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In Tasmania, the Devil Now Faces Its Own Hell
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE, The New York Times, May 31, 2005
LAUNCESTON, Tasmania - Even by the brutish standards of Tasmanian devils, Rosie, Harry and Clyde have led a lamentable life.
A year ago, when the three were each the size of a sesame seed, they wriggled out of their mother's birth canal and undulated their way to her pouch. There, each locked onto a teat and grew like gangbusters.
But tragedy struck. Within months, their mother developed devil facial tumor disease - a mysterious malady that in the last three years has killed nearly half of all the world's devils, marsupials that are found only in Tasmania. Shortly after she died, the baby devils, grown to the size of tiny puppies, were found dangling from their mother's pouch, starving to death.
( Read More )
Declaring With Clarity, When Gender Is Ambiguous
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS, The New York Times, May 31, 2005
Dr. William G. Reiner, a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma and Johns Hopkins, says he is just a "dull guy leading a dull life."
That seems unlikely. A 57-year-old psychiatrist and urologist, Dr. Reiner is a leading specialist in the treatment of children with the intersexual condition, boys and girls born with ambiguous genitaliA.
"I like working with these children," he said on a break in a meeting in Washington, where he had made a presentation before the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "They've had atypical life experiences, and they tend to be extraordinarily sensitive and vulnerable. They see an aspect of what it means to be alive in a different way from the rest of us."
( Read Interview )
Surrogate Mothers' New Niche: Bearing Babies for Gay Couples
By GINIA BELLAFANTE, The New York Times, May 27, 2005
On a spring morning not long ago, Lura Stiller sat in her stocking feet in a sunny cottage in Cambridge, Mass., helping Cary Friedman and his partner, Rick Wellisch, calm their daughter, a 3-month-old in a pink T-shirt.
Ms. Stiller, 34, a homemaker from the Dallas suburbs, likes to say that the number of gay people in her acquaintance before she met Dr. Friedman, a psychiatrist, and Dr. Wellisch, an internist, amounted to zero. "Everything I knew about gay people I knew from TV, which meant that everything I knew about gay people I learned from 'Will and Grace' and 'The L Word,' " she said.
In December, Ms. Stiller gave birth to the baby, named Samantha, for Dr. Friedman and Dr. Wellisch, conceived with a donor egg and the sperm from one of the partners. (They chose not to know which.) In her decision to work with them Ms. Stiller is part of a small but growing movement of surrogate mothers choosing gay couples over traditional families.
( Read More )
Voyager 1 Approaching Edge of the Solar System
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, May 31, 2005
After nearly 28 years of touring the giant planets and beyond, NASA's Voyager 1 has now reached the outermost antechamber of the solar system, a final interlude before it departs.
"We're now in the final lap of the race to get to interstellar space," said Dr. Edward C. Stone, the project scientist for the two Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977 and continue operating on their plutonium power sources.
In New Orleans last week, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, scientists reported that last December Voyager 1 passed through a boundary, called the termination shock, that is similar to a sonic boom. Although silent to human ears, the tenuous gas particles in outer space do bounce back and forth in fast-moving sound waves. At the termination shock, the speed of particles streaming out from the Sun suddenly drops from supersonic - 700,000 to 1.5 million miles per hour - to subsonic, slowed by the pressure of interstellar particles pushing on the solar system.
( Read More )
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE, The New York Times, May 31, 2005
LAUNCESTON, Tasmania - Even by the brutish standards of Tasmanian devils, Rosie, Harry and Clyde have led a lamentable life.
A year ago, when the three were each the size of a sesame seed, they wriggled out of their mother's birth canal and undulated their way to her pouch. There, each locked onto a teat and grew like gangbusters.
But tragedy struck. Within months, their mother developed devil facial tumor disease - a mysterious malady that in the last three years has killed nearly half of all the world's devils, marsupials that are found only in Tasmania. Shortly after she died, the baby devils, grown to the size of tiny puppies, were found dangling from their mother's pouch, starving to death.
( Read More )
Declaring With Clarity, When Gender Is Ambiguous
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS, The New York Times, May 31, 2005
Dr. William G. Reiner, a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma and Johns Hopkins, says he is just a "dull guy leading a dull life."
That seems unlikely. A 57-year-old psychiatrist and urologist, Dr. Reiner is a leading specialist in the treatment of children with the intersexual condition, boys and girls born with ambiguous genitaliA.
"I like working with these children," he said on a break in a meeting in Washington, where he had made a presentation before the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "They've had atypical life experiences, and they tend to be extraordinarily sensitive and vulnerable. They see an aspect of what it means to be alive in a different way from the rest of us."
( Read Interview )
Surrogate Mothers' New Niche: Bearing Babies for Gay Couples
By GINIA BELLAFANTE, The New York Times, May 27, 2005
On a spring morning not long ago, Lura Stiller sat in her stocking feet in a sunny cottage in Cambridge, Mass., helping Cary Friedman and his partner, Rick Wellisch, calm their daughter, a 3-month-old in a pink T-shirt.
Ms. Stiller, 34, a homemaker from the Dallas suburbs, likes to say that the number of gay people in her acquaintance before she met Dr. Friedman, a psychiatrist, and Dr. Wellisch, an internist, amounted to zero. "Everything I knew about gay people I knew from TV, which meant that everything I knew about gay people I learned from 'Will and Grace' and 'The L Word,' " she said.
In December, Ms. Stiller gave birth to the baby, named Samantha, for Dr. Friedman and Dr. Wellisch, conceived with a donor egg and the sperm from one of the partners. (They chose not to know which.) In her decision to work with them Ms. Stiller is part of a small but growing movement of surrogate mothers choosing gay couples over traditional families.
( Read More )
Voyager 1 Approaching Edge of the Solar System
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, May 31, 2005
After nearly 28 years of touring the giant planets and beyond, NASA's Voyager 1 has now reached the outermost antechamber of the solar system, a final interlude before it departs.
"We're now in the final lap of the race to get to interstellar space," said Dr. Edward C. Stone, the project scientist for the two Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977 and continue operating on their plutonium power sources.
In New Orleans last week, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, scientists reported that last December Voyager 1 passed through a boundary, called the termination shock, that is similar to a sonic boom. Although silent to human ears, the tenuous gas particles in outer space do bounce back and forth in fast-moving sound waves. At the termination shock, the speed of particles streaming out from the Sun suddenly drops from supersonic - 700,000 to 1.5 million miles per hour - to subsonic, slowed by the pressure of interstellar particles pushing on the solar system.
( Read More )
