Category: Extras

Nicotine Patches Don’t Work [extended version]

This is an extended version of the interview with researchers at Harvard and the University of Massachusetts, which indicates that out in the real world, people who use nicotine replacement therapy in the hopes of an easier “quit” don’t fare any better than people who use will power and community support.  Some people who use nicotine replacements are actually MORE likely to relapse.  Here, Shelley Schlender talks with Lois Biener, a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Survey Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston.  Her research was published in the journal Tobacco Control.

 

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Extended interview with Alan Stern

On today’s show we featured an interview with Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, who is principal investigator on NASA’s New Horizons mission. He told us about a fourth, tiny moon orbiting Pluto—found last month by his team during observations in support of New Horizons, which will arrive at Pluto in 2015. Here’s an extended version of that interview.

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Janos Perczel – Invisibility Cloak (Extended Version)

This podcast provides extended version of our interview with Janos Perczel about his new Invisibility Cloak.

Background:

An undergraduate  at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland has overcome a major hurdle in the development of invisibility cloaks by envisioning an optical device that would allow the cloak to hide things against CHANGING backgrounds.  The Institute of Physics and German Physical Society’s New Journal of Physics, published the study today, and the lead author, Janos Perczel, spoke with us about it from Hungary, via Skype,.  But first — putting aside Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility for a moment, in real life, scientists have cloaked some palm-sized objects . . . but not especially well.  Here’s Janos Perczel.
Perczel
It depends on what you mean by an invisibility cloak.  The sort of stuff you see in Harry Potter films has never been made yet.  There have been experiments to test the theory but these experiments have always featured invisibility in some reduced form.
So far, cloaking only works when an object’s against one single field of steady background wavelength, like a “blue screen.”  And even that’s complicated. “Cloaking” conceals an object by bending light around it.  Perczel says it’s similar to putting a rock in a river, where the water bends around and covers the rock and makes it “disappear..  But just as water must speed up in order to hurry around the rock, bending light has required accelerating the light.   And super-speeded light flows too fast to allow a cloaking devices to adjust to changing backgrounds.  In the new report, Perczel and colleagues offer a solution.  They call it an invisibility sphere, and it buys enough time for the cloak to adjust to changing backgrounds by, well — what else?  Their device slows down the normal speed of light.

Janos Perczel

Perczel
So that all the light speeds that we use in our cloak will be less than the speed of light, in vacuum, so that the cloak we propose here would work for any frequency and would also work against an ever-changing background and a multiplicity of colors and, well anything.
It may be decades before this technology moves from theory to real world applications.  But Perczel predicts that there will be plenty.
Perczel
I’m not sure I would want to talk about the potential military applications, because that’s not something I’m terribly keen on. But, apart from those, this whole invisibility subject is based on transformation optics.  That’s the key word here, and it tells us how to control light and how to guide it pretty much any way we want to guide it around.  This might lead to the birth of incredible optical devices.  
Perczel envisions images that are sharper than the quality of the light the first hit the lens.  And who knows?  Maybe someday invisibilites cloaks will lead to anti-wrinkle creams and perhaps lower production costs of future Harry Potter movies.  Thanks to Shelley Schlender for doing this report.  You can hear an extended version of the interview, on our website, howonearthradio.org.

 

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Harvard Epidemiologist Dariush Mozaffarian on Salt (extended version)

Here’s an extended version of Shelley Schlender’s interview with Dariush Mozaffarian on Salt.  Note that in the interview, Shelley asks Dr. Mozaffarian to comment on some of the assertions made in the popular press, Scientific American story, It’s Time to End the War on Salt.”  The interview mentions a citation in the popular press article about the Cochrane Collaboration’s view on salt.  After the interview, Mozaffarian’s pointed out this more recent assessment from the Cochrane Collaboration:

The most recent on salt and blood pressure is below:
Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2004;(3):CD004937.
Effect of longer-term modest salt reduction on blood pressure.
He FJ, MacGregor GA.

Here are the verbatim conclusions from that report:
“CONCLUSIONS: Our meta-analysis demonstrates that a modest reduction in salt intake for a duration of 4 or more weeks has a significant and, from a population viewpoint, important effect on blood pressure in both individuals with normal and elevated blood pressure. These results support other evidence suggesting that a modest and long-term reduction in population salt intake could reduce strokes, heart attacks, and heart failure. Furthermore, our meta-analysis demonstrates a correlation between the magnitude of salt reduction and the magnitude of blood pressure reduction. Within the daily intake range of 3 to 12 g/day, the lower the salt intake achieved, the lower the blood pressure.”

Additionally, Mozaffarian suggests that people interested in this topic check out a meta-analysis by the British Journal of Medicine Titled, Salt intake, stroke, and cardiovascular disease: meta- analysis of prospective studies.

Last but not least, for a recent speech by Mozaffarian that provides even more detail on these topics, click here.

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