Why babies breathe more rapidly than adults

From Anatomy and Physiology for Speech, Language, and Hearing:

pg.127

During early development, the lungs completely fill the thorax, so that they are not stretched to fit the relaxed rib cage. As the child develops, the rib cage grows faster than the lungs, and the pleural linings and increased negative intrapleural pressure provide a means for the lungs to be stretched out to fill that space.

The result of this stretching is greatly increased capacity and reserve in adults, but not in infants. Because the thorax and lungs are the same size, infants must breathe two to three times as often as an adult for adequate respiration. The adult's lungs are stretched out and never are completely compressed, so there is always a reserve of air within them that is not at the moment undergoing gas exchange.

pg. 132

As we mentioned earlier, adults breathe between 12 and 18 times per minute while at rest, but the newborn will breathe an average of 40 to 70 cycles per minute. By 5 years, the child is down to about 25 breaths per minute (bpm), and that number drops to about 20 bpm at 15 years of age. The adult has a considerable volume of air that is never expelled, but the infant does not have this reserve. In essence, the thorax expands during growth and development and stretches the lungs beyond their natural volume.

Taiwan

Since Taiwan is kinda part of China and kinda not, Beijing has hundreds of missiles aimed at Taiwan just in case the qausi-breakaway province decides to declare independence. The issue was brought to my attention after the U.S. sold $6.4 billion of weapons to Taiwan, which it is obligated by a treaty to do.

Learn more about Taiwan in this brief timeline.

2,520

2,520 is the smallest number that is evenly divisible by all the numbers from 1 to 10.

To the right, to the right

Late-night TV hosts have their desks placed on the right because it makes them seem powerful:

In Western culture, we read from left to right, and we watch theater and television that way, too. Our eyes end up on the right side of the screen -- where the host sits (also known as stage left). In the theory of stagecraft, it's understood that a rightward placement telegraphs royalty. So no matter how famous the guest may be, sitting to the left makes him or her seem subservient. Late-night hosts also sit slightly upstage (farther back and slightly elevated) from their guests, which likewise reinforces the notion of a power imbalance.

It all started with Steve Allen, host of The Tonight Show from 1954 to 1957. Actually, hosts who have strayed from this format (Dick Cavett, Carson Daly, and more recently Jay Leno) have not survived in the studio that long.

Born with a silver tongue in your mouth

Someone who is said to be silver-tongued is someone who speaks to people in a pleasant way in order to persuade them.

First X-ray

The first ever X-ray was taken in late 1895 and the image was published in early 1896. German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen took an X-ray of his wife's hand wearing a wedding ring. The technology instantly became an international hit. Everyone had soon wanted an X-ray of themselves; women channeled Roentgen's wife and took X-rays of their hands with the wedding rings to send their friends.

First science book with photos

Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is the first science book ever published to have photographs. He had the help of a photographer named Oscar Rejlander to give him the pictures he needed.

Phillip Prodger describes that use of photography in his book Darwin's Camera.

This is what Phineas Gage looked like!

What a big revelation to brain science geeks like me.

For those who don't know, Phineas Gage was a railroad worker in New England who had an accident one day that would revolutionize the medical field. The tampering iron with which he was working prematurely exploded and pierced through his left eye and frontal lobe (the front part of the brain). Gage did not become unconscious, however, and with the exception of a missing eye, seemed perfectly normal as he was being transported to the hospital. But as time went on, friends noticed a marked personality change. He became irascible and began having a childlike temper, pretty much a 180 degree shift from his warm and kind demeanor.



Because of this incident, doctors and scientists concluded that the frontal lobe plays a vital role in one's personality. Before then, no one quite knew what the frontal lobe did and some actually believed it did nothing or very little.

The story of how the picture was discovered is almost as impressive. From NPR:

In 1968, Jack and Beverly Wilgus were charmed by a daguerreotype of a man holding a metal rod. It showed a seemingly self-possessed young man, surprisingly handsome despite missing an eye.

"It has a real presence about it," Jack says.

The Wilguses thought the man must have been some kind of whaler. They titled the portrait "One Eyed Man with Harpoon" when they posted it on their Flickr account over a year ago.

Whaling experts soon debunked that theory. That's not a harpoon, they said, and that's no whaler. The mystery remained until another Flickr member, Michael Spurlock, noticed the image. "Maybe you found a photo of Phineas Gage?" his comment read.

"The first thing I did, of course, was to Google Phineas Gage," Beverly says. "The more I read, the more excited I got, because everything just fit."

It's not yet confirmed that the picture is truly of Phin Gage, but even the curator at Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School is convinced.

Note: It seems that The Boston Globe already had a story about this in July.

Riddles of the Sphinx

Today I watched Nova's episode that aired this past Tuesday entitled "Riddles of the Sphinx." There's just way too much information to write about it here, like how the sphinx was made and that parts of it was rebuilt again and again by Greeks and Romans. Also learn who the sphinx was supposed to commemorate. All that can be found watching the episode. There's more stuff on the Riddles of the Sphinx page.

Also concerning Egypt, check out the recently unearthed cat temple.

Antarctica's "ghost mountains"

There are mountains underneath Antarctica's ice sheet. They're named the Gamburtsev Mountains, and they have pointy, jagged peaks standing at 8,500 feet tall. In terms of size and shape, they would probably most closely resemble the Cascade Mountains of the northwestern U.S. and southwestern Canada.

Mountaintop mining

Yep, I learned it on The Colbert Report.

C-sections for everyone!

During our evolutionary process, babies' heads were forced to become smaller because the size of the mother's pelvis could not cope with large heads during childbirth. That's easy enough to understand. But it might be that with that restricted size, the size of our frontal lobe and surface area of the cortex got compromised. The frontal lobe (along with other areas in the cortex) is basically what makes us smarter.

So why not put evolution on the fast track? Instead of giving birth naturally and doing nothing for the human race as far as increased intelligence, what if we greatly expand the availability of Cesarean sections? That way, over thousands of generations, our heads will be set free to become as big as they want, and we'll be able to think rationally and not get complacent when there's an important Senate race in Massachusetts.

Of course, all this is an amusing theoretical exercise. There's no strong proof so far that more C-sections help us become more intelligent. But it's still fun to think about.

Black and White

From Research Methods in Psychology (pgs. 75-6):

Plant and Butz (2006) examined non-Black college students' desire to avoid interracial interactions. They led participants to believe (falsely) that they would be interacting with a same-sex Black student following completion of a computer program measuring their degree of racial bias. Participants received false feedback indicating they were likely to respond positively or negatively during interactions with Black people. The participants then completed measures of self-efficacy and anxiety related to the upcoming interaction. Negative feedback increased participants' anxiety and their desire to avoid the interaction. Based on their findings, the authors suggested that non-Blacks' desire to avoid racial interactions can result not from intentional bias or dislike of Blacks, but rather of non-Blacks' concern about their ability to treat Blacks in a nonprejudicial manner.

Voodoo in Haiti

From an op-ed by David Brooks last week:

...Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile.

....

We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others...

From Christopher Hitchens' post on Slate.com last week:

And if any single thing explains the abject misery of Haiti in the years between independence and today, it is the prevalence of religious cultism in its various aspects. Voodoo keeps people afraid and makes them cowed into apathy by the nearness of the spirit world. It was exploited by the horrible Tonton Macoute regime of "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his gruesome son, who for decades kept the country as their own rack-rented fief.

Then I went to The World Factbook to see Haiti's religious statistics. Turns out that 80% of the population is Roman Catholic and 16% is Protestant, but "roughly half of the population practices voodoo." So it's a hell of a lot more than I expected.

Of course, the comments of these two gentlemen have gotten much criticism. (See Brooks' reader comments for that article, most of which don't deal with the issue of Haiti's religious practices. The ones that do, dismiss it as a sort of bagatelle.) I thought that the last line I quoted from Brooks was so great that, dammit, I just had to put it on my Clipmarks.

Keep in mind that I'm only discussing voodoo in Haiti. I in no way am trying to frame this vis-a-vis the tragedy that recently occurred.

Desultory

Desultory means "without purpose or intent; aimless."

What exactly is multiple sclerosis?

From Cognitive Neuroscience (pg. 26):

J.C. was 32 years old when she stumbled while walking down her level, clean driveway. Embarrassed at her clumsiness, she laughed and told her friend that she should have the driveway repaired. Two weeks later she fell while walking across her living room. Six months after these seemingly trivial instances of clumsiness, some minor but annoying visual problems developed but disappeared over the next 6 months. During the next year J.C. experienced some strange numbness in her hands and weakness in her left leg, which prompted her to seek medical treatment. Following a series of tests, J.C. was diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease called multiple sclerosis (MS). What is this disease, why did it lead to the varied symptoms, and why was J.C. sometimes clumsy?

Moment to moment, on a millisecond scale, the human nervous system processes sensory information and executes motor responses. Some of these are under voluntary control; perhaps the vast majority are reflexive or automatic in one fashion or another. With respect to standing, for example, not only do we decide voluntarily whether to stand or sit, but we also use reflexive systems to maintain balance and posture. To accomplish all this in real time takes speed and accuracy of timing. Thus, in many ways the nervous system is a high-speed machine. The timing of this machine is compromised in some disease states when the integrity of the neurons and their component parts is destroyed.

MS is one disease among many that manifests itself, in part, as a loss of coordination among information transactions within specified neural systems. Specifically, MS is manifest as damage of the myelin sheaths surrounding axons in the central nervous system or peripheral nervous system, or both. Through mechanisms not completely understood (likely some form of autoimmune reaction of the body against the molecules in the myelin itself), the myelin is damaged, and in a spotty fashion it may be broken down completely. The result for the patient can be mild or very severe. The symptoms of MS depend on which axons are affected by demyelination. If the affected axons are in the optic tract leading from an eye to the brain, then visual problems will be encountered. If axons in peripheral nerves are demyelinated, losses of sensation or muscular control and strength may result. If the demyelination occurs in white matter tracts interconnecting regions of cerebral cortex involved in higher function, the damage may affect cognition or personality.

Why does damage to myelin lead to these problems? Damage to myelin can lead to slowing or complete disruption of neural signaling and, hence, a loss of function in the portion of the neural circuitry affected. In addition, however, inflammation that occurs as a result of the demyelination can lead to damage of the axons themselves and ultimately to their destruction. So the symptoms of MS may have two causes: demyelination and neuronal damage.

Skinniest house in New York City

The skinniest house in New York City is 9.5 feet wide and 42 feet long. It's getting sold for $2.1 million. It was built in 1873 and used to be an alley between two other houses.

Stoma

A stoma is any opening in the body that links a part of the inner body cavity to the outside world. It can be either natural (mouth) or artificial. Three well-known artificial types of stoma are colostomy, ileostomy, and urostomy. These would be necessary when disease has prevented the internal organs to safely process waste. A pouch worn on the outside of the body, connected to the stoma, would be necessary to collect the person's waste.

Anne Green

From Cognitive Neuroscience (pg.1):

On December 14, 1650, Anne Green walked to the gallows in the courtyard of the city of Oxford, England. She was to be executed for murdering her newborn child (a crime she did not commit). As she faced certain death, it must have been the furthest thought from her mind that she was about to play a role in the founding of clinical neurology and neuroanatomy. She proclaimed her innocence to all who were watching, and after a psalm was read she was hanged. She hung there for a full half hour before she was taken down, pronounced dead, and placed in a coffin provided by Drs. Thomas Willis and William Petty. Willis and Petty were physicians at Oxford, and by order of Charles I, then king of England, they had permission to dissect, for medical research, the bodies of any criminals killed within 21 miles of Oxford.

An autopsy, however, was not what would take place on that fateful day. When Willis and Petty brought Anne's body back to their office, they heard a grumbling sound from her throat. They poured spirits in her mouth and rubbed a feather on her neck to make her cough. They rubbed her hands and feet for several minutes, bled 5 ounces of her blood, and swabbed her neck wounds with turpentine. They cared for her through the night, and the next morning she was able to drink fluids (in fact, she asked for a beer!). Five days later she was out of bed and able to eat normally.

Although the authorities wanted to hang Anne again, Willis and Petty fought in her defense. She had been accused of killing her baby, but the doctors argued that her baby had been stillborn and its death was not her fault. They also argued that her miraculous escape from death by execution was a divine providence proving her innocence. Their arguments prevailed. Anne was set free and later went on to marry and have three more children.

And Willis went on to become one of the greatest neuroanatomists of all time, and is considered the founder of clinical neuroscience.

The Origins of the Mozart effect

From Research Methods in Psychology (pgs. 18-19):

Not too long ago there was a widely publicized phenomenon called the "Mozart effect." Headlines such as "Classical Music Good for Babies' Brains" were common at the time. These headlines caught people's attention, especially the attention of new parents. Media reports indicated that parents were playing classical music to infants in the hope of raising their children's intelligence. One million new mothers were given a free CD called "Smart Symphonies" along with free infant formula. Clearly the distributors and many new parents were persuaded that the Mozart effect was real.

The idea that listening to music might raise the intelligence scores of newborns is an intriguing idea. When you encounter intriguing ideas in the media such as this one, a good first step is to go to the original source in which the research was reported. In this case the original article was reported in a respectable journal, Nature. Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1993) described an experiment in which a single group of college students listened to a 10-minute Mozart piece, sat in silence for 10 minutes, or listened to relaxation instructions for 10 minutes before taking a spatial reasoning test. Performance on the test was better after listening to Mozart than in the other two conditions, but the effect disappeared after an additional 10- to 15-minute period.

The findings reported in the original source may be judged as solid, but the extrapolations of these findings are very shaky. A million women were being encouraged to play "smart symphonies" for their infants on the basis of an effect demonstrated on a very specific type of reasoning test with college students and the effect lasted 15 minutes at the most! Although some studies with children were done, the ambiguous results of all the research studies indicate that something had been lost in the "translation" (by the media) from the original research reports to the widespread application of the Mozart effect. People who are skeptical enough to ask questions when they hear or read reports of research in the media and knowledgeable enough to read research in the original sources are less likely to be misinformed.

Negro, please!

The word Negro started becoming taboo around the mid-1960s and became out of favor in the 80s. Stokely Carmichael, a black activist who coined the term black power, argued in 1967 that Negro implied black inferiority. Throughout the late 60s, 70s, and early 80s, publications and institutions began replacing that word with black or African-American.

Dracula sneeze

The Dracula sneeze is the name of the sneeze where you cover your mouth with the crook of your elbow. The term was invented last year by California school students who were learning how to fend off swine flu. The image is of Dracula draping his cape over his mouth.

The word was voted by the American Dialect Society for Most Creative Word of 2009.

I just want to say that I've been doing this since 6th grade.

Lyudmila Pavlichenko

Lyudmila Pavlichenko is regarded as the most successful female sniper in history. Always known to be a tomboy, she joined the Russian army during WWII, where she racked up 309 kills.

Canal Street

Canal Street in Manhattan connects New Jersey in the west to Brooklyn in the east. It's known for the bustling open-air markets that sell bootleg and sometimes counterfeit products.

Gaucho

Gaucho is a term used to describe people who live in rural areas of southern South America (known as the Southern Cone). It can be used to mean "cowboy," but the term usually refers to people living in the 19th century.

A man a plan a canal Panama...

...is the coolest palindrome ever.

Willis Tower?

Did you know Sears Tower in Chicago is now named Willis Tower? I didn't. The tower got renamed last summer after Willis Group Holdings, a London-based insurance broker, got the naming rights.

Here's what the spokesman for the group said in March 2009:

It’s a tremendous boost for the Willis brand in North America. ...We’re especially well known in the U.K., but we’re relatively unknown in North America. We really feel this will make us a household name in the U.S.

I don't think so.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't say it: What'chu talkin' 'bout, Willis?

Lottery visa

The Diversity Visa program, more commonly known as lottery visas, is a U.S. federal program that makes available 50,000 green cards every year to people whose countries have a low rate of immigration to the U.S. The winners are chosen randomly by our State Department.

The first baby born in the decade in Tarrant County (Fort Worth, TX, whose Horned Frogs just lost today -- YES!) is the child of two parents who won lottery visas in Egypt.

Click here for a map of eligible and ineligible countries.

Atavism

Atavism is "the reappearance of a characteristic in an organism after several generations of absence."

How did our moon form?

For the full documentary, click here.

Skip to 4:29.

Food libel laws

Food libel laws, informally known as veggie libel laws, are laws passed in 13 U.S. states that make it easier for food companies to stifle criticism of their production habits. The states are Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas.

In 1996, Oprah Winfrey stated that mad cow disease would want to make her stop from eating another burger. She got sued but eventually won.

So I guess you can use free speech to redraw a picture of the President of the United States to make him look like Hitler and claim he's instituting "death panels," but you can't use that same free speech to bring up a legitimate issue regarding the practices of agribusiness.

This is an interview with Robert Kenner, director of the movie Food, Inc. Skip to 18:10.