The festive season is in full swing. The high street is full of fraught parents fighting their way to the shelves at Toys R Us, and baffled husbands debating whether an ironing board cover or a pair of socks is the best way to say “I love you” on December 25th. Kids are earnestly practicing their parts as Angel Gabriel or Donkey Number 2 for the school nativity. Yep, it’s Christmas time again, which means office parties and family gatherings a plenty.
What we really need at this time of year is a scientific explanation for why we’re having such a good time, as well as science-related party tricks and trivia to wow our loved ones and make us look incredibly cool. Especially in the unlikely event that all of our friends and family are fellow science geeks. So here we have a smattering of Christmas science from Neutrons for Breakfast…
Chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate
From turkey, stuffing and Brussels sprouts to Christmas cake and never ending piles of chocolates, it’s pretty clear that the festive season wouldn’t be the same without ludicrous volumes of food. I mean, whoever heard of Christmas without a box of Cadburys Roses or a massive Toblerone? But why does chocolate taste so delicious, and how does it give us that warm glow?
Chocolate contains caffeine, which we all know can give you a buzz. It also contains an amino acid called tryptophan, which tells the brain to step up its production of serotonin and puts us in a better mood. And yet another ingredient touted as a mood enhancer is phenethylamine, a molecule that seems to be lacking in people suffering from depression.
However, chocolate contains pretty small amounts of these chemicals, and in some cases the body probably breaks them down before they reach the brain to do their magic. So it is debatable whether they are the real cause of chocolatey deliciousness.
On the hunt for the truth behind chocoholic cravings, chemists in California ground up chocolate and did all sorts of complicated things in the lab to see what they could find. They came across three chemicals that act as cannabinoid mimics and may lead to feelings of euphoria, either on their own or by joining forces with the other magical ingredients we’ve already mentioned.
So there we have it – I give you all permission to eat loads of Christmas chocolate and be really happy, because science says so.
Christmas tipple
The office Christmas parties may have been and gone, but we still have Christmas Eve in the pub, or a few sherry fuelled afternoons playing scrabble with Granny, to look forward to. For the moment we shall step away from the negative side of alcohol and think about some good old Christmas cheer.
Once that glass of mulled wine has passed your lips, it travels to your stomach and on to your intestine. The ethanol is absorbed, gets into the bloodstream, and makes its way to the brain where it starts to play havoc with the nerve cells. Much like an inconsiderate boss popping up at your desk when you’re in the middle of a very important facebook chat about Friday night, ethanol messes up essential communication systems. In this case, we are talking about communication between cells.
When ethanol interrupts signals between cells it affects things such as your senses, balance, speech, regulation of your body temperature and your pain threshold. It also gets at part of your brain called the cerebral cortex, affecting the bit that moderates your behaviour. This might explain why a few G&Ts will have your usually shy and retiring best buddy dancing on the table, singing into her empty beer bottle.
Scientists have also found that after drinking alcohol we find everyone else more attractive, male or female, regardless of our sexual preference. That’s right, there is scientific proof for the existence of beer goggles. And this even holds after small volumes of alcohol that are not enough to affect our general mood.
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer: a case of mistaken identity
The image of Rudolph and his fellow reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh brings a warm glow to the hearts of children across the land. But Gerald Lincoln and David Baird from the University of Edinburgh recently made the shock announcement that Rudolph is in fact a girl! It turns out that only female reindeer still have antlers in the festive season, as males shed theirs earlier in the winter.
For many years scientists around the world have been desperate to solve the mystery of Rudolph’s shiny nose, a very important matter for medical science. Lacking a bit of Christmas spirit, a few years ago Odd Halvorsen from the University of Tromso gave a rather depressing diagnosis that his nose, sinuses and lungs were probably under attack from parasites! Lovely. Perhaps the real explanation, now that we know ‘he’ is actually a ‘she’, is simply over-zealous application of blusher.
And finally… science-related party tricks
Impress your friends and family, and possibly set fire to the Christmas dinner table, with these 10 top party tricks.
joshuahowgego
railwaybecks
ross
bethanlowder
robellisatlantic
I think ‘Rudolph – red faced rather than nosed after exposure as a girl’ would have been a good title for that section!