Get in tune with your brain waves

Insomniacs who listened to classical piano created in response to their own brain waves — a technique called brain music therapy — improved their sleep quality in four weeks according to a University of Toronto study. The cutting edge therapy boosts levels of melatonin, a brain chemical linked to sleep.

Snake oil you say? Science, says Dr. Galina Mindlin, MD, PhD, an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the Supervising Attending Physician in the Department of Psychiatry in St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center. She has a PhD in neurophysiology and neuropsychology.

According to the Brain Music Treatment web site, brain music therapy is an effective, scientifically proven treatment for stress, insomnia, anxiety, and depression. It has also been found to increase productivity and concentration. Doctors record an individual’s brain waves and convert them into unique musical sounds. These musical sounds correlate to brain waves that promote relaxation and trigger activation in your body. The musical sounds are presented to you in the form of two musical files - one relaxing, and one activating. Playing the files promotes relaxation and activation in your body. The therapy is backed by solid scientific evidence, including double blind studies.

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It’s science but, given a level table and steady hands, you just might use it to win a few beers at the local pub…

Thanks James!

For the mathematicians among you…

Do men and women think alike? Well, that’s a no-brainer: Of course not. Although 99 percent of our genes are the same, that 1 percent makes all the difference, as neurologist Louann Brizendine explains in her book, The Female Brain (Morgan Road). A few nuggets adapted from the book:

• Although male brains are larger by about 9 percent, women have the same number of brain cells packed more densely into a smaller skull.

• A baby girl’s skills in eye contact and face studying improve more than 400 percent during the first three months of life. Making eye contact is “at the bottom of (the boy baby’s) list of interesting things to do.

• Men use about 7000 words a day, women about 20,000.

• Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers of a girl’s brain…[providing] a major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward can get outside of an orgasm.

• Oxytocin [the “love” hormone] is released in the brain after a 20-second hug from a partner—triggering the brain’s trust circuits.

• The sexual desire trigger for both genders is the androgen testosterone… men have on average ten to 100 times more testosterone than women.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and LONDON, England (April 1st, 2008) – Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Virgin Group today announced the launch of Virgle Inc., a jointly owned and operated venture dedicated to the establishment of a human settlement on Mars. …

For thousands of years,
the human race has spread out across the Earth, scaling mountains and plying the oceans, planting crops and building highways, raising skyscrapers and atmospheric CO2 levels, and observing, with tremendous and unflagging enthusiasm, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply across our world’s every last nook, cranny and subdivision.

An invitation.
Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

The question is, do you want to join us?
Ever yearned to journey to the stars? You can learn how to become a Virgle Pioneer, test your Pioneering potential, or join the Mission Control community that will help develop the 100 Year Plan we’ve outlined here.

Interested? Complete the questionaire to see if you’re a suitable candidata. Questions? Check the FAQs. Read the hundred year plan. More

This May, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator yet created by humans, is scheduled to start smashing protons into each other with unprecedented impact speeds. The LHC will explore the leading explanation that mass arises from ordinary particles slogging through an otherwise invisible but pervasive field of virtual Higgs particles. In this image by Maximilien Brice, a person stands in front of the huge ATLAS detector (center, near bottom of frame), one of six detectors being attached to the LHC. This was the February 25, 2008 Astronomy Picture of the Day.

2008 is a leap year, so Friday will be February 29th, a date that rolls around just once every four years. If that’s your birthday, that makes you, what, eight? Ten?

Confused? Well, here’s the short explanation. Our year is measured by how long it takes the Earth to go around the Sun. It doesn’t take 365 days but 365 1/4. Actually… 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds. So, every four years we effectively lose a day. To prevent drift in our calendar we adjust the four year period to be 1,461 instead of 1,460 days. You can read more on The “Straight Dope” website.

Anyway, here are three smart things you should know about leap years in order to impress your friends and maybe win a few beers, compliments of Wired Magazine:

1) A leap year is any year evenly divisible by four — except for century years, which have to be divisible by 400. It’s not a perfect system: The Gregorian year is 27 seconds longer than the astronomical year. By 12008, we’ll be three days off.

2) October 5-14, 1582, never happened in Catholic lands. Brits (and their American subjects) born September 3 to 13 had no birthday in 1752. Those days were dropped when the Western world switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

3) International Atomic Time — kept by ultraprecise clocks — is gradually out-pacing astronomical time, which is determined by our planet’s rotation. (Earth’s spin is slowing — what a drag.) So in 1972, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service began adding occasional leap seconds. They’ve done it 23 times, most recently adding an extra “one-Mississippi” on December 31, 2005.

Did you see it? Night before last, we were witness to one of science’s more fascinating phenomenons — a total lunar eclipse. Dawn and I were driving home and watched it directly in front of us as we made our way up the hill from Sacramento, at least until it became obscured by clouds. It never ceases to amaze us, as I suppose is true for most people since such occurrences are some of the most witnessed and photographed worldwide. This image comes courtesy of Simone Vitale of Tucson, Arizona.

Want to be ready for the next lunar eclipse? Here’s a list through 2020.

This is a particularly interesting self-portrait, in part because it was taken by an astronaut of himself in space, but even more so because of the reflection in the glass of his helmet. Visible in the image, working in from the outer borders, are the edges of the reflecting helmet of a space suit, modules of the International Space Station (ISS), the Earth, the arms of Expedition 15 astronaut Clay Anderson, and the digital camera used to snap the image. This picture was taken during the shuttle orbiter Endeavour’s mission to expand the space station last August.

“Green Porno is a series of very short films conceived, written, co-directed by and featuring Isabella Rossellini. Inspired by the amazing and often bizarre sexual practices of insects and other creatures, these eight films are both comical and insightful studies of the curious ways a variety of earth’s tiny critters “make love”. Simple, playful and childlike by design, Green Porno provides a unique and provocative glimpse into an “underground” world of sexual encounters.” …

Or so the official Green Porno website, still under construction, promises. It’s difficult to imagine actress, model and film director Rossellini mounting a giant paper bug, but I’m on the site’s mailing list to get a heads up when it’s completed and the eight short films, designed for viewing on cell phones and small screen devises, are viewable.

So, why did I post about it today, you ask? Well, I thought it would be interesting to see how many people Googling “porno” would find their way to my site. Call it a silly experiment.

This picture of a crater resembling a “happy face” (click to enlarge) was acquired by the Context Camera (CTX) on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on January 28, 2008.

The unnamed crater is about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) across. It is located among the Nereidum Montes, north of the Argyre basin. North is toward the right and sunlight illuminates the scene from the upper right. Credit: NASA / JPL / MSSS

This isn’t the first happy-looking crater to be photographed from Mars. A more famous one, otherwise known as Galle crater, has been imaged by Viking, Mars Global Surveyor and by Mars Express (that one made the cover of the March/April 2007 issue of The Planetary Report).

But I really like this one; it’s more goofy.

This dreamlike view looking south from the historic mountain top Pic du Midi Observatory combines moonlit domes, a winter night sky, and the snowy peaks of the French Pyrenees. Encroaching on the night, lights from the La Mongie ski resort illuminate the mountain slopes nearby while the glow along the distant horizon is from urban areas in southern France and Spain. The image was NASA’s January 25 Astronomy Picture of the Day.

In a recent article, BBC News reported on research concluding that a compound extracted from tangerine peel can kill certain human cancer cells, information I thought worth sharing…

According to a research team at Leicester School of Pharmacy, Salvestrol Q40 - a type of phytoalexin (a chemical produced by plants to repel attackers, such as insects or fungi) extracted from tangerine peel, can kill certain human cancer cells. “Salvestrol Q40 is found at higher concentrations in the peel of the tangerine than in the flesh of the fruit, and is converted into a toxic compound by the cytochrome P450 CYP1B1 enzyme:

As a result, the researchers found, it proved to be 20 times more toxic to cancer cells than their healthy equivalents.

Dr. Tan said Salvestrol was found in other fruit and vegetables, such as the brassica family, which includes broccoli and brussels sprouts.

However, the compound tends to be produced at higher levels when infection levels among crops are high.

Therefore, the use of modern pesticides and fungicides, which have cut the risk of infections, have also led to a drop in Salvestrol levels in food.

CYP1B1 has been found to be expressed at a high frequency in a wide range of human cancers of different histogenetic types, including cancers of the breast, colon, lung, esophagus, skin, lymph node, brain, and testis.

Via Hyscience.

This is alarming:

Pasadena (UPI) - A U.S.-led international team of astronomers discovered that Neptune’s south pole is much warmer than the rest of the planet.

The researchers published the first temperature maps of the lowest portion of Neptune’s atmosphere, showing the warmer south pole is providing an avenue for methane to escape from the deep atmosphere.

“The temperatures are so high that methane gas, which should be frozen out in the upper part of Neptune’s atmosphere, the stratosphere, can leak out through this region,” said Glenn Orton of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Orton is lead author of a paper appearing in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. In the paper, the astronomers report the temperature at Neptune’s south pole is higher than anywhere else on the planet by about 18 degrees Fahrenheit. The average temperature on Neptune is about minus 392 degrees Fahrenheit.

The findings were made using the Very Large Telescope located in Chile, operated by the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere.

I hope Al Gore is on the case. I just know SUVs are somehow involved… More

I ran across some interesting health factoids over the weekend in the Sacramento Bee. For example, the first Merck Manual of medical information, published in 1899, listed these “scientifically-advanced treatments” and doctor-recommended prescriptions for what ailed you:

• Arsenic - diabetes, arthritis, and asthma

• Strychnine - skin diseases and bed wetting

• Smoking tobacco - asthma

• Cocaine - chest pains of coronary artery disease

• Cannabis - insomnia