Becoming a skilled surgeon is no easy task, but new research suggests that surgeons may be able to have a little bit of fun while they train. In a paper published today in PLOS One, researchers show have shown that a training regimen including the Wii can improve surgical skills.

It's nothing new that video game skill is positively correlated to laparoscopic surgery skill. In previous studies, surgeons were surveyed about their video game habits. In 2010 there was a correlation study that showed that a person's ability to play the Wii could predict laparoscopic surgery efficiency. Even as early as 2007 there was a study that showed that the most skilled laparoscopic surgeons also scored well in a game of Marble Madness.

This current study put those correlations to the test, showing a quantifiable improvement to laparoscopic skills from a training regimen that includes playing the Nintendo Wii. The surgeons-in-training were divided into two groups, one of which was asked to play the Wii for 60 minutes every day. The other group was asked to avoid all video games. After the four week period the group with the Wii training schedule had improved their surgical skills much more than the group that didn't play video games.The study concludes with the following statement:

"It is hard to suggest that Academic Institutions adopt a videogame console as a  didactic tool for surgery in addition to traditional training and simulators. (...) The Nintendo Wii may be adopted in lower-budget Institutions or at home by younger surgeons to optimize their training on simulators before performing real procedures" 

An interesting conclusion: You won't see medical schools rushing out to get their hands on a Wii, but if you are a young surgeon it may be a cheap alternative to expensive laparoscopic trainers.
Domenico Giannotti, Gregorio Patrizi, Giorgio Di Rocco, Anna Rita Vestri, Camilla Proietti Semproni, Leslie Fiengo, Stefano Pontone, Giorgio Palazzini, & Adriano Redler (2013). Play to Become a Surgeon: Impact of Nintendo WII Training on Laparoscopic Skills PLOS One

Today I'm introducing a new feature that I hope to make a regular post: Living with Chemicals. As most of you know, I am a chemist (although some of my peers may argue differently). One thing that really bothers me is chemophobia - the fear of chemicals. The term "chemical" has a bad connotation in the media and among pseudo-scientists. They push instead for "all natural" solutions (without realizing that natural does not mean good and synthetic does not mean bad). Unfortunately for them, everything around you is a chemical. In this feature I'm going to be giving examples of "synthetic" chemicals that are good for you, "natural" chemicals that are bad for you, and everything in between.

The Chemical (IUPAC Naming convention):  (3β,5Z,7E)-9,10-secocholesta-5,7,10(19)-trien-3-ol
You probably know it as: Vitamin D
The structure:
 


Vitamin D is somewhat of a misnomer - it's actually not a vitamin. A vitamin is a chemical that is necessary for normal growth, development, and function that is not synthesized in the body. However, vitamin D is synthesized in the body. As shown in the diagram below, when 7-Dehydrocholesterol is irradiated with the sun's ultraviolet light (hν) one bond is broken and another is formed. Cholecalciferol is another name for vitamin D₃.


So, technically it's not a vitamin. It got the name vitamin D because it was discovered while looking for an explanation of rickets - a disease that we now know is due to vitamin D deficiency. Sometimes you'll hear people talk about "absorbing vitamin D" from the sun, but that's not quite true. More correctly, vitamin D is synthesized in your skin using the sun's energy.

Image from science.howstuffworks.com

Life on earth is both ubiquitous and diverse - we're surrounded by somewhere around 8.7 million different species - and the mechanism for how such diversity came about is an interesting question. New research published today suggests that although genetic mutations happen at random, different organisms are able to find the same solution to an environmental pressure.

They did this by analyzing 17 gene samples from E-Coli that had been frozen at different stages of the initial experiment. This allowed them to see which mutations happened and in what order. Interestingly, even though the strains adapted to their environment at different times they adapted in the same way. In other words, even though the mutations are random the bacteria found the same solution to their hunger woes. Since evolution is not a guided process (mutations are random) these results are surprising. It seems that bacteria in a specific environment will evolve in a more predictable manner than originally thought.

On Thursday the Chairman of the Russian Higher Attestation Commission, Felix Shamkhalov, was arrested on charges of money laundering. This national organization oversees the awarding of advanced degrees. Felix, who allegedly stole ~1.5 billion roubles (~$50 million US) from the Russian Bank of Foreign Economic Activity (Vnesheconombank), will be held in custody until March 24th while the matter is investigated.

But this isn't the only problem the commission is facing. As of today 11 PhD diplomas have been revoked due to plagiarism. began in March 2012, when Andrei Andriyanov was appointed as head of the Kolmogorov School, an elite Moscow mathematical school. At the time Anderiyanov was accused of misrepresenting his qualifications. His dissertation was reviewed and several PhD requirement violations and plagiarisms were found. Since then a sample of 25 dissertations have been examined with a shockingly high 24 were found to contain either requirement violations or plagiarism.

The perils of academic dishonesty
This is obviously a huge blow to academia in Russia, and it reminds me that not only does academic dishonesty exists but it is more common than you would think. In 2011 Bengü Sezen, a former researcher at Columbia University, was found guilty of 21 counts of research misconduct and at least 9 papers have been found to be falsified, fabricated, plagiarized, or unable to be replicated (3 students that worked with Sezen quit the program, frustrated that they were unable to replicate her results).

Another, more recent example is that of Hyung-In Moon. As of late December 2012, 35 of Moon's papers have been retracted. Moon would submit an article to an Elsevier journal along with the names of several possible reviewers (this is standard practice). However, the "reviewers" were just his own alternate e-mail addresses. Moon's fraud was discovered when all of the reviewers comments for one of his papers were submitted within 24 hours.

As a scientist, I feel that we are pretty vigilant for fraud within our community. We're all aware that research brings with it the pressure to publish new, exciting results. This pressure sometimes leads to plagiarism and falsified or fabricated data. Falsified data may help one researcher feel like they're getting somewhere but in the end it really hurts the community. There is a certain amount of trust necessary when you read a peer-reviewed article. If someone has already solved a problem it may not be worth your time to replicate their results. Another effect of academic dishonesty is a diminished trust in scientists by the public in general. From my perspective scientists who falsify their data are a minority, but tales of academic honesty don't make for a good headline so that's not what the public sees.

Academic dishonesty isn't a new problem (Louis Pasteur faked much of his data that "disproved" the idea of spontaneous generation), and it's not always simple to know which results are falsified. When these big stories break, though, it's important to ask ourselves: are we being vigilant enough?

This post is the second in a three-post special Valentine's Day series about The Attractive Forces of Nature.  The previous post on gravity can be found here (opens in a new window).

1.  Electromagnetic force:

Electromagnetic force causes opposites to attract... At least when it comes to magnets and electrical charges.

2.  Weak force

Flavor changes by the weak force

Quick, don't think about a pink elephant!

Sure you just thought about a pink elephant, but why? The phenomenon is known as ironic processing and it happens when the act of trying to suppress a thought makes it stand out even more in your mind. If you've been around the internet for any time at all you've probably heard of The Game (which you just lost). The Game is an exercise in ironic processing where the goal is to not think about The Game - in other words, you lose The Game by thinking about The Game (of course if you win The Game, and realize you are winning, you immediately lose).

A recent, seemingly related, application of ironic processing has surfaced on Facebook. A post tells you to "Name a movie that doesn't have an S in it" or "Name a band that doesn't have a B in it". It's apparently a hard thing to do, but I didn't have any trouble at all. Here's what I came up with in just a few seconds:

Our sense of smell is often presented, even at the university level, as being well understood. A molecule binds to a receptor in our nose, sending a signal that our brain interprets as a certain smell.   This model of chemical interactions is called the "lock and key" model.¹ However, this model isn't as accepted in the scientific literature as you might expect. Researchers now have new information that suggests that the "lock and key" model might be wrong.

How it Works:
You probably remember from a physics class that there is positive charge and negative charge. Things of different charge attract, while things of like charge repel. As it happens, the strength of that force of attraction or repulsion follows an inverse square law. That simply means that the force is proportional to 1/r², where are is the distance between charged things. So, if the distance is 1000 meters, the force will be very small. If the distance is .001 meters, the force will be very strong.

You may also have heard that it’s possible to fuse nuclei. But according to that inverse square law (which, when you add in a bunch of constants is called Coulomb’s Law), if you get those positively
charged nuclei next to each other, the distance basically drops to 0. This should present a problem, partially because we all know that when you divide by 0 the universe ends, but more importantly, shouldn’t all nuclei be exploding right now?

That’s where something called Strong Nuclear Force comes in. Strong nuclear force is a fundamental force, the same as gravity or electromagnetism. It is very, very powerful, but it only acts over very short distances. So, you don’t really interact with it very much, at
least as far as you know.

So, in order to fuse two atoms (for simplicity, let’s say two hydrogen atoms) you’ve got to get those nuclei really, really close - close enough that the Strong Force of attraction overcomes the Coulomb Force of repulsion. This is called the “Coulumb Barrier.” Simply put, if you want fusion, you need two atoms to go really fast as they smack into each other.




Getting it to Happen
You can actually do it on your tabletop, using what’s called a Farnsworth Fusor. It’s basically an electrified cage that zaps protons toward its middle. Although most of the protons will not fuse, a few will randomly happen to have a bunch of energy, and will hit each other hard enough to fuse.

Think about it like this - if you have a million superballs bouncing in a zero gravity container, they’ll keep trading energy as they bounce around. Occasionally, one super ball will get hit on its backside repeatedly, causing it to speed way up. If another ball does the same and they happen to hit each other, BOOM! Okay, the analogy fails there because the superball will just explode. At the atomic scale, there’s a chance the Strong Force will kick in and make them stick together.

The way we know fusion has happened (typically) is by detecting energetic neutrons. Long story  short - when fusion happens, sometimes a neutron gets squeezed out of the new nucleus at very  high energy. You’re unlikely to encounter one of these during your day, so if you’re detecting a bunch coming out of your fusor, you know you’re in business. This is why, when people claim they have discovered cold fusion, scientists usually say “show us your neutrons!”

The Problem
So how come we don’t have these in every home? Well, although you can get fusion to happen on your tabletop, it costs energy. It takes more energy to get those protons to sit in the middle of the cage than you could possibly get back by, for example, having those neutrons slam into some water and heating it to power a steam turbine.

But, we know fusion works. It happens in the core of the sun all the time. Unfortunately, it works there because of the massive gravity of the sun, which confines vast amounts of hydrogen in its center. Until someone figures out how to generate artificial gravity (hopefully without destroying Earth in the process) we can’t do that here on terra firma.

Possible Solutions
Ever since fusion was discovered, scientists and engineers have tried to figure out a way to use it as an energy source. The various methods are outside the scope of this article, but here are a couple ways you could possibly pull off the trick:

1) Pinch it - Using devices like tokamaks (basically a donut-shaped version of the fusor), and very strong electromagnetic force, you can crunch the protons into a small space. They kick out neutrons, which you use for power. 

2) Blast it - In most cases this involves lasers. You can confine the protons to a small container, then zap it from a bunch of angles at once. This confines the protons into a small space to hopefully get you some more energy out than you put in. 

3) Hybrid - One recent development at Sandia labs is called MagLIF, short for Magnetized Linear Inertial Fusion. Basically, you use a laser to heat up the small container , then you use a powerful magnetic force to crunch the container down (first you blast it, then you pinch it!).

Current State
So far, nobody has achieved “energy gain.” That is, nobody has gotten more energy out than was put in. And, this is not for lack of trying. Fusion has turned out to be a difficult problem, which has caused the unfortunate truism that “fusion is always 50 years away.”

However, there are a number of active projects, doing all of the above approaches. There are also a number of heterodox approaches that are longshots, such as polywell fusion and focus fusion. Although it hasn’t happened yet, as the science improves, and we get bigger and bigger machines, like the Z Machine at Sandia and the forthcoming ITER tokamak in France, we can have reasonable hope that energy gain will happen in finite time.

Why It Would be Great
Fusion power is essentially limitless. The usual fuel for fusion reactions is deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen. It is abundant enough in the ocean that, even though we aren’t all running fusion reactors, you can actually buy it (relatively) cheap online.

If fusion did work, and could be made inexpensive enough, it’d mean limitless clean energy at low cost. Although most reactor designs produce some irradiated material (the walls of the confinement chamber, for example), it tends to be in smaller quantities and with a lower half life than standard fission reactors. As society relies more and more on energy for everything, lowering the cost of energy means far more abundance. Everything from laptops to chemical fertilizer requires energy input. A number of crucial services, like desalinization, also require a lot of energy. If that energy could be made very cheap, many problems social and environmental could be solved.

In fact, it’s hard to think of problems that wouldn’t be lessened by nearly free energy. For anything you own or any service you purchase, somewhere along the chain, a power plant is involved. Imagine how much it would change your world if both the financial and environmental cost of the things you desire were minimized.

It's that time of year again when you and your sweetheart wish to exchange saccharine expressions of your love for one another. Love is a many-splendored incomprehensible thing, so we tend to turn to the "incomprehensible" forces of nature to aid in our descriptions. "I love you like the ocean loves the beach." The ocean touches the beach, but is it really attracted to it? How strong is your love? Is it strong like the gravity that keeps us from floating into space, or is it even stronger than that? We hope this special series: Attractive Forces of Nature will help you express your love and impress your sweetheart this Valentine's day.

We'll begin with gravity. Love can often catch us unawares like an apple to the head, as goes the story of Newton's discovery of gravity. In reality, although Newton said that the falling of an apple inspired his work, the law of gravitation did not come to him instantaneously but after a great deal of thought and work. In fact, even before Newton came along, Galileo had conjectured that all objects are pulled toward the center of the earth with the same acceleration. Newton further fleshed out the law of universal gravitation, which acts on every object on and off the earth.

The force of gravitational attraction between two objects is expressed by:

Pluto isn't a planet anymore, but that doesn't mean astronomers are done studying the dwarf planet.  Over the last two years two new moons have been discovered. Currently the moons of Pluto are: Hydra, Charon, Nix, P4, and P5.

My son likes to eat snow.

Actually, he's somewhat of a snow connoisseur. He steers clear of the freshly fallen snow and heads right for the muddy, full of rocks, been-walked-through-for-a-week snow. New research from Stanford University suggests this habit could help make him a healthier adult.

Memory cells
Our immune system has several ways of fighting off disease, and memory cells play an important part in keeping us well. The first time your immune system comes up against a pathogen it may take weeks for you body to mount its response. After this first exposure, though, memory cells are able to recognize the pathogen and the next time you're exposed your immune system is able to respond much quicker.

This recent study found an abundance of CD4⁺ memory cells present in adults that had never had the initial exposure. These results are unexpected - it has been generally thought that until first exposure memory cells remained in an inactive "naive" state. In this study nearly all of the adults had active CD4⁺ cells in their blood for infections to which they had never been exposed. In contrast, the same memory cells were not found in umbilical blood of newborns - meaning we're not born with the memory cells but we don't always develop them from direct exposure either.

Low specificity memory cells
Chemical reactions are often described by a "lock and key" mechanism - if you want a reaction to happen the chemicals need to fit together just right. Specificity is the ability for one chemical to "recognize" another. Without high specificity our bodies would be a giant mess of uncontrolled chemical reactions instead of the orderly, almost sentient protein reactions that keep us alive.

Another surprise from this study is the low specificity of CD4⁺ cells. These cells were once thought to have a very high specificity. So high, in fact, that they circulated in the blood searching for a single pathogen. That doesn't appear to be the case. A large number of CD4⁺ cells were found to be reactive to harmless environmental microbes. This may mean that exposure to a high number of harmless environmental pathogens creates memory cells that will also be activated when exposed to a more dangerous pathogen - being exposed to a few harmless germs prepares you for the really nasty ones. It may also explain why the measles vaccines has been shown to give health benefits unrelated to the measles - the inoculation may be preparing your body for infections other than the measles.

Mark Davis, the principle investigator for the study, said:

"It may even provide an evolutionary clue about why kids eat dirt. The pre-existing immune memory of dangerous pathogens our immune systems have never seen before might stem from our constant exposure to ubiquitous, mostly harmless micro-organisms in soil and food and on our skin, our doorknobs, our telephones and our iPod earbuds."

So maybe it's ok if my son eats some muddy snow. Those harmless microbes are preparing his immune system for a bigger battle some day in the future.

Every other Wednesday I meet a group of friends at Applebee's to play bingo. The conversation usually gets pretty nerdy, pretty quickly (after all, on the Wednesdays we aren't playing bingo we are playing D&D). This last Wednesday, as I waited for everyone to show up, I thought it would be funny to yell out "BINGO!" when only 3 numbers had been called - an obvious impossibility since you need at least 4 numbers (and the free space) to get a bingo. This lead me to wonder - What is the probability that someone will get bingo after only 4 numbers, and how many people would have to play bingo together for it to be more likely than not that someone will get a bingo after only 4 numbers?

A bingo board has 75 possible numbers:

If you live in the US you probably know that the Super Bowl was today. A great side effect of the big game was the Twitter hashtag #SciBowl2013, where science great Phil Plait (and others) tweeted science related posts about the Super Bowl. Here are a few:

1. You don't want to play football on the sun. Not only would you have to rely on the running game (you can only throw it 25 yards at the most), but you would also die. Because it's the sun. 
2. When we colonize the moon, the standard football field should be extended to about 600 yards to retain the same game flow.
3. The Mars rover really should have brought a football. 

Notes

[1] I chose 55.9 mph because that's an even 25 meters per second - let's deal in real units here.

• This is a very cool idea. LeBron James asks questions about math and science
• Are you a quack?
• A very cool video of the moon rising.
• Nate Silver picks the winner of the Super Bowl.
• My first post for the Skeptoid blog.