Fans More Violent After Wins
Attention, college officials, especially at the campuses contesting tonight's final in the NCAA basketball tournament.
When sports teams lose important games, police worry that fans will unleash disorder and mayhem to express their frustration. But a new research study suggests that victory is a more potent cause of fan violence than defeat.
Fans celebrate after the University of Maryland won the NCAA basketball championship three years ago.
(Dudley M. Brooks -- The Washington Po St)
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In Wales, significantly greater violence resulted on days when the local soccer and rugby teams won their games than when they lost, according to a study by researchers at Cardiff University, who tracked assault-related emergency room visits over a seven-year period that included 106 games.
Previous studies had indicated that winning fans were more likely to be highly emotional and that domestic violence perpetrated by men occurs more often after the assailant's team wins. Counting assault-related emergency room visits on game day and the day after, the Welsh researchers found an average of 33.5 visits when local teams won, and 25.4 visits when they lost, regardless of whether the game was home or away.
"Levels of self-confidence, assertiveness or patriotism which may be heightened following a win are important factors," wrote Cardiff researchers V. Sivarajasingam, S. Moore and J.P. Shepherd in a paper they published last week in the journal Injury Prevention. "Winning prompts celebration, a key component of which is alcohol consumption, and prompts the formation of crowds of intoxicated individuals, making interpersonal physical assertiveness more likely."
-- Shankar Vedantam
THC Gets Unexpected High
Swiss researchers say the experience of two research subjects indicates that medicinal marijuana and marijuana-based drinks can sometimes trigger a powerful high at much smaller doses than expected, causing uncontrolled laughter, severe anxiety, loss of motor skills and other effects.
The two subjects were in a study of eight men given either a form of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana, or a placebo. They developed the side effects about an hour after ingesting the drug. One reported that he was "watching himself lying on the bed," and the other became suspicious that researchers were concealing some problems from him. Both were unable to complete simple tasks involving physical activities and sign recognition.
The investigators, from the Institut Universitaire de Médecine Légale in Lausanne, said the study was unusual in that the subjects were being carefully monitored and the levels of THC in their blood were well-measured. To their surprise, the researchers found that the two subjects achieved a "high" at THC concentrations in the blood well below 10 nanograms per milliliter, the level considered necessary to produce that response. The two subjects had levels of 4.7 and 6.2.
People smoking marijuana will generally become high more quickly and with greater intensity than those taking it orally as medicine, or as the increasingly popular South Asian drink bhang -- making the reaction of the two Swiss subjects even more unexpected.
The research, reported in the journal BMC Psychiatry, led the authors to conclude that both doctors and users had to be more aware of potentially significant reactions that can occur from marijuana drinks and THC-based medications.
-- Marc Kaufman
Clues to Breaking Down Plastics
When plastic lies out in the sun, the chemical chains called "polymers" that make up its structure slowly break into pieces. But the process can take a long time, as anyone can attest who has seen a blue grocery bag snagged in a treetop for months or years.
David R. Tyler, a chemist at the University of Oregon, has spent 15 years trying to understand what controls the rate of decay in plastics. In the current Organometallics, a journal of the American Chemical Society, he and his colleagues describe a plastic that starts to degrade as soon as it hits the light and turns to dust in three days.
The substance is a polyurethane that contains atoms of the metal molybdenum bonded to each other at periodic spots along the polymer "backbone." These metal-to-metal bonds are rapidly cleaved by light rays.
"These compounds have opened up the way to understand what is happening in everyday plastics," Tyler said last week.
His research has revealed that stress in the form of stretching, thickness, exposure to oxygen, temperature, and inherent malleability all affect the speed at which a polymer degrades.
However, one thing his metal-based plastics needs to decay quickly is "radical traps" -- atoms that bind up the molybdenum atoms once the bonds are broken. Oxygen in the air does that well. Tyler's new compound "photodegrades" in light even without oxygen because it carries chlorine -- also a trapping atom -- in the polymer.
These exotic plastics might be useful as the sheeting some vegetable farmers put on fields between plants to control weeds, and retain heat and moisture in the soil. But Tyler said his research group has "never looked that hard for a commercial application because there are so many interesting scientific questions we want to answer first."
-- David Brown
