The Excuses I'm Going With

WHEN BAD ODORS HAPPEN TO CLEAN PEOPLE

2012-01-29T01:47:00.002-05:00

Some people stink no matter how often they bathe. In August 2011 the American Journal of Medicine published a study of 353 people who had "malodor production" that couldn't be explained by poor hygiene, flatulence, or dental problems. They found that about one third of them tested positive for trimethylaminuria (TMAU), a genetically-transmitted disease that thwarts the body's ability to metabolize trimethylamine (TMA), a chemical compound common in eggs, some legumes, wheat germ, saltwater fish, and organ meats. When TMA is inadequately metabolized, it accumulates in urine, sweat, and saliva. The result is a gently radiating, fishy stench that is far from popular on the play-yard or at the water cooler.

TMAU was first identified as a disease in 1970, and the chemical test used to identify it is common. What is special about this study is that its researchers hail from the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a flavor lab in Philadelphia. Monell's team paid its usual heightened attention to aromatic nuance. What they found was a rich and varied TMAU bouquet. Because the disease is classified as rare (fewer than 200,000 affected individuals in the United States), typically doctors sniff for the characteristic fishiness before authorizing the chemical test. The researchers in this study suggest that, by doing so, they may be missing positive cases. Which is unfortunate because, once TMAU is identified, the odor problem can be solved. A diet hygienically "clean" of the foods carrying high TMA concentrations clears the air.

Dance Your Ph.D.

2011-12-23T12:35:00.002-05:00

I've been researching smell, and stumbled upon this riotously entertaining dance video. Really. You'll have to trust me on this one.

Dance your PhD 2011

"Smell mediated response to relatedness of potential mates. Individuals often migrate from their place of origin in a relatively slow pace. As such, related individuals frequently interact. Relatedness between two individuals is defined as the percentage of genes in those two individuals that are identical by..."

In Discover Magazine This Month: Lawnmower Man

2011-12-23T12:10:00.005-05:00

It was Mary Leakey who discovered Paranthropus boisei, an evolutionary cousin of ours that went extinct some 1.5 million years ago. Because of his strong jaws and facial musculature, he has long been called Nutcracker Man. New research shows he was a grazer. See Discover Magazine's "Top 100 Stories of 2011 #85: Meet the Grazing Hominid." 

It's Not Just Narcissists Who Want Plastic Surgery....

2011-10-09T00:49:00.001-04:00

It's narcissists who are perfectionists.

Call it their own Snopes.com sleuthing. But hearing again and again that narcissistic self-absorption and perfectionistic striving fuel the current boom in cosmetic surgery, researchers at Canada's Dalhousie University decided to poke around a bit in the assumptions. To do so, they recruited 305 undergraduate women, and had each one complete tried-and-true diagnostic questionnaires returning measures of narcissism and perfectionism, along with one measuring interest in cosmetic surgery.

The researchers discovered that neither narcissism nor perfectionism predicted interest in cosmetic surgery. However, women scoring high on measures for both diagnoses showed the strongest interest in cosmetic surgery of any women in the study.

The implications of this study may be profound--for plastic surgeons. In the June 2011 issuse of Plastic and Reconstruction Surgery: The Journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the authors speculate that cosmetic surgeons' patients may be grandiose and demanding to a fault--and, by diagnosis, "nearly impossible to satisfy," no matter how objectively successful their cosmetic surgery was.

Next up: How would 305 cosmetic surgeons perform on measures of depression, anger, and desire for a new career?

Because Mom Likes Valentine's Day and Hates Halloween

2011-10-01T23:59:00.014-04:00

A hugely pregnant woman and her OBGYN walk into a bar. The woman says, "When will this baby ever come?" And the OBGYN says, ....

It's a joke waiting for a punchline--that's been delivered (ba-da-bum) in the October 2011 issue of Social Science and Medicine. And here's the punchline: The baby's arrival may be either delayed or hurried along by Mom's emotions.

Researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine's School of Public Health analyzed birth certificate information for all births in the United States for the weeks before and after Valentine's Day and Halloween across 11 years. They determined that on Valentine's Day there was a 3.6% increase in spontaneous births and a 12.1% increase in cesarean births. On Halloween, however, there was a 5.3% decrease in spontaneous births and a 16.9% decrease in cesarean births.

In Discover Magazine This Month: Man's Best Friends Know Who Their Best Frieinds Are

2011-09-10T21:05:00.003-04:00

Dogs Can Help Themselves by Deciphering Human Interactions

In October's Discover Magazine:

Researchers and pet owners have long known that dogs can learn spoken commands and understand certain human gestures. But can they actually eavesdrop—that is, pick up information simply by watching interactions between people? Animal cognition researcher Sarah Marshall-Pescini and her colleagues at the University of Milan believe that dogs do indeed engage in interspecies snooping....

Read the article.

In Discover Magazine This Month: The Wine Whisperers

2011-08-11T18:56:00.007-04:00

What does California taste like--in a wine? And who are the artisans who can bring that to [groan] fruition? See my Destination Science piece in September's Discover Magazine: "The Wine Whisperers."

ET, Go Home

2011-08-11T11:32:00.004-04:00

What If We Call Out to Extraterrestrials, and They Respond?

NASA routinely beams messages into the universe in an attempt to contact extraterrestrial intelligence. In more than 50 years of listening for a response, they've heard zilch. Which might be good. For even as NASA sends messages, some of its scientists wonder what it is they should say, and whether Earth should, indeed, keep putting out the proverbial welcome mat. In "Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity?", in the June/July 2011 issue of Acta Astronautica, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Departments of Geography and Meteorology, and from NASA, systematically analyze a broad range of contact scenarios, categorizing each one as beneficial, neutral, or harmful to humanity. Although the researchers do not perform quantitative analysis on the likelihood of the various scenarios, they do note that a relatively large number fall into the "harmful" category. Because of this, they recommend that Earth's messages to extraterrestrials be written more cautiously. For example, we should stop sending "About Us" information that includes specifics about our DNA. (It could be used to design biological weapons against us.) Initial communication should be limited to mathematical discourse, and we should take care not to suggest that we want to colonize other planets. Nor should we broadcast that we are less than admirable stewards of the natural resources of our own planet. After all, we want to seem like the sort of neighbors a more advanced civilization would want to keep around.

Praying for Peace

2011-08-11T11:23:00.002-04:00

Religion may have caused century upon century of war, but praying--well, that's something we should all get behind. So say researchers from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and from VU University in Amsterdam in "Pray for Those Who Mistreat You: Effects of Prayer on Anger and Aggression" (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, March 18, 2011). In three control-group experiments the researchers determined that the act of praying for strangers who had provoked them actually calmed subjects' anger and aggression--and it did so with almost miraculous speed. If religion is the opiate of the masses, what's praying? Maybe the valium of the oppressed.

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Magnetism

2011-08-02T13:00:00.004-04:00

In the July-August special issue of Discover Magazine:

1 Magnetism is familiar to every fifth grader, but describing it can confound even the most brilliant physicist.

2 Take the case of Richard Feynman. When asked to explain magnetism, he urged his BBC interviewer to take it on faith (video). After seven minutes of stonewalling, he finally said, “I really can’t do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else that you’re more familiar with because I don’t understand it in terms of anything else that you’re more familiar with.”

3 He did break down and try for a few seconds before abandoning the attempt. Those seconds were packed with oversimplifications: “All the electrons [in a magnet] are spinning in the same direction.”

See "things" 4-20.

Clowning and IVF Success Rates

2011-08-02T11:31:00.002-04:00

Anticipating a Sudden Run on Red Rubber Noses

Though it's been tried for millennia, it is of course as yet unproven that crying works as birth control. But laughing may help fertility. In a quasi-randomized study, researchers at Assaf Harofeh Medical Center in Zrifin, Israel found that the pregnancy rate following in vitro fertlization and embryo transfer was more than 16% higher among women who were visited immediately after embryonic transfer by a medical clown. As reported in "The Effect of Medical Clowning on Pregnancy Rates after In Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer (IVF-ET)" (which came online in January in the journal Fertility and Sterility) the clown performed 12-15 minute routines of jokes, tricks, and magic at each woman's bedside. The researchers point out that the immune benefits of humor have long been understood, and that the beneficial effect of stress reduction on successful egg implantation has been demonstrated recently in rats. They also suggest that, even though their method requires one clown per IVF mom, it's a cheaper and more successful intervention than many other stress reduction techniques that fertility clinics have historically advocated.

Facebook Me. No, Me! No, Me!

2011-07-11T11:25:00.003-04:00

You might think that narcissists' Facebook profiles would be heavily spiced with the word "I." But it seems that even narcissists know that's a dead giveaway about their least attractive personality trait. In "Narcissism and Implicit Attention Seeking: Evidence from Linguistic Analyses of Social Networking and Online Presentation" (July 2011 in Personality and Individual Differences), an international team of researchers report on a typical social networking "workaround" used by narcissists. When they restrain their online use of the word "I," they call attention to themselves with sexy photos and profanity.

In Scientific American This Month: Beauty and the Beasts

2011-07-02T14:02:00.005-04:00

In July's Scientific American:

Show a man a picture of an attractive woman, and he might play riskier blackjack. With a real-life pretty woman watching, he might cross traffic against a red light. Such exhibitions of agility and bravado are the behavioral equivalent in humans of physical attributes such as antlers and horns in animals. “Mate with me,” they signal to women. “I can brave danger to defend you and the children.” ....

Read the article.

Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia

2011-06-11T11:18:00.001-04:00

So ... um ... how do you think Princess Diana died? JFK? When you talk about the "terrorist attacks of 9/11," do you actually draw air quotes with your fingers? Was coverage of the U. S. Apollo missions to the moon a sham? Is your government hiding visits from space aliens?

A long-growing body of research suggests that people who believe in conspiracy theories do so in order to vent unrelieved negative and angry feelings. These people are disagreeable and have difficulties in their relationships with authority figures. This body of research has now been topped off by a study conducted at Northumbria University in Newcastle. In "Belief in Conspiracy Theories. The Role of Paranormal Belief, Paranoid Ideation, and Schizotypy," in the June 2011 Personality and Individual Differences, the psychologists report that people who believe in conspiracy theories score high on measures of paranoia and schizotypal (odd loner) behavior. The psychologists suggest that, for many such people, conspiracy theories may serve a useful function, giving them a safe hook on which to hang their otherwise mounting anxiety.

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Stress

2011-06-02T13:19:00.001-04:00

In June's Discover Magazine:

1 Think about money, work, economic outlook, family, and relationships. Feeling anxious? In a 2010 American Psychological Association survey [pdf], those five factors were the most often cited sources of stress for Americans.

2 Stress is strongly tied to cardiac disease, hypertension, inflammatory diseases, and compromised immune systems, and possibly to cancer.

3 And stress can literally break your heart. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome,” occurs when the bottom of the heart balloons into the shape of a pot (a tako-tsubo) used in Japan to trap octopus. It’s caused when grief or another extreme stressor makes stress hormones flood the heart.

See "things" 4-20.

Pornography Terms in Google Searches by Democrats and Republicans

2011-05-11T11:13:00.003-04:00

The "challenge hypothesis" first put forth in 1990 in an article in The American Naturalist states that, as an evolutionary holdover from the need to guard mates and progeny, testosterone levels in males are high after vicious competition. Evidence to support the hypothesis has been found in birds. And in human competitors following various types of sporting competitions, elevated testosterone levels have been found--but only in winners. Even politics can provide a testosterone boost, and not only to the direct competitors. For example, right after the 2008 elections, researchers found higher testosterone levels in men who voted for Barack Obama than in men who voted for John McCain.

Now, demonstrating perhaps that the exquisitely sensitive thumb Google has on the pulse of our nation can serve as an epidemiological assay of biomarkers, researchers from Villanova and Rutgers Universities have been following the search terms used in red and blue states. They report that people in traditionally Republican states conducted Google searches for pornography keywords more often after the 2010 midterm elections (widely seen as a Republic victory) than after the 2008 elections (widely seen as a Democratic victory). On the other hand, people from Democratic states searched for pornography terms less frequently after the 2010 Democratic loss than after the 2006 Democratic win. The study assumes a direct correlation between testosterone levels and interest in pornography. It is "Pornography Seeking Behaviors Following Midterm Political Elections in the United States: A Replication of the Challenge Hypothesis," in the May 2011 issue of Computers in Human Behavior.

In Scientific American This Month: Coral in Love

2011-05-02T13:55:00.004-04:00

In May's Scientific American:

It is hard to court the opposite sex when you are cemented in place, which explains why polyps—the tiny creatures whose exoskeletons form corals—do not reproduce by mating. Instead they cast millions of sperm and eggs into the sea, where they drift up to the ocean surface, collide, form larvae and float away to form new coral reefs....

Read article.

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Cyrstals

2011-05-02T13:22:00.002-04:00

In May's Discover Magazine:

1 It’s all about the rhythm: Crystals are repeating, three-dimensional arrangements of atoms, ions, or molecules.

2 Almost any solid material can crystallize—even DNA. Chemists from New York University, Purdue University, and the Argonne National Laboratory recently created DNA crystals large enough to see with the naked eye. The work could have applications in nanoelectronics and drug development.

3 One thing that is not a crystal: leaded “crystal” glass, like the vases that so many newlyweds dread. (Glass consists of atoms or molecules all in a jumble, not in the well-patterned order that defines a crystal.)

See "things" 4-20.

Women Think Venus Is Funny; Men Prefer Mars

2011-04-20T11:16:00.004-04:00

Gender Differences in How We Process Humor

Functional MRI images have shown gender differences in emotion processing, and behavioral studies have found gender differences in humor processing. In "Gender Differences in the Neural Correlates of Humor Processing: Implications for Different Processing Modes" (in the April issue of Neuropsychologia) an international team of investigators report on an experiment assessing the reactions of 14 females and 15 males to cartoons. Blood oxygenation levels were assessed alongside fMRIs. Women, it seems, process humor primarily in the part of the cortical processing system associated with primitive emotions and motivations. While men, too, engage those deep brain structures, more than women they also engage parts of the cortex associated with evaluative thinking.

Which Came First, the Tool or the Hand Size?

2011-04-05T17:51:00.006-04:00

Did Technology Drive Human Evolution?

140 years ago Charles Darwin speculated that tool use may have influenced the evolution of the human hand. Now, in "Technology Based Evolution? A Biometric Test of the Effects of Handsize Versus Tool Form on Efficiency in an Experimental Cutting Task," in-press at the Journal of Archeological Science, two anthropologists at the University of Kent in Canterbury are investigating the particulars of that idea. Through a series of experiments with stone flake tools (similar to the those used by African hominids 2.6 million years ago) and un-handled steel blades, they have shown that bigger hands use those tools more efficiently. The scientists speculate that just as opposable thumbs may have enabled tool use, tool use may have influenced the biological evolution of hand size—and of musculature and bone structure in the hand. As eons ticked on, it was the hominids with genes coding for hands adept at tool use that survived.

In Scientific American This Month: Outsmarting Dengue Fever

2011-04-02T13:57:00.002-04:00

In April's Scientific American

Just after sunrise in early January, a delivery van trundled along a suburban street in Queensland, Australia. Inside were tubs filled with a type of mosquito that carries dengue fever, the flu-like illness that annually sickens 50 million to 100 million people worldwide. Workers inside the van stopped at every fourth house, took out what resembled a small Chinese food container and released 40 mosquitoes into the wild. After a week, they had filled the air with 6,000 insects. By early March they had launched 72,000....

Read the article.

Shaky Reasoning

2011-03-03T16:36:00.002-05:00

In 2008, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon, Vermont began storing high-level radioactive waste in 19-foot tall dry casks outdoors, on a concrete slab 254 feet away from the bank of the Connecticut River.

That's a foot and a half beyond what Dr. Leslie Kanat, a Geology Professor at Johnston State College, calls the "Probable Maximum Flood Level."

I am more than a bit concerned about those casks, but maybe I ought to feel relieved--even if a foot and a half doesn't sound like much. Maybe I also ought to feel relieved that Holtec International, the company supplying the casks, reports that their casks stay operational even when submerged at 50 feet for 8 hours. But while Holtec's tests have reassured me that river water would not be a problem for those dry casks, I'm not so sure about river mud.

Holtec's dry casks have vent holes at top and bottom. They are designed for air to enter at bottom, cool the waste, and exit at top.

What would happen if those vents were blocked? Did Holtec run tests for that?

It did not. But in 2002, Dr. Marvin Resnikoff, an international consultant on radioactive waste management, was asked by The Connecticut Yankee Decommissioning Advisory Committee how long it would take for a cask to overheat if vents were blocked. His answer: Maybe a week.

"Maybe." And, again, maybe I should feel relieved. After, all, there's a nice margin of safety in that hypothetical week. I can imagine fire engines arriving at the high-level radioactive waste storage slab right after helping little old ladies out of their collapsed homes, and taking care to hose down the casks after hosing down the fires decimating Main Street. But what about the fact that guesses are sometimes off the mark? What if there were not a week to spare but only two days or three? Would emergency workers even know to abandon their attempts to help survivors and begin to frantically deal with muddy dry casks?

And what about the fact that, during his testimony to the Connecticut Yankee Decommissioning Advisory Committee, Dr. Resnikoff explained that each dry cask contains a Cesium and Strontium inventory equal to 10 Hiroshima bombs?

Entergy, the plant's corporate owner, has never actually acknowledged that mud could reach the vents of the dry casks at Vermont Yankee. Their directors and administrators keep the conversation focused solely on water. But Ray Shadis, technical director for the anti-nuclear watchdog group New England Coalition, is concerned about the combination of Cesium, Strontium, and high temperatures due to a failed, mud-dependent cooling system. In a not-too-difficult-to-imagine scenario, Shadis suggests that the ground surrounding the concrete slab that holds the casks could become wet with river water. Consequently (he says), the slab could become unstable.

And then what?

Well, if you shake even relatively dry soil really, really hard, its strength and stiffness are reduced. That's called "liquefaction." It's responsible for much of the damage during earthquakes. If you actually add liquid to the mix, you create something like quicksand.

What if the Connecticut River Valley suffered a double whammy of flood plus even a minor earthquake? Could the ground around the slab holding the dry casks become like quicksand? Could an edge of the slab shift or, worse, tip?

Even Entergy has suggested that the ground around the concrete slab could get an occasional and maybe even regular soaking soaking from river water. What they haven't gone out of their way to point out is that Vermont is in a bit of an earthquake zone. We have been significantly rattled 15 times since 1900.

Most scientists agree that we are entering an unstable time weather-wise, with melting ice caps, rising waters, and the possibility of more frequent flooding. Given that, I can't help but question Entergy's foresight in trying to get a license extension allowing them to create another 20 years of radioactive waste, only to store it in an earthquake zone near a population center at river's edge.

This is adapted from a Vermont Public Radio commentary by the author.

In Scientific American This Month: Bison vs. Mammoths

2011-03-02T13:59:00.002-05:00

In March's Scientific American:

Bear-size beavers, mammoths, horses, camels and saber-toothed cats used to roam North America, but by 11,000 years ago most such large mammals had died off. To this day, experts debate what caused this late Pleistocene extinction: climate change, overhunting by humans, disease—or something else? Eric Scott, curator of paleontology at the San Bernardino County Museum in Redlands, Calif., suggests it was something else: namely, the immigration of bison from Eurasia....

Read the article.

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Spiders

2011-03-02T13:25:00.002-05:00

In the March Discover Magazine:

1 The venom of the Australian funnel-web spider can kill a person in less than an hour, and its fangs can bite right through a shoe.

2 But for most people, fear of spiders is a far greater problem than the spiders themselves. Researchers at the University of São Paulo have developed an improbable way to undo arachnophobia by having patients stare at pictures of “spiderlike” objects—a tripod, a carousel, a person with dreadlocks.

3 Quackery? Apparently not. In a 2007 study, the scientists reported a 92 percent success rate.

See "things" 4-20.

Up Malaria's Sleeve

2011-03-01T17:25:00.002-05:00

And why bed nets don't quite do the trick

The primary vector of malaria to humans has long been known to be the Anopheles gambiae mosquito. When one bites a human it transmit the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, and that's what hosts the virus. The insects bite mostly when inside human dwellings. Hence, malaria control methods rely heavily on the indoor use of insecticides and on bed nets.

Despite best efforts, however, malaria continues to infect about 250 million people a year and kill about a million. In the February 3 issue of Science a team lead by parasitologist Ken Vernick of the Pasteur Institute in Paris reports the discovery of a subtype of A. gambiae that may account for some of the continuing high rate of infection. Mosquitoes of this subtype--known as Goundry, for the African village in the country of Burkina Faso in which Vernick's team found it--live outdoors, and they seem to be particularly dangerous. Goundry are more susceptible than indoor-living A. gambiae to Plasmodium, acquiring infection 23% more frequently when feeding on malaria-infected blood.

Vernick and colleagues have yet to find adult Goundry in the wild. What they discovered outdoors were larvae, which they hatched in the lab, raised to adulthood, genetically tested, and used in infection experiments. Possibilities for population control of Goundry include traditional methods like wide-spread fogging, and newer, chemical-free approaches like the release into the wild of genetically engineered sterile males.

Sterile insect technology has problems above and beyond push-back from a public afraid of "Jurassic Park" insects. How do you breed a bug to be both sterile and hardy? Sterile and sexy? How do you track the insects? (There are no physiological markers identifying them as sterile.) These are issues pressuring not only scientists who combat disease-carrying mosquitoes but those fighting agricultural pests like fruit flies, coddling moths, and pink bollworms, as well.

The New Madrid Seismic Zone: Much Ado About Something ... Unexpected

2011-02-23T08:00:00.001-05:00

In 1811 and 1812, four major earthquakes (M7.4 to M8 on the Richter scale) centered in New Madrid, Missouri changed the course of the Mississippi River near Memphis, and may have caused the river to flow temporarily upstream. The entire fault system has been named after those earthquakes' epicenter. The biggest part of the New Madrid system sits in Missouri; it then extends along the Mississippi River Valley from northeast Arkansas through southeast Missouri and into western Tennessee and western Kentucky. The more than 4,000 earthquakes recorded there since 1974 make it the single most active fault system in the United States.

Is a "big one" centered in New Madrid on the near horizon? Anxiety runs high, and the local data are fearsome.

Yet the New Madrid (pronounced New MAD-rid) seismic zone is a mid-continent, or intraplate fault system, a rift occurring within the interior of a tectonic plate, and that may be key in forecasting the fate of the New Madrid area. Publishing in the journal Lithosphere, Mian Liu, professor of geological sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Seth Stein, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University, and Hui Wang, a Chinese Earthquake Administration researcher, suggest that widespread concern about the New Madrid area may be misplaced—literally. Examining about 2,000 years of records of mid-continent earthquakes from China, they found that big earthquakes never struck twice in the same place. Rather, after an initial earthquake, a series of aftershocks quaked the immediate area, sometimes with intensity approximating that of the initial shock. Additional trembling sometimes occurred with astonishing frequency over hundreds of years. The next major earthquake, however, was always further along the fault system. The investigators' GPS data show that an earthquake and prolonged resettling on one spot of a fault system inevitably increases tectonic stress on other sections of the system.

All of which suggests that New Madrid itself will probably not host the next mid-continent big one. On the other hand, St. Louis and Memphis—both of which are heavily populated, and situated near the furthest reaches of the New Madrid fault system—might. It could be what FEMA calls a "maximum of maximums" event. In anticipation of such a catastrophe, FEMA will lead a national-level exercise in May of 2011. Federal, state, and local governments will be involved, as well as businesses, private groups, and even faith-based groups. As May approaches, FEMA will make more exercise information available.

Species Assault is a Go

2011-02-21T09:00:00.001-05:00

If it weren't nonfiction, it might be the definitive computer nerd thriller. "The computer says you must now die, and this is how it will happen." Really. And "the state" controls the computer.

But it's not necessarily as Orwellian as it sounds. For it's pest control of the animal variety that's the topic. Australia is spectacularly beset by non-native, invasive species introduced over the years in misbegotten attempts to have exotic pests "bio-control" populations of domestic ones. (One famous example: In 1935 enormous Hawaiian toads were let loose in Australian sugar cane fields to control cane beetles. But as things turned out, the beetles clung near the tops of the stalks, and as high as they jumped, the bottom-heavy toads couldn't reach them. The toads proved to be voracious omnivores. At the same time, they multiplied rapidly and spread diseases among indigenous species.)

Now, according to the first issue of the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, a computer application developed by ecologists at the University of Adelaide in Australia offers wildlife managers Spatio-Temporal Animal Reduction (STAR), a spreadsheet of tested culling strategies and options. Goodbye feral pigs, buffalo, horses, and other fiendishly foreign fauna. Species assault is a "go."

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Older

2011-02-21T09:00:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth Blackburn of UC San Francisco is part of a three-person team that won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the 1978 discovery of telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens and stabilizes telomeres. (Telomeres are DNA-protein complexes that cap the ends of chromosomes. As Blackburn explains it, they function like the tips on shoe laces, and protect chromosomes from fraying. However, each time a cell divides, some of the telomeres are used up. Below a critical telomere length, the cell loses its ability to reproduce itself. By replenishing telomeres with each cell division, telomerase plays a critical role in cell health and life span.)

In a landmark study of mothers of chronically ill children that was published in 2004, Blackburn reported that the mothers with the longest-term stress (the mothers with the oldest chronically ill children) had chromosomes with the shortest telomere tips. She and fellow researchers attributed the shorter lengths to diminished serum levels of telomerase, and estimated that during their years of stress those mothers' white blood cells had prematurely aged by 9-17 years.

Now Blackburn is suggesting that the aging news is not all bad for the chronically stressed, for with knowledge comes power. In studies published in 2009 and 2010, some subjects studied actually enjoyed increased telomere length over time. These findings opened the door to the search for factors that can help people lengthen telomoeres. Studies published in 2010 pointed to meditation, exercise, and, for women, delayed menopause.

According to Blackburn, the take-home message for chronically-stressed people who don't want to prematurely fall prey to age-related illness and debility is this: "Work hard. Play harder."

Diamonds Are Forever. Extinction Isn't.

2011-02-01T16:27:00.001-05:00

In Australia, researchers at the University of Queensland have compiled a global database on mammals identified as "missing" (a category to which they assign extinct species as well as those "critically endangered and possibly extinct"). The database includes records dating as far back as 1500. In the September 2010 issue of Journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, mammal ecologist Diana Fisher and statistical ecologist Simon Blomberg report that of the 187 missing species, 67 have been rediscovered. Based on their analysis of factors like date of last sighting and probable cause of extinction, they offer advice for conservationists. Mammals that are wide-ranging, have been missing for not more than 100 years, and are believed to have been killed off by habitat loss are most likely to be recovered; those killed off by predators, disease, or hunting are least likely. Unfortunately that second group includes charismatic mammals like the Tasmanian tiger, for which 25 major searches and countless amateur hunts have been launched. Those bad-bet expeditions happen at the expense of better-bet efforts to save non-celebrity species like the Australian lesser stick-nest rat, thought to have met its end through habitat loss. The researchers advise conservationists to check their data, not their hearts, and apportion their resources to species with a reasonable chances of recovery.

Living Paintings

2011-01-25T16:28:00.001-05:00

Jack Pettigrew of the University of Queensland and his research team may have discovered why vibrant rock paintings from the Bradshaw rock artworks in western Australia's Kimberly region have not lost their visual intensity in the 40,000-70,000 years since they were painted. According to a a new study published in the journal Antiquity, the paint is long gone; the figures of humans and megafauna depicted are colored by a biofilm of microbes that are direct descendants of microbes that infected the original paint. The microbes in question are predominantly a black fungi, Chaetothyriales, which replicates by cannibilizing its predecessors, and a reddish organism that seems to be a cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria obtain energy through photosynthesis. Pettigrew speculates that both the fungi and bacteria were in the original paint in the Bradshaws, and that over tens of thousands of years the fungi has provided water to the bacteria and the bacteria in turn has given carbohydrates to the fungi.

Got Milk?

2011-01-21T16:40:00.005-05:00

Mare's milk, all the rave 5000 years ago, is back in fashion. * Cleopatra may have bathed in ass's milk when horse's milk would have done just fine. * Milk lovers may live longer. * Adding milk to black tea wrecks its health benefits. * Failure to-date: trying to turn grass into milk without use of a cow. * Giving a cow a name may boost her milk production. * Breast milk ice cream, anyone? * A mother's laughter may improve the health benefits of her breast milk. * A laser-assisted robot milkmaid in Sweden milks cows anytime they want, and they want it a lot. * Tit birds like milk (but we should have known that). * Breast milk should be drunk at the same time of day that it is expressed. * Space Yoghurt.

Sex Appeal

2010-11-21T17:05:00.000-05:00

Women seeking short-term relationships like men with facial scars. * Oh, that cave man look (women still fall for it). * Why cosmetics work (it's about contrast). * Hamburger makeup artistry. * Nefertiti's eye makeup, and the face cream preferred by ancient Rome's women. * Neanderthal cosmetics. * What a computer likes to see in a woman. * Soft, touchable skin for robots. * Wasps that wear makeup suffer a rude awakening. * Shoppers buy more from attractive sales people. * A woman's belly button may signal her mating potential (and outies are out). * When penis enhancement surgery goes awry. * The future of cosmetics (bioengineered skin color). * Etc.

In Discover Magazine This Month: What Happens in Las Vegas Gets Flipped by Plate Techtonics

2010-11-02T13:27:00.002-04:00

In November's Discover Magazine:

Just a few miles from the perfectly enclosed, artificial worlds of the Strip's casinos, there lie some beautiful and accessible spectacles of nature.

See article.

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Nanotechnologoy

2010-07-02T13:08:00.000-04:00

In the July-August issue of Discover Magazine:

1 Get small. A nanometer is about the width of a strand of DNA; if you design, build, or use functional systems smaller than 100 of these, you’re a nanotechnologist.

2 By that definition, we have been doing nanotech for centuries. For instance, the colors in medieval stained glass windows result from nanocrystals created in the heating and cooling of the glass.
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3 Size matters. At the nano scale, materials take on unusual properties. Their color, transparency, and melting point often differ significantly from those of larger clumps of the same stuff.

See "things" 4-20.

2010-06-02T13:15:00.000-04:00

In June's Discover Magazine:

1 The sultry “dog days of summer” get their name from ancient astronomers who noticed that those days coincide with the period when Sirius, the Dog Star, rises at the same time as the sun.

2 Bad astronomy: Sirius is the brightest star in the sky, but it is just one 10-billionth as bright as the sun and has no effect on our weather.

3 Nerd. Fido will touch his nose to a computer screen if it has a picture of a dog on it but not if it shows a landscape, University of Vienna researchers have found.

See "things" 4-20.

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Water

2010-05-02T12:54:00.000-04:00

In May's Discover Magazine:

1 Water is everywhere—there are 332,500,000 cubic miles of it on the earth’s surface. But less than 1 percent of it is fresh and accessible, even when you include bottled water.

2 And “fresh” can be a relative term. Before 2009, federal regulators did not require water bottlers to remove E. coli.

3 Actually, E. coli doesn’t sound so bad. In 1999 the Natural Resources Defense Council found that one brand of spring water came from a well in an industrial parking lot near a hazardous waste dump.

See 4-20.

In Discover Magazine This Month: The Best Adventures, Museums, and Nightspots of the Year

2010-04-02T13:31:00.000-04:00

In May's Discover Magazine:

DESTINATION SCIENCE: CAYMAN TRENCH, CARIBBEAN Scuba diving into the abyss.

The Cayman Trench, a nearly five-mile-deep, 155-mile-wide basin running from the southeastern tip of Cuba toward Guatemala, is many things to many people. To veteran divers, it is a not yet fully explored mystery zone. To oceanographers, it is one of the deepest parts of the Caribbean. To geologists, it is a volatile subduction trench, part of the geologically complex boundary between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates....

Read the article.

Animal Truths

2010-02-01T10:17:00.002-05:00

Breakwater Review, a new literary ezine by the MFA program at The University of Massachusetts Boston, published my story "Animal Truths." That story is also the first chapter of a book of linked stories that I'm writing ... & writing ... & writing.

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Computer Hacking

2009-11-02T13:05:00.000-05:00

In November's Discover Magazine:

1 Hacker originally meant “one who makes furniture with an ax.” Perhaps because of the blunt nature of that approach, the word came to mean someone who takes pleasure in an unconventional solution to a technical obstacle.

2 Computer hacking was born in the late 1950s, when members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club, obsessed with electric switching, began preparing punch cards to control an IBM 704 mainframe.

3 One of the club’s early programs: code that illuminated lights on the mainframe’s console, making it look like a ball was zipping from left to right, then right to left with the flip of a switch. Voilà: computer Ping-Pong!

See "things" 4-20.

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Sugar

2009-10-02T12:36:00.000-04:00

In October's Discover Magazine:

1 The average American eats 61 pounds of refined sugar each year, including 25 pounds of candy. Halloween accounts for at least two pounds of that.

2 Trick: Sugar may give you wrinkles via a process called glycation, in which excess blood sugar binds to collagen in the skin, making it less elastic.

3 Or treat: Cutting back on sugar may help your skin retain its flexibility. So actually, no treats.

See "things" 4-20.

Sigmund Freud's 10 Steps to Great Fish

2009-09-14T20:56:00.005-04:00

Narwhal Magazine is running my "Sigmund Freud's 10 Steps to Great Fish" as its featured Absurdist List this week.

Oedipus Schmoedipus

2009-06-17T22:26:00.014-04:00

June 21 is Fathers Day 2009, and time once again to do battle with Sigmund Freud, for 2009 is the centenary of the Oedipus Complex, the idea that all sons fantasize about killing their fathers and having sex with their mothers.

Freud formalized the Oedipus Complex after treating a patient whom he called Rat Man, so nicknamed because thoughts of a rat preoccupied the patient. Whenever strong sexual cravings visited him, Rat Man conjured up an idea that a jar with a live rat was being strapped to his naked behind. The rat would use its teeth to tunnel through to his….

Perhaps Rat Man couldn't say it.

"Anus?" Sigmund Freud may have had to suggest.

"Yes. Thank you," Rat Man might have gasped in reply. We do know, anyway, that "anus" was the word upon which he settled.

In addition to longings (and fears) about a jarred rat, Rat Man hoped (and hoped not) that his thoughts determined peoples' fates. There was a third layer of anxieties and desires about unpaid debts and a fourth, too, and this is the one that formed Rat Man's psychoanalytic legacy. Rat Man told Sigmund Freud that he had wanted to kill his father. He told him that, again and again, he had imagined taking the jarred rat and strapping it to his father's backside whence the rat, once released, could tunnel through to his father's….

"Anus?" Freud may have again had to suggest to his verbally reticent and all a-quiver patient.

Anyway, somehow from the epiphany of such a clinical moment, Freud formulated the Oedipus Complex. All boys, Freud said after one year of analyzing Rat Man and two more years of thinking about him, want to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers in the same way that Oedipus of Greek myth did and Rat Man of turn-of-the-century Vienna aspired.

That Freud had found no evidence at all that Rat Man wanted to have sex with his mother didn't figure into Freud's calculus. All that Freud factored into his ideas about Oedipus were two items from Rat Man's history. First, when Rat Man was six years old his father caught him masturbating and beat him in punishment. Rat Man was filled during that beating with murderous rage. The second item: Rat Man's account of his first sexual dalliance. At the moment of climax, Rat Man had thought, "But this is wonderful! For this one could murder ones father!"

"And one could, couldn't one?" Freud apparently thought.

Freud's own father was Jacob Freud, a wool merchant of no particular talent. After he went bankrupt, he moved the family from Moravia to Vienna, where he rented a series of increasingly dismal apartments in what had been Vienna's Jewish ghetto. Jacob may have been involved in a counterfeit scheme. Regardless, he was disappointing as a provider and protector, or so Freud remembered.

Freud's mother, Amalia, on the other hand, was a paramount protector, a lioness, and one of the great loves of Freud's life. She was beautiful, for starters, and willful, and she favored Freud (her firstborn son) over all of his siblings. Amalia was Jacob's third wife, about the same age as Jacob's sons from his first marriage. Writers have, for years, imagined the lust that Freud's grown brothers must have felt for their bodacious stepmother and the lust that little Sigmund, emulating the big boys, must have felt for the woman who pinched and pampered him so.

"For this one could murder one's father!"

Fathers Day is one year younger than the Oedipus Complex. Nine-nine years into its celebration, perhaps its time to wonder whether the Oedipus Complex is a universal male tendency that Freud identified or merely the abiding bathtub ring of Freud's own psyche. After all, the original Oedipus myth is about a young man who only inadvertently killed his father and bedded his mother. Never aware that he was abandoned by birth parents (King Laius and Queen Jacosta of Thebes), he loved and honored as parents King Polybus and Queen Periboea of Corinth, for they had raised him lovingly and instructed him so well that, as an adult, he and he alone could solve the Riddle of the Sphinx.

For the next ninety-nine Fathers Days, perhaps we could talk about a Polybus Complex when we talk about fathers and their sons. Actually, the conversation needn't exclude daughters. We could define the Polybus Complex as describing the immense love and occasionally ambivalent feelings that even the best fathers have for their children and the immense love and occasionally ambivalent feelings that even the best children have for their fathers. The Polybus Complex would be about fealty, forgiveness and the willingness of imperfect people to move on together in life.

Isn't that what we've been celebrating all of these Fathers Days, anyway?

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Movies

2009-06-02T12:40:00.000-04:00

In Discover Magazine's June issue:

1 The first celluloid roll film was developed in 1887 by Hannibal Goodwin, an Episcopalian minister from Newark, New Jersey.

2 In 1891 Thomas Edison’s company demonstrated the Kinetograph, the first motion picture camera, but never got around to creating a projector for playback.

3 Instead, the company acquired manufacturing rights to a machine called the Vitascope. One of the conditions of the deal was that Edison be credited as the inventor.

See "things" 4-20.

What Are Little Boys Made Of?

2009-03-10T15:36:00.004-04:00

My boy used to make sense to me. That was when he was one year old and loved to vacuum the rug. “Big noise!” he’d shout as the vacuum roared.

Ben no longer does rugs. He still likes big noises, though—much more than I like them. He likes bangs and explosions. He loathes predictability. He wants to make sudden, full-body motions and to hunt big game and fish big fish.

I, on the other hand, detest big noises and love predictability. I want to type small words on a small computer. I don’t even eat meat much less hunt. If I were to fish, I would use plastic bait. So, at age 7, Ben no longer makes perfect sense to me. Quite literally he sometimes seems to be from Mars while I am from Venus. Already.

Ben does make sense to his father, also from Mars. Trouble is, his father is gone a lot of nights and weekends. Then it’s just me and two kids—the quiet, sensible girl and the loud boy. There’s no way around it; that’s how I react on some level, even though I try not to. On good days we laugh about it together.

Ben’s plight in our mother-dominated house has gotten me to thinking about boys in general. An increasing number of mothers are single moms. Do their boys grow up feeling from the get-go like Martians on Venus? If so, how many become toughs and miscreants, just in ego-defense?

Try as I might I can’t find scholarly answers to those questions. I have found studies showing that helping boys feel less alienated can keep them out of jail. The Cornell Consortium for Longitudinal Studies goes so far as to say that the earlier we help boys feel less alienated, the better—and that the best “boy-saving” programs link overwhelmed parents and children to community resources and supports.

Last Spring I was feeling both overwhelmed and shy on support. Ben was feeling boyish—you know, impulsive, impish, wonderful to watch but difficult to keep up with. And then he wanted to go fishing. He was crazy with desire.

See? I said “crazy.” What does that tell you about the intensity of his urge and the rigidity of my perceptions?

Out of blue sky, a community support appeared. The local gun club was sponsoring a fishing derby for kids. I don’t think I have to help you imagine what my let-me-be-alone-with-my-computer, knee-jerk reaction is to ideas like “gun clubs.” But at that point I was desperate to help Ben feel good about being a boy—and I liked the idea that someone from the gun club might bait our hook.

We showed up with a line and reel, my plastic worms, and some live worms of Ben’s. I quickly learned that fish don’t eat plastic but that they do love the rich smell of a freshly impaled member of the genus Lumbricus.

Ben—whose genetic material, after all, is 50% mine—had some trouble learning that fishing is not the same as hitting “enter” on a computer keyboard. There’s a lot of disappointed waiting involved. In fact, while kids right and left hauled in trout, Ben had to wait to catch one of the last fish of the day. A man I only know as “Mike from the Gun Club" showed Ben how to kill the fish and clean it. Mike did both the killing and cleaning with respect for the fish and with respect for Ben. And Ben noticed. In those very few minutes my boy saw in Mike that it’s OK to do guy things and that manliness can also be gentleness.

As we left I watched for a moment while one of the gun club volunteers worked patiently on fly fishing technique with one of our school’s young toughs. Mind you, that volunteer was a pretty big guy.

By the way, have you ever seen fly fishing? I hadn’t. It’s fantastically beautiful to watch the line whip and weave. As I watched the big volunteer and his tiny new pal practice their fly fishing I retired a few of my prejudices about fishing—and about gun clubs (though not about guns). I thought, “Thank goodness for men like that big guy and Mike. I even thought, “Long live the Putney Gun Club.”

This was broadcast in 2000 as part of the Vermont Public Radio "Commentary" series.

Technorati Tags:
boys, mothers, single mothers, fishing, Venus and Mars, community supports, family

International Women's Day

2009-03-09T10:04:00.002-04:00

In honor of International Women's Day I decided to create my post about women inventors in the language that for centuries was the international language of respectability. That being said, please understand that I speak French haltingly. Consider this French essay a best effort offered with good intentions.

Spécial Journée de la femme

Où serions-nous, en tout cas, sans technologie de rayons X, Nystatin, le téléphone informatisé le système échangeant, le Snugli, le médicament luttant contre leucémie 6-mercaptopurine, Kevlar, les poupées de Barbie, Actar 911 (le mannequin CPR) et les sacs en papier chargés-plats? Chaque année, les centaines de milliers de femmes demandent et reçoivent un brevet. Pendant la période de vingt ans 1977-1996, environ 83% des brevets décernés aux femmes étaient pour les brevets utilitaires, 16.5% pour les brevets de design, et 0.5% pour les brevets d'équipement.

Les appelons les "mères d'invention." La décade après la décade quelques inventions créé par les femmes a aidé des autres femmes sur leur voyage vers l'émancipation. Par exemple, le Costume d'Émancipation de flanelle a été inventé par Susan Taylor Converse. Elle a reçu un brevet le 3 août 1875. Les femmes qui ont porté le Costume n'ont pas eu besoin de porter un corset. Par conséquent, ils ne se sont pas évanouis comme leurs "soeurs." D'autre part, quelques inventions créé par les femmes ont été utilisées par plus d'hommes que les femmes. Le Kevlar de Stephanie Kwolek est un exemple. Kevlar est une fibre. Par le poids c'est cinq fois plus fortes que l'acier. C'est la composante protectrice primaire dans les gilets pare-balles.

Certain des femmes qui ont inventé ont été l'équivalent femelle du geek mâle solitaire. Mais certains ont été des succès de ce monde. L'actrice de film Hedy Lamar a travaillé avec un partenaire pour développer un "Système de Communications Secret" utilisé par les forces armées pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale pour transmettre le code. L'actrice Julia Newmar a joué la Femme de Chat dans le film. Mais elle a aussi inventé le collant ultra-absolu, ultra-douillet.

Une des créations que j'aime le mieux est la "Maison qui se nettoie," conçu en 1915 par Frances Gabe. Chaque pièce avait sur son plafond un artifice qui a lavé et a séché les contenus de la pièce. (Tous les murs, les plafonds, les étages et les meubles dans la maison étaient imperméables.) Il n'y avait aucun tapis. Tous les étages étaient slanted. "Au fond" des étages étaient des trous. L'eau vidée dans ces trous et a été emportée par les pipes.

Un inventeur que j'admire particulièrement est Ada Lovelace. En 1843 elle a écrit un papier scientifique qui s'est attendu au développement de logiciel, intelligence artificielle, et musique informatique. Elle a aussi créé une méthode pour utiliser des cartes perforées pour calculer des nombres Bernoulli. Cela l'a faite, essentiellement, le premier programmeur informatique. En 1980, dans son honneur le Ministère de la défense américain a appelé sa langue informatique "Ada."

C'est tout. Ayez un magnifique Spécial Journée de la femme.

Technorati Tags:
Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamar, Julia Newmar, Kevlar, Spécial Journée de la femme, Système de Communications Secret

Family Mysteries

2009-03-02T21:25:00.002-05:00

Remember that Thanksgiving when Uncle Ed fell down the stairs? Does everyone remember his fall the same way? No. Some say Ed was drunk when he fell. Others say he got drunk later to dull the pain. Some say Ed tumbled down two flights. Aunt Ruth says he only missed a bottom step. Twenty years later, the whole family disagrees about what happened, and they do it loudly every Thanksgiving.

According to researchers at New York University, that family mystery will never be solved. That’s because the worst thing you can do to a memory is recall it. In fact, remembering is a “practice makes imperfect” kind of thing.

It was standard rat research: Phase I. Rats. A short tone followed by an electric shock. Rats learn that tone means shock.

Phase II: Same rats. Next day. Short tone. Rats still show fear even though they’re not shocked. Short-term learning has become long-term memory.

Phase III: Same rats. Same tone. Again no shock. This time inject rats’ brains with a drug that blocks protein synthesis. Do it at the very moment that they look fearful.

I know. Poor rats. But why the protein-blocking drug?

It’s an axiom of brain biology that memory is encoded indelibly when the chemical bonds between the nerve cells holding it are protein-enriched. The scientists wanted to test that axiom. Are the bonds really indelible? Are the memories? If protein bonds were indelible the drug that blocks protein synthesis would have no effect—because no new protein would be needed. If protein bonds need to be re-made each time a memory is recalled, injecting the drug would interfere with the memory.

Which brings us to Phase IV. Same rats. Same tone. Again no shock. But this time, no fear behavior. Interfering with protein production at the moment of a memory’s recall erases the fearful memory. Which, according to the scientists, means:

First, the physical circuitry of a memory changes when a protein is replaced. Memory is no more than circuitry. Change the circuitry, you change the memory. Second, at the very moment of recall, any long-term memory is lacking its protein-enriched bond. It is extremely labile. Any sort of present sensory input could get wrapped up in the memory.

Now what does all this mean to us bigger rats?

Every time you tell the story of your Uncle Ed’s Thanksgiving tumble, the memory itself is changed—and you are open to suggestions from others. Whatever your Aunt Ruth says can get seamlessly recorded in your brain as part of what you think is pristine memory.

Does this rat research shed any light on the argument about true and false accusations? Obviously. Families that have long debated the truth of certain accusations should realize that the more they try to remember what happened the farther they may be from knowing. And the more they talk about the mystery together the muddier things may become.

What about the supposed epidemic of false memories? Sorry. No illumination. This new research says that the worst thing you can do to a memory is to recall it. But the true and false memory debate was mostly about memories that allegedly lie dormant until they are recalled years later for the very first time.

In fact, studies show that about half of such supposedly “iffy” memories can be independently verified.

Truth or lies? Lots of people would like simple answers. But in old family mysteries, it’s actually getting tougher to tell.

This was originally a Vermont Public Radio commentary.

Technorati Tags:
memory, remembering, brain research, laboratoroy rats, long-term memory, short-term memory, protein bonds, recovered memory, truth, lies

Your Cheatin' Mind Will Tell on You

2009-03-02T21:22:00.004-05:00

It's been a little over 100 years since Sigmund Freud claimed in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” that women who have orgasms by means other than direct penile penetration of the vagina become prone to neurosis and hysteria.

Back near the turn of the century, women responded to Freud’s warning by beginning a multi-generational, transcontinental tsunami of faked vaginal orgasms. Or so the lore tells us. But who cares anymore? Any supposed physiological differences between vaginal and clitoral orgasms were debunked in the 60’s by Masters & Johnson.

No one fakes it anymore. Right? Not. Sexual surveys conducted since 2000 place the incidence of fakery at between 51% and 73% for women (and slightly higher for Democrats than Republicans). At last, however, technology has caught up with the liars. Indeed, recent advances may have made faking orgasms both nearly impossible and completely irrelevant.

Item: As of September 2005, faking orgasms became much harder to get away with for people having sex in magnetic resonance imaging tubes. Neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia declared ready for prime time their lie detection technology. Using functional MRIs that display changes in oxygen levels in a subject’s cerebral cortex, the scientists are almost always able to detect when test subjects lie about the identity of cards they are dealt. Now imagine this: A sexually as-yet unsatisfied woman relaxes near her spent lover in the MRI tube. Only moments before, hoping to fool him about the quality of his performance, she sang loudly, in soprano registers, of her pleasure. Now imagine that her lover asks, “Wow. So it was good for you, too?” Imagine that she answers, “Wonderful!” rather than, “Actually, no.” Were her lover to chance a look at the MRI screen, he would notice tell-tale elevated oxygen levels in the picture of her anterior cingulated gyrus and left prefrontal cortex. The gig, as they say, would be up.

Item: Another recent lie catching breakthrough is a P300-detecting electroencephalograph (or EEG) developed at the Brain Fingerprinting Lab in Seattle, Washington. The presence of the brainwave called P300 on this EEG’s readout denotes that a test subject is familiar with the details she has been asked to recall. Theoretically, therefore, the absence of P300 in the brainwave of an as-yet sexually unsatisfied woman would be telling. Immediately post-coitus, her lover might ask, “So, was it good for you, too?” But even a quick glance at her EEG would tell him that she has insufficient data with which to answer the question. That would be a disappointing performance review for him -- no matter how theatrically she may have tried to hide the truth.

Item: Faking orgasms is now unnecessary, as may be sex. An Orgasmatron has been developed by an anesthesiologist at the Piedmont Institute of Pain Management in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It’s a box of electrodes that is implanted under the skin of either a man’s or a woman’s buttocks and that stimulates nerves in the spine. Triggered by remote control, the device lets lovers proceed from A to Z without dallying at B, L, or W.

Barbarella, watch out.

”What do women want?” Sigmund Freud famously asked shortly after he had announced that what women shouldn’t want is any stimulation of the bundle of nerve endings that actually produces orgasm. Freud readily acknowledged that he was not well-informed enough to answer the question he had posed. Now, 150 years after his birth, we still can’t answer the question in any but the most superficial ways. However, functional MRIs, the P300-Reading EEG and the Orgasmatron may be about to change all that. True, they probably won’t ever tell us what women really and truly want in their hearts of hearts. But they may give both men and women what they need: No way to lie, and no excuse to, either.

Technorati Tags:
brain science, neurology, Sigmund Freud, hysteria, orgasm, lying, EEG, fMRI, R300, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Words Fail Me

2009-02-27T04:27:00.002-05:00

On days like this, images are better.

Valentine's Day Hangover: When Pro-Life is Pro-Choice

2009-02-15T00:51:00.007-05:00

Quick. What's the leading cause of death in pregnancy? Cardiovascular collapse? Embolism? Botched delivery?

No. It's botched love.

According to the authors of a longitudinal study conducted at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, homicide is the leading cause of death in pregnant women. The study's authors reviewed 651 autopsy charts from the District of Columbia Chief Medical Examiner’s Office for cases from 1988 until 1996. They found that homicide accounted for nearly 43% of deaths among pregnant women.

The younger the woman the greater the risk.

Who's doing the killing? The study doesn't give clues. But when the Journal of the American Medical Association published the study, it ran an accompanying editorial that called non-lethal violence in pregnancy common. It cited other studies indicating that when any woman is murdered, 8 times out of 10 it is by her intimate partner. JAMA encouraged gynecologists and obstetricians to routinely screen pregnant couples for homicide potential.

Now, what is significant here other than the cold, scary facts?

When doctors worry about the leading causes of death in pregnancy, they should worry about more than just biological causes. Ditto, perhaps, for worry about the causes of birth defects. Because not only are 43% of deaths in pregnancy murders, 25% of pregnant women are physically abused while pregnant. (That last statistic is from the American College of Obstetrics.) With violence rates that high, it's hard to imagine that every birth defect is evidence of bad genetic luck.

Which leads me to ask, not entirely facetiously, whether being pro-life and pro-choice are one and the same.

It all has to do with the “life is sacred” point of view. You see, the violence and murder in pregnancy statistics make atrociously clear that sometimes a woman doesn't hear, "Great, Hon!" in response to "Sweetheart, guess what?" Think what you will about abortion. But especially for very young women, the only way to save a life--her own life--may be to make her own decisions about own pregnancy and to make them quickly, privately, self-protectively, and in the nick of time.

This was originally a Vermont Public Radio commentary.

Technorati Tags:
abortion, homicide, murder, pregnancy, pro-life, pro-choice

The First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the Scientists

2009-02-14T13:27:00.012-05:00

According to a University of California, Berkeley study in the February issue of Political Psychology, when people learn about research findings that run counter to their own political beliefs, they doubt the conclusions. (That's to be expected.) What surprised the UC researchers is that people—particularly politically conservative people—often also question the researcher's objectivity. In the study, survey participants with conservative beliefs tended to attribute scientific data resulting in liberal findings to a researcher's liberalism. At the same time, they were less likely to conclude that conservative findings were due to a researcher's conservatism.

So that could explain why the Republican Congress was so slow to act on Global Warming, and why they got so explosively red in the face when they were accused of nattering on pig-headedly about the whole thing. It could also explain why Bush's White House self-righteously muzzled scientists in general on many issues, and smiled when they did so. And it also may shed light on a more recent hairy tussle between The Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Attorney General of Connecticut. From the Abstract of "Science, Politics, and Values: The Politicization of Professional Practice Guidelines" in Journal of the American Medical Association (Feb 11, vol. 301, #6):

"The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) issued updated clinical practice guidelines in 2006 for the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease.1 Within days, the Connecticut attorney general launched an investigation, alleging IDSA had violated state antitrust law by recommending against the use of long-term antibiotics to treat 'chronic Lyme disease (CLD),' a label applied by advocates to a variety of nonspecific symptoms for which frequently no evidence suggests the etiologic agent of Lyme disease is responsible. The IDSA was forced to settle the claim to avoid exorbitant litigation costs, even though the society's guidelines were based on sound science. The case exemplifies the politicization of health policy, with elected officials advocating for health policies against the weight of scientific evidence. [Emphasis mine.]

Unlike Bush, Obama "gets" global warming. He also gets the need to put scientists in charge of the national debates on health, energy, and technology policy. But will Republican Senators and Representatives reflexively gridlock progress if and when scientists like our new Nobel-laureate Energy Secretary, with full transparency, lead the nation in ways that run counter to conservative political beliefs? Should we expect conservatives to assume that the nation's most eminent scientists are unscientific?

Maybe.

Technorati Tags:
cognitive dissonance, conservatives, global warming, liberals, political psychology, politics, psychology

Your Cheatin' Mind Will Tell on You

2009-02-13T11:15:00.002-05:00

It's been a little over 100 years (103 years, actually) since Sigmund Freud claimed in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” that women who have orgasms by means other than direct penile penetration of the vagina become prone to neurosis and hysteria.

Back near the turn of the century, women responded to Freud’s warning by beginning a multi-generational, transcontinental tsunami of faked vaginal orgasms. Or so the lore tells us. But who cares anymore? Any supposed physiological differences between vaginal and clitoral orgasms were debunked in the 60’s by Masters & Johnson.

No one fakes it anymore. Right? Not. Sexual surveys conducted since 2000 place the incidence of fakery at between 51% and 73% for women (and slightly higher for Democrats than Republicans). At last, however, technology has caught up with the liars. Indeed, recent advances may have made faking orgasms both nearly impossible and completely irrelevant.

Item: As of September 2005, faking orgasms became much harder to get away with for people having sex in magnetic resonance imaging tubes. Neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia declared ready for prime time their lie detection technology. Using functional MRIs that display changes in oxygen levels in a subject’s cerebral cortex, the scientists are almost always able to detect when test subjects lie about the identity of cards they are dealt. Now imagine this: A sexually as-yet unsatisfied woman relaxes near her spent lover in the MRI tube. Only moments before, hoping to fool him about the quality of his performance, she sang loudly, in soprano registers, of her pleasure. Now imagine that her lover asks, “Wow. So it was good for you, too?” Imagine that she answers, “Wonderful!” rather than, “Actually, no.” Were her lover to chance a look at the MRI screen, he would notice tell-tale elevated oxygen levels in the picture of her anterior cingulated gyrus and left prefrontal cortex. The gig, as they say, would be up.

Item: Another recent lie catching breakthrough is a P300-detecting electroencephalograph (or EEG) developed at the Brain Fingerprinting Lab in Seattle, Washington. The presence of the brainwave called P300 on this EEG’s readout denotes that a test subject is familiar with the details she has been asked to recall. Theoretically, therefore, the absence of P300 in the brainwave of an as-yet sexually unsatisfied woman would be telling. Immediately post-coitus, her lover might ask, “So, was it good for you, too?” But even a quick glance at her EEG would tell him that she has insufficient data with which to answer the question. That would be a disappointing performance review for him -- no matter how theatrically she may have tried to hide the truth.

Item: Faking orgasms is now unnecessary, as may be sex. An Orgasmatron is in clinical trials. Developed by an anesthesiologist at the Piedmont Institute of Pain Management in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, it’s a box of electrodes that is implanted under the skin of either a man’s or a woman’s buttocks and that stimulates nerves in the spine. Triggered by remote control, the device lets lovers proceed from A to Z without dallying at B, L, or W.

Barbarella, watch out.

”What do women want?” Sigmund Freud famously asked shortly after he had announced that what women shouldn’t want is any stimulation of the bundle of nerve endings that actually produces orgasm. Freud readily acknowledged that he was not well-informed enough to answer the question he had posed. Now, 150 years after his birth, we still can’t answer the question in any but the most superficial ways. However, functional MRIs, the P300-Reading EEG and the Orgasmatron may be about to change all that. True, they probably won’t ever tell us what women really and truly want in their hearts of hearts. But they may give both men and women what they need: No way to lie, and no excuse to, either.

Leader of My Pack

2009-02-06T12:09:00.002-05:00

Let me begin by assuring you that my dog mended, though she still has a huge hitch in her walk, and her back legs go faster now than her front ones, giving her a John Wayne lope.

Jeanette is a miniature beagle, bred, I'm told, to ride in the saddlebags of horses on the hunt. Her "saddlebag equivalent," she thinks, is the front passenger seat of my Subaru.

For 12 years now, whenever my kids and I have driven away without her, her brain has seized with compulsion to join the hunt. Jeanette has chewed through her crate and a fancy French door in her efforts to reach us. She digs under fences. She wriggles out of leads.

On a hot day one summer back in her third year, I didn't put Jeanette in her crate when we all left for the town pool. I knew she'd chew through it anyway, so I left her outside. When she looked like she wanted to follow, I sternly said "No," put pedal to metal, and tried to outrun her with my car. Long after I thought we'd left her behind, we all felt a big bump.

“What was that?” the kids asked when I slowed the car to a stop.

With my eyes glued on the rear-view mirror, where I could see a small tri-color mass lying in the middle of the road, I blurted out, "I killed the dog". Well, not quite. I almost killed the dog. But with my pre-emptive announcement I did throw the children into a frenzy.

When I loaded Jeanette into my wayback, she was jerking her head, voiceless, an accusing jitter in her eyes. The children were not at all able to follow my suggestions that they not look and that they please quiet down and think wonderful thoughts to give Jeanette some peace. Kora, our 7-year-old friend, saved my sanity by suggesting that we all say, "Good girl, Jeanette." Ben, my 6-year-old, sobbed the phrase like a mantra. Katie, my 10-year-old, wailed it angrily. The vet’s office down the road was closed. I raced into town, through a senseless traffic jam, and on, frantically searching for someone who could help.

And as I drove, I heard Kora tell Jeanette that her white light was getting brighter. And then Jeanette started to whimper. Softly. Then loudly. The dog that I thought had seconds to live had some animation by the time we reached a vet. Soon enough she was home from a week-long stay in an ICU. By Week Two she had full control of the left side of her body and was gaining some control of the right.

Everything happens for a reason, right? Well, no—but I am relieved to paraphrase Samuel Clemens. "The reports of Jeanette's death were greatly exaggerated." And I learned a lesson, for which I am deeply grateful. As a parent, I am the leader of a small pack--the children (Katie and Ben), and Jeanette, our dog. Jeanette has taught me that a difficult pack member only gets more difficult if the leader gives up and fails to follow through on reasonable restrictions. Jeanette was, for the rest of that summer, quite literally my constant and well-deserved burden. (I had to carry her around in a baby sling). Things turned out that way because I had failed to contain her the way she needed to be contained. But because I learned my lesson well enough, my sometimes difficult children—now in their mid and late teens--will never suffer the consequences of my failing to say "No", mean "No", and enforce "No” ... no matter how strongly they rebel.

Because Jeanette escapes crates, fences, and leads, more than one friend has suggested that I rename her "Houdini." I won't. I may actually rename her "Consequences," though. "Consequences"--as in "We reap exactly what we, in our equivocations, sew". In flights of fancy I stand on my back porch each night, gratefully calling my "Consequences" home.

This was originally part of the Vermont Public Radio "Commentary" series.

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family, pets, beagle, children

In Discover this Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Television

2009-02-02T12:44:00.000-05:00

In February's Discover Magazine:

1 Fade to black: On February 17, television stations will broadcast only digital signals, ending the run of the TV system used in the United States for the past 55 years.

2 The digital television signal can transmit pictures composed of up to 1,080 lines. That’s a long way from the first TV, demonstrated by John Logie Baird in 1926. It used just 30 lines to create a coarse image.

3 Baird’s television looked like a peep-show device, held together with scrap wood, darning needles, string, and sealing wax. His invention was partly mechanical, relying on a spinning metal disk with a spiral of holes to chop up images for transmission.

See 4-20.

It's Cold Here

2009-02-01T10:28:00.000-05:00

And weather is moving in.

What Vermont Looks Like

2008-10-10T10:21:00.000-04:00

Private, tortured fall foliage.

In Discover this Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Genius

2008-10-02T12:48:00.000-04:00

In October's Discover Magazine.

1 The latest winners of the Nobel Prize—the big kahuna of genius awards—will be announced this month. Were you nominated? To find out, you’ll have to either win or wait 50 years, which is how long the Nobel committee keeps secret the list of also-rans.

2 Nyah, nyah. William Shockley, who won the 1956 Nobel in physics for inventing the transistor, was excluded as a child from a long-term study of genius because his I.Q. score wasn’t high enough.

3 History repeated itself in 1968 when Luis Alvarez won a Nobel for his work on elementary particles. He had been excluded from the same research program as Shockley. Who set up that study, anyway?

See "things" 4-20.

New Beginnings

2008-03-09T14:27:00.003-04:00

After I read an article suggesting that people could revive relationships by engaging together in exhilarating sports, I could have asked my husband to go skiing. But my marriage is not the only time-worn relationship I'm in. I have nearly grown children. Sure, our first years together had their passion, good and bad. But then things evened out--considerably.

A week or so after I read the article, I needed to make plans for my 15-year-old son's spring break. Did I want to spend it pestering him to clean his room? Did he want claim it's clean already? Or might we dispel our standoff and revive our relationship by, say, scuba diving?

Cut to: The Cayman Islands and a diving course that culminates in a descent to 120 feet.

Even I did not have "reviving our relationship" in mind as Ben and I began the final dive. I was wondering if my brain was going to explode, though at around 45 feet I remembered that "imploding" was the correct worry. But soon enough, I was swimming with Ben through a maze of coral as we descended to our record depth.

Emotion distorts memory. I remember seeing Ben shoot ahead, out of a cave, and hover over the 25,000 foot drop that is the renowned Cayman Trench. I remember holding my breath in fear. Ben has pointed out that it was the instructor who went first and that, if I had held my breath, I'd have died.

ANYWAY, we both agree that all the fish were behind us, grazing on the coral. Ahead and below was just blue. Without debris or life forms to define foreground from background, we couldn't tell if the blue was an inch thick or if it extended to the center of the earth.

When I was little I wanted to be the first person on the moon. When I was 15 Neil Armstrong was. Now, at the very age at which that early dream died, my son has experienced weightlessness and a sense of limitless space, and he's shared that space companionably with a range of aquatic animals, some of which we'd always thought would eat us. (What they actually do is swim lazily by, certain that we are not part of any food chain they recognize.)

Did a spring break of exhilarating sport give Ben and me a new beginning? On the way home he handled my luggage. I opened doors. We cheerfully survived a 2-hour wait at Immigration. And neither of us has mentioned the state of his room since our return.

All right. Days in our house bounce by as imperfectly as they do anywhere and, no, we can't afford to dive again soon. But I am sold as never before on the idea of families getting outside together when the going gets tough--or even when the going gets boring.

This was original part of Vermont Public Radio's "Commentary" series.

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sports, scuba diving, children, family, relationships, Cayman Islands

The Last Comic Standing

2007-01-01T21:30:00.002-05:00

This is about events during the last week of 2006, though it starts out in 1959.

That’s so that I can make a point about tornados. In 1959 my family lived on the plains of South Dakota -- tornado country. Just to give you an idea of what I mean by “tornado country,” on one day in 2003, 54 tornados struck. Granted, that was 44 years after my family left. But my point is that when you live in tornado country you build a storm cellar before you build your house, because you’re going to need that cellar some day.

Now to the closing week of 2006: On Thursday of that week, tornados were in the sky near the Crawford, Texas home of George and Laura Bush. The Bushes waited out the storm in an armored car. Apparently, when they built their10,000 square foot vacation home in tornado-country Texas, they forgot to start with the cellar.

On Friday night of that week, a man of unmitigated evil was hanged. Inflicting terror had brought Saddam Hussein untold joy so I shed no tears for him. I do, however, think there were more politically astute ways than execution for us to reckon with him.

By the way, did you catch last summer’s NPR piece about the Anger Bar in Nanjing, China? Women pay about $8 for 60 seconds in which they beat up one of the male bar staff. One woman said it helped her work out her fury at her cruel boss. One member of the bar staff said that getting hit by a woman is better than getting hit by a man.

Saddam Hussein was no garden-variety cruel boss. Ruining as many lives as possible was what made him happy. But we didn’t need to kill Hussein in order to work out our fury at him. And even if we did, Iraq is not the Anger Bar.

It seems to me that, if the United States wants to regain face in world affairs, we should start behaving with exceptional decency. As a country we desperately need friends. Most religions -- indeed, most of our allies and potential allies -- condemn capital punishment. So what should we have done with Saddam Hussein?

Not what the man who forgot to start his house with a cellar did.

The problem of long-term arrangements for Saddam Hussein required much more deliberation than it (or the construction of the house in Crawford or even the invasion of Iraq) received. Because now, as we begin 2007, the wannabe high-toned United States of America has become the joke of civilized people.

Saddam Hussein: A bad idea, poorly executed. The United States: The last comic standing.

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Saddam Hussein, Geroge Bush, South Dakota, tornado, Crawford, Texas, Anger Bar

Funny Freud Merchandise

2006-05-01T13:20:00.002-04:00

Sigmund Freud’s 150th birthday is May 6, and kitsch sellers are making full use of the occasion. On its web site, the American Psycholoanalytic Association sells beverage coasters (they call them “table defenses”), each with a mug shot of Freud. The web site’s “Many Moods of Freud” T-shirt shows the same mug shot. The T-shirt, though, repeats it nine times with nine different mood captions: ecstatic, depressed, surprised, cautious, love struck, angry, hysterical, confused, and happy.

At Whackyplanet.com there’s a Sigmund Freud action figure for sale. Ask around at a few stores during May and you’re sure to find a Persian rug mousepad.

Is Sigmund Freud a Joke?

It’s hard to know for sure. One hundred fifty years into the legend, nearly everything we know about Freud seems to have been refracted through trick mirrors, making it hard nowadays to see anything but a funhouse-quality grotesquerie. In the 1960’s Masters and Johnson debunked Freud’s distinction between clitoral and vaginal orgasms. Ever since then, feminists have shot his ideas about women all to hell. In his time, however, Freud was much more than a buffoon on a beverage coaster. He was one of the major shapers of modern thought. His ideas were so breathtaking, his influence so pandemic, that W. H. Auden aptly described him as not a person but “a whole climate of opinion.”

Whence the deterioration of Freud’s reputation? Surely it isn’t just the passage of time. For, even though science has marched steadily onward, we all still think highly of Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei. The guffaws that we reserve for Freud can’t even be blamed on his fascination with sex. Witness the reputations of Jean-Martin Charcôt and Pierre Janet and even those of William Masters and Virginia Johnson; they remain pretty untarnished. Even Alfred Kinsey, with a major motion picture exposing his personal pecadillos, gets more respect these days than Sigmund Freud.

But then, as far as we know, Alfred Kinsey did not have an erotic relationship with his own daughter. As far as we can guess, Sigmund Freud did.

It seems to have happened behind closed doors, in psychoanalytic sessions.

The Freud Family Skeleton

Anna Freud was born in 1895 and lived until 1982. Unlike her two sisters and three brothers, she never married. Instead, beginning in her mid teens, she became Freud’s pupil of sorts. By her early adulthood she was his nearly constant companion and, eventually, his closest collaborator. As Freud’s cigar habit led to cancer and cancer surgeries increasingly debilitated him, Anna began tending physically to her father day and night. This arrangement continued until Freud’s death, when Anna assumed the mantle of the head of the psychoanalytic movement and carried his psychoanalytic seed forward into the world. Ultimately, Anna became a pioneer in the field of child psychoanalysis, doing truly groundbreaking work with war orphans and with children traumatized by violence and neglect.

Anna was inarguably her father’s favorite daughter. Freud’s intellectual descendents readily concede that point. What most Freudians don’t concede is that there was anything inappropriate in Anna’s relationship with her father. For the longest time, most didn’t have cause to.

It wasn’t until the late 1960s that Paul Roazen, a political scientist and historian of the development of psychoanalysis, stumbled upon an immense skeleton in the Freud family closet. Even though Freud defined analysis as an erotic relationship laden with transference (the inevitable desire of the patient for the analyst) and countertransference (the inevitable, reciprocal desire of the analyst for the patient), Freud analyzed Anna. He did so for two periods, one beginning in 1918 and continuing for almost four years and one beginning in 1924 and continuing for almost two years.

Roazen published his discovery in 1969 in Brother Animal, a book that raised serious questions about Freud's role in the bizarre suicide of one of his most brilliant pupils. To say the least, the book was not heartily embraced by the psychoanalytic community.

So while, beginning in about 1969, some people within the psychoanalytic community surely knew about the illicit analysis, for the most part, that community treated Roazen's views—and news—with scorn. It wasn’t until 1988 that news of the improper analysis officially “broke” within the psychoanalytic community itself. In Anna Freud: A Biography, Psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Breuehl described the analysis without commenting on its propriety or lack thereof. On the other hand, that same year in Freud: A Life for Our Times, Peter Gay (a historian with no professional allegiance to Freud’s ideas) called that particular psychoanalysis “a most irregular preceding,” and Freud’s decision to analyze Anna, “a calculated flouting of the rules he had lain down with such force and precision.”

Indeed, again and again Freud had cautioned his colleagues about the rules. “Never, ever try this at home” is essentially what he said about psychoanalysis and families.

Questions for Freud

Both Gay and Young-Bruehl named the analyses primary topic: Anna’s masturbation fantasies, which were frequent, violent, and masochistic. Anna had been masturbating to what she called “beating fantasies” since about age six. The earlier fantasies took different forms and had vaguely defined protagonists and antagonists. Now that she was an adult, the fantasies were clearly about Anna. She imagined herself a young man being held captive by a knight who tried to force her to betray “family secrets.” Even though the youth never made a whole-hearted attempt to escape from the knight, he refused to blab. The youth was always beaten by the thoroughly enraged knight.

When Freud first analyzed Anna, he seems to have done so with the objective of relieving her of her habit of masturbating—a habit that he considered masculine in nature and therefore dangerously inappropriate for females. But was Freud concerned about more than just the masturbating? Anna had not married; she’d never even dated. In the beating fantasies that she discussed with her father she played the role of a male (albeit a male in a homoerotic relationship with another male). Was Freud also concerned about a general tendency in Anna towards masculinity? And was Anna indeed struggling with questions of sexual preference when she first entered analysis with her father?

In 1922 Anna and Freud mutually terminated Anna’s analysis; although the record is unclear about why they chose to do so, the frequency of Anna’s masturbating may have diminished. Regardless, by 1924 she was again masturbating regularly—and enjoying it immensely. “I am impressed by how unchangeable and forceful and alluring such a daydream [of the young man held captive by the knight] is, even when it has been—like my poor one—pulled apart, analyzed, published, and in every way mishandled and mistreated,” Anna wrote to her friend, the novelist and femme fatale, Lou Andreas-Salomé. “I know that it is really shameful … but it [is] very beautiful.”

And so, in 1924, Anna reentered analysis with her father.

Also in 1924, Anna met an American woman, Dorothy Burlingham, heir to the Tiffany fortune. Almost immediately, Dorothy and her four children took up permanent residence in Vienna. Soon enough they moved into an apartment in the same building as that of the Freud family. Anna moved many of her personal items out of her family’s apartment and into Dorothy’s. Dorothy and Anna began vacationing together. They bought a small house in the country together. Eventually Dorothy began referring to Anna as the second mother to her children.

Almost any concerned father of Freud’s day would have hoped that his daughter would marry and have a family. So Freud may be forgiven for at least wanting Anna to be analyzed in 1924, given the fact that she was about to turn 30, her biological clock was ticking, she was masturbating again and aplenty, and her sexual fantasies were not classically “boy meets girl, boy marries girl, girl has children” ones. Freud may also have been especially interested in analyzing Anna once Dorothy entered the picture and the apartment building.

But given that Freud knew that analysis was always erotically charged, why didn’t he refer Anna to a colleague for analysis? By his own theorizing, if his daughter were a lesbian, mistakes that he had made as a father were the cause of that trouble. Was Freud too worried about his personal reputation to let a colleague talk frankly with Anna? Was he hoping that, as Anna’s analyst, he could quietly rectify any “problems” he had “caused”—and help her refuse a life that would speak embarrassingly about his failings?

And just how erotic did things get in the nearly six years of analysis between Sigmund and Anna Freud?

No doubt, an answer to the question about incestuous overtones in the father-daughter psychoanalytic relationship would be easier to improvise if Anna’s sexual fantasies had demonstrably changed over the course of the analyses in a way that invited speculation. But they didn’t. Anna continued on with her “young man meets knight, young man gets imprisoned by knight, young man doesn’t actually try to escape from knight, young man gets beaten by knight and Anna has an orgasm” fantasy life.

Anna, however, was hardly the only significant party to the analysis. Surely her father’s thoughts, feelings, and fantasies were tugged thither and yon in all of that transference and countertransference. Does evidence exist suggesting how Freud himself was affected? Changed?

Certainly we know nothing about his sexual fantasies during that period or any changes in them. We do know, however, about his theories about women, and those did change, significantly, during the years of his analyses of Anna. Or at least two theories did.

During the six years in which Freud analyzed Anna, he redefined penis envy as the major factor in a woman’s sexual development and he redefined masochism as an expression of female nature.

Penis Envy

Way back when Anna was 10 years old, Freud had first theorized about penis envy, but back then he had framed the concept rather innocently. In 1905’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud had sounded neither pejorative nor terribly informative about a girl’s supposed desire for a penis of her own. He said that all little boys assume that everyone has a penis. When presented with evidence to the contrary they deny the absence that they behold. Little girls, on the other hand, do not resort to denial. They immediately recognize that a boy's genital is bigger than a girl's and they want one more like the one that boys have. Penis envy as described in 1905 was much like the envy that any child with a small scooter might have for another child with a large tricycle. For a child size always matters.

Even as a little girl, Anna had been a precocious thinker, so independent that her father’s letters to friends were proudly speckled with anecdotes about her feral ways. As a young woman, she remained unconventional and forward-thinking. Other girls looked forward to lives as homemakers. Anna did not. She wanted to know about analysis. She wanted to meet analysts, breathe analysis. She wanted to discuss ideas.

However, once Freud took 23-year-old Anna into analysis and the inevitable web of sexual attractions were woven, Anna grew emotionally dependent on her father, more than she had ever been before. While they were briefly separated in 1920, she wrote to Freud, “You surely can’t imagine how much I continually think of you.” Around the same period, Freud’s letters to friends began including concerns about Anna’s increasingly unshakable attachment to him. In 1921, he wrote to his Berlin colleague, Max Eitington, “I wish that she would soon find reason to exchange her attachment to her old father for a more durable one.”

It was in 1925 that Freud published an elaboration of his original theory of penis envy. He said, essentially, that the moment at which a girl first discovers her lack of a penis is a moment of ineradicable psychic trauma. From that single moment on the girl will want a penis. As she matures, however, she will realize that she can never under any circumstances grow one. Hoping, then, for second best, she will begin to desire her father's penis. Because she knows that incest is taboo, the girl's desire for her father's penis will be wrapped in shame. She will eventually sublimate her desire for her father’s penis into a desire for a child. To fulfill her obsession to have children throughout her childbearing years she will need to secure and retain a man.

Freud believed that boys build their moral sense from a fear that their fathers might castrate rather than spank them. A girl, however, has no penis to lose to her father’s rage and therefore no good incentive to develop moral virtue. Whatever virtuous behavior she will manage to exhibit will derive from her quest to catch and maintain the man who can provide her with cute and cuddly penis substitutes. Or so said Freud, roughly.

By Freud’s own understanding of the erotic tangle that psychoanalysis creates, each session of Anna’s six-night-a-week psychoanalysis was one in which she and her father/analyst sexually desired each other. There seems no reason not to assume that each of them conducted themselves admirably in spite of the abundant opportunity the privacy of analysis gave them to transgress almost any boundary imaginable. Rather, there is every reason to assume that they went through whatever machinations were necessary to avoid acting on whatever desire they felt. It seems probable that their actual behavior was impeccable, and this in spite of the fact that the nightly topic of conversation (the youth, the knight, the youth’s curious failure to escape, and, oh, that inevitable beating) probably fed the general level of agitation in the room.

Plain English: However innocent its beginnings, Freud’s theory about penis envy and a girl’s overwhelming desire for her father’s penis may be based only minimally on observable phenomena in girls and young women in general. More profoundly, it might be about Freud’s own daughter and Freud’s own penis.

Masochism

In 1905’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud also first discussed masochism, observing that certain people require physical or mental pain in order to achieve sexual satisfactions. Unequivocally he called masochism a perversion.

Then, in a 1919 paper called "A Child is Being Beaten," Freud normalized masochism, suggesting that sometimes masochistic elements in childhood sexual fantasies are but sexual representations of underlying feelings of guilt. Freud based "A Child is Being Beaten" on his analysis of the masochistic fantasies of two boys and four girls. However, one child’s case material made up the lion’s share of the paper’s documentary evidence.

That “child” was Anna. The fantasies were the childhood versions of her adult beating fantasies. We know this because, three years later, Anna described the same child and the same fantasies in "Beating Fantasies and Daydreams," her first psychoanalytic paper ever. (In "Beating Fantasies and Daydreams," Anna referred to the child as a patient of hers. However, as psychoanalyst and historian Elisabeth Young-Bruehl pointed out in her 1988 biography of Anna, the conceit is transparent. The “patient” must have been Anna herself, for it would be another six months before Anna began psychoanalyzing anyone.)

Then, in 1924, Freud elaborated on masochism, suggesting for the first time that it is quintessentially feminine to find pleasure in pain—indeed that masochism is “an expression of the feminine nature.”

To his credit, there is no evidence that Freud based his 1924 idea of feminine masochism mostly on his analysis of Anna. Regardless, he did write it during his analysis of her. So it seems fair to ask: To what degree did his analysis of Anna convince Freud that masochism is characteristically female? Keep in mind that Freud, a self-described “conquistador” of the inner world, required Anna to recline on the couch six nights a week while he psychologically teased her apart. Keep in mind also that she complied.

Keep in mind that the young man in Anna’s beating fantasies never once tried to escape the pleasure of the knight.

All The King’s Horses and All The King’s Men

Shortly after Anna’s second bout of analysis came to an end, she went on to cohabit happily ever after with Dorothy. Evidently, even the king of psychoanalytic persuasion could not dictate to his daughter whom and how she would love. Freud seems to have grudgingly accepted Anna and Dorothy’s relationship. In his correspondence with friends he referred to them both fondly as “virgins” but, as the years passed, stopped wishing for the day that Anna would marry. Following Freud’s suit, over the years, friends and family and even Freud’s most doctrinaire adherents acknowledged Anna and Dorothy’s relationship as intimate and exclusive. However, no one but the maid ever hinted that it was sexual. (According to Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson, the former Projects Director of the Freud Archives, Anna and Dorothy’s maid told him that they “shared a bedroom” from time to time.)

Surely, during Anna’s second analysis, Freud sensed that he was losing the battle for Anna’s future. If so, he may have used with Anna the word “hysteria.” It was the diagnosis that doctors of his day sometimes gave to women whose sexual preferences wandered intractably from the straight and narrow.

One can only hope that, if Freud did label Anna an hysteric, he did not personally practice with her one of the era’s most common medical treatments for hysteria. It was the direct and prolonged application of massage by the doctor to the external genitalia of the patient. The massage continued until the patient reached orgasm.

Although the patients undoubtedly enjoyed the treatments, doctors sometimes complained that they were boring to administer. Indeed, as the use of electricity became widespread in cities, one inventive doctor treating a plethora of female hysterics developed the electric vibrator. While it probably didn’t “cure” his hysterical patients, no doubt it did reduce for him the risk of repetitive stress injuries in his wrists and hands.

Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious

1905, the year in which Freud first wrote about masochism and penis envy, was the first time he’d written in broad strokes about sexuality in general. Perhaps not coincidentally, that same year, Freud also wrote about humor. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, he suggested that jokes, like dreams, symbolically express unacceptable sexual impulses.

In other words, dreams are the sexual secrets that we tell ourselves at night. Jokes are the ones we tell each other at parties.

In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud also wrote about laughter. He said that it’s the ejaculative emotional response that comes when a joke sets up an exquisite tension and then relives it with a surprise.

So now we know why we laugh at Freud. When one first reads Freud, one is impressed at the breadth of his curiosity and at his command of language. We admire Freud and we envy him. We want the ability to wonder as Freud wondered and articulate the precocious questions he dared to ask. Our regard for him grows almost unbearably as we browse through his works and then through tome after tome written by admirers with impressive credentials. And then, finally, suddenly, we learn just enough, perhaps about the history of psychoanalysis or about his comportment with various female patients or about the skeleton in the Freud family closet to begin to realize that we’ve been “had” in a grand way. Surprise! The tension breaks and with it comes laughter.

150 years after Sigmund Freud’s birth the laughter is coming in waves. Steadily, increasingly, Sigmund Freud seems funny. Indeed, funny Freud merchandise may be this May’s real growth industry.

The Parent Trap (It's Depression)

2006-03-01T17:58:00.002-05:00

Lately I’ve been thinking about that old Woody Allen line: Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids.

Now, don’t get me started on Woody Allen's parenting skills. But it seems he may be almost right here. We don’t inherit insanity from our kids, but we may “inherit” depression.

That’s what a study by Florida State and Vanderbilt Universities has found. Analyzing data gathered by the National Survey of Families and Households, researchers found that parents have significantly higher levels of depression than do adults without children.

Other important findings:

Moms and dads get and stay depressed at about the same rate.
Parent is a parent is a parent, which is to say that single parents, married parents, parents of young children, and parents of grown and gone children all report significantly more depression than non-parents.

In fact, as their children grow older and leave home, the incidence of depression among parents rises. How so? Yes, empty nesting can carry an emotional shock but the adage, “Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems,” may also explain a bit of what’s going on. Sometimes just burping a baby puts a "little worry" to rest. But no pat on the back can make our world safe for our adult children as they move beyond our protection. And while we love them differently than we loved them as babies, we love them just as much—and worry way more.

That’s what the Florida State and Vanderbilt University researchers suggested, anyway, when presenting their findings. They also hinted that, in other countries, parents might not be more depressed than non-parents. In America, especially, parenting can be an isolating experience. We value individual strength and privacy. We pride ourselves on our successes. We blame ourselves for our failures. This means that when our growing children wander astray from the paths we think are safe and onto ones that we fear, the psychological costs of parenting can quickly seem to outweigh the benefits.

More often than is good for us, apparently, Americans hoe the hard row of parenting without adequate social and emotional supports. Depression in adults costs society greatly. The workplace cost alone is as high as $40 billion a year. So maybe it’s time to look to our state and municipal governments for policy options, to our churches, community centers, and employers for structured social supports, and, parents, to each other for all of the help, humor, and heart we can give.

Woody Allen also once said: “Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all.” Funny quote, but not a funny reality. We parents need to have fun, to get out, to get support and perspective. Parenting is great – except that sometimes it isn't.

But if you're a parent, you knew that.

Now, even the national numbers show it.

This was originally a Vermont Public Radio commentary.

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parenting, depression, Woody Allen, family, children

La Plus Ça Change

2005-12-30T14:01:00.000-05:00

As the landscape turns white here in New England at the end of 2005, the entire western world approaches the end of a few notable celebrations and a few less than notable ones. 2005 was the centennial of Einstein’s theory of relativity. It was the centennial of Las Vegas, of Saskatchewan and Alberta becoming Canadian provinces, and, in Vermont (where I live) of Montpelier's Lodge of Elks #924.

2005 was also the centennial of Sigmund Freud's theory of vaginal orgasms. In 1905, Freud declared "infantile" any orgasm a woman has by any means other than penile penetration. Recent survey data suggest that only 20-30% of women have orgasms by the means Freud favored. I can't find data showing how many men believe their women partners to have "vaginal orgasms." But if it's more than 20-30%, 2005 is probably also the centennial of the faked orgasm. In which case it marks, to cop a title from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 hundred years of solitude, or at least of loneliness and disappointment.

Another centennial: 100 years before 2005, Anna Freud, Sigmund's Freuds daughter, turned 10. "Not a big deal," you might say. How many 10-year-olds' birthdays do we celebrate 100 years later?

Not a lot. But, you see, Sigmund wasn't an easy father for any 10-year-old to have, much less this 10-year-old. W. H. Auden once described Sigmund as "not a person but a whole climate of opinion." Not only did he declare anything but vaginal orgasms infantile, he declared homosexuality sick and lesbianism the fault of the father. Way back when Anna was turning 10, Sigmund's ideas were blasting across Europe like a weather front. Unfortunately, while she hunkered in her father's shadow, she was probably developing inklings that she wasn't going to live a life replete with the kind of orgasms he specifically extolled. For while her sisters and friends were getting their first serious crushes on boys, Anna was probably getting her first crushes -- on other girls. And that was something that she probably had to deal with very, very creatively, given who her father was and what her father pronounced.

I’ll wager that no Freudian psychoanalyst you will ever meet will acknowledge to you that Anna Freud was gay. They tend to protect Sigmund's theories, which means that they refer to her as a life-long vestal virgin. (That's what her father called her.) But the truth is that Anna lived the last 50+ years of her life in a monogamous relationship with Dorothy Burlingham, who was heir to the Tiffany fortune. It was a dignified Boston marriage typical of the time. Anna doesn't seem to proclaimed her love for Dorothy to anyone but Dorothy. Their friends and family were far too polite, far too reserved, far too awed by Sigmund's intellectual legacy to ask them direct and personal questions, as, apparently, were tabloid journalists.

However, in the late 1970s, when Anna and Dorothy were very old women, the Research Director of the Freud Archives was Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson, Ph.D. Dr. Masson is a rather colorful gourmand of gossip. He was so colorful in the 1970's that Janet Malcolm profiled him in a series of articles in The New Yorker (for which she and The New Yorker got sued, but that's another story). Anyway, while in the employ of the Freud Archives, Dr. Masson became curious about the two old dears. They doted on each other so sweetly. Dr. Masson was oh, so fascinated and oh, so inquisitive. He asked Freud family friends about the nature of Anna and Dorothy's relationship. They replied to his questions with blank stares. So, frustrated and a bit too restlessly, perhaps, Dr. Masson did the obvious. He asked Paula Fichtl, who had been Dorothy's maid since the 1920s. "Do Miss Burlingham and Miss Freud share a bed?" the Research Director asked Paula. Laughing with surprise, Paula stumbled in her answer, "Why no, sir. They each have their own beds." And then, guiltily, rather by way of explanation: "They sleep together in one or another, whichever they please."

Of course, I paraphrase and probably embellish. But you get the point.

The way I see it, 2005 -- which, as I've said, was the centennial of the vaginal orgasm and all of those faked ones -- may have also been the centennial of 10-year-old Anna's very first steps in a long and ultimately successful struggle to define herself as separate from her father's ideas and to live a productive, laudable life that included romantic, homosexual love. Actually, she did become a psychoanalyst, so I guess the apple didn't fall very far from the tree in some respects. But she was a psychoanalyst of a different kind, specializing in the analysis of traumatized children, a group with which she may have had cause to identify, given the fact that her homophobic father analyzed her for about five years. They talked about her sexual inclinations and fantasies.

So as 2005 closes, while we are recognizing Einstein’s relativity theory, Las Vegas, Saskatchawan, and Alberta in the closing days of their centennials and while we are lauding the Elks of Montpelier, Vermont's Lodge 924, are there any women (gay or straight) out there who want to raise a glass to 100 years of faked orgasms? Any women who want to raise one to Anna Freud? She found someone with whom she didn't have to fake and she lived the rest of her life in a this-is-who-I-am-dear, pass-the-tea-and-hang-the-crumpets, happily-ever-after sort of way. To me anyway, a married heterosexual woman writing from the woods of Vermont, that seems like something to toast. Bob (husband), dear, would you hang the crumpets?

What Did the Children Know, and When Did They Know It?

1999-05-01T11:58:00.005-04:00

On March 11, 2009, a high school student killed 16 peers in Germany. The commentary below originally aired on Vermont Public Radio in 1999, at the beginning of the U.S. epidemic of school violence. It may have relevance today, as well.

More than a third of women seeking help in hospital emergency rooms report that they have been abused by intimate partners. So say the results of a survey by the Allegheny University of the Health Sciences. Interviewing almost 3500 women, researchers identified something that puts women at especially high risk of domestic violence: raising young children.

Anyone who’s been a parent can tell you that young children are only really perfect when they’re asleep—and that if there’s a short-fused temper in a house, the normal antics of wide-awake children might ignite an explosion. So learning that women with young children are in the high risk group for domestic violence doesn’t surprise me.

But it does concern me. Here we are, the year in the midst of an epidemic of school violence, pointing our fingers accusingly at TV screens as we try to track the epidemic’s cause. And here I am, wondering: When dad is hurting mom are the high-spirited children awake? Listening? Watching? What’s going on in the kitchen between mom and dad is probably way more interesting than what’s happening on TV. Do the children know? And if they do know, how many of them now accept violence against women as an ordinary part of everyday life?

I’m willing to bet that TV, computer games, and teasing all play a role in school violence epidemic. But did you know that almost all of the children killed in the school murders last academic year were girls—and that all of the killers were boys?

Norwalk, Calif.: A boy killed his 16-year-old estranged girlfriend.
Jonesboro, Arkansas: Four girls died when a 13-year-old, with help from his cousin, set out to kill all of the girls who had ever broken up with him. That was his threat just the day before.
Pearl Mississippi: Two girls died. According to a friend of the murderer’s, he had talked about killing one because she wouldn’t go out with him anymore.

By the way, the Allegheny University study reported another interesting finding: Women trying to end an intimate relationship are seven times more likely to be hurt by their partners. Last school year, of the eleven students murdered, ten were girls. And of the seven murderers, four were boys who seem to have been hunting specific girls; the rest of the dead may have been what military generals euphemistically call "collateral damage."

Do we know whether these four boys had witnessed violence between their parents? No. While we can safely assume that some of last year’s school murders were about romantic rejection, we can’t safely assume that any of the boys had learned violence at home.

But it does make one wonder about children in general.

Studies since the early 80’s have statistically tied witnessing family violence to violent behavior in boys. Interestingly, they have also tied witnessing family violence to "sitting duck" behavior in girls. According to the American Bar Association, witnessing family violence places children of both sexes at high risk of lifelong problems—the boys as offenders and the girls as victims.

“Home Schooling” I guess you could call it. But at the same time, many kids from violent homes do grow up to have healthy relationships. Why? How?

There are lots of good opinions from psychologists working with children of violence. One whose name I have long forgotten said something like: “If kids in these families are to keep from going crazy, someone in their lives—it doesn’t have to be a parent—has to be crazy about them.” It’s a simplistic analysis that ignores all sorts of factors, yes. But I love it. It suggests a course of action. And I, anyway, am grasping for ways to help.

Many children who witness violence are threatened by the abuser not to tell anyone, and they don’t. So if we want to help, we’ll have to let all the children in our lives know that we’re crazy about them. We’ll have to get crazy and stay crazy.

Children of violence often act out in ways that make them difficult to love. So, long-term, getting and staying crazy about every kid in town is not going to be easy. I hope we don’t just cut a wide swath of well-intentioned promises without any real follow-through. I hope we don’t ride roughshod in delicate situations.

And as much as we want to help, we will probably find that sometimes we can’t. Things conspire; fate wins. And when fate does win, we will be unbearably sad.

But if nothing else our lives and maybe the life of someone else will have been enriched by the happy lunacy of our actions.

And that, perhaps, will be something.

This was broadcast in 1999 as part of Vermont Public Radio's Commentary series.

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family violence, sitting duck syndrome, cycle of violence, domestic violence