A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Adventures of Riley: Riddle of the Reef by Amanda Lumry and Laura Hurwitz, Scholastic Press, ISBN: 978-0-545-06847-5, $16.99 US, $21.99 Canada (Hardcover, there is also a paperback version).

Riley flies out to Australia to help Aunt Martha, Uncle Max, Alice, and Wyland find out what’s killing off the coral of the Great Barrier Reef. The set up of having Riley join them allows the authors to provide informational and scientific data within the context of the story as Riley asks the questions that most nine-year-old boys would ask about what is happening and what he’s seeing. Alice appears in the illustrations and seems to be the same age as Riley; but has no part in this story other than being there. Aunt Martha has only a few lines. It’s Uncle Max and Wyland who provide information, instructions, and work with Riley. I would have felt more comfortable with the females of the expedition also being more active in the imparting of knowledge rather than simply adding gender balance.

In the context of a story there’s not much here. But as a source of information about the Great Barrier Reef and Coral Bleaching, packaging the information in an adventure in which the young protagonist, Riley, gets to take part allows the authors to provide exposition in a more natural way than they otherwise could with standard fictional story. Here Riley is taking an active part but, because he’s young, inquisitive, and not trained — he becomes the sounding board for the adults.

While this lesson in environmental change and the destruction of the coral that makes up the Great Barrier Reef is easy to understand, given in small doses throughout, it does require that the reader or if read to, the hearer, to be moderately interested in the subject matter. The authors don’t tone down the information though they do use easily understood language and they also provide a Glossary at the end of the book.

The book is heavily illustrated with photos and art. The art is realistic and colorful and the photographs are matched to the text to help to make the material clear and to focus on what’s being imparted about the reef and coral. While having art on top of photographs is a bit jarring, it works in this context to keep some distance from the material, while having the immediacy of photography.

Using Wyland as a character in the book is a great way to appeal to children, many of whom will be familiar with his murals of sea life. We lived in Providence, Rhode Island for a while and one of his murals is visible from the interstate as you drive through. His realistic murals of undersea life and whale creates an instant connection for children who are familiar with his work.

The scientific information is given in two ways: as conversation/instruction or as insert/sidebars. The inserts/sidebars have a quote about coral, sea life, or some related topic and are fully attributed. I found this first one to be striking and memorable:

* A coral reef produces its own sunscreen, using the same chemical in the sunscreen that humans use.
* Corals are like tiny anemones or jellyfish. Over 3 million little algae live in their skin and produce energy for them to feed on.
* The Great Barrier Reef is so large, it can be seen from outer space!
— Tim McClanahan, Ph.D., Senior Conservation Zoologist, Wildlife Conservation Society.

In the end, our adventurers discover some of the issues that are destroying the reef and causing coral bleaching. The book ends with a few suggestions for what people can do to help slow the destruction.

This series has a website where you can get further information on this and other books about Riley’s adventures: www.adventuresofriley.com.

On the whole, I heartily recommend the book for a young person who wishes to know more about the environment, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, coral, or the world’s oceans. The science is sound, though on a basic level, and matched to a young person’s understanding. Books on scientific topics are difficult to write for young people and these authors have done a wonderful job of balancing science information with a story narrative. If the reader has an interest in the core science area of the adventure, then they’ll enjoy the book.

I’ve noticed that music can lighten my mood if I’m unhappy. Depress me if I’m sad. Give me that extra energy to go just a bit more on some task or other when I’m tired. Music, even when it’s the music of wind in the leaves and birds at the feeder, makes life just more “there”.

For many years, I’ve noticed that when the music fits a movie it adds to the viewing and the story. When the sounds are right and the music is right you don’t even notice it it just stays in the background — but it can make you cry more at the sad parts, shudder at the scary parts, and thrill to the adventure — it adds to the story but in a way you don’t even notice.

Today, this article in ScienceDaily caught my eye, or rather the title did, “Scary Music Is Scarier With Your Eyes Shut“. Prof. Talma Hendler and Dr. Yulia Lerner at Tel Aviv Universities Functional Brain Center studied people listening to scary music with their eyes open and closed and found some interesting results:

15 healthy volunteers listen to spooky Hitchcock-style music, and then neutral sounds with no musical melody. They listened to these twice, once with their eyes open and a second time with their eyes shut, as she monitored their brain activity with an fMRI. While volunteers were listening to the scary music, Dr. Lerner found that brain activity peaked when the subjects’ eyes were closed. This medical finding corresponded to volunteer feedback that the subjects felt more emotionally charged by the scary music.

The amygdala, the region of the brain in which emotions are located, was significantly more active when the subjects’ eyes were closed. “It’s possible that closing one’s eyes during an emotional stimulation, like in our research, may help people through a variety of mental states. It synchs connectivity in the brain,” Dr. Hendler says.

They’re hoping that this research can be used to design future studies that could help people with dementia and systemic brain disorders.

Music brings balance to the brain and more readily integrates the affective and cognitive centers of our mind. Music may help us think better and even improve our learning abilities.

I don’t know about people with actual physical neurological problems but for many years Hollywood has been experimenting on hundreds of thousands of people by using music to play with their emotions. Just as many students use music to help them concentrate on their studies. Workers the world over use music to mask annoying background chatter so that they can work effectively. Many people have used music to regulate their movements so that everyone is in sync when group efforts are required (rowing, lifting heavy objects, etc.). Guess now science has caught up.

Imagine my surprise when I bumped into this item when scanning through some science sites this morning.   I checked out the website at http://beagle.vpro.nl/#/ where you need to click on the language you prefer to read. I watched the trailer promo there and then moved on to the YouTube Beagle Channel. The website will have the 35 episode after they air on Dutch television.

Even though the voyage started on September 13th (that’s at least what I gather from the promo) you can still catch up and follow along as they retrace the five year voyage in one year on the Clipper Stad Amsterdam. It will be very interesting to follow along and see how the past and the present mesh and what that might mean for the future.

Guess I’ll go dust off my copy of Origins of the Species — oh, wait it isn’t dusty, I’ve also got an electronic copy (available from several online sources including Gutenberg. There’s also a Facebook page and Twitter coverage.

I’m beginning to think all my life is about time. Time to work. Time to sleep. Time to play. Hours. Minutes. Seconds. Years. Decades. A lifetime.

All these small bits of time make up our lives. We treat life like it is infinite, but we all know there’s an end. Every minute is precious and not to be wasted. We know that and yet we waste so much time.

I find myself staring off into space. Not daydreaming. Daydreaming would be thinking, imagining things as they aren’t, but could or might be if only… An absence of consciousness — but not asleep either. Time has past and I don’t know where it went. I can account for the time but some is missing — so where did it go.

I’ve the flu — or a cold — I never know which because I always have the symptoms of both so I can’t tell. So maybe some of this missing time is because of the way I’m feeling but what about at other times.

Maybe you’ve had the same feeling when your coding and really into it — or writing or whatever you get very involved in. To me only a few minutes will have past, but my spouse will say it’s been hours are you ready for a break, and I check the clock and it has been hours …  but only minutes for me.

This blog seems like it’s really beginning to be about time — but that’s because I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Maybe it’s because I work at home — mostly alone without interruptions — so there’s no break-time or lunch-time or close-up-for-the-day-time. All time is work time if I don’t watch out.

How to other people perceive time? I wonder if other people miss time, find it passing quickly or excruciatingly slow or just as it should. What should our relationship to time be? I know it’s changed over the years with the invention of lights, the industrial revolution, the factories, and other imposition of time constraints by society.

I guess it’s always something to think about–time. What does it mean to me? What does it mean to you? How do you use it? Do you miss it? Is there enough for work, family, and play?

Remember people telling you to just get over it when you got picked last for games, when you never got invited to the cool parties, when you were a wall-flower at dances, or when your best-friend canceled because he/she found something better to do at the last minute. Well, those rejections hurt. The problem though was that everyone said it was in your head that it didn’t really hurt — you were just pretending.

Well, according to this article in Telegraph.co.uk, that pain was real.

Psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles say the human body has a gene which connects physical pain sensitivity with social pain sensitivity…

Their study indicates that a variation in the mu-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1), often associated with physical pain, is related to how much social pain a person feels in response to social rejection.

I’ve often wondered why people think that psychological pain is somehow less painful than physical pain when the pain receptors are basically the same. Pain is pain no matter where it comes from — whether you fall down a flight of stairs or have your significant other walk out on you because s/he need to find him/herself (as if they got lost and can’t get dressed until they find their body — where ever it went off to) is painful. Some people react to social rejection as if it was physical.

I’d hope that this finding will get educators and other to be a bit more proactive in stopping bullies and intimidation in the schools. But, since not even having children go postal or committing suicide because of the painful torment they suffer every day seems to be helpful, I doubt that research that shows these children and adults (faced with the same bullying and intimidation) do suffer pain will cause anyone to actually change their behavior.

Those who have suffered the pain for social rejection however, should feel a bit of vindication to know that the pain they felt or feel was not imaginary, it was real. And while from social rather than physical stimulus it still takes a toll on a person’s immune system and stamina.

Now if only someone could come up with a cure for a broken heart. Any ideas? Personally, I like to spend time with Ben & Jerry when I’m feeling the pain of social rejection.

Have you ever sat down to read a new novel and found hours later that it’s after midnight and you need to work tomorrow but what the heck, you need to finish this story? Well, that’s getting lost in a good book. Some people get so wrapped up in the story and the world between the covers of the book that the world in which they live just disappears for a while.

I remember when I was around 11 or so, my mother had to go out and left the pot roast cooking, and I was to check it every now and then and, if I could see the roast, add a bit of water. I’d done that before lots of time with her there and she was only going next door. But I was reading a book about a jungle and the main character was hiding from the bad guys in the fog in the jungle. Mom came home to a house full of smoke and a burnt pot roast. I realized that there was smoke or fog, but it was part of the story, so I just thought it was really real, I could even smell the burning campfire. Mom never let me forget that and I could never make her understand that I didn’t know the pot roast was burning because I was in the jungle a gazillion miles away.

Well, evidently, some scientists wondered if people who read text actually had physical reactions as they read as if they were doing what they were reading about. An article in New Science written by Andrea Thompson called “Why We Get Lost in a Book” explains the research study and some of their results. Evidently, if you read about throwing a ball or moving to a new area, the parts of the brain that would be activated if you were doing it for real also get activated, but to a lesser degree, if you’re reading about it.

Of course the study group was fairly small (28 people) and the reading material as described was bland and boring. I’m surprised they got any results at all, especially since there were 20 women and 8 men and the reading material was from a book called One Boy’s Day. Just the title makes me think of the fascinating activity of watching paint dry — wonder why?

But, at least it’s a beginning. They also found that some people have stronger reactions to reading than others — no surprise there. I might suggest that those with stronger MRI reactions found the material more interesting than those who didn’t, but that’s just me.

Reading is an activity that we all hope people will participate in. In this day and age, everyone needs a basic reading skill level in order to function. For some that’s enough but others spend their free time reading. There are non-readers, people who read for work and necessity and those that also read for pleasure. I often think that reading for pleasure is a nerd activity in a lot of ways, or at least I was always told it was because I preferred a book to sports or watching TV or just hanging out.

Now that we have the first “proof” that reading effect the various centers of the brain as if the activity we’re reading about was happening — what makes some people react more than others. Why do some people go on and become readers and some become extreme-readers and some just give it up and become non-readers (meaning they can read but don’t).

And will definitions of reading change as more and more of our material goes online. I know many people (including teens/students) who read constantly online but seldom crack a book — instead reading books online or on their cell phones or Kindles. For some reason, some researchers don’t consider that reading because it’s not on paper.

To me, reading is reading no matter whether the words are on paper, cereal box, sides of buses and building, street signs, ipods, Kindles, laptop or desktops. However, it’s nice to know that some of us really do get lost in good books — but we usually find our way out with new ideas, new experiences, and new knowledge.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen a crew member exposed to lethal radiation in science fiction stories and the doc just loads up the anti-radiation serum and gives them a shot and everything is looking good. In movies and TV, I’m sure you’ve seen it. Just the other night we were watching a Battlestar Galactica DVD and the planet had high radiation levels and Starbuck, Helo, and Boomer just dosed themselves with the anti-radiation serum at regular intervals.

Now it looks like science has caught up with fiction. Ynet News has a story on Cure for radiation sickness found? by Ronen Bergman. The medication developed by Professor Andrei Gudkov – Chief Scientific Officer at Cleveland BioLabs has immediate real life implications for people who have or need to be exposed to high levels of radiation. From the article:

Gudkov’s discovery may also have immense implications for cancer patients by enabling doctors to better protect patients against radiation. Should the new medication enable cancer patients to be treated with more powerful radiation, our ability to fight the disease could greatly improve.

How the discovery came about is one of those lucky ideas that sometimes happen when the right conditions come together.

The process that led up to the medical innovation dates back to 2003, when Professor Gudkov came up with the idea of using protein produced in bacteria found in the intestine to protect cells from radiation.

Tests so far on mice and monkeys look like this is the “real deal”. If approved after being moved to the fast track, this would be a preventative medication not a cure but it would be safe and easily injected. The possible uses could be a miracle for cancer patients, workers in the nuclear industry, astronauts and space workers, and many others such as governments who wish to stockpile medications — just in case the worst case scenario of MAD comes knocking.

In fact, if this drug manages to hold up to its promise, it could mean that space flight and/or long-term habitation of space stations and on ships heading to Mars (for example) would have less of a problem with radiation that would other wise limit our chances of success. It opens up a lot of possibilities that were previously unavailable to us because of the radiation exposure the crews would face.

What are your thoughts? And please read the original article before commenting?

It was 40 years ago today that man landed on the Moon.  We did it.  We wanted to get there before the Russians and put all the energy and enthusiasm into getting a man on the moon first our priority.  I remember that day, watching TV and holding my breath as the craft began its decent.  It was a momentous event.  One that would make the history books.

Ernest Lilley, Sr. Editor for TechRevu.com, also remembers that exciting day and he’s written a prose poem commemorating his memories called “Moonfall“.

Google is celebrating this occasion with the release of an update to Google Earth allowing us to take our own trip to the Moon. You can download Google Moon for free here.

To learn more about Google Moon, take a look at this video:

Now if only NASA can get itself to get fired up about exploring space with the same dedication and attention to getting the job done as it did when we decided to go to the moon. I vote for men living on Mars. It’s the most likely planet to support human life and it’s about time we started thinking about getting some of our eggs out of this very fragile basket.