Center for Children and Families at the State
University at Buffalo, where she now works. She soon began thinking about her
own behavior, past and present. She had long had difficulty focusing on even
simple jobs, like paying bills on time and remembering and keeping
appointments.
She decided to have one of her sons’ psychologists evaluate her for attention
problems. The symptoms of attention deficit disorder, which some scientists now
see as a temporary delay in the maturing of the brain, can last through
adulthood, but it almost always shows up first in childhood. To make a proper
diagnosis, doctors like to see some evidence of a problem in childhood —
evidence that can be hard to come by.
“In my case, I went to school here in Buffalo, and
I dug through some boxes and found reports going back to elementary school,”
Ms. Eaton said. “Sure enough, they said things like, ‘Disorganized,’ and ‘Has
trouble paying attention.’”
She now takes a stimulant medication, she said,
that helps her focus enough to compensate for the problem, by making calendars,
notes to herself, and responding to invitations and messages on time. Once it’s
out in the open, knowledge of a parent’s diagnosis or behavioral tendencies can
ease strained relations in a family, especially if the previously unappreciated
disability contributed to the rupture.
John Halpern, 76, a retired physicist living in
Massachusetts, began to review his own life not long after hearing a radio
interview with an expert on Asperger’s syndrome. He immediately recognized
himself as a textbook case, he said, and decided to call his daughter, whom he
hadn’t spoken to in 10 years. He wanted to apologize, he said, “for my
inadequacy as both a father and a husband to her mother.”
But as soon as he started explaining, he said, his
daughter cut him off. “That’s Asperger’s,” she told him. “She knew,” he said.
“She had been looking into it herself, wondering if in fact I had it.”
Mr. Halpern said that over several calls they
shared feelings and agreed “to work on our new relationship and see how far we
can take it.” The two now talk regularly, at least once a week, he said.
Children made miserable by a psychiatric or
developmental disorder may not always want company; but they often long for
evidence that they aren’t the only ones putting a burden on the family, some
psychiatrists say. Having a parent with the same quirks who can talk about it
eases the guilt a child may feel. The child has a fellow traveler, and in some
families maybe more.
“When we got reports that our son was not
interacting in school, that he was very quiet, slouching, unusual — we said,
‘Well, that’s us; our family is like that,’” said Susan Shanfield, 54, a social
worker living in Newton, Mass.
AFTER her son’s difficulties were diagnosed as a
learning deficit, a neuro-lingual disorder, she quickly identified some of the
same traits in herself. “It was very therapeutic for me,” she said. “I had
known I was different from an early age, and now I had a definition that could
at least explain some of that. I also told my father, a man now in his 80s, and
he was very moved by it.” He has since talked openly about painful memories
from growing up, and during his time raising his own family, that were all but
off-limits before, she said, and become more tolerant of his own past mistakes
and others’.
It can alter the present, too, if parent and child
have enough common ground. Mr. Schwarz, the software developer in Framingham,
said he became in some ways like a translator for his son, who’s now 16.
“I think there are a lot of parents of kids with
these diagnoses who have at least a little bit of the traits their kids have,”
Mr. Schwarz said. “But because of the stigma this society places on anything
associated with disability, they’re inhibited from embracing that part of
themselves and fully leveraging it to help their kids.”
Astronomers are radically reshaping our picture of the Milky Way’s
neighbors. Our corner of the cosmos, known as the Local
Group, includes two giant spiral galaxies—the Milky Way and
Andromeda—and smaller satellite galaxies orbiting them. The Milky Way was
thought to have about 10 satellites, but within the last year or so,
that number has nearly doubled. “Most astronomers, myself included, thought we
at least knew the members of the Local Group,” says Daniel Zucker of Cambridge
University, whose team found the new batch of eight galaxies. “I don’t think
anyone expected us to find a significant population of these things. They’re
fainter than anybody thought a galaxy could be—even smaller and less luminous
than what are typically considered dwarf galaxies,” he adds, so they became
“hobbit galaxies.” One, Leo T, still has gas associated with it, providing the
raw material for stellar births. “It’s arguably the smallest star-forming
galaxy known,” Zucker says. The survey that found the satellite galaxies
scanned only a fifth of the sky, so there could be dozens more waiting to be
found.
In another surprise,
Harvard University astrophysicist Nitya Kallivayalil recently announced that
two of our largest satellite galaxies probably aren’t satellites at all.
Kallivayalil found that the Large and Small Magellanic
clouds are shooting by us at around 200 miles per second, faster
than a satellite would. With that kind of speed, she says, they are likely to
be travelers speeding through the region. The only scenario in which the clouds
could remain satellites enthralled in the gravitational pull of the Milky Way
requires that the galaxy have twice its currently estimated mass.
Astronomers are also resizing our largest neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, finding that its radius is up to
five times larger than anyone thought. Observations revealed a halo of stars
half a million light-years from the galaxy’s center but still bound to it.
“Much of the space between the Milky Way and Andromeda is filled with stars
that belong to those galaxies,” says University of California at Santa Cruz
astronomer Raja Guhathakurta, whose team discovered the halo. “They practically
overlap. It really challenges the notion of galaxies as groups of stars with
empty space between them.”
Future astronomers will
become intimately acquainted with Andromeda as it screams toward us on a collision course with the Milky Way. A new
simulation indicates that the first pass of galactic jousting will
occur in 2 billion years, and the galaxies will fuse within 5 billion years. As
the universe expands, all other galaxies will fade from sight. Harvard
astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who developed the simulation, says astronomers should
appreciate that we live at a special time in cosmic history: “Now when we look
up, we see many galaxies. In the distant future, this will become a lonely
place, with nothing to look at. If we want to learn about the universe at
large, we’d better do it while we still can.”
Muons
Meet the Maya
At its
most glamorous, the life of an experimental high-energy physicist consists of
smashing obscure subatomic particles with futuristic-sounding names into each
other to uncover truths about the universe—using science's biggest, most
expensive toys in exciting locations such as Switzerland or Illinois. But it
takes a decade or two to plan and build multibillion-dollar atom smashers.
While waiting, what's a thrill-seeking physicist to do?
How about using some
of the perfectly good, and completely free, subatomic particles that rain down
on Earth from space every day to peek inside something really big and
mysterious, like, say, a Mayan pyramid? That's exactly what physicist Roy
Schwitters of the University of Texas at Austin is preparing to do.
High-energy particles
known as muons, which are born of cosmic radiation, have ideal features for
creating images of very large or dense objects. Muons easily handle situations
that hinder other imaging techniques. Ground-penetrating radar, for instance,
can reach only 30 meters below the surface under ideal conditions. And seismic
reflection, another method, doesn't fare well in a complex medium. With muons,
all you need is a way to capture them and analyze their trajectories.
Besides probing
pyramids in Belize and Mexico, physicists are applying the muon method to
studying active volcanoes and detecting nuclear materials. The concept sounds
out of this world, but it's really quite simple. When cosmic rays hit the
Earth's atmosphere, collisions with the nuclei of air atoms spawn subatomic
particles called pions that quickly decay into muons that continue along the
same path. Many of the muons survive long enough to penetrate the Earth's
surface. Because of their high energy, the particles can easily pass through
great volumes of rock or metal or whatever else they encounter. However, they
are deflected from their path by atoms in the material, and the denser the
material, the greater the deflection.
Schwitters wants to
exploit this deflection to see if there are any rooms or chambers inside a
Mayan pyramid in Belize, he told science journalists in Spokane, Wash., at a
recent meeting sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
His team is building several muon detectors that would be buried in shallow
holes around the base of the pyramid to create an image of what's inside by
measuring the trajectories of the muons that pass through it.
"What you see is
very much like an X ray," he says. "If you see a spot with more
muons, it means there's a space there. If you see fewer muons, it means there's
something extra-dense there."
Schwitters won't be
the first to marry physics and archaeology in this way. In 1967, Nobel
prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley
placed a muon detector in a chamber beneath the pyramid of Khafra in Egypt to
see if it was hiding any burial chambers like those discovered in the larger
pyramid of Khufu. He found none, but the experiment showed that the method
worked.
As the director of the
Superconducting Supercollider laboratory in Texas until 1993, when Congress
gave the project the axe, Schwitters is no stranger to waiting for the next big
thing. And he has always been intrigued by the possibility of applying the
tools of the high-energy physics trade elsewhere, so a chance conversation with
one of Alvarez' former colleagues, combined with a little spare time, got
Schwitters wondering what other enigmatic ancient structures were waiting to be
probed.
Archaeologist Fred
Valdez, director of the Mesoamerican Archaeological Research Laboratory at UT
Austin, had the answer: an enormous pyramid in the third-largest Mayan city in
Belize. The city is in an area in northwestern Belize known as La Milpa, which
was home to one of the densest populations of Maya from as early as 1000 B.C.
until around A.D. 850. The area was packed with four large cities, each with
20,000 or more residents, that were only around 8 to 12 kilometers apart with
60 or more towns, villages, and hamlets in between. Valdez believes there is
much to be learned from the society that existed there.
"The amazing part
is how close how many of these large cities are to each other," he said.
"The Maya were clearly expert at adapting to their environment and
exploiting their environment, clearly making better use of things than we are
today, just to support the populations that were there."
Because there isn't a
chamber below the La Milpa pyramid, Schwitters plans to harness muons with four
or five smaller detectors spaced around the structure to get a
three-dimensional view inside. Each detector will be a cylinder wrapped with
strips of polystyrene, which emits light when hit by a muon. The bursts of
light as each particle passes through both sides of the detector will be
recorded by photo detectors at the end of the cylinder and used to reconstruct
the muon trajectories.
Dense matter will
deflect muons away from their paths, so fewer muons will hit the detectors from
that area while more particles will pass through empty spaces to reach the
detectors. A computer program will translate the information into an image that
can be read like a CT scan or an X ray with bright spots indicating voids and
dark areas correlating to more dense matter. Because muons hit the Earth at the
rate of about 1 per square centimeter per minute, it will take several months
to get a good image of the guts of the pyramid. Schwitters hopes he'll be able
to resolve chambers as small as a cubic meter.
Knowing exactly where
to dig to find potential tombs or other chambers could save precious time when
dealing with very large structures like the pyramid in Belize. It could also
save artifacts that need special treatment, sometimes within hours, to keep them
from deteriorating from exposure. Dust in a tomb that is normally trampled
during excavation could contain valuable information about diseases that
affected the Maya, or about the plants and herbs they used.
"Ideally, the
results would give us a look into the building without having to do the
destructive process of excavation," Valdez said.
He envisions being
able to drill a small auger hole into a chamber and send a fiber-optic camera
down to take a look. That way he can study the chambers exactly as they were
left, and the appropriate experts and equipment can be on hand to deal with the
contents as they are exposed by coating them with resin, immersing them in
water, or sealing them in an airtight case.
"That's
tremendous information," he said. "It's almost like 20/20
hindsight."
With funding from
Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., and support from UT and
National Instruments, Schwitters' team has already built and successfully
tested one detector at UT that weighs in around a ton, at 4.5 m long with a 1.5
m diameter. The detectors that will go to Belize will be much smaller, around
the size of water heaters and weighing about 200 pounds. Depending on funding,
the detectors could be ready for showtime in 2009.
Another team of
scientists may be just months away from using muons to image the Pyramid of the
Sun in Teotihuacán, Mexico, in a quest to learn why the pyramid was built. And
if burial chambers such as those found in the nearby Pyramid of the Moon are
discovered, they could reveal whether the society was ruled by a single person
or a government of several leaders.
Led by physicist
Arturo Menchaca-Rocha of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the team
is currently working out some kinks in its detector having to do with wires cracking
from temperature changes. Once that hurdle is cleared, which will likely be
sometime after January, their single detector will be placed in a tunnel
discovered under the pyramid in 1971, much like Alvarez' experiment in Egypt.
"We are quite
delayed," Menchaca-Rocha said in an e-mail from a meeting in Veracruz.
"But the pyramid has been sitting there for 2,000 years, so it can wait
for us to be perfectly happy about the detector."
In the meantime,
physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are looking to muons
to help detect special nuclear materials such as plutonium and uranium at the
country's borders. Current nuclear-detection capability relies on identifying
the gamma-ray radiation emitted by the materials, but that doesn't always work.
"If someone wants
to bring in nuclear material to build a bomb, they need to shield it with
something dense like lead to stop the gamma rays," says Los Alamos
physicist Chris Morris.
So Morris is working
on a detector that would use muons to root out both nuclear materials and
shielding. Lead is dense enough to perturb a muon's path, and it is even easier
to spot the muon fingerprint of things like plutonium and uranium because their
high density and big atomic charge scatter the particles more than anything
else.
Los Alamos lab has
partnered with Decision Sciences Corporation of San Diego to build a prototype
four-sided muon detector that resembles a carport before the end of the year.
Vehicles would drive into the device like entering a car wash and wait while
detectors on all four sides of the tunnel record muon trajectories. A single
muon would be recorded by multiple detectors, revealing any changes in its
path.
"It measures the
track of every muon going through the vehicle," Morris says. "In 20 seconds
you can detect whether or not they have a chunk of metal that's 4 inches by 4
inches by 4 inches. If you went a little longer, you can see something
smaller."
But the real strength
of muon imaging is tackling very large structures, such as volcanoes, that defy
other methods. Scientists led by Hiroyuki Tanaka of the University of Tokyo
installed a single muon detector 1 kilometer from the summit of Mount Asama on
the main island of Japan. By measuring muons traveling nearly horizontally
through the volcano, the detector successfully imaged a lava mound that was
created a few hundred meters below the crater floor during a 2004 eruption and
a conduit below it.
"The cosmic-ray
muon imaging technique has much higher resolving power than conventional geophysical
techniques, with resolutions up to several meters allowing it to see smaller
objects and greater detail in volcanoes," Tanaka wrote in a report on the
results of the Mount Asama study in the Nov. 15 Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
Tanaka's team has also
used muon detection to image a lava dome that has been smoking since 1945 on
the flank of Usu volcano in Hokkaido, Japan. Both of Tanaka's current studies
involved single detectors. But adding more detectors would give a
three-dimensional view and help untangle the effect of higher-density materials
on the muons from that of a longer distance traveled through somewhat
less-dense material.
"This technique
might provide a way to forecast a volcanic eruption by monitoring changes in
the density of the magma channel inside the summit region of a volcano,"
Tanaka writes in a study on the lava dome in the Nov. 16 Geophysical Research Letters.
Even more promising is
a real-time digital muon camera that Tanaka is working on that could capture
real-time images of an active volcano. He hopes to have one installed with a
view of Mt. Asama from 1.5 km away by May 2008, and a second one sometime
thereafter that could provide a 3-D picture of Asama's next eruption.
"With this
device, I think that the technique would be more practical for use in
forecasting eruptions," he wrote in an e-mail from Japan.
Schwitters envisions
other geologic studies that could benefit from muon detection, such as gauging
the size and location of underground aquifers or assessing the stability of the
geology around nuclear-waste depositories. But for now he is content to focus
on the pyramids buried under dirt, trees, and vines in the forest in Belize.
"There
is good reason to believe they contain rooms and chambers that have not been disturbed
since the Maya left, and that's what makes them so exciting," he says.
Jim Hammond is an elite athlete. He works out two hours a day with a
trainer, pushing himself through sprints, runs, and strength-building
exercises. His resting heart rate is below 50. He’s won three gold medals and
one silver in amateur competitions this year alone, running races from 100 to
800 meters. In his division, he’s broken four national racing records. But
perhaps the most elite thing about Hammond is his age.
He is 93. And really, there’s nothing much wrong with him, aside from
the fact that he doesn’t see very well. He takes no drugs and has no
complaints, although his hair long ago turned white and his skin is no longer taut.
His secret? He doesn’t
have one. Hammond never took exceptional measures during his long life to
preserve his health. He did not exercise regularly until his fifties and didn’t
get serious about it until his eighties, when he began training for the Georgia
Golden Olympics. “I love nothing better than winning,” he says. “It’s been a
wonderful thing for me.” Hammond is aging, certainly, but somehow he isn’t
getting old—at least, not in the way we usually think about it.
They say aging is one of the only certain things in life. But it turns
out they were wrong. In recent years, gerontologists have overturned much of
the conventional wisdom about getting old. Aging is not the simple result of
the passage of time. According to a provocative new view, it is actually
something our own bodies create, a side effect of the essential inflammatory
system that protects us against infectious disease. As we fight off invaders,
we inflict massive collateral damage on ourselves, poisoning our own organs and
breaking down our own tissues. We are our own worst enemy.
This paradox is transforming the way we understand aging. It is also
changing our understanding of what diseases are and where they come from.
Inflammation seems to underlie not just senescence but all the chronic
illnesses that often come along with it: diabetes, atherosclerosis,
Alzheimer’s, heart attack. “Inflammatory factors predict virtually all bad
outcomes in humans,” says Russell Tracy, a professor of pathology and
biochemistry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, whose pioneering research helped demonstrate the
role of inflammation in heart disease. “It predicts having heart attacks,
having heart failure, becoming diabetic; predicts becoming fragile in old age;
predicts cognitive function decline, even cancer to a certain extent.”
The idea that chronic diseases might be caused by persistent
inflammation has been kicking around since the 19th century. Only in the past
few years, though, have modern biochemistry and the emerging field of systems
biology made it possible to grasp the convoluted chemical interactions involved
in bodywide responses like inflammation. Over a lifetime, this essential set of
defensive mechanisms runs out of bounds and gradually damages
organs throughout the body.
When you start to think about aging as a consequence of inflammation,
as Tracy and many prominent gerontologists now do, you start to see old age in
a different, much more hopeful light. If decrepitude is driven by an overactive
immune system, then it is treatable. And if many chronic diseases share this
underlying cause, they might all be remedied in a similar way. The right
anti-inflammatory drug could be a panacea, treating diabetes, dementia, heart
disease, and even cancer. Such a wonder drug might allow us to live longer, but
more to the point, it would almost surely allow us to live better, increasing
the odds that we could all spend our old age feeling like Jim Hammond: healthy,
vibrant, and vital. And unlike science fiction visions of an immortality pill,
a successful anti-inflammatory treatment could actually happen within our
lifetime.
For the last century and a half, the average life span in wealthy
countries has increased steadily, climbing from about 45 to more than 80 years.
There is no good reason to think this increase will suddenly stop. But longer
life today often simply means taking longer to die—slowly, expensively, and
with more disease and disability. “If you talk to many old people, what they
are really desperate about is not the fact that they’re going to die but that
they are going to be sick, dependent, have to rely on others,” says Luigi Ferrucci,
chief of the longitudinal studies section at the National Institute on Aging
and director of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, the nation’s
longest-running study of old age.
Biologists have known for a while that inflammation increases with
age, but until recently, given everything else that slumps, spikes, or goes off
the rails as we get old, it didn’t seem especially important. Some researchers
on aging still think that way.
But a big clue linking inflammation with aging came in the late 1990s,
when Tracy and his colleagues showed that C-reactive protein (CRP), an
inflammatory protein, is an amazingly accurate predictor of a future heart attack—as
good as or better than high blood pressure or high cholesterol. At least in
heart disease, inflammation isn’t just a bystander. What’s more, we could do
something to decrease it. Aspirin, which was already known to help people with
heart disease, seems to work primarily by reducing inflammation.
So why should our own
immune system rely on such an apparently dangerous mechanism? The answer lies
in the fact that infectious disease has historically been the number one killer
of human beings, and responding to this threat has profoundly shaped our
biology. Possessing a fierce and ferocious immune response primed to keep us
alive long enough to reproduce was an evolutionary no-brainer.
Inflammation is what gives us that response. It serves as all-purpose
protection against invaders and traumatic damage. To take a simple scenario,
suppose you are bitten by a cat. First, coagulation factors promote clotting in
order to stanch bleeding and prevent germs from spreading from the wound site.
A menagerie of phagocytes, which swallow and destroy pathogens, surge out of
the bloodstream and squeeze into the affected tissue, engulfing bacteria and
secreting cytokines—messenger proteins that send out the call for more
responders. The phagocytes also generate reactive oxygen species, unstable compounds
that chew up bacteria as well as damaged human tissue.
At the same time, other switches get flipped throughout the body,
modifying everything from metabolism to cell growth, via other cytokines, such
as IL-6 and tumor necrosis factor–a, and things like CRP, which mark bacteria
for destruction. The specialized adaptive immune response eliminates any
remaining germs.
So far, so good. But the
inflammation response can kick in even when there’s no invader. Atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries,
is a classic example. In response to fatty deposits on the walls of the
arteries, a type of phagocyte called a macrophage identifies the growing
lesions as trouble spots and infiltrates them, swelling and destabilizing the
deposits. Those lesions can then break open, resulting in the formation of a blood
clot that can clog blood vessels and cause heart attacks. The more active the
macrophages are, the more CRP is in the bloodstream, and the more likely the
lesions will break open, block your arteries, and kill you.
The evidence that inflammation is behind other diseases is indirect,
but it is mounting. Researchers have long known that in patients with
Alzheimer’s, the areas of the human brain clogged with senility-associated
plaques also bristle with inflammatory cells and cytokines.
Modern research has found that cytokines block memory formation in mice. In
diabetes, inflammation and insulin resistance apparently track together, and
drugs that effectively restore insulin sensitivity also appear to reduce
inflammatory factors like IL-6 and CRP. Inflammation is also being investigated
by a group at Leiden University in the Netherlands as a culprit in declining
lung function, in osteoporosis, and in old-age depression. Even the weakness of
old age may have an inflammatory cause: Ferrucci has found that inflammatory
activity breaks down skeletal muscle, leading to the
loss of lean muscle mass. Being fat makes all these diseases strike earlier, and that
seems to be at least in part because fat cells spur more inflammation.
These findings have provided researchers with a totally new
appreciation of how subtly inflammation can work and how wildly awry it can go
over time. It’s not about “a massive infection or a welt the size of an egg
because you got hit in the head with a two-by-four,” Tracy says. “Inflammation
also goes on at a much lower level.” As it simmers in the background, over
years and decades, collateral damage accumulates—in the heart, in the brain,
everywhere. Harvey Jay Cohen, chairman of the department of medicine and
director of the Center for the Study of Aging at Duke University Medical Center,
likens inflammation to “little waves lapping on the shore. It’s a relatively
low level of activity, one that sustained over time wears away at the beach and
stimulates other bad events.”
Evolution has designed into us a cruel trade-off: What saves us in the
short term kills us over the long haul. As we get older, acute episodes of
inflammation tend to turn into chronic ones, perhaps because the regulation of
the immune system becomes less efficient. Inflammatory factors in the blood can
increase two- to fourfold. Chronic infections may be partly to blame. Although
we usually don’t know it, nearly all adults are infected with the Epstein-Barr
virus, and at least 60 percent of us with cytomegalovirus. These two pathogens
can stay in our bodies in a latent state, hiding out in our cells. But Ronald
Glaser, a viral immunologist at Ohio State University Medical Center and his
research partner (and wife), psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, think that
these viruses are not fully dormant. They’ve found evidence
(pdf) that with age, antibodies to these viruses increase, indicating a
reawakened virus and an active immune response.
Early experiences may also influence the way that inflammation affects
an individual’s aging, says Caleb Finch, a neurobiologist and gerontologist at
the University of Southern California. Analyzing historical birth and death
records from 19th-century Europe, he and Eileen Crimmins, a gerontologist and
sociologist at the University of Southern California, found that longevity is directly
related to exposure to childhood disease. Children born during years
of high neonatal mortality who survived to adulthood didn’t live as long as
those born in healthier years. The reason, he says, is inflammation: A high
infectious burden in childhood results in a high inflammatory burden in
adulthood, which results in a shorter, sicker life. Conversely, Finch believes
that people in affluent countries now live so long because their childhoods are
free from diseases like measles, typhoid, malaria, whooping cough, and worms.
Without these diseases, people grow bigger and stronger—and live much longer.
Looking beyond provocative findings like those in Finch’s study, Tracy
and other researchers on aging say that it may be too simplistic to think of
inflammation in terms of straightforward cause and effect. Instead we must
think of human biology as a group of interdependent systems. “Is inflammation a
response to aging, or is it causing aging or disease?” Tracy asks. “My answer
is: Yep, yep, yep. It does all those things. There’s no other way to think
about it—it’s both cause and response to what’s going on.”
Inflammation is not
uncontested as a theory of aging. There are many competing hypotheses. Yet
inflammation reinforces some more than others, potentially establishing a
plausible constellation of mechanisms responsible for aging.
For example, according to the “free radical” hypothesis of aging, we
get older because of constant cellular damage caused by reactive oxygen
compounds that are a natural product of metabolism. Inflammation can partly
explain how this might work. Macrophages, as part of the inflammatory response,
produce reactive oxygen species in order to attack bacteria. Oxidative stress
and inflammation clearly egg each other on, and calming one can inhibit the
other.
To take another prominent example, a low-calorie diet is known to increase the life spans of
creatures ranging from flatworms to rats, but no one knows why,
or whether it will help humans live longer. Inflammation provides a clue:
Dietary restriction sharply inhibits the inflammatory response, and that may be
part of why it promotes longevity at the same time that it reduces insulin
resistance and slows dementia. Yet another widely discussed theory of why we
age blames the shortening of telomeres, chromosomal structures that, in most
cells, dwindle with each division and may ultimately limit the number of times
any cell can divide. It is possible that inflammation could play a role here,
too, because it prompts the faster turnover of cells in the immune system and
other tissues.
Still, nobody thinks
that there is a single root cause of aging—different species may age in
different ways, and multiple mechanisms are probably at work. “I think it would
be a mistake to suggest that inflammation is the cause of aging, or that all
theories of aging must be tied to it,” Cohen says. Then again it may not
ultimately matter whether inflammation is the most significant cause of our
decay. More important is that inflammation offers an unparalleled opportunity to
do something about it.
Some ways to reduce inflammation are elementary. It is impossible to
know exactly what is going on in Jim Hammond’s body, but all the aspects of his
regimen—healthy food, exercise, and a good attitude—reduce systemic
inflammation. Those of us without his tenacity can turn to drug companies,
which are exploring new anti-inflammatory drugs like flavonoids. Researchers
are also looking at new uses for old drugs—trying to prevent Alzheimer’s using
ibuprofen, for example. “The research is really to prevent the chronic
debilitating diseases of aging,” says Nir Barzilai, a molecular geneticist and
director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of
Medicine in New York. “But if I develop a drug, it will have a side effect,
which is that you will live longer.”
Some of this research stretches the boundaries of what we know. Rudi
Westendorp, head of the department of gerontology and geriatrics at the Leiden
University Medical Center, is trying to treat old-age depression with drugs that are
currently used for autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. Harvard
University researchers are considering a vaccine against atherosclerosis, which
may provoke a reaction that suppresses inflammation.
The caveat with these experiments is that by modifying inflammation,
we are playing with fire. After all, fighting off infection is an absolutely
essential bodily function. “The danger of monkeying around in a system like
that is that you may do more harm than good,” Cohen says. But humans appear
willing to renegotiate the ancient evolutionary bargain that traded robust
reproductive health for frail old age.
Think of Jim Hammond if
you have any doubts. In his blog, he describes running the 800-meter race in
the 2007 National Senior Olympics games. “I won in a photo finish, and I broke
the national record,” he wrote. The crowd went nuts. At the age of 93, Hammond
had the most exhilarating experience of his entire life.
December 4, 2007
NEWS ANALYSIS
An Assessment Jars a Foreign
Policy Debate About Iran
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — Rarely, if ever, has a single
intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a
foreign policy debate here.
An administration that had cited Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as the
rationale for an aggressive foreign policy — as an attempt to head off World
War III, as President Bush himself put it only weeks ago — now has in its hands
a classified document that undercuts much of the foundation for that approach.
The impact of the National Intelligence Estimate’s
conclusion — that Iran had halted a military program in 2003, though it
continues to enrich uranium, ostensibly for peaceful uses — will be felt in
endless ways at home and abroad.
It will certainly weaken international support for
tougher sanctions against Iran, as a senior administration official grudgingly
acknowledged. And it will raise questions, again, about the integrity of
America’s beleaguered intelligence agencies, including whether what are now
acknowledged to have been overstatements about Iran’s intentions in a 2005
assessment reflected poor tradecraft or political pressure.
Seldom do those agencies vindicate irascible
foreign leaders like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who several weeks
ago said there was “no evidence” that Iran was building a nuclear weapon,
dismissing the American claims as exaggerated.
The biggest change, though, could be its effect on
President Bush’s last year in office, as well as on the campaign to replace
him. Until Monday, 2008 seemed to be a year destined to be consumed, at least
when it comes to foreign policy, by the prospects of confrontation with Iran.
There are still hawks in the administration, Vice
President Dick Cheney chief among them, who view Iran
with deep suspicion. But for now at least, the main argument for a military
conflict with Iran — widely rumored and feared, judging by antiwar protesters
that often greet Mr. Bush during his travels — is off the table for the
foreseeable future.
As Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, put it,
the intelligence finding removes, “if nothing else, the urgency that we have to
attack Iran, or knock out facilities.” He added: “I don’t think you can
overstate the importance of this.”
The White House struggled to portray the estimate
as a validation of Mr. Bush’s strategy, a contention that required swimming
against the tide of Mr. Bush’s and Mr. Cheney’s occasionally apocalyptic
language.
The national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said the estimate showed
that suspicions about Iran’s intentions were warranted, given that it had a
weapons program in the first place.
“On balance, the estimate is good news,” Mr. Hadley
said, appearing at the White House. “On one hand, it confirms that we were
right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons. On the other
hand, it tells us that we have made some progress in trying to ensure that that
does not happen. But it also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear
weapon remains a very serious problem.”
Mr. Hadley insisted, as he and others have, that
the administration had hoped and still hoped to resolve the outstanding
questions about Iran’s nuclear programs using diplomacy, not force. But the nuances
of his on-this-hand-on-the-other argument will probably make it much harder to
persuade American allies to accept the administration’s harder line.
One official pointed out that the chief American
diplomat on the Iran question, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, had
just met with counterparts from Europe, Russia and China, and had seemed to
make some headway on winning support for a third round of sanctions by the United Nations Security Council. The official
said Mr. Burns could not divulge the intelligence findings at that meeting on
Friday because Congress had not been briefed.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J Sheehan
Louis J. Sheehan
The immediate task for Mr. Burns and other
administration officials is to untangle the confusion caused by its own
statements and findings and to persuade skeptics that this time, the United
States has it right about what Iran was doing before 2003 and what that means
for what it might do in the future.
“The way this will play is that the intelligence
community has admitted it was wrong,” said Jon B. Alterman of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies. “So why should we believe them now?”
Mr. Hadley said the drastic reversal in the
intelligence agencies’ knowledge about Iran’s weapons programs was based “on
new intelligence, some of which has been received in the last few months.”
He also said that he and other senior officials, including
Mr. Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, had reviewed it and debated
it two weeks ago.
With some of the administration’s most prominent
hawks having departed and not taking part in the review of findings like these,
it is possible that the zeal for another military conflict has diminished.
After all, the first two wars on Mr. Bush’s watch remain unresolved at best.
Senator Hagel said he hoped that the administration
might in its final year in office show the kind of diplomatic flexibility it
did with North Korea over its nuclear weapons or with the conference in
Annapolis, Md., last week on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He has
previously called for the United States to open direct and unconditional talks
with Iran to end the state of enmity that has existed since 1979.
He said Iran’s halt of weapons activity had created
an opening for such talks, indicating, as the assessment does, that Iran’s
government may be more rational than the one that Mr. Bush said in August had
threatened to put the entire region “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.”
“If we’re wise here, if we’re careful, I think we
have some opportunities,” Mr. Hagel said.
The findings, though, remain open for
interpretation, as they always do, even in documents meant to reflect the
consensus of the intelligence community. When it comes to Iran, at odds with
the United States on many fronts beyond the nuclear question, hawks remain.
“Those who are suspicious of diplomacy are well dug
in in this administration,” said Kurt M. Campbell, chief executive officer of
the Center for a New American Security.
John R. Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations, who recently left the
administration and began to criticize it, sounded very much like Mr. Hadley on
Monday, saying the assessment underscored the need for American toughness. He
said Iran’s intentions would always remain a concern as long as it continued to
enrich uranium.
“The decision to weaponize and at what point is a
judgment in the hands of the Iranians,” he said. He added that the finding that
Iran halted a weapons program could just mean that it was better hidden now.
JAKARTA (Reuters) - Many of Indonesia's islands may
be swallowed up by the sea if world leaders fail to find a way to halt rising
sea levels at this week's climate change conference on the resort island of
Bali.
Doomsters take this dire warning by Indonesian
scientists a step further and predict that by 2035, the Indonesian capital's
airport will be flooded by sea water and rendered useless; and by 2080, the
tide will be lapping at the steps of Jakarta's imposing Dutch-era Presidential
palace which sits 10 km inland (about 6 miles).
The Bali conference is aimed at finding a successor
to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, on cutting climate warming carbon
emissions. With over 17,000 islands, many at risk of being washed away,
Indonesians are anxious to see an agreement reached and quickly implemented
that will keep rising seas at bay.
Just last week, tides burst through sea walls,
cutting a key road to Jakarta's international airport until officials were able
to reinforce coastal barricades.
"Island states are very vulnerable to sea
level rise and very vulnerable to storms. Indonesia ... is particularly
vulnerable," Nicholas Stern, author of an acclaimed report on climate
change, said on a visit to Jakarta earlier this year.
Even large islands are at risk as global warming
might shrink their land mass, forcing coastal communities out of their homes
and depriving millions of a livelihood.
The island worst hit would be Java, which accounts
for more than half of Indonesia's 226 million people. Here rising sea levels
would swamp three of the island's biggest cities near the coast -- Jakarta,
Surabaya and Semarang -- destroying industrial plants and infrastructure.
"Tens of millions of people would have to move
out of their homes. There is no way this will happen without conflict,"
Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar said recently.
"The cost would be very high. Imagine, it's
not just about building better infrastructure, but we'd have to relocate people
and change the way people live," added Witoelar, who has said that
Indonesia could lose 2,000 of its islands by 2030 if sea levels continue to
rise.
CRUNCH TIME AT BALI
Environmentalists say this week's climate change
meeting in Bali will be crunch time for threatened coastlines and islands as
delegates from nearly 190 countries meet to hammer out a new treaty on global
warming.
Several small island nations including Singapore,
Fiji, Kiribati, Tuvalu and Caribbean countries have raised the alarm over
rising sea levels which could wipe them off the map.
The Maldives, a cluster of 1,200 islands renowned
for its luxury resorts, has asked the international community to address
climate change so it does not sink into a watery grave.
According to a U.N. climate report, temperatures
are likely to rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius (2.0 and 11.5 degrees
Fahrenheit) and sea levels by between 18 cm and 59 cm (seven and 23 inches)
this century.
Under current greenhouse gas emission levels,
Indonesia could lose about 400,000 sq km of land mass by 2080, including about
10 percent of Papua, and 5 percent of both Java and Sumatra on the northern
coastlines, Armi Susandi, a meteorologist at the Bandung Institute of
Technology, told Reuters.
Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous
country, has faced intense pressure over agricultural land for decades.
Susandi, who has researched the impact of climate
change on Indonesia, estimated sea levels would rise by an average of 0.5 cm a
year until 2080, while the submersion rate in Jakarta, which lies just above
sea level, would be higher at 0.87 cm a year.
A study by the UK-based International Institute for
Economy and Development (IIED) said at least 8 out of 92 of the outermost small
islands that make up the country's borders are vulnerable.
TOO MANY ISLANDS TO COUNT
Less than half of Indonesia's islands are inhabited
and many are not even named. Now, the authorities are hastily counting the
coral-fringed islands that span a distance of 5,000 km, the equivalent of going
from Ireland to Iran, before it is too late.
Disappearing islands and coastlines would not only
change the Indonesian map, but could also restrict access to mineral resources
situated in the most vulnerable spots, Susandi said.
He estimates that land loss alone would cost
Indonesia 5 percent of its GDP without taking into account the loss of property
and livelihood as millions migrate from low-lying coastlines to cities and
towns on higher ground.
There are 42 million people in Indonesia living in
areas less than 10 meters above the average sea level, who could be acutely
affected by rising sea levels, the IIED study showed.
A separate study by the United Nations Environment
Programme in 1992 showed in two districts in Java alone, rising waters could
deprive more than 81,000 farmers of their rice fields or prawn and fish ponds,
while 43,000 farm laborers would lose their job.
One solution is to cover Indonesia's fragile
beaches with mangroves, the first line of defense against sea level rise, which
can break big waves and hold back soil and silt that damage coral reefs.
A more expensive alternative is to erect multiple
concrete walls on the coastlines, as the United States has done to break the
tropical storms that hit its coast, Susandi said.
Some areas, including the northern shores of
Jakarta, are already fitted with concrete sea barriers, but they are often
damaged or too low to block rising waters and big waves such as the ones that
hit Jakarta in November.
"It will be like permanent flooding,"
Susandi said. "By 2050, about 24 percent of Jakarta will disappear,"
possibly even forcing the capital to move to Bandung, a hill city 180 km east
of Jakarta.
(Editing
by Megan Goldin)
WASHINGTON
- One of the most complete dinosaur mummies ever found is revealing secrets
locked away for millions of years, bringing researchers as close as they will
ever get to touching a live dino.
The fossilized duckbilled hadrosaur is so well
preserved that scientists have been able to calculate its muscle mass and learn
that it was more muscular than thought, probably giving it the ability to
outrun predators such as T. rex.
While they call it a mummy, the dinosaur is not really
preserved like King Tut was. The dinosaur body has been fossilized into stone.
Unlike the collections of bones found in museums, this hadrosaur came complete
with skin, ligaments, tendons and possibly some internal organs, according to
researchers.
The study is not yet complete, but scientists have
concluded that hadrosaurs were bigger — 3 1/2 tons and up to 40 feet long — and
stronger than had been known, were quick and flexible and had skin with scales
that may have been striped.
"Oh, the skin is wonderful,"
paleontologist Phillip Manning of Manchester University in England rhapsodized,
admitting to a "glazed look in my eye."
"It's unbelievable when you look at it for the
first time," he said in a telephone interview. "There is depth and
structure to the skin. The level of detail expressed in the skin is just
breathtaking."
Manning said there is a pattern of banding to the
larger and smaller scales on the skin. Because it has been fossilized
researchers do not know the skin color. Looking at it in monochrome shows a
striped pattern.
He notes that in modern reptiles, such a pattern is
often associated with color change.
The fossil was found in 1999 in North Dakota and
now is nicknamed "Dakota." It is being analyzed in the world's
largest CT scanner, operated by the Boeing Co. The machine usually is used for
space shuttle engines and other large objects. Researchers hope the technology
will help them learn more about the fossilized insides of the creature.
"It's a definite case of watch this
space," Manning said. "We are trying to be very conservative, very
careful."
But they have learned enough so far to produce two
books and a television program. The TV special, "Dino Autopsy," will
air on the National Geographic channel Dec. 9. National Geographic Society
partly funded the research.
A children's book, "DinoMummy: The Life,
Death, and Discovery of Dakota, a Dinosaur From Hell Creek," goes on sale
Tuesday and an adult book, "Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs: Soft Tissues and
Hard Science," will be available in January.
Soft parts of dead animals normally decompose
rapidly after death. Because of chemical conditions where this animal died,
fossilization — replacement of tissues by minerals — took place faster than the
decomposition, leaving mineralized portions of the tissue.
That does not mean DNA, the building blocks of
life, can be recovered, Manning said. Some has been recovered from frozen
mammoths up to 1 million years old, he said. At the age of this dinosaur, 65
million to 67 million years old, "the chance of finding DNA is
remote," he said.
A Manchester colleague, Roy Wogelius, who also
worked on the dinosaur, said "one thing that we are very confident of is
that we do have some organic molecular breakdown products present." That
look at chemicals associated with the animal is still research in progress.
Matthew Carrano, a paleontologist at the
Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, said he could not comment in
detail about the find because he had not seen the research. But, he added,
"Any time we can get a glimpse of the soft anatomy of a dinosaur, that's
significant."
The findings from Dakota may cause museums to
rethink their dinosaur displays.
Most dinosaur skeletons in museums, for example,
show the vertebrae right next to one another. The researchers looking at Dakota
found a gap of about a centimeter — about 0.4 inch — between each one.
That indicates there may have been a disk or other
material between them, allowing more flexibility and meaning the animal was
actually longer than what is shown in a museum. On large animals, adding the
space could make them a yard longer or more, Manning said.
Because ligaments and tendons were preserved, as
well as other parts of Dakota, researchers could to calculate its muscle mass,
showing it was stronger and potentially faster than had been known.
They estimated the hadrosaur's top speed at about
28 miles per hour, 10 mph faster than the giant T. Rex is thought to have been
able to run.
"It's very logical, though, that a hadrosaur
could run faster than a T. rex. It's a major prey animal and it doesn't have
big horns on its head like triceratops. Hadrosaurs didn't have much in the way
of defense systems, so they probably relied on fleet of foot," Manning
said.
Dakota was discovered by Tyler Lyson, then a teenager
who liked hunting for fossils on his family ranch. Lyson, who is currently
working on his doctorate degree in paleontology at Yale University, founded the
Marmarth Research Foundation, an organization dedicated to the excavation,
preservation and study of dinosaurs.
77777777777
In 1982, I joined a bunch of my
13-year-old friends for a birthday party. We went to see a new movie, one we
seemed certain to like. After all, it starred Harrison Ford, known to us as Han
Solo and Indiana Jones, as a detective chasing down androids in a future world
of vertiginous skyscrapers and flying cars.
As it turned out, I did like
"Blade Runner," though the movie was considerably different than what
I'd expected. There were gleaming skyscrapers and flying cars, but most of the
movie took place either indoors or on crowded streets awash in rain and noise.
Mr. Ford's character, Deckard, sure didn't seem much like Han or Indy: While he
wasn't exactly the bad guy, he shot two women (one in the back) and spent much
of the movie all but leveled by exhaustion, pain or both. Meanwhile, the
villain -- Rutger Hauer's platinum-blonde replicant Batty -- wound up striking
us as a sort of hero. In fact, the replicants seemed more caring, and more
human, than the humans hunting them. For a 13-year-old it was at first
confusing, then very interesting.
Now "Blade Runner" is back,
in a recut, restored edition billed as director Ridley Scott's "final
cut." Last week I watched the DVD, curious to see what changes had been
made, if they'd improve a movie I vividly remembered in its original
incarnation, and how the future imagined in "Blade Runner" holds up
in an age of ubiquitous computing and communications.
Of course, "Blade Runner"
never really left. It became a cult classic, appearing in a puzzling array of
versions, and an Internet favorite. Not long after I first went online, I
discovered newsgroup FAQs recounting the movie's troubled production, the
tug-of-war between Mr. Scott and others over the story, and arguments about
what the movie really "meant." I was fascinated: I hadn't known that
Mr. Ford had disliked the movie, or that his Sam Spade voiceover and the oddly
happy ending had been tacked on after test screenings. And I'd never seen the
odd "unicorn scene" added in later releases, or read how it
"proved" Deckard was also a replicant.
All this Net lore made "Blade
Runner" a richer experience, but it was also frustrating: I wanted to see
the movie I remembered again, but I wanted to see it the way Mr. Scott had
intended it. That kept getting pushed off, though; for years Web chatter
suggested a new edition would be on the way … soon.
Now, the wait is over and "Blade
Runner" and I are at last reacquainted. The restored movie is beautiful,
with superb sound, but I'd expected that. While it's possible the voiceover
helped me get my bearings as a 13-year-old, I didn't miss it now --
particularly not in the film's powerful final minutes, with a battered Deckard
left to ponder Batty's sacrifice in silence. I enjoyed following the clues
about Deckard possibly being a replicant, and found the less-happy ending more
satisfying. (Some of the continuity bloopers and special-effects flubs have
also been cleaned up, and of course there are all manner of intriguing extras,
from Mr. Scott's commentary to a exhaustive, occasionally exhausting
warts-and-all documentary.)
How did the movie hold up for me?
"Blade Runner" is set in Los Angeles in 2019, and some parts of that
vision do now seem more derived from the early 1980s: Darryl Hannah's evil-doll
replicant looks like she stepped out of first-wave MTV, Deckard wears a digital
watch, and nobody has a cellphone.
And then there was one of my favorite
scenes. Deckard uses a voice-activated computer to delve deep into a snapshot,
zooming in until he finds the reflection of a face in a mirror in the
background. It remains a startling piece of movie-making, one I often think
about when working with high-resolution digital photos. But this time I found
myself distracted. Why doesn't Deckard's software zoom in smoothly, like every
program does today? This would be a real pain to use, I thought -- and was
disappointed to think so.
But these are quibbles. I was still
drawn in by the look and feel of "Blade Runner," slipping easily into
the world it imagines. Yes, that world includes space colonies and attack ships
off the shoulder of Orion. But we never see them, which is good -- because even
in the best science fiction, everything from gadgetry to clothing typically
strikes us as fantastic, and therefore fake. "Blade Runner" is
different: We see a transformed but still-recognizable world, with odd but
not-unfamiliar fashions, a familiar urban divide between conspicuous wealth and
grinding poverty, and people trying to get by as best they can on crowded,
chaotic streets.
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As a forerunner of cyberpunk,
"Blade Runner" helped strip science fiction of starships and space
wars, though it just pushes them offscreen instead of doing away with them
entirely. (Another cyberpunk pioneer, William Gibson's "Neuromancer,"
also comes with the trappings of conventional sci-fi, with orbiting space
stations and a self-aware supercomputer.) But "Blade Runner" also
continues to speak to our hopes and fears. In 1982, it channeled fears of
overpopulation and pollution, as well as American worries about Asia's rise. If
some of those worries have subsided, new ones have replaced them: The weather
has changed by 2019, and real animals have all but disappeared.
Louis J. Sheehan Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
And the fear of being ceaselessly
stifled and jostled and overwhelmed remains with us, though transferred from
the real world to the virtual one. "Blade Runner" is full of noise
and overrun by gadgetry, its buildings choked by the technological kudzu of
advertisements and infrastructure. Yet peeking out amid the babble and clutter,
we recognize things from our time -- old cars, photos, the books and piano in
Deckard's apartment. They seem fragile and vulnerable, as if a few more rainy
nights might leave them rotted and replaced, and we want desperately to hold
onto them. Even without replicants or advertising zeppelins, that's a fear
we've felt as well, watching with mingled excitement and anxiety as the digital
age sweeps away old ways and familiar things.
Nearly 19,000 Americans died in 2005
of invasive infections caused by drug-resistant staphylococcus bacteria—more
than were killed by AIDS, according to a new study in the Journal of the
American Medical Association.
The report, written by experts at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the latest research to note the
alarming spread of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus in communities
across the U.S. and to document the bacteria's deadly impact.
MRSA is a superbug that does not
respond to treatment with common antibiotics such as penicillin. More than
94,000 Americans contracted life-threatening MRSA infections in 2005, including
blood and bone infections, pneumonia and inflammation of the heart's lining.
Most appear to be traceable back to hospitals, nursing homes or medical
clinics, the new CDC report found.
"This is really a call to action
for health-care facilities to make sure they're doing everything they can to
prevent MRSA," said R. Monina Klevens, the lead author of the report and a
medical epidemiologist at the CDC.
This year, Illinois became the first
state in the nation to require hospitals to report infection rates, test
patients in intensive-care units for the bacteria and to take specific measures
to prevent its spread.
Nancy Foster, vice president of
patient safety at the American Hospital Association, called the study an
"eye-opener" and said hospitals across the country will need to
evaluate whether current strategies for combating MRSA are effective.
But a growing number of MRSA cases are
also arising at community gyms and schools, and these, too, can be deadly. On
Tuesday, a high school senior in Moneta, Va., died after being hospitalized for
a week with an infection that spread to his kidney, liver, lungs and heart.
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"I've never heard of a bacterial
invasive disease with an attack rate anywhere near this high in children and
the elderly," said Dr. Robert Daum, a specialist in MRSA and a professor
of pediatrics at the University of Chicago.
It's not known how the Virginia
student contracted the infection, but officials ordered all 21 schools in the
district closed for cleaning Wednesday. The bacteria can live on common
surfaces, such as a table, for days or weeks and can be transmitted when
someone touches it.
The CDC study found 32 of every 100,000
people in the communities studied contracted invasive MRSA infections. Rates
were twice as high for African-Americans (66 per 100,000) and four times higher
for the elderly (128 per 100,000). For infants younger than 1, the rate for
blacks was four times that of whites.
African-Americans may be more
vulnerable because they have higher rates of chronic illnesses such as
diabetes, which require more visits to health-care providers, Klevens said.
Infected individuals may then unwittingly spread the bacteria to other
household members.
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The new CDC report is the most
reliable overview of serious MRSA infections prepared to date. The data came
from nine sites: Connecticut; Baltimore; the metropolitan areas of San
Francisco, Denver, Atlanta and Portland, Ore.; and three counties in Minnesota,
Tennessee and New York.
Instead of using administrative data,
researchers checked medical records to confirm cases of invasive MRSA
infections and double-checked laboratory results. An earlier CDC study that
relied on administrative data had estimated 5,000 people die each year of
dangerous MRSA infections.
Dr. William Jarvis, former acting
director of the hospital infections program at the CDC, called upon the agency
to strengthen recommended measures for preventing MRSA's spread in light of the
new report's findings.
"The CDC recommends routine
screening for HIV for everyone who goes to a doctor, but it doesn't even
recommend routine screening for all hospital patients for MRSA," he said.
Dr. John Jernigan, deputy chief of
prevention at the CDC, defended recent agency guidelines that call for
health-care facilities to lower MRSA infection rates. The guidelines are
voluntary and there is no timetable or national reporting of the data. But
Jernigan said the recommendations will work if health-care facilities are
serious about following them.
By day, David Lassiter's view of his
surroundings is confined to what he can see from the cab of a ready-mix
concrete truck.
By night, it is as vast as the
universe.
On clear nights, Lassiter is in his
backyard observatory, viewing planets, comets and other deep-space objects or
photographing them with a computer-controlled camera designed for
astrophotography.
His photographs have appeared in
Astronomy Magazine and on its Web site. His photograph of Comet Holmes was
recently a "Photo of the Day."
Lassiter, 59, of Fishing Creek Valley
Road in Middle Paxton Twp., said he has always been interested in astronomy but
didn't acquire his first telescope until about six years ago.
That was a 41/2-inch Newtonian
reflector he bought for about $350.
"I always wanted to buy a
telescope," Lassiter said. "I would look up at the night sky and
wonder what is out there."
Today, a 14-inch research-grade
Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope is the heart of his observatory, which is in a 10-
by 12-foot wooden shed with a roll-off roof. Lassiter has invested more than
$10,000 in equipment.
Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes use
mirrors and a lens. The size of Lassiter's telescope refers to the size of its
mirror.
The larger the mirror or lens, the
more detail one can see, he said.
"I love astronomy and the beauty
of it," Lassiter said. "After a long, stressful day, there is
something about being able to roll back that roof, focus on some distant object
in the universe, and mellow out.
"You are looking in the face of
God, looking at God's amazing creation."
Michael Bakich, the photography editor
for Astronomy Magazine, said he gets 100 to 200 photographs a week from
backyard stargazers such as Lassiter.
"We love to get pictures from
David and other amateurs," he said. "They are taking photographs of
deep-space objects that rival those major observatories were making 25 or 30
years ago.
"The equipment that amateur
astronomers are using today is much better than anything a large observatory
was using 25 years ago," Bakich said.
Louis J Sheehan
Louis J Sheehan, Esquire
Digital imaging allows amateur
astronomers to get more detail in their photographs.
Once he had the ability to view even
the smallest and faintest celestial object, Lassiter wanted to photograph them.
He uses a computer-controlled digital
camera that controls the focus of the telescope and the length of the exposure.
"I can photograph things with it,
like the Horsehead Nebulae in the Constellation Orion, that I can't even see
through the eyepiece of my telescope," he said.
Sky charts help him find the objects,
much like Mapquest helps drivers find the best route to grandma's house.
Photographs show brilliant colors and
details that can't be seen with the unaided eye, Lassiter said.
"The light cones in the human eye
are too weak to pick the colors up, and it may take an exposure of several
minutes for them to show up," he said. "When the live image finally
comes up on your computer, you can see all these beautiful colors."
While he enjoys astrophotography,
Lassiter also makes sure to leave time for plain old visual observation on rare
perfect nights.
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J Sheehan Esquire
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"All these beautiful objects are
out there, just waiting to be seen," he said.
"People call me a stargazer, but
I don't spend any time looking at stars. All you see when you focus on a star
is a bright point of light."
9999999999999
COMMENTARY
A record eight million Americans moved
from one state to another last year. Where is everyone going, and why? The
answer has little to do with climate: California has arguably the nicest
climate of any state in the nation -- yet in this decade more Americans have
left the Golden State than entered it.
Migration patterns instead reveal
which states have the most dynamic and desirable economies, and which are
"has-been" states. The winners in this contest for the most valuable
resource on the globe -- human capital -- are generally the states with the
lowest tax, spending and regulatory burdens. The biggest losers are almost all
congregated in the Northeast and Midwest. Liberals contend that tax rates,
regulations, forced union laws and runaway government spending don't matter
when it comes to creating jobs, high incomes and a higher quality of life.
People tell us otherwise by voting with their feet.
[chart]
The American Legislative Exchange
Council has just released a study we've done that presents a 2007 Economic
Competitiveness Rating of the 50 states, based on 16 economic policy variables,
including taxes, regulation, right to work, the legal system, educational
freedom and government debt. Over the past decade, the 10 states with the
highest taxes and spending, and the most intrusive regulations, have half the
population and job growth, and one-third slower growth in incomes, than the 10
most economically free states. In 2006 alone 1,500 people each day moved to the
states with the highest economic competitiveness from the states with the
lowest competitiveness.
Of all the policy variables we
examined, two stand out as perhaps the most important in attracting jobs and
capital. The first is the income tax rate. States with the highest income tax
rates -- California and New York, for example -- are significantly outperformed
by the nine states with no income tax, such as Texas and Florida. As a study
from the Atlanta Federal Reserve Board put it: "Relative marginal tax
rates have a statistically significant negative relationship with relative
state growth."
The other factor for attracting jobs
and capital is right-to-work laws. States that permit workers to be compelled
to join unions have much lower rates of employment growth than states that
don't. Many companies say they will not even consider locating a factory in a
state that does not have a right-to-work law.
Our study also finds that states with
antigrowth tax and spending policies don't just lose people. Noncompetitive
states like New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois and New Jersey are
plagued by falling housing values, a shrinking tax base, business outmigration,
capital flight and high unemployment rates, and less money for schools, roads
and aging infrastructure. These factors of decline hurt the poor the most.
The Northeast is the classic case of a
region suffering from self-inflicted wounds. In the year 2006, it was home to a
smaller share of the U.S. population, and produced a smaller percentage of
America's total value-added, than at any time in the nation's history. Why?
One big reason is that governments in
the Northeast are about one-fifth more expensive than in the rest of America
($6,000 versus $5,000 of state spending per resident). An average-income family
of four still saves $4,000 in lower income, property, sales taxes and fees by
moving to just an average-tax state, and more like $6,000 a year by moving to,
say, Florida. Since the Northeastern states tend to have highly progressive tax
systems, the incentive to flee is even greater for higher-income earners.
Northeasterners complain disdainfully
of the "war between the states" for jobs and businesses, and for good
reason: They can't win. Southern and Western states are cherry-picking
companies from the North Atlantic states. One Southern governor (who didn't
want to be identified) recently told us his state had closed its economic
development offices in Europe. "Why search for factories overseas when we
can plunder high tax areas like Connecticut and New York?" he said.
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Auto and other manufacturing jobs are
still being created in America -- but in Alabama, North Carolina and even
Mississippi. It has to be infuriating to Northeasterners to learn that people
and businesses are "trading up" by moving out of their region to the
likes of Georgia and Alabama. But they are.
The states losing population are in
effect suffering from a slow-motion version of the economic sclerosis that
paralyzed much of Europe in the 1980s and '90s, particularly France and Germany
with their massive welfare systems. At least the European socialist nations are
finally starting to change their taxing and spending ways to win back jobs.
No such luck in this country. Five of
the states near the bottom of our competitiveness ratings -- Illinois,
Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey and Wisconsin -- have enacted major tax
increases in the last two years. Maryland and Michigan just raised business and
income taxes on upper-income earners, while arguing that raising the cost of
doing business will attract more businesses. More likely it will induce
companies to stay away, and people to move out.
With the wide-ranging conquests of Alexander
the Great, the Greek or Hellenic polis 'city-state' gave way to Hellenistic
Empire. Distinctions between Greek and barbarian fell; individuals, no longer
simply part of their poleis (pl. of polis), were suddenly aware of the greater
whole to which they belonged. Stoicism arose as an attempt to comprehend the
new cosmopolitan order. The philosophy of the Stoics lasted for 500 years,
during which time it had a major impact on Christianity, the idea of natural
law, and moral virtue. Some of the major early stoics were Chrysippus,
Cleanthes, and Zeno.
Chrysippus
Without Chrysippus, there wouldn't have been any
Stoicism
- anonymous
He alone is the sage, the others only act as
shadows.
- anonymous
Chrysippus (280-207) wasn't the founder
of Stoicism. That honor goes to Zeno (c 336-264). Chrysippus wasn't even the
second head of the stoa poikile. That honor goes to Cleanthes. Chrysippus was,
however, the person on whom our knowledge of the early Stoics depends. Like
Epicurus, he was a prolific writer, composing 705 books of which none remain
except fragments preserved by others, including Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca, Aulus
Gellius, and Athenaeus.
Some of Chrysippus' actions adversely
affected the reputation of the Stoics. He refused to honor distinctions of
rank. He would take opposite viewpoints for the sake of argument, but in the
process show up the inconsistencies of Stoic beliefs. He sometimes argued
illogically.
How Chrysippus died is not known. Two
alternative theories are that Chrysippus died of laughter or over-proof wine.
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Cleanthes
Cleanthes (331-232), a wrestler from
Lydia, had neither money nor genius, but through diligence and perseverance he
served as Zeno's pupil for 19 years before succeeding him. He still had a long
teaching career, since he died at 99, reportedly through intentional
starvation.
Diogenes Laertius' Lives of Eminent
Philosophers provides most of our information on Zeno of Citium because,
although he was the founder of the Stoic school, none of his works survives.
Zeno began his career as a merchant, but shipwreck led him to Athens and the
Cynic philosopher, Crates. While under Crates' tutelage, Zeno wrote his
Republic.
In the Republic, his utopian, rational
society would have no need for laws. But since humans live in an imperfect
society, they must accept social realities. Zeno opposed slavery, believed in
sexual equality, opposed modesty, lived frugally, and appears to have drunk
excessively.
Stoics and Moral Philosophy
8 Principles of Stoic Philosophy and
Their Serenity Prayer-Like Advice
Below are 8 of the main ideas held by
the Stoic philosophers.
1. Nature - Nature is rational.
2. Law of Reason - The universe is governed by the law
of reason. Man can't actually escape its inexorable force, but he can,
uniquely, follow the law deliberately.
3. Virtue - A life led according to rational nature is
virtuous.
4. Wisdom - Wisdom is the the root virtue. From it
spring the cardinal virtues: insight, bravery, self-control, and justice.
"Briefly, their notion of
morality is stern, involving a life in accordance with nature and controlled by
virtue. It is an ascetic system, teaching perfect indifference ( APATHEA ) to
everything external, for nothing external could be either good or evil. Hence
to the Stoics both pain and pleasure, poverty and riches, sickness and health,
were supposed to be equally unimportant."
5. Apathea - Since passion is
irrational, life should be waged as a battle against it. Intense feeling should
be avoided.
6. Pleasure - Pleasure is not good. (Nor is it bad. It
is only acceptable if it doesn't interfere with our quest for virtue.)
7. Evil - Poverty, illness, and death are not evil.
8. Duty - Virtue should be sought, not for the sake of
pleasure, but for duty.
Serenity Prayer and Stoic Philosophy
The Serenity Prayer could have come
straight from the principles of Stoicism as this side-by-side comparison of the
the Serenity Prayer and the Stoic Agenda shows:
Serenity Prayer
God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
Stoic Agenda
"To avoid unhappiness,
frustration,
and disappointment, we, therefore,
need
to do two things: control those
things that are within our power
(namely our beliefs, judgments,
desires,
and attitudes) and be indifferent
or apathetic to those things which
are not in our power (namely, things
external to us)."
Louis J Sheehan
Louis J Sheehan, Esquire
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William R Connolly
Update: December 2007: It was pointed
out to me that the main difference between the two passages is that the modern
version includes a bit about knowing the difference between the two. While that
may be, the Stoic version states those which are within our power -- the
personal things like our own beliefs, our judgments, and our desires. Those are
the things we should have the power to change.
"The life of virtue is the life
in accordance with nature. Since for the Stoic nature is rational and perfect,
the ethical life is a life lived in accordance with the rational order of
things.'Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want
them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well' (Handbook, ch.
8)."
-- Ecole Initiative Stoicism
999999
American Experience Vietnam: A Television History
Vietnam was before my time, so this was a good introduction
for me. I’m sure it can’t cover
everything and I accept same. For
me, the show leaves unaddressed one important question/decision. First, a quick review of some facts
from the show:
- Tonkin in summer of 1964; the communists might have assumed they were attacking South Vietnamese and/or the CIA so these facts don’t matter for my question. However, the Americans DID retaliate by bombing the North.
- On the eve of the November 1964 elections, the Communists attacked an American airbase near Saigon that was being used against them; this was the first Communist attack against an American installation. The Americans did NOT retaliate.
- December 24, 1964, the Communists bomb the Brinks Hotel which hotel was occupied/used by high-ranking American Officers. The Americans did NOT retaliate (“who could bomb Santa Claus?”).
- The Communists attack an American airbase in the Central Highlands (“Pleiku”) killing 8 and wounding 126 (it is not clear from the show how many of the forgoing casualties were Americans). The Americans DID retaliate AND planned sustained bombing but the bombing was postponed because of a coup attempt in Saigon in February of 1965.
- Sustained bombing does begin as Operation Rolling Thunder.
- On March 8, 1965, 3,500 Marines are brought in to defend the three jet-capable American airbases (these 3,500 are mentioned in the context of DaNang).
- Three weeks after these Marines land, the Communists attack the American embassy in Saigon.
- Less than one month after landing, the Marines’ mission is expanded to engage in offensive patrols (“ … don’t sit on your dittyboxes ….”).
- 72,000 American troops are “committed” by the end of Spring. 200,000 American troops are “committed” by the end of the year.
The question(s):
Did the Communists think that these pinpricks would dissuade the
Americans from entering the War?
Or what did they think the probability was that these attacks would
dissuade the Americans rather than cause them to escalate their efforts? Surely the Communists did NOT want the
Americans to escalate their presence/effort?
Louis J Sheehan
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(AP) -- Scientists have apparently
broken the universe's speed limit.
For generations, physicists believed
there is nothing faster than light moving through a vacuum -- a speed of
186,000 miles per second.
But in an experiment in Princeton, New
Jersey, physicists sent a pulse of laser light through cesium vapor so quickly
that it left the chamber before it had even finished entering.
The pulse traveled 310 times the
distance it would have covered if the chamber had contained a vacuum.
Researchers say it is the most
convincing demonstration yet that the speed of light -- supposedly an ironclad
rule of nature -- can be pushed beyond known boundaries, at least under certain
laboratory circumstances.
Not so impossible
"This effect cannot be used to
send information back in time," said Lijun Wang, a researcher with the
private NEC Institute. "However, our experiment does show that the
generally held misconception that `nothing can travel faster than the speed of
light' is wrong."
The results of the work by Wang,
Alexander Kuzmich and Arthur Dogariu were published in Thursday's issue of the
journal Nature.
The achievement has no practical
application right now, but experiments like this have generated considerable
excitement in the small international community of theoretical and optical
physicists.
"This is a breakthrough in the
sense that people have thought that was impossible," said Raymond Chiao, a
physicist at the University of California at Berkeley who was not involved in
the work. Chiao has performed similar experiments using electric fields.
In the latest experiment, researchers
at NEC developed a device that fired a laser pulse into a glass chamber filled
with a vapor of cesium atoms. The researchers say the device is sort of a light
amplifier that can push the pulse ahead.
Previously, experiments have been done
in which light also appeared to achieve such so-called superluminal speeds, but
the light was distorted, raising doubts as to whether scientists had really
accomplished such a feat.
The laser pulse in the NEC experiment
exits the chamber with almost exactly the same shape, but with less intensity,
Wang said.
The pulse may look like a straight
beam but actually behaves like waves of light particles. The light can leave
the chamber before it has finished entering because the cesium atoms change the
properties of the light, allowing it to exit more quickly than in a vacuum.
The leading edge of the light pulse
has all the information needed to produce the pulse on the other end of the
chamber, so the entire pulse does not need to reach the chamber for it to exit
the other side.
The experiment produces an almost
identical light pulse that exits the chamber and travels about 60 feet before
the main part of the laser pulse finishes entering the chamber, Wang said.
Wang said the effect is possible only
because light has no mass; the same thing cannot be done with physical objects.
The Princeton experiment and others
like it test the limits of the theory of relativity that Albert Einstein
developed nearly a century ago.
According to the special theory of
relativity, the speed of particles of light in a vacuum, such as outer space,
is the only absolute measurement in the universe. The speed of everything else
-- rockets or inchworms -- is relative to the observer, Einstein and others
explained.
Application: faster computers?
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In everyday circumstances, an object
cannot travel faster than light. The Princeton experiment and others change
these circumstances by using devices such as the cesium chamber rather than a
vacuum.
Ultimately, the work may contribute to
the development of faster computers that carry information in light particles.
Not everyone agrees on the
implications of the NEC experiment.
Aephraim Steinberg, a physicist at the
University of Toronto, said the light particles coming out of the cesium
chamber may not have been the same ones that entered, so he questions whether
the speed of light was broken.
Still, the work is important, he said:
"The interesting thing is how did they manage to produce light that looks
exactly like something that didn't get there yet?"
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