I am not alone. Last year, The Washington Post published a fantastic article on this alarming topic. Even better, Alison Winter wrote a comprehensive history of truth serums that appeared in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine two years ago.

It began with the so-called “zombie drug” scopolamine. In the 1920s, Robert House, a doctor from Texas, branded the versatile alkaloid as a means to extract information. In the next decade, barbituates including sodium amytal and sodium pentothal were introduced.

It didn’t take long for reasonable people to realize that truth serum would produce inaccurate or inconsistent results during interrogations, and yet former CIA officials and Indian judicial officials take them seriously. Perhaps they read too many Dick Tracy comics as kids.

I tend to write off stories about animals saving people as wishful thinking on the part of reporters and pet lovers. But in this case, I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that a parrot is considerably louder than a fire alarm.

Thermite is a mixture of iron oxide and aluminum. When ignited, the aluminum is oxidized and the iron oxide is reduced. If you put it in a terracotta flower pot with a sheet of metal covering the hole at the bottom, the thin strip will melt just as the reaction has completed and allow a column of molten iron to pour straight downward.

When alkali metals react with water, the products are a metal hydroxide, hydrogen gas, and lots of heat. As this video shows, metals at the bottom of the periodic table react far more violently than those at the top. Every high school science student should see this.

Reporter Veronique Greenwood included short summaries of academic research about each of the mental malfunctions. I was pleased to see that she included the names and affiliatons of the researchers, but disappointed that she only identified one of the journals in which the research that she described appears.

After reading dense blurbs like these, I often want to know more.

It always irritates me when huge publications like PopSci go to great lengths to create a fantastic story, and then slap it up on the web without adding any extra information. They could have at least linked to the webpages of each researcher and some of their abstracts. That would have taken a half hour and greatly enriched the article.

For your enjoyment, here are profiles of those five researchers:
Note that you can find long lists of their scholarly publications on each of these pages.

Susumu Tonegawa – Deja Vu, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 5, 361-372
Eric Altschuler – Out of Body Experience, Perception 36(4) 632 – 634
Jamie Ward – Mirror-touch Synesthesia, Brain, 128, 1571-1583
Olaf Blanke — You’re Being Watched
Amir Amedi — Seeing sounds, Neuron, Vol 48, 859-872

This week, I stumbled upon one of his stories in The Best American Science Writing 2006 and thoroughly enjoyed it. My Bionic Quest for Bolero tells the tale of his quest to hear every nuance of his favorite song by traveling across the country and allowing a host of scientists to tweak the settings of his digital ear. I was fascinated to learn that researchers were able to squeeze so much extra performance out of the medical device without any upgrades to the implanted hardware.

Modafinil (provigil) is a treatment for narcolepsy. It also allows healthy people to stay awake for extended periods of time. Armodafinil (neuvigil) is a newer product that contains only one isomer of the drug.

Methylphenidate (ritalin) is a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. More recently, Novartis has introduced dexmethylphenidate (focalin) which contains only a single isomer of the active molecule.

This is a bit heavy: Stereoisomers are molecules that have the same chemical formula and bonds, but a different arrangement of atoms. Enantiomers are a type of stereoisomer that are mirror images of each other — just like a right hand is the mirror image of a left hand. R-stereoisomers can be thought of as “right handed” and L-stereoisomers can be thought of as “left handed”.

In both cases, the generic names of the new drugs say something about their stereochemistry. Armodafinil sounds like R-modafinil, and in fact, it is the R-stereoisomer of the powerful stimulant. The prefix dex- in dexmethylphenidate indicates that when polarized light is shined through a solution of the substance, the polarization will rotate a bit in a clockwise direction.

Eszopiclone (Lunesta), Escitalopram (Lexapro), and Dexedrine are also pure enantiomers. Clearly, our brains are very picky about the shape of their drugs.

This past Saturday, dozens of computer programmers descended upon a mansion in Cupertino, California to enjoy massive troughs of Indian food, camaraderie, and 12 hours of working on a diverse array of projects alongside one another.

I visited the event, called SuperHappyDevHouse 20, as an observer. It made me wonder: What if all scientists worked this way?

Granted, it would be immensely difficult, and possibly dangerous, for a hundred chemists or biologists to bring all of their instruments to a suburban home and set up shop for the weekend. All scientists have conferences that they can attend. But I think that there is a point to be made here.

Coders are accustomed to communicating with each other must faster than their laboratory-bound counterparts. Some Google employees told me how they are barraged each day with a phalanx of email. Countless message boards, IRC channels, and other sites allow isolated programmers to share with each other. And then we have this: a gathering with lightning talks and guys squeezed ten to a folding table sharing ideas as quickly as they can speak. Perhaps this allows their culture and projects to evolve more quickly as well.

By comparison, there are few chemistry message boards, and only the open access journals like chemistry central include a comments thread alongside every peer-reviewed research paper, and conferences are dry, twice-a-year poster and powerpoint affairs.

It makes perfect sense that information technology for laboratory scientists would lag behind that which is at the disposal of career programmers, because the coders can make their own. But despite that understanding, I want more. I want lightning talks, and hack days, and zillions of active boards for biologists and chemists and physicists.

Instead, I have absolutely no idea what goes on in the labs on either side of mine. I know what topics my neighbors are studying, but I don’t see the nitty gritty details. Concrete walls separate us.

Increasing the rate at which laboratory science evolves is a challenge for architects. Would researchers work more effectively in cavernous labs that allow them to interact more fluidly with hundreds rather than a handful of other scientists? Could a business profit from renting out a venue where scientists temporarily set up camp to show each other the latest techniques? While it may be impractical, it would seem far more colorful than simply meeting in a convention center and watching slide shows.

Rare stories of organic chemists bringing insect pheromones or other oddities with them to conferences are the stuff of legend.

There is a small silver lining to this cloud. Websites like the Journal of Visualized Experiments have sprung up to share the minutia of what goes on in labs — allowing researchers from across the globe to reproduce complicated procedures with less difficulty. But still, there is something to be said for being there.