"More weight loss operations for diabetes" via BBC news 

TL;DR - The NHS spends 10% of its budget on diabetes. NICE is suggesting we operate on overweight people to lower this cost.

I don't know how you feel about this. To be quite honest, it makes me sort of cross.

 Knee-jerk reaction maybe...

but only in the UK would this be acceptable. We pay our taxes into a system that
gives us "free" health care. This health care money is then spent on people who
have a completely manageable condition, who choose NOT to manage their symptoms
so now MORE money will be spent on keeping them
healthy.

If people choose not to live a healthy
lifestyle there's really not much you can do about it until they decide
otherwise. I'm not talking just overeating. I'm talking all of the risk factors
for diabetes - smoking, drinking, the whole caboodle. It's not just being
overweight that does it. Furthermore, just to clarify I'm talking about excess
body fat over normal BMI. Not the kind of BMI where actually you have only 8%
body fat and you're healthy as a horse - just really short and muscly
:P

Nor am I talking about the people who have
diabetes for other reasons - maybe your excess body fat caused it, maybe it
didn't - but excess body fat still doesn't help. I'm talking about the people
who live a lifestyle that is chronically unhealthy. I'm sure everyone has their
"special snowflake" story, just reading the comments on this article there are
loads of cries of "but I'm different" "but I'm more different than the last
person" "BUT IT ISN'T MY FAULT". Some of them are bona-fide, yeah, good point.
Some though reflect exactly what I'm saying. I'm not looking to porportion
blame, I'm looking to increase people's self-reliancy. WE are ALL responsible
for what we do to our bodies. Yes, overweight diabetics pay their taxes, but
yes, they do spend MORE than their share on their health. Yes, I'm also talking
about the people who smoke, or drink to excess out there. Yes, I am my own
special snowflake.

As I’m sure you know, I speak from
a point of view that has a lot of personal feelings attached to it. I watched my
grandmother destroy her body
over the course of 20 years. She refused to
"give up" the things she "shouldn't" eat. What she never seemed to see was what
she'd be gaining in doing so. Has NHS money been spent on her? Yes. Should it
have been? It's hard for me to answer that one. Of course in the abstract it's
easy to say "no", but what would that have meant for her? Certainly death by
now.

But what if those doctors had refused to treat her early in the
course of her disease? Would that have forced her to rethink her options? Maybe.
Maybe not - it's too late to ask now.

I know I keep saying it, but
accountability is something we're sorely missing. You see it everywhere - I
failed my exam, it's my teachers fault. I
never learnt how to employ my
good manners, its my parents fault. I'm only overweight because I was never
taught how to eat properly - my parents AND my teachers fault.

What would happen if people suddenly started taking responsibility for their own
actions? What sort of world would THAT be? I'm ill because I eat too much crap
that's bad for my body. I'm ill because I smoke/drink/eat too much. I failed my
exams because I didn't work hard enough. I'm bad mannered becase I choose to be
that way.

Woah. A whole new world of opportunity arises.

If its your parents fault you're overweight, well, what can you do to help that? But
how about the responsibility lies with you? Well. All of a
sudden you have
control. Yes. You do have the responsibility, but you also have an element of
control suddenly. I can lose weight because I've not educated myself on healthy
diet so far, but with the wealth of knowledge out there - I can change
that.

Yes, the article mentions that NICE don't expect that many people
to have surgery. Of course. But once it's an option it will shut down some
people's resolve. Why bother losing weight when if you get overweight enough you
can have surgery to do the magic for you? Losing weight is hard work.
It
requires control of your diet, control of your exercise, motivation, reading up
on stuff....why bother when a band can stop you eating as much?

And then
when you get down to healthy weight - do you have a clue of how to maintain
that? Nope. It's like in WoW when they introduced the "boost to 90 type
programmes. All of a sudden we had an influx of new players, at top level that
had NO idea which buttons did what and how they could use them. Not so great for
raiding. In fact, I even levelled my paladin from 19-60 once using such a
system. Could I play her? Like heck I could. Why? Because I'd never learnt the
appropriate skills on my way to the top.

Likewise with losing weight. You
can't cheat your way down there, you won't know what to do to stay there. How
many people re-rolled their classes to have another go? Loads. How many people
just kept playing (really badly) loads. People who use quick ways out of being
heavy will usually only rebound. Yes there are exceptions, but most studies
support the rule - not the exceptions.

5 years ago I'd have taken a magic
pill to lose my weight. Today I'd never consider it. It's been hard, tough,
sometimes really downing, but at the end of it I know a LOT more about myself
than I ever would have otherwise, and a lot more about fitness and nutrition
than I would have otherwise.

What do you think? Is this a good
proposition to decrease the money spent on diabetes? Or would we do better to
educate our population?

"Idle minds succumb to temptation of electric shocks" via New Scientist

Would you rather be in your own world? Or would you do anything to avoid it?

TL;DR - people would rather give themselves an electric shock than just sit still and do nothing.

This lab study shows that people would..

rather self-administer the electric shock than sit still and have nothing to do.

I don't know about you, but before I starting writing this I'd
spent at LEAST 10 minutes doing bugger all. And that was in between an hour 
of flicking from doing bugger-all, to trying to concentrate on what I was doing 
and back.

I have to confess, I'm a bit of a daydreamer. I used
to get in trouble in class for it, I still get in trouble for
it these days. Especially when I let Tom slip off the pole because I was
imagining what it would be like to be a professional pole dancer instead of a 
teacher. Ooops. It's ok, he landed on his back. I even had my music planned 
out....

In class I used to look out of the window and day-dream
about running out over the field and away. As I grew up it
would be about what I'd do with my life, or on one occasion what my RE teacher
would look like in a pink-bunny outfit (think the Chandler bunny oufit from Friends).

What I'm trying to say is, I'm quite content in my own
thoughts. I sometimes even dream up entire stories and just
let them play out in my head.

Would I be content to sit still and daydream? Oh
yes. Would I be content to sit still and
daydream if I was told to? I very
much doubt it. I have obediance issues.
Day-dreaming is something I do on
my OWN time....it wouldn't be right to be told
to do it. You can't do it on demand!

What's my point? (that's often the question) My point is
that this lab study, the people
were TOLD to sit still and do nothing. What
better reason to not do it!


The trouble with these lab studies, as
I've mentioned before, is that we can never be sure they're actually
measuring what they're supposed to be measuring. Surely this study is
measuring how well
someone can do as they're told rather than would they
sit still and do nothing? 

What if it's measuring obediance, or following instructions, rather than ability
to sit still and do nothing? For me, it
lacks validity. On the face of it, maybe
we have some validity, but delve deeper.

And what about demand characteristics? Hawthorn effect? All
of those little things that happen when you get given an instruction by
someone - do you comply or not?


Furthermore, yes, they were given the shock
before the experiement, but what if the curiousity to try it
again over took? 

Oh, don't look at me like that. You've done it too. I put
a battery on my tongue
once. I only did it another 4 or 5 times to check
what I felt. When it's a very
minor risk, or pain, it's tempting to try it
again - just to see if it was "really" that bad. Take for example the
incident with the snorting of Paprika.
We ALL saw what it did to our
friend, yet we all tried it. Several times. Just
to check.

What I'm saying is, that humans are
curious creatures. We try something once - it
hurt, but did it hurt that bad?
Did we imagine the shock? Would we do it
again? Well, if it wasn't life
threatening, I'd bet you would. I can assure you, I've put my fingers in hot wax
many times (it IS kind of cool....), but I'd never walk out in front of a car again.

The article is interesting, and maybe it's a true
reflection on our society - we'd rather
be doing anything than be doing nothing.
It would fit with our fast paced,
instantly gratifying society but I'd just urge
you to look a little deeper. 

Does it tell us what we think it tells us? Or have we found out something
else about human nature entirely?

"Man up: Is testosterone an elixir of youth?" via New Scientist

TL;DR - men with flagging testosterone levels may be better skipping the supplements.

This article looks at the effects of testosterone on the body, and the effects of testosterone supplements. 

Socially testosterone is seen as the MAN hormone. Its effects encapsulate the
"male" attributes - strength, virility, aggression but actually, a lot of men are supplementing their bodies with the hormone when actually, it might not be at all necessary to do so.

Firstly: what is testosterone?

Testosterone is a type of steroid
hormone, which is associated with the development of the primary sex
characteristics of men (development of the testes and prostate) as well as the
secondary sex characteristics in men (increased muscle mass, higher bone
density, body hair) (Science Daily). It's also essential in women for the reduction of Osteoporosis (Karger).

Both men and women have testosterone, but women produce far less (usually) than men.
Due to the higher metabolic consumption in males, men produce 20 times more
testosterone in a day than a woman would (on average), however levels of
testosterone are around 7-8 times higher in men than they are in women (JCEM). Women are also
much more sensitive to the effects of the hormone (as stated in the article in
question).

What happens to testosterone levels as men age - and what does this mean?

They are thought to drop; however, in a study of Tsine men, testosterone levels were found to be
fairly level throughout adult life (New Scientist). Could
this all be a socially constructed ploy to sell you something you don't
need?

Well. When testosterone comes into
contact with fat cells, it does change into a form of oestrogen, which in turn
helps lay fat down. This in itself could be a tempting reason to reach for the
supplementation - but when men exercise, the body naturally releases
testosterone, raising levels of the hormone in the body.

In
fact, staying active throughout life has shown that levels of the hormone remain
relatively stable and reduces the chances that you'll lay down a load of
fat.

So what's wrong with taking the hormone
anyway?

Firstly: why would you supplement something you don't need?
Surely having a healthy, natural body is much more in line with what you'd want
as a healthy person? It's a bit like taking a multi-vitamin tablet when you have
a full and varied diet - there's no benefit and we actually don't know the long
term effects of doing this.

Some of the dangers
highlighted in this article are increased risk of heart attack - testosterone
has a massive role in blood clotting ability, higher levels = higher clotting
factor. Which in itself can cause all kinds of problems - bringing in the risk
of stroke and other problems associated with blood clotting when it's not
supposed to.

So why would you supplement
this stuff?

I can only speak as a woman. I have no idea
what the male psyche encounters as it ages, but at a female guess I would say
that fear of ageing, of not being able to "perform" - either in the bedroom, in
your job, or in the weights room would strike fear into the heart of the nearly
middle-aged man.

The age old fear of growing
old. The social issues surrounding the loss of a man's virility are widely
published. Men are made to feel less than human, less than "a man". Even the
saying "man up" - what connotations does that bring? That you're not a man. That
you're behaving like a child. That you shouldn't be showing your fears, or your
emotions, or your pain.

If that's the case -
why would you want to be a "man"? Because that is what is expected of you. Just
as women are expected to grow up and have babies, so men are expected to grow up
and provide for the woman, for their family. The sword cuts both ways.


But what if we challenge these expectations?
What would happen if the women provided for the family? Would that be the end of
the world? What happens if you are hurt, or scared and you show it? Maybe in
evolutionary terms you might get eaten, but in modern society - what is the
worst that can happen? You'll be told to man up. What does that even
mean?

For me this article really highlights
something that has been entirely created by a media construct designed to sell a
product. You need supplmentation. You'll buy the supplements from the big
companies that sell them. The cycle of money
continues.

How do they convince you to buy their stuff?

They insinuate that you're less of a man as you age. That you're not able to perform, that you're not able
to keep up with the lads. That you won't grow muscle. That you won't be big and
strong and tough unless you eat this supplementation designed to keep you
"manly".

Man up guys - you don't need that
crap. Having a penis makes you a male - why would you want to be the media's
construction of a "man"?

Stay strong brothers. 

Stay active, stay happy. Your body knows what it's doing!

"Running Cures Blindness In Mice" via IFLscience

TL;DR - running whilst looking at stuff promotes activity in the visual cortex (the bit of the brain which organises sight).

Basically, if animals have limited sight in one eye from birth (in the case of these mice they had their one eye covered up) then the corresponding part of the brain has less neural activity.

These scientists are saying that during running or walking the mouse brains increase in neural activity. If the
eye that was covered up has more visual stimulation at this point, the corresponding part of the brain also fires more frequently (and more robustly) which increases the amount of activity in that area. This in turn would lead to
increased sensitivity and increased visual acuity in these mice.

What does any of this mean?

It means that the adult brain (in mice) is much more capable of "reprogramming" itself than we originally believed.
Apparently old mice can learn new tricks!

If studies in humans show similar results, that would mean that restoration (or certainly
partial restoration) of sight would be possible. What an amazing breakthrough that would be!

So was the study actually any good?

Well, my main point would be that it has only been done on mice. Scientists aren't allowed to take babies and cover one of their eyes up until they're adult and then test it out on them to see if it works. We could take humans that already have a condition that leads to partial or no sight in one eye and see whether it works, but the first round of testing is much easier to do on mice (for various reasons that I've already explained - the main one being it's cheaper to arrange), so now that we can see there is some sort of response we can move on to human subjects.

It does make sense that the brain retains this level of plasticity into adulthood - environments change and even
adult organisms need to adapt to change.

So does running improve sight all around?

Who knows. 

Personally I find my sight goes more blurry....could be on account of my poor cardio fitness though.... :p in theory though (and according to this theory) all of our senses should respond to the increase in pace - we're moving faster
through our environmend and we're being bombarded with information at a faster pace.

It's well known that running has many benefits - could increased eyesight be one of them? I certainly hope so.

"Human Gut Cells Coaxed Into Producing Insulin" via IFL science

Wow. Reading the original article from Nature Communications.....wow.

TL;DR - scientists have worked out which gene to switch on/off to make normal gut cells produce insulin.

So,  a bit of info: insulin is usually produced from the pancreatic cells and it regluates the metabolism of carbohydrates (sugars) and fats.

In type 1
diabetics, their immune system is attacking the
insulin making cells - they have
no internal insulin and rely on outside
sources. Type 2 diabetes comes about
from insulin resistance and therefore
a relative insulin
deficiency.

So, we've found the switch to make

cells turn into different cells and produce something that Type 1 diabetics

can't usually produce....

Firstly, this procedure has been

tested on human cells in a lab environment and it appears to work. Would this

work in a real body? For all we know there could be
compounds/cells/metabolic
processes that inhibit the gene we're looking at.
We've yet to see human trials,
but if it does it would be a lifechanging

event.

If you were diabetic, would you want
your gut cells to
be changed into insulin producing cells? Of course, for
example, the
religious crowd may feel this is stepping on God's toes a bit - to
make
things do what they're not supposed to, but if it changes people's lives -

people who are otherwise dependant on out-sourced insulin (that often comes from

pigs, I might add) how could you deny them?


I'm sure there are
others, maybe non-religious
groups that would also have something to say
about changing code within
ourselves - what long term effects might there
be? Will it affect anything else?
Could it cause a knock-on effect in the
cells, causing disordered
behaviour?

We don't know. And that's one
of the
things about humans, we often play with things we don't fully

understand.

This is a huge breakthrough - we're
making one type of
cell do the job of another type of cell. Could this work
elsewhere in the
body? How many diseases that come about from disordered
behaviour of cells
could be fixed?

This is an exciting
article - one that could really
change lives.


Would you undergo the procedure if you had
need
of it?

"Facebook emotion experiment sparks criticism" via BBC 
news

TL;DR Facebook messed about with some peoples feeds a couple of years ago and now people are pissed.

Sorry. Am I being a wee bit judgemental?

It's easier when you simplify things right down to the very basics, but in reality, it's rarely ever that simple.

Faecbook agreed to take part in an
experiment that allowed researchers to see how negative/positive updates on
people's feeds affected their views. They found that people who had more
negativity posted more negative status updates.


The article came to light in a few places, the
first place I read about "emotional contagion" was in New Scientist a few days
ago.

So what do you
think?

Personally I feel that these sorts of experiments
have to be done without people's knowledge. Yes, yes, abuse of power etc but if
you told people that you were going to put negative stuff on their news feeds to
assess how they coped with it the experiment wouldn't work. Likewise, if you
told people that you'd be making a change to their newsfeeds and monitoring
them, again, behaviour would change. This is known in Psychology and Sociology
as the Hawthorn effect - what we're try to observe is changed by the observation
itself.

Facebook took no personal data, they kept it
confidential and they interfered as little as possible with people.


Experiments like this date back for years. Think on
Milgram's famous study into obedience. Ok, so maybe the question isn't as
pertinent as "how many people would actually kill someone else if they were told
to?" but it does help us understand the effect that social media can have on our
population.

Ok, so they made people feel sad.
In very extreme cases they would have come across someone with a mood disorder
who it could have severely affected, yes, maybe in those cases it was
irresponsible - but how many severely depressed people are using social media
sites? The tendancy is to withdraw from social communications. Again, numbers
are unclear, so not such a great move there - but we're assuming that the
content the experimenters used was fairly mild and unlikely to provoke a severe
response in their demographic.

I think that
maybe people are looking a little too far into this. Yes. It is an abuse of
power - but it was done in the interest of curious people. Yes, maybe it was
wrong, but the results are fairly interesting and the experiment would have been
carefully designed, taking into account the risk factors. All information was
kept confidential and was not passed on any further. After reading some of the
comments from this article and from below it, to be honest,  I'm not sure what
there is to get your knickers in a twist about.

'He saved my life that night' via BBC 
news

Sometimes it's all to easy to judge someone.

Take the first case of the delinquent teenager. How easy is it to pass off as just a "bad person"? How easy is it just to label him as a troublemaker for no other reason than boredom?

Don't get me wrong, I don't condone illegal behaviour but I'm keen to explore the reasons behind WHY people indulge in such behaviour.

It's easy to pass psychologists off as

"making excuses" for "bad" people, but that's not what
we're doing. We're trying to tell you that there's a bit more to the story than
just what you see on the face. So that maybe, just maybe we can make enough
people stop and think before judging. So that maybe we can stop that vicious
cycle in its tracks.

For example: my friend was telling me
about a child she worked with who had told her to "f*ck off you st*pid f*cking
b*tch", who regularly went around kicking doors, riling up other students and
smoking weed in the toilets.

"What a little sod", I said, but
then she told me the rest. His parents had split up when he was 5, he'd been
sexually abused from that age on by his step-father, his mother was a drug
dealer and had remarried someone who was regularly violent towards her. He also
thought he was the head of a local drugs gang and they suspected he was dealing
drugs himself.

It's easy to dismiss these people. "Scum",
I've heard people say. But has that child chosen his life? No. I'm not saying
that gives him an excuse for the way he behaves, but it helps us to understand a
little better that maybe he's just a frightened child who is acting out. When
you understand that there is another human underneath all of that trouble it
makes it easier to see that there are hopes, dreams, memories in that
individual. It's easy to let all of that potential to slip
away.

Anxiety and depression are exceptionally common
disorders and yet we're still afraid to talk about them. We still don't
understand them and we don't understand the effects these sometimes debilitating
disorders can have.

I'm sure you have your own opinion on
this - but next time you see someone acting out give them a second of thought.
What might be causing that behaviour? Sometimes it's just that they are "like"
that. But most often you'll find there's a nice person underneath. Maybe you
can't change them, but maybe a smile when you see them might just make the
difference to that person - they have enough people frowning at
them.

"What's eating Luis Suarez: the psychology of biting" via New Scientist

Sorry all, but I had to. The World Cup is pervasive enough, but as a psychologist this is just downright fascinating.

I have to admit, I'm not a huge football fan. I'll watch it if it's on and being a teacher it's usually good to keep relatively up to date so you can keep up with the students, the theatrics are always good to watch but I wouldn't replace another activity with football, nor do I actively seek games.

That being said...

I was watching the England game that Suarez helped Uruguay win. Not being a football fan it was
the first time I'd put the face to the name and the first thing I noticed about
him was his rather large teeth. But he behaved himself that
game.

The next thing I hear is that he's biting another
player.
"Biting?" I inquired.
"Yup" was all I
got back from hubs.

Biting is an odd one. Watching the
footage back it's sort of like watching some sort of zombie flick. Zombie
apocolypse incoming and it all started with Suarez....

This article is great, I had a bit of a chuckle at the journalism who has a very
clear opinion on Mr. Suarez.

What the psychologist
interviewed is saying is that basically, like a child, Suarez is acting out and
he's using his teeth to do it.

Personally I'm
not sure that someone who can't contain themselves on a football pitch in front
of millions of people is completely sane but what does "sane" actually
mean.

The psychology of biting appears to be a release of
frustration, and in adults an inability to contain themselves in terms of
impulse control. Being a world class athlete there is a lot of stress and very
high emotional contexts. In this is it possible to lose yourself so completely
you revert to displaying toddler-esque behaviours? I've seen fully grown adults
throw tantrums (to the point of stamping feet), I have known adults who suck
their thumbs; in fact surely you could argue that smoking is a form of
replacement for such behaviour, I've seen adults who lose their temper in a
blink of the eye - all things we would expect from smaller children, but
displaying in adults.

Maybe Suarez isn't
*quite* as odd as we might originally assume. Just because it's not
"appropriate" doesn't mean the behaviours go away. Most people control them (I
know I was ready to have a knock-down temper tantrum a few weeks ago.....I
didn't, don't worry. And I only bit the cat.....j/k, he's too furry) but you do
see lack of impulse control in a lot of people, often it manifests in other ways
- for example emotional eating, control of "addictive" substances, swearing out
of the car window at the person who just cut you up (or in fact getting out of
your car to shout at them which I saw a fully grown adult man do the other
day).

Are we being too harsh on him? Or is this a price of
the position he occupies representing his country in a world class tournament.
What do you think?

Background references:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/players/luis-suarez/10925060/Luis-Suarez-needs-therapy-to-overcome-urge-to-bite.html

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/06/why-luis-suarez-is-always-biting-everybody.html

http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2014/06/you-are-more-likely-be-bitten-luiz-suarez-1-2000-shark-1-3700000