Cats and earthquakes were popular subjects this year. (image courtesy of flickr user 37prime)

It’s that time of year when journalists and bloggers put together their reviews of the past 12 months. But the list below is unlike any other. You may have noticed that Surprising Science tends to cover science a bit differently than other blogs and publications do. Combine that with a diverse (and, of course, fabulous) readership, and you’ve got an interesting list of most-read stories for the year. (If you’re looking for a more traditional 2011 retrospective, we recommend the lists from Discover, Scientific American and Science.)

#10 Earthquake in Washington, D.C.: On August 23, the Smithsonian offices, along with a good portion of the Northeast, shook due to a magnitude 5.8 earthquake in Mineral, Virginia. In a weird coincidence, I had been researching earthquakes in unexpected places when the quake took place, and so people in my office jokingly blamed me for the incident.

#9 14 Fun Facts About Chickens: Following the earthquake and Hurricane Irene, we took a break from natural disasters with weird chicken facts. My favorite? That a female bird can eject the sperm of a rooster if she decides she doesn’t want his chicks.

#8 The Science Behind the Japanese Earthquake: On the morning of March 11, we woke up to news of a powerful earthquake off the coast of Japan. That shaking, however, would soon be overshadowed by the devastating tsunami and nuclear disaster that followed.

#7 Examining Telecommuting the Scientific Way: Unfortunately this post did not have the result I’d hoped, and I’m still not allowed to telecommute. (But if anyone has been successful in using these arguments, please let us know in the comments below.)

#6 The Secret Lives of Feral Cats: After a study in which scientists tracked feral kitties, we weighed in on the question of whether it was better to trap the cats, spay/neuter them and release them back into the wild or, as some advocate, euthanize any found. The blog came down on the side of catch and release, but we discovered many readers who have a serious hatred for these felines.

#5 The Curious World of Zombie Science: We examined an interesting trend in science, the study of human zombies, including computer models of the spread of the zombie disease, potential ways zombies could be created and how math could save you from a zombie attack.

#4 The Myth of the Frozen Jeans: Levi’s and the New York Times claimed that freezing your jeans would kill the germs that make them smell. Scientists who study bacteria disagree.

#3 Five Historic Female Mathematicians You Should Know: Our list, a companion to a top ten list of historic female scientists, included the creator of the world’s first computer program and a contemporary of Albert Einstein.

#2 Life Without Left Turns: A study that found that intersections constructed to eliminate dangerous left turns were more efficient than traditional intersections added to my convictions that getting rid of left turns would be a good thing. But not all my readers agreed.

And #1 The Glow-in-The-Dark Kitty: A story about Mayo Clinic researchers who created a fluorescing cat as part of their studies on feline HIV, which they hope would lead to insight on human HIV and AIDS, sparked a debate in the comments about the ethics of the research.

Do you freeze your jeans? (courtesy of flickr user fogindex)

Levi Strauss advises freezing your jeans to kill the germs that make them smelly, thereby saving the water you’d use in washing them.

Don’t bother, says Stephen Craig Cary, a University of Delaware expert on frozen microbes, who wrote to us from Antarctica.

Most of the bacteria on your jeans probably started off on your own body. Since these critters are happiest living at the temperature of human skin, “one might think that if the temperature drops well below the human body temperature they will not survive,” Cary writes, “but actually many will. Many are preadapted to survive low temperatures.” And it takes only one survivor to repopulate your jeans when they warm up.

“I would suggest that you either raise the temperature to 121 degrees Celsius [250 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature used for sterilization] for at least 10 minutes,” Cary writes, “or just wash them! The latter surely is the best alternative to save energy.”

Julie Segre of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who studies the skin’s microbiome, seconds the washing recommendation. “The bacteria that would live on your jeans [are likely feeding] on the sloughed skin and the dirt nutrients [on the jeans rather] than the jeans themselves, so detaching the sloughed skin could reduce the microbial load of your jeans,” she says. In her opinion, removing the dirt and the sloughed skin is more important than removing any bacteria, though she warns that she may have “just transitioned from speaking as a scientist to speaking as a mother.”

How often you wash your jeans may depend on how comfortable you are with the growing amount of dirt and sloughed skin on the fabric; the bacterial load doesn’t seem to be much affected by how often you go between washings. A somewhat unscientific experiment by a Canadian student found little difference in the bacterial load between one pair of jeans worn for 15 months without washing and another pair worn for 13 days.

So, sorry Levi’s, freezing our jeans sounded like a great idea, but it’s probably not doing anything more than taking up space better left for ice cream.

The skeptics were not happy and immediately claimed that the study was flawed.

Also in the news last week were the results of yet another study that found no link between cell phones and brain cancer. Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Denmark looked at data from 350,000 cell phone users over an 18-year period and found they were no more likely to develop brain cancer than people who didn’t use the technology.

But those results still haven’t killed the calls for more monitoring of any potential link.

Study after study finds no link between autism and vaccines (and plenty of reason to worry about non-vaccinated children dying from preventable diseases such as measles). But a quarter of parents in a poll released last year said that they believed that “some vaccines cause autism in healthy children” and 11.5 percent had refused at least one vaccination for their child.

Polls say that Americans trust scientists more than, say, politicians, but that trust is on the decline. If we’re losing faith in science, we’ve gone down the wrong path. Science is no more than a process (as recent contributors to our “Why I Like Science” series have noted), and skepticism can be a good thing. But for many people that skepticism has grown to the point that they can no longer accept good evidence when they get it, with the result that “we’re now in an epidemic of fear like one I’ve never seen and hope never to see again,” says Michael Specter, author of Denialism, in his TEDTalk below.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you think I’m not talking about you. But here’s a quick question: Do you take vitamins? There’s a growing body of evidence that vitamins and dietary supplements are no more than a placebo at best and, in some cases, can actually increase the risk of disease or death. For example, a study earlier this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that consumption of supplements, such as iron and copper, was associated with an increased risk of death among older women. In a related commentary, several doctors note that the concept of dietary supplementation has shifted from preventing deficiency (there’s a good deal of evidence for harm if you’re low in, say, folic acid) to one of trying to promote wellness and prevent disease, and many studies are showing that more supplements do not equal better health.

But I bet you’ll still take your pills tomorrow morning. Just in case.

This path has the potential to lead to some pretty dark times, as Specter says:

When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science, you end up in a place you don’t want to be. You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS. Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease.

If you don’t think that can happen here, think again. We’re already not vaccinating children against preventable diseases, something that will surely lead (and probably already has led) to lives lost. We have big problems to address in the coming decades—even greater changes to temperature, weather and water as the planet warms; a growing population—and we need to start putting our trust back into science, into the process that has brought us to where we are today, with longer lives, cleaner water and skies, more efficient farming. Because you have to admit, this is a pretty great time to be alive and it’s science that got us here.

Does this Aston Martin V8 Vantage make your mouth water? (courtesy of flickr user Destinys Agent)

If you think about it, some of the phrases we use to express desire for inanimate, non-food items are pretty weird. We “drool” over cars. Our “mouths water” at the sight of a pile of money. Salivating makes sense when we’re talking about food—after all, salivation is part of the anticipatory phase of digestion, and saliva moistens our food to assist swallowing—but why would we drool over something we can’t eat? We do, though, as shown in a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

David Gal, a marketing professor at Northwestern University, conducted two experiments, each time measuring saliva production. In the first he started off with a writing assignment, asking the participants to write about either a time they felt they had power or a time when they lacked power. Those two groups were then split and shown either images of money or, as a control, office supplies. Only the people who had been assigned to write about a time when they lacked power salivated at the sight of money, Gal found. The assignment had primed those individuals to find money to be more attractive. (Office supplies, not shockingly, had no effect.)

In the second experiment, which focused on the responses of men only, the participants were primed with what Gal calls a “mating goal.” Half had to choose a picture of a woman and write about an imagined date with her; the other half had to choose a picture of a barbershop and write about an imagined haircut. The images of money and office supplies were then replaced with pictures of sports cars and fastening tools. Again, the participants who had been primed to think about what they lacked salivated over the photos of the cars. (Guys really do think that sports cars make them more attractive to girls.) “These findings show that exposure to a material reward cue stimulates salivation when the reward value is high,” Gal writes.

OK, so under the proper circumstances, we might drool over a non-food item. But why would this be? As Gal notes, “Salivation to material reward is not of any obvious function.” He has two theories, though: One, that we are conditioned from early in life to associate material rewards with food. More likely, though, might be number two, that salivation is a side-effect of the natural reward system. If there’s just one system in our brains that rewards us for everything—from drugs to money to chocolate chip cookies—then it makes sense that we could salivate over any of those things. As Jonah Lehrer writes on the Wired blog Frontal Cortex:

Although our dopamine neurons evolved to process and predict biological necessities, they’ve since learned to embrace a more catholic set of desires, so that pieces of green paper filled with pictures of dead presidents get them very excited. While relying on a single pathway to process all of our rewards normally works quite well—the dopamine reward pathway is some well-tested cognitive software, since the same basic code is present in nearly every mammal—it does lead to a few unintended side-effects. Just ask a drug addict, or that man who starts to drool whenever a Ferrari drives by.

A screenshot from The Great Flu, an online game.

I’m looking forward, with some trepidation, to seeing the movie Contagion, which comes out in theaters tomorrow. The subject is scarier than any made-up horror flick–a realistic scenario of a killer pandemic virus. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University and an expert consultant on the new film, gave me real reason to worry about the scenario dreamed up by the moviemakers, telling Salon: “We know that if we were to have some sort of an outbreak—or pandemic, worse yet—in the United States, we don’t at present have the tools that are required to rapidly ramp up some sort of a strategy for making vaccines and distributing them. Those are just the cold, hard facts.” After watching Contagion, we’re all going to either want to hide away in our homes and/or start calling our congresspeople to take action so we’re better prepared for something like this.

Or we could just play games. Here are five games to play after watching the movie:

Sneeze: The goal of this mini online game is to sneeze at just the right time and in just the right direction to transfer a virus to others who then transfer it to others and so on, eventually reaching as many individuals as possible. It’s a simple demonstration of how easy it is to transmit a virus when people don’t cover their mouths when they sneeze (and one out of four people in one study didn’t bother).

Pandemic, The Board Game: In this cooperative game, two to four players work together to cure four diseases. Each player takes on a role—such as scientist or medic—and on each turn travels the world, treating people, building research centers and finding cures for the diseases. If you find the cures, everyone wins. If not, you’re all dead. The message of the game is that if this happens in real life, we’re all going to have to work together to fight a pandemic or we’ll all end up dead.

Pandemic 2: This is another mini online game (and not related to the board game, despite the name), and the goal is to wipe out the world. Pick a virus, bacteria or parasite and let it loose. As more people become infected (and eventually die), you earn points that you can use to buy new traits for your disease, such as symptoms, drug resistance and modes of transmission. Can you evolve your disease faster than humans can develop and deploy a vaccine? This game excels at demonstrating how the various traits of a disease can affect where and how quickly it spreads and how virulent and deadly it becomes.

The Great Flu: Choose from one of five viruses (difficulty levels) in this online game and then pick through a selection of strategies to defeat it. You can stockpile vaccines and antiviral medicines, spend money on research facilities and teams, shut down schools or airports, distribute face masks, or isolate infected individuals. Trying to contain the disease in a single country is not easy, and the numbers of infected and dead can quickly pile up. This game is an interesting simulation of some of the realistic options available to those fighting a pandemic disease.

Killer Flu: This game, from the U.K. Clinical Virology Network, should give us all a little hope. The UK CVN developed the game, in part, to demonstrate just how hard it is for a flu virus to mutate, spread and kill. And that adds a layer of difficulty to the game, in which you try to make a flu virus spread from person to person and city to city, infecting as many people as possible, and makes it that much more fun.

Do you ever peek at the end of a book? (courtesy of flickr user Documentally)

Do you hate it when someone tells you the ending of a book you haven’t read? Do you get angry at reviewers who give away too many plot points? Does the existence of “spoiler alerts” set your hackles up because you think spoilers shouldn’t even exist? Well, it seems you might be missing out—spoilers may enhance story enjoyment, according to a new study from Psychological Science.

Two researchers at the University of California, San Diego set up an experiment in which undergraduate students read classic short stories presented in one of three ways: by itself, with a separate spoiler paragraph, or with that same paragraph incorporated into the beginning of the story. They were then asked to rate their enjoyment of the story on a scale from 1 t0 10. The 12 stories fell into three types: ironic twist, such as “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov; mystery, such as “A Chess Problem” by Agatha Christie; and literary, such as “The Calm” by William Butler.

Each story type and each story were rated higher when presented with the spoiler paragraph. The scientists write:

Writers use their artistry to make stories interesting, to engage readers, and to surprise them. But giving away these surprises makes readers like stories better. This was true whether the spoiler revealed the twist at the end—that the condemned man’s daring escape was just a fantasy before the rope snapped taut around his neck—or solved the crime—that Poirot will discover that the apparent target of attempted murder is in fact the perpetrator.

The researchers suggest that knowing what will happen helps the reader (or viewer) concentrate on other bits of the storytelling. “So it could be that once you know how it turns out, it’s cognitively easier—you’re more comfortable processing the information—and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story,” says study co-author Jonathan Leavitt.

However, this study does not indicate that writers should be giving away all their secrets in the first lines. When the spoiler paragraph was presented as part of the story, there was no additional benefit to reader enjoyment.

The researchers conclude:

Erroneous intuitions about the nature of spoilers may persist because individual readers are unable to compare between spoiled and unspoiled experiences of a novel story. Other intuitions about suspense may be similarly wrong, and perhaps birthday presents are better wrapped in transparent cellophane, and engagement rings not concealed in chocolate mousse.

Perhaps not. But considering all the joy people (including myself) get from rereading and rewatching stories over and over again, maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about ruining our pleasure when we come across spoilers.

(HT: io9)

Brain cells, stained in red, are sensitive to hormones that influence appetite. (Credit: MRC Toxicology Unit. Wellcome Images, via flickr)

There are plenty of theories for why diets don’t work, why the pounds won’t go away or they come back so quickly: Diets make you tired. They eat away at healthy muscle. They’re unnatural and can’t be followed for a lifetime. They may be unhealthy and lacking in vital nutrients. They can lead to eating disorders.

But now a group of researchers from Albert Einstein College of Medicine have a new theory—dieting causes the brain to eat itself. (Their study is published today in Cell Metabolism.)

Scientists have known for a while that when a body becomes starved for sustenance, cells start eating bits and pieces of themselves. It’s a process known as “autophagy” and one that’s a normal part of the cell life cycle; it’s how other cells get energy during the tough times. But it was thought that the brain was largely resistant to autophagy under these conditions.

At least one part of the brain, however, now appears to self-cannibalize. It’s the hypothalamus, which sits right above the brain stem and regulates a variety of functions, including sleep, body temperature, thirst and hunger. The researchers, working with mice, found that neurons in the hypothalamus started eating their own organelles and proteins when the animals were deprived of food. That autophagy then set off a series of steps, which included releasing fatty acids, that resulted in the release of hunger signals, telling the brain that more food was needed.

When the autophagy was blocked by the researchers, though, those hunger signals were blocked. The mice became lighter and leaner after being deprived of food, and they ate less and burned more energy. This insight into metabolism may lead to the development of better treatments for obesity and metabolic syndrome, the scientists write.

In addition, the researchers speculate, the finding may provide clues about why a high-fat diet may make you more hungry—all those fatty acids in the bloodstream may set off that same series of steps that the autophagy of neurons did, making a person more hungry and prompting them to eat even more.

Colin Firth, a king AND a scientist. © The Weinstein Company/courtesy Everett Collection

Ideas for scientific experiments come from all sorts of places (and fewer of them originate in the lab than you might think). A study on political orientation and brain structure, published in Current Biology, for example, got its start when the actor Colin Firth—credited as a co-author on the paper—was guest-editing a BBC Radio 4 program called “Today.” “This struck me as an opportunity to explore things which compel me…but about which I’m perhaps not sufficiently informed,” he told host Justin Webb. “I…decided to find out what was biologically wrong with people who don’t agree with me and see what scientists had to say about it.” Or to put it a bit more nicely, to see if the brains of people with different political leanings were truly different.

Ryota Kanai and Geraint Rees of University College London took that idea and ran with it. They performed MRI scans of 90 college students who had been asked about their political attitudes, and then looked at various structures in the brain. They found that a greater amount of gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex was associated with liberalism and a greater amount in the amygdala was associated with conservatism. They confirmed the finding in a second set of 28 participants.

These findings are consistent with previous studies showing greater brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex of liberals. One of the jobs of that area of the brain is to monitor uncertainty and conflicts. “Thus, it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views,” the scientists write.

The amygdala, on the other hand, processes fear, and previous studies have shown that conservatives respond more aggressively in threatening situations. “Our findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty,” the researchers write.

Still unknown, however, is which comes first, the brain structure or the beliefs. The researchers would have to expand their study to see if there are changes in brain structure before or after a person changes their political leanings.

Perhaps Firth could sign up as a volunteer.

A mummified princess from Thebes (known as Luxor during her time) is the earliest person known to have had coronary heart disease (courtesy of flickr user Rita Willaert)

You might be under the impression that hardening of the arteries, a.k.a. atherosclerosis, is a modern problem. That our diets, rich in animal fats and processed foods, are the problem, and if we only ate like humans used to not so long ago, we’d have no need for bypass surgeries and no one would ever die of a heart attack. But atherosclerosis is common in Egyptian mummies, say scientists who imaged dozens in Egypt, going as far back as 1550 B.C. (Their study, recently published in the journal Cardiovascular Imaging, was presented at the International Conference of Non-Invasive Cardiovascular Imaging earlier this week.)

The researchers created CT scans of 52 ancient Egyptian mummies at the National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo (the mummies couldn’t leave, so the scans were done at the museum). They could see arteries in 44 of the mummies. Of those, 20 had calcification, a marker for atherosclerosis, in their arteries, and in three of the mummies that calcification could be seen in coronary arteries.

Calcification in the right (RCA) and left (LCA) coronary arteries appears white in this CT scan (courtesy of the European Society of Cardiology)

The mummies with signs of atherosclerosis tended to be those that had lived the longest; they averaged 45 years old. One of the three with coronary heart disease was the princess Ahmose-Meryet-Amon, who lived in Thebes around 1580 to 1530 B.C. and died in her 40s; two of her three main coronary arteries were blocked. If she had lived today, “she would have needed bypass surgery,” said one of the study’s co-authors, Gregory Thomas of the University of California, Irvine. She is now known as the earliest person in history to have suffered from coronary heart disease.

At the time when the princess lived, the Egyptian diet consisted of fruit and vegetables, bread, beer and a little domesticated, lean meat, which may sound like a doctor’s recommendation for how to avoid the very problem the princess had. So how did her arteries end up with so much calcification? The researchers have a couple of theories. Parasitic infections were common in ancient Egypt, and the resulting inflammatory response may have predisposed her body to atherosclerosis, much as HIV appears to do so today. Foods during that time were often preserved in salt, which could have had an adverse effect. Or the princess may have eaten a different diet than the average Egyptian; as a royal, she could have feasted on luxury foods like meat, cheese and butter, the very items that heart doctors tell us to avoid.

Boredom may not be a bad thing (courtesy of flickr user Aidras)

There’s a feeling these days that if you’re not actively doing something with a purpose, you’re just wasting time. Schools get rid of recess. Weekends must be filled. Vacations are scheduled down to the minute. Not everyone thinks this way, of course. Google is probably the best example—the company lets employees spend 20 percent of their time on activities outside their job descriptions and has had great results, such as the creation of a Body Browser. And scientists are finding that many so-called time wasters are actually helping us:

Boredom is often thought to be bad, possibly associated with negative outcomes like aggression, anger, drug abuse, even pathological gambling. But Wijnand van Tilburg and Eric Igou of the University of Limerick are proposing a new theory on the subject, saying that bored people feel that their actions are meaningless and those feelings provide motivation for more positive things. “Boredom can paradoxically be a very strong motivator for people to seek out unpleasant yet meaningful tasks, such as blood donations,” van Tilburg told the Guardian. Others have noted that boredom is often related to creativity.

Doodling may help people concentrate by preventing them from drifting off in a daydream. In one experiment, participants were asked to listen to a recording of names and places and later write down those they remembered. The people who were filling in shapes on a piece of paper remembered a third more names than those who simply sat and listened.

Not that daydreaming doesn’t have its own benefits (though you should probably stick to doodling in meetings). Scientists say it can help you relax, boost your creativity and productivity, and even help in the maintenance of a healthy relationship. We spend about a third of our waking lives daydreaming, and during that time our brains are surprisingly active, according to a 2009 study. That might be because they’re trying to tackle more complex problems, like how to find success in life.

Full-fledged sleep is also a good thing, as we covered a few weeks ago. Napping can have positive effects on visual, verbal and motor skills, blood pressure, memory, cognitive processing and creativity. Studies have even found that healthy nappers have lower death rates from heart attacks and strokes.

And for kids, the value of playtime is often unappreciated (why else cancel recess?). Play is how children learn the social and intellectual skills they need as adults. It helps their brains develop and bodies stay healthy. Playtime also helps kids to develop creativity and to pay attention. And a 2009 study found that a daily recess break of at least 15 minutes was associated with better classroom behavior and better performance in school. As the study’s lead author, Romina M. Barros of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told the New York Times, “we should understand that kids need that break because the brain needs that break.”

Cambridge University Botanic Garden, Cambridge, England (photo by Sarah Zielinski)

I may have grown up in the countryside, but I am more than content with my life as a city girl. That said, I find myself drawn to green spaces; for example, my vacations more often than not include trips to botanic gardens. And I like to walk to work when the weather’s nice, taking advantage of Washington’s quiet, tree-lined streets, sometimes cutting through a couple of parks and a public garden.

I’m getting more than simple enjoyment (and great pictures) out of these parks and gardens—it turns out that they may convey whole array of benefits, as explained in “Parks and Other Green Environments: Essential Comp. of a Healthy Human Habitat” (pdf), a recent report from the National Recreation and Park Association. (And what better subject to talk about on Earth Day?) Some highlights:

* A study that compared census tracts in Los Angeles found that people who had more parks reported higher levels of trust and a greater willingness to help each other.

* In a Dutch study of more than 10,000 households in the Netherlands, the less green a person’s environment was, the more likely there were to be lonely or report a lack of social support.

* In low-income housing projects, residents who have views of only concrete and more buildings report more violence and aggression than residents who have a view of trees and grass. Thefts, burglaries and arson are all more common when vegetation is scarce.

* Japanese researchers found that just 15 minutes of walking in a forest environment resulted in less stress along with lower cortisol levels, pulse rate and blood pressure.

* Employees who have a view of trees from their desks report less job stress and more job satisfaction.

* Children who live in greener environments are more resilient and better able to cope with stressful life events, such as divorce.

* In another study, children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder had better concentration after a 20-minute walk in the park than if that walk had been taken through a neighborhood or downtown setting.

* Children in greener neighborhoods also weigh less and gain less weight than similar children in less green neighborhoods.

* A study of elderly people in Sweden found they had better concentration after an hour in the garden than if they had spent that hour in their favorite indoor room.

* A 1984 study of surgical patients in a Pennsylvania hospital found that those who had a view of trees and grass recovered faster, with fewer complications and able to rely on lower-strength pain medications.

* Several diseases are less prevalent in greener neighborhoods, including depression, asthma, stroke and migraines.

* In the places with the fewest green spaces, the poorest people die at twice the rate of the richest, but where green space is common, that is lowered to only 1.43 times the rate of the rich.

Study after study shows that greening our urban environment is important, that it can lead to less crime, less stress and better health. More than half the world’s people now lives in urban areas, and by 2030 nearly 70 percent will do so. But, worryingly, our urban spaces are becoming less green, not more. So what’s to be done? It’s easy: build more parks, plant more trees, don’t get rid of what we already have. And take advantage of what’s outside.

Modern medicine is getting more complex than ever (image courtesy of flickr user - POD -)

While working on this story from Smithsonian‘s May issue about oncologist Brian Druker and his discovery 10 years ago of a breakthrough drug for chronic myeloid leukemia, I was struck by the following passage:

Over the pub’s blaring music Mayfield said of his BCR-ABL gene, “I had the G250E mutation—have the G250E mutation—which is why I became resistant to Gleevec.”

His remark sounded like something out of a time machine programmed to years or decades from now, when people will nonchalantly talk about their deadly genetic mutations and the drugs that stymie them. It’s an image Druker often conjures. “In the not-too-distant future,” he wrote when accepting the Lasker-DeBakey Award, “clinicians will be able to thoroughly analyze individuals’ tumors for molecular defects and match each person with specific, effective therapies that will yield a durable response with minimal toxicity.”

Genes, genetic mutations, targeted drugs, toxicity, molecular defects, enzymes, stem cells, chromosomes, tyrosine kinases (and these are just examples for this one rare cancer)—modern medicine is getting more and more complex as we learn more about what makes us ill. That’s only going to get more complicated as time goes on, and doctors don’t always have the time for long explanations.

This is just one more reason why everyone needs a solid base in science, and one more reason to worry when reading stories about how science education is being neglected or actively undermined.

I don’t expect that high school science will keep someone prepared for when they are diagnosed with some disease 40 years later—grandchildren will still be explaining medical topics after their grandparents’ doctor visits for decades to come—but a good grounding in science brings a certain comfort level that lets a person quickly educate themselves when new topics arise.

But when people cannot understand their own medical issues, this illiteracy is just one more barrier to getting the care they need. Studies have found that these individuals are more likely to poorer health, less likely to use preventative care, as well as more likely to be hospitalized and have poor outcomes. One study even found higher rates of mortality among elderly people with low medical literacy.

The National Patient Safety Foundation estimated in 2007 that low health literacy costs the United States $106 billion to $236 billion every year. (And technology may not be as great a help as we would like.) With health care costs increasing every year, tackling this problem seems like a no-brainer.

Taking a nap can be good for workers (image courtesy of flickr user mira mira on the wall)

Disappear from your desk for a coffee run or a smoke break—that’s fine. Spend time on Facebook or Twitter—that’s OK, too. Fall asleep at your desk for five minutes—then the boss gets mad.

Napping is generally unacceptable in the workplace, and that’s sad because it’s the healthiest activity I’ve mentioned here and the only one that can actually make you a better worker.

Most modern humans push all of our sleep into one big chunk, usually at night, but our bodies still want to have a second bout of sleep in the afternoon. (That’s why you get sleepy right after lunch.) Add into the mix the fact that most Americans aren’t packing enough sleep into our nights and that napping is common in other societies, and a daily afternoon snooze starts looking quite natural.

Not only is napping natural, but it has numerous benefits. One study compared the effects of napping, caffeine and a placebo and showed that verbal and motor skills decreased after caffeine consumption but visual, verbal and motor skills were enhanced by napping. Another found that blood pressure decreased during an afternoon siesta. Healthy nappers may have lower death rates from from heart attacks and strokes. “Other studies have yielded similar findings for obesity and diabetes. Napping benefits the mind, too; naps enhance creative thinking, boost cognitive processing, improve memory recall and generally clear out the cobwebs,” James Maas and Rebecca Robbins, co-founders of Sleep for Success, wrote in the New York Times last year.

I’m familiar with Maas, a Cornell University psychology professor, from my undergrad years at that institution. Every freshman there learns from her Psych 101 class (or from her friends taking it) about the importance of “power naps,” those 10- to 20-minute cat naps intended to quickly give you a punch of energy. They’re quick enough to not interfere with your regular sleep pattern or make you feel groggy afterwards.

There’s also evidence that a longer nap might not be such a bad thing. One study found that a 30-minute nap could halt the irritation, frustration and poor performance (i.e., “burnout”) that occurs when learning a new task, and a hour-long nap got rid of burnout entirely. Naps of 90 to 120 minutes, which allow the brain to cycle through all the various stages of sleep, may help with memory recall, mood or just tackling a sleep deficit.

“Napping is a natural medicine; you don’t need special equipment or clothing to nap; there is no need to shower after napping; it doesn’t hurt your joints; no drugs are needed,” Boston University sleep expert William Anthony pointed out in the New York Times.

While dozing off at your desk might be adequate for these benefits, lying down is best, say the experts. So with all this in mind, perhaps every office should set aside a small nap room for their hardworking, sleep-deprived employees.

A zombie walk in Chile in 2010 (courtesy of flickr user rodolpho.reis)

Zombies seem to be only growing in popularity, and I’m not talking about the biological kind. They’ve got their own television show, plenty of films, and even a musical. They invaded the world of Jane Austen, and there are zombie crawls around the world, in which people dress up like the living dead and shuffle across some urban area.

And then there’s the growing field of zombie science.

In 2009, University of Ottawa mathematician Robert J. Smith? (and, yes, he really does include a question mark at the end of his name) published a paper in a book about infectious disease modeling titled “When Zombies Attack! Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection” (pdf). It started as a class project, when some students suggested they model zombies in his disease modeling class. “I think they thought I’d shoot it down,” Smith told NPR, “but actually I said, go for it. That sounds really great. And it was just a fun way of really illustrating some of the process that you might have in modeling an infectious disease.” Using math, the group showed that only by quickly and aggressively attacking the zombie population could normal humans hope to prevent the complete collapse of society.

That paper sparked further research. The latest contribution, “Zombies in the City: a NetLogo Model” (pdf) will appear in the upcoming book Mathematical Modelling of Zombies. In this new study, an epidemiologist and a mathematician at Australian National University refine the initial model and incorporate the higher speed of humans and our capacity to increase our skills through experience. They conclude that only when human skill levels are very low do the zombies have a chance of winning, while only high human skill levels ensure a human victory. “For the in-between state of moderate skill a substantial proportion of humans tend to survive, albeit in packs that are being forever chased by zombies,” they write.

Then there’s the question of whether math is really the most important discipline for surviving a zombie attack.

But how might zombies come about? There are some interesting theories, such as one based on arsenic from Deborah Blum at Speakeasy Science. Or these five scientific reasons a zombie apocalypse could happen, including brain parasites, neurotoxins and nanobots.

A Harvard psychiatrist, Steven Schlozman, broke into the field of zombie research and then wrote The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse, which blames an airborne contagion for the zombie phenomenon. The book delves into the (fictional) research of Stanley Blum, zombie expert, who searched for a cure to the zombie epidemic with a team of researchers on a remote island. (They were unsuccessful and succumbed to the plague, but nicely left their research notes behind, complete with drawings.) It’s more than just fun fiction to Schlozman, though, who uses zombies to teach neuroscience. “If it works right, it makes students less risk-adverse, more willing to raise their hands and shout out ideas, because they’re talking about fictional characters,” he told Medscape.

For those interested in getting an overview of the science, a (spoof) lecture on the subject, Zombie Science 1Z, can now be seen at several British science and fringe festivals. Zombiologist Doctor Austin, ZITS MSz BSz DPep, lectures in three modules: the zombieism condition, the cause of zombieism, and the prevention and curing of zombieism. And for those of us who can’t attend in person, there’s a textbook and online exam.

And the Zombie Research Society keeps track of all this and more, and also promotes zombie scholarship and zombie awareness month. Their slogan: “What you don’t know can eat you.”

The plastic skeletons and body models used in classrooms and doctors’ offices may soon become obsolete, it seems, due to one of Google’s latest offerings: Google Body. The program is still in beta (meaning it’s got some bugs); this week its creators added a male body to the female they began with in December. And now users can tour the body, zooming in on various layers—circulatory system, muscles, bones, organs and so on—identifying parts, marking them, making notes.

The “body browser” works only with the most recent versions of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, but no special plug-ins are required. Instead, the product makes use of WebGL technology to produce the 3-D graphics. The creators say that Google Body works best in newer computers, but I had no problems with the site using Firefox 4.0 on my 5-year-old MacBook last night.

One thing I find fascinating about the project is how it came about: Google has a policy that allows company engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on personal projects, and Google Body came out of the 2o percent time of a group of Web developers in Google’s Cambridge, Massachusetts office who were inspired by the area’s strong medical community.

“We originally built Google Body as a demonstration,” project manager Roni Zeigler told the New York Times News Service, “but we’ve discovered that it has tremendous potential for teaching and patient education.”