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Trends
THIS UNIVERSE Prof Yash
Pal |
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Happiness with electrical current We all want to be happy in our life but it is rightly said that “it is simple to be happy but difficult to be simple”. Happiness is not only good for a healthy life style but also is work productive. We all derive happiness from various sources within and around us. With the growing materialistic lifestyle which is full of pressure, competition, workload and lack of free time, people are leading a stressful life which is taking them towards depression and happiness has become a thing of past. It is well accepted that lifestyle blessed with real happiness is beyond the scope of present day civilisation and thus, for depression free (or happy) life people are turning towards the use of anti-depression medicines/pills which may give momentary happiness but with lots of side effects. With the advances in bio-medical technology (application of science in human body), scientists have progressed well to understand the shock analysis (application of electric voltage to human body). Therefore, the most promising new treatment for severe depression isn’t a pill but is a permanent power packs implant that shocks the brain. This technology treats depression through deep-brain stimulation, a procedure in which two electrodes are implanted in the head. Most depression therapies address the disease as a kind of communications problem in the brain. When all is healthy, a neuron receives a chemical message from a neighboring neuron and dispatches a corresponding electrical signal along a nerve fiber called an axon. Then, at the other end, the neuron pumps chemicals on to the next cells. Drugs attempt to improve communication by altering chemical signals. Prozac, the popular antidepressant, blocks the action of a pump that sucks serotonin, a key mood-regulating chemical, out of the gaps between two neurons. This leaves more serotonin in those spaces, supposedly improving the flow of messages between neurons. Recent studies suggest that anti-depression pills work only 50 percent of the time—and they don’t do much at all for the millions who are severely depressed. Different anti-depression drugs are in use along with whole-brain shock technique known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). ECT—a treatment still used on many patients a year—floods the brain with electricity from the outside; this technique delivers a smaller dose of better-targeted current to an area of the brain believed to be a key regulator of mood. Wires thread beneath the skin from their place in the brain and plug into two battery-run stimulators implanted in the chest. About the size of an iPod nano, each stimulator constantly pumps out current, bathing a small region of brain tissue in electricity. Deep-brain stimulation (DBS) began as a treatment for movement disorders in the mid-1990s, and the surgery has been performed on more than 40,000 patients, most of them Parkinson’s sufferers, since then. Clinical trial of DBS– operating Diane Hire along with 16 other patients is among the first to tackle depression. Other major trials are under way at different places. For the past 20 years, Diane Hire (USA) has suffered from severe depression, a crippling strain of the disease that afflicts as many as four million people. Years of therapy, at least 10 different drugs and six courses of ECT the all failed to bring Hire lasting relief. Her final hope was the operation, this radical form of neurosurgery called deep-brain stimulation. Neurosurgeon Ali R. Rezai treated Diane Hire’s brain at Cleveland Clinic’s surgical center (USA) with this technology for the first time. If ECT is the equivalent of slapping defibrillators against a heart-attack victim’s chest, deep-brain stimulation is the pacemaker that prevents the attack in the first place. Deep-brain stimulation takes another approach, targeting the electrical signals that facilitate the chemical communication. In DBS the target is a chunk of neurons associated with energy and mood where the electrodes are lodged in the center of brain. At the signal, two volts of electricity, enough to power a wristwatch, course through the wires and radiate outward from the tip a few millimeters in every direction. Millions of neurons bask in the electricity, and the effect is fairly immediate. The patient feels warm at first, a bit flushed and then feels happy with a growing desire to do all sorts of things (i.e., full of energy). The exact mechanism affected is still undetermined, but scientists suspects that DBS works on axons, the central conduits of each nerve cell. These protein-sheathed fibers act like miniature telecommunications cables, passing messages from one end of a cell to the other. Added voltage may be increasing bandwidth in the axons, possibly allowing them to carry more information—and more of the right information. In the long run, it is hoped that identifying damaged axons could help scientists develop new methods of diagnosing and treating depression. The results of these limited tests of DBS are impressive so far. In 2005 the Toronto group found that four out of six patients showed significant improvements. Earlier this year, psychiatrist Thomas Schlaepfer’s group at the University of Bonn in Germany announced that all three of his patients were benefiting from the surgery. And the Cleveland-Brown collaboration reports improvements in 70 percent of their patients, half of whom are in complete remission. Medtronic, a company in Minneapolis that manufacturers the hardware for DBS, is working with the Food and Drug Administration to plan the largest study yet of depression and DBS. The Cleveland-Brown group is even starting to think about next-generation versions of the technology by developing versatile electrodes that send current in a specific direction. These would create a more targeted pulse, enabling the psychiatrist to further fine-tune the stimulation to suit the patient. Increasing failure of anti- depression drugs, therapy or ECT, reveal how little modern science really understands about depression. ECT treatment also failed to improve the mood and affected short-term memory, as a common sideeffect. When DBS seems to be a promising anti-depression therapy, it tends to raise thorny scientific and ethical questions. At present, in DBS technology, doctor himself uses a handheld device to tune the voltage and frequency of the stimulators implanted in the patient’s chest. Although patients might wish to manipulate the device themselves but experts say that self-control of DBS is unlikely as there’s a risk of cranking the volts too high, potentially causing brain damage. It may bother to have one’s mental health regulated by a machine as well as there will be the fundamental problem of delivering happiness on demand. The writer is from the Department of Physics, SLIET, Longowal |
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Trends As thousands looked on Tuesday, the inventor’s 16-year-old son donned a helmet, fastened himself to a prototype Martin jet pack and revved the engine, which sounded like a motorcycle. Harrison Martin eased about three feet off the ground, the engine roaring with a whine so loud that some kids covered their ears. With two spotters preventing the jet pack from drifting in a mild wind, the pilot hovered for 45 seconds and then set the device down as the audience applauded. The Martin jet pack can — in theory — fly an average-sized pilot about 30 miles in 30 minutes on a full 5-gallon tank of gas. —
AP
2100-year-old “computer” Experts from Britain, Greece and the United States said they have detected the word “Olympia” on a bronze dial, as well as the names of other games in ancient Greece on the device known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Their findings were reported on Thursday in the British science journal Nature. The 2,100-year-old Antikythera Mechanism was recovered from an ancient shipwreck in 1901 near
Antikythera, a small island off Greece’s south coast. — AP
Liquid confirmed on Titan Scientists positively identified the presence of ethane, according to a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which manages the Cassini mission exploring Saturn, its rings and moons. — AP |
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THIS UNIVERSE We say the universe is expanding, but where is it expanding? I have also read about contraction of space with time, can you give a description of that? As far as your first question is concerned, one can say that you cannot even define a space outside the universe. So the answer would be that the universe is expanding into the space it is creating! I am afraid I cannot give the answer to your second question without your knowing a little about relativity. In general, do not seek answers to one line questions – instead, seek to understand. You cannot escape studying and reading. One line answers might be good for quiz programs but counterproductive for understanding and learning. Why is humid air lighter than dry air? Humid air contains more water vapours and therefore should be heavier than dry air. I do not know whether you are familiar with high school chemistry or physics. But you know that a molecule of water contains two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. Its molecular weight is therefore Why are we able to balance only a moving bicycle and not a cycle at rest? I think I have answered this earlier. Incidentally it would be useful if you search the archives of The Tribune for my answers to several of your questions. But let me not be rude and give you a short answer to your important query. In order to ensure that the bicycle does not fall off you have to ensure that the centre of mass (of you and bicycle together) does not fall outside the line joining the ground contact points of the two wheels. The only way to ensure this is to somehow keep moving the contact line as required. This is almost impossible to do when you are stationary. But when the bicycle is moving you learn to tilt the direction of motion of the front wheel in the direction towards which you were about to fall. This happens automatically when you learn to bicycle. This has an important implication. It is difficult to remain stable when you are not moving. All stability is actually dynamic. Think about this a little.
Readers wanting to ask Prof Yash Pal a question can e-mail him at palyash.pal@gmail.com
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This isn’t how a jet pack is supposed to look, is it? Hollywood has envisioned jet packs as upside-down fire extinguishers strapped to people’s backs. But Glenn Martin’s invention is far more unwieldy — a 250-pound piano-sized contraption that people settle into rather than strap on.
An astronomical calculator, considered a technological marvel of antiquity, was also used to track dates of the ancient Olympic games, researchers have found.
At least one of many large, lake-like features on Saturn’s moon Titan studied by the international Cassini spacecraft contains liquid hydrocarbons, making it the only body in the solar system besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface, NASA said Wednesday.