Health & Science

Cheating with human growth hormone

The major sports are increasingly concerned about the use of human growth hormone, or HGH, by athletes seeking to illegally boost their performance. And with good reason: A new Australian study found that HGH could speed up an Olympic sprinter by 4 percent to 5 percent—enough to turn a last-place finisher into a gold medalist. The study, which examined the effects of HGH on 96 recreational athletes over several weeks, is the first to show improved performance from the drug. The volunteers received smaller doses than pro athletes are said to use, and showed no telltale increase in their muscle mass. But the effect on sprint speed was startling, and even more so when combined with doses of testosterone, says David Howman, director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency, which funded the study. “The real effects of growth hormone are, or could be, far greater than what’s reported,” Howman tells the Los Angeles Times. “Equally, the side effects could be much more serious.” Ominously, the subjects who took growth hormone complained of joint pain and swelling. Howman said the results show that both amateur and professional sports authorities “should wake up and see they should be putting a lot more effort into detection of this substance.”

The nature cure

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The great outdoors is good for your mental health—so good, in fact, that even a five-minute dose of greenery can work wonders for your state of mind, says USA Today. British researchers analyzed data from 10 separate studies, which looked at the effect that activities such as walking, cycling, fishing, farming, and gardening had on the mental states of the 1,200 people involved. Although everyone benefited, the young and mentally ill saw the biggest boosts to their self-esteem. Urban parks conferred positive effects, although green areas with water were even more beneficial. And the largest positive health changes occurred when people exercised in the outdoors, for periods as brief as just five minutes. “There would be a large potential benefit,” says study co-author Jo Barton, if “people were to self-medicate more with green exercise.”

Did asteroids create the oceans?

To their great surprise, scientists last year discovered substantial amounts of frozen water on the moon. Now water has been spotted on an asteroid for the first time. Using instruments attached to a telescope in Hawaii, NASA scientists found that 24 Themis, a large asteroid that orbits between Mars and Jupiter, is frosted with a layer of water-ice. Moreover, the slush appears to contain carbon compounds of a sort that likely gave rise to life on Earth billions of years ago. “They have found something that a lot of people, including myself, have been chasing in the solar system for a long time,” planetary scientist Dale Cruikshank tells Scientific American. The discovery offers clues to the origins of life on Earth. Shortly after it was formed, 4.6 billion years ago, the planet was bombarded by both comets and asteroids; if they were icy, these objects may have filled the oceans with water, and seeded the planet with the basic building blocks of life.

How to get a bright idea

In cartoons, the appearance of a light bulb above one’s head signifies the onset of a good idea. That popular association is so entrenched, says LiveScience.com, that just showing a real light bulb to people can actually trigger insights. Psychologists at Tufts University gave volunteers a series of puzzles to solve under time pressure. Partway through the test, either a bare light bulb or an overhead fluorescent light was turned on in the room. The researchers found that volunteers exposed to the light bulb were 50 percent to 70 percent more successful at the puzzles than subjects given the fluorescent light. This “priming effect” is common; for instance, people play economic games more competitively after looking at briefcases. But if something as simple as turning on a light bulb can prompt creativity, study author Michael Slepian says, imagine “if this works in the classroom or in the workplace.”

Women, men, and navigation

Men navigate the world differently than women do, and will eschew directions to prove their superior spatial sense. But in some circumstances, “a woman’s way of navigating is probably more efficient,” says The Economist. Using GPS devices, researchers in Mexico followed male and female villagers over several months as they gathered mushrooms in the countryside. Both genders collected about the same weight in mushrooms. But men walked farther and expended 70 percent more energy than women to accomplish the same task. The reason: Men hunted for thick troves of mushrooms, while women made do with sparser patches close at hand. The results lend support to the idea that mens’ navigational approach was originally honed for hunting, while “women perform better and more readily adopt search strategies appropriate to a gathering lifestyle,” study author Luis Pacheco-Cobos says. And what evolved in the wild still holds true in the modern world. “Women develop a certain intuition and make better judgment calls,” says sociologist Frank Furedi, while men “turn the most basic tasks into a very big deal.”