Chemistry: Concepts and ApplicationsChapter 1: Chemistry: The Science of MatterIn the NewsMakeUp Your MindJanuary 2005Who says it's not cool to be a chemist? Or that chemistry is only for boys? Or that chemists never make something tasty in their labs that you can use to color your lips? Not the girls in the Girls in Engineering Mathematics and Science camp, a program run by Minneapolis Public Schools and Augsburg College in Minneapolis. These young scientists are spending the summer in the chemistry lab at Augsburg College creating their own lip gloss. Not choosing it from a shelf, not picking it from a magazine--making it from scratch. How cool is that? These girls--there are 42 of them, all seventh and eighth graders--are part of a summer program called “MakeUp Your Mind.” It was created by their science teacher, Jennifer Rose, who got $10,000 grant from the National Science Teachers Association to help girls get interested in chemistry. And, at least for the first batch of curious chemists-to-be, it seems to be working. Is Chemistry for Boys? A lot of studies have found that the number of boys who excel in science is noticeably higher than the number of girls. Why is this? Girls are every bit as smart as boys, and can be just as great scientists--look at Madame Curie, who discovered radium, or Rosalind Franklin, who almost beat Watson and Crick to the Nobel Prize for her work in understanding DNA. Women can be just as daring, and just as great lovers science. Look at Rachel Carson. Something in our educational system, then, isn't inviting girls into science as much as it's inviting boys. Of course, when girls aren't turned on to the fun of science, everyone loses--not only because some people are missing out on careers they might have loved, but because for every Albert Einstein in the word, there could have been an Alice Einstein as well. Maybe part of the problem, some researchers have speculated, is that science just isn't presented in ways that are interesting to young girls. Of course, girls can be as interested in frog's guts and exploding rockets as boys can, but what's wrong with inviting in some adolescent folks into chemistry with lip gloss for a change? Real World Maybe Hollywood is part of the problem. Until just recently, you didn't see many women in the role of “scientist” on television or in movies. For that matter, when you saw men in the role of scientist, most of them were nerdy and always seemed to be caught up in some project that doesn't have anything to do with anything. One of Jennifer Rose's ideas was to offer her girls chemistry experiments that had obvious real-world applications. If you use makeup, you'll probably be curious about what it is. Once you know what it is, you'll start to wonder how it's made. Before you know it, you're involved in “cosmetic formulation.” In other words--chemistry. Chemical Properties At MakeUp Your Mind, the girls must learn the chemical properties of makeup itself. They have to understand where the initial materials come from (this includes a visit to a beekeeper to see how beeswax is harvested), and basic principles of combining these materials. There's a freedom involved in doing it yourself, too. Don't like the colors you can buy at the store? Don't think they shone enough? If you know your chemistry, forget those store-bought brands. You can make better ones on your own. The result is a summer of fun for forty-two young people, with no exploding frogs in sight. And maybe something even better--an invitation to the chemist within. Activity: You may never have thought of lipstick, lip gloss, eyeliner or other makeup products as involving chemistry, but they do. If you have any of these products in your house, examine them closely with a scientist's eye. What would you guess eyeliner is made out of? Where does rouge come from? Do whatever tests you can think of on these products to try and figure out what they really are. Duluth News Tribune.com: Minneapolis Public Schools: Augsburg College: Ghosts or Brain Chemistry?April 2005One of the most powerful insights modern science have given us into ourselves is that our very thoughts are somehow connected to the chemistry of our brains. Scientists won't know the exact details of this connection for many years yet, but we get the general picture: certain chemicals in the brain are responsible for certain kinds of thinking. This realization leads to all sorts of interesting possibilities. Just this year, for example, a neurologist named Peter Brugger, who works at the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, became curious as to whether people who believe in paranormal events have a different brain chemistry than those who don't. “Paranormal events” means ghosts, magic, and general supernatural happenings. Scientists dismiss claims for paranormal events because there is no evidence for them. Still, a great many people report seeing ghosts, for example, every year. Why is this? Peter Brugger suspected the difference between people who think they experience paranormal events and people who don't may be in those chemicals. Ghost in the Machine To test his idea, Brugger gathered forty volunteers. Twenty of them were “believers”--people who, by their own description, believe in paranormal events. The other twenty were “skeptics”--people who, by their own description, didn't believe in anything paranormal. Both groups sat in front of a machine that flashed images of people's faces as well as scrambled images that didn't have faces in them. The volunteers had to decide whether they had seen a face or not. A similar test was run with scrambled words. The idea was that “believers” might be more likely to see a face when there wasn't one there. In other words, something about their brain chemistry might be causing them to interpret random information in a meaningful way. That could explain why some people see ghosts where others just see shadows, or why some people see magic where others just see a coincidence. Sure enough, when the results were in, the “believers” group claimed to have seen more faces than were there, while the “skeptics” saw fewer than were there. That's interesting, because neither group was seeing reality: one shot high and one shot low. But wait--it gets even better. Now for the Brain Chemistry If chemicals underlie our thoughts, then you should be able to change the way people think by changing the chemicals in their brains. To test this, Brugger gave his volunteers a dose of a drug called “L-dopa,” which increases the levels of a brain chemical called “dopamine,” and had them do the test again. Did their reactions change? They sure did--the skeptics who had taken L-dopa, and therefore briefly had more dopamine in their brains, now reported seeing more faces and words than they had before! The believers stayed about the same. What was going on? Making Believers Out of Skeptics One way to interpret Brugger's data is to say that the more dopamine you have in your brain, the more likely you are to see patterns when there aren't any. As a result, high-dopamine brains will belong to people who believe in supernatural things and low-dopamine brains to people who don't. Giving extra dopamine to the skeptics briefly made them more like believers. The believers didn't change because they already have high levels of dopamine in their brains. If this is true, why would mother nature make us this way? That's an excellent question, and more research will need to be done to figure it out. We can take a guess, though. Being able to recognize patterns in nature is an important part of human survival. We evolved into the kinds of brains we have over many millennia, and the ability to spot an animal hiding in a bush is one we needed all that time. If the chemical dopamine helps us spot those patterns, then you would expect us to have a lot of it in our brains. On the other hand, if you have *so much* dopamine that you see patterns when there aren't any, you can make mistakes. Humans who were *forever* seeing ghosts and goblins--and therefore missing the real animals--wouldn't have lasted long. It's probably no coincidence that human brains today are close to the line between believing silly things and refusing to believe anything at all. Activity: Take a poll of your friends. How many believe in ghosts? (Make sure you ask them individually instead of as a group so that some people's answers don't influence other people's answers.) How many have actually seen a ghost? Do you see any pattern among your friends--that is, do certain people tend to believe in paranormal events more than other people? New Scientist: Neuroscience Center, Zurich: Team Dopamine Home Page: |  |
