Month: December 2012

If you’re smarter than other people it won’t make you personally happier but the brightest nations score high on measures of happiness compared to countries with lower intellectual ranking, according to a study by Ruut Veenhoven of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands and Yowon Choi of the appropriately named Center for Happiness Studies at Seoul National University in South Korea.

Education is in one sense all about maximizing intelligence, but wondered Veenhoven and Choi, does it also impact on happiness? Do brighter students make happier citizens? The researchers explored the relationship between intelligence and happiness on two levels, the micro-level of individuals and the macro-level of nations. On the former, they looked at data from 23 studies and found no correlation between recorded IQ and measures of happiness in individuals. However, at the macro-level, they found a strong positive relationship among 143 nations between a higher average IQ across a country and a higher average happiness compared to those countries with below average IQ.

This, they suggest means that, the presence of many intelligent people boosts average happiness in the country, though these people themselves are not any happier.

Why is that? The authors suggests that intelligence adds to happiness only indirectly though its effects on society. People are happier in developed nations than in developing ones and the functioning of developed society requires an intelligent populace.

Why then are intelligent people themselves no happier than their less intelligent compatriots? The authors infer rather curiously that the cultivation of intelligence goes at some cost, such as the many years spent at school benches and what they refer to as the attendant one-sided development. They call for attention to this hidden harm of education.

“Does intelligence boost happiness? Smartness of all pays more than being smarter than others” in Int. J. Happiness and Development, 2012, 1, 5-27

Hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) is a severe form of nausea and vomiting in pregnancy that is different from the more common nausea and vomiting known as morning sickness. The term hyperemesis meaning “excessive vomiting” from the Greek hyper meaning above and beyond and emesis, vomiting, gravidarum from the Latin gravis meaning heavy. Typical of medics to dress it up, just means puking really badly…

Of course, HG can lead to dehydration, malnutrition, and other serious complications are the result of unrelenting nausea and vomiting. It is a rare complication of pregnancy, but difficult to discern from a normal, but severe, case of morning sickness.

It is apparently more commonly associated with pregnancies that lead to multiple births, hence all the extra interest in the condition of the Duchess of Cambridge (aka Kate Middleton).

Hyperemesis gravidarum. A paper in J Obstet Gynaecol in November discussed evidence that there is an association between HG, sex ratio of offspring and its mediation by high gonadotrophin levels. A paper published this month in J Psychosom Obstet Gynaecol discusses the risk of depression in expectant mothers with HG. There have been suggestions that HG is a psychosomatic condition, but another recent paper in Gen Hosp Psychiatry endeavours to dispel that myth.

Writing in JACS recently, chemists at Yale University have reported details of the active site in the pigment molecule melanopsin. Melanopsin is present in the eye, but is not involved in vision. Instead it responds to light that enters the eye and reaches neurones (ganglions) deep within the retina. The pigment absorbs blue light, which hints at why there are so many current concerns about the effects of ubiquitous electric lighting and computer and mobile device screens that are always in our field of view. Absorption in this wavelength stimulates the pigment and sends a neuronal signal to the suprachiasmatic nuclei. This is a small region of the brain known to be at the heart of regulating the circadian rhythms of our neurones and hormones and matching them to the natural cycle of the 24-hour day.

via Slave to the Rhythm :: ChemViews Magazine :: ChemistryViews.

Cutting energy bills and reducing emissions of pollutants are both high on the agenda and finding sustainable power sources and improving efficiency are usually the concepts we think of when trying to action those points. However, there is a problem. Heating buildings and water, cooking food, switching on the lights all require energy but they don’t all require the same “quality” of energy. Maintaining a room at a temperature the occupants find comfortable does not need such high-quality energy as does running electric lights.

I’ve touched on this elusive notion of the ‘quality of energy’, or exergy before. It is defined by scientists in terms of thermodynamics as being the amount of useful work a flow of energy can do. In practical terms one might consider the different uses of energy within a building. To maintain a room at 20 Celsius when it is much colder outside requires energy in the form of heat, but the supply need only be slightly higher than 20 Celsius, assuming the walls and roof are relatively well insulated and no one leaves windows and outside doors open. Looking at the thermodynamics though and we can see from the Carnot efficiency relation that the ‘quality’, the exergy, need only be 7% or so. There should be no need to operate a boiler with very high combustion temperatures and to have a heating system running at 70-80 Celsius if a building could be designed to maintain a comfortable temperature with a so-called low-exergy heating system, e.g. a ground source heat pump supplying a low-temperature floor heating system

Similarly, the production of the hot water in a building for washing, bathing and other activities usually requires it to be heated to about 55 Celsius. A “boiler” running at a much higher temperature than that is producing energy with far too high an exergy just to heat water. The exergy need only be 15% or so. In contrast, the efficient operation of electrical appliances and lighting requires the highest possible exergy of close to 100%. That said, incandescent lighting represents an incredible waste in that much of the energy is converted to heat rather than light and in motorised appliances heat is generated through friction and so wasted.

Unfortunately, burning fossil fuels does not give us a simple way to use energy at the optimal exergy level for different applications and so huge amounts of fuel are wasted raising temperatures above what are needed for a specific use. Dietrich Schmidt of the Department Energy Systems at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics in Kassel, Germany, thinks he might have the answer. It should be possible to create so-called low-exergy, LowEx, buildings that exploit local heating systems and networks to fulfill the requirements for keeping rooms warm, for instance, without using a combustion process or boiling large tanks of water. Heat exchangers are usually utilizing low-quality energy in terms of the energy they supply, but if the heat is a few degrees above 20 Celsius, then that is adequate. No need to fill radiators with water at high temperatures or power up oil-filled heaters to even higher temperatures.

Schmidt has developed a model to allow architects and those running buildings a way to model the energy requirements and ensure that their buildings are ‘LowEx’. By adopting a ‘LowEx’ approach it might be possible to increase the use of renewable energy sources for space heating purposes, cut fuel bills and lower emissions considerably.

Schmidt D. (2012). Benchmarking of low ‘exergy’ buildings, International Journal of Exergy, 11 (4) 473. DOI: 10.1504/IJEX.2012.050257