September 9, 2006, 5:28 AM CT
How safe are we afte 5 years?
Five years after September 11 and one year after Hurricane, public confidence in the government to protect the area they live has hit a new low. Only 44% of the American public believes that the federal government can protect their community from a terrorist attack. This is a sharp and ongoing erosion of confidence, down from a high of 62% in 2003, and the second consecutive year that fewer than half of the American public believes government can protect them.
Confidence in the health system to respond to a biological, chemical, or nuclear attack has also steadily declined. Barely one-fourth (28%) are confident in comparison to 53% in 2002. Worse still, only 23% believe the health care system is ready to respond effectively to a bird flu pandemic.
When asked about specific aspects of keeping America safe, there are no signs of increased confidence. Just over one-third (36%) of the American public believes government can protect public transportation from terrorism, down from 43% in 2004. Also, just over one-third (36%) are confident that shipping ports are protected, confidence in the government's ability to protect U.S. borders (31%), and being confident in the government to oversee spending and set priorities on terrorism and disaster preparedness (35%).
These findings suggest a lack of confidence in the performance of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This is reinforced by our findings regarding DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff about whom only 38% expressed having confidence he can lead or organize a response to a major disaster. This contrasts starkly with the 65% rating of former DHS Secretary Tom Ridge two years ago.........
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September 7, 2006, 8:23 PM CT
greenhouse gas in the Siberian lake
Those frozen bubbles that you see in Siberian lakes are releasing methane, a greenhouse gas, at rates that appear to be five times higher than previously estimated. This methane gas is acting as a positive feedback to climate warming, as per Walter, in a paper published recently in the journal Nature.
Walter's project is the first time this type of bubbling has been accurately quantified. "We realized that our previous estimates were missing a very large and important component of lake emissions - in these bubbles were the dominant source of methane from lakes," said Walter, an International Polar Year post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
According to Walter, her team's calculations increase the present estimate of methane emissions from northern wetlands by between 10 and 63 percent.
Water studied a unique type of permafrost in Siberia, called yedoma, which contains an estimated 500 gigatons of carbon, largely in the form of ancient dead plant material. "This material has been locked up in permafrost since the end of the last ice age," Walter said. "Now it is being released into the bottom of lakes, providing microbes a banquet from which they burp out methane as a byproduct of decomposition".........
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September 7, 2006, 5:09 AM CT
What's On State Health Department Web Sites
A number of Web sites are written well above the comprehension level of the average American and are inaccessible to people with disabilities and non-English speakers, concludes a new report by Brown University scientists Darrell M. West and Edward Alan Miller reported in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved (available online in html and pdf).
"Inaccessible Web sites hurt the underprivileged and make it difficult to justify the investment in technology that has taken place in state governments around the country," the authors state. "Unless these concerns are addressed, public e-health will remain the domain of highly educated and affluent individuals who speak English and do not suffer from physical impairments".
West and Miller examined the accessibility, privacy and security of public Web sites maintained by the 50 state governments in the United States in the last two to five years. Using content analysis, they focused on readability levels, disability access, non-English accessibility and the presence of privacy and security statements.
They determined that text on the majority of sites employs a reading level too difficult to comprehend for most users. Though half of Americans read at an eighth-grade level, only 20 percent of state health department Web sites were written at that level in 2005, the authors found. The analysis concludes that 62 percent of the sites were written at the 12th grade level in the same year.........
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September 7, 2006, 5:04 AM CT
How Did Our Ancestors Make Sense Of Their World?
Padana, a young female orangutan at the Leipzig Zoo, who was one of the research subjects.
How did our evolutionary ancestors make sense of their world? What strategies did they use, for example, to find food? Fossils do not preserve thoughts, so we have so far been unable to glean any insights into the cognitive structure of our ancestors. However, in a study recently published in Current Biology (September 5, 2006), scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and their colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology were able to find answers to these questions using an alternative research method: comparative psychological research. In this way, they discovered that some of the strategies shaped by evolution are evidently masked very early on by the cognitive development process unique to humans.
Being able to remember and relocate particular places where there is food is an asset to any species. There are two basic strategies for remembering the location of something: either remembering the features of the item (it was a tree, a stone, etc.), or knowing the spatial placement (left, right, middle, etc.). All animal species tested so far - from goldfish, pigeons and rats though to humans - seem to employ both strategies. However, if the type of recall task is designed so that the two strategies are in opposition, then some species (e.g. fish, rats and dogs) have a preference for locational strategies, while others (e.g. toads, chickens and children) favor those which use distinctive features.........
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September 7, 2006, 4:53 AM CT
Migraine And American Women
Migraines are more common in the United States than diabetes, osteoarthritis or asthma. Of the 28 million people who experience migraines in this country, 18 million are women. Although prevention is very effective in managing this disorder, only 3 percent to 5 percent of women seek preventive therapy.
To better understand this issue and provide guidance for physicians treating female migraine patients, Mayo Clinic in Arizona Women's Health Internal Medicine physicians reviewed all the major studies on the disorder published in the past five years. They compiled study results into a concise review for clinicians, published in the August 2006 issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
"Most people with migraines first seek help from their primary care provider instead of a neurologist or a specialist. The purpose of our paper is to provide more information for primary care physicians who typically manage these cases," says Beverly Tozer, M.D., who led the review.
The review emphasized preventive therapies for migraines at different stages of a female's life. According to Dr. Tozer, strong evidence suggests that hormonal changes effect migraine development, with migraines being most prevalent during the reproductive years.
"Almost one-fourth of women in their reproductive years experience migraines," Dr. Tozer says. "During these years, women are building both their families and their careers. The predominance of this disorder in women with its associated social, functional and economic consequences makes migraine an important issue in women's health".........
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September 6, 2006, 9:59 PM CT
Dark Matter Proof in doubt
When Douglas Clowe of the University of Arizona in Tucson announced on 21 August that his team had "direct proof of dark matter's existence", it seemed the issue had been settled. Now proponents of the so-called modified theories of gravity, who explain the motion of stars and galaxies without resorting to dark matter, have hit back and are suggesting that Clowe's team has jumped the gun.
"One should not draw premature conclusions about the existence of dark matter without a careful analysis of alternative gravity theories," writes John Moffat, of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, who pioneered an alternative theory of gravity known as MOG (www.arxiv.org/astro-ph/0608675).
The controversy centres on the pattern of gravitational lensing, or the bending of light, around the Bullet cluster of galaxies, which formed from the collision of two clusters. While most of the Bullet cluster's visible mass lies in a pool of hot gas near the centre, galaxies can also be seen on either side. Clowe's study of lensing indicates that most of the mass is contained in the two lobes, rather than in the pool of gas. The team says this is evidence of dark matter surrounding the galaxies.
Moffat claims that his MOG theory can explain the Bullet cluster without an ounce of dark matter. In MOG, gravity acts as predicted by Newton's inverse square law up to a certain distance from the gravitating mass, after which it gets a little stronger. In the Bullet cluster, the complex arrangement of galaxies and hot gas combines to make gravity strongest in the lobes, so that is where the lensing would be most apparent. Moffat has worked this out for the Bullet cluster using a.........
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September 6, 2006, 9:50 PM CT
How safe is drinking water?
Are disinfection by-products (DBPs) in drinking water harmful to an unborn fetus? As per a research studyin the recent issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology (available online September 5), a team of scientists at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health headed by David A. Savitz, Ph.D., Director of the Center of Excellence in Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Disease Prevention at MSSM, and formerly Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have determined that drinking water DBPs -- in the range usually encountered in the US -- do not affect fetal survival. This finding is especially important because prior research has suggested that exposure to elevated levels of drinking water DBPs might cause pregnancy loss.
The interaction of chlorine with organic material in raw water supplies produces chemical DBPs of health concern, including trihalomethanes (THMs) and haloacetic acids (HAAs). Several epidemiological studies have addressed potential reproductive toxicity of DBPs. The strongest support in ealier studies was noted for pregnancy loss, including stillbirth.
Scientists looked at three locations with varying DBP levels and reviewed 2,409 women in early pregnancy to assess tap water DBP concentrations, water use, other risk factors and pregnancy outcome. Tap water concentrations were measured in the distribution system on a weekly or biweekly basis. DBP concentration and ingested amount, bathing/showering and integrated exposure that included ingestion and bathing/showering were considered. Based on 258 pregnancy losses, the finding did not show an increased risk of pregnancy loss in relation to ingested amounts of DBPs.........
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September 5, 2006, 9:10 PM CT
Real Time Rome Project At Venice Biennale
Real Time Rome project
Real Time Rome, a pioneering MIT project that promises to usher in a new era of urban mapmaking, will have its worldwide debut at the Venice Biennale, the prestigious biannual exhibition of contemporary art, from Sept. 10 to Nov. 19.
The project utilizes data gathered, in real time and at an unprecedented scale, from cell phones and other wireless technologies, to better understand the patterns of daily life in Rome, and to illustrate what ubiquitous connectivity in an urban environment looks like.
"In today's world, wireless mobile communications devices are creating new dimensions of interconnectedness between people, places and urban infrastructures," said project director Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT. "The goal of Real Time Rome is to use this connectivity to map the city in real time, which may ultimately lead to a deeper understanding of how modern cities function".
Real Time Rome features seven large animations, projected on transparent plexiglass screens. One screen shows traffic congestion around the city, while another screen shows the exact movements of all the city's buses and taxis. Another screen is able to track Romans celebrating major events like the World Cup or the city's annual White Nights festival (Notte Bianca, which will happen on Sept. 9, the evening before the Biennale's architecture exhibition opening). Additional screens show how tourists use urban spaces and how cars and pedestrians move about the city.........
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September 5, 2006, 9:03 PM CT
The Egg Drop Contest
This egg-drop contestant made it only partway down
The Terrascope Egg Drop was everything it was cracked up to be.
About 50 participants teamed up in small groups on Aug. 28 to find a way to protect a raw egg dropped from the roof of the 18-story Green Building, the tallest building on MIT's main campus.
Most teams concentrated on padding the egg for landing and easing its descent.
Parachutes were a popular design element, but proved a hindrance to targeting, according to Debra Gross Aczel of Terrascope. "They were competing with a bit of a wind," she said. "The eggs were sort of drifting".
Terrascope, which sponsored the event, is a learning community for freshmen that focuses on earth sciences and the environment. In keeping with Terrascope's mission, egg drop participants had to build their packaging out of recycled materials scrounged up around MIT.
Each team was given $1,000 in play money to buy recycled bottles, newspapers, paper cups and other materials. Contestants were judged on whether the egg survived, how close it came to the marked target, and how much the team spent. First-, second- and third-prize winners received Starbucks gift certificates.
Although timed to coincide with freshman orientation, the event was open to the entire MIT community.........
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September 5, 2006, 7:41 PM CT
Increasing Pressure On Chemical Controls
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has co-organized with U.S. industry a workshop to address the increasing pressure on manufacturers from emerging chemical controls and regulations from such countries as China and the European Union. The suite of issues stemming from regulatory actions in various markets, as well as global reporting and management efforts, has serious cost and market implications both for manufacturers of chemicals and for chemicals users and are potential barriers to innovation.
The workshop, "Innovation and Competitiveness: A Strategic Approach to Emerging Chemical Issues," will be held on Sept. 26-27 at the NIST laboratories in Gaithersburg, Md.
The costs of dealing with multiple chemical regulation and control requirements in different markets goes far beyond the chemical industry itself. Chemicals and chemical products contribute 16 percent of the value of material inputs in the automotive sector, 33 percent of the value of material inputs used to make semiconductors, and 30 percent of the value of medical supplies, for example. The European Union's "End-of-Life-Vehicles" (ELV) Directive affected thousands of U.S. automotive suppliers. A study conducted by the Original Equipment Suppliers Association (OESA) found that the average cost for inputting data into the International Material Data System (IMDS), a tool for complying with the ELV requirements, was $75 per simple raw material and up to $2,500 per complex assembly. In 2002, an Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) project team used these data and estimated that total costs to the entire U.S. supply chain for ELV compliance would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.........
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