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A Skeleton Moves From the Courts to the Laboratory
By TIMOTHY EGAN, The New York Times, July 19, 2005
SEATTLE, July 18 - The bones, more than 350 pieces, were laid out on a bed of sand, a human jigsaw with ancient resonance. Head to toe, one of the oldest and best-preserved sets of remains ever discovered in North America was ready to give up its secrets.
After waiting 9 years to get a close look at Kennewick Man, the 9,000-year-old skeleton that was found on the banks of the Columbia River in 1996 and quickly became a fossil celebrity, a team of scientists spent 10 days this month examining it.
They looked at teeth, bones and plaque to determine how he lived, what he ate and how he died. They studied soil sedimentation and bone calcium for clues to whether he was ritually buried, or died in the place where he was found. They measured the skull, and produced a new model that looks vastly different from an earlier version.
And while they were cautious about announcing any sweeping conclusions regarding a set of remains that has already prompted much new thinking on the origins of the first Americans, the team members said the skeleton was proving to be even more of a scientific find than they had expected.
( Read More )
How Linguists and Missionaries Share a Bible of 6,912 Languages
By MICHAEL ERARD, The New York Times, July 19, 2005
Among the facts in the new edition of Ethnologue, a sprawling compendium of the world's languages, are that 119 of them are sign languages for the deaf and that 497 are nearly extinct. Only one artificial language has native speakers. (Yes, it's Esperanto.) Most languages have fewer than a million speakers, and the most linguistically diverse nation on the planet is Papua New Guinea. The least diverse? Haiti.
Opening the 1,200-page book at random, one can read about Garo, spoken by 102,000 people in Bangladesh and 575,000 in India, which is written with the Roman alphabet, or about Bernde, spoken by 2,000 people in Chad. Ethnologue, which began as a 40-language guide for Christian missionaries in 1951, has grown so comprehensive it is a source for academics and governments, and the occasional game show.
Though its unusual history draws some criticism among secular linguists, the Ethnologue is also praised for its breadth. "If I'm teaching field methods and a student says I'm a speaker of X, I go look it up in Ethnologue," said Tony Woodbury, linguistics chairman at the University of Texas. "To locate a language geographically, to locate it in the language family it belongs to, Ethnologue is the one-stop place to look."
Yet Ethnologue's most curious fact highlights a quandary that has long perplexed linguists: how many languages are spoken on the planet?
( Read More )
Between Series, an Actress Became a Superstar (in Math)
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, July 19, 2005
On her Web site, Danica McKellar, the actress best known as Winnie Cooper on the television series "The Wonder Years," takes on questions that require more than a moment's thought to answer.
"If it takes Sam six minutes to wash a car by himself," one fan asked recently, "and it takes Brian eight minutes to wash a car by himself, how long will it take them to wash a car together?"
"This is a 'rates' problem," Ms. McKellar wrote in reply. "The key is to think about each of their 'car washing rates' and not the 'time' it takes them."
Ms. McKellar, now a semiregular on "The West Wing" playing a White House speechwriter, Elsie Snuffin, is probably the only person on prime-time television who moonlights as a cyberspace math tutor.
Her mathematics knowledge extends well beyond calculus. As a math major at the University of California, Los Angeles, she also took more esoteric classes, the ones with names like "complex analysis" and "real analysis," and she pondered making a career move to professional mathematician.
"I love that stuff," Ms. McKellar said last month during a visit to Manhattan after a play-reading in the Hamptons. Her conversation was peppered with terminology like "epsilons" and "limsups" (pronounced "lim soups").
"I love continuous functions and proving if functions are continuous or not," she said.
She may also be the only actress, now or ever, to prove a new mathematical theorem, one that bears her name. Certainly, she is the only theorem prover who appears wearing black lingerie in the July issue of Stuff magazine. Even in that interview, she mentioned math.
( Read More )
Behavior: The Night Before the Morning After
By ERIC NAGOURNEY, The New York Times, July 19, 2005
When morning-after pills become more easily available, do women become less diligent about using birth control?
Apparently not, reports a new study in the medical journal BMJ, which looked at what happened in Britain after it became legal to buy emergency contraception without a prescription.
( Read More )
With New Data, a Debate on Low-Level Radiation
By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, July 19, 2005
WASHINGTON, July 18 - A report on the health effects of small doses of radiation has renewed a debate on the way exposure is regulated and how the public should regard such doses.
The report, issued by the National Academy of Sciences, incorporates nearly 15 years of new data on atomic bomb survivors in Japan.
It makes only small changes in estimates of the number of fatal cancers that can be expected from a given radiation dose, but it reinforces the idea, opposed by some experts, that even tiny doses may add slightly to risk. The report also gives more detail on cancer cases, concluding that women are more likely than men to contract the disease, given equal doses.
( Read More )
By TIMOTHY EGAN, The New York Times, July 19, 2005
SEATTLE, July 18 - The bones, more than 350 pieces, were laid out on a bed of sand, a human jigsaw with ancient resonance. Head to toe, one of the oldest and best-preserved sets of remains ever discovered in North America was ready to give up its secrets.
After waiting 9 years to get a close look at Kennewick Man, the 9,000-year-old skeleton that was found on the banks of the Columbia River in 1996 and quickly became a fossil celebrity, a team of scientists spent 10 days this month examining it.
They looked at teeth, bones and plaque to determine how he lived, what he ate and how he died. They studied soil sedimentation and bone calcium for clues to whether he was ritually buried, or died in the place where he was found. They measured the skull, and produced a new model that looks vastly different from an earlier version.
And while they were cautious about announcing any sweeping conclusions regarding a set of remains that has already prompted much new thinking on the origins of the first Americans, the team members said the skeleton was proving to be even more of a scientific find than they had expected.
( Read More )
How Linguists and Missionaries Share a Bible of 6,912 Languages
By MICHAEL ERARD, The New York Times, July 19, 2005
Among the facts in the new edition of Ethnologue, a sprawling compendium of the world's languages, are that 119 of them are sign languages for the deaf and that 497 are nearly extinct. Only one artificial language has native speakers. (Yes, it's Esperanto.) Most languages have fewer than a million speakers, and the most linguistically diverse nation on the planet is Papua New Guinea. The least diverse? Haiti.
Opening the 1,200-page book at random, one can read about Garo, spoken by 102,000 people in Bangladesh and 575,000 in India, which is written with the Roman alphabet, or about Bernde, spoken by 2,000 people in Chad. Ethnologue, which began as a 40-language guide for Christian missionaries in 1951, has grown so comprehensive it is a source for academics and governments, and the occasional game show.
Though its unusual history draws some criticism among secular linguists, the Ethnologue is also praised for its breadth. "If I'm teaching field methods and a student says I'm a speaker of X, I go look it up in Ethnologue," said Tony Woodbury, linguistics chairman at the University of Texas. "To locate a language geographically, to locate it in the language family it belongs to, Ethnologue is the one-stop place to look."
Yet Ethnologue's most curious fact highlights a quandary that has long perplexed linguists: how many languages are spoken on the planet?
( Read More )
Between Series, an Actress Became a Superstar (in Math)
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, July 19, 2005
On her Web site, Danica McKellar, the actress best known as Winnie Cooper on the television series "The Wonder Years," takes on questions that require more than a moment's thought to answer.
"If it takes Sam six minutes to wash a car by himself," one fan asked recently, "and it takes Brian eight minutes to wash a car by himself, how long will it take them to wash a car together?"
"This is a 'rates' problem," Ms. McKellar wrote in reply. "The key is to think about each of their 'car washing rates' and not the 'time' it takes them."
Ms. McKellar, now a semiregular on "The West Wing" playing a White House speechwriter, Elsie Snuffin, is probably the only person on prime-time television who moonlights as a cyberspace math tutor.
Her mathematics knowledge extends well beyond calculus. As a math major at the University of California, Los Angeles, she also took more esoteric classes, the ones with names like "complex analysis" and "real analysis," and she pondered making a career move to professional mathematician.
"I love that stuff," Ms. McKellar said last month during a visit to Manhattan after a play-reading in the Hamptons. Her conversation was peppered with terminology like "epsilons" and "limsups" (pronounced "lim soups").
"I love continuous functions and proving if functions are continuous or not," she said.
She may also be the only actress, now or ever, to prove a new mathematical theorem, one that bears her name. Certainly, she is the only theorem prover who appears wearing black lingerie in the July issue of Stuff magazine. Even in that interview, she mentioned math.
( Read More )
Behavior: The Night Before the Morning After
By ERIC NAGOURNEY, The New York Times, July 19, 2005
When morning-after pills become more easily available, do women become less diligent about using birth control?
Apparently not, reports a new study in the medical journal BMJ, which looked at what happened in Britain after it became legal to buy emergency contraception without a prescription.
( Read More )
With New Data, a Debate on Low-Level Radiation
By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, July 19, 2005
WASHINGTON, July 18 - A report on the health effects of small doses of radiation has renewed a debate on the way exposure is regulated and how the public should regard such doses.
The report, issued by the National Academy of Sciences, incorporates nearly 15 years of new data on atomic bomb survivors in Japan.
It makes only small changes in estimates of the number of fatal cancers that can be expected from a given radiation dose, but it reinforces the idea, opposed by some experts, that even tiny doses may add slightly to risk. The report also gives more detail on cancer cases, concluding that women are more likely than men to contract the disease, given equal doses.
( Read More )
