More Pills

Every year pharmacists work diligently to try and come out with new and better medicines for unwell patients.  This past year the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) approved 35 new drugs to be used in the United States.  That number matches last years number as the highest number of new approved drugs since 2004 when there were 36 drugs approved.  During many of the years in between the number was about half of what it has been the past couple of years.  These numbers may help to show a better pharmaceutical industry.

The FDA believes that they have made advancements not only in the way they produce the drugs but also the way they go about approving them.  They are now being able to approve drugs at a much faster and more professional way, allowing the public to be able to use the drugs they need.  Some of the drugs approved this past year include medicine for:  basal skin cancer, HIV and macular degeneration, a meningitis vaccine, and many new medicines for orphans.

Can I Get Some More ICE?

Global Warming is hitting again and hitting hard.  This year in the Arctic, several records were broken but not in a good way.  The amount of snow in the northern hemisphere in June were at record lows and the entire Greenland Ice Cap showed evidence of melting for the first time since 1979.  People continue to talk about global warming constantly but still the problem just grows and grows with no end or real solution to speak of.  Some scientists believe that if we are not there already then we are on the verge of seeing a new Arctic.  The reduction of snow in the Arctic in the summertime has made the ocean and the Arctic darker allowing it to absorb more sunlight and make things even worse.

Donald Perovich, an Arctic researcher at Dartmouth, said "The Arctic is one of Earth's mirrors, and that mirror is breaking."  The darkening ocean and Arctic surface are the reasons that the Arctic is warming up twice as fast as most of the rest of the world.  Wildlife in the areas around the Arctic are suffering because those animals were not meant to live in those types of conditions.  In reality all animals, including humans, will ultimately be affected the what goes on in the Arctic because even though it seems like its way up North and can't harm us, what happens in the Arctic does affect everybody.

Why Are Your Pupils So Big?

Different feelings, emotions, and thoughts can all cause different "ticks" in our physical appearance.  Many of these "ticks" occur in the eyes whether it be blinking or looking down.  Another of these "ticks" is the expansion of the pupil of the eye making it bigger.  It is nothing knew for scientists to know that the pupil will get bigger due to things other than a change in the light.  Pupil dilation doesn't come from the same part of the nervous system as the cortex which takes in an image and sends it to the brain.  The enlargement of the pupil is something out of conscious control.  It moves the iris in order to take in different amounts of light.  Different lighting can cause the pupil to shrink below two millimeters and other times grow to about eight millimeters in the dark.  Although the changes in the pupil  when cause my emotions and thoughts is usually a difference of less than a millimeter it can still help to recognize psychological phenomena.

When you are asked a question your pupils will enlarge in proportion to how hard the question is and will shrink back to normal once you finish the question.  In this way pupils show the amount of mental strain someone is going through as they try to solve a problem.  Scientist have now run studies where they believe they can come close to knowing what the person is feeling or thinking before the person does based on how their pupils look and expand.  The study of the pupils is known as pupillometry and scientists are continuously working harder and harder to be able to understand and tell what a person is feeling just by their pupils.  It has not got to the point yet of being able to be used for everyday situations because the pupils can be so small but if you look close enough, according to Men's Health Magazine, it can let guys know when they should "make their move."

Scammin' the Elderly

Older people always get made fun of for different reasons whether it be their hearing, their infatuation with the past, or their driving.  It is no secret that as you get older you lose certain abilities that you had when you were younger.  The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) released a study that found 80 percent of people who are involved in financial scams are above the age of 65.  Why is this the case?  A psychologist named Shelley Taylor from UCLA conducted a study with 119 older people (55-84) and 34 young people (20-42).  She gave each group pictures of faces which were pre-rated for trustworthiness.  She found that the older group found people that were determined to have untrustworthy faces as being trustworthy much more frequently than the younger group.  The older people's problem was they missed key facial cues like a full smile or direct gaze.

The researchers decided to conduct more tests and this time they got 44 volunteers to undergo a fMRI (functional magnetic brain imaging) while they were showed different faces.  The younger people had a lot more activity in the area associated with "gut feelings" known as the anterior singula, while the older people had very little to zero brain activity in this region.  There are still more studies that need to be done to determine whether the little to no activity in the brains of older people is a cause or effect of the elderly being more trusting.

It's Getting Hot in Here

A lot has been said in the last decade about the issue of global warming with some people (idiots) believing it is not even real.  Last month broke a 16-month streak of months where the temperatures have been above average.  In America things are getting the hottest in the region of the Great Plains.  The states of the Great Plains are currently in a drought that shows no signs of getting better any time soon.  Things have become so bad that on October 17 and 18 there was a big dust storm that caused the states of Colorado, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming to close major highways.

Planting conditions were highly effected by the Dust Bowl as well as many other things.  The mounds of dust as you see in the picture above where not the only terrible things that came from the Dust Bowl.  Scientists have said that if the drought doesn't get better in another two or three years then we could soon find the Great Plains are in another Dust Bowl.  This time there might not be these big dust storms sweeping across the area but the effects on farming conditions and plants would be hard to overcome.  Farmers have said they believe that they will be able to get through this Dust Bowl if it happens but it would require technological advances to help them.

The Mind of a Rapper

Many people give no respect to rappers or people of the urban culture in pop culture because they see them as dumb or ignorant when in fact they might be some of the more creative people in the world because of what they can do with an instrument or with words.  Neurologists have recently decided to study the creative flow that these people have due to their ability to come up with rhymes out of nowhere at any time.  They have used fMRI's (functional magnetic resonance images) on rappers while they are doing a freestyle to try to observe the blood flow and get a better understanding of where this creativity comes from.  Neurologists compared the fMRI results from freestyle rapping of 12 rappers with raps they had written down.

They found that during a freestyle the medial prefrontal cortex, which corresponds with self-motivation and initiation, as well as the emotional and and motor regions were more active during the freestyle raps more so than the written raps.  Siyuan Liu, the lead researcher said she believes that these different regions all become linked in a network when someone is doing a freestyle.  At the beginning of a phrase the they noticed the left side of the brain was more active but as they neared the end of the phrase the right side became more active.  This is odd but it is believed to be this way because they have to think about the words and language at the beginning (left brain) and think more and the music at the end (right brain).  These studies can be very important in helping to understand what factors in to creativity and trying to use those factors to everyone's advantage.

Drummin to the Brain's Beat

Since the 1920s it has been known that the brain has its own rhythm of electrical activity that were known as brain waves but new studies done by University of California neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley with the help of Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart have shown that this rhythm can be so much more.  They believe, with some evidence to support, that the rhythm of the brain could be the cause of, and the solution to diseases in the brain such as Alzheimer's, which Hart's grandmother dealt with.  Hart noticed that she could communicate better when he played the drums and that's when he decided to connect with Gazzaley and take part in this study.

In the last twenty years they have found that rhythm can be a factor in perception, attention, working memory, and learning.  That means that certain beats you hear can affect the way you learn or the way you look at things.  Music is now much more important than ever before because it can help someone with a brain disease hopefully recover a little bit.  It has already been shown that rhythm can reduce seizures in rodent models of epilepsy and they hope that this is no where near the end of what changing and messing with the rhythm of peoples' brains can do.  The hope is that music can be a real medicine for people with brain disease.

Ear Power

Taking power for a living organism is not a new thing for scientists and researchers to do but recently they have discovered how to take the inner ear of a guinea pig and use it for energy and sensory purposes.  Usually scientists use enzymes to transform catalytic energy into electric energy but this new way apparently just "steals" energy that the body produces by itself.  The cochlea of the inner ear converts sound pressure waves into electrical waves that are sent to the brain so you can process what it is you are hearing.  The new chip that the scientists came up with just takes out that electrical energy without disturbing the hearing of the organism.

Scientists from Harvard and MIT connected electrodes to the fluids in the cochlea.  They connected these electrodes to small sensors right outside the guinea pigs ear and took about 1 nanowatt.  These sensors are small enough to put in humans but the energy extracted is not enough to power a device to help with deafness.  Scientists have previously been using biofuel cells, creating energy from blood glucose but this energy doesn't last forever like the energy from the ear would.  The ultimate goal is to gain knowledge about how and why people have deafness and possibly to help cure the diseases of the ear.

The Debate Rages On

The idea of evolution, that people developed overtime from apes or monkeys into the human beings we are today, has long been debated by scientists and theologists alike and now we have more evidence to support the scientist side or the argument.  While studying the shoulders of a 3.3 million year old fossilized hominin known as Australopithecus afarensis, scientists found evidence that suggests that it climbed a lot of trees, supporting the evolution theory.  Australopithecus afrarensis is a species that is between an ape and and a human.  The shoulder blade that was studied suggests this species spent more time climbing around trees than it did on the ground, although it could walk upright on two legs.

The scientists studying the shoulder found that the shape and joint angles matched up closer to those of an ape instead of those of a human being.  Bones grow in different ways based on what you are continually doing with them so it is obvious that this A. afarensis was doing a lot of tree climbing.  Still there remain doubters with some people saying that they believe this shoulder is just a product of natural genetics, that is that since this species is in between apes and humans that they just have that particular shoulder shape naturally.  It is truly a never ending debate.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/33017/title/Acrobatic-Ancestors-/

More Approvals are Good

Recently the US Food and Drug Administration heard a proposal from The President's science advisors who hope to double the amount of prescription drugs for some specific diseases such as obesity.  Many of the drugs that get tested and have some poor side effects get turned down by the FDA and they wish that these drugs will instead get approved despite the negative side effects.  The President's science advisors only want people who have no other option to be able to get the drug and not have it available for the entire population.

Many people see this as a negative because of the negative side effects that the people who take the drug might obtain.  These drugs are not completely tested and have not worked out all the kinks in order to be given out to a mass number of people.  I disagree and believe this is a good thing because if people with obesity have tried other drugs that have not helped then maybe it is time to move on and try something new.  They know there will be side effects but it is their life.  If they are going to die anyway then why not give them something that could help save them.  It won't hurt anything. 
Another problem people saw was how to control the drug and make sure it is only given to the people who really need it and not those with only mild obesity.  I do not think this is a big deal either because how is this problem different from that of every other drug that people try to obtain due to addiction or recreational purposes when they don't really need it.



http://the-scientist.com/2012/10/01/government-urges-fda-to-speed-drug-approvals/

South America is the home of the largest bumblebees in the world, known as the "giant bumblebee" or its scientific name "Bombus dahlbomii."  These bees are found throughout Patagonia (the southern area of South America) but recently they have come into danger.  In 1997 European white-tailed bumblebees, B. terrestris, were brought into Chile for pollinating purposes.  Around 2006 the European bees escaped their secluded habitats and got into the wild, while at the same time the giant bees began to disappear from the area.  Many scientists believe the reason for this disappearance is due to a fatal single-cell parasite that came over to South America with the European bees, much like how Europeans brought diseases such as smallpox to America in the 16th and 17th centuries.  The parasite, Apicystis bombi, starts with a gut infection and then spreads to the rest of the body causing behavioral disorders. 

Some scientists still believe this parasite from the invading bees is not the reason for the decline in the giant bee population.  These people argue that it is because there is now more competition for food and other resources in the area.  To this the scientists who support the parasite theory say that there would not be competition for food because the two different species of bees have different eating habits that would prevent them from sharing the same types of foods.  There is some worry about the effect the parasite could have on other things such as plant life in the area.

MO Sleep MO Knowledge

In Israel, scientists have recently conducted studies that help to prove that people can gain new knowledge during sleep.  They conducted the experiment by playing music tones in the ears of sleeping people while they waft different smells in their noses.  The better something smelled the strong the sleeping individual would sniff.  When the smells were taken away and people were just left with the tones the scientists found that people were still sniffing to certain tones, even after waking up, although they didn't know what had happened while they were sleeping.

This opens up the door for a complete new way of learning information.  We can now unconsciously gain knowledge.  People who have trouble focusing on learning in normal atmospheres might have another option.  The scientists recognize that there are limitations to what people will be able to learn while they are sleeping but they expect that the limitations will be less than what they presently think.  One aspect that was focused on was getting people to unconsciously overcome an addiction.  Being aware of a habit and trying to get rid of it can be very hard for many people.  If they can overcome this addiction in their sleep then it could have a much bigger affect.