Entries from Here's Why tagged with 'neuro'
Graham Nicholson explains Ciguatera
Zombie Fish poison! Associate Professor Graham Nicholson from the department of molecular and medical biosciences in the faculty of science at the University of Technology, Sydney spoke with Ian Woolf about the tropical fish disease Ciguatera and the fish you...
Science Communication Education Project
I'm the Project Officer for the Science Communication Education Project in the Faculty of Science at the University of Technology, Sydney. I've recorded 11 radio interviews with cutting edge researchers at UTS as audio podcasts, and Shannon Jones has recorded...
Chocolate desire laid bare
MP3 Are you chocolate desiring or chocolate indifferent? The reason lies in your guts....
Gaming, aiding and training brains
MP3 A game controller reads your mind, Make a circuit to entrain your brain and help you become a lucid dreamer, Use Memory Goggles to record, index and search what you've seen....
Brain Scan Soldiers
MP3 The US military are testing systems that bypass the soldier's judgement and act before he realizes that his subconscious has spotted a potential target. Cognitive Threat Warning Systems, will scan the soldier's brain as if he were just...
Memory Prosthetics
MP3 Brain implants to help your memory. Ted Berger has a device that takes analogue signals from the brain, converts them to digital, processes the signals, and then outputs in the brains own language to neurons on the other...
Semen makes women happy
Play now Imagine if semen contained mind-altering and addicting chemical signals that made you feel good! Suggestive research that the neurotransmitters are absorbed quickly and act on the brain for hours. My information came from email discussions with Gordon...
Termites do your head in
Play now Termites do your head in! They emit poisonous naphthalene gas to keep other insects away from them. The termite toxin can cause headaches and nausea in small doses. The neurotoxin leads to organ failure in extreme cases....
Digital Brains?
If some of your brain works in binary, is it more like a digital computer than we thought?...
Sex and Vitamin C
What is it that reduces stress and anxiety, and makes you sexier? What helps your heart, and makes you slimmer? Dr Brody has discovered the strange connection between vitamin C and sexual behaviour. Ian Woolf pops a vitamin pill...
Bouncer on the Doors of Perception
Nitric Oxide is like a bouncer on our doors of perception....
Mint is the new heroin
A new mint oil inspired lotion may help people who suffer chronic pain....
Rape reduced by Erotica?
Professor Anthony D'Amato has written a research paper showing a suggestive correlation between the dramatic decrease in the incidence of rape in the USA and the increase in the availability of erotic materials in his paper "Porn up, Rape...
Women are right
James Roney at the University of California, Santa Barbara, US and his colleagues at the University of Chicago believe their research shows that women judge a potential mate accurately by his face. Ian Woolf checks out why talking with...
Parasitic Puppet-masters Invade Europe
Parasites infect human brains and change their behaviour for the worst. Listen to the MP3:...
Karaoke Therapy
I accidentally ingested neurotoxins from tropical fish in December 2002, on a locally delivered pizza. Amongst the bizarre Ciguatera symptoms was "Mild Aphasia", including changes to my voice. I sounded terrible. I wasn't able to convey emotions in the...
Vampire Domestication talk by Peter Watts
Vampire Domestication talk by Peter Watts This is a clever teaser for his new novel Blindsight to be released early next year. I tried to convert the wmv file into a DVD, but all my software cuts off the edges...
What the cat saw
At the University of California, Berkeley, scientists Stanley, Li and Dan can jack into brains and extract video. This is a step towards a future portrayed in the movie "Strange Days" and the movie "Brainstorm", where not only vision, but...
Sexy Lettuce
Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorin has solved the puzzle of why lettuce sap has been used in ancient Rome to dampen sexual desire, and in ancient Egypt to inflame sexual desire. In ancient Greece and Rome, the milky sap from lettuce has been used as a sedative and painkiller. In the 1st Century AD, the Roman army used it to drive out sexual dreams of soldiers. Pliny the Elder wrote about its ability to dampen sexual desire a hundred years later. However archaelogical evidence also shows that it was used as an aphrodisac in ancient Egypt, in an offering to the fertility and sexuality god Min. For more than a hundred years archaeologists have wondered why a vegetable used to calm dreams was associated with the exuberant sexuality of Min. Samorin tested the hormone-like phytochemicals in lettuce sap, and found that the effect depends on the dose. The milky sap comes from cutting the stem of the plant. A small dose of one gram of lettuce sap, causes the calming and pain killing effects to appear, because of the presence of lactucin and lactucopicrin. At the higher doses of two to three grams, the stimulating effects of cocaine-like tropane alkaloids dominate, acting like an aphrodisiac. So the Romans had a small amount of lettuce sap to calm down, and the Egyptians used a larger dose of wild lettuce sap, to get excited. Further tests are needed to confirm Samorin's results at of the Civic Museum in Rovereto. Luckily Lettuce is legal, grows wild in several countries, and is safe to eat.
Brains scans proof for hypnosis
Actual physical changes in the brain caused by hypnosis have been shown by Amir Raz and his colleagues at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Over the last few decades, scientific study has explored how hypnosis can change memory,...
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