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Basics: The Nose, an Emotional Time Machine
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, August 5, 2008
Here is a fun and easy experiment that Rachel Herz of Brown University suggests you try at home, but only if you promise to eat your vegetables first, floss afterward, and are not at risk of a diabetic coma. Buy a bag of assorted jelly beans of sufficiently high quality to qualify, however oxymoronically, as “gourmet.” Then, sample all the flavors in the bag systematically until you are sure you appreciate just how distinctive each one is, because expertise is important and you may never get another excuse this good.
Now for the meat of our matter: pinch your nostrils shut and do the sampling routine again. Notice the differences? That’s right — now there are none. Every bean still tastes sweet, but absent a sense of smell you might as well be eating sugared pencil erasers. And if in midchew you unbind your nose, what then? At once the candy’s candid charms return, and you can tell your orange sherbet from a buttered popcorn.
( Read More )
An Energy Diet for Power-Hungry Household PCs
By STEVE LOHR, The New York Times, August 6, 2008
In its drive to go green, the technology industry has so far focused mainly on big targets like corporations and especially computer data centers, the power-hungry computing engine rooms of the Internet economy.
Next come the hundreds of millions of desktop and laptop personal computers in households worldwide.
Microsoft, the nonprofit Climate Savers Computing Initiative and a start-up called Verdiem are combining to put a spotlight on the energy-saving opportunity in PCs, and distributing a free software tool to consumers to help them do it.
( Read More )
Trove of Endangered Gorillas Found in Africa
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, August 5, 2008
A grueling survey of vast tracts of forest and swamp in the northern Congo Republic has revealed the presence of more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas, a rare example of abundance in a world of rapidly vanishing primate populations.
( Read More )
Observatory: Fossils Add More Proof of Global Climate Shift
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, August 5, 2008
The Antarctic Dry Valleys are among the most extreme environments anywhere, so dry and windswept and barren that they are thought to be the closest analog to the surface of Mars.
So imagine the surprise when, several years ago, Adam R. Lewis, a glacial geologist, and a colleague found what Dr. Lewis described as “freeze-dried fossils sticking out of the ground.” The well-preserved mosses were “completely out of place,” he said, and a sign the area was more like tundra long ago.
Those fossils, and others of insects, diatoms and tiny freshwater crustaceans, now form the basis for further understanding of global cooling that occurred during the mid-Miocene epoch, some 14 million years ago. In a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Lewis, now at North Dakota State University, Allan C. Ashworth of North Dakota State, David R. Marchant of Boston University and colleagues show that the Antarctic cooled by at least 14 degrees Fahrenheit over about 200,000 years.
( Read More )
Vital Signs: Disparities: Surgical Tools Not Fit for Smaller Hands
By ERIC NAGOURNEY, The New York Times, August 5, 2008
Now that more doors are opening for women who want to be surgeons, it may be time to look at the equipment they are given at the operating table.
A new study finds that some devices commonly used in what was once a male bastion are too big to be comfortable for women.
The study, which appears in Surgical Endoscopy, notes that women’s hands tend to be smaller then men’s, but that men with smaller hands may also find the equipment challenging.
( Read More )
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, August 5, 2008
Here is a fun and easy experiment that Rachel Herz of Brown University suggests you try at home, but only if you promise to eat your vegetables first, floss afterward, and are not at risk of a diabetic coma. Buy a bag of assorted jelly beans of sufficiently high quality to qualify, however oxymoronically, as “gourmet.” Then, sample all the flavors in the bag systematically until you are sure you appreciate just how distinctive each one is, because expertise is important and you may never get another excuse this good.
Now for the meat of our matter: pinch your nostrils shut and do the sampling routine again. Notice the differences? That’s right — now there are none. Every bean still tastes sweet, but absent a sense of smell you might as well be eating sugared pencil erasers. And if in midchew you unbind your nose, what then? At once the candy’s candid charms return, and you can tell your orange sherbet from a buttered popcorn.
( Read More )
An Energy Diet for Power-Hungry Household PCs
By STEVE LOHR, The New York Times, August 6, 2008
In its drive to go green, the technology industry has so far focused mainly on big targets like corporations and especially computer data centers, the power-hungry computing engine rooms of the Internet economy.
Next come the hundreds of millions of desktop and laptop personal computers in households worldwide.
Microsoft, the nonprofit Climate Savers Computing Initiative and a start-up called Verdiem are combining to put a spotlight on the energy-saving opportunity in PCs, and distributing a free software tool to consumers to help them do it.
( Read More )
Trove of Endangered Gorillas Found in Africa
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, August 5, 2008
A grueling survey of vast tracts of forest and swamp in the northern Congo Republic has revealed the presence of more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas, a rare example of abundance in a world of rapidly vanishing primate populations.
( Read More )
Observatory: Fossils Add More Proof of Global Climate Shift
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, August 5, 2008
The Antarctic Dry Valleys are among the most extreme environments anywhere, so dry and windswept and barren that they are thought to be the closest analog to the surface of Mars.
So imagine the surprise when, several years ago, Adam R. Lewis, a glacial geologist, and a colleague found what Dr. Lewis described as “freeze-dried fossils sticking out of the ground.” The well-preserved mosses were “completely out of place,” he said, and a sign the area was more like tundra long ago.
Those fossils, and others of insects, diatoms and tiny freshwater crustaceans, now form the basis for further understanding of global cooling that occurred during the mid-Miocene epoch, some 14 million years ago. In a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Lewis, now at North Dakota State University, Allan C. Ashworth of North Dakota State, David R. Marchant of Boston University and colleagues show that the Antarctic cooled by at least 14 degrees Fahrenheit over about 200,000 years.
( Read More )
Vital Signs: Disparities: Surgical Tools Not Fit for Smaller Hands
By ERIC NAGOURNEY, The New York Times, August 5, 2008
Now that more doors are opening for women who want to be surgeons, it may be time to look at the equipment they are given at the operating table.
A new study finds that some devices commonly used in what was once a male bastion are too big to be comfortable for women.
The study, which appears in Surgical Endoscopy, notes that women’s hands tend to be smaller then men’s, but that men with smaller hands may also find the equipment challenging.
( Read More )
