Category Archives: Science

Medical, Research, Science

Inside Track: ‘Head rush’

MIND & BODY

THE CONNECTION between cardiovascular activity and mood is more than a feeling; it’s scientific fact. There is a growing body of evidence to show that exercise doesn’t just make you happier, it makes you smarter, enhancing your ability to solve problems, brainstorm ideas, and by thinking faster.

Exercise improves your cognitive functioning no matter what your age. Cognitive functioning refers to the mental processes – awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgement – by which knowledge is acquired. While earlier research efforts have focused on children and the elderly, study populations have broadened significantly in recent times, the results proving that everybody – as well as every brain – can benefit from regular exercise.

Many studies have been completed on the relationship between physical activity and mental performance and have found that most had a shared conclusion. One such finding is that the short-term effects of a bout of exercise can lead to a greater focus and for individuals to make fewer errors in decision making. Several of the studies also found that during and/or following a bout of vigorous exercise (typically, running or cycling for 20 minutes to an hour), individual performances on tests measuring ‘executive control’ (the processes involved in achieving goals in a changing environment) improved significantly when compared with pre-exercise scores.

The use of exercise to spark creativity is hardly a novel idea. Among today’s creative exercisers, the award-winning writer Joyce Carol Oates says she avoids rest days because her craft depends on running: ‘There isn’t any piece of my writing that didn’t evolve through running,’ says Oates, who runs daily on the country roads near her home.

It’s not just literary types who see the benefit. The chief operating officer of a global junk-removal business based in Vancouver, for instance, knows his miles are anything but junk. The executive says that when out running a mental zone is soon found within that allows many of life’s problems to be solved. The business chief has a whole office of fitness diehards – and, keeps an eye out for similar types who may wish to join the firm in the future. ‘We look to hire athletes,” says the director, who finds fit people more focused and engaged.

Investigators elsewhere would also tend to agree. Previous tests carried out at the University of Ulm, in Germany, for example, asked a group of subjects to run 30 minutes twice a week for six weeks. Another group remained sedentary for the same time period. Following each session (or non-session), participants were examined to measure concentration. The runners scored higher, but it didn’t end there. The lead researcher concluded: ‘Twelve weeks after they stopped running, we could still see some effects.’

Scientists now know that the body’s dopamine and epinephrine levels are responsible for this effect. These neuro-transmitters, which enhance communication between key areas of the brain, climb during physical activity. The effects are fleeting, however, peaking about 20 minutes into exercise and petering out shortly after its conclusion, but other neurochemicals may take over where those leave off, responsible for the longer-term effects reported by researchers.

One of the next areas of intense study and research will be the exact prescription. Many agree that we need dose-response studies to see just how much exercise will produce the best cognitive results.

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Health, Medical, Research, Science

New heart drug offers biggest breakthrough since statins

MEDICAL RESEARCH

Unlike other treatments that tend to focus on cholesterol, Canakinumab works to lower inflammation in the body.

The discovery of a new heart drug is being hailed as the biggest breakthrough since statins. Thousands of lives could be saved.

In a four-year trial, scientists found that the drug – given by injection every three months – cut the risk of heart attacks by a quarter.

The study involving 10,000 patients, and around 1,000 doctors in 39 countries, also suggested that the drug could halve the risk of dying from lung cancer and prevent arthritis and gout.

Scientists said the treatment marked “a new era of therapeutics” that could save thousands of lives.

The drug, canakinumab, works by reducing inflammation – a major new approach in heart medicine. For the past 30 years cholesterol-busting statins have been given to nearly all people deemed to be at risk of cardiovascular disease in an effort to save them from heart attacks and strokes.

Yet half of the 200,000 people who have a heart attack in Britain each year do not have high cholesterol, so there is a desperate need for a different approach to treatment.

Experts have long thought that inflammation – the body’s natural responses to infection or injury – might also play a major role in causing heart attacks and strokes, possibly because it causes swelling in the arteries, increasing the risk of a blockage.

The new trial, however, is the first definitive proof that cutting inflammation slashes heart risk.

Study leader Professor Paul Ridker of Harvard Medical School said the new drug opened up a “third front” in the war on heart disease, following the previous focus on cholesterol and lifestyle.

Presenting his findings at the European Society of Cardiology congress in Barcelona, Professor Ridker said: “These findings represent the end game of more than two decades of research, stemming from a critical observation – half of heart attacks occur in people who do not have high cholesterol.

“We’ve been able to definitively show that lowering inflammation independent of cholesterol reduces cardiovascular risk.”

Professor Ridker, whose results are published in the New England Journal of Medicine, added: “This has far-reaching implications.

“It tells us that by leveraging an entirely new way to treat patients – targeting inflammation – we may be able to improve outcomes for certain very high-risk populations.”

Canakinumab is an antibody that attacks an immune-system protein called interleukin-1, which in high levels results in increased inflammation throughout the body.

The scientific trial involved high-risk patients who had already suffered a heart attack – a group in desperate need of help because a quarter of patients suffer a second attack within five years, even with statins.

All patients in the trial took statins as well, but canakinumab cut the risk of repeat heart attacks by 24 per cent, over and above the impact of the cholesterol drug.

People who took the drug were 36 per cent less likely to be hospitalised with unstable angina, and 32 per cent less likely to require costly bypass surgery.

Researchers reported a sharp rise in infections, which killed one in every 1,000 patients. But patients had a 51 per cent reduced risk of lung cancer deaths – a finding they said was “very exciting”. Gout and arthritis, which are linked to inflammation, also fell.

Canakinumab manufacturer Novartis said it would seek a licence to use the drug for heart disease.

Canakinumab is used for inflammatory problems, including forms of arthritis, at the cost of £9,928 per jab. Experts said the price – £40,000 a year for heart patients – would have to be lowered for it to be made available on the NHS.

Professor Jeremy Pearson, of the British Heart Foundation, said: “These exciting trial results finally confirm that ongoing inflammation contributes to risk of heart disease, and could help save lives.

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Arts, History, Science

Quantum Leaps: Sir Isaac Newton

1642 – 1727

So many extensive books and articles have been written on the life and impact of Sir Isaac Newton over the last three centuries it is impossible to do his achievements justice in a short entry like this. He is quite simply one of the greatest scientists of all time.

. A Slow Beginning

His early years did not necessarily suggest, however, he would end up as such. Born and bred in the quiet village of Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, England, and schooled in the nearby town of Grantham, he was not particularly noted for academic achievements as a child. Even on entry to Trinity College, Cambridge, he did not stand out until, ironically, the University was forced to close during the period 1665-1666 due to the high risk of plague. Newton returned to Woolsthorpe and began two years of remarkable contemplation on the laws of nature and mathematics which would transform the history of human knowledge. Although he published nothing during this period, he formulated and tested many of the scientific principles which would become the basis for his future achievements.

However, it would often be decades before he returned to his earlier discoveries. For example, his ideas on universal gravitation did not re-emerge until he began a controversial correspondence on the subject with Robert Hooke in around 1680. Furthermore, it was not until Edmond Halley challenged Newton in 1684 to find out how planets could have the elliptical orbits described by Johannes Kepler, and Newton replied he already knew, that he fully articulated his law of gravitation. Yet he had begun work on the subject back in the 1660s in Woolsthorpe after famously seeing an apple fall from a tree and wondering if the force which propelled it towards the earth could be applied elsewhere in the universe.

Following his declaration to Halley, Newton was forced to recalculate his proof having lost his original jottings, and the result was published in Newton’s most famous work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). This law of gravitation proposed that all matter attracts other matter with a force related to the combination of their masses, but this attraction is weakened with distance, indeed, in inverse proportion to the square of their distances apart. This universal principle applied just as equally to the relationship between two small particles on earth as it did between the sun and the planets, and Newton was able to use it to explain Kepler’s elliptical orbits.

. Newton’s Laws of Motion

In the same work, Newton built on earlier observations made by Galileo and expressed three laws of motion which have been at the heart of modern physics ever since. The ‘law of inertia’, states that an object at rest or in motion in a straight line at a constant speed will carry on in the same state until it meets another force. The second stated that a force could change the motion of an object according to the product of its masses and its acceleration, vital in understanding dynamics. The third declares that the force or action with which an object meets another object is met by an equal force or reaction.

Aside from the wide-ranging uses for the laws Newton outlined in the Principia, the important point is that all historical speculation of different mechanical principles for the earth from the rest of the cosmos were cast aside in favour of a single, universal system. It was clear that simple mathematical laws could explain a huge range of seemingly disconnected physical facts, providing science with the straightforward explanations it had been seeking since the time of the ancients. Newton’s insistence on the use of mathematical expression of physical occurrences also underlined the standard for modern physics to follow.

. Further Achievements

Newton achieved major breakthroughs in other areas too. His proof that white light was made up of all the colours of the spectrum was outlined in his 1672 work New Theory about Light and Colours. In Opticks (1704), he also articulated his influential (if partially inaccurate) particle or corpuscle theory of light.

Another achievement significant to mathematics was his invention of the ‘binomial theorem’.

Newton had a practical side too, inventing the reflecting telescope in the 1660s. This new instrument bypassed the focusing problems caused by chromatic aberration in the refracting telescope of the type Galileo had created.

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