Memory and its loss

Posted by on

It seems that resting in a quiet room for 10 minutes without distractions can boost our ability to remember new information. “A lot of people think the brain is a muscle that needs to be continually stimulated, but perhaps that’s not the best way,” says Michaela Dewar at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. To store them long-term, new memories must be consolidated, a process that may happen while we sleep. But at least some consolidation may occur while we’re awake, says Dewar – all you need is time out. In 2012, her team found that people who had a 10-minute rest after hearing a story remembered 10 per cent more of it a week later than those who played a spot-the-difference game immediately afterwards.’ “We dim the lights and ask them to sit in an empty, quiet room, with no mobile phones,” says Dewar. Most volunteers said they let their minds wander during this time.

Now Dewar and her colleagues have shown that rest can also consolidate spatial memories. Volunteers who rested after exploring a virtual-reality environment were 10 per cent more accurate at orientating themselves in relation to virtual landmarks (Hippocampus, doi.org/926). This is good news for insomniacs, suggesting that simply resting while awake can give us some of the memory benefits of sleep. “As long as you’re reasonably relaxed, you might still be experiencing some of the memory-consolidation processes,” says Gareth Gaskell at the University of York, UK. The effect is particularly strong in people with amnesia. In a memory test of a list of words, eight of 12 volunteers with the condition were unable to remember any of them without a break. But after resting for 9 minutes, the same volunteers could recall between 30 and 80 per cent of the list. The results suggest that amnesiacs may not have completely lost the ability to form new memories after all. Dewar thinks that overstimulation may be what causes their memory problems. (Jessica Hamzelou, New Scientist)

One of the most alarming and frustrating things about getting older is forgetting – forgetting words, forgetting events, forgetting names. Nothing upsets Epicurean ataraxia more than forgetting something or someone, while having clear recollection of events in childhood. So now I am going off to ……what was I going to do?

College sport

Posted by on

There is a college called Clemson that plans to build a sports center for their football players worth $55 million. It includes a 9 hole golf course, sand volleyball courts, bowling lanes just for starters. An “arms race” is on between American colleges to lure good football players with stellar athletic facilities, In 2014, according the the Washington Post, 48 colleges in the five wealthiest conferences in college sports, spent a staggering $772million on the pampering of athletes, an 89% increase from the $408 million spent in 2004, adjusted for inflation. Football stadiums and basketball arenas are complemented by practice facilties, fancy locker rooms, players’ lounges with HD TVs and video game facilities.

Gradually disappearing is any discussion of academic rigor or good teaching. Rigor means hard work and tough grading. The important thing is to fill the college with full-paying students for financial reasons. To be cynical, that allows the administrators to continue to pay themselves handsomely. The people who pay for this are the students, deep in debt, and the parents who help pay the fees. Lucky are those with scholarships.

This cannot go on indefinitely. The college industry is a bubble ready to burst. What will cause it to finally implode burst, one suspects, is twofold: when industry starts to worry that job applicants with supposed excellent degrees are not very well educated; and secondly, when prospective students decide that being in debt for years for the sake of being lectured to by teaching assistants (and meeting with a professor only rarely) is not worth the cost, a cost being grossly inflated by the ridiculous emphasis on college sport.

More on the threat posed by beef farming

Posted by on

This blog has discussed the huge problem of meeting the growing world demand for beef. The global demand for meat is expected to increase by more than two-thirds in the next 40 years, with huge effects on the whole environment – everywhere.

It sounds disagreeable, but Mark J. Post, from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, produced the world’s first lab-grown hamburger and fed it to food researcher Hanni Ruetzler and food writer Josh Schonwald. Ruetzler praised the burger’s flavour, but at $330,000 a burger, it wasn’t exactly considered competition for cattlemen. In 2015, however, Post, bankrolled by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, brought the price down to $80 per kilogram of meat, or a little over $11 per patty – much closer to commercial viability.

The main problem is that the burger is dry, because it has none of the fat that otherwise gives it flavour and keeps the meat “juicy”. The growth medium for the beef is also a problem: Post’s stem cells have thus far grown successfully into meat only when soaked in a serum made from foetal calf blood – an expensive option. Post and his colleagues at Maastricht are now working on solving those problems. Post estimates it will be 20 to 30 years before lab-grown beef goes commercial in a big way.

But if this idea is made to work it will, along with vertical farms (see yesterday’s post), it could theoretically free up some 20 billion square miles of land previously devoted to food production. Where once we used 40% of the Earth’s surface for meat production, in the future, ideally, we will need less than 5%. This will present an opportunity to “re-wild” huge stretches of the Earth’s surface. If every city could manufacture even 10% of what it ate, the subsequent re-wilding “would mean a huge addition to hardwood forests that would suck up enough carbon to set the clock back to about 1980 in terms of atmospheric carbon”. And that’s with only about 340,000 square miles of land reclaimed; imagine the climate gains brought by several billion square miles of land re-wilded – and all with food to spare. (Precis of an article in Newsweek, 2015).

As a non-beef eater I don’t see the attraction of burgers, however they are created. However, I do see the attraction of the vision of re-afforesting everything we so casually deforested. Epicurus would have approved.

Diets are losing their lustre

Posted by on

Diets used to be incredibly popular all over the Western world, but it seems those days are over. “Dieting is not a fashionable word these days,” says Susan Roberts, a professor of nutrition and psychiatry at Tufts University. “[Consumers] equate the word diet with deprivation, and they know deprivation doesn’t work.” A survey of 2,000 people released by the firm in October found that 94 percent of respondents no longer saw themselves as dieters. They were also disillusioned with the industry: 77 percent of the consumers surveyed said that diet products are not as healthy as they claim to be, and 61 percent said most diets are not actually healthy.

As Jean Fain, a Harvard Medical School-affiliated psychotherapist and author, has noted, programs like Weight Watchers typically are just “a short-term fix and conditional support for long-standing eating issues” and can even exacerbate them. But many people do still want to lose weight, and increasingly they’re hoping good nutrition and “healthy eating” will get them there, says R.J. Hottovy, a senior equity analyst with market research firm Morningstar. “Consumers are looking for a more holistic, more health and wellness approach,” he says. “The shift in food trends is toward fresher and more natural ingredients.”

But there’s a lot of disagreement over what a healthy, well-balanced meal looks like, and even the federal government isn’t sure what “natural” means. Increasingly consumers have to contend with terms like gluten-free, vegan and non-GMO in the grocery store. These and other restrictive notions of eating have been quick to catch on, but often don’t have consistent scientific evidence backing them up as healthful or effective for weight loss. In consequence, people don’t know what to think anymore,” she says. “I think what [consumers] want to do is lose weight by eating sensibly. That’s the holy grail of weight loss, and the companies say, ‘We’ll lock into that.’ ”

Some companies have simply changed their labels to include the words “No Preservatives”,”Gluten-Free” and “Non-GMO”. Susan Roberts, however, doesn’t see the products getting any healthier. “They can relabel them, but the meals are not any different. If you open a box of Lean Cuisine or something like that, you’ll see about a quarter cup of veggies in there. Is that an outstandingly healthy meal? By my standards, it’s not.” About all one can say is that fat-free, high-sugar products are out. (Edited version of an article on the NPR website).

My wife and I have approached the problem by cutting out sugar and puddings as far as possible, and counting carbohydrates (no more than 60 per meal for a man) and using Stevia for sweetener as and when. A lot of our time is spent examining the contents of food packaging to spot the total carbs, the recommended servings and the sugar content. But I am happy to (provisionally ) say that I am lighter and still have plenty of energy.

Potentially good news about feeding the world: vertical farms

Posted by on

There are more than seven billion humans on the Earth, and to feed them we’ve taken 40% of the planet’s total land mass and turned it into cornfields to produce feed for beef cattle. Unfortunately, the world population is expected to grow to 9.6 billion by 2050, and possibly 11 billion by the end of the century. We are going to have to increase our food production by 70% by mid-century. The problem is that most of the land we can work for food is already being cultivated. The only potential farmland left would require slashing and burning the world’s remaining rain forests. This implies big changes to how we farm. But help is at hand.

Spanish greenhouses in the Tabernas Desert already produce a big proportion of fresh vegetables eaten in Europe. The greenhouses now cover 50,000 acres, adding $1.5bn annually to the economy of the province of Almeria. Fruits and vegetables grown indoors tend to have far greater yields per area than comparable produce grown outside. Problems caused by weeds, pests and inclement weather vanish. Add technology such as hydroponics – growing plants so the roots sit in a customised nutrient slurry rather than plain old dirt – to the equation, and yields increase even more. Better yet, build a hydroponic rig that is modular, rotates and stacks: this means you can have several “storeys” of produce growing on the same spot, assuming the stacks all get sufficient light, and you can keep pests and diseases away.

The Fukushima disaster, which wiped out huge areas of farmland, spurred the development of vertical farms in an effort to replace the lost land. Now Japan has hundreds of them – greenhouses stacked high into multistorey skyscrapers where plants rotate daily to catch sunlight. Instead of growing in soil, the plants grow with roots exposed, soaking in nutrients from enriched water or mist. The root systems grow much longer because they have to increase their surface area to absorb the same amount of nutrients. That, in turn, makes the plants grow much faster. Singapore, Sweden, South Korea, Canada, China and the Netherlands also now boast skyscraper farms similar to Japan’s. But with vertical farms light remains a problem; the towers need to be narrow enough to let sunlight penetrate all the way through, or else builders must figure out a way to rotate the growing plants to make sure they all catch enough sunlight.

Or, perhaps, sunlight can be replaced by artificial sources of light energy, such as light-emitting diodes. “Pinkhouses”, as they’re sometimes called, are lit blue and red: those are the spectrums of visible light best absorbed by plants. By using these colours alone, pinkhouses are efficient. In the wild, plants use at most 8% of the light they absorb, while in pinkhouses, the plants can use as much as 15%. In addition, because everything happens indoors, the lights, temperature and humidity can be controlled better than in the most high-tech, sun-dependent vertical farms and greenhouses. As a result, the plants grown in these pinkhouses grow 20% faster than their outdoor cousins, and need 91% less water, negligible fertiliser and no treatment with herbicides or pesticides. (a precis of an article in Newsweek, 2015)

What the produce tastes like is another matter. But then beggars can’t be choosers. It seems that we are already consuming vegetables grown hydroponically in greenhouses, and only a few (such as this writer) have noticed the difference. At least there is food available, economically grown.