Researchers from the Department of Emergency Medicine, the Long Island Jewish Medical Center and Albert Einstein College conducted a study about the impact of Bat Day at Yankee Stadium on blunt trauma reports within the city. Surely, giving a bunch of Yankee fans wooden bats would theoretically lead to an increase in people getting hit over the head?

Amazingly, no. So much for generalizing New Yorkers.

Turns out, the Sun is far more dangerous.

Seventy-seven patients sustained bat injuries, 38 (49%) before and 36 (47%) after Bat Day. There were no significant differences between the two groups with respect to age, sex, time of injury, number and distribution of fractures and lacerations, incidence of loss of consciousness, source of history, or dispostion. There was a positive association between the number of cases on a given day and the average temperature that day (r = .5; P < .01). CONCLUSION: The distribution of 25,000 wooden baseball bats to attendees at Yankee Stadium did not increase the incidence of bat-related trauma in the Bronx and northern Manhattan. There was a positive correlation between daily temperature and the incidence of bat injury. The informal but common impressions of emergency clinicians about the cause-and-effect relationship between Bat Day and bat trauma were unfounded.

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There are two types of people: those who crack their knuckles relentlessly and those, like me, who never crack their knuckles unless by accident. I have never understood the point in cracking knuckles. I don’t feel any more limber or loose after bending my digits, nor am I found of the sound the process makes.

Now, if you’re one of those people who loves to c rack his or knuckles, then you have no doubt been told (numerous times) that doing so is BAD FOR YOU. It will lead to early Arthritis! So on and so on.

Well, new research reveals that no, crackling your knuckles has no bearing on the health of your hands, no evidence that it leads to Arthritis, so you can tell those people to shut up once and for all.

Unger undertook his self and righteous research because, as he wrote, “During the author’s childhood, various renowned authorities (his mother, several aunts and, later, his mother-in-law [personal communication]) informed him that cracking his knuckles would lead to arthritis of the fingers.” He thus used a half-century “to test the accuracy of this hypothesis,” during which he could cleverly tell any unsolicited advice givers that the results weren’t in yet.

Finally, after five decades, Unger analyzed his data set: “There was no arthritis in either hand, and no apparent differences between the two hands.” He concluded that “there is no apparent relationship between knuckle cracking and the subsequent development of arthritis of the fingers.” Evidence for whether the doctor himself was cracked may be that he traveled all the way from his California home to Harvard University to pick up his Ig Nobel Prize in person.

Actually other scholarly studies of the phenomenon had been done. Responding to the Unger paper, Robert Swezey, M.D., wrote to the journal to report that his own 1975 study—co-authored by his then 12-year-old son in an apparent attempt to get the kid’s grandma to stop the kvetching over the cracking—also found no crack case for arthritis. Swezey further consulted Rand Corporation statistician John Adams, who noted that “it appears that the [Unger] study was not blinded. Blinding would only be possible if the investigator didn’t know left from right. This is not likely since studies indicate that only 31 percent of primary care physicians don’t know left from right.”

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Looking for a new excuse not to fly anywhere this Christmas? How about your dislike of being bombarded with heavy doses of intense radiation? Think the family will buy that?

New research reveals that passengers aboard an aircraft that flies near a lightning discharge can be exposed to radiation levels that are the equivalent of 400 chest X-rays!

“We know that commercial airplanes are typically struck by lightning once or twice a year,” said Joe Dwyer, professor of physics and space sciences at Florida Tech. “What we don’t know is how often planes happen to be in just the right place or right time to receive a high radiation dose. We believe it is very rare, but more research is needed to answer the question definitively.”

They concluded the radiation in a football field-sized space around these lightning events could reach “biologically significant levels,” up to 10 rem (roentgen equivalent man), which is the dosage considered the maximum safe radiation exposure over a person’s lifetime.

While the research raises obvious concerns, recent in-flight experiments suggest the incidents are rare, according to study scientist David Smith, an associate professor of physics at UC-Santa Cruz. Flying aboard an aircraft this past summer in Florida, Smith and several of the other researchers used a highly sophisticated instrument to measure gamma-ray flashes from thunderstorms. Over the course of several flights, they only detected one such flash, at a safe distance from the plane.

“These observations show that although thunderstorms do occasionally create intense gamma-ray flashes, the chance of accidently being directly hit by one is small,” Smith said.

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A lot of people invest much value in dreams. Many claims that dreaming is some kind of mystical doorway from which we view our inner-most feelings and memories. Some claim dreams predict the future or are Nature’s way of forcing us to explore what we would prefer to remain hidden. Others, like Dr. J. Allan Hobson, pours cold water on those theories and makes the bold claim that dreams are nothing more than a nightly tune-up session for the day ahead.

From the NY Times:

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.

“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.

“Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis. “What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing.”