Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Neglected and abused infants shuttled from one foster-care setting to another have every reason to feel anxious and threatened in the presence of caregivers. However, if placed with a nurturing foster mother as late as age 1 1/2, children with such backgrounds usually develop a secure relationship with her in a matter of months, a new study suggests.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
Surprisingly, 1-1/2-year-olds responded as well and as quickly to a nurturing foster mother as did much younger infants, who had experienced less neglect and fewer disrupted foster placements, say psychologist Mary Dozier of the University of Delaware in Newark and her coworkers.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
"Even though late-placed foster infants initially push their caregivers away, they're capable of forming secure attachments [with a nurturing foster parent]," Dozier's group concludes in the September/October Child Development.
In related research, children adopted by age 2 fare better emotionally and academically than those adopted at later ages, regardless of any deprivations suffered before the adoption (SN: 8/13/94, p. 104). Scientists have yet to track the long-term emotional development of infants placed with foster parents at various ages.
Dozier and her colleagues studied 50 infants�32 black, 14 white, and 4 Hispanic�and their foster mothers. Infants had been placed with these caregivers between birth and 20 months of age. They began receiving foster care after their biological parents had neglected, abandoned, or abused them. Twenty-two of the children had one to five previous foster placements.
Foster mothers ranged in age from 26 to 69, and each cared for one to five foster kids during the study. Half the foster mothers lived with a husband or partner.
A little more than 3 months after placement, the researchers observed each infant's style of relating to the foster mother during a series of brief separations and reunions. In separate studies of children and their biological mothers, secure infants look to a friendly experimenter for solace when the mother leaves but are more readily calmed by the mother upon her return.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
Insecure infants either shun or angrily resist their mother when upset. Other children, who fit neither category, look dazed, freeze, or otherwise appear to be disorganized in the face of distress.
Of 26 secure foster infants in the new study, 23 had foster mothers who, in interviews with the researchers, placed great value in warm, trusting family relationships. In contrast, of 24 insecure or disorganized infants, 13 had foster mothers who expressed significant conflicts or confusion about their family relationships and their roles as foster mothers.
Infants' responses showed no link with their foster mothers' age, race, marital status, or number of foster siblings.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Monday, December 22, 2008
stake 8.sta.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
It has become an overused word, but Giordano Bruno may justly be described as a maverick. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com Burned at the stake in Rome on Ash Wednesday in 1600, he seems to have been an unclassifiable mixture of foul-mouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, religious reformer, scholastic philosopher and slightly wacky astronomer. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com His version of Christianity is impossible to label. Educated by the Dominicans — the guardians of Catholic orthodoxy in those days — he revered certain scriptures and the writings of St. Augustine, always doubted the divinity of Jesus and flirted with dangerous new ideas of Protestantism, and yet hoped that the pope himself would clear him of heresy.
Bruno was a martyr to something, but four centuries after his immolation it is still not clear what. It doesn’t help that the full records of his 16 interrogations in the prisons of the Roman Inquisition have been lost or destroyed. The enigma of Bruno runs deeper than that, as Ingrid Rowland, a scholar of the Renaissance who teaches in Rome, makes clear in her rich new biography, “Giordano Bruno.” Was he some sort of scientific pioneer, to be compared with Galileo, whose milder encounter with the Roman Inquisition — indeed, with the same inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine — followed not long afterward? Like Galileo, Bruno rejected the earth-centered cosmology and Aristotelian physics endorsed by the church. In the 19th century, historians of science saw him as an early proponent of atomic theory and the infinite universe. Or was Bruno an occultist dreamer, more magician than mathematician, as the renowned historian Frances Yates influentially argued in the 1960s? Either way, Bruno suffered for speaking his mind, though he also had a lot of bad luck, some of which he brought upon himself.
His story begins in Nola, a small city to the east of Naples. Bruno referred to himself as “il Nolano,” and Rowland echoes this, calling him “the Nolan” and frequently speaking of the “Nolan philosophy.” (This moniker may be harmless in America today, but it has awkward connotations for those who remember the Nolans of the 1970s and 1980s European pop scene, and their biggest hit, “I’m in the Mood for Dancing.”) The son of a well-connected professional soldier, Bruno entered the Neapolitan convent of San Domenico Maggiore at the age of 14 and was quickly noticed for two things. First, there was his prodigious memory: as a 20-year-old he was sent to perform his feats of recall before the pope. The ancient art of enhanced memorization was what he was best known for in his own time, and teaching it to others was his most marketable skill. Mnemonic feats were not only a practically useful party trick, but were often held to enable a practitioner to arrive at a systematic understanding of the world. Second, there was his religious unorthodoxy. As a boy, he removed all pictures from his convent cell, keeping only a crucifix, and he scoffed at a fellow novice for reading a devotional poem about the Virgin.
Although he was ordained a priest in 1572 and licensed to teach theology three years later, he was soon under investigation by the local head of the Dominicans for his irregular and outspoken views. By 1576 he had fled to Genoa and abandoned his clerical garb, teaching astronomy and Latin in a nearby town. The next 15 years were spent wandering through Europe on a hunt for patrons and professorships. First came Venice, then Padua, then Lyons, then a copy-editing job in Calvinist Geneva, where he was jailed and excommunicated for publishing an attack on a local philosopher. After two years of lecturing in Toulouse on Aristotle and astronomy, he had some success in Paris teaching the art of memory, with Henry III as royal patron. It was in Paris that he published a long philosophical drama, “The Candlemaker,” which Rowland implausibly suggests can be staged successfully, despite its five-hour running time. Its title page names the author as “Bruno the Nolan, the Academic of no Academy; nicknamed the exasperated.”
In 1583 Bruno joined the household of the French ambassador in London, where he published his major philosophical works, all dialogues, in which he espoused an infinite universe teeming with life. The timing was bad for such unorthodox cosmology. A century earlier, a German cardinal and mathematician, Nicholas of Cusa, made similar suggestions; but back then the church was not yet threatened by Protestant heresy and took a more relaxed attitude to strange views. A century later, a book by a writer of the early French Enlightenment, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle,popularized the same idea. (Though technically banned by the church, Fontenelle’s “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds” was a literary sensation.) Bruno was both too late and too early to paint a universe in which man and his planet were not the center of a cozy domain.
In 1591 Bruno returned to Italy, where the real trouble began. A Venetian grandee, Giovanni Mocenigo, invited Bruno to teach him the art of memory, and Bruno moved into the family’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. After seven or eight months, relations between the two men began to cool (there are also suggestions that relations between Bruno and Mocenigo’s wife heated up), and the Venetian denounced him. Among the many unacceptable things Mocenigo claimed to have heard Bruno say, listed in a letter to the Inquisition in May 1592, were that Christ was a wretch and a magician, that the world is eternal but divine punishment is not, that bread does not turn into flesh in the Eucharist, that the Virgin cannot have given birth and that all friars are asses.
Bruno made a few unwise admissions to his Inquisitors, but denied most of the accusations. One informant was not enough for a conviction — a second witness was needed — and Bruno was willing to repent in order to gain release. The matter could have ended there, but the Roman Inquisition asked for Bruno’s extradition, and Venice, after months of negotiations, complied. The Romans interviewed many of Bruno’s old cellmates from Venice, and found one — an unstable Capuchin friar, himself later burned at the stake — who falsely believed that Bruno had denounced him and decided to return the favor.
Even with this second witness, it took the Roman Inquisition nearly seven years to bring the case to its sorry conclusion, and it managed to do so only when the Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine took charge. Rowland quotes Bellarmine as once saying that “I hardly ever read a book without wanting to give it a good censoring.”Bruno’s fate was sealed when he unsuccessfully attempted to appeal over the heads of the Inquisition to the pope himself. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com
Though it can be hard to follow the story line in Rowland’s early chapters, where the background to Bruno’s later work is jumbled in with biographical fact, her telling of his end is gripping. As an intellectual biography, however, the book has too little examination of his ideas. Although Rowland would like us to see Bruno as a martyr to science, his work comes across more as theologically inspired science fiction. He was a poetic speculator, not an empirical or systematic investigator. Thus it is still not clear what the great master of memory should be remembered for. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Bruno was a martyr to something, but four centuries after his immolation it is still not clear what. It doesn’t help that the full records of his 16 interrogations in the prisons of the Roman Inquisition have been lost or destroyed. The enigma of Bruno runs deeper than that, as Ingrid Rowland, a scholar of the Renaissance who teaches in Rome, makes clear in her rich new biography, “Giordano Bruno.” Was he some sort of scientific pioneer, to be compared with Galileo, whose milder encounter with the Roman Inquisition — indeed, with the same inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine — followed not long afterward? Like Galileo, Bruno rejected the earth-centered cosmology and Aristotelian physics endorsed by the church. In the 19th century, historians of science saw him as an early proponent of atomic theory and the infinite universe. Or was Bruno an occultist dreamer, more magician than mathematician, as the renowned historian Frances Yates influentially argued in the 1960s? Either way, Bruno suffered for speaking his mind, though he also had a lot of bad luck, some of which he brought upon himself.
His story begins in Nola, a small city to the east of Naples. Bruno referred to himself as “il Nolano,” and Rowland echoes this, calling him “the Nolan” and frequently speaking of the “Nolan philosophy.” (This moniker may be harmless in America today, but it has awkward connotations for those who remember the Nolans of the 1970s and 1980s European pop scene, and their biggest hit, “I’m in the Mood for Dancing.”) The son of a well-connected professional soldier, Bruno entered the Neapolitan convent of San Domenico Maggiore at the age of 14 and was quickly noticed for two things. First, there was his prodigious memory: as a 20-year-old he was sent to perform his feats of recall before the pope. The ancient art of enhanced memorization was what he was best known for in his own time, and teaching it to others was his most marketable skill. Mnemonic feats were not only a practically useful party trick, but were often held to enable a practitioner to arrive at a systematic understanding of the world. Second, there was his religious unorthodoxy. As a boy, he removed all pictures from his convent cell, keeping only a crucifix, and he scoffed at a fellow novice for reading a devotional poem about the Virgin.
Although he was ordained a priest in 1572 and licensed to teach theology three years later, he was soon under investigation by the local head of the Dominicans for his irregular and outspoken views. By 1576 he had fled to Genoa and abandoned his clerical garb, teaching astronomy and Latin in a nearby town. The next 15 years were spent wandering through Europe on a hunt for patrons and professorships. First came Venice, then Padua, then Lyons, then a copy-editing job in Calvinist Geneva, where he was jailed and excommunicated for publishing an attack on a local philosopher. After two years of lecturing in Toulouse on Aristotle and astronomy, he had some success in Paris teaching the art of memory, with Henry III as royal patron. It was in Paris that he published a long philosophical drama, “The Candlemaker,” which Rowland implausibly suggests can be staged successfully, despite its five-hour running time. Its title page names the author as “Bruno the Nolan, the Academic of no Academy; nicknamed the exasperated.”
In 1583 Bruno joined the household of the French ambassador in London, where he published his major philosophical works, all dialogues, in which he espoused an infinite universe teeming with life. The timing was bad for such unorthodox cosmology. A century earlier, a German cardinal and mathematician, Nicholas of Cusa, made similar suggestions; but back then the church was not yet threatened by Protestant heresy and took a more relaxed attitude to strange views. A century later, a book by a writer of the early French Enlightenment, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle,popularized the same idea. (Though technically banned by the church, Fontenelle’s “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds” was a literary sensation.) Bruno was both too late and too early to paint a universe in which man and his planet were not the center of a cozy domain.
In 1591 Bruno returned to Italy, where the real trouble began. A Venetian grandee, Giovanni Mocenigo, invited Bruno to teach him the art of memory, and Bruno moved into the family’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. After seven or eight months, relations between the two men began to cool (there are also suggestions that relations between Bruno and Mocenigo’s wife heated up), and the Venetian denounced him. Among the many unacceptable things Mocenigo claimed to have heard Bruno say, listed in a letter to the Inquisition in May 1592, were that Christ was a wretch and a magician, that the world is eternal but divine punishment is not, that bread does not turn into flesh in the Eucharist, that the Virgin cannot have given birth and that all friars are asses.
Bruno made a few unwise admissions to his Inquisitors, but denied most of the accusations. One informant was not enough for a conviction — a second witness was needed — and Bruno was willing to repent in order to gain release. The matter could have ended there, but the Roman Inquisition asked for Bruno’s extradition, and Venice, after months of negotiations, complied. The Romans interviewed many of Bruno’s old cellmates from Venice, and found one — an unstable Capuchin friar, himself later burned at the stake — who falsely believed that Bruno had denounced him and decided to return the favor.
Even with this second witness, it took the Roman Inquisition nearly seven years to bring the case to its sorry conclusion, and it managed to do so only when the Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine took charge. Rowland quotes Bellarmine as once saying that “I hardly ever read a book without wanting to give it a good censoring.”Bruno’s fate was sealed when he unsuccessfully attempted to appeal over the heads of the Inquisition to the pope himself. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com
Though it can be hard to follow the story line in Rowland’s early chapters, where the background to Bruno’s later work is jumbled in with biographical fact, her telling of his end is gripping. As an intellectual biography, however, the book has too little examination of his ideas. Although Rowland would like us to see Bruno as a martyr to science, his work comes across more as theologically inspired science fiction. He was a poetic speculator, not an empirical or systematic investigator. Thus it is still not clear what the great master of memory should be remembered for. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
wind 44.win.9993 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . In centuries past throughout the world, windmills dotted bucolic landscapes, where millers ground cereal grains into flour. Later, farms and ranches harnessed the power of the wind to pump water. Although most farms and mills now run on electricity, wind power's appeal is reemerging. Several major food companies are investing in wind farms to cover all or part of their substantial electricity needs.
http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com
On Jan. 25, the Environmental Protection Agency recognized the top 25 institutions committed to making significant investments this year in ecologically responsible, "green" power systems—especially wind farms.
The Air Force topped EPA's new list, with a commitment to buy more than 1 million megawatt-hours (mWh) of renewably generated power—electricity equal to 11 percent of its projected use. Food companies came in second, sixth, eighth, and fourteenth place, a remarkable showing for one industry. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com
Electricity moves about the U.S. power grid like water through a network of streams. Power created in one place may be consumed locally or more than 1,000 miles away, depending on how electrons get shunted through the system. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com
Some farmers have installed turbines on their land to serve not only their own needs but to produce a crop of electrons to sell into a regional electrical grid (SN: 7/21/01, p. 45). Companies and institutions on EPA's new list, by contrast, are investing in a host of green-power systems including biomass energy and solar power. However, because wind-generated electricity is among the more affordable of alternative electricity-generating options, the majority of investments by institutions on EPA's new top-25 list—including those of all the food-related companies—went to wind power.
Green-power investors buy some share of the output of renewable-energy facilities, such as wind farms, and receive credit that can be exchanged for a comparable amount of power from a local utility.
The grocery chain Whole Foods Market, number two on EPA's green list, has committed to buying more green energy this year than even EPA itself buys for its many offices and operations. Both Whole Foods and Starbucks—number six on the green list—have purchased more green energy than the U.S. Energy Department has for its own operations.
The other food companies on EPA's greenest-25 list are Safeway and WhiteWave.http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com
Institutions on the list that don't make food their major business: Johnson & Johnson, the World Bank Group, the U.S. General Services Administration, HSBC North America, the city of San Diego, New Jersey Consolidated Energy Savings Program, Advanced Micro Devices, Staples, the Austin (Tex.) Independent School District, Mohawk Fine Papers, the Tower Companies, FedEx Kinko's, the Army's Fort Carson, the University of Pennsylvania, Montgomery County in Maryland, a consortium of Dallas-area hotels, Western Washington University, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Science News Online contacted the food companies on EPA's new list to find out what prompted them to go green.
Whole Foods (Green-Power Ranking: 2)
This 25-year-old Austin, Texas–based grocery chain—renowned for promoting natural and organic foods—has 180 stores, all but 10 of them in the United States. "We felt that as we were becoming a larger company, we needed to really give back to our community and the environment," explains Margaret Wittenberg, the firm's vice president for communications and quality standards.
Last Dec. 9, the company purchased wind-power credits to offset all of its projected North American power needs for 2006—some 458,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. It was the largest wind-energy purchase in U.S. history, the company announced last month, "and makes Whole Foods Market the only Fortune 500 company purchasing wind energy credits to offset 100 percent of its electricity use." Previously, 20 percent of the company's stores were purchasing some type of renewable energy.
access
This new recycled-paper cup is another way Starbucks is reducing its environmental footprint.Starbucks Coffee Co.
"Conventional electricity generation is the largest industrial source of air pollution in the United States, and wind power is a clean and renewable alternative," says Kurt Johnson, who directs EPA's Green Power Partnership program, which compiled the new list. "Whole Foods Market's commitment to wind power is providing an outstanding example of environmental leadership."
Whole Foods purchased its credits from the wind-power broker Renewable Choice Energy of Boulder, Colo. The total should match the electricity demand by its stores, bakeries, and operations facilities this year. "This wasn't just a 1-year trial," Wittenberg says, but something the company plans to invest in over the long term.
Wittenberg won't give financial figures but acknowledges that her company's wind credits cost more than conventional electricity. Typically, wind power costs about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) more than conventionally generated electricity. "But for us it's cost-neutral," says Wittenberg, since the company will finance the extra from savings elsewhere in its budget.
Green power is part of an overall trend for the company in reducing its environmental footprint. For instance, some of its stores use solar panels to generate electricity on-site. Some Whole Foods trucks run on biodiesel—a conventional-fuel substitute made from food or crop wastes (SN: 12/5/98, p. 364). Several stores—including the company's flagship grocery in Austin—even compost food wastes and sell the product to gardeners.
Starbucks (Green-Power Ranking: 6)
"Agricultural-based companies have reason to be concerned about the long-term implications of climate change on very sensitive ecosystems," says Ben Packard of Starbucks Coffee Co. That's why his firm bumped up its purchase of green power from the equivalent of 5 percent of the firm's electricity consumption by North American company-owned stores last year to 20 percent this year.
EPA equates Starbucks' green-power total to eliminating 237 million pounds of carbon dioxide that would be spewed if conventional fossil-fueled plants were used to meet the company's electricity needs.
This green-power initiative is consistent with Starbuck's longstanding goal to become a corporate leader in social and environmental responsibility, Packard says. He points to the company's policy of:
* Paying premium prices for its coffee to help farmers in developing countries make a fair income.
* Operating a center in Costa Rica that provides local farmers the technical training and aid needed to produce high-quality coffees while preserving the environment.
* Purchasing substantial amounts of coffee from shade-grown plants, which conventionally don't yield as much as full-sun coffee plants but are more likely to attract natural pollinators, which increase yields without the use of environmentally damaging fertilizers and pesticides (see The Buzz over Coffee).
* And creating and supporting a Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) project that favors farmers and coffee suppliers that demonstrate they're sustaining the environment and trading coffee fairly.
Those are behind-the-scenes changes that customers don't see. This month, however, the company will start handing customers paper cups that are better for the environment than the stores' cups are now.
http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
Worldwide this year, Starbucks expects to dispense some 1.9 billion paper cups. Those in North America will incorporate 10 percent post-consumer recycled paper fiber. This might not sound like much, says Packard, but no other company has gotten Food and Drug Administration support to use recycled-paper packaging in direct contact with food or drink.
"We anticipate that the switch . . . is going to lower our use of new tree fiber by a little over 5 million pounds," Packard says, which will eliminate the logging of some 60,000 trees. On Jan. 24, the National Recycling Coalition presented Starbucks with its "Recycling Works Award." The prize recognized the company for a range of activities, but especially its 8-year effort to bring a recycled paper cup to the marketplace.
Safeway (Green-Power Ranking: 8)
Last September, Safeway Inc. became the largest purchaser of renewable energy in California, its home state. This national supermarket chain purchased wind credits for 78,000 mWh—enough electricity to power all 270 of the company's gas stations, 15 of its grocery stores in the San Francisco Bay area, and its two corporate campuses.
Although the green-power commitment was for this year only, "in the future we do hope to expand our purchases . . . powering more of our operations with wind or another form of renewable energy," says spokesperson Teena Massingill.
She says that the green-power purchase is part of a trend—"to be as environmentally friendly as possible"—that the company has been phasing in during stores' construction and renovation. For instance, many of the company's facilities are cutting back on electric lighting and making greater use of natural light through skylights. More subdued illumination "makes for a friendlier shopping environment" while cutting the company's electric bills, Massingill says.
Safeway announced that its wind energy "will come solely from newly constructed wind-turbine generators."
WhiteWave (Green-Power Ranking: 14)
WhiteWave—the company that makes Silk, a soy-based milk alternative—started investing in wind power in 2003. Last year, the Broomfield, Colo.–based company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Dean Foods in Dallas, which markets the Horizon brand of organic dairy products.
http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
This year, WhiteWave is offsetting 100 percent of its projected electricity use in manufacturing Silk and Horizon products—almost 50,000 mWh—with wind credits. Such green-power investments are expected to "continue inching up," notes the company's Ellen Feeney.
Green power is "in keeping with our culture [of] a real nuts-and-bolts organic lifestyle." Wind investments are just one feature of WhiteWave's environmental program. Indeed, Feeney notes, the company's new headquarters is pushing recycling to the limit—even to the point of composting food scraps from kitchens used by employees.
This "ecosensitivity," Feeney says, is not only what the employees want, but also what studies have shown appeal to the company's core customers, made up primarily of baby boomers.
Other greens
Most of the companies on EPA's new top-25 list are investing in wind-generated electricity. However, it's hardly their only green option. The agency invites public and private institutions to consider solar and geothermal energy, small hydropower systems, and biofuels such as wood, straw, manure, and methane.
In an effort to wean the United States from its addiction to fossil fuels, EPA offers a "green power locator" map, where homeowners and corporate managers can find companies marketing renewable energy credits in their area, if not nationally (http://www.epa.gov/greenpower/locator/md.htm). For instance, Maine Power Options (http://www.mainepoweroptions.org/GreenPower.htm) offers buyers credits for a 50:50 mix of biomass- and hydropower-generated electricity, and it markets these credits to power users as far away as California and Washington State. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com
On Jan. 25, the Environmental Protection Agency recognized the top 25 institutions committed to making significant investments this year in ecologically responsible, "green" power systems—especially wind farms.
The Air Force topped EPA's new list, with a commitment to buy more than 1 million megawatt-hours (mWh) of renewably generated power—electricity equal to 11 percent of its projected use. Food companies came in second, sixth, eighth, and fourteenth place, a remarkable showing for one industry. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com
Electricity moves about the U.S. power grid like water through a network of streams. Power created in one place may be consumed locally or more than 1,000 miles away, depending on how electrons get shunted through the system. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com
Some farmers have installed turbines on their land to serve not only their own needs but to produce a crop of electrons to sell into a regional electrical grid (SN: 7/21/01, p. 45). Companies and institutions on EPA's new list, by contrast, are investing in a host of green-power systems including biomass energy and solar power. However, because wind-generated electricity is among the more affordable of alternative electricity-generating options, the majority of investments by institutions on EPA's new top-25 list—including those of all the food-related companies—went to wind power.
Green-power investors buy some share of the output of renewable-energy facilities, such as wind farms, and receive credit that can be exchanged for a comparable amount of power from a local utility.
The grocery chain Whole Foods Market, number two on EPA's green list, has committed to buying more green energy this year than even EPA itself buys for its many offices and operations. Both Whole Foods and Starbucks—number six on the green list—have purchased more green energy than the U.S. Energy Department has for its own operations.
The other food companies on EPA's greenest-25 list are Safeway and WhiteWave.http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com
Institutions on the list that don't make food their major business: Johnson & Johnson, the World Bank Group, the U.S. General Services Administration, HSBC North America, the city of San Diego, New Jersey Consolidated Energy Savings Program, Advanced Micro Devices, Staples, the Austin (Tex.) Independent School District, Mohawk Fine Papers, the Tower Companies, FedEx Kinko's, the Army's Fort Carson, the University of Pennsylvania, Montgomery County in Maryland, a consortium of Dallas-area hotels, Western Washington University, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Science News Online contacted the food companies on EPA's new list to find out what prompted them to go green.
Whole Foods (Green-Power Ranking: 2)
This 25-year-old Austin, Texas–based grocery chain—renowned for promoting natural and organic foods—has 180 stores, all but 10 of them in the United States. "We felt that as we were becoming a larger company, we needed to really give back to our community and the environment," explains Margaret Wittenberg, the firm's vice president for communications and quality standards.
Last Dec. 9, the company purchased wind-power credits to offset all of its projected North American power needs for 2006—some 458,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. It was the largest wind-energy purchase in U.S. history, the company announced last month, "and makes Whole Foods Market the only Fortune 500 company purchasing wind energy credits to offset 100 percent of its electricity use." Previously, 20 percent of the company's stores were purchasing some type of renewable energy.
access
This new recycled-paper cup is another way Starbucks is reducing its environmental footprint.Starbucks Coffee Co.
"Conventional electricity generation is the largest industrial source of air pollution in the United States, and wind power is a clean and renewable alternative," says Kurt Johnson, who directs EPA's Green Power Partnership program, which compiled the new list. "Whole Foods Market's commitment to wind power is providing an outstanding example of environmental leadership."
Whole Foods purchased its credits from the wind-power broker Renewable Choice Energy of Boulder, Colo. The total should match the electricity demand by its stores, bakeries, and operations facilities this year. "This wasn't just a 1-year trial," Wittenberg says, but something the company plans to invest in over the long term.
Wittenberg won't give financial figures but acknowledges that her company's wind credits cost more than conventional electricity. Typically, wind power costs about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) more than conventionally generated electricity. "But for us it's cost-neutral," says Wittenberg, since the company will finance the extra from savings elsewhere in its budget.
Green power is part of an overall trend for the company in reducing its environmental footprint. For instance, some of its stores use solar panels to generate electricity on-site. Some Whole Foods trucks run on biodiesel—a conventional-fuel substitute made from food or crop wastes (SN: 12/5/98, p. 364). Several stores—including the company's flagship grocery in Austin—even compost food wastes and sell the product to gardeners.
Starbucks (Green-Power Ranking: 6)
"Agricultural-based companies have reason to be concerned about the long-term implications of climate change on very sensitive ecosystems," says Ben Packard of Starbucks Coffee Co. That's why his firm bumped up its purchase of green power from the equivalent of 5 percent of the firm's electricity consumption by North American company-owned stores last year to 20 percent this year.
EPA equates Starbucks' green-power total to eliminating 237 million pounds of carbon dioxide that would be spewed if conventional fossil-fueled plants were used to meet the company's electricity needs.
This green-power initiative is consistent with Starbuck's longstanding goal to become a corporate leader in social and environmental responsibility, Packard says. He points to the company's policy of:
* Paying premium prices for its coffee to help farmers in developing countries make a fair income.
* Operating a center in Costa Rica that provides local farmers the technical training and aid needed to produce high-quality coffees while preserving the environment.
* Purchasing substantial amounts of coffee from shade-grown plants, which conventionally don't yield as much as full-sun coffee plants but are more likely to attract natural pollinators, which increase yields without the use of environmentally damaging fertilizers and pesticides (see The Buzz over Coffee).
* And creating and supporting a Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) project that favors farmers and coffee suppliers that demonstrate they're sustaining the environment and trading coffee fairly.
Those are behind-the-scenes changes that customers don't see. This month, however, the company will start handing customers paper cups that are better for the environment than the stores' cups are now.
http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
Worldwide this year, Starbucks expects to dispense some 1.9 billion paper cups. Those in North America will incorporate 10 percent post-consumer recycled paper fiber. This might not sound like much, says Packard, but no other company has gotten Food and Drug Administration support to use recycled-paper packaging in direct contact with food or drink.
"We anticipate that the switch . . . is going to lower our use of new tree fiber by a little over 5 million pounds," Packard says, which will eliminate the logging of some 60,000 trees. On Jan. 24, the National Recycling Coalition presented Starbucks with its "Recycling Works Award." The prize recognized the company for a range of activities, but especially its 8-year effort to bring a recycled paper cup to the marketplace.
Safeway (Green-Power Ranking: 8)
Last September, Safeway Inc. became the largest purchaser of renewable energy in California, its home state. This national supermarket chain purchased wind credits for 78,000 mWh—enough electricity to power all 270 of the company's gas stations, 15 of its grocery stores in the San Francisco Bay area, and its two corporate campuses.
Although the green-power commitment was for this year only, "in the future we do hope to expand our purchases . . . powering more of our operations with wind or another form of renewable energy," says spokesperson Teena Massingill.
She says that the green-power purchase is part of a trend—"to be as environmentally friendly as possible"—that the company has been phasing in during stores' construction and renovation. For instance, many of the company's facilities are cutting back on electric lighting and making greater use of natural light through skylights. More subdued illumination "makes for a friendlier shopping environment" while cutting the company's electric bills, Massingill says.
Safeway announced that its wind energy "will come solely from newly constructed wind-turbine generators."
WhiteWave (Green-Power Ranking: 14)
WhiteWave—the company that makes Silk, a soy-based milk alternative—started investing in wind power in 2003. Last year, the Broomfield, Colo.–based company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Dean Foods in Dallas, which markets the Horizon brand of organic dairy products.
http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
This year, WhiteWave is offsetting 100 percent of its projected electricity use in manufacturing Silk and Horizon products—almost 50,000 mWh—with wind credits. Such green-power investments are expected to "continue inching up," notes the company's Ellen Feeney.
Green power is "in keeping with our culture [of] a real nuts-and-bolts organic lifestyle." Wind investments are just one feature of WhiteWave's environmental program. Indeed, Feeney notes, the company's new headquarters is pushing recycling to the limit—even to the point of composting food scraps from kitchens used by employees.
This "ecosensitivity," Feeney says, is not only what the employees want, but also what studies have shown appeal to the company's core customers, made up primarily of baby boomers.
Other greens
Most of the companies on EPA's new top-25 list are investing in wind-generated electricity. However, it's hardly their only green option. The agency invites public and private institutions to consider solar and geothermal energy, small hydropower systems, and biofuels such as wood, straw, manure, and methane.
In an effort to wean the United States from its addiction to fossil fuels, EPA offers a "green power locator" map, where homeowners and corporate managers can find companies marketing renewable energy credits in their area, if not nationally (http://www.epa.gov/greenpower/locator/md.htm). For instance, Maine Power Options (http://www.mainepoweroptions.org/GreenPower.htm) offers buyers credits for a 50:50 mix of biomass- and hydropower-generated electricity, and it markets these credits to power users as far away as California and Washington State. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
nylon 88.nyl.00003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Each year, thousands of tons of nylon end up in landfills. But small-scale experiments may offer big hope for efficient recycling of some types of the material.
Nylon-6, an artificial polymer used in carpets, clothing, and car parts, is made by chemically linking large numbers of molecules derived from a petroleum product called caprolactam. Current processes to break apart, or depolymerize, nylon-6 typically must take place at high temperatures and high pressures. The processes are also relatively inefficient, says Akio Kamimura, an organic chemist at Yamaguchi University in Ube, Japan. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
On the other hand, incinerating the polymers in mixed trash can create prodigious amounts of toxic compounds (SN: 1/29/00, p. 70). That's why nylon-6 usually ends up in landfills. Each year in the United States alone, carpets containing about 500,000 metric tons of nylon-6 end up at the dump.
Now, Kamimura and his colleague Shigehiro Yamamoto have developed a process that depolymerizes nylon-6 and regenerates caprolactam. The researchers describe their bench-scale experiments, which use common laboratory equipment, in the June 21 Organic Letters.
Kamimura and Yamamoto placed chips of nylon-6 and small amounts of a catalyst in various ionic liquids, which consist solely of positively and negatively charged ions (SN: 9/8/01, p. 156). At a temperature of 270°C, the depolymerization reaction was inefficient, and the team recovered only 7 percent of the caprolactam contained in the nylon chips, says Kamimura. At temperatures above 330°C, the reaction was more efficient, but only 55 percent of the caprolactam was recovered because some of the substance decomposed in the heat.
At the intermediate temperature of 300°C—low by industrial standards—the yield of caprolactam approached 86 percent, says Kamimura. More important, he notes, at that temperature the ionic liquid didn't become tainted with by-products of the reaction. The researchers were able to reuse their ionic liquid five times without significant drops in caprolactam yield.
The team's approach is novel because it uses ionic liquids under conditions less harsh than those needed for other solvents, says Michael P. Harold, a chemical engineer at the University of Houston. He suggests, however, that several issues may stand in the way of making the process economically feasible. For instance, because ionic liquids are typically quite costly, expanding the process to an industrial scale would require the solvent to endure hundreds of depolymerization cycles.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
"Ultimately, the economics [of the process] will dictate the success," says Harold. "If the ionic liquid is very expensive and not sufficiently durable, the concept will not be viable."http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
John D. Muzzy, a chemical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and his colleagues are developing a different sort of chemical reaction to unzip nylon-6. In the lab, they've used a liquid catalyst to melt the nylon and cleave its long molecules. The researchers haven't yet published their findings, but Muzzy and his team estimate that a single facility using this process to recycle nylon-6 would be able to recover about 90 percent of its caprolactam. It could generate more than 4,600 metric tons of an impure solution of caprolactam each year at a cost of about half the current market price.
Nylon-6, an artificial polymer used in carpets, clothing, and car parts, is made by chemically linking large numbers of molecules derived from a petroleum product called caprolactam. Current processes to break apart, or depolymerize, nylon-6 typically must take place at high temperatures and high pressures. The processes are also relatively inefficient, says Akio Kamimura, an organic chemist at Yamaguchi University in Ube, Japan. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
On the other hand, incinerating the polymers in mixed trash can create prodigious amounts of toxic compounds (SN: 1/29/00, p. 70). That's why nylon-6 usually ends up in landfills. Each year in the United States alone, carpets containing about 500,000 metric tons of nylon-6 end up at the dump.
Now, Kamimura and his colleague Shigehiro Yamamoto have developed a process that depolymerizes nylon-6 and regenerates caprolactam. The researchers describe their bench-scale experiments, which use common laboratory equipment, in the June 21 Organic Letters.
Kamimura and Yamamoto placed chips of nylon-6 and small amounts of a catalyst in various ionic liquids, which consist solely of positively and negatively charged ions (SN: 9/8/01, p. 156). At a temperature of 270°C, the depolymerization reaction was inefficient, and the team recovered only 7 percent of the caprolactam contained in the nylon chips, says Kamimura. At temperatures above 330°C, the reaction was more efficient, but only 55 percent of the caprolactam was recovered because some of the substance decomposed in the heat.
At the intermediate temperature of 300°C—low by industrial standards—the yield of caprolactam approached 86 percent, says Kamimura. More important, he notes, at that temperature the ionic liquid didn't become tainted with by-products of the reaction. The researchers were able to reuse their ionic liquid five times without significant drops in caprolactam yield.
The team's approach is novel because it uses ionic liquids under conditions less harsh than those needed for other solvents, says Michael P. Harold, a chemical engineer at the University of Houston. He suggests, however, that several issues may stand in the way of making the process economically feasible. For instance, because ionic liquids are typically quite costly, expanding the process to an industrial scale would require the solvent to endure hundreds of depolymerization cycles.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
"Ultimately, the economics [of the process] will dictate the success," says Harold. "If the ionic liquid is very expensive and not sufficiently durable, the concept will not be viable."http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
John D. Muzzy, a chemical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and his colleagues are developing a different sort of chemical reaction to unzip nylon-6. In the lab, they've used a liquid catalyst to melt the nylon and cleave its long molecules. The researchers haven't yet published their findings, but Muzzy and his team estimate that a single facility using this process to recycle nylon-6 would be able to recover about 90 percent of its caprolactam. It could generate more than 4,600 metric tons of an impure solution of caprolactam each year at a cost of about half the current market price.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
epigenic 5512.epi.0025 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. As I wrote in my story in the New York Times today, much of your DNA is shut down by molecules collectively known as epigenetic marks. Roughly 100 sites are notable exceptions to this rule: your mother’s copy of these stretches of DNA are silenced, while your father’s are free to make proteins and RNA–or vice versa. This imbalance, known as imprinting, is utterly fascinating, and when the imprinting system goes awry–when dad’s genes start becoming active when they shouldn’t, or when mom’s genes go quiet when they should be active–the effects can be catastrophic. I first became familiar with gene imprinting while writing an article for the Times a couple years ago about a scientist at Harvard named David Haig, who has a theory for how it had evolved. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang He argues that gene imprinting is the result of an evolutionary tug of war between mothers and fathers, because mammalian parents have an evolutionary conflict of interest.
Now a couple scientists are extending this conflict theory to explain why so many imprinted genes are turning up in psychiatric disorders, ranging from autism to schizophrenia. They argue that the conflict between our parents plays out in our brains, too. This morning you can read about this provocative idea in my latest Discover column on the brain, or in this article by Benedict Carey in the Times. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang
These articles ought to come with a disclaimer: when we write about conflicts between parents, we are speaking metaphorically. We are actually referring to the rise and fall of different genes over millions of years, as natural selection acts on populations of thousands or millions of individuals. Just because you inherited imprinted genes from your mother or father doesn’t mean they sat down and drew up plans for using to maximize their own reproductive success. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang
Now a couple scientists are extending this conflict theory to explain why so many imprinted genes are turning up in psychiatric disorders, ranging from autism to schizophrenia. They argue that the conflict between our parents plays out in our brains, too. This morning you can read about this provocative idea in my latest Discover column on the brain, or in this article by Benedict Carey in the Times. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang
These articles ought to come with a disclaimer: when we write about conflicts between parents, we are speaking metaphorically. We are actually referring to the rise and fall of different genes over millions of years, as natural selection acts on populations of thousands or millions of individuals. Just because you inherited imprinted genes from your mother or father doesn’t mean they sat down and drew up plans for using to maximize their own reproductive success. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang
Sunday, November 16, 2008
training 774.tra.222 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Among physically healthy seniors, advancing age often takes a toll on memory and other mental abilities. There's encouraging news, though, for those who want to boost their brainpower.
A brief training course in any of three domains of thought�memory, reasoning, or visual concentration�yields marked improvement on tests of these cognitive skills, according to the largest geriatric study to date of these instructional techniques. The enhancement lasts for at least 2 years.
"Improvements in memory, problem-solving, and concentration following training roughly counteracted the degree of cognitive decline that we would expect to see over a 7-to-14-year period among older people without dementia," says psychologist Karlene Ball of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Ball and her colleagues report their findings in the Nov. 13 Journal of the American Medical Association. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.COM
It's not yet clear whether training-induced effects translate into improved thinking in everyday situations, cautions Ball.
In their study, the scientists recruited 2,832 men and women, ages 65 to 94.
They came primarily from senior-housing sites, community centers, and medical facilities in six urban regions of the United States. Participants were in good health and living independently.
These volunteers were randomly assigned to one of three training groups or a control group that didn't receive any training. One course of instruction focused on ways to improve memory for word lists and stories. Another bolstered reasoning in problems analogous to daily tasks such as reading a bus schedule. A third coached participants to identify visual information quickly in computer displays that corresponded to challenges such as reading traffic signs while driving.
Each training course consisted of 10 roughly hour-long sessions over 5 to 6 weeks. Most who completed training received a refresher set of four training sessions 11 months later.
Immediately after the first round of sessions, 26 percent of memory-trained participants, 74 percent of reasoning-coached volunteers, and 87 percent of those instructed in visual concentration showed substantial improvement on the targeted skill. While most members of the no-training group showed no change or declined, a small number improved as much as those who had received training.
The proportion of trained participants scoring markedly above their starting value dipped slightly over the next 2 years but remained greater than the proportion of untrained volunteers who upped their performance similarly.
Refresher sessions enhanced training-induced gains in reasoning and visual concentration but not in memory. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.COM
"I think we can build on these results to see how training ultimately might be applied to tasks that older people do everyday, such as using medication or handling finances," comments psychologist Richard M. Suzman of the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Md.
A brief training course in any of three domains of thought�memory, reasoning, or visual concentration�yields marked improvement on tests of these cognitive skills, according to the largest geriatric study to date of these instructional techniques. The enhancement lasts for at least 2 years.
"Improvements in memory, problem-solving, and concentration following training roughly counteracted the degree of cognitive decline that we would expect to see over a 7-to-14-year period among older people without dementia," says psychologist Karlene Ball of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Ball and her colleagues report their findings in the Nov. 13 Journal of the American Medical Association. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.COM
It's not yet clear whether training-induced effects translate into improved thinking in everyday situations, cautions Ball.
In their study, the scientists recruited 2,832 men and women, ages 65 to 94.
They came primarily from senior-housing sites, community centers, and medical facilities in six urban regions of the United States. Participants were in good health and living independently.
These volunteers were randomly assigned to one of three training groups or a control group that didn't receive any training. One course of instruction focused on ways to improve memory for word lists and stories. Another bolstered reasoning in problems analogous to daily tasks such as reading a bus schedule. A third coached participants to identify visual information quickly in computer displays that corresponded to challenges such as reading traffic signs while driving.
Each training course consisted of 10 roughly hour-long sessions over 5 to 6 weeks. Most who completed training received a refresher set of four training sessions 11 months later.
Immediately after the first round of sessions, 26 percent of memory-trained participants, 74 percent of reasoning-coached volunteers, and 87 percent of those instructed in visual concentration showed substantial improvement on the targeted skill. While most members of the no-training group showed no change or declined, a small number improved as much as those who had received training.
The proportion of trained participants scoring markedly above their starting value dipped slightly over the next 2 years but remained greater than the proportion of untrained volunteers who upped their performance similarly.
Refresher sessions enhanced training-induced gains in reasoning and visual concentration but not in memory. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.COM
"I think we can build on these results to see how training ultimately might be applied to tasks that older people do everyday, such as using medication or handling finances," comments psychologist Richard M. Suzman of the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Md.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
google 8883.goo.332 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com/
While doctors may gripe about the increasing number of patients that arrive in their offices with WebMD printouts and search-engine-assisted self diagnoses, Google sees it as opportunity. Today, Google.org (the philanthropic arm of the Google monster) unveiled Google Flu Trends, a web tool that will track flu outbreaks based on user-generated search terms. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com/
Flu Trends works because the Google search box is so often the first place people turn at the first sign of a sniffle. The company says Flu Trends could alert users to flu activity in their area up to two weeks ahead of traditional systems like emergency room reports.
The New York Times reports:
To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others. Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped the data onto the C.D.C.’s reports of “influenza-like illness,” which the agency compiles based on data from labs, health care providers, death certificates and other sources. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com/ Google found an almost perfect correlation between its data and the C.D.C. reports.
Flu Trends gives you a day-to-day report on flu activity across the country, so you’ll know to stay in bed if your state turns red (level: intense)—in which case, Google will still be there for you, letting you stargaze and navel-gaze from the comfort of your own home. It won’t make you chicken soup…yet. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
While doctors may gripe about the increasing number of patients that arrive in their offices with WebMD printouts and search-engine-assisted self diagnoses, Google sees it as opportunity. Today, Google.org (the philanthropic arm of the Google monster) unveiled Google Flu Trends, a web tool that will track flu outbreaks based on user-generated search terms. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com/
Flu Trends works because the Google search box is so often the first place people turn at the first sign of a sniffle. The company says Flu Trends could alert users to flu activity in their area up to two weeks ahead of traditional systems like emergency room reports.
The New York Times reports:
To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others. Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped the data onto the C.D.C.’s reports of “influenza-like illness,” which the agency compiles based on data from labs, health care providers, death certificates and other sources. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com/ Google found an almost perfect correlation between its data and the C.D.C. reports.
Flu Trends gives you a day-to-day report on flu activity across the country, so you’ll know to stay in bed if your state turns red (level: intense)—in which case, Google will still be there for you, letting you stargaze and navel-gaze from the comfort of your own home. It won’t make you chicken soup…yet. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Monday, October 20, 2008
dongtan 773.34 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
We’ve heard for years how our current way of life is unsustainable and that it shouldn’t be used as a model for developing nations. Well, it appears that
Leaders of the world’s largest population are currently planning the creation of at least 10 eco-cities – large communities where green living will not only be preached but practiced. If any of these cities accomplishes even a fraction of what’s on the drawing board, they will be years ahead of anything in the United States or elsewhere in the West.http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com
Indeed,
Head directs a London-based sustainable-building unit for Arup. This consulting company designs and engineers construction projects around the world. A little less than three years ago, the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corp. commissioned Arup to “plan the world’s first sustainable city”. Those are Arup’s words, not mine. But that his eco-city description looks pretty apt, at least on paper, based on Head’s presentations about Dongtan, last week (at events associated with the World Science Festival).
To be sited on the eastern edge of an island associated with
Plans for the new community – initially with a population of 80,000, but eventually with one perhaps six times that size – call for the sole use of zero-emissions vehicles, which means ones that are all-electric or run on hydrogen-powered fuel cells. Wastes throughout the community will be recycled. Electricity will be powered “entirely from renewables,” Head said –everything from solar energy to the burning of rice husks or trash. Carbon-dioxide emissions from burning will be captured and used to help fuel the growth of food crops. Waste heat from the power plants will be piped throughout the community to warm homes or other facilities. Rainwater and sewage will be captured, cleaned, and re-used.
Foods will be grown close to the town. Everyone’s home or business is supposed to be accessible from public transportation (buses, streetcars, or water taxis) that is no more than a 7-minute walk away. Healthcare centers, cultural venues, leisure parks and greenways are being planned to pepper the community so that people don’t have to leave the island for fun, education, doctors, or employment.
In 1900, Head says, there were eight hectares of land for every person on the planet. Today the patch of land that supports each of us has shrunk by 75 percent, partly owing to pollution and partly due to population growth. Clearly, the fossil-fuel-based lifestyle that characterized the past century can’t be relied upon much longer, he argues.
Apparently, it’s a point that not lost upon Chinese-development officials either. Which is why they’re sinking big bucks into foreign consultants and engineers to help them create a new paradigm for urbanization, Head says. Big Red’s eco-cities will become test beds for new technologies, new systems for delivering goods and services, and catalyzing social change.
Head says Chinese officials believe they can design new urban centers that will take their citizens straight “from the agricultural to the ecological age.”
We’ll see. It’s a bold experiment. There are bound to be big hiccups along the way as good ideas and inflation swell budgets and tax the patience of designers. We’ll also see how comfortable people are becoming guinea pigs for a whole new era of social engineering.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the idea of these eco-cities is long overdue. I might even volunteer to live in one if it were cloned on American soil and Science News would allow me to telecommute. But in
Pollution wafts a long way and even if the new eco-cities are clean, their neighbors’ emissions could keep the regional air chokingly dirty for years to come. Moreover, Dongtan is basically out in the sea – courting a drowning if sea levels rise (I didn’t see dike development as a key feature in Dongtan’s landscape).
But I commend
We don’t have long to wait to see if this concept blossoms or fizzles.
Monday, October 13, 2008
a
When Comet 8P/Tuttle passed close to Earth early this year, astronomers took its portrait with the
“To make a [comet] contact binary implies a formation mechanism that we don’t understand, but we’re guessing would be different than that in the asteroid belt,” says study collaborator Mike Nolan of
Such fragmenting is well known among comets, but in this case some of the pieces, which travel on similar but not identical orbits, would have had to reassemble. “Our understanding of how you make comets must now include the possibility of making an object” like 8P/Tuttle, says Nolan.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
hybrid 883300.33e Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. A gene of mixed evolutionary pedigree may have transformed mammalian reproduction, leading to the evolution of apes and humans.
Analyses of genetic data from a variety of mammals show that this gene, called Tre2, occurs only in apes and people, say graduate student Charles A. Paulding and geneticist Daniel A. Haber, both of Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Charlestown, and anthropologist Maryellen Ruvolo of Harvard University. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com
Although other investigators first identified Tre2 about 10 years ago, the gene's evolutionary origins were unknown. Tre2 represents a hybrid, or so-called chimeric version, of two genes that fused together, Paulding and his coworkers assert in an upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The DNA sequence of roughly half of Tre2 closely corresponds to an evolutionarily ancient gene still possessed by many species of mammals, the scientists hold. The rest of Tre2's sequence matches a more recently evolved gene found only in monkeys, apes, and people.
Fusion of the two genes must have occurred after the arrival of a common ancestor of apes and humans, between 21 million and 33 million years ago, the scientists theorize.
Although Tre2's two precursor genes both translate into proteins that act on many tissues, Tre2's corresponding protein affects only the testes, Paulding's group finds. If further research implicates Tre2 in sperm function, it will support the possibility that the gene's emergence created reproductive barriers between ancient creatures that did and didn't have it.
In other words, Tre2 may have influenced the evolution of species ancestral to modern apes and humans. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com
"Tre2 by itself isn't a magic bullet that explains the evolution of ape and human ancestors," says Ruvolo. "This is the beginning of a new line of research into many chimeric genes that characterize different primate species."
Chimeric genes apparently form as part of a DNA-reshuffling process. Many genes contain two or more segments that produce specific proteins.
For instance, unlike its genetic precursors, part of Tre2 codes for a protein that influences cell proliferation, even in animals that don't possess Tre2.
"Many genes have hybrid histories," comments geneticist Pascal Gagneux of the University of California, San Diego. "This interesting new finding is the beginning of an avalanche of information from different laboratories searching for genes specific to humans and apes." When the complete sequence of the chimp genome becomes available later this year, scientists will be able to expand their hunt for hybrid genes, Ruvolo adds.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
rub 0000190.1 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Before Jonathan Kuniholm, a marine reservist, was shipped off to the war in Iraq, he and three friends formed a research and development firm they called Tackle Design. The four men had worked together in an industrial engineering class at North Carolina State University (N.C.S.U.), and, filled with youthful enthusiasm, they hoped their fledgling company could survive on jobs that were interesting and beneficial rather than simply moneymaking. They worked with inventors—making prototypes for a plastic lock to keep shoestrings tied and a fishing lure with an embedded LED—as well as with medical engineers from their alma mater, who were developing tools for minimally invasive robotic surgery.
Then, before business had a chance to get off the ground, Kuniholm was deployed. A few months later, on New Year’s Day 2005, he and about 35 other marines were ambushed near the Hadithah Dam along the Euphrates River northwest of Baghdad. His platoon had been looking for insurgents who had fired at a Swift boat patrolling around the dam a few hours earlier. As the marines closed in on the suspected hotspot, an IED—improvised explosive device—hidden in a can of olive oil exploded. Shrapnel ripped through the platoon, and Kuniholm was blasted off his feet. Moments later, when he came to his senses, he discovered his M16 rifle had been blown in half and his right arm was nearly severed just below the elbow. Caught in a raging firefight, Kuniholm pulled himself out of harm’s way. His fellow marines called for air evacuation, and soon surgeons at a hospital near Baghdad were amputating his ravaged arm.
After returning to North Carolina, Kuniholm underwent multiple surgeries at the Duke University Medical Center. Then, following his convalescence, he visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where doctors outfitted him with two kinds of artificial replacement for his hand and lower arm. One was a conventional split-hook device, essentially two hooks aligned with each other, which the user can spread apart or close up via a harness and cable system activated by the shoulder or arm. The second was a more advanced “myoelectric” prosthesis, which picks up nerve signals produced by the slightest muscle tension and translates the signals into movement. Flexing the upper arm muscle causes the pincers of a prosthetic “hand” to grip; relaxing the muscles causes the pincers to release.
The two prostheses from Walter Reed were state-of-the-art, the latest in prosthetic design. But back in North Carolina, Kuniholm and his partners at Tackle Design were shocked at the lack of innovation in arm and hand prostheses. They were sure they could do better. And that is how the small North Carolina design firm got into the prosthetics business. More, Kuniholm and his partners have created a clearinghouse for prosthetic designs, an online consortium they call the Open Prosthetics Project (OPP), whose goal is to nurture useful ideas for innovations and then freely give the designs away. The idea is to benefit not only people such as Kuniholm, who already have the resources that come from living in a first-world economy, but also amputees all over the world. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Innovation Stagnation
Ironically, one of the reasons a group such as the OPP can get on the public radar at all is the high human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because of tremendous advances in emergency medicine, as well as the use of such armor as Kevlar vests, the fighting has resulted in a far lower fatality rate among injured soldiers than it has in past wars. That’s the good news. The bad news is that many veterans whose wounds would have killed them in the past come home today with grievous injuries.
Still, in absolute terms, the number of upper-limb amputees is small, and the prosthetics market is hard to crack. As Kuniholm and his partners did their research about the prosthetics industry, it became evident that the main reason for the lack of innovation was a lack of financial incentive. According to the Amputee Coalition of America, 1.7 million Americans have lost a limb because of illness or trauma, but relatively few of them need a replacement arm or hand. The typical amputee is older than 50 and has lost a leg or a foot to diabetes or some other disease. Upper-extremity amputees—those who have lost an arm or a hand—number about 100,000 people, or some 6 percent of the total. Fewer still are wounded veterans. As of the end of 2007, about 700 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are amputees, and of those about 150 have lost a hand or an arm (or, in some cases, both arms).
Such a relatively small market, and the resulting narrow profit margins, makes it unprofitable for most companies to invest in research and development of upper-arm prostheses. “Prosthetics is one of many underserved markets in which innovation has stagnated because the traditional incentives are lacking,” Kuniholm says. “The people who make innovations in this field are usually passionate users tinkering around in their garage.”
What Kuniholm has in mind is what Eric von Hippel calls a lead user—a person who is out in front of most other people and even other companies with respect to an important market trend. A lead user also expects to reap great profits or benefits from the trend. According to von Hippel, a professor and head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, lead users also tend to be active innovators. Kuniholm is betting that by incorporating the insights of lead users into a new product, the product has a good chance to win in the marketplace because it anticipates consumer needs.
But patenting and securing a manufacturer are costly and convoluted processes, so most amputees who try to improve prosthetic designs never see their ideas get past the workshop. “All that information and innovation mostly just disappear into the ether,” Kuniholm adds.
The Web site www.openprosthetics.org, which is part of an organization called the Shared Design Alliance, invites prosthesis users, engineers and anyone else with an interest to join a discussion entitled “Pimp My Arm.” (The name is a takeoff on the MTV show Pimp My Ride, which features auto mechanics who fix up and customize old clunkers.) Participants can contribute time, hunches and imagination about how to improve the devices. All the ideas are “open source”—that is, nothing is proprietary, and any idea is understood to be freely shared.
A Simple Solution
Kuniholm’s chief personal contribution to the OPP is the ongoing development and improvement of the Trautman hook. Introduced in 1925, the device is classified as a “voluntary opening” prosthesis, meaning its pincers are held closed with internal rubber bands. If the user wants to open the hook, he moves or shrugs his shoulder, which engages a harness and cable system. If that sounds relatively crude and basic, it is. Like most other hooks on the market, the Trautman design has changed very little since it was first introduced. “Many prosthetics manufacturers are subject to the same one-size-fits-most economics as mass-market consumer goods,” Kuniholm says. But in prosthetics, he adds, “each person’s needs and capabilities are unique.”
Although hooks may not be aesthetically pleasing and are decidedly low tech, they are generally more functional and durable and certainly less expensive than myoelectric devices (hooks cost between $600 and $2,200, on average, whereas myoelectric hands start around $6,000). Moreover, the Trautman hook is unique in having a so-called back lock: like the ice tongs once used for carrying blocks of ice, which convert the weight of the block into the force that grips both its sides, the pincers of the hook lock or squeeze harder on an object as the user pulls back on the hook with greater force. Another advantage is that the pincers of the Trautman hook have serrated teeth that interlock, making its grip even stronger. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
“There are many options for prosthetic devices, but none with this one’s capabilities,” says Agnes A. Curran, an upper-extremity specialist and clinical director of the Orthotic and Prosthetic Group of America. “Throughout my travels I meet patients all over the country who are longtime Trautman hook users, and these guys won’t even look at a modern device. They keep them held together with welds, baling wire and duct tape.”
Because of its unique features and rugged design, the Trautman hook developed a passionate following, particularly among farmers and ranchers in the Midwest. But the manufacturer, the Paul Trautman Company, went out of business in the 1990s, and within a short time after the company’s demise, only a limited number were still available on the aftermarket. When Kenneth M. Heide, a prosthetist in Fargo, N.D., who has many patients loyal to the Trautman hook, heard about the OPP, he saw it as the perfect opportunity to get the unique device back on the market. With the blessing of the Trautman company, Heide loaned the OPP two old Trautman devices borrowed from his patients and two new devices from Steven Stolberg, an instructor at Century College in White Bear, Minn., who used them in his class. Tackle Design reverse-engineered them, creating a digital model in a computer-aided design (CAD) program that could serve as a starting point for making improvements.
For the first batch, Kuniholm and his partners kept it simple. All they did was make some small changes to strengthen the used hooks where they had broken and then been welded back together. They e-mailed the specifications of one of the hooks to Anvil Prototype & Design in Charlotte, N.C., which put the digital designs through a process called rapid prototyping. Anvil transformed the digital information into the specifications for a “3-D printer” to build an early-stage concept model out of thousands of thin layers of powder and binder materials, adding or “printing” them one layer at a time. Rapid prototyping makes it possible to refine the design quickly. Rapid Tool in Boulder, Colo., then made four test models out of a bronze-infused stainless steel powder that was also added layer by layer, heated and fused. Tackle Design donated the new and improved hooks to patients for a test run.
Testing, Testing
One of the test patients was L. Gus Davis, the 57-year-old president of a water treatment company in St. Peter, Minn., who lost his right arm in a 1972 motorcycle accident. Although Davis had once considered getting a myoelectric arm, he thought it could never withstand his lifestyle. “I still ride motorcycles, I run a chain saw and I split wood by hand,” Davis says. “I’m pretty hard on [prosthetic devices], and I don’t think the myoelectric could stand up to it. But the Trautman hook is slick and tough. I would definitely be a potential customer.”
With feedback from his test patients, Kuniholm is fine-tuning the design of the next round of prototypes. He says the simplicity of the original hook—three metal parts and two screws—makes it a promising candidate for further customization and improvement. It could be made of a lighter alloy, for instance, and it could probably be modified to have a stronger grip. But the main glitch has already been fixed. For the hook to open and close properly, one of the screws had to be loosened, and with time that enlarged the hole and allowed the screw to wiggle free. To remedy the problem, many longtime users drilled out the screw holes, welded metal into them and tapped in new threads for the screws. Eventually, though, repeated repairs put a lot of wear and tear on the hook. Two students at N.C.S.U., Andy Richards and Richard Shoge, modified the design to correct the problem.
Eagerly awaiting the next test batch is Curran. Many of her patients were veterans of World War II, and most of them, elderly and accustomed to what they had, made little demand for prosthetic innovation. But recently she has started to see a growing number of younger patients, particularly soldiers returning from Iraq. “I would love to see what the younger guys think of this device and let them compare it with the more modern ones,” she says.
In addition to helping people here in the U.S., a cheap and simple device such as the Trautman hook would be invaluable in developing countries, where war, poor health care and manual labor are common. In such areas the population of upper-limb amputees is growing at an alarming rate, and a prosthesis can be crucial for returning to gainful employment. Yet a severe lack of funds prevents most amputees from receiving a simple, cheap and durable prosthesis. “We have to think outside the U.S.,” Curran says. “We need to look at places like Saudi Arabia, India, China, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh and elsewhere in the world where, unfortunately, some of the amputations are punitive.”
It’s the Economy, Stupid
The key to getting the hooks into the hands of the people who need them is finding a distributor that is willing to market the hooks internationally. But that has proved to be more easily said than done.
“When I was going around to different companies asking if they’d be willing to help out, they all asked the same question,” Curran says. “‘How many will I sell in a year?’ If there’s not a lot of potential profit, they’re just not that interested.” And with plenty of options already available, what point is there in trying to come up with another device, particularly in a market so fraught with financial obstacles?
To Kuniholm, that is the counsel of despair. You might just as well say that everything that needs to be invented already has been. To be sure, there are plenty of prosthetic devices available that do different things well. “But,” he notes, “there’s still nothing on the market that’s an acceptable substitute for a hand.”
William J. Hanson, president of Liberating Technologies, Inc. (LTI), in Holliston, Mass., a manufacturer and distributor of upper-limb prosthetic components, explains that his company distributed the first titanium split hooks in the U.S. Like most prosthetics companies, though, LTI shifted its focus away from hooks and on to more modern mechanical and myoelectric devices. “Now just a handful of well-established companies supply most of the market with body-powered hook devices,” Hanson says.
Hosmer Dorrance Corporation is one of those companies. Based in Campbell, Calif., Hosmer is one of the leading manufacturers of upper- and lower-extremity prostheses. Karl Hovland, the company’s president, recalls that over the years many inquires have come in about the Trautman hook. It has always remained on the back burner, he adds, because it never promised a big enough return to make the investment: “We would certainly consider it, but the numbers have to add up.” Making such an investment even more risky is that Medicare recently consolidated its reimbursement billing system for “orthotic and prosthetic” services. The result has been smaller reimbursements for several kinds of functional hooks. “There’s just no incentive if the reimbursement is less than what we have to charge for them,” Hovland says. “We want to do everything we can for the patient, but we are a business for profit.”
And therein lies the rub. Kuniholm’s vision of “substituting public good for profits” keeps running up against bottom-line roadblocks. Nevertheless, Kuniholm, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Duke University, continues to search for manufacturing, marketing and distribution channels for the Trautman hook. He hopes to find a company that will donate e-commerce and payment and order management services—or better yet, a company already developing prosthetic devices that is willing to take on the OPP designs.
“The reality,” he notes, “is that there’s no traditional economic incentive to do work and make improvements on prosthetics. That doesn’t mean that nobody cares, but most people don’t have the money or know-how to magnify whatever efforts or improvements they make. I think we can generate far more societal benefit if we give away information than if we commercialized and sold the ideas. Our goal is to create a way to share these efforts and improvements with anyone who needs them.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Monday, September 1, 2008
slow-wave 0000123 Louis J. Sheehan
For much of the time that we snooze, our brains generate an electrical output known as slow-wave activity. This sleep-specific pattern arises from neural processes involved in learning rather than in recharging fatigued brain cells as scientists have often assumed, a new study suggests. http://louis-j-sheehan.net
Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin in Madison and his coworkers instructed 11 adult volunteers to practice a hand-eye coordination task shortly before spending a night in a sleep laboratory. In the task, each participant used a handheld device to move a cursor toward a target on a computer screen while the scientists slightly altered the cursor's trajectory, as if it were fighting a current.
After falling asleep, participants displayed slow-wave activity that was largely confined to two areas toward the back of the right brain. Brain scan studies had implicated these areas in skilled actions that depend on spatial perception. http://louis-j-sheehan.net
In line with earlier investigations (SN: 6/1/02, p. 341: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020601/fob6.asp), volunteers performed the task better after a night's sleep. Those who had exhibited the greatest amount of slow-wave activity in the two right-brain areas while asleep showed the most improvement on the task the next day.
Tononi's group reports its findings on June 6 in the online version of Nature.Sunday, August 24, 2008
olmec
More than 3,000 years ago, a coastal town served as the center of a "mother culture," that shaped societies in a wide swath of what's now southern and central Mexico. Jeffrey P. Blomster of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and his colleagues arrived at this conclusion following an extensive investigation into the region's pottery trade.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com
Blomster's team determined the chemical composition of 725 ceramic pieces and 828 clay samples, from the town of San Lorenzo and six other ancient population centers. The pieces were between 2,850 and 3,450 years old. Using the data from their analyses, the researchers traced the movement of pottery goods and found that communities everywhere imported pottery that originated in San Lorenzo—defined by the cultural style called Olmec—but that San Lorenzo didn't import any ceramic goods in return. Potters at some sites outside San Lorenzo also created imitations of Olmec jars from local clays, the researchers report in the Feb. 18 Science.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com
The new results challenge the view that Olmec-era societies in Mexico traded goods back and forth as "sister cultures," contributing about equally to the spread of pottery-making techniques and symbolic designs.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
relief
Pain relief provided by a substance with no active ingredients, called a placebo, may have neural as well as psychological origins. Men who reported relief from a painful jaw after receiving a placebo injection also showed signs of enhanced activity of a brain substance that regulates stress and suppresses pain, say Jon-Kar Zubieta of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his coworkers in the Aug. 24 Journal of Neuroscience. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis_J_Sheehan_Esquire_1
The scientists administered an intravenous salt solution, which they described to volunteers as a pain reliever, to seven men who also received a jaw injection that caused a moderately painful muscle spasm for about 20 minutes. Another seven men received the jaw injection but not the placebo.
In brain scans of the placebo group only, positron-emission tomography and molecular-imaging techniques revealed pronounced activity at brain-cell receptors for chemical messengers known as endorphins. Prior studies had linked endorphins to pain relief. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis_J_Sheehan_Esquire_1
Men who reported the greatest relief from the placebo injections exhibited the most-intense responses at endorphin receptors in the brain, Zubieta's group reports.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
dasgupta
Drano, All laundry detergent and Arm & Hammer baking soda have become drug-addicted job applicants’ last resorts to pass urine screenings. But researchers performing lab tests are one step ahead.
Legislation allowing workplace drug testing began in 1986. During the late 1980s, 13 percent of the tests came back positive. Now, less than 4 percent show a positive result, in part because 13 states now ban the sale and distribution of drug test altering chemicals, said Amitava Dasgupta during a press conference July 28 at the annual meeting of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. http://Louissheehan.BraveDiary.com
“It is a game of cat and mouse,” said Dasgupta, a pathologist at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. “As more companies try to achieve drug-free work environments, more people attempt to beat drug tests with additives, flushing agents and drug-free urine purchased on an increasing number of websites.” Toxicologists respond by creating new screenings to catch the cheaters, he said.
Dasgupta demonstrated how prospective employees attempt to cheat on drug tests using additives brought from home or even with expensive ones purchased on the Internet. He also showed the tests laboratory scientists use to catch these kinds of potential cheaters.
Adulterant testsThis image shows the test strips that can be used to test for certain chemicals a prospective employee may have added to a urine sample. Tests such as this one are now becoming commercially available, making it easier for employers to screen job applicants for drug use.Rapidxams.com
“People who abuse drugs need work,” he said. http://Louissheehan.BraveDiary.com “They need money to pay for their habit, and they do anything to cheat on drug tests.”
The altering chemicals, called adulterants, disrupt the antibodies toxicologists use to identify the presence of an illicit drug in urine. A person might add a household bleach or cleanser such as Drano to cover the presence of drug use. But products like Drano change the color of the sample and also raise the pH, the measure of acidity or alkalinity. The standard pH of urine with no added substances is between 4 and 8, Dasgupta said. Drano makes a sample climb to 14, the most basic reading on the pH scale. http://Louissheehan.BraveDiary.com
For more sophisticated approaches to cheating, drug addicts purchase fake urine or complex chemical compounds to get a negative test. These compounds, pyridinium chlorochromate and potassium nitrite, destroy the drug molecules, specifically those indicative of marijuana, Dasgupta said. But, he countered, toxicologists have simple “spot tests” that use hydrogen peroxide and other common chemicals to test for even the most complex adulterants. If the sample is tainted, it is considered invalid. The drug test is incomplete, and the prospective employee is not hired, he said.
Dasgupta said while a federal law banning the fabrication and distribution of complex adulterants should be created, nothing would prevent the companies creating the compounds from moving overseas and shipping their products back to the United States.
But, he continued, no matter the cost, keeping workplaces drug-free is important because clean environments prevent accidents and also improve productivity. The American Council for Drug Education reports that drug abusers are 33 percent less productive and 10 times as likely to miss work than employees who are sober and do not use drugs. Drug abusers are also almost four times more likely to be involved in on-the-job accidents and five times more likely to file workers compensation claims for such accidents.
“This is a very important public safety issue,” Dasgupta noted.Tuesday, July 22, 2008
airplane
Airplane wings, wind turbines, and boat rudders are so smooth they invite you to run your hand over them. The smoother the surface, the less drag it produces, and the easier it moves through the air or water — or so says conventional engineering wisdom. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com Humpback whales, however, move their massive frames around in a different way.
The leading edge of a whale’s fin looks more like a ripped piece of cardboard. It’s covered in little bumps called tubercles that give it an uneven texture and increase upward pressure on the fin. Practically, that means a two-ton marine creature can make sharp turns and elegant maneuvers to capture its dinner of fish and crustaceans. So if whales move this well with serrated fins, maybe we’re missing something with our smooth-as-a-baby’s-bottom surfaces. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com
Frank Fish, a biologist at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, certainly thought so. He thought the physics of moving through the air versus through the water were similar enough that he could steal the humpback’s trick and use it outside of the ocean. So he co-founded a company, WhalePower Corp., to develop ceiling fans whose blades mimic the ragged edge of a whale’s fin. They then signed a development deal with Canadian company Envira-North Systems to create a prototype. The fans they created cut energy use by 20 percent in their initial tests, and ran quieter as well. Once they clear the Canadian government’s testing and certification requirement, Envira-North officials hope their WhalePower fans will hit the market.
So if you needed one more reason to keep your hands away from the ceiling fan, someday it might come with blades that look like a steak knife.
This post has been appended. It has been changed to reflect the fact that Frank Fish co-founded WhalePower, which owns all rights to the new fan technology, and merely signed a development deal with Envira-North.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
illegal
May 20, Friday. The Secretary of State is becoming very anxious in view of our relations with France
I told him she was yet in the hands of the contractor, and was likely to be for some time, and when we had her I was not certain that it would be best to send her across the
The recent arrest of a Spaniard (Arguellis) who was in
Mr. Seward sometimes does strange things, and I am inclined to believe he has committed one of those freaks which make me constantly apprehensive of his acts. He knows that slavery is odious and all concerned in slave traffic are distrusted, and has, it seems, improved the occasion to exercise arbitrary power, expecting probably to win popular applause by doing an illegal act. Constitutional limitations are to him unnecessary restraints. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Should there be an investigation instituted and mere denunciation of the act, the President will be called upon to assume the responsibility, yet I am persuaded he has nothing to do in this affair beyond acquiescing without knowledge in what has been done. Could the abduction by any possibility be popular, Mr. S. expects it to inure to his credit.
Monday, June 30, 2008
laser
A laser treatment that wipes out drug-resistant bacterial infections may one day help doctors tackle the growing problem of superbugs, British researchers said on Tuesday. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Laboratory experiments showed that a laser-activated dye widely used for medical diagnosis produces a number of bacteria-killing chemicals, Michael Wilson of University College London and colleagues said. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
It could be used for spot treatment of skin infections and save the use of infused or oral antibiotics for more serious cases, they wrote in the journal BioMed Central Microbiology.
Their study showed indocyanine green dye killed a wide range of bacteria including Staphyloccus aureus, Streptococcus pyogenes and Pseudomonas aeruginosa whan activated by a near-infrared laser.
Methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus, or MRSA, infections can range from boils to more severe infections of the bloodstream, lungs and surgical sites. Most cases are associated with hospitals, nursing homes or other health care facilities.
The superbug is a growing problem worldwide and can cause life-threatening and disfiguring infections and can often only be treated with expensive, intravenous antibiotics.
This new approach using a dye safe for humans could save lives and get people out of the hospital more quickly -- and cheaply, the researchers said.
"The growing resistance to conventional antibiotics among organisms that infect wounds and burns makes such infections difficult to treat," Wilson's team wrote.
The treatment is promising because the activated dye targets both the bacteria's DNA and membrane, a two-pronged attack making resistance unlikely to develop, even after repeated use, they said.
The researchers said they conducted their experiments using bacteria grown in a lab so the next step is testing the laser on mice before starting human trials.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
zhou
In a society where news is restricted, much weight is put on stories which cannot be verified. It was widely believed that at the Geneva Conference of 1954 U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles snubbed Zhou by publicly brushing past his outstretched hand. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.comWhether the incident actually happened or not, President Nixon clearly believed that it had. Therefore, when he descended from Air Force One in Beijing in January 1972, he ostentatiously and respectfully held out his hand to Zhou, who appreciated the symbolism. [10]
The clash with Russia created a number of these stories. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.comOne story had it that Zhou met Premier Nikita Khrushchev outside a meeting hall where each had denounced the other. Khrushchev, who was said to be jealous of Zhou’s cosmopolitan skills, remarked to Zhou “it’s interesting, isn’t it. I’m of working class origin while your family were landlords.” Zhou quickly replied “Yes, and we each betrayed our class!” [11]
Another such doubtful but widespread story had it that at another such encounter Khrushchev shook Zhou’s hand, then pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his hands. Zhou then pulled out his handkerchief, wiped his hands, and put the handkerchief in the nearest wastebasket. [12] This is especially interesting since apparently Richard Nixon told a similar story. He recalled that in 1954 Undersecretary of State, Walter B. Smith did not want to "break... discipline" but also did not want to slight the Chinese blatantly. Therefore, Smith held a cup of coffee in his right hand when shaking hands with Zhou. Zhou took out a white handkerchief, wiped his hand and threw the handkerchief into the garbage.
[edit]
Friday, June 13, 2008
italian Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Eighth Army plans for 21 November were for 70 Division to break out from Tobruk and cut the German lines of communication and supply to the troops on the border to the southeast. At the same time 7th Armoured would advance from Sidi Rezegh to link with them and roll up the Axis positions around Tobruk. Meanwhile, XIII Corps' New Zealand Division would take advantage of the receding threat from 21st and 15th Panzer and advance 30 miles (48 km) northeast to the Sidi Azeiz area, overlooking the Axis defenses at Bardia. http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us
The strength of 70th Division's attack surprised their opponents, Rommel having underestimated the garrison's size and particularly its armoured strength. Fighting was intense as the 2nd Battalion, Black Watch advanced to capture a series of prepared strongpoints. By mid afternoon they had advanced some 3.5 miles (5.6 km) towards Ed Duda on the main supply road when they paused as it became clear that 7th Armoured would not link up.[7] A German account of the action of the 70th Division is given by Generalmajor Alfred Toppe of the German Wehrmacht:
A strong attack supported by fifty infantry tanks, was made from the southeast section of the fortress of Tobruk. The enemy broke through the encirclement front, penetrated across the main highway and and destroyed a good part of the Bologna Division. A counterattack by elements of 21st Panzer Division succeeded in restoring the situation.[8]
In summing up the experience of the 2nd Battalion the Black Watch in the attack, the Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War wrote that "The superlative élan of the Black Watch in the attack had been equalled by the remarkable persistence of the defence in the face of formidable tank-and-infantry pressure."[9]
7th Armoured had planned its attack northward to Tobruk to start at 08.30 on 21 November. However, at 07.45 patrols reported the arrival from the southeast of a mass of enemy armour, some 200 tanks in all. 7th Armoured Brigade, together with a battery of field artillery turned to meet this threat leaving the four companies of infantry and the artillery of the Support Group to carry through the attack to the north in anticipation of being reinforced by 5th South African Infantry Brigade which had been detached from the South African Division at Bir el Gubi facing the Ariete Division and was heading north to join them.[10]
Without armoured support the northward attack by the Support Group failed and by the end of the day, 7th Armoured Brigade had lost all but 28 of its 160 tanks and were relying by that time mainly on the artillery of the Support Group to hold the enemy at arm's length. The South African brigade meanwhile were dug in southeast of Bir el Haiad but had the German armour between them and Sidi Rezegh. However, by the evening of 21 November 4th Armoured Brigade was 8 miles (13 km) south east of Sidi Rezegh and 22nd Armoured Brigade were in contact with the German armour at Bir el Haiad, some 12 miles (19 km) southwest of Sidi Rezegh.[11]
[edit] 7th Armoured Division defeated at Sidi Rezegh
Overnight Rommel once again split his forces with 21st Panzer taking up a defensive position alongside the Afrika Division between Sidi Rezegh and Tobruk and 15th Panzer moving 15 miles (24 km) west to Gasr el Arid to prepare for a battle of manoeuvre which General Cruewell believed would favour the Afrika Korps. This presented a clear opportunity for a breakthrough to Tobruk with the whole of 7th Armoured Division concentrated and facing only the weakened 21st Panzer. However, XXX Corps commander Norrie, aware that 7th Armoured division was down to 200 tanks decided on caution. Instead, in the early afternoon Rommel attacked Sidi Rezegh with 21st Panzer and captured the airfield. Fighting was desperate and gallant: for his actions during these two days of fighting Brigadier Jock Campbell, commanding 7th Support Group was awarded the Victoria Cross. However, 21st Panzer, despite being considerably weaker in armour, proved superior in its combined arms tactics, pushing 7th Armoured Division back with a further 50 tanks lost (mainly from 22nd Brigade).[12]
The fighting at Sidi Rezegh had continued through 22 November, with South African Division's 5th Brigade by that time engaged to the south of the airfield. An attempt to recapture it failed and the Axis counter-offensive began to gain momentum. 7th Armoured Brigade had been withdrawn with all but four of their 150 tanks out of commission or destroyed.[13] In four days the Eighth Army had lost 530 tanks against Axis losses of about 100. http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us
In the meantime the Italian forces had succeeded in repulsing a strong thrust from Tobruk aimed at penetrating into the area of Sidi Rezegh, as a German narrative recorded:[15]
"After a sudden artillery concentration the garrison of Fortress Tobruk, supported by sixty tanks, made an attack on the direction of Bel Hamid at noon, intending at long last unite with the main offense group. The Italian siege front around the fortress tried to offer a defense in the confusion but was forced to relinquish numerous strong points in the encirclement front about Bir Bu Assaten to superior enemy forces. The Italian "Pavia" Division was committed for a counterattack and managed to seal off the enemy breakthrough."
Friday, June 6, 2008
Oberth Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 211223
Hermann Julius Oberth (June 25, 1894 – December 28, 1989) was an Austro-Hungarian-born, German (Transylvanian Saxon) physicist, and, along with the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the American Robert Goddard, one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics. The three were never active collaborators: instead, their parallel achievements occurred independently of one another.
The statue of Hermann Oberth in front of Sibiu city hall
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[edit] Early life
Oberth was born to a Saxon family in the Transylvanian city of Schäßburg (Romanian Sighişoara, Romania). By his own account and that of many others, around the age of 11 Oberth became fascinated with the field in which he was to make his mark through the writings of Jules Verne, especially From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, re-reading them to the point of memorization. Influenced by Verne's books and ideas, Oberth constructed his first model rocket as a school student of 14. In his youthful experiments, he arrived independently at the concept of the multistage rocket, but lacked, at the time, the resources to pursue his idea on any but a theoretical level.
In 1912, Oberth undertook the study of medicine in Munich but at the outbreak of World War I he was drafted in an Imperial German infantry battalion and sent to the Eastern Front; in 1915 he was moved to a medical unit in a hospital in Sighişoara.[1] Here he initially conducted a series of experiments concerning weightlessness and later resumed his rocket designs. By 1917, he showed what his studies were about and what would become a shooting missile with liquid propellant to Hermann von Stein, the Prussian Minister of War.[2]
On July 6, 1918 he married Mathilde Hummel, with whom he had four children, among them a son who died at the front during World War II, and a daughter who also died during the war, when a liquid oxygen plant exploded in a workplace accident in August 1944. In 1919 he moved once again to Germany, this time to study physics, initially in Munich and later in Göttingen.[1]
In 1922, his doctoral dissertation on rocket science was rejected as "utopian". He had the 92-page work privately published as the controversial Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ("By Rocket into Planetary Space"); in 1929, Oberth would expand this to a 429-page work entitled Wege zur Raumschiffahrt ("Ways to Spaceflight"). Oberth commented later that he made the deliberate choice not to write another doctoral dissertation: "I refrained from writing another one, thinking to myself: Never mind, I will prove that I am able to become a greater scientist than some of you, even without the title of doctor."[3] He criticized the German system of education, saying "Our educational system is like an automobile which has strong rear lights, brightly illuminating the past. But looking forward things are barely discernible."[3] Hermann Oberth was finally awarded with the title of doctor in physics with the same paper, by professor Augustin Maior, at Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca (Romania), on May 23, 1923. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
He became a member of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR - "Spaceflight Society"), an amateur rocket group that had taken great inspiration from his book and acted as something of a mentor to the enthusiasts that made it up. For several years before his final departure from Romania in 1938, Oberth taught physics and mathematics at the Stephan Ludwig Roth High School in Mediaş.[1]
[edit] Rocketry and space flight
In 1928 and 1929 Oberth worked in Berlin as a scientific consultant on the first film ever to have scenes set in space, Frau im Mond ("The Woman in the Moon"), directed at Universum Film AG by Fritz Lang. The film was of enormous value in popularizing the idea of rocket science. Oberth's main task was to build and launch a rocket as a publicity event prior to the film's premiere. On June 5, 1929, Oberth won the first REP-Hirsch Prize of the French Astronomical Society for his Encouragement of Astronautics in his book Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (Ways to Spaceflight) that expanded Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen to a full-length book. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
In autumn 1929, Oberth launched his first liquid fuel rocket, named Kegeldüse. He was helped in this experiment by his students at the Technical University of Berlin, one of whom was Wernher von Braun, who would later head the wartime project to develop the rocket officially called the A4, but far better known today as the V-2 rocket.
In 1938 the Oberth family left Sibiu for good, to settle first in Nazi Germany. Oberth himself moved on first to the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, then the Technische Hochschule in Dresden. Oberth arrived at Peenemünde in 1941 to work on the V-2 and circa September 1943, was awarded the Kriegsverdienstkreuz I Klasse mit Schwertern (War Merit Cross 1st Class, with Swords) for his "outstanding, courageous behavior … during the attack" of Peenemünde by Operation Hydra.[5] Oberth later worked on solid-propellant anti-aircraft rockets at the WASAG complex near Wittenberg. At the end of the war the Oberth family moved to Feucht, near Nuremberg. Oberth left for Switzerland in 1948, where he worked as an independent consultant and a writer.
In 1950 he went on to Italy, where he completed the work he had begun at WASAG for the Italian Navy. In 1953 he returned to Feucht to publish his book Menschen im Weltraum (Man in Space), in which he described his ideas for a space-based reflecting telescope, a space station, an electric spaceship, and space suits.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Oberth offered his opinions regarding unidentified flying objects; he was a supporter of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. For example, in an article in The American Weekly, October 24, 1954, he stated: "It is my thesis that flying saucers are real and that they are space ships from another solar system. I think that they possibly are manned by intelligent observers who are members of a race that may have been investigating our earth for centuries..." [6]
Oberth eventually came to work for his ex-student von Braun, developing space rockets in Huntsville, Alabama in the United States (see also List of German rocket scientists in the United States). Among other things, Oberth was involved in writing a study, The Development of Space Technology in the Next Ten Years. In 1958 Hermann was back in Feucht, where he published his ideas on a lunar exploration vehicle, a "lunar catapult", and on "muffled" helicopters and airplanes. In 1960, in the United States again, he went to work for Convair as a technical consultant on the Atlas rocket. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
[edit] Later life
Hermann Oberth retired in 1962 at the age of 68. From 1965 to 1967 he was a member of the far right National Democratic Party. In July 1969, he returned to the US to witness the launch of the Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo 11 crew on the first landing mission to the Moon.[7]
The 1973 energy crisis inspired Oberth to look at alternative energy sources, including a plan for a wind power station that could utilize the jet stream. However, his main interest in retirement was to turn to more abstract philosophical questions. Most notable among his several books from this period is Primer For Those Who Would Govern.
Oberth died in Nuremberg, on December 28, 1989.[2] [8]
[edit] Legacy
Oberth is memorialized by the Hermann Oberth Space Travel Museum in Feucht, and by the Hermann Oberth Society, which brings together scientists, researchers and astronauts from East and West in order to carry on his work in rocketry and space exploration.
Also, a crater on the Moon was named after him (see Oberth (crater)).
The Oberth effect is named after him.
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock featured an Oberth-class starship in his honor: this class was subsequently used in various episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa features Hermann Oberth as the "teacher" of the films protagonist, Edward Elric. Oberth is also mentioned in the last episode of Fullmetal Alchemist. In that episode Edward has heard of a great scientist, named Oberth, with curious theories. The last moments of the series are Edward on a train to meet Oberth; determined to study rocketry with him.
In Hideo Kojima's space adventure game, Policenauts, there is an extravehicular mobility suit called the Oberth.
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