Louis J Sheehan - 3.3.08.2

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3.3.08.2

Louis J. Sheehan Blog 3

Louis J Sheehan

3.3.08.2

Women with M.B.A.s are twice as likely to get divorced or separated as their male counterparts. The picture isn't much rosier for women with law or medical degrees.

That is the finding in a soon-to-be-published study by Washington & Lee University School of Law Prof. Robin Fretwell Wilson. Using a National Science Foundation survey of more than 100,000 professionals, Prof. Wilson analyzed data on newly minted professionals in business, law and medicine. Her conclusion: For women, a professional degree is often hazardous to marital health.

"It's like the Virginia Slims ad -- we've come so far -- but, man, we haven't come so far," says Prof. Wilson, herself a divorcée. "In a lot of ways women aren't getting the same deal as men." Unlike men, she says, "women can't have it all because there is a social stigma to having or being a stay-at-home spouse."

Much has been written about the growing "opt-out revolution" in which female professionals, buffeted by crosscurrents at work and at home, are exiting the workplace in droves. And the topic of female success and marital status has been explored by others. In 2001, for instance, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett collected data on high-achieving women, defined as being both high-earners and "super-credentialed" -- with graduate degrees, for example -- and found that the more women earned, the more likely they were to be single and without children.

What Prof. Wilson's study highlights is the large number of professionals -- particularly women -- who remain in the workplace but "opt out" of having families.

Women with M.B.A.s described themselves as divorced or separated more often than women with only bachelor's degrees (12% of female M.B.A.s compared with 11% of women with only bachelor's degrees) and more than twice as often as men with M.B.A.s (5% of whom reported being divorced or separated), according to Prof. Wilson's study. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
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The study will be published next week by the Witherspoon Institute as a chapter in a book to which Prof. Wilson contributed, "Rethinking Business Management."

According to Prof. Wilson's study, women with law or medical degrees divorce less often than those with only bachelor's degrees, but are still more likely to divorce or separate than their male counterparts (10% of women with law degrees and 9% of women with medical degrees, compared with 7% of male lawyers and 5.1% of male doctors).

Prof. Wilson also found that female professionals abstain from marriage at double and sometimes nearly triple the rate of men.

Ms. Hewlett believes more is at play than just a prevailing image that high-earning women are a threat to men. Suggesting that highly successful women are attracted to similarly successful men, she put forward the idea that such women "can't summon up the TLC and support that high-earning men need."

Her advice? Well-educated, highly compensated women should be targeting particularly loving and supportive men.

A few years ago, my sister called to tell me my mother had just been diagnosed with leukemia. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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After we hung up and I prepared to call my mom, I realized I had absolutely no idea what to say to her. It took me four hours to make the call.

I learned a lasting lesson that day: There isn't anything correct to say to someone reeling from the shock of a cancer diagnosis. But in helping my mom through her illness, I also discovered that some ways of showing support are better than others. And while there's no right approach, there may indeed be wrong things to say or do.
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Cancer survivors explain how support from friends and family was critical to fighting the disease.

Even as the medical community has gotten better at detecting and treating cancer early -- allowing many patients to live longer -- people are understandably overwhelmed by the devastating news of a diagnosis. So family and friends grapple with how to best offer comfort.

Not every cancer patient wants the same type of support. Some want to talk about their illness and accept help willingly. Others struggle to preserve their independence and behave, at least outwardly, as if nothing is wrong.

So how do you know how best to offer assistance to someone struggling with a serious illness? I posed this question to oncologists, psychologists and patients.

"Loved ones don't know what to do, and they don't want to make a terrible error," says Marisa Weiss, an oncologist and founder of Breastcancer.org, a nonprofit organization. "This fear keeps people from doing anything."
SUPPORTING ROLES

More help for patients and caregivers:
• www.breastcancer.org has message boards for patients and families.
• www.lotsahelpinghands.com emphasizes patients' practical needs.
• www.talkingaboutcancer.com deals with the emotional impact of cancer.
• www.carepages.com allows families to set up sites to share information about the person who is sick.

While that's the worst mistake you can make, experts say, there are a number of other slip-ups. Well-meaning friends and family members often ask inappropriate questions, such as the patient's prognosis. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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They offer theories on why their loved one got sick, give unsolicited advice or insist that "everything is going to be just fine."

When Lori Hope was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002, she says many people asked her if she had been a smoker. Some told her of people they knew who had died of cancer. One friend asked why she was going on vacation since she would probably worry the whole time. "People tend to rush in without thinking," she says.

In response, Ms. Hope wrote a book, "Help Me Live: 20 Things People with Cancer Want You to Know." Her advice: Admit you don't know what to say. Apologize in advance for doing or saying anything upsetting. Then be sure to tell your friend you will be there for her.

"Bumbling is OK," says Susan Brace, a psychologist in Evergreen, Colo., whose specialty is treating terminally ill patients. "You're in a situation you've never been in before, so you make up the rules as you go along."

In general, experts say, you should take your lead from the person who is sick. If she wants to talk about her illness, then listen. Don't be afraid of emotions. "Being there, listening and being supportive is a powerful role," Dr. Weiss says. "If the person feels comfortable crying in front of you, be honored, because you fulfilled a really important need."

What do you say to a loved one suffering from a potentially terminal illness? Beyond words, what can you do to show you care? Discuss

It's critical not to treat your friend just as a patient. So remember to ask about other aspects of her life, such as her children. Ask her permission before you share news of her illness with others. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
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Don't recommend books or treatments without first inquiring if she'd like to hear about them.

You should also ask exactly what type of help your loved one needs. You can offer to pick up groceries, provide transportation or return phone calls. And don't be deterred if your offer of help is declined. People who are diagnosed with a major illness often don't know what they will need at first. In addition, accepting help can be frightening for people accustomed to being independent. Keep offering help.

And if your friend, co-worker or family member isn't returning calls, don't take it personally. She may not have the energy or time to call you back. Stay in touch anyway.

As cancer awareness has grown in recent years, so have the resources to help people offer support to patients. Web sites for the American Cancer Society (www.cancer.org) and the National Cancer Institute (www.cancer.gov) offer information for caregivers, family and friends. There are books, too: "Help Me Live," by Ms. Hope; "What Can I Do to Help," by Deborah Hutton; "Cancer Etiquette," by Rosanne Kalick; "The Etiquette of Illness," by Susan P. Halpern.

In short, there is help for people who want to help their friends and loved ones. "You should be there for your friends," says Howard Leventhal, professor of psychology at Rutgers University and director of the Center for the Study of Health Beliefs and Behavior. "And being there doesn't require much more than enduring their pain and trying to be useful."

Medical-device makers, venture capitalists and surgeons are racing to turn a once-controversial weight-loss procedure into the next big thing in elective surgery.

Once dismissed by some surgeons as a gimmick, gastric banding -- in which a silicone band is wrapped around the upper stomach to restrict food intake -- is now the focus of a fierce competition pitting consumer-products giant Johnson & Johnson against Botox maker Allergan Inc. Venture-capital-backed outpatient centers are popping up to implant the bands. Growing ranks of surgeons are touting the procedure at free public seminars. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
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All see a vast market in a country where diet and exercise programs have failed to slow an obesity epidemic.

• What's New: Once dismissed as a gimmick, gastric banding is now seen by some in the medical industry as the next big thing in elective surgery.
• The Players: Industry giants Johnson & Johnson and Allergan, as well as venture-capital firms that are backing outpatient centers.
• Patient Concerns: The silicone device can shift after surgery, causing it to lose effectiveness. And patients may eventually need another surgery to replace or remove it.

Like any major surgery, gastric banding carries risks of infection and even death. The silicone device can shift after surgery, causing it to lose effectiveness. No one knows how long it will last inside the body, so patients may eventually need another surgery to replace or remove it. And some surgeons say the weight loss achieved through banding isn't as much as other weight-loss procedures. "There's no question that advertising and the commercialization of the band is what's driving it," says J.K. Champion, a bariatric surgeon in Atlanta. Bariatric is a medical term derived from the Greek word "baros" meaning "weight."

Weight-loss surgery remains rare, despite the fact that about a third of adult Americans are obese -- and despite evidence that the procedures improve overall health. Only an estimated 1% of the nation's 15 million morbidly obese people, typically those who are 100 pounds or more overweight, have undergone surgery. That may be partly due to the fact that the most popular weight-loss surgery to date has been gastric bypass, a more invasive procedure. Louis J Sheehan

A number of recent studies suggest that gastric banding is safer than gastric bypass, and some data suggest comparable, if slower, weight-loss results. Improvements in surgical techniques and follow-up care have helped gastric banding become the dominant weight-loss operation in Europe and Australia. Credit Suisse analyst Marc Goodman predicts that gastric banding will account for half of all weight-loss surgeries by 2010, up from about 30% today.

Treatment for Diabetes

And banding is emerging as a treatment for diabetes: It effectively cured the disease in 73% of treated adults who were lighter than people who typically undergo weight-loss surgery, according to an Australian study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January. Diabetes remission closely tracks weight loss.

Some parts of the country are already bombarded with gastric-banding ads. In one television spot airing in Texas for True Results, a Dallas-based chain of six outpatient centers, a young woman says, "I'm going to be around much longer for my family," after losing 178 pounds. Unlike the band makers, physicians and clinics can make advertising claims that aren't subject to the strict rules imposed by the Food and Drug Administration.
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"We see patients come into our office at the Cleveland Clinic who have heard about the band," says Philip Schauer, director of the Ohio-based Cleveland Clinic's bariatric and metabolic institute. He adds that the ads exert a powerful influence. "You don't see commercials for gastric bypass," he says.

In gastric bypass, the surgeon reroutes the gastrointestinal system. But gastric bands don't alter the body's basic plumbing. Tiny incisions are made in the abdomen, and a camera is passed through one of them so the surgeon can view the operation site on a video monitor. A band made of silicone is fastened around the upper stomach to create a small pouch that limits food intake.

Periodic Adjustments

After the band is installed, doctors make periodic adjustments depending on the patient's weight loss, food cravings and physical reactions to the band. Patients typically need four to six adjustments in the first year, and two or three in each of the next couple of years. If the band is removed, the patient may revert to old eating habits.

Not all surgeons have jumped on the bandwagon. Some believe gastric bypass is better for the super obese, who may be more than 200 pounds overweight. "We're finding patients have different demands," says Dr. Schauer.

What's more, the duration of weight loss for either procedure is still unknown. The possible complications of banding include slippage of the device or erosion into the stomach. Many health insurers are still reluctant to cover the procedures -- leaving patients to pay, or borrow, the $15,000 to $40,000 to finance the surgery.

But some patients are storming ahead anyway. "It's the best thing I've ever done for myself," says Patricia Zeolla, a 59-year-old teacher in New York City, who learned of the procedure via a Web site.

Concluding that gastric bypass is too "scary," Ms. Zeolla opted for gastric banding instead at New York's Lenox Hill Hospital; her insurer, initially resistant, eventually agreed to foot the bill after her surgeon intervened. In one year, Ms. Zeolla whittled her weight down to 166 pounds from 286 pounds.

The first adjustable gastric bands were implanted in Europe and Australia in the early 1990s. The procedure had many early detractors. A high rate of surgical complications made surgeons wary. Inamed Corp., the company pitching the Lap-Band, was better known for its breast implants and had a poor reputation with bariatric surgeons eager to distance themselves from cosmetic surgeons.

"There was a mind-set that gastric bypass was better," says Paul O'Brien, an author of the recent Australian diabetes study and director of the Centre for Obesity Research and Education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Dr. O'Brien did his first Lap-Band surgery in 1994 in Australia. Since then, he and his colleagues have studied thousands of patients.

Gastric banding exploded after 2006, when Inamed was acquired by Allergan, best known for the antiwrinkle drug Botox. Allergan bought Inamed for its portfolio of cosmetic medical devices, but "we quickly realized the real jewel was Lap-Band," David E.I. Pyott, chief executive officer, said recently at Allergan's offices in Irvine, Calif.

In November 2006, Allergan began advertising the Lap-Band directly to consumers, an unusual tactic for a surgical device. The company aired a television commercial featuring a distressed woman trying to "tame" a roaring lion pulling her to the refrigerator.

The campaign was an immediate success: Within a week, visits to Allergan's Lap-Band Web site had increased nearly fivefold. Sales of Lap-Band and other obesity-intervention devices soared 50% last year to $270 million, making them Allergan's fastest-growing product line.

Enter Johnson & Johnson. Last September, J&J's Ethicon Endo-Surgical unit received FDA marketing approval to sell its band, dubbed Realize. In recent months, J&J has been bringing obesity surgeons to weekend training sessions to teach them how to implant the device. Bariatric surgeons such as Alan Wittgrove of La Jolla, Calif., who once pooh-poohed banding, say that J&J's efforts are validating banding as an option.

Quiet Launch

In January, J&J quietly launched a snazzy Web site that has surgeons buzzing. The site, www.realizemysuccess.net, provides patients with a suite of customizable online tools. After receiving a personal code, a patient can create an image of himself or herself by answering a series of questions, then adjust the images to see how they would look 25 or 35 or 50 pounds lighter. Patients can send daily alerts to their cellphones at set times to remind themselves to avoid the office candy dish.

Patients can even see what they might look like in a new wardrobe, for instance, just as shoppers can when visiting retailer Lands' End's site. The site also helps surgeons track patients' weight-loss progress. Surgeons receive alerts if a patient doesn't come in for follow-up care, or begins gaining weight.

J&J says it spent nearly two years developing the site, which draws on ideas from other consumer businesses. The site's customizable options are intended to keep patients on track, since studies show that long-term success at weight loss is driven by what happens to change behavior after surgery, says Tom O'Brien, Ethicon's director of marketing. J&J adds that a media launch touting its Realize band is on the drawing board.

Despite Allergan's head start, Credit Suisse's Mr. Goodman expects J&J to grab a chunk of the market almost immediately. Although both companies charge roughly the same amount -- about $3,000 -- for their bands, J&J has a small army of specialized salespeople selling other bariatric surgery supplies and instruments.

Adapting Strategies

Allergan isn't backing down. Adapting strategies that built Botox into an iconic brand, Allergan is rolling out a new multimillion-dollar Lap-Band campaign. "If I lost the weight...I could stop taking so many medications," says one heavyset woman in a television spot that started airing in March. Shown on ABC, CBS and cable stations, the spot targets female audiences of daytime soap operas. Allergan has also revamped its Lap-Band Web site with a support program for patients before and after surgery.

In a bid to neutralize its disadvantages in the surgical market, Allergan recently signed a co-marketing pact with Covidien Ltd., J&J's largest competitor in the bariatric-surgery field. Covidien's sales force will scout out general surgeons interested in the banding business.

"We threw [J&J] a curveball with Covidien," Allergan's Mr. Pyott boasts. The arrangement also puts a third large company behind the push toward gastric banding, raising its profile, he adds. Mr. Pyott says he is focused on growing the overall market for banding, rather than defending Allergan's share vis-à-vis J&J.

Gastric banding is also being promoted by a growing number of outpatient banding centers. Backed by venture capitalists, the clinics buy specially designed waiting-room furniture, operating tables and scales to accommodate large people. Facilities are located a few steps from parking spaces to make access easier for outsized patients. The centers spend liberally on marketing to lure cash-paying customers. Banding typically costs $17,000, versus $25,000 for gastric-bypass surgery, though surgeons sometimes charge much more.

The American Institute of Gastric Banding, which operates the True Results clinics, says it has performed more than 11,000 surgeries since 2001. In Texas, "we basically took the Lasik playbook and ran it for banding," says founder Peter Gottlieb, referring to the popular eyesight-correction surgery. Closely held oBand Surgery Centers Inc., with surgery centers in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Orange, Calif., has a billboard on a busy boulevard in Los Angeles and is running commercials on the "Dr. Phil" and "Oprah Winfrey" television shows.

Then there is the growing number of surgeons who are joining the fray. Unlike gastric bypass, gastric banding is a relatively simple procedure, making it easy for surgeons to pick up.

Now, scores of surgeons across the country are touting weight-loss surgery at free seminars. Patients find them on Web sites sponsored by Allergan and J&J, as well as the Web sites of individual surgeons, hospitals and outpatient centers. The sites invite users to punch in a zip code to find seminars in their geographic area. JourneyLite, a network managed by closely held Bariatric Partners Inc., recently directed prospective patients to such a meeting in Ventura, Calif.

About 50 people, mostly middle-aged women, gathered in a nondescript room in the office suite of a local bariatric surgeon. Dressed in blue surgical scrubs, Helmuth Billy chatted for three hours about everything from the benefits of losing weight to the calories in a Starbuck's caramel macchiato coffee. The "personal cost of obesity" adds up to $15,568 a year, including medications and food, according to a slide Dr. Billy showed, which was provided by Allergan. The total turned out to be close to what the surgeon charges for surgery, including follow-up visits.

One of his patients, a dark-haired woman in her 50s, stood up. "My name is Sandi and I weighed 424 pounds in May 2004, before losing 250 pounds," said Sandi Henderson, who adds that she swims every morning and has tossed out her old medications. "I put my food-addiction money toward shopping and exercise," she laughed. Since her insurance specifically excluded bariatric surgery, Ms. Henderson says she used some of her retirement savings to pay for the procedure.

The band makers are hoping to change insurers' minds. While Inamed had employed only five people in its reimbursement department, Allergan has 100 people in that job today, and "we are monitoring how we're moving the needle," says Mr. Pyott. This year, the team is targeting major employers who make their own decisions about coverage.

Insurers are slowly loosening their purse strings. The federal agency that oversees the Medicare program instituted coverage for bariatric surgery in early 2006. That was followed by a favorable assessment on gastric banding last year from the BlueCross BlueShield Association, whose member health plans look to it for guidance. In September, the federal Tricare program, which provides coverage for 9.2 million active and retired U.S. military personnel, as well as their families, said it would cover gastric banding, retroactive to February 2007.

Allergan is also working to expand Lap-Band applications to younger and lighter patients. It is sponsoring human tests in teens between the ages of 14 and 17 as well as adults who aren't as heavy as most bariatric surgery candidates. To make the band adjustments easier, the company is developing a remote-control system that would allow surgeons to loosen or tighten the devices telemetrically.

Canis Major dwarf galaxy is located in the same part of the sky as the constellation of Canis Major. The galaxy contains a relatively high percentage of red giant stars, and is thought to contain an estimated one billion stars in all.

The Canis Major dwarf galaxy is classified as an irregular galaxy and is now thought to be the closest neighbouring galaxy to our location in the Milky Way, being located about 25,000 light-years away from our Solar System and 42,000 light-years from the Galactic Center. It has a roughly elliptical shape and is thought to contain as many stars as the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, the previous contender for closest galaxy to our location in the Milky Way.

The galaxy was first discovered in November 2003 by an international team of French, Italian, British and Australian astronomers. Although closer to the Earth than the centre of the galaxy itself, the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy was difficult to detect as it is located behind the plane of the Milky Way, where concentrations of stars, gas and dust are densest. This, along with its small size, explains why it was not discovered sooner.

The team of astronomers that discovered it were collaborating on analysis of data from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), a comprehensive survey of the sky in infrared light, which is not blocked by gas and dust as severely as visible light. Because of this technique, scientists were able to detect a very significant over-density of class M giant stars in a part of the sky occupied by the Canis Major constellation, along with several other related structures composed of this type of star, two of which form broad, faint arcs.

Astronomers believe that the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is in the process of being pulled apart by the gravitational field of the more massive Milky Way galaxy. The main body of the galaxy is extremely degraded. Tidal disruption causes a long filament of stars to trail behind it as it orbits the Milky Way, forming a complex ringlike structure sometimes referred to as the Monoceros Ring which wraps around our galaxy three times. The stream of stars was first discovered in the early 21st century by astronomers conducting the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It was in the course of investigating this ring of stars, and a closely spaced group of globular clusters similar to those associated with the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, that the Canis Major dwarf galaxy was discovered.

Globular clusters thought to be associated with the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy include NGC 1851, NGC 1904, NGC 2298 and NGC 2808, all of which are likely to be a remnant of the galaxy's globular cluster system before its accretion, or swallowing, into the Milky Way. NGC 1261 is another nearby cluster, but its velocity is different enough from that of the others to make its relation to the system unclear. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/

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The Canis Major Dwarf galaxy may also have associated open clusters, including Dol 25 and H18, and possibly AM-2. It is thought that the open clusters may have formed due to the dwarf galaxy's gravity perturbing material in the galactic disk and stimulating star formation.

The discovery of the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy and subsequent analysis of the stars associated with it has provided some support for the current theory that galaxies may grow in size by swallowing their smaller neighbors. Martin et al. believe that the preponderance of evidence points to the accretion of a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way which was orbiting roughly in the plane of the galactic disk.

A new study by Yazan Momany using 2MASS data casts doubts on the nature of the dwarf galaxy. The data suggests that the trail of stars is actually part of the warped galactic disc. This conclusion, however, is still being challenged and the true nature of the overdensity in Canis Major remains unknown.

NGC 5128 is a lenticular galaxy about 14 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. It is one of the closest radio galaxies to Earth, so its active galactic nucleus has been extensively studied by professional astronomers. The galaxy is also the fifth brightest in the sky, making it an ideal amateur astronomy target, although the galaxy is only visible from low northern latitudes and the southern hemisphere.

A relativistic jet which extracts energy from the vicinity of what is believed to be a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy is responsible for emissions in the X-ray and radio wavelengths. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/2008/03/22/try/
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By taking radio observations of the jet separated by a decade, astronomers have determined that the inner parts of the jet are moving at about one half of the speed of light. X-rays are produced farther out as the jet collides with surrounding gases resulting in the creation of highly energetic particles.

As observed in other starburst galaxies, a collision is responsible for the intense burst of star formation. Using the Spitzer Space Telescope scientists confirm that Centaurus A is going through a galaxy collision by devouring a spiral galaxy.

Centaurus A may be described as having a peculiar morphology. As seen from Earth, the galaxy looks like a lenticular or elliptical galaxy with a superimposed dust lane. The peculiarity of this galaxy was first identified in 1847 by John Herschel, and the galaxy was included in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies (published in 1966) as one of the best examples of a "disturbed" galaxy with dust absorption]. The galaxy's strange morphology is generally recognized as the result of a merger between two smaller galaxies.

The bulge of this galaxy is comprised mainly of evolved red stars. The dusty disk, however, has been the site of more recent star formation; over 100 star formation regions have been identified in the disk.

One supernova has been detected in Centaurus A[9]. The supernova, named SN 1986G, was discovered within the dark dust lane of Centaurus A by R. Evans in 1986[10]. The supernovae was later identified as a type IA supernova[11]. A type Ia supernova forms when a white dwarf's mass supersedes the maximum mass where it can support itself gravitationally, as may happen when a white dwarf in a binary star system strips gas away from the other star in the system. The white dwarf then collapses, the collapse triggers runaway fusion processes throughout the star, and the star explodes. SN 1986G was used to demonstrate that the spectra of type Ia supernovae are not all identical and that type Ia supernovae may differ in the way that they change in brightness over time[.

Centaurus A is at the center of one of two subgroups within the Centaurus A/M83 Group, a nearby group of galaxies. Messier 83 (the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy) is at the center of the other subgroup.
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http://louis0j0sheehan.livejournal.com/15433.htmlThese two groups are sometimes identified as one group and sometimes identified as two groups. However, the galaxies around Centaurus A and the galaxies around M83 are physically close to each other, and both subgroups appear not to be moving relative to each other.

Centaurus A is located approximately 4° north of Omega Centauri (a globular cluster visible with the naked eye). Because the galaxy has a high surface brightness and relatively large angular size, it is an ideal target for amateur astronomy observations. The bright central bulge and dark dust lane are visible even in finderscopes and large binoculars, and additional structure may be seen in larger telescopes.

M104/NGC 4594 is an unbarred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo. It has a bright nucleus, an unusually large central bulge, and a prominent dust lane in its inclined disk. The dark dust lane and the bulge give this galaxy the appearance of a sombrero. The galaxy has an apparent magnitude of 9.0, making it a galaxy that can easily be seen with amateur telescopes. The large bulge, the central supermassive black hole, and the dust lane all attract the attention of professional astronomers.

The Sombrero Galaxy was discovered in May 1781 by Pierre Méchain, who described the object in a May 1783 letter to J. Bernoulli that was later published in the Berliner Astronomisches Jahrbuch. Charles Messier made a hand-written note about this and five other objects (now collectively recognized as M104 - M109) to his personal list of objects now known as the Messier Catalogue, but it was not "officially" included until 1921. William Herschel independently discovered the object in 1784 and additionally noted the presence of a "dark stratum" in the galaxy's disk, what is now called a dust lane. Later astronomers were able to connect Méchain's and Herschel's observations.

In 1921, Camille Flammarion found Messier's personal list of the Messier objects including the hand-written notes about the Sombrero Galaxy. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
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This was identified with object 4594 in the New General Catalogue, and Flammarion declared that it should be included in the Messier Catalogue. Since this time, the Sombrero Galaxy has been known as M104.

In the 1910s, Vesto Slipher discovered that the spectra of several galaxies, including the Sombrero Galaxy, are redshifted. The average velocity calculated from these redshifts was 400 km/s. The redshift for the Sombrero Galaxy itself was calculated to be 1100 km/s. Slipher's spectra were among the first observations of the expansion of the universe, one of the key pieces of evidence for the Big Bang Theory.

Slipher also detected rotation within the spectra of the Sombrero Galaxy. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
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His observations of galaxy rotation are among the first ever performed.

As noted above, this galaxy's most striking feature is the dust lane that crosses in front of the bulge of the galaxy. This dust lane is actually a symmetric ring that encloses the bulge of the galaxy.[8] Most of the cold atomic hydrogen gas[9] and the dust[8] lies within this ring. The ring might also contain most of the Sombrero Galaxy's cold molecular gas,[8] although this is an inference based on observations with low resolution and weak detections.[10][11] Additional observations are needed to confirm that the Sombrero galaxy's molecular gas is constrained to the ring. Based on infrared spectroscopy, the dust ring is the primary site of star formation within this galaxy.[8]

The nucleus of the Sombrero galaxy is classified as a low ionization nuclear emission region. These are nuclear regions where ionized gas is present, but the ions are only weakly ionized (i.e. the atoms are missing relatively few electrons). The source of energy for ionizing the gas in LINERs has been debated extensively. Some LINER nuclei may be powered by hot, young stars found in star formation regions, whereas other LINER nuclei may be powered by active galactic nuclei (highly energetic regions that contain supermassive black holes). Infrared spectroscopy observations have demonstrated that the nucleus of the Sombrero Galaxy is probably devoid of any significant star formation activity. However, a supermassive black hole has been identified in the nucleus (as discussed in the subsection below), so this active galactic nucleus is probably the energy source that weakly ionizes the gas in the Sombrero Galaxy.

In the 1990s, a research group led by John Kormendy demonstrated that a supermassive black hole is present within the Sombrero Galaxy. Using spectroscopy data from both the CFHT and the Hubble Space Telescope, the group showed that the speed of rotation of the stars within the center of the galaxy could not be maintained unless a mass 1 billion times the mass of the Sun, or 109M☉, is present in the center. This is among the most massive black holes measured in any nearby galaxies.

At radio and X-ray wavelengths, the nucleus is a strong source of synchrotron emission. Synchrotron emission is produced when high velocity electrons oscillate as they pass through regions with strong magnetic fields. This emission is actually quite common for active galactic nuclei. Although radio synchrotron emission may vary over time for some active galactic nuclei, the luminosity of the radio emission from the Sombrero Galaxy only varies 10-20%.

In 2006, two groups published measurements of the submillimeter radiation from the nucleus of the Sombrero Galaxy at a wavelength of 850 micrometres. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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This submillimeter emission was found not to originate from the thermal emission from dust (which is commonly seen at infrared and submillimeter wavelengths), synchrotron emission (which is commonly seen at radio wavelengths), bremsstrahlung emission from hot gas (which is uncommonly seen at millimeter wavelengths), or molecular gas (which commonly produces submillimeter spectral lines). http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
The source of the submillimeter emission remains unidentified.

The Sombrero Galaxy has a relatively large number of globular clusters. Observational studies of globular clusters in the Sombrero Galaxy have produced estimates of the population in the range of 1200 to 2000. The ratio of the number of globular clusters to the total luminosity of the galaxy is high compared to the Milky Way and similar galaxies with small bulges, but the ratio is comparable to other galaxies with large bulges. These results have been repeatedly used to demonstrate that the number of globular clusters in galaxies is thought to be related to the size of the galaxies' bulges. The surface density of the globular clusters generally follows the light profile of the bulge except for near the center of the galaxy.

At least two methods have been used to measure the distance to the Sombrero Galaxy.

The first method relies on comparing the measured fluxes from planetary nebulae in the Sombrero Galaxy to the known luminosities of planetary nebulae in the Milky Way. This method gave the distance to the Sombrero Galaxy as 29.0 ± 2.0 Mly (8.9 ± 0.6 Mpc).

The other method used is the surface brightness fluctuations method. This method uses the grainy appearance of the galaxy's bulge to estimate the distance to it. Nearby galaxy bulges will appear very grainy, while more distant bulges will appear smooth. Early measurements using this technique gave distances of 30.6 ± 1.3 Mly (9.4 ± 0.4 Mpc).Later, after some refinement of the technique, a distance of 32 ± 3 Mly (9.8 ± 0.8 Mpc) was measured.[26] This was even further refined in 2003 to be 29.6 ± 2.5 Mly (9.1 ± 0.8 Mpc).

The average distance measured through these two techniques is 29.3 Mly (9.0 Mpc) with an uncertainty of 1.6 Mly (0.5 Mpc).[a]

The Sombrero Galaxy lies within a complex, filament-like cloud of galaxies that extends to the south of the Virgo Cluster.However, it is unclear as to whether the Sombrero Galaxy is part of a formal galaxy group. Hierarchical methods for identifying groups, which determine group membership by considering whether individual galaxies belong to a larger aggregate of galaxies, typically produce results showing that the Sombrero Galaxy is part of a group that includes NGC 4487, NGC 4504, NGC 4802, UGCA 289, and possibly a few other galaxies. However, results that rely on the percolation method (i.e. the "friends-of-friends" method), which links individual galaxies together to determine group membership, indicate that either the Sombrero Galaxy is not in a group or that it may only be part of a galaxy pair with UGCA 287.

The Sombrero Galaxy is located 11.5° west of Spica and 5.5° northeast of Eta Corvi.Although the galaxy is visible with 7x35 binoculars or a 4 inch amateur telescope an 8 inch telescope is needed to distinguish the bulge from the disk,and a 10 or 12 inch telescope is needed to see the dark dust lane.

The M51 Group is located to the southeast of the M101 Group and the NGC 5866 Group. The distances to these three groups (as determined from the distances to the individual member galaxies) are similar, which suggests that the M51 Group, the M101 Group, and the NGC 5866 Group are actually part of a large, loose, elongated structure. However, most group identification methods (including those used by the references cited above) identify these three groups as separate entities.

Blue stragglers (BSS) are stars in open or globular clusters that are hotter and bluer than other cluster stars having the same luminosity. Thus, they are separate from other stars on the cluster's Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Blue straggler stars appear to violate standard theories of stellar evolution, in which all stars born at the same time should lie on a clearly defined curve in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, with their positions on that curve determined solely by their initial mass. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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Since blue stragglers often lie well off this curve, they may undergo abnormal stellar evolution.

The cause of this is not yet clearly known, but the leading hypothesis is that they are current or former binary stars that are in the process of merging or have already done so. The merger of two stars would create a single star with larger mass, making it hotter and more luminous than stars of a similar age. If this theory is correct, then blue stragglers would no longer cause a problem for stellar evolution theory; the resulting star would have more hydrogen in its core making it behave like a much younger star. There is evidence in favor of this view, notably that blue straggler stars appear to be much more common in dense regions of clusters, especially in the cores of globular clusters. Since there are more stars per unit volume, collisions and close-encounters are far more likely in clusters than among field stars.

One way to test this hypothesis is to study the pulsations of variable blue straggler stars. The asteroseismological properties of merged stars may be measurably different from those of normal pulsating variables of similar mass and luminosity. However, the measurement of pulsations is very difficult, given the scarcity of variable blue stragglers, the small photometric amplitudes of their pulsations, and the crowded fields these stars are often found in.

Blue stragglers rapidly rotate at a rate of 75 times that of the Sun's rotation. They appear to be two to three times the mass of the other cluster stars present. The most recent research reveals that nearby stars to blue stragglers have significantly less carbon and oxygen than their neighbors. This suggested that one star becomes hotter and bluer by pulling material from an orbiting star. The star that has had material stolen from it has deep regions exposed that show areas where the star’s original carbon had fused into heavier elements. It will later die.

When it comes to "energy independence," American politics has discovered a new spirit of bipartisanship. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all call for it, in one form or another -- in the name of fighting global terrorism, global warming or merely global price spikes at the pump. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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And of course the phrase is a cliché outside the world of politics, too, showing up in earnest op-eds and green-shaded pronouncements. Well, Robert Bryce is having none of it.

In "Gusher of Lies," Mr. Bryce declares that "energy independence is hogwash." There is not a chance in the world, he says, that we're going to kick our "oil addiction." Our economy runs on oil and will continue to do so for a long time to come. There are no "Manhattan Projects" on the horizon. Not even the big bad oil companies are "energy independent" anymore. Mr. Bryce notes that oil companies now own only 10% of the world's oil reserves. Everything else is claimed by national governments.

And trends don't favor an American version of energy independence anyway. As U.S. onshore production has slowly played out, the western Gulf of Mexico has been punctured like a pincushion. And yet the eastern Gulf (i.e., Florida) and the East and West coasts won't let drilling rigs anywhere near their waters. And don't even mention the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, still untouchable.

No, the gushers are elsewhere these days. America's oil production peaked in 1970; non-OPEC oil production peaked about five years ago. Oil power is shifting even more toward the Persian Gulf. Jubail (a port in Saudi Arabia) and Dubai (in the United Arab Emirates) are fast becoming industrial and financial centers on a scale to defy the Western imagination. Halliburton moved its top executives to Dubai in 2007, and little wonder.

What about the imperatives that are so often evoked on behalf of "energy independence"? On global warming, Mr. Bryce is an agnostic, but he notes that, with China adding the equivalent of France to its electrical grid every year -- 90% of it in coal -- talk about reducing global carbon emissions is just prattle. As for the geopolitical aspect of energy independence -- starving bad regimes into reform -- Mr. Bryce believes it to be wishful thinking. We're never going to isolate Iran, he argues. The Iranians are building pipelines to Pakistan and India and signing multibillion-dollar natural-gas deals with China. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
"The one being isolated on the energy front isn't Iran," he argues; "it's the U.S." If by some miracle oil prices were to plunge dramatically (the result of energy independence and a drop in demand), "there's no evidence -- none -- to support the assertion," Mr. Bryce claims, "that an oil price crash will lead to reform" in troublesome Islamic countries.

Instead we should be thinking of energy "interdependence" in a world where we, quite properly, export what we have in abundance and import what we can't produce for ourselves. The search for "alternative" fuels is, in Mr. Bryce's view, a costly byway. He saves particular scorn for ethanol, "the largest scam in our nation's history," assembling 50 pages of evidence to show that, if anything, the energy-intensive effort to distill ethanol out of the nation's corn crop diminishes our energy supply. Yet ethanol production has become entangled with that other impossible-to-repeal boondoggle, agricultural subsidies.

For all his confidence and expertise, Mr. Bryce can be a little weak in some areas. He rightly notes that both American and Canadian natural-gas production has peaked, but then he talks casually about importing vast quantities from Russia and Iran. Bringing this gas across the oceans, however, will involve liquefying it, adding a huge price premium -- if we ever get the receiving terminals built in the first place. Even with "energy interdependence," natural gas is going to be much more expensive in the future. On nuclear energy, Mr. Bryce is even weaker. At one point he refers to uranium as a "fossil fuel"; and he doesn't seem to grasp nuclear's greater-by-orders-of-magnitude energy potential.

Mr. Bryce's ultimate counsel -- that we should forget about what Arab countries are doing with their petrodollars and learn to get along -- is also hard to accept. It ignores all those stories about the third cousins of oil sheiks showing up in al Qaeda training camps with suitcases full of cash. But it's hard to ignore Mr. Bryce's main point -- that politicians and pundits are woefully uninformed about energy. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
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When you hear a presidential candidate or a TV talking head calling for energy independence, or claiming that we can reduce carbon emissions by 60% or 70%, or pointing to windmills, ethanol and solar panels as the energy future of the American economy, you can be fairly certain that they are wasting their own energy on false promises and futile schemes.

Brown dwarfs, a term coined by Jill Tarter in 1975, were originally called black dwarfs, a classification for dark substellar objects floating freely in space which were too low in mass to sustain stable hydrogen fusion (the term black dwarf currently refers to a white dwarf that has cooled down so that it no longer emits heat or light). Alternative names have been proposed, including Planetar and Substar.

Early theories concerning the nature of the lowest mass stars and the hydrogen burning limit suggested that objects with a mass less than 0.07 solar masses for Population I objects or objects with a mass less than 0.09 solar masses for Population II objects would never go through normal stellar evolution and would become a completely degenerate star (Kumar 1963). The role of deuterium-burning down to 0.012 solar masses and the impact of dust formation in the cool outer atmospheres of brown dwarfs was understood by the late eighties. They would however be hard to find in the sky, as they would emit almost no light. Their strongest emissions would be in the infrared (IR) spectrum, and ground-based IR detectors were too imprecise at that time to readily identify any brown dwarfs.

Since those earlier times, numerous searches involving various methods have been conducted to find these objects. Some of those methods included multi-color imaging surveys around field stars, imaging surveys for faint companions to main sequence dwarfs and white dwarfs, surveys of young star clusters and radial velocity monitoring for close companions.

For many years, efforts to discover brown dwarfs were frustrating and searches to find them seemed fruitless. In 1988, however, University of California at Los Angeles professors Eric Becklin and Ben Zuckerman identified a faint companion to GD 165 in an infrared search of white dwarfs. The spectrum of GD 165B was very red and enigmatic, showing none of the features expected of a low-mass red dwarf star. It became clear that GD 165B would need to be classified as a much cooler object than the latest M dwarfs then known. GD 165B remained unique for almost a decade until the advent of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) when Davy Kirkpatrick, out of the California Institute of Technology, and others discovered many objects with similar colors and spectral features.

Today, GD 165B is recognized as the prototype of a class of objects now called "L dwarfs". While the discovery of the coolest dwarf was highly significant at the time, it was debated whether GD 165B would be classified as a brown dwarf or simply a very low mass star, since observationally, it is very difficult to distinguish between the two.

Interestingly, soon after the discovery of GD 165B other brown dwarf candidates were reported. Most failed to live up to their candidacy however, and with further checks for substellar nature, such as the lithium test, many turned out to be stellar objects and not true brown dwarfs. When young (up to a gigayear old), brown dwarfs can have temperatures and luminosities similar to some stars, so other distinguishing characteristics are necessary, such as the presence of lithium. Stars will burn lithium in a little over 100 Myr, at most, while most brown dwarfs will never acquire high enough core temperatures to do so. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
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Thus, the detection of lithium in the atmosphere of a candidate object ensures its status as a brown dwarf.

In 1995 the study of brown dwarfs changed dramatically with the discovery of three incontrovertible substellar objects, some of which were identified by the presence of the 6708 Li line. The most notable of these objects was Gliese 229B which was found to have a temperature and luminosity well below the stellar range. Remarkably, its near-infrared spectrum clearly exhibited a methane absorption band at 2 micrometres, a feature that had previously only been observed in gas giant atmospheres and the atmosphere of Saturn's moon, Titan. Methane absorption is not expected at the temperatures of main-sequence stars. This discovery helped to establish yet another spectral class even cooler than L dwarfs known as "T dwarfs" for which Gl 229B is the prototype.

Since 1995, when the first brown dwarf was confirmed, hundreds have been identified. Brown dwarfs close to Earth include Epsilon Indi Ba and Bb, a pair of dwarfs gravitationally bound to a sunlike star, around 12 light-years from the Sun.

The standard mechanism for star birth is through the gravitational collapse of a cold interstellar cloud of gas and dust. As the cloud contracts it heats up. The release of gravitational potential energy is the source of this heat. Early in the process the contracting gas quickly radiates away much of the energy, allowing the collapse to continue. Eventually, the central region becomes sufficiently dense to trap radiation. Consequently, the central temperature and density of the collapsed cloud increases dramatically with time, slowing the contraction, until the conditions are hot and dense enough for thermonuclear reactions to occur in the core of the protostar. For most stars, gas and radiation pressure generated by the thermonuclear fusion reactions within the core of the star will support it against any further gravitational contraction. Hydrostatic equilibrium is reached and the star will spend most of its lifetime fusing hydrogen into helium as a main-sequence star.

If, however, the mass of the protostar is less than about 0.08 solar mass, normal hydrogen thermonuclear fusion reactions will not ignite in the core. Gravitational contraction does not heat the small protostar very effectively, and before the temperature in the core can increase enough to trigger fusion, the density reaches the point where electrons become closely packed enough to create quantum electron degeneracy pressure. According to the brown dwarf interior models, typical conditions in the core for density, temperature and pressure are expected to be the following:

        \rho_c \sim 10 - 10^3 g/cm^3
        T_c \lesssim 3 \times 10^6 K
        P_c \sim 10^5 Mbar

Further gravitational contraction is prevented and the result is a "failed star", or brown dwarf that simply cools off by radiating away its internal thermal energy.

Lithium: Lithium is generally present in brown dwarfs and not in low-mass stars. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx
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Stars, which achieve the high temperature necessary for fusing hydrogen, rapidly deplete their lithium. This occurs by a collision of Lithium-7 and a proton producing two Helium-4 nuclei. The temperature necessary for this reaction is just below the temperature necessary for hydrogen fusion. Convection in low-mass stars ensures that lithium in the whole volume of the star is depleted. Therefore, the presence of the lithium line in a candidate brown dwarf's spectrum is a strong indicator that it is indeed substellar. The use of lithium to distinguish candidate brown dwarfs from low-mass stars is commonly referred to as the lithium test, and was pioneered by Rafael Rebolo and colleagues.

    * However, lithium is also seen in very young stars, which have not yet had a chance to burn it off. Heavier stars like our sun can retain lithium in their outer atmospheres, which never get hot enough for lithium depletion, but those are distinguishable from brown dwarfs by their size.
    * Contrariwise, brown dwarfs at the high end of their mass range can be hot enough to deplete their lithium when they are young. Dwarfs of mass greater than 65 MJ can burn off their lithium by the time they are half a billion years old[Kulkarni], thus this test is not perfect.

Methane: Unlike stars, older brown dwarfs are sometimes cool enough that over very long periods of time their atmospheres can gather observable quantities of methane. Dwarfs confirmed in this fashion include Gliese 229B.

Luminosity: Main sequence stars cool, but eventually reach a minimum luminosity which they can sustain through steady fusion. This varies from star to star, but is generally at least 0.01% the luminosity of our Sun. Brown dwarfs cool and darken steadily over their lifetimes: sufficiently old brown dwarfs will be too faint to be detectable.

A remarkable property of brown dwarfs is that they are all roughly the same radius, more or less the radius of Jupiter. At the high end of their mass range (60-90 Jupiter masses), the volume of a brown dwarf is governed primarily by electron degeneracy pressure[2], as it is in white dwarfs; at the low end of the range (1-10 Jupiter masses), their volume is governed primarily by Coulomb pressure, as it is in planets. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
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The net result is that the radii of brown dwarfs vary by only 10-15% over the range of possible masses. This can make distinguishing them from planets difficult.

In addition, many brown dwarfs undergo no fusion; those at the low end of the mass range (under 13 Jupiter masses) are never hot enough to fuse even deuterium, and even those at the high end of the mass range (over 60 Jupiter masses) cool quickly enough that they no longer undergo fusion after some time on the order of 10 million years. However, there are other ways to distinguish dwarfs from planets:

Density is a clear giveaway. Brown dwarfs are all about the same radius; so anything that size with over 10 Jupiter masses is unlikely to be a planet.

X-ray and infrared spectra are telltale signs. Some brown dwarfs emit X-rays; and all "warm" dwarfs continue to glow tellingly in the red and infrared spectra until they cool to planet like temperatures (under 1000 K).

Some astronomers believe that there is in fact no actual black-and-white line separating light brown dwarfs from heavy planets, and that rather there is a continuum. For example, Jupiter and Saturn are both made out of primarily hydrogen and helium, like the Sun. Saturn is nearly as large as Jupiter, despite having only 30% the mass. Three of the giants in our solar system (Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune) emit more heat than they receive from the Sun. And all four giant planets have their own "planetary systems" -- their moons. In addition, it has been found that both planets and brown dwarfs can have eccentric orbits.

Currently, the International Astronomical Union considers objects with masses above the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium (currently calculated to be 13 Jupiter masses for objects of solar metallicity) to be a brown dwarf, whereas those objects under that mass (and orbiting stars or stellar remnants) are considered planets.

The defining characteristic of spectral class M, the coolest type in the long-standing classical stellar sequence, is an optical spectrum dominated by absorption bands of titanium oxide (TiO) and vanadium oxide (VO) molecules. However, GD 165B, the cool companion to the white dwarf GD 165 had none of the hallmark TiO features of M dwarfs. The subsequent identification of many field counterparts to GD 165B ultimately led Kirkpatrick and others to the definition of a new spectral class, the L dwarfs, defined in the red optical region not by weakening metal-oxide bands (TiO, VO), but strong metal hydride bands (FeH, CrH, MgH, CaH) and prominent alkali lines (Na I, K I, Cs I, Rb I). As of April 2005, over 400 L dwarfs have been identified (see link in references section below), most by wide-field surveys: the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), the Deep Near Infrared Survey of the Southern Sky (DENIS), and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

As GD 165B is the prototype of the L dwarfs, Gliese 229B is the prototype of a second new spectral class, the T dwarfs. Whereas near-infrared (NIR) spectra of L dwarfs show strong absorption bands of H2O and carbon monoxide (CO), the NIR spectrum of Gliese 229B is dominated by absorption bands from methane (CH4), features that were only found in the giant planets of the solar system and Titan. CH4, H2O, and molecular hydrogen (H2) collision-induced absorption (CIA) give Gliese 229B blue near-infrared colors. Its steeply sloped red optical spectrum also lacks the FeH and CrH bands that characterize L dwarfs and instead is influenced by exceptionally broad absorption features from the alkali metals Na and K. These differences led Kirkpatrick to propose the T spectral class for objects exhibiting H- and K-band CH4 absorption. As of April 2005, 58 T dwarfs are now known. NIR classification schemes for T dwarfs have recently been developed by Adam Burgasser and Tom Geballe. Theory suggests that L dwarfs are a mixture of very low-mass stars and sub-stellar objects (brown dwarfs), whereas the T dwarf class is composed entirely of brown dwarfs.

The majority of flux emitted by L and T dwarfs is in the 1 to 2.5 micrometre near-infrared range. Low and decreasing temperatures through the late M, L, and T dwarf sequence result in a rich near-infrared spectrum containing a wide variety of features, from relatively narrow lines of neutral atomic species to broad molecular bands, all of which have different dependencies on temperature, gravity, and metallicity. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx
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Furthermore, these low temperature conditions favor condensation out of the gas state and the formation of grains.

Typical atmospheres of known brown dwarfs range in temperature from 2200 down to 750 K (Burrows et al. 2001). Compared to stars, which warm themselves with steady internal fusion, brown dwarfs cool quickly over time; more massive dwarfs cool more slowly than less massive ones.

Coronagraphs have recently been used to detect faint objects orbiting bright visible stars, including Gliese 229B.
Sensitive telescopes equipped with charge-coupled devices (CCDs) have been used to search distant star clusters for faint objects, including Teide 1.
Wide-field searches have identified individual faint objects, such as Kelu-1 (30 ly away)

Recent observations of known brown dwarf candidates have revealed a pattern of brightening and dimming of infrared emissions that suggests relatively cool, opaque cloud patterns obscuring a hot interior that is stirred by extreme winds. The weather on such bodies is thought to be extremely violent, comparable to but far exceeding Jupiter's famous storms.

X-ray flares detected from brown dwarfs since late 1999 suggest changing magnetic fields within them, similar to those in very low-mass stars.

A brown dwarf Cha 110913-773444 located 500 light years away in the constellation Chamaeleon may be in the process of forming a mini solar system. Astronomers from Pennsylvania State University have detected what they believe to be a disk of gas and dust similar to the one hypothesized to have formed our own solar system. Cha 110913-773444 is the smallest brown dwarf found to date (8 Jupiter masses) and if it formed a solar system it would be the smallest known object to have one. Their findings were published in the Dec. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal

Modern life is loud. The jolting buzz of an alarm clock awakens the ears to a daily din of trucks idling, sirens blaring, televisions droning, computers pinging and phones ringing — not to mention refrigerators humming and air-conditioners thrumming. But for the 12 million Americans who suffer from severe tinnitus, the phantom tones inside their head are louder than anything else.
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Often caused by prolonged or sudden exposure to loud noises, tinnitus (pronounced tin-NIGHT-us or TIN-nit-us) is becoming an increasingly common complaint, particularly among soldiers returning from combat, users of portable music players, and aging baby boomers reared on rock ’n’ roll. (Other causes include stress, some kinds of chemotherapy, head and neck trauma, sinus infections, and multiple sclerosis.)

Although there is no cure, researchers say they have never had a better understanding of the cascade of physiological and psychological mechanisms responsible for tinnitus. As a result, new treatments under investigation — some of them already on the market — show promise in helping patients manage the ringing, pinging and hissing that otherwise drives them to distraction.

The most promising therapies, experts say, are based on discoveries made in the last five years about the brain activity of people with tinnitus. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/
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With brain-scanning equipment like functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers in the United States and Europe have independently discovered that the brain areas responsible for interpreting sound and producing fearful emotions are exceptionally active in people who complain of tinnitus.

“We’ve discovered that tinnitus is not so much ringing in the ears as ringing in the brain,” said Thomas J. Brozoski, a tinnitus researcher at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Springfield.

Indeed, tinnitus can be intense in people with hearing loss and even those whose auditory nerves have been completely severed. In the absence of normal auditory stimulation, the brain is like a driver trying to tune in to a radio station that is out of range. It turns up the volume trying but gets only annoying static. Richard Salvi, director of the Center for Hearing and Deafness at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said the static could be “neural noise” — the sound of nerves firing. Or, he said, it could be a leftover sound memory.

Adam Edwards, a 34-year-old co-owner of a wheel repair shop in Dallas, said he developed tinnitus four years ago after target shooting with a pistol. “I had all the risk factors,” he said. “I grew up hunting, I played drums in a band, I went to loud concerts, I have a loud work environment — everything but living next to a missile launch site.” His tinnitus, which he described as a “computer beeping” sound, was so intense and persistent that he needed sedatives to sleep at night.

Mr. Edwards says he has gotten relief from a device developed by an Australian audiologist, which became widely available in the United States last year. Manufactured by Neuromonics Inc. of Bethlehem, Pa., it looks like an MP3 player and delivers sound spanning the full auditory spectrum, digitally embedded in soothing music.

Similar to white noise, the broadband sound, tailored to each patient’s hearing ability, masks the tinnitus. (The music is intended to ease the anxiety that often accompanies the disorder.) Patients wear the $5,000 device, which is usually not covered by health insurance, for a minimum of two hours a day for six months. Since completing the treatment regimen last year, Mr. Edwards said his tinnitus had “become sort of like Muzak at a department store — you hear it if you think about it, but otherwise you don’t really notice.”

A small, company-financed study in the journal Ear & Hearing in April 2007 indicated that the Neuromonics method was 90 percent successful at reducing tinnitus. A larger study is under way to determine its long-term effectiveness.

Anne Howell, an audiologist at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders at the University of Texas at Dallas, said the Neuromonics device was a big improvement over older sound therapies that required wearing something that looked like a hearing aid all the time and took 18 to 24 months.

“The length of time was discouraging for many patients,” she said. “And a lot of them told me that wearing something that looks like a hearing aid would cause a problem in their professional life.”

Other treatments showing promise include surgically implanted electrodes and noninvasive magnetic stimulation, both intended to disrupt and possibly reset the faulty brain signals responsible for tinnitus. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Using functional M.R.I. to guide them, neurosurgeons in Belgium have performed the implant procedure on several patients in the last year and say it has suppressed tinnitus entirely.

But the treatment is controversial. “It’s a radical option and not proven yet,” said Jennifer R. Melcher, an assistant professor of otology and laryngology at Harvard Medical School.

The magnetic therapy, similar to treatments used for depression and chronic pain, involves holding a magnet in the shape of a figure eight over the skull. Clinicians use functional M.R.I. to aim the magnetic pulses so they reach regions of the brain responsible for interpreting sound. Patients receive a pulse every second for about 20 minutes. “It works for some people but not for others,” said Anthony Cacace, professor of communication science and nerve disorders at Wayne State University in Detroit. Since tinnitus has so many causes, Dr. Cacace said, the challenge now is to find out which “subsets of patients benefit from this treatment.”

Researchers in Brazil have published a study indicating that a treatment called cranial-sacral trigger point therapy can relieve tinnitus in some head and neck trauma cases by releasing muscles that constrict hearing and neural pathways.

And drugs intended to treat alcoholism, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and depression that alter levels of various neurotransmitters in the brain like serotonin, dopamine and gamma-aminobutyric acid have quieted tinnitus in some published animal and human studies.

“We’ve never been so hopeful,” said Dr. Salvi, of SUNY Buffalo, “of finding treatments for a disorder that haunts people and follows them everywhere they go.”

Archimedes said he could move the Earth if given a place to stand.

That galley slave would have known that the rowing stations in the middle of the ship were best, although he might not have known why. That took scholars to figure out. “Think of the oar as a lever,” Prof. Mark Schiefsky of the Harvard classics department said. “Think of the oarlock as a fulcrum, and think of the sea as the weight.”

The longer the lever arm on the rower’s side of the fulcrum, the easier to move the weight. In the middle of the ship, as the rowers knew, the distance from hands to oarlock was longest.

This explanation is given in Problem 4 of the classical Greek treatise “Mechanical Problems,” from the third century B.C., the first known text on the science of mechanics and the first to explain how a lever works. It preceded, by at least a generation, Archimedes’ “On the Equilibrium of Plane Figures,” which presented the first formal proof of the law of the lever.

Dr. Schiefsky teaches Greek and Latin as his day job and reads Thucydides and Sophocles in ancient Greek for fun. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
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He also majored in astronomy as an undergraduate, and about nine years ago, feeling science-deprived, he joined a multinational research endeavor called the Archimedes Project, based at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

The Archimedes team studies the history of mechanics, how people thought about simple machines like the lever, the wheel and axle, the balance, the pulley, the wedge and the screw and how they turned their thoughts into theories and principles.

The textual record begins with “Mechanical Problems,” moves to Rome and then through the medieval Islamic world to the Renaissance. It ends, finally, with Newton, who described many of the basic laws of mechanics in the 18th century.

There are a surprising number of old, and extremely old, scientific texts that have survived the ravages of time in one form or another. The Archimedes Web site lists far more than 100, including Euclid’s geometry, Hero of Alexandria’s Roman-era technical manual on crossbows and catapults, medieval treatises on algebra and mechanics by Jordanus de Nemore and Galileo’s 17th-century defense of a heliocentric solar system.

The nice thing for Dr. Schiefsky is that hardly anyone reads the stuff. Scientists generally are not into ancient Greek or Latin, let alone Arabic, and most of Dr. Schiefsky’s colleagues work on literature, philosophy, philology or archaeology. In fact, Dr. Schiefsky suggests “about 100 people” worldwide work on both science and the classics.

By following the historical record, the Archimedes researchers have discovered that the evolution of physics — or, at least, mechanics — is based on an interplay between practice and theory. The practical use comes first, theory second. Artisans build machines and use them but do not think about why they work. Theorists explain the machines and then derive principles that can be used to construct more complex machines.

The Archimedes researchers say that by studying this dialectic they can better understand what people knew about the natural world at a given time and how that knowledge may have affected their lives.

“What do you do when you want to weigh a 100-pound piece of meat and you don’t have a 100-pound counterweight?” Dr. Schiefsky asked. “You use an unequal-armed balance, with a small weight on the long arm and the meat on the short arm.”

The uneven balance, known as a steelyard, is a kind of lever, and Dr. Schiefsky notes that it has a cameo in Aristophanes’ “Peace,” a comic fantasy about ending the Peloponnesian War. When a furious arms dealer cannot figure out what to do with a surplus war trumpet, Trygaeus, the central character, suggests pouring lead in the bell to make a steelyard.

Referring to the mouthpiece, Trygaeus says, “Attach at this end a scale-pan hung on cords, and you’ll have the very thing to weigh out figs to your servants out in the country.”

Natural-gas producers are swarming into Pennsylvania to chase what many are betting could be the next big thing: a thick wedge of gas-bearing rock called the Marcellus Shale.

The recent surge in interest was triggered by disclosures in the fall from producer Range Resources Corp. of Fort Worth, Texas, that it had drilled a well there producing more than three million cubic feet of natural gas a day, proving that Marcellus Shale wells can be profitable. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com/

Since then, Range has reported wells that produce even more gas.

• Rising Interest: Natural-gas producers are swarming to the state to drill in a potentially hot production area.
• Difficult Area: Lack of equipment and manpower has impeded some efforts.
• The Risk: The area hasn't yet shown that producers will find major gas deposits.

The result is a land rush unmatched anywhere else in North America as companies try to snap up drilling acreage on a giant swath of rock stretching from West Virginia across Pennsylvania to the northeast corner of the state, 90 miles from New York City.

Range Resources plans to spend $426 million in Appalachia this year. Other out-of-state companies, such as EOG Resources Inc., Chesapeake Energy Corp. and Anadarko Petroleum Corp., have either begun drilling or are planning to drill wells targeting the Marcellus Shale.

Wall Street has recently awakened to the potential earnings power of these Pennsylvania wells, but analysts contend they still could be undervalued. "Even though these stocks have done well, to say the market has fully captured the potential is laughable," says Subash Chandra, an energy analyst with Jefferies & Co. Range Resources' shares were at $64.31 apiece as of 4 p.m. New York Stock Exchange composite trading, up from $34.01 a year earlier.

A relatively clean-burning fuel, natural gas is in growing demand. About half of U.S. homes use natural gas, and it generates about a fifth of the nation's electricity. Meanwhile, natural-gas prices have gone above $6 per million British thermal units for the past three years, triple their historical average. Prices recently topped $10 per million BTUs before falling back and ended Tuesday at $9.72 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Estimates of the Marcellus Shale's supplies vary widely. In 2002, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated there may be 1.9 trillion cubic feet. Earlier this year, Terry Engelder, a Pennsylvania State University geosciences professor, made what he called a conservative estimate of 168 trillion cubic feet. http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com/
http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/His estimate has yet to be confirmed. By comparison, the U.S. consumed 23.05 trillion cubic feet last year, according to the Energy Information Administration, or about 63.2 billion cubic feet a day.

Still, there have been relatively few completed Marcellus Shale wells, and it isn't clear whether the rock will produce prolific wells across the state or only in certain pockets. Companies could be spending a lot of money leasing acres and drilling wells in counties where there won't be enough gas for the wells to offer a reasonable return.

Information about the potential of the Marcellus gas field has emerged slowly because of Pennsylvania rules that allow companies to keep well-production data and drilling logs confidential for five years, compared with about 60 days in Texas. While Range has told Wall Street analysts about its wells, it hasn't disclosed where the wells are.

"Why would we educate anybody else?" says Ray Walker, Range's head of Appalachian shale production. The best way to protect shareholders, he says, "is to keep information close at hand." In the fall, after Range personnel caught someone snooping around their wellhead reading the production meter, Mr. Walker padlocked covers on well-production meters.

The technique for drilling into shale rock to harvest natural gas was pioneered outside Fort Worth about six years ago. Since then, the Texas Barnett Shale has gone from obscurity to the most prolific domestic gas field in the continental U.S. That one field produces about 3.5 billion cubic feet a day, or about eight times more than all of Pennsylvania in 2006, which is the latest data available.

Gas producers hope they can do the same for the Marcellus, but development in Pennsylvania has been slowed by a lack of equipment. Drilling rigs capable of penetrating deep into the complex rock formations needed to be imported from Texas, Wyoming and other active energy regions. Experienced crews capable of fracturing the dense shale in order to coax out the gas also had to be brought in.

Now, oil-field services firms are slowly expanding operations in the region, raising another obstacle. Jefferies analyst Mr. Chandra says development of the shale could be slowed by a culture clash generated by hard-charging Texas and Oklahoma energy companies "doing business in a way that hasn't been done before" in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania has had an oil and gas industry for more than a century, but it's been dominated by small companies that tend to drill low-cost, low-risk wells that produce a fraction of the gas that companies believe they can coax from a Marcellus Shale well. But these small, local companies long ago locked up most of the drillable acreage.

To gain access, out-of-state companies are opening up their checkbooks to sign deals with local companies sitting on large swathes of acreage. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com/
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"We've never seen this kind of money around here," says Terry Jacobs, president of family-owned Penneco Oil Co. He cut a deal last year to allow Range to drill wells on leases he holds.

It isn't uncommon to find drilling crews filled with Texans and Oklahomans. On a recent morning, Jared Griffith, a third-generation Texas oil hand, sat with his crew inside an oil-field office trailer. Almost all were Texans. "I never thought I'd be north of the Mason-Dixon line," says Mr. Griffith, an operations manager for Frac Tech Services Ltd., a drilling-services firm based in Cisco, Texas.

Leasing prices for land still available for drilling has skyrocketed along with the out-of-state influx. Near Williamsport, Pa., a drilling lease that fetched $5 an acre in 2003 now can fetch $2,000 an acre, local residents say. Those kind of prices are "unheard of in our part of the world," says Rich Weber, president of Atlas Energy Resources LLC, based in Moon Township, Pa.

Range's Mr. Walker has worked to smooth over relations with local landowners. The company contributed $35,000 so Hickory, Pa., could buy a bronze statue of a farmer to commemorate the region's agricultural history. At last year's local Washington County Youth Livestock Show, Range bought the champion steer for $12,285. "I thought it was cheap," Mr. Walker says.

Now available in the family planning sections of Rite Aid stores throughout the midstate: A DNA-based paternity test kit.

Though it's not admissible in court, the kit's maker hopes it can offer peace of mind.

But some authorities said paternity is more complex than mere biology, and the results could leave families struggling for answers.

DNA tests have been sold online and through mail order for years, but the Identigene DNA Paternity Test Kit might be the first available over a drugstore counter.

Rite Aid, based in East Pennsboro Twp., and Identigene, of Salt Lake City, Utah, began test-marketing the kits in California, Washington and Oregon in November.

"We thought that if each store could sell at least one unit per month with minimal ads and do consistently well for two to three months, we would consider that successful for the new product launch," said Doug Fogg, Identigene's chief operating officer. Some stores sold more than one a month, he said.

Rite Aid decided to sell the kits in its 3,463 stores in 30 states because "it's our goal to be the first to market innovative health care products, and it makes this technology available in an affordable manner," said Cheryl Slavinsky, a Rite Aid spokeswoman.

The kits, which sell for $19.99, contain cotton swabs to collect cheek cells from the alleged father, child and mother. http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
The buyer then returns the individually marked DNA samples to Identigene, which charges $120 to determine if man and child are related.

Such "self-collection" or "private" DNA tests are not admissible in Pennsylvania courts, said Stacy Witalec, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Welfare, which administers county domestic relations.

Legally admissible tests, which Identigene also can provide, require a certified third party to collect DNA samples and verify the participants' identify, Fogg said.

Rite Aid does not train its pharmacists to answer customers' questions about home-test kits, including paternity, pregnancy, diabetes and drug tests, Slavinsky said.

"There is a detailed instruction booklet with the Identigene kit with frequently asked questions that are pretty clear," Slavinsky said. "And there is also a toll-free number where the Identigene DNA test consultants are available."

Buyers who don't get help interpreting the findings is a concern for Michael J. Green, a bioethics teacher and researcher at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.

"It's hard to tell what the consequences of these sorts of things are going to be, and it's important for people to understand that what it takes to be a family is not merely genetic," Green said. "It's social as well as genetic. Somebody is a father because they take care of and raise and nurture and care for a person, not just because they happen to share the same genetic material."

For the DNA Paternity Test, Identigene requires consent from all participants or a child's parent or guardian, Fogg said, although the company cannot always weed out forged signatures.

Without informed consent, Green worried whether "people will have full understanding of the implications of such things."

"Children, especially if they're young, are unable to give consent, and chances are, if you're talking about this sort of testing, there may be some contention or disharmony in the family unit," he said.

Fogg said that pregnancy tests also created a stir when they become available over the counter.

"Similar to an early pregnancy test, this is a test that essentially gives confirmation to something that people already know anyway," he said.

Dauphin County's domestic relations office has not dealt with anyone who tried to use a private test to prove a paternity case, spokeswoman Diane McNaughton said. http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com/
County judges order paternity tests based on the child's interest, and a subcontractor performs the tests, she said.

"While court officials acknowledge that this kit is probably the wave of the future, important safeguards must be in place," she said. "The Rite Aid kits may lead to more challenges of paternity, but the county will continue to rely on reputable DNA testers and determine, through a petition and/or a hearing, whether the test is in the best interests of the child."

Purity of Essence

TF 121

The Phoenicians, especially those from the city of Tyre, are most famously credited with discovering how to manufacture a dye extracted from of the sea mollusk or murex. This secretion made clothing purple or reddish-purple. It was a very expensive and unusually durable dye in the Mediterranean region, sold from at least the 14th century B.C. Recent scholars point to evidence that Minoans discovered the dye in the 18th century B.C. The highest quality purple dye soon became the color of only the wealthiest, like kings. It was also used on ceremonial garments.

In antiquity, as is still true today, different statuses are associated with specific colors. At a funeral in the West, mourners expect the widow to wear black or some other dark, somber hue.

A virginal bride in the U.S. is expected to wear white and if someone obviously not a virgin wears a white gown, it occasionally leads to snickering. In Greek artwork about the Trojan War, a certain type of conical cap, which we call a Phrygian cap, identifies its wearer as Trojan. In Republican Rome, freed slaves had red Phrygian caps. Also in Republican Rome, after a great military victory, a general's troops might proclaim the leader imperator, and so help him on his way to the granting of a triumph. The cloak that identified the imperator was purple.

During the period of the Roman Empire, the title imperator came to be used for the one-man ruler or princeps. We call him emperor. Assuming the purple meant putting on the purple cloak of the imperator. This signalled the fact that the person so doing had become emperor.

Here's another passage about assuming the purple, from an abridgment of Eutropius Roman History. Book IX

    Gallienus, who was made emperor when quite a young man, exercised his power at first happily, afterwards fairly, and at last mischievously. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com/
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In his youth he performed many gallant acts in Gaul and Illyricum, killing Ingenuus, who had assumed the purple, at Mursa, and Regalianus

Constantinene, emperors wore diadems in imitation of the Persian kings. Today we speak of the crowning of kings. The crowning of a king is very much like the emperor assuming the purple.

A few weeks ago, I received a dreaded phone call at 8:30 a.m. telling me he wasn't going to make it. The "he" in this case was my car, and the bearer of bad news was my mechanic. My 1994 Saab bit the dust when its timing belt broke, and after discussions about the cost of the repair versus the value of the car, I accepted the fact that I'd need to start looking at buying another vehicle.

I headed online to start researching (I was looking for a used car) but was overwhelmed by an avalanche of information. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Everyone seemed to have something to say about cars, whether in blogs, community forums, editorial reviews, Kelley Blue Book values, Carfax reports or local dealer sites. As I discussed my findings with friends and family, more people than not were surprised to hear about the variety of research and price comparisons available online.

This week's column is an overview of sites that may help you or someone you know browse for a new or used car on the Web. I used sites ranging from trusted resources like ConsumerReports.org to search engine tools like Yahoo Autos. This column can't possibly mention every car-searching resource on the Web; rather, it's just a taste of what's available.

Edmunds.com and ConsumerReports.org both feature informative data on a number of new and used vehicles. Edmunds is a free site specifically geared toward cars, including an online magazine for enthusiasts called Inside Line and a Web forum for discussions about automobiles called CarSpace. I used various tools on Edmunds.com, including one that estimates the true cost to own a specific car over time. I especially enjoyed reading an article titled "Confessions of a Car Salesman," which proved uncanny in predicting a range of tricks and techniques the salespeople used when I first visited a car dealership.

Edmunds offers a four-step pricing system, which includes getting quotes from dealers, and a payment calculator, which estimates monthly payments. Edmunds teams up with AutoTrader.com to help perform searches for certified pre-owned or used cars online.

Consumer Reports covers products as well as cars but keeps much of its most useful data behind a Web-site subscription, which costs $26 annually or $5.95 monthly (magazine subscribers can pay a discounted price of $19 a year). You need this subscription to access CR's respected ratings and certain sections of its Web forums. These ratings were helpful to me, as they assessed numerous aspects of specific car models, including trouble spots by year, performance, safety and fuel economy.

CR also offers valuable lists such as "All Recommended Cars," "Best and Worst Used Cars" and "Reliable Used Cars by Price." A car-buying calculator is an asset to this site that helps you decide whether it would be smarter to buy or lease a vehicle.

Google, Yahoo and AOL all present special search-results pages when you search for a specific car for sale, using drop-down menus and various ways to sort results. Google Base for automobiles, found by selecting "Vehicles" from www.google.com/base, is a list of data submitted to Google. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Drop-down menus help broaden or narrow results by sorting the data according to certain attributes, such as make or price. Vehicle-search results can be viewed in one of three formats: List View, Table View or Map View -- an illustration of each car's location in relationship to a Zip Code. I found Table View most useful because it organized data in smart, spreadsheet-like displays so I could quickly skim through columns listing price, color, amenities and mileage.

But not all car searches within Google Base returned the same drop-down-menu options for sorting. In a few instances, I couldn't sort my search results by model year. Google Base does show the date on which each car was listed.

Yahoo Autos, found at www.autos.yahoo.com, teamed up with Cars.com to offer richer content, including a Car Finder feature that helps people narrow down what type of new car they might like according to price, driving style and fuel (type and economy). Yahoo even tries to answer car questions with its Yahoo Answers Q&A tool, which lets people submit questions. I found user reviews on this site, as well as expert reviews provided by NewCarTestDrive.com, an auto-review site.

The used-car section in Yahoo Autos reminded me of Google with its drop-down menus and results that displayed in list or map views. List view shows plenty of information in one glance, including an image of the car for sale and the number of additional available photos. From this list, users can link directly to view or order Carfax reports or email the dealer, saving time wasted on excess mouse clicks and browsing.

AOL Autos, found at http://autos.aol.com, does a nice job of integrating Web 2.0 features such as pop-up menus that appear within a page rather than in an entirely new Web page. Vehicle-search results are found by entering a few criteria for a new or used car, and used-car results can be further narrowed by adding or subtracting desired specifics listed on the far left of the screen. Some specs include model type, engine, year or extras like heated seats or a sunroof.

This site can also condense numerous used-car listings into one graph that illustrates car prices in relationship to mileage or year. Selecting any point on the graph reveals a short description of a vehicle's location, price and mileage. For new cars, AOL Autos offers lengthy expert reviews from NewCarTestDrive.com, as well as user reviews.

Both Yahoo Autos and AOL Autos walk users through steps to get price quotes from dealers for new cars.

Carfax.com provides car-history reports using vehicle-identification numbers, or VINs. For a $30 fee, used-car buyers can use Carfax.com for 30 days. This report shows a vehicle's history such as if it was a rental or not, how many different owners it had, how long each owner possessed the vehicle and where it came from.

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Tips pop up within these reports, including one that warned me about "curbstoning," a term that describes an individual without a dealer's license looking to sell a number of cars by posing as a private seller.

As can be expected, many newspaper Web sites offer automobile sections that display digitized classified ads, so be sure to check your local paper's Web site.

At the end of the day, test-driving a car will be a true test as to whether or not you like it -- no matter how much research you've done online. But knowing your stuff before you visit a dealership can save money and time.



The U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday, hearing arguments over a Washington, D.C., ban on handguns, appeared ready to affirm a constitutional right for individual gun ownership.

But it was less clear how and to what extent the high court might invalidate the D.C. law, which is the strictest set of gun regulations in the country.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court's key swing vote, stated his position on the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution early in the arguments, giving gun rights supporters on the high court a likely majority on a divided court.

"In my view it supplements it, saying there is a general right to bear arms," Justice Kennedy said, explaining he believes the Second Amendment covers both the right of states to form militias and the rights of individuals to own guns.

The Supreme Court hasn't ruled directly on the Second Amendment in almost 70 years. It also over time has offered little guidance on the extent to which the amendment covers individual gun ownership for self-defense, hunting and recreational shooting. In taking up the D.C. handgun ban, the court said it would decide whether a federal appeals court properly concluded the city's laws violated the Second Amendment because it bars individuals from owning handguns.

The court allotted extra time beyond the usual hour it gives for oral arguments in appeals. http://louis-j-sheehan.myblogvoice.com/louis-j-sheehan-1023071-205297.htm
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Walter Dellinger, a veteran advocate before the court, appeared in support of D.C. and argued the Second Amendment refers to military needs and doesn't extend to rights for individuals. "The second clause -- to keep and bear arms -- is referred to in a military context," Mr. Dellinger said.

A pro-gun advocate holds up a sign outside the Supreme Court, as the court heard arguments in an attempt to overturn D.C.'s firearms ban.

Early in his presentation, Mr. Dellinger encountered critical questioning from conservatives on the court. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia in particular challenged Mr. Dellinger's reading of the Second Amendment.

U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, arguing on the side of challengers to the D.C. laws, said they violate the Constitution. "The Second Amendment as it is written guarantees an individual right," Mr. Clement said. He urged the Supreme Court to find a broad right for individual gun ownership that he said may even extend to machine guns, because those guns are routinely issued to military personnel.

Alan Gura, an Alexandria, Va., attorney representing the law's challengers, urged the justices to reject the entire set of D.C. gun regulations. "We have here a ban on all guns for all people in all homes at all times," Mr. Gura said. "That is too broad and too sweeping under any review."

Moderate and liberal members of the court made it clear they didn't see a broad individual gun ownership right. Justice John Paul Stevens several times turned to the political context in which the Second Amendment was written, noting that language in Pennsylvania and Vermont constitutions that covered self-defense rights were rejected during development of the Second Amendment.

It wasn't clear, however, whether the case would split 5-4 with Justice Kennedy voting on the conservative side. Justice Stephen Breyer asked several hypothetical questions that assumed an individual right but focused closely on whether the D.C. gun ban is reasonable given the level of criminal violence the city has faced.

The Supreme Court could affirm a lower court ruling that declared the D.C. handgun ban unconstitutional and it could outline guidelines for what is allowed and not allowed in the law.

The D.C. law, on the books since 1976, bans handgun registration, bars concealed weapons possession and require shotguns and rifles to be registered and then kept unloaded and disassembled or locked.

The law was challenged by six D.C. residents who said they wanted to legally possess handguns in their homes for self-protection. A U.S. District Court threw out the challenge, but a panel of the Washington-based U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived one of the claims and ruled a special police officer, the now-retired Dick Heller, was wrongly denied a handgun permit.

The D.C. Circuit added the city can't ban handguns in the home or require that residents keep their guns dismantled or equipped with a trigger lock.

A decision in the case, D.C. v. Heller, is expected by July.

In its only ruling of the day, the Supreme Court upheld Washington's open primary election system. By a 7-2 vote, the court said the state may use a primary system that allows the top two vote-getters to advance to the general election, even if they are from the same party.

Tuesday's decision is the second of two this year on the rights of political parties. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
Washington never held a primary under the new system because of legal challenges.

Athletes who take human growth hormone may not be getting the boost they expected.

While growth hormone adds some muscle, it doesn't appear to improve strength or exercise capacity, according to a review of studies that tested the hormone in mostly athletic young men.

"It doesn't look like it helps, and there's a hint of evidence it may worsen athletic performance," said Hau Liu, of Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, Calif., who was lead author of the review.

Growth hormone, or HGH, is among the performance enhancers baseball stars Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte were accused of taking in Sen. George Mitchell's report. Mr. Clemens denies using the hormone, while Mr. Pettitte admits using it.

The new research has some limitations and sheds no light on long-term use of HGH. The scientists note their analysis included few studies that measured performance. The tests also probably don't reflect the dose and frequency practiced by athletes illegally using the hormone.

Dr. Liu and his colleagues at Stanford University sought to find out if growth hormone could improve performance. They looked for the best published tests, those comparing participants who got the hormone to those who didn't get the treatment.
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They analyzed 27 studies involving 440 participants. The results were released yesterday by the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Researchers found that those who got the hormone put on about five pounds more of muscle and lost about two pounds more of fat, although the fat loss wasn't statistically different. The researchers said some of the extra body mass could be fluid buildup.

There was no difference found in strength or exercise stamina between the two groups, but there were only two strength studies and eight that measured exercise.

For love, some would twist the laws of physics. Short of doing that, mantis shrimp communicate with the other sex by spinning light waves, biologists find. The feat seems to be unique to this animal.

Alone in the animal kingdom, mantis shrimp may use the physics phenomenon of circularly polarized light to signal their presence to—and to see—potential mates.

Light is made of electromagnetic waves. These are electric and magnetic fields that wiggle perpendicular to each other and to a light ray's direction. Many invertebrates have sophisticated eyes that can detect wavelengths of light invisible to humans. Some, including bees, can also distinguish linearly polarized light. That's when a light ray's electric field wiggles not in varying directions, but rather in one precise direction that forms a right angle to the ray.

Researchers now show that mantis shrimp—which actually look more like small lobsters—can tell when light is circularly, rather than linearly, polarized. That means that the electric field twists like a corkscrew as the light ray moves. http://louis1j1sheehan.blog.ca/
The corkscrew can twist right or left—or, in biological terms, be right- or left-handed.

Roy Caldwell of the University of California, Berkeley, suspected that one species of mantis shrimp, Odontodactylus cultrifer, might be able to distinguish circular polarizations. Animals in this species, especially adult males, are rare. But 2 years ago, thanks to a tip from a crustacean enthusiast, Caldwell obtained a 4 inch-long adult male originally from Indonesia.

The shrimp had a fin with shades of red that looked more or less intense when seen through filters for right- or left-handed circular polarization. This trait was rare enough, but not unique in the animal kingdom. Caldwell's collaborators at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia also took a closer look at the eyes of O. cultrifer and of two similar species to see whether the animals could distinguish between right- and left-handed polarization.

The researchers found that some of the eyes' light-sensing cells doubled up as filters, explains Tom Cronin of UMBC. The cells have microscopic structures, like bristles of a toothbrush, that slightly slow light with electric fields parallel to the bristles, but not light with fields that are perpendicular. As a result, the twist of a circularly polarized wave will be flattened into a steady, linearly polarized wiggle, which another layer of sensory cells can then detect. Depending on their arrangement, bristled cells will select right- or left-handed polarization. This parsing enables mantis shrimp to distinguish the two types of light.

Meanwhile, the team trained mantis shrimp to feed from one of a few different tubes based on the circular polarization in the tubes' reflected light. Results appear online in Current Biology.

Caldwell says the skill, unknown in other animals, most likely helps the shrimp find mates. "It's the most private communication system imaginable," he says. http://louis1j1sheehan.blog.ca/
"No other animal can see it."

Hundreds of years ago in Japan, people offered thanks to the gods by sacrificing a horse or a pig. Horses and pigs, however, were valuable and expensive, so poor folks had a hard time expressing their gratitude. So they came up with a solution: Rather than sacrificing a horse, they would simply draw a painting of a horse on a wooden tablet and hang it in the temple.

Then someone, most likely an impoverished samurai, realized that horses and pigs were hardly the only thing that could be drawn on a tablet. He had the idea of painting something original, something beautiful, something creative. He offered mathematics.

This tablet was hung in the Kinshouzan shrine in the Gifu Prefecture in 1865. It shows 12 different geometric problems. The third problem from the right was presented by a 16-year-old girl.

Hundreds of beautifully painted, multi-colored wooden tablets showing problems and theorems of geometry have adorned Japanese temples. They are called "sangakus," which simply means mathematical tablets. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com/
The text on the tablets is written in an ancient form of Chinese, which was the language of scholars, much like Latin in the West. Only in the past couple of decades have these tablets been translated into modern languages in significant numbers.

A Japanese mathematics teacher, Hidetoshi Fukagawa, has been finding, translating, and researching the tablets. This spring, Fukagawa and Tony Rothman of Princeton University will publish a complete history of sangaku, including photographs of many sangakus that have never before been seen outside of Japan.

"Sangakus are exceptional," Rothman says. "They're not only exceptionally beautiful, but the problems are often exceptionally difficult. And the solutions can be very clever. http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com/
Some of the things they do to solve these problems would never have occurred to me."

The sangakus were made during a period when Japan was mostly isolated from the outside world. The shogun leaders expelled all the foreign missionaries and forbade Japanese from leaving the country on pain of death in the early 1600s. The result was a kind of renaissance in Japan, with a flowering of unique cultural traditions like tea ceremonies, puppet theater, and woodblock prints.

At the same time, the shoguns persuaded the samurai warriors to lay down their weapons and become government functionaries. The pay, however, was low, so the samurai often moonlighted with other jobs. One of these outside jobs was to teach mathematics in the schools.

This tablet was created in 1814, but it was only discovered in 1994 when the temple it was in was about to be destroyed.

Isolated from the development of calculus taking place in the West, these mathematicians and their students created a kind of home-grown geometry with a uniquely Japanese character. Many of the problems were based on origami or folding fans, for example.

Here is an example of a sangaku problem. Take a circle and draw a polygon inside it, with each corner of the polygon on the circle. Choose one of the vertices of the polygon and connect lines from it to all the other vertices, dividing the polygon up into triangles. Within each one of those triangles, draw a circle that just touches each side of the triangle. The sum of the radii of those circles will be constant, no matter which vertex you chose.

One sangaku shows that the sum of the radii of the small circles in each of these drawings will be the same.

Most sangakus simply state the theorem and provide a diagram, but they don't provide a proof, and this one is no exception. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com/
The most straightforward way to prove it relies on Carnot's Theorem, which wasn't proven in the West until 100 years after the sangaku was created.

Rothman believes that sangakus were not just religious offerings, but "acts of bravado and challenges to other people to solve the problem." For example, one sangaku proclaims, "'This answer is correct to 15 decimal places,'" Rothman says. "It's kind of like, 'top that if you can!'"

Starting around 1800, several collections of sangaku problems were made into books, including the solutions, so researchers know the original methods for many of the problems. But a couple of sangakus are unsolved to this day. "One of them results in an equation of the 1024th degree," Rothman says. "A mathematician later got very famous for reducing it to a problem of the 10th degree, but that's still way too big to solve. We have no idea how they did it."

The Kaizu Tenma Shrine in the Shiga prefecture has a sangaku under the right eave which contains 30 problems. It's 10 inches high and 17 feet long.

A few years ago Avishai Dekel gave up chess in favor of mud wrestling. Dekel is a cosmologist and he isn't known to frequent strip clubs. http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
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But there are two types of cosmologists: those who study fundamentals, like the initial conditions and content of the early universe, and those who immerse themselves in the messier problem of galaxy evolution, replete with gas and stars that heat and cool, form jets, make black holes, and sometimes explode.

A computer simulation models how matter may accumulate into large-scale structures, the beginnings of galaxy formation. Illustrated is a patch of the cosmos 100 million light-years across. Yellow lines trace the flow and grouping of matter as it moves toward the red, or densest area, and away from the black, or least dense area.
Martin Rees of the University of Cambridge in England calls the two classes of cosmologists chess players and mud wrestlers. Cosmology is "a fundamental science just as particle physics is," says Rees. "The first million years [of the universe] is described by a few parameters ... but the cosmic environment of galaxies and clusters is now messy and complex."

Now that the chess players have established those basic parameters—such as the relative amounts of invisible dark matter, even-more mysterious dark energy, and ordinary matter—more cosmologists are turning to the mud. http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com/

Recent surveys of the shapes, colors, and masses of galaxies have put a new focus on the nitty-gritty of galaxy formation.

"Now that we know the cosmological parameters, it's really time to understand how galaxies form," says Dekel, of The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. To do that, "we have to trace the gas," not dark matter, because it's the gas that forms stars. "That's where the action is." The physics of gas interactions, or gastrophysics, is much more complicated than that of dark matter. Gas molecules respond to a host of forces while dark matter is simple to model because it responds predominantly to just one force: gravity. Nonetheless, says Dekel, he is a recent convert to gastrophysics.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Dekel spent most of his time trying to estimate the density of matter in the universe by mapping the velocities at which galaxies and matter move through the vast invisible reaches of dark matter. Although no one knows what dark matter is made of, it appears to constitute 85 percent of the mass of the universe. And simply because there's so much of it, the stuff provides the gravitational scaffolding that pulls together ordinary gas-electrons, protons, atoms, and the like—to make stars and galaxies. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com/
http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com/The behavior of dark matter has thus been considered a reliable map for the path of galaxy formation.

Only a few narrow streams can penetrate through the hot medium to build a galactic disk at the center and form stars. The bigger the halo, the more likely it is to quench star formation because of such heating..

Every galaxy is nestled within a halo of cold dark matter, composed of exotic particles that move much slower than the speed of light. (This relatively slow pace is why this dark matter is dubbed "cold.")

The halos start out small but continually merge to grow bigger, dictating that all structure in the universe should evolve in the same way, from little to big. The growing clumps of dark matter form the backbone of a cosmic web, with clusters and superclusters of galaxies falling into place along the densest filaments, like paint onto a dark canvas. On the largest scales in the universe, dark matter accounts amazingly well for galactic structure—where and how galaxies concentrate, says Piero Madau of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

But in 2003, Dekel and others became intrigued by a finding about galaxies that dark matter alone could not explain. Astronomers have known since the 1920s that the modern-day universe consists mainly of two galaxy types—young-looking, disk-shaped spirals like the Milky Way, and elderly, football-shaped ellipticals. Ellipticals have a reddish tinge—an indication that they are old and finished forming stars long ago—while spirals have a bluish tinge, a sign of recent star formation.

A few years ago, researchers found that in the universe today, these two populations divide sharply by weight (SN: 5/31/03, p. 341). An analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has recorded about 1 million nearby galaxies of the northern sky, revealed that the "red and dead" ellipticals nearly always tip the scales at masses greater than the Milky Way, while the star-forming spirals fall below that weight. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com/

Somehow, star birth was systematically and dramatically quenched in the big guys but proceeded unimpeded in the spiral small-fry.

The puzzle deepened in 2005 when Sandy Faber of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleagues announced that they found the same galactic dichotomy when the universe was 7 billion years old, half its current age. Faber's team used a spectrometer she designed for the Keck Observatory atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea to measure the mass of distant galaxies, part of a survey of what composed the universe at 7 billion years. She reviewed the results of the survey, known as Deep-2, at the January meeting in Austin, Texas, of the American Astronomical Society.

At first glance, the dichotomy would seem to conflict with cold dark matter theory. A preponderance of "red and dead" massive galaxies early in the universe might indicate that halos can start out as giants and then break apart into smaller bodies, the opposite trend of what dark matter would produce.

Dekel and his colleagues, including Yuval Birnboim, now at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Mass., have an explanation that would fit with cold dark matter theory, but it requires combining gastrophysics with dark matter.

Gas pulled inside a dark-matter halo would normally fall into the center, where it would cool and grow dense enough to make stars. But as the universe ages, dark-matter halos merge and grow more massive, some becoming greater than about a trillion times the mass of the sun.

When a halo reaches this critical value, the stage is set for a galactic divide, according to Birnboim and Dekel. Their calculations and simulations show that the infalling gas rams into the relatively cold, stationary gas already at the halo's center. The collision creates a long-lasting shock that heats the cold gas, causing it to exert a pressure. That pressure pushes on infalling gas, hurling the material back to the halo's outskirts, where it remains like some exile in galactic Siberia, unable to coalesce and make stars. As long as the material in the central part of the halo maintains its outward pressure, the supply of fresh gas is choked off, and the galaxy can no longer make stars. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com/

Louis J. Sheehan
Over time, the massive galaxy growing inside the halo's center, once a hotbed of star birth, becomes red and dead.

Halos that remain less massive—and which therefore beget smaller galaxies—can't forge such long-lasting shocks. Gas continues to stream unimpeded into the central region, enabling the birth of new generations of stars.

Simulations from several other groups, including those led by Dusan Keres, now at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Darren Croton, now at the University of California, Berkeley; Richard Bower of Durham University in England; and Andrea Cattaneo, now at the University of Potsdam in Germany, have come up with similar findings.

"The idea is that big, central galaxies are quenched before [the universe is 7 billion years old] because they are in massive halos ... while smaller galaxies are quenched later, if at all, when their parent halos reach the critical mass," says Dekel.

One remaining puzzle, notes Dekel, is how gas within the center of a massive halo can maintain, for up to 10 billion years of cosmic history, the outward pressure that keeps new gas at bay in the outer halo. He calculates that the pressure might last for only one-tenth that time. Some other source must keep star birth from turning back on.

YOUNG AND OLD. The young spiral galaxy NGC 300, located about 7 million light-years from Earth, is brimming with newborn stars in this combined ultraviolet- and visible-light snapshot. In contrast, the more mature elliptical galaxy NGC 1312, some 62 million light-years distant, is more quiescent.

Again delving into gastrophysics, he and other researchers point to the unusual role that black holes may play in staving off star birth in massive galaxies. Researchers now believe that every massive galaxy houses a central, heavyweight black hole, and that these gravitational monsters wield influence far beyond their immediate surroundings.

Packing the equivalent of millions to billions of suns into a volume no bigger than our solar system, black holes don't just pull matter in. Energy from the gas and stars spiraling into the hole also creates jets of matter that blast back out a million light-years from the center. In this way, a black hole could act to regulate or even switch off star formation, Dekel says.

Moreover, researchers have found that black holes at galactic centers grow in lockstep with the mass of stars in that galaxy's hub: The holes always seem to be one five-hundredth the mass of those stars. That prescription means that the most massive galaxies house the heaviest black holes—exactly the ones that are most likely to have jets strong enough to interrupt star formation.

"What's truly amazing is how tight the correlation seems to be" between the mass of a central black hole and a surrounding galaxy, says Tim Heckman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "I don't think prior to 10 years ago you would have found one astronomer in one thousand that thought black holes had some fundamental part in the formation of galaxies. We still don't know whether a black hole dictates the formation of a galaxy or the other way around."

Dekel and Birnboim, along with Jerry Ostriker of Princeton University, recently began entertaining the idea that black holes might not be needed to explain the galactic divide after all. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire2.blogspot.com/
http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com/According to their calculations, the heat produced by gas falling into the centers of massive dark-matter halos might be enough to quench the supply of cold, star-forming gas.

A new study goes further back in time than ever before to probe the difference between galaxy types.

Using distant quasars as searchlights, a team led by Art Wolfe of the University of California, San Diego, says its search may have reached back to the era when massive galaxies were still forming stars, before the death knell sounded for these heavyweights.

WELCOME TO THE WEB. The varying density of gas is related to the evolution of structure in the universe and the formation of galaxies. Gas density is shown (increasing with brightness) along with temperature (increasing from blue to red in color). Yellow circles indicate black holes (higher masses indicated by longer diameters). The left image models the universe at about 450 million years after the Big Bang. The early universe still shows a relatively uniform structure. At about 6 billion years (right), the universe has many black holes and a more filamentary structure.

During their 5-year study, Wolfe and his colleagues, including Jason Prochaska of the University of California, Santa Cruz, used spectrometers at the Keck Observatory to study star formation in 143 dense gas clouds, each pierced by radiation from a different quasar. Astronomers generally agree that these clouds, known as damped Lyman-alpha systems, are the likely predecessors of modern-day galaxies. They reveal what those galaxies were like when the universe was only about 2 billion years old.

To assess the star-formation rate in the clouds, the team homed in on the abundance of carbon atoms stripped of a single electron. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/
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Newborn stars readily excite these carbon ions. The higher their abundance, the higher the star formation rate.

The team used spectra of another ion, silicon stripped of one electron, to indicate the masses of the dark-matter halos in which the dense clouds reside.

To the surprise of the researchers, the study revealed that star birth was highest in those clouds that lie within the heaviest dark-matter halos. Those clouds are the likely progenitors of the most massive galaxies today, the team says in an upcoming Astrophysical Journal.

That scenario contrasts with the current universe, "where [massive galaxies] exhibit little, if any, star formation," says Wolfe. "But that's just what the Dekel-Birnboim model predicts. That far back [in time], the high-mass galaxies are still forming stars at a high rate." Moreover, observations of distant galaxies by several researchers, including Chuck Steidel of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, also show that star formation once proceeded at a feverish rate in massive galaxies.

"We go back far enough to see the star-forming phase of the high-mass systems," says Wolfe. It's only later, he notes, that star birth shuts down in the high-mass systems, a victim of overheated gas and possible interference by monster black holes.

Dekel, in the meantime, says he hasn't entirely abandoned his interest in investigating the fundamental properties of the universe. It's just that the evolution of galaxies provides such a messy, and thus intriguing, canvas for testing his ideas. "I see myself as a chess player who has waded into the mud," he notes. "And that's where all the fun is."

Modern genetics produced a paradox: The more we learn how much DNA we share, the more we are intrigued by the minor biochemical variations that set us each apart -- and with good reason.

Tiny differences in genes we have in common make some of us more vulnerable to breast cancer, alcoholism or infections, researchers recently reported. Other variations in genes we share make some of us more resistant to chemotherapy or treatments for heart disease and hypertension.

Any one of 11 variations in a single gene, for another example, can make it harder for commonly prescribed antidepressants to temper our moods, researchers at Munich's Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry reported in January in Neuron. Any one of nine variations in another gene may double the risk of lupus, University of Alabama scientists said.

Many of these fractional hereditary distinctions are random effects of chance at play. (Any two people are more than 99% the same at the genetic level.) http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
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Broadly speaking, they also arise from the ancient history recorded in the genetic autobiography that we carry in our cells, coded there in billions of characters of DNA. The human genome is a biomedical narrative of migration, disease, conquest and trade. It has been accumulating plot twists and changes since small clans first moved out of East Africa to settle the world tens of thousands of years ago.

In the most detailed look yet at global human variation, two independent research teams -- one led by scientists at Stanford University and the other by scientists at the University of Michigan -- recently analyzed more than half a million genetic markers across hundreds of people from 51 ethnic groups on five continents. Melding medical genetics and population genomics, they probed kinship, diversity and the underpinnings of disease. "We are tying together what we know about human history with what we see in the human genome," said University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending.

New research in that effort reveals, for example, that Americans of European descent carry more potentially harmful genetic variations than do African-Americans, Cornell University computational biologist Carlos Bustamante and his colleagues reported last month in Nature.

The researchers concluded that this pattern of variation was the legacy of humanity's first forays into prehistoric Europe, when the venturesome probably numbered a few thousand or less. The hereditary flaws carried by these forebears then became widespread as their descendants expanded into a population of millions.

This year, new studies of human genetic variation around the world have produced genome data nearly 100 times more detailed than previous global assessments, yielding insights into how humanity's early migrations out of Africa affect us all today.
In Nature, researchers at the University of Michigan last month reported their analysis of more than 500,000 DNA markers occurring across 29 populations on five continents.
In Science, scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine reported last month on 650,000 genetic markers measured across 51 population groups worldwide. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
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The effect of migration from Africa to Europe can still be seen in the genes of Europeans today, Cornell University researchers reported last month in Nature.
Differences in gene expression between Europeans and Africans affects responses to medications and to infections, University of Chicago researchers reported earlier this month in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
In January, scientists in England, China and the U.S. launched the 1,000 Genomes Project to seek more detailed information about human genetic variation by sequencing the genomes of at least 1,000 people around the world.

Dr. Bustamante compared 10,000 genes shared by 15 African-Americans and 20 European-Americans and found nearly 40,000 individual differences in which a gene's smallest structural unit -- a single DNA base pair -- had been altered. Half of them had no measurable effect. Everyone harbors some potentially harmful variations, but, overall, the European-Americans had a higher percentage of those that could be deleterious.

"You cannot say anything at the individual level on the basis of this data," Dr. Bustamante cautioned. "No one person's genome is any healthier or better or more fit in an evolutionary sense than any other individual's."

Hundreds of genes also behave slightly differently in families of European descent than they do in families of African ancestry, especially those genes involved in producing antibodies and other fundamental cell functions, University of Chicago medical researchers reported this month in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

The Chicago scientists analyzed gene variations to learn why some people are more sensitive than others to the toxic side effects of chemotherapy. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
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They compared 9,156 genes in 30 Caucasian families in Utah with those in 30 Yoruban families from Ibadan, Nigeria.

All told, they found that 156 shared genes were more active among those of European heritage, while 254 other shared genes were more active among those of African ancestry. No one knows yet what, if anything, the minor variations in levels of gene activity mean medically or if they affect chemotherapy, said Chicago pharmaco-genomics expert Eileen Dolan.

In each instance, "we are comparing the same exact gene in both populations," she said. "The differences are subtle, not dramatic."

To delve even more deeply into human variation, scientists in the U.S., England and China in January launched a $50 million effort to catalog in exhaustive detail the DNA of at least a thousand people from around the world. They expect the 1000 Genomes Project, as they call it, to produce 60 times as much genetic sequence data in three years than has been released in all of the last quarter century.

Researchers hope it may help them tailor more effective medical treatments.

Human variation, however, may be more than medicine can easily master. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
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Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston reported last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that even crucial genetic mutations in cancer cells, for example, may be different in every patient.

Within hours of President Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, the CIA had established that Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged killer, had met with Cuban officials at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City eight weeks before. The CIA had also established that, four weeks after the meeting, Havana had approved a visa for Oswald, even though it normally did not grant visas to American citizens. At the time, Oswald was working under the alias "O.H. Lee" at the Texas Book Depository in Dallas.

Such facts obviously point toward the sinister possibility of foreign involvement in the Kennedy assassination -- Cuban involvement. That two CIA sources independently reported seeing a Cuban official giving money to Oswald at Cuba's embassy in Mexico City only adds force to the possibility. And Fidel Castro himself had said, in the summer of 1963, that if American leaders continued "aiding plans to eliminate Cuban leaders . . . they themselves will not be safe." As CIA officials knew, such U.S. "plans" -- i.e., the CIA's efforts to assassinate Castro -- had continued up to the day of the Kennedy assassination.

So when the Mexican federal police, after the Kennedy assassination, arrested a female employee of the Cuban Consulate who had been in contact with Oswald, the CIA suggested that the Mexicans hold her incommunicado. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com/
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The agency also suggested that they ask her such questions as: "Was the assassination of President Kennedy planned by Fidel Castro . . . and were the final details worked out inside the Cuban Embassy?" Thomas Mann, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, alerted Washington that there might be an indictable case against Cuban officials.

Little wonder, then, that the Warren Commission -- put together within days of Kennedy's death to investigate the assassination -- asked the CIA to provide it with everything the agency had regarding Oswald's activities in Mexico. The commission dispatched its top staff members to Mexico to meet with Ambassador Mann and Winston Scott, the CIA's station chief there. But nothing ever came of this Cuban connection. As we know, the Warren Commision, in its final report, determined that Oswald acted alone. What happened?

For one thing, the CIA had changed its tune by the time the Warren Commission staff members got to Mexico. The agency now claimed that it had learned of Oswald's activities in Mexico long after the assassination, by way of the FBI, and that stories about a Cuban official giving money to Oswald did not hold up. The Warren Commission concluded that there was no credible evidence of Cuban involvement.

Years later, thanks to congressional investigations, it emerged that the CIA had not been forthcoming with the Warren Commission about what it knew of Oswald's Mexican activities. Jefferson Morley's "Our Man in Mexico" brilliantly explores the mystery of this reticence. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com/
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Though Mr. Morley is a dogged investigative reporter, he has not discovered any jaw-dropping evidence that will change forever the way we think about the Kennedy assassination, but he uncovers enough new material, and theorizes with such verve, that "Our Man in Mexico" will go down as one of the more provocative titles in the ever-growing library of Kennedy-assassination studies.

The book begins as a straightforward biography of Winston Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico City in the early 1960s. It is an enthralling account of Scott's career as one of America's most accomplished spy masters. Mr. Morley memorably depicts not only Scott's espionage exploits, from London in World War II to Mexico City at the height of the Cold War, but also his complicated love life and his ambitions as a poet.

"Our Man in Mexico" moves onto murkier ground as it explores Oswald's movements in Mexico City during Scott's tenure there. But Mr. Morley has succeeded in ferreting out a wealth of CIA documents that reveal lapses, misreporting and destroyed evidence. He maintains that the CIA once possessed photographs of Oswald entering the Cuban Embassy and audiotapes of wiretaps that picked up Oswald's conversations with Cuban officials. The evidence is missing, he says; in fact, the disappearance of so much material has led him to conclude that Scott "perpetrated a wide-ranging coverup of CIA operations around Oswald." But why would Scott have done it?

Mr. Morley advances the theory that the CIA had to cover up an "operation" of its own that employed Oswald. While that theory might explain the holes in the record he encountered, Mr. Morley offers no evidence that such an operation ever existed. Instead he resorts to dredging up the "tantalizing" outline for a proposed novel by an ex-CIA officer in which a character working for the CIA recruits Oswald to assassinate Castro. Using fiction to make a factual argument is dubious enough, but what makes this exercise particularly absurd is the identity of the aspiring novelist: David Atlee Phillips, who testified repeatedly under oath to Congress that he did not know of any CIA plots involving Oswald.

There are, of course, more mundane explanations for the gaps in the CIA's surveillance of Oswald. Consider, for example, the agency's inability to produce photographs of Oswald entering the Cuban diplomatic compound in late September 1963, when eyewitnesses attested to his presence there. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire2.blogspot.com/
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Mr. Morley shows that if Oswald used the public entrance to the embassy, he almost certainly would have been photographed by the CIA. So he concludes the CIA hid the evidence.

But what if Oswald had entered through the embassy's back garage, which was not covered by the CIA camera? As it turns out, two other investigators, Wilfried Huismann and Gus Russo, researching for their documentary "Rendezvous With Death," tracked down the guard who was on duty at the garage back then. He recalled seeing Oswald in the garage, explaining that he would have noted the outsider's presence since Oswald was accompanied by a Cuban intelligence officer.

Winston Scott was naturally aware that the CIA's surveillance cameras could be avoided by using the embassy's nonpublic entrances. After the assassination, why didn't he investigate the reasons behind such limited observation of the site at a time when Oswald was being tracked? My own guess is that Scott realized that a consensus had been reached in Washington according to which Oswald had acted alone, without foreign assistance; in short, there was no need to pursue that avenue of inquiry. He probably also realized that opening up the Cuban angle would lead to embarrassing revelations about the CIA's earlier operations against Castro. In other words, he acted like a bureaucrat by protecting the government's secrets.

As with so many of the tangents in the history of the Kennedy assassination, the record of Oswald's activities in Mexico City is so spotty that we likely will never know what really happened there and can only speculate. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Scott supposedly wrote a memoir in which he refuted the Warren Commission's conclusions. But shortly after he died in 1971, the manuscript disappeared -- at the instruction, Mr. Morley suggests, of CIA Director Richard Helms. Maybe it will surface one day.

Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon still lies comatose at the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer where he remains hospitalized. Tuesday marks the former leader's 80th birthday, and his family plans to mark the day with a symbolic token gift, but little more.

Aside from Sharon’s failing health, the Sharon family finds itself hit with more bad news on the former prime minister’s birthday.

Last week, the Jerusalem Supreme Court denied an appeal by former Knesset Member Omri Sharon, son of the former prime minister, thus not overturning his 2006 conviction for falsifying corporate records and campaign financing offenses.

Sharon is to start serving his seven-month prison sentences for these offenses this week, as well as paying a NIS 300,000 (about $80,000) fine.

Ariel Sharon was hospitalized on January 4, 2006, following a major stroke, and has remained in a coma ever since.

First signs of medical trouble already appeared in December 2006 , when Sharon suffered a minor stroke and was rushed to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem. The former prime minister was hospitalized and kept for testing for several days.

Sharon’s doctors held a press conference several days later, in which they announced that tests revealed that the former prime minister had a congenital heart defect that was the likely reason for his stroke. Sharon was to undergo angioplasty several weeks later, but insisted on going home to recuperate in his Sycamore Ranch home in southern Israel instead of staying for observation at the Jerusalem hospital.

The angioplasty on the former PM was scheduled for January 5, 2006. A few days beforehand, however, Sharon felt ill and was rushed to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem once again. This, even though Soroka University Medical Center in Be'er Sheva was closer to Sharon’s southern Israel home. Aides reasoned that the Jerusalem hospital was more familiar with Sharon’s medical history, and could better care for him.

Sharon was rushed into surgery at the Jerusalem hospital following a massive bleed into his brain. Surgeons worked tirelessly for seven whole hours to repair the bleed, and save the former prime minister’s life. http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Sharon had to undergo two additional surgeries and numerous CT scans, but ultimately his condition stabilized. He never regained consciousness, and despite doctor’s efforts to awaken his gradually, remained comatose.

In February 2006, Sharon experienced further health woes, and had to undergo four hours of surgery to repair an ischemic bowel.

Five months after his debilitating stroke he was transferred to the respiratory rehabilitation unit at the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, where he will spend his 80th birthday.

Comic books have never really been respected as an art form by the general public.

That being said, it might nevertheless surprise some folks to know that there was a time when comics were seen not only as kiddie fare but as harmful, vile, mind-alteringly dangerous kiddie fare.

That history is recounted in David Hajdu's excellent new book, "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America." http://louis4j4sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Hajdu provides a captivating, insightful and detailed look at how American parents in the 1950s became convinced that the crime, horror and romance comics their kids were devouring would turn them into sociopaths.

He builds his history slowly, taking readers through a basic history of how the medium took shape in America and describing how artists such as Charles Biro and publishers such as EC's Bill Gaines saw a way to sell books by offering lurid, pulpy stories of criminals, killers, vampires and other monsters.

Parents, psychiatrists and other do-gooders, led by one Dr. Fredric Wertham, whose book "Seduction of the Innocent" accused the industry of being little more than Nazis, feared such material would lead to antisocial behavior.

They began a pogrom of attacks in the media, attempts at censorship through legislation and book burnings in towns, all of which Hajdu recounts with flair.

While Hajdu makes it clear what side he's on, he nevertheless is careful not to portray the comics industry as being rife with innocents.

He chastises certain people for their naivete and greed, not to mention disregard for seeing their books as anything other than product.

It all came to a somewhat literal head during a congressional hearing in which Gaines, high on diet pills, was asked whether a cover depicting a severed woman's head could be in "good taste," Hajdu said.

His answer inadvertently led to the Comics Code, a self-policing organization that proceeded to violently neuter every book on the stands.

Comics quickly lost whatever cultural cache they had and more than 800 talented people lost their jobs as companies folded.

Only Gaines managed to salvage through, taking his humor comic, Mad, and turning it into a 25-cent magazine that still thumbs its nose at popular culture today.

Hajdu's central conceit is that the comic book was the opening salvo in baby boomer culture wars. He makes a strong point.

The kids who read "Crime Does Not Pay," after all, would go on to discover rock 'n' roll, grow out their hair and protest the Vietnam War.

And yet this sort of cultural battle has occurred throughout history.

People freaked out about the waltz, for example, when it was introduced in the 18th century, calling it vulgar and sinful.

To those who think such censorship scares could never happen in today's enlightened times, I only ask you to consider the pillorying video games receive today from such upstanding moral folk as Sens. Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman.

'Comic Book Comics':

If you prefer to have your comic book history told in a more ... well, comic book fashion, then perhaps you should pick up a copy of the oddly titled "Comic Book Comics."

Having explored the lives of deep thinkers such as Nietzsche and Kant in their previous series, "Action Philosophers," writer Fred van Lente and artist Ryan Dunlavey decided to take on the convoluted and at times controversial history of the comics industry.

"We realized we couldn't keep ["Philosophers"] going on forever. We were running out of thinkers," van Lente said during a recent interview. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com/
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"The one thing we could be certain all comic fans like are comics."

"Comics" takes a more linear approach than "Philosophers," starting with the appearance of the Yellow Kid in newspaper pages in 1896, then hurtling forward to the birth of the comic book and animated cartoon while touching on important figures such as Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Walt Disney and Max Fleischer.

There won't be any resting on laurels however.

Holy Haleakala! Yesterday, a gamma-ray burst went off that was so bright that had you been looking at the right spot in the sky you could have seen it with just your own eyes!

It’s difficult to put this into the proper context. GRBs are monumental explosions, the exploding of a massive star where most of the energy of the catastrophe is channeled into twin beams of energy. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
These beams scream out from the explosion like cosmic blowtorches, and for thousands of light years anything they touch is destroyed. Happily for us, GRBs always appear hundreds of millions or billions of light years away.
Let me put this in perspective for you. Imagine a one megaton nuclear weapon detonating. That’s roughly 50 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Devastating.
The Sun, every second of every day of every year, gives off 100 billion times this much energy. That’s every second. A star is a terrifying object.
In the few seconds that a gamma-ray burst lasts, it packs a million million million times that much energy into its beams. In other words, for those few ticks of a clock the GRB is sending out more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime.
There is, quite simply, no way to exaggerate the devastation of a gamma-ray burst.
Yet for all that, they are optically faint due to their terrible distance. At billions of light years away, even the Universe’s second biggest bangs are difficult to see.
So that’s what makes GRB 080319B (the second GRB seen on 2008 March 19) so incredible: distance measurements put it at 7.5 billion light years away, yet it was visible to the unaided eye had you just happened to be looking up at the sky at that moment.
Whoa.
This is the single brightest GRB ever seen in optical light, so as you can imagine reports are pouring in from observatories all over the world right now. Anything this bright must be extraordinary, and you can bet that astronomers will be falling over themselves to observe this incredible event. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
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We still don’t know enough about GRBS; just what mechanisms focus those beams? We know black holes are at their core, powering these events, but how do the gravity and magnetic fields come together to generate forces like this? How tightly focused are the beams? Do they open at a one degree angle? 5? 10? Why does every GRB behave somewhat differently, with some lasting for seconds and others for minutes?
And why was this one so frakkin’ bright? Was it a more energetic explosion itself, or were we, by coincidence, looking precisely down the center of the beam? If the beam of a GRB is pointed ever-so-slightly away from us, so that the edge nicks us, the GRB will look fainter. By staring down the throat of a GRB we’d see it as bright as it could possibly be. Maybe GRB080319B had us dead in its sights.
Watching the extremes of GRB behavior can help us constrain the more normal aspects of them… if you can even use the word "normal" when it comes to such titanic explosions on these scales. There is a fascination we humans have with such terrible events, an atavistic thrill even when our puny brains can’t comprehend the size and scale of them.
If you want to know what my nightmares look like, then GRBs are a good place to start. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
I’m just glad there (most likely) aren’t any stars nearby that can do this. I like GRBs… when they’re far, far away.

A startling result from the Cassini mission has just been announced: Titan, Saturn’s giant moon, may have an ocean of water and ammonia under its surface.

The Cassini probe does more than return hauntingly beautiful images. It is equipped with a sort of radar that allows it to map the topographical features of Saturn’s moons. This allows scientists to make accurate studies of the moons’ surfaces, including that of Titan. This in turn gives scientists an excellent set of landmarks, allowing them to study physical characteristics of the moons, including their rotation period.
Titan’s period is well-studied, and Cassini has visited Titan many times. Astronomers used the known landmarks and rotation period of Titan to predict what they will see with each visit… and they found landmarks like lakes and mountains that were far afield of where they were expected, as much as 30 kilometers (19 miles). A solid body will rotate as such, making these features very predictable. If the landmarks weren’t where they should be, then it must mean that Titan isn’t a solid body.
The more detailed story is that the crust, the surface layer of the moon must be decoupled, separate, from the interior. The only way for that to be is for there to exist a liquid layer between the surface and the core. Titan is far too cold and is comprised of the wrong material to have a hot mantle like the Earth does. Instead, scientists think it has an ocean 100 km below its frozen surface. Given the composition of the surface and the known density of Titan, they suspect it is made of liquid water and ammonia. The crust floats over this chilly liquid, and as winds blow on the surface the crust drifts, causing the predictions of landmark locations to be off.
The surface of Titan is loaded with what we call simple organic molecules: ethane, methane, and more. It is shocking, to say the least, to consider what would happen when you mix liquid water and organic compounds. Could there be life swimming deep under the surface of that planet-sized moon?
At the moment — and for the foreseeable future — there is no way to know. The ocean, if it exists, has not yet been confirmed, so we don’t want to put the cart before the horse. A lot of hard work lies ahead for those who study this distant world — seasonal variations in the positions of Titan’s landmarks would indicate that it is indeed the atmosphere blowing over the surface that is changing the rotation of the crust itself, and that in turn would give much credence to the idea of an underground ocean.
If this does pan out, then we will have to add yet another object in our solar system to the short list of worlds where liquid water can and does exist. And given the near-certainty of liquid water below the surface of Enceladus, Saturn will be able to proudly claim at least two them.

Athletes who take human growth hormone may not be getting the boost they expected.

While growth hormone adds some muscle, it doesn't appear to improve strength or exercise capacity, according to a review of studies that tested the hormone in mostly athletic young men.

"It doesn't look like it helps, and there's a hint of evidence it may worsen athletic performance," said Hau Liu, of Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, Calif., who was lead author of the review.
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Growth hormone, or HGH, is among the performance enhancers baseball stars Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte were accused of taking in Sen. George Mitchell's report. Mr. Clemens denies using the hormone, while Mr. Pettitte admits using it.

The new research has some limitations and sheds no light on long-term use of HGH. The scientists note their analysis included few studies that measured performance. The tests also probably don't reflect the dose and frequency practiced by athletes illegally using the hormone.

Dr. Liu and his colleagues at Stanford University sought to find out if growth hormone could improve performance. They looked for the best published tests, those comparing participants who got the hormone to those who didn't get the treatment.

They analyzed 27 studies involving 440 participants. The results were released yesterday by the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Researchers found that those who got the hormone put on about five pounds more of muscle and lost about two pounds more of fat, although the fat loss wasn't statistically different. The researchers said some of the extra body mass could be fluid buildup.

There was no difference found in strength or exercise stamina between the two groups, but there were only two strength studies and eight that measured exercise.

These days, people really are taking coals to Newcastle.

That flow is part of a vast reorganization of the global coal trade that is making the United States a major exporter for the first time in years — and helping to drive up domestic prices of the one fossil fuel the nation has in abundance.

Coal has long been a cheap and plentiful fuel source for utilities and their customers, helping to keep American electric bills relatively low.

But rising worldwide demand is turning American coal into another hot global commodity, with domestic buyers having to compete with buyers from countries like Germany and Japan.

Environmental concerns have forced some American utilities to cut back on plans for coal-burning power plants.

Nonetheless, spot prices for two benchmark American grades of coal, from central Appalachia and the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, have been rising, with occasional dips, since last spring.

They eased in recent days but are still up by 93 percent and 64 percent, respectively, in the last year, according to figures from Doyle Trading Consultants and Evolution Markets.

How high prices will go, and how quickly the increases will be passed along to electricity customers, remains to be seen.

American utility companies buy almost all their coal on long-term contracts, locking in prices for several years.

But as those contracts come up for renewal, price increases are likely, analysts said.

“Watch out, consumer,” said David M. Khani, a coal analyst at Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx

“You’re probably going to see accelerating electricity prices in 2009, 2010 and 2011.”

Coal and utility executives predict that coal will remain the most economical fuel in years to come. But they concede that any significant rise could have an important inflationary impact since coal is used to produce about half the nation’s electric power, and coal is also vital in steel production.

For coal producers, the new demand abroad is good news at a time when coal is under political attack at home. More than 50 proposed coal-fired power plants were delayed or canceled over the last year because of concerns over greenhouse gas emissions.

“This export boom right now is the difference between slow growth in our markets and hyper-expansion in our markets,” said Gregory H. Boyce, chairman and chief executive of Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company. “You have two billion-plus people looking for a better standard of living. The world is energy-short and the U.S. coal sector is beginning to fill that gap.”

Many environmental groups see the rising global trade as an ominous development, however, since it promises to confound efforts to limit global emissions. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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World consumption of coal has increased in recent years by more than 4 percent annually, a major reason that emissions of carbon dioxide are going up, not down. Carbon dioxide is the principal gas implicated in global warming.

“Any rise in coal use around the world is bad news for the environment,” said Alice McKeown, who works on coal issues for the Sierra Club. “The U.S. needs to be a leader on global warming, and increasing our coal exports is moving in the wrong direction.”

The United States will export 7 or 8 percent of its coal production this year, up from about 5 percent last year, industry leaders predicted in interviews. Because of higher prices, the value of coal exports should double, to $3.75 billion.

United States exports of coal grew from 49 million tons in 2006 to about nearly 59 million tons in 2007, according to coal industry statistics, while domestic production increased by 1 percent. Coal executives say they expect exports to reach 80 million tons this year, and with railroad and port improvements, to rise to as much as 120 million tons in the next few years.

“There’s no question that the incremental rise in exports this year has driven the prices up,” said Charles E. Zebula, senior vice president for fuel supply at American Electric Power, one of the country’s largest utilities.

Simultaneously, imports of coal are decreasing gradually as producers in Colombia and Venezuela turn to markets other than the United States for higher prices. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
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The shifts are further tightening supplies of coal in the eastern United States, where stiffening regulations and various mine closings have limited output in recent years.

“U.S. coal producers are trying as much as possible to ship coal to the highest bidder, and in many cases that means Europe,” said Gordon Howald, a coal analyst at Calyon Securities. “The once-stodgy coal industry has become an exciting global commodity.”

Great Britain, the country that used its vast coal stocks to pioneer industrial development in the 18th century, has become a major coal importer in recent years, its own industry moribund. With Newcastle-upon-Tyne once being the center of a rich English coal region, the phrase “hauling coals to Newcastle” was a cliché describing an absurd economic proposition.

Nowadays, however, coal arrives regularly at the Port of Tyne from suppliers in the Baltic and South America. American coal goes to other English ports at rising rates; figures from the Commerce Department show that in 2007, United States steam coal exports to the United Kingdom increased by 53 percent and coking coal, used in steel-making, by 20 percent, compared to the previous year.

The boom in coal exports is partially linked to a falling dollar, which makes American coal cheaper on world markets. But there are deeper, longer-term reasons for the world to turn to the United States, which has 27 percent of the world’s coal reserves, more than any country.

As it continues a building spree for coal-fired power plants, China is consuming so much coal that its ability to export is diminishing rapidly; it is expected to become a net importer. Other exporters like South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam are cutting back for a variety of reasons, including growing domestic needs and local power shortages. Recent flooding in Australia has cut exports, at least temporarily, while an earthquake closed a major mine in Germany.

Meanwhile India is building huge coal plants that will require growing imports, while Russia is using more and more coal to make natural gas available for export.

As a result the pattern of world shipments for coal used for metallurgical and energy purposes is shifting. South Africa and other exporting nations that used to export to Europe are turning to Asia, where coal prices are higher, leaving European markets open for American exports. American coal is making its way to England, Spain, Japan and other countries that traditionally looked elsewhere.

The increase expected this year will make the United States a major global exporter for the first time since the early 1990s. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
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For years, low-cost producers in Australia, China and other countries grabbed the bulk of the international coal trade. But now the United States is becoming a low-cost producer, in part because the euro and other currencies have gained so much value in relation to the dollar.

In the United States, plans to build new coal-fired plants are being shelved, and bankers are scrutinizing new projects because of uncertainties over future costs of carbon dioxide emissions. Both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates say they favor legislation to control global warming, which would presumably limit such emissions.

As the coal industry sees it, exports could be crucial if the American market starts to shrink. Coal executives are talking about upgrading mines, rail and port facilities to meet increasing world demand.

Just within the last couple of months, Peabody began sending coal from Wyoming to Europe, first by rail to the Mississippi River, then by vessel through the Gulf of Mexico. And for the first time in a decade, the company is shipping coal to Japan from the California coast.

“As U.S. coal demand is constrained because of increasing environmental regulation, coal production in the United States will increasingly go toward overseas buyers,” Chris Ruppel, an energy analyst at Execution, a brokerage and research firm, predicted.

The rise in coal prices has so far been invisible to most American consumers because price increases have yet to hit most utilities.

American Electric Power said it had contracted for more than 90 percent of its coal for 2008 before recent price increases. The company said it expects to spend 13 percent more for coal this year than last, after spending about 5 percent more in 2007 compared with 2006.

“We’re not going to see the spot market price in the customer’s bill today,” Mr. Zebula said. “But clearly the price of the good has gone up and will increase over time.”

Already, there are some signs of rising prices. Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power, both American Electric Power subsidiaries, on Feb. 29 filed papers seeking approval in West Virginia for a 17 percent increase in revenues, mainly to pay for costlier coal. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
If the request is approved, a residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt hours a month would see his bill increase from $64.55 to $73.94, starting in July.

Kenneth B. Medlock, an energy analyst at Rice University, predicted many more electricity consumers will begin to feel the coal price spike over the next year, particularly in states most dependent on coal, like Kentucky, Illinois and Ohio.

“Their power bill is going to go up, but it also will start to affect the prices of goods they buy at the grocery store,” he added.

The dispute over the “little people” of Flores continues, unabated.

The bones and a single skull of these “little people” are believed to be remains of a separate species of the human family that lived about 18,000 years ago on an island in Indonesia, as the scientists who made the sensational discovery concluded in 2004.

But persistent skeptics have contended in a recent flurry of scientific reports that they were nothing more than modern humans with unusually small bodies possibly malformed by genetic or pathological disorders. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx
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Neither side is backing off in this sometimes bitter row, which intensified last week with the announcement of the discovery that in Palau, in the Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia, other abnormally small-bodied people had lived long ago. Their bones were found in two caves and described in the online journal PloS One.

Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and his colleagues said the Palauan bones, representing at least 25 individuals, were from modern humans about four feet tall, close in size to some pygmies living in this region of the Pacific. Populations on isolated islands with limited resources often evolve short statures.

The Palauan specimens shared facial, chin and dental traits with the Flores people, the scientists said, but had larger braincases “possibly at the very low end or below that typically observed in modern, small-bodied humans.”

For these and other reasons, the scientists say, these Palauan people, who lived from 1,400 to 3,000 years ago, suggest the possibility that the Flores people were not a distinct species, designated Homo floresiensis, but “simply an island adapted population of Homo sapiens, perhaps with some individuals expressing congenital abnormalities.”

In previous reports and interviews, other skeptical scientists have contended that the extremely small brain size of the Flores people, close to that of a chimpanzee, was more likely a consequence of any number of growth disorders. Teuku Jacob, an Indonesian paleoanthropologist who was one of the first to examine the Flores bones, immediately suspected microcephaly, a genetic condition causing a small head.

This hypothesis has been argued back and forth, and last month an Australian scientist offered another possible explanation. The scientist, Peter Obendorf of RMIT University in Melbourne, reported that an image of the base of the Flores skull showed evidence of an enlarged pituitary gland, suggesting the individual may have suffered from cretinism, which can cause stunted growth and a small brain.

The two principal scientists who advanced the separate-species thesis — Peter Brown, a paleoanthropologist, and Michael Morwood, an archaeologist, of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia — have said they are unmoved by the criticism. And prominent experts on early humans have endorsed the new-species interpretation, including Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley, and Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.

After the publication of Dr. Berger’s findings, Bernard Wood, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University, said, “Obviously the Flores material came as a bit of a surprise to many of us, but it was not a surprise that might not have been anticipated.”

Dr. Wood, who was not involved in the original research, said the one fairly complete Flores skeleton and other fragments have got “all sorts of intriguing morphology” that distinguishes the individuals from modern humans. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com/

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He and a group of other scientists have prepared their own assessment in a report to be published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“All of these exotic explanations being proposed require the suspension of any fragment of common sense,” Dr. Wood said. “They are seeking a much more exotic explanation than the one for a distinct species that looks like an earlier Homo.”

Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University who has examined casts of the Flores braincase, disputed the microcephaly argument and the Berger paper.

In a study comparing the Flores specimen with known microcephalics, Dr. Falk and researchers at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University concluded three years ago that the ancient individual did not suffer such a disorder. Its wide brain and frontal lobes, she said, were not like the brains of microcephalics.

“Suites of features from head to feet set the Flores individuals apart from Homo sapiens, which is why this is a new species,” she said in an interview.

William L. Jungers, a paleoanthropologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who has worked closely with the Flores researchers, said in an e-mail message that the Berger paper “is really much ado about nothing,” adding that modern human pygmies of the size reported on Palau “are old news in this part of the world.”

Dr. Jungers said that none of these small-bodied humans “are as short as the various individuals of Homo floresiensis” or have similar limb proportions, cranial capacity, jaw anatomy, wrist bones and other characteristics.

The new-species proponents concede that they would have a stronger case if it rested on more than a single skeleton with a skull and assorted bones of about 12 other individuals.

Dr. Berger, whose research at Palau was supported by the National Geographic Society, emphasized in an interview, “I’m not on either side of this debate.” But he defended his report, which he said was preliminary yet based on substantial fieldwork and analysis, as a contribution to “the discussion of modern human variations that has been missing in the Flores debate.” These variations, he added, “occur with high frequency or we would not have found them so readily.”

In an extraordinary news conference on his first full day on the job, Gov. David A. Paterson acknowledged on Tuesday that he had had several extramarital relationships, including one with a state employee, but said he had done nothing illegal and had been faithful to his wife in recent years.

Mr. Paterson said he made the disclosure because he wanted to clear his conscience and avoid being blackmailed. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
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He said he hoped his openness about his past affairs would help him to gain the trust of New Yorkers and move forward to focus on governing.

“I didn’t want to be compromised, I didn’t want to be blackmailed, I didn’t want to hesitate taking an action because the person on the other end might hurt me or my family,” Mr. Paterson, a Democrat, said during the tense and often awkward appearance with his wife, Michelle Paige Paterson, at his side. “I just thought this was the time to come forward and reveal this.”

Mr. Paterson said no state funds had been used as he carried out his affairs. He said he may have used his campaign credit card for some expenses that he did not detail, but said, if so, he would have reimbursed his campaign for the spending.

Mr. Paterson’s revelation comes less than a week after Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a prostitute, resigned, and a former governor of New Jersey, James E. McGreevey, and his estranged wife publicly traded claims about the nature of their sex life together.

Mr. Paterson said he had asked Mr. Spitzer to delay the effective date of his resignation until Monday as he grappled with how much to disclose about his past infidelities.

“I didn’t know that I was even going to be here until last Wednesday,” he said, referring to the office of governor. “I put it back a few days to try and organize things, and this is one of the issues I just want to get straight with New York’s citizens so that they know who their governor is and that their governor takes this office seriously.”

The news conference capped an astonishing 24 hours that began with Ms. Paterson holding the Bible as her husband was sworn in before an ebullient audience of lawmakers in the Assembly chamber as dignitaries, including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and prominent black politicians, looked on.

Just after the swearing-in, while Mr. Paterson’s supporters were still celebrating, the new administration was plunged into its first crisis, as a Daily News columnist inquired about a past affair and Mr. Paterson and his mostly untested advisers debated how to handle the matter.

The governor and his wife told the columnist that they had each strayed during the marriage, and then Ms. Paterson, an executive at the Health Insurance Plan of New York, canceled a morning appearance in Manhattan and came to the capital to meet the crush of reporters. http://louis-j-sheehan.de/
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While ordinary New Yorkers seemed startled by the emergence of another story of sexual infidelity, reaction to the revelations in Albany was generally supportive, in part because the new governor, a former state senator, has a deep reservoir of good will among lawmakers. It remains to be seen, however, how long Republicans will give him a honeymoon.

“This week has been a whirlwind,” said Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Democrat from Brooklyn. “I think what happened last week with Governor Spitzer was a terrible personal tragedy that then turned into a crisis for this state.”

Mr. Paterson’s revelations, he said, “make him stronger.”

“I think a lot of people admire his forthrightness and his honesty,” he added.

Senator Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican majority leader, said the Patersons’ marital problems were nobody’s business but their own, as he brushed off suggestions that the affair threatened to interfere with the state’s business.

Neither the governor nor his staff would specify when he stopped having the affairs, beyond saying several years ago.

“Several years ago, and there were a number of women,” Mr. Paterson said during the news conference.

He did not supervise the state employee with whom he had an affair, he said, and did nothing to further the woman’s career. Christine Anderson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Paterson, said the state employee worked in the executive branch of the Spitzer administration and was considering whether to continue to work for the new administration.

Campaign finance records indicate that the Paterson campaign paid the woman $500 for work she did for his State Senate campaign several years ago.

It remains unclear if other complications lie ahead for Mr. Paterson.

The governor expressed uncertainty about whether he had used campaign funds to pay for hotel rooms for his assignations, but said he never would have knowingly done so.

Under state law, politicians are barred from using campaign funds for personal expenses. Mr. Paterson’s campaign filings showed a handful of payments over several years to a hotel on West 94th Street, not far from his home, that Mr. Paterson’s office has confirmed he used for an extramarital affair during that period. But he has also said his staff used the hotel on occasion. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx

It was not clear on Tuesday who had made use of the hotel rooms.

“I would never use campaign funds for that purpose,” Mr. Paterson said, but then added, “There have been a couple of questions about the campaign funds and I’ll have to check them out. There have been a few times when my credit card didn’t work, I used the campaign credit card and reimbursed it. But I never knowingly used campaign funds.”

While the governor dealt with the intensely personal issue, he also confronted a growing financial crisis. The State Division of Budget said on Tuesday that the nation was in recession, and Mr. Paterson moved late in the day to impose $800 million in new spending cuts, the third retrenchment made by the executive branch since it released its original budget in January and a sign of the precarious nature of the state’s finances. The governor likened it to “a fiscal challenge that we have not seen since the dark days following September 11.”

The governor’s mood was in marked contrast to his joking, effusive appearance in the Assembly chamber during his swearing-in, which included an impersonation of the Assembly speaker.

When he opened his press conference, the governor said: “I betrayed a commitment to my wife several years ago, and I do not feel I’ve betrayed my commitment to the citizens of New York State. I haven’t broken any laws, I don’t think I’ve violated my oath of office, and I saw this as a private matter.”

“This is something I think in a regular marriage we would have been wishing to go to our graves with,” he said, adding, “the reason that we disclosed the truth is so the citizens of New York State would know that when confronted with these questions, that we would be honest.”

Mr. Paterson said he had had affairs at a time when he “was jealous over Michelle” but later said he “didn’t take the actions because I was jealous; I was just trying to explain how I was feeling.”

“I’m not trying to blame anyone,” he added. “I’m not trying to say I was upset, so you can’t blame me. I was just pointing out that this happens to people.”

Mr. Paterson said that he and his wife had sought counseling and had since resolved their marital problems. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
For her part, Ms. Paterson said “the message I try to teach my children is that a marriage is going to have peaks and valleys, so you want to show them how to get through them and how to work through them, because no marriage is perfect.”

Researchers believe they have figured out why a genetic blood disorder found in the tropics protects against death from malaria.

The disease, alpha thalassemia, causes children to produce abnormally small red blood cells, often rendering them listless from mild anemia — a much smaller threat than malaria, which kills an estimated one million children a year.

Alpha thalassemia is common in tropical parts of Asia, Melanesia and the Mediterranean. The name means “sea blood,” and its connection to the Mediterranean Sea was known to the Greeks.

Parasitologists have known for 50 years that it protects against malaria. They speculated that it somehow blocked the malaria parasite from entering the cell.

But scientists at New York University’s medical school and Oxford University, studying 800 children in Papua New Guinea, found parasites in the blood cells of children with thalassemia.

Life-threatening anemia occurs in children only when their hemoglobin levels drop below 50 grams a liter, and children with thalassemia produce more red blood cells than average, with less hemoglobin per cell.

The scientists propose that this protects them because parasites destroy a smaller percentage of their blood cells.

“It is really remarkable and so simple,” said Karen Day, chairwoman of the department of medical parasitology at N.Y.U.

Population increases in many fast-growing counties, particularly in the South and West, started slowing last year, suggesting that the housing crunch may be forcing many Americans to stay put.

People "are paralyzed in their quest for jobs in growing areas in many parts of the country because the housing market has shut down across the board," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

The Census Bureau's annual estimate of county-population changes covers the 12 months that ended July 1, 2007. http://louis1j1sheehan.us/
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It shows that many Americans continued moving to sunny counties in Florida, Georgia and Arizona, but that the rates were slowing.

The data show a marked deceleration in population growth in several suburban counties that are farthest from urban centers -- the kind of counties to which some city residents had flocked in prior years for bigger houses and a different lifestyle. At the same time, urban areas and close-in suburbs were seeing population decreases slow, and in some cases reverse.

"It's a year of a migration correction, just as there was a correction in the housing market," said Mr. Frey.

Americans continue to seek out the Sunbelt. The 10 counties with the largest population increases were all in California, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina.

Maricopa County, Ariz., where Phoenix is located, had the biggest rise in population between July 2006 and July 2007, adding 102,000 people, tallying births, deaths and migration from inside and outside the U.S. That increase, though, was 30,000 fewer than the year before, mostly reflecting fewer people moving there from another county.

The slowdown of county-to-county movement pulled down expansion in other fast-growing counties. Population in California's Riverside County, which is east of Los Angeles, increased by 66,000 -- down from 80,000 between July 2005 and July 2006. In Texas's Harris County, where Houston is, the population increased by 60,000, less than half the gain between July 2005 and July 2006.

Some formerly highflying counties actually saw population fall. Broward County, Fla., part of the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area, added an average of 28,000 residents a year between 2000 and 2005. But the county lost 13,000 residents between July 2006 and July 2007. That was the county's first population decline recorded by the Census Bureau.

Some cities and suburbs that had been losing people to outer areas saw the exodus slow. Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, had lost an average of 16,000 a year between 2000 and 2006. Last year it gained about 4,800. In San Diego, the population rose by 27,000 in the latest period, compared with an average gain of 5,000 a year between 2003 and 2006.

"It's like the whole system [of migration] is kind of gearing down a little bit," said Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute.

Movement from one part of the country to another often slows during economic weakness and sometimes spurs shifts. In the early 1980s, many people fled the industrial Midwest for Texas oil towns, then moved again when the boom ended. Earlier this decade, workers from tech firms in Northern California headed south after the late 1990s tech boom collapsed.

The housing market's woes, though, are working the other way. Demographers and headhunters suggest people may be staying put because they can't sell their homes or can't get financing for new ones.

Dru George, a partner at Austin McGregor, an executive search firm based in Dallas, said that in the past nine months he has had several executives turn down jobs in other places because of the financial hits they would take if they sold their homes. Some are "under water" -- that is, they paid more on their houses than they would get selling them -- he said.

"I'm doing a search in Austin, and I was speaking with candidates, East Coast, West Coast, in the South," he said. "A lot of these executives are $300,000 to $400,000 under water on their house. Do they sell it at a loss or stay put? That's something we see on a daily basis."

The data also show that some Gulf Coast counties, decimated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, are attracting new residents.

Two of the nation's fastest-growing counties, on a percentage basis, were in Louisiana. Orleans Parish, La., added 29,000 residents between July 2006 and 2007, after losing 243,000 residents in the year-earlier period. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
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As the national divorce rate plateaus at historically high levels, many people yearn to understand what makes a successful marriage. This has given rise in recent years to an outpouring of confusing studies and surveys attempting to nail down the odds of particular types of couples staying together.
Which couples have the best chances? Depending on which study you believe -- they vary widely in quality -- you must get lots of education, earn a lot of money, marry over age 25, live in a Blue State, be white, or be a Presbyterian or a Catholic (but only a faithful one who attends Mass). What doesn't help: being a born-again Christian, having daughters instead of sons, having divorced parents or being born in Oklahoma. (Pilloried in the media a few years ago for its high divorce rate, Oklahoma has mounted a state-funded marriage-education program that has enrolled 133,000 people so far, an official says.)

As a child of divorced parents who has seen many friends divorce, Maggi Deroian, 29, who is single, wants a happy marriage. To that end, the New York event producer follows the research and makes "rules for my life, based on statistics, that would help minimize my chances for divorce," she says. What's frustrating, though, is that many of the studies focus on factors she can't control, such as family history or race. "Knowing that practicing Catholics who go to church have a lower divorce rate" doesn't help someone who's not one, she says.

Many people regularly see a doctor for an annual physical or visit the dentist for an annual cleaning. Now, clinicians at the Center for Couples and Family Research want people to undergo a regular marriage checkup. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com/
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This quiz was developed at the center, based at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., to help couples assess their marital health. Even the best marriages have strengths and weaknesses, and this checklist aims to help identify them. There's no "score" at the end, where couples discover if their marriage will fail or succeed. Instead, couples are encouraged to identify areas where they can improve their relationship. Take the assessment.
For more information, visit Clark University's Web site.

The research, adds Erin Stafford, 27, a Fullerton, Calif., image consultant who is also single, "just feeds the fires of insecurity."

After reviewing a stack of studies, I've extracted some findings that are generally helpful:

- Take life's big steps in mindful order. On average, 43% of first marriages end in separation or divorce within 15 years, a federal study shows. Marrying in your teens or having children out of wedlock are linked to higher rates. Odds improve when you graduate from college first; then marry, then have children. The divorce rate falls as the age of marriage rises through the late 20s, then levels off, says a new study by Evelyn Lehrer at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Be wary of casual cohabitation. Singles have been scared by studies linking cohabitation before marriage to divorce; however, people who live together are a self-selecting population who may place less value from the start on lifelong monogamy. In a more helpful insight, Scott Stanley at the University of Denver and others have found cohabitation can create an inertia effect -- a tendency for cohabiting couples who otherwise wouldn't marry to slide into marriages of convenience that later hit the rocks. Couples who wait to live together until after they're engaged tend to avoid comparable problems.

Find a supportive workplace. While blacks tend to divorce at higher rates than whites, Jay Teachman at Western Washington University has found the divorce gap vanishes among couples in the Army, one of the nation's most race-blind institutions. In the Army, blacks tend to be fairly paid and promoted -- and to divorce at the same rate as white civilians. Given the well-documented tendency of workaday emotions to spill over at home, it makes sense to avoid workplaces where the deck is stacked against you.

Act quickly when troubles arise. Women working outside the home have been blamed for higher rates of divorce. In fact, working women leave unhappy marriages at higher rates, but not unions that are happy or average, say preliminary findings by researchers at Ohio State and Stanford universities. "If a woman can support herself, she's more likely to think it's viable to leave," says Stanford's Paula England. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
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A countervailing factor: Dual-earner couples tend to share housework and child care more evenly, making marriages happier and offsetting divorce risk, says Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage: A History."

Whatever the case, if your marriage starts to slide, act right away to change damaging behaviors or take counseling or a marriage-education program (findable at www.smartmarriages.com).

Studies aside, the final unit of analysis is the relationship. Ms. Deroian says the best wisdom gleaned from her "quest to solve the question of 'forever' " in marriage came from a cab driver she rode with once who had been married 45 years. When she asked how he and his wife did it, he told her about their travels together, and evenings spent dancing. "At the end of the day," she says, "you have to take time to enjoy one another."

Several years after Americans woke up to a bedbug problem, the pest-control industry is rolling out an arsenal of methods that promise an easy yet thorough assault on the bloodthirsty pests.

Bedbugs, which can be difficult to spot, are becoming even tougher to eradicate as they spread and their resistance to some pesticides grows. In response, pest-control companies are adopting new tactics.

Stern Environmental Group LLC, a Secaucus, N.J., company that serves the New York City area, recently started using a technology that sprays the bugs with icy carbon dioxide to kill them. ThermaPure Inc., of Ventura, Calif., uses devices similar to giant hair dryers to heat up a room and bake the bugs to death. Bedbugs & Beyond LLC in New York will remove people's furniture from their homes and fumigate it with a poisonous gas. Another method uses specially trained dogs to track down tiny bedbugs and their eggs, helping exterminators target spraying. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Minnesota are studying bedbugs' behavior in an attempt to develop a trap that simulates a typical victim -- a sleeping human.

Professional treatments, including many of the conventional methods still being used, can start at about several hundred dollars and reach into the thousands.

A simple solution to rid a home of the common bedbug, or Cimex lectularius, has proven elusive since the brown, wingless creatures made a resurgence in the U.S. about five years ago. Both entomologists and the pest-control industry say they have seen a rise in infestations of homes and hotels; Steven Jacobs, an urban entomologist at Penn State University who identifies insects for homeowners and pesticide companies, says he now receives about 30 bedbug specimens a year, compared with almost none about five or six years ago.

Bedbugs are slightly smaller than an apple seed and hide in the folds and seams of mattresses and other furniture, emerging at night to feed on a warm-blooded host. Part of what makes bedbugs so tricky to eradicate is that the insects aren't confined to the bed. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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They live in drapes, behind wall hangings, in the cracks of wall plaster -- and even in light fixtures and electronics. Further complicating matters, a female can deposit the tiny eggs around a room. The bugs are transported from one location to another in luggage or clothing; pest experts say the bugs likely accompany travelers home from hotels or enter a house on secondhand furniture.

Entomologists say it is unclear why the pests have made a comeback, but theories include a more restrained use of other pesticides that in the past might have helped to nab bedbugs, and an upswing in international travel.

Bedbug bites can produce itching welts, but the bugs aren't known to carry disease. Still, they can be quite a nuisance and take a powerful psychological toll. Some people don't sleep well for months, worrying that every itch is a bug on them, and many feel ashamed to tell their relatives or neighbors about the problem.

Bedbugs typically have been treated with a class of chemicals known as pyrethroids. Yet entomologists who study bedbug control say the insects have developed some resistance to these chemicals. Other chemicals are more effective but can take longer to work. Mattress encasements may be successful in eliminating bugs -- but only from the mattresses.

Companies pitching the latest eradication methods -- such as heat or icy sprays -- say they are more effective as well as more palatable for people worried about using pesticides. Yet entomologists caution there still are drawbacks: The cold spray might not reach every bug; dogs can miss hiding places high up in a room; and heating might cause bugs to flee to a cooler place in the home. Except for heating, the latest methods usually require the homeowner to go through the onerous process of clearing out rooms, drawers and closets, and washing or dry cleaning all clothing and linens.

"We don't have any easy method of elimination," says Michael Potter, a professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky who has observed an increase in bedbugs through his research and work with pest-control companies. "We are looking for the silver bullet."

While visiting her father's home over Christmas, Chance Fechtor developed 40 bites on her body that doctors suspected were from bedbugs. Convinced she had brought the bugs home with her, Ms. Fechtor took apart her bed and went though her clothes looking for them. She even starting waking up in the middle of the night and donning a headlamp in hopes of nabbing them.

After doing some research, she came across Advanced K9 Detectives in Milford, Conn., which trains dogs to spot bedbugs. A dog found some bugs in the mattress, the carpet, a drawer and behind a radiator. The house was sprayed with pesticides, and Ms. Fechtor says her Boston-area home has since remained pest-free.

"It was very stressful," she says. "The idea that there were I don't how many bugs on me while I was sleeping completely grossed me out."

Pest-control experts and researchers say dogs can indeed be helpful for finding bedbugs humans might miss or to confirm a treatment has gotten rid of all the bugs. Pepe Peruyero, who last year started training bedbug-sniffing dogs for pest control companies at his J & K Canine Academy in High Springs, Fla., says the cost can be about $200 an hour, depending on home size and travel time.

Another solution is killing the bugs and their eggs by heating a room to between 120 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit for several hours. ThermaPure uses infrared heaters to uniformly heat the room, says President and Chief Executive David Hedman. Treatment costs between $500 and $1,000 per room. (Easily melted items like candles and lipstick must first be removed.)

At the opposite end of the temperature spectrum, Cryonite, made by CTS Technologies, a unit of Venteco PLC in London, aims to eradicate the bugs by dousing them with a snowy spray of carbon dioxide. A drawback: Some bugs can survive if they aren't directly hit by the spray. Treatments cost between $600 to $700 per room, or as much as 50% more than a conventional chemical treatment, says Douglas Stern, managing partner of Stern Environmental, one of the companies using the method.

Meanwhile, desperate homeowners who don't want to pay hundreds of dollars are taking matters into their own hands, putting sticky tape on or near their beds to snare the bugs, vacuuming compulsively or ordering do-it-yourself solutions online. Entomologists say tape and vacuuming aren't likely to eliminate the bugs and over-the-counter products might kill only the bugs that people can see.

"It's getting the ones that are hiding that is the problem," says Susan C. Jones, an associate professor of entomology at Ohio State University. Louis J Sheehan
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Groundbreaking research suggests genes help explain why some people can recover from a traumatic event while others suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. Though preliminary, the study provides insight into a condition expected to strike increasing numbers of military veterans returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, one health expert said.

High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don't start school until age 7.

Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they're way ahead in math, science and reading -- on track to keeping Finns among the world's most productive workers.
Finland's students are the brightest in the world, according to an international test. Teachers say extra playtime is one reason for the students' success.

The Finns won attention with their performances in triennial tests sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group funded by 30 countries that monitors social and economic trends. In the most recent test, which focused on science, Finland's students placed first in science and near the top in math and reading, according to results released late last year. An unofficial tally of Finland's combined scores puts it in first place overall, says Andreas Schleicher, who directs the OECD's test, known as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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The U.S. placed in the middle of the pack in math and science; its reading scores were tossed because of a glitch. About 400,000 students around the world answered multiple-choice questions and essays on the test that measured critical thinking and the application of knowledge. A typical subject: Discuss the artistic value of graffiti.

The academic prowess of Finland's students has lured educators from more than 50 countries in recent years to learn the country's secret, including an official from the U.S. Department of Education. What they find is simple but not easy: well-trained teachers and responsible children. Early on, kids do a lot without adults hovering. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx

And teachers create lessons to fit their students. "We don't have oil or other riches. Knowledge is the thing Finnish people have," says Hannele Frantsi, a school principal.

Visitors and teacher trainees can peek at how it's done from a viewing balcony perched over a classroom at the Norssi School in Jyväskylä, a city in central Finland. What they see is a relaxed, back-to-basics approach. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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The school, which is a model campus, has no sports teams, marching bands or prom.

Trailing 15-year-old Fanny Salo at Norssi gives a glimpse of the no-frills curriculum. Fanny is a bubbly ninth-grader who loves "Gossip Girl" books, the TV show "Desperate Housewives" and digging through the clothing racks at H&M stores with her friends.

Fanny earns straight A's, and with no gifted classes she sometimes doodles in her journal while waiting for others to catch up. She often helps lagging classmates. "It's fun to have time to relax a little in the middle of class," Fanny says. Finnish educators believe they get better overall results by concentrating on weaker students rather than by pushing gifted students ahead of everyone else. The idea is that bright students can help average ones without harming their own progress.

At lunch, Fanny and her friends leave campus to buy salmiakki, a salty licorice. They return for physics, where class starts when everyone quiets down. Teachers and students address each other by first names. About the only classroom rules are no cellphones, no iPods and no hats.

Every three years, 15-year-olds in 57 countries around the world take a test called the Pisa exam, which measures proficiency in math, science and reading.
• The test:2 Two sections from the Pisa science test
• Chart:3 Recent scores for participating countries

Fanny's more rebellious classmates dye their blond hair black or sport pink dreadlocks. Others wear tank tops and stilettos to look tough in the chilly climate. Tanning lotions are popular in one clique. Teens sift by style, including "fruittari," or preppies; "hoppari," or hip-hop, or the confounding "fruittari-hoppari," which fuses both. Ask an obvious question and you may hear "KVG," short for "Check it on Google, you idiot." Heavy-metal fans listen to Nightwish, a Finnish band, and teens socialize online at irc-galleria.net.

The Norssi School is run like a teaching hospital, with about 800 teacher trainees each year. Graduate students work with kids while instructors evaluate from the sidelines. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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Teachers must hold master's degrees, and the profession is highly competitive: More than 40 people may apply for a single job. Their salaries are similar to those of U.S. teachers, but they generally have more freedom.

Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.

One explanation for the Finns' success is their love of reading. Parents of newborns receive a government-paid gift pack that includes a picture book. Some libraries are attached to shopping malls, and a book bus travels to more remote neighborhoods like a Good Humor truck.

Ymmersta school principal Hannele Frantsi

Finland shares its language with no other country, and even the most popular English-language books are translated here long after they are first published. Many children struggled to read the last Harry Potter book in English because they feared they would hear about the ending before it arrived in Finnish. Movies and TV shows have Finnish subtitles instead of dubbing. One college student says she became a fast reader as a child because she was hooked on the 1990s show "Beverly Hills, 90210." http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx

In November, a U.S. delegation visited, hoping to learn how Scandinavian educators used technology. Officials from the Education Department, the National Education Association and the American Association of School Librarians saw Finnish teachers with chalkboards instead of whiteboards, and lessons shown on overhead projectors instead of PowerPoint. Keith Krueger was less impressed by the technology than by the good teaching he saw. "You kind of wonder how could our country get to that?" says Mr. Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an association of school technology officers that organized the trip.

Finnish high-school senior Elina Lamponen saw the differences firsthand. She spent a year at Colon High School in Colon, Mich., where strict rules didn't translate into tougher lessons or dedicated students, Ms. Lamponen says. She would ask students whether they did their homework. They would reply: " 'Nah. So what'd you do last night?'" she recalls. History tests were often multiple choice. The rare essay question, she says, allowed very little space in which to write. In-class projects were largely "glue this to the poster for an hour," she says. Her Finnish high school forced Ms. Lamponen, a spiky-haired 19-year-old, to repeat the year when she returned.

At the Norssi School in Jyväskylä, school principal Helena Muilu

Lloyd Kirby, superintendent of Colon Community Schools in southern Michigan, says foreign students are told to ask for extra work if they find classes too easy. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
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He says he is trying to make his schools more rigorous by asking parents to demand more from their children.

Despite the apparent simplicity of Finnish education, it would be tough to replicate in the U.S. With a largely homogeneous population, teachers have few students who don't speak Finnish. In the U.S., about 8% of students are learning English, according to the Education Department. There are fewer disparities in education and income levels among Finns. Finland separates students for the last three years of high school based on grades; 53% go to high school and the rest enter vocational school. (All 15-year-old students took the PISA test.) Finland has a high-school dropout rate of about 4% -- or 10% at vocational schools -- compared with roughly 25% in the U.S., according to their respective education departments.

Another difference is financial. Each school year, the U.S. spends an average of $8,700 per student, while the Finns spend $7,500. Finland's high-tax government provides roughly equal per-pupil funding, unlike the disparities between Beverly Hills public schools, for example, and schools in poorer districts. The gap between Finland's best- and worst-performing schools was the smallest of any country in the PISA testing. The U.S. ranks about average.

Finnish students have little angstata -- or teen angst -- about getting into the best university, and no worries about paying for it. College is free. There is competition for college based on academic specialties -- medical school, for instance. But even the best universities don't have the elite status of a Harvard.

Taking away the competition of getting into the "right schools" allows Finnish children to enjoy a less-pressured childhood. While many U.S. parents worry about enrolling their toddlers in academically oriented preschools, the Finns don't begin school until age 7, a year later than most U.S. first-graders.

Once school starts, the Finns are more self-reliant. While some U.S. parents fuss over accompanying their children to and from school, and arrange every play date and outing, young Finns do much more on their own. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
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At the Ymmersta School in a nearby Helsinki suburb, some first-grade students trudge to school through a stand of evergreens in near darkness. At lunch, they pick out their own meals, which all schools give free, and carry the trays to lunch tables. There is no Internet filter in the school library. They can walk in their socks during class, but at home even the very young are expected to lace up their own skates or put on their own skis.

The Finns enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world, but they, too, worry about falling behind in the shifting global economy. They rely on electronics and telecommunications companies, such as Finnish cellphone giant Nokia, along with forest-products and mining industries for jobs. Some educators say Finland needs to fast-track its brightest students the way the U.S. does, with gifted programs aimed at producing more go-getters. Parents also are getting pushier about special attention for their children, says Tapio Erma, principal of the suburban Olari School. "We are more and more aware of American-style parents," he says.

Mr. Erma's school is a showcase campus. Last summer, at a conference in Peru, he spoke about adopting Finnish teaching methods. During a recent afternoon in one of his school's advanced math courses, a high-school boy fell asleep at his desk. The teacher didn't disturb him, instead calling on others. While napping in class isn't condoned, Mr. Erma says, "We just have to accept the fact that they're kids and they're learning how to live."

Tampa, Fla.

They're bullish on testosterone here at the 6th Annual World Congress on the Aging Male.

Physicians and researchers from around the world gathered to review the latest findings on what low levels of the male hormone means for men, how replacing it might help and why it hasn't caught on broadly.

"If we had a drug that could restore sexual function in men, make them stronger, build their bones, reduce fat and get rid of the blues, you'd say, 'Oh my God, why doesn't everybody know about it?' " says Abraham Morgentaler, a urologist at Harvard Medical School and director of the Men's Health Boston clinic. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx
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"There is a drug like that -- but the public associates testosterone with cheating and illicit behavior and the fact that 40 years ago, it was thought to give people prostate cancer."

Whether it does or not is still an open question. But many studies have shown that low testosterone is associated with reduced muscle mass, bone density, sexual function and vitality, and increased fatigue, depression, Type II diabetes and obesity -- particularly belly fat. Evidence is accumulating that restoring testosterone to normal can alleviate many of those problems.
Some studies suggest that boosting testosterone can boost muscle strength, bone density, sexual function and general quality of life in older men. But the risks remain unknown. So, is it a risk worth taking? "Men with low testosterone are miserable to live with -- they fall asleep after dinner and snap at everyone," says David Greenberg, a general practitioner in Toronto. "You restore it and they say, 'Wow, I feel like myself again.' "

But there's debate over which of the three forms of testosterone to measure, what level constitutes "low" and, most importantly, at what age. Testosterone declines naturally after age 40. So is a 70-year-old man deficient or just aging?

"The moment you add the element of aging, you add the element of ageism. It's giving things for sex to old men," says John E. Morley, director of geriatric medicine at Saint Louis University, who, like other experts quoted here has worked with makers of testosterone products.

"Everybody agrees that testosterone deficiency should be treated in younger men. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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Why not treat it in older age groups?" says Ronald S. Swerdloff, chief of the endocrinology at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Women lose estrogen much more abruptly in menopause, and replacing it to alleviate symptoms and maintain bone health has been standard practice for decades, though questions remain about the risk of breast cancer.

There are even more unknowns about the risks and benefits of testosterone replacement. For one thing, many of the symptoms of low testosterone are very common in older men and could be related to other conditions. Some, like obesity, may lead to low testosterone rather than vice versa.

And there is lingering concern that testosterone could fuel prostate cancer -- largely because drugs that reduce testosterone seem to shrink enlarged prostates and lower the risk of developing prostate cancer by 25%, according to the National Cancer Institute's Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial.

On the other hand, an analysis of 18 studies in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute last month concluded that there is no correlation between testosterone levels and prostate-cancer risk. Another study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that men with low testosterone had higher mortality rates in general than those with higher levels, regardless of other risk factors.

Some drug makers are testing oral variations of testosterone that would deliver the benefits without the potential prostate hazards. For now, testosterone is available mainly in injections, topical gels and patches. Nearly three million prescriptions were written in the U.S. in 2007, according to IMS Health, a health-information company.

Everyone here agrees that large-scale clinical trials are needed to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of testosterone therapy. One such trial has been proposed to the National Institutes of Health; and the New England Research Institutes is starting a registry of 1,000 patients, half in the U.S. and half in Europe, to follow for two years. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
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In the meantime, some doctors are wary of treating older men until more is known. "If your patient is an old man who's grumpy and not the stud he used to be, you could give him testosterone for a few months and see what happens," says Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, chief of epidemiology at University of California, San Diego. "But no epidemiological results justify giving it to older men in general."

Starbucks' chairman and CEO, Howard Schultz, has embarked on an aggressive campaign to restore the company's luster after various missteps, such as selling glorified Egg McMuffins (bad) and hawking CDs by Kenny G (worse). Stores nationwide were shut down for a few hours Tuesday so that baristas could be retrained to work the espresso machines correctly. But if Mr. Schultz is eager to improve the Starbucks experience, there's a simple place he could start: Lose the tip jars.

During the second half of the 20th century, the practice of tipping largely retreated from American life. The earliest of tipped workers -- railroad porters -- gave way to flight attendants (the first of whom were registered nurses, whose station was deemed above gratuities). Gone are telegrams, the receipt of which required a tip. Men stopped getting shaved at barbershops -- where one stiffed the barber at one's peril. In June 1903, an unlucky New York streetcar conductor named John Shanno failed to tip his barber, Joseph Ferlanto. "I'll teach you not to forget to tip," Ferlanto screamed, and went all Sweeney Todd on him.

But after decades in which tipping was reserved almost exclusively for waiters, waitresses, hairdressers, cabdrivers and bellhops, the practice has begun to expand again. Typical is a sandwich shop in my neighborhood: Pay with a credit card and the signature slip urges the addition of a gratuity, all for a sack handed over a counter. This new expansion of everyday tipping has been driven by the near-ubiquitous tip jar, a phenomenon for which Starbucks bears no little responsibility, having brought the practice to every corner of the country.

For Starbucks' CEO, getting and giving tips are matters of significant self-regard. In his memoir, "Pour Your Heart Into It," Mr. Schultz recalls the degradations of his youthful days waiting tables in the Catskills. "I remember how terribly rude some of the guests were to me," Mr. Schultz writes. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
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"They would be brusque and demanding, and I'd run around and do my best to please them, and when they departed, they would leave only a meager tip." Mr. Schultz promised himself, were he to get rich: "I'm always going to be a big tipper."

One of Henry James's favorite ways to illustrate the naïveté and social insecurity of newly rich Americans in Europe was to show them lavishing excessive tips on everyone in sight. But such extravagance can also be a sign of an unpleasantly aristocratic impulse. The grand tip reached its modern zenith in Frank Sinatra, whose entourage had pockets full of neatly folded 50s and hundreds. At a signal from the Chairman, his hangers-on would "duke" -- Sinatra's lordly slang for his largess -- the lucky waiters, hat-check girls, doormen and anyone else nearby.

When tipping first caught on in the U.S., late in the 19th century, it was the old-world, aristocratic overtones of the practice that drew the most ire. An 1897 editorial in the New York Times declared tipping to be the "vilest of imported vices." The paper lamented not only that "we have men among us servile enough to accept their earnings in this form" but that others were willing "to reward the servility." Joining the chorus against "flunkyism," the Washington Post denounced tipping as "one of the most insidious and one of the most malignant evils" of modern life. Tipping was seen to foster a lord-and-vassal relationship that the prouder professions resisted. Well into the 1910s many bartenders refused gratuities as an insult to their status.

Opposed to vassalage and servility (except to the state, that is), communists have often targeted tipping. When George Orwell arrived in Barcelona in 1936 to fight in Spain's civil war, "almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from an hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy." In fact, one of the best arguments to be found in favor of tipping is that Fidel Castro tried to eradicate it in Cuba.

In America, receiving tips long ago lost any stigma; indeed, the "partners" at Starbucks regard their gratuities as an acknowledgment that they are more worthy than their counterparts at McDonalds. But making one's employees dependent on the kindness of strangers is not without cost. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
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Jim Romenesko, known for his media Web site, also runs the popular Starbucksgossip.com1, where baristas and customers post comments and questions about the chain. As Mr. Romenesko has noted, the most heated, vitriolic discussions are those on tipping. Most of the postings are by levelheaded employees who make it clear that they deliver good service tips or no. But there is no shortage of workers angry at the "cheap bastards" who risk getting secretly "decaffed" if they don't tip. One barista reminds customers: "I control your daily dose of crack!"

If the tip jar encourages staff animosity, it also makes many customers uncomfortable. On the Starbucksgossip site, plenty of coffee-drinkers echo Mark Twain's complaint about tipping: "We pay that tax knowing it to be unjust and an extortion; yet we go away with a pain at the heart if we think we have been stingy with the poor fellows."

We Americans see ourselves as generous -- we each want to tip a bit more than the average guy. Thus the actual average creeps ever higher. Not long ago, an 18% restaurant tip was a tad better than the 15% that was expected. Now I don't know anyone who tips less than 20%. Soon we'll feel the need to show our generosity by leaving 25% of the tab.

To resist the custom is to be radically antisocial, like "Mr. Pink," the crook played by Steve Buscemi in "Reservoir Dogs." He doesn't tip "because society says I gotta tip." When a fellow hoodlum avers that waitresses are underpaid, Mr. Pink answers: "She don't make enough money, she can quit."

Generous? No. But economically sound. It's not that we tip waiters because they are paid so little; they are paid so little because they can expect to make up the difference in tips. Starbucks is known for paying relatively well and providing respectable benefits. Yet, without the tip-jar take, the company would have to raise its wages commensurately to maintain the same caliber of employees. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
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Perhaps prices would rise too, but I suspect many would be happy to have the full, unambiguous cost of the transaction up on the board. As things stand, the tip jar subsidizes the company's payroll costs. So when you toss a dollar into the cup, you're really making a donation to Starbucks -- and I can think of needier beneficiaries.

The mob that set the American embassy in Belgrade ablaze had that intuitive sense crowds of this kind possess: a feeling of persecution and a "knowledge" of the enemy. Grant the Serbian nationalists, with their narrative of victimization and belligerent self-pity, their due: It was American power, deployed in the Balkans since the mid-1990s, which rescued the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo from the dark threat of Serbian nationalism.

In the early 1990s, it was said that Europe would put out the flames of the Balkans and shelter the Muslims of that region. But Europe averted its gaze from the pitiless campaigns of Serbian nationalism (the Croats, too, had been no friends of tolerance), and it was left for American power to come to the rescue of the beleaguered Muslims. The angry crowd in Serbia had it right: This new, impoverished state of Kosovo would have never seen the light of day without American patronage.

A rioter throws wood into the burning U.S. embassy in Belgrade, Serbia.

The Ottoman Turks brought Islam to the Balkans, but their power receded in the middle years of the 19th century. In his celebrated and disturbing work of fiction, "Bridge on the Drina," (1945), Bosnian-born Ivo Andric prophesied calamities for the Muslims. The power of the Turks had vanished "like an apparition," he wrote, yet the children of Islam "remained here, deceived and menaced like seaweed on dry land left to their own devices and their own evil fate." Andric was prescient: The dark nationalisms of the Balkans would eventually heap on the Muslims of these lands bottomless sorrow.

Communist leader Josip Tito gave the Muslims and other nationalities of the south Slavs a reprieve from the battles of faith and nationalism. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
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No sooner had the edifice he had maintained come apart, the Bosnians and the Kosovars would be hurled into a battle for their very survival.

On one cruel day in the summer of 1995, some 7,000 people, men and young boys, were herded out of the town of Srebrenica by General Ratko Mladic, of the Bosnian Serb army, and executed in cold blood. When it fell to the Serbs, the town was flying the flag of the United Nations, it was a "safe area," patrolled by Dutch troops. But the peacekeepers had simply handed it over to the Serbs and made their way to safety.

Srebrenica shamed Bill Clinton who had tried his best, over 30 long, bloody months, to stay out of the war for Yugoslavia. (Here he was true to the policy of his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, who along with his advisors, believed that America had no dog in that Balkan fight, as the inimitable James Baker so famously put it.)

After Srebrenica, appeasement of the Serbs came to a swift end, and America would give the Muslims of Bosnia a chance at some normalcy. America was now in the Balkans, the Muslim children of the Ottoman Empire had become wards of the Pax Americana.

And so a Balkan mantra would come to pass: "The Yugoslav crisis began in Kosovo, and it will end in Kosovo." It was on the outskirts of Pristina, Kosovo's principal city, on June 28, 1989, that Slobodan Milosevic, the arsonist who lit the fuse of Yugoslavia's wars, recast himself from a communist party hack into a great nationalist avenger. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
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It was a day fraught with symbolism: the anniversary of what the Serbs take to be the central drama and epic of their history, their defeat in 1389 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, on the Field of Blackbirds.

In their self-pitying epic, fate had been cruel to the Serbs -- their capital, Belgrade was destroyed 40 times, their holy lands in Kosovo lost to the infidels, overwhelmed by the Albanians. Kosovo may indeed have been the cradle of the Serbian Church: But in the 1980s and 1990s, the Serbs were deserting Kosovo by the day, and by the time it descended into mayhem, they accounted for less than 10% percent of the province's population.

It would have been the better part of wisdom to let well enough alone, but Serbia's grief over setbacks in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, and Serbia's vanity, broke the fragile peace of Kosovo. There had been autonomy for the Kosovars, the regime in Belgrade annulled it. There had been a constitution that gave the Kosovars a measure of protection within Serbia, but the Milosevic regime shredded all that.

Then the Kosovars declared their own independence in 1990. That declaration was in vain, only Albania recognized the new entity.

It would take an American-led NATO campaign, an air war of 11 weeks, in 1999, to make Serbia abandon its project of conquest and tyranny in Kosovo. Milosevic had played cat-and-mouse with Washington and Brussels, and had bet on the Russians coming to his rescue. He was in for the surprise of his life: The air campaign was a substitute for a ground war that American and European leaders were eager to avoid.

The Serbs (and the Croats) had been warning of an "Islamic crescent" in the Balkans; they had depicted themselves as standing at the ramparts of Christendom, fighting the wars of the West. This was bigotry and delusion: Islam of the Balkan variety was tolerant and pluralistic, the religion of people who had an enlightened view of their faith, and who lived at the crossroads of civilizations.

Some jihadists, it is true, made their way to the Balkans from the Middle East and North Africa but their zeal was alien to these secularized children of Islam. In the most telling metaphor of this civilizational drama, some jihadists brought the seeds of the palm trees of their habitat. Those seedlings would not take and died. Only apple trees grew here, said a man of the Balkans.

The air war launched by NATO ended the Serbian reign of terror in Kosovo, and made that province a NATO protectorate. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
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The day of reckoning was put off -- but the declaration of independence by the Kosovars on Feb. 17 has now resolved the ambiguity of Kosovo's status.

There are no angels in the Balkans, and the Albanian inheritors of Kosovo who were forged by a bitter military struggle against the Serbs will have to tread carefully. They will have to show qualities of mercy and moderation that have not been in ample supply on the Balkan soil. Too much history, too little geography, it has been said of the Balkan Peninsula and its terrible wars.

And in Muslim lands? There has been silence about American deeds in the Balkans. The drums of anti-Americanism are steady, and no one has stepped forth to acknowledge American mercy and American protection. Precious few, even in "moderate" Muslim lands, own up to the fact that Islam survived in Sarajevo only because American power rescued it from the Serbo-Croat campaign of the 1990s.

And yet today, in this tale of Kosovo, the willfulness in Muslim lands is easy to see. Whether Muslims acknowledge it or not, whether Americans themselves admit it or not, the Pax Americana is the provider of order of last resort in the lands of Islam.

In less than two decades, there have been American campaigns of rescue in Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
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Two of these American wars, the ones in the Balkans, were on behalf of Muslims stranded in a hostile European landscape. In its refusal to acknowledge the debt owed American power, Muslim society tells us a good deal about its modern condition, and about that false, mindless anti-Americanism on the loose in Muslim lands.

U.S. Senator John McCain
"Reagan's Disciple is the ideal antidote for the superficial and imitative analysis that seems to dominate the coverage of George W. Bush. For those looking for a deeper and fairer understanding of the strengths and flaws of his presidency, and for penetrating observations about Ronald Reagan's enduring influence on this country, this is the book to read."

Kenneth M. Duberstein, former Reagan White House chief of staff
"Lou and Carl, as usual, get it right. Uncommon anecdotes, insights, and analysis that catalogue why one president soared--and one didn't. They tell it like it was, and like it is."

Discover the tender gritty, self-told survival story of a teenage addict. Here is a cant-tear-yourself-away look at what can happen to the one-in-five teenagers who have a drinking problem. At age six, author Jennifer Storm was already stealing sips of her mothers crème de menthe. By age 13, she was binge drinking and well on her way to regular use of cocaine and LSD. She anesthetized herself to many of the harsh realities of her young lifeincluding her own misunderstandings about her sexual orientation which made her even more vulnerable to victimization. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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As a young teen, Jennifers life was awash in alcohol, drugs, and the trauma of rape. The upside is that Jennifer came through untold darkness to create for herself a life of accomplishment and joy. Her remarkably tender and telling story proves that forgiveness and redemption are more than possible through recovery and a commitment to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Jennifer Storm is the executive director of the Victim/Witness Assistance Program in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 2002, Governor Edward G. Rendell appointed Storm as a commissioner to the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. Her media appearances include frequent live and taped interviews on all major networks as a spokesperson for victims' rights. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
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She has been profiled and appeared in We, Women, Central Penn Business Journal, Rolling Stone, Time, and many local and statewide newspapers. This is her first book.

“The Changing of the Guard”
The Twilight Zone episode

Scene from "The Changing of the Guard"
Episode no.    Season 3
Episode 102
Written by    Rod Serling
Directed by    Robert Ellis Miller
Guest stars    Donald Pleasence : Professor Ellis Fowler
Liam Sullivan : Headmaster
Production no.    4835
Original airdate    June 1, 1962
Episode chronology
← Previous    Next →
"Cavender Is Coming"    "In His Image"
List of Twilight Zone episodes

"The Changing of the Guard" is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.
Contents

    * 1 Synopsis
    * 2 Trivia
    * 3 Critical Response
    * 4 See also
    * 5 References
    * 6 External links

Synopsis
    Please help improve this article or section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (January 2008)

Professor Ellis Fowler is an elderly teacher who is forced into retirement by his school. Looking through his old yearbooks and reminiscing about his former students, he becomes convinced that all of his lessons have been in vain and that he has accomplished nothing with his life. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
Deeply depressed, he returns to his school one last time intending to kill himself. Before he can commit suicide, the ghosts of former students reappear to prove that his teachings were very much appreciated.

Trivia
    Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines.
The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

    * Donald Pleasence was heavily made-up in order to appear much older than his actual age of 42.

    * The quote Professor Fowler reads on the statue's plinth, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity,” is the motto of Rod Serling’s alma mater Antioch College, and was said by its first president, Horace Mann. Serling accepted a teaching post there after completing this script.

Critical Response

Andrew Sarris, excerpt from Rod Serling: Viewed from Beyond the Twilight Zone:
“    It should be noted, however, that much of Serling’s fantasy and science fiction writing is somewhat genteel by today’s scary, paranoid standards. Although he has acknowledged Hemingway as an early stylistic influence, there are echoes in his recurringly pastoral nostalgia of such wistful authors as Thornton Wilder, Christopher Morley, Robert Nathan, and James Hilton. Indeed Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips could have served as the model for “The Changing of the Guard” with Donald Pleasence cast in the role of Professor Ellis Fowler, an old crock who is being retired after 51 years of service. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
Convinced that his life’s work has been a waste, he is reassured only by the testimony of ghosts of students past that his teachings have been applied and absorbed. This fantasy is so gentle, uncomplicated and sentimental that one is brought up short by the seeming absence of a disquieting twist in the plot, which one could suppose is that self-same twist.    ”

See also

    * The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series)
    * Episode List
    * Season 3

References

    * Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)

External links

    * The Changing of the Guard at the Internet Movie Database
    * TV.com episode page

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A little over a year ago, NASA announced it had found strong evidence of liquid water flowing, at least temporarily, on the surface of Mars. Pictures taken a few years apart showed flow-like gullies in the sides of craters, and there were a few different pieces of evidence that these were due to sudden flooding of liquid water downhill. Here are the original shots:

However, a new study just released says that these images fit better with being dry grains flowing downhill.
The researchers, led by Jon D. Pelletier of The University of Arizona, used HiRISE, the very high-resolution camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to look at the same regions as observed before. By taking images at different angles, they could establish a digital elevation model, a topographical map of the same crater shown in the earlier announcement. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
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They then modeled the way liquid water would flow under Martian conditions compared to how dry grains would flow. To their surprise, they found that dry grains were a better match. From their press release:
“The dry granular case was the winner,” said Pelletier, … “I was surprised. I started off thinking we were going to prove it’s liquid water.”
Finding liquid water on the surface of Mars would indicate the best places to look for current life on Mars, said co-author Alfred S. McEwen, a UA professor of planetary sciences.
“What we’d hoped to do was rule out the dry flow model — but that didn’t happen,” said McEwen, the HiRISE principal investigator and director of UA’s Planetary Image Research Laboratory.
An avalanche of dry debris is a much better match for their calculations and also what their computer model predicts, said Pelletier and McEwen.
While this isn’t conclusive, it does seem compelling (they can’t rule out very thick mud, incidentally). The press release doesn’t have any statements from the scientists who made the previous announcement about water, and I’ll be very curious indeed to hear what they have to say.
If it holds up, it’s too bad. I’d love to see better evidence of ubiquitous water on (or immediately under) the surface of Mars. But facing reality is what we have to do. Of course, as our tools get better, we’ll get better at figuring this stuff out, too. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
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It helps that so many people involved are so very clever.
A final note: I reread my original blog post about the announcement of possible water. While I think the content of my post was suitably skeptical, I let my feelings get away from me a bit in the headline: "LIQUID WATER ON MARS!" Hmmmm. Looks like sometimes I need to remember my own advice.
American International Group Inc. swung to a fourth-quarter net loss on a $11.12 billion pre-tax write-down on the value of insurance contracts tied to mortgages.

Shares fell in after-hours trading as the company said it expected to report more unrealized market valuation losses and impairment charges in 2008.

The New York insurance giant reported a net loss of $5.29 billion, or $2.08 a share, compared with net income of $3.44 billion, or $1.31 a share, a year earlier.

Results in the latest quarter also included pretax net realized capital losses of $2.63 billion primarily from other-than-temporary impairment charges in AIG's investment portfolio, with an additional $643 million pretax other-than-temporary impairment charge related to available-for-sale investment securities. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx
These charges resulted primarily from rapid declines in market values of residential mortgage-backed securities.

The prior-year quarter's results included a pretax net realized capital gains of $238 million.

Excluding items, such as the $11.12 billion write-down related to a decline in value of credit default swaps, which are financial instruments used to insure against default of certain securities, the company lost $1.25 a share compared with earnings of $1.47 a year earlier.

Analysts' mean estimates were for earnings of 60 cents a share on revenue of $29.83 billion, according to a poll by Thomson Financial.

Chief Executive Martin Sullivan said, "During 2008, we expect the U.S. housing market to remain weak and credit market uncertainty will likely persist. Continuing market deterioration would cause AIG to report additional unrealized market valuation losses and impairment charges."

He called AIG's results in 2007 "clearly unsatisfactory."

Earlier this month, AIG disclosed in an Securities and Exchange Commission filing that its outside accountants had found "material weakness" in its accounting systems and were forcing it to boost its fourth-quarter write-down of the value of insurance contracts.

In a press release Thursday, AIG said it "continues to believe that the unrealized market valuation losses on this super senior credit default swap portfolio are not indicative of the losses it may realize over time. Based upon its most current analyses, AIG believes that any credit impairment losses realized over time will not be material to AIG's consolidated financial condition, although it is possible that realized losses could be material to AIG's consolidated results of operations for an individual reporting period."

AIG's shares fell 12% after that accounting announcement to $44.74, a five-year low. They were at $49.15, down $1, or 2%, in after-hours trading Thursday.

The company faces other challenges confronting the insurance industry, such as the inability to raise premiums because of competition. Problems in the housing market were among the reasons that AIG's mortgage insurance unit, United Guaranty Residential Insurance Co., recorded a $348 million operating loss compared with operating income of $27 million a year earlier.

Profit also fell 22% in general insurance operations.
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Mount Lycaeon, in Arcadia, was a place of cult worship and sacrifice to Zeus Lycaeus. A temple and altar stood on the mountain's highest summit. The Arcadians believed Zeus Lycaeus was born in the district of Mount Lycaeon. They celebrated the Lycaea in Zeus' honor; however, ironically, the events of the originating myth of the Lycaea brought Zeus' wrath.
NASA’s Swift observatory is designed to detect high-energy radiation coming from the most powerful explosions in the Universe: gamma-ray bursts.

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But it’s also equipped with a more normal telescope, one that has a 30 centimeter mirror — that’s smaller than the one I have in my garage! But, this telescope is in space, so the atmosphere doesn’t blur out the images. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
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More importantly, the air above our heads absorbs ultraviolet light, preventing ground-based telescopes from even seeing any UV light.
So Swift’s UVOT (Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope) may not be big, but it can easily see UV coming from astronomical objects. And it has a wide field of view, allowing it to get fantastic images of bigger things… like galaxies.

That’s M33 (click to embiggen), a very nearby galaxy; it’s part of our neighborhood of galaxies called the Local Group. It’s a hair under 3 million light years away, and it’s smaller than the Milky Way, about half our size and a tenth our mass. It’s actually visible with binoculars as a fuzzy patch not too far from its big brother, the Andromeda galaxy.
The funny thing is, we know that UV light is predominantly given off by star-forming regions in galaxies; gas clouds where stars are actively being born. The amount of UV from M33 indicates that it is ablaze with stars, cranking them out at a rate far higher than the Milky Way. So even though it’s a bit on the smallish side, it’s certainly pulling its weight when it comes to making stars.
This image is pretty cool. It’s a mosaic of 39 individual images totaling 11 hours of exposure time, using three different UV filters, and it’s the most detailed UV image of an entire galaxy ever taken. Not bad for a telescope built to do an entirely different kind of science!
I worked on the education and public outreach for Swift for several years, and I remember first reading about the UVOT and thinking, wow that’s a pretty small telescope. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
I wonder what it will be able to do? Then after a moment or two of some mental math I began to realize that this was in fact a fairly powerful telescope; it’s no Hubble, but it can do some terrific science. And it can also make some very pretty pictures.

Ulysses’s odyssey comes to an end
You may have already heard that scientists have decided that is it time for the solar satellite Ulysses to shed this mortal coil.

Ulysses was launched from the Space Shuttle back in 1990, and was designed to operate for 5 years. Now, over 17 years later, its radioactive power source has finally decayed to the point where power is a serious issue. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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They’ve decided that in a few months they’ll shut it off, after an extraordinary mission.
Ulysses didn’t take pictures, so you may never have heard of its breakthrough science. It was the first machine to directly detect interstellar dust particles and helium atoms in our solar system, literally, interlopers from another star. It took unprecedented data of the Sun and its magnetic field, and did so continuously for so long that we now have an excellent baseline for such measurements, including over an entire sunspot cycle*.
For me, the most interesting aspect of the mission was that it was in a solar polar orbit: instead of sticking to the orbital plane of the planets like most probes, it was actually sent into an orbit nearly perpendicular to the orbit of the planets, so that it could peer straight down over the solar poles, an aspect we had never witnessed before.
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Getting a probe into an orbit like this is hard. Why? Because the Earth orbits the Sun pretty quickly, at 30 km/s (18 miles/second). You need to mostly negate that velocity for a probe to end up perpendicular to the plane of Earth’s orbit, and then you need to give it a huge velocity "down", south if you will, to get it in that orbit (or up, of course, but in this case Ulysses was sent down). No rocket we have now (or in 1990) could do that.
So we borrowed energy from one of the biggest sources we have: Jupiter. Ulysses was launched toward the giant planet, and using a slingshot maneuver launched itself down, down, and away, into the polar orbit around the Sun. While it was at Jupiter it took lots of scientific measurements, and has been sending back data ever since.
But now that’s over. With the power source dying, it cannot keep energy flowing to its instruments, communication devices, and also be able to heat the hydrazine fuel it uses for maneuvering (this is the same stuff the spysat that was recently destroyed — and many other satellites — use for fuel). http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
When Ulysses’s orbit takes it out to Jupiter’s distance once again, it’s so cold that the probe has a hard time keeping its fuel from freezing. All of these together mean it’s time for Ulysses to say its goodbyes.
My only regret for this mission? It didn’t swing by the asteroid 201 Penelope.
Panspermia is the idea that life on Earth originated in space and was seeded here by some event. This covers a lot of ground sky: comets, Mars, Venus, aliens, and so on.

The idea isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. It’s more medium-fetched. Mars is smaller and farther from the Sun, so therefore it cooled faster than Earth did after the period of heavy asteroid and comet bombardment a billion or so years after the planets formed. It may have had oceans and better conditions for the start of basic life before the Earth had cooled enough.
But if life started up first on Mars, how did it get here?
Asteroid impacts. The idea is that a smallish asteroid could have hit Mars and launched quite a bit of Martian territory into space. Eventually this could hit Earth. We know this can happen; we have samples of meteorites that are clearly form Mars; the isotope ratios of the chemicals in the meteorites matches what we know of Mars’s atmosphere. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
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Heck, I used to own a small Mars meteorite myself, until it fell out of my bag and I lost it, arrrrggggg!
Anyway, if some of that Martian ground had bugs in it of the protozoan kind, then they could make it to Earth.

Of course, there are hazards. They’re in space a long time, so they have to survive that. They also have to survive the fall to Earth. It’s not clear they could live through either event. And before that, they have to survive the enormous pressure of being smacked by an asteroid impact.
But a new paper that just came out in the peer-reviewed journal Astrobiology says that some bacteria could, in fact, survive the initial launch event. Amazingly, the enormous pressure generated in an asteroid impact on the surface of Mars may be survivable, if you’re really really tiny.
The researcher made models of the Martian ground seeded with bacteria, then subjected these samples to the pressures expected in an impact event. Amazingly, many of the bacteria survived. Lichens and bacteriospores did the best, surviving pressures from 5 - 40 billion Pascals, which is about 50,000 to 400,000 atmospheric pressures. That’s a lot. Cyanobacteria were the wussies of the lot, only surviving up to 100,000 atmospheric pressures.
Mind you, a human would be less than a greasy smear at that kind of pressure.
Anyway, this is pretty interesting stuff. It doesn’t say that the buggers could survive the trip here (millions of years) and the entry into our atmosphere, but there are scenarios where those are possible.
On a personal note, I think panspermia is interesting and worth investigating, but some people think it’s the panacea to everything. Notably an astronomer named Chandra Wickramasinghe, who has made the fun claims that interstellar dust is actually made of clouds of E. coli, and that the flu is really a virus from space.
Right.
Still, when the study stays scientific, it’s worth a look. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
I have seen no evidence at all that we actually did start on Mars or a comet or Somewhere Else, but it’s still possible such evidence will turn up. When we get to Mars, for example, what if we find DNA-based life? It’s much easier to get a rock from Mars to Earth than vice-versa (due to orbital and gravitational mechanics), so a find like that would be pretty conclusive. Until then, we have to do what we can to figure out what it was like for such interplanetary interlopers each step of the way. And the first step appears to be viable.
Oh– I cover some of this in my upcoming book, too. After all, if bugs might have made it here three billion years ago, they might make it today. Can we get wiped out by alien bacteria? Well, no, but read the book anyway. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
More than a trillion tons of methane lie trapped in permafrost and under frozen lakes in the Arctic. As the region thaws, the gas—a huge potential source of alternative energy—is bubbling out, simultaneously attracting venture capitalists and worrying climatologists. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that methane locked in ice (known as hydrates) could contain more organic carbon than all the world’s coal, oil, and nonhydrate natural gas combined. But that isn’t the only reason to keep track of methane release. Because of the way methane absorbs warmth radiating from Earth, it is as much as 21 times more heat-trapping—and thus climate-warming—than carbon dioxide. Yet current models of climate change do not take into consideration the potential impact of methane.

Katey Walter, a researcher at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, has spent the past few years mapping and measuring hot spots of methane emission in the rapidly melting regions of Alaska and Siberia. In a recent study, Walter and her team predict that if these methane reservoirs melt over the next 100 years, the gas released could re-create climate conditions that prevailed during a 2,500-year warming spell that began 14,000 years ago.
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Walter mapped likely methane deposits across the region; quantified how much methane, formed when permafrost melts, is bubbling out of current lakes; and compared that with the amount emitted from methane-laden sediments taken from ancient frozen lakes.
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She determined that 11,000 years ago methane released from thawing lakes contributed 33 to 87 percent of atmospheric methane. After that, melting slowed for the next 9,000 years and the lakes refroze. But now due to global warming over the past 100 years, methane release in the Arctic seems to be accelerating, Walter says, and left unchecked, it will continue to rise well above the levels found 10,000 years ago.

A 386,000-square-mile tract of permafrost in Siberia contains as much as 55 billion tons of potential methane, Walter says —10 times the amount currently in the atmosphere. Several companies, including BMW, have expressed interest in methane-to-energy technologies for large-scale operations. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx

Walter sees the benefits of using methane as an energy source as twofold: “Not only does it prevent a potent greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere by converting it to weaker greenhouse gases—water vapor and carbon dioxide—but using it on-site would also reduce the demand for other fossil-fuel sources.”

Vitamin A is essential for the production of testosterone. Could our high fiber low fat diets have anything to do with low testerone levels? http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx

High quality cod liver oil is an excellent source of both vitamins A&D, not to mention essential fatty acids EPA and DHA.

My boyhood baseball hero Rich "Goose" Gossage made it into the baseball Hall of Fame last week. His 98-mph fastball and 22-year career as a fearsome relief pitcher were achieved without the use of steroids. His best years were back in the '70s and early '80s when men were men and made their own testosterone naturally. But even the most macho among us face a decline in the quintessential male hormone as we age. Recent evidence points to a decline in testosterone levels in the general population of men, regardless of age. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx

A 20-year study of testosterone levels in men found that testosterone concentrations dropped about 1.2% per year, or about 17% overall, from 1987 to 2004. The downward trend was seen in both the population and in individuals over time.

What happened to our testosterone? Did the ballplayers siphon it off? Some theorize changes in the environment are responsible for the broad decline. A physician friend who works out regularly told me recently that he could really start to feel the effects of his age after he hit his 40s. The signs: Slower recovery from activity, less tolerance of long hours and less muscle flexibility.

Testosterone levels start to drop for most men in middle age. For those wanting to start their testosterone decline sooner than that, getting married may help.

Married men have lower testosterone levels than single guys. A recent study among the Ariaal people in Kenya showed that unmarried men had higher testosterone levels than men with a single wife. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis1j1sheehan.us/And men with two or more wives had even lower testosterone than those with one.

It's estimated that two million to four million American men have a significant testosterone deficiency and that less than 5% of them are getting treatment. That mirrors what I see in my own practice. Most men who might need treatment don't come in with any regularity. Overall, I'm probably not helping as many men with the problem as I need to.

Low testosterone may lead to loss of body hair, sleep disturbance, sweats, depression, impaired thinking, lower bone mass and strength, fatigue and weak bones. Some signs are more subtle. Decreases in sex drive, energy, motivation, initiative, aggressiveness and self-confidence are other signals. Testosterone levels can be measured with a blood test. It's best to have it done before 10 a..m. because levels fluctuate during the day.

I discovered one of my patients was low on testosterone after he fell during a minor mishap and unexpectedly broke his forearm. He turned out to have osteoporosis due to low testosterone. He developed type 2 diabetes around the same time. Adult onset diabetes in men is also associated with low testosterone.

Carrying extra weight around the middle and a drop in muscle mass were warning signals that became clear after the fact. Low testosterone levels are increasingly prevalent and often under diagnosed by the medical community. It's one of those chronic things that can drag on for years without much beyond vague symptoms that a guy might wonder about but not come in over. Doctors often overlook it because other important and more pressing health problems. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/

How do you separate what's normal aging from a serious medical problem? And how bad would it have to be before you would bring it up with your doctor? Men, do you find it difficult to discuss "nonpressing" issues with your doctor? What about sex-related disorders like erectile dysfunction and lowered sex drive? Women, do you have a tough time convincing the men in your life to seek medical counsel? Share your views on the board.

Some two in 10 men over the age of 60 are testosterone deficient. Still, many men aren't aware that their testosterone levels are low or that there's a treatment available if they have symptoms from a deficiency.

Most commonly, gels, patches or injections are given to correct the deficiency. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
There can be side effects such as acne and oily skin, increases in red blood cells that could be potentially harmful and, in a worse-case scenario, acceleration of prostate cancer growth if an undiagnosed tumor is present.

This is one situation where more of a medication isn't necessarily better and the levels of testosterone need to be monitored along with prostate exams, blood work for PSA testing, liver function testing and blood counts.

Men with erectile dysfunction should have their heart and their testosterone levels checked because there is much more at stake than just their sex life. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx

ED is associated with heart disease, and the smallest arteries responsible for erections are often the first to clog. If you have ED and haven't had your heart checked, you should. If you have ED and your Viagra isn't working, you should have your testosterone levels checked.

Compared with our knowledge of estrogen replacement for menopausal women relatively little is known about the long-term effects of testosterone supplementation in men. There were years when estrogen replacement was commonly prescribed for women with the expectation that it was beneficial for all sorts of ills. When large clinical trials were done we found out that risks for breast cancer and heart problems were higher for women taking hormones and that some benefits were overstated.

One thing is certain: Testosterone is not a magic medicine that will halt aging.

Steroids should stay banned from baseball, but in medicine they have their place. Despite all the testosterone in the world I'm never going to get a hit off the Goose. Even if he is 56.



Tampa, Fla.

They're bullish on testosterone here at the 6th Annual World Congress on the Aging Male. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
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Physicians and researchers from around the world gathered to review the latest findings on what low levels of the male hormone means for men, how replacing it might help and why it hasn't caught on broadly.

"If we had a drug that could restore sexual function in men, make them stronger, build their bones, reduce fat and get rid of the blues, you'd say, 'Oh my God, why doesn't everybody know about it?' " says Abraham Morgentaler, a urologist at Harvard Medical School and director of the Men's Health Boston clinic. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
"There is a drug like that -- but the public associates testosterone with cheating and illicit behavior and the fact that 40 years ago, it was thought to give people prostate cancer."

Whether it does or not is still an open question. But many studies have shown that low testosterone is associated with reduced muscle mass, bone density, sexual function and vitality, and increased fatigue, depression, Type II diabetes and obesity -- particularly belly fat. Evidence is accumulating that restoring testosterone to normal can alleviate many of those problems.

"Men with low testosterone are miserable to live with -- they fall asleep after dinner and snap at everyone," says David Greenberg, a general practitioner in Toronto. "You restore it and they say, 'Wow, I feel like myself again.' "

But there's debate over which of the three forms of testosterone to measure, what level constitutes "low" and, most importantly, at what age. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
Testosterone declines naturally after age 40. So is a 70-year-old man deficient or just aging?

"The moment you add the element of aging, you add the element of ageism. It's giving things for sex to old men," says John E. Morley, director of geriatric medicine at Saint Louis University, who, like other experts quoted here has worked with makers of testosterone products.

"Everybody agrees that testosterone deficiency should be treated in younger men. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
Why not treat it in older age groups?" says Ronald S. Swerdloff, chief of the endocrinology at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Women lose estrogen much more abruptly in menopause, and replacing it to alleviate symptoms and maintain bone health has been standard practice for decades, though questions remain about the risk of breast cancer.

There are even more unknowns about the risks and benefits of testosterone replacement. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
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For one thing, many of the symptoms of low testosterone are very common in older men and could be related to other conditions. Some, like obesity, may lead to low testosterone rather than vice versa.

And there is lingering concern that testosterone could fuel prostate cancer -- largely because drugs that reduce testosterone seem to shrink enlarged prostates and lower the risk of developing prostate cancer by 25%, according to the National Cancer Institute's Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial.

On the other hand, an analysis of 18 studies in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute last month concluded that there is no correlation between testosterone levels and prostate-cancer risk. Another study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that men with low testosterone had higher mortality rates in general than those with higher levels, regardless of other risk factors.

Some drug makers are testing oral variations of testosterone that would deliver the benefits without the potential prostate hazards. For now, testosterone is available mainly in injections, topical gels and patches. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
Nearly three million prescriptions were written in the U.S. in 2007, according to IMS Health, a health-information company.

Everyone here agrees that large-scale clinical trials are needed to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of testosterone therapy. One such trial has been proposed to the National Institutes of Health; and the New England Research Institutes is starting a registry of 1,000 patients, half in the U.S. and half in Europe, to follow for two years.

In the meantime, some doctors are wary of treating older men until more is known. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
"If your patient is an old man who's grumpy and not the stud he used to be, you could give him testosterone for a few months and see what happens," says Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, chief of epidemiology at University of California, San Diego. "But no epidemiological results justify giving it to older men in general."

The Jerusalem Post is an Israeli daily English language broadsheet newspaper, founded on December 1, 1932, by Gershon Agron as The Palestine Post. While the daily readership numbers (tens of thousands) do not approach those of the major Hebrew newspapers, the Jerusalem Post has a much broader reach than these other newspapers in that their readership is composed of Israeli politicians, foreign journalists, tourists, and also distributed worldwide. Whilst it was once regarded as left-wing, the paper underwent a noticeable shift to the right in the late 1980s. Under new ownership and editorial leadership of editor-in-chief David Horovitz since 2004, the paper's political identity has moved again to a more complex centrist position. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx
Examples of this shift include support for the August 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the paper's advocacy for privatization of Israeli religious institutions.

The Palestine Post was founded on December 1, 1932 by American journalist-turned-newspaper-editor, Gershon Agron in the British Mandate of Palestine. During its time as The Palestine Post, the publication supported the struggle for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and openly opposed British policy restricting Jewish immigration during the Mandate period.

On the evening of February 1, 1948, a car exploded outside the Jerusalem building housing the Palestine Post. The building also contained other newspaper offices, the British press censor, the Jewish settlement police, and a Hagana post with a cache of weapons. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
The bomb destroyed the Hagana post, a large part of the Palestine Post offices, and badly damaged several nearby buildings. One typesetter died and about 20 people were injured. The morning edition of the Palestine Post appeared in reduced format. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
The bombing was the work of Fawzi el-Kuttub, under the command of Arab leader Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni. Al-Husayni claimed responsibility for the bombing, but Hagana leaders did not believe that the Arab forces were capable of such operations and suspected various other parties, including Etzel, British forces, and "German saboteurs".

The newspaper's name was changed in 1950, two years after the state of Israel was declared and the Mandate of Palestine ended.

Until 1989 the Jerusalem Post supported the forerunners of the Labour Party and had a liberal or left of center political orientation. In 1989 it was purchased by Hollinger Inc. Under the control of Canadian conservative newspaper magnate Conrad Black the paper became supportive of the Likud. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
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A number of journalists resigned from the Post after Black's takeover and founded the left-wing weekly Jerusalem Report, which eventually was sold to the Post. On November 16, 2004, Hollinger sold the paper to Mirkaei Tikshoret Ltd., a Tel Aviv-based publisher of Israeli newspapers. CanWest Global Communications, Canada's biggest media concern, had announced an agreement to take a 50 percent stake in the Jerusalem Post after Mirkaei bought the property, but the Mirkaei pulled out of the deal. CanWest sued in court, but lost.

Currently the newspaper is viewed as having a moderate conservative slant on news coverage, although left-wing columns are often featured on the editorial pages. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
It espouses economic positions close to those of neoliberalism: tight fiscal control on public spending, curbing of welfare, cutting taxes, and anti-union monopoly legislation, among others. The paper competes with the liberal Haaretz newspaper, which began publishing an English language edition in the 1990s as an insert to the International Herald Tribune.

As with other Israeli newspapers, the Jerusalem Post is published from Sunday to Friday, with no edition appearing on Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath) and Jewish religious holidays. http://louis-j-sheehan.de/

The current head editor is David Horovitz (formerly editor of the Jerusalem Report) who took over for current Wall Street Journal editorial board member Bret Stephens in 2004.

In print, the Jerusalem Post also publishes other editions geared for the local and foreign markets: a Christian Edition, French, 'International', as well as several kids and youth magazines. There is also a section titled "Iranian Threat". In 2007, it also started publishing a Hebrew-only business daily called The Business Post. The newspaper also maintains an online edition named jpost.com.

I wish I could draw. Instead of writing 1,000 words I would sketch a cartoon of Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas all dressed up for a wedding with nowhere to go. Not a pretty picture, I admit. But this was the image that sprang to mind as the two very odd friends argued about Jerusalem - not about its status, but about when to discuss it.

They reminded me of a couple so in love with the idea of getting married that they refuse to talk about any of the serious issues - like where to live or how to raise their children - for fear that their different ideas would trip them up on the way to the wedding canopy.

Such a marriage, if it takes place at all, is clearly doomed. Olmert and Abbas also know their chances of a happy union are slim. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
They might march off to "Here comes the Bride," arguably Richard Wagner's best-known piece, but Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, with its convoluted plot full of fateful decisions and deceit, might be more suitable. In fact, Olmert and Abbas might not so much march off into the sunset ceremony as waddle, in the view of some. Speaking at last week's Jerusalem Conference, Opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu warned: "The prime minister said that we are not talking about Jerusalem, and that we are leaving it until last. But I say, if it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, then they plan to divide Jerusalem." Perhaps I should alter my mental cartoon to include the image of lame ducks. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx
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http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx Or sitting ducks. At least I should add some ruffled feathers.

Jerusalem is definitely what is now being called a "core issue." Obviously it must be resolved if a peace agreement is to be born of a union between Olmert and Abbas or any other unlikely couple. Like other core issues, such as the "right of return for refugees" and the eventual borders, it lies at the heart of the matter. Even the question of who has the right to decide Jerusalem's fate - the politicians, the voting public, or the Diaspora - has not been solved.

The press has obsessed over whether the question of Jerusalem is currently "on the table," "under the table," or tabled for a different round of discussions some time in the future when the smaller issues are out of the way.

Our bride, it seems, has a dress, a venue, a caterer and music in mind. She just doesn't have a date.

A groom under the huppa pledges: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning. If I do not raise thee over my own joy, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." He then stamps on a glass in an act usually attributed to commemorating the destruction of the Temple.

Olmert might do well to put his foot down now and remember not just the destruction of the ancient sanctuary but also what his strange communion will mean for the future. Love might be blind but it is wise to go into marriage with your eyes wide open. Marriage requires compromise and sacrifice, it is true. In a happy marriage, however, they have to be made by both sides and be worth it.

The international community, including the US and the European states, are eager to attend this wedding. You can almost imagine George W. Bush and Tony Blair practicing their best-man speeches in the mirror. The presents will undoubtedly be lavish. Like wedding guests everywhere, the celebrants here, too, would be happy to eat, drink, dance and then go home to discuss the chances of the bride and groom living happily ever after.

Unfortunately, shlom bayit, domestic peace, is not likely to come out of these nuptials if the bride and groom can't even admit there is a problem to begin with. The guests want Israel and the PA to divide Jerusalem. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
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But Jerusalem is far more than a city. It cannot be cut up for convenience as if it were simply some triple-tiered wedding cake with a plastic bride and groom perched on top.

"If we withdraw from Jerusalem, Hamas will go in. It will turn into a haven for global terror. If you want peace in Jerusalem, leave it united," Netanyahu told the conference in the capital, addressing his voters.

Meanwhile, Olmert and Abbas each have their coalition and political situation to consider. As American humorist Will Rogers once noted: "Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials."

When the leader of the opposition is refreshing his slogans on the subject of a potentially divided Jerusalem (a winning tactic for Netanyahu in the 1996 elections) it is no surprise that the prime minister is promising Shas, his key coalition partner following the Israel Beiteinu walk-out, that the issue will be delayed until the final stage of the talks. The religious party is almost certain to follow in Israel Beiteinu's footsteps if Jerusalem is up for grabs and elections are in the air.

Thus, while Olmert pledges Jerusalem is not yet on the agenda, Palestinian Authority officials insist that Israel is "prepared to withdraw from almost all the Arab neighborhoods and villages in Jerusalem." And Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, while not forgetting Jerusalem, would rather not talk to the press about it altogether.

No wonder Shas MKs complain they are being accosted at weddings and other gatherings by those pushing for them to leave the government and bring Olmert down.

On the Palestinian side, negotiator and Abbas aide Yasser Abed Rabbo threatened that if Jerusalem and other issues are not resolved at this initial stage, the Palestinians will declare independence a la Kosovo. The warning was quickly downplayed by Abbas, however.

When he met Olmert at the Prime Minister's Residence in Jerusalem on February 19 for their biweekly meeting, the status of the city apparently was not raised.

In a speech to the Presidents Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations on February 17, Olmert said he and Abbas had agreed to make Jerusalem the last item on the agenda because it was "the most sensitive and difficult" issue.

But Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat continues to insist: "Core issues are inseparable. http://louis-j-sheehan.de/
They are all one package, and there is no such agreement to exclude or delay any of them."

Clearly it's too early to send out the invitations. If the wedding goes ahead, we are likely to find that the confetti consists of shredded paper recording previous peace agreements. The guests might have a good time, but you can kiss the bride and groom goodbye. The world of realpolitik is not known for its fairy-tale endings.

Dog poop is nothing to sniff at -- a huge growth in the business has prompted the explosion of professional pooper scoopers around the country. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx
And many are competing to be Top Dog.

Last month, at the fifth annual convention of the Association of Professional Animal Waste Specialists, dog-poop picker-uppers faced off to see who had the best and quickest technique to pick up more than two dozen or so plastic poop. They were made to look like real ones and were scattered over a grassy area of an Atlanta hotel for the group's "Turd-Herding Contest: Rake, Shovel or Hand?" Some used special rakes and hoes, or forgo that method for gloved hands.
Dog poop is nothing to sniff at -- a huge growth in the business has prompted the explosion of professional pooper scoopers around the country. Many are competing to be Top Dog.

The boom in pet waste removal comes at a time when pet ownership is at an all-time high, yards are smaller than ever and home services are exploding as breadwinners are busier and don't have time to mess with the cleanup. Plus, stricter pooper-scooper laws and greater awareness of health hazards of doggie excrement have also helped prop the burgeoning industry. Some have even franchised their business, such as Pet Butler Franchise Services Inc. and DoodyCalls Franchising. aPAWS has grown from 12 businesses in 2002 to about 200 today.

It's a service that's becoming more popular, just like having someone clean the pool, wash the car, walk the dogs or clean the house. "They'd rather spend time with their kids, and play with their dog than picking up after them," says Timothy Stone, co-founder of the organization and owner of Scoop Masters USA Inc. of Santa Clarita, Calif. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
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Members typically charge about $8 to $10 per visit for one dog, once a week. Cheresee Rehart, owner of Yard Guards on Doody of Tampa, Fla., will be making $100,000 this year from her 110 customers -- a far cry from when she started the company in June 2003 with $40 to buy a book on professional pet waste scooping.

There are 74.8 million pet dogs in the U.S., according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association Inc. And a typical pooch produces 274 pounds of poo each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Last year, pet services accounted for $3 billion out of the total $41.2 billion spent on U.S. pets -- with annual expenses for dogs topping $1,425 per year.

In the first turd-herding contest held in St. Louis in January 2003, cut-up potatoes were used instead of fake poop, which is now used. This year, prunes were also added. Rules abound: Contestants must conduct their poop-scooping in the same manner as they would use normally around their clients, meaning "no shoving, jumping fences, urinating in public, dressing inappropriately." Also, running is prohibited and physical contact with the another contestant (like tackling, which has happened in past events) is a no-no.

In the industry, people have always debated what's the fastest method of picking up dog poop, Mr. Stone says. "So we just decided, why don't we just have the contest, and we'll see what's the fastest?"

This year, the title went to a teenager.

Christopher Trauco, a 19-year-old of Tyrone, Ga., owns Scoop D'Poo (www.scoopdpoo.com) and was the youngest winner the contest has ever crowned as the aPaws "King of Crap." Mr. Trauco won by picking up 28 rubber poops in two minutes. He chose to not use a shovel or rake or any other doggy tool. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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Rather, he used one latex glove and his right hand. He says he usually uses his hand in his business, because it saves more time and money on disinfectants.

"I was really worried about other people who decided to use tools," Mr. Trauco says. "It was a lot of pressure, and I wanted to win. It really helped that I was in athletics in high school."

Mr. Trauco started his own pooper-scooper business at 16. He runs about 20 miles a day and has also participated on a cheerleading squad.

He received an 11-inch high rectangular-shaped plaque with an embedded golden shovel. Second place ("The No. 2 Award") and third place winners scooped up 24 and 23 fake dog-turds, respectively. There were no tiebreakers, so no scoop-off.

That is because the world’s largest maker of generic drugs laid out some bold growth goals last Thursday at its investor day. Teva said it expects to double its revenue to $20 billion by 2012 and, aside from a couple of complimentary acquisitions, it expects to do so primarily through organic growth.

Swanson, though, believes that goal may be overly ambitious without significant M&A. “Teva has a history of sustained growth and shareholder value creation, lending credibility to its targets,” he writes. “Like its past history, however, we believe Teva will need to rely on significant M&A to achieve its goals.”

Citigroup projects that by 2012 Teva’s revenue will rise to $13.3 billion from $10 billion in 2007, meaning that to close the gap the Israeli company will need to add $6.7 billion in revenue through an acquisition or acquisitions.

Swanson points out that Teva should consider a purchase sooner rather than later. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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Assuming that Teva could increase the acquired company’s operations 15% for five years, Teva would only need to find a company with $3.3 billion in revenue now. That means the longer Teva waits, the “financial parameters must be increasingly attractive to meet the earnings goals in a shorter time.” On top of that, the number of attractive candidates continues to shrink.

What companies would be on Teva’s wish list? Swanson expects Teva to consider a purchase that would bolster its international presence, especially in emerging markets. Such a deal, though, would face significant hurdles. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
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The most attractive targets, he says, such as Slovenia’s Krka or Hungary’s Gedeon Richter, each have obstacles ranging from their current valuation to significant government stakes, making a takeout difficult.

What does that leave? Swanson sees “one potential long-shot that runs counter to the ‘add-on’ philosophy expressed by the company: making a run at the combined Mylan/Merck organization and acquiring both U.S. scale and an enhanced international presence at a reasonable price.”

Back in May, Mylan beat out Teva for the generic-drug business of Germany’s Merck KGaA, acquiring it for $6.6 billion. As Swanson points out, that Merck business would have “essentially fit the bill for Teva’s growth needs.”


In his lab near the snow-covered Rocky Mountains, Steve Bytnar is plotting to topple a winter mainstay: rock salt.

Pointing to a line of glass jars containing a colorful array of liquids, Mr. Bytnar declares: "I have a vision that I can de-ice a road without any chemicals." While that is a distant goal, his attack on rock salt is well under way. "We get all our customers by teaching them how to use less" salt, he says.

Spreading rock salt has been the standard response to icy American highways since World War II. Salt is plentiful, and it's cheap. But dumping tons of rock salt has drawbacks. The salt speeds up the corrosion of bridges and cars, chokes vegetation and isn't very effective below 17 degrees Fahrenheit.

Last week, a truck spread liquid deicer in Aurora, Colo.

Now, a campaign to find substitutes is gaining traction.

Mr. Bytnar, a tireless tinkerer who says he is an "obsessive-compulsive" lab rat, is at the forefront of a growing movement to overthrow salt's long reign. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
In its place, he and other researchers are producing liquid anti-icers containing molasses, corn syrup, beet juice -- and other, mystery ingredients -- to keep highways safe for winter driving.

Akron and many other Ohio towns are trying "GeoMelt," a gooey liquid derived from sugar beets that is often mixed with salt brine. New Jersey is now treating its busiest thoroughfares -- the turnpike and the Garden State Parkway -- with brines enhanced by "Magic Minus Zero," a liquid anti-icing agent containing residue from rum distillation. "We use half as much [salt] as we used to," says Joe Orlando, a spokesman for the state's turnpike authority.

Transportation departments in Colorado are dousing roads with "MeltDown Apex," a cloudy whitish liquid created by Mr. Bytnar. Highway officials don't know exactly what's in the concoction. Mr. Bytnar says it's a secret. "They're not going to tell you that unless you have a court order," says Steve Krause, a street division manager in Aurora, Colo., who swears by Apex at the first sign of snow.

Rock salt, basically a chunkier version of table salt, remains the entrenched incumbent in many parts of the country because it is abundant and cheaper than liquid de-icers. Areas that apply liquid anti-icing products early in a storm often turn to dry salt as snow piles up, too.

"Salt is still the name of the game," says Matt Smith, a spokesman for Chicago's streets and sanitation department. In Minnesota, where overuse of salt has poisoned waterways like Shingle Creek near Minneapolis, transportation departments still mainly rely on it.

Liquid anti-icers are more expensive up front. But Mr. Bytnar and many of his customers say cost savings accrue eventually as less salt and sand are applied. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
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This argument has been bolstered lately by an increase in salt prices spurred by a particularly snowy winter across the northern half of the country.

The shift away from sodium chloride began in the 1980s, when companies and towns started experimenting with magnesium chloride and other compounds that melt ice at lower temperatures than sodium chloride does, and had fewer environmental drawbacks. The use of renewable organic matter like corn syrup started in the 1990s. Industry lore has it that a worker taking a smoke break outside a Hungarian factory noticed that pond water mixed with a syrupy byproduct of alcohol distillation wasn't freezing in subzero temperatures.

Soon, American chemists began combining magnesium chloride with liquid residues from plant and vegetable processing to test their de-icing powers.

Mr. Bytnar, 37 years old, plunged into the field of de-icing in the mid-1990s after Minnesota Corn Processors, a cooperative where he worked as a researcher was acquired by Archer Daniels Midland Co., Decatur, Ill., gave him free rein to experiment.

"I saw it as a way to separate myself from everyone else," he recalls. "They said don't lose $2 million and blow the plant up, but otherwise do what you want to do."

One of his first projects: finding a way to turn the Hungarian discovery into a commercially viable product. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
The result was "Ice Ban," a brown blend of magnesium chloride and residue from ethanol distillation. It attacked the ice-and-pavement bond more effectively and at lower temperatures than sodium chloride did, he says, allowing highway managers to cut their salt use.

However, as with many environmentally friendly alternatives to old technology, Mr. Bytnar's potions had some drawbacks. For one thing, they were expensive. For another, they smelled.

One of the first times Denver sprayed Ice Ban, he says, the expected snow never came, leaving the streets coated in a stinky goo. "The city people thought they'd moved out to the farm," Mr. Bytnar recalls.

But city officials also saw that it worked. "It's colored like maple syrup and smells like a nasty alcohol," says Mr. Krause, the street manager in Aurora, a Denver suburb, as he unscrews an old sample of Ice Ban. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx
When the snow fell, he says, "this stuff worked."

The next blockbuster anti-icing product to spring from Mr. Bytnar's lab was "Caliber," which incorporated corn syrup and didn't smell as bad. MeltDown Apex hit the market in 2005.

Today, liquid anti-icing is de rigueur in Colorado. Early one morning recently, as a snowstorm began and temperatures fell into the teens, crews at Denver International Airport splashed runways with potassium acetate, a nonchloride de-icer that can be prohibitively expensive for many localities. Mr. Krause's trucks sprayed Mr. Bytnar's MeltDown Apex all over Aurora. During the snowy morning rush, car tires kicked up rooster tails of water even though the outdoor temperature was 20 degrees.

Surveying the situation on Colfax Avenue at 7:30 a.m., Mr. Krause was satisfied. "The road doesn't look bad at all," he said.

Mr. Bytnar now works for EnviroTech Services Inc., a manufacturer and distributor of de-icing and dust-control products. The company is one of many competing in the freewheeling market for rock-salt alternatives, which ranges from small vendors like Road Solutions Inc. of Indianapolis to giants like Cargill Inc. in Minneapolis. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
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Besides vials of ice-busting liquids, Mr. Bytnar's office is decorated with archery targets commemorating his first perfect score as a competitive archer. He won a state archery title in 2002. But these days, a shoulder injury has him favoring golf, a skill he taught himself and honed by hitting 200 balls a day last summer.

During a recent storm on the frigid mountain passes west of Denver, trucks equipped with rows of metal nozzles sprayed Apex across the lanes, quickly turning the snow into a manageable slush and allowing the flow of traffic to pick up.

Still, some crews were opting to apply a sodium chloride-based product. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
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At a storage shed atop Vail Pass, where the temperature was 16 degrees, Mr. Bytnar encountered a red-bearded snowplow driver from eastern Colorado, which isn't mountainous. "Sand and salt?" he guessed.

Driving west down the pass, Mr. Bytnar noted slippery conditions where liquids had been shunned. He "doesn't know what he's doing," Mr. Bytnar said. "It's always a battle."

A ceremonial plaza built 5,500 years ago has been discovered in Peru, and archeologists involved in the dig said on Monday carbon dating shows it is one of the oldest structures ever found in the Americas.

A team of Peruvian and German archeologists uncovered the circular plaza, which was hidden beneath another piece of architecture at the ruins known as Sechin Bajo, in Casma, 229 miles north of Lima, the capital. Friezes depicting a warrior with a knife and trophies were found near the plaza.

"It's an impressive find; the scientific and archeology communities are very happy," said Cesar Perez, the scientist at Peru's National Institute of Culture who supervised the project. "This could redesign the history of the country."

Prior to the discovery at Sechin Bajo, archeologists considered the ancient Peruvian citadel of Caral to be one of the oldest in the Western Hemisphere, at about 5,000 years. http://louis-j-sheehan.de/
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Scientists say Caral, located a few hours drive from Sechin Bajo, was one of six places in the world -- along with Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India and Mesoamerica -- where humans started living in cities about 5,000 years ago.

"The dating done by the German archeologists puts it at about 5,500 years," Perez said of the plaza, which has a diameter of about 46 feet.

Earlier finds near Sechin Bajo had been dated at 3,600 years, and there may be other pieces of the citadel older than the plaza.

"We've found other pieces of architecture underneath the plaza that could be even older," German Yenque, an archeologist at the dig site, told Reuters. "There are four or five plazas deeper down, which means the structure was rebuilt several times, perhaps every 100 to 300 years."

Hundreds of archeological sites dot the country, and many of the ruined structures were built by cultures that preceded the powerful Incan empire, which reached its peak in the 16th century, just before Spanish conquerors arrived in what is now Peru.

There are so many archeological treasures that tomb robbing is a widespread problem in the Andean country.

Yenque said the scientists are filling in the site with dirt to preserve it and plan to resume excavation of the deeper floors when they get more grants to fund the project. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx

"We are lucky it was never destroyed by tomb robbers; that is why we are covering it up now," Yenque said.

Buoyant energy markets and restructuring efforts helped make Foster Wheeler Ltd. a turnaround story.

Just a few years ago, the engineering and construction company was reeling from losses caused by unprofitable projects and high operating costs in the 1990s. It also faced thousands of claims related to its construction of asbestos-encrusted boilers through the 1970s.

Foster Wheeler was the worst 10-year performer in last year's Shareholder Scoreboard, with a compound average annual return of minus 21.6% for the decade through 2006.

Now, Foster Wheeler is the best three-year performer, with a compound average annual return of 113.8% for the three years through Dec. 31. A $1,000 investment in Foster Wheeler stock at the end of 2004 would have been worth $9,768 at the end of last year, compared with $1,282 for a similar investment in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.

Glimpses of change were evident in 2005 and 2006, when the stock returned 132% and 50%, respectively.
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In 2007, the return was 181.1%, making Foster Wheeler No. 8 among the best one-year performers in this year's Scoreboard.

"We are not done growing," says Raymond Milchovich, chairman and chief executive officer, who was brought in to turn around the company in late 2001.

Foster Wheeler has benefited from the increasing demand for oil, natural gas and petrochemicals, which are the industries the company serves. The firm also has a power unit, which develops boilers that use alternative fuels such as agricultural and animal waste as well as coal. Mr. Milchovich says he expects that unit to be a big driver of earnings this year.

The company's revenue and earnings jumped almost 60% in the first nine months of 2007. It expects to release fourth quarter and full-year 2007 results tomorrow.

The company, which is based in Hamilton, Bermuda, and has operational headquarters in Clinton, N.J., does business in some 30 countries and gets nearly 80% of its revenue from outside North America. Hoping to further expand, the company has been hiring aggressively, cutting back on its debt -- to less than a fifth of the peak in 2002 -- and building up its cash reserves. "Number one priority for the cash...is acquisition targets," says Mr. Milchovich.

Challenges remain. Amid a U.S. economic slowdown and a potential global slowdown, energy demand may decline and stall some projects -- though Mr. Milchovich believes developing economies like China and India will keep demand for oil and other fuels high for a long time. Foster Wheeler stock has fallen 1.6% so far this year, adjusted for a 2-for-1 stock split last month.

The company still has pending liabilities from asbestos-related claims, around $399 million at the end of September, down from $445 million a year earlier. Mr. Milchovich says insurance is expected to cover about $336 million of those claims.

Investors are encouraged by the company's leadership. Shawn Driscoll, a stock analyst at money-management firm T. Rowe Price Group Inc., says managers have done a good job of picking appropriate projects and structuring contracts in a way that allows price increases as needed, thus keeping operating margins high. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
"This management team has really distinguished itself," says Mr. Driscoll. Several T. Rowe Price funds own the stock.

Five former insurance executives were convicted on charges stemming from a fraudulent transaction between American International Group Inc. and General Re Corp., and prosecutors said they plan to "work up the ladder" seeking more indictments.

Four of the five executives worked for General Re, a unit of billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., while the fifth was formerly with AIG. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
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A federal jury found them guilty on all 16 counts in their indictment, including conspiracy, securities fraud, mail fraud and making false statements.

Prosecutors had accused the executives of inflating AIG's reserves by $500 million in 2000 and 2001 through fraudulent reinsurance deals to artificially boost the insurer's stock price. Reinsurance allows insurance companies to completely or partly insure the risk they have assumed for their customers.

After winning what legal experts portrayed as a complicated trial involving arcane accounting rules and tens of thousands of pages of documents, prosecutors hinted they might be looking to gather evidence against others in the fraud.

During the trial, former AIG Chief Executive Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg, who led the company for nearly four decades, presiding over much of its growth, and General Re's current chief executive, Joseph Brandon, were identified as unindicted co-conspirators. Neither Mr. Greenberg nor Mr. Brandon have been charged with any wrongdoing.

"We're not done. The investigation continues," said Paul Pelletier, one of three federal prosecutors who tried the case in U.S. District Court in Hartford, Conn. "We've got a lot of work to do to work up the ladder."

Convicted yesterday were General Re's former chief executive, Ronald Ferguson, 65 years old; former Senior Vice President Christopher Garand, 60; former Chief Financial Officer Elizabeth Monrad, 53; and Robert Graham, a General Re assistant general counsel, 69, along with Christian Milton, AIG's former vice president of reinsurance. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
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Messrs. Ferguson, Graham, Milton and Ms. Monrad each face prison terms as long as 230 years and a fine of as much as $46 million. Mr. Garand faces as long as 160 years in prison and a fine of as much as $29.5 million.

While prosecutors might have lacked evidence to secure additional indictments last year, some legal experts said yesterday's convictions could bolster a possible case. Neither Mr. Greenberg nor Mr. Brandon appeared on taped phone conversations that were among the most compelling pieces of evidence presented in the trial.

"When you have a conviction of this sort, it certainly can shake information loose from defendants who are convicted in post-conviction cooperation," says Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University.

"Hank Greenberg was not a defendant in this action, and he neither initiated nor participated in an improper transaction," a lawyer for Mr. Greenberg said in an email yesterday, adding that Mr. Greenberg had "acted responsibly, ethically and legally during his career at AIG, which he built into the largest and most successful insurance company in the world."

For AIG, the verdict comes at a time when the influence of its 82-year-old former leader has loomed large. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
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In a securities filing in November, Mr. Greenberg and a group of affiliated shareholders expressed "concern over the direction" of AIG, from which he resigned in 2005 amid an investigation into its accounting. Mr. Greenberg and the other shareholders in the group together owned almost 12% of the company's voting shares as of Oct. 31, according to the New York State Insurance Department.

Mr. Greenberg, who has also been actively pursuing other business ventures since he left the insurer, followed up with another filing in which he said he wouldn't launch a proxy fight or serve again as an officer or director of AIG. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
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Still, his role cast a spotlight on the insurer's performance under Mr. Greenberg's onetime deputy and successor, Martin Sullivan.

This month, AIG disclosed that its auditor had found a "material weakness" in its accounting, and the stock fell to a five-year low, though it has since rebounded somewhat.

Jerry Bernstein, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer at Blank Rome LLP in Manhattan, said that "manipulation of financial reserves and reinsurance are not concepts that typical jurors know about, so these convictions can only further embolden the Justice Department to bring to trial cases dealing with complex financial transactions." Such cases could include the current probes into Wall Street firms' role in the turmoil in subprime-mortgage markets.

Lawyers for the five defendants convicted yesterday said they intend to appeal. Fred Hafetz, a lawyer for Mr. Milton, the only defendant who worked for AIG, said he believes his client was denied a fair trial when he was prosecuted with the four former General Re executives.

The defendants, who remain free on $1 million bond, are scheduled to be sentenced May 15. They could try to reduce their sentences by cooperating with prosecutors in building cases against other, more senior conspirators, if any, legal experts say.

Prosecutors had said they would call Mr. Buffett to testify should the defense produce evidence showing his alleged involvement in the reinsurance deals at issue in the trial. Contrary to pretrial indications by defense attorneys, none of the defendants testified at the trial. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
During the trial, defense attorneys invoked Mr. Buffett's name to support their arguments that their clients believed the widely respected investor was aware of the deals, and therefore they didn't have any criminal intent in putting them together.

Prosecutors, however, said Mr. Buffett, who hasn't been charged with any wrongdoing, wasn't involved in the deals. The Omaha businessman wasn't called to testify.

The federal case started coming together in late 2004 and early 2005, when federal investigators began probing various financial products and accounting practices that companies used to improperly burnish their earnings.

The government alleged that the defendants in the case engaged in a sham deal, in which General Re, for a $5 million fee, improperly helped AIG boost its loss reserves by about $500 million, misleading investors about the amount of losses AIG could absorb and supporting its stock price. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx

Reid Weingarten, a lawyer for Ms. Monrad, previously defended former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers. Before and during the insurance trial, he alleged that Mr. Buffett knew about the transaction, something Mr. Buffett and his attorneys have denied.

The defense lawyers maintained that their clients weren't responsible for the way AIG accounted for the transaction, nor did they know AIG would account for it improperly.

"These convictions continue the string of successes in our crackdown on corporate fraud and our effort to restore integrity to our financial markets," said Acting Deputy Attorney General Craig Morford, chairman of the President's Corporate Fraud Task Force.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have expressed interest in getting information on a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission into whether Merrill Lynch & Co. booked inflated prices of mortgage bonds it held despite knowledge that the valuations had dropped, according to people familiar with the matter. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx
Prosecutors in Brooklyn, N.Y., have launched a preliminary criminal investigation into whether UBS AG also improperly valued its mortgage-securities holdings, as well as the circumstances surrounding two failed hedge funds at Bear Stearns Cos., which collapsed last summer because of losses tied to mortgage-backed securities, according to people familiar with the matter.

In 1999, I wanted to get business cards, and wanted a more colorful image for them. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
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My friend DeLee Smith, who is a graphic artist, put a great image together; it's now the one I use at the top of every page of this site.

Hubble image of NGC 3603 It has the same idea as the old image, with the letters reverse-masked over an astronomical image. This time, though the image is of NGC 3603, a gorgeous nebula (cloud of gas and dust) as seen through the eye of Hubble. It may be, in fact, my favorite image from Hubble. And, as it happens, I have a little history with this object.

In the image seen here (click on it to see a bigger version), there is a star in the upper left that has a broken bluish ring around it. Just to the upper right of it is a saucer-shaped blue cap, and the same to the lower left. The bright star in the ring is named Sher 25 (it's the star in the letter "A" in "Astronomy" in my new logo).

It's a pretty interesting star. Classified as a B1a, it's a hot supergiant, tipping the cosmic scale at something like 40 times the mass of the Sun. Stars like that don't live long; a few million years tops. When they die, they do it with a bang. Literally. In a few thousand years, and no more than 20,000, it will explode. When it does, it will send out a flood of high-energy ultraviolet photons that will slam into that ring of gas, making it fluoresce like a neon sign.

How do I know this? The star is a virtual twin of the star that blew up to form Supernova 1987A. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx

In fact, there are many similarities. Long before it exploded, the progenitor of SN87A formed a three-ring system around it (see the picture to the right). These rings are made of a very tenuous gas, and they have a complicated but interesting history. No one knew of the rings before SN87A exploded because the star wasn't quite hot enough to excite the gas; it took the fury of the star exploding to light up the ring system. From studying the rings, their age can be found, and it's pretty well determined that they formed about 20,000 years ago. Since the star blew up in 1987, and the rings formed when Sanduleak -69 202 was a star like Sher 25, it's reasonable to assume that Sher 25 has a maximum lifespan of 20,000 years.

In fact, Sher 25 may have considerably less time. We don't know how long it's been a blue supergiant; it may have turned a thousand years ago, or 18,000. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
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http://louis1j1sheehan.us/It may actually be right at the end of its life, and may explode like its twin did any day now. I am frequently asked what star I think will blow up next, and many astronomers assume it will be Betelgeuse, the red supergiant located in Orion. But I wonder... not too many people have heard of Sher 25, but I bet they will soon!

One last note: the other reason I am fond of this star is that it was the subject of the only paper I ever refereed as a professional astronomer. I was delighted to referee the article; it was excellent, and was the first time I had ever heard of the star. The authors even thanked me in their acknowledgements: "We thank an anonymous referee for valuable comments." Sniff! How touching!

(η Carinae or η Car) is a highly luminous hypergiant double star. Estimates of its mass range from 100–150 times the mass of the Sun, and its luminosity is about four million times that of the Sun.

This object is currently the most massive nearby star that can be studied in great detail. While it is possible that other known stars might be more luminous and more massive, Eta Carinae has the highest confirmed luminosity based on data across a broad range of wavelengths; former prospective rivals such as the Pistol Star have been demoted by improved data.

Stars in the mass class of Eta Carinae, with more than 100 times the mass of the Sun, produce more than a million times as much light as the Sun. They are quite rare — only a few dozen in a galaxy as big as the Milky Way. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx
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They are assumed to approach (or potentially exceed) the Eddington limit, i.e., the outward pressure of their radiation is almost strong enough to counteract gravity. Stars that are more than 120 solar masses exceed the theoretical Eddington limit, and their gravity is barely strong enough to hold in its radiation and gas, resulting in a possible supernova or hypernova in the near future.

Eta Carinae's chief significance for astrophysics is based on its giant eruption or supernova impostor event seen around 1843. In a few years, Eta Carinae produced almost as much visible light as a supernova explosion, but it survived. Other supernova impostors have been seen in other galaxies, for example the false supernovas SN 1961v in NGC 1058 and SN 2006jc in NGC 4904, which produced a false supernova in October 2004. Significantly, SN 2006jc was destroyed in a supernova explosion two years later, on October 9, 2006. The supernova impostor phenomenon may represent a surface instabilityor a failed supernova. Eta Carinae's giant eruption was the prototype for this phenomenon, and after 160 years the star's internal structure has not fully recovered.

This object is located in the constellation Carina (right ascension 10 h 45.1 m, declination -59°41m), about 7,500 to 8,000 light-years from the Sun. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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It is not typically visible north of latitude 27°N.

Related names have caused much confusion:

   1. "Eta Carinae" means the star itself.
   2. The "Homunculus Nebula" is the bipolar cloud of debris ejected in the great eruption, portrayed in images such as those from the Hubble Space Telescope.
   3. "The Keyhole Nebula" is a much larger, nearby diffuse structure.
   4. "The Carina Nebula," NGC 3372, is a large, bright star-formation region that produced a number of very massive stars including Eta Carinae.
   5. "Trumpler 16" open cluster, to which Eta Carinae belongs, is itself located within the Carina Nebula. The nebula includes other open clusters, for example, Trumpler 14.

[One remarkable aspect of Eta Carinae is its changing brightness. It is currently classified as a luminous blue variable (LBV) double star.

When Eta Carinae was first catalogued in 1677 by Edmond Halley, it was of the 4th magnitude, but by 1730, observers noticed it had brightened considerably, and was at that point one of the brightest stars in Carina. Subsequently it dimmed again, and by 1782 was back to its former obscurity, but in 1820 it started growing in brightness again. By 1827 it had brightened more than tenfold, and reached its greatest brightness in April 1843: with a magnitude of -0.8 it was the second brightest star in the night-time sky (after Sirius at 8.6 light years away), despite its enormous distance of 7,000–8,000 light-years. (To put the relationship in perspective, the relative brightness would be like comparing a candle (Sirius) at 14.5 meters (48 feet) to another light (Eta Carinae) on the horizon of our planet 10 kilometers (6 mi) away, which would appear almost as bright as the candle.)

Eta Carinae sometimes has large outbursts, the last one just around its brightness maximum, in 1841. The reason for these outbursts is not yet known. The most likely possibility is believed to be that they are caused by built-up radiation pressure from the star's enormous luminosity.

After 1843 Eta Carinae faded away, and between about 1900 and 1940 it was only of the 8th magnitude: invisible to the naked eye
A "spectroscopic minimum" or "X-ray eclipse" occurred in the midsummer of 2003. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
Astronomers organized a large observing campaign, which included every available ground-based (e.g. CCD optical photometry[6]) and space observatory, including major observations with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the INTEGRAL Gamma-ray space observatory, and the Very Large Telescope. Primary goals of these observations were to determine if in fact Eta Carinae is a binary star; if so, to identify its companion star; to determine the physical mechanism behind the "spectroscopic minima"; and to understand their relation (if any) to the large scale eruptions of the 19th century.

Falceta-Gonçalves and co-workers have found good agreements between the X-rays' light curve and the evolution on a wind-wind collision zone of a binary system. Their results were complemented by new tests on radio wavelengths.

Spectrographic monitoring of Eta Carinae showed that some emission lines faded precisely every 5.52 years, and that this period was stable for decades. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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The star's radio emission along with its X-ray brightness, also drop precipitously during these "events" as well. These variations, along with ultra-violet observations gives very high probability for the scenario that Eta Carinae is actually a binary star, in which a hot, lower mass star revolves around η Carinae in a 5.52-year, highly eccentric elliptical orbit.

Kashi and Soker studied the propagation of the ionizing radiation emitted by the secondary star in Eta Carinae. A large fraction of this radiation is absorbed by the primary stellar wind, mainly after it encounters the secondary wind and passes through a shock wave. The amount of absorption depends on the compression factor of the primary wind in the shock wave. The compression factor is limited by the magnetic pressure in the primary wind. The variation of the absorption by the post-shock primary wind with orbital phase changes the ionization structure of the circumbinary gas and can account for the radio light curve of Eta Car. Fast variations near periastron passage are attributed to the onset of the accretion phase.

Eta Carinae suddenly and unexpectedly doubled its brightness in 1998–1999. Currently (2007) it can be easily seen with the naked eye, because it is brighter than magnitude 5.

Very large stars like Eta Carinae use up their fuel very quickly because of their disproportionately high luminosities. Eta Carinae is expected to explode as a supernova or hypernova some time within the next million or so years. As its current age and evolutionary path are uncertain, it could explode within the next several millennia or even in the next few years. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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LBVs such as Eta Carinae may be a stage in the evolution of the most massive stars; the prevailing theory now holds that they will exhibit extreme mass loss and become Wolf-Rayet Stars before they go supernova, if they are unable to hold their mass to explode as a hypernova.

More recently another possible Eta Carinae analogue was observed; namely SN 2006jc some 77 million light years away in UGC 4904, in the constellation of Lynx. It brightened on 20 October 2004 and was reported by amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki as supernova. However, it survived and finally exploded two years later as a Mag 13.8 type Ib supernova on 9 October 2006. Its earlier brightening was a supernova impostor event; the initial explosion hurled 0.01 solar masses (~20 Jupiters) of material into space.

Due to the similarity of Eta Carinae and SN 2006jc, Stefan Immler of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center suggests that Eta Carinae could explode in our lifetime or even in the next few years. However, Stanford Woosley of the University of California in Santa Cruz disagrees with Immler’s suggestion, and he says it is likely that Eta Carinae is at an earlier stage of evolution and that it has several kinds of material left for nuclear fusion.

Another recent analog star explosion was supernova SN 2006gy, observed starting on September 18, 2006 in NGC 1260 (a spiral galaxy in the constellation Perseus) 238 million light years from earth. A number of astronomers modelling supernova events have suggested that the explosion mechanism for SN 2006gy may be very similar to the fate that awaits Eta Carinae.

It is possible that the Eta Carinae hypernova or supernova could affect Earth, about 7,500 light years away, but would not likely affect humans directly, who are protected from gamma rays by the atmosphere. The damage would likely be restricted to the upper atmosphere, the ozone layer, spacecraft, including satellites, and any astronauts in space. At least one scientist has claimed that if the star were to explode, "it would be so bright that you would see it during the day, and you could even read a book by its light at night". http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
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A supernova or hypernova produced by Eta Carinae would probably shoot a gamma ray burst out on both sides in the direction of its rotation axis. This catastrophic burst would probably not hit Earth, though, because the rotation axis does not currently point at us. Since Eta Carinae is at least a double star, or even a triple star, examined due to its short brightness and X-ray variation period, this may either increase or decrease the intensity of the supernova or hypernova it produces depending on the circumstances.

Irony has a way of being so, well, ironic sometimes. I have been writing these Snacks for three years now, and my plan was-- and still is-- to talk about things I find interesting about astronomy, and hope that you find them interesting as well. So how ironic is it that in all this time, I've never written about the one object I find most interesting of all?

I have always loved supernovae, stars that explode. There's something very dramatic about such a titanic display of force. When a star explodes, in one second it emits as much energy as the Sun does in its entire lifetime! Luckily, these events aren't too common, and tend to happen pretty far from the Earth. They are so bright, they can be seen clear across the Universe, a fact which may have startling implications for our eventual fate.

This week marks the anniversary of perhaps the most important supernova we've ever seen. It was the most closely studied supernova of all time; for one thing, it was the brightest supernova since the invention of the telescope! It revolutionized our ideas about how stars explode, why they explode, and what happens after they explode. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
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For the next few weeks I'll take a look at different aspects of this star, and how it changed astronomy. It certainly changed me! Even the discovery of this object is amazing, and so we'll start off this mini-series with just how this star exploded into our lives.

Late in the evening of February 23rd/24th, 1987, an astronomer named Ian Shelton was taking images of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. He was using a small telescope to take images of the LMC to check for variable stars and novae (novae are stars that suffer minor explosions, and are far less energetic then their big brothers the supernovae). http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
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Shelton was taking a photographic plate of the LMC at about 1:00 a.m. local time that night.

At roughly the same time, Oscar Duhalde, an operator for a telescope not far from where Shelton was at the same observatory, decided to go outside to take a break from using the 'scope. Using nothing but his own eyes and his intimate knowledge of that area of the sky, he noticed a star in the LMC that wasn't there the last time he looked. He was actually the first person to see the supernova! Unfortunately, he didn't report it to the other astronomers, perhaps because he had been working so hard, and he simply forgot. Shortly thereafter, Ian Shelton developed the plates he had been taking of the LMC and immediately saw the new star. He went over to the other telescope and told them what he had found; Duhalde then mentioned that he had seen it earlier. At this point, the four astronomers (Shelton, Duhalde, Barry Madore and Robert Jedrzejewski) promptly went outside to see for themselves this new supernova.

And a supernova it was. They knew this immediately; it was far too bright to be a simple nova in the LMC. They sent a telegram to Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is the clearing house for astronomical discoveries. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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A confirmation was sent by another team in New Zealand just half an hour later. It was by this margin that Shelton became known as the discoverer of Supernova 1987A.

Perhaps even funnier is that the supernova had actually been photographed even earlier. Robert McNaught, in Australia, was also photographing that area of the sky. However, unlike Shelton, he didn't notice the new star until later. Other photographs by other observers were also made before Shelton's. However, he is the one who first reported it, and so he is the one credited with discovering what would later turn out to be the most studied and important object of its kind.

Next week we'll talk about just why a star like this explodes, and how SN87A surprised us all by not following the rules.

Australia's 17-year-old economic expansion has reached a boiling point, leading policy makers to intensify their war on inflation.

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the Reserve Bank of Australia has raised its benchmark interest rate 11 times to 7%, the highest since 1996. And it may raise rates by another percentage point by year end.

With the world economy slowing, some Australians worry that the rate increases could go too far, ending the longest sustained period of prosperity in 50 years. "They do need to be careful," says Bernie Fraser, who was governor of the RBA between 1989 and 1996.

So far, however, the problem seems to be the opposite: The tightening measures haven't had much effect on the inflation rate, which could hit 4%, on a year-to-year basis, in the first quarter, well above the central bank's 2% to 3% target.

Australia's economy, the fifth-largest in Asia and about 1/15th the size of the U.S. economy, has withstood past upheavals such as the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s and the U.S. technology bust in 2000. These days, it is insulated to some extent from the storms hitting financial markets because of the rapid emergence of China and India, with their hunger for Australian commodities.

But with core inflation at 16-year highs, the RBA is in an unusual position: It is raising interest rates when many other central banks, including the Federal Reserve, are cutting rates or holding them steady.

Much of the Australian economy is roaring along. Unlike American consumers, who are struggling under heavy debt loads and pulling back, Australians have kept on spending.

Export revenue, meanwhile, is surging as coal and iron-ore producers lock in price increases of as much as 70% from steel mills and energy suppliers in Japan, China and South Korea. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx

Nicole Hollows, chief executive of MacArthur Coal Ltd., based in Queensland, expects the good times to continue as Russia and Brazil emerge as major buyers of energy products.

In addition, farmers are benefiting from the arrival of La Niña weather patterns, which are ending years of drought. The summer grain crop is projected to rise 40%, while the winter wheat crop is expected to set a record, just as world grain prices surge. Farmers could add A$8 billion (US$7.4 billion) to the economy this year.

The central bank and the new center-left government are determined to bring inflation under control. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has labeled inflation the government's No. 1 challenge, pledging deep spending cuts when he unveils the government's budget in May.

The RBA said last week that it considered raising its target for the cash rate, its main monetary-policy tool, by 0.5 percentage point at its Feb. 5 policy meeting but decided instead on a 0.25-percentage-point increase because of global uncertainty.

That has some onlookers warning that, as the U.S. economy sinks into what many fear could be a severe recession, Australia's war on inflation should be tempered. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
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http://louis1j1sheehan.us/Bob Gregory, a member of the central-bank board between 1985 and 1995, says there is an increasing risk that the central bank's rate increases will "overshoot."

"You do get locked into the potential for overshooting, because you get frustrated at the lack of success," he says.

Mr. Gregory warns that Australia's growth is uneven, with mining states fueling growth. Using the blunt instrument of interest rates could harm other parts of the economy, he says.

The central bank said in its latest policy statement that it expects annual nonfarm growth to slow to 2.75% this year from a 4% pace in the third quarter of 2007. Fourth-quarter growth data are due in March.

There are signs that the rate increases may be starting to take a toll. Sentiment among some businesses and consumers is falling as their debt-servicing costs rise. Exporters -- particularly those outside the resources sector -- may have a tougher time as interest rates rise, pushing up the Australian dollar. That would make exports more expensive for foreign buyers.

In addition, banks are confronting rising funding costs.
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The heads of two of the country's major banks have warned that their costs have risen and customers may end up carrying the burden. "Looking at the global environment more broadly, this is a financial-services bloodbath," says Mike Smith, chief executive of Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia's CEO, Ralph Norris, has said he couldn't rule out passing on higher costs to customers if there is a further deterioration in global credit markets.

The diverging trends -- with concern among bankers and some consumers and optimism among miners and other commodity-based companies -- mean policy makers have their work cut out for them. Too much tightening could be disastrous for the economy. But too little could fuel the kind of inflation that in the past required a severe recession to quash.


COMMENTARY


A record eight million Americans moved from one state to another last year. Where is everyone going, and why? The answer has little to do with climate: California has arguably the nicest climate of any state in the nation -- yet in this decade more Americans have left the Golden State than entered it.

Migration patterns instead reveal which states have the most dynamic and desirable economies, and which are "has-been" states. The winners in this contest for the most valuable resource on the globe -- human capital -- are generally the states with the lowest tax, spending and regulatory burdens. The biggest losers are almost all congregated in the Northeast and Midwest. Liberals contend that tax rates, regulations, forced union laws and runaway government spending don't matter when it comes to creating jobs, high incomes and a higher quality of life. People tell us otherwise by voting with their feet.
[chart]

The American Legislative Exchange Council has just released a study we've done that presents a 2007 Economic Competitiveness Rating of the 50 states, based on 16 economic policy variables, including taxes, regulation, right to work, the legal system, educational freedom and government debt. Over the past decade, the 10 states with the highest taxes and spending, and the most intrusive regulations, have half the population and job growth, and one-third slower growth in incomes, than the 10 most economically free states. In 2006 alone 1,500 people each day moved to the states with the highest economic competitiveness from the states with the lowest competitiveness.

Of all the policy variables we examined, two stand out as perhaps the most important in attracting jobs and capital. The first is the income tax rate. States with the highest income tax rates -- California and New York, for example -- are significantly outperformed by the nine states with no income tax, such as Texas and Florida. As a study from the Atlanta Federal Reserve Board put it: "Relative marginal tax rates have a statistically significant negative relationship with relative state growth."

The other factor for attracting jobs and capital is right-to-work laws. States that permit workers to be compelled to join unions have much lower rates of employment growth than states that don't. Many companies say they will not even consider locating a factory in a state that does not have a right-to-work law.

Our study also finds that states with antigrowth tax and spending policies don't just lose people. Noncompetitive states like New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois and New Jersey are plagued by falling housing values, a shrinking tax base, business outmigration, capital flight and high unemployment rates, and less money for schools, roads and aging infrastructure. These factors of decline hurt the poor the most.

The Northeast is the classic case of a region suffering from self-inflicted wounds. In the year 2006, it was home to a smaller share of the U.S. population, and produced a smaller percentage of America's total value-added, than at any time in the nation's history. Why?

One big reason is that governments in the Northeast are about one-fifth more expensive than in the rest of America ($6,000 versus $5,000 of state spending per resident). An average-income family of four still saves $4,000 in lower income, property, sales taxes and fees by moving to just an average-tax state, and more like $6,000 a year by moving to, say, Florida. Since the Northeastern states tend to have highly progressive tax systems, the incentive to flee is even greater for higher-income earners.

Northeasterners complain disdainfully of the "war between the states" for jobs and businesses, and for good reason: They can't win. Southern and Western states are cherry-picking companies from the North Atlantic states. One Southern governor (who didn't want to be identified) recently told us his state had closed its economic development offices in Europe. "Why search for factories overseas when we can plunder high tax areas like Connecticut and New York?" he said.

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Auto and other manufacturing jobs are still being created in America -- but in Alabama, North Carolina and even Mississippi. It has to be infuriating to Northeasterners to learn that people and businesses are "trading up" by moving out of their region to the likes of Georgia and Alabama. But they are.

The states losing population are in effect suffering from a slow-motion version of the economic sclerosis that paralyzed much of Europe in the 1980s and '90s, particularly France and Germany with their massive welfare systems. At least the European socialist nations are finally starting to change their taxing and spending ways to win back jobs.

No such luck in this country. Five of the states near the bottom of our competitiveness ratings -- Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey and Wisconsin -- have enacted major tax increases in the last two years. Maryland and Michigan just raised business and income taxes on upper-income earners, while arguing that raising the cost of doing business will attract more businesses. More likely it will induce companies to stay away, and people to move out.

With the wide-ranging conquests of Alexander the Great, the Greek or Hellenic polis 'city-state' gave way to Hellenistic Empire. Distinctions between Greek and barbarian fell; individuals, no longer simply part of their poleis (pl. of polis), were suddenly aware of the greater whole to which they belonged. Stoicism arose as an attempt to comprehend the new cosmopolitan order. The philosophy of the Stoics lasted for 500 years, during which time it had a major impact on Christianity, the idea of natural law, and moral virtue. Some of the major early stoics were Chrysippus, Cleanthes, and Zeno.
Chrysippus

    Without Chrysippus, there wouldn't have been any Stoicism
    - anonymous

    He alone is the sage, the others only act as shadows.
    - anonymous

Chrysippus (280-207) wasn't the founder of Stoicism. That honor goes to Zeno (c 336-264). Chrysippus wasn't even the second head of the stoa poikile. That honor goes to Cleanthes. Chrysippus was, however, the person on whom our knowledge of the early Stoics depends. Like Epicurus, he was a prolific writer, composing 705 books of which none remain except fragments preserved by others, including Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca, Aulus Gellius, and Athenaeus.

Some of Chrysippus' actions adversely affected the reputation of the Stoics. He refused to honor distinctions of rank. He would take opposite viewpoints for the sake of argument, but in the process show up the inconsistencies of Stoic beliefs. He sometimes argued illogically.

How Chrysippus died is not known. Two alternative theories are that Chrysippus died of laughter or over-proof wine.

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Cleanthes
Cleanthes (331-232), a wrestler from Lydia, had neither money nor genius, but through diligence and perseverance he served as Zeno's pupil for 19 years before succeeding him. He still had a long teaching career, since he died at 99, reportedly through intentional starvation.

Diogenes Laertius' Lives of Eminent Philosophers provides most of our information on Zeno of Citium because, although he was the founder of the Stoic school, none of his works survives. Zeno began his career as a merchant, but shipwreck led him to Athens and the Cynic philosopher, Crates. While under Crates' tutelage, Zeno wrote his Republic.

In the Republic, his utopian, rational society would have no need for laws. But since humans live in an imperfect society, they must accept social realities. Zeno opposed slavery, believed in sexual equality, opposed modesty, lived frugally, and appears to have drunk excessively.

Stoics and Moral Philosophy
8 Principles of Stoic Philosophy and Their Serenity Prayer-Like Advice
Below are 8 of the main ideas held by the Stoic philosophers.

   1. Nature - Nature is rational.

   2. Law of Reason - The universe is governed by the law of reason. Man can't actually escape its inexorable force, but he can, uniquely, follow the law deliberately.

   3. Virtue - A life led according to rational nature is virtuous.

   4. Wisdom - Wisdom is the the root virtue. From it spring the cardinal virtues: insight, bravery, self-control, and justice.

      "Briefly, their notion of morality is stern, involving a life in accordance with nature and controlled by virtue. It is an ascetic system, teaching perfect indifference ( APATHEA ) to everything external, for nothing external could be either good or evil. Hence to the Stoics both pain and pleasure, poverty and riches, sickness and health, were supposed to be equally unimportant."

5. Apathea - Since passion is irrational, life should be waged as a battle against it. Intense feeling should be avoided.

   6. Pleasure - Pleasure is not good. (Nor is it bad. It is only acceptable if it doesn't interfere with our quest for virtue.)

   7. Evil - Poverty, illness, and death are not evil.

   8. Duty - Virtue should be sought, not for the sake of pleasure, but for duty.

Serenity Prayer and Stoic Philosophy

The Serenity Prayer could have come straight from the principles of Stoicism as this side-by-side comparison of the the Serenity Prayer and the Stoic Agenda shows:

Serenity Prayer
God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

Stoic Agenda
"To avoid unhappiness, frustration,
and disappointment, we, therefore, need
to do two things: control those
things that are within our power
(namely our beliefs, judgments, desires,
and attitudes) and be indifferent
or apathetic to those things which
are not in our power (namely, things
external to us)."

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William R Connolly
Update: December 2007: It was pointed out to me that the main difference between the two passages is that the modern version includes a bit about knowing the difference between the two. While that may be, the Stoic version states those which are within our power -- the personal things like our own beliefs, our judgments, and our desires. Those are the things we should have the power to change.

"The life of virtue is the life in accordance with nature. Since for the Stoic nature is rational and perfect, the ethical life is a life lived in accordance with the rational order of things.'Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well' (Handbook, ch. 8)."
    -- Ecole Initiative Stoicism

1. Gold was probably the first metal worked by prehistoric man. Decorative gold objects found in Bulgaria date back to 4,000 B.C., so the gold age actually overlaps with the Stone Age.

2 In the 7th century B.C., dentists in Italy used gold wire to attach fake teeth, and gold fillings were recommended for cavities as far back as the 16th century.

3    When the Spaniards landed in Peru in 1532, the Incan Empire had one of the largest collections of gold ever amassed. After the Incan king Atahuallpa was captured by the conquistadores, he offered, as ransom, to fill a 22-by-18-foot room with gold as high as he could reach.

4 The Spanish killed him anyway.

5 The Aztec word for gold is teocuitlatl, which means “excrement of the gods.”

6 Conrad Reed found a 17-pound lump of gold on his father’s North Carolina farm in 1799, the first documented discovery of gold in the United States. They used the rock as a doorstop for three years before a local jeweler identified it.

7 Reed’s father sold it to the jeweler for $3.50, less than one-thousandth of its true value. Eventually Reed caught on—the lump would be worth more than $100,000 today—and started the nation’s first commercial gold mine.

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8 Contrary to what James Bond told you in Goldfinger, there’s no such thing as “skin suffocation.” But the film crew didn’t know that: When they covered actress Shirley Eaton in gold paint, they left bare a small patch on her tummy.

9 Gold is extremely malleable and ductile. A one-ounce piece can be beaten into a translucent sheet five-millionths of an inch thick or drawn out into 50 miles of wire five micrometers thick—one-tenth the diameter of a human hair.

10 The metal is also virtually indestructible and has been highly valued throughout history, so humans have always recycled it. Upwards of 85 percent of all the gold ever found is still being used today.

11 Gold foil was wrapped around the Apollo lunar landing modules to protect the astronauts from radiation. A thin gold film over astronauts’ visors is still used to protect their eyes from glare.

12 For more than 70 years, the standard treatment for rheumatoid arthritis was regular injections of a liquid suspension of gold, which acts as an anti-inflammatory. Doctors still don’t know why.

13 The eternal quest of alchemists—to change base metals into gold—was actually achieved to a certain degree in Soviet nuclear reactors, where radioactivity transformed some lead nuclei into gold.

14 Gold is green: Windows in some apartment buildings are coated with gold to help reflect sun in the summer and retain heat in the winter.

15 Actually getting the metal is not so green. Gold mines spew cyanide into waterways and nitrogen and sulfur oxides into the air; in 2000, a cyanide spill at a Romanian mine made the local water for 2.5 million people undrinkable.

16 Australian researchers have discovered microorganisms that “eat” trace amounts of gold within rocks and then deposit them into larger nuggets. Mining companies are looking to use the critters instead of cyanide to pull gold from ore, which would be much less environmentally destructive.
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17 Nice threads: In terms of gold reserves, the United States has the world’s largest hoard. But if ornamentation is included, India takes the title—over 20 percent of the decorative gold used throughout the world is in the thread in Indian saris.
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18 The largest reservoirs of gold on the surface of the earth, an estimated 10 billion tons, are the oceans. Unfortunately, there is no practical way to get it out.

19 That’s chump change compared with the amount of gold in outer space. In 1999, the NEAR spacecraft showed that a single asteroid, Eros, contains more gold than has ever been mined on Earth.

20 Calm down, space cowboys: There’s no way we can retrieve that gold either.

ATLANTA, Nov. 16 -- Clinicians should keep their eyes peeled for a mutated form of adenovirus 14 that has caused at least 10 deaths, most of them among adults, the CDC warned.

Noting that control of adenovirus is "challenging," the CDC urged health care practitioners to take extra care if they suspect an adenovirus infection and to follow the 2003 guidelines for pneumonia care.
Action Points

    * Explain to interested patients that adenovirus infections are usually not life-threatening among adults, although they can be deadly in newborns, the elderly, and those with an underlying medical condition.

    * Note that this report suggests that a strain of adenovirus now circulating is preferentially causing mortality among adults.

But the agency -- calling the infection "uncommon" -- did not suggest any special precautions for the general public.

Fifty-one adenoviruses are known and most cause non-life-threatening disease in adults, although severe disease -- including pneumonia and gastrointestinal disease -- can occur in newborns, the elderly, and those with an underlying medical condition.

The new strain of adenovirus 14 differs in that most of its victims have been otherwise healthy adults, CDC officials said.

"What really got people's attention is these are healthy young adults landing in the hospital and, in some cases, the ICU," said John Su, M.D., Ph.D., of the CDC.

But the first case that came to the CDC's attention was a 12-day-old infant who died in a New York hospital in May 2006. The baby girl was full-term and the delivery was uncomplicated, the agency reported.

Postmortem examination found adenovirus 14, as well as chronic inflammatory cells with intranuclear inclusions, in the lungs, consistent with adenoviral bronchiolitis and acute respiratory distress syndrome.

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The strain would prove to be genetically identical to isolates found in three clusters of adenovirus 14 disease over the following 18 months, the CDC said, but different in some respects from the reference strain, first isolated in 1955.

The finding suggests "the emergence and spread of a new [adenovirus 14] variant" in the U.S., the agency said in the Nov. 15 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The later clusters were reported in 2007 in Oregon, Washington state, and Texas, the CDC said.

The largest outbreak took place from Feb. 3 to June 23 at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, where 27 patients were sent to the hospital with pneumonia, including five who were admitted to the intensive care unit.

One of the five required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for about three weeks and ultimately died. Medical personnel collected throat swabs from 16 of the 27 -- including the intensive care patients -- and all tested positive for the virus.

Also, during that period, medical personnel collected and tested 423 specimens associated with an outbreak of febrile respiratory infection, of which, 268 tested positive for adenovirus. A little less than half of the specimens (44%) were also serotyped and 90% were adenovirus 14.

The deadliest outbreak, identified retrospectively, occurred in Oregon, after a local clinician reported multiple patients admitted to a single hospital for pneumonia over a five-week period in March and April.

Of the 17 specimens obtained, 15 were positive for adenovirus 14, the CDC said, leading Oregon public health authorities to review records from virology labs and find 68 people who tested positive between Nov. 1, 2006, and April 30, 2007.

Of those, 50 isolates could be serotyped and 31 were adenovirus 14, the CDC reported, while 15 were another serotype and four were not actually adenovirus.

Review of medical records for 30 of the 31 with adenovirus 14 showed that 22 patients required hospital care, 16 required intensive care, and seven died, all from severe pneumonia. Most of the dead were adults, but one infant also died.

In contrast, only two of the 13 non-type 14 patients whose charts were available needed hospital care, none needed intensive care, and none died. (See: IDSA: Outbreak of Severe Pneumonia Traced to Adenovirus 14)

In Washington, officials reported four patients -- one with AIDS and three with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease -- with cough, fever, or shortness of breath between April 22 and May 8, 2007.

Three required intensive care and mechanical ventilation for severe pneumonia, and after eight days of hospital care, the AIDS patient died, while the other patients recovered.

All four tested positive for adenovirus and the three with isolates available for serotyping were shown to have adenovirus 14.

The CDC urged clinicians to follow its 2003 guidelines for pneumonia care. Among other things, the guidelines suggested changes in ventilation practices:

    * Orotracheal rather than nasotracheal tubes should be used in patients who need mechanically assisted ventilation.
    * Noninvasive ventilation should be used to reduce the need for and duration of endotracheal intubation.

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http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&Mytoken=0E8C2F8F-97A6-4722-B42E66081516F38C21613609
http://louis-j-sheehan.myblogvoice.com/louis-j-sheehan-1023071-205297.htm
http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=ab-usgovinfo&tid=2153
http://www.attorneygeneral.gov/dnc.aspx
https://www.donotcall.gov/
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/9373335p-9286744c.html

http://www.doubtaboutwill.org/signatories/name?page=20
http://web.mac.com/lousheehan

    * The breathing circuits of ventilators should be changed when they malfunction or are visibly contaminated.
    * When feasible, an endotracheal tube with a dorsal lumen should be used to allow drainage of respiratory secretions.

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