Here’s an excerpt from my second post at the Techonomy blog–which is on the morning’s workshop about the global spread of information and communication technologies. You can read the full post here.

Unlike my fellow blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick, I don’t have anything too astute to say about the opening pre-conference workshop of Techonomy—hosted by the World Economic Forum and entitled “How to measure the impact and transformational power of technology?”

But I do have a remark on how sophisticated conversations like this one often get mashed into meaningless by media coverage–which is why we need ideas-oriented conferences like Techonomy in the first place.

The morning’s workshop centered on a regularly released World Economic Forum report—better described as a brick, really; this thing is massive—entitled the “Global Information Technology Report.” If that sounds wonky, it is. But it’s also a crucial document for tracking just how countries are doing when it comes to getting their citizens online, and upgrading and improving their information and communications technologies.

Whenever the “GITR” comes out, observed its co-author Soumitra Dutta, the press uses its release as an occasion for tech horse race stories—e.g., Sweden ranked # 1 in “networked readiness,” Singapore # 2, and so on. Woo hoo. Journalists cover such data almost like they would a presidential campaign….KEEP READING.

Recreational drug users call it “Special K.” Large, frequent doses of the anesthetic ketamine can give users vivid hallucinations, but a recently published study hints that the drug may have a medicinal use: temporarily treating depression brought on by bipolar disorder.

The small, proof-of-concept study appears in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry. National Institutes of Health researchers randomly gave 18 depressed patients ketamine or a placebo on two different days, two weeks apart. They used a much smaller dose of the drug than the amount used for recreation or anesthesia, but within 40 minutes 71 percent of the patients who received ketamine showed a significant improvement in mood, which lasted for three days, as measured using a psychiatric depression rating scale.

The quick response time is unusual for the drugs typically used to treat bipolar disorder’s depression, such as lithium or antidepressants like Prozac, and many of the study’s patients had failed to respond to other treatments. On average, the study participants had tried seven antidepressants and 55 percent of participants had failed to respond positively to the extreme measures of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)–seizures brought on by electrical current. Ketamine’s apparent success may have to do with the neurotransmitter, glutamate:

Does the unconventional drug ketamine work better? The best answer is that it works differently. Many antidepressants relieve depression by altering levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. Ketamine dissociates patients from negative thoughts and feelings by preventing another neurotransmitter, glutamate, from interacting with a receptor in the brain that usually processes it. Brain autopsies have suggested that glutamate activity is associated with bipolar disorder, and past studies have shown that severing the glutamate-receptor link can rapidly lift symptoms in people with major depression within two hours. [Time]

Though ketamine’s therapeutic effects were only temporary, scientists hope that with more research they may be able to incorporate the drug into treatments.

Ketamine could improve treatment of bipolar illness and depression in a variety of ways, [coauthor Carlos A.] Zarate said; for example, as a means to jump-start standard drug treatment, or as an anesthetic before ECT. “It’s opened the floodgate of many different directions of research, and all of them are quite encouraging,” said Zarate, who along with a co-author has filed for a patent on the use of ketamine in depression. Those rights would be assigned to his employer, the National Institutes of Health. [Reuters]

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Image: flickr / Carly & Art

This is wildly good news! Through Vaccine Central I learned that a major polio outbreak in Tajikistan has been stopped!

How? Through vaccination.

Yup. The first reports of polio were confirmed in April — 413 of them. However, that ended in late June, when no new cases were reported. That is credited to the thousands of doctors and nurses who not only vaccinated at least 97% of the children in each region of the mountainous country, but also flooded the area with multi-lingual informational leaflets, posters, and banners.

And they succeeded! With no new reports, it appears this outbreak was stopped cold.

And with the AVN in Australia getting hammered repeatedly in the press, I can now have some hope that the movement here in the United States, spearheaded by Jenny McCarthy, will die off as well. Vaccinations work, and they save a lot of lives.

A brutal Mount Everest storm might have doomed legendary climber George Mallory. How do we know? Because it’s there—in his team’s meteorological records.

Mallory was the man who, according to legend at least, responded to a question about why he’d want to climb Everest with the immortal reply, “Because it’s there.” But he and his partner, Andrew Irvine, never returned from their 1924 attempt to summit the world’s highest peak. Their lost expedition spurred decades of curiosity about their fate, a curiosity that only intensified when explorers found Mallory’s body in 1999.

For a paper published in the journal Weather, scientists have scoured the meteorological measurements taken at the expedition’s base camp at 16,500 feet and recorded in the logs. Despite the fact that those logs were brought back to Britain in 1926, the researchers argue that they haven’t been part of the discussion of Mallory’s downfall, even though the answer could be right there on the decades-old pages.

The researchers analysed barometric pressure measurements and found that during the Mallory and Irvine summit attempt, there was a pressure drop at Everest base camp of approximately 18 millibars (mbar). Lead author GW Kent Moore, from the University of Toronto, Canada, described this as “quite a large drop”. He said: “We concluded that Mallory and Irvine most likely encountered a very intense storm as they made their way towards the summit” [BBC News].

A storm on Mount Everest is bad news for climbers by itself. But the drop in pressure also depletes the oxygen that’s so precious when you’re so high up.

Dr John Semple, an experienced climber and the chief of surgery at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, said: “Mount Everest is so high that there is barely enough oxygen near its summit to sustain life and a drop of pressure of 4 mbar at the summit is sufficient to drive individuals into a hypoxic state” [The Telegraph].

Even if Moore is right, his storm hypothesis still can’t answer the real burning question about the lost expedition: whether Mallory and Irvine achieved the top of Everest before they died. The 1999 explorers found Mallory’s body more than 26,000 feet up. If he had reached the summit, it would have predated Sir Edmund Hillary’s 1953 ascent by nearly three decades.

For more about Mallory, check out the new documentary The Wildest Dream, which follows both the 1924 ascent and the 1999 mission that finally found him.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Want to attract a good mate and ward off unknown relations? Secrete a smelly substance from that gland on your chest and rub it all over. At least that’s what a mandrill might do: A recent study suggests that the baboon-like primates may use their smelly secretions to distinguish compatible mates from family.

After taking swabs from mandrill sternal glands, researchers genotyped each sample to determine the monkey’s major histocompatibility complex (MHC)–a unique genetic signature related to the animal’s immune system. They also, using a sorting technique called gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, determined each secretion’s chemical makeup, and thus its stink bouquet.

As the study’s leader Leslie Knapp of Cambridge University told the BBC, more “genetically diverse” mandrills, i.e. unrelated, have different MHCs and chemically-speaking different scents:

“[I]t seems that the odour is something that tells us some really important things about the genes of a mandrill.”

If this all sounds familiar, perhaps that’s because some researchers have said the same thing about humans. We somehow–even though researchers can’t seem to pin down human pheromones–seem to pick out one another’s genetic diversity when sniffing out good mates. Related studies have even examined whether birth control messes with our and animal’s don’t-mate-with-me-cousin beacons, which could hypothetically lead to inbreeding.

As Knapp told the BBC, the animal’s colorful face markings also seem important for attracting mates and communicating status. But to complicate matters on our end of the primate family tree, another recent study hinted that, for humans, faces that resemble our own or our parents’ drive us wild, narcissistic lot that we are.

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Image: Wikimedia / Robert Young