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Advances in photographic technology that occurred in the 1860s and 70s led to the invention of plates that had exposure times of a fraction of a second. This allowed for "instantaneous photography," as it was called at the time. Moving objects could be frozen in time by the camera. Researchers immediately used this technology to study bodies in motion. Most famously, Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 took a series of images to study the galloping of a horse. Similarly, neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot used instantaneous photography to study the muscular movements of his human patients. A more unusual application of the technology took place on June 6, 1881, when Mr. Van Sothen, photographer in charge at the United States School of Submarine Engineers in Willett's Point, New York, took an instantaneous photograph of a mule having its head blown off by dynamite. The mule was apparently old and was going to be put down anyway, so it was decided to "sacrifice the animal upon the altar of science."  The resulting photo Eugene Griffin, First Lieutenant of Engineers, described the details of the experiment in a letter to Lieut. Col. H.L. Abbot: On the 6th of June, 1881, an instantaneous view was taken, by your direction, of the execution of a condemned mule belonging to the Engineer Department. A small bag containing 6 ounces of dynamite and a fuse was fastened on the mule's forehead, the wires from the fuse connecting with a magneto-electric machine. The camera was placed at a distance of about 47 feet from the mule and properly focussed; the drop shutter was held up by a string, fastened to another fuse, which was placed in the same circuit with the first, so that both were fired simultaneously and the shutter allowed to drop. The result was a negative showing the mule in an upright position, but with his head blown off. This photograph has excited much interest and comment in the scientific world. A very narrow slit was used in the shutter, and as nearly as can be estimated the time of exposure was about 1/250 of a second. A 10 by 12 gelatino-bromide instantaneous Eastman dry plate was used, with a 4 D Dallmeyer lens, using the full opening. Several months later Scientific American published an account of the experiment, including several engravings showing before and after scenes: 
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Electrified Sheep
& Elephants on Acid
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 Stewart conducted his experiment at the Eden Project, a large, botanical-themed visitor attraction in St. Austell, Cornwall. His container was an airtight Perspex tank, 8 meters long, 2 meters wide, and 2½ meters high. The plants inside it included miscanthus, banana plants, maize, and a variety of tropical herbs. He hoped to find out if he could survive for 48 hours sealed in the tank with the plants. The event was filmed by the BBC as part of a documentary, How Plants Made the World. Eden Project visitors were allowed to approach to within a meter of the container, observing him as if he were an animal on display in a zoo. Stewart envisioned the public experiment as a way to dramatize the extent to which people rely on the oxygen produced by plants. He explained to The Independent: "That box, this experiment, is the planet. People don't think of plants as our life support system without which we wouldn't be able to function and life wouldn't be able to function." Stewart entered the container at 10pm on the night of Thursday, September 15. His colleagues then sealed him in. Besides the plants, Stewart also had a mobile phone, hammock, laptop, chemical toilet, and exercise bike with him. The first few hours Stewart spent in darkness. As he did so, the oxygen levels in the container dropped from 21% down to 12.5%, the equivalent of the atmosphere at an altitude of 4500 metres. Then, early in the morning of September 16, his colleagues turned on a bank of lights, and the plants began to photosynthesize, supplying him with oxygen. The lights remained on for the rest of the experiment. Researchers from the University College London's Centre for Altitude Space and Extreme Environment Medicine and the Royal Free Hospital constantly monitored Stewart and the atmosphere inside the container. When carbon dioxide levels fell too low for the plants, they had Stewart exercise on the bike, causing him to breath harder and produce more carbon dioxide. Stewart communicated with his colleagues via walkie talkie. Stewart achieved his goal of remaining inside the tank for 48 hours, although he did suffer severe headaches and fatigue — effects of the oxygen deprivation. He also had trouble sleeping because of the constant lights, high humidity, and high temperature (25 degrees Celsius). He emerged from the container on the night of Saturday, September 17.
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During World War II, millions of men served their country by fighting in the army. Hundreds of thousands of others worked in hospitals or factories. And thirty-two men did their part by wearing lice-infested underwear. They were volunteers in an experiment designed by Dr. William A. Davis and Charles M. Wheeler.
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 Sam Legg, a participant in the experiment More after the jump →
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 D.F. Jones He made the announcement in April 1940, during the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, at the end of an otherwise quite dry presentation about "Growth changes resulting from chromosome arrangement." His announcement was so unusual that it got picked up by the media. The Science News-Letter reported as follows: Dr. Jones found the perverted Sign of the Crooked Cross in the cells of a corn plant that had gone wrong. The grains were partly aborted, some of them showing little swellings like malignant tumors. When he made microscopic preparations of cell tissues he found that two of the long chromosomes had become crossed at right angles. Where they crossed there had been a break or bruise and the two had grown together. Their ends had bent over, giving the whole figure a sinister semblance to a swastika. For Jones, his discovery wasn't merely a meaningless curiosity but suggested parallels between politics and nature. The New York Times quoted him as saying, "The swastika is a sign of malignant growth not only in the political field but in living matter as well." This pronouncement, though patriotically anti-Nazi, didn't meet with universal approval. One columnist, Edwin C. Hill, argued that science should remain above politics: we find this swastika-chromosome discovery hard to take, although the cancerous derivation of the symbol would seem to meet the mood of the moment in this country. Nature never tagged anything 'good' or 'evil.' In fact, she has been so remiss in this matter that she has left the argument wide open, in barroom discussions and university seminars and all between.
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An August 2011 Associated Press story reported that Dutch artist Jalila Essaidi, in collaboration with Utah State researcher Randy Lewis, created "bulletproof skin". Or, at least, skin that's somewhat bulletproof. The material was able to stop a bullet fired at reduced speed from a .22 caliber rifle, though not one fired at normal speed.  An undated image by Essaidi showing the bulletproof skin stopping a bullet. Lewis is well known as a silk expert. He's most famous for genetically engineering goats to produce spider silk in their milk. When Essaidi learned of Lewis's goat-silk, she came up with the idea of using some of it to create bulletproof skin. She wrote on her blog: By implementing this bulletproof matrix of spider silk produced by transgenic goats in human skin I want to explore the social, political, ethical and cultural issues surrounding safety in a world with access to new biotechnologies. Issues which arise on the basis of ancient human desire for invulnerability. It is legend that Achilles, the central character of Homer’s Iliad was invulnerable in all of his body except for his heel. Will we in the near future due to biotechnology no longer need to descend from a godly bloodline in order to have traits like invulnerability? In this video clip, Essaidi discusses her project: Unfortunately, Lewis didn't have enough of the goat-silk to spare for Essaidi's project. So Instead he sent her some silk from genetically engineered silkworms. Essaidi was then able to get human skin to grow on a lattice of this silk. She placed the skin/silk combination on a gelatin block and fired bullets at it. Lewis responded to the news that the material had stopped low-velocity bullets by saying, "We were more than a little surprised that the final skin kept the bullet from going in there... It still ended up 2 inches into the torso, so it would not have saved your life. But without a doubt the most exciting part for us is the fact that they were able to recreate the skin on top of our fibers. It's something we haven't done. Nobody has worked in that area." Lewis reportedly doesn't think that making skin that can stop bullets is going to be a major research focus going forward, but he does think that such silk/skin could have some surgical applications. According to the AP, "He said the material's strength and elasticity would enable doctors to cover large areas without worrying about it ripping out — a big advantage over small skin grafts." More after the jump →
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Cracking an Egg in Zero-G. This experiment seems like it turned out to be rather anti-climactic, though it's being presented to the press as a great success. Teachers from Warren Tech, a Colorado vocational high school, came up with the idea for the experiment. So NASA researchers duly took some eggs along on a "vomit comet" flight. According to the NASA press release: "When they cracked the egg in the microgravity environment, it stayed inside the shell, even when held upside down. The egg had to physically be removed from the shell so that the team could take a look at how it behaved in the air. 'It looked like a little planet,' said David Bochmann, a culinary teacher at the vocational school. 'It formed a little ball. It was amazing.'" Links: NASA, YouTube.| Categories: Aviation, Space, 2000s, United States, Nutrition and Food | Comments (0) |
The Benefits of Reading to Dogs. This is weird in a feel-good kind of way. Researchers from the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University took a group of 18 second-grade students and split them into two groups. The first group had to read aloud to a dog for a few minutes every week during their 2010 summer vacation. The second group had to read aloud to a human. The result: those who read to dogs saw improvements both in their reading ability and in their positive attitude toward reading. However, those who had to read to humans saw declines in both. Also, a third of the kids dropped out of the read-to-a-human group. But no one dropped out of the dog group. So obviously dogs are intellectually stimulating companions. The unanswered question here is: what about reading to cats? Links: tufts.edu, sciencedaily.com.| Categories: Animals, Human Subjects, Children, Cats & Dogs, 2000s, United States | Comments (2) |
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Academia has a reputation for harboring radicals and communist sympathizers. This was no less true 75 years ago than it is today. In fact, back in the mid-1930s some families were concerned about whether they should send their young daughters off to college, for fear they would come home commies. In 1934, psychologist Stephen M. Corey set out to determine whether such fears were justified. Corey administered the Thurstone Attitude Scale to 234 female freshmen. (He seems to have done this at the University of Wisconsin, though he didn't say so specifically.) He examined their attitudes to six areas: Reality of God, War, Patriotism, Communism, Evolution, and Church. A year later he retested 100 of these students when they were sophomores. It turned out that their attitudes only changed slightly, but the change was in the direction of liberalism. Corey wrote in a 1940 article in the Journal of Social Psychology, "The opinions of the students appeared to have undergone at least a degree of liberalization during their one year of attendance at a University." However, he also noted that students who scored higher on intelligence tests showed less change than did those who scored lower. The following table detailed how the attitudes of the young women changed with respect to each topic:  Although Corey's article suggested that the college experience caused a slight shift towards liberalism, when he presented his findings at the Midwestern Psychological Association convention in May 1940, he toned down this finding, perhaps fearing it would cause families to deny their daughters higher education. Instead, he assured people that it was safe to send young women to college, stating, "There was no great difference in the girls' attitudes. The average co-ed apparently would rather mix with stag lines than picket lines." But not only that. He also emphasized that the young women lost none of their feminine habits at college. A United Press reporter paraphrased his words of assurance: He found that in general college did little to upset or change a co-ed's home training but that she might learn to apply her makeup better, dress better and talk better. "But she won't talk about Communism -- college offers too many other diversions." In other words, families could rest assured that their daughters would still be good homemakers upon their return. Not godless communists!
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The Virtual Rat Project. A group of American researchers (led by Dan Beard of the Medical College of Wisconsin) is joining forces to build a virtual rat. It'll be a computer simulation of a rat's physiology, which researchers will then be able to use to run virtual experiments. Apparently the idea is not to have the virtual rat replace real rats, but rather to use the virtual rat to help design better experiments using real rats. Link: jsonline.com.| Categories: Animals, Rodents, Biology, Physiology, Computers, Medical Research, 2000s, United States | Comments (2) |
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In a 1995 study led by Julie Mennella of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a panel of adults was given two clear substances to smell. The substances were presented to them in plastic squeeze bottles, at room temperature. The panelists were asked to state which of the substances smelled more strongly of garlic. What the panelists didn't know is that the substances they were sniffing was amniotic fluid, taken from ten pregnant women who had undergone routine amniocentesis. Five of these women had been given garlic pills to swallow shortly before the procedure, while the other five had been given placebo capsules. The experiment was an effort to determine the extent to which the garlic would alter the odor of the amniotic fluid. The larger purpose behind all this was to investigate the sensory environment fetuses are exposed to in utero — the theory being that whatever food the mother eats ends up being sampled by the fetus as well. The researchers suspected that adult food preferences are strongly influenced by the tastes people are exposed to in their mother's womb. Therefore, the experiment was designed to demonstrate that strongly flavored foods definitely can alter the smell of the amniotic fluid, and will therefore be experienced by the fetus. The authors of the study explained: Because the normal fetus swallows significant amounts of amniotic fluid during the latter stages of gestation and has open airway passages which are bathed in amniotic fluid, the fetus may also be exposed to a variety of chemosensory experiments in utero. The environment in which the fetus lives, the amnion, can indeed be odorous... In the present study, we describe the first experimental evidence in humans that volatiles from the pregnant woman's diet are transmitted to amniotic fluid. The result: the panelists quite easily identified the garlicky amniotic fluid. So if you love garlic, it could be because your mother ate a lot of it while pregnant with you.
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Making an Artificial Anus. Here's one of those things that sounds bizarre but will doubtless prove highly beneficial to patients. Researchers have built a functional anal sphincter in the laboratory. From ScienceBlog: "the researchers used a small biopsy from a human sphincter and isolated smooth muscle cells that were then multiplied in the lab. In a ring-shaped mold, these cells were layered with nerve cells isolated from mice to build the sphincter. The mold was placed in an incubator for nine days, allowing for tissue formation. The entire process took about six weeks. Numerous laboratory tests of the engineered sphincters, including stimulating the nerve cells, showed normal tissue function, such as the ability to relax and contract. The sphincters were then implanted just under the skin of mice to determine how they would respond in the body." The research is reported in the journal Gastroenterology.| Categories: Medical Research, Tissue Engineering, 2000s, United States | Comments (1) |
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In October 1936, at the 86th annual convention of the Pennsylvania Medical Society, Dr. W. Edward Chamberlain of Temple University unveiled a "glass brain". Enthusiastic news reports gushed that the glass-and-rubber device performed "all of the functions of the human brain except thinking." That was a slight exaggeration. A brief description in the journal Epilepsia explained that the contraption was actually designed to illustrate "the physio-dynamics and hydraulics of the craniovertebral cavity". The journal further noted, "A vascular and cerebrospinal fluid circulation had been constructed within the model, so as to duplicate the volume and pressure changes encountered in the human structure." The device itself consisted of a glass sphere that represented the skull. The brain inside the "skull" was a water filled bladder. The capillaries were represented by a filter through which imitation blood flowed. Chamberlain subsequently showed his glass brain at other medical conventions and was always, as journalists noted, the "center of attraction".  Dr. Chamberlain shows off his glass brain
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 E.A. Carmichael The above experiment, conducted by the brain specialist Edward Carmichael, was designed to test the reaction of the sympathetic nervous system to sudden shocks. Carmichael hypothesized that such shocks would trigger a vasomotor response. That is, the sympathetic system, which controls the body's "fight or flight response," would rapidly constrict blood vessels. Carmichael measured the vasomotor response by means of a device that could sense minute changes in the width of fingers — since constricting blood vessels would reduce blood flow to the digits causing them to shrink slightly. This device consisted of a glass container placed around the fingers, connected to a machine that could detect subtle variations in air volume. Carmichael had his subjects sit in a room in which absolute silence was maintained. The subjects had to keep their eyes tightly closed. Carmichael then exposed them to a series of shocks, all the while recording the expansion and contraction of their fingers. The shocks took a variety of forms. He produced sudden noises, such as screaming or dropping a plank of wood on the floor. He pinched the subjects on the arm and poked them with pins. He dropped pieces of ice down their back. And he also applied sudden pressure to their testicles. More after the jump →
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Like many people during the great depression, thirty-year-old William Bird of Jacksonville, Vermont had fallen on hard times. He was out of work, heavily in debt, and facing eviction. He feared he would soon be unable to feed and clothe his wife and three children. So Bird came up with a plan. He would sell himself to science. He announced his offer in November 1936 through the local press: If some doctor or group of doctors would let me borrow enough to pay my bills and set me on my feet, I would give myself as security. If I failed to pay it back at a time decided, they could have me to experiment on any way they wished. They might discover something worth many times the sum they let me have.  William Bird posing with his family Later he further elaborated on his offer, noting that it would be all right with him if he didn't survive the experimentation process: If I could borrow $2500 for three years, I would pay up all my bills and buy, free and clear, a little place for my family to live. Then, if I didn't pay it back and the experimenting killed me, it would be all right by me. No one could kick my children out, if I bought the home for them first. The media picked up on his unusual offer and broadcast it nationwide. Reporters noted that he was a prime physical specimen — six feet tall, 175 pounds, and a sturdy workman of good habits. In other words, excellent guinea pig material. An anonymous Texan took sympathy on Bird and sent him $10. However, the scientific community wasn't tempted. No doctors took him up on his offer. Although Bird didn't end up being dissected in a laboratory, the story nevertheless had a happy ending. Within days of making his appeal, Bird was given a job on a construction project. He said, "I don't know who was responsible for giving me work, but I sure appreciate it." But he also noted that, despite having a job, his offer still stood should some doctor ever want to take him up on it.  Bird at his new construction job
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