Just like a chocolate milkshake, only sporty

Sometimes science tells you really cool things. Like how there are times – certain times – that chocolate flavoured milk can actually be beneficial.

Three published clinical trials, one from 2006 and two from 2009, have shown that chocolate milk is at least as good for exercise recovery as specially-designed sports drinks, and probably better (read these reports via The Cochrane Library).

Why chocolate milk works so well is not certain, but there a number of things that might be responsible, some of which it shares with sports drinks:

1. Water – pretty much any drink will help to rehydrate you, which is rather important after exercise.
2. Sugar – helpful for replacing the energy you’ve burned. But in particular chocolate milk contains sucrose, which seems to be good for replenishing glycogen, which an important reserve energy source for muscle cells.
3. Salt – it’s good to replace salt you’ve sweated out, particularly if you’re prone to low hyponatremia. And while it’s true that chocolate milk has less salt than most sports drinks, that mightn’t be too bad considering most of us eat too much salt already.
4. Protein and fat – the protein is good for repairing muscle damage, and it’s something sports drinks don’t have. But the fat content of milk helps too (even low-fat milk still have some), possibly as an extra fuel source.
5. Taste – chocolate milk has an appealing, chocolatey flavour, so you want to drink more of it.

This last one might sound trivial, but it’s been confirmed in studies and is actually one of the main justifications for the benefits of sports drinks – people will voluntarily consume more fluid if a drink tastes better (see, e.g. Passe DH, Horn M, Stofan J, Murray R 2004, “Palatability and voluntary intake of sports beverages, diluted orange juice, and water during exercise”, Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab., vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 272-84).

And indeed, this is one of the main reasons the Australian Institute of Sport recommends using sports drinks.

Now, I’m not saying we’ve rigorously proven that chocolate milk beats sports drinks in this category, but it did score highly in our informal experiment.

John demonstrating his preference for chocolate milk over water and a sports drink

Once again, ground-breaking on-air research from the Lost in Science team.

(Oh, and of course I need to point out that if you’re not doing heavy exercise, then you probably don’t need the extra sugar and salt of sports drinks or chocolate milk. They’re good as a treat, perhaps, but plain water will do to get you through the day.)

The methane rain falls mainly on the plain

NASA’s Cassini space probe has been orbiting Saturn (that’s the pretty planet with the rings) taking pictures of it and its moons since 2004. In particular it’s focused on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan; in fact, Cassini travelled to Saturn accompanied by a lander called Huygens, which actually went down to Titan’s surface.

Titan is so intriguing for scientists because it’s large enough to have an atmosphere. And recently Cassini was fortunate enough to catch pictures of methane rain around Titan’s equator.

A huge arrow-shaped methane storm blows across Saturn's largest moon, Titan (Image: NASA/JPL/SSI)

Along with its parent planet, Titan is over 9 times further from the Sun than the Earth is, so naturally it’s a lot colder. Its average surface temperature is −179.5 °C, which is of course well below the freezing point of water.

But methane (chemical formula CH₄), which is a gas on Earth, is liquid between -182.5 °C and -161.6 °C. This means that Titan can experience the same types of weather events – rain, storms, etc. – as us. Only with methane instead of water.

Hot rockers

The Earth has been particularly active lately. It’s easy for us to forget, running around on the surface as we do, that there’s a lot more going on beneath our feet.

The rocks we’re familiar with are merely the crust on the surface, between 5 km (under the ocean) and 50 km thick. Beneath that is about 2,890 km of mantle, a 2,266 km  thick liquid outer core and a solid inner core, which has a radius of 1,216 km.

Cross section diagram of the Earth, showing the crust, mantle, outer core and inner core (Image by NASA)

And of course, it’s really, really hot down there. Thanks to radioactive decay, warming from the sun and heat left over from the Earth’s formation 4.5 billion years ago (kept under great pressure), the inner core is believed to be as hot as 5505 °C. That’s about the same as the surface of the sun.

Such an enormous amount of heat has to be good for something, and it is: we can use it to generate geothermal energy.

Diagram showing the 3 different geothermal energy types, volcanic hydrothermal, hot sedimentary aquifer and enhanced geothermal, or hot rocks (Image from AGEA)

Shaken by a moment of great magnitude

What’s all this talk about the “magnitude” of an earthquake? Whatever happened to the Richter scale?

I’m glad you asked. The moment magnitude scale has gradually taken the place of the Richter scale since 1979, when it was developed by Hiroo Kanamori and Tom Hanks (no, not that Tom Hanks). It’s designed to be more reliable for larger events, being based on the energy released by the quake rather than how much the ground has moved.

Actually, it’s based on the logarithm of the energy, meaning that the scale goes up by one when the energy goes up by a factor of 10. There are many measurement scales based on logarithms, from pH to decibels, stellar magnitude to information, even the octave scale. In fact there is evidence to suggest that human beings find it more natural to estimate quantities based on logarithmic scales.

In the 19th century, Ernst Heinrich Weber and Gustave Theodor Fechner performed experiments like gradually increasing weights held by blindfolded people. Small increases were barely perceptible, but when the weight was increased by an amount comparable to what it started with, it could easily be detected – regardless of the starting weight.

As is often the case, the maths may sound complicated, but we’re awfully good at doing it subconsciously.

Drunk as a skunk

No doubt you’ve been dying to find out what the teaser image from the other day was all about. Well, this week on Lost in Science we performed an experiment – a very responsible experiment – to find out the effect of light on beer, and how different colour beer bottles can help or hinder.

Spectrum of sunlight filtered by clear, green, blue and brown glass (Image from Australian Brews News)

Beer is made from grains – usually barley – fermented by yeast. But the familiar, bitter flavour comes from hops, the flowers of which were originally added to help stop the beer going off. In particular, the bitterness comes from three compounds called isohumulones, or iso-α-acids. And when isohumulones are exposed to light, they react with proteins in the hops to form foul-smelling sulfur compounds.

Don’t call me dumbo

We all know that elephants – like the mafia – never forget. But now it seems that they not only have good memories, but they’re also very good at solving problems and cooperating.

In a study recently published online, researchers tested the ability of elephants to work together to achieve a shared goal – in this case two pachyderms needed to pull on ropes simultaneously to obtain some food (Plotnik JM, Lair R, Suphachoksahakun W & de Waal FBM, “Elephants know when they need a helping trunk in a cooperative task”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 7 March 2011).

In the wild, elephants maintain strong social groups, so their ability to work together isn’t so surprising. But what was surprising was how some individuals were able to figure out the need for cooperation and didn’t even try until their partner arrived. One elephant even figured out a technique the researchers hadn’t even thought of, which was to simply stand on the rope and let the other one do all the work.

Does this mean elephants are actually smarter than humans? Read more about this research at Discovery News – unless you’re an elephant yourself, in which case you probably already know all about it.

Four bottles of beer on the wall

What’s going on here?

Tune in to Lost in Science this week to hear our first on-air experiment…

More on radiation

Recently we posted a story about measuring radiation, trying to put in context the numbers being reported from Japan. At the moment, no one really knows the full extent of the damage, and it’s impossible to predict with any certainty what will happen.

But a high level of interest and a low level of knowledge leads to a lot of speculation, and, it seems in this case, considerable exaggeration of the dangers. A map of radiation distribution produced by the United Nations Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation shows how wind patterns across the Pacific Ocean mean that radioactive particles emitted from Fukushima will eventually reach the United States.

Map of forecast for 19 March 2011 of the distribution of radiation released by the Fukushima nuclear power plant (United Nations Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation)

This is a scary map. But it’s important to note that the radiation here is measured in “arbitrary units”, and the nasty-looking violet colours in California correspond to 0.0001 in these arbitrary units. And the worst case scenario they’ve identified is “extremely minor health consequences”.

This is not to say there is absolutely no danger. As we mentioned in our last post, 1 millisievert of radiation is estimated to be equivalent to smoking 100 cigarettes, so even a tiny fraction of that could be considered a fraction of a cigarette. But when a 7 hour airplane flight alone will expose you to 0.05 mSv, the relative risk compared to other normal activities is fairly low.

Of course, this could all change if conditions worsen at Fukushima. And what this map does show is the potential geographical spread of the impact from an event like a full-scale meltdown. It’s just not worth panicking over yet.

This brings to mind an event from the early history of nuclear research, when the dangers of radiation were still unknown. In 1937, John Lawrence and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley decided to test the effect of radiation by putting a rat inside a particle accelerator. Lawrence recounts:

“After the cyclotron had run,” said Lawrence, “I crawled back in there to see how the rat was doing. When I opened the canister, the rat was dead. It scared all the physicists. I later learned that the rat died of suffocation, not radiation, but I didn’t spread that news around. The physicists became much more interested in radiation protection after that. Soon the cyclotron was heavily shielded. And the word got around about radiation hazards, because we reported some of our early findings in a paper presented at a meeting in Buenos Aires.”

So the impact of their misunderstanding was to err on the side of caution. Then as now, it’s important not to panic and to try and fully understand what’s happening, but it’s still better to over-estimate the risk than to under-estimate.

Invasion of the bloody snatchers

Recently, the malaria parasite was for the first time videoed entering and infecting a human red blood cell (via New Scientist TV):

Gravity can really slow you down

While the future’s all abuzz about the World Time Machine Project, it’s timely to talk about what gravity has to do with it. With time, that is.

It’s all thanks to general relativity, Albert Einstein’s extension to his special theory of relativity in order to take into account both acceleration and gravity (which Einstein actually showed were equivalent).

General relativity is both famously elegant – among physicists and mathematicians, at least – and horrifically difficult to understand. When the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington was told about a rumour that only three people in the world really understood it, he responded “I’m trying to think who the third person is.”

But today you can be the fourth person on that list, as we explore gravitational redshift, one of the simplest demonstrations of how gravity slows down time.

Image via Wikimedia Commons