Blaise Frederick has displayed some excellent pothead ingenuity (article with pics), and built a waterbong that allows his team's research subjects to toke comfortably while lying down inside a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine.
The device is made up of two components: the bowl and water filter remain outside the MRI inside a plastic cooler, and the test subject inside the MRI wears a mask connected by tubing to the cooler. The mask is made entirely of nonmetallic materials such as acrylic glass so that it does not pose a hazard near the strong magnetic fields MRI machines produce. An exhaust tube is also attached, which prevents baking out the lab room.
Studies on marijuana's effects usually use prepared joints from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which are standardized for THC content. However, Frederick's team at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital's Behavioral Psychopharmacology Research Laboratory, who study the effects of nicotine and THC via brain imaging, find that it is quite difficult to smoke a joint inside an MRI machine. Instead, they have had to rely on oral marijuana like Marinol and injections of THC. This has the potential to produce misleading results, however, because marijuana contains other psychoactive cannabinoids besides THC.
The team published the details of their bong in the scholarly journal Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior. Now, thanks to Frederick's MacGyver-esqe skills, his research subjects can puff proper.
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This is fucking awesome.