Having a robot light up is a much safer way to study the impacts of smoking
Q. Whatever is a robot doing smoking cigarettes, taking leisurely shallow drags, then faster and faster? A. Better a robot than a nicotine-addicted Homo sapien, with all the maladies that might attend such a habit. Researchers at Harvard University designed a machine that can be programmed to puff a cigarette fast or slow and to take deep or shallow drags, reports “IEEE Spectrum” magazine. They’re able to adjust “the amount of smoke flowing into a lung-on-a-chip, a sensor lined with human lung cells.” With no harm done, they can replicate “the effects on lung disease of a multiple-pack-a-day smoking habit.” Q. For those of us who grew up with temperature readings expressed in Fahrenheit, the Centigrade scale is not intuitive. Sure, you can take a C value and convert it to F using the formula we learned in math class: Multiply by 9, divide by 5, and add 32. But that’s too much mental work. Instead, it’s convenient to rely on a few F-C correspondences, such as water’s freezing (0C=32F) and boiling points (100C=212F). Can you cite some others? A. One easy-to-remember correspondence is -40, which is identical in both the F and C scales, but this doesn’t have much practical value unless you happen to live in the Arctic or Antarctic. More useful is to recall that “room temperature” is about 20C (68F) and “body temperature” 37C (98.6F). And just for the fun of it, consider the swapped-digit (approximate) correspondences 16C=61F and 28C=82F, as pointed out by Liz Strachan in her book “A Slice of Pi.” Q. Can you think of any special circumstance when brain loss might be a good thing? A. The latest data suggest that pregnancy selectively shrinks mom’s gray matter to make her brain more responsive to baby (“Nature Neuroscience”), says Laura Sanders in “Science News” magazine. In general, a woman’s reproductive history can reflect long-lasting changes to her brain’s health. “Pregnancy leaves signatures so strong that researchers could correctly predict whether women had been pregnant based on the brain changes,” changes still evident two years after pregnancy.
Further experiments suggested “the regions that shrunk the most—parts of the frontal and temporal cortices as well as the midline— are thought to be involved in understanding other people’s mental perspectives.” Perhaps these regions then become more specialized, helping a mother better care for a baby. The regions showed greater responses to photos of a woman’s infant, and tellingly, “moms whose brains changed the most scored higher on a questionnaire about attachment to their babies.” Q. The sister ships RMS Titanic, HMHS Britannic and RMS Olympic were bound by virtually identical designs and a similar family fate. Not so for Violet Jessop, who was in a class of her own. Explain, please. A. You’re no doubt familiar with the circumstances surrounding the sinking of the Titanic in the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage in 1912, leaving some 1,500 of the 2,200 passengers and crew dead. But only a year earlier, under the command of Captain Edward Smith (later captain of the Titanic), the Olympic crashed into a British warship and nearly capsized, reports Dan Lewis in his book “Now I Know.” Fortunately, the ship was able to return to shore with no casualties. Then, in 1916, four years after the sinking of the Titanic, the Britannic sunk in the Mediterranean Sea, though the death toll was smaller, with 1,036 of the 1,066 people on board surviving.
One of the survivors was nurse Violet Jessop, who had previously been on the Titanic when it sank. “She is the only person to have survived both, and was also on the Olympic during its aforementioned collision.”