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position 4 instead of 27. It seems a subtle difference, but to a cell it’s a distinction as clear as that between red and green traffic signals. In embryonic stem cells, genes that encode proteins important in development and about 2,500 other genes carry both Polycomb and trithorax methylation marks, says Bradley Bernstein, a genome scientist and chromatin biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. So, much as Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat is paradoxically alive and dead at the same time, genes in embryonic stem cells are, in a sense, simultaneously on and off. Chromatin is packed loosely around these genes, allowing easy access for turning genes on. In embryonic stem cells, the chromatin proteins “breathe,” Bernstein says, latching onto DNA and letting go — like pulling into a parking space, backing out, then parking again. That doesn’t happen in mature, differentiated cells. Once cells begin to specialize, the proteins tend to stay parked, Bernstein told colleagues gathered in Philadelphia in June for a meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. Although the dual methylation marks allow embryonic stem cells to keep their options open, all the doubly marked genes are switched off. As the cells differentiate, the marks made by the Polycomb proteins are erased, giving cells the green light to develop into particular cell types. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com Polycomb and trithorax methylation marks may act as homing beacons to transcription factors searching for their parking spaces. Researchers at Harvard University investigated how nine different transcription factors behave and interact in embryonic stem cells. In the March 21 Cell, the team reported that Oct3/4, SOX2, NANOG, KLF4, and three other transcription factors tend to carpool, selecting genes marked by both Polycomb and trithorax. Those genes are generally active in embryonic stem cells but get turned off as cells differentiate. On the other hand, genes that have only one type of methylation mark tend to attract single transcription factors, or smaller groups of transcription factors. Those genes are usually shut off in stem cells but get turned on as cells differentiate. A small number of genes have no methyl groups on their histones. Those genes are largely ignored by transcription factors, the Harvard group reports. Still other genes seem to be turned on at low levels in stem cells all the time, Bernstein says. Those genes may help direct the cell down a developmental path. This type of promiscuous gene activity is also found in oocytes — immature egg cells, says John Gurdon, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge in England. Oocytes will often turn on genes normally found in muscle cells or other adult cells. And the oocytes do it without the help of transcription factors, Gurdon says. That means the earliest cells open up the entire genome, stripping the DNA and histones bare. Development then becomes an exercise in shutting down things that aren’t wanted. Red light, stop One method of shutting things down is to stick methyl groups on DNA. The groups gum up the works, closing the on-ramps to the gene-activation fast lane. In embryonic stem cells, some regulatory regions called CpG islands get away scot-free, while other areas of the genome are heavily methylated, Bernstein says. Louise Laurent, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues examined DNA methylation patterns in several different embryonic stem cell lines. The researchers compared the stem cells with many types of differentiated cells to see if stem cells contain other hidden methylation patterns that distinguish them from adult cells. The group did the same sort of comparison for another type of master regulator in the cells. Those regulators are tiny snippets of RNA only 20 letters, or bases, long. Their diminutive size has earned them the name microRNAs, but the molecules do a big job, controlling much of the protein production in the cell. Usually microRNAs act a lot like building inspectors, shutting down protein-building until certain conditions are met. Each microRNA may help regulate production of hundreds to thousands of proteins. On human chromosome 14, the team found a cluster of microRNAs located “bang, one right after the other,” Laurent says. This cluster is turned off in embryonic stem cells. The team soon discovered why. Located nearby is a gene, called maternally expressed gene 3, that makes RNA, but no protein. Only the copy of the gene inherited from the mother is turned on because a special chemical alteration keeps the copy from the father switched off. Scientists call this imprinting. Imprinting is akin to a genetic custody fight. People inherit two copies of almost all genes, one from mom and one from dad. Most of the time, both copies get to make RNA and proteins, but in a few cases, it’s important that only one copy be active. In those cases, cells decide which parent’s gene will get the honor, by serving the other parent’s gene with a methylation mark. In the case of maternally expressed gene 3, the father’s gene is shut off by methylation while mom’s gene makes RNA. The cluster of microRNAs is imprinted in the same way so that only the mother’s copy is active. The situation may be reversed for other genes. Many important genes are imprinted, and disrupting this balance leads to diseases and disorders, such as Angelman syndrome and Prader-Willi syndrome. Curiously, in every embryonic stem cell line the team examined, both the mother’s and father’s chromosome carried a methylation mark. That is not supposed to happen. It’s as if a judge decides that neither parent should get custody and the child ends up in an orphanage instead. The consequence is that the microRNA cluster is silenced in embryonic stem cells. The result was unexpected, and Laurent is still trying to sort out how the methylation later gets erased from the mother’s chromosome, allowing the microRNAs to be made. The scientists also don’t know why embryonic stem cells handle imprinting so differently from other cells. “One possibility is that we don’t really understand imprinting as well as we thought we did,” Laurent says. “The other possibility is that imprinting in embryonic stem cells is not stable.” Driving forward These types of dysfunctional family battles could help explain why some cloned animals have health problems. Imprinting defects might also limit the use of stem cells as therapies for people. Just as embryonic stem cells do things differently from mature cells, embryonic stem cells from other species also have particular characteristics, Ying says. Even though human embryonic stem cells and mouse embryonic stem cells both come from embryos at what appears to be the same stage of development, the cells differ in their abilities. Human embryonic stem cells can produce placenta, while mouse embryonic cells can’t. That seems to indicate that human cells are at a slightly earlier stage of development with more possibilities open to them, but Ying says most data suggest human cells are slightly more advanced than mouse cells in a developmental sense. Ying and his colleagues have succeeded in isolating embryonic stem cells from rat embryos, a feat scientists have been trying to accomplish for more than 30 years. Rat cells are different from either human or mouse cells and must be grown under special conditions, Ying says. He has been able to make the rat cells do almost everything human and mouse embryonic stem cells can do, including producing about 95 percent of the cell types in the animal. But the rat cells haven’t yet formed cells that will produce sperm and eggs, crucial for classification as true embryonic stem cells. But Ying thinks focusing on differences will teach only a limited amount about how stem cells work. He wants to compare human, rat and mouse embryonic stem cells to see what traits are alike. Stem cells are just too important for evolution to have taken a different tack in every species, he says. “The real mechanism must be shared between species, so we’re trying to look at what’s common,” Ying says. Even with rats and mice as guides, it may still be years before scientists know all the secret ingredients and tricks embryonic stem cells use to achieve stemness. Louis J. Sheehan</p> 4705468 2008-09-09 20:19:24 2008-09-09 20:19:24 open open stem-0000146-9-louis-j-sheehan-4705468 publish 0 0 post 0 louis j. sheehan figurines ii 0000199.0001567 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/09/09/figurines-ii-0000199-0001567-louis-j-sheehan-4701489/ Tue, 09 Sep 2008 03:22:35 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan. Excavations in caves in southwestern Germany are carving out a new chapter in art prehistory. Most recently, researchers sifting through dirt that had been dug out of the Hohle Fels cave uncovered three tiny figurines that were sculpted from mammoth ivory between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago. http://louis2j2sheehan.us The figurines, each nearly as long as a thumb, depict a horse's head, a duck or some other waterbird, and a half-lion, half-human creature. Along with the more than a dozen ivory figurines and other artifacts discovered decades ago at three nearby Stone Age cave sites, the new specimens belong to one of the oldest known art traditions in the world, says project director Nicholas J. Conard of the University of T�bingen in Germany. "Southwestern Germany was probably one of several centers of ancient figurative art," Conard says. The new German finds come from a time when artwork began to flourish in Europe. Conard's report on the figurines appears in the Dec. 18/25 Nature. http://louis2j2sheehan.us Three different laboratories produced radiocarbon dates for animal bones and charcoal at the four caves. Although no fossils of Homo sapiens or Neandertals have turned up at these locations, Conard suspects that people entered the region around 40,000 years ago and subsequently produced the figurines. Animal remains and ivory-working debris in Hohle Fels and the other German caves indicate that they were occupied repeatedly in the winter and spring. According to Conard, the new figurines support the controversial theory that a sizable portion of prehistoric artwork reflects shamans' supernatural rituals (SN: 10/5/96, p. 216). The half-man, half-lion figure�the second such sculpture found in southwestern Germany�fits with the belief that shamans can transform into certain animals, he notes. Also, traditional societies often regard water birds as spirits that usher shamans into supernatural worlds. There are several sites in Europe and Africa harboring roughly 30,000-year-old rock and cave art, although some researchers now contend that a couple of the European locations may be only 15,000 to 20,000 years old. Even so, the newly found figurines challenge the view that ancient art in Europe gradually evolved from simple origins, archaeologist Anthony Sinclair of the University of Liverpool in England remarks in a commentary accompanying Conard's report. "The first modern humans in Europe were, in fact, astonishingly precocious artists," he writes. The German finds suggest that Stone Age art began with realistic depictions of the world and evolved toward other modes of expression, such as the use of geometric designs, remarks archaeologist Steven Kuhn of the University of Arizona in Tucson. The motivations of Stone Age people for creating the Hohle Fels figurines remain hazy, Kuhn adds. To detect the objects' purposes, researchers must unearth more sculptures along with evidence about how the artifacts were used, he says. It's intriguing that at least some people living 30,000 years ago spent a lot of time creating figurines, says anthropologist Mark Collard of Washington State University in Pullman. Only large groups with secure food supplies could have supported such activity, he theorizes. Louis J. Sheehan</p> 4701489 2008-09-09 03:22:35 2008-09-09 03:22:35 open open figurines-ii-0000199-0001567-louis-j-sheehan-4701489 publish 0 0 post 0 louis j. sheehan marriage 0000180.1 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/09/07/marriage-0000180-1-louis-j-sheehan-4695315/ Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:16:33 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J Sheehan As someone living happily ever after in the secular West at the beginning of a new millennium, it is hard for me to imagine anything more elemental: First comes love, then comes marriage. Bad news, matrimonial romantics. In her delightful book, I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage, journalist Susan Squire traces roughly the first 5,000 years of marital behavior, and the real matrimonial axiom is not nearly as catchy: First comes proof of paternity, consolidation of property rights and the occasional ravishment (sorry, Sabine ladies!); then comes marriage. Squire's long history of connubial blisslessness starts in the caves and proposes that the marital relationship didn't really become complicated until our ancestors had an epiphany: All that humping in the fields? It wasn't just to pass the time between hunting and gathering. Man's realization of his comparatively minor role in baby-making put him in an existential pickle. He had to find a way to preserve his power over those cunning female incubators. It wouldn't be easy. Across the next several centuries, he had to cope with some tough broads: Eve, Jezebel, Lucretia, Helen of Troy. I Don't posits the Adam and Eve story as a cautionary tale (Dude, look what happened to humanity when you were fool enough to listen to your wife!) and charts, from there, changing sexual and marital mores through Athens, Rome, the Dark Ages and the golden age of 11th century "courtly love." (Guess what: We should be relieved that chivalry is dead.) By the time the Reformation rolled around, marriage had slipped to a scorned and sad second-place option behind celibacy. Enter German theologian Martin Luther, an unlikely but effective champion for marriage as a pleasurable and mutually beneficial partnership. It is there, in the startlingly tender matrimonial bed of Mr. and Mrs. Luther, that love and marriage began their embrace. It would have been easy for Squire to make an early history of marriage a mere rant; it was, to say the least, a trying time for the ladies. Women were chattel, the virgin/whore conceit was in its prime, and anyone whose mother read Betty Friedan knows things didn't improve for a long, long time. But Squire has a deft touch; the book is a chatty read, with more than a few laugh-out-loud moments. It's filled with fascinating tidbits and great scene setters, too. Picture Roman wives marching in the first women's rights demonstration, for the freedom to wear purple and gold. (Their husbands' horses had better wardrobes.) In the end, you're likely to gain some sympathy for our ancestors, cruel and clumsy though they were. You'd be cranky, too, if you had missed out on lust and love. All the more reason to learn from this ample history of marital injustice, lest you be doomed to repeat it — by chucking the book at your hubby's head. Excerpt: 'I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage' by Susan Squire I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage By Susan Squire Hardcover, 223 pages Bloomsbury List Price: $25.99 Prologue To call it "lovemaking" eons before anyone develops the idea of love, let alone links it to sex, would be absurd. In primal time there are no romantic delusions, no secret trysts, no promises, no privacy, no future plans. There's only lust, followed by sex — mindless sex, even for the creatures with minds. So humans aren't "making love", not yet, but they've already assumed the position without which lovemaking will be virtually unthinkable: belly to belly, length to length, face to face, eye to eye. And in this human proclivity for frontal sex — for "making the beast with two backs," to use the crude Elizabethan phrase — lies the potential for romance, emotional entanglement, erotic passion, and love love love, marital and extramarital. In the future, who has sex with whom, and when, and where, and in what position will become a very complicated business indeed. What matters in primal time is survival, which depends on rapid reproduction, which depends on copulation unfettered by conscious thought. History will demonstrate ad nauseam that once sex becomes mindful and thereby meaningful — once people figure out, for example, the cause- and- effect relationship between copulation and conception — making the beast with two backs will be subject to impediments. This can't happen too soon, or we wouldn't be here. Evolutionary logic suggests that the endgame of sex escapes awareness until humankind nails survival. There will be plenty of time for impediments later on. How much later? That question can be answered only speculatively, and loosely, by considering the archaeological timeline. The ability to make tools — a sign of rudimentary intelligence at work — dates back about 2.5 million years. But there's a vast cognitive distance between putting together a spear and putting together something as abstract as, say, a mythological explanation of life's origins, and it takes practically forever to close. Given that distance, and the fact that while maternity is obvious, paternity is not, people probably don't connect sex to reproduction for many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of years.1 Until this vital association is made — until men realize that women do not conceive new life all by themselves — there's little reason, in the Darwinian sense, to put the brakes on sexual activity, men's or women's. Notions of morality, propriety, guilt, and sin haven't been formed. Nor has the double standard of fidelity, that future anchor of marital law. And marriage itself — the civilizing agent of sex — hasn't been institutionalized. These developments await a series of external events that begin to converge in prehistory, some time after 12,000 BCE. By then, modern humans have fully evolved and subdivided into three races. Traveling in groups, or tribes, they're on the move, fanning out from Africa around the globe. Some tribes have already settled around the great river valleys of the Near East, and others inhabit caves farther north in what is now Europe, but most remain nomadic; they follow the food supply wherever it leads. Tribal members, men and women, pool their skills and their cunning to fend off the recurrent perils of common life. Their united struggle against starvation is waged on two fronts, animal and vegetable — both essential food sources — by two different teams. Innate logic dictates that the labor be split along gender lines. Men's greater strength, higher muscle- to- fat ratio, and unencumbered biology obviously suit them to the rigors of hunting; the breeding cycle limits women's mobility (and when it bears fruit, compounds their tasks), making the job of gathering plants and grains best suited to them. Crossover is possible. There may be the occasional woman who is rugged enough to haul a spear over treacherous terrain and who's also blessed with the acute vision to spot fast- moving prey, along with the sharp reflexes and sheer raw nerve to kill it — or be killed. There may well be the occasional man who does better in the field than on the trail. Still, it seems safe to say that female hunters and male gatherers are about as representative of the tribal population as female breadwinners and male homemakers are of the average middle- class marriage today: not very. But while men and women labor daily at different tasks in different places, as they will in the future, it's likely that "women's work" has yet to be downgraded in comparison to men's; women themselves have yet to be downgraded in comparison to men. In the common struggle for survival they are mutually indispensable — each sex contributes something essential that the other isn't equipped to procure or produce on its own — and therefore of relatively equal stature. Everything is shared: food and water, fire and shelter, the care of children, and the grown- ups' reproductive equipment. Men and women participate in a fluid, inclusive sexual system that anthropologists generally call "group marriage." Its existence can only be assumed (this is prehistory, after all), but the musical-chair- like mating game the term describes is certainly feasible and even probable — simply because such an arrangement would favor survival. Biology alone inhibits mating, although only for women who are already pregnant; as long as there are other ovulating women available, men's work is never done. Group marriage is plausible while sexual behavior remains uncivilized and instinctive, outside of conscious control. But once the mystery of conception is solved and the idea of ownership is born, it becomes untenable. Organized communal sex will never work again — and not for lack of trying. Both the Marxist- inspired free love movement of the mid- 1800s and the open marriage idea spawned by the so- called sexual revolution of the early 1970s, to name two recent incarnations, will be embraced by the outré few and quickly consigned to the dustbin of history's "radical social experiments" without ever attracting more than voyeur is tic interest among the majority. As it happens, the death knell for group marriage (and mindless sex) has already begun to ring. The gender parity that has presumably been the pattern for eons will be reconfigured in relative seconds — a casualty of the civilizing process. What catalyzes that process? It's undocumented by human hand, but there are enough environmental clues to suggest a plausible scenario. Those clues lie in a sequence of interrelated events, precipitated by something that could not sound more mundane: a change in the weather. Let's say that sometime between 10,000 and 8,000 BCE, in the vicinity of the Mediterranean Sea, a wandering tribe hacks its way through dense underbrush. Upon emerging, these nomads stop dead in amazement. They stand at the edge of a field fertile beyond imagining, a vast edible tableau of golden grains and wheat begging to be harvested, and promising to yield more than enough food to feed everyone for a year. The air is warm, the soil is rich, the sun glitters. Why not stay for the night — and the next, and the next? The gatherers get busy gathering; the hunters, having investigated the verdant forests surrounding the open land and found them full of well- nourished animal life, get busy hunting (and saving time, too, without fruitless hours and days spent tracking elusive prey). Pretty soon the group concurs that chasing the food supply when it's right in front of you, replenishing itself as fast as it's consumed, no longer makes sense. The wandering days are over. The group settles down. Global warming, of a sort, has made this new phase of human existence possible. The fourth, the longest and (so far) the last, Ice Age has ended. The frozen sheets, hundreds of feet thick, which had turned most of the northern hemi sphere into a gigantic skating rink for the past hundred thousand years, have finally re- turned to their Arctic origins. The newly temperate worldwide climate brings hot, dry summers and cool, moist winters to the Near East, and umpteen generations of European cave dwellers migrating south in search of hospitable temperatures find their way there. The change in the weather changes everything. It makes settled life possible and sparks the development of farming, which leads directly to an electrifying epiphany — an intellectual eureka moment of incalculable significance. Now that men have become shepherds rather than hunters, they're able to observe animal behavior at close range, day after day. One day the lightbulb goes on. Here's the scenario: A shepherd watches a ram trot over to a receptive ewe and mount her. When the act is completed, the ram doesn't lie down and go to sleep (as the man, given his druthers, might at such a moment). Instead, he mounts a new partner — sometimes a dozen more before the day's over. Several weeks later, the shepherd notices that the bellies of these same ewes appear to be swelling. The shepherd knows the likely result of this peculiarly female shape- shifting process, but until now has never guessed the cause. In lieu of evidence to the contrary, he assumed that baby making was self-generated by females and wholly unrelated to the sexual act. Suddenly, he gets it. The shepherd has stumbled upon what will soon be the glaringly obvious truth about male sexuality, human and animal alike: Ejaculation, gratifying though it may be, is not the end of copulation but the midpoint, the indispensable — and heretofore missing — link between copulation and conception. He already knows that his sexual anatomy, which enables him to penetrate a woman's body, is a source of physical pleasure and release. Now he begins to grasp that it is also a source (the source, he will soon decide) of life itself. The bellies of women do not swell of their own accord; men must first sow their seeds within. He grasps that his own life-giving power, awe-inspiring in itself, is also — more awe-inspiring still — potentially without limit. While a female is capable of being impregnated only when she's ovulating, and only by one male at a time, allowing the human female to give birth about once a year, a healthy man has the ability to impregnate numerous women — at any time, on any day, of any month, between puberty and death. In this matter of procreation, men have spent eons upon eons underestimating themselves, and eons upon eons overestimating women. They won't let either happen again anytime soon. On the contrary, now that lightning's struck, they will steadily magnify their reproductive role — until, with a major assist from Aristotle, fatherhood comes to mean nearly everything and motherhood almost nothing. It helps, of course, to be able to document this self- directed progression to stardom. Thanks to the invention of writing, that documentation will be ample indeed. Exhibit A: The word "seed" is mentioned no less than 222 times in the Old Testament, where it is deemed so precious that to spill it anywhere but inside a reproductively capable woman's reproductive orifice (and none other) is to incite the murderous wrath of God. Exhibit B: In classical Athens, the citizens (all of them, by definition, male) are so enamored of their life-engendering equipment that sculptures of massive erections dominate the cityscape as ubiquitously as crosses later will in Christian Rome. Exhibits C to F: the words incubator, container, receptacle, vessel. To describe the entirety of the maternal role as it will shortly be perceived, pick any one. Men have always surpassed women in physical strength. The newfound knowledge of paternity helps to anchor in consciousness the idea, or the hope, that men surpass women on the more profound level of being — of intrinsic human worth. Over time the notion becomes axiomatic for both men and women and a matter of public policy, what ever the private truth may be. From it, the principle of patria potestas, literally "the rule of the father," follows logically. How curious, then, that men should seem so threatened — so oppressed, especially in marriage — by women, affirming and reaffirming their physical, intellectual, and moral superiority, yet claiming repeatedly to be outmaneuvered and undone by what all presume to be the weaker sex. The intertwined story of women and marriage is largely filtered through a testosterone prism. Because of that, it reveals very little about women's experience, but plenty about what men think or imagine women's experience to be. Which is to say it reveals men's experience of women. Which is to say it reveals men. And men, throughout this story, often seem stymied by women, no matter what measures they take to protect themselves. Western history and literature teem with treacherous females who have their way with men. They have it by stealth, by seduction, by coercion, by dissembling, by their wits; in any case they have it regularly. More exhibits: Eve hands Adam temptation without disguising it, and he bites. In her wake are Delilah and Jezebel, who somehow force a great warrior and an enthroned king, respectively, to betray or dishonor everything that matters to their society. Elsewhere, in the Mediterranean, Homer constructs an epic poem around the presumption that one woman's beauty will prove toxic enough to start a war and ultimately level an entire society. Recurrent suspicion that women can render men flaccid or tumescent at will, through witchcraft, helps to fuel four hundred years of mass hysteria from Spain to Germany to the American colonies, leading to the ostracization, torture, and execution of alleged evildoers, 80 to 85 percent of whom happen to be female. What compels the designated stronger sex, whose members produce and preserve the work that defines Western culture, to view itself repeatedly as an easy mark for members of the designated weaker sex? If one side is really convinced of its superiority to the other, why the need to issue ceaseless reminders on that score? How can men have at their disposal an arsenal of weapons, including law and custom weighted heavily in their favor, to be used against women — who have, in any tangible sense, zilch — and yet project themselves as defenseless victims of women? As men's tangled history of their lives with women unfolds through fact and fiction there's a refrain that emerges, a subtextual complaint that the composers may not even recognize, and it reverberates between the lines century after century. In the domestic and sexual union that is unique to married life, there seems to be an inherent contradiction between authority and power. The difference is far from obvious. A husband's authority over his wife is endorsed, accepted, indeed commanded — by God, by law, by social consensus, every which way — from the beginning, without question. It should go without saying that he who has the authority automatically has the power as well, but in marriage this turns out to be not quite true. In marriage, men cannot help revealing themselves, exposing themselves — physically, emotionally, spiritually, sexually, one way or another — to their wives. This is also true in reverse, of course, but the stakes are so much lower that a wife's exposure can do no worse than to confirm the assumption at the heart of patriarchal marriage: Women are inferior to men as servants are to masters, and no one expects much from inferiors. But masters have a hell of a lot to lose and a hell of a distance to fall. Either way, they're vulnerable. And here "the rule of the father" comes back to haunt the fathers themselves. That's the source of the power that men unwittingly bestow upon their wives. Whether the women wield it or not is up to them — and if literature mirrors life, sources ranging from the Bible and Roman mythology to Renaissance tragedy, Restoration comedy, and straight through to the modern age teem with women who do. "Men," states one of them in 1993, "exist in a state of perpetual enmity towards women." But these hellishly complicated feelings men hold toward women across the ages track back to the paternal awakening, to the moment when the rapture fades and the anxiety creeps in. The heightened sense of potency has a flip side: heightened vulnerability. Against it men try to armor themselves. Instituting "the rule of the father" provides a semi- safe harbor along the shoals of daily life. It means that wives enjoy the same legal status as children and slaves, which is to say none. They're deprived of civic voice, property rights, and all the rest. But the buffer systems men devise are no more than that. Awareness of paternity afflicts them with apparently permanent insecurity. They often seem stumped by their need for women, starting with the undeniable reality that women possess the only suitable containers in which seed can thrive. And that's the heart of the dilemma: How can a man be sure that it is his seed alone she breeds, not his brother's or cousin's or neighbor's? The answer, until the advent of DNA technology in the 1980s: He can't. "It's he who has no wife who is no cuckold," Chaucer writes in the latter half of the fourteenth century, crisply distilling one of the most per sis tent themes in Western culture since the start of history. The belief spans ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and even Victorian eras: women are sexually rapacious, indeed insatiable. A catch- 22 arises out of the prehistoric paternal euphoria, eventually becoming a historical constant: Women must be controlled, but women can't be controlled. When civilization finally stirs in its Near Eastern cradle, men have just begun to feel uneasy. How can they safeguard the precious paternity they've just discovered? They've awoken to a problem that they identify as Woman, and now they set about solving it. At the outset there's no reason to think that success might elude them. After all, if goats and dogs and cows can be domesticated and possessed, why not women? So the civilizers make the control of sex their first priority. It's the right move at the right time: To control sex is to control reproduction, and to control reproduction is (theoretically) to control women, by controlling their access to sexual partners — and to control women is to ease or even eliminate entirely the threat to men. They devise numerous strategies to achieve this goal, and though their successors adjust the mix, tailoring the details to fit the times, at all times men reach for the same end, and fall short. Of those strategies, three eclipse all others: patriarchal marriage ("the rule of the father"); the double standard of sexual fidelity (loose for husbands, rigid for wives); and confinement at home ("woman's place"). Men put these tactics in play at the start and keep them in play throughout history. We'll see how well they work. Louis J. Sheehan http://louis-j-sheehan.biz </p> 4695315 2008-09-07 19:16:33 2008-09-07 19:16:33 open open marriage-0000180-1-louis-j-sheehan-4695315 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis j sheehan.biz how to live 0000179 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/09/06/how-to-live-0000179-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-4691183/ Sat, 06 Sep 2008 19:29:44 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Girl's effort 'taught us how to live' %%headline%%REMEMBERING Anna Leigh Tomalis 1995-2008 Saturday, September 06, 2008 BY T.W. BURGER Of The Patriot-News Anna Leigh Tomalis told her family she wanted her funeral to be a celebration of her life. She said she did not want her family to be sad. It was a short life. Anna died at 13, a victim of embryonal sarcoma -- a cancer so rare that it strikes fewer than a dozen people a year. Her father, Ronald Tomalis, did his best to keep his voice from breaking when he talked about his daughter's last days. A week before she died after a three-year fight, she went horseback riding, to a movie with friends and parasailing, he said. She was buried in a pink dress, in a hot-pink casket. "The funeral director told us that nobody made hot-pink caskets," Tomalis said. "We found an auto body shop in Allentown and had the casket shipped to them [for painting]. They worked all night and sent it right back. It's what she said she wanted." The family had lived in Mechanicsburg before moving to the Washington, D.C., area. Former neighbors said they couldn't believe that Anna was gone. "My heard dropped when I saw Anna had passed away," Lisa Shedlosky said. "She was my son Max's best friend. He was devastated. They were inseparable when the family lived here." Anna's mother, Elizabeth, a nurse, had researched treatments aggressively. She discovered there are drugs under development, but they were unavailable except for patients taking part in trials. Anna was too young and too sick to take part in the studies. Surrender was not in the Tomalises' vocabulary. The family tried to change the system. "My wife and Anna worked through advocacy groups and spoke to members of Congress, hoping to find a way to try some experimental therapies," Ronald Tomalis said. "She was relatively shy, but she wanted to take advantage of this calamity that had befallen her and use it to help others." In May, partly because of Anna's efforts, legislation proposing Access, Compassion, Care and Ethics for Seriously Ill Patients Act was introduced by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Rep. Diane Watson, D-Calif. The bill is co-sponsored by Pennsylvania Sens. Bob Casey Jr. and Arlen Specter. The bill is identical to one introduced in 2005. In any case, the bill was too late to give Anna a chance at the experimental drugs. "Anna knew she wouldn't benefit from it. She knew her predicament would be settled soon," her father said. In April, Anna reached out in another way. She had learned of a blood shortage at local hospitals and organized a blood drive. She was there, reassuring people who were nervous about giving blood. "I think that Anna has taught us how to live, that as long as we have our lives, there is work to be done," said Dorothy Forrey of Camp Hill. "Her life was a sermon for us to listen to." "We kept on trying," Ronald Tomalis said. "That's what she wanted. She never wanted to quit. For Anna, the glass was half full, all the way to the end." T.W. BURGER: 255-4123 or tburger@patriot-news.com ©2008 The Patriot-News © 2008 PennLive.com All Rights Reserved. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire</p> 4691183 2008-09-06 19:29:44 2008-09-06 19:29:44 open open how-to-live-0000179-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-4691183 publish 0 0 post 0 Jabir Herbert Muhammad 0000152 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/09/05/jabir-herbert-muhammad-0000152-louis-j-sheehan-4683849/ Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:38:53 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Jabir Herbert Muhammad, who became Muhammad Ali’s boxing manager after Ali’s conversion to Islam and negotiated his multimillion-dollar fights while also serving as his spiritual adviser, died on Monday in Chicago. He was 79. The cause was complications from the heart surgery he had the week before, said his lawyer, Joseph A. Morris. When Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, captured the heavyweight championship in 1964 by knocking out Sonny Liston, he was managed by a group of businessmen in Louisville, Ky. The morning after winning the crown, he confirmed that he had joined the Nation of Islam, a black Muslim movement, and he soon became Muhammad Ali. Jabir Herbert Muhammad, a son of Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam leader, became Ali’s personal manager. When Ali’s contract with his Louisville backers expired in 1966, Mr. Muhammad began managing Ali’s boxing career. Mr. Muhammad, who oversaw Ali’s finances until 1991, a decade after he retired from boxing, said he had undertaken the role at the request of his father to ensure that Ali was not taken advantage of. “For 26 years, I’ve been teaching Ali about the religion,” Mr. Muhammad told Thomas Hauser in his 1991 oral history “Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times.” As Mr. Muhammad told it, “My father put that job on me and asked me to show him the way.” Mr. Muhammad was born in Detroit, the third son of Elijah Muhammad and his wife, Clara. When his father established his headquarters in Chicago, Jabir Herbert Muhammad became the Nation of Islam’s chief business manager, operating restaurants, bakeries and laundries. He also oversaw its newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. Mr. Muhammad first met Ali after the Liston fight, when Ali visited a photographic studio he operated. Soon afterward, he accompanied Ali to Africa, then introduced him to a woman named Sonji Roy, who had worked in sales for Muhammad Speaks. She became Ali’s first wife a little more than a month later. Ali, the three-time heavyweight champion, became one of the world’s most recognizable personalities while under Mr. Muhammad’s management. But for all his glory years, Ali essentially ended his career on a brutal note when, coming back from a layoff at the age of 38, he was battered by Larry Holmes in October 1980. He fought once more, losing to Trevor Berbick in 1981. “As far as Ali fighting Holmes, I believed he could beat Larry,” Mr. Muhammad told Mr. Hauser, defending his decision to arrange the bout. “I was the one who stopped the fight,” he said. After the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975, Jabir Herbert Muhammad pursued independent real estate and restaurant ventures. He built the first free-standing mosque in Chicago, Masjid al-Faatir, on land he donated. Ali and Mr. Muhammad battled in court over financial disputes in the 1990s, but Mr. Morris said that “they had decidedly reconciled” and had seen each other within the last year in Chicago. Ali, in a statement Wednesday, called Mr. Muhammad “a friend and confidant” and said that “Herbert and I spoke often about the hereafter, and I pray he has found peace and God’s blessing.” http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com Mr. Muhammad is survived by his wife, Aminah Antonia Muhammad; six sons: Elijah III, Alif, Mourad, Omar and Jabir Muhammad, and Isa Muhammad Ali; eight daughters: Safiyya Rahmah, Gina Driskell, Saeedah Hamahouallah, Salimah Zahid, Saniyyah Sepanik, and Samirah, Samiha and Zarinah Muhammad; four brothers: Elijah II, Nathaniel and Akbar Muhammad, and Wallace D. Mohammed; a sister, Ryaha Muhammad; 45 grandchildren; 21 great-grandchildren; and two great-great-grandchildren. In 1988, with Ali dealing with Parkinson’s syndrome, Mr. Muhammad reflected on the times when Ali proclaimed “I am the greatest.” “Back then, I had to run to keep up with him when he walked,” Mr. Muhammad told Sports Illustrated. “But this sickness stopped him dead in his tracks. Now everything’s in slow motion. Now he’s a hundred times more religious and meek than I ever thought he’d be.” Louis J. Sheehan </p> 4683849 2008-09-05 00:38:53 2008-09-05 00:38:53 open open jabir-herbert-muhammad-0000152-louis-j-sheehan-4683849 publish 0 0 post 0 monogamy in humans 0000201 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/09/02/monogamy-in-humans-0000201-louis-j-sheehan-4669540/ Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:04:41 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan There’s news for women who want a man who bonds instead of a James Bond: Scientists have identified a common genetic variation that appears to weaken a man’s ability to emotionally attach to one partner. The study, to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to try to examine whether a hormone that encourages monogamy in animals plays a similar role in male humans. Before getting ideas about a DNA-fidelity test, though, women should consider that the study wasn’t designed to determine how much — or even whether — the gene in question is responsible for monogamy in humans. “We can’t with any accuracy predict effects on behavior,” says Hasse Walum of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. “A lot of different things determine how happy you will be in a relationship.” http://www.thoughts.com/Zeta0Reticuli0Louis0J0Sheehan0/blog But women can now wonder, “What about his vasopressin 1a receptor subtype?” The hormone vasopressin affects several body systems, including cardiac and urinary function. In addition, scientists have long studied how vasopressin influences behavior in prairie voles. The mouselike animals, found in the grasslands of North America, are famous for social monogamy. Males tend to be family guys, sticking close to home and helping to raise the pups. Even related species such as meadow voles don’t bond for so much as a romantic weekend. Over years of study, scientists have concluded that prairie vole bonding has much to do with vasopressin activity in the brains of males. Through a series of studies that manipulated vasopressin levels in the vole brain, scientists have even made the animals more, or less, faithful. Vasopressin is not a love potion, though. Nerve cells also have to be equipped with specific receptor molecules that allow the hormone to bind to the cell and activate certain internal circuitry. The new study examined a gene that codes for a vasopressin receptor in the human brain. In addition, Walum and an international team of collaborators also had volunteers fill out questionnaires to measure their level of “pair bonding” and marital strife. About 500 couples, who had been together at least five years, answered questions such as, “How often do you kiss your mate?” Or, “Have you discussed divorce or separation with a close friend?” In the end, one particular variation of the gene, called allele 334, was associated with lower scores on partner bonding and greater odds of marital conflict. The effect was concentrated in men. For instance, among men either with no copies or just one copy of the 334 allele, 15 to 16 percent reported a marital crisis in the past year. However, when men had two copies of the 334 allele, the odds of marital crisis doubled, to 34 percent. http://www.thoughts.com/Zeta0Reticuli0Louis0J0Sheehan0/blog “I think this is actually a real breakthrough paper,” says Steve Phelps of the University of Florida in Gainesville. “The magnitude of effect is really astonishing.” He says that few studies of behavior find large effects for single genes. But he and others were also cautious. “I think the results are really intriguing,” says Larry Young of Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, who in 2005 reported in the journal Science that a variation of the same gene predicted the quality of bonding in male voles. “I still remain skeptical until this can be replicated,” he says. And even if the association holds up in further experiments, it doesn’t mean that women would want a future husband to submit a genetic sample for allele-334 testing, Young says. Marital harmony is determined by the behavior of two complex individuals, of which genes play only a part. “It will be labeling a lot of people in a way that will be absolutely wrong,” Young says. “There’s so much more that goes into the quality of a relationship than a single gene.” http://www.thoughts.com/Zeta0Reticuli0Louis0J0Sheehan0/blog </p> 4669540 2008-09-02 02:04:41 2008-09-02 02:04:41 open open monogamy-in-humans-0000201-louis-j-sheehan-4669540 publish 0 0 post 0 16536498 Sustanon 250 mg http://wordpress.com/ 127.0.0.1 2011-09-28 13:34:13 2011-09-28 13:34:13 Thank you for the sensible critique. Me u0026 my neighbor were just preparing to do some research about this. We got a grab a book from our local library but I think I learned more from this post. I am very glad to see such great information being shared freely out there. 1 0 0 honey 00000105 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/08/30/honey-00000105-louis-j-sheehan-4656211/ Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:03:00 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>The Bible refers to ancient Israel as the “land flowing with milk and honey,” so it’s fitting that one of its towns milked honey for all it was worth. Scientists have unearthed the remains of a large-scale beekeeping operation at a nearly 3,000-year-old Israeli site, which dates to the time of biblical accounts of King David and King Solomon. Excavations in northern Israel at a huge earthen mound called Tel Rehov revealed the Iron Age settlement. From 2005 to 2007, workers at Tel Rehov uncovered the oldest known remnants of human-made beehives, excavation director Amihai Mazar and colleagues report in the September Antiquity. No evidence of beekeeping has emerged at any other archaeological sites in the Middle East or surrounding regions. “The discovery of an industrial apiary at Tel Rehov constitutes a unique and extraordinary discovery that revolutionizes our knowledge of this economic endeavor, particularly in ancient Israel,” says Mazar, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Many scholars assume that ancient Israelis made honey from fruits such as figs and dates. Nowhere does the Bible mention beekeeping as a way to produce honey, according to Mazar. The earliest known depiction of beekeeping appears on a carving from an Egyptian temple that dates to 4,500 years ago. It shows men collecting honeycombs from cylindrical containers, pouring honey into jars and possibly separating honey from beeswax. Beehives portrayed in ancient Egyptian art resemble those found at Tel Rehov, as well as hives used today by traditional Mediterranean and Middle Eastern groups, says entomologist Gene Kritsky of the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati. “Tel Rehov is so important because it contains a full apiary, demonstrating that this was a large-scale operation,” Kritsky says. Mazar’s team has so far uncovered 25 cylindrical containers for bees in a structure that is centrally located in the ancient city at Tel Rehov. High brick walls surrounded the apiary. Beehives sat in three parallel rows, each containing at least three tiers. Each beehive measured 80 centimeters long and about 40 centimeters wide. In the best-preserved beehives, one end contains a small hole for bees to enter and exit. A removable lid with a handle covers the other end. Chemical analyses of two Tel Rehov beehives revealed degraded beeswax residue in the containers’ unfired clay walls. The researchers are now examining pollen remains and bee bodies found in charred honeycombs from inside the hives. A violent fire in ancient times caused walls surrounding the hives to collapse and destroy many of the bee containers. Radiocarbon measures of burned grain from the apiary floor and nearby structures provided an age estimate for the finds.http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com Mazar estimates that the ancient apiary contained at least 75 and perhaps as many as 200 beehives. A clay platform of the same width as a nearby row of hives probably served as a foundation for some of the hives. The facility held more than 1 million bees and had a potential annual yield of 500 kilograms of honey and 70 kilograms of beeswax, Mazar says. Writings and paintings from ancient Egypt suggest beehives possessed considerable value at the time. Honey was used as a sweetener, a salve for wounds and a ritual substance. Beeswax also had various uses, including being molded into casts for bronze objects. Only a strong central authority could have established and maintained a large apiary in the center of town, Mazar notes. The apiary apparently hosted ceremonies intended to spur honey production and ensure the operation’s success. Ritual finds near the hives include a four-horned clay altar that features carved figures of two female goddesses flanking an incised tree. Louis J. Sheehan</p> 4656211 2008-08-30 01:03:00 2008-08-30 01:03:00 open open honey-00000105-louis-j-sheehan-4656211 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com 7627927 Deanyd http://wordpress.com/ 127.0.0.1 2008-08-30 04:53:58 2008-08-30 04:53:58 That is quite fascinating that they found evidence of the Israelites harvesting honey like that. The only time I ever ran into someone in that time frame eating honey from a beehive was Samson. Other than that the only other person I can think of was John the Baptist. Or did he? Anyhow, it makes sense that the Israelites would know how to do this if the Egyptians had done it. As slaves, there was likely a small group of people dedicated to keep the hives for Pharaoh and the knowledge was passed down when they had hope of 'the land of milk and honey'. Very interesting. 1 0 0 Latin 0000084 Louis J Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/08/28/latin-0000084-louis-j-sheehan-4649070/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:01:01 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan. The following are some confusing pairs or triplets of Greek and Latin roots that are used to make English words, especially in the scientific fields. The Latin form comes first and is lower case. The Greek form is all in caps. The - shows where other parts of the word are attached and the English definition(s) follow. There are sometimes Latin or Greek variant forms, which are listed before the English definition. http://louis-j-sheehan.net The selection of which words are confusing is mine. It is based on words that would sound similar when pronounced or might seem close in spelling. It also includes words I confuse. Let me know if you have others to add to this list. To see scientific words formed with these Greek and Latin bases, see Online Medical Dictionary. * al- phonological change from ad 'to' that occurs before an /l/ * al- wing * ALL- other * ambul- to walk * AMBLY- dull * articul- joint * ARTHR- joint, speech sound * aud-, audit- hear * AUT- self * bull- bubble, blister * BUL- (BOUL-) will * bi- two * BI- life * bract- thin plate * BRACHY- short * BRACHI- arm * cent- hundred * CENTE- puncture * col- to inhabit * coll- neck * COL- colon * COLL(A)- glue * cord- heart * cori- skin * COR(E)- pupil of the eye * cre-, cresc-, cret- to grow * CRI- separate * dent- tooth * DENDR- tree * dorm- sleep * DROM- running * err- wander * ERG- work * hal-, halit- to breathe * HAL- salt * loc- place * LOG- word, reason, speech * medi- middle * mega- large, one million * ment- mind * ment- chin * MEN- moon * nar- nostril * NARC- stupor * nerv- nerve, vein of an insect wing or leaf * NEUR- nerve, nervous system, tendon * nod- knot * NOT- the back * ole- oil * OLIG- few * os-, or- mouth, opening * OSS- bone * * palli- mantle, covering * PALI(N)- again, pack * PALE- (PALAE)- old http://louis-j-sheehan.net * pati- pass- to suffer, to endure * PATH- disease, suffering * ped- foot * PED- (PAED)- child, instruction * pend-, pens- to hang * PEN- deficiency, lack * PENT(A)- five * plan- flat * plant- sole of the foot * PLAN- wandering * plex- to interweave, to braid * PLEX- stroke * PLEG- paralysis * * scop- broom, brush * SCOP- to view * sep-, sept- to separate, wall * SEP- to rot * spir- to breathe * SPIR- coil * somn- sleep * SOM-, SOMAT- body * stercor-, sterc- excrement * STERE- solid, 3-d * sta-, stat- to stand * STA- to stand, to stop * terti- third * TETRA- four * tri- three * TRI- three * TRIB-, TRIP- rub, crush Source: Bioscientific Terminology, by Donald M. Ayers 1972 How Do You recognize the Root? Affect vs. Effect I.e. vs. E.g. Also see these articles on words and word derivations: * Latin Words in English I English has lots of words of Latin origin. Some of these words are changed to make them more like other English words -- mostly by changing the ending (e.g., 'office' from the Latin officium), but other Latin words are kept intact in English. Of these words, there are some that remain unfamiliar and are generally italicized to show that they are foreign, but there are others that are used with nothing to set them apart as imported from Latin. Here are some such words and abbreviations. * Latin Words in English II (See preceding.) * On Translating Latin Into English. http://louis-j-sheehan.net Whether you want to translate a short English phrase into Latin or a Latin phrase into English, you can not just plug the words into a dictionary and expect an accurate result. You can't with most modern languages, but the lack of a one-to-one correspondence is even greater for Latin and English. * Latin Religious Words in English If you want to say that the prospects are bleak, you could say "it doesn't augur well." Augur is used as a verb in this English sentence, with no particular religious connotation. In ancient Rome, an augur was a religious figure who observed natural phenomena, like the presence and location to left or right of birds, to determine whether the prospects were good or bad for a proposed venture. Find out about more such words. Louis J. Sheehan. </p> 4649070 2008-08-28 14:01:01 2008-08-28 14:01:01 open open latin-0000084-louis-j-sheehan-4649070 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis j sheehan.net amniotic 0000052 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/08/27/amniotic-4641937/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:06:14 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>The clear, slightly yellowish amniotic fluid that envelops unborn babies during pregnancy harbors previously unidentified and unrecognized infection-causing microbes, researchers report online August 26 in PLoS ONE. The study adds evidence to the premise that infectious microbes found in amniotic fluid can cause premature birth.http://louis-j-sheehan.com “We were surprised with the amount of unexpected bacteria we found in the fluid and the fact we encountered new species of bacteria,” says Dr. Daniel DiGiulio of the Stanford University School of Medicine and lead author of the study. Screening the amniotic fluid with both conventional methods and a novel DNA sequencing approach, the scientists identified infectious bacteria or fungi in 25 of the 166 women in the study. That prevalence for infection — 15 percent — is 50 percent higher than in past studies, DiGiulio says. The level of infection is likely even higher because the tests do not yet identify all pathogenic material in the fluid, he adds. “We only know the names of relatively a few of all the bacteria that exist, and a lot of them are difficult to culture or can’t be cultured with our current technology,” comments Dr. Robert Goldenberg of the Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia. He was not surprised by the results and suspects that as scientists continue to study amniotic fluid with improved techniques many more pathogens will be identified. http://louis-j-sheehan.com A baby born before 37 weeks is considered premature. In 12 percent of pregnancies in the United States, babies are born prematurely. Early birth is the leading cause of neonatal death worldwide, according to the National Institutes of Health. In about half of those cases, the trigger of the premature birth remains unknown, DiGiulio says. But doctors suspect that infection-causing microorganisms living in the amniotic fluid probably trigger a response from a woman’s body. The microbes can infiltrate the sack from the vagina or by way of the bloodstream from other parts of the body, including the mouth. As a result, the immune system tries to fight the infection, causing inflammation that can cause contractions and birth of the child. To better study if infection leads to early birth, DiGiulio and colleagues, including researchers at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, studied the amniotic fluid of 166 women who went into preterm labor at the Hutzel Women’s Hospital in Detroit from 1998 to 2002. Of the total, 113 women delivered prematurely and 25 showed infection. All 25 women with infected fluid gave birth prematurely. Of those women, the ones harboring the highest number of infectious bacteria had their babies the earliest — a telling sign of the link between infection and premature birth, DiGiulio says. “There’s lots of evidence that inter-uterine infections cause preterm birth, especially early preterm birth,” notes Goldenberg.http://louis-j-sheehan.com But DiGiulio says studies have yet to confirm that infections do in fact cause preterm labor or premature birth. To show definite causality, much larger studies need to be done, he explains. Currently he and his colleagues are studying fresh, rather than stored, amniotic fluid to see if it is possible to identify the infections before they induce preterm labor or premature birth. “If we can do that,” he says, “we could potentially create a treatment for these infections and prevent a lot or possibly all of premature births.” Louis J. Sheehan</p> 4641937 2008-08-27 00:06:14 2008-08-27 00:06:14 open open amniotic-4641937 publish 0 0 post 0 esquire louis j. sheehan pull 000014 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/08/21/pull-000014-louis-j-sheehan-4620427/ Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:56:57 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan. When the next revolution rocks physics, chances are it will be about nothing—the vacuum, that endless infinite void. In a discipline where the stretching of time and the warping of space are routine working assumptions, the vacuum remains a sort of cosmic koan. And as in the rest of physics, its nature has turned out to be mind-bendingly weird: Empty space is not really empty because nothing contains something, seething with energy and particles that flit into and out of existence. Physicists have known that much for decades, ever since the birth of quantum mechanics. But only in the last 10 years has the vacuum taken center stage as a font of confounding mysteries like the nature of dark energy and matter; only recently has the void turned into a tantalizing beacon for cranks. As one blond celebrity heiress and embodiment of emptiness might say, nothing is hot. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com To investigate the mysteries of the void, some physicists are using the biggest scientific instrument ever built—the just-completed Large Hadron Collider, a huge particle accelerator straddling the French-Swiss border. Others are designing tabletop experiments to see if they can plumb the vacuum for ways to power strange new nanotech devices. “The vacuum is one of the places where our knowledge fizzles out and we’re left with all sorts of crazy-sounding ideas,” says John Baez, a mathematical physicist at the University of California at Riverside. Whether in the visionary search for the engine of cosmic expansion or the near-fruitless quest for perpetual free energy, the vacuum is where it’s happening. By mining the vacuum’s riches, a true theory of everything may yet emerge. Empty space wasn’t always so mystifying. Until the 1920s physicists viewed the vacuum much as the rest of us still do: as a featureless nothingness, a true void. That all changed with the birth of quantum mechanics. According to that theory, the space around a particle is filled with countless “virtual” particles rapidly bursting into and out of existence like an invisible fireworks display. advertisement | article continues below Those virtual quantum particles are more than a theoretical abstraction. Sixty years ago a Dutch physicist named Hendrik Casimir suggested a simple experiment to show that virtual particles can move objects in the real world. What would happen, he asked, to two metal plates placed very close together in a complete vacuum? In the days before quantum mechanics, physicists would have said that the plates would just sit there. But Casimir realized that the net pressure of all the virtual particles—the stuff of empty space—outside the plates should exert a minuscule force, a nudge from nothing that would push the plates together. Physicists tried for decades to measure the Casimir force with great precision, but it wasn’t until 1997 that technology caught up with theory. In that year, physicist Steve Lamoreaux, now at Yale, managed to detect the feeble Casimir force on two small surfaces separated by a few thousandths of a millimeter. Its strength was about equal to the force that would be exerted against the palm of one’s hand by the weight of a single red blood cell. At first most physicists regarded the Casimir force as a quantum oddity, something of no practical value. Now that has changed: Forward thinkers see it as an important energizer for the tiniest of machines, devices on the nano scale, and a few labs are working on ways to use the force to defy the conventional limitations of mechanical design. Federico Capasso, a physicist at Harvard, leads a small team that is trying to create a repulsive Casimir force by tinkering with the shapes of plates or with the coatings used to cover them. His entire set of experiments fits on a desktop, and the objects he works with are so small that most of them cannot be seen without a microscope. “Once you have a repulsive force between two plates, you should be able to eliminate static friction,” Capasso says. That could lead to a host of useful applications, including tiny frictionless bearings or nanogears that spin without touching. “But the experiments are enormously difficult, so I cannot tell you when and how.” The vacuum is filled with countless virtual particles rapidly bursting into and out of existence like an invisible fireworks display. For all its strangeness, the Casimir force may be the one property of empty space that does not baffle today’s physicists. It is garden-variety quantum mechanics, weird but not unexpected. The same can’t be said about dark energy, a truly astonishing discovery made by astronomers a decade ago while observing distant exploding stars. The explosions revealed a universe expanding at an ever-faster rate, a finding at odds with previous expectations that the expansion of the cosmos should be slowing down, braked by the collective gravitational pull of all the matter out there. Some unknown form of energy—physicists call it dark energy simply for lack of a more descriptive term—appears to be built into the very fabric of space, countering the gravitational pull of matter and pushing everything in the universe apart. Some theorists speculate that dark energy might cause a runaway expansion of the universe, resulting in a so-called Big Rip some 50 billion years from now that would tear the cosmos to pieces, shredding even atoms. The observations have allowed physicists to estimate the quantity of dark energy by deducing the force needed to produce the accelerating effect. The result is a minuscule amount of energy for every cubic meter of vacuum. Since most of the cosmos consists of empty space, though, that little bit adds up, and the total amount of dark energy completely dominates the dynamics of the universe. With the discovery of dark energy came difficult questions: What is this energy, and where does it come from? Physicists simply do not know. According to quantum mechanics, the energy of empty space comes from the virtual particles that dwell there. But when physicists use the equations of quantum theory to calculate the amount of that virtual energy, they get a ridiculously huge number—about 120 orders of magnitude too large. That much energy would literally blow the universe apart: Objects a few inches from us would be carried away to astronomical distances; the universe would literally double in size every 10-43 second, and it would keep doubling at that rate until all the vacuum energy was gone. This may be the most colossal gap between observation and theory in the history of science. And it means that physicists are missing something fundamental about the way the universe works. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com </p> 4620427 2008-08-21 22:56:57 2008-08-21 22:56:57 open open pull-000014-louis-j-sheehan-4620427 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com quit louis j. sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/08/19/quit-louis-j-sheehan-4611278/ Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:53:43 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>I’VE been thinking about quitting lately. No, not my job, nor my marriage nor the incredibly long Russian novel I need to read by September for my book group (check back with me on that later). Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Joel Castillo Rather, I’ve been thinking about the concept in general. Watching the superhuman feats of the Olympic athletes this week, I’ve admired the dedication and single-minded focus they exhibit. I think about how maybe if I had just worked harder — much harder — at gymnastics when I was young, I could have reached that lofty goal (conveniently forgetting how ill-suited I was to the sport because of my great fear of falling on my head). Olympians embody one of the great clichés about quitting: “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” My athletic career, on the other hand, is summed up by the other platitude about quitting: “You’ve gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.” Throughout life, we pretty much get those two contradictory messages about quitting. In general, quitting is perceived as bad. A quitter is a loser or, even worse, a traitor — someone who doesn’t hang in when the going gets tough, someone who lets her team down. Quit once, and it becomes a habit. “Americans have been brainwashed by Vince Lombardi,” said Seth Godin, author of the book “The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick).” (Portfolio, 2007). Lombardi coined the “quitters never win” quote. Winners do quit all the time, Mr. Godin says. “They just quit the right stuff at the right time.” The trick, of course, is to know when it’s right to walk away and when it’s not. Gregory Miller, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, has helped write a number of studies on quitting, or in the scientific parlance, “disengaging from goals.” Professor Miller and his colleagues have followed college students, older people and the parents of children with cancer and found that, in many cases, moving from a difficult goal to another, more attainable, one can create a greater sense of well-being, both mentally and physically. In the September issue of the journal Psychological Science, Professor Miller, along with Carsten Wrosch, associate professor of psychology at Concordia University, reported that they had followed 90 teenagers for one year. The study found those who could not renounce hard-to-attain goals showed increased levels of the inflammatory molecule C-reactive protein, which is linked to such health problems as heart disease, diabetes and early aging in adults. The goals, chosen by the participants in the subject, tended to revolve around academic success or body image, Professor Miller said. The difficulty lies in knowing when to abandon one goal and move on to something else. “That’s the million-dollar question,” Professor Miller said. “How do you draw the line between what’s attainable and what’s not?” Professor Miller is not advocating forsaking your dreams, just shifting to those that may be more manageable. In particular, studies of older people found that they were happier if they found new goals to pursue once giving up on the old ones, in contrast with those who abandoned their previous aims without substituting anything new. We have to realize, he said, that “this relentless pursuit of goals has a cost to it.” Kathleen D. Vohs, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, has also studied the issue, largely in relation to people who regularly overspend and to chronic dieters. She said that people need internal resources to attain their goals, and “if you are a pursuing a goal that is constantly frustrating, you will be less successful in goal attainment in other areas of life. “One of the most frustrating goals for people is weight loss or weight loss maintenance,” Professor Vohs said. So if a person concentrates on that goal, she may have fewer internal resources to deal with other challenging situations in life, like a demanding boss or an angry spouse. The answer, Professor Vohs said, is perhaps “stepping back temporarily and saying, ‘I’m going to try to live a healthy life and not try so hard to lose weight.’ ” </p> 4611278 2008-08-19 23:53:43 2008-08-19 23:53:43 open open quit-louis-j-sheehan-4611278 publish 0 0 post 0 Body Language 49922 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/08/16/body-language-49922-louis-j-sheehan-4594814/ Sat, 16 Aug 2008 01:17:57 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Subtle cues in posture can confound attempts to read emotion from a face, neuroscientists have found. This opposes the prevailing idea that people infer each other's emotions almost exclusively from facial cues. Previous studies had shown that people quickly recognize emotions expressed on an isolated face or from a body topped with a blurred head. Scientists are now investigating how the face and the body, combined, affect people's perception of emotion. "We wanted to know to what extent [people] would be sensitive to any mismatch between the facial expression and the body," explains Beatrice de Gelder of Tilburg University in the Netherlands. In the Nov. 8 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, de Gelder and her colleagues describe their study, in which 12 participants were shown pictures of men and women and asked to immediately indicate the emotion on their faces by pressing buttons assigned to each emotion.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz Some pictures were of just faces or just bodies, while others consisted of the four combinations possible with a frightened or angry face and a frightened or angry body stance. A frightened face was marked by high eyebrows, for instance, and an angry body had arms back and shoulders angled. "We told [the participants] to only look at the faces and ignore all the rest," notes de Gelder. The researchers reported that when the volunteers were shown incongruent pairings of facial expressions and body postures—a frightened face with an angry body posture, for instance—their accuracy was 64 percent. In contrast, the participants were 81 percent accurate in their quick reads of angry faces shown without bodies. The researchers also used an electroencephalogram to probe the participants' brain activity. The machine detected unusually large voltage spikes in a face-recognition brain area when participants looked at images with mismatched cues. Similar neural responses are typical in people observing something unexpected, de Gelder explains. "If the message is congruent, [cognitive] processing goes through smoothly," she says. "If there's a mismatch, then there's a red flag." This cognitive red flag and the participants' poor accuracy in determining facial expression accompanied by incongruent body language reveal that people can be distracted by mixed signals, says de Gelder. "It means that our whole perceptual equipment is very finely tuned to the signals in our environment, even if our mind is occupied by something else," in this case a face, she says. "This is a very elegant study," says Pawan Sinha of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It shows that the analysis of body cues is tightly integrated with the processing of facial cues and that there may not even be a clear distinction between the two kinds of analysis."</p> 4594814 2008-08-16 01:17:57 2008-08-16 01:17:57 open open body-language-49922-louis-j-sheehan-4594814 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis j sheehan.biz iridescence 43388822 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/08/15/iridescence-43388822-louis-j-sheehan-4592175/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:20:35 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan. Believe it or not, science has barely begun to fathom the peacock’s tail. Subtle as a pink tuxedo, one might think. Big flashy thing. Peahens love it. What’s not to understand. Roslyn Dakin, though, has plenty of questions. There’s the matter of choreography. Already this year she has left Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, to visit peacocks (the birds) in Los Angeles and New York. She has spent weeks collecting feathers and watching males fan out their finery before the ladies. “The males do all sorts of strange footwork,” she says. With their tails a wall of shimmer, they sidestep or sometimes strut backward to their audience. Dakin is testing her idea that there’s a method here. For the final act of the show, males vibrate the big eye-bearing feathers so vigorously they make a rattling sound, and Dakin hypothesizes that the males’ footwork maneuvers them and their audience to line up with the sun for the finale. A female with sun right behind her gets the most dazzling angle on the feathers, and for a peacock, angles are everything. The fiery greens and blues that have become a symbol of extravagant ornament have no green or blue pigment in them. There’s black pigment, but the rest is all just the play of light. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de The trick for conjuring colors out of nothing depends on structure at the scale of hundreds of nanometers. At this scale, the smallest branchings within peacock feathers reveal themselves coated with arrays of rods. When light bounces off, certain wavelengths combine to intensify a color as other wavelengths interfere with, and cancel out, each other. The effect of this symphony of light shifts with the angle of view, the definition of iridescence. Dakin described her work in February at a conference on iridescence held at Arizona State University in Tempe. The physicists who attended have been discovering that birds, beetles, butterflies and plenty of other creatures evolved cutting-edge optical systems long before modern technology did. Dakin and other biologists are now trying to figure out what the animals do with their light shows. These nano-marvels make excellent systems for testing ideas about how animal communication systems evolve. One of the questions under lively debate at the meeting was whether iridescence has signaling power because it is difficult to manufacture or maintain. Only the best males would flaunt the brightest colors, and females would evolve to favor the flashiest fellows. In contrast, Richard Prum of Yale University, a biologist at the conference, argues that searching for such clues to quality could be just wishful thinking. Iridescent glitter could appeal to female animals all right. But the driving force for evolving that preference could have nothing to do with the male’s health or any other quality. The majority of iridescence, he says, could be arbitrary, or “merely beautiful.” Controlling color, naturally Mere prettiness is no slur on the marvels of iridescent structures. A longtime iridescence specialist, developmental biologist Helen Ghiradella of the University at Albany, State University of New York, has published pages and pages of scanning electron microscope images revealing huge variety in the fine details of the textures of animal surfaces: bumpy surfaces like rows of Christmas trees, fields of latticework honeycombs, bristles that work like fiber optic cables (but better). She reels off examples of the cutting-edge developments in optics that she has observed in nature: thin films, photonic crystals ordered in one, two and three dimensions, plus surfaces that combine techniques.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de She protests the unfairness of questions about which species flaunt the showiest iridescence. When pressed, though, she offers examples that include the Southwest’s scarab beetle Chrysina gloriosa. The naked human eye can’t detect the full light show, alas, so people have to make do with admiring the beetle’s shimmery green back. Equipped with the right instruments, though, an observer realizes that the beetle reflects the controlled spirals of both right- and left-handed circularly polarized light. Even one of the field’s old classics, the Morpho butterflies that Ghiradella studied during the 1970s, still hold surprises. In 2007, she contributed to a Morpho article in the February Nature Photonics published by a General Electric research team led by Radislav Potyrailo of the company’s Niskayuna, N.Y., lab. Potyrailo had seen pictures of a Morpho wing nanostructure and realized that vapors of different gases should subtly alter the butterfly’s iridescence. The GE team and Ghiradella analyzed the effects, which Potyrailo says suggest new options for developing sensors that change color with a whiff of a certain vapor. Natural structures for controlling colors certainly should be an inspiration for engineers, and physicists should pay attention, says Andrew R. Parker of the University of Oxford in England. His group studies optical biomimetics, or nature-inspired technology. The animals’ devices come from millions of years of evolutionary trial and error and, as he puts it, “the average physicist has rather less time.” Wings of wood Imitating nature isn’t easy. Peter Vukusic, who estimates his research group at the University of Exeter in England has looked for these structures in 500 to 600 species of insects, still uses words like “unbelievable.” He and his Exeter colleagues have attempted to replicate the surface complexity of a butterfly wing. Starting almost a decade ago, they experimented with building large-scale models of these structures, at first just for show-and-tell but then in the hopes of doing experiments to understand the novel optical properties. Vukusic, a veteran of restoring old houses, started trying to create repetitious elements in wood the way a router shapes chair rails. He wasn’t even trying to build a whole wing, since he’d scaled up so much that a single butterfly would spread more than a kilometer. Even at that extreme magnification, the skilled and inventive fabricators for Exeter’s laboratories struggled to produce even grossly simplified versions. Then, while driving home one day, Vukusic says, he “experienced a moment of clarity—suddenly the mist rises.” Vukusic abandoned several years’ worth of wooden butterfly parts and used a rapid prototyping system to bring wings into the era of computer-controlled polymer shaping. He and his colleagues finally created chunks of opaque white plastic that mimic a fleck of wing surface accurately enough for research purposes. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de “This thing looks like a dinner plate,” he says. At this large scale, the model bit of a Morpho butterfly wing, for example, holds shapes that resemble a row of white Christmas trees, each a few centimeters high. At this scale, the models do nothing to light but can manipulate the longer wavelengths of microwaves as stand-ins. Vukusic’s team is using these models and microwaves to study how insect wings create a silvery effect. His models starred at the February workshop in Tempe. Creative communication Animals might have a hard time with these specialized structures too. If they do, some biologists suggest that the challenges give iridescence its value. In one scenario, the structures represent a handicap. Growing them might sap energy from other developmental processes. Or flying around as a living disco ball might stir up predators. Costly iridescence would become the male butterfly’s Porsche, says Darrell Kemp of James Cook University in Cairns, Australia. In a related scenario, “iridescence is just plain difficult, not necessarily costly, for all males to generate, like a good sense of humor in human males,” Kemp says. Earlier work on what female butterflies like had resoundingly shown that color matters. When researchers blotted out the iridescent ultraviolet markings on the wings of male Colias butterflies, the researchers found that the males had a pretty lonely existence. Yet Kemp argues these earlier experiments had created such drastic changes in male finery that researchers couldn’t say in what way the color mattered. The female might have rejected the male because she no longer recognized him as the right species. He revised experimental procedures and worked with Hypolimnas bolina butterflies. The upper surface of their wings are iridescent in ultraviolet wavelengths, which females of that species can see. The males must look like flashing beacons as they flap their wings. To avoid the extremes of earlier experiments, Kemp used a screening substance to dull the males’ wings to about half their former UV brilliance. For comparison, he also blacked out the UV patches with a pen on some of the males. In tests in fields and enclosures, marked males failed to attract the attention that females bestowed on the full-UV fellows. The loss of brightness matters to female butterflies in choosing mates, he concluded last year in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. A similar experiment finds the same dynamic in Eurema hecabe butterflies. Dulled males meet with less success in mating, particularly in attracting the supposedly more desirable large females, Kemp reports in the January/February Behavioral Ecology. So Kemp says he’s convinced that females pay attention to males’ iridescent light shows. Now he’s working on understanding what kind of information those shows might contain. He has raised caterpillars under sorry conditions and checked to see if their displays changed. Both those that had to make do with skimpy rations and those that as pupae endured great swings of heat and cold grew poorly. As adults, their wings did not flash as brightly. Also, he noted that the iridescence seemed to diminish more than other traits he checked, such as pigment colors. Thus the intensity of iridescence could serve as a sensitive indicator of a male’s history. One theory had also proposed that color signals could carry information about genetic quality, perhaps identifying certain males with the built-in resistance to laugh off slings and arrows of developmental stress. Kemp looked for signs that clusters of related individuals looked pretty good despite the stresses. Nice idea, but in this case, no support. Prum says he accepts that animals use traits like iridescence as signals. What he objects to is what he describes as a widespread presumption that signals routinely carry information pertinent to the decision at hand. Some human signals, like onomatopoeic words, do carry clues to their meaning. Pop, snap, murmur. But plenty of human signals, like the words plenty of human signals, don’t. Genetic modeling, says Prum, shows that animal signals can easily arise without some innate relevant clue, such as a connection to male quality. So he hypothesizes that most animal signals will turn out to be like plenty of human signals.</p> 4592175 2008-08-15 12:20:35 2008-08-15 12:20:35 open open iridescence-43388822-louis-j-sheehan-4592175 publish 0 0 post 0 louis j. sheehan esquire Gobero 4990002 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/08/15/gobero-4990002-louis-j-sheehan-4590472/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:19:46 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan. Investigators searching for dinosaur fossils in the Sahara in 2000 suddenly took an unexpected and scientifically exciting leap backward in time. They came upon a stretch of sand littered with the bones of ancient people positioned in ways characteristic of intentional burials.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US Investigations of the bones and associated finds made since that fateful discovery show that they come from the largest and oldest Stone Age graveyard in the Sahara, team members report online in the Aug. 14 PLoS ONE. They also described their findings August 14 during a press briefing held at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., which partly funded the excavations. The Gobero archaeological site, which dates to as early as 10,000 years ago, lies in the western African nation of Niger. The area had already gained fame earlier when excavation director and paleontologist Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago found 110-million-year-old dinosaur fossils nearby. Work at Gobero indicates that two successive human populations divided by 1,000 years lived by a lake, perhaps seasonally, during a time of regular Saharan rainfall. These hunter-gatherer groups buried their dead in separate gravesites by the lake, leaving an unprecedented biological and material record of their poorly understood cultures. Although hunter-gatherer groups are typically mobile and small in number, those living in resource-rich areas tend to stay for long periods at seasonal sites, comments anthropologist Henry Harpending of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “It’s interesting that at Gobero these ancient populations became dense enough to require large cemeteries,” he says. Excavation seasons in 2005 and 2006 have revealed 200 graves. Human and animal bones, as well as bone artifacts, have yielded 78 radiocarbon dates, which are based on ratios of different isotopes of carbon in the bones and artifacts. “I’ve never seen an archaeological site that’s as exceptional as Gobero is,” archaeologist and team member Elena Garcea of the University of Cassino in Italy said at the press briefing. The older Gobero group, members of the Kiffian culture, hunted large game and speared two-meter-long perch with bone harpoons. They colonized the Sahara from 10,000 to 8,000 years ago, when heavy rains created a deep lake at Gobero. Pottery pieces at the site are decorated with zigzags and wavy lines already linked to the Kiffians, Garcea says. Kiffians buried dead individuals with their legs pulled up tightly against their body, suggesting that the deceased were bound up with some type of wrapping. Both adult males and females often reached two meters in height.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US The later Gobero residents, from the Tenerian culture, hunted small game using tiny stone arrowheads, caught small catfish and tilapia and herded cattle. The Tenerians inhabited the site from 7,200 to 4,200 years ago, when it featured a shallow lake. Parallel lines of impressed dots cover Tenerian pottery. Tenerians were shorter and had slighter builds than Kiffians did. Tenerians often buried their dead with jewelry and placed them in ritual poses. The 4,800-year-old skeleton of a girl lying on her side, with arms and legs slightly bent, includes an upper-arm bracelet carved from a hippo’s tusk. Based on her bone development, the researchers estimate that the girl was 11 years old when she died.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US The most striking find occurred in 2006, when the researchers uncovered what they say is Africa’s first triple burial. A petite, 40-year-old Tenerian woman lay on her side, facing two children, an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old. Their entwined arms reached out and their hands clasped in what Sereno’s team calls the “Stone Age embrace.” These individuals died from undetermined causes 5,300 years ago.</p> 4590472 2008-08-15 01:19:46 2008-08-15 01:19:46 open open gobero-4990002-louis-j-sheehan-4590472 publish 0 0 post 0 Smart Shoppers http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/08/13/smart-shoppers-4584130/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:56:32 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Consumers make better decisions about major purchases if they heed the power of their unconscious minds, say psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam and his colleagues. Conscious thinking enables a person to follow precise rules using small amounts of information, the researchers say. Unconscious thinking, or deliberation without directing one's attention to the choice at hand, permits detection of critical patterns in a mass of information, Dijksterhuis' team asserts in the Feb. 17 Science. In one experiment, 80 college students read information about four made-up cars. Each car was described by 4 or 12 attributes, including whether it handled well and got good gas mileage. One car had mainly positive attributes, one had mainly negative ones, and two had even numbers of both. When grappling with 12 attributes per automobile, students who were given 4 minutes to think about the cars and make a choice frequently didn't choose the best vehicle and immediately afterward said they were dissatisfied with the decision. Students who first spent 4 minutes completing the distracting task of solving anagrams usually chose the best cars and felt satisfied with the decision. When volunteers had to consider only four attributes for each car, however conscious thinking proved slightly superior to unconscious deliberation. http://louis-j-sheehan.com Another experiment focused on 27 people making major purchases at a furniture store and 27 others buying inexpensive items at a department store. Those who reported having thought only a little about specific furniture to buy before shopping were much happier with their choices a few weeks later than were those who said that they had thought a lot about what to buy before shopping. The reverse characterized the department store customers. Louis J. Sheehan</p> 4584130 2008-08-13 16:56:32 2008-08-13 16:56:32 open open smart-shoppers-4584130 publish 0 0 post 0 esquire louis j. sheehan infants 6663992666 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/08/13/infants-6663992666-louis-j-sheehan-4584105/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:52:34 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan. Before they start to talk, babies can recognize the difference between two and three entities, a new study suggests. Most 7-month-old infants match the number of faces that they see talking—whether two or three—with the number of voices that they hear, without any training, say Kerry E. Jordan and Elizabeth M. Brannon, psychologists at Duke University in Durham, N.C. The researchers studied 20 babies who were held by their mothers in front of two video monitors. One screen showed two women mouthing the word "look" and the other showed three women doing the same. All five women spoke repeatedly for 1 minute. A loudspeaker played either two or three women's voices saying "look" in synchrony with one of the video images. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET Fourteen babies preferred looking at the video in which the number of women matched the number of voices, Jordan and Brannon report in the Feb. 28 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. On average, infants looked at matching displays for nearly 22 seconds, compared with 14 seconds for mismatched displays.</p> 4584105 2008-08-13 16:52:34 2008-08-13 16:52:34 open open infants-6663992666-louis-j-sheehan-4584105 publish 0 0 post 0 louis j. sheehan esquire sacrifices http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/08/13/sacrifices-http-louis2j2sheehan2esquire--4580124/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:42:52 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Double and triple burials at 23,000-to-27,000-year-old sites in Europe and western Asia suggest prehistoric human sacrifices, says Vincenzo Formicola of the University of Pisa in Italy. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US Of 30 known burials from that time period and area, 6 held more than one person. These graves contain two or three children, adolescents, or young adults apparently buried at the same time, positioned in curious ways, and accompanied by unusually valuable objects, Formicola says. Most of the multiple burials include at least one youngster with a deformity. One of the graves, at Russia's 24,000-year-old Sunghir site, contains a boy and a girl buried head to head, dusted in red ocher, and ornamented with thousands of ivory beads, fox-teeth pendants, and pierced antlers. Spears carved out of mammoth tusks lay next to the children. The Stone Age girl displayed severely bowed legs that would have limited her mobility. Louis J. Sheehan. It would have taken months to produce all the items interred with the two youngsters, Formicola says. "Was the burial of these children foreseen long in advance?" he asks. "It raises the possibility of [prehistoric] human sacrifices."</p> 4580124 2008-08-13 00:42:52 2008-08-13 00:42:52 open open sacrifices-http-louis2j2sheehan2esquire--4580124 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.us tut 778822 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/08/11/tut-778822-louis-j-sheehan-4574555/ Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:51:55 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Louis J. Sheehan. Scientists studying jars recovered from King Tutankhamen's tomb have extracted the first chemical evidence of white wine in ancient Egypt. A team led by Maria Rosa Guasch-Jané of the University of Barcelona analyzed the chemical makeup of dried liquid residues on the inside surfaces of six jars from the boy-king's tomb. The jars are now displayed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Residue in each jar contained tartaric acid, a chemical marker of grapes, the investigators report in the upcoming August Journal of Archaeological Science. One jar yielded dark residue that also displayed traces of syringic acid, a substance derived from the main pigment of red wine. The other jars served