By Science Mom

My five-year old son, Alexander, loves science. So each week, the two of us have pledged to do a science experiment. There are not too many rules – only that the experiment can be easily done in the kitchen of our apartment, and not leave too much of a mess. Last week, Alex tried to make rice bounce by putting it in a glass of carbonated liquid. It took us a few tries to get the experiment right, but eventually it worked.

EXPERIMENT 1

This week, we had been thinking about doing an experiment to determine why it is sometimes hard to open a freezer door after it has just been closed. But then the folks at Talking Science gave Alex and me a wonderful kids science product to play with. It’s called Pop Bottle Science: 79 Amazing Experiments & Science Projects by Lynn Brunelle.

The Pop Bottle Science book comes in a large plastic bottle, which can be pulled apart to make a funnel or a bucket, depending on your scientific needs. The kit also contains a blue measuring cup, a set of yellow measuring spoons, some balloons and a cork.

So, Alex and I went looking through the book for an experiment to perform. We quickly found one that asked the question, “Can you make a bottle burp?” Alex – as a five-year-old boy who thinks anything to do with bodily functions is hysterical – started howling with laughter. “Burp!” he chortled. “The bottle is going to BURP!” Then he looked at me and hollered, “Do you think the bottle will say EXCUSE ME?” before doubling over with laughter.

The experiment seemed quite simple. Put a plastic bottle without a lid in the freezer for an hour. Take it out, and place a quarter that you have just rinsed in water where the bottle’s lid ought to be. Then, as the cool air molecules inside the bottle warm up to room temperature, the bottle should burp, slightly dislodging the quarter as it does so.
So we waited for the bottle to freeze, wet the quarter, put it on the bottle, and waited. Nothing. We are not quite sure what we did wrong. Perhaps our freezer was not cold enough. Or maybe we just had a very polite bottle. But the molecules did not gather enough momentum, the quarter did not move, and the bottle did not burp.

EXPERIMENT 2

Since we had not had instant success with the experiment we did the previous week trying to get rice to bounce, Alex, despite being deprived of a scientific burp, was philosophical. We decided to move onto another experiment in the book that asked “Can you get pepper to run away from your finger?”

Again, it’s a very simple procedure. Fill a small vessel with water, sprinkle some pepper on the surface, and then dip your finger in. The pepper will do nothing. But then rub your finger on some soap, and put it back in the vessel. The pepper should go shooting away from your finger to the sides of the vessel.

And that’s exactly what happened. When Alex put a clean fingertip in the peppery water, nothing happened. But when he put a soapy fingertip in, the pepper charged away like it was possessed.

I’m learning just as much as Alex from these experiments. In particular, I’m learning that when it comes to scientific experiments for kids, if something doesn’t happen in the first thirty seconds, it’s probably not going to happen at all, and you should either try the experiment again later or move on and do another one.

We’ll see if next week’s experiment bears this theory out.

Editor’s Note: This is a re-post from mid-March, 2009. The original seems to have disappeared.

By Science Mom

My five-year old son, Alexander, has already developed a strong interest in math and science. At his request, we recently enrolled him in an after-school astronomy class, where he draws stars and shoots the galaxy breeze with the other pupils. He has settled on Saturn as his favorite and most interesting planet; he loves the rings.

As part of a plan to nurture Alex’ interest in science, I decided that each week, he and I should try some form of scientific experiment. With that in mind, Talking Science helped me out by giving me access to Mick O’Hare’s great book, How to Fossilize Your Hamster And Other Amazing Experiments for the Armchair Scientist.

Alex particularly wanted to try one experiment from the book; Bouncing Rice – where a grain of cooked rice bounces up and down in glass of fizzy drink. Sounds easy enough, right? Alex and I thought so. Hmmm. As it turned out, instant armchair scientists we weren’t.

BOUNCING RICE

According to O’Hare, the armchair scientist need only drop a grain of cooked rice into a glass of soda and wait for the rice, buoyed by the bubbles of carbon dioxide in the soda, to start rising and falling. Where did Alex and I go wrong?

We started by filling two shot glasses with selzer water. We put a single grain of rice in one, and three grains in the other, watched them sink to the bottom, and waited. Nothing. The grains twitched a little, but showed no sign of rising up anywhere. Alex had his face inches from the shot glasses, willing the rice to move. At one stage he also went and got his magnifying glass, to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. Still no luck.

We discussed that maybe the rice was the problem, because it was boil-in-the-bag. But it was all we had, so we decided to change beverages, and we filled another shot glass with Diet Coke, dropped in a grain of rice and waited. Nothing. Although we could barely even make out the rice through the murky gloom of Diet Coke brown, it definitely was not moving.

CHAMPAGNE, ANYONE?

With Alex’s attention starting wander, we decided to further diversify both the range of glasses and the beverages we were using for the experiment. Half an hour after we started, we had ten vessels full of fizzy drinks, including two shot glasses full of selzer water, one shot glass of diet coke, one large beer glass and one small mug of selzer water, one champagne flute full of ginger ale, another champagne flute full of tonic water, one Bob-The-Builder tumbler full of ginger ale, and an Irish coffee glass full on tonic water. And at the bottom of each? Stubborn grains of rice, all lying very, very still

SO THAT’S WHY THEY CALL IT “SPRITE”

Then Alex spied the remains of a bottle of Sprite in the refrigerator and suggested we use that. I was worried that it might be flat, but I emptied it into a regular-sized tumbler. Then Alex added the grain of rice, and we watched and waited.

But not for long. The rice went beserk!! It bounced up and down like a jumping bean. Alex squealed with delight, and declared the experiment ‘cool.’ Then, in order to reassure that it was the Sprite, and not the size of the glass that triggered the success, we repeated the experiment by pouring Sprite into a shot glass, and then adding a grain of rice. The rice nearly jumped out of its skin it was moving so fast.

Alex and I are going to try one experiment per week. Next week, we’re tossing up between testing the dynamics of our freezer door, or trying to create ‘clouds’ of smoke inside a plastic bottle. We’ll keep you posted.

Editor’s note: This is a re-post from March 1st, 2009 because the original seems to have vanished.

Last Saturday afternoon in the cafeteria of a New York City public school, a ten-year-old boy gazed at a tiny, squirming worm in his palm. “I want to name it,” I heard him say to a volunteer from the Lower East Side Ecology Center, “but even if I give it a name, it still won’t be my pet.” A desire to connect, sprinkled with a little hesitation, perhaps.

Close by at the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine’s table, girls with plastic blue gloves handled tan, squishy globs of I knew not what. As I approached, I realized they were cradling kidneys, an esophagus, and other organs from human cadavers. One girl pointed to a grayish pair of organs and asked the Touro volunteer, “Are those lungs dark because of smoking?” The volunteer nodded. “And this is a normal uterus,” she said, handing the girl a womb. Then she pointed to another, very bulbous uterus and explained that it contained a tumor.

Catty-corner to that table, kids were dancing, gyrating their waists in order to keep hoola hoops elevated. They were congregated below a large sign that read, “Hoop Against Gravity” and “Hoop Contra Gravedad.”

For this was the first semi-Spanish language science festival at P.S. 165, the Robert E. Simon School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, whose students are 73 percent Hispanic. The Ecology Center and Touro booths were among about 15 others set up for the Super Saturday Science Festival. Dedicated to interactive learning focused on science, the event was organized by The Morningside Area Alliance.

The kids were engaged and exuded enthusiasm. It seemed to me that a healthy mix of fun, curiosity, and seriousness permeated the room.

I moved on in search of the auditorium, where Ann Marie Cunningham, TalkingScience.org’s Executive Director, was handing out special glasses for a 3-D show in the upcoming Science Cabaret. Earlier, she and Haley Main, a bird educator from the National Audubon Society, answered questions about a rare pigeon, an Egyptian Swift.

Also at the talkingscience.org table was “Susan the Scientist,” who makes science education videos. She showed her latest, “Why does the Sand Sound So Loud?” and handed out copies of the script so that kids could replicate her experiments about how sound travels. A Talkingscience.org blogger called “Science Mom” and her five-year-old showed how to make a soda bottle burp. Read about it here. And Barbara Juncosa, also known as “Dr. BJ, the Queen of DNA,” showed kids how to extract their DNA from their spit using only liquid soap, rubbing alcohol, water, and a pinch of salt.

Ann Marie kicked off the Science Cabaret with a pigeon-naming contest and announced submissions by kids who had visited the TalkingScience.org booth. These were Houston, Snoopy, Flappy, Red, and Isis. Red got the most applause and a boy named Henry, who suggested the name, won a T-shirt.

Next, Ann Marie introduced a slim, blond young woman, Debbie Berebichez, as a “true Science Diva.” She is, in fact, the first Latino woman to earn a physics Ph.D. from Stanford University and now consults on Wall Street. Debbie asked the audience who thinks science is cool. “We do,” the kids roared back with loud cheers, hoots, and lots of hand waving. Then Debbie asked how many knew that high heels have to do with the Newtonian physics. The kids were quiet and listened raptly as she explained that a 100-pound woman wearing stiletto heals exerts as much pressure on the ground as does an elephant’s foot. She asked they knew why. A boy answered that the elephant’s huge weight is spread out over a larger area, but high heals press on only a tiny area of the floor. He, too, got a Super Saturday T-shirt.

Debbie asked the kids to name everyday activities that involve science. Someone shouted out cooking, because it involves chemical reactions. Another said watching the stars at night, and another said discovering galaxies. Three more T-shirts.

Outer space provided Debbie with a segue to scientists who create Hollywood special effects for other worlds, like Gerald Marks. A 3-D photographer and artist, he has worked with the Rolling Stones and Bjork, in addition to working for movie directors. He also teaches at New York’s School of Visual Arts. The lights went out and everyone donned their fancy glasses. We looked at a photograph of a seal in an aquarium. That was followed by shots of the moon and roller bladders on New York’s streets––Jerry explained that he likes to photograph skaters because he grew up in the neighborhood and used to ice-skate not far from the school. Then he showed sand dunes on Mars and a robotic vehicle that landed on it. “There were so many rocks nearby, that scientists gave them names. One is called Yogi,” he said, “for the baseball player.” The kids laughed.

Returning from outer space to Earth, Jerry showed a stunning shot of a radiolarian, are amoeboid protozoa that produce intricate mineral skeletons. This radiolarian was a specimen that Professor Dee Breger from Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory collected from the Antarctic. Here it is, scanned in an electron microscope. That shot was my favorite. Oohs and ahs resounded throughout the packed auditorium.

Next on the program were hip-hop National Stroke Association artists A. D. Harris and Tiffany Newton from Harlem Hospital. Their mission: to teach kids how to recognize when someone is having a stroke and what to do. “Hip hop stroke, brain attack,” they chanted, and the kids chimed in. They sang “My Amazing brain, does so much,” and the kids echoed them. Once they had the kids’ attention, A.D. and Tiffany divulged information without scaring or overwhelming them. They handed the kids a sheet of paper, The Hip Hop Stroke Brain Map, which showed the brain’s basic anatomy. And they came up with a mnemonic, F.A.S.T. for stroke symptoms: “F” for a droopy face, “A” for an arm that drifts down, “S” for slurred speech, and “T” for time to call 911. I didn’t catch what F stood for and asked a little girl sitting next to me. She didn’t remember either, but no matter. A cartoon quickly followed to reinforce the lesson. And after that, we reviewed F.A.S.T. one more time.

As a result, the kids did learn fast and seemed to have a lot of fun. If only every child in could attend such a super Saturday. There were role models, interactive “edutainment,” a balance of information from adults with a sense of wonder about the world that was contagious for both girls and boys. With more events like these, we might solve the education crisis in science, technology, and engineering. For much of life is a science cabaret, old chum. So come to the cabaret.

For information about me, please visit my site, www.karenafrenkel.com

As it turns out, Spring break is great for science experiments. There’s plenty of time and plenty of scope, especially if the weather is lousy and you have a curious five-year-old.

So, Alex decided that he wanted to do three experiments while he was on break. We found them – as we have found most of the things we have done – in Pop Bottle Science, which features 79 easy experiments that are not too time-consuming or messy. And in addition to a book full of experiments, the Pop bottle breaks into two, yielding both a container and a funnel as necessary.

Firstly, Alex wanted to blow bubbles. You know those little bubble-blowing kits that you can buy that contain a small bottle with some kind of detergent in it, and have a hole on a dipping stick that you have to blow through? The bubble blowing experiment in Pop Bottle Science is based on the same principles.

Get a large bowl of water, and then add a few squirts of detergent and a spoonful of sugar. (The sugar is to help strengthen the mixture and thicken the bubble wall so it doesn’t pop too quickly. I’m guessing this is the reason why bubble gum is so sweet, although I don’t know that for sure.) Then dip the top half of the pop bottle in the mixture, and blow through the neck of the bottle.

At first, Alex blew too hard, and the bubbles popped immediately. But once he got the hang of it, the gentle, sustained stream of air that he sent through the Pop bottle neck yielded fantastic results. Big bubbles formed, grew, and then hung off the bottle neck like pendulous fruit.

Next up: an experiment to make a raisin ballet. A simple premise: add four tablespoons of vinegar and three tablespoons of baking soda to a half a container of water and then throw in ten raisins. The combination of vinegar and baking soda creates carbon dioxide, which should make the ten raisins rise and fall in the water, creating a raisin ballet.

Or not so much a ten-raisin ballet as a pas de quatre. We only managed to get four of the raisins to rise and fall. Even after we threw in some more vinegar and baking soda to liven things up, the six uncooperative raisins would not budge. It was a bit like an experiment we tried a while back to get a grain of rice to rise and fall in a glass of carbonated liquid. It took us a while to get that one right, too.

Lastly, Alex wanted to explore the principle of inertia. This started with a discussion we had about how if you pulled a tablecloth out from under a bunch of dishes, there was a chance the dishes would stay in place. Instead of putting the whole dining table at risk, we decided to try it on a micro level. We put a card on top of the empty bottom half of the Pop bottle, put a quarter on top of the card, and then Alex flicked the card to try and make the quarter fall into the container.

It took Alex a couple of tries to get the trajectory right. At first he was flicking the card upward, which dislodged the quarter. But eventually, he was flicking the card straight ahead, making the quarter fall into the empty container below. This one, Alex loved. He still likes to do it from time to time, just to make sure that the principle of inertia hasn’t changed its mind.

Emily Levine’s personal philosophy, “We must grow up, not wide,” informs her work as well as her life. In her own words, “the upgrade to Emily 3.0” ditches “Emily 2.0, who only ever thinks about herself.” Her workshop, “5 Easy steps to Metaphysical Fitness: They Actually Work,” served as the beta form to her current Ensemble Studio Theater (EST) production, “Emily at the Edge of Chaos,” which will then go into movie production at the end of the summer.

Levine’s philosophical breakthroughs occurred during her own phase transitions—“From ping, productive, radiated confidence; to pong, sleeping 12 hours a night, faked confidence.” She had gone from being a big television writer living in L.A. to having big hands and feet due to a rare disease, acromegaly, in which her pituitary released too much human growth hormone. Analogous to this is America, which was once at the height of its capitalist career, but now wades through an economic depression.

Levine navigates “The Edge of Chaos” through a fractal mapping of physics, philosophy, newspaper clippings and personal experiences. She bestows a comprehensive view of current affairs, grounds it in a subjective history, and asks her audience to begin with a new perspective—not to continue in the philosophical tradition of Hegel, Newton or Descartes. Having learned the effects of the dichotomous “/,” Levine suggests we’d be better off “funambulating on hyphens.”

EST turns out to be the perfect place for a post-modern-one-woman show. Its intimate size allows Levine to interact with her audience. The stage lights are directed at both Levine and her spectators, allowing them to contribute to the performance as well. “I have to read [people’s expressions]. It’s the only way I could keep it fresh,” says Levine.

In a recent interview I had with Levine, she claimed to always have a knack for comedic timing and enjoyed projecting herself, but had not been exposed to stand-up comedy until she was 24 years old. At that age, she had just returned from Rome and landed her first job, teaching children with autism. As a teacher, she did not want to turn her classroom into a performance routine, so she enrolled in some acting workshops. It was while doing these workshops that someone suggested she take the stage as a comedienne.

Levine pleaded, “But I’m really smart.” She had graduated from Harvard with honors in general studies.

Levine’s brilliance and empathy run in the family. Her father was an internist and her late mother “is a great role model and wonderful person,” says Levine. When her mother was diagnosed with cancer, she looked back and saw she lived a very happy life. “Both parents were committed to making the world a better place,” recalls Levine.

Perhaps it was this experience that solidified Levine’s reassuring optimism. Perhaps it was dealing with acromegaly before doctors could properly diagnose it. Perhaps it was figuring out there was nothing wrong with her perceptions of reality. Rather, it was Hollywood that proved to be more delusional. After trying a hand in stand-up, she was offered to write television pilots in L.A. However, when she had written scripts that mirrored reality, producers critiqued that a female character wanting neither to become a wife nor mother was unlikable and not real.

When asked why she stopped writing for television on her F.A.Q., she responded, “First of all, I never liked writing television. Second of all, I never knew what studio and network executives meant by ‘real.’”

If woman’s experiences were only funny when she was cast as the subjective, Levine felt that she could only be smart or funny. She traced this problem to Netwon’s Either/Or contradiction and Descartes’ Mind/Body dualism, in which the mind dominates ontology, or a person’s state of being.

According to her online bio, she had a philosophical breakthrough when she “discovered the quantum logic of And-And” and decided she could be “smart and funny.”

Levine claims her productions are, “Personal, political and cosmological. The balance needs to be right between these three things.” Inspired by the Oracle of Delphi, Levine feels stand-up is “the closest thing to a woman getting up and telling the truth.”

Levine’s goals? “Deconstruct my constructed self. I want to talk about the connections,” she says.

Although “Edge of Chaos” lost a little bit of the science she had gone into with “5 Easy Steps,” there’s no loss of how science connects to our understanding of life, relationships or economics.

Edge of Chaos closes Saturday night at EST.

7pm on the 6th Floor

$15 tickets

Editor’s note: Edge of Chaos actually closed on Saturday, 4/11, not on Friday 4/10.

By Hugh Lippincott

I want to try and explain some of the math behind the double-slit experiment. The goal here is not to explain the weird nature of light mathematically, which is beyond the scope of a blog. I do want to show how the double-slit experiment proves light behaves as a wave quantitatively and give an example of how math can be used to explain the results of an experiment.

After a brief discussion with my mom, I realize that I will have to start by explaining what the sine function is (hence the “Part 1″ in the title. For the reader who knows what the sine function is, I apologize. Hopefully you will enjoy this post anyway [I always like reading about something I know, it's egotistically gratifying and maybe there will be some interest to be found here from a pedagogical standpoint]). From looking at some of the comments, I fear that just the mention of something called a sine function will cause eyes to glaze over, so let me try and explain why I think it’s cool. Math is a language, and each additional element in the language expands the scope of what you can talk about. For example, English with just nouns and verbs would be a boring language (”I wrote”). This is like math with just multiplication. But when you include adverbs and adjectives, all of a sudden you can say something interesting (”I wrote a fascinating post on math, and everyone unanimously agreed that I was the best blogger around who specializes in explaining physics to his mother.”). In math, it’s the same way; the sine function is a tool that enables a discussion of a whole host of things that were previously unavailable, and in particular, waves.

Part 1
Let’s start with a circle like the one shown and draw a line from the center of the circle to the edge. I’m going to trace out the circumference of the circle with this line. At any one time, the angle between that line and the horizontal axis is θ (my mom will ask about the variable names again, for whatever reason angles are always given Greek letters, and θ is always the first one given), and the projection of that line on the horizontal and vertical axes are x and y respectively. I’m particularly interested in the vertical projection, y (hence the color). Initially, when θ=0, the line is entirely horizontal, and y=0. As θ increases, then so does y, until reaching its maximum value when the line is entirely in the vertical axis. Then y decreases before reaching 0 again, and then goes negative, before finally returning to where it started. We can imagine going around the circle again and getting the exact same thing.

Now plot y as a function of θ, and we get a wave.
This is the sine function - or more technically, the ratio of y to the radius of the circle (we could have performed a similar exercise for the x coordinate and obtained the cosine function, which is [clearly] a very close relative of the sine). It describes a wave as well as circular motion. It also represents a relationship between the sides of a triangle (the alert reader will have noticed that x, y and the radius created a triangle for each angle, suggesting that the sine of an angle relates the length of the sides of a triangle to the hypotenuse). Among many other things. All in all, it’s really useful.

Part 2

(click on the picture for a larger view)

Now that we know what a sine wave is, we can understand the double-slit experiment. I need to start with a few definitions that I probably should have put in the last post: the wavelength is the length between two successive peaks in the wave (often represented by λ) and the amplitude is the height of the wave (we’ll call it A). There is a symmetry property of the wave; if you shifted the wave to the right or left by its wavelength, it would look exactly the same. In fact, you could shift the wave by any integer times the wavelength, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. This will be important later on.

To understand the double slit experiment, we need to ask what happens when two waves overlap. The answer depends on their “phase,” or where each wave is in its oscillation relative to the other. For example, suppose two waves are perfectly “in phase,” so that when one wave is peaking, so is the other. When you add these two waves together, you’ll get a wave that is twice as big in amplitude.

By Hugh Lippincott

I will use the Bohr model (together with the nature of light discussed in the last few posts) to predict the existence of “spectral lines,” which will finally bring me back to dark matter by explaining exactly how we measure the speed of those rotating galaxies (see the Dark Matter Intro link if this is not familiar). Historically speaking, I’m presenting this material backwards, as the observation of spectral lines came first and the explanation came later, but I will proceed anyway.

Niels Bohr is in many ways the father of quantum physics, if not its prime mover. He came of age before the revolutionary wave of the 1920s, but almost all of the physicists involved in developing quantum mechanics (Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli to name a few) spent some time at the Institute of Theoretical Physics he founded in 1921. His model of the atom was a precursor to all of the discoveries of quantum physics to follow.

So what is that model? Although it turns out not to be accurate, it’s a pretty good start, and I would guess that the Bohr model is generally the picture most of us have in our minds for the atom today. Analogous to our picture of the solar system, the Bohr model imagines a dense, very small nucleus, surrounded by orbiting electrons (I took the picture from a website at Jefferson Lab).
By itself, that isn’t all that interesting - the real theoretical interest of the Bohr atom was that the electrons are constrained to lie at specific orbits. In the solar system, the planets could theoretically lie at any radius - we could take the Earth, move it a little farther away from the sun, and it would still orbit contentedly (we might all be a bit colder, but the orbit would be fine). In Bohr’s atom, an electron can’t move to a slightly larger orbit; instead, it would have to jump to the next available orbit. The analogy is that the Earth can only be at our orbit or Mars’ orbit, but nowhere in between.

To take this a step further, we can add energy considerations. The farther away from the nucleus, the more energy an electron has. Therefore, whenever an electron switches orbits, it gives up or takes in energy (depending on whether it’s heading out or heading in). If it is only allowed to be in certain orbits, then the possible energy steps are discrete - it can only take in or give up a very specific amount of energy. For one more analogy, suppose my mom is on an elevator on the ground floor. If she goes up in the elevator, she can only get off on floors, she can’t get off in between floors. And, as she goes up, she picks up a specific amount of energy (which she could give back if she were to jump out a window - she would be rather more regretful if she jumped out a 4th floor window as opposed to a 1st floor window because of all the energy she picked up by going up the elevator). The electrons in the orbit of the Bohr atom are like my mom on the elevator - they can’t get off between floors and the amount of energy they can pick up or give out is discrete and fixed.
The very astute reader might see a similarity between this model and the photoelectric effect of Einstein from my post on the nature of light when light could carry a specific and discrete amount of energy depending on its frequency. In fact, this is exactly the same thing - how does the electron gain or give up energy? By absorbing or emitting photons (in the photoelectric effect, an electron absorbs enough energy to jump off the surface of the metal, or be “freed” from the orbit). This has significant results for observations of atoms as we’ll see in the next post. For now, though, I’ll put up one more diagram, similar to the one above, containing the positively charged nucleus at the center, and an electron that can be in one of three “energy levels” (or floors) by emitting or absorbing a photon (the wavy line). Also, for a little interactive demonstration of the same thing, try this.

ケイトリン・ミリテロ
編集：アロン・ホロウィッツ

3月15日にMSNBCがピーナッツアレルギーについて驚きの情報を発表した。デューク大学医療センターとアーカンソー小児病院の新しい治療のおかげで29人の子供がアレルギー反応を起きずにピーナッツを食べることができた。治療は「経口脱感作」（けいこうだっかんさ、oral desensitization）と呼ばれ、食物アレルゲンを少しずつ経口投与することによって免疫寛容を上げる方法である。

医療研究がまだ必要だが、その29人の内5人の子供はアレルギーが完全に治ったようだ。アメリカのピーナッツアレルギーの患者の180万人にとっては、人生が変わりうる情報である。毎年アメリカでは、200人はピーナッツアレルギーによって死亡し、後3万人は救急治療室に運ばれる。

メドラインプラス医療事典によると、食べ物不耐性の患者は多い(乳製品がうまく消化 できない「乳糖不耐症」は厳密にはアレルギーではない）。しかし、食物アレルギーはもっと珍しく、花粉症と同じように抗ヒスタミンと抗体を発する。重度のピーナッツアレルギーはアナフィラキシーショックを起こす恐れがあり、患者も多いため、ピーナッツは一番危ないアレルゲンの内に入る。

色々な統計の内、アメリカのFDAによるとアメリカ人の1.5％、つまり400万人は食物アレルギーにかかっており、国立国会図書館によると日本には1～2％、つまり150万人は患者である。

数年前から、普通のアレルギーの患者は抗ヒスタミン薬を飲んだり、アレルギー注射を受ることも出来たが、重度ピーナッツアレルギーの患者は治療法がなかった。この新しい治療でアレルギー注射のように少しだけのアレルゲンが体内に入ることによって、免疫寛容を上げながらピーナッツの量も増やす。これによって、いままでピーナッツが食べられなかった子供が無反応で食べることができるようになる。

しかし、この治療はアレルギー注射とはいくつかの違いがある。アレルギー注射は腕に注射することに対し、ピーナッツ経口脱感作治療を受ける人は、最初は、非常に少量の粉末ピーナッツを毎日食べる。しかも、アレルギー注射では免疫寛容を上げることしかあり得ないが、ピーナッツの経口脱感作治療はアレルギー自体を直す可能性がある。

しかし、注意点は、この治療は医師から直接受けなければならなくて、ピーナッツアレルギーの患者にとってはまだ危険性がある。もっと安全で全員が使用できる方法を研究すべきだが、それには時間がかかる。

だが、デューク大学医療のアレルギー部長は「私達は経口脱感作治療を受けた子供たちはピーナッツアレルギーが完全に直った自信がある」と述べた。つまり、今のところは、ピーナッツアレルギーの患者は、デュークの医者のように希望を持つべきだ。

参考：食物アレルギー持つ子供の給食は？

By Caitlin Militello

On March 15, MSNBC had some surprising news about peanut allergies. Thanks to a new treatment by Duke University Medical Center and the Arkansas Children’s Hospital, 29 children were able to eat peanuts without any allergic reactions. The treatment is called oral desensitization, a method of gradually introducing a food allergen orally in order to build up immune system tolerance.

Though further study is still necessary, 5 of those 29 children appear to have had their peanut allergies completely cured. This isn’t just good news for the 1.8 million peanut allergy sufferers in the U.S.– it could change their lives. Every year, 200 people die in the U.S. because of peanut allergies, and another 30,000 make emergency visits to the hospital.

According to the MedlinePlus Encyclopedia, many people have food intolerances (lactose intolerance, for example, is a condition in which a person cannot drink milk or consume dairy products, but does not have an actual allergy). Food allergies, however, are much less common, and cause the production of antihistamines and antibodies in response to the allergen, much like seasonal allergies or hay fever. Because many people have severe peanut allergies which can result in anaphylaxis, the peanut is high on the list of the most dangerous allergens.

There are many statistics on food allergies, but, according to the FDA, 1.5%, or 4 million Americans have them, with 1 to 2 percent, or 1.5 million food allergy-sufferers in Japan, according to figures from the Japanese National Diet Library.

For many years, people with run-of-the-mill, non-food allergies could take antihistamines or allergy shots for relief, but people with the often terrible peanut allergy had no recourse. With this new treatment, peanut allergy patients are given small amounts of the allergen, much like with allergy shots, gradually increasing the dose as his or her tolerance builds. The result is that children who could not eat peanuts before are now able to do so to some degree, without any adverse reactions.

Peanut oral desensitization is different from allergy shots, however. Allergy shots are injected into the arm, while oral desensitization patients eat small doses—starting with amounts smaller than a person could cut by hand, or powders—of peanut every day. Furthermore, unlike allergy shots, which carry only a possibility of increased allergen tolerance, oral desensitization carries a hope of actually curing the peanut allergy.

There are still a few caveats: this method can only be administered by a doctor, and is still dangerous for those with peanut allergies. Doctors should continue to search for a safer method that can be used by everyone, but that will take time.

However, as the head of the allergy department at the Duke University Medical Center said, “We’re optimistic that [the children who have undergone oral desensitization] have lost their peanut allergy.” So, for the time being, if you think of peanut allergies, think like the doctors at Duke: optimistically.

Read more: The Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network: Tips for Managing a Peanut Allergy and FAQs

People tell their doctors personal information that no one else knows- these clipboard wielding strangers know so many details about us that maybe it’s time we get to know them a little better. One could look to prime time to learn more about the secret lives of doctors- ABC’s Scrubs is hilarious, ER is a classic, and there’s about a dozen more doctor shows. These shows might be so popular because they tell the story from the other side of the stethoscope… with a little more glam. Well, a lot more glam- in my experience, I’ve never had a doctor who looks like George Clooney or else I would have broken a few more bones in my life. There’s now an alternative to prime time doctor shows- NOVA’s new documentary Doctors’ Diaries, directed by Michael Barnes takes a realistic look at the professional and personal lives of seven doctors starting when they enter Harvard Medical School in 1987 and ending at present day.

With only two hours to convey seven lives over a twenty-one year span, Doctors’ Diaries only gives a glance of the sleepless nights and rigorous classes to get through med school, the intense hands-on residencies, and the life each doctor forges out of their training. Observing the three women and four men at Harvard and beyond as they struggle with large workloads, classes that involve human corpses, attempts to have intimate relationships and interests outside the medical world, life in busy hospitals; all while coming of age. This is truly a look at an evolution and a non-linear, sometimes out of balance, path to a life they all dreamed of. And that path never seems to stop winding, as each doctor narrows down their field interests, have families, and become teachers and role models to the next generation of doctors.

The word doctor originates from a word that meant teacher, scholar, religious teacher, or someone respected because of their knowledge. Today, doctors are some of the most educated people and their knowledge of our bodies is invaluable. While their ability to teach us about living healthy is important and evident to most- Doctors’ Diaries points out another lesson we can learn from doctors that is not often appreciated. In the current economic climate where headlines only seem to tell of corporate greed and selfishness, the enormous amount of sacrifice all seven doctors go through to get to where they are today- six are practicing medicine and one is in the non-profit world- is refreshing. Besides the six plus years of medical school and residencies, the doctors of this film have accepted a life of working long hours- and their personal lives, interests and sometimes health suffer. Their sacrifices are proof that there are people who have a desire, or a calling, to help those around them by using their talents for the benefits of others. It is a nice reminder that there are still people in our country who are concerned with the quality of life for everyone.

Doctors’ Diaries will air on PBS Tuesday April 7th and Tuesday April 14th, 2009.