This Week in Science!!!

A career in writing will lead to premature aging and a healthy dose of personal humiliation. But science and medicine is where you'll make money, fame, and the respect of your parents. As a result, we might as well pay attention to what they're doing in those fields.

So if you've put down your Jane Austen and William Faulkner for a moment, it's time to take another peak at anything going on in the world of science and medicine this week.

Starting off with: Lassie and Rin Tin Tin were onto something.


story one:
Fido can detect your emotions just like your significant other!!!

He's looking into your soul.

And both Fido and your significant other are, to be honest, a little tired of you.

A study from the University of Helsinki (the Harvard of Helsinki) finds that dogs' social gazing behavior is similar to humans, preferring to look at a person's eyes to figure out their mood. Moreover, dogs are most responsive to tense, threatening faces than they are to any other emotion.

You know when you mistakenly walk into a biker bar with a ton of guys with prison tats who just got out of the slammer for involuntary manslaughter, and they give you "that look"? Happens to the best of us. But, yeah, it's kind of like that for Fido. It's believed to be an evolutionary response, as being able to detect a threat, real or imagined, allowed for survival.

What does this all mean then? Take your dog if you want to avoid a biker bar, I think.



story two:
Cocaine can make your brain eat itself!!!

He took three bumps of coke before this photo.

Sure, the pick-me-up favored by investment bankers and second-rate Miami speedboat enthusiasts has been around for ages--but research now says the drug can cause your brain cells to eat themselves. I believe you see that happen to Tony Montana in a deleted scene from the director's cut of Scarface.

In essence, researchers knew cocaine wasn't good for the brain (gasp!), but wanted to know specifically why. A team at Johns Hopkins University performed a study which resulted in learning that the activation of a pathway involving nitric oxide (a gas that cells use to communicate) and an enzyme called GAPDH, which nitric oxide can modify the activity of, resulted in cell destruction.

Cue the coked-out mice!

As if mice didn't look hyped-up on a good day, a range of cocaine doses was administered to the mice. Researchers then dissected the mouse brains and found a series of markers to cell-death pathways revealed. Called autophagy--literally "eating oneself"--it entails, as IFLScience explains, "packaging bits of the cell, such as debris, into membrane-bound sacs and then fusing these with acid-filled compartments that degrade the contents." Or, you know, eating itself.

Being addicted to heroin never looked so appealing!



story three:
Now we have problem gambler rats!!!

I suddenly feel the need to bet on black, baby!

First a little nose candy, now we have rodents addicted to the sexy, sexy thrill of casino gambling.

Scientists at the University of British Columbia have published an article in the Journal of Neuroscience stating that when they administered flashing lights and music mimicking a casino to rats, the rats became "problem gamblers."

Trained with sweet treats and given an option to "gamble" on receiving that treat, the rats typically avoided risk. But once researchers flipped the lights on and pumped up the club beats, the rats were down for some hot gambling action apparently. I assume it wasn't long until an ecstasy-fueled quickie wedding to a showgirl named Honey occurred for the rats.

The researchers point out that when they gave the rats a drug to block a certain dopamine receptor, the gambling jones wore off, and the rats went back to a boring, meaningless life in the suburbs driving a station wagon.



story four:
North Korean scientists claim to have made a hangover-free alcohol!!!

Everyone in North Korea lines up for some booze.

Always at the forefront of revolutionary scientific and superhuman advancements, one of North Korea's leading media outlets, The Pyongyang Times, is reporting scientists from the country have created a hangover-free alcohol. Party at Kim Jong-un's house, amiright??

Distilled to a range of 30-40% alcohol (because you always want a wide range on your finer spirits), the Times reports, "Koryo Liquor, which is made of six-year-old Kaesong Koryo insam [ed: a type of ginseng], known as being highest in medicinal effect, and the scorched rice, is highly appreciated by experts and lovers as it is suave and causes no hangover.”

If there's anything I know, it's about being suave--and nothing channels my inner globe trotting gentleman of leisure quite like thoughts of those sun-kissed beaches ski chalets penthouse suites prison camps of North Korea. The Times article also reports that the alcohol "exudes national flavour," which I assume is a delicious blending of despair and the tears of weeping mothers.

Weeping in happiness over hangover-free alcohol!