Retrosexual revolution

The popularity of social networking sites are increasing among the older generation, and with it more and more people are picking up on friendships that ended many years ago. This also includes rekindling old flames from loves lost, a practice that has coined the phrase retrosexual.

According to TIME, as Facebook users have begun to skew older — the website is now as popular with 30-, 40- and 50-somethings as with the college students who pioneered it — they have found ways to reconnect with one another. And who better to get in touch with than an old flame? "Facebook makes it easier for you to take that first step of finding someone again," explains Rainer Romero-Canyas, a psychology research scientist at Columbia University. "It has finally provided a way for people to reach out to someone without fear of rejection." The Boston Phoenix even coined a term, retrosexuals, for people who are taking the plunge into recycled love.

Most retrosexual experiences seem to spring from an intense, almost uncontrollable mixture of nostalgia and interest. "You get a thrill out of finding an old girlfriend just to see if she still likes you," says W. Keith Campbell, a University of Georgia psychology professor and co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic. "You're curious to see what she looks like, and it's easy to fantasize about alternative courses your life might have taken." It's the same feeling that compels people to attend high school reunions.

Whether this will lead to another sexual revolution is anybody's guess, but the facts seem to point to a whole lot of sexual activity among people in an age group where sex normally tapers off. Go gramma!

Delusions of happiness

In 1988, psychologists Shelly Taylor and Jonathon Brown published an article making the somewhat disturbing claim that positive self-deception is a normal and beneficial part of most people’s everyday outlook. They suggested that average people hold cognitive biases in three key areas: a) viewing themselves in unrealistically positive terms; b) believing they have more control over their environment than they actually do; and c) holding views about the future that are more positive than the evidence can justify. The typical person, it seems, depends on these happy delusions for the self-esteem needed to function through a normal day. It’s when the fantasies start to unravel that problems arise.

Heavy water

Scientists at Vemork first observed the curious heavy-water in 1934 when it appeared as a by-product of their revised ammonia production process. Physically and chemically the substance is similar to ordinary water, but while the hydrogen atoms in normal H₂O consist of one proton and one electron, many of the hydrogen atoms in heavy-water have the added weight of a neutron– an isotope known as deuterium. This deuterium oxide (D₂O) does exist in water naturally, though its ratio is normally only about one part in 41 million, so it had not been previously observed in significant quantities. For eight years Vemork’s scientist had been collecting the exotic liquid for scientific scrutiny, supplying samples to the world’s researchers for basic experiments.

Heavy water itself is not radioactive, and has physical properties similar to water save for being about 11% more dense. However, as commercially made, heavy water contains whatever tritium was present in the water from which it was isolated. When the water in eukaryotic organisms is replaced by more than about 25 to 50% heavy water, they experience toxicity due to interference by the deuterium with the mitotic apparatus of these cells. Higher organisms, including mammals, if given only heavy water, soon become ill and die at the point that about half their body water has been replaced. Bacteria, however, are able to grow slowly in pure heavy water.

Small concentrations of heavy water are nontoxic. The adult human body naturally contains deuterium equivalent to the amount in about 5 grams of heavy water, and comparable doses of heavy water are still used as safe non-radioactive tracers for metabolic experiments in humans and other animals.

Heavy water is 10.6% denser than ordinary water, a difference which is difficult to notice in a sample of it (although it looks like water, it reportedly tastes slightly sweet^[3]). One of the few ways to demonstrate heavy water's physically different properties without equipment, is to freeze a sample and drop it into normal water. Ice made from heavy water sinks in normal water. If the normal water is ice-cold this phenomenon may be observed long enough for a good demonstration, since heavy-water ice has a slightly higher melting-temperature (3.8 °C) than normal ice, and thus holds up very well in ice-cold normal water.

Heavy water is the only known chemical substance that affects the period of circadian oscillations, consistently increasing them. The effect is seen in unicellular organisms, green plants, isopods, insects, birds, mice, and hamsters. The mechanism is unknown.^[7]Circadian rhythms are endogenously generated, and can be entrained by external cues, called Zeitgebers, the primary one of which is daylight. These rhythms allow organisms to anticipate and prepare for precise and regular environmental changes.

Circadian Rhythms

A great deal of research on biological clocks was done in the latter half of the 20th century. It is now known that the molecular circadian clock can function within a single cell; i.e., it is cell-autonomous.^[7] At the same time, different cells may communicate with each other resulting in a synchronized output of electrical signaling. These may interface with endocrine glands of the brain to result in periodic release of hormones. The receptors for these hormones may be located far across the body and synchronize the peripheral clocks of various organs. Thus, the information of the time of the day as relayed by the eyes travels to the clock in the brain, and, through that, clocks in the rest of the body may be synchronized. This is how the timing of, for example, sleep/wake, body temperature, thirst, and appetite are coordinately controlled by the biological clock.

Deuterium has a different magnetic moment from hydrogen and therefore does not contribute to the NMR signal at the hydrogen resonance frequency.

Even though there is very little commercial use for heavy water beyond it's use in nuclear reactors, it is produced by several countries in the world, including India, the worlds largest producer.

The universal vacuum cleaner

WE CANNOT see what lies beyond the visible horizon of our universe, simply because light emitted beyond that horizon has not had time to reach us. Despite this out-of-sightness, we've always assumed that space is filled with the same stuff wherever you go in the universe.

So a recent finding by Sasha Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, does not make sense. His team has found a group of galaxy clusters moving at an extraordinary speed towards a small patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. Kashlinsky calls it the "dark flow", in tribute to those other cosmic mysteries dark matter and dark energy (New Scientist, 24 January, p 50).

Big Bang Mystery

OUR best theories of the early universe also tell us which atoms should have been forged in the first 5 minutes after the big bang. The existing amounts of hydrogen and helium match theory perfectly - so well, in fact, that cosmologists claim this is the best evidence we have for the big bang. Things aren't so good for the third element, lithium, however (New Scientist, 5 July 2008, p 28).

In the beginning...

Antimatter mystery - 02 September 2009 - New Scientist

Experiments in accelerators now tell us that for every 10 billion antiprotons present in the early universe, there were 10-billion-and-one protons. The same tiny imbalance applied to other particles, such as electrons, too. At some point in cosmic history, matter and antimatter met and annihilated. Left behind, those extra particles eventually came together and formed the matter-filled universe we know today. So what created that initial imbalance?

Genetic roulette

Hybrid life - 02 September 2009 - New Scientist

LOOK at the genome of a sea squirt and you'll get a nasty surprise. Half of its genes have a straightforward evolutionary history. In fairness, so does the other half. Trouble is, the two histories are completely different. It seems that sea squirts do not, as we had thought, sit among the chordates, on the same evolutionary line as humans and other vertebrates. Instead, they are the result of what happens when you fuse an ancient chordate with the ancestor of a sea urchin.

The bloop

IN THE summer of 1997, an array of underwater microphones, or hydrophones, owned by the US government picked up a strange sound. For a minute, it rose rapidly in frequency; then it disappeared. The hydrophones, a relic of cold-war submarine tracking, picked up this signal again and again during those summer months, then it was never heard again. No one knows what made the sound, now known as "The Bloop" (hear it at www.thebloop.notlong.com).