>The Discovery of Umami
Posted: June 4, 2010 Filed under: Health, Research Leave a comment »>
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Professor Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University was thinking about the taste of food: “There is a taste which is common to asparagus, tomatoes, cheese and meat but which is not one of the four well-known tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty.”
It was in 1907 that Professor Ikeda started his experiments to identify the source of this distinctive taste. He knew that it was present in the “broth” made from kombu (a type of seaweed) found in traditional Japanese cuisine. Starting with a tremendous quantity of kombu broth, he succeeded in extracting crystals of glutamic acid, an amino acid, and a building block of protein. 100 grams of dried kombu contain about 1 gram of glutamate, the sodium salt of glutamic acid. Professor Ikeda found that glutamate had a distinctive taste, different from sweet, sour, bitter and salty, and he named this taste “umami”.
Professor Ikeda decided to make a seasoning using his newly-isolated and distinctive-tasting ingredient. To be used as seasoning, glutamic acid had to have some of the same physical characteristics which are found, for example, in sugar and salt: it had to be easily soluble in water but neither absorb humidity nor solidify. Professor Ikeda found that monosodium glutamate had good storage properties and a strong umami or savory taste. It turned out to be an ideal seasoning. Because monosodium glutamate has no smell or specific texture of its own, it can be used in many different dishes where it naturally enhances the original flavor of the food.
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Thanks to Michele for the news tip!
>Healthy Sleep ‘Linked to Longer Lifespan’
Posted: May 6, 2010 Filed under: Happiness, Health, Research Leave a comment »>
Getting less than six hours sleep a night can lead to a shorter life span, UK and Italian researchers have warned.
They said people regularly having such little sleep were 12% more likely to die over a 25-year period than those who got an “ideal” six to eight hours.
They also found an association between sleeping for more than nine hours and early death, although that much sleep may merely be a marker of ill health.
Sleep journal reports the findings, based on 1.5m people in 16 studies.
The study looked at the relationship between sleep and mortality by reviewing earlier studies from the UK, US and European and East Asian countries.
Premature death from all causes was linked to getting either too little or too much sleep outside of the “ideal” six to eight hours per night.
But while a lack of sleep may be a direct cause of ill health, ultimately leading to an earlier death, too much sleep may merely be a marker of ill health already, the UK and Italian researchers believe.
Time pressures
Professor Francesco Cappuccio, leader of the Sleep, Health and Society Programme at the UK’s University of Warwick, said: “Modern society has seen a gradual reduction in the average amount of sleep people take and this pattern is more common amongst full-time workers, suggesting that it may be due to societal pressures for longer working hours and more shift-work.
“On the other hand, the deterioration of our health status is often accompanied by an extension of our sleeping time.”
If the link between a lack of sleep and death is truly causal, it would equate to over 6.3 million attributable deaths in the UK in people over 16 years of age.
Prof Cappuccio said more work was needed to understand exactly why sleep seemed to be so important for good health.
Professor Jim Horne, of the Loughborough Sleep Research Centre, said other factors may be involved rather than sleep per se.
“Sleep is just a litmus paper to physical and mental health. Sleep is affected by many diseases and conditions, including depression,” he said.
And getting improved sleep may not make someone better or live longer, he said.
“But having less than five hours a night suggests something is probably not right.
“Five hours is insufficient for most people and being drowsy in the day increases your risk of having an accident if driving or operating dangerous machinery.”
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By The BBC
>If You Want to Succeed, Don’t Tell Anyone
Posted: May 5, 2010 Filed under: Happiness, Research Leave a comment »>
It is better not to tell people who you want to be. I am a regular reader of the New York Times obituaries. It fascinates me to read about the lives of people who have devoted their lives to something and have succeeded to the point where they were recognized by their peers, even if their names were not widely recognized.
One reason why this interests me is that I also spend a lot of time around college students, who are typically at the front end of their career paths. Most students are just starting the process of committing themselves to a course of study or a career that will be interesting, fulfilling and successful (though hopefully they won’t appear in the Times obituaries any time soon).
As a result, I’m interested in what makes people succeed at becoming the people they want to be. You might think that the best way to ensure this success would be to announce it to the world. Some recent research suggests that a public statement of your intentions may not be such a good idea.
Peter Gollwitzer, Paschal Sheeran, Verena Michalski, and Andrea Siefert published an interesting paper on this topic in the May, 2009 issue of Psychological Science. They argued that important goals like pursuing a career path involve a commitment to an identity goal. Identity goals are goals that ultimately influence a person’s concept of who they are. Careers choices are one kind of identity goal, but committing to a hobby, to being a good parent, or to taking on a volunteer or charity position may also be identity goals.
They suggest that when people announce an intention to commit to an identity goal in public, that announcement may actually backfire. Imagine, for example, that Mary wants to become a Psychologist. She tells Herb that she wants to pursue this career and that she is going to study hard in her classes. However, just by telling Herb her intention, she knows that Herb is already starting to think of her as a Psychologist. So, she has achieved part of her identity goal just by telling Herb about it. Oddly enough, that can actually decrease the likelihood that Mary will study hard.
Gollwitzer and his colleagues provided evidence for this point. In one clever study, they had students interested in becoming Psychologists list two activities that they would perform in the next week to help them achieve that goal. Half of the people handed what they wrote to the experimenter who read it over and acknowledged reading what they had written. The other half were told that the exercise of writing down their intentions was given to them in error, and that nobody would be looking at it. The following week, all of the participants were contacted again and were asked to remember the goals they had written down the previous week and then to write down how much time they had spent on those activities. The people whose goals were read by the experimenter actually spent less time pursuing those activities than the people whose goals were not read. A number of follow-up studies were presented as well that ruled out other explanations for this finding.
These research results suggest that wanting to have a particular identity is an important motivator in carrying out the activities one needs to perform to succeed. When those activities are the only marker that you and others have that you have taken on a particular identity, then your motivation to work hard will be strong. When there are other ways to communicate your identity to others, your motivation to work hard will not be as strong. So when you are just starting out on the road toward a big undertaking, it is probably best to let your actions express your intentions louder than your words.
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By Art Markman, PhD
>Group Claims to Have Discovered Noah’s Ark
Posted: April 28, 2010 Filed under: Early Man, Research Leave a comment »
Visual approximation
By Amanda Fox
An evangelical group comprised of Turkish and Chinese explorers claims that they think they have potentially made one of the biggest discoveries of the last hundred years – Noah’s Ark. The group that claims to have made this discovery of Biblical proportions is Noah’s Ark Ministries International. At this time they concede they are not 100% sure this is Noah’s Ark, but they do claim to be 99.9% sure.
Noah’s Ark Ministries International claims to have made the discovery on Mount Ararat which is located in eastern Turkey. At this time the team has released no photos, but has submitted an application for United World Heritage status in Ankara to preserve the integrity of the site while further work is being performed.
Gerrit Aalten, a noted Ark researcher, has been included in the process to help verify the legitimacy of the teams claims. Aalten has stated the he felt this was a legitimate discovery based on so many details matching historic accounts of the Ark, and that this particular area has long been thought to be the Ark’s final resting place. He has not staked his reputation to saying this is definitely the Ark with no doubts, but has rather stated that it is a legitimate archaeological discovery.
Early descriptions of the alleged Ark describe several compartments the ream believes were used to house animals. Carbon dating of relics recovered from the site has placed the age of the discovery at around 4,800 years old. They also point out that no human settlement has ever been discovered above 11,000 feet (The alleged Ark now rests at about 13,000 feet) in the locality in question which indicates that it is very highly unlikely they stumbled upon an abandoned ancient settlement.
Before anyone gets too excited about this being the genuine Ark of Noah, there have been many previous claims of its discovery that turned out to be erroneous. What has many people excited about this particular discovery is that this particular location has been believed to be the actual location since 1959 when aerial photographs showed an anomaly in the landscape many believed could only be man made. They further point out the size is indicates the proportions cited in the Bible.
While it is going to take years to unravel this mystery, the excitement for many surrounding this discovery is undeniable – even if it does not prove to be Noah’s Ark. The worry many have at this time is that the faithful see what they want to see without regard for science – and that includes the archaeologists on the team. The discovery of the true Noah’s Ark would potentially have implications that cannot be fully fathomed, and because of that the scientific community is calling for extreme caution before nay further pronouncements are made.
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By Amanda Fox.
>Study to Probe Mobile Health Risk
Posted: April 22, 2010 Filed under: Health, Research, Technology Leave a comment »>
The world’s largest study on the safety of using mobile phones has been launched by researchers in London.
The project will recruit 250,000 phone users across five different European countries including the UK.
It will last between 20 and 30 years and aims to provide definitive answers on the health impacts of mobile phones.
Research to date has shown no ill effect, but scientists say those studies may be too short to detect longer term cancers and other diseases.
The study is known as Cosmos – the cohort study on mobile communications.
It is being funded in the UK by the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research programme, an independent body, for an initial five year period.
A member of that group, Professor Lawrie Challis, said the study was crucial.
“We still cannot rule out the possibility that mobile phone use causes cancer. The balance of evidence suggests that it does not, but we need to be sure.”
The co-principal investigator of the study, Dr Mireille Toledano from Imperial College London, added that there are still “gaps in our knowledge, there are uncertainties”.
She said: “The best thing we can do as a society is to start now to monitor the health of a large number of users over a long period of time – that way we can build up a valuable picture as to whether or not there are any links in the longer term.”
She stressed the study was not just about brain cancer.
People were now using mobiles in many different ways including surfing the web, which means the phones are not always held against the head.
She added: “We will be looking at a range of different health outcomes, including other forms of cancers such as skin cancers and other brain disease such as neurodegenerative diseases.
“We will also be monitoring things like if there’s a change in the frequency of symptoms such as headaches, tinnitus, depression or sleep disorders.
“These are things that people commonly report in association with their mobiles and these are things we are going to be following up on over time as well.”
Bias
One of the greatest concerns about research to date is that it has usually depended on participants recalling how much they have used their phones.
Scientists say this can affect the outcome. The Cosmos project will be prospective – meaning that it will record actual phone use into the future.
Around 100,000 mobile phone users in the UK across different networks will be invited to take part.
Mobile phone users will also be recruited in Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Dr Toledano says the scientists will monitor mobile usage but not the numbers people call. And once participants fill in a questionnaire and give permission to access their records the project will operate very much in the background.
“It’s really not intrusive,” she said. “Most of it is very passively done, once they’ve given us their permission to sign up, we’ve really made it very easy and that’s why we’d encourage people to take part.”
The researchers will report their initial findings in five years.
They will monitor WIFI, cordless phones and the use of baby monitors by participants as well as mobiles, to obtain a complete picture of exposure to all types of electromagnetic radiation.
More than 70m phones are in use in the UK at present, out of a global total of 6bn.
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By Matt McGrath. Science reporter, BBC World Service.
>Video: Selective Attention Test
Posted: April 9, 2010 Filed under: Psychology, Research, Videos Leave a comment »>
First watch the video and then read below to learn about this experiment…
Imagine you are asked to watch a short video (above) in which six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla?
Almost everyone has the intuition that the answer is “yes, of course I would.” How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when we did this experiment at Harvard University several years ago, we found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.
This experiment reveals two things: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much. To our surprise, it has become one of the best-known experiments in psychology. It is described in most introductory textbooks and is featured in more than a dozen science museums. It has been used by everyone from preachers and teachers to corporate trainers and terrorist hunters, not to mention characters on the TV show C.S.I., to help explain what we see and what we don’t see. And it got us thinking that many other intuitive beliefs that we have about our own minds might be just as wrong. We wrote The Invisible Gorilla to explore the limits of human intuition and what they mean for ourselves and our world. We hope you read it, and if you do, we would love to hear what you think.
By Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
Thanks to Melanie for sharing!
>Does Reading in Dim Light Really Hurt Your Eyes?
Posted: April 7, 2010 Filed under: Health, Research Leave a comment »>
There are many nights in a young child’s life when bedtime comes far too early. Sleep seems like a distant possibility, yet parents insist that the child remain in bed with the lights off. In this situation, many children have resorted to reading under their covers by flashlight. The meager beams of light ensure that parental attention won’t be aroused while providing the children with a chance to catch up with their favorite fictional characters, from girl detectives to boy wizards and talking animals.
Unfortunately, children engaging in this activity have frequently been caught by their snooping parents. And not only is there a potential punishment in store for staying up past lights out, children are also issued the ominous warning that their dimly lit reading will ruin their eyes. This scenario may represent one of the few times in which children aren’t praised for their diligent reading habits.
Yet if these children are avid readers who’ve consumed a few tales of pioneer life, they may wonder if this threat holds true. After all, generations of people had only candlelight to read by, and they turned out just fine. Are today’s parents just overprotective of our eyesight?
As it turns out, they probably are, but they’re not the only ones. In 2007, the idea that reading in dim light ruins eyesight was named one of the seven medical myths that doctors are most likely to believe . The study, published in the British Medical Journal, revealed that reading in low light does not damage eyes, but rather causes eye strain. Eye strain is no walk in the park, though. Find out more about this phenomenon on the next page.
By Molly Edmonds
>Video: Monkey Tool Usage
Posted: April 1, 2010 Filed under: Animals, Research, Videos Leave a comment »>
(4:30) – Capuchin monkeys in an experiment in South Carolina demonstrate wonderful tool usage and remarkable problem solving abilities, to acquire honey using multiple tools.
Illustrates planning behaviour, the understanding that tools having different properties are useful for different applications, and even rudimentary bartering ability!
The token exchange is interesting in and of itself; I’m sure it took a lot of training. There is another example of its usage by the same experimenter here.
From the BBC documentary “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle”, narrated by the ever brilliant Sir David Attenborough.
For the full 29 minute documentary, “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle”, click here.
Source:
Westergaard, G.C., Evans, T.A., Howell, S. 2007. Token mediated tool exchange between tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). Animal Cognition 10(4):407-414. (doi:10.1007/s10071-007-0072-9)
https://commerce.metapress.com/content/c8…
>The Secret to Happiness
Posted: March 26, 2010 Filed under: Happiness, Research Leave a comment »>
The American Dream tells us we are free to pursue happiness, but doesn’t give us instructions. Even life-changing events such as winning the lottery have been shown (Brickman 1978) to only increase happiness in the short-term.
The secret to long term happiness is a concept that seems too sacred to be studied and dissected. However, many researchers devote themselves to this topic, and this paper by Sheldon and Lyubomirsky presents a nice theory about sustainable happiness.
This elusive goal is difficult, and may be impossible. Many past studies have shown that each person has a base level of happiness which they can only deviate from temporarily. Even more unfortunate, is that this base level of happiness is 50-80% inherited.
The researchers in this paper divided events that increase your well-being into: activity changes (intentional acts such as exercising) and circumstantial changes (such as being assigned a great roommate). They performed 3 studies on psychology students who had recently experienced an increase in well-being. These studies showed that sustainable happiness was only possible through activity changes. Intentional changes resulted in a bigger boost in happiness and more varied experiences.
After a period of time, those who experienced the increase in well-being because of an activity change retained their increase more than those who experienced the increase because of a circumstantial change. The ones who became happier by chance became accustomed to the change and were no longer affected by it.
There is no shortcut — effort and hard work are the best route to happiness.
Sheldon, K & Lyubomirsky, S. (2006). Achieving sustainable gains in happiness: Change your actions, not your circumstances. Journal of Happiness Studies, 7, 55 – 86.
>Super-Sizing the "Last Supper"
Posted: March 25, 2010 Filed under: Health, Research Leave a comment »>
The Biblical story of the Last Supper hasn’t changed, but portion sizes have grown in artist’s renderings since Leonardo da Vinci’s time, according to a study.
(Reuters) – We’ve been overeating our way through ever-larger portions over the past 1,000 years, a U.S. study revealed after studying more than 50 paintings of the Biblical Last Supper.
The study, by a Cornell University professor and his brother who is a Presbyterian minister and a religious studies professor, showed that the sizes of the portions and plates in the artworks, which were painted over the past millennium, have gradually grown by between 23 and 69 percent.
This finding suggests that the phenomenon of serving bigger portions on bigger plates, which pushes people to overeat, has also occurred gradually over the same time period, said Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.
“The last thousand years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food,” Wansink, author of “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,” said in a statement.
“We think that as art imitates life, these changes have been reflected in paintings of history’s most famous dinner.”
The researchers analyzed 52 paintings depicting the Last Supper which were featured in the 2000 book “Last Supper” by Phaidon Press, and used computer-aided design technology to analyze the size of the main meals, or entrees, bread and the plates relative to the average size of the disciples’ heads.
The study found that, over the past 1,000 years, the size of the main meal has progressively grown 69 percent; plate size has increased 66 percent and bread size by about 23 percent.
The research, conducted with Wansink’s brother, Craig Wansink, a professor of religious studies at Virginia Wesleyan College, was published in the April edition of The International Journal of Obesity.
(Writing by Miral Fahmy, Editing by Steve Addison)
