrive in low-oxygen environments. (I believe such bacteria belong to a class of microbes known as extremophiles -- microbes that thrive in extreme conditions such as extreme heat or cold, extreme pressures, even high concentrations of toxic chemicals in some cases.) Organic waste is collected and fed into air-tight containers filled with anaerobic bacteria. One type of bacteria releases enzymes that turn carbohydrates into simple sugars, amino acids and fatty acids. A second group of bacteria takes those component molecules and converts them into acetic acid -- the primary component of vinegar -- hydrogen gas, and carbon dioxide. These compounds in turn are converted into methane and (again) carbon dioxide. The bulk -- 60-80% -- becomes methane, which can be harnessed as fuel for an internal combustion engine, thereby providing electricity. Other uses for such digesters include waste and sewage treatment, heating, and increasing the level of nutrients in soil.

Granted, the connection with Raising the Roofs' flatulent fools is a bit tenuous, since anaerobic digestion is quite different from human digestion. The type of bacteria that produces the methane in the UC-Davis digester don't thrive in the human digestive tract. But Ruihong Zhang, a professor of biological and agricultural engineering at UC-Davis, does admit that certain foods produce more methane than others, i.e., meat produces more than potatoes. Not exactly the squeamish type, Zhang is also testing the renewable energy potential of livestock manure and the creeping wild rye that pervades California's San Joaquin Valley.

The UC-Davis digester program is part of the $100,000 Sacramento Municipal Utility District's (SMUD) pilot project. SMUD's goal is to obtain as much as 20% of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind, solar and biodegradable matter (a.k.a., "biomass") by 2011. That's double its current percentage (10%), and biomass accounts for a mere 2.5% of that 10%. An even bigger digester system will soon be operational in San Francisco, and a fruit cooperative in Fresno called Valley Fig Growers recently installed a digester to degrade sugars in wastewater. The Fresno digester can handle 1.8 million gallons of sugary water without sending it to the city's sewage treatment plant, thereby cutting the cooperative's sewage bill by as much as three-quarters. And that's not counting a little extra electricity that can be used in-house.

California's efforts at fostering renewable energy sources reflect current national trends. According to the US Department of Energy, as of 2003, biomass was the leading source of renewable energy in this country for four years running, providing 47% of all renewable energy, or 4% of the total energy produced in the US. Not all of this comes from anaerobic digesters, of course, but it's all part and parcel of a growing interest in recycling waste products into something more useful, i.e., fuel. And not just methane: hydrogen is also a fuel of interest, as is biologically derived ethanol. In 2005, more than 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol was made from cornstarch and used as automotive fuel.

But the process of ethanol conversion is pricey because the chemical makeup of most biomass materials doesn't allow for optimal efficiency in the conversion process -- more often than not, there's a high percentage of worthless acetic and lactic acids that result. Lonnie Ingram, a professor of microbiology at the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, has developed a new process for producing fuel-grade ethanol from farm wastes using genetically engineered E. coli bacteria, the reigning workhorse of metabolic conversion technologies. (Unlike the bacteria used to make methane at UC-Davis, E. coli bacteria do thrive in the human gut; they are also used to make insulin.) Basically he cloned the unique genes needed to digest sugars into ethanol, and inserted them into a variety of other bacteria to increase their conversion efficiency to 90-95%.

Ingram's technology can produce ethanol for about $1.30 per gallon, thereby stretching the nation's fuel supply while producing gasoline that burns more cleanly, thanks to the high ethanol content. He says his genetically engineered E coli can convert all sugar types found in plant cell walls into fuel ethanol: sugarcane residue, rice hulls, forestry and wood wastes, for example, in addition to corn stems, cobs and leaves. A 30 million gallon plant is now being built in Jennings, Louisiana, based on Ingram's process for converting biomass to ethanol, and should become operational by the end of the year, drawing on the region's ample supply of sugarcane waste as its primary feedstock.

Kudos to Zhang, Ingram, and other scientists working on similar projects for contributing something truly useful to benefit the environment. We're all for converting waste products into energy that can be harnessed to perform useful functions, thereby benefiting our society. Now if we can only find a way to convert the trashy shows on TV into a viable form of energy, we'd have an endless source of fuel for countless generations to come.

from the belly of the beast

It's Valentine's Day, when one's thoughts should naturally turn to love and romance -- or the pronounced lack of same in one's life, if such is the case. But what's actually on my mind at the moment is, well, whale vomit. I kid you not. A few weeks ago I read a fascinating item at BBC News about an Australian couple who picked up a big lumpy rock on the beach at Streaky Bay, located somewhere in southern Australia. But this wasn't the usual flotsam and jetsam that washes up on most beaches. It turned out to be a very rare material known as ambergris, sought after as an ingredient in high-end perfumes because of its sweet, musky odor. It's so exotic that ambergris is worth about $20 per gram. The lump in question weighed about 14.75 kilograms, which means that the nice beach-combing couple could pocket as much as $295,000. Not bad for a leisurely stroll on the beach.

My fascination with the topic stems from the fact that this coveted, exotic aromatic resin actually starts out as a foul-smelling black bile in the gut of the giant sperm whale, supposedly as a digestive aid. (Whales don't have access to Tums or Rolaids out there in the middle of the ocean, which might explain why a whale suddenly turned up in the Thames River in England, looking for the local chemist's shop. Or not...) It's believed to be associated with the undigestible beaks of the whale's principal food, the common cuttlefish, and squid. In fact, it's a bit like gallstones. Because it's composed primarily of ambrein, a derivative of cholesterol, scientists believe the stuff is produced in response to the constant irritation caused by the sharp beaks in the whale's gut.

When the gunk is finally expelled from the belly of the beast -- along with whatever material the whale couldn't digest from its last meal -- it is little more than odiferous, black, viscous waste matter floating on top of the water. What turns it into treasure is time: several years of exposure to sun and salt water causes the vomit to oxidize and solidify, turning it into a compact rock with a kind of marbled waxy texture, and a very sweet, musky scent prized by perfumers around the world. It can float for years before being washed ashore, which is why ambergris is sometimes called "floating gold." (I wish I could say the same about the expellings of my chronically bulimic cat, who is plagued by hairballs, and yet still quite chubby, so the bulimia isn't really working for her. Alas, Clio's "offerings" are merely repugnant. On the other hand, she's not in danger of extinction, while the days of the mighty sperm whale could be numbered, if present whaling trends continue unabated.)

As far as the science behind the stuff, two French chemists were the first to isolate, characterize and name ambrein -- the principal ingredient -- in 1820. Other elements include salt and phosphate of lime (probably from those unwanted squid beaks), as well as various alkaloids and acids, most notably benzoic acid, which also gives cranberries their tart flavor. It's the benzoic acid that supposedly works with the ambrein to give ambergris its unique, long-lasting fragrant properties.

Tales of serendipitous discovery of pieces of ambergris can be found in almost every culture, including Japan, Hawaii, Madagascar, Morocco, Brazil, Ireland, and the Persian Gulf, to name a few. In the 1930s, an American sailor on Cape Code named Jeremiah Pratt scooped up a 28-pound lump of ambergris, which he sold to a New York perfumer, enabling him to buy a poultry farm and retire from his seafaring ways.

Not surprisingly, ambergris also found its way into fiction. It makes an appearance in Herman Melville's whale of a tale, Moby Dick: a crewman named Stubb finds ambergris inside a dead whale, and Ishmael explains that while it might look like mottled cheese, it is actually used in perfumes. In The Thousand and One Nights, Sinbad is shipwrecked on a desert island and discovers a spring of smelly crude ambergris. (The Arabs of that period believed that raw ambergris, which they called anbar, emanated from springs near the sea.) Sinbad reports that the crude flows into the sea, where it is swallowed by giant fishes and regurgitated as fragrant lumps on the shore.

For those interested in perusing the history of ambergris in detail, I recommend a charming 1933 article published in Natural History Magazine called "Floating Gold: The Romance of Ambergris," by Robert Cushman Murphy, former curator of oceanic birds for American Museum.

Other fun facts I've discovered about this smelly substance:

1. Before 1000 AD, the Chinese called ambergris lung sien hiang, or "dragon's spittle perfume," because they thought it came from drooling dragons slumbering on rocks at the seashore. The Japanese called it kunsurano fuu, or "whale droppings." Its current name derives from the French term ambre-gris (gray amber), which was used to distinguish the substance from true, yellow amber.

2. The ancient Greeks believed that adding ambergris to wine -- or merely smelling the stuff prior to a drinking binge -- would enhance the effects of alcohol.

3. Marco Polo was the first Westerner to correctly connect the origin of ambergris to sperm whales, but it wasn't until 1783 that Western confusion on the subject was definitively put to rest, with the presentation of a paper by renowned botanist Joseph Banks before the Royal Society. (The paper was actually written by a German physician then living in London named Franz Xavier Schwediawer.)

4. The Arabs used ambergris as medicine for the heart and brain, while the Dutch and English once ate it with eggs for breakfast.

5. Ambergris is also supposed to have powerful aphrodisiac properties. Middle Eastern men and women, for instance, rub it into their hair and on their bodies to entice the objects of their affection. See? Whale vomit isn't as far removed from romance this fine Valentine's Day as one might think.

Above all, ambergris is rife with metaphorical potential, and not just for the obvious "one whale's vomit is another man's gold" wisecrack. (C'mon! You know you were thinking it!) We all egest a certain amount of psychological wreckage and roiling emotional waste over the course of a fully-lived life. It's nice to think that time can turn all that gunk into something of great and lasting value. My pain isn't different, after all. It's golden.