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evidence of this widely shared experience. To close this gap, our team, under the direction of medical psychologist Jörg Kupfer, conducted a psychological experiment with students. Our unsuspecting participants were asked to evaluate the educational quality of a lecture on the topic, “Itching—What Is It?” The test subjects—60 medical and psychology students—attended one of two different lectures. One group viewed images of lice, fleas, bedbugs and allergic skin reactions; the other group saw babies and calming landscapes. Unsurprisingly, the students in the first group scratched themselves significantly more frequently during the presentation than their counterparts in the second one did. http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com It may be that this mental trigger is associated with so-called mirror neurons. These specialized nerve cells fire both when we ourselves perform a certain action and when we observe someone else doing it]. The contagious character of yawning, for example, is attributed to mirror-neuron activity. To find out which areas of the brain are particularly active during itching, researchers have used imaging methods to look into the heads of their test subjects after generating itchiness with histamine. Neuroscientist Francis McGlone of Unilever Research and Development in Cheshire, England, and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal firing in parts of the cerebellum and in regions of the frontal lobe. The researchers found that the behavioral responses result from the different frontal lobe activation for itching and pain—that is, scratching, on the one hand, and pain perception, on the other. A team at the Bender Institute of Neuroimaging at the University of Giessen in Germany also used fMRI to study the itching triggered by histamine over a period of approximately 15 minutes, the time it generally takes for such experimentally induced itching to subside. The researchers found that several areas of the brain would activate in characteristic ways: regions, for example, in the frontal lobe, in the left temporal lobe and in the left hemisphere of the cerebellum. Surprisingly, however, there was no apparent activity in the sensorimotor cortex—the areas of the cerebral cortex that process sensory stimuli and control movement. Instead many of the regions that fired are those that tend to be associated with emotion. On the Trail of Neurodermatitis Other researchers have confirmed the importance of brain areas that process emotion. According to a recent study by Handwerker, itching is partly processed and activated in some of the same regions of the brain that pain is and, additionally, in the emotion center, the amygdala. And according to a team led by Hideki Mochizuki of the Japanese National Institute for Physiological Sciences, the cingulum, a switching center that processes emotions, and the insula, an area also associated with emotion and disgust, both fire during itching—but not during pain. Gil Yosipovitch of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center has demonstrated that the brains of patients with neurodermatitis (chronic itching) react markedly differently than those of healthy persons. Only in the latter individuals does scratching inhibit activity in the cingulum. The researchers hypothesize that this control mechanism normally prevents itching from being strengthened by emotion. In neurodermatitis patients, the mechanism seems to be overridden, and itching gains the upper hand as a consequence. Itch research has recently spread to molecular biology as well. In 2007 Zhou-Feng Chen and Yan-Gang Sun of the Washington University Pain Center in St. Louis, for example, looked at the GRPR gene, which contains the building instructions for a receptor that is activated by a compound called gastrin-releasing peptide (GRP). Such neuropeptides are proteins that neurons release, often with profound effects on behavior. Mice in which the GRPR gene has been deactivated react to substances that stimulate itching with less scratching than control animals do. When the researchers injected normal mice with a blocker for the GRP receptor, these animals were also less susceptible to itching. The connection between itching and neuropeptides such as GRP has been a topic of research for some time and is a special focus of the work of Martin Steinhoff and his colleagues at the University of Münster in Germany. They have found that certain neuropeptides, along with their receptor molecules and so-called endopeptidases (which degrade neuropeptides), play a key role. If the regulation of these biochemical processes gets out of whack, the result may be problems with chronic inflammation, itching and pain. Neurodermatitis is a very common case in point. Here the endopeptidases do not work fast enough, so that the neuropeptides end up activating far too many immune cells. The consequence is a cascading inflammatory response and itching. Soothing News Scratching offers temporary relief but may further irritate the skin or cause it to tear. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com Treatments include lotions and creams (such as calamine and hydrocortisone), antihistamines, opioid antagonists (such as naltrexone, a drug used to treat narcotic and alcohol dependence), aspirin and ultraviolet-light therapy. Chronic itching is primarily treated medically. In a recent study of 385 patients, Dorothee Seipmann and Sonja Ständer of the University of Münster showed that 65 percent of sufferers benefit from such drugs. The most frequently prescribed medications are antihistamines. The epilepsy drug gabapentin is used in cases of neuropathic (caused by nerve fibers) itching, and combinations of naltrexone, pregabelin, the antidepressant paroxetine (Paxil) and the immunostatic cyclosporine are also in use. The most promising treatment approach at the moment may include substances that affect the opioid receptors involved in itching. Opium and heroin addicts almost always suffer from itching, brought about largely by hyperactivation of the mu-opioid receptors. Pursuing this trail, researchers might explore the therapeutic approach of blocking this type of receptor. The receptors’ natural antagonists are the kappa-opioid receptors, whose activation decreases itching. Initial clinical studies are already looking at substances that stimulate the kappa receptors. A number of calming techniques, among them autogenic training (in which patients repeat a set of visualizations) and Jacobson’s progressive muscle relaxation (in which patients relax muscles to relieve tension), have proved effective in supplementing medical treatment. Psychotherapy is generally not very useful in getting rid of the urge to itch. And what can sufferers do at home to decrease persistent, bothersome itching? Cool showers or baths, particularly with bath additives that contain soothing substances suggested by a dermatologist, can help. Cold packs can also be useful in getting a localized itch under control. A cool environment, especially at night, is helpful. Air out the bedroom and wear loose-fitting pajamas—if you need to wear anything at all. Sometimes that is all it takes to reduce itching to a tolerable level. In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday. With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents. The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.” http://louis0j0sheehan.blogspot.com “This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant. The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle. The release on Monday of the unclassified parts of the decision followed a brief court notice last week. The notice said a classified decision had directed the government to release Mr. Parhat, transfer him to another country or conduct a new military hearing at Guantánamo to determine if he had been properly classified as an enemy combatant. The Justice Department declined to comment on the ruling. Although the decision was a defeat for the Bush administration, it was unclear what it might mean immediately for Mr. Parhat, a former fruit peddler who in recent years sent a message to his wife that she should remarry because his imprisonment at Guantánamo was like already being dead. American officials have said that they cannot return Mr. Parhat and 16 other Uighur detainees at Guantánamo to China for fear of mistreatment and that some 100 other countries have refused to accept them. Detainees’ lawyers said the ruling in the case of Mr. Parhat, who says he went to Afghanistan in 2001 to escape China, could broadly affect other detainees because of its skeptical view of the government’s evidence. A lawyer representing other detainees, Marc D. Falkoff, said the evidence against many of the 270 men now at Guantánamo was similar to that in the Parhat case. “This opinion shows that the government is going to have a hard time defending the military’s decision to detain many of these men,” said Mr. Falkoff, a professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law. Pentagon officials have claimed that the Uighurs at Guantánamo were “affiliated” with a Uighur resistance group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and that it, in turn, was “associated” with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com The ruling released Monday overturned the Pentagon’s finding after a 2004 hearing that Mr. Parhat was an enemy combatant based on that affiliation. He and the 16 other Uighurs were detained after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The court said the classified evidence supporting the Pentagon’s claims included assertions that events had “reportedly” occurred and that the connections were “said to” exist, without providing information about the source of such information. “Those bare facts,” the decision said, “cannot sustain the determination that Parhat is an enemy combatant.” Some lawyers said the ruling highlighted the difficulties they saw in civilian judges reviewing Guantánamo cases. “This case displays the inadequacies of having civilian courts inject themselves into military decision-making,” said Glenn M. Sulmasy, a law professor at the Coast Guard Academy and a national security fellow at Harvard. The appellate panel reviewed Mr. Parhat’s case under a limited procedure Congress provided for challenging military hearings at Guantánamo. The case was argued before the Supreme Court’s decision on June 12 that detainees have a constitutional right to seek release in more expansive habeas corpus proceedings. The 17 Uighurs now held at Guantánamo say they are allies, not enemies, of the United States. The Uighur Muslims, who come from an area of far western China they call East Turkestan, claim oppression at the hands of the Chinese government, including forced abortions and relocations of educated people to remote areas. The Chinese government has described the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization. American officials agreed in 2002, when they were pressing for Chinese support for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The decision was written by Judge Merrick B. Garland, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. It was joined by Chief Judge Sentelle, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, and Judge Thomas B. Griffith, a 2005 appointee of President Bush. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com The following interview took place on Wednesday, 4 November, in Wytheville, VA. Dan Gordon is the news director of radio station WYVE in Wyethville. Since October 1st, his station has been besieged with calls from residents who have witnessed something strange in the night skies. When the calls wouldn't stop, he decided to take a look for himself. Gordon was interviewed by ParaNet member Ronald Jennings of Newport News. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Gordon: ...I call it an aircraft because that's the only term I can think of for it. But on October the 13th, on a Wednesday, I was with a friend of mine who's a former pilot. And we had spent about two and a half hours in the cold with our heads out the window looking for the UFO that people had seen. Because I had been reporting UFO sightings [as a newsman] up to my neck, and I decided that the only way I could actually solve the puzzle was go out and see the UFO for myself... My friend and I rode through all the areas where the sightings had occurred, especially multiple sightings. As we were coming home, we had about given up the search, I looked to the left on Route 21 South, which is about four and a half miles due south of Wytheville, between Wytheville and [Speedwell?], I noticed a very unusual aircraft coming to my left. So I stopped the car and got out. http://louisfjfsheehan.blogspot.com As it approached, it looked like it had...the front shape was kinda like a funny-looking, round front to a craft, with a long, split cockpit, and I say "split" because as it approached, one side of the cockpit went dark. It had a strobe that was putting out five different colors of lights on the right side of the craft. I told my friend to get out, because he was on the other side of the car, and he got out, and we both were pretty astounded just from what we saw as it was coming toward us. I had a 35 mm camera on the dash, he had an [?] in the trunk of the car. From there on in, we were so astounded and appalled we were froze to our spot. We did not use either camera. I've been in the news business nine years, I've never missed a shot, to my knowledge. In sports...I've covered murders, fires, guy hung himself from a tree...everything. So nothing appalls me. This appalled me. I probably was standing with my mouth agape. As it came by me, a side view...it seemed like it went on forever. We're talking a couple thousand feet [altitude]. The altitude was estimated by my partner, who's a former pilot and a former airplane mechanic in Florida...we estimated 2000 feet based on the treetop level. As it came past, like I say, it was a very large craft, some 8-900 feet in length, probably bigger than any 747 I've ever seen at an airport. As it came by, it continued very slowly, just like it would skim through the air...no sound, no jetstream [contrails], no smell, no nothing. Totally quiet, and now we're on a road where there's radio going, there's no noise whatsoever. No other cars coming. As the craft gets past me, the rear of it - and I say the rear, that's the area that we are looking at as it was going away from us - had three panels of what appeared to be windows. The top one was parallel with the ground, and appeared to be like in a circular, dome shape at the top...looked like a window pane you would see in a house. To each side of this window was two, they were going vertically, same size windows, looked like three windows on the end of a house. It was emitting no light, yet it shone a very soft white light from the inside like a 75-watt bulb would show in a house with very thin shades. We were both, like I say, appalled. We watched it continue...it went behind a cloud. At the same time it went behind a cloud, I noticed a spherical dull-red object come from the left, parallel with the ground, not from up or down, at a high rate of speed. It was not a hologram or a laser or anything because it blotted out the stars as it traversed across the sky. It went behind the cloud directly with the aircraft. The aircraft momentarily (maybe a minute elapsed) came out of the cloud, the spherical object didn't, at least not by itself. The craft continued on south and we lost sight of it. Because it was the first sighting I had ever had, being a skeptic I automatically asked my friend, "what did you see? Describe it back to me," to make sure I had seen the same thing he did. Because during this whole time we were almost quiet. He described virtually the same craft, and told me it was unlike any conventional aircraft he had ever seen, in magazines or in his dealings with aircraft. And naturally we couldn't explain the spherical object. So, because we didn't get a picture, we cursed ourselves all around. So the next night, with a photographer, John Stember, a fashion photographer, and his girlfriend and the pilot and myself went back in the general area, stopped in the same area, didn't see anything. About two miles up the road, the same route, on Thursday night of this week, the day after I'd seen the first sighting, we saw a craft hovering over a dirt road, to the left. I pulled over, slammed on the brakes, we jumped out. The craft, like it sensed us, turned and proceeded along the mountain top. We grabbed cameras and started shooting with videotape and two 35 mm, at a pretty good distance. I had a 135mm lens, 1000 speed film, shot [1/50th?]. He was shooting with, I believe, a Nikon, 500mm lens, and a multiplier, which made it 1500mm. My camera quit after three shots. Don't know why. Got back in the car, it worked fine. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com Next day the camera was checked by a local camera shop. Wasn't anything wrong with the battery. I put a new one in, just in case, but for some reason it stopped after three frames. What I got was a light shape of a spherical object, a dome shape, and another craft coming down, preparing to dock in behind. We witnessed this craft docking behind us, large domed craft, and proceed with it some 15 miles before it went out of sight. The videotape showed nothing but just some very dim lights. The 500mm lens with the multiplier came out blank. Mine just had a few dots, it was blank. Not enough light let in, undoubtedly. So we decided from there to go public with it that Friday in a press conference here at the radio station. And we had a gentleman who's a computer analyst, Andrew Convery, in from Virginia Beach. He had seen it at a motel, the same night, in [?], some 15 miles away. We went public, we did not have the film developed yet. We tried to see if we could get any response from the military, or if we could get any input from anybody else, before we actually told people, and showed them what we saw. We had no response. We got no response from anybody except the public, they had seen the same thing. We had fifty reports of the same object, same description, before they had ever heard our description. We had never gone public in the media in any form in this county, in this area, with this type of sighting, even though we had other sightings, we had not described this large, "mother craft", I'll call it. We had 50 sightings. We even had a lady come in and participate in the press conference, Emma Burchette, who had seen it the night before, had not told me what she had seen, we put her on the panel and she told the press. It was the first time I'd heard it. It was identical to my sighting. After the press conference, I was hit by a media blitz. So I was having a hard time finding [time] to go look for the object. I went with a lot of TV crews in the area, and we never saw anything. So, finally the media blitz died down a little bit last Friday. My wife, my child and I went back to 21 South, the same area, finally spotted the craft up on the mountain - Sand Mountain - and watched it hover for 20 minutes. Same craft. It would not come off the mountain, just hovered up there. And I drove all around trying to find a road to get up to that area, so I could photograph it. I wanted something close. I came to town to get gas, I was about to run out of gas, I came back and it was gone. I've seen it on three occasions, in a nocturnal sighting. On October 16th, after about two weeks of UFO sightings, I'm still not sure if my mind was playing tricks on me, but I seen, in a bright blue sky, 6:00, at Exit 19 off Interstate 81, looked up and saw what appeared to be a pie-pan turned upside down, just sitting there, and all of a sudden, zoom! it was gone. Silver, kinda gold-silver object. No wings, no sign of jetstream, nothing, it was a day where you could see jetstreams everywhere. I assumed at that time that maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me. To this day I'm still not sure but it appears, we have had three daytime sightings by people who will not come forward to the public but they've told me. And we've had over a thousand sightings total. Jennings: In what period of time? Gordon: Since October 1. Last Monday night, October 26th, I was in the Speedwell area with five people, including four members of a TV crew from channel 9 in Washington, DC, we saw 25 jets in one area chasing red and white spherical objects. Chasing, but couldn't catch. The objects would hover, they'd chase, and they'd hover and stop and chase again. Never caught 'em. Finally the objects went off over the horizon. When I called Langley about it, the lady said they were conducting some kind of starflight exercise, its something they scramble their crews without notice, and they were done by 6:00. I said, "Lady, they were here at 8:30." She said, "no we weren't." That's the end of the conversation. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com Jennings: Was this Langley, VA or Langley Air Force Base, Hampton? Gordon: Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. Jennings: OK, could you tell me approximately the times that these sightings occurred at, that you've seen? Gordon: Between 8 and 10 o'clock. All the sightings that I have documented that people have called me, with the exception of three or four, have occurred between 8 and 10 o'clock, Monday through Friday. Jennings: What about the one in the daylight, do you know what time that was? Gordon: 6:00. One gentlemen saw them at 5 and one saw them at 4:45. Jennings: In the evening? Gordon: Yes. We had one sighting at 6AM in the morning, another at 12:45AM, but primarily everything from 8 to 10. Jennings: Did the object emit any sort of a noise? Gordon: People that have gotten closer than I have, say 6-700 feet, one gentleman had it 400 feet above his house, based on [the size of] his house and three more houses, he said that it had a real solid "hum," when you quit talking you could hear a real faint hum. Most anybody's told me, its either a drone or a hum. No roar, no hiss, no whoosh, or nothing. Course mine was at 2000 feet, I couldn't hear it. Jennings: Could you describe the shape of the object, again, please? Gordon: Well, the front, is like a very, like a flat, round shape, its almost like somebody took a "U", I mean a circle, and cut off the side and made it flat on one side. You've got a long, elongated cockpit area, it appears to be a cockpit area, with a slope on the front. And the rest of the aircraft takes many forms. Even though the back has windows in it, it almost looks identical to the Star Wars vehicle, that was in the movie "Star Wars" that flew between the asteroids, and it had all the different shapes and sizes on it. It [the Star Wars ship] was real dirty charcoal-gray, whatever, if you remember the Star Wars vehicle. That's what people keep describing it as, is a Star Wars vehicle. Jennings: Well, which vehicle in "Star Wars," it wasn't an X-wing fighter, was it? Gordon: http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com No, we're talking about the battleship, whatever,... Jennings: Well, are you talking about the ship that Han Solo used, by any chance? That big thing... Gordon: Whatever the big ship was that.... Jennings: Not the Death Star, not the big round sphere, it wasn't something like that? Gordon: No, we're talking a ship that had a lot of different shapes on it, it was not smooth. Jennings: All right, that was the ship, I think, that Han Solo flew in the movie. Gordon: That's what people describe it as, and that's the only I know that closely fits it. Its not a smooth object that people are seeing, now, that's hovering over their houses. Jennings: OK, one more question, are the sightings still going on? Gordon: Oh, yeah, we had five today reported to me on the telephone, another five walked in the door and told me. Jennings: Also, there's some reference to the Sheriff having seen something? Gordon: We talked to three members of, deputies of the Sheriff's department, in the town of [?], the town of Wytheville, and the chief of police in [?] saw it, saw it in [?] on the first night. That's what initiated the sightings, but since then, primarily I think maybe because of the media blitz, they decided all the sightings were refueling of aircraft. Jennings: And as far as you know, no photographs of the object came out, as yet? Gordon: Well, mine has come out, its just not definitive enough to produce, it doesn't show the mountain range because its too dark. It can't show anything in comparison to the object, because of the distance and the light. </p> 4433542 2008-07-11 09:23:07 2008-07-11 09:23:07 open open initiated-4433542 publish 0 0 post 0 muscles http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/07/08/muscles-4418073/ Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:52:05 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Apparently, leaky muscles. Researchers report in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that the fatigue extreme athletes feel after a race and that heart-failure patients routinely experience is probably caused by the same condition: a tiny leak that allows calcium to continuously drip inside their muscle cells. According to senior study author Andrew Marks and colleagues at Columbia University Medical Center, the leak weakens the force produced by the muscle and also releases a protein-digesting enzyme that damages the muscle fibers, reducing the ability of a single muscle to contract repeatedly before losing strength. Scientists discovered the leaky muscles in mice put through a grueling three-week swimming regimen and in humans after three days of intense cycling. The findings mimicked earlier ones they found in animals with heart trouble. But don't think this gives you an excuse to be a lazy bum. "The study does not mean exercise is bad for you," Marks stressed. "We only saw the leak in animals and human athletes that exercised three hours a day at very high intensities for several days or weeks in a row until they were exhausted." What's more, he noted, the athletes' muscles returned to normal after a few days of R&R. People with chronic heart failure, on the other hand, had the problem even though they didn't do a lick of exercise; and unfortunately, their damaged arm, leg and breathing muscles didn't bounce back. But researchers also found that an experimental drug they had developed relieved muscle fatigue in mice after exercise, suggesting that it may also perk up patients with chronic heart failure who are sometimes too weary to even get out of bed. Isabella Rossellini, well known as a supermodel and movie star, is now making short films for mobile devices that illustrate the sex lives of dragonflies, earthworms and other creatures. But they are not like standard nature shows. In these films, which she researched with the help of Wildlife Conservation Society experts, she not only details unusual aspects of the critters’ biology but also dresses up as them and mimics sex with paper cutouts. We asked Rossellini what she hopes to accomplish with the films on invertebrate love, dubbed Green Porno, which premiered May 5 on the Sundance Channel’s Web site. How did you get started making these short films? Sundance was interested in experimenting and expanding the definition of film. Sundance said, “Would you be interested in making films for the mobile?” We thought short films would be something that people would dedicate two minutes to watch, but longer would be difficult. You call it Green Porno—what’s the story behind the name? Sundance wanted, if possible, content that was environmental, because the channel and Robert Redford [the creative director of the network] are very dedicated to it. And then they said, “Because this is new media, can you make it flashy and funny?” Flashy to me translated into sex, so it’s great to do a very short little series about the life of bugs. Was it hard researching the sexual behavior of bugs? It was difficult. I was always joking with some of the scientists I called that when it comes to insects, you can go through pages and pages and pages of how their mouths work, and I kept on saying, “I want to know how the genitalia work.” There are great descriptions about mouths and not much about sex. I read scientific books that have a lot of terminology that is hard for me to understand. So I bring it back to humans. That’s the process I tried to illustrate when I did Green Porno. I was terrified of making mistakes. I’m a very big supporter of the Wildlife Conservation Society, so I kept calling them, and their scientists are very kind. Also in the article How far did you go with the costumes? Often I had the bug eyes. Once I have the eyes on, I can’t see anything. But the earthworm was the worst, because the costume is 35 feet long. Once I was in the costume I couldn’t come out, and then my arms were along my body, so I was completely strapped, and it’s very constrictive. I almost broke out of it one afternoon after being there for three hours while they were fiddling with the lights for some reason—“Ahh, I can’t wait, I’m going nuts!” They [the costumes] were fragile. Once I humped them, they came apart. You also play the males quite often—for instance, in one of the shorts, you portray a small male spider that sneaks up to mate with a large female to avoid getting eaten. Obviously, there are lots of species of spiders, and I had to generalize there—spiders have the most incredible sexual rituals. If I do another series [of films], I might have to add more spiders—they do things that are very funny. So why focus on insects as opposed to the rest of the animal kingdom? Mammals would look too pornographic. With the bugs, they’re so strange and far out, they’re comical. If a human being behaved like a bug, he or she would be arrested. Also, when I was little, I always said I should have been born in Africa or been like Jane Goodall. That was my dream. And then when I moved to live in the country, I discovered all these bugs in my backyard. I discovered you can do your own safari. Animals are everywhere. Some are more romantic, like tigers and elephants and chimpanzees, and some are less romantic, like earthworms, but they are just as interesting. As the daughter of John Zoltewicz, a longtime professor of organic chemistry at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Susie Zoltewicz grew up hearing about chemical experiments. They intrigued her, and so, as a high school student in the 1980s, she decided to do an unusual thing for a teenager: spend more time with her dad than necessary. She joined his lab to work on a project to enter in science fairs and competitions. "It was a little stressful at times," she says. "He was pretty strict." She tried to quit more than once, but then her work started garnering attention at various science fairs. At the time there was some speculation that a particular fluorescent compound could be used in cancer treatment, but the compound broke apart rapidly in water. That would be a problem, because water is a key ingredient in the human body. Zoltewicz's work showed that by incorporating micelles—basically, a detergent called SDS found in laundry soaps—into water solutions with the fluorescent compound, you could make it last longer in the body. Zoltewicz entered her results in the 1986 Westinghouse Science Talent Search and was named a finalist. HOW IT AFFECTED HER CAREER: Working in the lab—and winning awards—whetted Zoltewicz's taste for research. At Princeton University she studied molecular biology, and afterward, pursued her PhD in developmental biology at the University of California, Berkeley, (where she dedicated her thesis "To my dad, for leading me to science"). Her main focus has been studying how the central nervous system develops in embryos: in frogs as a graduate student, then in mice as a postdoc at Duke University starting in 1997, and later at U.C. San Francisco when her lab moved to the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center there in 1999. In 2003 she was promoted to an associate research scientist at Gallo. She works on a gene called Oto, mutations in which block head development. In her experiments, "basically what you do to try to understand something is to mess it up and compare it to the normal," she says. So with frogs, for instance, she cut and pasted genes in experiments that sometimes led to the development of two-headed (or no-headed) tadpoles. Although this sounds a bit grim, she notes that there are multiple humans born each year with severe head defects. Many die quickly. "We want to understand why that does happen and prevent it from happening," she says. Her father—now retired—has watched her career with pride. "The father–daughter to teacher–pupil to fellow scientist progression has caused our relationship to mature and expand through common learning experiences and activities, providing a special bond," he says. WHAT SHE'S DOING NOW: Zoltewicz's lab at Gallo closed in 2006 (the professor who ran it left to work for Genentech in 2005). So she decided to move back home to Gainesville to take a break before diving back into research. She and her father are now working together again—this time on painting and renovating her house. "It's better than the lab days," she says. "We're getting to know each other as adults and people—and getting to be friends." </p> 4418073 2008-07-08 03:52:05 2008-07-08 03:52:05 open open muscles-4418073 publish 0 0 post 0 olympic http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/07/08/olympic-4418062/ Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:41:06 +0200 Beforethebigbang 4418062 2008-07-08 03:41:06 2008-07-08 03:41:06 open open olympic-4418062 publish 0 0 post 0 commonwealth http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/07/08/commonwealth-4418050/ Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:27:09 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>A nondescript gene that no scientist has studied before determines why some people gain more weight than others. A new study of nearly 40,000 Europeans found that people with mutations in both of their copies of the gene known as FTO are 70 percent more likely to be obese than those with regular copies of the gene. Researchers says that identifying a genetic basis for obesity could lead to novel treatments for the increasingly prevalent condition blamed for life-threatening heart disease and type 2 diabetes, among other disorders. "Approximately one sixth of the population will have two copies of the variant and that will result in them being three kilograms [6.6 pounds] heavier than the one third of the population who do not have any copies of the variant," says geneticist Andrew Hattersley of the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, England. "[This] is a genetic variant which is involved in the regulation of weight." Other genes, such as GAD, ENPP1 and, most recently, INSIG2, have been put forward as playing a role in the genetics of obesity but subsequent research has not borne that out. FTO first came to light when researchers compared the genomes of 1,924 Britons who had type 2 diabetes with those of 2,938 healthy peers and found a correlation in those who had the mutated gene and extra fat. To ensure the accuracy of that finding, the researchers then culled even more DNA samples from more than 38,750 people, ranging from English adults to Finnish children, to see if FTO variations affected a wide variety of people. "Regardless of your age, your weight, this effect was seen in all those populations," says Timothy Frayling, a geneticist at Peninsula and lead author of the study published in Science online. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com The variants of the gene correlate with increases in a person's body mass index (BMI)—a measure of weight versus height. By this index, a person is overweight if his or her BMI reaches 25 kilograms per meter2 and obese if it rises above 30 kilograms per meter2, or roughly 213 pounds for someone who is six feet tall. (Some very muscular people can have high BMI with no health risks.) If a study participant had two copies of mutant FTO, scientists found they had 1.67 times the risk of being obese using this measure. The gene is associated with both higher weight (regardless of differences in height) as well as wider waists and thicker concentrations of fat mass. FTO itself is an unstudied gene in an unidentified pathway. In other words, scientists basically have no idea what it does. It was originally discovered as part of the genome of a mutant mouse with a fused toe, hence the FT at the beginning of its name. "The gene which has been implicated, FTO, is a gene about which we know very little," admits co-author Mark McCarthy of the University of Oxford. "It has not been implicated in obesity before." Obesity is on the rise worldwide, correlated with gains in affluence. According to a recent study in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association, nearly 100 million men, women and children in the U.S. alone are considered obese. "This particular genetic variant would play a role in about 20 percent of those," Hattersley says. "The genetics is the same as it was 100 years ago when we had far less obesity. So you can never underestimate the effects of lifestyle." McCarthy says that FTO is unlikely to be the only gene involved in obesity. "This gene alone is not going to explain why some people are 30 or 40 or 50 kilograms [65 to 110 pounds] heavier than other people living in the same town, same street or exposed to the same environment," he says. But obesity appears to be highly heritable, according to recent studies in identical twins. "It's a very complicated mix of genes and environment—and teasing them apart is not very easy," he adds. "Not least because some of the things that you think of as environmental, for example, food preference or the choice to exercise a lot or a little, there's quite a bit of evidence that those themselves are under some genetic control." Regardless, the identification of a gene that predisposes individuals to fat opens up the possibility of genetic testing for obesity in the future. The gene seems to begin to kick in by the age of seven and continues for life. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com Further studies are planned in other ethnic populations as well as to determine what FTO actually does. But regardless of the genes you carry, McCarthy says, the treatment for obesity remains, and will remain, exactly the same—"eating less, exercising more.'' Don't be fooled by the rigid feel and appearance of a skeleton. The 206 bones in the human body not only support it but are in a constant state of flux, breaking down and rebuilding themselves as well as manufacturing blood cells in their marrow. But that is not all they do. A new study shows that the skeleton is also an endocrine organ involved in energy metabolism, and as such may play a role in weight gain and loss: Bones regulate glucose (blood sugar) by secreting osteocalcin, a hormone that enhances insulin activity and reduces obesity and type 2 diabetes in mice. "It's exciting because of the therapeutic implications. There is a novel way of regulating glucose metabolism [that could lead to] a breakthrough in the treatment in type 2 diabetes," says Gerard Karsenty, chair of the genetics and development department at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City and lead author of the study published in the journal Cell. Karsenty and his colleagues decided to probe further after finding last year that leptin, a hormone secreted by fat cells, regulates bone mass. If fat cells are talking to bone cells, they wondered, are the bone cells talking back? "We wanted to test the hypothesis that bone cells, in turn, were regulating fat cells," Karsenty explains. So the team set out to identify which of the few genes that operate primarily in bone cells are linked to glucose metabolism. They "knocked out'' (inactivated) these genes in mice and discovered that the animals lacking a functional osteocalcin gene were fat and also glucose intolerant, both prediabetic conditions. Further investigation revealed that osteocalcin signals fat cells to release adiponectin, a hormone that increases insulin sensitivity, confirming researchers' suspicions that bone cells communicate with fat cells. What's more, osteocalcin triggers the production of more pancreatic beta cells, the body's insulin factories, and increases their output, thus making more insulin available to the body. "These properties are rather unusual," Karsenty says, noting that it is rare to find a hormone that simultaneously ups production and insulin sensitivity. Researchers are optimistic that one day osteocalcin may be used to treat type 2 diabetes by helping patients make and use insulin more effectively. "So far, most of the drugs that we use [for type 2 diabetes] work on [only] one pathway at once," says Manu V. Chakravarthy, an endocrinologist and diabetes researcher at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. "[Osteocalcin] is a promising candidate because it does both." But can the results be duplicated in humans? "You can never be sure but it's fairly likely that it happens in humans, because the hormone is made in humans," Karsenty says, noting that people with type 2 diabetes generally also have low osteocalcin levels. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com Type 2 diabetes—the variety of the disease associated with obesity and a sedentary lifestyle—accounts for up to 95 percent of U.S. cases and has nearly tripled over the past 25 years or so, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It now afflicts some 21 million Americans, or 7 percent of the U.S. population. Just a few more portions of broccoli each week may protect men from prostate cancer, British researchers reported on Wednesday. The researchers believe a chemical in the food sparks hundreds of genetic changes, activating some genes that fight cancer and switching off others that fuel tumors, said Richard Mithen, a biologist at Britain's Institute of Food Research. There is plenty of evidence linking a healthy diet rich in fruits and vegetables to reduced cancer risk. But the study published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS One is the first human trial investigating the potential biological mechanism at work, Mithen added in a telephone interview. "Everybody says eat your vegetables but nobody can tell us why," said Mithen, who led the study. "Our study shows why vegetables are good." Prostate is the second-leading cancer killer of men after lung cancer. Each year, some 680,000 men worldwide are diagnosed with the disease and about 220,000 will die from it. Mithen and colleagues split into two groups 24 men with pre-cancerous lesions that increase prostate cancer risk and had them eat four extra servings of either broccoli or peas each week for a year. The researchers also took tissue samples over the course of the study and found that men who ate broccoli showed hundreds of changes in genes known to play a role in fighting cancer. The benefit would likely be the same in other cruciferous vegetables that contain a compound called isothiocyanate, including brussel sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage, rocket or arugula, watercress and horse radish, they added. Broccoli, however, has a particularly powerful type of the compound called sulforaphane, which the researchers think gives the green vegetable an extra cancer-fighting kick, Mithen said. "When people get cancer some genes are switched off and some are switched on," he said. "What broccoli seems to be doing is switching on genes which prevent cancer developing and switching off other ones that help it spread." The broccoli eaters showed about 400 to 500 of the positive genetic changes with men carrying a gene called GSTM1 enjoying the most benefit. About half the population have the gene, Mithen said. The researchers did not track the men long enough to see who got cancer but said the findings bolster the idea that just a few more vegetable portions each week can make a big difference. It is also likely that these vegetables work the same way in other parts of the body and probably protect people against a whole range of cancers, Mithen added. "You don't need a huge change in your diet," he said. "Just a few more portions makes a big difference." A BUBBLY and witty presence, the tall, older gentleman with the cane does not instantly come across as an Auschwitz survivor, or a fighter in the Warsaw Uprising, or a imprisoned dissident under Communism. In fact, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski is all those and more. Yet he is also the type of man who, on a busy day, stops to chat with the hotel maids and is sure to make them laugh before he goes on his way. The world is unlikely to produce many more Wladyslaw Bartoszewskis (pronounced vwad-IH-swav bart-o-SHEV-skee), and that is probably a good thing, given the events he lived through and witnessed from an early age. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com But while his life may have been forged through immense suffering, it never managed to define his outlook. “The optimists and the pessimists live identically long, but the optimists are considerably happier,” he said with an amused shrug, when asked about his famous good humor. Mr. Bartoszewski, 86, bears an all-too-heavy history with a light touch. It is a gift that has allowed him, at an age when most of his generation has long since retired or died, to be a successful diplomat for Poland, as well as a source of moral authority. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll live,” he said quite matter-of-factly in an interview last week. “No one knows, either. I can say that my plan is to help the government for as long as I can tell that it’s needed. My idea is to die in service, and not through sclerosis.” He has twice served as his country’s foreign minister and is working again as an adviser to Prime Minister Donald Tusk. His special responsibility is for two of his country’s most complicated relationships, with Germany and Israel. He has been honored by each repeatedly for his lifelong work to improve ties. “This is one of the unique people who have worked in both ways, as a symbol and with a very practical contribution,” said Andrzej Jonas, editor of the English-language newspaper Warsaw Voice, and an acquaintance of Mr. Bartoszewski’s for several decades. “He is recognized as a person who was always able to continue dialogue, even the most complicated dialogues, in the name of Poland.” The animated Mr. Bartoszewski, prone to bursts of throaty laughter and colorful anecdotes comparing international relations to dating, describes himself as just a normal man. Many Poles would vehemently disagree, speaking of him as a living national treasure. Yet he remains personable and approachable to a remarkable degree — if not the father of his nation, its wise but funny grandpa. He uses his personal history not as a cudgel but as an opening for his charm and understanding. “I’m on the side of the people in the middle rather than the extremists,” he said. “Mankind has suffered enormously due to the ideologically motivated extremists, in Europe and all over the world.” He was given an unfortunately good perch to make that observation. He was born in Warsaw in 1922, and was just 17 when he participated in the unsuccessful defense of his hometown as the Nazi Army conquered Poland in 1939. A year later, Mr. Bartoszewski was among many young Catholic Poles rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, and among the few lucky enough to survive. HE was released in 1941, and went to work with the resistance. He helped found the clandestine Zegota, or Council for Aid to Jews, which provided money, hiding places and false identity papers to Polish Jews trying to flee the Holocaust. Such assistance was punishable by death under Nazi occupation. In 1965, Mr. Bartoszewski was named one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial and museum. “They were making mass raids, arresting people on the street, shooting them down, taking them to camps,” he recalled. “I had to, at a minimum, pay for my resistance, in defense of the values that mobilized millions of people around the world.” Yet instead of dwelling on his own actions, he quickly turned the conversation to the subject of classmates who fought in Western Europe, including the devastating Allied assault on Nazi positions at Monte Cassino in Italy in 1944. After the war, Poland fell into the Soviet sphere. Mr. Bartoszewski was rewarded for his work to liberate his country and save his Jewish fellow citizens by being thrown behind bars again. “By the time I was 32, I had sat for eight years in prisons and camps,” Mr. Bartoszewski said. After he was freed in 1954 — and in the following year rehabilitated by the regime — he became a journalist for a Catholic newspaper in Krakow, and later a professor at the Catholic University of Lublin. He once again found himself part of an underground movement, this time a teaching network called the Flying University operating outside of the officially sanctioned education system. When Poland’s last Communist leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, declared martial law in December 1981 as part of an effort to suppress the Solidarity movement, Mr. Bartoszewski was imprisoned once more, until his release the following April. BY the time of the elections in 1989, which were only partly free but nevertheless seen as a victory for Solidarity, Mr. Bartoszewski was 67, past retirement age. But he was just getting started, embarking on his new career as a diplomat, first as the ambassador to Austria and later as the foreign minister under two different Polish governments, in 1995 and again from 2000 to 2001. He had settled into a busy retirement, writing books and sitting on boards, like the International Auschwitz Council, of which he is chairman. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com But the often divisive nationalistic government of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and his twin brother, the current president, Lech Kaczynski, brought him back into the fray. He grew into a fierce critic and spoke out against them before the election last October. Afterward, the new prime minister, Mr. Tusk, offered to make Mr. Bartoszewski foreign minister again. He demurred in favor of his former deputy, Radek Sikorski, but agreed to take on a special advisory role. “I decided to come back in spite of my age because I was convinced that something could be done,” he said. Speak to experts and observers on the Polish-German relations, and his name is invariably the first to come up in discussing the thaw in the relationship that has taken place since the new government came into office last year. “It is a completely new personal politics,” said Gesine Schwan, his counterpart as the German government’s coordinator for German-Polish relations and now the Social Democrats’ candidate for president. Mr. Bartoszewski shows no sign of slowing down either, saying he plans to publish five books in the coming years, one of which will be 100 short biographies of famous people he has known. He said that his many projects give him motivation to keep working as long as he can. “What more could you really ask for?” he said, before grabbing his cane and heading out to meet with the Polish ambassador to Germany, and later that afternoon, with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. June 30, 1908, 7:14 a.m., central Siberia—Semen Semenov, a local farmer, saw “the sky split in two. Fire appeared high and wide over the forest.... From ... where the fire was, came strong heat.... Then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few yards.... After that such noise came, as if . . . cannons were firing, the earth shook ...” Such is the harrowing testimony of one of the closest eyewitnesses to what scientists call the Tunguska event, the largest impact of a cosmic body to occur on the earth during modern human history. Semenov experienced a raging conflagration some 65 kilometers (40 miles) from ground zero, but the effects of the blast rippled out far into northern Europe and Central Asia as well. Some people saw massive, silvery clouds and brilliant, colored sunsets on the horizon, whereas others witnessed luminescent skies at night—Londoners, for instance, could plainly read newsprint at midnight without artificial lights. Geophysical observatories placed the source of the anomalous seismic and pressure waves they had recorded in a remote section of Siberia. The epicenter lay close to the river Podkamennaya Tunguska, an uninhabited area of swampy taiga forest that stays frozen for eight or nine months of the year. Ever since the Tunguska event, scientists and lay enthusiasts alike have wondered what caused it. Although most observers generally accept that some kind of cosmic body, either an asteroid or a comet, exploded in the sky above Siberia, no one has yet found fragments of the object or any impact craters in the affected region. The mystery remains unsolved, but our research team, only the latest of a steady stream of investigators who have scoured the area, may be closing in on a discovery that will change our understanding of what happened that fateful morning. The study of the Tunguska event is important because past collisions with extraterrestrial bodies have had major effects on the evolution of the earth. Some 4.4 billion years ago, for example, a Mars-size planetoid seems to have struck our young planet, throwing out enough debris to create our moon. And a large impact may have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Even today cosmic impacts are evident. In July 1994 several astronomical observatories recorded the spectacular crash of a comet on Jupiter. And only last September, Peruvian villagers watched in awe and fright as a heavenly object streaked across the sky and landed not too far away with a loud boom, leaving a gaping pit 4.5 meters deep and 13 meters wide. Using satellite observations of meteoric “flares” in the atmosphere (“shooting stars”) and acoustical data that record cosmic impacts on the surface of the earth, Peter Brown and his co-workers at the University of Western Ontario and Los Alamos National Laboratory estimated the rate of smaller impacts. The researchers have also extrapolated their findings to larger but rarer incidents such as the Tunguska event. The average frequency of Tunguska-like asteroidal collisions ranges from one in 200 years to one in 1,000 years. Thus, it is not unlikely that a similar strike could occur during our lifetimes. Luckily, the Tunguska impact took place in an unpopulated corner of the globe. Should something like it explode above New York City, the entire metropolitan area would be razed. Understanding the Tunguska event could help us prepare for such an eventuality and maybe even take steps to avoid its occurrence altogether. The first step in preparing ourselves would be to decide whether the cosmic object that affected Siberia was an asteroid or a comet. Although the consequences are roughly comparable in either case, an important difference is that objects in the solar system that circle far away from the sun on long-period orbits before returning, such as comets, would hit the earth at much greater velocities than close-orbiting (short-period) bodies, such as asteroids. A comet that is significantly smaller than an asteroid thus could release the same kinetic energy in such a collision. And observers have much more difficulty detecting long-period objects before they enter the inner solar system. In addition, the probability that such objects will cross the earth’s orbit is low relative to the probability that asteroids will. For these reasons, confirmed comet impacts on the earth are so far unknown. Therefore, if the Tunguska event was in fact caused by a comet, it would be a unique occurrence rather than an important case study of a known class of phenomena. On the other hand, if an asteroid did explode in the Siberian skies that June morning, why has no one yet found fragments? First Expedition Part of the enduring mystery of the Tunguska event harks back to the stark physical isolation of central Siberia and the political turmoil that raged in Russia during the early 20th century, a time when the czarist empire fell and the Soviet Union emerged. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com These two factors delayed scientific field studies for nearly 20 years. Only in 1927 did an expedition led by Leonid Kulik, a meteorite specialist from the Russian Academy of Sciences, reach the Tunguska site. When Kulik got to the site, he was confronted with some almost unbelievable scenery. Amazingly, the blast had flattened millions of trees in a broad, butterfly-shaped swath covering more than 2,000 square kilometers (775 square miles). Furthermore, the tree trunks had fallen in a radial pattern extending out for kilometers from a central area where “telegraph poles,” a lone stand of partially burned tree stumps, still remained. Kulik interpreted this ravaged landscape as the aftermath of an impact of an iron meteorite. He then began to search for the resulting crater or meteorite fragments. Kulik led three additional expeditions to the Tunguska region in the late 1920s and 1930s, and several others followed, but no one found clear-cut impact craters or pieces of whatever had hit the area. The dearth of evidence on-site gave rise to various explanatory hypotheses. In 1946, for instance, science-fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev explained the puzzling scene by positing a scenario in which an alien spacecraft had exploded in the atmosphere. Within a few years, the airburst theory gained scientific support and thereafter limited further speculation. Disintegration of a cosmic object in the atmosphere, between five and 10 kilometers above the surface, would explain most of the features investigators observed on the ground. Seismic observatory records, together with the dimensions of the devastation, allowed researchers to estimate the energy and altitude of the blast. The lack of an impact crater also suggested that the object could not have been a sturdy iron meteorite but a more fragile object, such as a relatively rare, stony asteroid or a small comet. Russian scientists favored the latter hypothesis because a comet is composed of dust particles and ice, which would fail to produce an impact crater. Another explanation for the tumult in the Tunguska region claimed that the de–struc–tion resulted from the rapid combustion of methane gas released from the swampy ground into the air. Laboratory Models In 1975 Ari Ben-Menahem, a seismologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, analyzed the seismic waves triggered by the Tunguska event and estimated that the energy released by the explosion was between 10 and 15 megatons in magnitude, the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Astrophysicists have since created numerical simulations of the Tunguska event to try to decide among the competing hypotheses. The airburst of a stony asteroid is the leading interpretation. Models by Christopher F. Chyba, then at the NASA Ames Research Center, and his colleagues proposed in 1993 that the asteroid was a few tens of meters in diameter and that it exploded several kilometers above the ground. Comparison of the effects of nuclear test airbursts with the flattened pattern of the Tunguska forest seems to confirm this suggestion. More recent simulations by N. A. Artemieva and V. V. Shuvalov, both at the Institute for Dynamics of Geospheres in Moscow, have envisioned an asteroid of similar size vaporizing five to 10 kilometers above Tunguska. In their model, the resulting fine debris and a downward-propagating gaseous jet then dispersed over wide areas in the atmosphere. These simulations do not, however, exclude the possibility that meter-size fragments may have survived the explosion and could have struck the ground not far from the blast. Late last year Mark Boslough and his team at Sandia National Laboratories concluded that the Tunguska event may have been precipitated by a much smaller object than earlier estimates had suggested. Their supercomputer simulation showed that the mass of the falling cosmic body turned into an expanding jet of high-temperature gas traveling at supersonic speeds. The model also indicated that the impactor was first compressed by the increasing resistance of the earth’s atmosphere. As the descending body penetrated deeper, air resistance probably caused it to explode in an airburst with a strong flow of heated gas that was carried downward by its tremendous momentum. Because the fireball would have transported additional energy toward the surface, what scientists had thought to be an explosion between 10 and 20 megatons was more likely only three to five megatons, according to Boslough. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com All this simulation work only strengthened (and continues to strengthen) our desire to conduct fieldwork at the Tunguska site. Trip to Siberia Our involvement with the Tunguska event began in 1991, when one of us (Longo) took part in the first Italian expedition to the site, during which he searched for microparticles from the explosion that might have become trapped in tree resin. Later, we stumbled on two obscure papers by Russian scientists, V. A. Koshelev and K. P. Florensky, that reported their discovery of a small body of water, Lake Cheko, roughly eight kilometers from the suspected epicenter of the phenomenon. In 1960 Koshelev speculated that Lake Cheko might be an impact crater, but Florensky rejected that idea. Florensky instead believed the lake was older than the Tunguska event, based on having found loose sediments as thick as seven meters below the bottom of the lake. Word that a lake sat close to ground zero piqued our interest in mounting a field trip there because lake-bottom sediments can store a detailed record of events that occurred in the surrounding region, the basis of paleolimnological studies. Although our team knew little of Lake Cheko, we thought that we could perhaps apply paleolimnological techniques and find in the lake’s sediments clues to unravel the Tunguska mystery, as if the lake were the black box from a crashed airliner. A few years later we found ourselves journeying to Russia in the cargo hold of an Ilyushin Il 20M propeller plane, a onetime aerial spy from the cold war era. Having found the necessary funds and having organized our venture in cooperation with research groups at Moscow State University and Tomsk State University in Russia (with the assistance of former cosmonaut Georgi M. Grechko), we were finally on our way to the Tunguska region. After the transport carried most of our Italian team and its equipment to a military base near Moscow, we flew overnight to Krasnojarsk, in central Siberia. We then transferred our equipment and ourselves, plus several researchers from Tomsk State, into the belly of a huge Mi 26 heavy-lift helicopter (formerly used by the military). For six hours we squatted among our equipment, deafened by the chopper’s twin turboshaft engines, until we finally reached our distant goal in the middle of the endless taiga. After circling the lake’s dark waters warily, the helicopter hovered precariously above the swampy lakeside (which was too soft for a landing) as we jumped down amid a torrential rainstorm. With eight blades rotating furiously above our heads, the resulting hurricane of air and water seemed set to sweep us away when at last we managed to unload our heavy cargo. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com With a roar, the craft lifted upward, and we were left drenched and exhausted near the edge of the lake, suddenly immersed in the deep silence of the Siberian wilderness. Any small relief we felt when the rain stopped was immediately forgotten as clouds of voracious mosquitoes descended on us like massed squadrons of tiny dive-bombers. On-Site Studies We spent the next two days organizing the camp, assembling our survey boat (a catamaran) and testing our equipment. Our studies would require a range of technologies, such as acoustic echo sounders, a magnetometer, subbottom acoustic profilers, a ground-penetrating radar, devices to recover sediment cores, an underwater television camera and a set of GPS receivers to enable study teams to track their position with a resolution of less than a meter. For two weeks after that, our group surveyed the lake from the catamaran, tormented the entire time by hordes of mosquitoes and horseflies. These efforts focused on exploring the sedimentation and structure of the lake’s subbottom. Other team members, in the meantime, busied themselves with their own tasks. With his ground-penetrating radar, Michele Pipan, a geophysicist at the University of Trieste, gradually mapped the subsurface structures (some three to four meters deep) below the 500-meter shore perimeter. Eugene Kolesnikov, a geochemist at Moscow State, and his colleagues excavated trenches in peat deposits near the lake, a tough job given the resistance of the hard permafrost layer below the surface. Kolesnikov’s team searched the peat layers for chemical markers of the Tunguska event. At the same time, Romano Serra of Bologna University and Valery Nesvetailo of Tomsk State collected core samples from nearby tree trunks to study possible anomalies in the tree-ring patterns. Meanwhile, high above us, the aircraft that brought us to Krasnojarsk returned and circled the region to take aerial photographs so that we could compare them with those Kulik made some 60 years before. We had assumed that the lake-bottom sediments might contain markers of the Tunguska event. After completing just a few runs across Lake Cheko with our high-resolution acoustic profiler, it became clear that the sediments blanketing the lake’s bottom were more than 10 meters thick. Some sediment particles had been transported to the lake by winds, but most of them came by way of the inflow of the little Kimchu River that fed Lake Cheko. We estimated that sediment deposition in a small body of water that stays frozen for most of the year would probably not exceed a few centimeters a year, so such a thick sediment layer might imply that the lake existed before 1908. On the other hand, the more we profiled the lake bottom, the more perplexed we became. It appeared that the lake, which is about 50 meters (165 feet) deep in the middle and has steep slopes, is shaped like a funnel or an inverted cone, a structure that is difficult to explain. If the lake were thousands of years old, it would probably have a flat bottom, the result of fine sediments gradually filling it up. We also found it hard to account for the funnel shape using typical erosion-deposition processes that occur when a small river meanders across a relatively flat landscape. Our entire team discussed these questions during the evenings as we sat under rain tarps, dining on delicious Russian kasha seasoned liberally with the bodies of dead mosquitoes. Soon our time in Tunguska was nearly over. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com The expedition members spent the last day frantically disassembling the boat, packing the equipment and dismantling the camp. When the helicopter arrived at noon the next day, we rushed to load all our stuff and ourselves into the hovering chopper amid the storm of human-made turbulence and finally began our return. Titillating Evidence Back in our laboratories in Italy, the three of us completed processing our bathymetric data, which confirmed that the shape of Lake Cheko’s bottom differs significantly from those of other Siberian lakes, which typically feature flat bottoms. Most lakes in the region form when water fills the depressions left after the ubiquitous permafrost layer melts. The funnellike shape of Lake Cheko, in contrast, resembles those of known impact craters of similar size—for instance, the so-called Odessa crater, which was created 25,000 years ago by the impact of a small asteroid in what is now Odessa, Tex. The idea that Lake Cheko might fill an impact crater became more attractive to us. But if the lake is indeed a crater excavated by a fragment of the Tunguska cosmic body, it cannot have been formed earlier than 1908. We sought evidence that the little lake existed before the event. Reliable, pre-1908 maps of this uninhabited region of Siberia are not easy to come by, but we found a czarist military map from 1883 that fails to show the lake. Testimony by local Evenk natives also asserts that a lake was produced by the 1908 explosion. But if the lake was not formed before 1908, how can one explain the thickness of the deposits carpeting its floor? Our seismic-reflection data revealed two distinct zones in the lake’s deposits: a thin, roughly meter-thick upper level of laminated, fine sediments typical of quiet deposition overlying a lower region of nonstratified, chaotic deposits. A recent study by two Italian paleobotanists, Carla Alberta Accorsi of the University of Modena and Luisa Forlani of the University of Bologna, however, has shown that whereas the upper sediment layers contain abundant evidence of aquatic plants, these signs are totally absent in the lower chaotic deposits, which hold plentiful quantities of pollen from forest trees. So it looks as if the lake’s true deposits are only about a meter thick, a feature that is compatible with a hypothesis that posits a young age for the lake. A forest seems to have grown on wet ground there before the lake formed. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com Our survey team also observed the half-buried remains of tree trunks in the deeper part of the lake via underwater video. And high-frequency acoustic waves reflected back from the same zone showed a characteristic “hairy” pattern that could have resulted from the presence of the remains of trunks and branches. Perhaps these results are a trace of the forest obliterated by the impact. Suspect Lake Shape To explain the lower chaotic deposits, we can imagine a cosmic body hitting soggy ground overlying a layer of permafrost several tens of meters thick. The impactor’s kinetic energy is transformed into heat, which melts the permafrost, releasing methane and water vapor and expanding the size of the resulting crater by as much as a quarter. At the same time, the impact would have plastered preexisting river and swamp deposits onto the flanks of the impact crater, where they would later be imaged as the chaotic deposits in our acoustic-echo profiles. Most intriguing, a careful analysis of the seismic-reflection profiles we obtained across the lake has revealed several meters below the deepest point at the center a strong acoustic reflector, probably the echo of a dense, meter-size rocky object. This result is supported by the finding of a small magnetic anomaly above the same spot during our magnetometer survey. Are these indications of a fragment of the Tunguska body? We are anxious to find out. Our team is now preparing to return later this year to attempt to drill the center of the lake to reach the dense seismic reflector. The year 2008 is the centennial of the Tunguska event. We hope it will also be the year the Tunguska mystery is solved. For years, emissions of greenhouse gases in developed countries—and throughout the world—have been going down while economic activity increased. Even as the economies of the U.S. and European Union continued to grow, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) per car built, burger served or widget sold was on the decline. No more. "It appears that the carbon intensity of economic activity has stopped improving," says Chris Field, director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, Calif. "Each dollar of economic activity is requiring more rather than less carbon, which reverses a long-term trend." In fact, the growth of CO2 emissions tripled between 2000 and 2004—growing by more than 3 percent per year—according to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. From 1990 to 1999, emissions growth had averaged a little over 1 percent per year. (Researchers based their findings on data from the U.S. Department of Energy, the United Nations Statistics Division and the International Monetary Fund.) Carbon dioxide is responsible for trapping roughly 63 percent of the extra heat blamed for global warming. By 2005, emissions from man-made fossil fuel combustion had reached 7.9 billion metric tons per year (or 1.7 x 1013 pounds), according to the Global Carbon Project (GCP)—an Australia-based research consortium devoted to analyzing the problem. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com Developing countries such as China and India, which have experienced economic booms, are leading the charge in increasing CO2 emissions. Although the U.S., Europe and other developed countries have contributed 77 percent of the cumulative emissions since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, developing nations were responsible for 73 percent of the total growth in 2004 alone. "Basically, the increase reflects a surge in economic activity," Field says. "There is a tight link between economic activity and energy use." In other words, the more widgets produced, the more energy consumed—and therefore the more CO2 emitted. Carbon intensity is going up because countries like China are relying on the cheapest and dirtiest of fossil fuels to power their growth. "Basically, their economy is growing on coal," Field notes. But according to the U.S. Department of Energy, pollution is on the rise in the U.S. and world energy use is expected to grow 57 percent by 2030, with coal being the fastest growing energy source. Study lead author Michael Raupach, GCP co-chair and atmospheric physicist at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, says it will take economic, policy and social changes to reverse the trend, such as capturing the CO2 emitted by coal-fired power plants and increased international cooperation. This is particularly true as national governments continue to strive to enhance the economic well-being of their populations. "In an era of rapidly increasing economic growth and increasing carbon emissions, you can't assume that we're going to continue to see improvement in carbon intensity," Field says. "We have to figure out some way to get the carbon intensity of the energy system to go down." Fields argues the burden rests with countries like the U.S. that have the resources and technological know-how to undertake solutions, such as carbon capture and storage, which will be needed quickly. "We have to try harder to control global warming," Raupach adds. "The final judge of our efforts is the global atmosphere and its judgment at present is harsh." </p> 4418050 2008-07-08 03:27:09 2008-07-08 03:27:09 open open commonwealth-4418050 publish 0 0 post 0 slowly http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/07/08/slowly-4417997/ Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:02:18 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.” What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency. Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods. Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed. But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity. The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities. Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured. In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners. Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document. “What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. http://Louissheehan.BraveDiary.com But we don’t need false intelligence.” A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. “I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,” Colonel Ryder said. “I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely.” Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects. The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.” The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.” The documents released last month include an e-mail message from two SERE trainers reporting on a trip to Guantánamo from Dec. 29, 2002, to Jan. 4, 2003. Their purpose, the message said, was to present to interrogators “the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training.” The sessions included “an in-depth class on Biderman’s Principles,” the message said, referring to the chart from Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article. Versions of the same chart, often identified as “Biderman’s Chart of Coercion,” have circulated on anti-cult sites on the Web, where the methods are used to describe how cults control their members. Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo. “It saddens me,” said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a “180-degree turn.” The harshest known interrogation at Guantánamo was that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Qahtani’s interrogation involved sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other methods also used by the Chinese. Terror charges against Mr. Qahtani were dropped unexpectedly in May. Officials said the charges could be reinstated later and declined to say whether the decision was influenced by concern about Mr. Qahtani’s treatment. Mr. Bush has defended the use the interrogation methods, saying they helped provide critical intelligence and prevented new terrorist attacks. But the issue continues to complicate the long-delayed prosecutions now proceeding at Guantánamo. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured. http://www.bebo.com/LouisS205 Sixty years ago a B-29 bomber on a secret mission fell from the sky in Waycross, Ga. Nine men died, and the widows of three of them sued the government for negligence. The case, United States v. Reynolds, gave birth to the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to shut down litigations simply by invoking national security. The privilege has been a particular favorite of the Bush administration, which has asserted it in dozens of cases, including ones challenging the legality of extraordinary renditions and warrantless surveillance. “Claim of Privilege,” by Barry Siegel, is an important and exhaustive look at the Reynolds case, and it conclusively demonstrates that the state secrets privilege was built on a lie. The central document in the case was the Air Force’s accident report. The government refused to turn it over, saying that disclosure of the report, even to a judge, would endanger national security by revealing military secrets. When the report was ultimately released in 1996, it contained no secrets at all but did show appalling negligence. The first case in which the Supreme Court recognized the state secrets privilege thus perfectly illustrated how problematic it is. By giving the executive branch close to unilateral power to have lawsuits dismissed on national security grounds, the privilege can easily turn into a device to conceal government misconduct and to frustrate justice. Mr. Siegel, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing at The Los Angeles Times in 2002, has written a work of narrative journalism, rich in detail and relatively light on analysis. He is an exemplary reporter, and he has seemingly discovered all that can be known about the flight, the men aboard, the people they left behind and the Reynolds case itself. But the book is frustrating in places. The story’s protagonists engage the reader only fitfully; passages on aviation technology and litigation maneuvers go on too long; the potted cold war history meant to provide context has a textbook quality; and the book’s structure, built around a recent effort to reopen the case, sometimes feels breathless and artificial. The slow patches alternate with exciting and infuriating ones. And when Mr. Siegel has good material to work with, he is a master. His portrait of Charles J. Biddle, the lawyer who brought the Reynolds case, is, for instance, exceptionally vivid. Mr. Biddle, a World War I flying ace and a patrician member of the Philadelphia legal establishment, was an unlikely plaintiffs’ lawyer, particularly in a case against the government. Yet Mr. Biddle handled the Reynolds case with punctilious diligence and honor, while his adversaries alternated among lawyerly evasions, outright lies and unseemly bullying. Even as the case progressed through the courts, the accident report at its center came up for a routine classification review inside the Pentagon. It was downgraded from “secret” to “restricted,” a designation not used for national security materials. The trial judge, William H. Kirkpatrick, was not told of this development. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com But Judge Kirkpatrick, a keen student of the separation of powers, nevertheless ordered the government to turn over the report for his private review. When the government refused, he entered judgment for the plaintiffs, awarding the families about $500,000 each in today’s dollars. The federal appeals court in Philadelphia affirmed, in a decision that in retrospect seems more sensible than the one later produced by the Supreme Court. Giving the executive branch unilateral power to deny access to information needed in a litigation, Judge Albert B. Maris wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel, is an invitation to abuse. “It is but a small step,” Judge Maris wrote, “to assert a privilege against any disclosure of records merely because they might prove embarrassing to government officials.” In 1953, five years after the crash, the Supreme Court reversed, in a murky decision that seemed to tell judges to forgo making their own determinations about whether secrecy is warranted, in at least some cases. These days most judges seem to think that the Reynolds decision forbids them to do anything more than make sure the privilege has been properly invoked — that the right person said the right words. According to Mr. Siegel, since 1993 courts have required the government to turn over the actual documents for private review by a judge in fewer than one in eight cases. Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson made an assumption in the Reynolds case. “Certainly there was a reasonable danger,” he wrote, “that the accident investigation would contain references to the secret electronic equipment which was the primary concern of the mission.” That assumption turned out to be wrong. And it was unnecessary to make assumptions: all a judge had to do was to demand to see the document and to read it. Judge Maris, in the appeals court ruling the Supreme Court reversed, argued forcefully for a judicial role in assessing assertions of the state secrets privilege. “Claim of Privilege” vindicates him, and it may also influence the progress of other cases in which the executive branch is asking the courts to trust it to decide which cases should be dismissed on state secrets grounds. The chemicals in watermelon work much like Viagra. Give me two more." Just a week after the annual watermelon thump celebration in luling..There's Something new that watermelon growers can hang their hat on. "The rind on watermelons has some of the same effects as Viagra. Really, really, get me another one." The director of texas a&m's fruit and vegetable improvement center has Discovered that watermelons have an ingredient that delivers viagra like Effects and may even increase libido. "Maybe you need to raise the price." There is a catch...The phyto-nutrient called citrulline that relaxes the blood Vessels is found in highest concentrations in the part you generally don't Eat...The watermelon rind. "Would it take like a whole watermelon rind to eat to do any good, you might get yourself sick before you do yourself any good." "Have you ever eaten the rind? No, but I'm going to start." Rinds are used in watermelon pickles...They're kelly allen's specialty. "My husband loves these I don't know if its because he eats these or not but he doesn't have a problem." Neither does hoyt alford...According to his girlfriend lois. "I don't know that you need em...well thank you...that's a compliment isn't it?" http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de Scientists are working to breed watermelons with higher concentrations of Citruline in the flesh which may change luling's image from being known for Watermelons...To something else."It might be a new aspect to our watermelon growing I can tell you that...no pun intended" The researcher who conducted the study says the watermelon rind also has a beneficial effect on the heart. But no one seems very interested in that aspect right now. The UFO Reporting Center received an eyewitness report from an employee of the O'Hare Airport in Chicago as early as the middle of November, 2006, stating that an unknown object had hovered over the major airport for several minutes on November 7. The object then shot away from the area, creating an "eerie" hole in the cloud cover. This initial report went virtually unnoticed, viewed as just another report. Chicago Tribune Releases Report: On January 1, 2007, Jon Hilkevitch of the Chicago Tribune wrote an article titled, "In the sky! A bird? A plane? A... UFO?" which broke the O'Hare sighting report to the mass media. Peter Davenport of the NUFORC, had related his findings to Hilkevitch, which listed a number of United Airline employees who had come forward with their eyewitness accounts of that day. When contacted, an United Airlines spokesman denied the reports. Saucer-shaped Object: The employees became upset that the airlines would not take their reports seriously. They reported that a saucer-shaped UFO had hovering above the airport for several minutes before shooting away at great speed through the clouds. The energy expelled from the burst of energy had made a strange, eerie hole in the cloud bank. The question had to be asked, Could this have been something as simple as a weather balloon, or some trick of the eye? FAA Admits Knowledge of UFO: Although more than a dozen witnesses had seen and reported the UFO to United Airlines, when first queried by the Chicago Tribune, the Airlines denied that they had any knowledge of the events of November 7. However, the Federal Aviation Administration admitted that the air traffic control tower had received a call from a United Airlines supervisor requesting information on an "elliptical-saucer-shaped craft" hovering over Concourse C of the terminal. "Chuckles" in the Tower: FAA spokesperson Elizabeth Isham Cory stated that none of the air traffic controllers had seen the object, and they saw no radar return from an uncorrelated target. She also stated that the FAA had no plans to investigate the incident. They did, however, have a theory-the sightings were caused by a "weather phenomenon." http://louis-j-sheehan.biz Hilkevitch reported that there were plenty of "chuckles" in the tower over the report. Dark Gray, Clearly Visible: The UFO was first seen by a United Airlines ramp worker who was directing a plane at Gate C17, according to a report by the NUFORC. He stated that his sighting occurred at 4:30 PM. He and other witnesses said the object was a dark gray, and clearly visible in the clouds. The object did not show any lights, and could have been up to 24 feet in diameter. The object made no noise as it hovered over the airport. Eyewitness Statement: "I tend to be scientific by nature, and I don't understand why aliens would hover over a busy airport," said a United mechanic who was in the cockpit of a Boeing 777 that he was taxiing to a maintenance hangar when he observed the metallic-looking object above Gate C17. "But I know that what I saw and what a lot of other people saw stood out very clearly, and it definitely was not an [Earth] aircraft," the mechanic said. United Airline Manager Hears Report: One of the United Airline managers stated that he heard reports of the UFO on internal airline radio. "I stood outside in the gate area not knowing what to think, just trying to figure out what it was," he said. "I knew no one would make a false call like that. But if somebody was bouncing a weather balloon or something else over O'Hare, we had to stop it because it was in very close proximity to our flight operations." Considerations: An important consideration in the matter is public safety, and whatever was in the area at the time posed a risk to planes and passengers. All witnesses to the events of November 7, state that the object was not a weather balloon, helicopter, airplane, or any known conventional flying craft. It is important to note that some of the reports were made by pilots, whose professional expertise involves the identification and observance of flying craft. Some Conclusions: Pilots aboard the plane at Gate C17 were alerted to the sighting by United personnel. One of the pilots opened his cockpit windscreen to get a good look at the UFO. He saw the object accelerate through the clouds, which had a ceiling of 1,900 feet at the time. Because of the fear of losing their jobs, and probably being under instruction to not discuss the incident, all of the employees who have come forward have done so anonymously. There are reports from reliable sources that at least one photograph was taken of the object, but as of this writing, none have been made public. United Airlines had the witnesses make drawings of what they saw, but even these drawings have not been made public. The FAA, which initially told the Chicago Tribune that it had no knowledge of the sightings, has changed their position because the Tribune filed a Freedom of Information Act request. It remains to be seen what will be revealed in this compelling UFO sighting case at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. The case began as three Texas Technological College professors, Dr. W. I. Robinson, Dr. A. G. Oberg, and W. L. Ducker were chatting in Robinson's backyard at 9:10 PM, August 25. Without a warning, the three men saw a number of lights fly across the clear, dark Texas sky. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET 30 Luminous Beads in Sky: The lights appeared to be made up of glowing beads, and the grouping, looking at it straight on, was a boomerang shape. A second group would soon make its appearance. The following day, the three professors checked with Air Force personnel, who claimed that there had been no traffic in the air the night before. From the initial sighting until November, Ducker alone saw 12 different groups of these lights. Three Flights a Night: Talk of the lights brought a public awareness, and there would soon be reports of what seemed to be a systematic schedule of as many as three sets of lights in one night over Lubbock. Many eyes were trained on the night skies, and within a few days of the initial sightings on August 30, 18-year old Carl Hart Jr. would take five photographs of the lights with a Kodak 35-mm camera at f3.5, 1/10 of a second. Texas education officials could find no reasonable explanation for the objects in Hart's photographs. More Intense than Venus: With the objects caught on film it was simple now to count the number of light spots. The number ranged anywhere from 18 to 20. It was determined that the brightness of the objects was greater than that of the planet Venus. There could be one or two groups of the boomerang-shaped lights at any one time. Some photographs seemed to show one larger light separate from the group. It was surmised that this lone object might be a mother ship. Air Force Examines Photographs: As one would expect, soon the United States Air Force would become involved in the matter. During the later part of September, they would make a detailed examination of the Hart photographs. The Air Force could not authenticate nor debunk the photographs. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt was sent to Lubbock to examine the mystery. He would later become the first director of Project Blue Book. Just a Plover Bird?: Hoping to get away from any extraterrestrial explanation, several earthly explanations for the lights would be offered. One was that the objects were plover birds, similar in size to a quail, another a flock of ducks, and another of shooting stars, or comet fragments. The most likely cause, the plover bird, was quickly dismissed by game wardens. They explained that the plovers never flew in groups of over 3. Still Discussed Today: The case of the Lubbock Lights is still being discussed today, with different theories being offered to explain what was seen and photographed over the Texas city in 1951. The photographs taken by Carl Hart Jr. have never been debunked as to their authenticity, but the question remains. What were the strange lights that moved across Lubbock, Texas in 1951? One of the most researched and best documented cases of multiple alien abduction occurred in August, 1976, in the state of Maine. The Allagash Waterway Abduction is a integral piece of the alien abduction puzzle. This case gained world-wide attention when it was dramatized in an episode of television's "Unsolved Mysteries." Twin brothers Jack and Jim Weiner, along with their friends Chuck Rak and Charlie Foltz, would be participants in an event involving a UFO sighting, missing time, and medical procedures performed by beings unknown. http://louis-j-sheehan.com Just a Fishing Trip: Not only were the four men fishing buddies, but they were all art students, having met at the Massachusetts College of Art. They set out for what should have been an uneventful, relaxing fishing trip. It was not to be. After being on the waterway for a time, the four fishermen had canoed to Eagle Lake. They had no luck there, and returned to the bank. As they were beginning to get low on provisions, they decided to do a little fishing at night. To be on the safe side, they built a roaring fire on the bank to use as a landmark in case they became turned around on the lake. Brighter Than a Star: After a short period of time, all four of the men's attention was drawn to a large, bright light in the sky over the lake. It was much more brilliant than a star. Only a couple of hundred yards away, the UFO was hovering over a group of trees. The object began to move, and change colors, from red to green, then to a whitish yellow. The men were watching the object in awe, wondering what it might be. At this time, they estimated it to be about 80 feet in diameter. Charlie Foltz decided to signal to it with his flashlight. At once, the UFO began to move toward them. They were being watched. Rowing for the Bank: The object silently made its way toward the men. They began a dash to the shore, paddling as fast as they could. A light from the object beamed down and engulfed the men and their canoe. The next thing they knew, they were back on the bank. Foltz again signaled the UFO with his flashlight-but this time it rose upward, and departed from their view. Then they noticed that the large fire they had started only a short time ago, was already burned to ashes, which should have taken several hours. What had happened to them? Missing Time: It was obvious to the four buddies that they were missing several hours of time. Little was said between them at this time. They packed up their belongs, and headed back home. As time went by, the events of that terrible night on Allagash would begin to have an effect on their lives. The first man to suffer was Jack Weiner. He began to have awful nightmares of strange beings with long necks, and large heads. He could see himself being examined, while the other three men sat idly by. Haunting Nightmares: The strange humanoid beings in Jack's nightmares were described as having metallic-like, glowing eyes with no lids. Their hands were like an insect's with only four fingers. See more on strange alien beings described in the Pascagoula abductions, and also the Betty Andreasson abduction2. The other three men also were having dreams of a similar nature. Finally, in 1988, Jim Weiner decided to visit a UFO conference, which was hosted by author Raymond Fowler. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US When the conference ended, he talked to Fowler, and related his remarkable encounter on the Allagash Waterway. Regressive Hypnosis: Fowler was very experienced in dealing with the exact problem that Jim, his brother and the two other fishermen were facing. He suggested to Jim that all four of the men undergo regressive hypnosis, a type of hypnosis that recovers lost memories. After the four men completed their sessions, it was determined that all of them had been abducted by strange beings from the UFO that engulfed them and their canoe on the Allagash Waterway. Part of the abduction involved very sensitive personal issues of the taking of fluid (semen) samples, and other humiliating medical tests. Men Were Not Lying: The men all recalled the abduction procedure-some would recall one part of it, and some another part, but when combined, they showed a complete picture of a typical alien abduction. Since the men were all artists, they were able to draw striking depictions of the examination room, the instruments used, and the aliens. This information would be invaluable to those who study the phenomena of alien abduction. The four friends would also take lie-detector tests, which they all passed, further verifying their encounter. A two-week cruise on an icebreaker to the top of the world last summer gave scientists a look at the aftermath of an event once thought impossible: a violent volcanic eruption on the deep-sea floor. http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com In 1999, a global network of seismic instruments detected the largest swarm of earthquakes ever to occur along the planet’s system of mid-ocean ridges, where tectonic plates spread to form new ocean crust. Several aspects of the recorded vibrations suggested that the quakes were generated by volcanic activity, says Robert A. Reves-Sohn, a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. http://louisyjysheehan.blogspot.com However, he notes, many scientists have doubted that explosive volcanism can take place at the 4,000-plus-meter depth where these quakes occurred because the immense pressure of overlying water prevents seawater from flashing into steam, a major driving force for such eruptions. The source of the quakes was the Gakkel Ridge, a mid-ocean ridge that runs along the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Sonar scans at a stretch of the ridge about 500 kilometers from the North Pole revealed several distinctive volcanic features, says Reves-Sohn. The largest of these undersea features, which usually have flat tops scarred with prominent central craters, are about 2 kilometers across and a few hundred meters tall. Images gathered by a remotely operated vehicle show that the ocean floor is blanketed by layers of loose volcanic ash up to 10 centimeters thick. This material is piled on top of rocks and other high-standing features on the ocean floor, a sign that the jagged, glassy particles of ash — each typically measuring no more than a couple of millimeters across — gently rained down upon the ocean floor rather than sweeping down the flanks of the undersea volcanoes, Reves-Sohn says. He and his colleagues don’t know the full extent of the volcanic deposits, but they did find ash in all parts of the 5-by-10-kilometer area that they surveyed, they report in the June 23 Nature. The size and shape of the larger particles hint that one of the area’s undersea volcanoes spewed 1-kilometer-tall fountains of lava during an explosive eruption. When that molten material hit the near-freezing seawater, it quickly chilled into golf-ball-size chunks and then fractured into tiny bits that rained to the seafloor, Reves-Sohn speculates. Many of the ash bits are jagged, thin, Christmas-ornament-like fragments of glass, a testament to the violence of the eruption and the bubbles contained in the molten material. Because steam couldn’t have driven the eruption, the volcano must have been fueled by another volatile component of the magma, the researchers say. The most likely culprit, says Reves-Sohn, is carbon dioxide. The amount of gas needed to fuel a deep-sea eruption like the ones that occurred along the Gakkel Ridge, however, is about 100 times the amount normally found dissolved in molten rock, he notes. The tectonic plates at most mid-ocean ridges spread apart about 30 millimeters each year, around the same rate at which a fingernail grows. However, the Gakkel Ridge is an ultra-slow spreading center where the plates diverge only half that fast. Whereas volcanic eruptions in many shallow seafloor locales may occur every 10 years or so, eruptions at deep-sea, slow-spreading centers may happen only once every 10,000 years or so, Reves-Sohn speculates. If so, sufficient reservoirs of carbon dioxide can easily build up in the magma chambers beneath the undersea peaks. Such a scenario for deep-sea eruptions is “quite plausible,” says James W. Head III, a geoscientist at Brown University in Providence, R.I. The profuse deposits of ash along the Gakkel Ridge “are a big find,” he notes, adding that apparently “things don’t happen often at slow-spreading centers, but when an eruption occurs there’s a lot going on.” http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com Unlike Richard Scarry’s Lowly Worm, real worms don’t drive cars or go to school. But the wriggly creatures appear to live a more purposeful life than previously thought. Earthworms deliberately gather and bury ragweed seeds from around their burrows, reports a new study in the Journal of Applied Ecology. The findings fit with recent work documenting how nonnative earthworms are changing U.S. northern forests. Though native worms were wiped out from the northern United States in the last glaciation — only persisting south of the ice sheet and permafrost — European worms then arrived with settlers. The newcomers are slowly changing northern deciduous forests by eating through the leaf litter and “duff” that native plants need to thrive. “Worms do a great job in gardens, it’s true,” comments Cindy Hale of the University of Minnesota Duluth. “But take the same organism and put it in a native hardwood forest that’s evolved over 10,000 years earthworm-free, and the worms change everything about the ecosystem. The physiology, the chemistry — they have a profound effect on nutrient cycling.” access Researchers tied string to several ragweed seeds to follow their fate. Worms made quick work of bringing the seeds into their burrows. Kent Harrison Seeds that the worms buried grew into the healthiest plants, suggesting that the crawlers’ activity could help not only ragweed thrive, but perhaps also help invasive plants gain a foothold in new territory, Hale says. “They might be priming the pump for successful germination,” she adds. Led by weed ecologist Emilie Regnier of Ohio State University in Columbus, researchers conducted field experiments to determine how exotic European night crawlers, Lumbricus terrestris, affected the survival of the seeds of Ambrosia trifida, giant ragweed. access Strings attached to ragweed seeds mark the trail the seeds took: into an earthworm's lair. The earthworm carried them there one by one. By sequestering seeds, earthworms give ragweed an advantage for growth, one of many ways the lowly worm makes a big impact.Kent Harrison In addition to its powers as an allergen, ragweed is a major weed of soybean fields and cornfields in the Midwest, Regnier says. This fact has puzzled scientists because ragweed seeds are usually quickly eaten by birds, rodents and beetles. http://louisfjfsheehan.blogspot.com Worms collected and