bright 4.bri.000203 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Progressively larger brains evolved in primates of all stripes, not just humans. We can thank a common capacity for solving a broad range of problems, from coordinating social alliances to inventing tools, according to a new study.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

This conclusion challenges a popular theory that big, smart brains arose primarily because they afforded advantages when it came to negotiating complex social situations during human evolution.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

"The ability to learn from others, invent new behaviors, and use tools may have [also] played pivotal roles in primate-brain evolution," say Simon M. Reader of McGill University in Montreal and Kevin N. Laland of the University of Cambridge in England. In an upcoming report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the two zoologists chronicle links between an array of intelligent behaviors and enhanced brain size in primates.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

Reader and Laland examined approximately 1,000 scientific studies of behavior in 116 of the world's 203 known primate species. They identified 553 instances of animals discovering new solutions to survival-related problems, 445 observations of individuals learning skills and acquiring information from others, and 607 episodes of tool use.

The researchers then consulted previously obtained data on brain size relative to body size in different primates. In particular, they focused on the volume of the structures that make up what scientists call the executive brain, a frontal region thought to be crucial for complex thinking.

Species that have the proportionately largest executive brains are the ones that most often innovate, learn from others, and use tools, Reader and Laland contend. These three facets of intelligence vary together as primate brains enlarge, they say. There's no evidence in any species of an evolutionary trade-off between these traits, such as an increase in innovation accompanying a decline in social learning.

A related report by neuroscientist Barbara L. Finlay of Cornell University and her colleagues concluded that different brain regions in mammals enlarged all together during mammalian evolution, not in piecemeal fashion related to specific functions. Whole-brain evolution was driven by changes in the timing of early brain development in individuals, says Finlay. In all species, late-generated structures�including the executive brain�have grown the largest, Finlay's team asserted in the April 2001 Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Reader and Laland provide "important new evidence" that wide-ranging thinking skills shared by many primate species encouraged the evolution of large brains, comment psychologist Robert M. Seyfarth and biologist Dorothy L. Cheney, both of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, in a comment published with the new report.

They suggest that intellectual accomplishments unique to people, such as language use, may have playe

face 6.fac.000200 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Something strange recently happened to me in Tennessee. I wasn’t actually in Tennessee when it happened. The strangeness emanated from there–actually, from one spot in Tennessee–and eventually reached me here up in New England.

It started with a column I wrote in the October issue of Discover, about the evolution of the human face. Sometimes people write letters to the magazine about my pieces. My editors dropped a note to let me know that all at once they got 40 60 letters about my column. All from the outskirts of Memphis.http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com All pretty much identical in style and substance. Some had been written on a computer, but some were written by hand–young hands, judging from their appearance.

Here’s a sample…

“I enjoyed reading your article and was interested in the research done on how the face and its muscles work to make expressions. I however believe that the brain and facial expressions are not a byproduct of years of evolution but instead a fingerprint of intelligent design. You claim in your article, that the muscles of the face are the result of the transition of life from land to water, but where is the fossil record for the jump? None have been found. There is no proof of the evolution of water to land creatures.”

And a second…

“I would like to show you what I think may have happened. First off, there is the law of entropy. This law states that everything is in a state of going deeper into chaos. The brain could not have formed going from a blob of amino acid to a highly complex organ that is capable of generating the power that is does. That is going into a state of unity and order. According to natural laws, this is impossible. Only a creator is capable of doing this.”

And a third

“If the face is an irreducibly complex machine, which it is, it cannot evolve because the original face would be missing parts, which would make the whole machine non-fuctioning. This rules out the possibility of evolution in human faces.”

I don’t know if all these letters came from a single class or club. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com In any case, the folks at Discover asked me if I’d write something in response. So–to my correspondents from Tennessee:

Thank you all for your letters. I appreciate that you took the time to read my article. While I can’t write to all forty sixty of you individually, I want to respond to the overall gist of your letters.

A number of you stated that there is no evidence that the human face–or even humans, period–evolved. For instance, one writer claimed that there is no fossil record of the transition of life from water to land.

new-tetra600.jpg

Actually, there is a fossil record, and it’s getting more and more detailed every year. The best source of information at the moment is a new review written by three experts on the subject. They explain how paleontologists have found a number of fossils of fish with some–but not all–of the features found in land vertebrates. They’ve also found a lot of early land vertebrates that still had not yet evolved some of the anatomy found on land vertebrates today. The illustration above, from the review, shows just how many fossils of these early land vertebrates and their relatives have been discovered in rocks between 400 and 300 million years ago.

This is what you’d expect if life evolved.

When scientists compare the traits on all those species, they can judge which species are most closely related to each other, and use that information to draw an evolutionary tree. The land vertebrates alive today, including mammals, reptiles, and amphibians are represented by the brown and green arrows. The closest living fish relatives, according to this research, are lungfish and coelacanths (Dipnoi and Actinistia on the tree). As the tree shows, there are 19 different lineages paleontologists have discovered the branched off between our common ancestor with lungfish 410 million years ago, and the common ancestor of all land vertebrates alive today, which lived some 350 million years ago. Those extinct lineages mark the evolution, step by step, of our legs, arms, wrists, ankles, fingers, and toes. Do they mark every generation through this transition? Of course not–but no paleontologist would ever dream of finding fossils of every individual that ever lived. Instead, they judge how well each new fossil fits into the overall picture.

Scientists can also use other lines of evidence to test their hypothesis for how vertebrates came on land. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com The tree I’ve reproduced here makes it clear that our closest living aquatic relatives are lungfish and coelacanths–two very rare lineages that make up a half dozen species or so all told. Recently scientists compared a lot of DNA from from several species of fish–including lungfish–and land vertebrates. They got the same result looking at genes that paleontologists get looking at bones: lungfish are our closest relatives.

The support that comes from different studies gives scientists confidence that they can look at fish to track the evolution of our faces. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com On fossils, they can look at scoops and troughs in bones that mark the places where muscles attached. And they can study muscles in the heads of living fish. A lamprey doesn’t have a dimpled smile, let alone a jaw. But it does have some of the same muscles as we have in our faces. These muscles develop from the same place in the heads of lamprey embryo and a human embryo. More closely related animals share more face muscles with us. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have just about every muscle in our own face, and they produce the same expressions when they are stimulated. (See the illustration at the top of the post, from this review of face evolution from fish to humans.)

This is, again, the sort of pattern you’d expect from evolution. So there is, in fact, a lot of evidence documenting the evolution of the face from our fish ancestors–and more coming to light each year.

But many of you also make a different sort of claim: that evolution could not have possibly produced the face.

Let me explain why this is not the case.

One person wrote in that the laws of entropy, which drives the universe to chaos. “The brain could not have formed going from a blob of amino acid to a highly complex organ.”

But think about what happens every time a brain develops from nothing in a human embryo. How can this order emerge, if entropy rules? Because the laws of entropy do not prevent order from arising in a particular place. An embryo takes in energy to form its complex body, and it pumps out heat, increasing the entropy in the environment. Entropy is likewise not a problem for evolution, if there is enough energy to increase local order and a place to push the disorder. And our planet, getting energy from the sun and releasing heat back into space, provides just those conditions.

Some of you claimed that the face could not evolve because it is an “irreducibly complex” system. If you take one part away from it, it does not work. But that’s not actually the case. Think about it–chimpanzees and other primates have most of the facial muscles that we do–but not all of them. In other words, they are missing some parts of the human face. But their faces are not “non-functioning” as one letter-writer claimed. They make plenty of faces–although they cannot make as many faces as we can.

You don’t even have to leave our own species to see that our faces are not “irreducibly complex.” Many people are lacking one or more muscles in the face, but their faces work normally. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com Botox paralyzes some muscles in the face–knocking out several parts of this supposedly irreducibly complex face. It may be hard for people with Botox to frown, but they can still smile and produce other facial expressions. That’s hardly non-functional.

The links in my response take you to several scientific papers. Actually, there are many, many more on the topics I’ve discussed. I’d encourage you to take the plunge and learn more about the face and its evolution. I’d hope you’d find it as fascinating as I do.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

ragweed 88.rag.20 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. People with seasonal allergies know that some months can be tougher than others. An unprecedented 15-year study conducted in the New York City area charts how air concentrations of different types of pollen vary throughout an average year.

Ragweed pollen, the most significant cause of allergy, is airborne mainly during August and September, report researchers at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey–New Jersey Medical School in Newark. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jmbPCHg9dLPh1gHoZxLG.GpS

By contrast, tree pollen is most abundant during May and is nearly absent from the air after the end of June. Grass-pollen concentrations peak in June and rise again, albeit to a lesser extent, in September.

Contrary to what some people with allergies might think, pollen abundance has decreased—at least in the New York City area—over the past decade.

The new data might help some people avoid unnecessary outdoor exposure at times when their allergies are most likely to be active, Leonard Bielory and his colleagues say in the May Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. They note that seasonal pollen patterns are likely to differ from one region of the country to the next. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

under 99.und.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire To protect right whales in the northwest Atlantic—one of the most depleted cetacean populations worldwide—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has proposed seasonal speed limits for large, ocean-going vessels. Currently, ship strikes pose the greatest threat to the population, NOAA says, with at least one or two deaths reported from such collisions each year. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang

Under the new proposal, ships 65 feet and longer could travel no faster than 10 knots in eastern U.S. waters near areas where the whales have been spotted. Normally, such vessels travel at 15 knots or faster. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang

Although protected from hunting since 1935, the species' population off the eastern United States and Canada is around only 300. This population's calving rate has risen in recent years to about 20 annually. Still, it doesn't fully compensate for adult-whale deaths sustained over the past 2 decades, NOAA reported in a June 26 Federal Register announcement of the proposed new rule.

The locations and sizes of go-slow zones will vary by season, and their duration will always be at least 15 days.

Roughly 70 percent of large commercial ships traveling along the East Coast passes through the right whale's critical habitat, researchers reported last year in the July-September Coastal Management. They found that most of those vessels moved at "speed[s] at which large whales may be critically injured." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

eruptions 4.eru.2 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Volcanologist Andrew McGonigle walks through clouds composed of mist, steam, carbon dioxide (CO2), and sulfur dioxide (SO2) on Vulcano, an active volcanic island off the coast of southern Italy. To predict eruptions, volcanologists typically use distant ultraviolet spectrometers to measure SO2 released by active volcanoes. McGonigle has developed a remote-controlled helicopter called Aerovolc 1 to do it better. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com By accurately measuring CO2, which escapes magma earlier than SO2, scientists could predict eruptions sooner, helping to implement timely evacuations for nearby populations—but measuring CO2 is a challenge. McGonigle’s method requires that sensors capture gases directly above a volcano, a major problem for static instruments, which are easily destroyed by magma. But a remote-controlled helicopter can gather data from a safe distance. McGonigle, who recently won the $100,000 Rolex Award for Enterprise, plans next to outfit a fully automated helicopter, akin to the unmanned aerial vehicles used by the military. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com/

married 55.mar.1 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

More from Cynthia Tucker:

* GOP NEEDS A BETTER CANDIDATE THAN PALIN FOR FUTURE SUCCESS
* SUN IS SETTING ON THOSE WHO PREFER AN AMERICA OF INEQUALITY
* GEORGIA SENATE RACE HIGHLIGHTS WHAT'S ON MANY MINDS IN U.S.

Read all the columns »
About The Author:

Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a syndicated columnist whose commentary appears in dozens of newspapers across the country.

President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, are members of a minority: They are a black married couple.

Wed 16 years in October, the Obamas conceived their two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, after the wedding. While traditional couplehood such as the Obamas' is losing popularity in every corner of the country, it has all but disappeared in black America, where more than 70 percent of children are born outside marriage.

In 2006, The Washington Post published an op-ed essay by writer Joy Jones with the provocative headline, "Marriage is for White People." The headline didn't reflect Jones' views; it repeated "what one of my students told me some years back when I taught a career exploration class for sixth-graders at an elementary school in southeast Washington (D.C.).http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com/

"I think I'll invite some couples in to talk about being married and rearing children," she told the class." 'Oh, no,' objected one student. 'We're not interested in the part about marriage. Only about how to be good fathers.' And that's when the other boy chimed in ... 'Marriage is for white people.'"

That sixth-grader was likely reflecting his environment, which may not have included many black married couples. While 62 percent of white adults and 60 percent of Latino adults are married, only 41 percent of black adults are.

The Obamas are already burdened by the baggage of cultural expectations, but I'll go ahead and add another sack to their load: Here's hoping their presence on the national stage will erase that sixth-grader's wrongheaded notion. Marriage ought to be an equal-opportunity institution, no matter color, creed or sexual orientation.

"I was really excited when I saw the Obama family on the (TV) screen (on Nov. 4) because I meet so many young African-Americans who, frankly, have never seen an intact family like this," said Leah Ward Sears, chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court and board member of the Institute for American Values, which promotes marriage. "I'm hopeful (the Obamas) will be a brand-new model of what the ideal is, even if many, many of us will fall short of the ideal," she added.

Certainly, there are millions of law-abiding and accomplished adults who grew up in non-traditional households -- reared by single moms or single dads or grandparents. It's also true that many non-custodial parents, who are usually fathers, are actively involved in their children's lives, boosting their chances for successful lives. Still, a significant body of research emphasizes that, all other things being equal, children are better off with two loving, responsible parents who are married to each other. Those kids are less likely to engage in drug abuse or risky sexual behavior and more likely to do well in school.

Moreover, fathers are more likely to stay connected with their children if they are married to the kids' mom. "There is a saying in social research: 'A mother is a mother all of your life, but a father is a father only when he has a wife,'" Justice Sears said.

Indeed, research also suggests that marriage is good for adults.

"Compared with unmarried people, married men and women tend to have lower mortality, less risky behavior, more monitoring of health, more compliance with medical regimens, higher sexual frequency, more satisfaction with their sexual lives, more savings and higher wages," according to "Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the United States," a 2002 study sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com/

Yet, the institution of marriage is under severe stress. Though the idealized intact family remains a mainstay of popular culture, married couples represent only half of all households in the United States. And the trend toward unmarried parenthood has affected white and brown America, too, a fact highlighted by Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter, Bristol. About 27 percent of white children are now born outside marriage, as are about 42 percent of Latino children.http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com/

There isn't much a President Obama can do about that except continue to present his family as an alternative -- a very attractive alternative. Who knows? The new, new thing could be marriage.

panic 55.2.pan.1 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

“I was driving home after work,” David reported. “Things had been very stressful there lately. I was tense but looking forward to getting home and relaxing. And then, all of a sudden—boom! My heart started racing, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was sweating and shaking. My thoughts were racing, and I was afraid that I was going crazy or having a heart attack. I pulled over and called my wife to take me to the emergency room.”

David’s fears turned out to be unjustified. An emergency room doctor told David, a composite of several therapy patients seen by one of us (Arkowitz), that he was suffering from a panic attack.

The current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) defines a panic attack as an abrupt and discrete experience of intense fear or acute discomfort, accompanied by symptoms such as heart palpitations, shortness of breath, sweating, trembling, and worries about going crazy, losing control or dying. Most attacks occur without obvious provocation, making them even more terrifying. Some 8 to 10 percent of the population experiences an occasional attack, but only 5 percent develops panic disorder. Contrary to common misconception, these episodes aren’t merely rushes of anxiety that most of us experience from time to time. Instead patients who have had a panic attack typically describe it as the most frightening event they have ever undergone.

Research has provided important leads to explain what causes a person’s first panic attack—clues that can help ward off an attack in the first place. When stress builds up to a critical level, a very small additional amount of stress can trigger panic. As a result, the person may experience the event as coming out of the blue.

Some people may have a genetic predisposition toward panic, as psychologist Regina A. Shih, then at Johns Hopkins University, and her colleagues described in a review article. The disorder runs in families, and if one identical twin has panic disorder, the chance that the other one also has it is two to three times higher than for fraternal twins, who are genetically less similar. Although these findings do not rule out environmental factors, they do strongly suggest a genetic component. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Panic disorder imposes serious restrictions on patients’ quality of life. They may be plagued by a persistent concern about the possibility of more attacks and may avoid situations associated with them. To receive a diagnosis of panic disorder, patients must also worry that they might have another attack where it would be embarrassing (say, in a public setting such as a classroom), difficult to escape (such as when one is stuck in traffic), or difficult to find help (for example, in an area with no medical facilities nearby). Panic disorder accompanied by extensive avoidance of these situations results in a diagnosis of panic disorder with agoraphobia; in extreme cases, sufferers may even become housebound.

From Normal Anxiety to Crippling Fear
What are the roots of such incapacitating attacks? Psychologist David H. Barlow of Boston University, who has conducted pioneering research on understanding and treating panic disorder and related disorders, and others believe that panic attacks result when our normal “fight or flight” response to imminent threats—including increased heart rate and rapid breathing—is triggered by “false alarms,” situations in which real danger is absent. (In contrast, the same response in the face of a real danger is a “true alarm.”) Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

When we experience true or false alarms, we tend to associate the biological and psychological reactions they elicit with cues that were present at the time. These associations become “learned alarms” that can evoke further panic attacks.

Both external situations and internal bodily cues of arousal (such as increased breathing rate) can elicit a learned alarm. For example, some people experience panic attacks when they exercise because the physiological arousal leads to bodily sensations similar to those of a panic attack.

Why do some people experience only isolated attacks, whereas others develop full-blown panic disorder? Bar­low has synthesized his research and that of others to develop an integrated theory of anxiety disorders, which states that certain predispositions are necessary to develop panic disorder:

• A generalized biological vulnerability toward anxiety, leading us to overreact to the events of daily life.
• A generalized psychological vulnerability to develop anxiety caused by early childhood learning (such as overprotection from our parents) that the world is a dangerous place and that stress is overwhelming and cannot be controlled.
• A specific psychological vulnerability in which we learn in childhood that some situations or objects are dangerous even if they are not.

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Panic disorder develops when a person with these vulnerabilities experiences prolonged stress and a panic attack. The first attack activates the psychological vulnerabilities, creating a hypersensitivity to external and internal cues associated with the attack. As a result, even medication containing a mild stimulant can provoke an ­attack.

Still, there is good news. Two findings in particular can provide reassurance for those with panic disorder. The first is that all panic attacks are triggered by known events, even though the sufferer may be unaware of them. This knowledge can reduce the anxiety associated with the sense of unpredictability. Second, it can be reassuring to learn that a panic attack is a misfiring of the fight-or-flight response in the absence of danger. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Basic research not only has helped us understand panic disorder but also has led to effective treatments. In particular, Barlow and his associates developed panic-control treatment, described in their 2006 book Mastery of Your Anxiety and Panic. It involves education about panic disorder and somewhat gradual exposure to the internal and external cues that trigger panic attacks, along with changing the catastrophic interpretations of bodily cues so that they no longer trigger the attacks. This treatment has in most instances surpassed drug therapies for the disorder over the long term. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

00998

When food writer Lisë Stern needs fresh vegetables to roast with a chicken, she bicycles to the green market near her Cambridge, Mass., home where local farmers sell organically grown produce. Once back in her kitchen, she prepares the meal using knives, bowls, utensils, a cutting board and a roasting pan dedicated solely to cooking with meat, and serves it to her two teenage sons (her 11-year-old daughter is a vegetarian) on glass plates never touched by milk, cheese or other dairy foods.

Stern, the author of How to Keep Kosher: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding Jewish Dietary Laws, is one of a million or so American Jews (out of around six million total) who keeps her kitchen year-round according to the laws of kashruth, or kosher. She's also interested in the environment. So how does keeping kosher contribute to—or undermine—her efforts to go a little lighter on the planet?

In 2007 kosher foods were worth $12.5 billion of the $500-billion retail food market, according to market research firm Mintel. It isn't only Jews: According to marketing company Lubicom, the 10.2 million Americans who eat kosher foods include around three million Muslims, whose halal dietary rules overlap with kosher ones.

Kosher rules state: those who keep kosher eat traditionally domestic fowl like chicken and turkey; most fish with fins and scales—that means no shrimp, crab or lobster; and mammals that both chew their cuds and have split hooves, which includes cows and sheep, but not pigs.

What would the environment look like if everyone kept kosher? Per capita, Americans consume about 63.5 pounds (29 kilograms) of beef, 48.2 pounds (22 kilograms) of pork and 59 pounds (27 kilograms) of chicken per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They also down 54 pounds (25 kilograms) of fish and shellfish, including about four pounds (two kilograms) of shrimp (the U.S.'s most popular seafood), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Marine Fisheries Service.

So how does a kosher diet fare as one that is ecofriendly? Time for some calculations: first, let's assume that kosher vegetarians would still steer clear of meat in any quantity, even if they did not keep kosher, meaning that observing the rules would have no impact. Let's also assume that kosher omnivores consume the same average weight of meat per capita as other Americans, but replace pork with either beef or chicken. That would have an impact. Solely in terms of how much grain livestock consume, producing a pound (0.45 kilogram) of beef releases 13.67 pounds (6.2 kilograms) of greenhouse gases, compared with around 6.75 pounds (3.1 kilograms) to produce a pound of pork, and 3.37 pounds (1.5 kilograms) for every pound of chicken—and this does not even take into account the other factors in meat's carbon footprint, from deforestation for pasturage to shipping it to market. Globally, meat production generates 18 percent of the world's man-made greenhouse gases, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

That means replacing nonkosher pork with an equivalent 48 pounds (22 kilograms) of beef releases about 1,504 pounds (682 kilograms) of greenhouse gases annually, compared with 1,378 pounds (625 kilograms) of carbon a year for the pork-friendly eater। http://louis-j-sheehan.com

Of course, you could go the other way: If the kosher-only omnivore replaced all the pork with chicken, their greenhouse emissions would drop to 1,216 pounds (552 kilograms) per annum. But if the "pork difference" were split equally between beef and chicken, the kosher-only meat diet would yield 1,460 pounds (662 kilograms) of emissions—about 6 percent more than the nonkosher diet.

What about shrimp? It takes 243 gallons (920 liters) of diesel fuel to trawl about 1.1 tons (one metric ton) of the shellfish, according to Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, making shrimp one of the most energy-intensive wild seafood harvests, with a footprint of 5,395 pounds (2,447 kilograms) of carbon dioxide per metric ton even before processing and transportation are taken into account. And shrimp farming (which provides well over one million metric tons of shrimp annually, about 25 percent of all shrimp consumed) has been linked to the destruction of almost half of the world's mangroves: coastal forests that absorb carbon dioxide and provide essential habitat for wild fish species. Crab, meanwhile, was among the least energy-intensive species to catch in the Dalhousie study, whereas the fuel needed to collect a ton of lobster swung wildly—ranging from 5.3 gallons (20 liters) per metric ton in Iceland to about 38 gallons (144 liters) in Maine to 271 gallons (1,025 liters) in Norway.

Just as with livestock, the ultimate green boost from kosher law's taboo on shrimp and other shellfish depends on what you eat in its place. Assuming that the kosher consumer replaces the average American's four pounds of shrimp a year (and its 9.79 pounds, or 4.4 kilograms, of carbon dioxide emissions) with another fish, Canadian North Atlantic herring is a good choice: it takes around 5.28 gallons (20 liters) of fuel to purse seine (net using two trawlers) a metric ton of these small fish, according to Dalhousie, releasing about 117 pounds (53 kilograms) of carbon dioxide—meaning four pounds of herring have a carbon footprint of a mere 0.21 pound (0.09 kilogram). Wild U.S. or Canadian salmon take an average of just over six gallons (23 liters) of fuel per metric ton to catch, releasing about 133 pounds (60 kilograms) of carbon dioxide. So eating four pounds of salmon a year would account for 0.24 pound (0.1 kilogram) of carbon dioxide. Both of these are obviously just a fraction of the 9.79 pounds of carbon dioxide for the shrimp eater.

Tuna are energy hogs by comparison, needing about 460 gallons (1,740 liters)—twice the fuel of trawling for shrimp—to harvest the same single metric ton of tuna. That adds up to a massive 10,212 pounds (4,632 kilograms) of carbon dioxide per catch. So eating four pounds a year would have a footprint of 18.5 pounds (8.4 kilograms) of carbon dioxide, almost twice the shrimp eater's footprint.

Kosher rules do remove some overfished wild species from your plate—such as sharks, which are in serious decline worldwide, according to the Monterey Aquarium's Seafood Watch program. On the other hand, some popular fish that are kosher, such as bluefin tuna and Chilean sea bass are also in peril.

Kosher rules also forbid mixing meat and dairy foods: No cheeseburgers, please. "The idea repeated three times in the Bible is, 'you shouldn't boil a kid in its mother's milk'," says Stern. This has evolved over the centuries into complex rules and practices to keep the two apart in the kitchen and the stomach as well as in the cooking pot. That means two sets of dishes. Doubling one's kitchenware would seem to run counter to the "less is more" mantra of contemporary environmentalism but, as Stern notes, because both sets are never used simultaneously, the useful life of each is likely extended over time. http://louis-j-sheehan.com

Even though keeping kosher is not inherently more or less ecofriendly than a conventional diet, Stern notes that the small but growing kosher organic meat offerings, along with the overall boom in organic foods, make it easier to suffuse keeping kosher with her green values. And, of course, there are benefits that can't be counted by the numbers. "For me, keeping kosher is a spiritual commitment," Stern says. "It imbues the mundane with the sublime."

hiv

A millennium and a half after the fall of their empire, ancient Romans might still be wreaking havoc on the European continent। http://Louis-J-sheehan.info

On average, Northern Europeans are more resistant to HIV infection and take longer to develop AIDS than Southern Europeans, and French researcher Eric Faure thinks that represents the legacy of the Roman Empire, strangely enough. There’s a gene variant in question, called CCR5-Delta32, which produces proteins that the HIV virus has trouble attaching to. But while in some areas of Northern Europe 15 percent of people carry this gene variant, only 4 percent of Greeks have it. In fact, if you look at the distribution of places where few people carry the gene, Faure says, the map looks suspiciously like that of the extent of Roman rule.

But Romans didn’t necessarily intermix with their colonists that much, according to Faure, so how did their lack of CCR5-Delta32 spread across Southern Europe? He says it’s possible that Romans introduced a disease that hit people who carried the HIV-resistant gene variation especially hard and reduced their numbers। The conquerors also introduced domesticated animals like cats and donkeys across their territory, and those animals can spread disease to humans. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info

This finding isn’t definitive, and other hypotheses about the gene variation exist. But when ancient Romans nicknamed theirs “the eternal city,” they probably couldn’t imagine how many places their legacy would turn up.

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

In October 2000, workers blasting soil to widen a highway near Tel Aviv blew off the top a cave that had been covered by dirt for thousands of years.

Archaeologists called to the site determined that the cave contained Stone Age artifacts. A fence now surrounds the cave's opening as excavation proceeds.

It's lucky that the discovery, called Qesem Cave, didn't become road kill. It contains some of the oldest and best-preserved evidence of hunting by our evolutionary ancestors in the span of time from around 300,000 to 200,000 years ago, says Mary C. Stiner of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Stiner is analyzing Qesem Cave finds with Avi Gopher and Ran Barkai, both of Tel Aviv University.

Abundant deer bones exhibiting butchery marks lie in sediment layers of the Israeli cave that also hold a mix of stone tools, including teardrop-shaped hand axes with sharpened edges. Age estimates for the bones rest on measurements of the proportion of specific uranium and thorium isotopes in them.

Deer remains at the site, which represent all parts of the animals' bodies, came primarily from mature individuals that would have been of prime interest to Stone Age meat eaters, Stiner notes. Many of the bones display discoloration from burning.

The Qesem Cave bones contain many more butchery incisions than are typically seen on the bones of hunted animals at other Stone Age sites. "This was a heavy-handed way of dealing with carcasses," Stiner says. "It implies a lack of caring about the fate of stone-tool edges."http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

color

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

For an enlightening perspective on how primates acquire color vision, consider baby monkeys. These infants' ability to recognize basic colors in different environmental settings depends on their prior exposure to a full spectrum of colors in natural light, a new study suggests.http://louis-j-sheehan.net

Although the colors in an image shift as available light intensifies or diminishes, people, as well as monkeys, usually recognize a particular hue throughout that change. For instance, an observer perceives a dog's red collar as the same color on a dark, cloudy day as on a sunny day. Scientists refer to this crucial visual adjustment as color constancy.

Prior investigations have failed to clarify whether color constancy is an innate capability of the retina's cone cells or it's acquired only with help from the brain's visual system.

Yoichi Sugita of the Neuroscience Research Institute in Tsukuba, Japan, explored color constancy in four macaque monkeys that had been raised from age 1 month to 1 year in a room illuminated by light with a highly restricted range of wavelengths, which ensured that the animals couldn't discern a normal array of colors.

After age 1, the monkeys couldn't usually identify colors they had just seen on a computer screen when the on-screen illumination of those colors changed, even after intensive training designed to overcome this problem, Sugita reports in the July 27 Current Biology. In contrast, four macaque monkeys that had been raised in a room illuminated by sunlight and fluorescent lamps recognized colors in a variety of lighting conditions.

Over 3 days of training, all the year-old animals learned to identify matching pairs of black, white, or gray rectangles. After another 3 days of training, the monkeys identified pairs of equally illuminated rectangles with common colors—blue, green, yellow, or red.

After 10 days of training and 3 weeks of further testing, however, those monkeys raised under restricted-illumination conditions still had great difficulty recognizing different shades of the same color as well as identifying the same color illuminated to varying degrees. These problems remained 9 months after the monkeys had been moved to a room illuminated by sunlight and fluorescent lamps.http://louis-j-sheehan.net

"These results indicate that early visual experience is indispensable for normal color perception," Sugita says.

His report is the first clear demonstration that animals can perceive colors, which indicates working cone cells in the retina, but that they lack the capacity for color constancy, comments Stanford University vision researcher Brian A. Wandell. This implies that the brain, not the retina, assumes substantial responsibility for performing color judgments under different lighting conditions, in his view.

Brain-imaging studies are needed to pinpoint disrupted parts of the brain's visual system in monkeys without color constancy, Wandell says.

novel

By the time babies are 6 months old, they distinguish the faces of different people—and can also discern the faces of specific monkeys. Now, researchers have found that with parental coaching, infants can retain their skill at telling animals apart instead of losing it by 9 months of age as babies usually do.Louis J. Sheehan

In their investigations of baby perception, psychologist Olivier Pascalis of the University of Sheffield in England and his team hypothesize that infants rapidly transform themselves from perceptual generalists to specialists (SN: 5/18/02, p. 307: http://www.sciencenews.org/20020518/fob1.asp). Intense practice at discerning different human faces prompts the loss of perceptual insights into nonhuman faces by 9 months of age, the scientists propose.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

That perceptual trade-off may not be inevitable, however. From age 6 months to 9 months, babies whose parents show them photographs of monkeys' faces for brief periods hang on to the ability to tell one furry primate's mug from another, Pascalis and his coworkers report in an upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers are now testing how long this retention lasts.

"Our data further elucidate the role of early experience in the development of face processing," Pascalis says.

In the new study, 26 infants participated in face-recognition trials. While being held by their mothers, the 6-month-olds viewed an image of a monkey's face and then saw that picture presented alongside another monkey's face. All the animals displayed neutral expressions.

Babies looked substantially longer at the novel face in each pair, a sign the researchers take for both recognition of and preference for new faces.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

The researchers then gave half of the mothers mug shots of six monkeys, each labeled with a name. For the next week, each mother showed her baby the photos and talked about each monkey for 10 to 20 seconds daily. Photo presentations over the next 3 months tapered off to one per week.

At age 9 months, infants who had been shown monkey faces at home still looked longer at novel monkey faces than they did at faces they had just seen. The 13 babies who received no face training at home looked equally long at novel and previously viewed monkey faces.

The results indicate that babies need only exposure to still images of monkey faces to maintain perceptual sensitivity to them, remarks psychologist Paul C. Quinn of the University of Delaware in Newark, who has collaborated with Pascalis in other work.

The social nature of home practice sessions probably played a big role in preserving infants' ability to distinguish monkey faces, Pascalis adds. Mothers guided their babies' attention and motivated the youngsters to examine the photos, he says.

The findings parallel evidence that babies start out skilled at discerning the sounds of many languages but lose that generic capacity as they learn their parents' language, says Pascalis.

memories

World War II ended 60 years ago, but memories of that conflagration show surprising staying power। Danes who lived through the Nazi occupation, which began in 1940, and the liberation in 1945 remember information associated with those two events with considerable accuracy, a new study finds. Louis J. Sheehan

Vivid recollections of one's surroundings and other personal experiences at the time of momentous, surprising events have been dubbed flashbulb memories. Earlier studies indicated that the accuracy of this type of recall declines substantially for 3 years after such events take place. That led some researchers to posit that after a decade or more, such memories become totally untrustworthy.

However, a healthy proportion of flashbulb memories related to World War II have stayed intact for more than half a century in Danes, say Dorthe Berntsen and Dorthe K. Thomsen, psychologists at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.

Their conclusion hinges on study participants remembering verifiable information related to the wartime events, such as the time of day that the radio announced liberation. Berntsen and Thomsen argue that the accuracy of verifiable information serves as a gauge of the veracity of personal recollections. Their technique conservatively estimates flashbulb-memory accuracy, the researchers contend, since people remember material better if they recount past events spontaneously rather than respond to questions about those events, as in the study.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Berntsen and Thomsen administered questionnaires to 145 Danes, ages 72 to 89. None had been diagnosed with a brain disease. Another 65 Danes born during or after World War II, ages 20 to 60, also completed questionnaires.

All the volunteers answered such questions as what the weather was like on occupation and liberation days and whether those days fell on workdays or the weekend.

Elderly participants also reported what they were doing when they heard news of the occupation and liberation, and their most negative and most positive personal memories from World War II.

Older Danes answered far more factual questions correctly than their younger counterparts did, the scientists report in the May Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. For instance, 100 war survivors, compared with only 3 of the younger participants, accurately described weather conditions on the day the Germans invaded Denmark.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Nearly all the older Danes cited personal memories related to the two war events. About 80 percent related either a most-negative or a most-positive wartime memory. Participants remember the liberation more clearly and with more details than they recall the invasion.

Individuals who reported having intense emotions at the time of occupation and liberation and who had regularly thought about those events after the war revealed the most detailed personal memories.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

The 66 participants who reported ties to the Danish resistance movement displayed particularly accurate factual recall and remembered personal experiences with great clarity.

"Occupation and liberation during World War II dramatically affected everyone in Denmark," comments psychologist David C. Rubin of Duke University in Durham, N.C. "Danes now at advanced ages appear to have pretty accurate flashbulb memories for those events."

Liberation loomed large in the older Danes' memories because it's often publicly commemorated in Denmark, the investigators say.

cassini

Swooping within 49 kilometers of Saturn’s tiny, geologically active moon Enceladus, the Cassini spacecraft has pinpointed the locations of the icy geysers that erupt from the southern hemisphere of this wrinkled moon’s surface.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Images taken by Cassini during an Aug. 11 flyby have revealed new details about the south polar fractures, dubbed tiger stripes, from which the geysers emanate. The images reveal that the fractures are about 300 meters deep and have V-shaped inner walls. Some fractures are flanked by large deposits of fine material, another indication that those trenches are the geysers’ source. Blocks of ice, house-sized and larger, litter the surrounding, more finely fractured terrain.

ENLARGE | Cassini shot past the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus on August 11, recording seven high-resolution images that home in on warm regions within the moon's tiger-stripe fractures, also known as sulci. This composite image shows two of the stripes; circles indicate the location of geysers that emanate from these fractures.NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The geysers blast icy particles, water vapor and trace amounts of organic compounds into space, and researchers are hoping to use the images and other Cassini data to determine whether these vents originate from a subsurface ocean. The craft’s recent detection of sodium in Saturn’s icy E ring, whose ice particles are supplied by Enceladus, suggests that the moon has an underground reservoir of salty water.

Icy particles line some of the fractures, even the regions between geysers. One explanation is that when warm vapor from an underground source rises to the cold surface, ice particles condense and settle on the ground, sealing off a vent. New jets may then erupt from other locations along the same fracture.

ENLARGE | This close-up of an Enceladus tiger-stripe fracture known as Damascus Sulcus shows the location of two geysers (yellow circles).NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

“At the limited spatial resolution on the tiger stripes that we had from previous flybys, we could not previously identify any unique morphological [shape], albedo [reflectivity] or color details that would allow us to distinguish the active vent locations from the rest of their tiger stripes,” notes Cassini researcher Paul Helfenstein of Cornell University.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

The Aug. 11 passage was Cassini’s fifth close flyby of Enceladus and the nearest yet to the moon’s surface. From Cassini’s point of view, Enceladus streaked past at a relative speed of 64,000 kilometers per hour, making it extremely challenging to take sharp, smear-free images.

Helfenstein devised a strategy of pointing the craft far ahead of Enceladus and then turning the craft as quickly as possible in the direction of the moon’s path. That enabled the craft to take seven high-resolution images of the tiger stripes in rapid सुक्सस्सिओं.

Cassini will next pass by Enceladus on October 10, when the craft should venture even closer, within 25 kilometers of the moon’s surface. Five other flybys are plannedcassini

Pakefield

लुईस जे। शीहन Scientists excavating ancient river sediment along England's southeastern coast have unearthed stone tools from roughly 700,000 years ago, the earliest evidence of human ancestors in northern Europe।

A team led by Simon A. Parfitt of University College London found 32 pieces of worked flint, including a cutting implement with a sharpened edge and a fist-size rock from which smaller, tool-size pieces had been hammered. These unexpected discoveries occurred near the village of Pakefield, Suffolk, and near the base of an eroding cliff that has been combed by fossil hunters for the past 200 years.

Fossils of extinct animals found near the artifacts, as well as measurements of Earth's magnetic field within the sediment, guided the scientists' age estimate. Remnants of cold-averse animals, insects, and plants in the tool-bearing deposit further indicate that a warm, Mediterranean climate prevailed there 700,000 years ago, the researchers report in the Dec. 15, 2005 Nature. At that time, a land bridge connected England to northwestern Europe.

The Pakefield finds show that human ancestors reached northern and southern parts of Europe at around the same time, remarks John McNabb of the University of Southampton in England. Other researchers previously uncovered remains of Homo species that inhabited Mediterranean areas, such as Spain and Italy, by at least 800,000 years ago। Until now, the earliest evidence of human ancestors in England dated to about 500,000 years ago. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Faced with a climate that fluctuated dramatically every few thousand years, our evolutionary forerunners probably spread northward during warm times and retreated south during cold phases, says University College's Anthony J। Stuart, a coauthor of the new study.

लुईस

pennsylvania

Southeastern Asian forests harbor a small-bodied line of apes, known as gibbons, that sing like rainforest Pavarottis। These animals' full-throated refrains reverberate through dense vegetation. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com

A research team has now gone behind the music and gleaned the first evidence that singing gibbons rearrange notes to communicate with their comrades. This simple system, or syntax, for recombining sounds to convey messages represents a step toward human language that had not previously been demonstrated in apes, says psychologist Esther Clarke of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Researchers have traditionally held that syntax arose only as the vocabulary of prehistoric people grew large and unwieldy. "We're finding the opposite in gibbons," says psychologist Klaus Zuberbühler, also of the University of St. Andrews. "One way of escaping the constraints of their limited vocal abilities is to combine signals into more-complex sequences, which carry meaning."

Gibbons evolved complex vocal skills as a tool for finding long-term mates in a competitive social scene, the scientists theorize. In the December 2006 PLoS ONE, a new online journal, Clarke, Zuberbühler, and a colleague outline basic rules for gibbon songs stimulated by a predator's presence versus those crooned with a mate.

From April 2004 to August 2005, the researchers studied 13 groups of white-handed gibbons living in Thailand's Khao Yai National Park. Each group consisted of two to six members—usually an adult pair, its offspring, and occasionally another adult male.

Clarke elicited predator songs by placing realistic models of threatening animals in trees where an entire group of gibbons could see them. Models included a fake fur–wrapped sack representing a leopard and a painted, papier-mâché, crested serpent eagle covered in feathers.

The team recorded predator-induced songs, which began with series of soft "hoo" notes and included many instances of another note. Each predator tune lasted roughly 30 minutes.

Pairs of adult males and females that mate for life perform duets, often adjusting the tunes over time. In the new experiment, adult pairs of each group spontaneously produced duets that were captured by the audio recordings. These songs lacked introductory "hoo" notes and the repeated extra note of the predator songs, and duets lasted only 10 minutes.

Gibbons within earshot of singing comrades discriminated between duets and predator songs. Nearby females emitted a characteristic brief call after hearing any song, but they delayed this response for 2 minutes or more following predator tunes. All members of neighboring groups responded to predator-induced crooning by loudly repeating the sequence of notes.

Although a substantial gap separates human language from ape communication, the new study shows that "in gibbons, the difference in degree of vocal complexity and sophistication is not as large as some have been tempted to think," remarks biological anthropologist Barbara J. King of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

Biologist Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia recommends that recordings of the two song types be played to gibbons in the same setting। She adds that syntax in gibbon songs falls short of that in language, which uses words to serve specific functions in sentences as well as to refer to features of the world. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com

vanilla

Scientists have ascertained the pedigree of Tahitian vanilla, the orchid whose rarity and rich, sweet flavor distinguishes it from the widely used commercial vanilla। The discovery of the plant’s heritage could set off a custody battle between nations, researchers say। http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com

The new analysis, reported in the August American Journal of Botany, places Tahitian vanilla’s origin in Central America, although today the plant is grown only in French Polynesia and doesn’t exist in the wild। http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com

“I am concerned that this altogether could dispossess Polynesia of a patrimonial genetic resource,” comments Pascale Besse, a plant geneticist at the joint research center PVBMT Cirad and University of Reunion. Now that Tahitian vanilla’s parents have been identified, people could create “Tahitian” vanilla anywhere, diluting its value in the luxury and gourmet markets, Besse says. But that flavor doesn’t arise from genes alone, she adds, and the Tahitian environment may be central to the orchid’s distinctive bouquet.

As with wine and coffee, environmental factors, such as climate or soil quality, and processing methods are important, she says.

PROUD PARENTSScientists identified Tahitian vanilla’s ancestors as V. planifolia (left) and V. odorata (right).Lubinsky; M. Van Dam

The pods or “beans” of Tahitian vanilla (Vanilla tahitensis) are much richer in oils known as oleoresins and have a fruitier scent than Vanilla planifolia, the species that provides roughly 95 percent of the vanilla beans sold worldwide each year, says economic botanist Pesach Lubinsky of the University of California, Riverside, who led the new study.

Scientists had established that Vanilla planifolia is native to Mesoamerica, but the heritage of Vanilla tahitensis remained a riddle. The 50 to 100 species in the orchid genus Vanilla are found all over the globe, but only the Western Hemisphere species bear fragrant pods, Lubinsky says.

“Only the New World species are aromatic — that was a big clue. If we are looking for its ancestors, let’s look in the New World,” he says.

Most hypotheses about Tahitian vanilla’s origins implicated good old V. planifolia. But there were two contenders for the other parent. V. pompona, which Tahitian vanilla tends to smell like, and V. odorata, which Tahitian vanilla tends to looks like.

To investigate, Lubinsky and colleagues examined DNA from chloroplasts, the plant’s light-harvesting factories, and from the nuclei of several species of vanilla. The chloroplast genome is passed on only by mothers; it doesn’t tango with paternal DNA the way nuclear DNA does. Tahitian vanilla’s chloroplast DNA was indeed identical to V. planifolia, confirming plain vanilla as its mom. The nuclear DNA was a mixture of V. planifolia and V. odorata, as would be expected from a hybrid, the researchers report.

Tahitian vanilla was probably born between 1350 and 1500, says Lubinsky, perhaps bred intentionally by farmers in the lowlands of Central America and then used as a flavoring in chocolate. “For my money, that’s where Tahitian vanilla originated — in some Maya forest garden,” he says. “It’s pretty clear its first use was by the ancient Maya who were drinking chocolate.”

“Vanilla is the secret of chocolate,” says Lubinsky, author of an analysis in the current issue of Economic Botany on the origins and dispersal of commercial vanilla.

Because the new finding demonstrates a Mesoamerican origin of what is now a solely French Polynesian crop, it does raise an interesting genetic resources dilemma regarding what nation owns rights to the plant’s genes, Lubinsky says.

Today, to safeguard the crop, growable plant parts of V. tahitensis are not allowed to be imported or exported from Tahiti. “It would be disastrous for Tahiti if other places started producing this vanilla,” Lubinsky says.

monroe

MAY 24TH.—Clear and warm.

No fighting yesterday besides small collisions near Hanover Junction. It is said to-day that Grant threatens the Central Railroad, on Lee’s left. This is regarded as a serious matter. We want men। http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com

An armed guard is now a fixture before the President’s house.

Peas were in market on the 18th inst।; price $10 a half peck. Strawberries are $10 per quart. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.comThere has been no meat in market for a long time, most of the butchers’ stalls being closed during the last three months. Unless government feeds the people here, some of us may starve.

Nothing especial at the Cabinet. The condition and position of the armies canvassed. Chase was not present. He seldom attends of late.

Seward urges the departure of the Niagara. I have no doubt that Sanford, our Minister at Belgium, one of Seward’s pets, who is now here, has been instrumental in urging this matter. He wants a public vessel to carry him abroad, and has cajoled Seward . . . to effect this object. I do not like to be bamboozled, as Colonel Benton says, by such fellows as Sanford.

There are, however, some reasons to influence action.

Seward sent to my house on Saturday evening a bundle of dispatches from Mr. Dayton, and also from Mr. Bigelow, our consul at Paris, relative to the conduct and feelings of the French Government. That breaking through the blockade for tobacco looks mischievous, and one or more vessels ought doubtless to appear in European waters.

Bigelow, in his confidential dispatch, tells Seward that it was not judicious to have explained to the French Government in regard to the resolution of our House of Representatives that they would maintain the Monroe Doctrine.

found

Pierre Janet originally developed the idea of dissociation of consciousness as a result of his work with hysterical patients। http://louis_j_sheehan.today.comHe believed that hypnosis was an example of dissociation whereby areas of an individual's behavioral control are split off from ordinary awareness. Hypnosis would remove some control from the conscious mind and the individual would respond with autonomic, reflexive behavior. Weitzenhoffer describes hypnosis via this theory as "dissociation of awareness from the majority of sensory and even strictly neural events taking place." http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com

Anna Gosline says in a NewScientist.com article:

"Gruzelier and his colleagues studied brain activity using an fMRI while subjects completed a standard cognitive exercise, called the Stroop task.

The team screened subjects before the study and chose 12 that were highly susceptible to hypnosis and 12 with low susceptibility. They all completed the task in the fMRI under normal conditions and then again under hypnosis.

Throughout the study, both groups were consistent in their task results, achieving similar scores regardless of their mental state। During their first task session, before hypnosis, there were no significant differences in brain activity between the groups. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com

But under hypnosis, Gruzelier found that the highly susceptible subjects showed significantly more brain activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus than the weakly susceptible subjects. This area of the brain has been shown to respond to errors and evaluate emotional outcomes.

The highly susceptible group also showed much greater brain activity on the left side of the prefrontal cortex than the weakly susceptible group. This is an area involved with higher level cognitive processing and behaviour."

chemistry

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on the 13 October 1925[2] to Alfred Roberts, originally from Northamptonshire, and Beatrice Stephenson Roberts from Lincolnshire. Thatcher spent her childhood in the town of Grantham in Lincolnshire, where her father owned two grocery shops.[3] She and her older sister Muriel (1921–2004) were raised in the flat above the larger of the two located near the railway line.
http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Her father was active in local politics and religion, serving as an Alderman and Methodist lay preacher. He came from a Liberal family but stood—as was then customary in local government—as an Independent. He lost his post as Alderman in 1952 after the Labour Party won its first majority on Grantham Council in 1950.[5]

Thatcher was brought up a devout Methodist and has remained a Christian throughout her life.[6] After attending Huntingtower Road Primary School, she received a scholarship and attended Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School.[7] Her school reports show hard work and commitment, but not brilliance. Outside the classroom she played hockey and also enjoyed swimming and walking.[8] Finishing school during the Second World War, she subsequently applied for a scholarship to attend Somerville College, Oxford and was only successful when the winning candidate dropped out.
http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

She went to Oxford in 1944 and studied Chemistry, specifically crystallography.[3] She became President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946, the third woman to hold the post. Thatcher graduated from Oxford in 1947 with a Second Class Honours B.Sc. in Natural Sciences. She received her MA from Oxford in 1950.[3]

Following graduation, Margaret Roberts moved to Colchester and worked as a research chemist for BX Plastics.[10] During this time she joined the local Conservative Association and attended the party conference at Llandudno in 1948, as a representative of the University Graduate Conservative Association.[11] She was also a member of the Association of Scientific Workers. In January 1949, a friend from Oxford, who was working for the Dartford Conservative Association, told her that they were looking for candidates.[11] After a brief period, she was selected as the Conservative candidate, and she subsequently moved to Dartford to stand for election as a Member of Parliament. To support herself during this period, she went to work for J. Lyons and Co., where she helped develop methods for preserving ice cream and was paid £500 per year.[11]

bees Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Bees play an important role in pollinating flowering plants, and are the major type of pollinator in ecosystems that contain flowering plants. Bees either focus on gathering nectar or on gathering pollen depending on demand, especially in social species. Bees gathering nectar may accomplish pollination, but bees that are deliberately gathering pollen are more efficient pollinators.http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com




It is estimated that one third of the human food supply depends on insect pollination, most of which is accomplished by bees, especially the domesticated Western honey bee. Contract pollination has overtaken the role of honey production for beekeepers in many countries. Monoculture and pollinator decline (of many bee species) have increasingly caused honey bee keepers to become migratory so that bees can be concentrated in seasonally-varying high-demand areas of pollination. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Recently, many such migratory beekeepers have experienced substantial losses, prompting the announcement of investigation into the phenomenon, dubbed "Colony Collapse Disorder," amidst great concern over the nature and extent of the losses. Many other species of bees such as mason bees are increasingly cultured and used to meet the agricultural pollination need. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.comMost native pollinators are solitary bees, which often survive in refuge in wild areas away from agricultural spraying, but may still be poisoned in massive spray programs for mosquitoes, gypsy moths, or other insect pests.

Conrad Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 77200

Conrad most resists our understanding. There is sense in this. His largest theme is mystery, and the heart of all his greatest work is dark. He understood this early. "Marlow was not typical," we read of the surrogate who narrates the first and most celebrated of his major works; "to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze." An empty center, then, surrounded by mist. I have studied Conrad for years, yet I perpetually feel, as I don't with any other writer, that I am only just scratching the surface. Perhaps my mistake, as Conrad's image suggests, is that I still believe that there is a hard or steady surface to scratch.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

And what is true of the work, as E.M. Forster was the first to point out, is true of the man who made it. "Behind the smoke screen of his reticence there may be another obscurity," Forster wrote, "preceding from ... the central chasm of his tremendous genius." Another enveloping mist, another absent center. Conrad, who lived three lives--Pole, mariner, and writer--devoted the third to writing about the second and erasing the first. But he knew himself too well to believe in self-knowledge. "One's own personality," he wrote, "is only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknown." His own memoirs are anti-confessional: evasively genial, suspiciously neat, not to be trusted. Conrad did not understand himself, and did not pretend to understand himself, and did not expect to be understood. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire UFO II

On the night of October 4, 1967, at about 11:20 p.m. Atlantic Daylight Time, it was reported that something had crashed into the waters near Shag Harbour, on Nova Scotia's South Shore. At least eleven people saw a low-flying lit object head down towards the harbor. Multiple witnesses reported hearing a whistling sound "like a bomb," then a "whoosh," and finally a loud bang. Some reported a flash of light as the object entered the water. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire
Thinking that an airliner or smaller aircraft had crashed into the Sound next to Shag Harbour, some witnesses reported the event to the local Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) detachment.

Cyclohexane Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 00393

ZPF-INDUCED GRAVITATION
One of the first ob jections typically raised against the existence of a real ZPF is that the mass equivalent Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire



of the energy embodied in Eq. (1) would generate an enormous spacetime curvature that would shrink the
universe to microscopic size. The resolution of this dilemma lies in the principle of equivalence. If inertia is an
electromagnetic phenomenon involving interactions between charge and the ZPF, then gravitation must be
http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us


a similar phenomenon. The mere existence of a ZPF would not necessarily generate gravitation or spacetime
curvature. Indeed, preliminary development of a conjecture of Sakharov (1968) by Puthoff (1989a) indicates
that the ZPF in and of itself cannot be a source of gravitation (see also discussion in Haisch and Rueda
[1997]).
Expressed in the simplest possible way, all matter at the level of quarks and electrons is driven to oscillate
(zitterbewegung in the terminology of Schr¨odinger) by the ZPF. But every oscillating charge will generate its
own minute electromagnetic fields. Thus any particle will experience the ZPF as modified ever so slightly Louis J. Sheehan


by the fields of adjacent particles. . . and that is gravitation! It is a kind of long-range van der Waals force.
Such a ZPF-based theory of gravitation is only in the exploratory stage at this point. The Puthoff (1989a)
analysis that resulted in the calculation of a proper Newtonian inverse-square law of attraction has since
been shown to be problematic, e.g. see Carlip (1993) and the reply by Puthoff (1993), also Cole, Danley and
Rueda (1998). Moreover at this time there is no accounting for the gravitational deflection of light other
than to invoke a variable permittivity and permeability of the vacuum due to the presence of charged matter.
However if it can be shown that the dielectric properties of the vacuum can be suitably modified by matter
so as to bring about light deflection, this may be a viable alternative interpretation to spacetime curvature
since light propagation serves to define the metric.
CONCLUSIONS http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET


A concept has been proposed that attempts to account for the inertia of matter as an electromagnetic reaction
force. A parallel gravitation concept along lines conjectured by Sakharov (1968) also exists in preliminary
form, and is consistent with the proposed origin of inertia as demanded by the principle of equivalence. On
the basis of this ZPF-inertia concept, we can definitively rule out one speculatively hypothesized propulsion
mechanism: matter possessing negative inertial mass, a concept originated by Bondi (1957) is shown to be http://louis-j-sheehan.com
logically impossible. One cannot “turn around” the reaction force an ob ject experiences upon accelerating
into an oppositely directed ZPF momentum flux.




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Convention Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 33002

Tomorrow's science stars got to pick the brains of today's science giants during a question and answer session May 13 in Atlanta at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. A panel of six Nobel laureates and one scientist whose work helped win the Nobel for her adviser took questions from the young audience on a range of topics from eureka moments to hospitable planets.

Much of the discussion emphasized science as process. Robert Curl, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of fullerene molecules, responded to a question about his journey to winning a Nobel by saying, "Like everything in life, the real meaning comes from doing it, not the reward." He noted that his discovery was a "lucky accident." http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de



"Fullerenes insisted on intruding on our … well-planned experiment.… Fullerenes said, 'Something interesting is going on here — look at me!'" Curl concluded, “The only moral lesson I can draw from this is if something seems interesting — look at it!"

Another student asked the scientists on the panel how it made them feel to know that students read about their work in textbooks. Curl noted that, of course, it doesn't feel bad. But he pointed out that the rewards of science aren't defined by outside acknowledgment, nor is that acknowledgment a motivator.

"As a scientist, you find out something, you write it up — but it is kind of like having a child — you can't play favorites. Some of my “children” never get written up, but I think about them with great pleasure.…There is a warm feeling about the work you've done, but it doesn't have much to do with the rest of the world appreciating it," Curl said.

The panel also spoke about balancing work and family. Richard J. Roberts, who won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine 1993 for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing, urged the high school students to find tools that would help them balance work with the rest of life.

"From time to time you have to be obsessed. I suspect most of you in this room have really obsessive personalities. It's OK — it's not a bad thing. But you need to learn the techniques and tools that work for you so you can see this obsessiveness and turn it off."

On a more somber note, Jocelyn Bell Burnell whose work led to the discovery of pulsars and won her thesis adviser Antony Hewish a Nobel in physics in 1974, commented that for women in science, the road was easier without the commitments of family.

"I spent half my working life as a married woman and mother, trying to reconcile working life and these commitments. My second half has been as a divorcee," Bell Burnell said. "In terms of my career, [the second half] has been a lot more straightforward, and a lot lonelier. Being female, [in this career] I have to say it is a lot easier being single. I'm very sorry that I have to say that."

The students also expressed concern that everything worth discovering in science had already been discovered. Panelists responded with laughter. Dudley Herschbach, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1986 and chairs the board of trustees for Science News’ parent organization, the Society for Science & the Public, commented that he has heard this refrain before.

"I can understand [this idea] that the older generation walked through picking all the low hanging fruit from the trees, the fruit rained down on them and now, what is left for your generation? But you've been left new tools that allow you to entertain a much wider range of ideas than your predecessors."

Leon Lederman, who won the Nobel Prize in physics 1988 for his work with neutrinos, pointed out that there is much more work to be done in his field. "We've been very happy with quantum theory … and we have relativity and cosmology … but they are not compatible. They get together and spit and claw. They don't work well together. Then there's new data that's baffling to us. The collaborative effort to build this machine in Europe [the Large Hadronhttp://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

Collider] — with that, there are unknown possibilities and lots of expectations."

Finally, panelists were asked what their most rewarding accomplishment was, other than their Nobel. H. Robert Horvitz, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine said being a father. To which Herschbach replied, "The only one matching that is being a grandfather!"

The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair is the world's largest international pre-college science competition and is run by the Society for Science & the Public. More than 1,500 high school students from over 40 countries showcase their independent research at the fair and compete for roughly $4 million in prizes and scholarships. Since 1997 Intel Corp. has partnered with Society for Science & the Public in sponsoring the fair. Agilent Technologies is the presenting sponsor this year.

New York Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 11001

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is a prominent university hospital in New York City, composed of two medical centers, Columbia University Medical Center and the Cornell University Weill Medical Center.

New York-Presbyterian Hospital was formed in 1998 with the merger of two large, previously independent hospitals, the New York Hospital and Presbyterian Hospital1. The NYPH system includes a variety of outlying hospitals that had previously been acquired by NYH or Presbyterian; these hospitals stretch throughout the five boroughs, Westchester County, Long Island and New Jersey. NYPH is now the largest private employer in New York City.

The two medical schools remain essentially autonomous, though there is increasing cooperation and coordination of clinical, research, and residency training programs. The hospitals, themselves, have merged administrations, with Herb Pardes, M.D., having led the hospital system since the merger.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is one of the most comprehensive university hospitals in the world, with leading specialists in every field of medicine.

The institution's five main facilities are:

* NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center
* NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/ Weill Cornell Medical Center
* The Allen Pavilion
* Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian
* NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Westchester Division


As of 2007, the U.S. News and World Report rankings place NYPH overall as the sixth-best hospital in the United States. Every specialty was ranked by US News, and the following were ranked in the top 10: gynecology; heart and heart surgery; endocrinology; kidney disease; neurology and neurosurgery; urology; pediatrics; and psychiatry. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire


The New York Hospital was founded in 1771 by a Royal Charter granted by King George III of England and became associated with Weill Cornell Medical College upon the latter institution's founding in 1898. It was the second oldest hospital in the United States. A 1927 endowment of more than $20 million by Payne Whitney expanded the hospital significantly and the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic is named in his honor. Other prominent donors include Howard Hughes, William Randolph Hearst, Harry and Leona Helmsley, Maurice R. Greenberg, and the Baker, Whitney, Lasdon, and Payson families.


The Presbyterian Hospital was founded in 1868 by James Lenox, a New York philanthropist and was associated with Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1925 the Sloane Hospital for Women, a leader in obstetrics and gynecology that had been founded in 1886, was incorporated.

New York Hospital was the subject of a lawsuit from the family of Libby Zion, a young woman admitted in 1984 who died while under the care of hospital residents. An investigation by the New York state Health Commissioner, the Bell Commission, led to restrictions on the number of hours residents could work and required oversight of their care by accredited physicians. These reforms have since been adopted nationwide.



The hospital, along with Weill Cornell Medical College and Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, runs the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System, a network of independent, cooperating, acute-care and community hospitals, continuum-of-care facilities, home-health agencies, ambulatory sites, and specialty institutes in the New York metropolitan area.



NewYork-Presbyterian Emergency Medical Services (NYP-EMS) is the largest hospital-based ambulance service in the City of New York. Since 1981, NYP-EMS has been one of the largest participants in the New York City 911 system. NYP-EMS also operates critical care transport ambulances throughout the New York City Metropolitan Area. The service is licensed to operate in the 5 counties of New York City, Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties in New York, and in the state of New Jersey for Basic Life Support and Specialty Care Transport. In addition to providing emergency and non-emergency ambulance services, either through the New York City 911 system on through the NYP-EMS Communications Center at Weill Cornell Medical Center, NYP-EMS provides stand-by EMS services for events throughout the New York City area, including the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer and the NYC Triathlon. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

NYP-EMS is also a New York State Department of Health-approved training center for EMT and Paramedic programs, several of which are approved for college-level credit by the New York State Department of Education. NYP-EMS operates one of the largest American Heart Association Emergency Cardiac Care training centers in New York.

NYP-EMS also maintains a Special Operations team trained in hazardous materials decontamination and technical rescue. This team, accompanied by several Weill Cornell Physicians, provided rescue and relief support on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Most recently, the team decontaminated 28 patients after the 2007 New York City steam explosion in Midtown Manhattan on July 18th, 2007.

no longer

Sometime in August 2011, a boxy space probe called Dawn will settle into orbit around one of the most underrated and overlooked objects in the solar system, a giant oblong asteroid named Vesta. After lingering for almost 10 months of study, Dawn will depart for Ceres, the biggest asteroid of all. Ceres is so large that it was recently promoted to the rank of dwarf planet, putting it on a par with Pluto and highlighting its status as a key planetary missing link.

Vesta and Ceres are the big enchiladas of the asteroid belt, a loose collection of rubble left over from the earliest days of the solar system. They are interesting because they’re like time capsules. “These two bodies are building blocks,” says Chris Russell, the principal investigator for the Dawn mission. It was asteroids like these that “came together to make the rest of the planets. It might have taken millions of Vestas and Cereses to make Earth. We want to understand how the building blocks were different from one another and how they came together to build the planets. Vesta and Ceres represent an important stage in the history of the solar system.”

Vesta and Ceres, along with the rest of the material in the aster–oid belt, would have coalesced into a planet too, were it not for Jupiter’s powerfully disruptive gravity. Ceres is 585 miles wide and contains more than a quarter of all the mass in the asteroid belt. It was the first asteroid discovered, spotted by Italian astron–omer Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
Vesta, the second-largest asteroid, was discovered six years later. For a few years, both were regarded as bona fide planets, but scientists soon discovered many more small bodies in similar orbits. In the mid-1800s these objects were reclassified as “asteroids” and largely dismissed as bit players. It has taken a century and a half to shift that view.

Although Vesta is just under one-third the mass of Ceres, in some ways we know it much more intimately. Vesta’s composition closely matches that of a group of common meteorites that have been found on Earth, called HED meteorites; these are literally chips off Vesta’s block. Blurry but tantalizing images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest where those space rocks came from: A massive crater dominates Vesta’s southern hemisphere, testifying to a powerful collision that gouged out nearly 1 percent of its volume a billion years ago. From studies of the HED meteor–ites and from measurements of light reflected off the asteroid’s surface, scientists have concluded that Vesta has a very planetlike nickel-iron core. And its surface is basaltic—largely formed by lava flows from below.

Ceres, by contrast, is a far more mysterious body that could yield more profound discoveries. Its dark surface (Ceres reflects just one-fourth as much light as Vesta) indicates a water-rich interior; some researchers even speculate that it could have a mile-deep ocean under a frozen surface. Water raises the possibility of life, which automatically elevates asteroids in the cosmic pecking order. It also implies that Ceres is the largest intact piece of the raw material that built Earth into the wet, living world it is today. But without close-up observations, these ideas remain hypothetical.

“We have no meteorites, nothing that’s associated with Ceres,” says Tom McCord, a longtime asteroid hunter and an investigator on the Dawn mission. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
“Its surface looks like clay, which is the result of an interaction between water and rock. Where do you get clay on Earth? In riverbeds! Why would the surface of this asteroid be like the clay we see on Earth when we look at riverbeds? That is a mystery to us.”

Russell has spent much of the past 15 years fighting to get the crucial close-up of these two forgotten miniplanets. When a Delta II rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral (video) shortly after sunrise last September 27 and shoved Dawn onto its 3.2-billion-mile journey, he finally let out a deep sigh of relief; for a long time it had not been clear that NASA could muster the money and the technology to make the mission happen.

To conduct meaningful studies of both Vesta and Ceres, Dawn will be the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial bodies in a row, a major engineering challenge. Entering and leaving orbits require a lot of energy—too much energy, in fact, for a conventional rocket. What makes Dawn’s mission possible is a type of propulsion known as an ion engine.

Ion engines work by stripping electrons from the atoms of an inert gas such as xenon, making them positively charged. A negatively electrified grid at the back of the engine attracts the ions, accelerating them backward. The ions fly past the grid and out the back of the rocket, pushing the rocket forward. A typical ion engine provides 10 times the specific impulse of a conventional solid-fuel booster (specific impulse can be thought of as a spaceship’s miles-per-gallon rating). In gaining fuel efficiency, ion engines sacrifice thrust, the ability to deliver strong acceleration. On Earth they are useless because they are too weak to get off the ground. But in space they can slowly but steadily—and very efficiently—build up to extremely high velocities.

Russell got interested in ion engines in 1992, when he met Scott Benson, an engineer at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland (now the Glenn Research Center), who had recently begun experimenting with ion propulsion. In fact, NASA had explored the technology as far back as the 1960s but lost interest as the agency’s focus shifted to the space shuttle; ion engines had been developed only to make minor adjustments in the paths of Earth-orbiting satellites
http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
When NASA started its New Millennium program in the 1990s to develop innovative spaceflight technologies, research on ion thrusters began again, this time in earnest. “One of the features of ion propulsion is that it essentially allows you to fly on a smaller launch vehicle, at lower cost, to destinations that would require a larger vehicle with chemical propulsion,” says Benson. At first Russell’s instinct was to use ion propulsion to go back to the moon. As a postgraduate researcher on the Apollo program, he had developed instrumentation for the command module that measured the lunar magnetic field. With Benson he spent two years on a sequel of sorts, a lunar orbiter that used an ion engine, but the idea was passed over. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/He next worked up a proposal to go to Vesta but again failed to win backing from NASA. Russell suspects that ion propulsion was deemed too risky—it had never been used on a space probe. He tried to be philosophical: “Each time you lose,” he says, “you learn something.”



The challenge was to turn an engine intended for occasional use on a satellite into a trustworthy interplanetary thruster. Deep Space 1, an engineering test mission launched by NASA in 1998, demonstrated that an ion engine could be used to move around the solar system. “That excited people,” Russell says. “That was a winner.” In December 2001, NASA gave Dawn a green light.

“Dawn really reflects a big departure from what we used to do in planetary exploration,” Russell adds. “The way we’re probing these bodies is very cost-effective.” NASA considered the cost of exploring both Vesta and Ceres with chemical rockets and concluded that it would have required two missions at $750 million each, as opposed to Dawn’s sub-$500 million price tag. “We’re saving a billion dollars compared with what it would have cost us to do it any other way,” Russell says.

In Russell’s proposal, Dawn used the same basic engine design as Deep Space 1 but needed a larger xenon fuel tank and other changes to ensure the system would survive its eight-year mission. Making these alterations nearly doomed the project, forcing it way over its $373 million budget. “The design parameters of Dawn were ambitious,” says Tom Jones, a former shuttle astronaut and now a consultant to NASA. “No probe had ever gone to one body, slowed down and achieved orbit, and then turned around and gone to a second body. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/That puts a lot of stress on an engine, and you have to make it reliable.”

By October 2005 Dawn was $73 million over budget. That, combined with concerns over the fuel tank’s design and the mission’s management, prompted NASA to pull the plug, canceling the project altogether in March 2006. NASA was also scrambling for funds to cover President George W. Bush’s moon program. Despite having already spent hundreds of millions of dollars, administrators may have been willing to scrap Dawn to avoid spending any more. Russell insists the project’s technical troubles were nothing out of the ordinary for such a complicated mission, and that NASA’s decision to cancel the project was foolhardy. “I don’t have any logical reason for why they did that,” he says. “To throw away the roughly $300 million that had been invested was crazy. Why not just finish off the project and get a return on this investment?” Fortunately, NASA’s chief administrator, Michael Griffin, allowed an appeal, and the mission was reinstated.

Now journeying outward, Dawn is following a flight plan unlike that of a conventional spacecraft. To set course for Vesta, a chemical rocket would burn for a few minutes near Earth, putting it on a path that intersected Vesta’s orbit, and then burn again to enter that orbit. Dawn’s ion engine, by contrast, has to accelerate the spacecraft continuously for months on end, spiraling outward until its trajectory matches Vesta’s orbit. The thrust from each of Dawn’s three ion engines is minuscule, a force equivalent to that of the weight of a piece of paper resting on the palm of your hand. But an engine will be firing during 90 percent of the trip, building up a speed as high as that attained by any chemical rocket.

A Mars flyby in February 2009 will help things along, giving Dawn a gravitational kick. In August 2011 it will begin slowing down as it approaches and then settles into orbit about Vesta. The craft will fire up its engines again in May 2012 to set course for Ceres. It will arrive in February 2015, once again slowing down to enter orbit and snap photos.

Taking snapshots will be a major part of its mission, because Dawn is not exactly a flying lab bristling with instruments. It has only three—part of the trade-off necessary to keep its weight and cost under control. A camera will create detailed maps of the two asteroids, with a resolution of about 225 feet for Vesta and 400 feet for Ceres. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/A spectrometer will measure the light absorbed by the asteroids’ surfaces, which will tell much about their composition. And a gamma ray and neutron detector will measure cosmic radiation bouncing off the surface of the asteroids. (It will be able to scan several yards below Ceres’ surface, searching for ice or liquid water.) In addition, variations in Dawn’s radio signal will be monitored to provide information about the gravitational pull—hence the internal structure—of the asteroids.

During the years of proposals and rejections, Russell had plenty of time to think about what Dawn might find when it finally reached its mystery worlds. His interests naturally led him to McCord, another asteroid hunter, who had gotten into the business indirectly. At Caltech in the 1960s, McCord helped develop instruments for remote spectrometry—analyzing the light coming off planets and stars. The first thing McCord and his colleagues trained their new instruments on was the moon, but soon they began measuring everything in sight. They worked their way through the planets and down to the asteroids, and eventually Vesta found itself in their crosshairs.

“It doesn’t sound like exploration, but that’s the way it really works,” McCord says. “You’ve got an instrument and you just go out and do everything you can with it. New data are power in science, and if you can measure something 10 times better than somebody else can, you’re going to learn a lot of exciting things.”

McCord didn’t get around to looking at Vesta until the early 1970s, and even then he didn’t give it much thought until his team got around to processing the data. “I was in the lab one day and one of the guys pulled the Vesta spectrum out of the computer, which we had observed a week or a month before,” he says. “And my God, it had one of the most beautiful absorption features you ever saw on a planetary object.” The data indicated that Vesta was basaltic, which suggested that Vesta’s rocks had been heated to melting at some point and then cooled. The discovery also established that the HED meteorites and Vesta shared the same composition.

McCord and his researchers also looked at Ceres but didn’t get far. Ceres was darker and murkier, and it didn’t have the clearly identifiable spectrum of Vesta. McCord’s grad students set to work on the data and came up with some preliminary findings: Ceres was a carbonaceous chondrite (a type of asteroid composed of water locked in minerals and carbon-based materials), and it had not been thermally altered. In other words, it had never melted and cooled, as Vesta had. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/This posed more questions than it answered. How did a large asteroid evolve and retain significant amounts of water? Nobody had any theories to explain it, and the researchers dropped the subject.

When the Dawn mission was approved, much of the focus was on Vesta. “You’re human, so you’re generally interested in things you know about,” Russell admits. “If you don’t have any information, you don’t have that thing to grab your interest.” That attitude began to shift in 2002, when McCord took a sabbatical to Nantes, on France’s west coast. “I got to thinking about Ceres, and I learned that the people who had been doing the most careful orbit and mass determinations were at the University of Bordeaux, a two-hour drive to the south.” McCord went down and learned that researchers there had been able to make accurate estimates of Ceres’ density. Pure water has a density of 1 (measured in grams per cubic centimeter). A conventional dry asteroid, made of silicates with some iron mixed in, would have a density of 3 or 3.5; Vesta’s is thought to be in this range. Ceres has a density only slightly higher than 2. That means there is a lot of water in the mix.

McCord found the work of Christophe Sotin and his graduate students at the University of Nantes even more intriguing. Sotin had developed a computer model of how Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan, could have formed without its liquids boiling off. Although Titan is chemically very different from Ceres, it too contains a lot of water. Perhaps, thought McCord, some version of Sotin’s model could explain how Ceres could have formed with its water intact. “We began to see that it was easy for Ceres in the early, early history to have created a liquid ocean,” McCord says.

Here’s how the theory goes: In the early solar system, dust particles glommed together to form bigger dust particles, which formed pebbles, then rocks, and so forth, until they combined into an object up to several hundred miles in diameter. The original dust particles were made largely of silicates mixed with other materials, including water and aluminum 26, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of about 700,000 years. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/That’s just long enough to make a big difference in how an asteroid evolves. Vesta and most other asteroids, the theory goes, accreted quickly and accumulated a lot of aluminum 26 that had not yet decayed. The aluminum 26 produced so much heat inside the asteroid that any water evaporated into space. Ceres, by contrast, accreted more slowly, so by the time it formed, the aluminum 26 had already mostly burned itself out. As a result, Ceres retained most of its water—and a memory of the solar system’s original composition.

These findings ignited McCord’s interest in Ceres, to the point where “I kept demanding we go to Ceres first,” he says. Russell sympathizes. “If we had to pick which was the most interesting, Ceres or Vesta, it’s not clear which one would win,” he says.

The argument is moot: Vesta is closer than Ceres, and therefore it must be Dawn’s first stop. But Ceres may make the bigger headlines. Vesta seems like Mercury or the moon, writ on a smaller scale. Ceres is unique. Imaging of the surface may reveal whether there is indeed an ocean beneath an icy crust. Observing the surface should allow scientists to glean some idea of how the interior behaves—if there’s volcanic activity that could provide the heat to sustain life, for instance. Dawn’s spectrometer will be able to detect the presence of organic molecules.

Unfortunately, Dawn isn’t equipped to search for past or (dare we dream?) present life on Ceres. That would require penetrating the surface and taking and analyzing samples. “To detect life, you need a pretty sophisticated lab on the surface or in the interior or wherever the environment is,” McCord says. “That’s technically a major challenge and virtually impossible—nobody’s willing to spend the amount of money to do that.”

For now, at least. After Dawn’s visit, attitudes might change.


No one expects a 3-year-old who loves to dress like a princess to swear like a sailor.

But early exposure is not so uncommon. Who's to blame? Well, there's a pretty apt quote from a 1970 Pogo cartoon: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

The "us" are parents. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/A few weeks ago, I put a question out to hundreds of mothers on a local list-serv asking for anecdotes about the first time they heard their children use inappropriate words.

Many responses were similar to mom Julia Gordon of Silver Spring, Md. She was in her car, in a hurry and trying to park.

"The parking lot was crazy," says Gordon, a lawyer and mother of a four-year-old daughter. When someone sped into a parking space she had been waiting for, Gordon said under her breath, "He totally screwed me."

And a few minutes later, she heard her daughter parrot back the same phrase.

"I have to admit I did laugh at first," says Gordon. "Then I immediately stopped and told her, 'We don't say that word!'"

The Worst Swear Word of All

Psychologists say it's no surprise that children mimic words and phrases.

"That's just language learning. These words have no special status as taboo words," says Paul Bloom, Ph.D., of Yale University. "Learning they're taboo words is a later step."

Bloom explains that children are using words to communicate instinctively. They don't yet have the judgment to take a step back and think about whether a word is appropriate for a given situation.

Bloom remembers one day when his son Max, then 6, came home from school.






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Max asked in a hushed voice: "Dad, do you know what the worst swear word of all is?"

His son then went on to explain that "damn" must be the worst. When Bloom asked why, his son said, "I listen to my babysitter talk on the phone, and she uses the 'f' word, and the 's' word, but she never says 'damn!'"