Halloween is heaven for those who revel in horror flicks and haunted houses, for those macabre souls who enjoy the hair-raising pangs of terror. Fear is an emotion sparked by perceptions of threat; its core function is to help us avoid peril.
From a survival-based perspective, we’re not supposed to find pleasure in feeling scared. Yet many of us spend good time and money to court the heebie-jeebies. We genuinely enjoy the experience. And, according to research on fear, overlapping behavioral and neurological factors may explain why so many of us prefer to Netflix-and-chill with The Walking Dead than Veep.
Some scientists believe that non-life-threatening fear — e.g., watching The Shining alone in a cabin in the woods — is a close relative of excitement. Fear, they say, is enjoyable in a safe environment because it prompts a flight-or-fight chemical rush, without the actual jeopardy. And our brains, being so damn clever, can actually distinguish between fun-scary and holy-shit-I’m-going-to-die scary. Another notion says we court fear because we love when it’s over; we know a euphoric relief is coming when the frightening is finished.
But yet another theory challenges an assumption made by the first two: that negative and positive emotions are mutually exclusive. In a 2007 study, consumer science researchers argued that the brain can simultaneously venture into both safe and dark waters. In other words, we can be perfectly happy being scared (or being sad, for that matter).
Consider the amygdala, that wee part of the brain involved in emotional responses. It flares up when we’re scared or anxious. It also flares up when we experience other strong, salient emotions. Research suggests we retain stronger memories of emotionally salient experiences.
Therefore, if we’re happy to be scared, we’re likely to have especially vivid memories of scenarios involving these two salient emotions. For those who thrive on this seeming dichotomy, a freaky kid croaking redrum may serve as a nostalgia trigger. It’s just fun.
Additionally, as The Atlanticreported, there’s strong evidence that, more so than others, some of us are chemically wired to get off on thrills. When we’re scared, our brains release neurotransmitters, including the pleasure chemical dopamine. Some brains squeeze out more dopamine. More dopamine, more pleasure. Even when it’s a fright show out there.
Everyone assumes this is the result of the obesity epidemic – too many calories in, too few out. Children and adults are getting fat, so they’re getting sick. And it is generally assumed that no one specific food causes it, because “a calorie is a calorie”.
I’ve been studying the role that sugar plays in contributing to chronic disease for years, and my research group at the University of California, San Francisco has just published research in the journal Obesity that challenges this assumption. If calories come from sugar, they just aren’t the same.
Diabetes is increasing faster than obesity
It’s clear that the cause of rising rates of health conditions like Type 2 diabetes isn’t as simple as people just eating too many calories.
Obesity is increasing globally at 1% per year, while diabetes is increasing globally at 4% per year. If diabetes were just a subset of obesity, how can you explain its more rapid increase?
And certain countries are obese without being diabetic (such as Iceland, Mongolia and Micronesia), while other countries are diabetic without being obese (India, Pakistan and China, for instance). Twelve percent of people in China have diabetes, but the obesity rate is much lower. The US is the fattest nation on Earth and our diabetes prevalence is 9.3%.
If normal weight people have these conditions, how then are they related to obesity? Indeed, we now know that obesity is a marker rather than a cause for these diseases.
Epidemiological studies have found a correlation between added sugar consumption and health conditions like cardiovascular disease. So could cutting excess sugar out of our diets reverse metabolic syndrome?
What happens when you stop feeding kids added sugar?
Our group at UCSF studied 43 Latino and African-American children with obesity and metabolic syndrome over a 10-day period. We started by assessing their metabolic status – insulin and glucose levels, as well as blood fats and other markers for disease, like lactate and free fatty acids – on their home diet.
For the next nine days, each child ate an individual tailored diet. We catered their meals to provide same number of calories and protein and fat content as their usual home diet. We gave them the same percentage of carbohydrate, but we substituted starch for sugar. The big difference: this special diet had no added sugar. This means their diet had no sugar from sugarcane or high fructose corn syrup. The kids consumed foods such as fruits and other whole foods that naturally contain some sugar. These foods also have fiber, which reduces the rate of sugar absorption, so they don’t affect the body the same way that added sugar does.
We took chicken teriyaki out. We put turkey hot dogs in. We took sweetened yogurt out. We put baked potato chips in. We took donuts out. We put bagels in. We gave them unhealthy processed food, just with no added sugar. Each child was given a scale to take home, and if their weight was declining, we made them eat more. Then we studied them again.
The children had eaten the same number of calories and had not lost any weight, and yet every aspect of their metabolic health improved. With added sugar cut out of their diet for 10 days, blood pressure, triglycerides, low-density lipoprotein (LDL, or “bad cholesterol”), insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance all improved. And remember, we weren’t giving them just leafy greens and tofu – we fed the kids processed foods, just ones without sugar.
Further studies are needed to see if this will also work in adults, and if the benefits are short-term or long-term.
Sugar is like alcohol
This study demonstrates that a calorie is not a calorie, and that sugar is a primary contributor to metabolic syndrome, unrelated to calories or weight gain. By removing added sugar, we improved metabolic health.
Sugar may not be the only contributor to chronic disease, but it is far and away the easiest one to avoid. Kids could improve their metabolic health – even while continuing to eat processed food – just by dumping the sugar. Can you imagine how much healthier they’d be if they ate real food?
The naysayers will say, “But sugar is natural. Sugar has been with us for thousands of years. Sugar is food, and how can food be toxic?"
material consisting essentially of protein, carbohydrate, and fat used in the body of an organism to sustain growth, repair, and vital processes and to furnish energy.
Sugar by itself furnishes energy, and that’s about it. In that sense, sugar is like alcohol. It’s got calories, but it’s not nutrition. There’s no biochemical reaction that requires it. And at high doses, alcohol can fry your liver.
Same with sugar. Fructose, the sweet molecule in sugar, contains calories that you can burn for energy, but it’s not nutrition, because there’s no biochemical reaction that requires it. In excess, it can fry your liver, just like alcohol. And this makes sense, because where do you get alcohol from? Fermentation of sugar.
Too much sugar causes diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease and tooth decay. When consumed in excess, it’s a toxin. And it’s addictive – just like alcohol. That’s why children are getting the diseases of alcohol – Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease – without alcohol. But our research suggests we could turn this around in 10 days – if we chose to.
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly will Thursday set a new record for the longest single stretch of time spent in space by an American, with 216 consecutive days at the International Space Station.
Kelly is more than midway through an entire year at the ISS, as part of an experiment to study the effects of long-term spaceflight on the body and mind.
Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko is also spending a year at the orbiting outpost for the study.
Kelly's twin brother, Mark, is taking part on Earth to help scientists compare any genetic changes they see in Scott while in space.
Astronauts typically spend no longer than five to six months at a time in space.
"Breaking such a record for time in space is important because every additional day helps us better understand how long-duration spaceflight affects bodies and minds, which is critical to advancing NASA's journey to Mars," the US space agency said in a statement.
NASA hopes to send people to the Red Planet by the 2030s. But it remains unknown if explorers could survive the long journey, which might last three years.
Concerns for the health of pioneers in deep space include exposure to potentially cancer-causing levels of radiation, and the psychological difficulties of living in an enclosed space with no access to nature, family, or friends.
The record for longest single spaceflight was previously held by American astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who spent 215 days in space as commander of the ISS in 2006.
Since Kelly has already flown in space several times before, he broke another record earlier in October for the most cumulative days spent in space by an American.
On October 16, Kelly marked his 383rd day living in space, surpassing US astronaut Mike Fincke's record of 382 cumulative days.
But Kelly is a long way from the record of the longest time spent in space by a human being.
That honor goes to Russian Gennady Padalka, who set a 10-year-old record for the number of cumulative days in space June 28 when he reached 804 days.
Padalka flew to space with Kornienko and Kelly in March, and returned to Earth after six months.
"When he returned to Earth September 11, Padalka had spent 879 days living and working in space," NASA said.
Kelly is scheduled to return to Earth on March 3, 2016, by which time he will have logged 522 total days living in space during four missions.
The ISS is about to mark its 15th year of continuous human presence in low-Earth orbit.
The research outpost has been staffed by a rotating cast of more than 200 people over the years.
The swollen rivers only dropped back to normal water levels last week, but flood-weary Charleston, S.C. is already seeing water in the streets again. This time it’s not a 1,000-year deluge from the sky, it’s high tide.
The so-called “king tides” are a natural occurrence. Unusually high tides occur several times each year, often depending on the moon’s orbit and alignment with the earth and sun. King tides only cause flooding for a few hours around high tide, yet they still cause damage and inconvenience for coastal dwellers.
But sea level rise and warm waters from El Niño are making king tides and other nuisance tidal flooding worse. Sea levels have risen by 8 inches around the globe since the start of the 20th century due to ocean warming and the melting of the world’s land ice. The rate of rise is expected to increase and by the end of the 21st century, sea levels could be up to 39 inches higher if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory.
Despite the seemingly small rise to-date, the impacts have been major for cities around the globe including Charleston.
Nuisance flooding has increased 400 percent in Charleston since the 1960s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Other cities, like Annapolis and Baltimore, have seen flooding increase by more than 900 percent.
“Gradually, year by year, the tides are getting higher and higher,” Brian McNoldy, a cyclone researcher at University of Miami, said. “And places flood that otherwise would not have."
As oceans continue to rise, the world will eventually reach a tipping point where even the average high tide will make nuisance flooding routine. Charleston could see as many as 30 days of nuisance flooding a year by 2030.
A tide gauge in the Charleston harbor measured a high tide of 8.68 feet on Tuesday morning, putting it above the city’s major flood threshold and tying for the fourth highest crest on record. Most historical crests are due to hurricanes, but this king tide measured the same height as 1979 Hurricane David’s storm surge in Charleston. It was even higher than the historic flooding earlier this month, which crested at 8.29 feet in the Charleston harbor.
High tides on Tuesday and Wednesday along much of the East Coast are expected to be several feet higher than usual, pushing water into streets and buildings and adding new entries to the record books.
A drug that is given to late-stage cancer patients to help ease the constipation brought on by morphine has been shown to extend their lives, researchers said.
Methylnaltrexone, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2008 to treat opioid-induced constipation, could play a role in cancer therapy, said researchers who presented their findings at the meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists in San Diego.
"Early on, we began to suspect that methylnaltrexone might inhibit cancer growth," said Jonathan Moss, lead author of the study and professor of anesthesia and critical care at the University of Chicago.
"After more than a decade in the lab trying to assess how methylnaltrexone affects cancer, we have the first evidence that it can decrease tumor growth and extend survival in patients who respond to the drug."
The study was a retrospective survival analysis involving 229 patients across two randomized, controlled clinical trials on the relief of constipation for patients in the late stages of cancer and other terminal diseases.
Opioids like morphine are known to cause severe constipation that often cannot be relieved by traditional laxatives.
"In these two trials, 117 cancer patients received methylnaltrexone (marketed as Relistor) for opioid-induced constipation, while 112 were given a placebo," said the study.
Just over half (57 percent) of those who received methylnaltrexone experienced relief from constipation. The other 43 percent did not.
"Those who received and responded to methylnaltrexone lived, on average, twice as long (118 days versus 58 days) as those who did not respond or were given the placebo," said the findings.
The drug did not have any life-extending effects on patients with other illnesses like congestive heart failure, advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or neurologic diseases.
Researchers are not sure exactly how the drug works to extend life, and are continuing to study the matter.
Methylnaltrexone was invented in 1979 by Leon Goldberg, a pharmacologist at the University of Chicago who wanted to help a friend suffering from cancer and morphine-related constipation.
Moss and his colleagues began to notice in 2002, during early studies using the drug, that some cancer patients lived longer than expected.
"These were patients with advanced cancer and a life expectancy of one to two months yet several lived for another five or six months," Moss said.
"It made us wonder: could there possibly be a direct effect on the tumors?"
Next, researchers hope to find out if their discovery could lead to new methods of cancer treatment.
The tractor beam, a staple of science fiction including "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" that is employed to grab spaceships and other things remotely, is entering the realm of reality.
Researchers on Tuesday said they have developed a tractor beam that uses high-amplitude sound waves to levitate, move and rotate small objects without making contact with them. They envisioned medical and other applications for the device.
"As a mechanical wave, sound can exert significant forces on objects. Just remember the last time you were in a concert and your chest was vibrating with the music," said study lead author Asier Marzo of Britain's University of Bristol and Spain's Public University of Navarre.
Marzo said this sonic tractor beam has manipulated objects up to about one-seventh of an inch (4 mm) in diameter and can control the position and orientation of the levitated objects.
The tractor beam uses ultrasound at a frequency of 40 kilohertz. People can hear only below 20 kilohertz.
The researchers used sound waves from 64 miniature loudspeakers called transducers to create what they called "acoustic holograms" to control an object without touching it. These waves took the form of tweezers to lift an object, a vortex to hold a levitating object in place and a cage to surrounds an object and hold it in place.
"A simple wave will just push the particle in the direction of propagation. However, multiple waves will interfere with each other and create complex, acoustic 3D shapes that exert forces from all directions and keep the particle in place," Marzo said.
Marzo said the largest object moved using the device was a 4 mm bead made of a light plastic called polystyrene.
"With special high-power transducers it would be possible to levitate even steel balls," Marzo said.
Marzo described possible medical applications.
"Sound cannot travel through the void of space but it can do it through water or human tissue. This potentially enables the manipulation of clots, kidney stones, drug capsules, microsurgical instruments or cells inside our body without any incision," Marzo said.
More powerful sonic tractor beams capable of levitating bigger objects from greater distances could control objects floating adrift in zero-gravity environments like inside the International Space Station, Marzo said.
The research, which also involved researchers at Sussex University and a British company called Ultrahaptics, was published in the journal Nature Communications.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)
US archaeologists in Greece have uncovered the skeleton of an ancient warrior that has lain undisturbed for more than 3,500 years along with a huge hoard of treasure, the Greek culture ministry announced Monday.
The treasure is "the most important to have been discovered in 65 years" in continental Greece, the ministry said.
The wooden coffin of the unknown soldier -- evidently a person of some importance -- was found on the site of the Mycenaean-era Palace of Nestor on Greece's Peloponnese peninsula.
He had been laid to rest with an array of fine gold jewelry, including an ornate string of pearls, signet rings, a bronze sword with a gold and ivory handle, silver vases and ivory combs.
The jewellery is decorated in the style of the Minoans, the civilisation that flourished on the island of Crete from around 2000 BC, with the figures of deities, animals and floral motifs.
The archaeologists, Jack L. Davis and Sharon R. Stocker from the University of Cincinnati, have identified more than 1,400 pieces "whose quality testifies to the influence of the Minoans" on the later Mycenaeans.
The Mycenean civilisation spread from the Peloponnese across the whole of the eastern Mediterranean in the 2nd century BC.
The tomb, which stands at 2.4 metres (7 feet 10 inches) long and 1.5 metres wide, was unearthed during excavations begun in May near Pylos, on the site of the palace of Nestor.
Built between 1300 and 1200 BC, the palace's ruins were discovered in 1939.
An unmanned NASA spacecraft is about to make its deepest dive ever into the icy spray emanating from the underwater ocean on Saturn's moon, Enceladus.
The tiny moon orbiting the sixth planet from the sun stunned scientists when they discovered it had an icy plume in 2005.
After years of observations, NASA announced earlier this year that Enceladus definitely has a subterranean ocean, widening the search for alien life in our solar system.
While the Cassini probe's flyby on Wednesday will not be able to detect if there are life forms in the spray, scientists hope the close pass will give them new insight into the habitability of the extraterrestrial ocean.
"This daring flyby will bring the spacecraft within 30 miles (48 kilometers) of the surface of Enceladus's south polar region," NASA said in a statement.
"The encounter will allow Cassini to obtain the most accurate measurements yet of the plume's composition, and new insights into the ocean world beneath the ice."
The flyby should take place at 1522 GMT on Wednesday, though the scientific data it collects may not be published for months.
Scientists hope that the trip will tell them how much icy material is emanating from Enceladus, and perhaps what kinds of complex organic molecules it contains, though not with enough detail to determine if anything is alive.
The $3.26 billion mission is a joint project by the US space agency, European space agency and Italian space agency.
Cassini is the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn, and it has been circling the planet since 2004.
It is making a series of flybys of Enceladus, including a final pass in December.
Price-gouging "pharma bro" Martin Shkreli took part in an "ask me anything" session Sunday on Reddit -- and the results were just as disastrous as you would expect.
The 32-year-old Shkreli has become one of the most hated men in the U.S. in the month since news broke that he had purchased the rights to a drug used to treat AIDS and parasitic infections and jacked up the price overnight from $13.50 per pill to $750.
The founder and chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals admitted that he and his public relations team had handled the controversy "poorly" -- and a Reddit user asked whether the "awful" question-and-answer session was his PR team's idea or whether he created the "train wreck" himself.
"This is 99% statement and 1% question," Shkreli sniffed. "I think that violates the terms of service."
The former hedge fund manager claimed he had "talked to many HIV and AIDS patients," and he insisted that "none of them are hurt or will be hurt by the higher price."
One user accused Shkreli of using "sock puppets" to pose softball questions, a common complaint during "ask me anything" sessions with famous individuals, although the social media user pointed out that more than two dozen newly created accounts -- including one called Shkrelidelic -- had lobbed inane questions.
Shkreli expressed regret that he had been a "flippant jackass" instead of carefully explaining the price increase, although he told another Reddit user that he didn't understand how raising the price to $20, for example, might have been more reasonable than a 5,500 percent hike.
"I believe drugs should be priced relative to the value they confer," he said.
The pharmaceutical company CEO got absolutely destroyed by a physician who exposed his limited understanding of how the drugs he sells actually work.
"Medically speaking I haven't yet heard of why your drug's worth $749 more than my pyrimethamine," said a Reddit user identified himself as Anandya, a doctor who works for a charity. "Does it improve on the nausea, vomiting and (diarrhea)? Does it have a folate sparing effect? Can it be used in pregnant women and in epileptics?"
"No one's been able to tell me what your upgrade is or how it works or even if it is a cost saving upgrade," the physician said, asking what changes or improvements his company had made to the drug to warrant the price increase.
Shkreli admitted his company sold the same form of pyrimethamine, or Daraprim, that had been on the market for 70 years -- although he expressed hope that his company could develop a more potent form of the drug that did not hinder the body's production of folic acid.
"The mechanism of the drug is folate inhibition," Anandya reminded the CEO, adding that what Shkreli had proposed might not even be scientifically possible.
"The entire mechanism of the drug is to stop the production of folic acid in the first place and the bulk of its side effects are tied up with that," Anandya said. "It's kind of counter-intuitive to say that you are going to solve this problem when it's not a problem as much as the whole raison d'etre of the drug. This I find is the main problem with your plan. That the solution is not worth $749."
"One cannot suggest such a (monstrous) increase in the price of a drug which by your own admission does nothing better while telling me your plan is to (because this is the only way it would work) create an entirely new drug not related to pyrimethamine at all because it would require a new structure," the physician continued. "Which in turn would give you a big hassle since you would require testing and FDA approval from scratch anyway. I think your plan is flawed."
Other Reddit users stood back and applauded in awe, saying that's what happens when "overblown salespeople run into people who actually know what they're talking about."
"Dude you just got schooled by a real f*cking doctor," said Reddit user ixora7. "Go f*ck yourself with your pills."
Update: The Raw Story spoke to Anandya and verified that he is a bachelor of medicine, bachelor of surgery who works at a charity hospital in India.
Do you walk the walk, or just talk the talk? Can you put your money where your mouth is, or are you all mouth and no trousers? According to a new study it seems that it’s mouth or trousers – we can’t have both.
In the animal kingdom evolution often provides males with beefy bodies, sexual weaponry such as big teeth, horns or antlers, or bold colours in order to attract a female’s attention and out-compete rivals. But as females often mate with multiple partners, males also need to generate numerous fast and healthy sperm to ensure that they are the most likely to sire offspring. So males are left facing competing demands, between finding a mate and fertilising eggs.
The problem is that these traits are costly, so males may be unable to invest in both.
There is evidence to suggest that species do face these “trade-offs” over reproduction, where it’s impossible to improve one trait without detracting from another. For example, in humans it’s thought that there may be a trade-off between growth and reproduction in women. Women who go through puberty earlier, or have children at an earlier age, are shorter as adults.
Similarly men may face a trade-off between investing in reproduction or resisting diseases. Those with higher levels of testosterone have been shown to have weaker immune responses. The same trade-off between investment in either bigger bodies and sexual weaponry or bigger testes and genitals is found in other animals, such as seals and sea lions, dolphins and whales, and many other birds, primates, ungulates and even insects.
In a new study, published in Current Biology, we were interested in examining this evolutionary trade–off in howler monkeys. These monkeys, of which there are ten species distributed from Mexico to Argentina, live in a wide range of habitats and show big differences in social organisation.
Howler monkeys are among the loudest animals on the planet, yet they weigh just 7kg – about the size of a small dog, and lighter than a big Christmas turkey. They produce powerful, low frequency calls using a highly modified larynx, with extremely long vocal folds and a greatly enlarged cup-shaped hyoid bone. In most animals the hyoid is a very small, horseshoe-shaped bone that sits in the neck above the larynx and supports the tongue, but in howler monkeys it has evolved to become a large resonating chamber to amplify their roars. These evolutionary adaptations allow howler monkeys to produce extremely loud and incredibly low-frequency calls like those produced by animals ten times their size.
Remarkably, there is a huge amount of variation in the size of the hyoid bone among the howler monkeys species. Our new research aimed to try and describe this variation quantitatively, as well as understand both the evolutionary pressures that led to the observed variation, and the acoustic consequences of having large versus small hyoids.
We found that among males, hyoid volume varied widely among species – in fact the largest hyoid was 14 times the size of the smallest. We also found a large amount of variation in the size of the testes among species, with the largest testes 6.5 times bigger than the smallest. Overall, species living in small groups in which there tends to be just one male tended to have extremely large hyoids and very small testes. Those living in large groups, with many competing males, tended to have very small hyoids and very large testes. So it seems that males either invest in one reproductive trait or the other, but not both.
We studied the acoustics of the howler monkey’s roars and found those with larger hyoids produced lower frequency roars that made them seem much bigger than they really are. Presumably this is important in those species where it’s common for a single male to reign over a harem of females, and needs to scare off rivals. In species where there are many males living in mixed groups there is perhaps less need for such vociferousness, but on the other hand the males need to produce more and faster sperm.
This is the first known example of a trade-off between investing in vocalising and increased sperm production, which opens the door to many other potential studies on the trade-offs between sexually-selected traits. It’s hard to say exactly how the trade-off works. Developing a large vocal organ and roaring may be so costly that there is simply not enough energy left to invest in testes. Alternatively, such a roar may be so effective at deterring rival males that there’s no need for capacious, hard-working testes to generate large amounts of quality sperm.
So it seems that, in howler monkeys at least, males are either all mouth and no trousers, or all trousers and no mouth. When it comes to sex and reproduction, evolution says you can’t have it all.
The world of quantum mechanics is weird. Objects that are far apart can influence each other in what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”, and cats can potentially be dead and alive at the same time. For decades, scientists have tried to prove that these effects are not just mathematical quirks, but real properties of the physical world.
And they are getting somewhere. Researchers have finally proven in a new study that the link between particles at a distance reflects how the universe behaves, rather than being an experimental artefact. Meanwhile, another team of researchers have set out to show that a living creature, albeit a bacterium, can be in two different quantum states at the same time – just like the cat in Schrödinger’s thought experiment.
Bell’s inequality test
But let’s begin with the paper, published in Nature, which proves that the world is inherently spooky. All systems described by quantum mechanics can display so-called entanglement. For example an electron, like a coin, can spin in two directions (up and down). But two electrons can be entangled so that a measurement of the spin of one electron will define the spin of the other.
According to quantum mechanics, the spin of one electron cannot be known in advance of a measurement yet will be perfectly correlated with the other, even if it is in a distant location. Einstein didn’t like this because it seemed to imply that the information can be sent from one electron to the other instantaneously – breaking a rule that says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. He instead thought that there were “hidden variables” encoded in each electron that could determine the result if only we could access them.
But in the 1960s, Northern Irish scientist John Bell came up with a method to test Einstein’s theory. “Bell’s inequality” is satisfied only if actions in one location cannot affect another instantly and the outcomes of measurements are well-defined beforehand – something dubbed “local realism”.
Bell showed, theoretically, that quantum entanglement would violate his inequality test but local realist theories containing Einstein’s hidden variables would not. This is because the link between entangled particles is stronger than Einstein wanted to believe. So if the measured correlation between pairs of particles from an experiment was above a certain threshold, it would be incompatible with hidden variables and entanglement would win the day.
Bell’s theorem.
The desire to test this in the lab has driven huge experimental advances in the 51 years since Bell’s paper. However, all implementations of Bell tests to date have contained loopholes that have left some wiggle room for the universe to obey local realist theories.
One of these was that the efficiency of the measurements was too low (known as the detection loophole). Although the data obtained violated Bell’s inequality test, it may not be a representative sample of a complete set due because some photons in the experiment couldn’t be detected. Another loophole was that the measurements were too slow (the locality loophole). If the measurement devices were able to communicate via some unknown, slower-than-light channel they could share information and influence the outcome of the impending measurement.
The new study is the first experiment to simultaneously close both of these loopholes in a test of Bell’s inequality. The scientists used a laser to make two specific electrons, each within a diamond located over 1km apart, to increase their energy and emit a particle of light (a photon), which was entangled with the state of the electron. The photons were then sent through an optical fibre to be united at a third location. If they arrived at just the same time, the photons would interact with each other and become entangled – meaning their remote electron buddies would become entangled too.
The electrons’ spins were then measured to test Bell’s inequality. The two loopholes were closed by ensuring that the efficiency and speed of the read-out were sufficiently high. As a result, the team were able to demonstrate conclusively that the universe does not obey local realism: the outcomes of measurements cannot be known in advance, and half of an entangled state can exert spooky action on its remote partner.
Physics' famous feline
Entanglement is not the only type of unusual quantum behaviour. Another effect, known as superposition, is the ability of a particle to exist in two states (for example spin or even location) simultaneously, and is now regularly observed in laboratories around the world. For example, electrons have been known to travel through two slits at the same time – when we are not watching. The minute we observe each slit to catch this behaviour in action, the particle chooses just one.
Quantum superposition made easy.
However, we do not directly observe these effects in daily life. For example, my glass cannot be in two places at once or I would struggle to drink. But because we don’t encounter such bizarre things, it would seem logical that at some scale things “switch over” from the weird world of the quantum to our familiar everyday.
But what is the scale at which this switch happens? If we had a technically perfect experiment, would we be able to observe large objects in these superposition states? This is the question posed by Schrödinger’s thought experiment in which a cat is placed in a sealed box with a flask of poison and a single radioactive atom, which will undergo decay at a random time. If the atom decays, the flask is broken and the cat is poisoned; if it does not, the cat lives on. By waiting for the atom to decay, does the cat exist in both states at once as the atom does? We know that when we open the box, we must find the cat alive or dead, but is it a property of the universe or the observer that makes the cat “choose” its state?
Back to the team preparing to address this very question. Their proposal involves putting a bacterium rather than a cat in a state of superposition. Recent technical advances based on superconducting microwave resonators – devices used to detect radiation and for quantum computation – have enabled physicists to observe quantum effects in tiny flexible aluminium membranes (known as micromechanical oscillators) coupled to the circuits.
Tiny membranes count as large objects in the world of quantum physics because, even with a mass of only 50 picograms (50 trillionth of a gram), they contain hundreds of billions of atoms. However, these resonators have to be cooled to within a fraction of absolute zero (-273°C) before any quantum behaviour emerges. Otherwise thermal vibrations mask the effects.
The team plans to put a bacterium on top of such a membrane, which would then be cooled to its lowest state of energy. The membrane would then be placed into a superposition of two different states of motion: two different types of oscillations. They aim to show that the effect of the bacterium on the properties of the oscillator would be minimal, with the oscillator effectively behaving as if the bacterium were not there. In this way, the bacterium would effectively be in two states of motion at once. The researchers also plan to entangle the position of the bacterium with the spin of an electron inside it.
The proposed experiment would be impressive – but mainly for showing that quantum mechanics holds true for objects bigger than subatomic particles. But it seems unlikely to answer whether Schrödinger’s cat can be alive and dead at the same time because the bacterium would remain in a constant glass-like state of cryopreservation. If this were the cat, it would exist in suspended animation rather than in a superposition of simultaneous life and death.
In addition to kidney damage, ketoacidosis and heart attacks, it turns out that canagliflozin – sold under the brand names Invokana and Invokamet – increases the risks of osteoporosis, or loss of bone density.
In clinical studies, elderly Type-2 diabetics treated with Invokana for two years or more showed reduced bone density in their lower spines and hips. While many people lose bone density as they get older, the recent studies show that treatment with Invokana can greatly accelerate the process. Some patients can suffer fractures in as little as three months after starting on the medication. Risks of bone loss and fractures were most pronounced in post-menopausal women.
The study, part of a post-marketing safety evaluation, continued for two years and involved more than 700 geriatric patients. According to a statement from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued on September 10th, “The additional data confirm the finding that fractures occur more frequently with canagliflozin [Invokana] than placebo…fractures can occur as early as 12 weeks after starting the drug.” Additional data was gathered from nine other clinical trials in which test subjects took the drug for an average of 85 weeks.
As a result of this new data, stronger warnings will be added to Invokana prescribing information. The FDA is advising physicians to consider the risk of bone fractures before prescribing Invokana for their diabetic patients. In addition to Invokana, the FDA is monitoring similar medications in the class of SLGT2 inhibitors, or gliflozins. These prescription drugs target a specific protein, known as sodium/glucose co-transporter 2. This protein is involved in the reabsorption of blood sugar (glucose) in the kidneys. SLGT2 inhibitors allow excess glucose to be passed in the urine. In addition to kidney damage, these drugs also increse the risk of urinary tract infections, vaginal yeast infections and dangerously low blood sugar levels (hypoglycemia). Other drugs in the gliflozin class include Farxiga (dapagliflozin), Jardiance (empagliflozin) and Glyxambia (linagliptin). All of these drugs will be under FDA scrutiny over the next several months.
Physicians are also being urged to monitor patients for diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) when prescribing gliflozin drugs such as Invokana. An research study recently published in the journal Diabetes Care noted over 100 patients worldwide who wound up suffering serious cases of DKA as the result of taking gliflozin medications. All of these cases were serious enough to warrant hospitalization. Untreated, the condition can cause patients to lapse into a coma, and can even result in death.
This brings up another issue, which has to do with the FDA approval process. In the journal article, the researchers state, “It is not unusual that serious safety issues related to a new drug go undetected during the relatively short clinical development programs for regulatory drug approval.” When introduced, Invokana was hailed as a “miracle drug.” However, concerns over the safety of Invokana were expressed early on. Furthermore, there is evidence that both drug maker Janssen and the FDA were aware of these dangers before Invokana was approved.
In too many cases, new “miracle” drugs are rushed to pharmacy shelves before they have been adequately tested. Despite testimony from medical experts who expressed serious concerns over the safety and efficacy of canagliflozin, the FDA went ahead and gave market approval for Invokana – on the condition that the manufacturer would do its own monitoring for “adverse events.”
Considering the potential profits at stake (the market for diabetic drugs is expected to reach well over $55 billion by 2017), there is little incentive for pharmaceutical companies such as Janssen to do rigorous and unbiased testing of their products. Until federal regulators are willing to stand up to Big Pharma, expect more adverse events resulting in injuries and death.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) state that insufficient sleep is a serious public health concern, because it can lead to many immediate dangers such as car crashes as well as long-term health problems like diabetes. The blame for sleep deprivation is often pinned on our fast-paced, 24/7 lifestyle, made possible by electric lighting at all times of day and night.
But are we really getting too little sleep?
A new study challenges that idea from a unique perspective, and it is getting wide media attention.
Researchers, led by Jerome Siegel at UCLA, followed three small preindustrial societies, two in Africa and one in South America, reasoning that the best way to judge whether sleep habits in the industrialized world are unnatural is to compare them to sleep habits in those few remaining societies on Earth that still live without electricity.
They found that the average period of time people spent trying to sleep was 7-8½ hours each night. Of this, only 5½-7 hours was confirmed as time asleep. This is about the same as, or less than, what is reported by most Americans and Europeans, and is considered too little for optimum health.
So maybe 5½-7 hours of sleep is natural and not the problem the CDC and many other health organizations say it is.
However, a crucial aspect of the findings of the new study has not been discussed in either the news stories or the paper itself: people in preindustrial societies spend much more time in darkness than people living in the industrialized world.
What does this study tell us about sleep patterns?
Besides finding that people in preindustrial societies without electricity sleep about the same amount as people in the electrified world, researchers also found that sleep didn’t start until several hours after sunset, although almost everyone woke up close to sunrise.
The researchers looked at temperature fluctuations, finding that it influenced the time of awakening in the morning. But for people sleeping in the modern built environment, temperature fluctuations in our bedrooms are minimal.
The researchers also found sleep in these societies was usually interspersed with periods of awakening that lasted for over an hour. These routine awakenings call into question the conventional wisdom that “ideal” sleep should be compacted into one stretch. Waking for a while at night is not necessarily a sleep disorder. Compacted sleep (“sleeping like a log”) is evidently not the way in which sleep evolved in humans.
But the big difference between sleep in the industrial world and sleep in the preindustrial world is about light and darkness. Electric light can delay or shut down nighttime physiology, whereas light from a wood fire or flame cannot. The researchers did not directly assess the quality of sleep, and this may be the part that matters.
The subjects in the preindustrial societies, living close to the equator, were exposed to darkness (with maybe an occasional wood fire) for 11 or 12 hours each night. In industrialized societies, people are typically exposed to darkness only as long as they are trying to sleep, often about seven hours.
Normal sleep and nighttime physiology
We humans have an endogenous circadian rhythmicity in physiology that is adapted to the solar cycle of day and night (as does almost all life on the planet). This means that in constant darkness we would still cycle about 24 hours in body temperature, hunger, activity and sleep.
When the sun is up, we are in daytime physiology: alert, active and hungry. When the sun sets in the evening, we begin the transition to nighttime physiology: body temperature drops, metabolism slows and sleepiness builds. In the world before electricity, each lasted about 11 hours near the equator, with time also for the transitions from one to the other at dawn and dusk. Of course, farther from the equator, the length of night increases or decreases according to season.
Part of nighttime physiology is sleep, but it is difficult to define what “normal” sleep is. Until the late 20th century, sleep was ignored by most biologists because it’s hard to study, and was thought by many ambitious people to be a vast waste of time. In recent years, this attitude has changed radically. It is now believed that modern life has led to unhealthy sleep habits and widespread sleep deprivation with a multitude of adverse health and productivity consequences.
In 1991, Thomas Wehr, a prominent sleep researcher, published the results of a landmark experiment he conducted in Bethesda, Maryland. In a sense, it mimicked sleep in the preindustrial world where there are naturally long, dark nights – the environment studied directly by Siegel and colleagues.
First, seven volunteers spent eight hours in the dark at night in the laboratory for four weeks; they then switched to 14 hours of dark each night without access to clocks and alarms. During the short nights, they slept a little more than seven hours on average. During the long nights they slept only about an hour more, a little over eight hours, and the sleep was broken into two stretches with an hour or two awake in between.
Importantly, the duration of melatonin production increased by about two hours after the long night. The hormone melatonin is a marker of nighttime physiology that helps regulate sleep and wake patterns. It has many important biological functions, and its production requires dark but not sleep.
So whether awake or not, these subjects produced melatonin, and maintained nighttime physiology, for the long duration of dark. But this is not how people actually live in the modern world. People use electric lights and electronic gadgets in the evening, and often late into the night.
The type of light we use at night matters
A useful term in the context of sleep and health is “circadian effective light” because bright, short wavelength light (blue, for instance) is much more effective than dim, longer wavelength light (yellow/red) in suppressing melatonin during the night and causing a premature transition to daytime physiology. There is also evidence from studies in humans that bright blue light in the evening decreases the quality of sleep compared to an evening of dimmer, longer wavelength light.
In industrial societies, people are bathed in blue light from smartphones, computers and some kinds of light bulbs all day, and for a good chunk of the night. Our preindustrial counterparts may stay up late too, but it’s in the dark or in the light of a flame.
Candlelight doesn’t interfere with our circadian rhythm like electric light. The Night School circa 1660-1665.
In the preindustrial time before electricity, sleep occurred within a much longer period of circadian dark; in the modern world it does not. Dark is restricted only to the sleep period, if even then; many people do not sleep in a truly dark bedroom. Seven hours of sleep embedded within 11 hours of circadian dark may be far more restorative than seven hours with bright, blue-containing light preceding it in the evening. The Siegel study might suggest that preindustrial people don’t sleep any more than people in industrialized societies, but perhaps they just get a better night’s sleep, and much more circadian dark.
For us in the industrialized world, it might be wise to use dimmer, longer wavelength lighting (like low wattage incandescent bulbs, if you can still find them) in the evening before sleep to allow an earlier transition to nighttime physiology. Fortunately, such circadian-friendly lighting is currently being designed with the new lighting technologies now available.
And during those inevitable periods of awakening in the middle of the night, try to enjoy the calm of darkness.
