Technical Writing Project - Scientific Articles

Rayne Johnson Page 1 1/25/2011

CO 310

Medical / Science Track:

Project #2


Rayne Johnson

Russell Ray

Technical Writing

04/13/2010

Table of Contents

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Press Release 1
Healing Effects of Prayer? Don’t Bet Your Life on It.

Medical phenomenons are some of the most fascinating for humans, and for good

reason. We all want to believe the body is ultimately unknowable and if we only have

enough faith any illness or injury can be overcome. The healing effects of prayer have

given a sanctuary of hope to those who are facing imminent mortality or have had a brush

with death.

In an article published in this week’s eSkeptic Michael Shermer, American

science writer, discusses a recent study of the power of prayer on health and recovery.

Cardiologist Dr. Herbert Benson began his study almost ten years ago observing a total of

1,802 patients who had undergone coronary bypass surgery. With participants from six

different hospitals, Benson divided them into three groups: those who were informed they

would be prayed for, those who were informed they may or not be prayed for and the

third group of individuals who were not prayed for at all (the control group).

Prayers were performed the night before patients went into surgery and continued

for two weeks afterwards. The results showed no significant differences between the

prayed-for and non-prayed for groups. The minor differences that were observed showed

those individuals who were informed they were being prayed for actually had a higher

rate of complications after surgery.

Other studies have been conducted on the topic but the majority have been found

to lack the controls, objectivity and thorough review. At a cost of 2.4 million dollars,

most of which was provided by the John Temple Foundation, Dr. Benson’s study might


be considered one of the most rigorous and comprehensive studies on the effects of

prayer and healing ever conducted.

eSkeptic, the online publication of The Skeptics Society and Skeptic Magazine, is

a scientific and educational organization of scholars, scientists, historians, magicians,

professors and teachers, and anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary

claims, revolutionary ideas, and the promotion of science. Skeptic has a mission of

serving as an educational tool for those seeking clarification and viewpoints on those

controversial ideas and claims.

Source:

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/06-04-05/

Press Release 2
A Reflection on Autism

For anyone whose life has been touched by autism, the passion involved in the

search for understanding and treatment cannot be understated. Autism, a disorder

involving brain development, affects one to two people per thousand resulting in

impaired social and communication skills. Though currently there is no cure, there are

scientists endeavoring to better understand the condition.

The article, written by Dan Ferber, recounts a study by Ilan Dinstein and David

Heeger of New York University. Their research shows autism could be the result of the

disruption of unique connections in the brain. This disruption affects an individual’s

ability to relate to others as well as their ability to learn actions through the imitation of

others.


For the study Dinstein and Heeger scanned the brains of subjects with and without

Autism while showing them images of hand gestures such as “rock”, “paper” and

“scissors”. In both groups the same area of the brain showed activity but after repeated

testing the areas in the brain of the Autistic patients began to show signs of strain and

eventually faded. Though it’s too early to draw conclusions, understanding this fading

affect and how it relates to Autism is an important step; with additional studies and

research this information could possibly lead to future treatment options.

Founded in 1848, the American Association for the Advancement of Science is an

international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world by

serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association. In addition to

organizing membership activities, AAAS publishes the journal Science, as well as many

scientific newsletters, books and reports, and spearheads programs that raise the bar of

understanding for science worldwide.

Source:

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/05/a-crack-in-the-mirror-neuron-hyp.html

Press Release 3
Found: Long-lost Relative of a Global Super-Predator

Who wasn’t fascinated with dinosaurs as a child? We imagined the exotic lands

they wandered, how they lived and if they really were as scary as movies made them out

to be. What we didn’t know was just like modern animals dinosaurs had home ranges or

were only found in particular areas; such was the case with the Tyrannosaurs-Rex who

called the northern hemisphere home, or so paleontologists thought.


The signs of an early and smaller relative of the Tyrannosaurus were discovered

in Australia in the form of a hipbone, whose shape is unique to the most infamous

prehistoric predator according to lead study author Roger Benson. The size indicates this

early Tyrannosaur was about the size of a human, not unusual as dinosaurs from the Early

Cretaceous (146 million to 100 million years ago) didn’t reach their legendary sizes for

another 34 million to 46 million years. In this instance it was location, not size, that

made this find so exciting.

Tyrannosaurs were common in the northern hemisphere in areas like Colorado

and China so the unique fossilized discovery gives hope of possible remains yet to be

uncovered in Australia, Africa, South America and Antarctica, which were all connected

at the time. The discovery also indicates what we all feared as children; no place was

safe from the tyrannosaurs, they were everywhere.

This discovery has left many open questions for researchers. Why were southern

tyrannosaurs so small in the south? Why did their northern relations grow to be so

enormous? With new evidence of where to search for clues to these questions, scientists

are hoping to have a better understanding of how the tyrant lizard king, better known as

t.rex, eventually evolved into the creature that still lurks in the wild spaces of our

imagination.

Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the U.S., has

been bringing its readers unique insights about developments in science and technology

for more than 160 years. More than 140 Nobel laureates have written for Scientific

American, most of whom wrote about their prize-winning works years before being

recognized by the Nobel Committee. In addition to the likes of Albert Einstein, Francis


Crick, Jonas Salk and Linus Pauling, Scientific American continues to attract esteemed

authors from many fields.

Source:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=new-australian-dinosaur-fossil-

show-2010-03-25

Press Release 4
Bee Business

Some of us love them; some of us hate them; some of us are allergic to them.

What we can all agree upon is the fact that bees are absolutely necessary for the

reproduce of most plants through pollination and essential for life-giving crops around

the world to yield a harvest.

Today the once prolific and hard-working European honey bee is being lost to a

phenomenon called colony collapse disorder (CCD) which causes the individual bees to

abandon their hive. Requiring this community effort, these bees eventually die and leave

a gaping hole in pollinators for growers of commercial crops in the United States to fill.

In an article written by Anna Lena Phillips, she reports that scientists are hoping native

bees have stepped up to the plate therefore they’ve started a citizen science project to

understand how colony collapse disorder affects these helpful little insects.

Conservation Biologist Gretchen Lebuhn launched the Great Sunflower Project to

monitor and map bee populations. This enormous undertaking needed thousands of

watchful eyes and found them in ordinary citizens. Participants in the study were

required to grow a sunflower and then observe how long it took for five bees to visit it.


Observations were made twice a month for a maximum of 30 minutes each time. “People

can take their cup of coffee out in the morning and if they see five bees in five minutes

they’re done. If they see none in 30 minutes, they’re still done,” Lebuhn explains.

Participants are also required to categorize the bees as honeybees, bumblebees, carpenter

bees, green bees and ‘other’.

As only 500 of the 4,000 estimated bee species don’t even have scientific names

and research on wild populations is weak, LeBuhn is hoping to not only understand

native populations better but also to track their health and whether they are filling in

where the European honeybees are gone.

American Scientist, published since 1913, is an illustrated bimonthly magazine

about science and technology. In recent years it has been honored with many awards for

editorial, design and illustration quality. Each issue is filled with feature articles written

by prominent scientists and engineers, reviewing important work in fields that range from

molecular biology to computer engineering. The articles are carefully edited and

accompanied by illustrations that are developed to enhance the reader's understanding

and enjoyment.

Source:

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2008/5/of-sunflowers-and-citizens


Press Release 5
The Fallacy of Facilitated Communication

Michael Shermer is naming names in a recent article in Skeptic Magazine

addressing what he entitles the “Coma Man Media Hoax”. The story addresses the story

of a Belgian man, Rom Houben, who purportedly “woke up” from a 23-year long coma

and began communicating via a keyboard with the assistance of a ‘facilitator’.

“Dr. Sanjay Gupta missed it on CNN, Dr. Nancy Snyderman missed it on

MSNBC. And neuroscientists untrained in skepticism and the history of facilitated

communication all missed it,” Shermer says of the news coverage given to the subject.

He goes on to explain that facilitated communication, FC for short, is no different than

the use of Ouija boards or dowsing rods; the coma patient isn’t guiding the facilitators

hand, it is the facilitator directing the coma patients movements.

Shermer recommends a simple test to prove his claim. Show a picture to the

facilitator and a different picture to the coma patient without revealing the picture the

other has seen and ask the coma patient to type what they were shown. This particular

test was used to debunk a claim in the 1990’s when it was publicized that severely

autistic children suddenly awoke from their condition and began talking and acting like

normal children….with the assistance of FC. In that instance the test was applied and

whatever the facilitator saw was typed 100% of the time; not once was the image shown

to the children typed. Still the exploitation of these children didn’t end for many years.

As Shermer observes, “…emotions almost always trump evidence.”

It is in the interest of wasted money, time and broken hearts that Shermer hopes

the Coma Man myth is thoroughly debunked now. Families of coma patients might be


spurred to buy these plastic keyboards in order to facilitate communication with their

loved ones only to have their hopes crushed when they realize FC doesn’t work.

Skeptic Magazine is the publication by the Skeptics Society, a scientific and

educational organization of scholars, scientists, historians, magicians, professors and

teachers, and anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary claims,

revolutionary ideas, and the promotion of science. Skeptic has a mission of serving as an

educational tool for those seeking clarification and viewpoints on those controversial

ideas and claims.

Source :

http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/archives/vol15n03.html

Note: The information came from the hardcopy magazine I subscribe to. It is not

available for review online.

Press Release 6
Aging Stardust

Humans are curious creatures that wonder about the source of everything whether

it’s life itself or the Mississippi River; that’s part of how we hypothesize about the future.

For cosmologists the search for the source of all things in the cosmos is a complex task

involving everything from the use of massive super-powered telescopes to analyzing and

determining the composition and age of the tiniest fragment of space dust.

Jennifer Matzel, a cosmochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is

the subject of an article written by John Matson in Scientific American. Her discovery

offers important information giving insight into what the conditions were like during the


earlier, formative years of our solar system. Part of being able to understand and predict

celestial trends involve understanding how and when they were started.

Comets are visitors from the distant, frosty regions in our solar system, specific to

this discovery are the comets that originate past Pluto’s orbit, an area filled with

fragments known as the Kuiper (kai-per) belt. The samples were collected from the

comet Wild 2 (pronounced ‘vilt’) in 2004 and delivered by NASA’s Stardust mission via

parachuted capsule as the Stardust probe passed Earth on its way to study the comet

Tempel 1, expected in 2011.

The fragment in question was named Coki and was formed in a high-temperature

process which seems to indicate formation later in the history of the solar system than

previously expected. The problem arises when scientists try to settle the idea of an

outward transfer process that may have been at work for millions of years while resolving

the question of how this material evaded the enormous gravitational pull of the larger

planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn. The gravitational pull of these planets seemed a

rather large hurdle for this material to jump in order to end up in the outer rings of the

solar system.

Though the evidence discovered is substantial, Matzel confesses the information

gathered so far has told a relatively consistent story and nothing can be ruled out without

further investigation. When scientists talk about understanding how various compounds

were distributed and “seeded” the solar system with the chemical foundations of life, it is

understandable why a discovery like this is exciting.









Source:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=wild-2-stardust-coki&print=true

Press Release 7
A Decade to Dark Matter

Tug of war is a very familiar game focusing on the strength between two

participants or groups of participants who pull on opposite ends of a rope. When

participants of one side pull their opponents onto their territory they are deemed the

winner of the game. In a similar struggle, cosmological forces play the same game with

dark matter (contracting force, gravity) on one side and dark energy (expanding force) on

the other. They both play a vital role in the nature of everything; too much dark matter

and we would be an inconceivably dense speck, too much dark energy and matter

wouldn’t hold together at all.

It is this study of the cosmological tug of war that initiated Physicist Peter Fisher

of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to address one of the participants, dark

matter, in John Matson’s article in the recent issue of Scientific American. The name

“dark matter” was coined when it was observed that celestial bodies moved as if there

was more matter than what was actually visible. The phenomenon was discovered by


Fritz Zwicky in the 1930’s and ever since that time mystified astronomers and

cosmologists have been searching for physical samples of the stuff.

According to Fisher’s lecture at the American Museum of Natural History in New

York, it may be at least another decade before science can identify the particle

responsible for the dark matter affect. The particles discussed, though some are larger

than others, are all so tiny they’re able to pass the space between the atoms that make up

known matter. The problem in detecting them isn’t their minute size but that their

signatures are faint when compared with the effects of other particles. For detectors such

as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe to pick up the signature of dark matter

they will have to be 10 times larger. Right now it is the cosmological equivalent of

detecting the sound of a pin drop in a hail storm.

Fisher notes that current technology for the detection of dark matter advances by a

factor of 10 every six or seven years it might take nearly another decade before

revelations about the source mysterious dark matter is discovered. He is hopeful for an

earlier detection by The DMTPC experiment being conducted underground in New

Mexico which will be able to detect the direction of incoming particles. Because the

interfering particles (the hail) comes from the direction of the sun, dark matter (the pin)

should travel in a distinctive, predictable direction as the planet rotates and the solar

system moves through the galaxy.









Source:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=whats-the-dark-matter-physicist-

pet-2010-04-17&print=true

Press Release 8
A Feathery Evolution

The feathers of modern birds showcase the amazing achievements of evolution.

Though they come in a variety of colors, shapes and weight they share, for the most part,

the same general structure. But as it was discovered, the early evolution of scales into

feathers did was neither a consistent or predictable process resulting in variations in the

structure feathers in dinosaurs. This discovery comes from a finding in the Liaoning

Province of China by Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and

Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. In her article for

Scientific American writer Katherine Harmon discusses the implication of the findings.

Early feathers developed in more diverse ways than modern birds; in ways that

have been lost in the evolution of feathers. This complex development is unknown in any

modern bird species and indicates the activation of the genes which caused the growth of

feathers was delayed and incomplete resulting in feather types that differed between the

young and adult specimens of the same animal.


This finding gives interesting insight into exactly how scales eventually evolved

into the plumage we see in modern birds. Just as characteristics of other prehistoric

animals did not survive evolution, feathers in modern birds are a reflection of the most

successful form of feathers. The development of feathers in dinosaurs, however, lends a

colorful and diverse aspect to common, modern-day animal characteristics.

Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the

U.S., has been bringing its readers unique insights about developments in science and

technology for more than 160 years. More than 140 Nobel laureates have written for

Scientific American, most of whom wrote about their prize-winning works years before

being recognized by the Nobel Committee. In addition to the likes of Albert Einstein,

Francis Crick, Jonas Salk and Linus Pauling, Scientific American continues to attract

esteemed authors from many fields.

Source:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=feathers-developed-differently-in-

d-2010-04-28&print=true

Press Release 9
T Cell Training

The amazing complexity of the human immune response has led to a hopeful

discovery on how to construct future vaccine efforts in the fight against the AIDS virus.

The discovery was made by Arup Chakraborty, an immunologist at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology at Cambridge and the subject of Alla Katsnelson’s article in

American Scientist called ‘Well-Trained Immune Cells Keep HIV in Check’.


The immune system detects foreign cells by recognizing proteins on the surface of

foreign cells called human leukocyte antigents (HLAs for short). This recognition is

done in the thymus organ of the human body on body fragments called self-peptides.

Think of it as target practice and the pupils are known T cells. A T cell must be able to

recognize at least one combination of HLA and self-peptide but if the T cell in question

reacts too strongly it is rejected. Such T cells would otherwise attack the body’s own

cells in a reaction resulting in autoimmune diseases.

It is precisely this reaction that is being studied. A small percentage of people

infected with HIV never develop AIDS and a commonality being discovered is the

existence of this autoimmune response. These cells have broader activity and likely

recognize HIV even if it were to mutate, the key to ‘elite controllers’ to keep the infection

under control.

Everyone has a certain number of extra-reactive T cells, though they are in much

smaller numbers, and this is the key researchers are hoping to take advantage of by

arming T-cell armies that are trained to actively select HIV cells. Conventional ways of

developing vaccines have not been successful for HIV, but with this discovery scientists

are hopeful that by taking advantage of the body’s own tricks, control of the infection can

eventually provided in the form of an AIDS vaccine.









Source:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=well-trained-immune-cells-

keep&print=true

Press Release 10
The Myths of Motivation

What incentivizes employees may not be what has been traditionally used to

increase employee happiness and engagement, or so says a book by Daniel H. Pink called

“Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us”. It isn’t the tangible rewards

given employees but rather an intrinsic meaning in the work they carry out that

encourages superior performance.

Writer Kenneth Silber’s review of Pink’s book in Scientific American references

the “candle problem” as noted by Pink. Sam Glucksberg, now at Princeton University

performed an experiment where participants were given a box of matches, a candle and

tacks and asked to affix the candle to a wall. The solution was to using the matchbox as a

platform to the candle, the findings of the experiment showed those participants who

were incentivized with cash took longer presumably because the focus on the reward was

a distraction to problem-solving.

In a more recent study, Harvard Business School asked artists and curators to rate

pieces of artwork for creativity and technical skill. Though the panel was not informed

about which pieces where commissioned and those that were not, the incentivized pieces


received lower scores in creativity though they showed the same amount of technical skill

as the non-commissioned pieces.

Not all incentives are negative, however. According to Pink a dangling carrot

may be useful in incentivizing individuals to work through monotonous, routine work.

The elements revealed in Pink’s book show autonomy, mastery and purpose as the top

three characteristics that are necessary for workers to find value in their jobs. With the

ever changing conditions in 21st-century America, creativity and innovation are much

needed elements in successful business operations; for today’s workforce it is finding a

deeper meaning. It is up to modern businesses to find a way to provide this essential

motivating factor.








Source:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mind-reviews-drive-the-surprising-

truth&print=true

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