Fear of a Female Planet

ESSAY: Is Doomsday Coming? Perhaps, but Not in 2012
By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times, November 17, 2009

NASA said last week that the world was not ending — at least anytime soon. Last year, CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, said the same thing, which I guess is good news for those of us who are habitually jittery. How often do you have a pair of such blue-ribbon scientific establishments assuring us that everything is fine?

On the other hand, it is kind of depressing if you were looking forward to taking a vacation from mortgage payments to finance one last blowout.

CERN’s pronouncements were intended to allay concerns that a black hole would be spit out of its new Large Hadron Collider and eat the Earth.

The announcements by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in the form of several Web site postings and a video posted on YouTube, were in response to worries that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012, when a 5,125-year cycle known as the Long Count in the Mayan calendar supposedly comes to a close.

The doomsday buzz reached a high point with the release of the new movie “2012,” directed by Roland Emmerich, who previously inflicted misery on the Earth from aliens and glaciers in “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow.”

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OBSERVATORY: Digging Into the Science of That Old-Book Smell
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, November 17, 2009

If you have torn yourself away from the virtual library that is the Internet long enough to visit a real library, you know that the smell of old books — musty, slightly acidic, even grassy — is instantly recognizable. But is it quantifiable? And if so, might old-book odor prove useful to librarians and conservators charged with preserving collections?

Matija Strlic, a researcher with the Center for Sustainable Heritage at University College London, thinks it might. With colleagues in Slovenia and with the assistance of the National Archives of the Netherlands, he has published proof-of-concept research that shows that it is possible to understand both the composition and condition of old paper by analyzing the volatile organic compounds they emit.

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GLOBAL UPDATE: Congo’s Army Accused of Striking Villages as Refugees Waited for Measles Shots
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, November 17, 2009

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders has accused the Congolese Army of attacking the villages of Rwandan refugees as they waited for measles shots offered by the charity.

Thousands of civilians gathered for shots at seven sites in a region of the former Zaire controlled by remnants of the Hutu militias who led the 1994 genocide against Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda.

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FINDINGS: A Case in Antiquities for ‘Finders Keepers’
By JOHN TIERNEY, The New York Times, November 17, 2009

Zahi Hawass regards the Rosetta Stone, like so much else, as stolen property languishing in exile. “We own that stone,” he told Al Jazeera, speaking as the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The British Museum does not agree — at least not yet. But never underestimate Dr. Hawass when it comes to this sort of custody dispute. He has prevailed so often in getting pieces returned to what he calls their “motherland” that museum curators are scrambling to appease him.

Last month, after Dr. Hawass suspended the Louvre’s excavation in Egypt, the museum promptly returned the ancient fresco fragments he sought. Then the Metropolitan Museum of Art made a pre-emptive display of its “appreciation” and “deep respect” by buying a piece of a shrine from a private collector so that it could be donated to Egypt.

Now an official from the Neues Museum in Berlin is headed to Egypt to discuss Dr. Hawass’s demand for its star attraction, a bust of Nefertiti.

These gestures may make immediate pragmatic sense for museum curators worried about getting excavation permits and avoiding legal problems. But is this trend ultimately good for archaeology?

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Well: A Marathon Run in the Slow Lane
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, November 3, 2009

After a 10-kilometer road race this summer, a friend apologized for missing me at the finish line. The truth was, she hadn’t lost me in the crowd. She just didn’t wait long enough.

I’m a slow runner. A really slow runner. In that field of 625, I finished in 619th place.

There was a time when I was embarrassed by my painfully slow pace, but not anymore. Since I began training for a marathon this spring, I’ve discovered that the view is a lot more interesting in the back of the pack.

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Fathers Gain Respect From Experts (and Mothers)
By LAURIE TARKAN, The New York Times, November 3, 2009

It used to irk Melissa Calapini when her 3-year-old daughter, Haley, hung around her father while he fixed his cars. Ms. Calapini thought there were more enriching things the little girl could be doing with her time.

But since the couple attended a parenting course — to save their relationship, which had become overwhelmed by arguments about rearing their children — Ms. Calapini has had a change of heart. Now she encourages the father-daughter car talk.

“Daddy’s bonding time with his girls is working on cars,” said Ms. Calapini, of Olivehurst, Calif. “He has his own way of communicating with them, and that’s O.K.”

As much as mothers want their partners to be involved with their children, experts say they often unintentionally discourage men from doing so. Because mothering is their realm, some women micromanage fathers and expect them to do things their way, said Marsha Kline Pruett, a professor at the Smith College School for Social Work at Smith College and a co-author of the new book “Partnership Parenting,” with her husband, the child psychiatrist Dr. Kyle Pruett (Da Capo Press).

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In the Mediterranean, Killer Tsunamis From an Ancient Eruption
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, The New York Times, November 3, 2009

The massive eruption of the Thera volcano in the Aegean Sea more than 3,000 years ago produced killer waves that raced across hundreds of miles of the Eastern Mediterranean to inundate the area that is now Israel and probably other coastal sites, a team of scientists has found.

The team, writing in the October issue of Geology, said the new evidence suggested that giant tsunamis from the catastrophic eruption hit “coastal sites across the Eastern Mediterranean littoral.” Tsunamis are giant waves that can crash into shore, rearrange the seabed, inundate vast areas of land and carry terrestrial material out to sea.

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Mind: When Parents Are Too Toxic to Tolerate
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D., October 20, 2009

You can divorce an abusive spouse. You can call it quits if your lover mistreats you. But what can you do if the source of your misery is your own parent?

Granted, no parent is perfect. And whining about parental failure, real or not, is practically an American pastime that keeps the therapeutic community dutifully employed.

But just as there are ordinary good-enough parents who mysteriously produce a difficult child, there are some decent people who have the misfortune of having a truly toxic parent.

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Remarkable Creatures: For Fish in Coral Reefs, It’s Useful to Be Smart
By SEAN B. CARROLL, October 20, 2009

I have long suspected that fish are smarter than we give them credit for.

As a child, I had an aquarium with several pet goldfish. They certainly knew it was feeding time when my hand appeared over their tank, and they excitedly awaited their delicious fish flakes.

They also exhibited a darker, disturbing behavior. Evidently, a safe life with abundant food was not fulfilling. From time to time, either sheer ennui or the long gray Toledo winter got to one of the fish and it ended its torment with a leap to my bedroom floor.

Maybe my anthropomorphizing is a bit over the top. But, really, just how smart are fish? Can they learn?

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Researchers Create Artificial Memories in the Brain of a Fruitfly
By NICHOLAS WADE, October 20, 2009

As part of a project to understand how the brain learns, biologists have written memories into the cells of a fruitfly’s brain, making it think it had a terrible experience.

The memory trace was written by shining light into the fly’s brain and activating a special class of cells involved in learning how to avoid an electric shock.

The goal of the research is not to give flies nightmares but rather to understand how learning in general works, from flies to people. “In the case of the fly, where we have a numerically rather simple nervous system that does something rather complex, I think we have a chance to break open the black box and understand it,” said Gero Miesenböck of the University of Oxford, leader of the team that has developed the new technique.

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Really? The Claim: Garlic Can Be Helpful in Warding Off a Cold
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, October 20, 2009

THE FACTS For centuries, garlic has been extolled not just for its versatility in the kitchen but also for its medicinal powers.

Whatever the reason, studies seem to support an effect. In one double-blind study, published in 2001, British scientists followed 146 healthy adults over 12 weeks from November to February. Those who had been randomly selected to receive a daily garlic supplement came down with 24 colds during the study period, compared with 65 colds in the placebo group. The garlic group experienced 111 days of sickness, versus 366 for those given a placebo. They also recovered faster.

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Well: Probiotics: Looking Underneath the Yogurt Label
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, September 29, 2009

When the label tells you the food you are buying “contains probiotics,” are you getting health benefits or just marketing hype? Perhaps a bit of both.

Probiotics are live micro-organisms that work by restoring the balance of intestinal bacteria and raising resistance to harmful germs. Taken in sufficient amounts, they can promote digestive health and help shorten the duration of colds. But while there are thousands of different probiotics, only a handful have been proved effective in clinical trials. Which strain of bacteria a given product includes is often difficult to figure out.

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Fossil Skeleton From Africa Predates Lucy
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, October 2, 2009

Lucy, meet Ardi.

Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, is the newest fossil skeleton out of Africa to take its place in the gallery of human origins. At an age of 4.4 million years, it lived well before and was much more primitive than the famous 3.2-million-year-old Lucy, of the species Australopithecus afarensis.

Since finding fragments of the older hominid in 1992, an international team of scientists has been searching for more specimens and on Thursday presented a fairly complete skeleton and their first full analysis. By replacing Lucy as the earliest known skeleton from the human branch of the primate family tree, the scientists said, Ardi opened a window to “the early evolutionary steps that our ancestors took after we diverged from our common ancestor with chimpanzees.”

The older hominid was already so different from chimps that it suggested “no modern ape is a realistic proxy for characterizing early hominid evolution,” they wrote.

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Evolution Run in Reverse? A Study Says It’s a One-Way Street
By CARL ZIMMER, The New York Times, September 29, 2009

Evolutionary biologists have long wondered if history can run backward. Is it possible for the proteins in our bodies to return to the old shapes and jobs they had millions of years ago?

Examining the evolution of one protein, a team of scientists declares the answer is no, saying new mutations make it practically impossible for evolution to reverse direction. “They burn the bridge that evolution just crossed,” said Joseph W. Thornton, a biology professor at the University of Oregon and co-author of a paper on the team’s findings in the current issue of Nature.

The Belgian biologist Louis Dollo was the first scientist to ponder reverse evolution. “An organism never returns to its former state,” he declared in 1905, a statement later dubbed Dollo’s law.

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Finding Order in the Apparent Chaos of Currents
By BINA VENKATARAMAN, The New York Times, September 29, 2009

Suppose a blob of dioxin-rich pesticide is spilled into Monterey Bay. It might quickly disperse to the Pacific Ocean. But hours later, a spill of the same size at the same spot could circle near the coastline, posing a greater danger to marine life. The briny surface waters of the bay churn so chaotically that a slight shift in the place or time an oil drop, a buoy — or even a person — falls in can dictate whether it is swept out to the open ocean or swirls near the shore.

But the results are not unpredictable. A team of scientists studying Monterey Bay since 2000 has found that underlying its complex, seemingly jumbled currents is a structure that guides the dispersal patterns, a structure that changes over time.

With the aid of high-frequency radar that tracks the speed and direction of the flowing waters, and computers that rapidly perform millions of calculations, the scientists found that a hidden skeleton guided whether floating debris lingered or exited the bay.

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Fossil Find Challenges Theories on T. Rex
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, September 18, 2009

Paleontologists said Thursday that they had discovered what amounted to a miniature prototype of Tyrannosaurus rex, complete with the oversize head, powerful jaws, long legs — and, as every schoolchild knows, puny arms — that were hallmarks of the king of the dinosaurs.

But this scaled-down version, which was about nine feet long and weighed only 150 pounds, lived 125 million years ago, about 35 million years before giant Tyrannosaurs roamed the earth. So the discovery calls into question theories about the evolution of T. rex, which was about five times longer and almost 100 times heavier.

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Remarkable Creatures: In a Shark’s Tooth, a New Family Tree
By SEAN B. CARROLL, The New York Times, September 15, 2009

“Like a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives.”

That is how a shark expert, Matt Hooper, described Carcharodon megalodon to the police chief in Peter Benchley’s novel “Jaws.” He was referring to the 50-foot-long, 50-ton body and enormous six- to seven-inch-long teeth that made the extinct megalodon shark perhaps the most awesome predator that has ever roamed the seas.

Hooper had just gotten his first glimpse of the massive great white shark that was terrorizing the residents of Amity Island. Hooper explained that the Latin name for the great white was Carcharodon carcharias and that “the closest ancestor we can find for it” was megalodon. So maybe, he speculated, this creature wasn’t merely a great white, but a surviving sea monster from an earlier era.

Hooper was toying with a simple and long-established idea: that the most feared predator in the ocean today, the great white shark, evolved from megalodon, the most fearsome predator of a few million years ago.

That is how the two species had been viewed, until recently, when new ways of looking at shark teeth, and new shark fossils from a Peruvian desert, convinced most experts that great whites are not descended from a megatoothed megashark. Rather, they evolved from a more moderate-size, smooth-toothed relative of mako sharks.

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New Clues to Sex Anomalies in How Y Chromosomes Are Copied
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, September 15, 2009

The first words ever spoken, so fable holds, were a palindrome and an introduction: “Madam, I’m Adam.”

A few years ago palindromes — phrases that read the same backward as forward — turned out to be an essential protective feature of Adam’s Y, the male-determining chromosome that all living men have inherited from a single individual who lived some 60,000 years ago. Each man carries a Y from his father and an X chromosome from his mother. Women have two X chromosomes, one from each parent.

The new twist in the story is the discovery that the palindrome system has a simple weakness, one that explains a wide range of sex anomalies from feminization to sex reversal similar to Turner’s syndrome, the condition of women who carry only one X chromosome.

The palindromes were discovered in 2003 when the Y chromosome’s sequence of bases, represented by the familiar letters G, C, T and A, was first worked out by David C. Page of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and colleagues at the DNA sequencing center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

They came as a total surprise but one that immediately explained a serious evolutionary puzzle, that of how the genes on the Y chromosome are protected from crippling mutations.

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Observatory: Fibers in a Cave Point to Ancient Craft Work
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, September 15, 2009

Archeologists looking for signs of what the ancient climate was like in the Caucasus Mountains have come across something else: signs of ancient craft work.

They found fibers of wild flax, up to 34,000 years old, in the Dzudzuana Cave in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Some of the fibers were twisted and some were dyed, which indicates they were used for sewing clothes, weaving baskets or making ropes. That makes the fibers the oldest known to have been used by humans.

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Diving Deep for a Living Fossil
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, The New York Times, August 25, 2009

For 33 years, Peter A. Rona has pursued an ancient, elusive animal, repeatedly plunging down more than two miles to the muddy seabed of the North Atlantic to search out, and if possible, pry loose his quarry.

Like Ahab, he has failed time and again. Despite access to the world’s best equipment for deep exploration, he has always come back empty-handed, the creature eluding his grip.

The animal is no white whale. And Dr. Rona is no unhinged Captain Ahab, but rather a distinguished oceanographer at Rutgers University. And he has now succeeded in making an intellectual splash with a new research report, written with a team of a dozen colleagues.

They have gathered enough evidence to prove that his scientific prey — an organism a bit larger than a poker chip — represents one of the world’s oldest living fossils, perhaps the oldest. The ancestors of the creature, Paleodictyon nodosum, go back to the dawn of complex life. And the creature itself, known from fossils, was once thought to have gone extinct some 50 million years ago.

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Global Update: Viruses: Veterinarian in Australia Is Sickened After Being Exposed to a Rare Virus
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, August 25, 2009

A veterinarian in Australia has been hospitalized in critical condition after exposure to the rare Hendra virus, according to local reports, which said he fell ill after treating two dying horses on a Queensland stud farm.

The virus was found in 1994 and has never been seen outside Australia since its discovery in Hendra, a Brisbane suburb. There have been only a dozen outbreaks, but the virus has proved lethal to horses and to humans caring for them. About 70 percent of the horses infected have died, and so have three of the six people known to have caught it from them — a veterinarian, a farmer and a prominent horse trainer, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

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Ancient Man Hurt Coasts, Paper Says
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, August 21, 2009

The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say Stone Age humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America. Now scientists are proposing a new arena of ancient depredation: the coast.

In an article in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Oregon cite evidence of sometimes serious damage by early inhabitants along the coasts of the Aleutian Islands, New England, the Gulf of Mexico, South Africa and California’s Channel Islands, where the researchers do fieldwork.

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Q & A: Red Hot Chili Peppers
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY, The New York Times, August 11, 2009

Q. If I eat a raw jalapeño pepper, my mouth is afire, my eyes water and my nose runs. How can some people eat pepper after pepper without pain? Have they destroyed the sensory receptors in their mouths and throats?

A. No receptors are destroyed, said Harry T. Lawless, a professor of food science at Cornell and an expert in the taste, smell and sensory evaluation of food. Instead, “people who eat a lot of the stuff tend to develop a tolerance that we call desensitization,” he said.

“There is nothing harmful in the capsaicin molecule, the active ingredient of hot peppers,” he said. “Capsaicin is kind of a harmless drug, and like any drug we develop a tolerance to it.”

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A Conversation With Paul Root Wolpe: Scientist Tackles Ethical Questions of Space Travel
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS, The New York Times, August 11, 2009

Q. AS NASA’S CHIEF BIOETHICIST, WHAT DOES YOUR WORK INVOLVE?

A. I’m an adviser to the chief medical officer for the agency. I don’t make decisions. Instead, I analyze situations and policies and offer bioethical perspectives on specific problems.

NASA does hundreds of research studies. Every astronaut who goes into space is, essentially, a human research subject. NASA’s looking at the effects of weightlessness, of G-forces and radiation on the human body. One of the things I do is look over the research protocols and make sure they are in compliance with earth-bound regulations about informed consent and health and safety. I also try to help solve some of the thorny ethical problems of medical care for astronauts in space.

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Birth Rate Is Said to Fall as a Result of Recession
By SAM ROBERTS, The New York Times, August 7, 2009

For the first time since the decade began, Americans are having fewer babies, and some experts are blaming the economy.

“It’s the recession,” said Andrew Hacker, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York. “Children are the most expensive item in every family’s budget, especially given all the gear kids expect today. So it’s a good place to cut back when you’re uncertain about the future.”

In 2007, the number of births in the United States broke a 50-year-old record high, set during the baby boom. But last year, births began to decline nationwide, by nearly 2 percent, according to provisional figures released last week.

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By Degrees: White Roofs Catch On as Energy Cost Cutters
By FELICITY BARRINGER, The New York Times, July 30, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — Returning to their ranch-style house in Sacramento after a long summer workday, Jon and Kim Waldrep were routinely met by a wall of heat.

“We’d come home in the summer, and the house would be 115 degrees, stifling,” said Mr. Waldrep, a regional manager for a national company.

He or his wife would race to the thermostat and turn on the air-conditioning as their four small children, just picked up from day care, awaited relief.

All that changed last month. “Now we come home on days when it’s over 100 degrees outside, and the house is at 80 degrees,” Mr. Waldrep said.

Their solution was a new roof: a shiny plasticized white covering that experts say is not only an energy saver but also a way to help cool the planet.

Relying on the centuries-old principle that white objects absorb less heat than dark ones, homeowners like the Waldreps are in the vanguard of a movement embracing “cool roofs” as one of the most affordable weapons against climate change.

Studies show that white roofs reduce air-conditioning costs by 20 percent or more in hot, sunny weather. Lower energy consumption also means fewer of the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.

What is more, a white roof can cost as little as 15 percent more than its dark counterpart, depending on the materials used, while slashing electricity bills.

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The final story is my favorite - I knew someone in high school who was a decedent of Phineas Gage.

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Dot Earth:Era of Trans-Arctic Shipping Nigh
By Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times blog, July 28, 2009

Since 1553, when Sir Hugh Willoughby led an expedition north in search of a sea passage over Russia to the Far East, mariners have dreamed of such a shortcut. (Willoughby and his crew, apparently asphyxiated by carbon monoxide after sealing up their boat against brutal cold, froze to death.)

In part because of warming and the retreat and thinning of Arctic sea ice in summer, this northern sea route is slowly becoming a reality. Russian vessels have long hauled ore and oil along the country’s sprawling northern coast, but no commercial ships under other flags have passed between Asia and Western Europe. Now, a German company, the Beluga Group of Bremen, has a ship poised to make what appears to be the first such trip, an 8,000-mile shortcut compared with alternate routes. The “Arctic Rush” is on.

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Scientist at Work: Tucker Childs: Linguist’s Preservation Kit Has New Digital Tools
By CHRIS NICHOLSON, The New York Times, July 28, 2009

TEI, Sierra Leone — Jogue, yipe, simoi are three short words for foods in Kim, a language in Sierra Leone that Tucker Childs has been trying, for the past three years, to write down, record and understand.

Kim is a dying language, and Dr. Childs a field linguist. From his base here in Tei, a small fishing village on the Waanje River, he canoes up the narrow waterways that cut across the river’s floodplain, and hikes a few miles inland, to where the last Kim communities remain. Based on recordings taken there, he has devised an alphabet and compiled a dictionary and is finishing a book on the grammar.

Africa has about 2,000 of the world’s 6,000 languages. Many are still unwritten, some have yet to be named and many will probably disappear. For centuries, social and economic incentives have been working against Kim and in favor of Mende, a language used widely in the region, until finally, Dr. Childs speculates, the Kim language has been pushed to the verge of extinction.

It used to be that field linguists like Dr. Childs, a scattered corps working against time to salvage the world’s endangered tongues — more than 3,000 at last count — scribbled data in smeared notebooks and stored sounds on cassette tapes, destined to rot in boxes. But linguistics has gone digital. Dr. Childs now uses a solid-state recorder, and he has applications that will analyze the elements of a vowel in seconds or compare sounds across languages.

Using Geographic Information Systems, software that translates data into maps, he and his research assistants, Hannah Sarvasy and Ali Turay, pinpoint villages that are not to be found on any official map. “There’s a whole bunch of reasons linguists want these languages preserved,” Dr. Childs said, “but for me it’s more an emotional thing. It’s not noblesse oblige, it’s capitalist oblige. These people are totally peripheralized.”

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Brain Power: In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, July 28, 2009

The sight was not that unusual, at least not for Mosul, Iraq, on a summer morning: a car parked on the sidewalk, facing opposite traffic, its windows rolled up tight. Two young boys stared out the back window, kindergarten age maybe, their faces leaning together as if to share a whisper.

The soldier patrolling closest to the car stopped. It had to be hot in there; it was 120 degrees outside. “Permission to approach, sir, to give them some water,” the soldier said to Sgt. First Class Edward Tierney, who led the nine-man patrol that morning.

“I said no — no,” Sergeant Tierney said in a telephone interview from Afghanistan. He said he had an urge to move back before he knew why: “My body suddenly got cooler; you know, that danger feeling.”

The United States military has spent billions on hardware, like signal jamming technology, to detect and destroy what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, the roadside bombs that have proved to be the greatest threat in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, where Sergeant Tierney is training soldiers to foil bomb attacks.

Still, high-tech gear, while helping to reduce casualties, remains a mere supplement to the most sensitive detection system of all — the human brain. Troops on the ground, using only their senses and experience, are responsible for foiling many I.E.D. attacks, and, like Sergeant Tierney, they often cite a gut feeling or a hunch as their first clue.

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TierneyLab - Putting Ideas in Science to the Test: The Curious Case of Phineas Gage, Refocused
By Benedict Carey, The New York Times, July 22, 2009

The medical literature is punctuated with gruesome, anonymous case studies but one of the most ghastly images of all comes with name: Phineas Gage, a Vermont railroad worker who, in 1848, was skewered through his brain by an iron bar the size of large fireplace poker in an explosion. Gage survived, became an object of medical fascination, and images of his impaled skull (preserved at Harvard University) later landed in textbooks to illustrate the function of the frontal lobes. With his frontals mangled, the once-reliable Mr. Gage became a lout and wastrel. Or so the textbook version goes.

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Testing Evolution’s Role in Finding a Mate
By SARAH ARNQUIST, The New York Times, July 7, 2009

Scientists have long observed that women tend to be pickier than men when choosing a mate. The usual explanation is evolutionary: because women have a bigger investment in reproduction — they are the ones who have to endure pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding — they need to hedge their bets against selecting a dud to be the father.

In recent years, the emergence of speed dating has given psychologists, economists and political scientists new ways to test this and other hypotheses about mating. Because participants can be randomly assigned to groups and have no prior information about other participants, three-minute speed-dating sessions are about as close to a controlled experiment as researchers are likely to get.

Now, two scientists at Northwestern University have published an experiment that challenges the evolutionary hypothesis. The study by Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick was published last month in the journal Psychological Science.The experiment looked at speed-dating sessions to determine whether men or women were choosier. The answer, it turned out, was neither. Regardless of gender, people who were instructed to approach other daters were less selective — that is, they were more likely to ask to meet later for a date.

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Personal Health: Updating a Standard: Fetal Monitoring
By JANE E. BRODY, The New York Times, July 7, 2009

Electronic fetal monitoring during labor and delivery was introduced into obstetrical practice in the early 1970s in hopes that it would reduce the risk of cerebral palsy and death resulting from inadequate oxygen to the fetal brain.

The monitors continually measure the fetal heart rate and produce tracings on a screen and paper that can alert a doctor to a baby who is doing poorly under the stress of labor. It is up to the doctor to try to alleviate the problem and, if those measures do not help, to decide whether to deliver the baby vaginally with forceps or surgically by Caesarean.

Today, more than 85 percent of the four million babies born alive in this country each year are assessed by electronic fetal monitoring, amid continuing controversy over whether it does more harm than good. New guidelines on fetal monitoring, published this month, aim to bring more consistency to how doctors interpret the results and act on them.

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In Public Housing, Talking Up the Recycling Bin
By MIREYA NAVARRO, The New York Times, July 4, 2009

Wearing a purple sweatsuit and leaning on a cane, Gloria Allen, 82, was hobbling down a hallway in a public housing project in Morningside Heights, knocking on doors and shouting, “Recycling education!”

There was no answer at the next apartment, but as soon as she detected movement inside, Ms. Allen, a retired printing-company worker, began her pitch.

“Please come out, baby,” she purred. “Please come out so we can educate you on how to recycle.”

The typical neighborhood environmentalist is often pictured as young and affluent, the kind of person who can afford a hybrid car and screen-printed hemp fabrics. But at General Grant Houses, a sprawling public housing development off West 125th Street in Manhattan, the eco-conscious are mainly people like Ms. Allen and Sarah Martin, who as leaders of the residents’ association fret as much about backed-up pipes as they do about recycling.

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Observatory: Warmer Winters and Shrinking Sheep
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, July 7, 2009

On a remote Scottish island, the sheep are shrinking, and the cause appears to be the warming of winter.

The wild Soay sheep that live on the island of Hirta in the North Atlantic have been under careful scientific observation since 1985, partly because the island ecosystem is a simple one consisting of the sheep and the vegetation they eat.

Timothy Coulson, a professor of population biology at Imperial College London, and his colleagues analyzed the sheep data and found that the weight of the average female Soay had decreased about three ounces a year, or about 5 percent over the past quarter-century.

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U.S. Cites Emergency in Asbestos-Poisoned Town
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, June 18, 2009

The Environmental Protection Agency declared a public health emergency on Wednesday in and near Libby, Mont., where over the course of decades asbestos contamination in a vermiculite mine has left hundreds of people dead or sickened from lung diseases.

It was the first health emergency ever declared under the Superfund law, the 1980 statute that governs sites contaminated or threatened by hazardous substances. The Libby site has been designated a Superfund priority since 2002.

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Report on Gene for Depression Is Now Faulted
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, June 17, 2009

One of the most celebrated findings in modern psychiatry — that a single gene helps determine one’s risk of depression in response to a divorce, a lost job or another serious reversal — has not held up to scientific scrutiny, researchers reported Tuesday.

The original finding, published in 2003, created a sensation among scientists and the public because it offered the first specific, plausible explanation of why some people bounce back after a stressful life event while others plunge into lasting despair.

The new report, by several of the most prominent researchers in the field, does not imply that interactions between genes and life experience are trivial; they are almost certainly fundamental, experts agree.

But it does suggest that nailing down those factors in a precise way is far more difficult than scientists believed even a few years ago, and that the original finding could have been due to chance. The new report is likely to inflame a debate over the direction of the field itself, which has found that the genetics of illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder remain elusive.

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In one view of the beginnings of life, depicted in an animation, carbon monoxide molecules condense on hot mineral surfaces underground to form fatty acids, above, which are then expelled from geysers.

New Glimpses of Life’s Puzzling Origins
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, June 16, 2009

Some 3.9 billion years ago, a shift in the orbit of the Sun’s outer planets sent a surge of large comets and asteroids careening into the inner solar system. Their violent impacts gouged out the large craters still visible on the Moon’s face, heated Earth’s surface into molten rock and boiled off its oceans into an incandescent mist.

Yet rocks that formed on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, almost as soon as the bombardment had stopped, contain possible evidence of biological processes. If life can arise from inorganic matter so quickly and easily, why is it not abundant in the solar system and beyond? If biology is an inherent property of matter, why have chemists so far been unable to reconstruct life, or anything close to it, in the laboratory?

The origins of life on Earth bristle with puzzle and paradox. Which came first, the proteins of living cells or the genetic information that makes them? How could the metabolism of living things get started without an enclosing membrane to keep all the necessary chemicals together? But if life started inside a cell membrane, how did the necessary nutrients get in?

The questions may seem moot, since life did start somehow. But for the small group of researchers who insist on learning exactly how it started, frustration has abounded. Many once-promising leads have led only to years of wasted effort. Scientists as eminent as Francis Crick, the chief theorist of molecular biology, have quietly suggested that life may have formed elsewhere before seeding the planet, so hard does it seem to find a plausible explanation for its emergence on Earth.

In the last few years, however, four surprising advances have renewed confidence that a terrestrial explanation for life’s origins will eventually emerge.

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A Conversation With Bert Hölldobler: Insects Succeeding Through Cooperation
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS, The New York Times, June 16, 2009

At 72, Bert Hölldobler, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University and a professor emeritus at the University of Würzburg in Germany, is one of the world’s great ant experts. Along with his collaborator, E. O. Wilson, Dr. Hölldobler won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for “The Ants.” The two wrote a second book in 2008, “The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies.”

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