GEN-ERIC News

A researcher tried to desalinate seawater with a generator he developed to treat cancer, and it caused a flash in the test tube. Within days, he had the salt water in the test tube burning like a candle, as long as it was exposed to radio frequencies. His discovery has spawned scientific interest in using the world’s most abundant substance as clean fuel, among other uses. Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, held a demonstration last week at the university’s Materials Research Laboratory in State College, to confirm what he’d witnessed weeks before in an Erie lab. Dr. Roy said the salt water isn’t burning per se, despite appearances. The radio frequency actually weakens bonds holding together the constituents of salt water – sodium chloride, hydrogen and oxygen – and releases the hydrogen, which, once ignited, burns continuously when exposed to the RF energy field. Mr. Kanzius said an independent source measured the flame’s temperature, which exceeds 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, reflecting an enormous energy output. As such, Dr. Roy, a founding member of the Materials Research Laboratory and expert in water structure, said Mr. Kanzius’ discovery represents “the most remarkable in water science in 100 years.”

Here’s a novel business plan. Prairie Village, Kansas-based Nowa Technology has come up with a wastewater treatment plant that sucks out materials from wastewater and some of these removed products can be consumed as a diesel additive. It depends on what’s in your wastewater, but Nowa CEO Richard Nelson says you find the fuel there quite a bit. You can mix it 50-50 with diesel and get about the same amount of energy as pure diesel, according to Nelson. This is different than what Israel’s BioPetrol is trying to accomplish. That company is applying the coal-to-petrol process on human sewage. The unit costs $7 million and pays for itself in a few years, he added. Water remains one of the growth areas in clean tech, but it doesn’t nearly get as much focus as biofuels and solar power. One of the fears about the water market is that the main customers are slow-moving municipalities.

Whether women are said to be flat-chested or big-busted, ordinary bras fall short when it comes to supporting bouncing breasts, a new study claims. And during exercise, women’s breasts bounce more than previously estimated, moving a vertical distance of up to around eight inches (21 centimeters) compared with a past maximum measurement of six inches (16 centimeters). The bouncing, in some cases with breasts weighing 20 pounds or more, can prove painful and damaging to the limited natural support system. While brassieres have evolved throughout history from body-binding corsets to cleavage-enhancing “miracle” bras, only recently have researchers injected a dose of science into the design of undergarments that go beyond conferring a more “perky” look, the researcher says.

Why is it important to know what brain systems underlie self control? Many neuropsychiatric disorders, from substance dependence to personality disorders to attention deficit disorder, involve impairments of self control. Basic research such as this study may eventually lead to a better understanding of the systems responsible for these disorders, as well as for differences in people’s ability to control our less constructive impulses, such as the urge to say or do something ugly. As Brass and Haggard put it in their introduction, “[The] decision whether to act often has critical consequences. For example, there is a clear distinction between intending to hit someone and actually hitting them.” The research also touches on the age-old problem of free will. If physical processes in the brain cause our actions, then how can there be free will? How can we be held responsible for our behavior? Can’t we just all plead “my brain made me do it"? Brass and Haggard’s results do not solve this puzzle, but they do reveal some important new features of the puzzle. Their results illuminate a very important aspect of the brain’s control of behavior – the ability to hold off doing something after you’ve developed the intention to do it , which one might call “free won’t” as opposed to free will. From the broader perspective of reconciling our identity as free moral agents with our identity as physical brains, this discovery of an area apparently associated with “free won’t” makes the “brain” side of the equation a little more interesting and nuanced. Our brains don’t just “make us do it"; they also have specialized systems for stopping us from doing it.

Researchers recently determined that refined sugar is actually more addictive than cocaine. In a recent study rats were given a choice between sugar water and cocaine, and 94% them chose sugar. Even the rats that had previously been addicted to cocaine switched to the sugar once it was a choice. Findings clearly demonstrate that intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward, even in drug-sensitized and addicted individuals. We speculate that the addictive potential of intense sweetness results from an inborn hypersensitivity to sweet tastants. In most mammals, including rats and humans, sweet receptors evolved in ancestral environments poor in sugars and are thus not adapted to high concentrations of sweet tastants. The supranormal stimulation of these receptors by sugar-rich diets, such as those now widely available in modern societies, would generate a supranormal reward signal in the brain, with the potential to override self-control mechanisms and thus to lead to addiction.

Starchy foods has fuelled human evolution on this planet to a large extent, a new study by researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz, has revealed. In their study in Nature Genetics, Dr Nathaniel Dominy and his colleagues found that compared to primates, humans are genetically more adept at breaking down calorie-rich starches, crucial for feeding the larger brains of humans. Previously, experts had speculated that meat in the diet was the probable answer. Dr Dominy refuted this argument on the ground that meat occupied a small fraction of the human diet even when looked at it in the hunter-gatherer perspective. “Even when you look at modern human hunter-gatherers, meat is a relatively small fraction of their diet. To think that, two to four million years ago, a small-brained, awkwardly bipedal animal could efficiently acquire meat, even by scavenging, just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” said Dr Dominy.

University of Minnesota researchers have discovered that a common amino acid, available as a health food supplement, may help curb pathological gamblers’ addiction. In a recent eight-week trial, 27 people were given increasing doses of the amino acid, N-acetyl cysteine, which has an impact on the chemical glutamate – often associated with reward in the brain. At the end of the trial, 60 percent of the participants reported fewer urges to gamble. Similar studies using N-acetyl cysteine have shown its ability to curb drug addictions in animals, and a current University of Minnesota study conducted by Grant is investigating whether the drug could help methamphetamine users quit.