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The man next door has been clearing leaves for forty minutes with a machine louder than every leaf involved. |
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Rats lacking nearly all brain dopamine still seemed to enjoy sugar |
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Rats that had lost nearly all the dopamine in their brains still made the facial expressions of an animal enjoying a sweet taste. They had no motivation to look for food, though, and in Terry Robinson's lab they had to be fed by hand. Roy Wise's rodents, by contrast, stopped eating, having sex and socialising once dopamine was blocked. Kent Berridge had expected the dopamine loss to turn liking into disliking, and it did not. The conclusion he and Robinson set out in a 2016 review in American Psychologist is that mesolimbic dopamine mediates wanting, while liking depends on smaller, more fragile systems that do not rely on dopamine. Raising dopamine made rats pursue rewards more intensely, and it did not seem to raise their liking for the reward, which fits the wanting half of the story. Headlines still call dopamine the pleasure chemical, which irritates me more than it should. The same muddle runs through the dopamine fast. The California psychiatrist Cameron Sepah designed it as a cognitive behavioural method for becoming less dominated by the unhealthy stimuli of modern technology. He told the New York Times that the dopamine label "makes for a catchy title." If anyone offers a fast from catchy titles, I am first in the queue. |
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A railway manager's traffic signal exploded outside Parliament |
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A railway semaphore stood in the road outside the Houses of Parliament, at the corner of Great George Street and Bridge Street. It went into use on 9 December 1868. John Peake Knight, a railway manager from Nottingham, had designed it to work like the signals on his railway. Semaphore arms told carriages to stop or proceed with caution, and red and green gas lamps did the job after dark. Smithsonian Magazine describes the problem it answered as chaotic horse-drawn traffic. I am an amateur here, but I find the whole thing endearing, and even I can see the weak point: a police officer still had to work the arms and the lamps by hand. A gas line fed those lamps. Soon after the installation, according to Smithsonian and Londonist, the line exploded and badly burned the officer operating the signal. |
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The Norwegian archipelago where Norway's immigration act does not apply |
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Svalbard is part of the Kingdom of Norway, and the Governor of Svalbard says the Immigration Act does not apply there. Foreigners do not need a visa or work and residence permits from the Norwegian authorities to travel to the archipelago, although anyone who needs a Schengen visa must hold one for the journey through mainland Norway. The reason is a treaty signed on 9 February 1920 and in force from 14 August 1925. It recognises Norway's full and absolute sovereignty, and it also requires Norway to ensure equal rights for nationals and companies of the parties in areas that include access, commercial activity, hunting, fishing and mining. More than 40 parties have acceded. Residence still has conditions. Among the requirements is that you must have the means to reside there, and the rules apply to Norwegian citizens as well. The Governor's own summary of the practical side is that "it's hard to get housing if you do not have a job." |
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An early touchscreen came from cabling problems at a particle accelerator |
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Bent Stumpe's answer to a wiring problem arrived in a handwritten note dated 11 March 1972. It proposed a capacitive touch screen with a fixed number of programmable buttons shown on a display. The problem was the SPS, an accelerator at CERN with a circumference of nearly 7 km. Running cables from every switch to a central control room would be economically unfeasible, so touch buttons with computer-generated labels were meant to replace many physical switches and knobs. Frank Beck, who later headed SPS Central Controls, championed the work. The first prototype had nine buttons, each a capacitor etched in a copper film on glass, and a finger approaching raised its capacitance by about 10 per cent. When the SPS started up in 1976, its control room was fully equipped with touch screens, which CERN Courier calls "apparently the first application of the capacitative touch screen in the world." |
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Why Popular Science shut off comments over a nanotechnology study |
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"Comments can be bad for science." That was Suzanne LaBarre, the magazine's online content director, on 24 September 2013, announcing that the site would no longer accept comments on new articles. The post argued that even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story. The research she leaned on came from a team led by Dominique Brossard at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Dietram Scheufele. A total of 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post about nanotechnology and were randomly assigned either civil comments or insult-laden ones. LaBarre's summary was that uncivil comments often changed a participant's interpretation of the story itself. Other readers of the study were less sure it said that. Columbia Journalism Review quoted Marie-Claire Shanahan saying that civility had no significant direct effect on readers' perceptions of nanotechnology overall, and that "among those who already held strong views, the uncivil comments tended to polarize them a bit further." |
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The Westminster signal is the one I would retell at dinner. |
