WHAT’S your biggest thrill? Knitting? Sex? Rollercoasters? The British inventor Brendan Walker is working on a machine to measure your thrill levels in order to make your most exciting experiences even more exciting.
Already Walker, a research Fellow based at the Royal College of Art, has built an auto-portrait machine that detects the point when people are most excited and then snaps their photograph.
The machine measures the skin’s ability to conduct electricity, which goes up when a person is excited, and is similar to the technology used in lie-detectors. He has used it to take pictures of people on funfair rides.
His next machine, the thrill measuring device (TMD), will be more sensitive and may be used by fairgrounds and computer-games developers to optimise the level of excitement they provide.
“If a computer-game player were hooked up to their console using the TMD, the game designer would have vital personal psychological information which would be used to tailor the game for them,” says Walker.
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An exhibition of his thrill photos opens today at the M+R Gallery in East London: www.re-title.com/exhibitions/mr.asp
Baby boost
A NEW test for genetic problems in foetuses which does not endanger the baby is being developed by doctors in Switzerland.
Prenatal diagnosis for hereditary genetic disorders currently relies on invasive procedures such as amniocentesis. These take a sample of fluid from the womb, and carry a small but significant risk of miscarriage.
The new technique, called size-fractionation, requires only a small sample of the mother’s blood, says a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week.
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Such tests have previously been impossible because the baby’s and the mother’s DNA are mixed up in the blood. But the Swiss-led team’s method has successfully separated the two, enabling the baby’s genes to be studied.
Fitness fungi
MUSHROOMS could provide a new dietary route to healthier hearts, say scientists, who have conducted an unprecedented examination of their chemical make-up.
While the fungi are already known to contain high-quality protein and fibre, only now have modern analytic tools been able to break down their complicated carbohydrate profiles, says the report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
The Illinois University scientists have discovered that mushrooms such as portabellas, shiitakes and enokis are rich in the compounds chitin and beta-glutan, which have both been found in clinical studies to significantly reduce levels of harmful cholesterols.
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Bone-dry drinks
CALCIUM-ENRICHED drinks such as fortified soy and rice beverages, and many “calcium-plus” orange juices are inferior to milk if you want to get the bone-building mineral into your system, says a report in Nutrition Today.
It warns consumers who believe that they are significantly helping to stave off the bone-wasting disease osteoporosis that the level of added calcium listed on the contents label may be vastly higher than the amount they actually consume.
The main problem, reports a study by food scientists at Creighton University’s Osteoporosis Research Centre, is that much of the added calcium sinks to the bottom of the container.
And then it doggedly stays at the bottom. “Shaking the container by hand was not enough,” says the food researcher Robert Heaney. “We found that really vigorous shaking, such as with the sort of paint-shaker you find in hardware stores, would have been needed to suspend the calcium in these beverages so you can put them in the glass and drink them.”
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Gout goodie
URIC acid, the villain behind gout attacks, could help to save people from being paralysed after spinal injuries.
Much of the damage that results from spine injuries is caused by the body’s inflammatory response, which releases a compound called peroxynitrite; this attacks neurons in the spine. But Philadelphia University researchers say that uric acid, which is found in urine, can actually protect the nerves.