Fear of a Female Planet

Visual Science: Map of Knowledge
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, March 16, 2009

A new map of knowledge has been assembled by scientists at the research library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It is based on electronic data searches in which users moved from one journal to another, thus establishing associations between them.

( Read More )

Now in Sight: Far-Off Planets
By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times, November 14, 2008

A little more of the universe has been pried out of the shadows. Two groups of astronomers have taken the first pictures of what they say — and other astronomers agree — are most likely planets going around other stars.

The achievement, the result of years of effort on improved observational techniques and better data analysis, presages more such discoveries, the experts said, and will open the door to new investigations and discoveries of what planets are and how they came to be formed.

( Read More )

Half of Doctors Routinely Prescribe Placebos
By GARDINER HARRIS, The New York Times, October 24, 2008

Half of all American doctors responding to a nationwide survey say they regularly prescribe placebos to patients. The results trouble medical ethicists, who say more research is needed to determine whether doctors must deceive patients in order for placebos to work.

( Read More )

Oral Cancer in Men Associated With HPV
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, May 13, 2008

The sexually transmitted virus called HPV, for human papillomavirus, is well known to lead to cervical cancer in women — which is why the federal government recommends that all girls be vaccinated for HPV at 11 or 12, before they become sexually active.

Now researchers are finding that many oral cancers in men are also associated with the virus.

( Read More )



Global Update: Fake Malaria Drugs Emerging in Vulnerable Countries in Africa
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, May 13, 2008

Until recently, fake malaria drugs have been a problem largely confined to Southeast Asia, where a sampling two years ago found 53 percent of the drugs substandard, and drug experts said Asia was facing “an epidemic of counterfeits.”

A study released last week suggests that the epidemic is spreading to Africa, where the malaria burden is even greater, and the regulatory agencies are even weaker.

( Read More )



For the Disabled, Age 18 Brings Difficult Choices
By MARC SANTORA, The New York Times, May 14, 2008

Outside Sam Stabiner’s room pumps the steady drone of ventilators, giving life to his neighbors breath by breath. Most are in their 80s and 90s, in the twilight of their years.

But Mr. Stabiner’s parents never imagined they would have to visit him in a place like this. On the eve of his 21st birthday, he is living in a Manhattan nursing home.

The Stabiners’ predicament, however, is far from unique. As medical advances have allowed patients who might have died as children to survive into adulthood, the patients are falling into a void in a health care system that has yet to develop institutions for the young and “medically fragile.”

( Read More )

Basics: Noble Eagles, Nasty Pigeons, Biased Humans
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, April 29, 2008

The other day I glanced out my window and felt a twinge of revulsion delicately seasoned with indignation. Pecking at my bird feeder were two brown-headed cowbirds, one male and one female, and I knew what that meant. Pretty soon the fattened, fertilized female would be slipping her eggs into some other birds’ nest, with the expectation that the naïve hosts would brood, feed and rear her squawking, ravenous young at the neglect and even death of their own.

Hey, you parasites, get your beaks off my seed, I thought angrily. That feeder is for the good birds, the birds that I like — the cardinals, the nuthatches, the black-capped chickadees, the tufted titmice, the woodpeckers, the goldfinches. It’s for the hard-working birds with enough moral fiber to rear their own families and look photogenic besides. It’s not meant for sneaky freeloaders like you. I rapped on the window sharply but the birds didn’t budge, and as I stood there wondering whether I should run out and scare them away, their beaks seemed to thicken, their eyes blacken, and I could swear they were cackling, “Tippi Hedren must go.”

In sum, I was suffering from a severe case of biobigotry: the persistent and often irrational desire to be surrounded only by those species of which one approves, and to exclude any animals, plants and other life forms that one finds offensive.
( Read More )



Essay: A Great Pox’s Greatest Feat: Staying Alive
By MARLENE ZUK, The New York Times, April 29, 2008

The findings were hardly earth-shaking. They dealt with an obscure bacterial infection found in an equally obscure group of natives in Guyana. Nonetheless, they made headlines.

Why? Because the disease was syphilis. The new research suggested that syphilis originated as a skin ailment in South America, and then spread to Europe, where it became sexually transmitted and was later reintroduced to the New World.

The origin of syphilis has always held an implied accusation: if Europeans brought it to the New World, the disease is one more symbol of Western imperialism run amok, one more grudge to hold against colonialism. Sexually transmitted diseases have always taken on moralistic overtones — they seem like the price of pleasure. We tell ourselves that if we can just make everyone behave responsibly, we can halt the attack.
( Read More )



Really? The Claim: Tilt Your Head Back to Treat a Nosebleed
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, April 29, 2008

THE FACTS

Most people know the right way to stop a nosebleed: lean the head back and apply pressure to the nose.

But medical experts say that what most people know about nosebleeds is wrong. Tilting the head back, a technique widely considered proper first aid, can create complications by allowing blood into the esophagus. It risks choking, and it can cause blood to travel to the stomach, possibly leading to irritation and vomiting.
( Read More )

Hermaphrodite Frogs Found in Suburban Ponds
By FELICITY BARRINGER, The New York Times, April 8, 2008

Just as frogs’ mating season arrives, a study by a Yale professor raises a troubling issue. How many frogs will be clear on their role in the annual springtime ritual?

Common frogs that make their homes in suburban areas are more likely than their rural counterparts to develop the reproductive abnormalities previously found in fish in the Potomac and Mississippi Rivers, according to the study by David Skelly, a professor of ecology at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

( Read More... )




A New York City subway car being added to an artificial reef off the coast of Delaware. The reef’s success has led to crowding for marine life and fishermen.

Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars
By IAN URBINA, The New York Times, April 8, 2008

SLAUGHTER BEACH, Del. — Sixteen nautical miles from the Indian River Inlet and about 80 feet underwater, a building boom is under way at the Red Bird Reef.

One by one, a machine operator has been shoving hundreds of retired New York City subway cars off a barge, continuing the transformation of a barren stretch of ocean floor into a bountiful oasis, carpeted in sea grasses, walled thick with blue mussels and sponges, and teeming with black sea bass and tautog.

“They’re basically luxury condominiums for fish,” Jeff Tinsman, artificial reef program manager for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, said as one of 48 of the 19-ton retirees from New York City sank toward the 666 already on the ocean floor.

But now, Delaware is struggling with the misfortune of its own success.

( Read More... )




The ruins of an Anasazi home near the Chimney Rock buttes in southern Colorado.

Vanished: A Pueblo Mystery
By GEORGE JOHNSON, The New York Times, April 8, 2008

Perched on a lonesome bluff above the dusty San Pedro River, about 30 miles east of Tucson, the ancient stone ruin archaeologists call the Davis Ranch Site doesn’t seem to fit in. Staring back from the opposite bank, the tumbled walls of Reeve Ruin are just as surprising.

Some 700 years ago, as part of a vast migration, a people called the Anasazi, driven by God knows what, wandered from the north to form settlements like these, stamping the land with their own unique style.

“Salado polychrome,” says a visiting archaeologist turning over a shard of broken pottery. Reddish on the outside and patterned black and white on the inside, it stands out from the plainer ware made by the Hohokam, whose territory the wanderers had come to occupy.

These Anasazi newcomers — archaeologists have traced them to the mesas and canyons around Kayenta, Ariz., not far from the Hopi reservation — were distinctive in other ways. They liked to build with stone (the Hohokam used sticks and mud), and their kivas, like those they left in their homeland, are unmistakable: rectangular instead of round, with a stone bench along the inside perimeter, a central hearth and a sipapu, or spirit hole, symbolizing the passage through which the first people emerged from mother earth.

“You could move this up to Hopi and not tell the difference,” said John A. Ware, the archaeologist leading the field trip, as he examined a Davis Ranch kiva. Finding it down here is a little like stumbling across a pagoda on the African veldt.

For five days in late February, Dr. Ware, the director of the Amerind Foundation, an archaeological research center in Dragoon, Ariz., was host to 15 colleagues as they confronted the most vexing and persistent question in Southwestern archaeology: Why, in the late 13th century, did thousands of Anasazi abandon Kayenta, Mesa Verde and the other magnificent settlements of the Colorado Plateau and move south into Arizona and New Mexico?

Scientists once thought the answer lay in impersonal factors like the onset of a great drought or a little ice age. But as evidence accumulates, those explanations have come to seem too pat — and slavishly deterministic. Like people today, the Anasazi (or Ancient Puebloans, as they are increasingly called) were presumably complex beings with the ability to make decisions, good and bad, about how to react to a changing environment. They were not pawns but players in the game.

( Read More... )

Guidelines for Epidemics: Who Gets a Ventilator?
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, March 25, 2008

It may sound unthinkable — the idea of denying life support to some people in a public health disaster like an epidemic. But a new report says doctors, health care workers and the public need to start thinking about it.

( Read More )



Cases: When the Disease Eludes a Diagnosis
By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D., The New York Times, March 25, 2008

Lucy, one of my longtime patients, has a neurological ailment she believes I have been unable to adequately diagnose.

Although I hope to make further progress on her case, I have also told her that there may never be a definitive answer. Not surprisingly, she is feeling pretty frustrated with me.

Why do doctors and patients often approach the diagnosis of disease so differently?

( Read More )




SEA SHRINKS FOAM Cups and their messages back from the Arctic Ocean: left, from recent Russian dives; right, from an earlier dive, with a landlubber.

Far Below the Surface of the World’s Oceans, a Tough Place for Foam Cups
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, The New York Times, March 25, 2008

Last August, as a team at the North Pole prepared to plunge more than two miles to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, some of the dozens of specialists who staged the dive engaged in a time-honored ritual: drawing on foam cups, decorating more than 100 of them.

The cups were then gingerly sent into the deep. During the historic dive, led by Russian scientists, the pressure of the surrounding water crushed the cups to the size of thimbles, also squeezing their whimsies of writing and drawing.

Afterward, the tiny cups became instant mementoes of the polar dive, offering striking proof of the descent into an unfamiliar zone and silent testimony to the crushing power of plain old water.

“The real North Pole,” read one cup’s shrunken writing. “Explore the abyss,” another urged.

Deep explorers have made thousands of such keepsakes over the decades, and more recently, schools have joined the fun as a way to drive home some of the peculiarities of a planet where very deep water covers some 65 percent of the surface.

( Read More )

The Professor as Open Book
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM, The New York Times, March 20, 2008

IT is not necessary for a student studying multivariable calculus, medieval literature or Roman archaeology to know that the professor on the podium shoots pool, has donned a bunny costume or can’t get enough of Chaka Khan.

Yet professors of all ranks and disciplines are revealing such information on public, national platforms: blogs, Web pages, social networking sites, even campus television.

( Wait a minute, you have a life? )



Debate Over ‘Little People’ Intensifies After Recent Island Discovery
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD,The New York Times, March 18, 2008

The dispute over the “little people” of Flores continues, unabated.

The bones and a single skull of these “little people” are believed to be remains of a separate species of the human family that lived about 18,000 years ago on an island in Indonesia, as the scientists who made the sensational discovery concluded in 2004.

But persistent skeptics have contended in a recent flurry of scientific reports that they were nothing more than modern humans with unusually small bodies possibly malformed by genetic or pathological disorders.

Neither side is backing off in this sometimes bitter row, which intensified last week with the announcement of the discovery that in Palau, in the Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia, other abnormally small-bodied people had lived long ago. Their bones were found in two caves and described in the online journal PloS One.

( Microcephalics or new species? )



The Tropics: Why a Genetic Blood Disorder Seems to Protect Against Malaria
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, March 18, 2008

Researchers believe they have figured out why a genetic blood disorder found in the tropics protects against death from malaria.

The disease, alpha thalassemia, causes children to produce abnormally small red blood cells, often rendering them listless from mild anemia — a much smaller threat than malaria, which kills an estimated one million children a year.

( A simple explanation? )

Whole Foods Chain to Stop Use of Plastic Bags
By ANDREW MARTIN, The New York Times, January 23, 2008

The Whole Foods Market chain said Tuesday that it would stop offering plastic grocery bags, giving customers instead a choice between recycled paper or reusable bags.
( Read More )



Europe, Cutting Biofuel Subsidies, Redirects Aid to Stress Greenest Options
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, The New York Times, January 22, 2008

Governments in Europe and elsewhere have begun rolling back generous, across-the-board subsidies for biofuels, acknowledging that the environmental benefits of these fuels have often been overstated.
( Read More )



Birds in Great Salt Lake Felled by Cholera by the Thousands
By SANA KHALID, The New York Times, January 22, 2008

Some of the birds flew upside down or threw their heads back between their wings. Some fell out of the sky. Others tried to land a foot or more above the water, or swam in circles when they got there. And then they died.

The birds — eared grebes, ruddy ducks, California gulls and northern shovelers, about 15,000 in all — have been discovered over the past month on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. According to the United States Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center, they died from avian cholera.
( Read More )



High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi
By MARIAN BURROS, The New York Times, January 23, 2008

Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.
( Read More )

Basics: Tiny Specks of Misery, Both Vile and Useful
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, January 8, 2008

I spent New Year’s Eve with friends and family. A couple of days later, my pathologically healthy mother called to say she’d gotten very sick after the party, like nothing she’d experienced before. She thought it had been a stomach bug. Hey, it’s just like in “The Devil Wears Prada,” I said lightly, the perfect way to jump-start your new diet!

Hardy har. By that afternoon, my husband and I had been drafted into the same violent weight-loss program, and for the next 18 hours would treat the mucosal lining of our stomachs like so much pulp in a pumpkin, while our poor daughter ran around scrubbing her hands and every surface in sight as she sought to stay healthy. I am relieved to report that she succeeded, and that her parents lost 10 pounds between them.

The agent of our misery was a virus, very likely a type of norovirus. Named for Norwalk, Ohio, the site of a severe outbreak of vomiting, nausea and diarrhea among schoolchildren in the late 1960s, the norovirus is a small, spherical, highly contagious virus that targets the digestive system. Its sour suite of symptoms is often referred to as “stomach flu,” but norovirus infection is distinct from the flu, which is caused by the influenza virus and targets not the gut but the lungs.

Well, not that distinct. Noroviruses, flu viruses, the rhino and corona viruses that cause the common cold, the herpes virus that causes the cold sore, all are active players in the wheezing ambient pleurisy of January.
( Read More )



Ancient Yucatán Soils Point to Maya Market, and Market Economy
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, January 8, 2008

Scientists using improved methods of analyzing the chemistry of ancient soils have detected where a large marketplace stood 1,500 years ago in a Maya city on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.

The findings, archaeologists say, are some of the first strong evidence that the ancient Maya civilization, at least in places and at certain times, had a market economy similar in some respects to societies today. The conventional view has been that food and other goods in Maya cities were distributed through taxation and tributes controlled by the ruling class.
( Read More )



Jump-Start on Slow Trek to Treatment for a Disease
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, January 8, 2008

Last month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $19 million to the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative to further one of its goals: finding a new drug for African sleeping sickness.

Not that $19 million will come close to doing that. Even if a miracle cure is found, it will take lab work and clinical trials that could easily cost $100 million to prove it is really a miracle and not the Vioxx of the African savannah.

But the gift spotlights just how tricky the search for new treatments can be when the disease is fearsome but nearly forgotten because its victims are poor and obscure.
( Read More )



Study Finds Vaccine Preservative Is Not Linked to Risks of Autism
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, January 8, 2008

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Autism cases in California continued to climb even after a mercury-based vaccine preservative that some people blame for the neurological disorder was removed from routine childhood shots, a study has found.

Researchers from the State Public Health Department found that the autism rate in children rose continuously in the study period from 1995 to 2007. The preservative, thimerosal, has not been used in childhood vaccines since 2001, except for some flu shots.

Doctors said that the latest study added to the evidence against a link between thimerosal exposure and the risk of autism and that it should reassure parents that vaccinations do not cause autism. If there was a risk, the doctors said, autism rates should have dropped from 2004 to 2007.
( Read More )