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On April 12th 2011 a rally to protest against proposed medical research budget cuts by the Australian government was held around the country. I attended the Sydney protest in Belmore Park and interviewed:
Bettina Arndt, Bill Ferris, Judy Black, and Andrea MacFarland.

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This is my 10 minute report on Gregory Benford's  hour-long talk and slide-show about his company Genescient's aquisition of the Methuselah flies, and how they are being used to show the networked interactions of drugs and foods with genes and how they express in the human body. He presented his talk at the Singularity Summit Australia. The Methuselah flies use experimental evolution to discover the genes that cause the diseases of aging. Their first product StemCell100 goes on dale in December 2010

Related articles

• Longevity of Man: How long can we live? (written in 1985, updated in 1994, pirated by others since)
• Personal Life Extension Conference (nextbigfuture.com)

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This recording was made in large echoing room, from the audience. Its less than ideal. I'll be posting a studio quality recording of me presenting a script based on this talk, very soon.

Gregory Benford spoke about his company Genescient's aquisition of the Methuselah flies and how they are being used to show the networked interactions of drugs and foods with genes and how they express in the human body. He presented his talk at the Singularity Summit Australia.

Here's my photos of his presentation as a slideshow or click on the thumbnails below:

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In the studio this week while we recorded Diffusion Science Radio, Victoria Bond demonstrated on Marc West the "Sailor's Handshake", used in the old days by sailors meeting eager girls on the docks, to subtly discover if they carried syphilis.

Victoria and Marc are members of the Diffusion Science Radio team.

Dr Rachel Dunlop has been battling the Australian Vaccination Network for the past 12 months. She explains why people were scared of vaccinations, and why they don't need to be afraid. download MP3

Dr Rachie is a member of the Australian Skeptics and a regular contributor to the SkepticZone podcast.

I reasoned that karaoke therapy might help my fluent or "mild" aphasia,. I have aphasia from chronic ciguatera fish poisoning. A year after I started singing, I had big improvements in the quality of my speech, and the science was published explaining why it worked, and why joining a choir may help me and other people who've suffered "mild" aphasia even more.

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Related articles

• Aphasia: What Is It And How Is It Diagnosed And Treated? (brighthub.com)
• It looks like I have Aphasia... (underthelobsterscope.wordpress.com)

Zombie Fish poison! Associate Professor Graham Nicholson from the department of molecular and medical biosciences in the faculty of science at the University of Technology, Sydney spoke with Ian Woolf about the tropical fish disease Ciguatera and the fish you eat to consume the poison.
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Here's a podcast of my response to the New Scientist headlines about "How People Can Think Themselves Sick - how chronic fatigue syndromes are triggered by people's mindset".
MP3

New Scientist have just published an interview with psychiatrist Simon Wessely with the irresponsible headline "When illness is mostly in the mind" which is advertised in their email PR as "How People Can Think Themselves Sick - how chronic fatigue syndromes are triggered by people's mindset"

I immediately wrote a comment about the unscientific interpretation of the data which I'll reproduce here.
His list of published work is here:on pubmed

I don't know which research he refers to in the interview.

Simon Wessley And CFS Sufferers Hurt By Wrong Headline


Simon has only shown that 33% of patients have recovered from CFS without knowing it and are merely de-conditioned from CFS, and 33% have been over-cautious with an illness that gives time-delayed feedback to activity, while the remaining 33% are managing their CFS exactly right and have no detectable psychiatric problem. At best 33% are "thinking themselves sick". There's nothing new in this, but it does prove that CBT and graded exercise doesn't cure 66% of CFS. If his research is correct.

 I notice that Simon Wessley never uses the phrase "mostly in the mind", and in fact never in the interview says that CFS is "triggered by a mindset." Where do these exaggerations come from?. Sadly its the exaggerated headlines and summaries that people will remember, not the carefully worded answers given in the interview.

One counter-example is all that is necessary to prove a scientific theory wrong. 66% of patients are not cured by CBT and graded exercise, therefore the theory is wrong. 33% not only aren't helped, but they are likely to have been MADE SERIOUSLY WORSE by the application of CBT and graded exercise. Given that this is the defining symptom of the diagnosis of CFS, why wasn't the question asked? How many people were hurt by being made to do exercise that made them sicker? 33% is a high number, and can't be dismissed the way Simon appears to.

His own research proves that his theory is wrong for 66% of patients. He should interpret this to mean that there are a small sub-set of people who have recovered from CFS and can be helped by CBT and graded exercise, and the remainder are sick for reasons his theory can't explain. Only half of those who don't recover respond to graded exercise and CBT with "good improvement", and half do not respond well to this treatment. This would be an accurate and fair interpretation that would not lead to CBT and graded exercise being the "cure" for all.

Whoever chose the headline and the short summary that appeared in the New Scientist PR email should apologize to both CFS sufferers and Simon Wessley for misleading everyone.

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I spoke with Professor Michael Cortie about his research using lasers to zap gold nano-particles to kill cancer cells and parasites, at the University of Technology, Sydney.

MP3

Dr Stephen Graves, Director of Hunter Area Pathology and the Australian Rickettsial Reference Laboratory spoke with me about the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Conference held in Cambridge in July 2008. What is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? What are the causes, and what is it like to be struck down by the illness? Why is it still the invisible illness so many years after its discovery in the 1980s?

The interview was broadcast on Diffusion Science Radio on 2SER on the 4th of August 2008 You can download the whole show here.

MP3
Are you chocolate desiring or chocolate indifferent? The reason lies in your guts.

MP3
Brain implants to help your memory. Ted Berger has a device that takes analogue signals from the brain, converts them to digital, processes the signals, and then outputs in the brains own language to neurons on the other side.

Is Vegemite illegal in America? Personally, I never touch the stuff.

Tomatoes may prevent asthma attacks, except when they cause them.

References:
Occupational Asthma in Tomato Growers following an Outbreak of the Fungus Verticillium albo-atrum in the Crop
Occupational asthma in greenhouse tomato growing
f25 Tomato allergens
The role of foods in asthma
Grass pollen allergens cross-react with food allergy proteins in tomato, lettuce, onion, celery, corn and sometimes carrots.
Nomato
Tomatoes Are Evil

A new mint oil inspired lotion may help people who suffer chronic pain.

All fishing in Sydney has been banned indefinitely because seafood from the Harbour is poisoned with 35 times the WHO safe level of dioxins.

Extension of harbour fishing ban likely ABC
Sydney Harbour commercial fishing halted ABC

None of the reports name the corporations who dumped all this poison into the harbour. There is no indication that the people poisoned, the fishermen rendered jobless, nor the cost of cleaning up will be borne by the polluters. They are just referred to as "industries in Homebush Bay", whose poison sediments have spread everywhere for many years.

The State government hasn't committed to payng for any of this either. They're just hoping that some of the most persistant industrial wastes in the world will go away in a few months - or that the electorate will forget about it.
The poison didn't just happen yesterday. The Primary Industries Minister's angle is that its not his fault that the WHO have lowered the safe amount of dioxins. He admits the current levels are as bad as they were when he checked ten years ago.

Maybe the fish that survive the poison can replenish the unsustainably over-fished ocean.

Ironically, the tabloid TV shows recently bullied fish shops for not displaying where fish was from so that people could avoid buying foreign food. Now the same origin labelling laws can help you avoid food grown locally.

I accidentally ingested neurotoxins from tropical fish in December 2002, on a locally delivered pizza. Amongst the bizarre Ciguatera symptoms was "Mild Aphasia", including changes to my voice. I sounded terrible. I wasn't able to convey emotions in the tonality of my voice, and I often slurred my words or went quiet. The professional speech therapists took two looks down my throat and told me they couldn't see me using my voice wrongly. So I've had to do the Mad Scientist thing and experiment on myself, after reading up on neurology and immunology and toxicology.

I figured that if singing activated a different part of the brain for people who stutter and helps them speak clearly, it may also help with my voice changes. A different neural pathway sounded like exactly what I need. Singing is all about conveying emotions in the changing tonality of your voice.

So I downloaded EvilLyrics and winamp, and sing along at home. I have a bad memory for lyrics, but with EvilLyrics downloading them and displaying them in front of me for every song; I could sing. Nobody had to hear me. Mysteriously, my voice was remarkably richer the next day.

Thus Karaoke therapy was born. I suspect the fact that I'm trying to match the singer's timing, pronunciation and inflection are part of what makes a difference. In primary school, I used to be part of a school choir. We sang at the Sydney Opera House. I think singing with another voice, gives feedback for me to make corrections to my singing.

It seems to give me the best results if I sing for up to an hour, as part of my preparing for sleep rituals. Too little time has less effect. If I miss it for too many days, then my voice reverts to poor, high montonal, and faint.

I'm experimenting further to see if I can refine it and get better results. Certainly listening to my mp3 radio pieces, the changes are clear.

I have no medical qualifications, I'm just giving myself technical support for a black box problem that the experts have given up on. This seems to work for me, I hope if you have suffered the same symptoms, that it works for you. If nothing else, Karaoke is fun!

The Sea Gypsy Moken people who live among the islands of Thailand and Myanmar can see twice as clearly underwater as anybody else, but without needing goggles. They have normal vision above the water. Anna Gislén, of Sweden's Lund University studied the nomadic hunter-gatherers who dive for tiny shellfish and other food from the ocean floor at depths of down to twenty-three metres underwater. The children are able to pick out small brown clams from amongst small brown stones that the Swedish scientists were unable to see even with goggles. Underwater, the human eye normally needs an extra layer of air from goggles to see anything more than a blur. This is because the light bends more travelling from air into the eye than from water into the eye. The Moken people have learned to control the muscles around their lenses so that they can voluntarily bend their lenses beyond what untrained people can do. More remarkably they have conscious control of the size of their pupils, and they contract their pupils to a tiny dot to better focus the light underwater. Its just like getting a better picture from a camera by using a smaller aperature, or hole for the light. Back in Sweden, they were able to teach school-children the tricks of shrinking their pupils and bending their lenses more, with about six months of training. The researchers fail to mention that the other time your eyes' pupil size changes, is when you are more interested in someone - its a social signal. The dilated pupils of someone who is interested, is more attractive. Learning the Moken skill of being able to consciously control your pupils to dilate when you want, could give you an edge not only underwater, but in flirting.

Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorin has solved the puzzle of why lettuce sap has been used in ancient Rome to dampen sexual desire, and in ancient Egypt to inflame sexual desire.

In ancient Greece and Rome, the milky sap from lettuce has been used as a sedative and painkiller. In the 1st Century AD, the Roman army used it to drive out sexual dreams of soldiers. Pliny the Elder wrote about its ability to dampen sexual desire a hundred years later. However archaelogical evidence also shows that it was used as an aphrodisac in ancient Egypt, in an offering to the fertility and sexuality god Min. For more than a hundred years archaeologists have wondered why a vegetable used to calm dreams was associated with the exuberant sexuality of Min.

Samorin tested the hormone-like phytochemicals in lettuce sap, and found that the effect depends on the dose. The milky sap comes from cutting the stem of the plant.

A small dose of one gram of lettuce sap, causes the calming and pain killing effects to appear, because of the presence of lactucin and lactucopicrin.

At the higher doses of two to three grams, the stimulating effects of cocaine-like tropane alkaloids dominate, acting like an aphrodisiac.

So the Romans had a small amount of lettuce sap to calm down, and the Egyptians used a larger dose of wild lettuce sap, to get excited.

Further tests are needed to confirm Samorin's results at of the Civic Museum in Rovereto. Luckily Lettuce is legal, grows wild in several countries, and is safe to eat.

The fliers just arrived from rachel at Cosmos magazine for this week's Science on Tap: A Beginners Guide to Immortality. I'll be the philosophical physicist who wants the science fiction to be made a reality on a panel with public health expert Stephen Leeder and biochemist Mark Jones. Its not enough to cure all fatal diseases, you've got to be able to survive assassination attempts as well. As the transhumanists would say; we need a backup! Wouldn't that be the ultimate life assurance policy? In the event of involuntary death, we'll resurrect you.

Actual physical changes in the brain caused by hypnosis have been shown by Amir Raz and his colleagues at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Over the last few decades, scientific study has explored how hypnosis can change memory, and pain perception. Hypnosis has been both a boon for pain control, and a danger with false memory syndrome. This new research suggests that hypnosis can also make it easier to solve certain types of problems.

Raz has hypnotised his subjects and then put them into a functional magnetic resonance imager.
He had sixteen subjects, of whom eight were easily hypnotisable, and eight were not. They were to take a test after being hypnotised.

The volunteers were hypnotised for twenty-five minutes, and told that when they later heard a cue, such as a coughing sound, they would see the printed words as gibberish and only be able to focus on the ink.

Researchers then brought them out of their trance state, and ten minutes later asked them to take the Stroop test while in a brain scanner.

The Stroop test has subjects name the colour of the ink of letters that spell out different colours. So that "Blue" might be spelled out in red ink. This kind of problem is known as a "cognitive conflict", and makes your brain work harder. Your brain has to use the anterior cingulate cortex to monitor the conflict, and plan for your future actions, as well as call on the visual areas and memory to identify the colour. It takes extra time. Other researchers have previously suggested that the anterior cingulate cortex is the part of the brain affected by hypnosis.

In the test, the easily hypnotizable individuals had better accuracy and quicker reaction times compared to the volunteers who were less responsive to hypnosis, and their brain scans showed reduced activity in the visual areas and the anterior cingulate cortex.

This gives a lot of support to those who have faced skepticism for years over the reality of hypnosis as an altered brain state, and not just some game played by hypnotist and a subject who just pretends to be hypnotised. Magician James Randi has been promoting this idea for decades, based largely on the stunts of stage hypnotists. Magicians Penn and Teller have debunked hypnosis on their TV show "Bullshit", despite admitting that there are some aspects that they can't explain with their theory that the subject is just following instructions and acting.

Amir Raz says "Words can form suggestions, and suggestions can have very, very strong effects on neurological activity".

Biopsychology newsletter
" Scans Show How Hypnosis Affects Brain Activity" Scientific American June 28

I found my first reference today that lets me translate the Hayflick Limit on human cells into years of life. New Scientist talks about obesity and cigarettes and ageing from a paper published in The Lancet. A new study from St Thomas Hospital in London focussing on the effects of obesity and smoking on aging, has also shed light on what has often been touted on the upper limit of how long people can live: The Hayflick Limit. The Hayflick Limit was discovered by Leonard Hayflick in 1961, and it refers to the fact that normal human body cells are mortal. Telomeres are the fuse that burns down every time a cell replicates, so that when its “boom” time, the cell stops replicating and starts to clog up with waste and eventually dies. In bottles, they reproduce fifty times, before they stop replicating. This has been compared to aging of the human body, and suggested as part of the aging mechanism - although nobody has any proof, yet. However until now, nobody has published the figures to translate from fifty cell replications in the lab, into how many years of life you could reach if all diseases and injuries were healed, before your cells stopped replicating and just died. Tim Spector measured the length of the telomere fuse as it burned down in a study of 1122 women, and importantly, the rate at which it burned down. He also looked at the effects of obesity and smoking, and its no surprize that they make you age much faster. Even if we cure all diseases and heal all injury, as long as we're flesh, the Hayflick Limit would kill us in the end. So how long would that give us? In his study at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, Tim Spector measured the length of the telomeres of 1122 women, and found that in 18 year olds, the telomeres were 7500 base pairs of chromosomes long. Now the telomeres shortened at an average rate of 27 base pairs per year. By simple back of the envelope calculations, that gives them 277 years of life before their cells stop replicating. Since they started at 18 years of age, that means they get on average, 295 years of life! I feel confident in saying that nobody on record has lived long enough to be killed by the Hayflick Limit. I’ll worry about it getting my telomeres lengthened when I'm halfway there at a young 142.

Variety isn't just the spice of life, its also a weight loss secret. Ben Fletcher of the University of Hertfordshire has invented a "no diet" diet that doesn't involve having to worry about exercise or what you eat. The weight stays off, and you feel happier.

The secret is to act outside of your familiar comfort zone. For the structured first month, you pick a different option from fifteen pairs of contrasting behaviours such as lively or quiet, introvert or extrovert, proactive or reactive, and then behave that way during the day. This can be a challenge for extroverts to blend in, and for introverts to stand out from the crowd. Twice a week, they also had to choose an alternative to their usual behaviour, such as listening to a different radio station, or just reading a different newspaper.

After four months, the volunteers had lost five kilograms. Six months later, they'd kept the weight down, and reported less depression and anxiety.

The method is based on Fletcher's Framework for Internal Transformation. When you are forced to change your routine, you have to think harder about all your decisions. So despite the volunteers not being given any instructions about exercise or diet, they ended up making wiser decisions in those areas, without needing the willpower required to stick to a conventional weight-loss diet and exercise regime.

It suggests that regularly changing your behaviour in minor and even random ways, makes it easier and more natural for you to change your behaviour over a longer term to be healthier and happier.

FIT Science (via wayback machine)

"FIT Science is the result of nearly 20 years of original research by Professor Ben Fletcher and his colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire, England. It's a new psychology with real implications for us all.

We use FIT Science and its body of research evidence, to underpin our work with sales teams.

The Statements:

The basic principles of FIT Science are set out in the following statements. These are just some of the ideas that lie behind FIT theory, to give you a taster.

FIT People:

* know that a small thought can change the whole world
* behave appropriately in all situations, and do so comfortably
* accept personal accountability for their world irrespective of factors outside themselves
* differentiate between right and wrong, and do what is right
* control themselves, and therefore their future
* know why things happen
* live in the present, look to the future and forget the past
* shape their world
* are powerful, not 'personalities'
* will always succeed in the long run
* learn differently -they use deeper strategies to tackle problems
* are noticeable - they are preferred in interviews
* are happier, more satisfied, and less stressed
* cope better with difficult working environments
* experience deep emotions but are still able to evaluate with detachment - they are emotionally intelligent
* do not repeat the past - they make present conditions decide
* do not live a life of repetition and habit, but one of renewal and change
* are receptive to feedback from the world and from others
* are attentive to their work and family lives
* are independent thinkers, less prejudiced and more skilled socially

UnFIT People:

* are unhappy, unhealthy or unsuccessful - the same is true of UnFIT companies
* often behave inappropriately, and cannot change their behaviours
* allow fear to dominate decisions and actions
* are unaware - they go about their lives asleep, just letting it happen to them
* live lives out of balance
* look for direction instead of for FITness
* trap themselves in the past, without even knowing it
* don't interrogate events or learn from them
* cannot help but reveal themselves

FIT Theory

* FIT is an acronym that stands for Framework for Internal Transformation
* this framework has 2 main components: Behavioural Flexibility (BFlex) and FIT Integrity
* your (Inner) FITness can be measured, and developed using FIT EXERcises
* the key to happiness, personal success and increased effectiveness is higher levels of (Inner) FITness
* your 'personality' is a constrained box of predictable behaviour keeping you on auto pilot - a no growth zone
* your 'comfort zone' of behaviour is narrow, your 'discomfort zone' too wide - this needs to be reversed
* your effectiveness in the world, at home, in relationships and in work is determined by your (Inner) FITness
* tiny differences have a huge impact on outcomes - a small increase in (Inner) FITness will effect many things

Behavioural Flexibility

* wider BFlex means appropriate behaviour all the time - not being a prisoner of 'personality' and 'habits'
* wider BFlex means operating in your current 'discomfort zone' - this is where personal growth takes place
* wider BFlex means not repeating the past, behaving as you always do because of past experiences
* wider BFlex means making decisions appropriate to the prevailing circumstances - not habitually
* wider BFlex means living and acting in the present - jettison the past, it is of no use

FIT Integrity

At the heart of FIT Theory is FIT Integrity, and what we call the five Constancies. Our extensive research has shown that these are the measures that matter in any human decision-making process.

* Awareness - the degree to which you see clearly what's going on inside, and around you
* Fearlessness - acting without fear, facing the unknown just as you face the known
* Self-Responsibility - accepting personal accountability for your world
* Balance - achieving a healthy balance between the other four Constancies, and between work and home life too
* Morals/Ethics - differentiating right from wrong, and doing what is right

Our FITness assessment measures these five Constancies.

FIT people score consistently well in all five, with similar scores for each constancy - and the balance is important. If you have a high score for Fearlessness, but a low one for Self Responsibility, say, you may act recklessly.

Through simple practices, everyone can improve their Behavioural Flexibility and their FIT Integrity. Changes in these levels improve sales performance:

For more information, you may like to read Professor Fletcher's book (Inner) FITness and The FIT Corporation (ISBN 1-86152-644-X)"

Ever thought that that attempt at seduction was so practiced that they could as well be seducing in their sleep? Well Australian sleep physician Peter Bucanan from Sydney's Prince Alfred Hospital told the Australiasian Sleep Association about a Canberra patient who walked out of the house and seduced and had sex with strange men, and then woke up at home the next morning next to her husband, with no memory of the night's events.

According to the June 2003 Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, people who suffer from "parasomnia", can not only walk, but also drive a car, eat, have sex, or commit acts of violence, all without being awake and legally responsible for their actions. They catalogue eleven cases of initiating sex with someone in the household while asleep, but none of them included a seduction of an awake stranger in another building.

Dr Bucanan was skeptical at first, but convinced by the distress of the couple and their confusion.
The husband had been aware of some sleepwalking, and then had found strange condoms around the house. He eventually woke to find her missing one night and found her having sex with another man.

Dr Bucahan diagnosed her after extensive testing with sleep sex, a form of Rapid Eye Movement REM behavioural disorder, where her body wasn't paralysed while sleeping, and so she was able to act out her dreams.

People only remember their dreams when they are woken during a dream, so people with REM behavioural disorder are often stunned and disbelieving when told what they have done.

Psychotherapy helps in half the cases, and medication can be helpful in others.