GEN-ERIC News

Good news for your Viagra-using hamster—on his next trip to Europe, he’ll bounce back from jet lag faster than his unmedicated friends. The researchers who revealed that bizarre fact earned one of ten Ig Nobel prizes awarded on Thursday for quirky, funny and sometimes legitimate scientific achievements, from the mathematics of wrinkled sheets to the US military’s efforts to make a ‘gay bomb’. The recipients of the annual award handed out by the annals of Improbable research magazine were honoured at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater. A team at Quilmes National University in Buenos Aires, Argentina, came up with the jet lag study which found that hamsters given the anti-impotence drug needed 50% less time to recover from a six-hour time zone change. Of course, they didn’t fly rodents to Paris. They just turned the lights off and on at different times. Odd as it may be, that research might have implications for millions of humans.

You arrive home from work, drop your mobile phone, MP3 player and camera on the kitchen table and pour yourself a well-earned drink. Immediately, the music on your MP3 player begins blaring from your hi-fi, photos start downloading to your PC and texts and emails start flashing up on your TV screen. What’s going on? The phone, MP3 player and camera are sending information to the table, which passes it to the walls, which in turn route it to the hi-fi, television and PC. Takao Someya, Tsuyoshi Sekitani and colleagues at the University of Tokyo, Japan, have developed a flexible, plastic electronic sheet that can be embedded in tables, walls and floors. Plastic transistors and copper wires that snake through the sheets allow gadgets placed on them to form spontaneous connections and swap data.

A paper that recently appeared in the journal Neuron sets up an interesting dichotomy in describing how to view the function of the brain. One option it presents is that the brain is an input-output device: give it a stimulus, and it will process it and respond. The alternative view is that the brain is simply doing its own thing, and stimuli act to modulate its activity, rather than direct it. Since the first perspective is an easier one to approach experimentally, it has received most of the attention, but the paper presents evidence that the alternative view shouldn’t be ignored. The experiments in the paper are built around two observations. The first is that just about every measure of brain function detects spontaneous, organized activity even when the owner of the brain doesn’t appear to be doing anything—in fact, this kind of activity has been detected when people are under anesthesia. The second key observation is that, even on the simplest tests, the same individual will perform differently when the test is repeated. The authors simply asked if these two were linked: is human action influenced by spontaneous brain activity?

“Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.”