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LONG soaks in a hot bath could help lift depression with just two afternoon sessions a week enough to give spirits a boost, a study finds. The extent of the benefit was similar to that seen with physical exercise, which is a recommended therapy for mild or moderate depression.
Warm baths could work because raising body temperature in the afternoon helps restore our circadian rhythm — the physical and biochemical changes in our bodies over the day — which is often disturbed in people with depression. They also improved people’s sleep patterns.
Depression is usually treated with antidepressants and talking therapy. But medication can cause side effects, and therapy can be expensive, with long NHS waiting lists.
The root cause of depression is unclear. The main theory is a shortage of a brain-signalling molecule called serotonin, which is raised by antidepressants. Another suspect is a disturbed circadian rhythm.
Your temperature would normally rise in the morning, peak in the afternoon, then dip back down when you sleep, following a wave-like curve with a difference of about 1C between day and night.
If you have depression, the cycle may be flatter, erratic or delayed, causing the peak to occur later in the day. Prof Johannes Naumann and his colleagues at the University of Freiburg in Germany wondered if a hot bath could nudge the cycle back into rhythm and improve mood.
His team allocated twice-weekly exercise sessions or thermal therapy to 45 people with depression. The bathing involved soaking in a pool at 40C for up to 30 minutes, then wrapping up with blankets and hot water bottles for another 20 minutes.
After two weeks, some people carried on with the routine at home, while the rest continued at the spa.
The baths raised body temperature by nearly 2C. After eight weeks, bathing reduced symptoms by about six points on a depression scale. The reduction was three points for those exercising. The baths also started working within two weeks. Psychiatrist Dr Nick Stafford, at the Black Country Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, said the approach makes sense given what happens to circadian rhythms in depression.
‘I’m not surprised they found a benefit, I’m just surprised no one has tried doing this before,’ he explained.
Should a self-driving car decide which life to save?
A SELF-DRIVING car is travelling along a two-lane road when its brakes fail. Should it stay in lane and hit a pregnant woman, a doctor and a criminal on a pedestrian crossing, or swerve and hit a barrier, killing the family of four in the vehicle?
Edmond Awad, a postdoctorate badociate, and his colleagues at the Mbadachusetts Institute of Technology think the answers people give to such questions can help those devising regulations for driverless cars.
‘This is one way to deliver what the public wants,’ he said.
The question comes from the Moral Machine, an ethics survey of millions of people from 233 countries and territories around the world. Participants were asked to consider different scenarios in which those who might be saved could be, say, fit or fat, young or old, pets, criminals or those with high-status jobs. In all, 40million decisions were collected.
Overall, people preferred to spare humans over animals and younger over older people. The characters that people opted to save least were dogs, followed by criminals and then cats.
But many technology researchers and ethicists oppose using such results to set policy or design autonomous vehicles because they simply perpetuate cultural biases and may not reflect moral decisions of what is right or wrong.
In the end, programming morality into an algorithm may be impossible. Prof H. Peter Steeves, an ethicist at DePaul University in Chicago suggested it could be ‘as absurd as finding the right colour of dance, or the right frequency for spaghetti’.
Ancient Tasmanian rocks with Grand Canyon-nection
THE Grand Canyon may be one of America’s most iconic landmarks but scientists have found it has a bizarre Antipodean link.
A chunk of the oldest rock layer at the bottom of the Arizonian natural wonder has been found thousands of miles away in Tasmania, Australia.
The Aussie rocks, which are between 1.1 and 1.2billion years old, have always seemed a bit out of place compared with ‘similarly aged rocks nearby’, geologists at Australia’s Monash University, said.
The team have now found they contain minerals with the same ‘geochemical fingerprint’ as those in the canyon.
‘We concluded that although it’s now on the opposite side of the planet, Tasmania must have been attached to the western United States,’ geologist Jack Mulder said.
Beyond extending the Grand Canyon’s reach into the southern hemisphere, uniting the Tasmanian rocks with those in North America could solve a geological jigsaw puzzle and help build models of ancient Earth. The tectonic plates used to fit together a billion years ago but it is unknown exactly how.
Algorithm that stands up to cyberbullies
ARTIFICIAL intelligence could be used to fight cyberbullying by filtering out offensive posts on social media.
Researcher Gilles Jacobs and colleagues at Ghent University in Belgium asked linguists to read 200,000 posts on the social media platform ASKfm and pick out examples. of bullying.
They trained an algorithm to detect words and phrases identified by the linguists. When tested on posts it hadn’t seen before, the algorithm could detect over two thirds of threats, insults and instances of badual harbadment.
Mr Jacobs also said it will soon be able to tell the difference between subtle bullying and harmless banter as it is exposed to more examples.
Super A.I. taught to design its own video games by Mario
WATCHING people playing Super Mario Brothers taught an artificial intelligence system to design its own video games. The AI from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta made Killer Bounce, in which players jump across blocks. Researcher Mark Guzdial wants to add complex games. He said: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could show the AI Fortnite and Minecraft and it spat out something new?’
Get busy, bees… slack workers jump to hive drummers’ ‘beat’
IF A HIVE isn’t quite buzzing and the workers need a signal to get busy, older honeybees use a drumming sound to order their colleagues to get to work. Why the signal — or dorso-ventral abdominal vibration — is most often given at night, when the bees only forage during the day, might be because the at-home older bees share different circadian rhythms, a Nottingham Trent University study found.
Also in New Scientist this week: ■ The truth about your memory ■ Why cities should go car free ■ Making quantum computers a reality
Based on stories in the latest issue of New Scientist, which is available in the shops now. For more cool science and technology stories go to newscientist.com
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