cafecuriosity

Putting Surgical Innovation Under the Knife

Breaking news this week, as researchers declared, "Case closed." on the question of why eyelids sag with age. Now this isn't a topic that I normally find gripping, however it makes a compelling case for why professional practice needs to progress. The conventional surgical approach to sagging eyelids is to tighten either the muscle surrounding the eye or the ligament that holds the eyeball in place while spreading the fat present inside the eyelid around. Surgeons rarely actually remove fat during these procedures. Interestingly, there is no scientific evidence to show the muscle or ligament actually weakens with age! The culprit is increased fat deposits over time. To put this in context, 241,000 Americans sets of sagging eyelids went under the knife in 2007! Question is, how long will it take for this advance in theory to be reflected in surgical practice? It puts a new face on the old issue of dissemination of innovation.   http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/baggy-lower-eyelids-a-new-ucla-55830.aspx   Image: American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery

Rev Headless

Rev heads everywhere will be mourning. If the latest DARPA (U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) Urban Grand Challenge succeeds, we will be one step closer to the driver-less car. Thus, this competition represents a threat to an entire way of life in Australia's suburbs! The Urban Grand Challenge pits a robotic car against an urban driving environment. Teams from around the world will be competing for a $2 million prize. Each competing car is expected to obey traffic signs, road markings and cope with normal traffic rules - all without an onboard driver or remote control. Australia's Information and Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence is collaborating on robotics and advanced sensors with the University of Sydney, UTS and the University of California at Berkley to create a vehicle with artificial intelligence. No word yet on whether the downunder entry will be performing burnouts, doughnuts or circle work after the competition! Brace yourself Summer Nats! http://nicta.com.au/news/current/nicta_joins_the_sydney-berkeley_driving_team_to_compete_in_the_darpa_urban_grand_challenge   Image: 1. UTS's autonomous modified Ford Cruiser, University of Technology, Sydney 2. Volkswagen Tourareg the 2005 desert race winner, AFP 

Sundried Tide's Out

We often associate serendipity with happy chance discoveries. There are occasions, when the serendipitous outcome is not so flash. While we may love a sun-dried country, we're not so keen on sun-dried reefs. Back in 2005, researchers were taking students on a field trip to Orpheus Island (off the Queensland coast - lucky buggers!) when they noticed great swaths of coral were dying. Initially disease was suspected. After analysing coral samples, they realised the coral bleaching was a rare phenomenon - a Sundried Tide a type of natural disaster not previously recorded on the Great Barrier Reef. An unfortunately serendipitous combination of sunny weather, together with the moon's gravitational pull and the sun's position high overhead produced an extreme low tide in the middle of the day. Extreme UV exposure stressed the corals beyond their tolerance limits, resulting in devastated corals. Now the mystery has been removed and the weather and tidal chart data is in, extreme Sundried Tides are proving predictable beasts. At least we now know when the coral will be stressed beyond its ability to cope!   http://www.coralcoe.org.au/news_stories/sundried.html  Image: 1. Healthy reef, 2. Extreme low tide, Exposed reef, Orpheus Island, James Cook University/ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

Curious Migration

Speculation and imagination are both fuel curiosity and impede it. They fuel our desire to explore, to look to see what lies over the horizon and they also cause us to doubt those same discoveries and dispute them when they conflict with our perceptions of the possible and plausible. Civil war stopped wildlife conservation activity in Southern Sudan in 1982. Since then, in the absence of eyes on the ground dire predictions for the fate of wildlife in the region ran rampant. However, the first aerial survey in 25 years found over 1.3 million antelopes and gazelles spread out over 590,000 square kilometres on their annual migration in a column 80 km long x 48 km wide. Scientists also found 8,000 elephants, 2,800 ostriches, 8,900 buffalo. Nearly 4,000 Nile lechwe - an antelope found nowhere else was spotted. The animal's sheer numbers could eclipse the better known Serengeti migrations. West of the Nile River though, the apocalyptic vision proved more accurate, losing as much as 90% of animals. Overall though the picture is far less gloomy than experiences in Mozambique and Angola had predicted. Curiosity revealed what may be the largest annual migration on Earth, while researchers' imaginations were challenged by the vibrant scale of the herds and the depth of loss in the Southern National Park.  http://www.wcs.org/353624/wcs_southernsudan   http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/06/070611-sudan-animals.html  Image: Southern Sudan migrations, 1 Nile lehcwe, www.quantum-conservation.org 2 Oryx , 3.Tiang antelope, 4. Elephants, 5.Ostriches, Wildlife Conservation Society/National Geographic Magazine,

Bali's Hard Lessons Learned

It's well established that humans learn far more from failure than we ever do from success. It's seemingly one of the quirks of our brain's wiring. Few lessons came harder than the importance of mental health to the treatment mix in the aftermath of the Bali bombings. The 2002 bombing at Paddy's Bar and the Sari Club in Kuta was Australia's terrorism initiation. Staff at the Royal Darwin Hospital found themselves on the front line. Victims and medical staff alike experienced profound mental health problems immediately after the bombings. By the 2005 bombing, trauma care and psychiatric support were more closely linked and the hospital's ability to cope was significantly enhanced. So what were our lessons learned? Unsurprisingly, it revealed the need for experienced mental health professionals on-site ahead of the first influx of casualties. Secondly, medical staff was just as likely to need support as the victims themselves. Some staff became highly anxious waiting for the first victims to arrive. Still others reported smelling burnt flesh - a throwback to the chemical burns they associated with the 2002 bombing. Thirdly, the mental health nurses had to be become part of Royal Darwin Hospital and not just add-ons. In 2005 mental health nurses were on-site at Royal Darwin Hospital, supporting the staff during their wait for the first casualties to arrive. (In stress situations, anticipation and our empathy are not our friends!). Many victims couldn't eat because they associated meals with the explosion (the bomb went off around mealtime). Others experienced depersonalisation, disassociation, disbelief and anger. As with other emergency services situations, trauma responses improve the more those involved understand the experience ahead of them and adopt a holistic approach to dealing with crisis situations. The better prepared we are, the better our skills, the greater our resilience and ability to adapt and cope.  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1365-2850.2007.01068.  Image: 1. www.answrs.com, 2. www.afp.gov.au, 3. www.news.bbc.co.uk

Nature's Builders and Shapers

Humans tend to view ourselves as being at the pinnacle of inventiveness and creativity. However, as these three examples show, our scientists are drawing their inspiration from nature's design studio:

Dudes from Georgia Tech have replicated the complex nano structures of a butterfly wing. Zhong Lin Wang a Materials Science professor is looking to nature for the next generation of photonics, "We want to utilise biology as a template for making new materials and new structures." Butterfly colours are produced by combining pigments with reflections from photonic structures - a complicated way of saying they bend light. Based on the wing structure of Morpho peleides the Blue Morphos butterfly (an iridescent tropical butterfly found in Mexico, Central America, Paraguay and Trinidad), they used layers of aluminum oxide to replicate the optical properties of the wing scales. The team deposited tiny layers of aluminum oxide (0.1 nanometre at a time) onto butterfly scales. Then they heated the scales to 800 C crystalising the alumina and burning off the butterfly scale. What was left was a perfect miniature replica, complete with branching hollow tubes. Their ALD process opens the way for more efficient optical fibres and power transmission. By varying the thickness of the alumina coating, they shifted the original blue light across the colour spectrum to green, yellow, orange and pink. http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/release.php?id=1215  Image: 1. www.kaieteurpark.gov.gy, 2. Zhong Lin Wang

Still at Georgia Tech, their exploration of natural nanotechnology led them to micro-algae or diatoms. Diatoms are the most common form of phytoplankton and their fossils date back to the Jurassic. Not the most appealing of pets, these diatoms create intricate structures within their cell walls - and we have no idea how they do it. At the human scale they look - well, like brown slime on stones. However, the little buggers can assemble complex silicon dioxide based structures and they do it at room temperature (producing 20% of the world's organic carbon along the way). http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/release.php?id=1211  Image: 1.Thalassiosira pseudonana, Nils Kroger, 2. Marine diatoms, wikipedia

Parking the Memories

CafeCuriosity's memory has been dodgy ever since his parachuting accident. While I can't remember landing my memory of coming to, to find someone ripping me out of my parachute harness and peeling back my eyelids is quite vivid. Somewhere along the way, I lost the context around that total memory (having your head smashed into the ground at 40kph is likely to do that!)   It appears our memories are experienced as an event comprising multiple contextual details and we use a particular part of the brain to bind those contextual fragments together. As the director of University of Southern California's Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory puts it, "You can't get out of memory what you didn't put into it. It is not possible to remember things later if you didn't pay attention to them in the first place." In my case, being unconscious clearly interfered with my ability to pay attention!) The bit that binds our memories together and processes them in integrated form seems to be the intra-parietal sulcus, part of the parietal cortex. http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1539 Image: www.answers.com

Annoyingly, I can remember an accident 20 years ago but struggle to remember where I left my car in Sydney airport's long term car park. Columbia University research indicates too much memory makes it harder to filter out information and increases the time it takes for new stuff to bed down in the short-term memory. Ironically, the more new neurons the brain grows, the in the hippocampus, the poorer our working memory. We see forgetfulness as a problem when actually forgetting is important for normal cognition. Indeed, most scientists assumed new neurons were good for our memories. No so. Working memory is sensitive to previously stored information so new tasks require us to delete information from our short-term memory. This seeming contradiction was summed up by research scientist Gael Malleret, "those with better working memory may have fewer new neurons being developed in their hippocampus which helps them forget old and useless information sooner and enable them to take in new information faster." I hope I'll remember that next time I get off my plane and can't remember where I've parked my car!  http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/news/press_releases/malleret_pnas_memory.html  Image: www.brainconnection.com

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Intent Counts

CafeCuriosity has recently been slaving over an ERP strategy for a multinational manufacturing client. One of the potential performance barriers in migrating to a new system is always the ability and the desire of staff to learn the system. My client organisation is dynamic, flexible and has delivered impressive growth over through international acquisitions. However, it doesn't display many of the behaviours associated with effective learning. We all know the old rule of thumb, "one third learn by listening, one third learn by reading and one third learn by doing." Transferring system skills is heavily dependent on showing how the system interfaces with their routine work be it warehousing, logistics, batch manufacturing or finance, then have them replicate what they have seen themselves. I was grappling with the implementation approach for my clients rather relaxed operating culture, when I came across a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers from the University of Oregon investigated which part of the brain fires up when we watch a demonstration of a task we later intend to replicate. They found the intraparietal sulcus - the same part of the brain used in goal-related motor learning through real life physical practice does the heavy lifting in these learning situations. Interestingly, the intraparietal sulcus is the part of the brain we use when actually performing manual tasks. The researchers speculate that the intraparietal sulcus provides an indicator of how well an individual translates what they observe into actual performance. As with my client, intention is the key to learning, not just the visual stimulus provided by sexy screen displays and cool navigation. It's about desire! Now all I have to do is find a way to strap my clients into a magnetic resonance imaging facility and I'll be good to go! http://waddle.uoregon.edu/?id=651

Image:  1. Scott Grey, Uni of Oregon, Jim Barlow, 2. intraparietal sulcus

Exposing the Stasi's Invisible Ink

CafeCuriosity has an uncertain relationship with rules but a recent item from Michigan State University caused us to pause and ask a simple question, "Can a cool discovery made by a seriously uncool institution in the service of a decidedly uncool state be an acceptable development? Science historian Kristie Macredis came across an incomplete formula for invisible ink in the Stasi archives after they were declassified by the reunified German government in 1992. The Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit or Stasi was the German Democratic Republic's security and intelligence service. At its peak, the Stasi had 91,000 employees and 300,000 informants. An estimated one in 50 East Germans collaborated with the Stasi. After her discovery, Macredis approached chemists at MSU to map out the missing pieces of the formula. They found the Stasi's invisible ink worked like carbon paper. An agent placed paper impregnated with cerium oxalate between two pieces of plain paper. As the agent wrote, the chemical was transferred to the bottom sheet. Upon receipt, the paper was bathed in manganese sulphate, hydrogen peroxide and other chemicals. Hey presto, the concealed writing magically appears! Having visited East Germany, and learnt a little about the Stasi from a father-in-law who worked for the CIA despite the complication of a brother in East Germany, there's something disturbing uncool about MSU's setting up a "spy lab" to teach students about catalysis, redox reactions, kinetics and pH - even if the chemistry itself is very cool. Can you strip the source from knowledge and retain an ethical perspective? Values and morality may not define the acceptability of the discovery itself, but history shows unethical methods inevitably leave their mark on the discoverer! Just ask the medical researchers who reviewed data from the Nazi experiments into altitude sickness and hypothermia which produced countless victims amongst concentration camp inmates as part of the U.S. Air Force's high altitude test flight program and NASA's exploration of space medicine for the Mercury, Gemini and ultimately, the Apollo program. It wasn't just the Nazi's bad science they found distasteful!  http://newsroom.msu.edu/site/indexer/2898/content.htm

Image: Michigan State University

Cracking Human Exclusivity

We humans have an interesting take on what defines our humanity. Traditionally, we've viewed certain traits as being uniquely human - namely our ability to; select, form and manipulate tools, exploit local resources effectively by shaping our environment, process and work raw materials for secondary applications, continued habitation of select sites and our habit of moving materials over often large distances to the point of consumption. Scientists have enjoyed bickering over which stream of humanity represents the point of origin of these aptitudes for years and now we have another candidate! Researchers from the Max Planck Society recently found evidence that West African chimps were using stone tools 4,300 years ago - smack in the Late Stone Age. This find pushes chimpanzee tools use back thousands of years and poses a very confronting question, "Did tool use descend from a common ancestor instead of arising independently amongst hominids and champs?" Intriguingly, tool usage amongst chimps is communicated socially, thus current tool usage represents a behavioural chain stretching back many, many generations. Cool! http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2007/pressRelease20070207/index.html

Image: Juvenile chimpanzee takes a nut from an anvil, Christophe Boesch