Fact weirder than fiction
By VIRGINIA WINDER - Taranaki Daily News
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First Rove, then Oprah and now The Wow! Factor.
It's OK, diehard fans (I know there're two of you out there): next week I'll be back with a new technology page that will keep you posted about the gadgets and gizmos that kids wield like extra limbs.
For now (who knows about the future?), let's focus on saying farewell to science and all those Freaky Facts. The first column, way back in April 2007, began with great news for alcohol imbibers. Richard Faull and his research team at Auckland University discovered that we do, indeed, grow new brain cells. They also found the pathway these new cells follow in the human brain.
"By knowing how stem cells move around, we can now look at new ways to regenerate cells and repair damage to the areas of the brain affected by these conditions," says the professor, who's originally from Tikorangi in Taranaki.
Freaky Facts first appeared in the second column, courtesy of the adhesive strips on Libra sanitary pads. Each strip has a list of strange information, like this: "The average person will consume 50 tonnes of food and 45,000 litres of water in a lifetime." It appears that we're not that average in New Zealand, where 60 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women are believed to be overweight.
The problem begins in the womb, says Peter Gluckman and his team from Auckland's Liggins Institute. Their research shows that if a mother has a poor diet during pregnancy, her developing child, or foetus, will "predict" a life where there is a shortage of food and will set its system to store fat. This works if the child is born into a life of lack; but there's a major mismatch when a wee one programmed for famine instead faces a feast, especially one high in fat and thick with fast food.
Libra fact: "Your brain is more active sleeping than it is watching TV." That wouldn't surprise associate professor of computer science Anthony Robins. A leading figure in Otago University's Memory: Mechanism, Processes and Applications research team, Robins believes he has unlocked the reason we dream.
He theorises that dreaming is all about the memory transferral process. This involves moving information from our temporary files, a kind of short-term memory stored in our hippocampus, to a massive neurological database called long-term memory found in our cortex. Dreaming is how we may do this.
Libra fact: "The African eagle, swooping at nearly 200km/h, can brake to a halt in 6 metres." Our native tui aren't such star fliers, but they are terrific impersonators. The noisy bird can imitate cellphones, normal phones, digital alarms, other birds and even human speech.
Kaori Wildlife Sanctuary volunteer guide Des Smith explains why. "The tui is a bird that's got two voice boxes. Both male and female sing and a lot of the song is out of range of human ears. They have regional and seasonal differences, so a tui from Taranaki could sound quite different to a tui from Wellington."
Libra fact: "A person living to 75 years of age will have slept almost 23 years of their life - or about 220,000 hours." That could be a lot less if you suffer from restless leg syndrome. For those not in the know, this is an annoying and sometimes debilitating genetic condition whereby people's limbs wake up when they want to go to sleep.
"People with RLS suffer severe disruption in their lives, including chronic lack of sleep, debilitating fatigue and inability to participate in activities that require prolonged sitting without movement, such as movies and airplane flights," says Restless Leg Syndrome Foundation chairman Lewis Phelps.
The foundation, based in the United States, helped fund a research programme that has discovered the first gene variant in people with the problem.
"The variant is extremely common - nearly 65 per cent of the population of Iceland and the southeastern United States carry at least one copy of the variant," the foundation says.
Libra fact: "The short-term memory capacity of most people is between 5 and 9 items or digits."
Sometimes memory has nothing to do with knowing people. If someone doesn't recognise you, he or she could suffer from face blindness, a neurological disorder called prosopagnosia. Some people become face blind after suffering brain damage after accidents, strokes and degenerative diseases. This is easily detected because the person is already under medical care and there is a huge difference in their perceptions of people.
Harder to detect are those people born with developmental face blindness, which scientists now believe is genetic and can run in families.
Libra fact: "Cooking and freezing does not affect the heat of chilli."
Capsaicin, the chemical that makes chillies burn, is the hottest new ingredient in local anaesthesia research. Scientists at Harvard Medical School have discovered that capsaicin can open a gateway into pain-sensing nerve cells.
What this means, say research paper authors Bruce Bean and Clifford Woolf, is it's possible to target just those neurons.
"Now we can block the activity of pain-sensing neurons without disrupting other kinds of neurons that control movements or non- painful sensations," Bean says.
"We're optimistic that this method will eventually be applied to humans and change our experience during procedures ranging from knee surgery to tooth extractions," Woolf adds.
Libra fact: "Bees have to collect nectar from 4 million flowers to make 1kg of honey." Manuka honey is a cure-all for a whole chart of illnesses, according to Peter Molan from the University of Waikato's honey research unit.
In October this year, the professor put his name to the Molan Gold Standard, the new standard that defines manuka honeys with the bioactivities identified in his research.
"Not all manuka honeys have true medicinal bioactivity beyond the range that's normal of all honeys and the industry is exposed if it does not make the distinction clear for consumers," he says. "Several manuka honeys called 'active' in combination with a number have little or none of the non-peroxide activity that is the key to its distinctive antibacterial qualities."
Meanwhile, Shaun Holt, author of Natural Remedies That Really Work, recommends a spoonful of honey to treat night-time coughs in children. Holt, a doctor and scientist who highlights the world's best research into natural products, points to a joint study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. This talked of the positive results of giving coughing youngsters a dose of honey 20 to 30 minutes before bedtime. "In a comparison of honey, dextromethorphan [an opioid analgesic] and no treatment, parents rated honey most favourably for symptomatic relief of their child's nocturnal cough and sleep difficulty due to upper respiratory tract infection. Honey may be a preferable treatment for the cough and sleep difficulty associated with childhood upper respiratory tract infection," the study says.
The Wow! Factor has focused on scientific research straight from universities and run interviews with leading scientists from around New Zealand and the world.
It has also tackled social, mental, medical and environmental issues. There have been features on plastic and its effects, the need for vitamins D, B6 and iodine, the genetics of stomach cancer, dieting and its problems, teenage brains, anti- depressants, the evils of P, caffeine shots and palm oil.
It's been a great ride, but we'll begin another that's just as fun next week on the new Gizmos & Gadgets page. See you there.
