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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.
We’ve all heard about the mysterious powers of smell and its importance in love, friendship and food. Yet a simple game like What’s My Bean, and our consistent surprise at the impact of shutting down our smell circuits, shows that we don’t really grasp just how deep the nose goes. At the International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste held in San Francisco late last month, Dr. Herz and other researchers discussed the many ways our sense of smell stands alone. Olfaction is an ancient sense, the key by which our earliest forebears learned to approach or slink off. Yet the right aroma can evoke such vivid, whole body sensations that we feel life’s permanent newness, the grounding of now.
On the one hand, said Jay A. Gottfried of Northwestern University, olfaction is our slow sense, for it depends on messages carried not at the speed of light or of sound, but at the far statelier pace of a bypassing breeze, a pocket of air enriched with the sort of small, volatile molecules that our nasal-based odor receptors can read. Yet olfaction is our quickest sense. Whereas new signals detected by our eyes and our ears must first be assimilated by a structural way station called the thalamus before reaching the brain’s interpretive regions, odiferous messages barrel along dedicated pathways straight from the nose and right into the brain’s olfactory cortex, for instant processing.
Importantly, the olfactory cortex is embedded within the brain’s limbic system and amygdala, where emotions are born and emotional memories stored. That’s why smells, feelings and memories become so easily and intimately entangled, and why the simple act of washing dishes recently made Dr. Herz’s cousin break down and cry. “The smell of the dish soap reminded her of her grandmother,” said Dr. Herz, author of “The Scent of Desire.”
Many mammals are clearly nosier than we. Consider that our olfactory epithelium, the yellowish mass of mucous membrane located some three inches up from our nostrils, holds about 20 million smell receptors designed to detect odor molecules delivered either frontally, when we, say, sniff a rose, or via the rear, the volatile aromas that come up through the back of the mouth and give each jelly bean meaning. The nasal membranes of a bloodhound, by contrast, sustain an olfactory army 220 million receptors strong.
Yet for all the meagerness of our hardware, we humans can become better nosehounds with startling ease. In one experiment, Dr. Gottfried said, subjects exposed to a single floral scent for just three and a half minutes markedly improved their ability to discriminate among whole families of flower odors. In another, participants soon learned to distinguish normally undetectable differences between one herbal smell and its mirror-image molecular twin if they were given mild electric shocks every time they guessed wrong.
Moreover, numerous studies have shown that smell memory is long and resilient, and that the earliest odor associations we make often stick. “With a phone number, if you get a new one, a week later you may have forgotten the old one,” Dr. Herz said. “With smells, it’s the other way around. The first association is better than the second.”
In another presentation, Maria Larsson, an associate professor of psychology at Stockholm University, described the power of smell to serve as an almost magical time machine, with potential for treating dementia, depression, the grim fog of age. Johan Willander and others in her lab have sought to give firm empirical foundation to the old Proustian hypothesis, the idea that smells and aromas, like the famed taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, can help disinter the past.
Studying groups of Swedes whose average age was 75, the researchers offered three different sets of the same 20 memory cues — the cue as a word, as a picture and as a smell. The scientists found that while the word and visual cues elicited associations largely from subjects’ adolescence and young adulthood, the smell cues evoked thoughts of early childhood, under the age of 10.
And despite the comparative antiquity of such memories, Dr. Larsson said, people described them in exceptionally rich and emotional terms, and they were much likelier to report the sudden sensation of being brought back in time. They smelled cardamom, and there they were in the kitchen, flour dust flying as they helped Mama and Nana roll out the holiday buns. The scent of tar, and they’re back at the dock with Dad, tarring the bottom of the family boat in anticipation of long summer sails.
Dr. Larsson attributes the youthfulness of smell memories to the fact that our olfaction is the first of our senses to mature and only later cedes cognitive primacy to vision and words, while the cortical link between olfaction and emotion ensures that those early sensations keep their bloom all life long.
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.
The potential savings in both dollars and pollution is huge, analysts say, when the estimated one billion PCs in use globally are taken into account. The research firm Gartner estimates that 40 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions resulting from information technology and telecommunications are attributable to PCs. Data center computers account for 23 percent, and the rest is attributable to printers and telecommunications equipment.
“If you are going to tackle climate change and curb energy use, you have to deal with consumer devices like PCs,” said Andrew Fanara, a product development expert in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program, which promotes energy-efficient products and practices.
For more than a decade, the federal Energy Star program has developed voluntary power-management standards for PCs, and suppliers like Intel and Microsoft have steadily improved the energy efficiency of their chips and software. But Mr. Fanara estimated that less than half of PCs met those standards, in part because more energy-efficient hardware adds slightly to production costs.
“There are large potential savings beyond what Energy Star can do,” he said.
The free software, called Edison, is a consumer version of the PC energy-saving software sold to corporate customers by Verdiem, which is financed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a leading venture capital firm and an aggressive investor in green technologies, and other venture investors.
Verdiem, based in Seattle, has 180 corporate and government customers, including Hewlett-Packard, which bundles Verdiem’s Surveyor program on its desktop PCs sold to corporations. Though he will not disclose sales figures, the company’s chief executive, Kevin Klustner, says revenue should triple this year.
There are other free tools for calculating and managing PC power consumption, including the E.P.A.’s EZ Wizard, CO2 Saver and a Google energy-saving gadget. But Edison allows the user more flexibility, especially in making the settings as stringent as they want, analysts say.
If a user sets the software to put the machine in a “deep sleep” mode after a few minutes of not hitting a keystroke, the hard drive powers down and the PC sips just 5 percent of its normal energy consumption.
That kind of energy diet is far from standard practice in homes and offices. Half of all electricity consumed by a standard PC is wasted, according to environmental and industry studies.
Household electricity bills could also be trimmed by $20 to $95 a year for each PC, depending on local power costs and the kind of PCs in use, said Mr. Klustner. “What we’re trying to do is raise the visibility of the power consumption problem on the PC desktop and really bring power management to the masses,” he said.
The Climate Savers group, which includes major technology companies and environmental groups, has set a goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from computers by 54 million tons by 2010. That is the equivalent of the yearly pollution from 11 million cars. The goal includes data center computers and PCs, and about half of all PCs are consumer machines.
“This kind of energy-saving technology for consumers is a key ingredient in moving toward that goal,” said Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist for Microsoft.
The companies said that the Edison software would be available to download on Wednesday from the Web sites of Verdiem (verdiem.com), Microsoft (microsoft.com/environment), and Climate Savers (climatesaverscomputing.org).
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.
As recently as last year, this subspecies of the world’s largest primate was listed as critically endangered by international wildlife organizations because known populations — estimated at less than 100,000 in the 1980s — had been devastated by hunting and outbreaks of Ebola virus. The three other subspecies are either critically endangered or endangered.
The survey was conducted by the Wildlife Conservation Society and local researchers in largely unstudied terrain, including a swampy region nicknamed the “green abyss” by the first biologists to cross it. Dr. Steven E. Sanderson, the president of the society, marveled at the scope of what the survey revealed. “The message from our community is so often one of despair,” he said. “While we don’t want to relax our concern, it’s just great to discover that these animals are doing well.”
The society is to release its findings on Tuesday at a meeting of the International Primatological Society in Edinburgh. Conservation society scientists said the continuing threat of Ebola precluded a change in the gorilla’s status. But the discovery was mainly stirring excitement.
“This is the light of hope you look for,” said Richard G. Ruggerio, a conservation biologist at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. But he cautioned that the large gorilla populations in the two studied tracts, which cover 18,000 square miles, should not lead to complacency. “It’s a different kind of alarm call, an opportunity that is increasingly rare on this planet — to do something before there’s a crisis,” he said. A separate global update on primates is being issued Tuesday at the Edinburgh meeting, showing that — with a few exceptions — forest destruction and, increasingly, hunting for meat, pets and Chinese medicinal products are imperiling monkeys and other primates, from Congo Republic to Cambodia.
In Vietnam and Cambodia, 90 percent of primates — including gibbons, leaf monkeys and langurs — are considered at risk, said scientists affiliated with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which issued the update with Conservation International.
“What is happening in Southeast Asia is terrifying,” said Jean-Christophe Vié, deputy chief of the group’s species program. “To have a group of animals under such a high level of threat is, quite frankly, unlike anything we have recorded among any other group.”
The lowland gorillas discovered in the Congo Republic survey are secure for now, but pressures are growing on wildlife in central Africa as international demand builds for tropical hardwood and other resources. The government of Congo Republic has granted national park status to one of the studied regions, Ntokou-Pikounda, which is estimated to hold 73,000 gorillas. But there is little money for staff or operations, conservation society officials said.
Over all, Dr. Sanderson said, the situation for the surveyed gorillas in Congo Republic appears promising. Along with the park plans, some logging companies that sell lumber certified as responsibly harvested are working with the conservation society and the government to adjust practices in ways that preserve habitat and limit meat hunting.
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.
The fossils were found at sites that had been small lakes, in sediments that were 14.07 million years old. So that must have been a period of “wet glaciation,” when it was warm enough for glaciers to melt and create the conditions for these organisms to thrive.
Then, at sediments that are 13.85 million years old, there are no fossils at all, Dr. Lewis said. By then, conditions must have been so cold that the glaciers did not melt at all, and they must have remained cold and dry since then for the fossils to remain so well preserved.
Previously, most knowledge of mid-Miocene cooling came from marine records. “Those are great if you want to do an average for the whole globe,” Dr. Lewis said.
“But nobody knew particularly what was Antarctica’s role,” he added. “That’s where the fossils come in.”
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.
One of the report’s authors, Dr. Peter Nichol of the University of Wisconsin medical school, said he had gotten the idea for the study while working with a resident and co-author, Dr. Danielle M. Adams.
The surgeons were using laparoscopic equipment to perform an appendectomy, and at one point Dr. Adams had a stapler in one hand and a grasper in the other. But she had to ask for help with the grasper because she needed two hands to fire the stapler. The same thing happened later with another piece of equipment. “Her frustration was palpable,” Dr. Nichol said in an e-mail message.
When the researchers surveyed surgery residents at four universities, they found that women often described laparoscopic equipment as awkward.
Laparoscopic surgery allows less discomfort for patients, but it can be more difficult for surgeons. “This complexity is made more difficult if the instrument does not fit the hand that is using it,” the study said.
The researchers noted that one in four general surgery residents in 2004 were women.
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.
We’ve all heard about the mysterious powers of smell and its importance in love, friendship and food. Yet a simple game like What’s My Bean, and our consistent surprise at the impact of shutting down our smell circuits, shows that we don’t really grasp just how deep the nose goes. At the International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste held in San Francisco late last month, Dr. Herz and other researchers discussed the many ways our sense of smell stands alone. Olfaction is an ancient sense, the key by which our earliest forebears learned to approach or slink off. Yet the right aroma can evoke such vivid, whole body sensations that we feel life’s permanent newness, the grounding of now.
On the one hand, said Jay A. Gottfried of Northwestern University, olfaction is our slow sense, for it depends on messages carried not at the speed of light or of sound, but at the far statelier pace of a bypassing breeze, a pocket of air enriched with the sort of small, volatile molecules that our nasal-based odor receptors can read. Yet olfaction is our quickest sense. Whereas new signals detected by our eyes and our ears must first be assimilated by a structural way station called the thalamus before reaching the brain’s interpretive regions, odiferous messages barrel along dedicated pathways straight from the nose and right into the brain’s olfactory cortex, for instant processing.
Importantly, the olfactory cortex is embedded within the brain’s limbic system and amygdala, where emotions are born and emotional memories stored. That’s why smells, feelings and memories become so easily and intimately entangled, and why the simple act of washing dishes recently made Dr. Herz’s cousin break down and cry. “The smell of the dish soap reminded her of her grandmother,” said Dr. Herz, author of “The Scent of Desire.”
Many mammals are clearly nosier than we. Consider that our olfactory epithelium, the yellowish mass of mucous membrane located some three inches up from our nostrils, holds about 20 million smell receptors designed to detect odor molecules delivered either frontally, when we, say, sniff a rose, or via the rear, the volatile aromas that come up through the back of the mouth and give each jelly bean meaning. The nasal membranes of a bloodhound, by contrast, sustain an olfactory army 220 million receptors strong.
Yet for all the meagerness of our hardware, we humans can become better nosehounds with startling ease. In one experiment, Dr. Gottfried said, subjects exposed to a single floral scent for just three and a half minutes markedly improved their ability to discriminate among whole families of flower odors. In another, participants soon learned to distinguish normally undetectable differences between one herbal smell and its mirror-image molecular twin if they were given mild electric shocks every time they guessed wrong.
Moreover, numerous studies have shown that smell memory is long and resilient, and that the earliest odor associations we make often stick. “With a phone number, if you get a new one, a week later you may have forgotten the old one,” Dr. Herz said. “With smells, it’s the other way around. The first association is better than the second.”
In another presentation, Maria Larsson, an associate professor of psychology at Stockholm University, described the power of smell to serve as an almost magical time machine, with potential for treating dementia, depression, the grim fog of age. Johan Willander and others in her lab have sought to give firm empirical foundation to the old Proustian hypothesis, the idea that smells and aromas, like the famed taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, can help disinter the past.
Studying groups of Swedes whose average age was 75, the researchers offered three different sets of the same 20 memory cues — the cue as a word, as a picture and as a smell. The scientists found that while the word and visual cues elicited associations largely from subjects’ adolescence and young adulthood, the smell cues evoked thoughts of early childhood, under the age of 10.
And despite the comparative antiquity of such memories, Dr. Larsson said, people described them in exceptionally rich and emotional terms, and they were much likelier to report the sudden sensation of being brought back in time. They smelled cardamom, and there they were in the kitchen, flour dust flying as they helped Mama and Nana roll out the holiday buns. The scent of tar, and they’re back at the dock with Dad, tarring the bottom of the family boat in anticipation of long summer sails.
Dr. Larsson attributes the youthfulness of smell memories to the fact that our olfaction is the first of our senses to mature and only later cedes cognitive primacy to vision and words, while the cortical link between olfaction and emotion ensures that those early sensations keep their bloom all life long.
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.
The potential savings in both dollars and pollution is huge, analysts say, when the estimated one billion PCs in use globally are taken into account. The research firm Gartner estimates that 40 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions resulting from information technology and telecommunications are attributable to PCs. Data center computers account for 23 percent, and the rest is attributable to printers and telecommunications equipment.
“If you are going to tackle climate change and curb energy use, you have to deal with consumer devices like PCs,” said Andrew Fanara, a product development expert in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program, which promotes energy-efficient products and practices.
For more than a decade, the federal Energy Star program has developed voluntary power-management standards for PCs, and suppliers like Intel and Microsoft have steadily improved the energy efficiency of their chips and software. But Mr. Fanara estimated that less than half of PCs met those standards, in part because more energy-efficient hardware adds slightly to production costs.
“There are large potential savings beyond what Energy Star can do,” he said.
The free software, called Edison, is a consumer version of the PC energy-saving software sold to corporate customers by Verdiem, which is financed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a leading venture capital firm and an aggressive investor in green technologies, and other venture investors.
Verdiem, based in Seattle, has 180 corporate and government customers, including Hewlett-Packard, which bundles Verdiem’s Surveyor program on its desktop PCs sold to corporations. Though he will not disclose sales figures, the company’s chief executive, Kevin Klustner, says revenue should triple this year.
There are other free tools for calculating and managing PC power consumption, including the E.P.A.’s EZ Wizard, CO2 Saver and a Google energy-saving gadget. But Edison allows the user more flexibility, especially in making the settings as stringent as they want, analysts say.
If a user sets the software to put the machine in a “deep sleep” mode after a few minutes of not hitting a keystroke, the hard drive powers down and the PC sips just 5 percent of its normal energy consumption.
That kind of energy diet is far from standard practice in homes and offices. Half of all electricity consumed by a standard PC is wasted, according to environmental and industry studies.
Household electricity bills could also be trimmed by $20 to $95 a year for each PC, depending on local power costs and the kind of PCs in use, said Mr. Klustner. “What we’re trying to do is raise the visibility of the power consumption problem on the PC desktop and really bring power management to the masses,” he said.
The Climate Savers group, which includes major technology companies and environmental groups, has set a goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from computers by 54 million tons by 2010. That is the equivalent of the yearly pollution from 11 million cars. The goal includes data center computers and PCs, and about half of all PCs are consumer machines.
“This kind of energy-saving technology for consumers is a key ingredient in moving toward that goal,” said Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist for Microsoft.
The companies said that the Edison software would be available to download on Wednesday from the Web sites of Verdiem (verdiem.com), Microsoft (microsoft.com/environment), and Climate Savers (climatesaverscomputing.org).
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.
As recently as last year, this subspecies of the world’s largest primate was listed as critically endangered by international wildlife organizations because known populations — estimated at less than 100,000 in the 1980s — had been devastated by hunting and outbreaks of Ebola virus. The three other subspecies are either critically endangered or endangered.
The survey was conducted by the Wildlife Conservation Society and local researchers in largely unstudied terrain, including a swampy region nicknamed the “green abyss” by the first biologists to cross it. Dr. Steven E. Sanderson, the president of the society, marveled at the scope of what the survey revealed. “The message from our community is so often one of despair,” he said. “While we don’t want to relax our concern, it’s just great to discover that these animals are doing well.”
The society is to release its findings on Tuesday at a meeting of the International Primatological Society in Edinburgh. Conservation society scientists said the continuing threat of Ebola precluded a change in the gorilla’s status. But the discovery was mainly stirring excitement.
“This is the light of hope you look for,” said Richard G. Ruggerio, a conservation biologist at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. But he cautioned that the large gorilla populations in the two studied tracts, which cover 18,000 square miles, should not lead to complacency. “It’s a different kind of alarm call, an opportunity that is increasingly rare on this planet — to do something before there’s a crisis,” he said. A separate global update on primates is being issued Tuesday at the Edinburgh meeting, showing that — with a few exceptions — forest destruction and, increasingly, hunting for meat, pets and Chinese medicinal products are imperiling monkeys and other primates, from Congo Republic to Cambodia.
In Vietnam and Cambodia, 90 percent of primates — including gibbons, leaf monkeys and langurs — are considered at risk, said scientists affiliated with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which issued the update with Conservation International.
“What is happening in Southeast Asia is terrifying,” said Jean-Christophe Vié, deputy chief of the group’s species program. “To have a group of animals under such a high level of threat is, quite frankly, unlike anything we have recorded among any other group.”
The lowland gorillas discovered in the Congo Republic survey are secure for now, but pressures are growing on wildlife in central Africa as international demand builds for tropical hardwood and other resources. The government of Congo Republic has granted national park status to one of the studied regions, Ntokou-Pikounda, which is estimated to hold 73,000 gorillas. But there is little money for staff or operations, conservation society officials said.
Over all, Dr. Sanderson said, the situation for the surveyed gorillas in Congo Republic appears promising. Along with the park plans, some logging companies that sell lumber certified as responsibly harvested are working with the conservation society and the government to adjust practices in ways that preserve habitat and limit meat hunting.
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.
The fossils were found at sites that had been small lakes, in sediments that were 14.07 million years old. So that must have been a period of “wet glaciation,” when it was warm enough for glaciers to melt and create the conditions for these organisms to thrive.
Then, at sediments that are 13.85 million years old, there are no fossils at all, Dr. Lewis said. By then, conditions must have been so cold that the glaciers did not melt at all, and they must have remained cold and dry since then for the fossils to remain so well preserved.
Previously, most knowledge of mid-Miocene cooling came from marine records. “Those are great if you want to do an average for the whole globe,” Dr. Lewis said.
“But nobody knew particularly what was Antarctica’s role,” he added. “That’s where the fossils come in.”
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.
One of the report’s authors, Dr. Peter Nichol of the University of Wisconsin medical school, said he had gotten the idea for the study while working with a resident and co-author, Dr. Danielle M. Adams.
The surgeons were using laparoscopic equipment to perform an appendectomy, and at one point Dr. Adams had a stapler in one hand and a grasper in the other. But she had to ask for help with the grasper because she needed two hands to fire the stapler. The same thing happened later with another piece of equipment. “Her frustration was palpable,” Dr. Nichol said in an e-mail message.
When the researchers surveyed surgery residents at four universities, they found that women often described laparoscopic equipment as awkward.
Laparoscopic surgery allows less discomfort for patients, but it can be more difficult for surgeons. “This complexity is made more difficult if the instrument does not fit the hand that is using it,” the study said.
The researchers noted that one in four general surgery residents in 2004 were women.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 04:10 pm (UTC)Additionally, I think the last article is really illustrative of the myriad ways in which our society is constructed to suit men, even women are allowed to join.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-08 07:19 pm (UTC)