Respiratory Illness Rose in Children After Katrina Hit
from the Washington Post (Registration Required): Hurricane Katrina provoked increased complaints to doctors of pneumonia, bronchitis and other lower respiratory illnesses among 144 children studied in Mississippi, according to a report released yesterday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the researchers said they could not determine the reason. They reported finding no difference in the patterns of visits to doctors by children who lived in disaster housing provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and those who did not. However, they said the findings could not be generalized beyond the small sample. The study's limited conclusions did not resolve broader concerns raised by health officials and pediatricians, who previously reported heightened complaints of breathing problems among children on the Gulf Coast after Katrina.
Lawmakers Turn Up the Heat on Ethanol in Response to Rising Food Prices
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): WASHINGTON -- Under pressure to do something about surging food prices, members of Congress are increasingly questioning the government's incentives for corn-based ethanol production, which have been blamed for contributing to the crisis. At hearings Tuesday and Wednesday, a bipartisan chorus in the Senate and House called for rethinking ethanol policy. The corn lobby is pushing back, but even ethanol supporters acknowledge that some tinkering may be needed. Retail food prices rose 4 percent last year, the largest increase since 1990, and are expected to rise 4 percent to 5 percent again this year. Factors at play include poor harvests, bad weather and growing demand. "Many of these factors are beyond the control of mankind, much less governments," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). "By contrast, however, biofuel subsidies and mandates are within the control of governments."
Broad Climate Fight Best, Not Just Gas Cuts, Study Says
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required): OSLO (Reuters) - An assault on climate change on many fronts makes good economic sense but will be money badly spent if the world focuses exclusively on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, a study said on Thursday. A 100-year package costing $800 billion to help people adapt to the impacts of warming - such as droughts or rising seas - while also funding research into new technology and curbing emissions could yield benefits of $2.1 trillion, it said. "We've got something that makes sense as an investment of public money," said Gary Yohe, an environmental economist at Wesleyan University in Connecticut who was lead author of the 56-page study with colleagues in Ireland and the United States. The same imaginary $800 billion invested solely in curbing or mitigating emissions ... would lose money overall with returns of just $685 billion. Until now, emissions curbs have been the overriding focus.
Early Whales Got the Bends
from New Scientist: Ancient whales were not master divers like their modern descendents. Biologists have discovered signs of decompression syndrome - the bends - in several different whale fossils, a finding that could revise the evolutionary history of deep diving. A team of paleobiologists surveyed hundreds of modern and ancient whale skeletons for decompression syndrome, which occurs when quick pressure changes force air or fat bubbles out of blood vessels.Such damage would have been common when whales first began plunging into the depths of the ocean, says Brian Beatty, of New York College of Osteopathic Medicine in Old Westbury, US, who led the study. However, whales eventually evolved to cope with frequent visits to their new world.
New Idea in Mortuary Science: Dissolving Bodies with Lye
from the Miami Herald (Registration Required): CONCORD, N.H. (Associated Press) - Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest - dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain. The process is called alkaline hydrolysis and was developed in this country 16 years ago to get rid of animal carcasses. It uses lye, 300-degree heat and 60 pounds of pressure per square inch to destroy bodies in big stainless-steel cylinders that are similar to pressure cookers. No funeral homes in the U.S. - or anywhere else in the world, as far as the equipment manufacturer knows - offer it. In fact, only two U.S. medical centers use it on human bodies, and only on cadavers donated for research. But because of its environmental advantages, some in the funeral industry say it could someday rival burial and cremation.
Earliest Known American Settlers Harvested Seaweed
from National Geographic News: People living in the earliest known settlement in the Americas harvested seaweed and other marine plants from a coastline more than 50 miles away, new research shows. Scientists discovered several species of seaweed and marine algae dating back more than 14,000 years at the Monte Verde archaeological site in south-central Chile. The findings suggest that these early Americans were beachcombers with a tradition of using coastal resources, says study lead author Tom Dillehay. "At least some first Americans had a broad spectrum diet, because we're seeing that they exploited a wide range of resources from multiple environmental zones - terrestrial, coastal, and so forth," said Dillehay, an anthropologist at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University.
Shift from Savannah to Sahara Was Gradual, Research Suggests
from the New York Times (Registration Required): Six thousand years ago, northern Africa was a place of trees, grasslands, lakes and people. Today, it is the Sahara - a desolate area larger area than Australia. Lake Yoa, in northeastern Chad, has remained a lake through the millennia and is still a lake today, surrounded by hot desert. Although little rain falls, Lake Yoa's water is replenished from an underground aquifer. By analyzing thousands of layers sediment in a core drilled from the bottom of this lake, an international team of scientists has reconstructed the region's climate as the savannah changed to Sahara. In Friday's issue of the journal Science, the researchers ... report that the climate transition occurred gradually.
Air Pollution in Wyo. Community Rivals That of Big Cities
from the Seattle Times: BOULDER, WYO (Associated Press) - There isn't anything metropolitan about this tiny unincorporated town in southwest Wyoming, where a few single-family homes and a volunteer fire station stand against a skyline of snowcapped mountains. But Boulder, with a population of just 75 people, has one thing in common with major metropolitan areas: air pollution thick enough to pose health risks. ... The pollution, largely from the region's booming natural gas industry, came in the form of ground-level ozone, which has exceeded healthy levels 11 times since January and caused Wyoming to issue its first ozone alerts. Now the ozone threatens to cost the industry and taxpayers millions of dollars to stay within federal clean-air laws.
Medical Know-How Raises Suicide Risk for Doctors
from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required): CHICAGO (Associated Press) - There's a grim, rarely talked-about twist to all that medical know-how doctors learn to save lives: It makes them especially good at ending their own. An estimated 300 to 400 U.S. doctors kill themselves each year -- a suicide rate thought to be higher than in the general population, although exact figures are hard to come by. Some doctors believe the stigma of mental illness is magnified in a profession that prides itself on stoicism and bravado. Many fear admitting psychiatric problems could be fatal to their careers, so they suffer in silence. And when the pain is too much, doctors have easy access to prescription drugs and a precise knowledge of both how the body works and the amount of a drug needed for an overdose to stop breathing and halt the heart.
California Museums Tell the History of Computing
from the Christian Science Monitor: Mountain View, Calif. - When this computer crashes, sword blades literally jam it to a halt. Debugging requires a crowbar. Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, one of the earliest computers, has just arrived for display May 10 at the Computer History Museum here in Mountain View. It existed only on paper for more than 150 years until, in 2002, Doron Swade and a small team assembled the five-ton computer from 8,000 bronze, iron, and steel parts. On one side is a hand crank, on the other a spool of paper to print answers to the polynomial functions used by navigators and astronomers. Between lies the heart of the engine, rising like a gigantic abacus whose beads are interlocking gearwheels, each representing a digit.