![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgt
Really? The Claim: Green Potatoes Are Poisonous
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, July 3, 2007
THE FACTS
It sounds like a joke, or perhaps just an urban legend that grew out of Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham.” But food scientists say this one is no myth. The reality is that green potatoes contain high levels of a toxin, solanine, which can cause nausea, headaches and neurological problems.
Potatoes naturally produce small amounts of solanine as a defense against insects, but the levels increase with prolonged exposure to light and warm temperatures.
The green color is actually caused by high levels of chlorophyll, which by itself is harmless. But it is also a sign that levels of solanine, which is produced at the same time as chlorophyll, have increased as well.
According to a recent report by Alexander Pavlista, a professor of agronomy and horticulture at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, a 100-pound person would have to eat about 16 ounces of a fully green potato to get sick. That is the weight of a large baked potato.
The report noted that most green potatoes never reach the market. Still, to avoid the development of solanine, it is best to store potatoes in cool, dimly lit areas, and to cut away green areas before eating.
Another good rule: if it tastes bitter, don’t eat it. Unlike Dr. Seuss’s entree, this green meal would not have a happy ending.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Green potatoes contain a chemical that can cause sickness.
It Will Take More Than a Wolf to Blow One House Down
By SIOBHAN ROBERTS, The New York Times, July 3, 2007
LONDON, Ontario — The hurricane season is now well under way, and as the buffer of El Niño rapidly retreats, the forecast is looking windy, with an estimated 17 “named storms” on the horizon of the Atlantic basin.
While hurricanes seldom hit here (the exception being the Category 4 Hurricane Hazel in 1954, in which a 7-year-old boy drowned), a team of wind engineers at the University of Western Ontario is nonetheless preparing for the worst: a Category 5 storm.
In a hurricane simulation study called the Three Little Pigs Project, a full-scale two-story red brick house will be hit with the equivalent of 186-mile-per-hour winds and sprayed with water until it is on the brink of collapse.
“We really expect that we are going to tear the roof off,” said Dr. Michael Bartlett, a civil and environmental engineer at the university who is delivering a talk on the experiment at the 12th International Conference on Wind Engineering this week in Cairns, Australia.
“It’s not just that we can simulate a Category 5,” Dr. Bartlett said, “but we can simulate a Category 5 and see the unsatisfactory performance, and then do something that we think will improve the performance” of the structure.
Alan Davenport, an authority on windblown buildings who in 1965 founded the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory at the university, conceived of the Three Pigs project in 1999, at the end of the United Nations’ International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction.
Despite the good intentions, “it was a bad decade,” Dr. Davenport said. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew caused $26.5 billion in damage in the United States (Hurricane Katrina’s bill in 2005 was $81.2 billion), and Hurricane Mitch killed more than 11,000 people in Central America in 1998. But the disaster reduction initiative “did get people thinking in new terms,” he said, “and led to a more organized measurement of wind turbulence.”
The Three Pigs house is anchored to a three-foot-deep concrete floor in a hangar exposed to the prevailing southwesterly winds at the airport in London. The experiment’s turbulent winds, however, depend not on Mother Nature, nor massive Hollywood special-effects fans. Rather, the wind is replicated by a series of 100 “pressure boxes” bolted to the house and braced against a galvanized steel cocoon.
The boxes are equipped with “pressure load actuators,” which are essentially sophisticated vacuum cleaners. Activated in unison they sound like an out-of-tune choir belting out a low- to high-C drone of 100 decibels, and blast out pulsating pressures that mimic the airflow of turbulent gusts as they dart around and through a house during a hurricane.
“When wind blows over a structure, it creates pressures which act on the surfaces of the building,” said Gregg Kopp, a civil and environmental engineer the university and an associate research director at the wind tunnel laboratory. The effect, Dr. Kopp said, is similar to the pressure differences between the upper and lower surfaces of an airplane’s wing that cause it to lift into the air.
“The same thing happens on a house — as the wind moves over it, low pressures are created which want to lift it,” Dr. Kopp said. “These pressures are less than atmospheric pressure, so we call them suctions. A suction is like a vacuum, or the principle that allows a vacuum cleaner to work. So, instead of blowing wind at the house, we replicate the pressures and suctions. This is more efficient and less expensive.”
The ultimate goal of the project is to gather enough information on damage caused by hurricane winds to recommend changes in building codes. The trick is striking a balance between what consumers are willing to pay and the amount of acceptable risk set out in the building codes.
“The answer isn’t making a house so reliable that nothing fails, because nobody wants to pay for that,” Dr. Kopp said. “People would rather pay for the nice marble counter top, the things they can show off.”
“We’re trying to improve the evidence for changing the way we design and build light frame houses,” Dr. Bartlett said, noting that although Florida building codes were improved after Hurricane Andrew, most North American houses could not withstand the 95-m.p.h. winds of a Category 1 storm.
“Code committees don’t like to change things unless there is an obvious reason,” Dr. Bartlett said. “Whenever you change a line in the code, then every single designer or engineer who uses that code has to learn something new, and there is a tremendous cost associated with that.”
In gathering the evidence for proposed changes, the Three Pigs experiment first measures the impact of a hurricane on a miniature model of a house in the confines of the Wind Tunnel Laboratory. That process translates general data on hurricane wind speeds into specific data on how those winds “excite,” or act upon, the geometry of a certain structure. The model is wired with ports that record the pressure on every square inch, producing what is called a “time history” of the turbulent wind pressure accurate to the second.
The results of the tests are used in the Three Pigs house. As the mechanical vacuums replay the recorded measurements, the effects of the storm are measured by 35 “load cells” beneath the house and recorded by 17 cameras within.
“That becomes the evidence that we take to building code committees,” Dr. Bartlett said. If engineers compare traditional building methods with those proven in their testing, “we think that building code committees will respond positively to that. They’ll say, ‘Yes, that’s sensible. That’s a change worth making,’ ” he said.
The project will also include educational videos distributed to insurance companies and homebuilders’ associations.
“There are 235,000 new homes built in Canada every year,” Dr. Bartlett said, “and for the United States we usually multiply by a factor of 10. So to have meaningful impact on the quality of such a large range of construction means that somehow we have to communicate through channels that are unconventional, to really get the word out.”
The raw data generated will also be used to refine computer modeling, which in turn will be applied to other domestic structures — a bungalow with siding, for instance, or a four-story apartment complex — thus eliminating the need for such extreme testing to be repeated.
Towers of condominiums, Dr. Kopp said, would be exempt. They already undergo rigorous testing and are engineered with redundant structural safeties.
“What governs the standards in high-rises is the comfort of the occupant,” he said. “Seeing the ground moving beneath, or the chandelier swinging from the ceiling, is not acceptable. The top corner in a condo building is the worst environment — and also where you have the wealthiest tenant, with the best access to lawyers.”
Siobhan Roberts is a writer in Toronto, and author of “King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, The Man Who Saved Geometry” (Walker, 2006).
Little-Known Virus Challenges a Far-Flung Health System
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, The New York Times, July 3, 2007
A little-known virus is causing a big fuss in Micronesia, the Pacific island nation partly managed by the United States.
The Zika virus, spread by mosquitoes, produces an itchy rash, pinkeye, joint pain and fever. Since its discovery 60 years ago in an ill monkey in the Zika forest in Uganda, it has caused rare cases and outbreaks in Africa and Southeast Asia. There is no specific treatment or vaccine.
Now Zika has made its first appearance in Micronesia, on the island of Yap, where health officials say there have been at least 42 confirmed cases and 65 probable ones. Additional cases may be occurring on other islands.
While Zika does not seem to be fatal, it is posing unusual challenges to the public health system, not just in this remote chain of islands, about 600 miles east of the Philippines, but also in the United States.
The virus can be misleading, giving false positive results on screening tests; also, studies are needed to gain insights into how infectious agents move unexpectedly in new areas and to be sure that Zika does not lead to long-term complications.
Scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the Pasteur Institute and the World Health Organization have joined Yap doctors in investigating the outbreak and trying to prevent further spread.
A physician on Yap alerted the C.D.C. in late May because he and his colleagues were puzzled by the pattern of symptoms their patients were experiencing, said Dr. Edward B. Hayes, an expert in mosquito-borne viral infections at the centers’ field station in Fort Collins, Colo.
The illness in Yap resembled another mosquito-borne infection, dengue fever, which has occurred in Micronesia and can cause severe bone pain. But the Yap illness seemed to differ from typical dengue, producing more joint pains and conjunctivitis (pinkeye).
After hearing the description of the cases, the team suspected dengue, Dr. Hayes said in an interview. But the team considered two other viruses: Chikungunya, which has been spreading in recent years in the Indian Ocean area, and Ross River, which occurs in Australia.
Because a C.D.C. function is to detect and control diseases like Chikungunya if they enter the United States, Dr. Hayes’s team asked for patients’ blood samples and permission to send two epidemiologists and an entomologist to Yap.
Working with practicing doctors, the epidemiologists interviewed patients to determine the frequency with which they experienced certain symptoms. They learned that the illness began like many others, nonspecifically, and that the spectrum of illness on Yap differed from some earlier outbreaks. For example, fever has been an inconsistent feature, and some patients have had pain their eyes, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes and diarrhea.
Entomologists believe Zika is spread by the same family of mosquitoes, Aedes, that transmit dengue and yellow fever.
In addition to warning people to wear long clothing, stay within screened areas and use insect repellents, health officials are trying to control the outbreak by decreasing the number of breeding sites in stagnant water and discarded containers.
Although scientists at Fort Collins have not isolated the Zika virus from the initial batch of blood specimens, they have implicated it through a number of genetic, immunologic and molecular biology tests.
How the outbreak started is not known, Dr. Hayes said. The frequent travel between Micronesia’s many islands and elsewhere could have allowed for the introduction of an infected mosquito or individual.
The scientists hope to conduct a survey of the affected area. In such studies, the investigators would select households at random, ask those living there if they are willing to participate in a study, and, if so, answer questions and provide blood samples. The findings could help define local factors that contribute to the spread of Zika, confirm the effectiveness of prevention measures and expand knowledge about a virus that has been little studied since its discovery in 1947.
Vital Signs: Insights: Big Yawn, Cooler Brain? Researchers Say Yes
By ERIC NAGOURNEY, The New York Times, July 3, 2007
Over the years, there have been many theories for why people yawn. It has been associated with sleepiness and boredom, and, incorrectly, with low oxygen levels in the blood.
“No one knows why we yawn,” says Andrew C. Gallup, a psychology professor at the State University of New York at Albany.
Now Dr. Gallup and fellow researchers have a new explanation: yawning, they said, is a way for the body to cool the brain.
Writing in the May issue of Evolutionary Psychology, they reported that volunteers yawned more often in situations in which their brains were likely to be warmer.
To prove their theory that yawning regulates brain temperature when other systems in the body are not doing enough, the researchers took advantage of the well-established tendency of people to yawn when those around them do — the so-called contagious yawn.
The volunteers were asked to step into a room by themselves and watch a video showing people behaving neutrally, laughing or yawning. Observers watching through a one-way mirror counted how many times the volunteers yawned.
Some volunteers were asked to breathe only through their noses as they watched. Later, volunteers were asked to press warm or cold packs on their foreheads.
“The two conditions thought to promote brain cooling (nasal breathing and forehead cooling) practically eliminated contagious yawning,” the researchers wrote.
The study may also help explain why yawning spreads from person to person.
A cooler brain, Dr. Gallup said, is a clearer brain.
So yawning actually appears to be a way to stay more alert. And contagious yawning, he said, may have evolved to help groups remain vigilant against danger.
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, July 3, 2007
THE FACTS
It sounds like a joke, or perhaps just an urban legend that grew out of Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham.” But food scientists say this one is no myth. The reality is that green potatoes contain high levels of a toxin, solanine, which can cause nausea, headaches and neurological problems.
Potatoes naturally produce small amounts of solanine as a defense against insects, but the levels increase with prolonged exposure to light and warm temperatures.
The green color is actually caused by high levels of chlorophyll, which by itself is harmless. But it is also a sign that levels of solanine, which is produced at the same time as chlorophyll, have increased as well.
According to a recent report by Alexander Pavlista, a professor of agronomy and horticulture at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, a 100-pound person would have to eat about 16 ounces of a fully green potato to get sick. That is the weight of a large baked potato.
The report noted that most green potatoes never reach the market. Still, to avoid the development of solanine, it is best to store potatoes in cool, dimly lit areas, and to cut away green areas before eating.
Another good rule: if it tastes bitter, don’t eat it. Unlike Dr. Seuss’s entree, this green meal would not have a happy ending.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Green potatoes contain a chemical that can cause sickness.
It Will Take More Than a Wolf to Blow One House Down
By SIOBHAN ROBERTS, The New York Times, July 3, 2007
LONDON, Ontario — The hurricane season is now well under way, and as the buffer of El Niño rapidly retreats, the forecast is looking windy, with an estimated 17 “named storms” on the horizon of the Atlantic basin.
While hurricanes seldom hit here (the exception being the Category 4 Hurricane Hazel in 1954, in which a 7-year-old boy drowned), a team of wind engineers at the University of Western Ontario is nonetheless preparing for the worst: a Category 5 storm.
In a hurricane simulation study called the Three Little Pigs Project, a full-scale two-story red brick house will be hit with the equivalent of 186-mile-per-hour winds and sprayed with water until it is on the brink of collapse.
“We really expect that we are going to tear the roof off,” said Dr. Michael Bartlett, a civil and environmental engineer at the university who is delivering a talk on the experiment at the 12th International Conference on Wind Engineering this week in Cairns, Australia.
“It’s not just that we can simulate a Category 5,” Dr. Bartlett said, “but we can simulate a Category 5 and see the unsatisfactory performance, and then do something that we think will improve the performance” of the structure.
Alan Davenport, an authority on windblown buildings who in 1965 founded the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory at the university, conceived of the Three Pigs project in 1999, at the end of the United Nations’ International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction.
Despite the good intentions, “it was a bad decade,” Dr. Davenport said. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew caused $26.5 billion in damage in the United States (Hurricane Katrina’s bill in 2005 was $81.2 billion), and Hurricane Mitch killed more than 11,000 people in Central America in 1998. But the disaster reduction initiative “did get people thinking in new terms,” he said, “and led to a more organized measurement of wind turbulence.”
The Three Pigs house is anchored to a three-foot-deep concrete floor in a hangar exposed to the prevailing southwesterly winds at the airport in London. The experiment’s turbulent winds, however, depend not on Mother Nature, nor massive Hollywood special-effects fans. Rather, the wind is replicated by a series of 100 “pressure boxes” bolted to the house and braced against a galvanized steel cocoon.
The boxes are equipped with “pressure load actuators,” which are essentially sophisticated vacuum cleaners. Activated in unison they sound like an out-of-tune choir belting out a low- to high-C drone of 100 decibels, and blast out pulsating pressures that mimic the airflow of turbulent gusts as they dart around and through a house during a hurricane.
“When wind blows over a structure, it creates pressures which act on the surfaces of the building,” said Gregg Kopp, a civil and environmental engineer the university and an associate research director at the wind tunnel laboratory. The effect, Dr. Kopp said, is similar to the pressure differences between the upper and lower surfaces of an airplane’s wing that cause it to lift into the air.
“The same thing happens on a house — as the wind moves over it, low pressures are created which want to lift it,” Dr. Kopp said. “These pressures are less than atmospheric pressure, so we call them suctions. A suction is like a vacuum, or the principle that allows a vacuum cleaner to work. So, instead of blowing wind at the house, we replicate the pressures and suctions. This is more efficient and less expensive.”
The ultimate goal of the project is to gather enough information on damage caused by hurricane winds to recommend changes in building codes. The trick is striking a balance between what consumers are willing to pay and the amount of acceptable risk set out in the building codes.
“The answer isn’t making a house so reliable that nothing fails, because nobody wants to pay for that,” Dr. Kopp said. “People would rather pay for the nice marble counter top, the things they can show off.”
“We’re trying to improve the evidence for changing the way we design and build light frame houses,” Dr. Bartlett said, noting that although Florida building codes were improved after Hurricane Andrew, most North American houses could not withstand the 95-m.p.h. winds of a Category 1 storm.
“Code committees don’t like to change things unless there is an obvious reason,” Dr. Bartlett said. “Whenever you change a line in the code, then every single designer or engineer who uses that code has to learn something new, and there is a tremendous cost associated with that.”
In gathering the evidence for proposed changes, the Three Pigs experiment first measures the impact of a hurricane on a miniature model of a house in the confines of the Wind Tunnel Laboratory. That process translates general data on hurricane wind speeds into specific data on how those winds “excite,” or act upon, the geometry of a certain structure. The model is wired with ports that record the pressure on every square inch, producing what is called a “time history” of the turbulent wind pressure accurate to the second.
The results of the tests are used in the Three Pigs house. As the mechanical vacuums replay the recorded measurements, the effects of the storm are measured by 35 “load cells” beneath the house and recorded by 17 cameras within.
“That becomes the evidence that we take to building code committees,” Dr. Bartlett said. If engineers compare traditional building methods with those proven in their testing, “we think that building code committees will respond positively to that. They’ll say, ‘Yes, that’s sensible. That’s a change worth making,’ ” he said.
The project will also include educational videos distributed to insurance companies and homebuilders’ associations.
“There are 235,000 new homes built in Canada every year,” Dr. Bartlett said, “and for the United States we usually multiply by a factor of 10. So to have meaningful impact on the quality of such a large range of construction means that somehow we have to communicate through channels that are unconventional, to really get the word out.”
The raw data generated will also be used to refine computer modeling, which in turn will be applied to other domestic structures — a bungalow with siding, for instance, or a four-story apartment complex — thus eliminating the need for such extreme testing to be repeated.
Towers of condominiums, Dr. Kopp said, would be exempt. They already undergo rigorous testing and are engineered with redundant structural safeties.
“What governs the standards in high-rises is the comfort of the occupant,” he said. “Seeing the ground moving beneath, or the chandelier swinging from the ceiling, is not acceptable. The top corner in a condo building is the worst environment — and also where you have the wealthiest tenant, with the best access to lawyers.”
Siobhan Roberts is a writer in Toronto, and author of “King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, The Man Who Saved Geometry” (Walker, 2006).
Little-Known Virus Challenges a Far-Flung Health System
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, The New York Times, July 3, 2007
A little-known virus is causing a big fuss in Micronesia, the Pacific island nation partly managed by the United States.
The Zika virus, spread by mosquitoes, produces an itchy rash, pinkeye, joint pain and fever. Since its discovery 60 years ago in an ill monkey in the Zika forest in Uganda, it has caused rare cases and outbreaks in Africa and Southeast Asia. There is no specific treatment or vaccine.
Now Zika has made its first appearance in Micronesia, on the island of Yap, where health officials say there have been at least 42 confirmed cases and 65 probable ones. Additional cases may be occurring on other islands.
While Zika does not seem to be fatal, it is posing unusual challenges to the public health system, not just in this remote chain of islands, about 600 miles east of the Philippines, but also in the United States.
The virus can be misleading, giving false positive results on screening tests; also, studies are needed to gain insights into how infectious agents move unexpectedly in new areas and to be sure that Zika does not lead to long-term complications.
Scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the Pasteur Institute and the World Health Organization have joined Yap doctors in investigating the outbreak and trying to prevent further spread.
A physician on Yap alerted the C.D.C. in late May because he and his colleagues were puzzled by the pattern of symptoms their patients were experiencing, said Dr. Edward B. Hayes, an expert in mosquito-borne viral infections at the centers’ field station in Fort Collins, Colo.
The illness in Yap resembled another mosquito-borne infection, dengue fever, which has occurred in Micronesia and can cause severe bone pain. But the Yap illness seemed to differ from typical dengue, producing more joint pains and conjunctivitis (pinkeye).
After hearing the description of the cases, the team suspected dengue, Dr. Hayes said in an interview. But the team considered two other viruses: Chikungunya, which has been spreading in recent years in the Indian Ocean area, and Ross River, which occurs in Australia.
Because a C.D.C. function is to detect and control diseases like Chikungunya if they enter the United States, Dr. Hayes’s team asked for patients’ blood samples and permission to send two epidemiologists and an entomologist to Yap.
Working with practicing doctors, the epidemiologists interviewed patients to determine the frequency with which they experienced certain symptoms. They learned that the illness began like many others, nonspecifically, and that the spectrum of illness on Yap differed from some earlier outbreaks. For example, fever has been an inconsistent feature, and some patients have had pain their eyes, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes and diarrhea.
Entomologists believe Zika is spread by the same family of mosquitoes, Aedes, that transmit dengue and yellow fever.
In addition to warning people to wear long clothing, stay within screened areas and use insect repellents, health officials are trying to control the outbreak by decreasing the number of breeding sites in stagnant water and discarded containers.
Although scientists at Fort Collins have not isolated the Zika virus from the initial batch of blood specimens, they have implicated it through a number of genetic, immunologic and molecular biology tests.
How the outbreak started is not known, Dr. Hayes said. The frequent travel between Micronesia’s many islands and elsewhere could have allowed for the introduction of an infected mosquito or individual.
The scientists hope to conduct a survey of the affected area. In such studies, the investigators would select households at random, ask those living there if they are willing to participate in a study, and, if so, answer questions and provide blood samples. The findings could help define local factors that contribute to the spread of Zika, confirm the effectiveness of prevention measures and expand knowledge about a virus that has been little studied since its discovery in 1947.
Vital Signs: Insights: Big Yawn, Cooler Brain? Researchers Say Yes
By ERIC NAGOURNEY, The New York Times, July 3, 2007
Over the years, there have been many theories for why people yawn. It has been associated with sleepiness and boredom, and, incorrectly, with low oxygen levels in the blood.
“No one knows why we yawn,” says Andrew C. Gallup, a psychology professor at the State University of New York at Albany.
Now Dr. Gallup and fellow researchers have a new explanation: yawning, they said, is a way for the body to cool the brain.
Writing in the May issue of Evolutionary Psychology, they reported that volunteers yawned more often in situations in which their brains were likely to be warmer.
To prove their theory that yawning regulates brain temperature when other systems in the body are not doing enough, the researchers took advantage of the well-established tendency of people to yawn when those around them do — the so-called contagious yawn.
The volunteers were asked to step into a room by themselves and watch a video showing people behaving neutrally, laughing or yawning. Observers watching through a one-way mirror counted how many times the volunteers yawned.
Some volunteers were asked to breathe only through their noses as they watched. Later, volunteers were asked to press warm or cold packs on their foreheads.
“The two conditions thought to promote brain cooling (nasal breathing and forehead cooling) practically eliminated contagious yawning,” the researchers wrote.
The study may also help explain why yawning spreads from person to person.
A cooler brain, Dr. Gallup said, is a clearer brain.
So yawning actually appears to be a way to stay more alert. And contagious yawning, he said, may have evolved to help groups remain vigilant against danger.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-07-03 04:56 pm (UTC)whenever i read out loud, like a book to a kid, i yawn like crazy. like every sentence.