Month: October 2011

UPDATE: 2011-11-02 I took the last capsule from my 28-day supply of omeprazole today. I am deferring a follow-up visit to the GP, as I’d like to see what happens over the next few days as my stomach adjusts to no longer having its hydrogen pumps inhibited…

I finally gave into my GP’s suggestion (actually a locum) that rather than suffering repeated acid reflux and taking antacids to partially neutralize stomach acid spilling into my esophagus I really ought to give omeprazole a try. He wrote me a scrip, I filled it and have been symptom free for the best part of two weeks.

Omeprazole is a proton pump inhibitor used in the treatment of indigestion (heart burn), dyspepsia, peptic ulcer disease PUD, gastroesophageal reflux disease GORD/GERD, laryngopharyngeal reflux LPR and Zollinger—Ellison syndrome. It is one of the most widely prescribed drugs internationally and is also available over the counter.

After so many years of suffering from acid reflux and growing discomfort when swallowing, I am pleased to have discovered the benefits of this drug. Its action presumably reduces the chronic inflammation that arises from repeated bouts of excess. I’ve got a couple of weeks supply remaining and will review with my regular GP before that expires.

I’m loathe to look too closely at the likely side-effects but aside from a nasty taste in the mouth that lasted for several days, but has subsided now, I’ve not noticed anything else. There were concerns that omeprazole blocks gastric emptying, but a recent study suggests that is not the case

If you have any of the above digestive problems, don’t suffer in silence. Moreover, if there’s a family history of Barret’s esophagus or esophageal cancer, it’s better to have such problems checked out and treated.

Kamiya T, Shikano M, Tanaka M, Tsukamoto H, Ebi M, Hirata Y, Mizushima T, Murakami K, Shimura T, Mizoshita T, Mori Y, Tanida S, Kato T, Imaeda K, Kataoka H, & Joh T (2011). The effect of omeprazole on gastric myoelectrical activity and emptying. Journal of smooth muscle research = Nihon Heikatsukin Gakkai kikanshi, 47 (3-4), 79-87 PMID: 21979407

A swell trick with a block of wood and an impossible nail…impossible you say? The wonders of hydrated lignin.

Bad news for Peppa Pig, Miss Piggy and Porky the Pig or any other animated characters of a porcine disposition, there is no pink light. The rainbow runs from red to violet and pink, or strictly speaking magenta (fuchsia). Magenta is a blend of red and blue, but if you roll up the rainbow we need to keep a gap between the red and the violet ends of the spectrum to squeeze in all the radio waves, micro waves, gamma and X-rays, ultraviolet and infrared, there is simply no place for pink light. Sorry piggies.

In his 2009 book The Vision Revolution, Mark Changizi explains how human colour perception evolved to allow us to see the subtle changes in skin tone that correlate with changes in blood flow and blood oxygenation. Why would we want to do this? Because changes in skin tones indicate emotions silently, allowing us to read the minds of others. An interesting point that arises from this theory, he explains, is that it is impossible to answer the question: What colour is my skin? Aside from the apparently superficial, but spectrally irrelevant, differences in skin colour between races, skin has no easy colour definition. Grass is obviously green, on a cloudless day the sky looks blue (usually), roses are red, violets are blue (well, actually they’re purple).

The colours of everything but skin are easy to describe. But, your skin? Whatever race you are you don’t think of your own skin as actually being the colour that people of different skin hue use to describe it. Caucasians aren’t white nor are they pink, blacks isn’t black, nor brown, brown. In fact, to the individual or the group that share skin hue, their skin has no colour, it is neutral. But, at the same time any human skin can take on almost any colour from pinks, blues, greens, yellows, browns, purples, whites…given applied pressure, temperature changes, illness etc.

Changizi argues that the colour of our skin being neutral in this way, having no single word to describe its colour means that we can perceive the subtlest of changes in skin tone associated with emotions, illness, embarrassment etc. It is the same in the sense that our saliva has no taste, but the slightest bitterness in the mouth is immediately obvious, just as our skin normally feels neither hot nor cold, but the forehead of someone with a fever just one degree hotter than us will feeling scorching hot, and just as our noses don’t generally detect the odour of our own bodies.

Fundamentally, we perceive ourselves as being at a neutral, baseline position to our senses. But, does this neutrality of
personal perception extend beyond skin colour and body odour? It occurred to me that perhaps it does and that this is the origin of so many issues. For example, we all have an “accent”, but we perceive it as being neutral until we are relocated from our home town to somewhere they speak differently. During my time working in the US the natives were forever commenting on my “English accent”, albeit a Geordie one. But, those same natives confronted with the reality of their own “American accent” were reluctant to accede that they had any accent at all!

So, if one’s accent is to one’s own perception, neutral then so might be one’s perception of the place where one is born, where one lives, the things one likes, the things one dislikes, political views, peccadilloes, kinks and perversions, religious standpoint etc. All “neutral” to you, but “an accent”, a deviation from the norm, to everyone else. Everyone knows someone more left or right than themselves, kinkier, odder…

The same probably applies to musical taste, taste in food, assessment of right and wrong…maybe this underpins the spread of memes within a society and how such “received wisdom” becomes culturally ingrained in pockets of community and spreads only farther afield through extreme intellectual intervention, or more commonly, violent persuasion.

In fact, I cannot think of any aspect of life that is not covered by our seeing ourselves as neutral and everyone else and everything everyone else does or believes in as being above or below our “neutral” baseline. Could this baseline perception be the origin of all debates, arguments and wars?

I asked Changizi what he thought of my little extension of his theory. This is what he had to say: “I totally agree! It’s worth a book of its own!” He added that, “Fleshing out the full extent to which it pervades everything would be utterly fascinating and mind-blowing.” But, conceded that he probably wasn’t the one to write that particular book.

Arsenic poisoning on the Indian sub-continent has been the worst, and most insidious environmental disaster we have ever witnessed, but very few people know about the problem of the hellish water that is poisoning hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. I have periodically written about the issue since 1995, having first made contact with the leader in the field Dipankar Chakraborti of Jadavpur University, and brought the problem to at least the attention of readership of The Guardian at the time.

It is always of interest to hear about new developments, new research into understanding the problem, how it might be abated, water filters etc. Unfortunately, nothing has yet solved the crisis. Most recently, I wrote about work published in Nature Geosciences that seems to suggest that subterranean sediments might somehow ameliorate the problem of soluble arsenice leaching into the groundwater. However, Chakraborti tells me that the subterranean landscape is far to heterogeneous for there to be a simple model that would apply to the whole region and allow definitive predictions to be made. You can read about this latest work in a short news article I put together for Chemistry World magazine.

Not surprisingly, there are apparent contradictions in the report that simply cannot be avoided given the complexity of this environmental disaster. The team in the Nature Geo paper claim one thing but Chakraborti who has been researching this for the best part of three decades says the situation is not at all clearcut, it depends on where you sample, when (pre or post irrigation/monsoon), how you sample and what type of well you’re looking at. Couple that to the fact that local bureaucracy and governments in this region have for years at turns, ignored, obfuscated, and worsened the problem through inefficiencies and political wranglings leading to mistake after mistake, then one thing that is clear, is that the problem is not going to be resolved any time soon, sadly. Much of the Western science that has recently been applied to the problem is either misguided or simply does not transfer to this part of the world with its intrinsic socio-economic problems.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…and colour! Autumn is upon us in the northern hemisphere and the leaves are changing colour once again. Time to get yourself somewhere deciduously and decidedly woody to see the reds, yellows, and oranges. But, what makes all those colours in autumn leaves? More to the point, why is the subject such an evergreen article idea for science writers?

Some of the colours are produced by the natural decomposition of the compound that makes leaves green during the spring and summer: chlorophyll. Part of the story is about waste products being excreted into the leaves by the tree and yet another aspect is the withdrawal of still useful pigment compounds and nutrients prior to leaf fall.

However, Bernhard Kräutler and his team at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, have just published a study that reveals a previously unknown chlorophyll decomposition product in the leaves of Norway maples. The discovery hints at a previously unknown aspect of autumnal biochemistry. It’s not unweaving the rainbow, as it were, it’s laying bare nature’s wonders. Via Colorful Leaves.

Müller, T., Rafelsberger, M., Vergeiner, C., & Kräutler, B. (2011). A Dioxobilane as Product of a Divergent Path of Chlorophyll Breakdown in Norway Maple Angewandte Chemie International Edition DOI: 10.1002/anie.201103934

My recent Research Highlight about “dopamine addiction“, raises a few intriguing points about how all addictive behaviour might be to do with the reward mechanism derived from rising dopamine levels in the brain that stimulate various pleasure centres. However, there is another way of looking at it: addiction is not about the reward of dopamine but the anticipation of that reward. US neurologist Robert Sapolsky explains the difference. It’s the uncertainty of the reward that drives behaviour and for humans that reward anticipation can last on the short timescale of slot machines at Las Vegas to the decades long anticipation of heaven’s unearthly estate for many.

Dopamine Jackpot! Sapolsky on the Science of…This is a subtle shift in emphasis. We’re perhaps not addicted to the rewarding feelings of dopamine but to the anticipation of dopamine and thus to anything that sustains dopamine levels through that anticipation whether gambling, drugs, sex, or the pursuit of money, power and the religious endpoint. My original article asked whether dopamine is the most evil chemical in the world. In the light of Sapolsky’s argument, dopamine itself is not the evil chemical, just the possibility of dopamine…we’re not addicted to the chemical, we’re addicted to the possibility of the chemical.

Thanks to ToddStarkfor pointing me to David Dobbs item in Wired displaying the Sapolsky video.

And speaking of anticipation – In the moments before you “stop and smell the roses,” your brain seems to create predictive olfactory templates for specific smells that set up your mental expectations of the scent before the first odour molecules even reach your nostrils – Christina Zelano, Aprajita Mohanty, Jay A. Gottfried. Olfactory Predictive Codes and Stimulus Templates in Piriform Cortex. Neuron, 2011; 72 (1): 178-187 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.08.010