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Education

Newscripts

Get psyched for 'Aha!', What is the most competitive sport?, 'Disappearing' tattoo ink

by Rachel Petkewich
May 15, 2006 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 84, Issue 20

Get psyched for 'Aha!'

Louis Pasteur said, "chance favors onlythe prepared mind." A study in press for the journal Psychological Science shows that he had the right idea.

Turns out that brain activity helps predict if people will solve a problem with sudden insight known as the euphoric "Aha! moment." As test subjects labored over word puzzles, psychologists at Drexel University; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and Northwestern University collected information about the subjects' brains with electroencephalograms and functional magnetic resonance imaging.

From those scans, the researchers linked brain patterns to distinct types of mental preparation. The results demonstrate that the big Aha! is the culmination of a process that begins before a person even starts trying to solve a problem. Basically, increased medial frontal activity in the brain indicated an insight was ahead, whereas occipital activity correlated to solutions that came more methodically.

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Credit: iStockphoto
Credit: iStockphoto

This new information may eventually lead to an understanding of how to attain the optimal "frame of mind" for solving vexing scientific questions. Maybe researchers will also figure out why people yelp "Aha!" as opposed to, for example, belting out an energetic "Hot doggone diggity dog!"

What is the most competitive sport?

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Credit: iStockphoto
Credit: iStockphoto

Soccer and baseball share the superlative title. Physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Boston University discovered that fact while they were trying to answer this question: How do some people end up at the top of the social ladder and others at the bottom? "Sports is a wonderful laboratory for" explaining this question "because the results of sports competitions are accurate, extensive, and publicly available," says lead researcher Eli Ben-Naim.

The researchers analyzed more than 300,000 games played in more than a century for five major sports leagues in England and the U.S., including the premier soccer league of the English Football Association (FA), Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Hockey League (NHL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the National Football League (NFL). According to the researchers' model, basketball and football are the least competitive, and hockey falls somewhere in between the most and the least. The online Cornell Physics Archive has a preprint, and the researchers have submitted a longer version to the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.

They conclude with these caveats: "In our theory, all teams are equal at the start of the season, but by chance, some end up strong and some end up weak. Our idealized model does not include the notion of innate team strength; nevertheless, the spontaneous emergence of disparate-strength teams provides the crucial mechanism needed for quantitative modeling of the complex dynamics of sports competitions." Thus, understanding the variance put forth by superstars and team rivalries would require additional grants.

'Disappearing' tattoo ink

Who knows if jimmy buffett's lyrics for "Permanent Reminder of a Temporary Feeling" has deterred anyone from getting a tattoo, but New Scientist magazine recently reported that Rox Anderson at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, developed a way to make the everlasting artistry easier to remove in the future. And it doesn't involve resorting to the kind of temporary tattoo that comes in a cereal box.

The Food & Drug Administration provides no safety standards for dyes used in body art. That means that tattoo ink can contain the same carbon black and metal salts used in car paint. Next year, a company in Philadelphia called Freedom-2 plans to release inks that contain dyes already approved by FDA for cosmetics, foods, and drugs. The dyes haven't been used in tattoos because the body absorbs them, but Anderson came up with idea of encapsulating those dyes in protective polymer beads. At 1-3 µm in diameter, they are small enough to travel through a needle and create a tattoo in the skin.

But should you find yourself in a situation where, for instance, the love of your life dumps you or the band breaks up, a single laser treatment will burst the beads, your body will absorb the dye, and the tattoo will fade. Right now, up to 10 laser treatments can dull, but not necessarily eliminate, a permanent tattoo.

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