Which organs can I live without, and how much cash can I get for them?

First, a disclaimer: Selling your organs is illegal in the United States. It’s also very dangerous. Handing off an organ is risky enough when done in a top hospital, even more so if you’re doing it for cash in a back alley. No, really: Don’t do this. OK? OK. There are many organs one can theoretically do without, or for which there’s a backup. Most folks can spare a kidney, a portion of their liver, a lung, some intestines, and an eyeball, and still live a long life. That said, donating a lung, a piece of liver or a section of intestines is a very complicated surgery, so it’s not done frequently on the black market. And no one’s going to make much cash on an eyeball. “In the U.S., there’s a fairly steady supply of donated corneas from corpses,” says Sean Fitzpatrick, director of public affairs at the New England Organ Bank. “There’s pretty much no market demand for eyes.”
Giving up a kidney, though, is a relatively simple surgery that has netted desperate people a few bucks.

Now, black-market organ dealers don’t do a great job of filing taxes, but here are some prices based on rumored deals and reports from the World Heath Organization. In India, a kidney fetches around $20,000. In China, buyers will pay $40,000 or more. A good, healthy kidney from Israel goes for $160,000. Don’t expect to pocket all that dough, though. “The person giving up the organ only gets a fraction of the fee,” says Sally Satel, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank who studies the prices paid by legal and illegal organ-donor operations. After the organ broker—the guy who sets up your kidney-for-cash transaction—takes his cut, he needs to pay for travel, the surgeon, medical supplies and a few “look-the-other-way” payoffs. Most people get $1,000 to $10,000 for their kidney (probably much less than you were hoping for).

The best bet is to wait until compensation for organs is legalized in the U.S.—the Organ Trafficking Prohibition Act of 2009 would allow payment to donors, but it stalled in Congress—because there’s certainly a market for kidneys. Last summer, a man offering one of his for $100,000 (plus medical expenses) on Craigslist received several offers until the Web site removed his post. And you could probably hold out for even more. In 1999, before eBay delisted a kidney put up for auction, bidders drove the price up to $5.75 million.

Source of Information : Popular Science February 2010

Does your brain make sweet music?

WHAT does the human brain sound like? Now you can find out thanks to a technique for turning its flickering activity into music. Listening to scans may also give new insights into the differences and similarities between normal and dysfunctional brains. Brain scans created using functional MRI consist of a series of images in which different areas light up with varying intensity at different times. These can be used to determine which parts of the brain are active during a particular task. To turn such scans into music, philosopher Dan Lloyd at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, identified regions that become active together and assigned each of these groups a different pitch. He then created software that analyses a series of scans and generates the notes at these pitches as the corresponding brain areas light up. Each note is played at a volume that corresponds to the intensity of activity.

When Lloyd fed the software a set of scans of his own brain taken as he switched between driving a virtual-reality car and resting, he found that he could detect the switch-over in the sounds. Lloyd then gave the software scans taken from volunteers with dementia and schizophrenia, and from healthy volunteers. The brains of people with schizophrenia switched between low and high activity more erratically than healthy brains, allowing the two types of brain to be distinguished by sound alone. While this difference is also clear from looking at the images, Lloyd’s collaborator Vince Calhoun at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, says there are variations in the music from people with schizophrenia that are not visually obvious. “It almost sounds like there is more background warbling,” he says. He suggests that these “unsteady rhythms and cadences” may be indicative of dysfunction in the brain. Lloyd also identified sounds and rhythms in the brains of people with dementia that distinguished them from healthy volunteers. Could identifying such aural differences ever be useful? Daniel Levitin , a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, thinks they might. He says brain music’s killer application might be in allowing researchers to home in on patterns that suggest a particular region is interesting and that wouldn’t be detectable using the eye alone. They could analyse these regions more closely using conventional imaging. His colleague Didier Grandjean at the University of Geneva in Switzerland says that brain music might help identify temporal patterns in particular. “Melodies are a much better way to build complex mental representations over time than anything the eye can do,” he says. Lloyd is also keen to explore the aesthetic aspects of brain music. “It’s not quite like composed sound but it’s not random either, it’s ‘almost music’. My students are putting it on their playlists.”


Turning brain activity into music
How brain activity from scans can be turned into a symphony
1: Areas of the brain that activate at the same time are assigned a particular note on a scale

2: A series of brain scans are fed into software that plots their activity levels against time

3: The notes are combined, with volumes varying with brain activity

Source of Information : New Scientist July 4 2009

A premium plan for the neediest

Could insurance giants save the world’s poor from the effects of climate change?

AS WESTERN governments dither at the negotiating table over how to help the world’s poorest people cope with climate change, some unlikely saviours have stepped up to the plate: the giants of the global insurance industry. As well as providing protection from the increasingly unpredictable weather, the premiums could also be a powerful way to get poor people to adapt to climate change by encouraging them to invest in measures like drought-resistant crops. Is this profit-driven endeavour too good to be true?

Each year, people in the small Ethiopian village of Adi Ha depend on the precise timing of the rain to grow teff, a sourtasting grain they turn into the traditional injera flatbread. If the rains fail, so do their livelihoods. Climate models forecast that droughts, floods, heatwaves and severe storms are destined to become more frequent, so what can poor farmers do? US and European farmers buy crop insurance to cope with extreme weather. But the cost of checking claims from smallholder farmers in developing countries is prohibitive, and so insurance companies have tended to steer clear of them. Now a different type of insurance scheme is being rolled out in Adi Ha and many other places in Africa, Latin America and Asia, backed by corporate giants such as Swiss Re and
Munich Re . Instead of insuring against lost crops, “index insurance” protects farmers against the vagaries of the weather.

For example, if rain gauges at local weather stations drop below a certain level, insurance companies can automatically transfer a payout to farmers without having to visit them. Cover is tailored to each region. In Adi Ha, where farmers need the rains to start before a certain date, those who are insured will receive a payment if rains fail to come before an agreed cut-off date. In the hurricane-prone Caribbean, hotel owners can buy insurance that pays out if winds exceed a certain speed. The premiums can cost as little as a few dollars a year. The scheme in Ethiopia is backed by Swiss Re, but like others of its kind, it only got off the ground because of the firm’s collaborators, in this case Oxfam and the
International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University, New York. Alliances between NGOs, charities and insurance firms may seem an unlikely match. “Oxfam went through a big soul-searching process before climbing on board microinsurance projects, and ultimately decided it made sense,” says Marjorie Victor of Oxfam America. “Insurance companies have surprisingly aligned interests with NGOs when it comes to reducing risk.” According to Molly Hellmuth of IRI, “the trick is to balance the needs of companies to make a profit with the needs of farmers”. At a session on insurance and climate change held in March in Copenhagen, Pablo Suarez , a researcher who has consulted on insurance projects for Oxfam and the UN Development Programme , confessed that he initially approached the idea with a degree of scepticism, but now calls himself a “convert”. Heavyweight humanitarians are also backing the idea. Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the UN and head of the Global Humanitarian Forum , has said


Source of Information : New Scientist July 4 2009

Why does Coke from a glass bottle, a plastic bottle and an aluminum can taste different?

It doesn’t. That’s what Coca-Cola’s spokespeople say, anyway. “The great taste of
Coca-Cola is the same regardless of the package it comes in,” they insist. Rather, they say, “the particular way that people choose to enjoy their Coke can affect their perception of taste.” Sure, most people would agree that the cola is indeeddelicious and refreshing, and pouring it into a glass or serving it over ice could influence the sensation of its flavor. But is it possible that the subtle variation in taste that some notice among aluminum cans, plastic bottles and glass bottles is more than just a psychological effect of their soda-consumption rituals?

Given that the formula is always the same, yes, according to Sara Risch, a food chemist and member of the Institute of Food Technologists. “While packaging and food companies work to prevent any interactions, they can occur,” she says. For example, the polymer that lines aluminum cans might absorb small amounts of soluble flavor from the soda. Conversely, acetaldehyde in plastic bottles might migrate into the soda. The FDA regulates this kind of potential chemical contact, but even minute, allowable amounts could alter flavor. Your best bet for getting Coke’s pure, unaltered taste is to drink it from a glass bottle, the most inert material it’s served in. Even that’s not a sure bet, though. Coca-Cola maintains strict uniformity in processes in all of its worldwide bottling facilities, but it concedes that exposure to light and how long the product sits on store shelves may affect the taste. So yeah, the packaging might mess with Coke’s flavor, but we’ll still take it any day over New Coke.—DOUG CANTOR

Source of Information : Popular Science July 2009

If a mosquito bites me after I’ve had a beer, can it get drunk?

Shockingly, no major studies have been conducted on this topic. “The implications are, however, profound,” says Michael Raupp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland. “Reckless flying, passing out in frosty beer mugs, hitting on crane flies instead of mosquito babes. Frightening!” Fortunately, enough related research exists to make an educated guess. First, does alcohol affect a mosquito’s simple nervous system the way it does creatures with complex brains, such as dogs or Mickey Rourke? In labs, honeybees fly upside-down after alcohol exposure, and inebriated fruit flies have trouble staying upright and fare poorly on learning tests. This suggests that mosquitoes can get tipsy.
Now, how much alcohol does it take to get them schnockered? Scientists routinely puff ethanol vapors at insects and measure their sensitivity with devices called inebriometers. Bugs are no lightweights, often withstanding vapor concentrations of 60 percent alcohol, far more than what’s in our blood after a couple beers. “Someone who’s had 10 drinks might have a blood alcohol content of 0.2 percent,” says entomologist Coby Schal of North Carolina State University. To a mosquito, a blood meal that contains 0.2 percent alcohol is like drinking a beer diluted 25-fold. Skeeters might have developed this Ruthian ability to hold their liquor through diet. They also feed on fermenting fruit and plants, which contain at least 1 percent alcohol and might have boosted their tolerance. And in a mosquito, alcohol (and any fluid other than blood) is diverted to a “holding pouch,” where enzymes break it down before it hits the nervous system.
Before you try to drink a mosquito under the table, heed this warning from Michael Reiskind, an entomologist at Oklahoma State University: The blood alcohol levels required to do so would almost certainly kill you as well.—BJORN CAREY

Source of Information : Popular Science July 2009

Edible Antifreeze

Borrowing a trick from the Arctic snow fl ea could banish freezer burn.

Putting food back in the freezer after it thaws causes ice crystals to grow, imparting the unwelcome crunchy texture and mildew-like taste of freezer burn. Now food chemist Srinivasan Damodaran of the University of Wisconsin–Madison has derived edible antifreeze from papaya enzymes and gelatin. His concoction, which stunts ice-crystal growth, promises always-creamy ice cream and juicier T-bones, even after their third trip between icebox and table. While studying gelatin, Damodaran realized that its protein is similar to the one that keeps the lowly snow flea from freezing in Arctic temperatures. To isolate the molecule involved, he mixed the gelatin with papaya enzymes, which are excellent at freeing proteins from other cellular material, and separated all the protein chunks by size. Then he mixed each batch with ice cream. The final step was to subject the dessert to a series of temperature changes until he found the one that remained ice-crystal-free. Damodaran still wants to better understand how the proteins work, but a patent for the process is in the works. In a few years, ice cream with a beard of frost should be a relic.

*.* Source of Information : May 2008 Popular Science

Why do some people dream?

Why do some people dream more than others? Unless you’re a character in A Nightmare on Elm Street, you probably dream the same amount as everyone else: upward of two hours a night, according to the National Institutes of Health. The brain’s sleep cycle, however, makes it extremely difficult to remember dreams. “During sleep, our memory systems are completely shut down, and we’re basically living on a self-erasing tape,” explains neurologist Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center. It’s like the “record” button in your brain has been switched off.

So why is it that some people regularly recall the intricate plots of their bizarre dreams? “The primary determinant of whether you’re going to remember a dream is if you awaken during it,” Mahowald says. Waking up snaps your memory into action, and it absorbs the bits of a dream that might otherwise fade into your subconscious. Frequent wakers are more likely to remember their dreams than deep sleepers, he adds. The content of your dreams might also play a role in retrieving your somnolent synapses. Bad dreams typically jolt you awake, so people who suffer from frequent nightmares may also be more likely to remember what they dream.

Research on dreaming has shown that it’s possible to train yourself to better recall whatever you were dreaming about just prior to waking up, says Alan Manevitz, a psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York.

*.* Source of Information : May 2008 Popular Science

WHY IS YAWNING CONTAGIOUS?

Go ahead; admit it—you’re yawning right now. That’s OK, we forgive you. We know it’s not because you’re bored. It’s just that seeing other people yawn, reading about yawning, or even just thinking about it can make you yawn. And it’s a good thing, too: Passing yawns around a campfi re might have kept our ancestors alive.

Picking up another person’s yawn may be an empathetic refl ex, says evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany. When you see someone yawn, neurons in your brain fi re and cause you to “feel” what that person is experiencing, commanding you to perform the action even if you don’t actually feel the need.

Scientists have yet to figure out why we yawn at all, though. Some say it signals boredom, whereas others have suggested that it balances carbon dioxide and oxygen levels in the blood. Most recently, Gallup theorized in a study last year that yawns cool our brains so that they run effi ciently, similar to running a fan in a computer. He found that, contrary to common perception, cooling the brain with a yawn keeps people from nodding off.

Alternatively, E.O. Smith, an emeritus professor of anthropology at Emory University, contends that yawning may have encouraged our ancestors to go to bed early. “Contagious yawning didn’t arise in a vacuum on a Saturday afternoon,” Smith says. Spreading a case of the yawns around a bonfi re, he posits, may have prompted night owls to climb up into their comfy tree beds with their sleepier brethren, out of danger from stealthy predators.

*.* Source of Information : May 2008 Popular Science