There was an interesting little piece in The New York Times a few days ago about how architects are increasingly relying upon findings in cognitive neuroscience as they develop their designs. At least, that’s what it claimed to be about. The story begins:
“A revolution in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape architects and urban designers shape our built environment.”
The story presents some intriguing architectural examples, though the piece itself is long on ideas and short on actual science. But fear not, data seekers! I wrote a feature for Scientific American Mind a few years back about this very topic. It covers findings on how our bodies and brains are affected by building layout, outdoor views, room color and lots more. Read it online at Scientific American Mind [behind a paywall] or download a PDF here.
By this point, I no longer need to tell you that I have been woefully remiss in my blogging duties of late. You have, no doubt, witnessed it with your own eyes. But I offer this quick post to provide four things:
1. An Apology
I’m sorry. I regret not blogging more frequently this fall. I do miss it, in fact, and have a list of ideas for posts I’d like to write. I’m sorry that my posts have been so few and far between.
2. An Explanation
Wither has my blogging energy gone? It’s simple–to my book. It’s been a busy fall, book-wise, and the deadline for my manuscript is now less than three months away. (Eek!) I’ve been working on the book pretty much nonstop over the last few months, and my frenetic pace of work hasn’t left much time or energy for blogging here.
3. A Warning
Things may get worse before they get better. With my deadline fast approaching, I think that my working life is about to even crazier. And I fear that my neglect of this blog will only grow.
4. A Promise
I will try and post when I can over the next few months. And as soon as I’ve wrapped up this whole book thing, I will return to blogging at full force. I love writing here, and I look forward to having more time to devote to it. This hiatus, will, I promise, be temporary.
Thanks for your patience and understanding. I can’t wait to meet you all back here in a few months.
It’s been more than a month since my story on animal prostheses ran in Wired, and I continue to get mail about it. Many of the messages contain heartwarming stories that testify to the strength of the human-animal bond, but an e-mail I got last week, in particular, stood out. (And so, with the author’s permission, I am reprinting part of his e-mail here.)
The e-mail was from Billy Rountree, an orthotic and prosthetic practioner assistant in Texas and a former employee of a company called ProsthetiCare. In his e-mail, Rountree recounted how he came into contact with a miniature horse named Midnite, who was missing part of his back leg. The staff of Rand Hand Rescue, the animal sanctuary where Midnite lived, hoped that outfitting the equine with a prosthetic would keep him from having to be euthanized. Continue reading »
After my last post, about injured animals outfitted with prosthetics, several people wrote me asking why I didn’t write about a famous pair of prosthetic-wearing elephants in Thailand. Unfortunately, I didn’t have room to cover these pachyderms in the Wired piece–space was extremely limited–but my correspondents are right: the animals do deserve more attention.
The elephants in question are Motala and Mosha–both lost their legs when they stepped on land mines. The animals were lucky enough to come into the care of Soraida Salwala, the founder of the Friends of the Asian Elephant Hospital in Lampang, Thailand. Though the recovery process was lengthy, both elephants are now tramping around on prosthetic legs, an amazing feat when you consider the weight that their artificial limbs must bear.
Of course, there’s much more to this remarkable story. Fortunately, Mosha and Motala have found an able chronicler, in the form of Windy Borman, who is making a documentary about the animals and the Friends of the Asian Elephant hospital. The film, called The Eyes of Thailand, is currently in post-production, and Borman hopes it will debut on the festival circuit next year. When the film’s premiere gets closer, I’ll be doing a Q&A with Borman–which will appear right here on this blog. So stay tuned. Until then, check out the trailer, below, and head on over to the film’s website to learn more.
My Wired piece about the weird and wacky world of animal prosthetics is finally out! And it looks stunning! (Thanks to the photographer and the Wired design team, not to me. I’m just the word girl.) In the actual hard copy of the magazine, the four-page photo spread, features three animals with prosthetics, but the online version is slightly extended–and depicts two extra animals not seen in the magazine. So be sure to check out the online bonus material.
The piece provides a quick glimpse into the veterinarians and prosthetists who are designing artificial limbs and body parts for injured animals. The piece grew out of my interviews with Kevin Carroll, Vice President of Hanger Prosthetics and Orthotics based in Austin, Texas and one of the world’s leading human prosthetists. (He consulted on the case of Oscar Pistorius, the controversial double-amputee sprinter from South Africa, and many of his patients are Paralympic Games medalists.)
Carroll, however, spends his night and weekends treating—for free—another class of patients: amputee animals. Over the years he has designed prosthetics for dogs, ducks, ostriches, storks, “whatever comes our way,” he says. He’s not the only one. There are now several animal-only prosthetic companies and clinics; one, the Denver-based OrthoPets, outfits an average of 150 animals a month with an orthotic or prosthetic. Material scientists have now created a prosthetic eagle beak; turtle shell; kangaroo foot and hundreds of dog and cat paws.
Animal bodies, of course, are radically different from our own, which is precisely what makes the wild kingdom such a hotbed of prosthetic innovation. With injured fauna, engineers are no longer bound by convention and tradition—in fact, success often requires ingenuity. Unable to just pop a human leg onto a kangaroo, for instance, or an elephant, or a crane, Carroll and his colleagues have to custom-design and individually
engineer each prosthetic. This sometimes involves creating new materials, joints, or structures that have never been used in prosthetics before. Add to that the fact that veterinarians can implement a new idea nearly instantaneously, without having to wade through the lengthy and costly clinical trials required for humans, and you have a recipe for innovation. Continue reading »
Erin Biba has a great story in the new issue of Wired about the latest DIY movement: do-it-yourself biotech. The feature peeks into the growing universe of “biohackers”–curious science enthusiasts who are finding ways to tinker with genes, brains, and bodies in basements or garages and on shoestring budgets.
One set of subjects, in particular, caught my eye: Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo. The pair, former neuroscience post-docs who met at the University of Michigan, run a company called Backyard Brains, which provides low-cost equipment that allows students and amateurs to become neuroscientists for a day (or month!). By pure coincidence, I had met the Backyard Brains boys just days before coming across the Wired article. One chapter of my upcoming book is about cyborg animals, and Gage and Marzullo’s latest product is the RoboRoach, a small kit of electronics that allow any interested amateur turn a living cockroach into a remote-controlled toy.
But the company’s first–and most successful–product is a little contraption known as the SpikerBox. On sale for $90, the device allows customers to observe neurons firing in a cockroach in real time. The SpikerBox has electrodes that can pick up on the electrical activity in a roach’s leg; this neural activity can then be transmitted through a speaker, as sound, or to the screen of an attached iPhone, as that characteristic visual pattern of peaks and valleys.
Gage and Marzullo came up with the idea for the SpikerBox–and their company in general–after being frustrated by the high barrier of entry to neuroscience. In some ways, Gage says, neuroscience is the opposite of astronomy, a field that amateurs can really sink their teeth into.You often have to be an advanced undergraduate to even observe the electrical activity of neurons. “It’s the equivalent of only being able to look at the moon through a telescope if you get a PhD in astronomy,” Gage told me.
The pair hopes that by allowing kids and students to really dig in there and interact with the brain–and see and hear–neurons in action, they can inspire new generations of neuroscientists. (The company’s motto, emblazoned on its custom-made circuit boards, and elsewhere, is “Neuroscience for Everyone!”)
The sentiment really resonates with me. For years, I wanted to be a neuroscientist, and I slogged through hours of organic chemistry lab in hopes that one day, I might get to do something like listen in on neurons or hijack an insect’s nervous system. I gave up on neuroscience before I got within miles of a brain. Perhaps, if I’d been able to play around with a SpikerBox, it would have gotten me excited enough about a career in laboratory neuroscience to prompt me to just grit my teeth through all those interminable hours of orgo.
Back in June, Eliza Gray, a reporter at The New Republic, had a remarkable cover story on transgender rights, which she called “America’s next great civil rights struggle. (Yes, I know I’m late in covering this, but I’ve been out of commission for most of the summer. And now that I’m back, I don’t want to miss the chance to talk about the story.)
The entire story is remarkable–and eye-opening and gut-wrenching look at the vast struggles still faced by transgendered and transsexual Americans, who have largely been excluded from much of the progress made in the realm of gay rights.
But I am, of course, a science writer, and one part of the story, in particular, really caught my eye. Eliza spent a lot of time with 56-year-old Caroline Temmermand, who is transitioning from male to female. One part of Caroline’s transition, it turns out, involved speech therapy.
…Every week, Caroline also attends voice lessons at a clinic in Washington, D.C. When it comes to vocal adjustment, transitioning male-to-females have a tough time, because estrogen does not make the voice higher. And there is a lot more to speech than hormones. Men speak in monotones, using volume instead of pitch to emphasize different syllables, with their heads perpendicular to their shoulders, while women tilt and move their heads and speak in rising and falling pitches. Male voices originate in the chest, female voices in the throat. This is the difference between a man who speaks in falsetto and a man who learns how to really speak like a woman.
I watched from an observation room as a clinician sat at a computer that monitors pitch and asked Caroline to hold certain vowel sounds for as long as she could. To me, her voice sounded quite feminine, but Caroline was tough on herself: After one assessment, she guessed that her pitch was 145. (Anything between 145 and 165 is considered gender neutral.) The clinician reassured her: The real number was 198, very close to the average range of feminine pitch of 210-220. Caroline then read a passage selected to contain all the sounds in the English language. This time, her average pitch was 177, just above gender neutral. “I still can’t find my voice,” says Caroline, disappointed. She also had work to do on her laugh, her cough, and her sneeze.
I know Eliza socially, and she told me that the story, in fact, began as a piece focused on speech therapy for transgendered people. Ultimately, the story became something broader and more ambitious–and wonderful–but it left me wanting more about the science of speech therapy for people who are transitioning. Eliza has generously agreed to field some questions on the topic. An edited version of our discussion follows. Continue reading »
Ramadan, the Islamic holy month during which Muslims fast during daylight hours, began last week. But Ramadan is more than a holiday–it’s also a unique research opportunity. The month provides a large population of people who are fighting against their normal circadian rhythms, eating and being active mostly when it’s dark. Back in 2007, I wrote a story for The Boston Globe about what scientists were learning by studying how the body adjusts to this topsy-turvy month.In honor of Ramadan, here’s a good chunk of that story:
During Ramadan, Muslims eat and get more active just when their bodies are used to winding down, creating sleep disruptions, hormonal changes, and sometimes mood impacts.
“Their biological clocks are no longer in harmony with their watches,” said Yvan Touitou, a chronobiologist at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. “Ramadan is capable of desynchronizing people.”
Touitou’s research has illustrated that Ramadan can alter the usual circadian patterns of cortisol, a stress hormone, and testosterone, with sharper decreases of these hormones in the morning and later rises at night – though the impact of these rhythm disruptions is unclear.
The holiday also changes the schedule of the release of leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite and weight, and decreases the peak levels of melatonin, a hormone released at night to induce sleep. Interestingly, despite the disruption in leptin and in daily eating patterns, Ramadan rarely causes significant changes in body weight. Investigating why this is the case could yield useful insights into human energy metabolism, said Tom Reilly, a sports scientist at Liverpool John Moores University in England who has studied circadian rhythms and Ramadan. Continue reading »
Emily Anthes is a freelance science and health writer. Her work has appeared in Scientific American Mind, Psychology Today, Seed, Slate, Discover, Popular Mechanics, New York, Good, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. More>>
