10 Daily Things

Here is some useful news you can use. Morning “big gulp” coffee drinkers are misusing the power of caffeine. Researchers at the Sleep Disorders Center at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago along with colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School have shown that caffeine is best administered in a larger number of smaller doses with the doses coming later in the day.

Researchers from Rush University Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School have discovered that caffeine works by thwarting one of two interacting physiological systems that govern the human sleep-wake cycle. The researchers, who report their findings in the May issue of the journal SLEEP, propose a novel regimen, consisting of frequent low doses of caffeine, to help shift workers, medical residents, truck drivers, and others who need to stay awake get a bigger boost from their tea or coffee.

Though many studies have measured caffeine’s sleep-averting effects, most do not take into account that sleep is governed by two opposing but interacting processes. The circadian system promotes sleep rhythmically—an internal clock releases melatonin and other hormones in a cyclical fashion. In contrast, the homeostatic system drives sleep appetitively—it builds the longer one is awake. If the two drives worked together, the drive for sleep would be overwhelming. As it turns out, they oppose one another.

Following a randomized, double-blind protocol, subjects received either one caffeine pill, containing 0.3 mg per kilogram of body weight, roughly the equivalent of two ounces of coffee, or an identical-looking placebo. They took the pills upon waking and then once every hour. The goal of the steady dosing was to progressively build up caffeine levels in a way that would coincide with—and ultimately, counteract—the progressive push of the homeostatic system, which grows stronger the longer a subject stays awake.

The strategy worked. Subjects who took the low-dose caffeine performed better on cognitive tests. They also exhibited fewer accidental sleep onsets, or microsleeps. EEG tests showed that placebo subjects were unintentionally asleep 1.57 percent of the time during the scheduled wake episodes, compared with 0.32 percent for those receiving caffeine. Despite their enhanced wakefulness, the caffeine-taking subjects reported feeling sleepier than their placebo counterparts, suggesting that the wake-promoting effects of caffeine do not replace the restorative effects gained through sleep.

Coffee, tea, and other caffeine-containing beverages are tools. Don’t drink more than you need to and slow the rate of your drinking to spread it out. Keep in mind that once you reach the point where you don’t need to maintain a high feeling of wakefulness that you should immediately stop drinking it.

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Most people know that nerves work by passing electrical currents from cell to cell. But you might be surprised to learn that no one knows exactly how anesthetics stop nerves from carrying pain signals. That’s why two scientists believe that we really don’t know how nerves work after all.

According to their controversial theory, electricity is just a side effect of how nerves really operate: by conducting high-density waves of pressure that resemble sound reverberating through a pipe. If correct, Jackson and Thomas Heimburg, a Niels Bohr biophysicist and co-author of a recent paper describing their theory, would turn a long-held (and Nobel Prize-winning) theory on its head.

Their theory, published in the Biophysical Journal, explains how nerves and anesthetics work as follows: Nerves are made of lipids that are liquid at body temperature. A yet-to-be-defined mechanism creates high-pressure, semisolid waves that move through the cells, delivering messages.

Anesthetics, they suggest, lower the temperature at which lipids become solid, making it difficult for the waves to form, thereby preventing nerves from sending pain signals. They also suggest that as the waves travel, they change the shape of the cell membrane, producing the electrical pulse that scientists currently mistake for the primary function of nerve cells.

Read the full article @ Wired >>>

For women hoping to become hostesses at next year’s Beijing Olympic Games medal ceremonies, here come the criteria: no tattoos, no big bottoms, and cut down on the earrings.

Tattoos and earrings tend to look sleazy, while big bottoms could stick out too much, state media reported Friday, quoting officials selecting candidates for medal ceremonies and other protocol activities.

“We don’t want anyone who looks in any way sleazy because that could really put athletes off,” said Li Ning, principal of Beijing Institute of Protocol, who is heading the selection process.

Read the full article @ Brisbane Times >>>

Mark Pagel, head of the evolutionary biology group at the University of Reading in England and editor of The Encyclopedia of Evolution, fills us in:

We humans are conspicuous among the 5,000 or so mammal species in that we are effectively naked. Just consider what your pet dog or cat (or, for that matter, a polar bear) would look like, and how it might feel, if its furry coat were shorn.

Scientists have suggested three main explanations for why humans lack fur. All revolve around the idea that it may have been advantageous for our evolving lineage to have become less and less hairy during the six million years since we shared a common ancestor with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee.

The aquatic-ape hypothesis suggests that six million to eight million years ago apelike ancestors of modern humans had a semiaquatic lifestyle based on foraging for food in shallow waters. Fur is not an effective insulator in water, and so the theory asserts that we evolved to lose our fur, replacing it, as other aquatic mammals have, with relatively high levels of body fat. Imaginative as this explanation is—and helpful in providing us with an excuse for being overweight—paleontological evidence for an aquatic phase of human existence has proven elusive.

The second theory is that we lost our fur in order to control our body temperature when we adapted to life on the hot savannah. Our ape ancestors spent most of their time in cool forests, but a furry, upright hominid walking around in the sun would have overheated. The body-cooling idea seems sensible, but even though lacking fur might have made it easier for us to lose heat during the day, we also would have lost more heat at night, when we needed to retain it.

Read the full article @ Scientific American >>>

Marine scientists in Canada and abroad are puzzled by bizarre photographs that appear to show the skeleton of a large mammal jutting out of an iceberg that recently drifted past Newfoundland’s east coast.

The six pictures show what looks like a brown rib cage and spinal column, slightly bent, sticking out of a crust of ice.

But researchers throughout Canada, Greenland and Norway are unable to determine the origin of the skeleton, said Garry Stenson, a marine mammal scientist with the federal Fisheries Department.

“It’s definitely unusual,” Stenson said Monday. “It’s not something that I’ve encountered before.”

His colleagues have been debating whether the carcass belongs to a bearded seal, a walrus or a beluga whale. But without the actual specimen in his hands, Stenson said he can’t resolve the mystery.

“It would be really nice to get a copy, a sample, a hold of it, but at this point we’re not quite sure what it is,” he said.

The photos were taken near Newtown, in Bonavista Bay, by Eli and Donna Norris on the weekend of May 26, said Ruth Knee, a friend who forwarded them to the Fisheries Department in hopes of identifying the bones.

Read the full article @ canada.com >>>