SCIENCE! Thousands of it. Let’s go, shall well?

Nicotine exposure in the womb leads to addiction susceptibility as an adult.

A recent study found that rats exposed to nicotine in the womb were far more likely to become adult rats who, when given the chance, over-indulged in nicotine, alcohol, and fatty foods.

The theory is that the nicotine causes the fetus to develop more of a kind of cell that makes neurochemicals that stimulate appetite, making said rats “hungrier” for all sorts of pleasure.

When I read this, a number of facts instantly correlated in my mind :

1. For most of my life, my mother chain-smoked more or less constantly.
2. In the seventies, when I was in vitro, people had no clue about smoking being bad when you were pregnant or breastfeeding
3. I weigh over 350 pounds.

Guess I should be glad I stayed away from the cigs and never got seriously into booze.

Could this eight year old be the key to immortality?

The girl in question, Gabby Williams, ages at an incredibly slow rate. It’s like the opposite of progeria. (Regeria?) Right now, it sucks to be her, because she is eight years old but has the body of an infant.

But by studying her, we might very well be able to find out her secret and invent an “off” switch for aging, rendering us effectively immortal.

Or at least extremely long lived.

The article leaves me with a lot of questions, though. Like, is Gabby mentally eight years old? One would think not, because she still has a baby’s cranium and hence no room for the all important brain expansion that occurs between birth and the age of five.

Still, if a human being matured normally until their physical peak then took the cure, that would not be am issue and we would just stay 25 forever.

A mixed blessing, that.

The Secret Of The Frozen Frogs

Some, but not all, wood frogs freeze absolutely solid ever winter and then thaw out in spring and hop away perfectly healthy. And scientists want to know why.

We have two-thirds of the puzzle. We know the tree frogs use three chemicals as protectants against the cellular damage that usually makes such a thing impossible.

One is a very common complex sugar, glucogen. They store this in their livers, which grow half again as big when winter is approaching.

Another is good old urea, AKA uric acid, AKA the acid in your pee.

But the third one is… unknown. And that is what has scientist’s interest peaked. They don’t know what it is or what exactly it does to help the process unfold.

I think you can imagine why they are keen to find out.

Cryogenics is not as dead as we thought! Perhaps it was merely frozen.

Ion thrusters. ION THRUSTERS. ION THRUSTERS!

Sorry about that, but I am a tad excited about this one. NASA has tested a viable, super efficient ion thruster and the age of the chemical rocket might just be over, thank goodness.

Instead of getting its thrust from a chemical reaction, an ion thruster gets its thrust from magnetically accelerated charged particles, or ions, of its fuel.

This makes it far more efficient than chemical rockets, able to get 10 to 12 more distance from a given amount of fuel. But there’s a cost.

The amount of thrust is tiny, so an ion based spacecraft accelerates extremely slowly. Slow as in, takes 10,000 hours, or around 417 days, to reach top speed.

So it is not so good for human space travel, but phenomenal for autonomous spacecraft, which could see so much more of the solar system on a single tank of gas.

You know what is coming next, kids. BRAIN SCIENCE!

Brain based labels are bunk.

Remember when people were abuzz with talk about whether someone was “left-brained” or “right-brained”? Don’t feel bad if you don’t. because it was ages ago now.

Well thanks to the miracle window into the brain that is fMRI, we now know that those ancient labels were full of crap. After we found out that certain brain functions happen in certain places, people leaped to the conclusion that the people who had “more” of those functions must have “more” on that side of the brain. Typical pop psychology.

Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be total bullshit. This does not surprise me.

What surprises me is that anyone still cared about some pop psych labels that I have not heard mention of for around thirty years.

Well, publish or perish.

Computer program knows what letter you are looking at.

Speaking of the marvels of the fMRI era, scientists have come up with a way for a computer program to interpret information from an active fMRI scan of a subject’s brain in such a way that the program knows what letter of the alphabet the subject is looking at.

Spookiness aside, this could be simply amazing for those poor souls who are so profoundly paralyzed that their eyes are all they can move.

They could finally be released from their locked-in condition by being able to use their eyes like a typewriter, rather like Stephen Hawking’s speech program. By looking at each letter in succession, they could spell out words, and finally be able to communicate with the world.

Further afield, it might just give you a way to type messages on your Google Glass device.

And finally, the Big Story of the week.

Predictors of suicidal behaviour found in blood.

This story is my big finale not because it is the most important or most amazing, but because it is the one that I found literally jawdropping.

When I saw the headline, my mouth gaped open and I said “WHAT???”

I had no idea we were this far into epigenetics yet. These scientists claim that they have found six blood markers than when taken together can predict when someone is a higher risk of suicide.

I find this hard to believe, but that might just be my brain nerd’s tendency to reflexively balk at any suggestion that a complex behaviour can be predicted by a simple test.

People have been trying to make that a reality for a century or more, and it has always turned out to be way more complicated than that.

But between epigenetics and fMRI, the rules are being rewritten at lightning speed. So there might just be something to this.

Having being suicidal myself, this story strikes home for me. I am not exactly sure what good a blood tesr would have done me, seeing as when I was severely depressed I rarely ever left my room, but I am sure it could be useful in an institutional setting.

One word of caution, though : suicidal people WANT to kill themselves, and if they think a blood test will deprive them of the ability to do so, they will resist said blood test very strongly.

That’s all the newts that’s fit to sprint for this week, folks!

See you next week for more SCIENCE!