New Timeslot!

The next Discovery science show will be broadcast on Thursday 21st April at 9am as we start our new Thursday 9am timeslot.

Simulated Nightclubs

Remember when American soldiers given amphetamine "GO pills" accidentally dropped a laser-guided bomb on Canadian and British soldiers during the invasion of Afghanistan? Now American soldiers traumatised by their war experiences are being asked to volunteer for simulated nightclubs, where they will take ecstasy. The ecstasy is meant to help them make an emotional connection with their therapist and thus free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares. After years of being highly illegal, trials of ecstasy started quietly last year on victims of sexual abuse with post-traumatic stress disorder, in preparation for the trial this year with soldiers. Researchers are hoping that the MDMA in ecstasy can help traumatised people speak about their experiences without triggering anxiety attacks. The ecstasy therapy lasts around eight hours while music is played to the patient. They may be given a hundred and twenty-five milligrams of ecstasy, or they may be swallowing a placebo, they don't know. Kind of like the way its taken in a nightclub. With MDMA back in the fold as an acceptable therapeutic drug, researchers are now looking at the psilocybin in magic mushrooms to see if they can successfully treat obsessive-compulsive disorder. No word yet on how the US military plan to make use of the research.

Discovery broadcast nationally

2BLU BLU FM 89.1 Katoomba, NSW 2BOB Taree, NSW 2HOT Cobar, NSW 2KRR Kandos, NSW 2MIA Griffith, NSW 2MCE Bathurst, NSW 2TLC Yamba, NSW 2WAR-2 Coonamble, NSW 3MBR Murrayville, Victoria 3MGB Mallacoota, Victoria 3OCR OtwayFM Colac, Victoria 4NAG Yeppoon, Queensland 4RRR Roma, Queensland 4ROK Moranbah, Queensland 5KIX Kingscote, Kangaroo Island, South Australia 5RRR Woomera, South Australia 6YCR York, Western Australia

NEWS: dodgy space suits from NASA; dangerous neckties in the hospital ward & spiders with garbage in their webs.

NEWS: dodgy space suits from NASA; dangerous neckties in the hospital ward & spiders with garbage in their webs. NASA crew at the International Space Station are finding problems with their space suits, or so reports New Scientist magazine this week. They are needed for a 4 ｽ hour spacewalk to fix a broken power controller that controls one of the 3 gyroscopes that control the international space station痴 alignment. The failed controller is on the US side of the space station, about 10 metres from a US airlock. The thing about airlocks is that they have a communication system linked to the space suits. So with the US space suits at the tailor, the astronauts need to try on the Russian space suits for size and colour instead, and go out through the Russian airlock. This makes the whole thing much more complex as this is further away from the broken gyro - about 25 metres away. This is a looooonng space walk. To help them on their way though they will be using a space crane to help them for the first two thirds of the way. They値l then have to climb another 10 metres. This is a whole lot more complicated apparently and so to ensure adequate preparation time, the walk has been deferred to June 16. NASA said in the interim they will try to troubleshoot the spacesuits on the ground as well. Closer to Earth, but still in North America, a study of neckties worn by doctors at the New York Hospital Medical Centre of Queen痴 found that they contained dangerous bacteria which can cause blood infections and pneumonia. The study started up after a med student noticed that doctor痴 ties sometimes brushed against patients, in the course of an examination. So they scaped of some samples from the ties and cultured them. Nearly half of the ties sampled from doctors and medical personnel contained dangerous pathogens. However a comparative test of security personnel found that they had an array of pathogens on only one in ten ties. Previous studies have shown that stethoscopes and cellphones are also pathogen reservoirs. In Aussie news, scientists say they reckon spiders leave trails of rotting garbage in their web to lure their prey. It痴 been known for a while that orb-web spiders leave a trail of partly digested insect flesh and plant material to rot away in their web. This was thought to be left overs, to munch on later. But spiders don稚 usually go for eating plants, so why the leaves & twigs? Some folks were pondering this at the department of zoology at the Uni of Melbourne. They tested the reactions of fruit flies and sheep blowflies by holding up one plain web and one debris web and looked at how many flies went where. Well apparently fruit flies don稚 really respond in any meaningful way. Sheep blowies however flew straight at the web with debris all over it. Not only this but they were more attracted to debris a week old when it痴 really rotting, rather than say 3 or 4 days old. This lines up with observations that the spiders replace old debris with a new selection that will smell. The smell comes from the bacteria that break down the debris.

Sibling Saviours

Move over designer babies, five “saviour siblings” have been born in the United States, in a special IVF program/. The babies were carefully chosen so they would provide stem cells to treat older siblings with diseases such as leukaemia. Using standard conception methods, the chances of having a baby with stem cell tissue that matched the older sibling’s were low, maybe one in five. But by testing the DNA of the foetuses during the IVF process, the likelihood of getting a match increases to 98%, according to the research team running the program. Taking stem cells from designer babies to help treat ailing family members has been done before, but this program is different in two ways. Non-genetic conditions have been treated in this way for the first time. And second, the procedure is non-invasive. IN the past, getting the designer child’s stem cells would have meant a painful extraction from bone marrow. In this case the stem cells transferred to the sick child are taken from the baby’s umbilical cord.

Bird Pollution

And finally, some nightingales have fallen foul of noise pollution laws in Europe. An ornithologist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany measured the calls of nightingales in busy urban areas and found that they increase the volume of their song to compete with traffic and other city noise. Some of them can reach 95 decibels, which is equivalent to being one meter away from a chainsaw. Producing that much sound requires five times the lung pressure, according to the researcher. It doesn稚 seem to worry the birds, though, as they appear quite capable of sustaining 95 decibel noise to competing with the city. Now, EU noise pollution laws allow workers to have exposure to sounds less than 87 decibels without ear protection. The nightingales in Berlin could, at those volumes, seriously damage your ears.