Scientists have looked our ancestors in the mouth and extracted a new insight about human evolution. Slowed-down tooth growth, a marker of extended childhood development in humans, emerged by only around 100,000 years ago, the investigators have found.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Even fossil species treated as direct or close ancestors of Homo sapiens, such as Homo erectus and Homo ergaster, exhibited relatively rapid tooth growth, more like that of apes than of people, report anatomist Christopher Dean of University College London and his colleagues. Overall, people take 18 to 20 years to reach full growth, while chimpanzees and gorillas take 11 to 12 years.
"I was quite surprised to find that tooth enamel grew at such different rates in early Homo species, [especially] Homo erectus, compared with Homo sapiens," Dean says. In his view, this dental disparity indicates that prolonged childhood development emerged when our ancestors evolved brains and bodies similar to those of people today. Dean's group presents its results in the Dec. 6 Nature.
Steven R. Leigh, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, calls the new study "a fine piece of work with important implications for understanding the evolution of human-life histories."
In particular, Dean's data highlight the "unusual nature" of individual development in H. sapiens and Neandertals, Leigh says. He suspects that delayed dental growth accompanied a substantially longer lifespan in these species.
The scientists focused on microscopic features of teeth to establish a time scale for dental growth throughout human evolution. Children's permanent teeth grow in layers that preserve a record of their developmental pace. One sheet of enamel gets laid down daily, the process forming a criss-cross pattern inside the tooth. Ridges on the enamel surface accumulate every 8 or 9 days.
Daily enamel layers grow more slowly and therefore are thinner in people than in apes, reflecting our longer period of physical development.
Of 13 fossil teeth examined by Dean and his coworkers, those attributed to australopithecines�members of the human evolutionary family that lived between 5 million and 1 million years ago�and to three Homo species�Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and H.
erectus�displayed signs of speedier, apelike enamel growth.
In a separate study, Spanish researchers identified a modern sequence of tooth development in an 800,000-year-old Homo species (SN: 6/2/01, p. 346: http://www.sciencenews.org/20010602/bob14.asp).
However, the new results suggest that this dental sequence occurred more rapidly than in modern people, Dean holds.
Scientists had expected that H. erectus, the first fossil ancestor with body proportions and tooth sizes like those of modern people, grew relatively slowly. Yet using measurements of the fossil teeth, Dean's group determined the time needed for tooth formation. The results indicate early and rapid growth for the teeth of H. erectus and earlier Homo species. For example, the first permanent molar, which erupts at around
6 years in modern humans and at about 3� years in apes, erupted between 4 and 4� years in H. erectus, Dean says.
The new study included teeth from a juvenile H. erectus skeleton found in Kenya and dating to 1.5 million years ago. Many researchers regard this boy, who was 5 feet 3 inches tall, as having been close to 12 years old. Evidence of more-rapid dental growth in H. erectus now places this boy at closer to 8 years old when he died, according to Dean. The earliest evidence for slower tooth growth appeared in a 100,000-year-old Neandertal specimen from an Israeli site, he adds.
A slowing of dental growth may have contributed to a tendency for the skulls of H. sapiens adults to look like larger versions of juvenile H. erectus skulls, comments anthropologist Susan C. Anton of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Even with refined theories about tooth growth throughout human evolution, she says the developmental picture for H. erectus remains fuzzy.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Tooth growth may have proceeded at varying paces in far-flung H. erectus groups, Anton suggests. For instance, African and Asian H. erectus specimens display shape differences in their skulls and teeth that may reflect disparities in the timing of enamel growth, Anton says.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Nonetheless, it's now clear that the thick tooth enamel in H. sapiens develops more slowly than comparably thick tooth enamel in our ancient ancestors grew, remarks Italian anthropologist Jacopo Moggi-Cecchi of the University of Florence.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Monday, December 22, 2008
engel 5.0020 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Does psychotherapy work?
Depends on what you mean by “psychotherapy.” And by “work.”
The answer matters. In trying to ascend from (as Freud once put it) “hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness,” millions of Americans attend weekly therapy sessions of myriad kinds, at costs that can exceed $10,000 a year. Large professional edifices — psychiatry, psychology, social work, among others — are constructed atop the notion that psychotherapy works. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com If it were to be conclusively demonstrated that therapy doesn’t work, therapists would be put out of business; that’s effectively what’s already happened to Freudian psychoanalysts.
Jonathan Engel, a professor of health care policy at Baruch College, begins “American Therapy” by asserting: “Psychotherapy works. Multiple studies conducted over the past half-century have demonstrated that two-thirds of people who engage in psychotherapy improve.” http://sheehan.myblogsite.com But then, intentionally or not, he dedicates the better part of this fascinating book to complicating that proposition.
For starters, there’s that one-third of patients who don’t get better with psychotherapy; by definition, it doesn’t work for them. And then, perhaps more damningly, there’s the one-third of patients who have been consistently shown to get better without any treatment at all.
And then there’s this: a survey published in the early 1970s found that whereas a majority (59 percent) of people who had visited a professional psychotherapist for mental distress reported having been “helped” or “helped a lot” by the consultation, much larger majorities of people who had consulted a clergyman (78 percent) or a physician without specialized psychological training (76 percent) or — get this — a lawyer (77 percent) reported the same thing. Of course, psychotherapy did develop some pretty wacky offshoots in the 1970s — primal scream therapy, rebirthing therapy and Z-therapy (which seems to have involved, among other things, poking and tickling the patient) — so maybe it’s not surprising that people got more psychic relief from their lawyers than their therapists. But while a 1974 paper by a Johns Hopkins psychiatrist criticized the “charlatans” who “preyed on the gullible and the self-deluded,” these kooky therapies were actually surprisingly effective; many of the patients who underwent them reported themselves cured. This would certainly seem to undermine the claims of mainstream professional psychotherapy to specialized knowledge of any particular usefulness. If someone can poke and tickle a neurotic patient to health, why should an aspiring psychotherapist bother to get a graduate degree? Is psychotherapy just a high-priced placebo?
Engel describes an experiment that seems to have been animated by these very questions. In 1979, a Vanderbilt University researcher named Hans Strupp divided 30 patients with psychological problems into two groups, one to be treated by trained psychotherapists, the other by humanities professors with no psychological expertise. The result? The two groups reported improvement at the same rates. “Effective psychotherapy,” Engel writes, “seemed to require little more than a willing patient and an intelligent and understanding counselor who met and spoke regularly and in confidence.”
A University of Pennsylvania study found that the most successful therapists — regardless of whether they were Freudians or behaviorists, cognitive therapists or Z-therapists — were honest and empathic and connected quickly and well with other people. (Krupp’s humanities professors may have fared so well because they were chosen based on how well likedthey were.) Studies like Krupp’s rattled the foundations of the field and, as Engel puts it, “shook therapists’ confidence in their own rectitude.” But, as Engel takes pains to remind us, if twice as many distressed people improve with therapy as without it — as studies consistently show — those are still pretty good odds for psychotherapy.
The question of effectiveness is only incidental to Engel’s main goal, which is to tell the story of how, over the course of less than 100 years, psychotherapy went from being an obscure treatment for upper-middle-class Jews in fin-de-siècleVienna to being a staple of mainstream American medical practice and a fixture of our popular culture. Mining both medical journals and the popular press, Engel spins a richly textured tale of psychotherapy’s rise.
Naturally, the story begins with Freud, a thoroughly unlikely candidate to become the progenitor of anything distinctly American. He visited the United States only once, in 1909, and found the country rather barbaric. Practical-minded Americans, for their part, would not seem to have provided a receptive audience for his arcane theory of mind, with its id, ego and superego, and its references to Oedipal crises, castration complexes and penis envy. But the most eminent American psychologists of the day — G. Stanley Hall at Clark University, James Jackson Putnam at Harvard, Adolf Meyer at Johns Hopkins and, later, Harry Stack Sullivan, of the Washington School of Psychiatry, among others — embraced and promoted Freudian theory. Psychoanalysis, Engel observes, “seemed to be compatible with a strain in the American zeitgeist,” and the psychoanalytic establishment here “rigidly stood by the Freudian canon for decades” after his death.
For several decades after Freud’s visit to America, psychotherapy remained at the margins of American culture; mental illness was still a little discussed, and highly stigmatized, phenomenon. World War II changed that: when 12 percent of draftees — nearly two million men — were rejected for “neuropsychiatric” reasons, it profoundly altered the American perception of mental illness; psychiatric problems became, in some sense, normal. William Menninger, who was serving as chief psychiatrist of the United States Army, noted that “people are beginning to see that damage of the same kind can be done by a bullet, bacteria or mother-in-law.” After the war, terms like “repression” and “inferiority complex” began cropping up in movies and best-selling novels. “Where the public once turned to the minister, or the captain of industry, or the historian or the scientist,” one social critic observed, “it is now turning more and more to the psychiatrist.” http://sheehan.myblogsite.com (Engel writes about the fascinating battle lines drawn between psychiatrists and the clergy during this time, with their diametrically opposed notions of guilt.)
When Time magazine put Freud on its cover in April 1956, the psychoanalytic moment in America had arrived, and for the next several decades psychoanalysts largely dominated the mental health field. But even as Freudians occupied the top echelons in the psychiatric institutes and the medical school residency programs, and the psychoanalytic idiom was tightly woven into the culture, more and more studies were calling into question the effectiveness of the psychoanalytic enterprise. In 1975, the behavioral psychologist Hans Eysenck declared (controversially) that “Freudian theory is as dead as that attributing neurotic symptoms to demonological influences, and his method of therapy is following exorcism into oblivion.”
The death warrant may actually have been written earlier, in the 1950s, on the first prescriptions for Thorazine, an antipsychotic medication so effective that it became known as “the drug which emptied the hospitals.” Though Freud himself anticipated the age of biological psychiatry (in 1938, he wrote “the future may teach us to exercise a direct influence, by means of particular chemical substances, on the amounts of energy and their distribution in the mental apparatus”), the realization that drugs could so successfully treat some forms of mental illness thoroughly discombobulated the psychoanalytic profession. If drugs worked, that implied an organic, or medical, basis for neurosis, which in turn challenged some of the basic assumptions of psychoanalytically oriented therapy. If mental illness was due to some physical anomaly in the brain, wasn’t the best way to treat the illness by directly addressing that anomaly, with a pill? By the mid-1960s, the psychiatric establishment was moving definitively in a pharmaceutically oriented direction.
Meanwhile, the advent of even better drugs like Prozac (which went on the market in 1987), and the proliferation of cognitive therapies, in which the patient works with a therapist in a focused way to change maladaptive ways of thinking, further diminished Freud’s standing; repeated controlled studies clearly showed both drug and cognitive therapies to be effective in ways that psychoanalysis, with its hours on the couch, has not been shown to be.Though some Freudian analysts continue to practice today, Engel writes, they resemble “nothing more than a fanatical Essene sect, living apart in the wilderness where they could continue to seek truth in the master’s writings.”
Engel describes how factors like changes in the structure of health insurance shaped (and often distorted) psychiatric care, and his book is studded with fascinating tidbits like this one: in the mid-1960s, two buildings on the corner of 96th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan had as many analysts as Minnesota, Oregon, Delaware, Oklahoma, Vermont, Wisconsin and Tennessee combined.
Engel gestures at, but doesn’t directly address, some of the most interesting questions prompted by the rise of psychotherapy. Is the enormous growth of the field over the last century simply a case of supply surging to meet demand, or does the volume of neurosis fluctuate over the years? Are anxiety and alienation always symptoms to be treated, or are they sometimes appropriate — even healthy — responses to the vicissitudes of late modernity? Is psychotherapy an art or a science, a subcategory of humanism or of biology?
But the story Engel does tell is plenty interesting and his conflicted view of Freudianism well worth absorbing: the most influential school of therapy in American history may not have worked very well as a treatment — but it did revolutionize how we think about the human mind. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Depends on what you mean by “psychotherapy.” And by “work.”
The answer matters. In trying to ascend from (as Freud once put it) “hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness,” millions of Americans attend weekly therapy sessions of myriad kinds, at costs that can exceed $10,000 a year. Large professional edifices — psychiatry, psychology, social work, among others — are constructed atop the notion that psychotherapy works. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com If it were to be conclusively demonstrated that therapy doesn’t work, therapists would be put out of business; that’s effectively what’s already happened to Freudian psychoanalysts.
Jonathan Engel, a professor of health care policy at Baruch College, begins “American Therapy” by asserting: “Psychotherapy works. Multiple studies conducted over the past half-century have demonstrated that two-thirds of people who engage in psychotherapy improve.” http://sheehan.myblogsite.com But then, intentionally or not, he dedicates the better part of this fascinating book to complicating that proposition.
For starters, there’s that one-third of patients who don’t get better with psychotherapy; by definition, it doesn’t work for them. And then, perhaps more damningly, there’s the one-third of patients who have been consistently shown to get better without any treatment at all.
And then there’s this: a survey published in the early 1970s found that whereas a majority (59 percent) of people who had visited a professional psychotherapist for mental distress reported having been “helped” or “helped a lot” by the consultation, much larger majorities of people who had consulted a clergyman (78 percent) or a physician without specialized psychological training (76 percent) or — get this — a lawyer (77 percent) reported the same thing. Of course, psychotherapy did develop some pretty wacky offshoots in the 1970s — primal scream therapy, rebirthing therapy and Z-therapy (which seems to have involved, among other things, poking and tickling the patient) — so maybe it’s not surprising that people got more psychic relief from their lawyers than their therapists. But while a 1974 paper by a Johns Hopkins psychiatrist criticized the “charlatans” who “preyed on the gullible and the self-deluded,” these kooky therapies were actually surprisingly effective; many of the patients who underwent them reported themselves cured. This would certainly seem to undermine the claims of mainstream professional psychotherapy to specialized knowledge of any particular usefulness. If someone can poke and tickle a neurotic patient to health, why should an aspiring psychotherapist bother to get a graduate degree? Is psychotherapy just a high-priced placebo?
Engel describes an experiment that seems to have been animated by these very questions. In 1979, a Vanderbilt University researcher named Hans Strupp divided 30 patients with psychological problems into two groups, one to be treated by trained psychotherapists, the other by humanities professors with no psychological expertise. The result? The two groups reported improvement at the same rates. “Effective psychotherapy,” Engel writes, “seemed to require little more than a willing patient and an intelligent and understanding counselor who met and spoke regularly and in confidence.”
A University of Pennsylvania study found that the most successful therapists — regardless of whether they were Freudians or behaviorists, cognitive therapists or Z-therapists — were honest and empathic and connected quickly and well with other people. (Krupp’s humanities professors may have fared so well because they were chosen based on how well likedthey were.) Studies like Krupp’s rattled the foundations of the field and, as Engel puts it, “shook therapists’ confidence in their own rectitude.” But, as Engel takes pains to remind us, if twice as many distressed people improve with therapy as without it — as studies consistently show — those are still pretty good odds for psychotherapy.
The question of effectiveness is only incidental to Engel’s main goal, which is to tell the story of how, over the course of less than 100 years, psychotherapy went from being an obscure treatment for upper-middle-class Jews in fin-de-siècleVienna to being a staple of mainstream American medical practice and a fixture of our popular culture. Mining both medical journals and the popular press, Engel spins a richly textured tale of psychotherapy’s rise.
Naturally, the story begins with Freud, a thoroughly unlikely candidate to become the progenitor of anything distinctly American. He visited the United States only once, in 1909, and found the country rather barbaric. Practical-minded Americans, for their part, would not seem to have provided a receptive audience for his arcane theory of mind, with its id, ego and superego, and its references to Oedipal crises, castration complexes and penis envy. But the most eminent American psychologists of the day — G. Stanley Hall at Clark University, James Jackson Putnam at Harvard, Adolf Meyer at Johns Hopkins and, later, Harry Stack Sullivan, of the Washington School of Psychiatry, among others — embraced and promoted Freudian theory. Psychoanalysis, Engel observes, “seemed to be compatible with a strain in the American zeitgeist,” and the psychoanalytic establishment here “rigidly stood by the Freudian canon for decades” after his death.
For several decades after Freud’s visit to America, psychotherapy remained at the margins of American culture; mental illness was still a little discussed, and highly stigmatized, phenomenon. World War II changed that: when 12 percent of draftees — nearly two million men — were rejected for “neuropsychiatric” reasons, it profoundly altered the American perception of mental illness; psychiatric problems became, in some sense, normal. William Menninger, who was serving as chief psychiatrist of the United States Army, noted that “people are beginning to see that damage of the same kind can be done by a bullet, bacteria or mother-in-law.” After the war, terms like “repression” and “inferiority complex” began cropping up in movies and best-selling novels. “Where the public once turned to the minister, or the captain of industry, or the historian or the scientist,” one social critic observed, “it is now turning more and more to the psychiatrist.” http://sheehan.myblogsite.com (Engel writes about the fascinating battle lines drawn between psychiatrists and the clergy during this time, with their diametrically opposed notions of guilt.)
When Time magazine put Freud on its cover in April 1956, the psychoanalytic moment in America had arrived, and for the next several decades psychoanalysts largely dominated the mental health field. But even as Freudians occupied the top echelons in the psychiatric institutes and the medical school residency programs, and the psychoanalytic idiom was tightly woven into the culture, more and more studies were calling into question the effectiveness of the psychoanalytic enterprise. In 1975, the behavioral psychologist Hans Eysenck declared (controversially) that “Freudian theory is as dead as that attributing neurotic symptoms to demonological influences, and his method of therapy is following exorcism into oblivion.”
The death warrant may actually have been written earlier, in the 1950s, on the first prescriptions for Thorazine, an antipsychotic medication so effective that it became known as “the drug which emptied the hospitals.” Though Freud himself anticipated the age of biological psychiatry (in 1938, he wrote “the future may teach us to exercise a direct influence, by means of particular chemical substances, on the amounts of energy and their distribution in the mental apparatus”), the realization that drugs could so successfully treat some forms of mental illness thoroughly discombobulated the psychoanalytic profession. If drugs worked, that implied an organic, or medical, basis for neurosis, which in turn challenged some of the basic assumptions of psychoanalytically oriented therapy. If mental illness was due to some physical anomaly in the brain, wasn’t the best way to treat the illness by directly addressing that anomaly, with a pill? By the mid-1960s, the psychiatric establishment was moving definitively in a pharmaceutically oriented direction.
Meanwhile, the advent of even better drugs like Prozac (which went on the market in 1987), and the proliferation of cognitive therapies, in which the patient works with a therapist in a focused way to change maladaptive ways of thinking, further diminished Freud’s standing; repeated controlled studies clearly showed both drug and cognitive therapies to be effective in ways that psychoanalysis, with its hours on the couch, has not been shown to be.Though some Freudian analysts continue to practice today, Engel writes, they resemble “nothing more than a fanatical Essene sect, living apart in the wilderness where they could continue to seek truth in the master’s writings.”
Engel describes how factors like changes in the structure of health insurance shaped (and often distorted) psychiatric care, and his book is studded with fascinating tidbits like this one: in the mid-1960s, two buildings on the corner of 96th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan had as many analysts as Minnesota, Oregon, Delaware, Oklahoma, Vermont, Wisconsin and Tennessee combined.
Engel gestures at, but doesn’t directly address, some of the most interesting questions prompted by the rise of psychotherapy. Is the enormous growth of the field over the last century simply a case of supply surging to meet demand, or does the volume of neurosis fluctuate over the years? Are anxiety and alienation always symptoms to be treated, or are they sometimes appropriate — even healthy — responses to the vicissitudes of late modernity? Is psychotherapy an art or a science, a subcategory of humanism or of biology?
But the story Engel does tell is plenty interesting and his conflicted view of Freudianism well worth absorbing: the most influential school of therapy in American history may not have worked very well as a treatment — but it did revolutionize how we think about the human mind. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
secret 5.sec.002005 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Fifteen years ago, scientists at the National Institutes of Health reported that malformed prions—proteins that can trigger lethal illnesses including mad cow disease—remain on soil surfaces for at least 3 years. Now, scientists report why rain doesn't flush away the prions: The proteins bind almost irreversibly to clay. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com
In fact, clay can "retain up to its own mass of ... prion proteins," says Peggy Rigou of the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA) in Jouy-en-Josas, France. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com
Her team added sheep prions to pure clay, sandy soil, and loam. Positively charged parts of the protein molecules bound to the negatively charged surface of the clay that was present in all the soil samples. Extensive washing failed to dislodge the prions. However, when the chemists treated the mixtures to make the proteins negatively charged and then ran an electric current through each mixture, the prions migrated off the clay particles.http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
Freeing the prions was a major achievement, Rigou notes, because it enables scientists for the first time to measure prion concentrations in soil. Until now, no technique could confirm that intact prions were present in soil. In an upcoming Environmental Science & Technology, her team reports that the new procedure permits detection of concentrations as low as 0.2 part per billion.
Soils might acquire prions from animal wastes or carcasses. Scientists' concern is that livestock might ingest infected clay particles while eating grass or drinking from mud puddles, Rigou says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
In fact, clay can "retain up to its own mass of ... prion proteins," says Peggy Rigou of the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA) in Jouy-en-Josas, France. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com
Her team added sheep prions to pure clay, sandy soil, and loam. Positively charged parts of the protein molecules bound to the negatively charged surface of the clay that was present in all the soil samples. Extensive washing failed to dislodge the prions. However, when the chemists treated the mixtures to make the proteins negatively charged and then ran an electric current through each mixture, the prions migrated off the clay particles.http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
Freeing the prions was a major achievement, Rigou notes, because it enables scientists for the first time to measure prion concentrations in soil. Until now, no technique could confirm that intact prions were present in soil. In an upcoming Environmental Science & Technology, her team reports that the new procedure permits detection of concentrations as low as 0.2 part per billion.
Soils might acquire prions from animal wastes or carcasses. Scientists' concern is that livestock might ingest infected clay particles while eating grass or drinking from mud puddles, Rigou says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
rockies 44.roc.22299991 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Climate change expected to occur in the coming decades may cause forests in northern stretches of the U.S. Rockies to stop absorbing carbon dioxide and even to release some to the atmosphere, exacerbating the planet's warming.
Trees pull carbon dioxide from the air as they grow. Much of the carbon from that gas is stored in wood and foliage, but some ends up in material littering the forest floor and in the underlying soil. From there, it can make its way back into general circulation, says Céline Boisvenue, an ecologist at the University of Montana in Missoula. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
She and her colleague Steven W. Running used computer models to estimate how three climate-change scenarios might affect carbon storage at forest sites in Idaho, western Montana, and northwestern Wyoming.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
The good news: By 2089, the growing season in the forests will be at least 3 weeks longer than it was in 1950. The bad news: Over that same period, higher temperatures will cause the trees to suffer water stress—slowing or stopping their growth—for an additional 8 weeks each year. Even under a climate scenario with higher precipitation than at present, trees will have insufficient water for 54 more days each year in 2089 than they did in 1950.
By the year 2020, under a scenario with reduced precipitation, dieback of trees and decomposition of leaf litter at three of the six studied sites will cause the forests to emit more carbon dioxide than they absorb. By the year 2070, the forests at five of those sites will be net producers of carbon, says Boisvenue. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Trees pull carbon dioxide from the air as they grow. Much of the carbon from that gas is stored in wood and foliage, but some ends up in material littering the forest floor and in the underlying soil. From there, it can make its way back into general circulation, says Céline Boisvenue, an ecologist at the University of Montana in Missoula. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
She and her colleague Steven W. Running used computer models to estimate how three climate-change scenarios might affect carbon storage at forest sites in Idaho, western Montana, and northwestern Wyoming.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
The good news: By 2089, the growing season in the forests will be at least 3 weeks longer than it was in 1950. The bad news: Over that same period, higher temperatures will cause the trees to suffer water stress—slowing or stopping their growth—for an additional 8 weeks each year. Even under a climate scenario with higher precipitation than at present, trees will have insufficient water for 54 more days each year in 2089 than they did in 1950.
By the year 2020, under a scenario with reduced precipitation, dieback of trees and decomposition of leaf litter at three of the six studied sites will cause the forests to emit more carbon dioxide than they absorb. By the year 2070, the forests at five of those sites will be net producers of carbon, says Boisvenue. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
nanoparticles 99.nan.00003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Bacteria found lurking in the bowels of an abandoned Wisconsin mine might have a role in cleaning up toxic metals. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO A new study shows that these bacteria make compounds that cement minute metallic particles into balls that naturally drop out of contaminated water.
As part of their metabolic cycles, certain bacteria that live in watery, oxygenfree environments take up one type of sulfur-containing chemical, a sulfate, and transform it into another type, a sulfide, that they then release. The sulfide binds to metals dissolved in water to form nanoparticles.
John Moreau of the U.S. Geological Survey in Middleton, Wis., and his colleagues studied the activity of such bacteria in a flooded lead-and-zinc mine. They discovered that zinc sulfide nanoparticles "were being scooped up and glommed together into spheroids," he says. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
The larger spheroids tend to settle out long before they get into the water supply.
The researchers found that, by weight, proteinlike material formed 10 to 15 percent of the metal spheroids. In lab tests, zinc sulfide nanoparticles clumped when placed in contact with the amino acid cysteine, a protein component. The team reports its findings in the June 15 Science. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
Scientists had previously come across metal spheroids in other oxygen-deprived environments and had proposed that heat, pressure, or magnetism might have formed the balls. Moreau and his colleagues now say that the bacteria can do double duty, creating a sulfide that leads to nanoparticle formation as well as making the proteinlike compounds that appear to promote nanoparticle clumping. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
As part of their metabolic cycles, certain bacteria that live in watery, oxygenfree environments take up one type of sulfur-containing chemical, a sulfate, and transform it into another type, a sulfide, that they then release. The sulfide binds to metals dissolved in water to form nanoparticles.
John Moreau of the U.S. Geological Survey in Middleton, Wis., and his colleagues studied the activity of such bacteria in a flooded lead-and-zinc mine. They discovered that zinc sulfide nanoparticles "were being scooped up and glommed together into spheroids," he says. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
The larger spheroids tend to settle out long before they get into the water supply.
The researchers found that, by weight, proteinlike material formed 10 to 15 percent of the metal spheroids. In lab tests, zinc sulfide nanoparticles clumped when placed in contact with the amino acid cysteine, a protein component. The team reports its findings in the June 15 Science. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
Scientists had previously come across metal spheroids in other oxygen-deprived environments and had proposed that heat, pressure, or magnetism might have formed the balls. Moreau and his colleagues now say that the bacteria can do double duty, creating a sulfide that leads to nanoparticle formation as well as making the proteinlike compounds that appear to promote nanoparticle clumping. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
wilson 88.wil.44413 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
One of the century’s most influential scientists and thinkers, Edward O. Wilson first came to widespread attention with the publication of his landmark book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com In it he describes sociobiology as “the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior.” The work’s most debated tenet was that all human behavior is ultimately genetically based—or, as Wilson once put it, that “genes hold culture on a leash.” Extremely influential and wildly controversial, Sociobiology changed the way animal and human behavior was researched and viewed. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com In fact, with this work Wilson accomplished what few scientists before him had done: He created a new paradigm of science. A recipient of the National Medal of Science and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, Wilson began his scientific life as an authority on ants and later turned his attention to the welfare of the entire living world. In works such as The Diversity of Life (1992), Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), and The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (2006), he pleads for a union of science, religion, and the humanities to protect the biodiversity on which all earthly life depends.
An appreciation of Wilson by Richard Machalek, sociobiologist, University of Wyoming:
Once, on a visit to San Antonio, Texas, Ed Wilson asked me to take him to the Alamo, that iconic old mission now famous as the site of a desperate battle for independence waged by “Texians” and Tejanos against a powerful Mexican army. Upon entering the sanctum, Wilson approached and leaned over a diorama depicting the battle in miniature. After closely scrutinizing the lines drawn by the toy soldiers as if they were ants, Wilson straightened up and in sad resignation commented, “The poor devils never stood a chance.” http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com
A career devoted to close observation of miniature lives has endowed this world-class scientist with the following inclinations: His gaze is drawn routinely not to the panoramic but to the minute, in which he sees elemental structures and processes comprising the basic ingredients of life. He is never content with knowing only what the books say but rather is determined, whenever possible, to go on-site to probe the fortresses of orthodoxy so as to see what might crumble and collapse. And he has become an inveterate disturber of the intellectual peace who has shown us with crystal clarity that any effort to fathom the human condition, absent an understanding of our place in nature, is doomed. This is Ed Wilson, Lord of the Ants, who has changed forever both our understanding of human nature and the fragile biosphere in which it evolved. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
An appreciation of Wilson by Richard Machalek, sociobiologist, University of Wyoming:
Once, on a visit to San Antonio, Texas, Ed Wilson asked me to take him to the Alamo, that iconic old mission now famous as the site of a desperate battle for independence waged by “Texians” and Tejanos against a powerful Mexican army. Upon entering the sanctum, Wilson approached and leaned over a diorama depicting the battle in miniature. After closely scrutinizing the lines drawn by the toy soldiers as if they were ants, Wilson straightened up and in sad resignation commented, “The poor devils never stood a chance.” http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com
A career devoted to close observation of miniature lives has endowed this world-class scientist with the following inclinations: His gaze is drawn routinely not to the panoramic but to the minute, in which he sees elemental structures and processes comprising the basic ingredients of life. He is never content with knowing only what the books say but rather is determined, whenever possible, to go on-site to probe the fortresses of orthodoxy so as to see what might crumble and collapse. And he has become an inveterate disturber of the intellectual peace who has shown us with crystal clarity that any effort to fathom the human condition, absent an understanding of our place in nature, is doomed. This is Ed Wilson, Lord of the Ants, who has changed forever both our understanding of human nature and the fragile biosphere in which it evolved. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
molten 55.molt.1 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
A new approach for breaking down cellulose could improve prospects for energy-efficient biofuels, researchers report.http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
Although making biofuels from the cellulose in cell walls of switchgrass or wood chips should require less energy than making corn-based ethanol, finding efficient ways to degrade cellulose has been difficult.
But molten salts can help break down the tough, energy-containing cellulose molecules without creating unwanted by-products, researchers said Monday at the World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioprocessing in Chicago.
The process “gives a much cleaner biomass than we’ve seen with these other processes,” said Jay Keasling of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “It looks really promising.”
Keasling heads the Joint BioEnergy Institute, one of three biofuel research centers funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Existing techniques use strong acids or high temperatures to start degrading cellulose into simple sugars, but these methods also produce toxic chemical by-products. For reasons that aren’t well understood, those unwanted chemicals inhibit the microbes that ferment the sugars into fuels, thus reducing yields.
“It’s a good potential use because molten salts are such strong and unique solvents,” comments Bruce Hammock, an agricultural biotechnology researcher who has worked with molten salts at the University of California, Davis.
Also called ionic liquids, molten salts consist almost entirely of electrically charged atoms or molecules called ions. The electrostatic forces exerted by these charged particles make the liquids exceptionally good for dissolving a wide range of substances.
The liquid “completely disrupts the crystalline structure of the cellulose,” says Blake Simmons, a biochemical engineer at JBEI and leader of the group performing the research. The resulting amorphous structure “is much easier to break down into glucose,” a simple sugar.http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
Chemists have studied ionic liquids as a “green” alternative to other industrial solvents for years, but Simmons says research on using ionic liquids to help break down plant matter for making fuels began only a few months ago.
Although making biofuels from the cellulose in cell walls of switchgrass or wood chips should require less energy than making corn-based ethanol, finding efficient ways to degrade cellulose has been difficult.
But molten salts can help break down the tough, energy-containing cellulose molecules without creating unwanted by-products, researchers said Monday at the World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioprocessing in Chicago.
The process “gives a much cleaner biomass than we’ve seen with these other processes,” said Jay Keasling of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “It looks really promising.”
Keasling heads the Joint BioEnergy Institute, one of three biofuel research centers funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Existing techniques use strong acids or high temperatures to start degrading cellulose into simple sugars, but these methods also produce toxic chemical by-products. For reasons that aren’t well understood, those unwanted chemicals inhibit the microbes that ferment the sugars into fuels, thus reducing yields.
“It’s a good potential use because molten salts are such strong and unique solvents,” comments Bruce Hammock, an agricultural biotechnology researcher who has worked with molten salts at the University of California, Davis.
Also called ionic liquids, molten salts consist almost entirely of electrically charged atoms or molecules called ions. The electrostatic forces exerted by these charged particles make the liquids exceptionally good for dissolving a wide range of substances.
The liquid “completely disrupts the crystalline structure of the cellulose,” says Blake Simmons, a biochemical engineer at JBEI and leader of the group performing the research. The resulting amorphous structure “is much easier to break down into glucose,” a simple sugar.http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
Chemists have studied ionic liquids as a “green” alternative to other industrial solvents for years, but Simmons says research on using ionic liquids to help break down plant matter for making fuels began only a few months ago.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
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It’s a tough time to be an African elephant. Despite an international ban on ivory trading, the animals are being slaughtered for their tusks at a greater rate today than before the ban was enacted in 1989. At the same time, scientists are learning that the traumatic effects of the deaths of close relatives — especially for female elephants — may echo throughout the fragmented families for decades.
“These solitary females just finally had daughters — they’re trying to raise families. And they are just going to get mowed down again,” says Kathleen Gobush, lead author of a new study that examines the long-term effects of poaching.
In the decade before the ivory ban, the number of African elephants plummeted from roughly 1.3 million to fewer than 600,000. There was a hue and cry from the public and, for a few years, the ban seemed to keep things in check. But then funding for wildlife law enforcement dropped and roads for logging and drilling opened vast, previously impenetrable tracts of the forest to poachers.
“Poaching is the worst in history right now,” says Samuel K. Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Before the ban, about 7.4 percent of animals were killed for their tusks each year. Estimates suggest that the annual rate is now 8 percent, which could bring African elephants close to extinction by 2020.
Scientists are documenting poaching’s lasting effects and, at the same time, making headway with forensics research that may help thwart poachers.
“Elephants are extremely important to ecosystems in Africa. They manipulate habitat, they keep savannahs, savannahs,” Wasser says. Implications for ecosystems and ecotourism aside, “when you reduce the elephant population it is hugely disruptive to their social structure and physiological health — and it takes a huge amount of time to recover.”
Two new studies document the toll of those disruptions. One, published online in Conservation Biology and based on Gobush’s dissertation work in Wasser’s lab, looks at the family structure, stress hormone levels and reproductive output of more than 200 female elephants in Mikumi National Park in Tanzania. This area lost an estimated 75 percent of its elephants to poaching before the ivory ban. Adult males and large adult females were the poachers’ first targets. Typically, 6 percent of populations are tuskless, due to a genetic quirk. That number has been boosted by selective poaching — today in Mikumi about 15 percent are tuskless.
Elephants have intricate social networks, dominated by female matriarchs, explains Joyce Poole, who studied the Mikumi population before the ban. The females and young males generally travel and live in groups. When group members do spend time away from each other, reunions are marked by “greeting ceremonies,” which entail throat rumbles, rapid ear flapping and a clanging of tusks.
The older females — African elephants can live to about 65 — are “the glue that holds the family together,” says Poole, the research and conservation director for ElephantVoices, which has projects in Kenya and Sri Lanka. Faced with a threat, younger elephants turn to the matriarch to determine if they should fight or flee. Daughters typically stay with their moms their whole lives.
Gobush, now with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, examined more than 100 of these family groups; about 59 percent had an old matriarch. The families were roughly distributed among six populations, each centered around a watering hole. Four areas were designated high-risk, having been poached heavily in the past. Those areas were farthest from park headquarters but close to park boundaries. Two populations lived in areas designated low-risk.
Analysis of fecal hormone levels and DNA revealed that female elephants in groups lacking a matriarch or closely related relatives had higher levels of stress hormones known as glucocorticoids. The spiked hormone levels were especially pronounced in elephants dwelling in areas where past poaching was greatest. Females from these disrupted groups were also less likely to be pregnant or have an infant.
“If you are in a high-risk area and you lack family — that solid group unit — that’s when you’re in trouble,” says Gobush.
The findings suggest disruption of a family group is a chronic stress condition for African elephants, and can be further exacerbated by other disturbances, such as a lack of rain.
The new work also suggests that, “If the family is disrupted it is going to be 30 years before the family is intact again,” says biologist Susan Alberts of Duke University, who calls the results “very well-integrated.”
A separate study by Charles Foley of the Wildlife Conservation Society, and colleagues, investigated the survival of elephant calves during extreme drought. Fewer calves died in groups with an experienced mother. Old matriarchs appear to give a family group a survival edge, perhaps by remembering the location of distant water in hard times, the researchers reported in August in Biology Letters.
Elephants have a “tremendous interest in and awareness of death,” Wasser says. They will spend an inordinate amount of time sniffing bones, passing over non-elephant skeletons. Researchers have noted the similarities between teenage elephants and teenage humans experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. A team of researchers, including
Also, in a study of a park heavily affected by poaching, elephant-against-elephant aggression accounted for 90 percent of deaths, compared with 6 percent in unstressed areas, the team wrote in 2005 in Nature. These hyperaggressive males were probably orphaned by poaching, and witnessed the death of close relatives, the researchers wrote.
The dismal outlook of today results from a confluence of factors. Illegal wildlife trade has metastasized in this era of global trade, where customs officials typically inspect a mere 1 percent of shipping containers, Wasser says. Yet compared to drugs or weapons, wildlife trafficking is a low priority for law enforcement and thus low-risk for criminals.
A booming economy in China has led to increased demand for symbols of wealth, exemplified by the rising popularity of ivory “hankos,” personalized signature stamps that are akin to a family seal. Ivory knife and gun handles have become popular in Japan and some U.S. cities. Since 2004 the wholesale price of ivory has more than quadrupled from roughly $200 per kilogram to $850 per kilo in 2006, and retail has been as high as $6,500 per kilo, says Wasser.
“Law enforcement can’t win this fight — it is hopeless. Enforcement will admit that without batting an eye,” says Wasser.
A new analysis by Wasser and colleagues focuses on pinpointing the origins of several large seizures of tusks, hankos and ivory scraps. Using DNA from more than 600 reference samples, the analysis assigns the DNA to a geographic region in Africa. The work suggests that rather than collecting from a hodge-podge of sites, poachers hit the same hot spots over and over again, Wasser and colleagues report in August in Conservation Biology. Tracing the ivory back to source countries highlights areas for enforcement to target and forces these countries to acknowledge poaching problems, says Wasser.
Given the threats to African elephants, it may come as a surprise that some areas are considering culling, or killing elephants to decrease their numbers for wildlife management. This tactic has recently been proposed to deal with the elephants in Kruger National park, South Africa’s biggest wildlife preserve. Until recently the park was completely fenced in, artificially concentrating the elephants, says Rudi van Aarde, director of the Conservation Ecology Research Unit at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
Years of data collection on the dynamics of elephant populations suggest an alternative: connecting disparate areas via tracts of land allows the elephants room to roam. This approach may do more to control the impact of elephants than lowering their numbers with guns. These "megaparks" would allow elephants to disperse, mimicking the ecological circumstances in which they normally function.
"At first people said you must be crazy," says van Aarde. "Now they are saying tell us how to implement this."
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Monday, October 20, 2008
China health care 663.34 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
China has unveiled an ambitious plan to achieve universal health care. The plan, released for public debate last week, lays out in broad strokes plans to introduce greater health-care funding and control prices. The current system leaves out much of the population and forces the rest to pay heavy out-of-pocket expenses.
Overhauling China's health-care system has global significance, given the country's demographic heft, its frequent role as epicenter of infectious diseases and its growing importance in health innovations ranging from organ donation to the use of traditional Chinese medicine.
"What happens in China is a major driver in the dynamics of global health," said medical journal Lancet.
The overall goal of the plan is to cover 90% of the population within two years and achieve universal health care by 2020.
One major point in the draft is to return to the nonprofit motive for national health care. This was dismantled in the 1980s as China cut public services, especially in the countryside.
Today, public hospitals receive little government funding and are pressed to operate like businesses. The peddling of experimental, costly drugs and treatments has become rampant.
Out-of-pocket payments constituted more than 60% of health spending at the end of the 1990s in China, a significantly larger percentage than in developed countries, according to the World Health Organization.
The draft proposal was crafted in a year-long process of consultations with groups such as the World Health Organization, the World Bank, management consultancy McKinsey & Co. and a few Chinese university-based public health experts.
According to the plan, all revenue raised by public hospitals will have to be funneled to state coffers. The government aims to set pricing standards for medical services, according to the plan, reflecting broad nationalization of the health-care system. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
The proposal has drawn heavy criticism. The current draft "is also hard for experts to understand," said Gordon Liu, an economist at the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University. Robert Pollard, director of Synovate Healthcare, a Beijing-based medical consultancy, said the plan doesn't give sufficient details on funding and implementation. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
The plan doesn't address how the government would pay for its nationalization program if hospitals are restrained from earning more and tax collection mechanisms remain weak.
So far, the draft has drawn a large number of comments -- more than 12,000 -- on the state planning commission's Web site. http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
game 4443.poi Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
At the Tokyo Game Show today, a video game player strapped on a headset and, without touching a conventional video game controller, began to kill zombies–using only the power of his mind. Called “Judecca,” the PC game is a zombie-killing first-person-shooter, though it’s really just a proof of concept and not something that’s going to be available to consumers anytime soon [Fox News].
The game was produced by leading Japanese studio Square Enix and makes use of a brainwave-sensing headset from NeuroSky, a San Jose-based company that develops biometric sensors and similar products aimed at the consumer market [PC World]. NeuroSky’s “Mindset” device looks like a big pair of headphones with a single electrode that wraps around to tap the wearer’s forehead; the company says the device uses electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the current state of relaxation or concentration of players.
The game made its debut at the Game Show today, and the first reports are coming in from bloggers who tried the system and figured out how to use the headset to wreak havoc on the zombie world. After holding up your hand, you then concentrate on a glyph that glows in direct relation to your ability to concentrate, opening up what’s called your Devil’s Eye. Once you’re in a zen-like state, you can see Judecca’s zombies and unleash some kill. You can also show your concentration skills enough to walk through walls, naturally [Tech News Time].
Entertainment that makes use of recent developments in machine-brain connections seems sure to emerge in the coming decade. Square Enix hasn’t announced whether it will push forward to produce a commercial game with the technology, but NeuroSky has said that its Mindset is a simple, plug-and-play device that could be used in many different gaming systems. NeuroSky also recently had a competition for game concepts that would use the Mindset and would run on the Nintendo system. http://louis1j1sheehan.us
Monday, October 6, 2008
climate change 2 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. For a scientist studying climate change, “eureka” moments are unusually rare. Instead progress is generally made by a painstaking piecing together of evidence from every new temperature measurement, satellite sounding or climate-model experiment. Data get checked and rechecked, ideas tested over and over again. Do the observations fit the predicted changes? Could there be some alternative explanation? Good climate scientists, like all good scientists, want to ensure that the highest standards of proof apply to everything they discover.
And the evidence of change has mounted as climate records have grown longer, as our understanding of the climate system has improved and as climate models have become ever more reliable. Over the past 20 years, evidence that humans are affecting the climate has accumulated inexorably, and with it has come ever greater certainty across the scientific community in the reality of recent climate change and the potential for much greater change in the future. This increased certainty is starkly reflected in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the fourth in a series of assessments of the state of knowledge on the topic, written and reviewed by hundreds of scientists worldwide.
The panel released a condensed version of the first part of the report, on the physical science basis of climate change, in February. Called the “Summary for Policymakers,” it delivered to policymakers and ordinary people alike an unambiguous message: scientists are more confident than ever that humans have interfered with the climate and that further human-induced climate change is on the way. Although the report finds that some of these further changes are now inevitable, its analysis also confirms that the future, particularly in the longer term, remains largely in our hands—the magnitude of expected change depends on what humans choose to do about greenhouse gas emissions.
The physical science assessment focuses on four topics: drivers of climate change, changes observed in the climate system, understanding cause-and-effect relationships, and projection of future changes. Important advances in research into all these areas have occurred since the IPCC assessment in 2001. In the pages that follow, we lay out the key findings that document the extent of change and that point to the unavoidable conclusion that human activity is driving it.
Drivers of Climate Change
Atmospheric concentrations of many gases—primarily carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and halocarbons (gases once used widely as refrigerants and spray propellants)—have increased because of human activities. Such gases trap thermal energy (heat) within the atmosphere by means of the well-known greenhouse effect, leading to global warming. The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide remained roughly stable for nearly 10,000 years, before the abrupt and rapidly accelerating increases of the past 200 years. Growth rates for concentrations of carbon dioxide have been faster in the past 10 years than over any 10-year period since continuous atmospheric monitoring began in the 1950s, with concentrations now roughly 35 percent above preindustrial levels (which can be determined from air bubbles trapped in ice cores). Methane levels are roughly two and a half times preindustrial levels, and nitrous oxide levels are around 20 percent higher.
How can we be sure that humans are responsible for these increases? Some greenhouse gases (most of the halocarbons, for example) have no natural source. For other gases, two important observations demonstrate human influence. First, the geographic differences in concentrations reveal that sources occur predominantly over land in the more heavily populated Northern Hemisphere. Second, analysis of isotopes, which can distinguish among sources of emissions, demonstrates that the majority of the increase in carbon dioxide comes from combustion of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas). Methane and nitrous oxide increases derive from agricultural practices and the burning of fossil fuels.
Climate scientists use a concept called radiative forcing to quantify the effect of these increased concentrations on climate. Radiative forcing is the change that is caused in the global energy balance of the earth relative to preindustrial times. (Forcing is usually expressed as watts per square meter.) A positive forcing induces warming; a negative forcing induces cooling. We can determine the radiative forcing associated with the long-lived greenhouse gases fairly precisely, because we know their atmospheric concentrations, their spatial distribution and the physics of their interaction with radiation.
Climate change is not driven just by increased greenhouse gas concentrations; other mechanisms— both natural and human-induced—also play a part. Natural drivers include changes in solar activity and large volcanic eruptions. The report identifies several additional significant human-induced forcing mechanisms—microscopic particles called aerosols, stratospheric and tropospheric ozone, surface albedo (reflectivity) and aircraft contrails—although the influences of these mechanisms are much less certain than those of greenhouse gases.
Investigators are least certain of the climatic influence of something called the aerosol cloud albedo effect, in which aerosols from human origins interact with clouds in complex ways and make the clouds brighter, reflecting sunlight back to space. Another source of uncertainty comes from the direct effect of aerosols from human origins: How much do they reflect and absorb sunlight directly as particles? Overall these aerosol effects promote cooling that could offset the warming effect of long-lived greenhouse gases to some extent. But by how much? Could it overwhelm the warming? Among the advances achieved since the 2001 IPCC report is that scientists have quantified the uncertainties associated with each individual forcing mechanism through a combination of many modeling and observational studies. Consequently, we can now confidently estimate the total human- induced component. Our best estimate is some 10 times larger than the best estimate of the natural radiative forcing caused by changes in solar activity.
This increased certainty of a net positive radiative forcing fits well with the observational evidence of warming discussed next. These forcings can be visualized as a tug-of-war, with positive forcings pulling the earth to a warmer climate and negative ones pulling it to a cooler state. The result is a no contest; we know the strength of the competitors better than ever before. The earth is being pulled to a warmer climate and will be pulled increasingly in this direction as the “anchorman” of greenhouse warming continues to grow stronger and stronger.
Observed Climate Changes
The many new or improved observational data sets that became available in time for the 2007 IPCC report allowed a more comprehensive assessment of changes than was possible in earlier reports. Observational records indicate that 11 of the past 12 years are the warmest since reliable records began around 1850.
he odds of such warm years happening in sequence purely by chance are exceedingly small. Changes in three important quantities—global temperature, sea level and snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere—all show evidence of warming, although the details vary. The previous IPCC assessment reported a warming trend of 0.6 ± 0.2 degree Celsius over the period 1901 to 2000. Because of the strong recent warming, the updated trend over 1906 to 2005 is now 0.74 ± 0.18 degree C. Note that the 1956 to 2005 trend alone is 0.65 ± 0.15 degree C, emphasizing that the majority of 20th-century warming occurred in the past 50 years. The climate, of course, continues to vary around the increased averages, and extremes have changed consistently with these averages—frost days and cold days and nights have become less common, while heat waves and warm days and nights have become more common.
The properties of the climate system include not just familiar concepts of averages of temperature, precipitation, and so on but also the state of the ocean and the cryosphere (sea ice, the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, glaciers, snow, frozen ground, and ice on lakes and rivers). Complex interactions among different parts of the climate system are a fundamental part of climate change—for example, reduction in sea ice increases the absorption of heat by the ocean and the heat flow between the ocean and the atmosphere, which can also affect cloudiness and precipitation.
A large number of additional observations are broadly consistent with the observed warming and reflect a flow of heat from the atmosphere into other components of the climate system. Spring snow cover, which decreases in concert with rising spring temperatures in northern midlatitudes, dropped abruptly around 1988 and has remained low since. http://louis-j-sheehan.comThis drop is of concern because snow cover is important to soil moisture and water resources in many regions.
In the ocean, we clearly see warming trends, which decrease with depth, as expected. These changes indicate that the ocean has absorbed more than 80 percent of the heat added to the climate system: this heating is a major contributor to sea-level rise. Sea level rises because water expands as it is warmed and because water from melting glaciers and ice sheets is added to the oceans. Since 1993 satellite observations have permitted more precise calculations of global sea-level rise, now estimated to be 3.1 ± 0.7 millimeters per year over the period 1993 to 2003. Some previous decades displayed similarly fast rates, and longer satellite records will be needed to determine unambiguously whether sea-level rise is accelerating. Substantial reductions in the extent of Arctic sea ice since 1978 (2.7 ± 0.6 percent per decade in the annual average, 7.4 ± 2.4 percent per decade for summer), increases in permafrost temperatures and reductions in glacial extent globally and in Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have also been observed in recent decades. Unfortunately, many of these quantities were not well monitored until recent decades, so the starting points of their records vary. http://louis-j-sheehan.com
Hydrological changes are broadly consistent with warming as well. Water vapor is the strongest greenhouse gas; unlike other greenhouse gases, it is controlled principally by temperature. It has generally increased since at least the 1980s. Precipitation is very variable locally but has increased in several large regions of the world, including eastern North and South America, northern Europe, and northern and central Asia. Drying has been observed in the Sahel, the Mediterranean, southern Africa and parts of southern Asia. Ocean salinity can act as a massive rain gauge. Near-surface waters of the oceans have generally freshened in middle and high latitudes, while they have become saltier in lower latitudes, consistent with changes in large-scale patterns of precipitation.
Reconstructions of past climate—paleoclimate— from tree rings and other proxies provide important additional insights into the workings of the climate system with and without human influence. They indicate that the warmth of the past half a century is unusual in at least the previous 1,300 years. The warmest period between A.D. 700 and 1950 was probably A.D. 950 to 1100, which was several tenths of a degree C cooler than the average temperature since 1980.
Attribution of Observed Changes
Although confidence is high both that human activities have caused a positive radiative forcing and that the climate has actually changed, can we confidently link the two? This is the question of attribution: Are human activities primarily responsible for observed climate changes, or is it possible they result from some other cause, such as some natural forcing or simply spontaneous variability within the climate system? The 2001 IPCC report concluded it was likely (more than 66 percent probable) that most of the warming since the mid-20th century was attributable to humans. The 2007 report goes significantly further, upping this to very likely (more than 90 percent probable).
The source of the extra confidence comes from a multitude of separate advances. For a start, observational records are now roughly five years longer, and the global temperature increase over this period has been largely consistent with IPCC projections of greenhouse gas–driven warming made in previous reports dating back to 1990. In addition, changes in more aspects of the climate have been considered, such as those in atmospheric circulation or in temperatures within the ocean. Such changes paint a consistent and now broadened picture of human inter-vention. Climate models, which are central to attribution studies, have also improved and are able to represent the current climate and that of the recent past with considerable fidelity. Finally, some important apparent inconsistencies noted in the observational record have been largely resolved since the last report.
The most important of these was an apparent mismatch between the instrumental surface temperature record (which showed significant warming over recent decades, consistent with a human impact) and the balloon and satellite atmospheric records (which showed little of the expected warming). Several new studies of the satellite and balloon data have now largely resolved this discrepancy—with consistent warming found at the surface and in the atmosphere.
An experiment with the real world that duplicated the climate of the 20th century with constant (rather than increasing) greenhouse gases would be the ideal way to test for the cause of climate change, but such an experiment is of course impossible. So scientists do the next best thing: they simulate the past with climate models.
Two important advances since the last IPCC assessment have increased confidence in the use of models for both attribution and projection of climate changes. The first is the development of a comprehensive, closely coordinated ensemble of simulations from 18 modeling groups around the world for the historical and future evolution of the earth’s climate. Using many models helps to quantify the effects of uncertainties in various climate processes on the range of model simulations. Although some processes are well understood and well represented by physical equations (the flow of the atmosphere and ocean or the propagation of sunlight and heat, for example), some of the most critical components of the climate system are less well understood, such as clouds, ocean eddies and transpiration by vegetation. Modelers approximate these components using simplified representations called parameterizations. The principal reason to develop a multimodel ensemble for the IPCC assessments is to understand how this lack of certainty affects attribution and prediction of climate change. The ensemble for the latest assessment is unprecedented in the number of models and experiments performed.
The second advance is the incorporation of more realistic representations of climate processes in the models. These processes include the behavior of atmospheric aerosols, the dynamics (movement) of sea ice, and the exchange of water and energy between the land and the atmosphere. More models now include the major types of aerosols and the interactions between aerosols and clouds.
When scientists use climate models for attribution studies, they first run simulations with estimates of only “natural” climate influences over the past 100 years, such as changes in solar output and major volcanic eruptions. They then run models that include human-induced increases in greenhouse gases and aerosols. The results of such experiments are striking. Models using only natural forcings are unable to explain the observed global warming since the mid-20th century, whereas they can do so when they include anthropogenic factors in addition to natural ones. Large-scale patterns of tempera-ture change are also most consistent between models and observations when all forcings are included.
Two patterns provide a fingerprint of human influence. The first is greater warming over land than ocean and greater warming at the surface of the sea than in the deeper layers. This pattern is consistent with greenhouse gas–induced warming by the overlying atmosphere: the ocean warms more slowly because of its large thermal inertia. The warming also indicates that a large amount of heat is being taken up by the ocean, demonstrating that the planet’s energy budget has been pushed out of balance.
A second pattern of change is that while the troposphere (the lower region of the atmosphere) has warmed, the stratosphere, just above it, has cooled. If solar changes provided the dominant forcing, warming would be expected in both atmospheric layers. The observed contrast, however, is just that expected from the combination of greenhouse gas increases and stratospheric ozone decreases. This collective evidence, when subjected to careful statistical analyses, provides much of the basis for the increased confidence that human influences are behind the observed global warming. Suggestions that cosmic rays could affect clouds, and thereby climate, have been based on correlations using limited rec-ords; they have generally not stood up when tested with additional data, and their physical mechanisms remain speculative.
What about at smaller scales? As spatial and temporal scales decrease, attribution of climate change becomes more difficult. This problem arises because natural small-scale temperature variations are less “averaged out” and thus more readily mask the change signal. Nevertheless, continued warming means the signal is emerging on smaller scales. The report has found that human activity is likely to have influenced temperature significantly down to the continental scale for all continents except Antarctica.
Human influence is discernible also in some extreme events such as unusually hot and cold nights and the incidence of heat waves. This does not mean, of course, that individual extreme events (such as the 2003 European heat wave) can be said to be simply “caused” by human-induced climate change—usually such events are complex, with many causes. But it does mean that human activities have, more likely than not, affected the chances of such events occurring.
Projections of Future Changes
How will climate change over the 21st century? This critical question is addressed using simulations from climate models based on projections of future emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols. The simulations suggest that, for greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates, changes in climate will very likely be larger than the changes already observed during the 20th century. Even if emissions were immediately reduced enough to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at current levels, climate change would continue for centuries. This inertia in the climate results from a combination of factors. They include the heat capacity of the world’s oceans and the millennial timescales needed for the circulation to mix heat and carbon dioxide throughout the deep ocean and thereby come into equilibrium with the new conditions.
To be more specific, the models project that over the next 20 years, for a range of plausible emissions, the global temperature will increase at an average rate of about 0.2 degree C per decade, close to the observed rate over the past 30 years. About half of this near-term warming represents a “commitment” to future climate change arising from the inertia of the climate system response to current atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.
The long-term warming over the 21st century, however, is strongly influenced by the future rate of emissions, and the projections cover a wide variety of scenarios, ranging from very rapid to more modest economic growth and from more to less dependence on fossil fuels. The best estimates of the increase in global temperatures range from 1.8 to 4.0 degrees C for the various emission scenarios, with higher emissions leading to higher temperatures. As for regional impacts, projections indicate with more confidence than ever before that these will mirror the patterns of change observed over the past 50 years (greater warming over land than ocean, for example) but that the size of the changes will be larger than they have been so far.
The simulations also suggest that the removal of excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by natural processes on land and in the ocean will become less efficient as the planet warms. This change leads to a higher percentage of emitted carbon dioxide remaining in the atmosphere, which then further accelerates global warming. This is an important positive feedback on the carbon cycle (the exchange of carbon compounds throughout the climate system). Although models agree that carbon-cycle changes represent a positive feedback, the range of their responses remains very large, depending, among other things, on poorly understood changes in vegetation or soil uptake of carbon as the climate warms. Such processes are an important topic of ongoing research.
The models also predict that climate change will affect the physical and chemical characteristics of the ocean. The estimates of the rise in sea level during the 21st century range from about 30 to 40 centimeters, again depending on emissions. More than 60 percent of this rise is caused by the thermal expansion of the ocean. Yet these model-based estimates do not include the possible acceleration of recently observed increases in ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Although scientific understanding of such effects is very limited, they could add an additional 10 to 20 centimeters to sea-level rises, and the possibility of significantly larger rises cannot be excluded. The chemistry of the ocean is also affected, as the increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide will cause the ocean to become more acidic.
Some of the largest changes are predicted for polar regions. These include significant increases in high-latitude land temperatures and in the depth of thawing in permafrost regions and sharp reductions in the extent of summer sea ice in the Arctic basin. Lower latitudes will likely experience more heat waves, heavier precipitation, and stronger (but perhaps less frequent) hurricanes and typhoons. The extent to which hurricanes and typhoons may strengthen is uncertain and is a subject of much new research.
Some important uncertainties remain, of course. For example, the precise way in which clouds will respond as temperatures increase is a critical factor governing the overall size of the projected warming. The complexity of clouds, however, means that their response has been frustratingly difficult to pin down, and, again, much research remains to be done in this area.
We are now living in an era in which both humans and nature affect the future evolution of the earth and its inhabitants. Unfortunately, the crystal ball provided by our climate models becomes cloudier for predictions out beyond a century or so. Our limited knowledge of the response of both natural systems and human society to the growing impacts of climate change compounds our uncertainty. One result of global warming is certain, however. Plants, animals and humans will be living with the consequences of climate change for at least the next thousand years. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Saturday, September 20, 2008
supernova 0000190.11 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. A new study of a stellar explosion visible from halfway across the universe finds that the blast had an unusual structure that researchers heretofore had never observed.
Gamma-ray burst GRB 080319B was already on record as the brightest stellar explosion ever recorded.
Now astronomers have analyzed the visible afterglow of the burst and found that the emitted light peaked initially an hour after the burst and a second time 11 days later.
They report today in Nature that the most likely explanation is the GRB produced a pair of relativistic (very high speed) jets, one inside the other. Gas and dust surrounding the exploding star flared with light each time a jet struck it. http://louis-j-sheehan.com
Detectors on NASA's Swift Gamma-Ray Burst satellite and by the Russian Konus gamma-ray instrument on board NASA's Wind satellite detected the initial burst on March 19.
It just so happened that a pair of optical telescopes on the ground was observing the last GRB, 080319A, which had gone off 30 minutes before in the same part of the sky.
These telescopes, along with Swift's own UV/Optical Telescope and other robotic telescopes alerted by the satellites, monitored the six-week afterglow of visible light following the burst.
Scientists believe GRB 080319B would have been visible to the naked eye for about 40 seconds if anyone had been looking its way, toward the constellation Bootes.
This is all the more remarkable given that it exploded an estimated 7.4 billion years ago—before the sun and Earth had formed.
It's the most complete picture of a GRB ever seen, says study author Judith Racusin, an astrophysicist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. http://louis-j-sheehan.com
"They've been sort of waiting around for something this bright," she says, referring to the telescopes. "It was just really luck that the brightest burst happened to occur and they were looking at it."
Longer lasting GRBs are believed to occur when a massive star collapses into a black hole, sparking a supernova explosion and whipping gas and dust into a pair of jets projecting in opposite directions.
Researchers had suggested that a nested jet could exist, Racusin says, but nobody had envisioned the inner jet moving so fast and producing all the gamma-rays by itself—part of the team's interpretation. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
marijuana 0000303 Louis J. Sheehan
Louis J. Sheehan
The federal government's war on drugs gets plenty of ammunition from scientific studies that have correlated the use of such substances to various psychological problems. Conspicuously absent, however, are data showing that marijuana, one of the most widely used illicit drugs, causes mental or behavioral problems in teenagers and young adults, a new report concludes.
The causal chain of events could just as easily run in the opposite direction, suggest psychologist John Macleod of the University of Birmingham in England and his colleagues in the May 15 Lancet. Available evidence is consistent with the possibility that various psychological and social difficulties foster marijuana use, which may then contribute to a worsening of those problems, Macleod's group contends. http://louis-j-sheehan.info
After reviewing 48 relevant multiyear studies published between 1975 and 2003, the team focused on 16 investigations that had regularly assessed large samples of children or teenagers for at least 10 years. http://louis-j-sheehan.info
"We've found no strong evidence that use of [marijuana] in itself has important consequences for psychological or social health, but we cannot exclude the possibility that such a relation exists," Macleod says.
He and his colleagues are particularly skeptical of recent reports from Sweden and New Zealand that around 1 in 10 teenagers who had smoked marijuana experienced schizophrenia symptoms by young adulthood. It's doubtful that marijuana plays a direct role in schizophrenia, Macleod's group argues, because the mental disorder's worldwide incidence has remained stable while the proportion of teens reporting marijuana use has fluctuated.
Psychiatrist Herbert D. Kleber of Columbia University says that this argument underplays the increased risk of schizophrenia reported in the Swedish and New Zealand studies. There's now so much evidence of an association between teens' marijuana use and later psychosocial problems that it's hard to dismiss the likelihood of a causal effect, Kleber argues. "Macleod's team sees the smoke but won't acknowledge that there's a fire," he says.
The controversy continues to smolder. The new review of research results "confirms what's been known for decades about marijuana's lack of extreme harmfulness," remarks medical sociologist Marsha Rosenbaum, director of the Drug Policy Alliance's San Francisco office. Her organization works to decriminalize marijuana but doesn't condone its use by teenagers. http://louis-j-sheehan.info
On the other hand, David Murray, special assistant to the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington, D.C., argues that reports of teens often developing psychological or behavioral difficulties after beginning to smoke marijuana are reason enough to regard early use of the drug as a public health concern, especially given the increased potency of marijuana sold in the United States in recent years.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
objects
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Failures in visual short-term memory of objects, what scientists call "iconic memory," could reveal people at risk of Alzheimer's disease, a new study finds. Iconic memory is the image that lingers in the mind's eye after a person sees something briefly.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com
To find out whether iconic memories are lost more readily in people with mild cognitive impairments—which include slightly diminished capacity to solve problems and keep track of time—researchers tested 11 study participants with such deficits and 16 without them. The average ages of the two groups were 85 and 77 years.
The researchers asked each participant to recall letters arrayed in a circle and flashed momentarily on a screen. Up to 10 seconds after the image had disappeared, an arrow cued the participant as to which letter to recall.
When cued immediately beforehand by an arrow pointing to the location of the letter to watch for, participants in the two groups performed equally well. But when this initial cue was not offered, participants with mild cognitive impairments didn't score as well as those with no impairments did. That suggests there was a decay in iconic memory, the researchers report in the Feb. 1 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Although doctors have various ways to identify people with mild cognitive impairments, "we would always be better off having a more comprehensive set of tests," says study coauthor Barbara Anne Dosher, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com
Early detection of the cognitive declines that presage Alzheimer's disease would be useful because the neuroprotective drugs now available work best when administered early in the course of disease, says neuroscientist Zhong-Lin Lu of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, another collaborator on the study.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
examined
Two genes already known to influence brain size have undergone relatively recent, survival-enhancing modifications in people and appear to be still evolving, a research team reports. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Specific variants of these genes have spread quickly by natural selection, say Bruce T. Lahn of the University of Chicago and his colleagues, who published separate reports on each gene in the Sept. 9 Science.
The researchers examined DNA from 1,186 adults representing 59 populations worldwide and determined the frequency of specific variants of the two genes called microcephalin and ASPM.
A variant of microcephalin originated roughly 37,000 years ago and now appears in 7 of 10 people, the scientists conclude from comparisons of the gene's sequence for the different groups. Populations outside of sub-Saharan Africa most frequently possess this modified gene.
A distinctive ASPM variant arose approximately 5,800 years ago and now shows up in 3 of 10 people. It occurs most often in Europeans, North Africans, Middle Easterners, and South Asians. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
native
A single population of prehistoric Siberians crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska and subsequently fanned out to populate North and South America, according to a new genetic analysis of present-day indigenous Americans. http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com
The study also hints that early Americans reached Central and South America by migrating down the Pacific coast by land or sea and only later spread into the interior of South America.
"We have good evidence that a single migration [from Siberia] contributed a large fraction of the ancestry of the Americas," says population geneticist Noah Rosenberg of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who led the large international study team. http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com
The finding draws on the largest database of Native American genetics ever compiled. The data include DNA from nearly 500 people belonging to 29 groups scattered across Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America. The researchers also studied samples from 14 Tundra Nentsi individuals living in eastern Siberia.
"They should be commended for bringing together an enormous database, something no one has done before," says Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
The team examined 678 genetic markers in the human genome and found that one of the markers ties every Native American group to the Tundra Nentsi. The marker, moreover, is found nowhere else in the world. "It's extremely difficult to explain this kind of pattern unless all of the Native American populations ... have a large degree of shared ancestry," says Rosenberg.
In addition, the Canadian groups share more genes with the Siberians than do the groups in Central and South America, Rosenberg and his team report online in the November PLoS Genetics.
Tracing further migration through the Americas, the team then correlated genetic variations among different tribes with each group's location as measured along inland or coastal routes. The genetic data suggest that most migration to Central and South America followed the coast.
"That's the easy way south," says Vance Holliday, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He cautions, however, that the groups that populated the South American interior would have had to surmount the formidable Andes Mountains.
Despite the migration findings, Holliday and Dillehay both say that southward migration along interior routes should still be considered. Dillehay notes that the current study excludes Native Americans from the United States and eastern Brazil. "It's a sampling bias," he says, that might have erroneously favored the Pacific coast migration model.
Rosenberg says that a second paper will soon address the genetics of tribes in the United States and whether there was more than one major Siberian migration.
While the study points to an eastern Siberian origin for most of the genes that spread across the Americas, it can't rule out small genetic contributions from other groups, says Kari Britt Schroeder of the University of California, Davis. In 2001, scientists unearthed 8,000- to 11,000-year-old skulls in Brazil that strikingly resemble today's Australian aborigines (SN: 4/7/01, p. 212). The find fueled speculation that several waves of immigrants from different parts of Asia reached the Americas.
"Even if Native Americans share a lot of ancestry from a single origin, there still could be contributions from other groups," says Schroeder.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
birchington
Hydroponic farming is coming to the U.K.—70 soccer fields worth of it.
http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Outside of Birchington in far southeastern England, workers are finishing the first of what will be seven giant greenhouses for growing tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Thanet Earth, as the complex is cleverly called, will cover around 220 acres of Kent County by its 2010 completion, according to the Daily Mail. In the greenhouses, plants will hang from a 26-foot-high ceiling. A drip will supply them with water, and also the nutrients they need and would normally take from soil, like potassium, magnesium, phosphate, and nitrogen.
http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Greenhouse operators will deploy bees to pollinate the plants, and wasps to keep pests like aphids from wrecking their rows and rows of produce.
It’s not hard to see the practical reasons why Britons would go hydroponic: Thanet Earth’s proponents say the £80 million (approximately $160 million) project will produce 2.5 million tomatoes every week. That’s not bad for a country used to importing much of its produce—the BBC says half of the U.K.’s fruit and 95 percent of its vegetables come from abroad.
But not everyone is so thrilled. While the sun supplies much of the energy for normal agriculture, growing hydroponic crops year-round could be an energy glutton. You have to shine artificial light on tomatoes to trick them into growing in February, and 220 acres is a lot of artificial light. Growing hydroponic plants should save water compared to soil farming, but there’s also a lot of good soil now buried beneath glass and concrete, and any archaeologists who many have wanted to excavate the historical area are out of luck.
British foodies aren’t terribly happy with this trend, either. Where’s the culinary romance in a factory-grown cucumber? In the Daily Mail story, Jeanette Longfield of the food campaign group Sustain brings up the French word “terroir,” which means the specific traits a food gets from its soil and environment and is often used to start arguments about wine. Hydroponic tomatoes all have the same terroir, she argues, or none at all.
Lastly, we wrote earlier this week about the origins of the current salmonella scare in American tomatoes, and Keith Warriner of the University of Guelph in Ontario told DISCOVER that it was actually easier for pathogens to establish themselves in the hydroponic greenhouse compared to the field. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, salmonella can enter a hydroponic facility on tools, water, or workers’ clothing. So it seems that tightly-controlled greenhouse might not be so easy to control after all.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
morgan
May 16, Monday. I yesterday took a steamer with a small company, consisting among others of Postmaster-General Blair, Senators Doolittle and Grimes, Messrs. Rice and Griswold of the Naval Committee, Count Rosen of the Swedish Navy, Mr. Hale (the newly selected Consul-General to Egypt), G. W. Blunt and Assistant Secretary Fox, Commander Wise, Dr. Horwitz, and two or three others, and went down the Potomac to Belle Plain. The day was pleasant and the sail charming. We reached Belle Plain about two P.M. and left a little past five. Is a rough place with no dwelling, — an extemporized plank-way from the shore some twenty or thirty rods in the rear. Some forty or fifty steamers and barges, most of them crowded with persons, were there. Recruits going forward to reinforce Grant’s army, or the wounded and maimed returning from battle. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise Rows of stretchers, on each of which was a maimed or wounded Union soldier, were wending towards the steamers which were to bear them to Washington
One of the prisoners, a young man of some twenty-five, joined me and inquired if I resided in the neighborhood. I told him at a little distance. He wished to exchange some money, Rebel for greenbacks. When I told him that his was worthless, he claimed it was better than greenbacks though not current here. I asked him if they had not enough of fighting, opposing the
To-day I have been busy in preparing two or three letters and matters for Congress.
Governor Morgan called on me relative to abuses in cotton speculations, and malconduct of Treasury agents and others. Some of the malpractices which are demoralizing the army and the officials and disgusting the whole people in the lower
Monday, June 30, 2008
slow fiz
Loretta Lynn's 2004 disc, "Van Lear Rose," was a remarkably modern-sounding record for the country-music veteran, thanks to the production and guitar-work of the White Stripes' Jack White. But for all the fashionably zitherish keening of the guitars, the CD's most popular song starts off with a paean to an anachronistic drink. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info"Well, Portland Oregon and Sloe Gin Fizz," sings the coal miner's daughter, "if that ain't love then tell me what is."
The Sloe Gin Fizz is that strange drink that few have actually tasted but whose name almost everyone has heard. This works for a lyricist because it taps into a deep reservoir of linguistic recognition while remaining rather mysterious. And it doesn't hurt that the drink's name also allows for the employment of a stock joke that turns on the fact that most people hear "slow" rather than "sloe" -- the purplish-red berry of the blackthorn bush that gives the liqueur its flavor. "Well, sloe gin fizz works mighty fast," Loretta Lynn sings, "when you drink it by the pitcher and not by the glass." In Dickens's England, a glass of sloe gin mixed with gin was known as a "Slow and Quick." More recently, in "Jitterbug Perfume," Tom Robbins lists a litany of drinks that includes "Two sloe-gin fizzes, two fast gin fizzes; three martinis dry, no starch."
Tennessee Williams uses the old joke in his play "A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur," reveling at the speedy moves a young man could make with a young lady when aided by sloe gin and a fancy car: "The gin was slow, maybe, but that man was a fast one, seducing a girl with adjustable seats and a flask of liquor in that Flying Cloud."
Sweetishly easy to drink, the Sloe Gin Fizz was famous for undoing co-ed inhibitions. Historian and Kennedy-crony Arthur Schlesinger Jr., recalling his days as a Harvard undergrad in the 1930s, noted that the cocktail was "supposed to reduce the most obdurate female to acquiescence." http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
But sometimes it worked the other way around. Belle, the commercial floozy in Eugene O'Neill's play "Ah, Wilderness!" is too tough a cookie to mess with Sloe Gin Fizzes -- Gin Rickeys are her poison. "Remember," she needles a bartender, "a rickey is supposed to have gin in it." But when she aims to move along her transaction with underage Richard Miller, she plies the boy with Sloe Gin Fizzes. O'Neill knew that the drink was relatively tame (sloe gin is usually about 50 proof, as opposed to the 80 or 90 proof of regular dry gin), so he has Belle insist with a nudge that the bartender "make it a real one." It takes only a couple of spiked Fizzes to get Richard drunk. After the bartender learns that the boy's father is the editor of the town newspaper, he gives Belle the heave-ho, furious that she "told me to hand him dynamite in that fizz." When the play was improbably made into a Hollywood musical (starring 27-year-old Mickey Rooney as the wet-nosed teen) the name was changed to "Summer Holiday," but the Sloe Gin Fizzes remained.
The absence of dynamite in the average Sloe Gin Fizz is one reason it makes such an excellent summertime cooler. In 1956, the Amy Vanderbilt etiquette column recommended them as a low-test way for partygoers to have a drink without ending up too far in their cups. Back then, there were many well-advertised brands of sloe gin. But by the '80s the liqueur survived only for its role in sexually suggestive quaffs.
First there was a Screwdriver made with sloe gin instead of vodka, a Sloe Screw. Such bawdy hilarity soon inspired the addition of Southern Comfort to the mix, creating the Sloe Comfortable Screw. Later, Galliano -- of Harvey Wallbanger fame -- was added to exploit even more elaborately lewd naming opportunities. The whole bunch were taste-impaired, figuratively and literally. It is an immutable law that the naughtier a drink's name, the worse that drink tastes.
Sloe gin might well have disappeared, slinking off in shamefaced embarrassment, had the folks at England's Plymouth Gin distillery not come to the rescue. Just now arriving in the States are bottles of their liqueur made by steeping honest-to-goodness sloe berries in Plymouth's dry gin. They have used a sparing hand with the sugar, letting the cranberry-tartness of the fruit come through. It makes for a fine Sloe Gin Fizz, a drink of lemon juice, sloe gin, sugar and soda water, on ice in a highball glass.
Plymouth's sloe gin is also good enough to drink in a straight-up cocktail. In the 1930s there were variations on a drink called a Sloe Gin Cocktail using the spirit as a base and adding bits of this and that. I played around with this basic idea until, on the seventh try, I hit upon a delicious drink of two parts sloe gin to one part dry vermouth, with one dash each of lemon juice and curaçao. Let's call it a Sloe Gin No. 7.
And please, no jokes about how fast it works.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Hershey Co.
Hershey Co. laid out plans Tuesday to battle the global candy giant to be created by the Mars-Wrigley merger, but offered little detail on how the iconic chocolate-bar maker will address its overwhelming reliance on the U.S. market for revenue. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com
At an investor update in New York, Chief Executive David West said Hershey would boost spending on marketing about 20% this year and next. He also slightly increased the company's long-term annual sales targets and outlined plans for new products.
But it isn't clear those steps will be enough in the coming candy wars. When Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms, and Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co., maker of Juicy Fruit and Doublemint, combine in a $23 billion deal expected to close in the next few months, their new company will have broad global reach. And that will put Hershey, whose business outside the U.S. represents just 14% of sales, in a difficult spot.
Consummating a long-time flirtation with Cadbury PLC would give Hershey broader international scale. But over the weekend, LeRoy Zimmerman, chairman of the Hershey Trust, the company's controlling shareholder, reiterated the trust's refusal to cede control of the Pennsylvania chocolate maker. In an opinion piece published Sunday in the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa., he wrote, "Simply put: We will not sell the Hershey Co." Hershey Trust spokesman Tim Reeves said that Mr. Zimmerman wouldn't comment further.
After the article was disseminated by a Wall Street analyst, shares of Hershey fell 6% Monday to close at $35.87. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.comThey fell again Tuesday to $35.15 after Mr. West addressed shareholders.
Mr. West set a new long-term annual sales growth target of 3% to 5%, compared with the previous goal of 3% to 4%, and an earnings-per-share growth target of 6% to 8%, down from the earlier 9% to 11%. Hershey affirmed its 2008 earnings forecast of $1.85 to $1.90 a share, but Mr. West said that Hershey won't hit its target in 2009 because of expected high commodity costs.
With the Mars-Wrigley combination looming, Hershey's options appear increasingly limited. To acquire Cadbury, which is valued at about $17 billion and is more than twice its size, Hershey would need to find a significant investment partner and would probably need to borrow a considerable sum.
Hershey could find itself in an even tighter bind if another company, such as Kraft Foods Inc., makes a play for Cadbury, as some analysts have speculated. A Kraft spokesman declined to comment on deal speculation but said one of the company's criteria for acquisitions is determining that it can "build scale in international geographies, especially in emerging markets."
Mr. West offered scant guidance on how the company plans to expand globally beyond saying it will continue entering into joint ventures and making acquisitions in Asia and Latin America.
He told investors that Hershey will take on Mars-Wrigley by competing aggressively in the U.S. "Although the Mars-Wrigley deal could affect our ranking, we remain well positioned on many dimensions, especially in chocolate, where we have a 43% share" of the $16 billion U.S. market, he said. "We are more convinced than ever that our core U.S. business can grow." http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com
Not enough, said Credit Suisse analyst Robert Moskow. "My concern is that the international footprint they now have in these emerging markets is very tiny. The real focus internally seems to be squeezing more growth out of the domestic market." Mr. Moskow has the equivalent of a "hold" rating on Hershey stock; his firm has an investment-banking relationship with Hershey.
Hershey has struggled in recent years as it neglected core brands in favor of pushing limited-edition products. That opened the door for Mars to introduce new Dove dark chocolates and other items that stole market share from Hershey.
Mr. West told investors that Hershey marketers have talked to tens of thousands of consumers to determine why and how often they buy candy. They identified six core consumer groups, including "loyal indulgers," or older consumers who are loyal to specific brands, and "engaged exploring munchers," who are the least price-sensitive and most profitable.
The company is now developing products targeted at these groups, Mr. West said. New Reese's Whipps -- a chocolate bar with a fluffy peanut butter and nougat filling -- is aimed at consumers seeking less fat, while Reese's Select Clusters -- chocolate-covered pieces of nuts, peanut butter and caramel that resemble turtle candies -- target consumers who want to indulge. To appeal to women between the ages of 25 and 49, the company launched creamy bite-size pieces of milk or dark chocolate called Hershey's Bliss. Hershey has also worked with Starbucks Corp. to develop a new line of chocolates in such flavors as Caramel Macchiato and Madagascar Vanilla Bean.
Mr. West said the company will increase marketing spending about 20% this year to more than $155 million, and plans an additional 20% increase next year. The company is also trying to make grocery-store candy aisles easier to shop by testing new displays that group products by purchasing occasion, such as movie candy, gifts and items for the candy dish.
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