Megatons To Megawatts: Russian Warheads Fuel U.S. Power Plants

On By A.P.In Cold War, energy, Nuclear Power, Philip Sewell, Ray Gaudette, Russia, uranium, WarLeave a comment

warheads

Here’s a remarckable fact: For the past two decades, 10 percent of all the electricity consumed in the United States has come from Russian nuclear warheads.

It was all part of a deal struck at the end of the Cold War. That deal wraps up today, when the final shipment of fuel arrives at a U.S. facility.

The origins of the plan lie in the early 1990s. At the time, Philip Sewell was working for the U.S. Department of Energy. The Soviet Union had just disintegrated, and Sewell’s job was to find ways to collaborate with the former adversaries. In practice, this involved driving out into the Russian countryside, to military facilities that weren’t even on the map. When Sewell got there, what he saw wasn’t pretty.

“Windows were broken, gates were not locked, and there were very few people around,” Sewell says.

But inside these crumbling buildings, the Russian government stored the uranium from thousands of decommissioned nuclear weapons. It seemed like practically anyone could walk off with stuff for a bomb. Sewell and his colleagues wanted to get rid of this uranium. So they decided to try to persuade the Russians to sell their surplus to the U.S. After all, the stuff was just lying around.

Initially, the Russians refused. “It was a matter of pride, principle and patriotism,” Sewell says. “Even though they didn’t need that excess material, [and] they didn’t have the money to protect it, they didn’t want to let go of it.”
But in the end they did let go. For one reason: money.

“Russia’s nuclear industry badly needed the funding,” says Anton Khlopkov, the director of the Center for Energy and Security Studies outside Moscow. He says Russia’s nuclear complex had nearly a million workers who weren’t getting paid a living wage.

So, in 1993 the deal was struck: The Russians would turn about 500 tons of bomb-grade uranium into nuclear fuel. The U.S. would buy it and sell it to commercial power plants here. Khlopkov says it was a win-win. “This is the only time in history when disarmament was actually profitable,” he says.

Very profitable. The Russians made around $17 billion. Sewell’s government office was spun off into a private company — the United States Enrichment Corporation — and made money from the deal too. And the U.S. power plants got the uranium at a good price.

But all good things must come to an end, says Matthew Bunn at Harvard University. “Russia is a totally different place today than it was twenty years ago,” Bunn says. “As the Russian government is fond of saying, they’re ‘no longer on their knees.’ ”

Still Bunn says this deal will go down in history as one of the greatest diplomatic achievements ever.

“I mean, think about it – 20,000 bombs’ worth of nuclear material, destroyed forever,” he says. “[Bombs that] will never threaten anybody ever again.”

The last shipment arrives today at a US storage facility. It will be sold off to utilities in coming years. So when you turn on the lights, feel good. Your bulb may be powered by what was once a bomb.

http://www.npr.org/2013/12/11/250007526/megatons-to-megawatts-russian-warheads-fuel-u-s-power-plants

Thanks to Ray Gaudette for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Uruguay becomes first nation to legalize of all aspects of marijuana trade

On By A.P.In Drugs, Jose Mujica, Kebmodee, marijuana, South America, UruguayLeave a comment

pot

Uruguay’s Senate, on Tuesday, approved the legalization of marijuana in the country—including the growing, sale and smoking—making it the first nation to sanction all aspects of the pot industry. Previously, the use of marijuana was legal in the South American country, but cultivation and sale of the drug were not.

The newly passed, government-backed bill will now provide for government regulation of all aspects of the marijuana trade with an eye on “wresting the business from criminals,” according to Reuters. “The bill gives authorities 120 days to set up a drug control board that will regulate cultivation standards, fix the price and monitor consumption.” Uruguayan president Jose Mujica is a supporter of a legal national market for marijuana, but the measure has yet to win over a majority of the 3-plus million people in the country. A recent poll, Reuters reports, found that 58 percent of Uruguayans are opposed to legalization.

Here’s more from Reuters on what the law will look like on the ground once it goes into effect:

Cannabis consumers will be able to buy a maximum of 40 grams (1.4 ounces) each month from licensed pharmacies as long as they are Uruguayan residents over the age of 18 and registered on a government database that will monitor their monthly purchases. When the law is implemented in 120 days, Uruguayans will be able to grow six marijuana plants in their homes a year, or as much as 480 grams (about 17 ounces), and form smoking clubs of 15 to 45 members that can grow up to 99 plants per year. Registered drug users should be able to start buying marijuana over the counter from licensed pharmacies in April.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/12/10/uruguay_sets_up_a_national_marketplace_for_marijuana_the_world_s_first.html

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Netflix has a plan to rewire our entire culture

On By A.P.In David Fincher, Netflix, Nielsen, Reed Hastings, SRW, Ted Sarandos, Vladimir Nabokov1 Comment

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Given all the faces you see glued to computers, tablets, and cell phones, you might think that people watch much less television than they used to. You would be wrong. According to Nielsen, Americans on average consume nearly five hours of TV every day, a number that has actually gone up since the 1990s. That works out to about 34 hours a week and almost 1,800 hours per year, more than the average French person spends working. The vast majority of that time is still spent in front of a standard television, watching live or prescheduled programming. Two decades into the Internet revolution, despite economic challenges and cosmetic upgrades, the ancient regime survives, remaining both the nation’s dominant medium and one of its most immutable.

And that’s why what Netflix is trying to do is so audacious. For the past two years, the Silicon Valley company has been making a major push into original programming, putting out an ambitious slate of shows that have cost Netflix, which had profits of $17 million in 2012, hundreds of millions of dollars. Because of the relative quality of some of those series, such as “House of Cards” (a multiple Emmy winner) and “Orange Is the New Black,” they’ve been widely interpreted as part of an attempt to become another HBO. Because every episode of every show is made available to watch right away, they’re also seen as simply a new twist in on-demand viewing. But in fact the company has embarked upon a venture more radical than any before it. It may even be more radical than Netflix itself realizes.

History has shown that minor changes in viewing patterns can have enormous cultural spillovers. CNN can average as few as 400,000 viewers at any given moment—but imagine what the country might be like if cable news had never come along. Netflix’s gambit, aped by Amazon Studios and other imitators, is to replace the traditional TV model with one dictated by the behaviors and values of the Internet generation. Instead of feeding a collective identity with broadly appealing content, the streamers imagine a culture united by shared tastes rather than arbitrary time slots. Pursuing a strategy that runs counter to many of Hollywood’s most deep-seated hierarchies and norms, Netflix seeks nothing less than to reprogram Americans themselves. What will happen to our mass culture if it succeeds?

Vladimir Nabokov believed that humanity’s highest yearning ought to be to leave behind any desire to be up-to-date, to be unconcerned with what is happening now. As he put it in his notes to Pale Fire: “Time without consciousness—lower animal world; time with consciousness—man; consciousness without time—some still higher state.”

The business of entertainment has not generally shared Nabokov’s view. It values timeliness above all, creating a hierarchy so fundamental that it resembles natural law: New is better than old, live trumps prerecorded, original episodes always beat reruns. That’s overwhelmingly obvious in sports and news, and accounts for the manufactured ephemerality of reality and talent shows. Yet it is also implicit in dramas and sitcoms, with their premieres, finite seasons, and finales. The rule holds fast for film as well. From its opening weekend in major theaters, through nearly two years of “release windows,” a movie drifts downward through airlines, hotels, DVDs, cable and network television, and the Internet, decaying in perceived worth.

The desire to be current is in some sense human nature. But when it comes to viewing choices, it also arises from the specific history and revenue model of the entertainment business. In its early years, television was necessarily live, for the technology of broadcasting preceded effective and cheap recording technologies. The first popular shows, like “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” were short serial dramas designed to keep audiences on a fixed daily schedule, each episode ending with some aspect of the plot unresolved. If you missed an installment, you missed it forever and might lose the big story in the bargain.

In normal markets, the most popular products aren’t necessarily the most profitable (think Louis Vuitton). But on network television, where the prices charged for advertising depend on ratings, comparative popularity matters a lot. If some sense of newness or urgency can get viewers from the desired demographic to tune in to one channel rather than another, that can make the difference between success or failure. The upshot is a business whose highest ambition is to get enormous groups of people watching the same thing at the same time: “event television.”

Atop this eventocracy are productions like the Super Bowl or the Oscars, which by managing to grab much of the nation therefore command the highest ad rates, about $4 million and $2 million, respectively. That compares with the $77,000 per spot that “30 Rock,” a smart but under-watched series, commanded at the end of its run. The premium on audience size orients creative decisions toward an ideal embodied by a Jay Leno monologue, avoidant of controversy or anything too weird or challenging. TV shows, in the words of economist Harold Vogel, are “scheduled interruptions of marketing bulletins.” And television itself, as Walter Lippmann, a founder of this magazine, put it, has long been “the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising.”

The Internet—while it has its own desires for attention—has always been a different animal. One way or another, it tends to thwart efforts to gather lots of users at the same time and same virtual place. The first “YouTube Music Awards,” stuffed with celebrities, attracted 220,000 live viewers, compared with more than ten million for MTV’s version. During the men’s 100-meter-dash final at the London Olympics, Web viewers groaned as NBC’s Web video lapsed into “buffer mode.”

Online, people are far more loyal to their interests and obsessions than an externally imposed schedule. While they may end up seeing the same stuff as other viewers, it happens incrementally, through recommendation algorithms and personal endorsements relayed over Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and e-mails. New content is like snowfall, some of it melting away, some of it sticking and gradually accumulating. The YouTube Music Awards may have been a bust as a live show, but within two weeks, the production had racked up 3.5 million views.

When I spoke with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in August, I noticed a subtle but significant shift in nomenclature: He had begun to refer to the company not as a tech start-up or a new media venture, but instead as a “network.” To claim that mantle is not a trivial thing. The National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) pioneered our understanding of what the concept means back in 1926, when it partnered with AT&T to create the first lasting national broadcast network. Until then, American home entertainment had been necessarily local—radio stations, technologically, only reached their host city or community. The founding idea of NBC was to offer a single, higher-quality product to the whole country. It was an idea of a piece with the late 1920s and 1930s, before fascism became unfashionable and nationalism was all the rage. A mighty and unifying medium fit with an era during which Fortune would praise Benito Mussolini as presenting “the virtue of force and centralized government acting without conflict for the whole nation at once.” The national network was an effective way to put people on a common daily cultural diet.

Claiming network status was also a bold move for Netflix just based on its track record alone; not so long ago, it was a struggling DVD rental company whose cachet came from its distinctive red envelopes and pretty good website. One wonders how much the shift really was planned, a question on which Hastings and chief content officer Ted Sarandos disagree. “When I met Reed in 1999,” Sarandos told me, “part of our first conversations were about the potential for original programming.” Hastings demurs, calling that “generous.” “What was planned all along was really just the evolution to streaming,” he says, “and thus the name of the company: Netflix, not DVDbymail.com.”

Netflix’s transition from delivering movies and TV shows through the U.S. Postal Service to beaming them over high-speed connections began in 2007 and is a well-known story. Less known is how Netflix found its way into the content business, a risky move that has embarrassed many tech firms. In the ’90s, Panasonic, a capable-enough maker of camcorders, acquired a precursor to Universal, only to have to jettison the entertainment studio a few year later. Around the same time, Microsoft, then at its most flush, blew billions creating content that for the most part vanished so fast that not even a Bing search could find it today.

But Netflix, without grabbing many headlines, had actually spent a long time preparing for its current chapter. While it is headquartered in Silicon Valley, the company opened an office in Beverly Hills in 2002, a bid to achieve a certain California bilingualism. Sarandos, who has overseen that southern outpost, spent his formative years working in a strip-mall video-rental shop and is upbeat and easy to talk to. He is a fluent Southern Californian, unlike Hastings, who’s known for his impatience with slow or muddy thinkers.

Throughout the early 2000s, Sarandos experimented with small content deals. Once, while attending a software convention, he ran into a guy named Stu Pollard who had self-financed a romantic comedy named Nice Guys Sleep Alone, the many extra copies of which he now had stored in his garage.

“He gave me his movie, and he said, ‘I’ve got ten thousand of these if you’re interested,’ ” Sarandos recalls. He watched the film, decided it wasn’t terrible, or at least “on par with a lot of the romantic comedies we were distributing.” Sarandos agreed to take 500 discs, pursuant to a revenue share, creating what might be called the first Netflix semi-exclusive.

Sarandos’s acquisitions budget, originally $100,000 a year, swelled as Netflix became a regular at Sundance and other film festivals. Under the name Red Envelope Entertainment, Netflix bought the rights to independent films such as Born into Brothels, a 2004 documentary about the children of Calcutta prostitutes (it won an Academy Award), and Super High Me, a documentary about the effects of smoking weed heavily for a month (sperm count and verbal SAT scores both went up; math scores suffered). When it acquired these films, Netflix added them to its own catalogue but did not keep the content entirely for itself, instead trying to distribute it as widely as possible. For Super High Me, that included sponsoring viewing parties for stoners.

In 2008, after acquiring about 115 films, Netflix folded Red Envelope and let go of several employees. Sarandos, at the time, gave good reasons for Netflix’s retreat. “The best role we play,” he said, “is connecting the film to the audience, not as a financier, not as a producer, not as an outside distributor or marketer.” It was the statement of a tech company sobering up.

Yet just a few years later, Netflix abruptly reversed course again. The company had finally passed 20 million subscribers. To thrive over the long term, it would need many more. At the same time, it now had enough scale to try a different way of using new content to lure them. “When a big company does a little bit of music, or a little bit of video, and it’s not essential to their future, it’s almost assured that they won’t do it well,” says Hastings. “It’s a dabble.” To make its first major original series, Netflix shelled out $100 million. It would not be dabbling.

In 2011, when independent studio Media Rights Capital shopped the American remake of a modestly successful British political drama named “House of Cards,” Netflix didn’t bother to attend its presentation to the networks. Instead, Sarandos got in touch with David Fincher, the Oscar-winning director of The Social Network, who’d been tapped to make the show. “We want the series,” Sarandos told him, “and I’m going to pitch you on why you should sell it to us.” Aware of the challenge of convincing a famous auteur to bring his talents to a medium more commonly known for cat videos, Netflix promised a lot: Fincher, though he’d never directed a TV series before, would enjoy enormous creative control. And rather than putting the show through the normal pilot process, the company would commit to two 13-episode seasons up front. It was nearly as aggressive with “Orange Is the New Black,” ordering a second season of the show—a subversive drama set in a women’s prison, featuring a notably motley cast—before the first was even available.

If those were big gambles, they were also calculated ones. Whatever it calls itself, Netflix still has tech-company DNA; its game, in part, is data. Much more so than a network that reaches viewers through a third-party cable operator like Comcast or Time Warner, it knows what its customers actually like and how they behave. To the consternation of entertainment reporters, Netflix never reveals just what its numbers say (or anything resembling ratings), but Sarandos says its process for “House of Cards” worked roughly like this: “We read lots of data to figure out how popular Kevin Spacey was over his entire output of movies. How many people actually highly rate four or five of them?” Then his team did the same for David Fincher. If you liked The Social Network, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Fight Club, “you’re probably a Fincher fan—you probably don’t know it, but you are,” he says. Once the company has a sense of how many fans are out there, it can “more accurately predict the absolute market size for a show.” And when you can do that, you don’t have to worry about pandering to, or offending, the masses.

Right now, American viewers are averaging only about 45 minutes of Internet-streaming video per week, a blip in comparison with total television intake. Given that audiences trained for decades to respond to event-driven television, how realistic is it to expect more viewers to shift from traditional TV? John Steinbeck offered one answer: “It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.” Any historian of consumer technology would add that machines change much faster than people.

Television in particular moves so slowly that the last time the concept of the network really came up for grabs was the late ’70s. That’s when Ted Turner (the Turner Broadcasting System), Pat Robertson (the Christian Broadcast Network), and the founders of HBO successfully used satellites to begin to beam programming to cable subscribers. The ensuing frenzy resulted in the launch of a dozen networks, including ESPN, MTV, CNN, Discovery, and Bravo. Most of those channels are still around, not necessarily because of the strength of their programming, but because the reigning content hierarchy has been so entrenched.

Netflix believes it has a powerful factor in its favor as it tries to change viewers’ habits. “Human beings like control,” says Sarandos. “To make all of America do the same thing at the same time is enormously inefficient, ridiculously expensive, and most of the time, not a very satisfying experience.” There is a freedom achieved when your options extend beyond that night’s offerings and the limited selection of past episodes that networks make available on demand. Specifically, it’s the freedom to only watch television you really enjoy. The crude novelty factor that compels people to try “Whitney” or “Smash” ultimately yields a lot of disappointed and frustrated viewers. An old episode of “Freaks and Geeks” or “The West Wing” might in fact be more worth your time—a message Netflix has pressed in a recent ad campaign promoting its collections of classic series and cult hits. Eventually—or so goes the strategy—people won’t be able to imagine having their options defined by a programming grid. Not coincidentally, Netflix has been vying with Amazon to become the premiere source of streaming series for young children, for whom having to wait for new episodes of their favorite shows to air is unfathomable.

While Netflix’s first few original series have been aimed at connoisseurs of high- or at least upper-middle-brow fare, its philosophy might be best captured by its co-production of “Derek,” a show that skews toward less sophisticated sensibilities. “Derek”is a Ricky Gervais sitcom revolving around the staff and residents of a small nursing home in England. The show, to put it mildly, does not have the usual indicia of widespread appeal. It might be described as the opposite of “Baywatch”—the setting is bleak, the stars ugly and often annoying, the dialogue sometimes incomprehensible to American ears.

And then there’s Gervais himself. He did serve for three years as the host of the Golden Globes, a paragon of event programming and water-cooler culture. Yet in that role, he was deemed a failure, his humor too edgy and offensive. Selling the masses on a series featuring Gervais playing the part of a weird man with greasy hair who likes hamster videos would be a losing proposition—but that’s not what Netflix is doing. To the company, it doesn’t matter if you’ve never heard of the show, or even know anyone who has. All that matters is that it wins the approval of Gervais loyalists, whom, the data must show, are a large enough Netflix population to justify the investment. Similarly, the names Luke Cage and Jessica Jones may mean nothing to you, but they do to comic-book fans, which is why Netflix just worked out a deal to create series based on them and two other Marvel superheroes.

Netflix’s transformation would of course be impossible without the path blazed by premium cable. HBO pioneered the subscription-fee model (though it collects from cable companies rather than directly from consumers) and its success made possible the specialized programming on other premium networks, like AMC and the rest. The DVD box set gave hard-core enthusiasts the first taste of the binge-viewing that is a Netflix trademark. The company’s achievement is to bring it all together and target the entire TV-watching population—not just a few selected die-hards, but every individual based on his or her own interests and obsessions.

And from that a picture of the not-too-distant TV future emerges. What remains of live programming is reserved for sports programming, breaking news stories, talent contests, and the big awards shows. Nearly all scripted shows become streaming shows, whether they are produced or aggregated by Netflix or Amazon, CBS or a (finally unbundled) HBO—or even an unexpected entrant such as Target, which recently launched a Netflix competitor. The new networks compete based on the their ability to make the right original programming decisions and secure the best old shows, as well as the prescience of their recommendation engines. But ultimately they’re all just selling access to piles of content to be perused at the viewer’s desire. Oddly enough, it’s a vision that actually makes television a lot more like the rest of retail. Or, more specifically, not unlike the old-style video-rental stores where Sarandos started his career, but super-sized for a new era.

Through the sheer number of hours watched and the dictation of evening routines—not to mention the way people orient entire rooms around the shiny screens placed at the center of their homes—network television played a singular role in creating American mass culture over the last 60 years. It now does the same in sustaining its vestiges. In the absence of a generation-defining genre—the rock of the 1960s, the rap of the 1990s—today’s pop hits flit through radio dials and iTunes playlists, catchy but ephemeral. Blockbuster movies and books are few these days, and the windows during which they command widespread attention brief. But television, despite the fragmenting influence of the Web and proliferating cable channels, continues to bind us more than any other medium. That’s why, should Netflix and the other streamers even partially succeed at redefining the network as we know it, the effects will be so profound.

If modern American popular culture was built on a central pillar of mainstream entertainment flanked by smaller subcultures, what stands to replace it is a very different infrastructure, one comprising islands of fandom. With no standard daily cultural diet, we’ll tilt even more from a country united by shows like “I Love Lucy” or “Friends” toward one where people claim more personalized allegiances, such as to the particular bunch of viewers who are obsessed with “Game of Thrones” or who somehow find Ricky Gervais unfailingly hysterical, as opposed to painfully offensive.

The baby-boomer intellectuals who lament the erosion of shared values are right: Something will be lost in the transition. At the water cooler or wedding reception or cocktail party or kid’s soccer game, conversations that were once a venue for mutual experiences will become even more strained as chatter about last night’s overtime thriller or “Seinfeld” shenanigans is replaced by grasping for common ground. (“Have you heard of ‘The Defenders’? Yeah? What episode are you on?”) At a deeper level, a country already polarized by the echo chambers of ideologically driven journalism and social media will find itself with even less to agree on.

But it’s not all cause for dismay. Community lost can be community gained, and as mass culture weakens, it creates openings for the cohorts that can otherwise get crowded out. When you meet someone with the same particular passions and sensibility, the sense of connection can be profound. Smaller communities of fans, forged from shared perspectives, offer a more genuine sense of belonging than a national identity born of geographical happenstance.

Whether a future based fundamentally on fandom is superior in any objective sense is impossible to say. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the whole idea of one great entertainment medium that unites the country isn’t really that old a tradition, particularly American, nor necessarily noble. We may come to remember it as a twentieth-century quirk, born of particular business models and an obsession with national unity indelibly tied to darker projects. The whole ideal of “forging one people” is not entirely benevolent and has always been at odds with a country meant to be the home of the free.

Certainly, a culture where niche supplants mass hews closer to the original vision of the Americas, of a new continent truly open to whatever diverse and eccentric groups showed up. The United States was once, almost by definition, a place without a dominant national identity. As it revolutionizes television, Netflix is merely helping to return us to that past.

Tim Wu, a New Republic contributing editor, is a professor at Columbia Law School, and the author, most recently, of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.

Thanks to SRW for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

John McKetta, Jr.: A Journey To Greatness Started In A Coal Mine

On By A.P.In Angola, Burton Handy, chemical engineering, Donald Katz, Dow Chemical, Dr. Rajadhyaksha, Forrest Preece, George Granger Brown, Indiana, International Chemical Engineering Award, John McKetta, Johnny Jay and the Kampus Kollegians, Jr., McKetta and Katz tables, Pennsylvania, Pinky Smith, Ray Bodie, Texas, Tri-State University, University of Texas, West Austin News1 Comment

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More-about-McKetta-1

More-about-McKetta-2

By Forrest Preece
West Austin News

Part 1

In 1903, a 14-year-old Ukrainian boy named John McKetta packed a suitcase and headed for Pennsylvania for $25, ($15 of which he gave to his father), a job in the coal mines, and a place to live.

That youngster had a lot on his mind – mainly how to survive in a new country and how to adjust to working deep underground for long hours. It’s doubtful he would have imagined his namesake son would become the world’s most prominent chemical engineer; receive the “International Chemical Engineering Award” in Venice, Italy; be one of the most revered professors ever to teach at The University of Texas, with a large academic department named after him; and serve as an energy adviser to five United States presidents. All of that would take a while.

When John, Jr., the subject of this column, was born in 1915, he faced the bleak prospect of finishing public school and then a lifetime of backbreaking work in the coal mines. That was the only career option – six days a week in the mines – the same as his father and uncle and the other men in Wyano, Pa., population 200. But before John could start the first grade, he and the other kids his age had to learn English. So they began a month early, were given primers, and they could all speak English when it was time for school to start. (“It can be done — that’s why I don’t like the idea of having double-language schools,” he says.)

For three years after he finished high school, John, Jr. went 475 feet underground into a seven-foot coal vein, six days a week.
”At least we could stand up! The men in Kentucky were in four-foot veins and had to stoop and crawl around all day,” he says.

During those three years, the most he ever made in a week was $3, based on 25 cents per ton of coal he brought out of the ground. In that era, the workers had no electric equipment to use. It was strictly pick-and-shovel manual labor.

“I hated every minute of it,” John says.

Then one day, he saw a book that changed his life. It was by a man named Porter about the process of carbonization that extracted energy from coal.

“There were people called chemical engineers who made this happen,” John says. “I wanted to be one of them.”

So he obtained a list of colleges in the country that had chemical engineering programs and determined to keep writing to them until one would accept him. With no typewriter or even a pen to use, he kept grinding out pencil-written letters.

”About the best I could do was three or four letters a night.”

Of the first 54 colleges he applied to, none even gave him the courtesy of a rejection letter. Finally, President Burton Handy of Tri-State University in Angola, Indiana wrote him back. His letter said, “If we admit you, we will provide you with a job that will help you pay for your tuition and your lodging. Please come talk to us.”

That was on a Friday. The next day, he put $10.20 in his pocket and hitchhiked across Ohio to Indiana.

“In those days, people would pick up a kid with a suitcase.”

When he arrived on Monday, he made a beeline for the registrar’s office. When he got there, he gave the receptionist his name. She flipped through her files, looked startled and said, “Oh yes, Mr. McKetta, President Handy wants to see you.”

John says that the president leaped out of his chair, came over and gave him a slap on the back. “He admired me for being willing to apply.”

The upshot of the conversation they then had was that John would have a job making twenty cents an hour, twenty hours a week. Of that $4.00 total weekly salary, he’d pay $2.00 for tuition and $2.00 for a room at a house off campus run by a lady named Mrs. Nichols.

After meeting Mrs. Nichols, and seeing his room that he’d be sharing, he decided to get a cup of coffee at a local diner. As it happened, the owner of the diner was just preparing a “Dishwasher Wanted” sign to put in his window. John asked about it and found out that it paid no money, but for every hour worked, it meant a free meal. He took the job and was just beaming over all his good fortune.

Then things got even better. He ran into a local bandleader named Ray Bodie who needed a second trumpet and John had played that instrument in the Wyano Volunteer Fire Department Band.

He told Bodie that he could sit in on Wednesday and Saturday nights, if he could find a trumpet to use. That was even more income. A year later, he started his own 12-piece band called JJKK – “Johnny Jay and the Kampus Kollegians” an, started playing gigs all over the thriving 3,000-person metropolis of Angola.

He paid himself $1.01 (sometimes $1.50) and hi musicians got 75 cents for their performances. All the while, he was diligently studying every night and he kept a coal miner’s cap on his desk for a very good reason.

“When some of the guy would ask me to go shoot pool, I’d just look at that cap and remember being in the mine and say ‘No, I have to study.”

Part 2
What can you say about a 98-year-old college professor who still goes to his office at The University of Texas at Austin three days a week, around 6 a.m. and stays for several hours to visit with researchers? Who still calls eight to ten of his former students a day -and laments how fast they are dying? And who still operates at a level of energy and good-hearted enthusiasm that would shame most 40- year-olds?

John McKetta, Jr. does all of that and more. In a recent interview with him at his apartment at Westninster Manor, where he has resided for eight years, John told me about his life. It has been quite a journey: from his post-high school years laboring in the coal mines of rural Pennsylvania to his career in chemical engineering, where he gained worldwide recognition for his teaching, research, publications and administrative ability.

He also told me about his family: his beloved wife Helen “Pinky” McKetta, who he married in 1943 and who passed away in 2011; his sons Charles, Mike and Randy and his daughter Mary Anne.

If you read part one of my column about him last week, you know that through dogged perseverance, he was accepted as a student at Tri-State University in Angola, Indiana, where he excelled in the chemical engineering program.

“The faculty members were so wonderful to me! And when I graduated, they got me job at the Michigan Alkali, CO. in Wyandotte, Michigan, near Detroit.”

His work there was exciting, but he started hearing about this company called Dow that was doing amazing things in the realm of producing chemicals from gas and oil.

Dr. George Granger Brown (or as he was jokingly called, “Great God” Brown), was a chief consultant to Dow and the chairman of the chemical engineering department at the University of Michigan. One day John drove his 1928 Ford up to meet this notable man. Soon he was a student again, working toward his Ph.D.

One night in an off-campus coffee shop, he met Pinky Smith, the love of his life. Who married him a few months later. Her name still crawls across his home office’s computer screen.

While he was at Michigan doing his Ph.D. research, John and one of his professors, Dr. Donald Katz, developed a set of tables relating to underground temperature and pressure in gas and oil wells that reveal the composition of the surrounding terrain. These McKetta and Katz tables are still in widespread use.

Partially thanks to his desire to be “where the oil and gas was underground,” he came to Texas. Besides that, Dow Chemical in Freeport was doing amazing things.

“God was with me when I decided to come to Texas and I got hired at the University in 1946.”

John would progress up the ladder at UT from assistant professor to professor, to chairman of the Department of Chemical Engineering to dean of the College of Engineering.

For a while, he was executive vice-chancellor for the UT system under Chancellor Harry Ransom. That was during the period when they were establishing UT Permian Basin, UT Dallas, UT El Paso and UT San Antonio and John was the key executive in that effort.

One conversation John recalls from his early days on the faculty is when, in 1948, he was having lunch with his colleagues in the College of Engineering and Professor Bill Cunningham (not the man who would later be president of UT) brought in a list of the top 50 engineering schools. UT wasn’t on it; Rice was number 26.

He laughs and says, “As of last year, we were number four on a similar list. For 40 years, he was on the payroll and taught at UT for another 20 years, he donated his time to teaching courses.

Also, with the $6,900,000 in the McKetta Fund which he established with a $964,000 personal gift, many outstanding students have scholarships so they concentrate on their studies. “It’s just wonderful for these students to have this financial support,” he says.

What changes has he seen in his field? He warms to the subject of bioengineering which is a topic that only recently has come to the fore.

“Forrest, when I wave my hand at you like this, there are something like 80,000 cells in my body involved. Your whole body is a chemical plant.”

Long story short, there are researchers at UT Austin who are zeroing in on being able to provide pinpointed medication to the parts of the body that cure certain diseases. John says that years ago, he went to the chairman of the board of directors of St. David’s Hospital and asked him to bring some of his MDs over to talk to the engineering faculty on a regular, voluntary basis about bioengineering.

Something like 80 percent of his engineering faculty members showed up for the talks, because they were all interested in this new field of research.

As a result, now there is a new $60,000,000 Bioengineering Building on the UT Austin campus. So what advice would he give to a student starting in engineering? First, they have to be interested in the field. And he says that there are two traits he looks for: curiosity and “judicious discontent.”

“I like kids who ask ‘why’ and ‘what can I do about it?’”

One last note – for many years, Dr. McKetta kept a miner’s cap on his UT office desk, as a reminder of how much better it is to be a professor than working in the mines. Oh – and being a Longhorn football fan to the max, he says that Mack Brown is going to have a terrific season this year.

http://www.che.utexas.edu/2013/09/06/a-journey-to-greatness-started-in-a-coal-mine/

Thanks to Dr. Rajadhyaksha for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Study reveals gene expression changes with meditation

On By A.P.In Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, DNA, Dr. D, epigenetics, gene, IIBB-CSIC-IDIBAPS, Medicine, Meditation, mindfullness, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Perla Kaliman, Psychoneuroendocrinology, Richard J. Davidson, Science, Spain, The Brain, University of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin-MadisonLeave a comment

meditation

With evidence growing that meditation can have beneficial health effects, scientists have sought to understand how these practices physically affect the body.

A new study by researchers in Wisconsin, Spain, and France reports the first evidence of specific molecular changes in the body following a period of mindfulness meditation.

The study investigated the effects of a day of intensive mindfulness practice in a group of experienced meditators, compared to a group of untrained control subjects who engaged in quiet non-meditative activities. After eight hours of mindfulness practice, the meditators showed a range of genetic and molecular differences, including altered levels of gene-regulating machinery and reduced levels of pro-inflammatory genes, which in turn correlated with faster physical recovery from a stressful situation.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that shows rapid alterations in gene expression within subjects associated with mindfulness meditation practice,” says study author Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Most interestingly, the changes were observed in genes that are the current targets of anti-inflammatory and analgesic drugs,” says Perla Kaliman, first author of the article and a researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona, Spain (IIBB-CSIC-IDIBAPS), where the molecular analyses were conducted.

The study was published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Mindfulness-based trainings have shown beneficial effects on inflammatory disorders in prior clinical studies and are endorsed by the American Heart Association as a preventative intervention. The new results provide a possible biological mechanism for therapeutic effects.

The results show a down-regulation of genes that have been implicated in inflammation. The affected genes include the pro-inflammatory genes RIPK2 and COX2 as well as several histone deacetylase (HDAC) genes, which regulate the activity of other genes epigenetically by removing a type of chemical tag. What’s more, the extent to which some of those genes were downregulated was associated with faster cortisol recovery to a social stress test involving an impromptu speech and tasks requiring mental calculations performed in front of an audience and video camera.

Perhaps surprisingly, the researchers say, there was no difference in the tested genes between the two groups of people at the start of the study. The observed effects were seen only in the meditators following mindfulness practice. In addition, several other DNA-modifying genes showed no differences between groups, suggesting that the mindfulness practice specifically affected certain regulatory pathways.

However, it is important to note that the study was not designed to distinguish any effects of long-term meditation training from those of a single day of practice. Instead, the key result is that meditators experienced genetic changes following mindfulness practice that were not seen in the non-meditating group after other quiet activities — an outcome providing proof of principle that mindfulness practice can lead to epigenetic alterations of the genome.

Previous studies in rodents and in people have shown dynamic epigenetic responses to physical stimuli such as stress, diet, or exercise within just a few hours.

“Our genes are quite dynamic in their expression and these results suggest that the calmness of our mind can actually have a potential influence on their expression,” Davidson says.

“The regulation of HDACs and inflammatory pathways may represent some of the mechanisms underlying the therapeutic potential of mindfulness-based interventions,” Kaliman says. “Our findings set the foundation for future studies to further assess meditation strategies for the treatment of chronic inflammatory conditions.”

Study funding came from National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (grant number P01-AT004952) and grants from the Fetzer Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, and an anonymous donor to Davidson. The study was conducted at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the UW-Madison Waisman Center.

http://www.news.wisc.edu/22370

Thanks to Dr. D for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Enormous alien planet discovered in most distant orbit ever seen

On By A.P.In astronomy, Exoplanets, HD 106906 b, Jupiter, Space and Time, University of Arizona, Vanessa BaileyLeave a comment

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An enormous alien planet — one that is 11 times more massive than Jupiter — was discovered in the most distant orbit yet found around a single parent star.

The newfound exoplanet, dubbed HD 106906 b, dwarfs any planetary body in the solar system, and circles its star at a distance that is 650 times the average distance between the Earth and the sun. The existence of such a massive and distantly orbiting planet raises new questions about how these bizarre worlds are formed, the researchers said.

“This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see,” study lead researcher Vanessa Bailey, a fifth-year graduate student in the University of Arizona’s department of astronomy, said in a statement.

In the most commonly accepted theories of planet formation, it is thought that planets that orbit close to their parent star, such as Earth, began as small, asteroid-type bodies that clumped together in the primordial disk of gas and dust around the burgeoning star. Yet, this process operates too slowly to explain how giant planets form far away from their star, the researcher said.

Alternative hypotheses have suggested that distant giant planets may form in ways similar to mini binary star systems, Bailey said.

“A binary star system can be formed when two adjacent clumps of gas collapse more or less independently to form stars, and these stars are close enough to each other to exert a mutual gravitation attraction and bind them together in an orbit,” she explained.

In the HD 106906 system, the star and planet may have collapsed independently, but the materials that clumped together to form the planet were insufficient for it to grow large enough to ignite into a new star, Bailey said.

But, there are still problems with this scenario. For one, difference between the masses of two stars in a binary system is typically no more than a ratio of 10 to 1.

“In our case, the mass ratio is more than 100-to-1,” Bailey said. “This extreme mass ratio is not predicted from binary star formation theories — just like planet formation theory predicts that we cannot form planets so far from the host star.”

Researchers are also keen to study the new planet, because leftover material from when the planet and star formed can still be detected.

“Systems like this one, where we have additional information about the environment in which the planet resides, have the potential to help us disentangle the various formation models,” Bailey said. “Future observations of the planet’s orbital motion and the primary star’s debris disk may help answer that question.”

The planet HD 106906 b is only 13 million years old, and is still glowing from the residual heat from its formation,” the researchers said. By comparison, Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, which makes it roughly 350 times older than the newfound exoplanet.

The planet was found using a thermal infrared camera mounted on the Magellan telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The researchers used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm their discovery.

The study, which has been accepted for publication in a future issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could lead to a better understanding of distantly orbiting exoplanets.

“Every new directly detected planet pushes our understanding of how and where planets can form,” study co-investigator Tiffany Meshkat, a graduate student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, said in a statement. “Discoveries like HD 106906 b provide us with a deeper understanding of the diversity of other planetary systems.”

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/enormous-alien-planet-discovered-most-distant-orbit-ever-seen-2D11703497

Thanks to Dr. D for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Sleep therapy becoming increasingly important in depression treatment

On By A.P.In Aaron T. Beck, American Psychological Association, Anxiety, brain, CBT, CBT-I, cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, Colleen Carney, Department of Veterans Affairs, Depression, insomnia, John M. Oldham, Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Medicine, Menninger Clinic, Michael T. Smith, Montefiore Medical Center, Neuropsychiatric Disease, psychiatrist, Psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, Ryerson University, Shelby Harris, Sleep, sleep psychology, Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine2 Comments

Insomnia-Electronic-Cigarettes

An insomnia therapy that scientists just reported could double the effectiveness of depression treatment is not widely available nor particularly well understood by psychiatrists or the public. The American Board of Sleep Medicine has certified just 400 practitioners in the United States to administer it, and they are sparse, even in big cities.

That may change soon, however. Four rigorous studies of the treatment are nearing completion and due to be reported in coming months. In the past year, the American Psychological Association recognized sleep psychology as a specialty, and the Department of Veterans Affairs began a program to train about 600 sleep specialists. So-called insomnia disorder is defined as at least three months of poor sleep that causes problems at work, at home or in relationships.

The need is great: Depression is the most common mood disorder, affecting some 18 million Americans in any given year, and most have insomnia.

“I think it’s increasingly likely that this kind of sleep therapy will be used as a possible complement to standard care,” said Dr. John M. Oldham, chief of staff at the Menninger Clinic in Houston. “We are the court of last resort for the most difficult-to-treat patients, and I think sleep problems have been extremely underrecognized as a critical factor.”

The treatment, known as cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I, is not widely available. Most insurers cover it, and the rates for private practitioners are roughly the same as for any psychotherapy, ranging from $100 to $250 an hour, depending on the therapist.

“There aren’t many of us doing this therapy,” said Shelby Harris, the director of the behavioral sleep medicine program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, who also has a private practice in Tarrytown, N.Y. “I feel like we all know each other.”

According to preliminary results, one of the four studies has found that when CBT-I cures insomnia — it does so 40 percent to 50 percent of the time, previous work suggests — it powerfully complements the effect of antidepressant drugs.

“There’s been a huge recognition that insomnia cuts across a wide variety of medical disorders, and there’s a need to address it,” said Michael T. Smith, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and president of the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine.

The therapy is easy to teach, said Colleen Carney, director of the sleep and depression lab at Ryerson University in Toronto, whose presentation at a conference of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies in Nashville on Saturday raised hopes for depression treatment. “In the study we did, I trained students to administer the therapy,” she said in an interview, “and the patients in the study got just four sessions.”

CBT-I is not a single technique but a collection of complementary ideas. Some date to the 1970s, others are more recent. One is called stimulus control, which involves breaking the association between being in bed and activities like watching television or eating. Another is sleep restriction: setting a regular “sleep window” and working to stick to it. The therapist typically has patients track their efforts on a standardized form called a sleep diary. Patients record bedtimes and when they wake up each day, as well as their perceptions about quality of sleep and number of awakenings. To this the therapist might add common-sense advice like reducing caffeine and alcohol intake, and making sure the bedroom is dark and quiet.

Those three elements — stimulus control, restriction and common sense — can do the trick for many patients. For those who need more, the therapist applies cognitive therapy — a means of challenging self-defeating assumptions. Patients fill out a standard questionnaire that asks how strongly they agree with statements like: “Without an adequate night’s sleep, I can hardly function the next day”; “I believe insomnia is the result of a chemical imbalance”; and “Medication is probably the only solution to sleeplessness.” In sessions, people learn to challenge those beliefs, using evidence from their own experiences.

“If someone has the belief that if they don’t sleep, they’ll somehow fail the next day, I’ll ask, ‘What does failure mean? You’ll be slower at work, not get everything done, not make dinner?’ ” Dr. Harris said. “Then we’ll look at the 300 nights they didn’t sleep well over the past few years and find out they managed; it might not have been as pleasant as they liked, but they did not fail. That’s how we challenge those kinds of thoughts.”

Dr. Aaron T. Beck, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania who is recognized as the father of cognitive therapy for mental disorders, said the techniques were just as applicable to sleep problems. “In fact, I have used it myself when I occasionally have insomnia,” he said by email.

In short-term studies of a month or two, CBT-I has been about as effective as prescription sleeping pills. But it appears to have more staying power. “There’s no data to show that if you take a sleeping pill — and then stop taking it — that you’ll still be good six months later,” said Jack Edinger, a professor at National Jewish Health in Denver and an author, with Dr. Carney, of “Overcoming Insomnia: A Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Approach.”

“It might happen, but those certainly aren’t the people who come through my door,” he said.

Dr. Edinger and others say that those who respond well to CBT-I usually do so quickly — in an average of four sessions, and rarely more than eight. “You’re not going to break the bank doing this stuff; it’s not a marriage,” he said. “You do it for a fixed amount of time, and then you’re done. Once you’ve got the skills, they don’t go away.”

Six things Nelson Mandela believed most people won’t want to talk about

On By A.P.In American imperialism, apartheid, Dr. D, Fidel Castro, George Bush, Iraq War, Kofi Annan, Malcom X, Mandela, Muammar Gaddafi, Nelson Mandela, Osama bin Laden, poverty, racism, slavery, South Africa, War on Terror, Yasser Arafat1 Comment

nelson-mandela-headshot-500px

In the desire to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s life — an iconic figure who triumphed over South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime — it’s tempting to homogenize his views into something everyone can support. This is not, however, an accurate representation of the man.

Mandela was a political activist and agitator. He did not shy away from controversy and he did not seek — or obtain — universal approval. Before and after his release from prison, he embraced an unabashedly progressive and provocative platform. As one commentator put it shortly after the announcement of the freedom fighter’s death, “Mandela will never, ever be your minstrel. Over the next few days you will try so, so hard to make him something he was not, and you will fail. You will try to smooth him, to sandblast him, to take away his Malcolm X. You will try to hide his anger from view.”

As the world remembers Mandela, here are some of the things he believed that many will gloss over.

1. Mandela blasted the Iraq War and American imperialism. Mandela called Bush “a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly,” and accused him of “wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust” by going to war in Iraq. “All that (Mr. Bush) wants is Iraqi oil,” he said. Mandela even speculated that then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan was being undermined in the process because he was black. “They never did that when secretary-generals were white,” he said. He saw the Iraq War as a greater problem of American imperialism around the world. “If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care,” he said.

2. Mandela called freedom from poverty a “fundamental human right.” Mandela considered poverty one of the greatest evils in the world, and spoke out against inequality everywhere. “Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times — times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation — that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils,” he said. He considered ending poverty a basic human duty: “Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life,” he said. “While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.”

3. Mandela criticized the “War on Terror” and the labeling of individuals as terrorists without due process. On the U.S. terrorist watch list until 2008 himself, Mandela was an outspoken critic of President George W. Bush’s war on terror. He warned against rushing to label terrorists without due process. While forcefully calling for Osama bin Laden to be brought to justice, Mandela remarked, “The labeling of Osama bin Laden as the terrorist responsible for those acts before he had been tried and convicted could also be seen as undermining some of the basic tenets of the rule of law.”

4. Mandela called out racism in America. On a trip to New York City in 1990, Mandela made a point of visiting Harlem and praising African Americans’ struggles against “the injustices of racist discrimination and economic equality.” He reminded a larger crowd at Yankee Stadium that racism was not exclusively a South African phenomenon. “As we enter the last decade of the 20th century, it is intolerable, unacceptable, that the cancer of racism is still eating away at the fabric of societies in different parts of our planet,” he said. “All of us, black and white, should spare no effort in our struggle against all forms and manifestations of racism, wherever and whenever it rears its ugly head.”

5. Mandela embraced some of America’s biggest political enemies. Mandela incited shock and anger in many American communities for refusing to denounce Cuban dictator Fidel Castro or Libyan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who had lent their support to Mandela against South African apartheid. “One of the mistakes the Western world makes is to think that their enemies should be our enemies,” he explained to an American TV audience. “We have our own struggle.” He added that those leaders “are placing resources at our disposal to win the struggle.” He also called the controversial Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat “a comrade in arms.”

6. Mandela was a die-hard supporter of labor unions. Mandela visited the Detroit auto workers union when touring the U.S., immediately claiming kinship with them. “Sisters and brothers, friends and comrades, the man who is speaking is not a stranger here,” he said. “The man who is speaking is a member of the UAW. I am your flesh and blood.”

http://thinkprogress.org/home/2013/12/06/3030781/nelson-mandela-believed-people-wont-talk/

Thanks to Dr. D for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Electric brain stimulation in a specific area discovered to induce a sense of determination

On By A.P.In aMCC, anterior midcingulate cortex, brain, Depression, determination, epilepsy, Josef Parvizi, Kebmodee, motivation, neural activity, neural prosthetics, neurologist, Neurology, Neuron, neuroplasticity, neuroprosthetic device, Neuropsychiatric Disease, Neuropsychopharmacology, Neuroscience, neuroscientist, neurosurgeon, neurosurgery, neurotransmitter, neurotrophin, Stanford, The FutureLeave a comment

Doctors in the US have induced feelings of intense determination in two men by stimulating a part of their brains with gentle electric currents.

The men were having a routine procedure to locate regions in their brains that caused epileptic seizures when they felt their heart rates rise, a sense of foreboding, and an overwhelming desire to persevere against a looming hardship.

The remarkable findings could help researchers develop treatments for depression and other disorders where people are debilitated by a lack of motivation.

One patient said the feeling was like driving a car into a raging storm. When his brain was stimulated, he sensed a shaking in his chest and a surge in his pulse. In six trials, he felt the same sensations time and again.

Comparing the feelings to a frantic drive towards a storm, the patient said: “You’re only halfway there and you have no other way to turn around and go back, you have to keep going forward.”

When asked by doctors to elaborate on whether the feeling was good or bad, he said: “It was more of a positive thing, like push harder, push harder, push harder to try and get through this.”

A second patient had similar feelings when his brain was stimulated in the same region, called the anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC). He felt worried that something terrible was about to happen, but knew he had to fight and not give up, according to a case study in the journal Neuron.

Both men were having an exploratory procedure to find the focal point in their brains that caused them to suffer epileptic fits. In the procedure, doctors sink fine electrodes deep into different parts of the brain and stimulate them with tiny electrical currents until the patient senses the “aura” that precedes a seizure. Often, seizures can be treated by removing tissue from this part of the brain.

“In the very first patient this was something very unexpected, and we didn’t report it,” said Josef Parvizi at Stanford University in California. But then I was doing functional mapping on the second patient and he suddenly experienced a very similar thing.”

“Its extraordinary that two individuals with very different past experiences respond in a similar way to one or two seconds of very low intensity electricity delivered to the same area of their brain. These patients are normal individuals, they have their IQ, they have their jobs. We are not reporting these findings in sick brains,” Parvizi said.

The men were stimulated with between two and eight milliamps of electrical current, but in tests the doctors administered sham stimulation too. In the sham tests, they told the patients they were about to stimulate the brain, but had switched off the electical supply. In these cases, the men reported no changes to their feelings. The sensation was only induced in a small area of the brain, and vanished when doctors implanted electrodes just five millimetres away.

Parvizi said a crucial follow-up experiment will be to test whether stimulation of the brain region really makes people more determined, or simply creates the sensation of perseverance. If future studies replicate the findings, stimulation of the brain region – perhaps without the need for brain-penetrating electrodes – could be used to help people with severe depression.

The anterior midcingulate cortex seems to be important in helping us select responses and make decisions in light of the feedback we get. Brent Vogt, a neurobiologist at Boston University, said patients with chronic pain and obsessive-compulsive disorder have already been treated by destroying part of the aMCC. “Why not stimulate it? If this would enhance relieving depression, for example, let’s go,” he said.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/05/determination-electrical-brain-stimulation

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Trapped in an Underwater Air Bubble for Three Days

On By A.P.In air bubble, Aristotle, Brooklyn Bridge, California, Chevron, diving bell, Harrison Okene, Henry’s law, Kebmodee, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Maxim Umansky, Nigeria, ocean, Phlebas the Phoenician, PoseidonLeave a comment

Being buried alive is usually near the top of any worst-ways-to-die list. But how about being buried alive 100 feet below the ocean surface in a tiny pocket of air? For Harrison Okene, a 29-year-old Nigerian boat cook, this nightmare scenario became a reality for nearly three grueling days.

The story began on May 26 at about 4:30 a.m., when Harrison Okene got up to use the restroom. His vessel, a Chevron oil service tugboat called the AHT Jascon-4, swayed in the choppy Atlantic waters just off the coast of Nigeria. What caused the tugboat to capsize remains a mystery, though a Chevron official later blamed a “sudden ocean swell.”

Okene was thrown from the crew restroom as the ship turned over. Water streamed in and swept him through the vessel’s bowels until he found himself in the toilet of an officer’s cabin. As the ship settled on the ocean floor, the water stopped rising. For the next 60 hours, Okene—who was without food, water, or light—listened to the sounds of ocean creatures scavenging through the ship on his dead crewmates. Like a living Phlebas the Phoenician, he recounted his life’s events while growing more resigned to his fate.

Unbelievably, Okene survived his underwater ordeal long enough to be rescued. Basic physics, it turned out, was on Okene’s side the whole time—even if Poseidon wasn’t.

When Maxim Umansky, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, read about Okene’s miraculous rescue, his interest was piqued. “For a physics question, it’s an interesting problem,” said Umansky. “Of course, I’m also glad the man survived and happy with the ending of his story.”

Umansky began conducting his own calculations to quantify the factors responsible for Okene’s survival. He also posed a question to a physics Web forum: How large does a bubble have to be to sustain a person with breathable air?

Okene’s salvation—the air bubble—was trapped because the overturned boat acted as a sort of diving bell, the cup-shaped chambers that have transported explorers and workers into the depths for centuries. In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle described the contraptions as enabling “the divers to respire equally well by letting down a cauldron, for this does not fill with water, but retains the air, for it is forced straight down into the water.” Years later, diving bells called caissons helped 19th-century workers construct the Brooklyn Bridge (though many died in the process).

Whether in a bell or boat, trapped air rises to the top of a concave chamber. The only way it can escape is by diffusing through the water itself, one molecule at a time. Eventually this would happen, but Okene would have succumbed to thirst, hypothermia, or asphyxiation long before his air bubble diffused into the ocean.

Fans of horror movies will note that asphyxiation typically claims victims of live burial. Carbon dioxide accounts for about 0.03 percent of normal air. If someone is trapped in an enclosed space, however, exhaling CO2 with every breath, the proportion of oxygen steadily decreases while the level of carbon dioxide increases. It’s the deadly CO2, not the lack of oxygen, that ultimately kills a person. Once the air reaches around 5 percent CO2, the victim becomes confused and panicked, starts hyperventilating, and eventually loses consciousness. Death follows. In an enclosed coffin, a person may produce deadly levels of carbon dioxide within two hours or so.

But Okene didn’t asphyxiate despite being trapped in a small, sealed space for 60 hours. How was this possible?

The water encapsulating his air bubble may have played a small role in his survival. Carbon dioxide, more so than oxygen or nitrogen, readily dissolves into water—especially cold water. The rate at which this occurs follows Henry’s law, a physics rule that states that the solubility of gas in a liquid is proportional to the pressure of the gas above the liquid. Disturbing the water’s surface, which increases its surface area, likewise increases the rate of transport of gaseous CO2 into the liquid. But if the volume of gas were too small to begin with—in other words, if deadly CO2 built up faster than it could diffuse away—that process wouldn’t have made much of a difference for Okene.

Humans require 10 cubic meters of air per day. So for Okene to continue breathing for 60 hours, he needed 25 cubic meters of air. (Even if his metabolism changed in the cold water, Umansky says, this is still a safe estimate). But Okene was breathing at 100 feet, or 30 meters, below the surface of the water. For every 10 meters a person descends, one atmosphere of pressure is added. This compresses gas and makes it denser, according to Boyle’s law.

Since Okene was trapped at 30 meters below the surface, his air supply became denser by a factor of four. This means he needed only 6 cubic meters of air to survive rather than 25 cubic meters. A space of about 6 feet by 10 feet by 3 feet would be sufficient to supply that amount of air. The press reported that Okene’s chamber was only about 4 feet high, and Umansky speculates that it must have been connected to another air pocket under the hull of the boat. “That’s the most reasonable explanation for this miraculous survival,” he said.

In a lively discussion on the physics forum, about a dozen participants offered their own calculations and observations. One user, Anna V., came up with a slightly larger figure for the bubble’s required size, about 10 feet by 25 feet by 25 feet. An enclosure of this size “is a reasonable one on a tugboat,” she writes. “He was just lucky the air siphoned where he was trapped.”

Other people have survived short periods underwater breathing trapped air. In 1991 diver Michael Proudfoot reportedly spent two days in an air pocket on a sunken ship off the coast of California after he accidentally smashed his scuba gear. Okene likely holds the new record for most time spent trapped underwater. After his rescue, he had to spend another 60 hours in a decompression chamber to rid his body of excess nitrogen, and some of his skin peeled off from soaking in salt water for so long. As one of his friends understatedly wrote on Okene’s Facebook wall, “I feel sorry for u that happened man.” Dozens of other friends and family members thank God and Jesus for looking out for Okene, though perhaps a hat tip to physics is in order, too.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/06/harrison_okene_s_shipwreck_air_bubble_how_could_he_survive_underwater_for.html

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.