Waiting in Transit…

Got this from Arvind Narayan’s blog post, in which he takes us through his research on caffeine consumption from a scientific point of view (Click on his blog to read the full analysis), with pretty cool results and analysis for Coffee Addicts (which are generally the corporate riff-raff) and how to use caffeiene to your best advantage.

I’ll just cover his basic results here:

1) Caffeine tolerance builds up rather quickly (2-3 weeks) and further, is near-total. That means that if you drink coffee regularly, pretty soon you start producing more adenosine in respose; thus you need your caffeine dose just to get up to your normal level of brain activity, and you’re dopey if you don’t take it.

2)  Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors in the brain (by tricking your brain into thinking it is adenosine.) A decrease in the activity of adenosine (which is a sleep chemical) increases neuron firing rate and increases focus and concentration.  (see above picture)

3)The best time to drink coffee is when you are already very alert.

4) When adenosine peaks, the best response is not to fight it, but “go with the flow” and (shock, gasp) sleep.  Sleep has effects on memory consolidation and is extremely beneficial in overcoming cognitive bottlenecks, making the brain maximally alert right after waking up. Thus, a possibly very effective coffee drinking pattern would be two cups a day, one early in the morning and one right after an afternoon nap. (Unfortunately, napping is stigmatized in the Western work culture, despite much scientific evidence touting the benefits. I hear that such stigmatization is non-existent in China. Good for them.)

5) Consistent caffeine consumption is as good as nonconsumption, because of (you guessed it) tolerance. a better strategy is periodic abstinence, it lets adenosine levels return to normal. With complete abstinence, it takes 5 days to reach adenosine normality; conservatively, and with imperfect abstinence, a week or 10 days may be required.

That’s about it… interesting eh?  What wasn’t covered in the research and what I’m interested in is the placebo effect of caffeine. As far as I recall there was some research done where 10 people were in a room 9 were given pure caffeine and 1 was given concentrated valium (all of them were told they were being given concentrated caffeine, and in another room it was vice versa.  In each case the subjects given valium in a caffeiene context and caffeine in a valium context had still manifested symptoms as the rest of the group in their particular context.  Hence, both the caffeine and valium had the opposite effect in those individuals.  word.

All in All, I think the above research has very interesting insights into coffee addicts planning their coffee consumption to get the most benefit.  Other than that I just don’t think most people would really care.

written by Muhammad \\ tags: Coffee, Interesting, Research, Science

What kind of freaks think up this stuff, I’m against all this genetic testing and playing God even if they do have the best intentions.  I did notice the article fail to mention how many times they failed before they came up with this cat.

“Mr. Green Genes is the first fluorescent cat in the United States and probably the world, said Betsy Dresser, the centre’s director.

The researchers made him so they could learn whether a gene could be introduced harmlessly into the feline’s genetic sequence to create what is formally known as a transgenic cat.

If so, it would be the first step in a process that could lead to the development of ways to combat diseases via gene therapy.”

Link

They’ve done much the same with a Goldfish as well, I’m wondering when we’ll see the next glow-in-the-dark humanoid. Fiction can’t beat reality, eh?

written by Muhammad \\ tags: Science, Weird

This from the New Yorker…

“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.“

That’s unbelievable… I can’t imagine having an itch that bad that I’d scratch right through bone? I’m skeptical as to whether this story is even true, seems extremely bizarre and also very scary.

Watch your fingers.

: Weird, Scratching, Science, Itch

written by Muhammad \\ tags: Science, Weird

Carl Zimmer @ Wired has an interesting article which covers the new discoveries revolving around the structure of genes and DNA and how all the wiring works.

We all already know that DNA helps structure life and carry out its functions. But this is not enough, the genes need to become active at the right place and the right time, otherwise if they were firing randomly we’d end up as one big pile of mush. Scientists have then discovered that there are a few genes which regulate the rest and these genes are responsible for switching on and off the many various other genes which make up an organism. Basically, the genes formed a chain of command, where a few were responsible for activating and deactivating the rest.

What makes it a bit more complicated is that as certain genes are switched on and off, the one which was switched on by one gene could switch off that same gene which activated it, in order to create a balance.

I guess the really interesting question here is , how do these genes know what to do? Where is the deep intelligence at the core which tells it how life should be structured? Where did this come from? Did it really just form from years of evolution a sort of “inherited intelligence”? I don’t buy the explanation that we’re all randomly created through natural selection.

As Zimmer himself says at the end of his article… “The source of their strength lies not in a single molecule — DNA — but in a complicated web of relationships. The network itself is the mystery for biologists in the 21st Century.”

Related Topics :
DNA Found to Have “Impossible” Telepathic Properties

Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current beliefs about what is possible, intact double-stranded DNA has the “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA. The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible.

I’ve found God says man who cracked human genome.

“I don’t see that as necessary at all and I think it is deeply disappointing that the shrill voices that occupy the extremes of this spectrum have dominated the stage for the past 20 years.”

For Collins, unravelling the human genome did not create a conflict in his mind. Instead, it allowed him to “glimpse at the workings of God”.

“When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it,” he said. “But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along.

“When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.”

Technorati Tags: DNA, Genes, Wired, Carl Zimmer, Collins, Genetics

written by Muhammad \\ tags: DNA, Genetics, Science

For anyone involved in Marketing in today’s times, it’s no understatement to say that it is sometimes downright confusing. Especially when you look at the three main weapons in the marketing arsenal today, Mass Marketing, Direct Marketing and Social Media Marketing. all three work according to very different rules and modes of operation.

I recently read this blog post which compared the Laws of Physics and how these three methods of marketing appropriately fit the explanations for the laws of physics.

Mass advertising is like Classical Physics; large-scale, mostly intuitive and somewhat predictable.

Direct Marketing is like Atomic Physics; small/medium-scale, mostly logical, but the segmentation aspects start to show some bumps and troughs on what appeared to be smooth and simple.

Social Media is more like Quantum Physics; small-scale, counter-intuitive and usually unpredictable.

• Traditional marketers deal with everyones opinions in big bins like sales figures, national focus groups, opinion polls, etc. These roll-ups average out the inconsistencies of individuals and blur together to form tendencies, trends and preferences. The actions taken in mass marketing can expect a relatively consistent result (i.e. send out a coupon and you can expect a certain level of redemption and sales revenue to come from it and the larger the audience, the more likely it is to average out at a predictable result). This is the world that marketers are familiar with and all-in-all it makes sense if you know the system.

• Social Media on the other hand acts on the niche and individual level where things are a lot less certain. The complex nature of blog posts is hard to parse out into definitive numbers and trends.The lack of large numbers makes the reaction and result of social media efforts difficult to determine and measure. It is much more difficult to roll up all of these disparate opinions into a meaningful decision than to look at an opinion pie-chart.So in essence, social media tools have given marketers a microscope powerful enough to see what is going on at smaller scales.

…many marketers in the classical camp are not very happy with what they see, because it doesn’t confirm what they thought they knew. Decisions which appear obvious when looking at large sample sizes becomes more nuanced and contradictory when you see everyone as an individual.

written by Muhammad \\ tags: Branding, Marketing, Science