The Bauer Confidential

Spending quality couple time is a serious challenge when little ones come along, so when such an opportunity is arranged, the hopes are high.  Matthew and I hadn’t had a “date” in many, many months, so with the romantic holiday coming up, we thought it would be nice to get someone to watch Jocelyn and go out and do something together, an afternoon at the movies sounded nice.

If you’re making the effort and incurring the expense, you want to pick a movie that will benefit from a large screen showing.  Naturally we chose Avatar 3D.  About an hour into the movie, I started to feel unwell, my stomach was tying up in knots and my head was pounding.  I tried taking off the 3D glasses, not watching, but I had to leave the theater.  Now a movie ticket in Cali is crazy expensive, even a matinee, so I decided after a breather, to head back in to the show.  I didn’t watch much, didn’t put on the glasses, but after about another hour (it’s a long movie), I had to run out of the theater.  I’ll spare you the details, they weren’t pretty, and I think I scared a bunch of ladies in the restroom.  I couldn’t text Matthew because my phone was in my purse under the seat in the theater, along with my wallet and gum, which I so could have used at that point.  So I went and waited in the lobby, as long as I could before I was afraid Matthew might think I was dead and come looking for me, then I went back in for the last 10 minutes.  I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see credits role in my life.

To Matthew’s credit, he kept suggesting we go, but I didn’t want to ruin our afternoon, I didn’t want to make him leave the first movie he’d gone out to in six months.  In the end, though, my determination to stick it out made things much worse.  If we’d left, we could have just enjoyed our afternoon together, instead of me praying to the porcelain gods and Matthew worrying about me.  I’ve suffered from minor motion sickness before, flying, windy roads, but never at the movies.  I’ve seen other movies in 3D, though none as motion-intense as Avatar.  Turns out the not wearing the glasses thing, which I thought would be helpful, probably made things worse, causing my brain to be even more confused by what it was seeing but not feeling.

When we got home, I did a bit of research.  Turns out a lot of people had similar reactions.  Motion sickness is a quirk of our anatomy, an unfortunate side effect of biology.  Kinetosis, or motion sickness, is caused when there is a disconnect between the stimulatory signals received by your brain.  When flying, your body feels you moving, but your eyes do not perceive the motion, confusing your noggin; in a 3D movie, it’s the opposite problem, your eyes tell your brain you’re flying through an alien world, but your inner ear is saying you’re simply sitting in a seat in a theater.   These conflicting inputs cause your body to conclude you are under the influence of a toxin; by vomiting you might be able to expel any toxin that’s still in your stomach before it affects you further.  Great for poisons in the jungle, not so great for 3D movies.

After our less than stellar attempt at romance, we spent the actual holiday doing family activities.  We took Jocelyn to the Little Farm at Tilden Park; she was interested, if a bit frightened of the strangers and huge animals.  Later in the day, we went to the tot park and pushed Jocelyn on the swings.  All my disappointment over our previous-day’s outing evaporated as she laughed with glee when flying through the air.  You see, baby smiles and laughter are addictive to parents, they stimulate the reward centers in your brain, much as drugs do.  So here it is, my own personal perfect drug.

P.S.  I hope you’ll forgive me for getting a little photoshop happy with the last image, I loved Jocelyn’s smile in it, but as she was moving, the focus was a bit blurry, I did some extreme sharpening and ended up with this, which I thought was pretty groovy.

Silly hat, pants slipping, toes in sand, pure bliss!

Beach near Pescadero, June 13, 2009.

More about Wordless Wednesday here.

I nearly choked on my cereal this morning when I heard the local news recounting this story.  Apparently a Post-Doc at UCSF tried to poison a technician from the same lab, not just once, but twice.  His chosen poison, while they don’t explicitly say in the article, is some common lab chemical that turned the drinking water of said technician blue, and get this, she noticed it was blue but drank it anyway.  They only figured out the Post-Doc was trying to poison her because he told her he was.  This whole thing is completely mind boggling.  I think it must be some sort of cry for attention, because if he was really trying to do her in, he did a very poor job for someone with a science background.  He refuses to tell the police his motives, and will most likely be deported (pretty sure attempted murder is a violation of a US work Visa).  I hope people don’t start to think all Post-Docs are unhinged like this guy.  Yes science can be stressful, but poisoning a lab-mate, I can’t believe it would get that bad.  My boss told me when he was in grad school, someone in a very well known lab was putting radioactive substances into the coffee of a lab-mate.  He wasn’t sure how they figured out who was doing this, but it sure makes you want to be nice to your co-workers.

In completely unrelated science news, researchers at the University of Michigan used nanotechnology to make some pretty cool likenesses of the President-elect, they call them Nanobamas.

Perhaps it is contradictory that as a scientist I don’t generally enjoy reading non-fiction.  I know many scientists who only read non-fiction, especially that of a scientific nature.  I prefer to read for an escape, and as my career requires I spend a lot of time reading primary literature, I tend to use my spare time to read things of a less serious nature.  That being said, I am willing to read almost anything, I just generally choose fiction.  This month’s book club selection falls into the non-fiction category, The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine is an interesting look into the neuroanatomy of a woman’s brain beginning with her time in her mother’s womb and exploring the changes that occur through advanced age.

The author, a neurotherapist and founder of a clinic dealing with the special aspects of female neurobiology, presents the information in this book in unabashedly pro-woman fashion.  Sometimes this comes at the expense of the value of the male brain and there is quite a bit of minimizing the positive aspects of male neurodevelopment, generally to highlight the strengths of the female mind.  I’m not claiming that the author isn’t justified in this perspective, with most neuroscience research conducted in males and most text-books centering on male development, this book may be the only chance the female brain gets in the spot-light.  It’s just that as a scientist, reading such an unbalanced presentation felt a little grating and heavy-handed at times.  Feminism is the belief that men and women are created equal, that neither is superior, some women forget this point.

It is the belief that the male and female brains are essentially the same that the author soundly repudiates in this book.  I think a great deal of this is common sense, we can look around us, examine our relationships, and see that there are fundamental differences between men and women.  The author allows us to understand these differences on a biological level, describing how hormones influence brain function and how the changes in hormones over a woman’s lifetime impact her and the way she views the world.  Dr. Brizendine contends that if we understand the way hormones and development influence our brain function then we are in control of how we react to our biology.

There are a couple scientific errors in the text that jumped out at me (especially since she restates one fallicy multiple times).  Still I found this book an interesting and informative read.  Preparing to introduce a new girl into my family, the first part of the book describing how the brains of infants and young girls develop was very helpful and has made me realize that its OK to give a girl dolls if she wants them and not worry that you are predetermining her destiny by forcing gender roles upon her.  It also gave me some insight into my own behavior (there’s a section on the mommy/pregnancy brain) and a bit about my mother.  I’ve encouraged Matthew to read it because I feel that men could gain some perspective on the women in their lives by reading this book.  I also came to appreciate that some of the differences between men and women are fundamental enough that we need to stop blaming one another for our inability to understand the opposite sex.  The book is not too technical in my opinion, though some members of the book club found it to be text-book like at times.  I think anyone who wants to understand women better will find this book to be an excellent resource; its really quite engaging and uses stories of individuals to illustrate the science.  It’s an easy read and worth the effort.

The big science story of last week was probably the announcement that the platypus genome has been sequenced. There are many reasons why I think that is cool, mainly because the platypus is such a weird animal. It’s got a bill, lays eggs, nurses young, and is a mammal. Such an odd creature!

There was also another article that seemed interesting. Why are some people obese and others lean? An article published online in Science last week looked at the biological aspects of this. Using BMI, the authors arranged two study groups, obese and lean. It was discovered, not so surprisingly, that obese people have a larger total number of fat cells than leaner people. When examining different age groups, it was also found that from early childhood to about 20 years old, the body is consistently increasing the total number fat cells. After the age of 20, the number of fat cells in your body appears to remain constant. The authors suggest that total number of fat cells in the adult body is determined sometime during childhood. What determines that number is a good question, but don’t despair!! We can still loose weight. The authors examined patients before and after gastric bypass surgery to see how they lost their weight. It was discovered that two months after the surgery (and after many pounds were lost), the number of fat cells remained the same, but the fat cell volume was greatly reduced. So adults lose weight by decreasing the Read more »