Research says.....

 We are in the age of information. With the number of ongoing researches and the results of even more researches surfacing each day, it isn't that common to find two studies with contradictory results surfacing in a very short span of each other. Now, there are too many examples to cite, but let us zero down on a recent one...

"Why you should choose a pint over a coffee: Caffeine can shorten life expectancy - but alcohol lengthens it."

This one has been doing a rounds in the newspapers and, quite inevitably, on the Internet.

Firstly, the whole concept of conducting an experiment with a bunch of parameters governing/controlling some phenomenon is itself awe-striking, if there is such a word called 'awe-striking' in the first place. For instance, there's this Behavioral Economics professor called Dan Ariely. This bloke went around Pittsburgh, conducting a study with the students from 2 prominent universities, namely Carnegie Melon and University of Pittsburgh. The study was to test conditions under which students were most likely to cheat in a test.

During the tests, student from both the universities were made to sit together in a class. They were provided with all the conditions conducive for cheating in the test, assuming for the sake of understanding that they had the answer-key to all the questions. The study revolved around finding the honesty in the students from each of the two colleges.

During the experiment, the students wore the sweatshirt of the college they belonged to.

The instructions for the test were as follows..

There were 20 questions

If the students finished all 20, they were to get up and out of the class,throw away the answer sheet and go to the invigilator to declare the number of questions they answered.

They would be payed a fixed amount of money for every question they declared they answered, correctness of the answer being immaterial. 

Plain and simple. Or so it sounded.

There was obviously a hitch. The questions were hard enough for anyone to finish in the provided time. But the researcher had a way around it. He had an impostor-student planted amidst the others. He too wore a Jersey of either one or the other college each time the study was conducted with different batches of students of the two colleges mentioned above. This student would be made to stand up in the middle of the test to declare he had completed the test.

It turned out that the amount of cheating among the students was directly linked with the university jersey the impostor-student wore. For instance, if the impostor wore the Jersey of Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon students ended up cheating more than the students from Pittsburgh University. On the other hand, if the impostor wore the Pittsburgh University, the Carnegie Mellon University students cheated far less than they would otherwise. And the results were rather obviously similar when analyzed for students of Pittsburgh University. The whole scene's got a lot to do with behavior of members of a group. Okay, end of story! Lights out! Pack up! Easy? 

Wow! It is bizarrely amazing how many things there are around to find and figure, even more so are  the minds conjuring up the conditions to put random theories to test.

 Now, coming back to the Coffee-Alcohol-Life Span study that surfaced recently. Dig just a bit deeper into the working of this study, and try as much as one may to avoid technical terms, encountering the word 'Telomere' is inevitable. The study states that consumption of alcohol causes lengthening of the telomere , (which is supposed to increase one's life span)and consumption of coffee causes shortening of the telomere (which is supposed to decrease one's life span.) So now, everyone will want to go around chugging beer, right? Pretty surely, few may have already started.

Now, onto telomeres, down to common man's jargon. We know cells divide. And if the multiply/divide/replicate like crazy, they turn into cancer/tumor cells. Let's not get too mathematical about the previous sentence. Consider this. There's a book, say of 150 pages. This is obviously a special book! Each time the book is read, one page from the end shreds itself completely. So if the book is passed around 50 times, the 50th reader gets to read only 2/3s of the book. To avoid this problem, the publisher slaps on 50 blank pages to the end of the book, so that at least 50 people get to read the complete story. Besides, which book lasts 50 readers?!

So now, every on, or at least 50 fellows get to read the book in it's entirety. Something very similar goes on in our body. Each time a cell in our body divides, the DNA is copied to produce 2 sets of DNA in the cell before dividing, to give each cell its own DNA after getting divided. There is a chain attached to the end of the DNA. This chain has a limited number of links. Each time the DNA divides in a cell, one of the links on the chain is taken off from it's end. So the cell can replicate/divide only as many times as many there are these links on the chain. By the way, this chain is the TELOMERE. That's all there is to it.

Theoretically, and even really speaking, the longer the telomere, the more times the cell can divide. And, the more number of times the cell can divide, the longer the organism can survive, which is exactly what the 'Coffee-Alcohol' research points out. We hence will technically live longer if we consume alcohol, obvously in moderation, instead of coffee.

In a way, the study may give an extreme impression that "Coffee-consumption shortens life". But extending the second half of the study's outcome to the extremes, it may also suggest that Alcohol, which a while ago was going to lengthen our life-span, could also turn healthy cells into cancerous/tumorous ones if it manages to increase the length of telomeres  a bit too much. Although that is a bit too far-fetched an idea, as is the one that 'Coffee consumption shortens life', it is important to understand that our natural systems have been designed to deal with and prevent as much as anomalies as possible, given the abuse it is subjected to. So, it is extremely important to understand as much as possible the underlying machinery of things we read about and come across.

As for the continuous onslaught of information, the endless researches and their results, we could just use them as instruments to appreciate the capacity of our minds to leave us 'Awe-struck'.