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Everyone has heard about MRI – Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

But do you know that a part of the actual term was dropped in forming this acronym ?

Hint : Read the title. Answer coming up soon …

pla·ce·bo
Pronunciation Key{.linksrc} (pl-sb)n. pl. pla·ce·bos or pla·ce·boes

A substance containing no medication and prescribed or given to reinforce a patient’s expectation to get well.

Why am i even talking about something that useless ?! Well here it is.

The placebo effect

Don’t try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it’s not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don’t know.
Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson’s disease (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 587). He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients’ brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson’s symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer “bursts” of firing – another feature associated with Parkinson’s. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body’s biochemistry. “The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction,” he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don’t know.

Also read more about the psychological theory behind it all that says “It’s all in your mind”. Sounds like “The Matrix” doesn’t it ?

Even as i start writing, i was thinking if i should categorize this under Weird Science ’cause this ain’t weird; It is mindblowing !

Ok before i give the actual jolt, here is a smooth intro to the whole thing ! It has not been a long time since i saw Spiderman 2, where the guy ends up creating a Fusion reactor, in mid-air ( Yeah sure ! Tell me about it !). But the beauty is that this reaction gets uncontrollable ( no surprises there ) and starts sucking in metal objects due to the increase in gravitational force as it gains mass. Well alright makes sense. But wait a minute, are you saying that you created a Black Hole right here on earth ? WTF ?!?!

Ahem, i think it is impossible. Or so i thought until i read a news article today, that states : Lab fireball ‘may be black hole’. Got very curious and started reading about it. It is actually quite interesting but way out of my league in terms of understanding the whole theory.

Here is the abstract and the actual paper which talks about this in detail). So someday, in the future, when i know enough about what i am dealing with, i will, hopefully, come here and read about it. And here is an excerpt of the article.

A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said. It was generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, US, which smashes beams of gold nuclei together at near light speeds. Horatiu Nastase says his calculations show that the core of the fireball has a striking similarity to a black hole.The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball’s core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter is thought to fall into a black hole and come out as “Hawking” radiation.

Awesome. Can’t say how cool this is !