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The Discovery national science show is recorded in the Sydney studios of community radio station 2SER 107.3 FM, broadcast and streamed over the web at 9am Thursday mornings. We are broadcast on the Community Radio Network via CBAA and picked up by seventeen stations around Australia that we know about. Discovery is Podcasting as we speak.

If you’d like to join the Discovery team and help us make weekly science radio, then please email us at discovery@2SER.com.

New Timeslot!

The next Discovery science show will be broadcast on Thursday 21st April at 9am as we start our new Thursday 9am timeslot.

Simulated Nightclubs

Remember when American soldiers given amphetamine “GO pills” accidentally dropped a laser-guided bomb on Canadian and British soldiers during the invasion of Afghanistan?

Now American soldiers traumatised by their war experiences are being asked to volunteer for simulated nightclubs, where they will take ecstasy. The ecstasy is meant to help them make an emotional connection with their therapist and thus free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares.

After years of being highly illegal, trials of ecstasy started quietly last year on victims of sexual abuse with post-traumatic stress disorder, in preparation for the trial this year with soldiers.

Researchers are hoping that the MDMA in ecstasy can help traumatised people speak about their experiences without triggering anxiety attacks.

The ecstasy therapy lasts around eight hours while music is played to the patient. They may be given a hundred and twenty-five milligrams of ecstasy, or they may be swallowing a placebo, they don’t know. Kind of like the way its taken in a nightclub.

With MDMA back in the fold as an acceptable therapeutic drug, researchers are now looking at the psilocybin in magic mushrooms to see if they can successfully treat obsessive-compulsive disorder. No word yet on how the US military plan to make use of the research.

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Scientists have begun introducing plants into their arsenal in the fight against pollution.

Scientists have begun introducing plants into their arsenal in the fight against pollution.

Daniel van der Lelie of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, has managed to modify the common yellow lupine with bacteria that have the ability of breaking down the toxic chemical toluene.

The modified yellow lupines have been found to literally leach the chemical right out the soil with their modified bacteria actually breaking down around 70% of the toxic substance.

Toluene is widely used in paint thinner, nail polish remover and adhesives with scientists hoping to enlist even more varieties of plants to combat a larger spectrum of dangerous chemicals that currently exist in many soil areas.

The Discovery Science News, with Beck Scouller

The Discovery Science News, with Beck Scouller
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Passive smoking
Last week researchers estimated that smoking reduced your life span by an average of 10 years. This week they have discovered that they may have been substantially underestimating the health risks of passive smoking
A British study conducted by researchers at St George’s Medical School and the Royal Free UCL Medical School in London, put the risk of passive smokers’ developing coronary heart disease at more than double previous estimates.
The reason for the difference is that earlier studies were based only on non-smokers living with a partner who smokes. The new study included non-smokers breathing in cigarette smoke at work, in bars and other smoky environments outside the home,.
Between 1978 and 1980, more than 2000 British men aged between 40 and 59 years underwent a blood test for cotinine, a break-down product of nicotine from cigarette smoke. Cotinine remains in the blood for up to 48 hours, and so is an indicator of a person’s exposure to smoke up to two-days’ prior to testing.
The men were rated in four groups according to their blood cotinine levels, and the incidence of coronary heart disease in the groups was measured over a 20-year period. Researchers found that elevated concentrations of blood cotinine levels associated with a 50 to 60% greater risk of coronary heart disease.
Earlier partner-smoking studies estimated the increased risk of heart disease in passive smokers at just 25 to 30%.
The British Medical Association is about to present UK prime minister Tony Blair with 4500 letters from doctors calling for a ban on smoking in public places and similar bans are also on the agenda for Australia.

Viagra for women
Viagra was never successful at turning women on. However researchers from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada may have found the solution. You guessed it – a woman needs her brain stimulated to have an orgasm!
Viagra works by dilating blood vessels and increasing the flow in the genitals – and this physical effect does the trick for many men.
However women are more complicated. “The difference between male and female orgasms is that brain effects are more important in women,” says John Stevenson, an endocrinologist at the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust.
Put simply a woman’s physical arousal doesn’t happen without desire. This is more difficult to trigger than physical stimulation.
According to James Pfaus, a behavioural neurobiologist at Concordia University, sexual desire affect disorders affect 30% of women in North America and Europe. While the loss can be due to personal factors in many cases, it is sometimes physiological.
James Pfaus believes that a drug called PT-141 could help women by stimulating their brains to increase libido. PT-141 mimics a hormone called alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone, which binds to certain receptors in the brain and is thought to stimulate sexual activity. The drug has already been shown to work on men who don’t respond to Viagra.
Clinical trials on female rats are showing positive results and human testing is likely to begin shortly

Speed of Light
Every science quiz night buff knows that in Einstein’s theory of relativity the speed of light is 299 792 458 m / s.
However contentious research is suggesting that not so long ago, some two billion years ago in fact, that the speed of light on Earth was actually lower.
This finding is and adding to an already heated debate. Especially as it is based on the re-analysis of old data. Data that was originally used to argue for exactly the opposite: the constancy of the speed of light and other constants.
If the finding proves correct it would undermine much of traditional physics. Some physicists believe it could explain puzzling cosmological phenomena such as the nearly uniform temperature of the universe. It might also support string theories that predict extra spatial dimensions.
The research is based on measurements of another parameter called the fine structure constant, or alpha, which dictates the strength of the electromagnetic force. The speed of light is inversely proportional to alpha, and though alpha also depends on two other constants, many physicists tend to interpret a change in alpha as a change in the speed of light.
UNSW scientist Victor Flambaum believes it is a valid simplification. he, along with John Webb and colleagues, were among the first to seriously challenged alpha’s status as a constant back in 1998.
Then, after exhaustively analysing how the light from distant quasars was absorbed by intervening gas clouds, they claimed in 2001 that alpha had increased by a few parts in 105 in the past 12 billion years.

NEWS: dodgy space suits from NASA; dangerous neckties in the hospital ward & spiders with garbage in their webs.

NEWS: dodgy space suits from NASA; dangerous neckties in the hospital ward & spiders with garbage in their webs.

NASA crew at the International Space Station are finding problems with their space suits, or so reports New Scientist magazine this week. They are needed for a 4 ½ hour spacewalk to fix a broken power controller that controls one of the 3 gyroscopes that control the international space station’s alignment.

The failed controller is on the US side of the space station, about 10 metres from a US airlock. The thing about airlocks is that they have a communication system linked to the space suits. So with the US space suits at the tailor, the astronauts need to try on the Russian space suits for size and colour instead, and go out through the Russian airlock.

This makes the whole thing much more complex as this is further away from the broken gyro - about 25 metres away.

This is a looooonng space walk. To help them on their way though they will be using a space crane to help them for the first two thirds of the way. They’ll then have to climb another 10 metres.

This is a whole lot more complicated apparently and so to ensure adequate preparation time, the walk has been deferred to June 16.

NASA said in the interim they will try to troubleshoot the spacesuits on the ground as well.

Closer to Earth, but still in North America, a study of neckties worn by doctors at the New York Hospital Medical Centre of Queen’s found that they contained dangerous bacteria which can cause blood infections and pneumonia.

The study started up after a med student noticed that doctor’s ties sometimes brushed against patients, in the course of an examination. So they scaped of some samples from the ties and cultured them.

Nearly half of the ties sampled from doctors and medical personnel contained dangerous pathogens. However a comparative test of security personnel found that they had an array of pathogens on only one in ten ties.

Previous studies have shown that stethoscopes and cellphones are also pathogen reservoirs.

In Aussie news, scientists say they reckon spiders leave trails of rotting garbage in their web to lure their prey.

It’s been known for a while that orb-web spiders leave a trail of partly digested insect flesh and plant material to rot away in their web. This was thought to be left overs, to munch on later.

But spiders don’t usually go for eating plants, so why the leaves & twigs?

Some folks were pondering this at the department of zoology at the Uni of Melbourne. They tested the reactions of fruit flies and sheep blowflies by holding up one plain web and one debris web and looked at how many flies went where.

Well apparently fruit flies don’t really respond in any meaningful way. Sheep blowies however flew straight at the web with debris all over it. Not only this but they were more attracted to debris a week old when it’s really rotting, rather than say 3 or 4 days old.

This lines up with observations that the spiders replace old debris with a new selection that will smell.

The smell comes from the bacteria that break down the debris.

An Extra Arm

Astronomers at the Australian National Telescope Facility have discovered that our own galaxy, the Milky way, has an extra arm.

The Milky Way Galaxy is one of the classic galaxy shapes, a collection of four long spiral arms swirling out from a central core. The astronomers have found an extra arm, almost eighty thousand light-years long, that circles all the others around the rim of the galaxy. It’s a bit like discovering a big new planet in the solar system, unnoticed for all these years.

The new galactic arm is made mostly of hydrogen gas, and is not visible to the naked eye. But it is easily seen with a radio telescope. The National Telescope Facility team is flabbergasted that no one had noticed this huge structure before now.

Rash of Kangaroos

First there was the mad cow disease, then bird flu threatened to cross over to the human population. Now Australia faces the possibility that a skin disease affecting kangaroos could spread to humans, according to scientists at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo.

As reported on the ABC’s science web site, the Lab, the scientists are concerned because this is the first time this kind of disease has been found in Australia. The disease produces skin ulcers on the roo’s ears and tail. It’s caused by a certain type of parasite that has jumped from animals to humans in other parts of the world. And while there isn’t a lot of direct contact between roos and humans in Australia, the disease could be passed on by a mediator, like a sandfly.

The scientists aren’t suggesting the disease has been passed on, and aren’t even sure if the parasites would infect human tissue. But given problems with similar diseases in other parts of the world, they are contacting Australian dermatologists to look for evidence of strange skin lesions and ulcers, similar to the ones on the kangaroos.

Sibling Saviours

Move over designer babies, five “saviour siblings” have been born in the United States, in a special IVF program/. The babies were carefully chosen so they would provide stem cells to treat older siblings with diseases such as leukaemia.

Using standard conception methods, the chances of having a baby with stem cell tissue that matched the older sibling’s were low, maybe one in five. But by testing the DNA of the foetuses during the IVF process, the likelihood of getting a match increases to 98%, according to the research team running the program.

Taking stem cells from designer babies to help treat ailing family members has been done before, but this program is different in two ways. Non-genetic conditions have been treated in this way for the first time. And second, the procedure is non-invasive. IN the past, getting the designer child’s stem cells would have meant a painful extraction from bone marrow. In this case the stem cells transferred to the sick child are taken from the baby’s umbilical cord.

Bird Pollution

And finally, some nightingales have fallen foul of noise pollution laws in Europe. An ornithologist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany measured the calls of nightingales in busy urban areas and found that they increase the volume of their song to compete with traffic and other city noise. Some of them can reach 95 decibels, which is equivalent to being one meter away from a chainsaw.

Producing that much sound requires five times the lung pressure, according to the researcher. It doesn’t seem to worry the birds, though, as they appear quite capable of sustaining 95 decibel noise to competing with the city. Now, EU noise pollution laws allow workers to have exposure to sounds less than 87 decibels without ear protection. The nightingales in Berlin could, at those volumes, seriously damage your ears.