So you are an unapologetic procrastinator, running fast and furious up to the deadline and, often, right past it. It is not that you choose to turn work in late but rather that you have no choice, you say? Now there is mathematical proof to back up your story.

Plotted on a graph, the speed of a procrastinator’s work is a straight line, rising as the deadline gets closer. Based on this observation, computer science professor Michael Bender of Stony Brook University in New York used the line to calculate the time it might take a real-life procrastinator to complete a series of tasks using a variety of common strategies, especially focusing on the most important (but not necessarily the most imminent) deadline first. His analysis, published in the Journal of Scheduling, showed that no strategies guarantee that procrastinators will meet all deadlines. Because procrastinators wait to work, when an unexpected assignment becomes a new priority—thanks to, say, a sick coworker—the model procrastinator has no slack time and blows the deadline. “To meet all their deadlines,” Bender says, “procrastinators have to be able to see the future perfectly.” http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

But they do not need a crystal ball, says Timothy Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. They need discipline. “Procrastination happens because you’re disorganized, not very dutiful, and probably impulsive,” he says.

The common bedbug (Cimex lectularius) is the best adapted to human environments. It is found in temperate climates throughout the world and lives off the blood of humans. Other species include Cimex hemipterus, found in tropical regions (as well as Florida), which also infests poultry and bats, and Leptocimex boueti, found in the tropics of West Africa and South America, which infests bats and humans. Cimex pilosellus and Cimex pipistrella primarily infest bats, while Haematosiphon inodora, a species of North America, primarily infests poultry.

Oeciacus, while not strictly a bedbug, is a closely related genus primarily affecting birds.

Adult bedbugs are a reddish brown, flattened, oval, and wingless, with microscopic hairs that give them a banded appearance. A common misconception is that they are not visible to the naked eye. Adults grow to 4 to 5 mm (one-eighth to three-sixteenths of an inch) in length and do not move quickly enough to escape the notice of an attentive observer. Newly hatched nymphs are translucent, lighter in color and continue to become browner and moult as they reach maturity. When it comes to size, they are often compared to lentils or appleseeds.

Bedbugs are generally active only at dawn, with a peak attack period about an hour before sunrise. They may attempt to feed at other times, however, given the opportunity, and have been observed to feed at any time of the day. Attracted by warmth and the presence of carbon dioxide, the bug pierces the skin of its host with two hollow tubes. With one tube it injects its saliva, which contains anticoagulants and anesthetics, while with the other it withdraws the blood of its host. After feeding for about five minutes, the bug returns to its hiding place. The bites cannot usually be felt until some minutes or hours later, as a dermatological reaction to the injected agents, and the first inclination of a bite usually comes from the desire to scratch the bite site.

Although bedbugs can live for a year or as much as 18 months without feeding, they typically seek blood every five to ten days. Bedbugs that go dormant for lack of food often live longer than a year, well-fed specimens typically live six to nine months. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Low infestations may be difficult to detect, and it is not unusual for the victim not to even realize they have bedbugs early on. Patterns of bites in a row or a cluster are typical as they may be disturbed while feeding. Bites may be found in a variety of places on the body.

Bedbugs may be erroneously associated with filth in the mistaken notion that this attracts them. However, severe infestations are often associated with poor housekeeping and clutter. Bedbugs are attracted by exhaled carbon dioxide and body heat, not by dirt, and they feed on blood, not waste. In short, the cleanliness of their environments has effect on the control of bedbugs but, unlike cockroaches, does not have a direct effect on bedbugs as they feed on their hosts and not on waste. Good housekeeping in association with proper preparation and mechanical removal by vacuuming will certainly assist in control.

All bedbugs mate via a process termed traumatic insemination. Instead of inserting their genitalia into the female's reproductive tract as is typical in copulation, males instead pierce females with hypodermic genitalia and ejaculate into the body cavity. This form of mating is thought to have evolved as a way for males to overcome female mating resistance. Traumatic insemination imposes a cost on females in terms of physical damage and increased risk of infection. To reduce these costs females have evolved internal and external "paragenital" structurescollectively known as the “spermalege”. Within the True Bugs (Heteroptera) traumatic insemination occurs in the Prostemmatinae (Nabidae) and the Cimicoidea (Anthocoridae, Plokiophilidae, Lyctocoridae, Polyctenidae and Cimicidae), and has recently been discovered in the plant bug genus Coridromius (Miridae).

Remarkably, in the genus Afrocimex both males and females possess functional external paragenitalia, and males have been found with copulatory scars and the ejaculate of other males in their haemolymph. There is a widespread misbelief that males inseminated by other males will in turn pass the sperm of both themselves and their assailants onto females with whom they mate. While it is true that males are known to mate with and inject sperm into other males, there is however no evidence to suggest that this sperm ever fertilizes females inseminated by the victims of such acts.

Female bedbugs can lay up to five eggs in a day and 500 during a lifetime. The eggs are visible to the naked eye measuring 1 mm in length (approx. two grains of salt) and are a milky-white tone. The eggs hatch in one to two weeks. The hatchlings begin feeding immediately. They pass through five molting stages before they reach maturity. They must feed once during each of these stages.

At room temperature, it takes about five weeks for a bedbug to pass from hatching to maturity. They become reproductively active only at maturity.

In most observed cases a small, hard, swollen, white welt may develop at the site of each bedbug bite. This is often surrounded by a slightly raised red bump and is usually accompanied by severe itching that lasts for several hours to days. Welts do not have a red spot in the center such as is characteristic of flea bites. In other cases, it is observed that welts first appear upon the inccessant scratching that is triggered by the bite, and seem like a mosquito bite that increases in size upon scratching. Later, however, the welts subside but tend not to disappear like those from mosquitos, and persist for up to several weeks. This usually depends on the person's skin type, environment and the species of bug.

Some individuals respond to bed bug infestations and their bites with anxiety, stress, and insomnia. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Individuals may also get skin infections and scars from scratching the bedbug bite locations.

Most patients who are placed on systemic corticosteroids to treat the itching and burning often associated with bed bug bites find that the lesions are poorly responsive to this method of treatment. Antihistamines have been found to reduce itching in some cases, but they do not affect the appearance and duration of the lesions. Topical corticosteroids, such as hydrocortisone, have been reported to expediently resolve the lesions and decrease the associated itching.

Bed bugs seem to possess all of the necessary prerequisites for being capable of passing diseases from one host to another, but there have been no known cases of bed bugs passing disease from host to host. There are at least twenty-seven known pathogens (some estimates are as high as forty-one) that are capable of living inside a bed bug or on its mouthparts. Extensive testing has been done in laboratory settings that also conclude that bed bugs are unlikely to pass disease from one person to another. Therefore bedbugs are less dangerous than some more common insects such as the flea. However, transmission of trypanosomiasis (Chagas disease) or hepatitis B might be possible in appropriate settings.

The salivary fluid injected by bed bugs typically causes the skin to become irritated and inflamed, although individuals can differ in their sensitivity. Anaphylactoid reactions produced by the injection of serum and other nonspecific proteins are observed and there is the possibility that the saliva of the bedbugs may cause anaphylactic shock in a small percentage of people. It is also possible that sustained feeding by bedbugs may lead to anemia. It is also important to watch for and treat any secondary bacterial infection.

Bedbugs were originally brought to the United States by the early colonists. They thrive in places with high occupancies such as hotels. Bedbugs were believed to be altogether eradicated 50 years ago in the United States and elsewhere with the widespread use of DDT. Some theories are now suggesting that they never really left. One recent theory about the reappearance of bedbugs has to deal with geographic epicenters where the bedbugs are believed to center from. During the investigations of these epicenters, they found two locations where they discovered the apparent epicenters. They are located at poultry facilities in Arkansas and Texas. It was determined that the workers in these facilities were the main spreaders of these bedbugs and carrying them to their places of residence and elsewhere after leaving work.Bedbug populations in the United States have increased by 500 percent in the past few years. It is still uncertain exactly what has caused the resurgence of these bedbugs, but most believe it has to do with the increase in international travel and the use of new pest-control methods that do not affect bedbugs. In the last few years, the use of baits instead of insecticide sprays is believed to have contributed to the increase.

As previously stated, bedbugs were all but eradicated from North America during the 1940s and 50s. However, bedbug cases have been on the rise recently, not only in North America, but all across the world. Prior to the mid twentieth century, bed bugs were very common. According to a report by the UK Ministry of Health, in 1933 there were many areas where all the houses were infested with bedbugs to an extent. Since the mid 90's, the reports of bed bug cases have been on the rise. Figures from one London borough show the numbers of reported bedbug infestations doubling each year during the period from 1995 to 2001. The rise in bedbug infestations has been hard to track due to the fact that bedbugs are not an easily identifiable problem. Most of the reports are collected from various pest-control companies, local authorities, and hotel chains. Therefore, the problem may be more severe than we currently believe it to be. Several reasons have been noted for the cause of the recent bedbug resurgence but the main two are the recent increase in international travel and the use of less noxious pesticides.

The most-cited reason for the dramatic rise in bed bug cases world wide is due to the increase in international travel in recent decades. In 1999, four separate infestations throughout the United Kingdom alerted people to the possibility of an increase in the world wide bedbug population, facilitated by international travel and trade. However, there is evidence of a previous cycle of bed bug infestations in the United Kingdom. The Institution of Environmental Health Officers maintained statistics for bed bug infestations, data collected from reports and inspections. In the period 1985-1986, the Institution of Environmental Health Officers reported treating 7,771 infestations in England and Wales, and 6,179 infestations in 1986-1987. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
There were also reports of infestations in Belfast and Scotland.

New York City has been riddled with bedbug infestations since the turn of the century. Bedbugs have found their ways into hotels, schools, and even hospital maternity wards. Jeffrey Eisenberg, the owner of Pest Away Exterminating on the Upper West Side claims his company receives 125 calls a week now as compared to only a few just 5 years ago. In 2004, New York City had 377 bedbug violations. However, from July to November of 2005, a 5-month span, there were 449 violations reported in the city, an alarming increase in infestations over a short period of time. A large number of international travelers visit New York each day, and exterminators and entomology experts place most of the blame on them.

Since 1999, infestations have been reported in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Two separate studies in Tuscany, Italy provide further proof of the resurgence of bedbugs in relation with international travel. In case 1, during the summer of 2003 a seven year old boy developed a number of papulae on his lower legs which caused severe itching. His parents suspected insects in the boy’s room and upon searching found several in the folds of the mattresses on the young boy’s bed. Two specimens were identified as C. lectularius and the room was treated with an insecticide to rid the room of the bedbug infestation. The house the boy was living in had not experienced a bedbug infestation before. However, one month before the infestation, two family friends had traveled by plane from Nepal to stay with the family for ten days. This is a good indication for the transfer of bedbugs due to international travel. Case 2 involves a forty-eight year old man traveling by car to Pisa, Italy from Prague, Czech Republic in June of 2003 and staying in a rented house with three friends. After several days, the man noticed several bullous eruptions on his upper and lower extremities all arranged in linear clusters of three. The man found several insects in his room and after identification the insects were identified as C. lectularius. The rent house was well kept and had never had a bedbug infestation. However, a group of Germans had rented the house a few weeks before the Czech group arrived. This too was a good indicator of bedbug spread by international travel.

Due to the widespread use of potent insecticides such as DDT, bedbugs were nearly eradicated. However, many of these strong insecticides have been banned from use in the United States are being replaced with weaker insecticides such as pyrethroids. The problem with the weaker insecticides is that many bedbugs have grown resistant to them. A study at the University of Kentucky randomly collected bedbugs from across the entire United States. These “wild” bedbugs were up to several thousands of times more resistant to pyrethroids than the laboratory bedbugs. Another problem with current insecticide use is that the broad-spectrum insecticide sprays for cockroach and ants that are no longer used had a collateral impact on bedbug infestations. Recently, the switch has been made to bait insecticides which have proven effective for cockroaches but have allowed bedbugs to escape the indirect treatment.

The number of bedbug infestations have risen significantly since the turn of the century. The National Pest Management Association reported a 71% increase in bedbug calls between 2000 and 2005. The Steritech Group, a pest management company out of Charlotte, North Carolina, claimed that 25% of the 700 hotels they surveyed between 2002 and 2006 needed bedbug treatment. In 2003, a brother and sister staying at a Motel 6 in Chicago were awarded $372,000 in punitive damages after being attacked by bedbugs during their stay. These are only a few of the reported cases since the turn of the 21st century.

There are several means by which dwellings can become infested with bedbugs. People can often acquire bedbugs at hotels, motels, and bed-and-breakfasts, as a result of increased domestic and international tourism, and bring them back to their homes in their luggage. They also can pick them up by inadvertently bringing infested furniture or used clothing to their household. If someone is in a place that is severely infested, bedbugs may actually crawl onto and be carried by people's clothing, although this is atypical behavior — except in the case of severe infestations, bedbugs are not usually carried from place to place by people on clothing they are currently wearing. Finally, bedbugs may travel between units in multi-unit dwellings (such as condominiums and apartment buildings), after being originally brought into the building by one of the above routes. This spread between units is dependent in part on the degree of infestation, on the material used to partition units (concrete is a more effective barrier to the spread of the infestation), and whether infested items are dragged through common areas while being disposed of, resulting in the shedding of bedbugs and bedbug eggs while being dragged. In some exceptional cases, the detection of bedbug hiding places can be aided by the use of dogs that have been trained to signal finding the insects by their scent much as dogs are trained to find drugs or explosives. A trained team (dog and handler) can detect and pinpoint a bedbug infestation within minutes. This is a fairly costly service that is not used in the majority of cases, but can be very useful in difficult cases.

The numerical size of a bedbug infestation is to some degree variable, as it is a function of the elapsed time from the initial infestation. With regards to the elapsed time from the initial infestation, even a single female bedbug brought into a home has a potential for reproduction, with its resulting offspring then breeding, resulting in a geometric progression of population expansion if control is not undertaken. Sometimes people are not aware of the insects, and do not notice the bites. The visible bedbug infestation does not represent the infestation as a whole, as there may be infestations elsewhere in a home. However, the insects do have a tendency to stay close to their hosts (hence the name "bed" bugs). http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

Bedbugs travel easily and quickly along pipes and boards, and their bodies are very flat, which allows them to hide in tiny crevices. In the daytime, they tend to stay out of the light, preferring to remain hidden in such places as mattress seams, mattress interiors, bed frames, nearby furniture, carpeting, baseboards, inner walls, tiny wood holes, or bedroom clutter. Bedbugs can be found on their own, but more often congregate in groups. Bedbugs are capable of travelling as far as 100 feet to feed, but usually remain close to the host in bedrooms or on sofas where people may sleep.

Bedbugs are known for being elusive, transient, and nocturnal, making them difficult to detect. While individuals have the option of contacting a pest control professional to determine if a bedbug infestation exists, there are several do-it-yourself methods that may work equally well.

The presence of bedbugs may be confirmed through identification of the insects collected or by a pattern of bites. Though bites can occur singularly, they often follow a distinctive linear pattern marking the paths of blood vessels running close to the surface of the skin. The common bite pattern of three bites close to each other has garnered the macabre coloquialism "breakfast, lunch, dinner."

A technique for catching bedbugs in the act is to have a light source accessible from bed and to turn it on at about an hour before dawn, which is usually the time when bedbugs are most active. A flashlight is recommended instead of room lights, as the act of getting out of bed will cause any bedbugs present to scatter. If you awaken during the night, leave your lights off but use your flashlight to inspect your mattress. Bedbugs are fairly fast in their movements, about equal to the speed of ants. They may be slowed down if engorged.

Glue traps placed in strategic areas around the home, (sometimes used in conjunction with heating pads, or balloons filled with exhaled breath, thus offering the carbon dioxide that bedbugs look for) may be used to trap and thus detect bedbugs. This method has varied reports of success. There are also commercial traps like "flea" traps whose effectiveness is questionable except perhaps as a means of detection. Perhaps the easiest trapping method is to place double-sided carpet tape in long strips near or around the bed and check the strips after a day or more.

With the widespread use of DDT in the 1940s and '50s, bedbugs all but disappeared from North America in the mid-twentieth century. Infestations remained common in many other parts of the world, however, and in recent years have begun to rebound in North America. Reappearance of bedbugs in North America has presented new challenges for pest control without DDT and similarly banned agents.

Another reason for their increase is that pest control services more often nowadays use low toxicity gel-based pesticides for control of cockroaches, the most common pest in structures, instead of residual sprays. When residual sprays meant to kill other insects were commonly being used, they resulted in a collateral insecticidal effect on potential bedbug infestations; the gel-based insecticides primarily used nowadays do not have any effect on bedbugs, as they are incapable of feeding on these baits.

The National Pest Management Association, a US advocacy group for pest management professionals (PMPs) conducted a "proactive bed bug public relations campaign" in 2005 and 2006, resulting in increased media coverage of bedbug stories and an increase in business for PCOs, possibly distorting the scale of the increase in bedbug infestations.

If it is necessary to live with bedbugs in the short term, it is possible to create makeshift temporary barriers around a bed. Although bedbugs cannot fly or jump, they have been observed climbing a higher surface in order to then fall to a lower one, such as climbing a wall in order to fall onto a bed. That having been said, barrier strategies nevertheless often have beneficial effects: an elevated bed, for example, can be protected by applying double-sided sticky tape (carpet tape) around each leg, or by keeping each leg on a plastic furniture block in a tray of water. Bed frames can be effectively rid of adult bedbugs and eggs by use of steam or, used with caution, by spraying rubbing alcohol on any visible bugs (although this is not a permanent treatment). Small steam cleaners are available and are very effective for this local treatment. A suspect mattress can be protected by wrapping it in a painter's disposable plastic drop cloth, neatly sealing shut all the seams with packing tape, and putting it on a protected bed after a final visual inspection. Bedding can be sanitized by a 120 °F (49 °C) laundry dryer. Once sanitized, bedding should not be allowed to drape to the floor. An effective way to quarantine a protected bed is to store sanitized sleeping clothes in the bed during the day, and bathing before entering the bed.

Food-grade diatomaceous earth (DE) can be sprinked under mattresses, along baseboards and on the edges of bookshelves where bed bugs hide. Food-grade DE, although harmless to mammals, including common house pets and humans, is a virtual death sentence for bed bugs. DE is a drying agent and is actually used in many dry pet foods to keep the kibble dry and fresh.

The DE particles abrade the bed bug, essentially dehydrating it of water and lipids. DE can be purchased online, in some health food stores, and in most plant stores. Neem oil (mentioned below) can be added to the DE (1 cup DE to 20 drops neem oil) in a plastic bag before sprinking it around. Other essential oils that can be added are juniper oil, eucalyptus oil, jlang jlang oil, rosemary oil and tea tree oil. The bed bugs hate the smell of the oils, and for those who don't and pass through, they will eventually be killed by the DE itself. Use 20 drops of each essential oil mentioned for each cup of DE.

Alternative treatments that may actually work better and be more comfortable than wrapping bedding in plastic that would cause sweating would be to encase your mattress and box springs in impermeable bed bug bite proof encasements after a treatment for an infestation. There are many products on the market but only some products have been laboratory tested to be bed bug bite proof. Make sure to check to see that the product you are considering is more than an allergy encasement, but is bed bug bite proof.

Vermin and pets may complicate a barrier strategy. Bedbugs prefer human hosts, but will resort to other warm-blooded hosts if humans are not available, and some species can live up to eighteen months without feeding at all. A co-infestation of mice can provide an auxiliary food source to keep bedbugs established for longer. Likewise, a house cat or human guest might easily defeat a barrier by sitting on a protected bed. Such considerations should be part of any barrier strategy.

BBC1 aired a television program entitled "The One Show" about the growth of bed bug infestations in London. In the program a pest control officer claimed that the use of insecticides alone was no longer an effective method to control bed bugs as they had developed a resistance to most if not all insecticides that might be used legally in the UK. He stated that insecticide use in conjunction to freezing bed bugs was the only effective control. All items of clothing and upholstery (including curtains) in the affected household had to be deep-frozen for at least 3 days in giant freezers to ensure complete eradication. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
The exact temperature at which bed bugs must be frozen was not mentioned.

Another method that might be useful in controlling bed bugs is the use of neem oil. It can be sprayed on carpets, curtains and mattresses. Neem oil is made from the leaves and bark of the neem tree native to India. It has been used safely for thousands of years in India both as a natural, effective insect repellent and it is antibacterial. It has recently received US Food and Drug Administration approval for external use. It is also possible to incorporate neem oil into certain types of mattress. Such mattresses are currently being manufactured by a German company.

Since most bedbugs are carried by travellers through contact with beds and hotel rooms of infected locations, following are some tips for those travelling to hotels that might be at risk.
1) First look at the room to seek potential hiding places for bedbugs, such as carpet edges, mattress seams, pillow case linings, bedboards, wall trim or other tiny crack-like places bedbugs might hide. 2) Next, look specifically at the mattress seams for signs of bedbug activity: droppings, eggs, bloodstains or even bedbugs themselves, hiding in tiny folds and seam lines. 3) As mentioned, keep a flashlight nearby when sleeping, to immediately observe activity during the night without having to get up out of bed, thus giving bedbugs time to hide in safety. 4) Never leave your clothing laying on the bed, or any location of possible infestation (as mentioned above). Instead, use hangers or hooks capable of keeping all cloth distant from the floor or bed. 5) Close your suitcase, travel bag, when you're not using it. This way, during the night the bugs may move over top of your luggage with greater difficulty to get inside. 6) Elevate your luggage off the floor to tables or chairs. These may also be hiding places, but less likely. 7) Keep any bedbug you find (intact if possible) to show the hotel owner. 8) If you have a bad feeling about a location, trust your instinct. Look carefully for possible activity, or change locations.

The Texas A&M Center for Urban and Structural Entomology and the University of Arkansas Department of Entomology have been collaborating to study bed bugs on a genetic level in the hopes to shed light on the their recent resurgence. By studying the genetic variation within bed bug populations, researchers can gain insight into insecticide resistance and insect dispersal. Researchers have two theories as to how bed bug resurgence has occurred in the United States. One theory is that the source of current bed bug populations is from other countries without bed bug pesticides that have made their way through air travel, and another theory is that the surviving bed bug populations were forced to switch hosts to birds, such as poultry, and bats. Since bed bugs have undergone a huge resurgence in poultry populations since the 1970s, theory two seems likely.

The theory that the surviving bed bug populations were forced to switch hosts to birds is also supported by the research done at Texas A&M and the University of Arkansas. In a recent study, researchers subjected 136 adult bed bugs from 22 sampled populations from nine U.S. states, Australia, and Canada to genetic analysis. Their finding concluded that the bed bug populations were never completely eradicated from the United States as there was no evidence of a genetic bottleneck in either the mitochondrial or nuclear DNA of the bed bugs. Researchers suspect that resistant populations of bed bugs have slowly been propagating in poultry facilities, and have made their way back to human hosts via the poultry workers.

Other research is being conducted at Texas A&M and Virginia Tech to be able to use bed bugs in forensic science. Researchers are working on, and have been successful at, isolating and characterizing human DNA taken from bed bug blood meals. One advantage that bed bugs have over other blood feeders being used in forensics is that they do not remain on the host, and instead remain in close proximity to the crime scene. Therefore bed bugs could potentially provide crucial evidence linking the suspect to the crime scene. Researchers are able to identify what hosts are being fed upon, and are taking further steps to be able to identify the individual by genotyping, and to predict the duration from the time of feeding to recovery of viable DNA.

Zhou Enlai (simplified Chinese: 周恩来; traditional Chinese: 周恩來; pinyin: Zhōu Ēnlái; Wade-Giles: Chou En-lai) (March 5, 1898 – January 8, 1976) was the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, serving from 1949 until his death in January 1976. Zhou was instrumental in the Communist Party's rise to power, and subsequently in the construction of the Chinese economy and reformation of Chinese society. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

A skilled and able diplomat, Zhou served as the Chinese foreign minister from 1949 to 1958. Advocating peaceful coexistence with the West, he participated in the 1954 Geneva Conference and helped orchestrate Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. Due to his expertise, Zhou was largely able to survive the purges of high-level Chinese Communist Party officials during the Cultural Revolution. His attempts at mitigating the Red Guard's damage and his efforts to protect others from their wrath made him immensely popular in the Revolution's later stages.

As Mao Zedong's health began to decline in 1971 and 1972, Zhou and the Gang of Four struggled internally over leadership of China. Zhou's health was also failing however, and he died eight months before Mao on January 8, 1976. The massive public outpouring of grief in Beijing turned to anger towards the Gang of Four, leading to the Tiananmen Incident. Deng Xiaoping, Zhou's ally and successor as Premier, was able to outmaneuver the Gang of Four politically and eventually take Mao's place as Paramount Leader.

He is also remembered for saying, when asked for his assessment of the 1789 French Revolution, "It is too early to say"

Zhou Enlai was born to a well-educated couple in 1898 or 1899[2] in Zhejiang, and spent most of his early years in Huai'an, Jiangsu. His education included the Chinese Classics and, later, the prestigious Tianjin Middle School. From there, he studied at Waseda and Nippon universities in Japan, and later attended Nankai University in Tianjin.

Zhou first came to national prominence as an activist during the May Fourth Movement. He had enrolled as a student in the literature department of Nankai University, which enabled him to visit the campus, but he never attended classes. He became one of the organizers of the Tianjin Students Union, whose avowed aim was “to struggle against the warlords and against imperialism, and to save China from extinction." Zhou became the editor of the student union’s newspaper, Tianjin Student. In September, he founded the Awareness Society with twelve men and eight women. Fifteen year old Deng Yingchao, Enlai’s future wife, was one of the founding female members. (They were married on August 8, 1925). Zhou was instrumental in the merger between the all male Tianjin Students Union and the all female Women’s Patriotic Association.

In January 1920, the police raided the printing press and arrested several members of the Awareness Society. Enlai led a group of students to protest the arrests, and was himself arrested along with 28 others. After the trial in July, they were found guilty of a minor offense and released. An attempt was made by the Comintern to induct Zhou into the Communist Party of China, but although he was studying Marxism he remained uncommitted. Instead of being selected to go to Moscow for training, he was chosen to go to France as a student organizer. Deng Yingchao was left in charge of the Awareness Society in his absence.

On November 7, 1920, Zhou Enlai and 196 other Chinese students sailed from Shanghai for Marseilles, France. At Marseilles they were met by a member of the Sino-French Education Committee and boarded a train to Paris. Almost as soon as he arrived Zhou became embroiled in a wrangle between the students and the education authorities running the “work and study” program. The students were supposed to work in factories part time and attend class part time. Because of corruption and graft in the Education Committee, however, the students were not paid. As a result they simply provided cheap labour for the French factory owners and received very little education in return. Zhou wrote to newspapers back in China denouncing the committee and the corrupt government officials.

Zhou traveled to Britain in January; he applied for and was accepted as a student at Edinburgh University. But the university term didn’t start until October so he returned to France, moving in with Liu Tsingyang and Zhang Shenfu, who were setting up a Communist cell. Zhou joined the group and was entrusted with political and organizational work. There is some controversy over the date Zhou joined the Communist Party of China. For secrecy reasons members did not carry membership cards. Zhou himself wrote "autumn, 1922" at a verification carried out at the Party's Seventh Congress in 1945.

There were 2,000 Chinese students in France, some 200 each in Belgium and England and between 300 and 400 in Germany. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
For the next four years Zhou was the chief recruiter, organizer and coordinator of activities of the Socialist Youth League. He traveled constantly between Belgium, Germany and France, safely conveying party members through Berlin to entrain for Moscow, to be taught the art of revolution.

Zhou returned to China as a seasoned party organizer in 1924. He was appointed Director of the CCP Guangdong Military Affairs Department, Director of Training at the National Revolutionary Army Political Training Department and Acting Director of the Whampoa Military Academy's Political Department. The latter role made Zhou political commissar of the 1st Division, 1st Corp during the Eastern Campaign of 1925.[3] At the end of that successful campaign, he was named CCP Secretary of Guangdong Province, one of the highest jobs in the party. A year later, at the age of 28 or 29, Zhou Enlai was elected to the CCP Politburo and placed in charge of military affairs.

In January 1924 Sun Yat-sen had officially proclaimed an alliance between the Kuomintang and the Communists, and a plan for a military expedition to unify China and destroy the warlords. The Whampoa Military Academy was set up in March to train officers for the armies that would march against the warlords. Russian ships unloaded crates of weapons at the Guangzhou docks. Comintern advisers from Moscow joined Sun’s entourage. In October, shortly after he arrived back from Europe, Zhou Enlai was appointed Director of the political department at the Whampoa Military Academy in Guangzhou.

Zhou soon realized the Kuomintang was riddled with intrigue. The powerful right wing of the Kuomintang was bitterly opposed to the Communist alliance. Zhou was convinced that the CCP, in order to survive must have an army of its own. "The Kuomintang is a coalition of treacherous warlords" he told his friend Nie Rongzhen, recently arrived from Moscow and named a vice director of the academy. Together they set about to organize a nucleus of officer cadets who were CCP members and who would follow the principles of Karl Marx. For a while they met no hindrance, not even from Chiang Kai-Shek, the director of the academy.

Sun Yat-sen died on 12 March 1925. No sooner was Sun dead than trouble broke out in Guangzhou. A warlord named Chen Chiungming made a bid to take the city and province. The East Expedition, led by Zhou, was organized as a military offensive against Chen. Using the disciplined core of CCP cadets they met with resounding success. Zhou was promoted to head Whampoa’s martial law bureau. Zhou quickly crushed an attempted coup by another warlord within the city. Chen Chiungming once again took the field in October 1925. Once again Zhou defeated him and this time captured the important city of Shantou on the South China coast. Zhou was appointed special commissioner of Shantou and surrounding region. Zhou began to build up a party branch in Shantou whose membership he would keep secret.

On 8 August 1925, he and Deng Yingchao were finally married after a long-distance courtship of nearly five years. The couple remained childless, but adopted many orphaned children of "revolutionary martyrs"; one of the more famous was future Premier Li Peng.

After Sun's death the Kuomintang was run by a triumvirate composed of Chiang Kai-Shek, Liao Zhongkai and Wang Jingwei, but in August 1925 Liao (father of Liao Chengzhi and grandfather to Liao Hui, both prominent PRC politicians), was murdered by Nationalist agents. Chiang Kai-shek used this murder to declare martial law and consolidate right wing control of the Nationalists. On 18 March 1926, while Mikhail Borodin, the Russian comintern advisor to the United Front, was in Shanghai. Chiang created a further incident to usurp power over the communists. The commander and crew of a Kuomintang gunboat was arrested at the Whampoa docks (see Zhongshan Warship Incident). This was followed by raids on the First Army Headquarters and Whampoa Military Academy. Altogether 65 communists were arrested, including Nie Rongzhen. A state of emergency was declared and curfews were imposed. Zhou had just returned from Shantou and was also detained for 48 hours. On his release he confronted Chiang and accused him of undermining the United Front but Chiang argued that he was only breaking up a plot by the communists. When Borodin returned from Shanghai he believed Chiang’s version and rebuked Zhou. At Chiang's request Borodin turned over a list of all the members of the CCP who were also members of the Kuomintang. The only omissions from this list were the members Zhou had secretly recruited. Chiang dismissed all the rest of the CCP officers from the First Army. Wang Jingwei, considered too sympathetic to the communists, was persuaded to leave on a “study tour” in Europe. Zhou Enlai was relieved of all his duties associated with the First United front, effectively giving complete control of the United Front to Chiang Kai-Shek.

After the Northern Expedition began, he worked as a labour agitator. In 1926, he organized a general strike in Shanghai, opening the city to the Kuomintang. When the Kuomintang broke with the Communists, Zhou managed to escape the white terror. Zhou attended a July 1927 meeting with Zhu De, He Long, Ye Jianying, Liu Bocheng, – all future marshals of the army – and Mao to decide a response to Chiang’s blood purge. Their move was the Nanchang Uprising, led by Liu and Zhou.

After that attempt failed, Zhou left China for the Soviet Union to attend the Chinese Communist Party's 6th National Party Congress in Moscow, in June-July 1928. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
He was elected Director of the Central Committee Organization Department; his ally, Li Lisan took over propaganda work. Zhou finally returned to China, after more than a year away, in 1929.

In Shanghai, Zhou began to disagree with the timing of Li Lisan's strategy of favoring rich peasants and concentrating military forces for attacks on urban centers sometime in early 1930. Zhou did not openly break with these more orthodox notions, and even tried to implement them later, in 1931, in Jiangxi.

Zhou moved to the Jiangxi base area and shook up the propaganda-oriented approach to revolution by demanding that the armed forces under communist control actually be used to expand the base, rather than just to control and defend it. In December 1931, he replaced Mao as Secretary of the 1st Front Army with Xiang Ying, and made himself political commissar of the Red Army, in place of Mao. Liu Bocheng, Lin Biao and Peng Dehuai all criticized Mao's tactics at the August 1932 Ningdu Conference. [8] Under Zhou, the Red Army defeated four attacks by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops.[9] Only when the Nationalists were forced to change their tactics did Zhou endorse withdrawal. Zhou Enlai was thus one of the major beneficiaries of the 1931-34 side-lining of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Tan Zhenlin, Deng Zihui, Lu Dingyi and Xiao Qingguang.

In early 1933, Bo Gu arrived with German Comintern adviser Otto Braun (a/k/a Li De) and took control of party affairs. Zhou at this time, apparently with strong support from party and military colleagues, undertook to reorganize and standardize the Red Army. The results were the structure that led the communists to victory:

In the Yan'an years, Zhou was active in promoting a united anti-Japanese front. As a result, he played a major role in the Xi'an Incident, helped to secure Chiang Kai-shek's release, and negotiated the Second CCP-KMT United Front, and coining the famous phrase "Chinese should not fight Chinese but a common enemy: the invader". Zhou spent the Sino-Japanese War as CCP ambassador to Chiang's wartime government in Chongqing and took part in the failed negotiations following World War II.

In 1949, with the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Zhou assumed the role of Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. In June 1953, he made the five declarations for peace. He headed the Communist Chinese delegation to the Geneva Conference and to the Bandung Conference (1955). He survived a covert proxy assassination attempt by the nationalist Kuomintang under the government of Chiang Kai-shek on his way to Bandung. A time bomb with an American-made MK-7 detonator was planted on a charter plane Kashmir Princess scheduled for Zhou's trip. Zhou changed planes but the rest of his crew of 16 people died. Zhou was a moderate force and a new influential voice for non-aligned states in the Cold War; his diplomacy strengthened regional ties with India, Burma, and many southeast Asian countries, as well as African states. In 1958, the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs was passed to Chen Yi but Zhou remained Prime Minister until his death in 1976.

Zhou's first major domestic focus after becoming premier was China's economy, in a poor state after decades of war. He aimed at increased agricultural production through the even redistribution of land. Industrial progress was also on his to-do list. He additionally initiated the first environmental reforms in China. In government, Mao largely developed policy while Zhou carried it out.

In 1958, Mao Zedong began the Great Leap Forward, aimed at increasing China's production levels in industry and agriculture with unrealistic targets. As a popular and practical administrator, Zhou maintained his position through the Leap. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a great blow to Zhou. At its late stages in 1975, he pushed for the "four modernizations" to undo the damage caused by the campaigns.

Known as an able diplomat, Zhou was largely responsible for the re-establishment of contacts with the West in the early 1970s. He welcomed US President Richard Nixon to China in February 1972, and signed the Shanghai Communiqué.

After discovering he had cancer, he began to pass many of his responsibilities onto Deng Xiaoping. During the late stages of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou was the new target of Chairman Mao's and Gang of Four's political campaigns in 1975 by initiating "criticizing Song Jiang, evaluating the Water Margin", alluding to a Chinese literary work, using Zhou as an example of a political loser. In addition, the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign was also directed at Premier Zhou because he was viewed as one of the Gang's primary political opponents.

In a society where news is restricted, much weight is put on stories which cannot be verified. It was widely believed that at the Geneva Conference of 1954 U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles snubbed Zhou by publicly brushing past his outstretched hand. Whether the incident actually happened or not, President Nixon clearly believed that it had. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Therefore, when he descended from Air Force One in Beijing in January 1972, he ostentatiously and respectfully held out his hand to Zhou, who appreciated the symbolism.

The clash with Russia created a number of these stories. One story had it that Zhou met Premier Nikita Khrushchev outside a meeting hall where each had denounced the other. Khrushchev, who was said to be jealous of Zhou’s cosmopolitan skills, remarked to Zhou “it’s interesting, isn’t it. I’m of working class origin while your family were landlords.” Zhou quickly replied “Yes, and we each betrayed our class!”

Another such doubtful but widespread story had it that at another such encounter Khrushchev shook Zhou’s hand, then pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his hands. Zhou then pulled out his handkerchief, wiped his hands, and put the handkerchief in the nearest wastebasket. This is especially interesting since apparently Richard Nixon told a similar story. He recalled that in 1954 Undersecretary of State, Walter B. Smith did not want to "break... discipline" but also did not want to slight the Chinese blatantly. Therefore, Smith held a cup of coffee in his right hand when shaking hands with Zhou. Zhou took out a white handkerchief, wiped his hand and threw the handkerchief into the garbage.

Zhou was hospitalized in 1974 for bladder cancer, but continued to conduct work from the hospital, with Deng Xiaoping as the First Deputy Premier handling most of the important State Council matters. Zhou died on the morning of 8 January 1976, eight months before Mao Zedong. In their book Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday assert that Mao had intentionally denied Zhou treatment for his cancer while in the hospital because Mao did not want Zhou to outlive him.[13] However, there is some controversy concerning the general accuracy of this book's depiction of Mao's life. Zhou's death brought messages of condolences from many non-aligned states that he affected during his tenure as an effective diplomat and negotiator on the world stage, and many states saw his death as a terrible loss. Zhou's body was cremated and the ashes scattered by air over hills and valleys, according to his wishes.

Inside China, the infamous Gang of Four had seen Zhou's death as an effective step forward in their political maneuvering, as the last major challenge was now gone in their plot to seize absolute power. At Zhou's funeral, Deng Xiaoping delivered the official eulogy, but later he was forced out of politics until after Mao's death.

Because Zhou was very popular with the people, many rose in spontaneous expressions of mourning across China, which the Gang considered to be dangerous, as they feared people might use this opportunity to express hatred towards them. During the Tiananmen Incident in April 1976, the Gang of Four tried to suppress mourning for the "Beloved Premier", which resulted in rioting. Anti-Gang of Four poetry was found on some wreaths that were laid, and all wreaths were subsequently taken down at the Monument to the People's Heroes. These actions, however, only further enraged the people. Thousands of armed soldiers repressed the people’s protest in Tiananmen Square, and hundreds of people were arrested. The Gang of Four blamed Deng Xiaoping for the movement and temporarily removed him from all his official positions.

Since his death, a memorial hall has been dedicated to Zhou and Deng Yingchao in Tianjin, named Tianjin Zhou Enlai Deng Yingchao Memorial Hall, and there was a statue erected in Nanjing, where in the 1940s he worked with the Kuomintang. There was an issue of national stamps commemorating the first anniversary of his death in 1977, and another in 1998 to commemorate his 100th birthday.

Zhou Enlai is regarded as a skilled negotiator, a master of policy implementation, a devoted revolutionary, and a pragmatic statesman with infinite patience and an unusual attentiveness to detail and nuance. He was also known for his tireless and dedicated work ethic. He is reputedly the last Mandarin bureaucrat in the Confucian tradition. Zhou's political behavior should be viewed in light of his political philosophy as well as his personality. To a large extent, Zhou epitomized the paradox inherent in a communist politician with traditional Chinese upbringing: at once conservative and radical, pragmatic and ideological, possessed by a belief in order and harmony as well as a faith in the progressive power of rebellion and revolution.

Though a firm believer in the Communist ideal on which the People's Republic was founded, Zhou is widely believed to have moderated the excesses of Mao's radical policies within the limits of his power. It has been assumed that he protected imperial and religious sites of cultural significance (such as the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet) from the Red Guards, and shielded top-level leaders from purges.

Zhou has not shared in the personal and political charges leveled at Mao. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
The recent biography by Gao Wenqian implies that during the Cultural Revolution, Zhou gave in to Mao's whims rather than consistently mitigating them, and that he did not protect all of those he could have. However, it is to be noted that Zhou, although sometimes giving in to Mao, was constantly having his political power undermined by the paranoid Mao.

A person’s breath is more than 99 percent water — and then a cocktail of many other molecules. Scientists are working to understand how the amounts of various molecules can serve as markers for some diseases, such as lung cancer.

Scientists would like to take your breath away. Literally.

Exhaled vapor holds clues to your health, revealing much more than just what you ate for lunch. In recent years, researchers have been scrutinizing the misty mixture of molecules with fervor, seeking evidence of conditions ranging from sleep apnea to cancer.

Breath can also reveal exposure to pollutants such as benzene and chloroform, providing a measure of internal dose that is missed by sampling polluted air.

“The lung is a soggy mess of tubes and sacs whose job is to exchange gases from blood into breath,” says Joachim D. Pleil, an analytical chemist and environmental health scientist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “The breath is a window into the blood.”

Collecting and analyzing breath is emerging as a kinder, gentler means for surveying the body, a complement to old standbys such as blood and urine tests, or invasive techniques that irritate the lungs, says Pleil, who reviews the role of exhaled breath analysis in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B.

“You might have a 90-year-old man on a respirator, and it’s hard to tap a vein,” he says. “Or an 800-gram infant who doesn’t make enough urine in a week to analyze. That infant is always breathing.”

Even the ancients knew that there’s more to breath than meets the eye. Doctors have been sniffing breath for indications of disease since Hippocrates’ day. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com
The sweet smell of acetone is a flag for diabetes, and advanced liver disease is said to make the breath reek of fish. Breath is 99 percent water, but roughly 3,000 other compounds have been detected in human breath—the average sample contains at least 200. There are also bits of DNA, proteins, and fats floating in the mist.

While research is being published at a rapid rate (more than 50 breath-related papers so far in 2008), scientists are still figuring out which breath-bound molecules are most meaningful and what collection methods work best.

“It’s unclear what we should be looking for in there—there’s stuff from A to Z,” says Rohit Katial, director of the allergy and immunology program at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver. Breath is “an intriguing source of a bodily sample,” he says. “But it is still in its infancy—the detection techniques just aren’t there yet.”

Although the results are still hazy in some areas of research, breath analysis is a reliable non-invasive means of detecting certain ills, such as lung inflammation, says John Hunt, a respiratory medicine specialist at the University of Virginia Children’s Hospital in Charlottesville. Breath from a normal airway is mildly alkaline, about pH 7.5, but someone with acute respiratory disease might have a breath pH of 3. “Kind of like putting lemonade in your eye,” says Hunt.

An airway making this much acid can be an early sign of pulmonary disease or lung transplant rejection, says Hunt, who cofounded a company that makes equipment for collecting breath condensate. And severe asthma—a suite of symptoms, not a disease—may be triggered by a number of cellular irritants, from viral infections to exposure to diesel emissions. Analyzing breath condensate can help discern whether acid reflux is causing irritation or contributing to it, helping doctors target drugs more effectively, says Hunt.

There is also a common breath test for Helicobacter pylori, the stomach-infecting bacterium that causes some ulcers. H. pylori has an enzyme—which humans lack—that breaks down urea. The patient drinks a cocktail laced with urea made with a heavy carbon isotope. If the bacterium has taken up residence, it breaks down the urea, and the heavy carbon isotope is detectable in the breath.

Scientists are also investigating volatile compounds in breath to see if there is a predictable compound or pattern in people with certain cancers. Cancerous cells burp different compounds than healthy cells—researchers have identified more than 20 of these volatiles. In papers published in Cancer Biomarkers last fall and in Clinica Chimica Acta in March, researchers present two analyses comparing the compounds in the breath of 193 lung cancer patients to 211 controls. Both models correctly identified the lung cancer patients about 84 percent of the time.

The target molecules will dictate the method of collection, says Michael C. Madden, a toxicologist with the EPA. Madden, Pleil and other colleagues recently published a new collection method in the Journal of Breath Research. The technique uses readily available equipment—a 75-milliliter glass bulb and a small tube—that allows many samples to be simultaneously prepared and stored, says Pleil.

Generally, collecting a sample involves breathing into the collection tube with the strength used to play a trumpet or clarinet. About five minutes of breathing yields one milliliter of breath condensate. Samples can then be capped, frozen if necessary and then brought to a lab for analysis.

The analysis side of things is where more work is needed, says Hunt. “That’s the downside,” he says. “Many of the assays are difficult to do. It’s easy for the patient, but tough for the lab.”

An expanding area of research involves looking for proteins made by distressed cells, says Madden. Lung cells that have been attacked by a pollutant often make interleukin 8, a protein that recruits immune system cells from the blood. If hundreds of school children were exposed to diesel exhaust, for example, breath analysis could reveal interleukins or cytokines, giving a quick take on how the kids’ lungs are dealing with the assault.

Eventually, says Madden, suites of proteins might be identified that indicate specific exposures. “If you look at 100 proteins, do 10 stick out as unique to smokestack emissions or 10 for ozone exposure?” Better collaboration between physicians on the clinical side and scientists on the environmental side would help move that prospect along, he says. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com

“It’s a fun and expanding field—an up-and-coming research tool that people are really trying hard to translate into the clinical world,” says Hunt. “I think a lot will happen in the next few years. Eventually, we’ll be able to smell how people are doing.”

Big, unmanned spy planes, like the Predators flying over Iraq, have plenty of problems. For starters, they are expensive to build and operate. More important, some can be relatively easy to spot. Shrinking such planes so that they weigh less than two ounces would result in the perfect vehicle to get a bird’s-eye view of the terrain.

Of course, flying a craft as small as 41/2 inches wide comes with its own difficulties—the smaller the flyer, the more unstable and less energy efficient it becomes. To smooth the flight of such small planes, Peter Ifju, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Florida, created a flexible wing (built onto the prototype plane at right) that can keep a steady course in the face of gusty winds. Inspired by the wings of bats, Ifju built a carbon fiber skeleton covered with a latex membrane that pacifies gusts by acting as a shock absorber.

The craft remains steady even on a windy day. The downside is a flight time of just 15 minutes before the battery must be recharged.

With a recent government study projecting that at least 36 states will face water shortages within the next five years, some states are looking to tap our oceans for more than a trickle of our freshwater needs. The only significant seawater desalination, or desal, facility in operation in the United States is the Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination Plant, which after a problem-plagued start is finally producing 25 million gallons of water a day, or about 10 percent of the region's water supply. California, Texas, Massachusetts, and Georgia are all cautiously considering similar saltwater desal plants. But critics say (pdf) these plants are energy hogs that have a hugely detrimental impact on coastal marine life.

One potential alternative that’s getting a lot of attention these days, not just in the United States but around the world, is the idea of offshore desalination platforms or vessels. “There are so many obstacles and hurdles to overcome in building and running a desal plant onshore,” says Charles “Skip” Griffin, a senior vice president with PBS&J Engineers who has been designing water-treatment plants for 40 years, “that going off-land is kind of a no-brainer.”

Offshore, the water can be extracted from an optimal depth where sea life density is low and where the water is cleaner, reducing the extensive pretreatment that onshore plants must perform. Furthermore, the concentrated saltwater left over after processing can be more thoroughly diluted in the deep ocean rather than being dumped near shore, where marine life is plentiful. And the cost of powering an offshore plant is expected to be less than for land-based plants; while land-based plants end up having to buy third-party power, an offshore plant could produce its own without the markup.

The notion of offshore desal platforms is not entirely new—India has built a test plant, and a Spanish company wants to construct a wind-powered one—but most such approaches are geared toward small productions of 5 million gallons or less per day. Far more ambitious is a plan from Water Standard Company, a Houston-based water-treatment outfit that intends to build a Seawater Desalination Vessel (SDV) that could output up to 15 times that much—up to three times the production of the Tampa Bay desal plant. The SDV, moored a mile or more offshore, would generate its own power with efficient gas turbines, which could use biofuels if sufficient supplies are available. The SDV would use the same desal method the Tampa plant uses, reverse osmosis, in which seawater is pumped at high pressure through dense membranes to remove the salt. It’s basically the same process that cruise ships (80,000 gallons per day) and military ships (aircraft carrier: 300,000 gallons per day) have used to convert seawater to freshwater for decades.

"It looks like it's feasible," says Mark S. Williamson, an engineer who evaluated the Water Standard Company's SDV proposal on behalf the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District in California. "But it has never been done before on this scale and so, in our assessment, we think the proponents have probably underestimated the cost and the regulatory difficulty. And the harm or lack of harm to the marine life has not been established in my judgment."

Water Standard says it's well aware of the costs and regulatory hurdles; to lessen the regulatory burden, the company expects the first ship will probably be built for Israel, Australia, China, or the Middle East—areas where there is a great demand for water and an easier path to government approval. The company hopes to have the first SDV up and running within two years. "There are no untried processes here," says spokesperson Gayle Collins. "This is proven technology."

— Call it the battle of the planet creationists.

On one side of the ring stands Doug “Rocky Core” Lin. On the other side stands Alan “Jupiter in a Hurry” Boss. For more than a decade, Lin, a theorist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has argued with Boss, a theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (D.C.), over the correct theory of planet formation.

Lin champions what is generally viewed as the standard model, known as core accretion. In this model, grains of dust lying within the disk of gas and dust that surrounds a young star gather together to form solid chunks of rock. Then some of these bodies are destined to become rocky planets like Earth; others cloak themselves in a massive envelope of gas and form gas giants like Jupiter. But one problem with this gradual, two-step recipe for making a Jupiter is that the gaseous disk may evaporate before the process finishes.

In the early 1990s, Boss proposed an alternate model, called gravitational instability, in which gas giants form wholesale from a sudden fragmentation of the disk. No gradual buildup is required.

Lin says he stuck his neck out in a public debate with Boss in San Diego a few years ago and made a prediction about the arrangement of extrasolar planets not yet found, a prediction only the core accretion model could support.

On June 16, during a workshop in Nantes, France, on superEarths — rocky extrasolar planets five to 10 times the mass of Earth — Lin said that a newfound association between these planets and extrasolar Jupiters matches his prediction and provides “an acid test for proving the core accretion scenario.” In his talk, Lin cited the new findings announced earlier that day by researchers based at Geneva Observatory in Switzerland. That team has found several extrasolar planetary systems in which a superEarth closely circles a star, while a Jupiter or Saturn orbits at a greater distance.

Those systems show that superEarths — rocky cores — must have formed first, before the Jupiters, just as the core-accretion model predicts, Lin says.

In Boss’ gravitational instability picture, the gas giants could form much faster than the rocky planets. In that theory, “It would be highly unlikely to form a generation of superEarths before the Jupiters get settled,” Lin notes.

At the conference in France, Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona in Tucson said he agrees that the findings support the core-accretion model, at least for making Jupiters in the inner part of the gas and dust disk. Reached by e-mail back in the United States, Boss contends that “these results are also consistent with the predictions of gravitational disk instability, which only operates in the outer disk, outside of the region where the terrestrial planets form.”

Says Lin: “I do not expect Alan to admit defeat and am sure that he will come up with an even more contrived scenario. Just ask him if there will ever be a reason that would make him give up.”

By mixing soapy water, oil and the theory of information, a physicist has found a possible clue to the origin of the genetic code, as well as to the structure of other biochemical languages. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com

Life’s workhorse molecules are made from only 20 different types of amino acids, encoded in the chemical makeup of DNA. In principle, DNA could code for about three times that many, 64 possible combinations. Comparing the genetic code with the physics of soapy water suggests an explanation for why nature chose 20 as an optimal number, Tsvi Tlusty of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, reports in an upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Genes are segments of DNA that encode instructions for constructing the molecules, primarily proteins, needed to build and operate cells. Each gene is a long sequence of “letters” — A, C, T and G — symbols for the chemical bases adenine, cytosine, thymine, and guanine. Each three-letter combination specifies an amino acid. But the code is redundant, meaning that sometimes different triplets represent the same amino acid — for example, CAA and CAG both represent glutamine. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com

The genetic code presumably evolved from the diverse and chaotic chemistry of the Earth’s primordial broth. Before settling on the 20 standard amino acids, the developing code faced opposing pressures. Organisms with a more complex molecular language — using more than 20 types of amino acids — could have deployed a wider range of chemical combinations to adapt to environmental changes. But organisms with simpler chemistry required less molecular machinery and energy, Tlusty explains. And using fewer amino acids reduces the rate of random errors in copying genetic information: If several triplets have the same meaning, there’s a good chance that changing one letter will have no consequences.

Eventually the code reached an optimal level of richness, which provided flexibility without being too high-maintenance. Such a balancing act, Tlusty says, is similar to how certain physical systems tend to make arrangements that minimize energy while maximizing entropy (a measure of disorder).

To put the analogy on more solid footing, Tlusty made a physics-inspired mathematical model of the genetic code. He first represented the code as a network in which each node stands for a three-letter word. Two nodes are connected if they differ by just one letter. Tlusty then “colored” the nodes, assigning the same color to triplets that encode the same amino acid. The coloring partitioned the network into regions.

In the early days of evolution, the boundaries of these regions would have shifted around before finding an optimal configuration. The competitive advantage of a richer code would favor breakup into smaller regions (encoding more amino acids), while the cost of copying errors and energy expense would push toward fewer, larger regions (and thus fewer amino acids). Based on this model, Tlusty says he found that 20 is an optimal number of regions, so nature’s choice of 20 amino acids wasn’t completely random.

Tlusty’s model is mathematically equivalent to the physics of oil and soapy water mixtures. In certain conditions, soapy membranes engulf the oil into tubes, and the tubes plug into each other, forming networks. These networks take on shapes that minimize energy and maximize entropy.

Tlusty says his theory also could apply to other biochemical codes that cells use to process information. For example, he says, it could offer some insight into the language of antigens, the molecules that prompt the immune system to produce particular antibodies.

However, comments Glenn Tesler, a mathematician at the University of California, San Diego, Tlusty’s paper is rather abstract and offers no concrete example of further applications. Still, Tesler adds, the results are interesting in that they tie together ideas from information theory, physics and biology.

Covered in antibodies and bathed in laser light, carbon nanotubes kill malignant cells with heat. The new technique may one day enable physicians to target and kill cancerous growth without surgery, radiation or chemotherapy.

After the team shone near-infrared light over a cell culture with antibody-coated carbon nanotubes attached to cancer cells, the diseased cells died, while non-cancerous cells went unharmed, researchers report online June 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If this technique works in living tissue, “it might be possible to cook tumors rather than to surgically remove them,” says Ellen Vitetta, an immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas and coauthor of the new study.

Should future tests show this method is safe to use in humans, doctors could inject antibody-coated carbon nanotubes into a breast lump and then pass near-infrared light laser light over the skin. That would, in theory, kill the tumor without invasive surgery.

“This research is at a very early stage,” Vitetta says, “so moving it from a tissue culture setting to an animal and then a human is going to take time. It might or might not work. It is too early to say.”

Vitetta and her colleagues coated carbon nanotubes with leukemia-specific antibodies that seek out and bind to particular molecules on human leukemia cells. They then created lymphoma-specific antibodies and did the same in human lymphoma cells. Each antibody type fits to only one kind of cancer cell, like a key fitting only one lock, Vitetta explains.

Once the antibodies clicked into their targets, scientists passed laser light over the cell culture. Like radio antennae, the carbon nanotubes picked up the laser light’s frequency and converted the light to heat, which heated, and ultimately killed, the cancer cells.

To make sure only diseased cells felt the heat, the team conducted two control tests on healthy cells — one with a cell culture treated only with laser light and one that also included the antibody-covered nanotubes. In these trials, no cells were damaged.

“The controls are good. They serve as a rigorous test,” says Eric Wickstrom, a biochemist at Thomas Jefferson University, in Philadelphia, who studies how to use nanotubes and near-infrared light to destroy breast cancer tissue but was not involved in the current study. “They answer whether a specific antibody goes to a specific cancer cell, or whether any antibody will do.”

The new study confirms Wickstrom’s team’s 2007 results, which showed breast cancer cells could be killed with a similar method that didn’t rely on specific antibodies. This team’s study shows that, using cancer-specific antibodies, researchers could one day target and kill particular types of cancer cells, Wickstrom adds.

That “proof of specificity” is the most significant aspect of this work, Vitetta says.

Current cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiation, kill both diseased and healthy cells, Vitetta explains. This method could cook only diseased cells, both dividing and dormant ones. According to Vitetta, standard treatments do not kill dormant cancer cells. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com

These cells are not dividing at the time of treatment but can do so at a later time and cause a relapse, Vitetta says. “Antibody-carbon nanotubes would not care if a cell is dividing,” she says.

Go ahead, have that extra cup of coffee.

One of the largest studies ever conducted shows that coffee drinkers die at almost the same rates as their non-drinking peers. But, after controlling for the fact that coffee drinkers tend to exercise less and smoke more, coffee is linked to a slightly lower death rate in both men and women. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com

The findings, reported in the June 17 Annals of Internal Medicine, are based on data from the Nurses Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. The two studies tracked 86,214 female nurses for 24 years and 41,736 male veterinarians, pharmacists and other health workers for 18 years. Every two years, the volunteers answered detailed questionnaires about coffee consumption, exercise habits, weight, smoking history and other health information.

Overall, participants who downed a few cups of coffee a day had about the same death rate as those who didn’t drink coffee, despite the fact that coffee drinkers tended to smoke more, drink more alcohol, not take vitamins and exercise less. All of those factors are linked to higher death rates.

After accounting for the caffeinated coffee drinkers’ less healthy lifestyles, the researchers found that women drinking two to three cups a day had a 25 percent lower death rate from heart disease and an 18 percent lower risk of death from all causes compared with their equally unhealthy peers. The study did not find such differences for men, perhaps because the study tracked fewer men for a shorter period of time, says Esther Lopez-Garcia of the University Autónoma of Madrid in Spain, who led the study. Volunteers who drank caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee had similar death rates, suggesting that caffeine was not responsible for the beneficial effect.

The death rates of those who drank even higher amounts of coffee did not differ significantly from the death rates of volunteers who drank 2 to 3 cups of coffee a day.

The findings suggest that coffee may reduce the risks of death in general, and may be especially good at combating heart disease.

David Jacobs, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis who was not involved in the study, says the results are convincing. “People like to sit down with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. That really confounds the data, but they have really nice analyses of smoking status and coffee.”

Ken Mukamal, an internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, agrees. “They have very careful and detailed information on lifestyle features,” he says. “It’s important . . . to take these results at face value.”

The idea that coffee can promote health isn’t far-fetched, Mukamal says. Coffee beans are chock-full of antioxidants, chemicals that can protect DNA from damage and promote cell survival. What’s more, coffee may also reduce inflammation inside the blood vessels, thereby lowering the risk of heart disease, Lopez-Garcia says.

Still, it’s premature to start guzzling coffee as a health tonic, she says.

Studies on coffee consumption and health have had mixed results over the years. Early studies linked coffee consumption to pancreatic cancer, and others have found elevated risks of heart disease. However, those studies did not account for the fact that coffee drinkers, in general, tend to have less healthy lifestyles, Lopez-Garcia says.

“There’s very little evidence that coffee itself is a bad thing. It’s gotten a bit of a bum rap,” says Mukamal, who has been involved in other epidemiological studies on coffee and mortality. “There’s a little bit of a legacy of thinking there’s something sort of hedonistic about drinking coffee, and I don’t think it’s all that warranted.”

Just any old coffee drink may not do. The volunteers in the study, who were tracked mostly in the late 1980s and early ’90s, likely drank primarily filtered drip coffee. But past studies have shown that the health effects of coffee may depend on how it’s made, Mukamal says.

Boiled drinks like Turkish coffee and French press have high levels of a cholesterol-boosting compound called cafestol. And “coffee drinks” like mocha triple venti lattes are full of calories, which may offset any benefit of the coffee itself, he says. By contrast, filtered drip coffee, which most of the survey respondents consumed, has few calories and almost no cafestol.

The study is probably “saying something about filtered, good old-fashioned 1980s and 1990s coffee and not saying very much about the fancy kinds of coffee that you might be drinking in 2008,” Mukamal says.

Lou Genise, a compact man with a shorn head and Fu Manchu mustache, sat propped up on a mattress in a hospital room tucked away on the fifth floor of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Wearing an eyeshade and listening to music through a headset, he was oblivious to the two psychiatrists sitting nearby, quietly monitoring his every move.

Worry and nausea had been the 37-year-old performance artist’s constant companions during his treatment for metastatic colon cancer that was diagnosed a year earlier. Yet the shroud of negativity lifted under the influence of psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in the hallucinogenic mushrooms used in sacred Native American rituals.

Early one morning last July, Genise had taken a little white capsule containing the psychedelic as part of a medically supervised study to test whether it could ease the mental anguish of people with terminal cancer. He had checked into the hospital the afternoon before, and Charles Grob, the UCLA psychiatrist who is conducting the study, reviewed with him the issues he wanted to confront. Genise said he had developed a Pavlovian aversion to hospitals after all he had been through and would get nauseated in anticipation of getting treatment. He was also having trouble accepting his separation from a former girlfriend, who had come to Los Angeles to care for him when he fell ill.

“I had dealt with the big, earth-shattering problems, but the day-to-day anxieties were the hard part,” Genise recalled five months later, sipping tea in his home in the L.A. neighborhood of Echo Park. “But following the session, I had two startling epiphanies. First, here I was in a hospital having a pleasurable experience, which immediately cured my anxieties. And it suddenly clicked in my head that I didn’t need to cling to my ex. It was a spectacular experience, because in a short time I was able to work through some serious issues on a very deep level.” http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com

At a handful of sites across the country, after a four-decade hiatus, psychedelic research is undergoing a quiet renaissance, thanks to scientists like Charles Grob who are revisiting the powerful mind-altering drugs of the 1960s in hopes of making them part of our therapeutic arsenal. Hallucinogens such as psilocybin, MDMA (better known as Ecstasy), and the most controversial of them all, LSD, are being tested as treatments for maladies that modern medicine has done little to assuage, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, drug dependency, obsessive-compulsive disorder, cluster headaches, and the emotional suffering of people with a terminal illness.

While Grob’s study is not complete—he has tested 11 out of a projected 12 volunteers—patients seemed to have positive experiences. “No one had a bad trip, and most derived some benefit,” he says. “It lowered their anxiety, improved their mood and disposition, and imbued them with a greater acceptance of their situation and capacity to live in the moment and appreciate each day.”

Other early test results are equally encouraging. University of Arizona scientists recently fed psilocybin to nine volunteers whose obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was so disabling that many could not hold down a job or leave the house; they would observe elaborate cleaning rituals or shower for hours until they felt comfortable. Conventional treatments such as psychotherapy and medication had failed. In each of the nine patients in the study, psilocybin drastically diminished or melted away their compulsions for up to 24 hours, and several remained symptom-free for days.

In another ongoing study, psychiatrist Michael Mithoefer of Charleston, South Carolina, is testing MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) on people suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including rape victims and Iraq War veterans who have not gotten any relief from conventional treatments such as antidepressants and therapy.

PTSD is normally triggered by a terrifying incident—combat, childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse, a serious accident, rape, or a natural disaster—in which people feel their lives are in danger but are powerless to defend themselves. Sometimes PTSD can be triggered by growing up in a harrowing environment where a child is at the mercy of a cruel parent or parental figure. To survive such horrific circumstances, sufferers often numb themselves to their pain. The cornerstone of PTSD treatment involves reliving the trauma in a way that enables patients to process their fears in a rational way. But by definition, revisiting the experience can be frightening, and people often become locked in the grip of intense anxiety.

The drug MDMA, a chemical cousin of mescaline and methamphetamine, can kindle intense euphoria or sublime seren–ity, creating a calming therapeutic environment in which to revisit trauma. Eighteen out of a projected 21 patients in Mithoefer’s study have already been treated, and in many cases just two sessions dramatically diminished symptoms, which is remarkable because PTSD in this group of subjects has been resistant to other types of treatment.

One of the study participants spent more than two decades in therapy in a futile attempt to heal the deep wounds inflicted by a violent and emotionally abusive stepfather. She ran away from home, was raped twice by men who picked her up hitchhiking, and ricocheted from one abusive relationship to another.

The patient, a 51-year-old woman from South Carolina, coped by deadening herself emotionally. “I knew I was messed up, but I sealed up all those feelings because they were so overwhelming,” she recalls. “They were like the monster that is locked behind a three-foot-thick steel door.”

Under the influence of MDMA, she was able to let go of the blockage that had stunted her emotionally. “The drug opened the door and removed that fear of feeling,” she says. “I never cried about those experiences before, but now I can and I welcome it. I no longer feel like I’m holding back the Red Sea.”

Success stories like these explain why psychedelics never lost their appeal for Grob and a handful of other academic scientists. Despite their promise, however, it is still difficult to get such studies off the ground. Psychedelics are classified as Schedule 1 drugs by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which outlaws their use outside a research setting. Exceptions are made for Native American church–goers, who are allowed by law to use peyote in prayer meetings, and members of a branch of a Brazilian-based church in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who have won court battles for the right to use the hallucinogenic tea ayahuasca in their religious rituals.

In the current climate, the main source of funding for studies of hallucinogens are two private philanthropies: the Heffter Research Institute in Santa Fe, which was founded in 1993 by academics and mental health professionals to finance scholarly research, and MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), which has dispensed more than $10 million since it was launched in 1986 by Rick Doblin, a drug reform activist in Boston with a Harvard University Ph.D. in public policy.

But it is not just social taboos that have scared off government funders and pharmaceutical companies. Critics worry that this research will legitimize reckless recreational use, especially among impressionable young adults. “That danger needs to be considered before we open a Pandora’s box,” says Glen Hanson, a pharmacologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and former acting director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “So much emotion is tied up with this research that it often gets in the way of critically analyzing the risks.”

Still, mainstream psychiatrists like Herbert Kleber, director of the Division on Substance Abuse at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, hope these experiments will chip away at institutional resistance. “They have therapeutic potential for crippling mental maladies, especially for OCD, PTSD, and drug and alcohol addictions, which have such a high relapse rate,” says Kleber, a former deputy director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy at the White House. “These are not easy drugs to work with, and some of the side effects are unpredictable. But they are all absolutely worthy of research.” http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com

With his salty beard, wire-frame glasses, khaki pants, tie, and sport jacket, Charles Grob, a 57-year-old professor of psychiatry, doesn’t look anything like a wild-eyed rebel of the ’60s. He squeezes in psychedelic research on weekends because his workdays are filled overseeing a large clinical program that handles 400 to 500 patients a year and supervising the child psychiatry fellows, residents, interns, psychology postdocs, and social workers in training who rotate through his department at UCLA.

Grob’s fascination with the medicinal powers of hallucinogens began in 1972, when he was babysitting dream-research experiments at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where his father, David Grob, was chief of medicine. Having dropped out of college and with little to do but read, he dug into the library of his psychologist boss, Stanley Krippner, and was astonished to learn that after World War II scientists were achieving what seemed like miracle cures by treating once-intractable mental ills with psychedelics such as LSD. “They were at the cutting edge of psychiatric research,” Grob says.

While peyote and other plant hallucinogens had been used in shamanistic rites for centuries, the modern era of hallucinogenic research began in April 1943. At Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally dosed himself with LSD, a rye ergot fungus he had been working with, and suddenly saw the world through kaleidoscope eyes.

That first acid trip sparked an explosion in experimentation by psychiatrists, intellectuals, artists, spiritual seekers, and even Nobel Prize–winning scientists including physicist Richard Feynman and Francis Crick, who reportedly admitted before he died in 2004 that he had visualized the double-helix structure of DNA while under the influence of LSD. In the heady postwar years, hundreds of promising studies were conducted in the United States, Canada, and Europe on the use of LSD and other psychedelics, like peyote, to treat such psychiatric maladies as schizophrenia, autism, drug addiction, alcoholism, and chronic depression. “People don’t realize today how valuable these studies were and how enthusiastic the reception was within psychiatry, which was then locked in a rigid Freudian orthodoxy,” Grob says. “Investigators were getting very rapid, positive, and transformative changes in patients.”

By the early 1960s more than 1,000 studies on LSD and other hallucinogens discussing the experiences of 40,000 patients had been published in reputable medical journals. “It was a medicine of remarkable power,” Stanislav Grof says. The Czech-born psychiatrist conducted dozens of government-sanctioned LSD experiments in the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s on heroin addicts, alcoholics, and terminal cancer patients in his native Prague and later at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, a mental health facility in Catonsville, Maryland, where he was chief of psychiatric research.

“The results were quite impressive, particularly in some of those categories that are very resistant to treatment, such as heroin addiction,” recalls Grof, who is now 76. “It could also frequently relieve pain, even pain that didn’t respond to narcotics. I found the studies with cancer patients to be the most moving, to see how their attitudes toward death changed.”

During the 1950s and early ’60s, research in Canada by psychiatrists Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond using mescaline and LSD on patients with severe alcohol addictions became the stuff of legend (pdf). “Alcoholics Anonymous believed many alcoholics don’t do well until they become deeply motivated by ‘hitting bottom,’” says Hoffer, who at 90 still sees patients. “We thought we could use a whip to frighten alcoholics and drive them away from a desire to drink by giving them a bad trip. After giving it to five patients, we realized that instead of hitting bottom, they were having a beneficial, pleasurable experience. It opened their minds, they developed some insights, and they began to see things they never had seen before,” which made them more receptive to psychotherapy.

This prompted Osmond to coin the term psychedelic (from the Greek, meaning “mind manifesting”) to describe the drugs’ capacity for mental enrichment. When combined with talk therapy, just one or two daylong LSD sessions blunted the desire to drink, even in alcoholics written off as hopeless. Psychedelics became part of treatment in Saskatchewan’s five treatment centers and were administered in 100- to 800-microgram doses—many times the strength of a street dose and potent enough to conjure up visions. In follow-ups two and three years later, researchers found that more than half the patients—and, in some instances, up to 90 percent—remained sober, according to Erika Dyck, a medical historian at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and author of an upcoming book on psychedelic psychiatry. Many patients said the sessions saved their lives.

But these potent potions soon became a symbol of the dark side of the ’60s counterculture. Unhinged people on bad acid trips who had taken bootleg or adulterated street drugs began showing up in emergency rooms in the throes of severe panic attacks or psychotic breakdowns. Psychedelics, and LSD in particular, were held responsible for suicides, permanent brain damage, and cult thrill killings. In response to the hysteria, Sandoz stopped supplying researchers with LSD in 1965; a year later the drug was outlawed in the United States, and by 1972 legitimate scientific research had ground to a halt.

Lack of scientific standards in many of the early studies compounded the problem. Often the reports were based on anecdotal evidence, or the studies failed to give any participants dummy pills as a basis for comparison. Nor were the tests blinded. In a blinded test, researchers don’t know whether they are giving patients the drug being tested or fake medicine. That is an important control; other–wise, personal biases and expectations can muddy test results.

At the time, though, Charles Grob thought the setbacks were only temporary. After hearing a lecture by Grof in the 1970s about his studies with the terminally ill, he decided that pursuing this line of research was what he wanted to do with his life. “His research was inspiring,” Grob recalls. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com
“The hospice movement hadn’t occurred yet, and these patients were often pushed off into a corner of a sterile hospital. But when I told my father, he said no one would listen to me unless I had credentials.”

Grob headed back to college, earned his medical degree in 1979, and, after completing a child psychiatry fellowship, began teaching at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1984. “Almost overnight, the field had gone into deep hibernation,” he recalls. Still, he never gave up on the drugs’ tantalizing potential. When UCLA wooed him away from the University of California at Irvine in 1993, where he was teaching and practicing after leaving Johns Hopkins, he told his future boss about his secret passion. “I hope I’m not too crazy for you,” Grob told him.

The research climate was changing once again. In 1990 Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico in Albu–querque, got federal clearance to do the first psychedelic studies on humans in nearly two decades. Several factors helped pry open the regulatory doors, Strassman says. The countercultural excesses were a dim memory, a new regime at the FDA was more open, the little-known psychedelic he proposed to test—DMT—didn’t have the baggage of LSD, and he was persistent. “It took two years,” Strassman says. “They never said no, so I thought until they did, I would continue working on getting approval.”

Over the next five years, he injected 65 healthy adult volunteers with DMT (dimethyltryptamine), a powerful hallucinogen derived from plants that induces a trancelike state. Many of the subjects, all of whom had taken psychedelics before, reported having out-of-body and near-death experiences and felt the sessions were among the most intense episodes of their lives. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com

Not long after, Grob witnessed the salutary effects of psychedelics when he was invited by a colleague to do a privately funded investigation of the emotional health of people who regularly ingested these substances as part of their religion. In the summer of 1993, he traveled to Manaus, Brazil, a major port city in the Amazon rain forest, to study members of the Centro Espirita Beneficente União do Vegetal (UDV) church. Founded in Brazil in 1961, the 8,000-member religion mixes traditional Christianity with indigenous beliefs. Central to the UDV rituals is drinking ayahuasca, a tea brewed from two plants that grow in the Amazon basin. One contains DMT; the other contains an alkaloid that prevents DMT from being degraded in the stomach. Grob did a psychiatric and neuropsychological inventory comparing 15 long-term users of ayahuasca with 15 matched controls and found the church members were physiologically and psychologically healthier. They were more cheerful, confident, relaxed, even-tempered, and orderly and scored better on memory and concentration tests—and there was no evidence of deterioration of their personalities or their mental acuity.

So much emotion is tied up with this research that it often gets in the way of critically analyzing the risks.

When Grob quizzed them about their personal lives, many UDV members described themselves as angry, impulsive reprobates hell-bent on self-destruction before they entered the church. Some had unsavory histories of violence and spousal abuse and were severely alcoholic or addicted to drugs. “I was amazed because these were responsible, high-functioning pillars of the community,” Grob recalls. “They all unequivocally credited ayahuasca, when taken in the controlled setting of the church, as the catalyst for their evolution into upstanding citizens.”

Emboldened by Strassman’s success, Grob applied to the FDA for permission to test MDMA on dying cancer patients. The agency insisted that safety studies be completed first on 18 healthy volunteers to ensure that the drug didn’t trigger damaging side effects. In 1994 he administered the first dose of MDMA to a test subject. But after completing the pilot study, he abandoned the drug in favor of the less controversial psilocybin. After Grob made the switch, the FDA gave him the go-ahead, and he recruited his first terminal cancer patient in 2004.

But the real turning point was a 2006 Johns Hopkins study using psilocybin in 36 healthy adults who were spiritually inclined but had never done psychedelics. They all received both psilocybin and an amphetamine-like compound (Ritalin), which has some psychoactive effects, such as increasing heart rate and increasing concentration. Some received psilocybin first; others received Ritalin first. In follow-up interviews two months later, four out of five said that the psilocybin experience had improved their well-being and satisfaction with life, about 70 percent rated the experience as among the most spiritually significant events of their lives, and nearly 70 percent called it one of the most personally meaningful events, comparable to the birth of a first child or the death of a parent. These beneficial effects persisted more than a year, when the volunteers were interviewed again. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com

“Many of these people had a genuine mystical experience, which was transformative in a profound way,” says Roland Griffiths, a behavioral psychopharmacologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the study’s lead investigator. Especially significant was the experiment’s rigorous design, which proved that this type of research can be safely done under scientifically standardized conditions. Perhaps even more important, Herbert Kleber says, is that Griffiths is new to the field and “not a true believer.”

What are the drugs doing to create such powerful effects? At the chemical level, psilocybin, LSD, and DMT—which are classified as tryptamines—are structurally similar to serotonin, a powerful chemical messenger that expedites the transmission of nerve signals in the brain. Tryptamines work by mimicking the action of serotonin, which is responsible for controlling an array of functions, including mood, sexual desires, sleep cycles, memory, and appetite. MDMA is a phenethylamine; it taps into the neuronal reservoirs of the key brain chemicals serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine (adrenaline), boosting their levels in the brain. Mescaline, although it is classified as a phenethylamine, works more like LSD or DMT.

While no one knows why psychedelics exert powerful positive effects or why they transform perceptions, progress in brain imaging has allowed researchers to discover where these drugs act in the brain. Extensive animal studies and PET scans on humans reveal that tryptamines such as psilocybin stimulate an array of brain structures: the prefrontal cortex, which is the center of executive functioning; limbic regions such as the amygdala that govern our emotional life and the formation of memories; the striatum, which plays a role in cognitive functions; and the thalamus.

Scientists suspect that one of the key areas especially affected is the thalamus, a walnut-size structure at the base of the brain that is the gateway for sensory information—taste, touch, vision, and hearing. The thalamus normally acts as a filter, winnowing out extraneous sensory information before relaying data to the cerebral cortex, the seat of memory, attention, language, and consciousness. Under psychedelics, the sensory overload may overwhelm the thalamus, leading to delusions, hallucinations, thought disturbances, feelings of persecution, and loss of coherent ego experiences.

“The cortex basically takes all the information coming in and synthesizes it into reality,” says David E. Nichols, a professor of medicinal chemistry at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who has done animal research on hallucinogens. “When you alter that circuitry, you’re essentially changing your perception of reality.”

That’s why scientists stress the importance of taking these powerful substances in a pleasant and well-supervised environment, rather than in the uncontrolled settings of recreational drug use. Psychedelics amplify whatever is going on around you and within you, Nichols says. “Taken in haste, without proper regard for their effects and in chaotic conditions, the effects can be really awful and frightening. But with the proper preparation, in a proper setting, with the right controls, the experience can be wonderful.” http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com

Annie Levy, a participant in Grob’s study, agrees. The 54-year-old neuropsychologist underwent her psilocybin session at UCLA last May, shortly after her ovarian cancer had come roaring back in spite of two rounds of intensive chemotherapy. Overwhelmed by dread, Levy says she was “plagued by obsessive thoughts that I would suffer horribly while going through the dying process.”

A few days before her treatment, Levy says, “I had felt somewhat anxious about participating in the study, but meeting the treatment team helped calm my fears.” And once the psychedelic took hold, her despair disappeared. She was able to come to terms with her eventual death, concentrate on all the joy in her life, and stop ruminating about all the awful things that might happen in the future. The drug’s influence endured for about six months. “I wish I could go in for another session,” Levy says, “like a booster.”

Despite such glowing testimonials, some researchers worry about the potential for serious psychic damage if these compounds are used by hundreds of therapists on thousands of patients, instead of by a small cadre of dedicated scientists testing carefully screened volunteers in tightly controlled situations. “The idea of turning [these drugs] loose makes me uncomfortable,” says University of Utah pharmacologist Glen Hanson, who is also director of the Utah Addiction Center there. “Before we make them available by prescription, there needs to be compelling evidence that they’re unique and that a large population would derive substantial benefit.”

Eventually, though, this research may lead to more precisely targeted therapeutics for the disorders psychedelics seem to help, such as OCD and other compulsive ills, like bulimia and anorexia. In animal studies, repeated dosages of psilocybin diminish the number of 2A serotonin receptors, which dampens their expression. This is a process known as downregulation.

“We suspect that physiologically, this is what happened in the OCD study—that psilocybin downregulates the activity of these receptors,” says Franz X. Vollenweider, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, who conducted many of the imaging studies and has done psychedelic research for more than a decade. “We’ve done a lot of basic research,” he adds. “Now we want to use the tools we’ve developed to see what is going on in real patients. If we could convincingly demonstrate hallucinogens alter these receptors, then we can find other compounds that have similar mechanisms but are less frightening.” http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com

Will these studies finally open the door to acceptance? David Nichols says psychedelics researchers keep a low profile “because everyone lives in fear that some administrator will kill their project.” Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins, for example, who has been doing pharmacological research for more than three decades, never had a project scrutinized as thoroughly by his institution’s review board and the FDA as his 2006 psilocybin study was. Throughout the study he worried that negative publicity might halt the research.

Charles Grob is more hopeful. “Sure, it’s been Sisyphean because of the cultural stigmas, and it has taken years to go even little baby steps,” he says. “But people are making dramatic progress working with the hardest cases. We’re on the threshold of opening up an exciting new field.”

An English-language newspaper in Moscow famed for lampooning Russian and Western officialdom has shut down after it fell under the scrutiny of the government for its raucous content.

The Exile spoofed the election of Russia's handpicked president by reporting results in advance. Dmitry Medvedev won 70% of the March 2 vote.

The demise of Moscow's Exile newspaper is the latest sign of the homogenization of the press within Russia, where an official crackdown on dissent has led to the self-censorship of many publications.

The Exile's editor, California native Mark Ames, said investors withdrew support earlier this month after officials from Russia's media regulator visited the paper's office and took away copies of recent issues to analyze whether the paper was violating Russia's media laws.

Though Russia's federal agency for media and communications has made no official move against the Exile, Mr. Ames said investors feared greater risks ahead for the paper, which had been unprofitable in recent years.

"If this had happened 10 years ago, people would not have been afraid to fight it," said Mr. Ames, who founded the paper in 1997. "Now there's a fear that all the power is in the hands of a few scary people who might do something very bad to you."

Evgeny Strelnik, an official at the media regulator that investigated the paper, said it was a "routine check." http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

"There were a few violations, and we've issued a warning," he said. He stressed that the government hadn't shut the paper down, something that would have required a court case.

With a circulation of less than 20,000 copies, the free biweekly never posed a serious threat to the Kremlin. For years, the newspaper's office was located above a Moscow strip club and the paper was staffed by a handful of poorly paid part-time writers.

It made a name for itself by celebrating the tumult and chaos of Moscow in an era of post-Soviet penury. Its readers were mainly Western businessmen looking for advice on where to find entertainment. The paper's club reviews advised which bars were frequented by violent thugs and which were popular with adventurous Russian women.

But the paper also sparked lively political debate among Russia experts in the West. An early contributor was Eduard Limonov, a radical counter-culture writer whose banned National Bolshevik Party has coalesced into a small but determined Kremlin opponent. His screeds -- complete with spelling and grammatical errors -- appeared twice a month.

The Exile assailed Western academics and journalists, whom it accused in the 1990s of understating the misery caused by the free-market reforms of President Boris Yeltsin. The paper's ribald and sometimes vicious pranks earned it enemies. Mr. Ames and another editor threw a pie made with horse semen into the face of one foreign correspondent for writing what they called a too-rosy account of Russia's transition to capitalism. The paper's articles were soon excluded from a popular Internet-based reading list used by foreign journalists.

Michael McFaul, professor of political science and director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, and a frequent target of attacks from the Exile, said he was "sorry to see the paper go" though he didn't always agree with its politics. The Exile frequently assailed Mr. McFaul for his 1970s-style haircut.

Mr. Ames said the paper had run into difficulty publishing some articles lately because Russia has broadened the definition of extremist literature, making it a crime to insult a public official. Earlier this year, the paper tried to publish photos of a protest in which Moscow university students had sex in a public museum near an exhibit of a stuffed bear. The publishing house, however, refused. The protest was directed at Russia's new president, Dmitry Medvedev, whose last name in Russian means "bear," and was supposed to mock his rhetoric about reversing Russia's population decline.

Mr. Ames said the paper had also failed to get beyond a fringe cult status among the Russian reading public, despite a Russian-language version on the Internet.

Kostantin Bukaryov, one of the founding investors of the Exile, said that profit had gradually declined since the late 1990s, largely because the foreign business community had shrunken in importance. "Before, a lot of the club owners in Russia were foreigners, as well as a large number of the patrons," Mr. Bukaryov said. "Now it's mostly Russians." The paper's financial problems saw Mr. Ames begin working in his spare time for Russian television, and a series of his travel programs appeared on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.

Alexei Simonov, head of the Glasnost Defense Fund, a nonprofit think tank that monitors press freedom in Russia, said the government's checkup on the Exile probably didn't spell serious problems for the paper. But he noted that newspaper owners in Russia have lately shied away from even minor confrontation with the government. Earlier this year, a Moscow tabloid closed down after then-President Vladimir Putin denied a report in it that said he would soon divorce his wife and marry an Olympic gymnast, Alina Kabayeva.

The owner of the newspaper, called Moskovskiy Korrespondent, denied the government pressured him into closing the paper, saying that he had decided to cut his investment because of "differences with the editorial staff over its concept."

Hershey Co. laid out plans Tuesday to battle the global candy giant to be created by the Mars-Wrigley merger, but offered little detail on how the iconic chocolate-bar maker will address its overwhelming reliance on the U.S. market for revenue.

At an investor update in New York, Chief Executive David West said Hershey would boost spending on marketing about 20% this year and next. He also slightly increased the company's long-term annual sales targets and outlined plans for new products.

But it isn't clear those steps will be enough in the coming candy wars. When Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms, and Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co., maker of Juicy Fruit and Doublemint, combine in a $23 billion deal expected to close in the next few months, their new company will have broad global reach. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
And that will put Hershey, whose business outside the U.S. represents just 14% of sales, in a difficult spot.

Consummating a long-time flirtation with Cadbury PLC would give Hershey broader international scale. But over the weekend, LeRoy Zimmerman, chairman of the Hershey Trust, the company's controlling shareholder, reiterated the trust's refusal to cede control of the Pennsylvania chocolate maker. In an opinion piece published Sunday in the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa., he wrote, "Simply put: We will not sell the Hershey Co." Hershey Trust spokesman Tim Reeves said that Mr. Zimmerman wouldn't comment further.

After the article was disseminated by a Wall Street analyst, shares of Hershey fell 6% Monday to close at $35.87. They fell again Tuesday to $35.15 after Mr. West addressed shareholders.

Mr. West set a new long-term annual sales growth target of 3% to 5%, compared with the previous goal of 3% to 4%, and an earnings-per-share growth target of 6% to 8%, down from the earlier 9% to 11%. Hershey affirmed its 2008 earnings forecast of $1.85 to $1.90 a share, but Mr. West said that Hershey won't hit its target in 2009 because of expected high commodity costs.

With the Mars-Wrigley combination looming, Hershey's options appear increasingly limited. To acquire Cadbury, which is valued at about $17 billion and is more than twice its size, Hershey would need to find a significant investment partner and would probably need to borrow a considerable sum.

Hershey could find itself in an even tighter bind if another company, such as Kraft Foods Inc., makes a play for Cadbury, as some analysts have speculated. A Kraft spokesman declined to comment on deal speculation but said one of the company's criteria for acquisitions is determining that it can "build scale in international geographies, especially in emerging markets."

Mr. West offered scant guidance on how the company plans to expand globally beyond saying it will continue entering into joint ventures and making acquisitions in Asia and Latin America.

He told investors that Hershey will take on Mars-Wrigley by competing aggressively in the U.S. "Although the Mars-Wrigley deal could affect our ranking, we remain well positioned on many dimensions, especially in chocolate, where we have a 43% share" of the $16 billion U.S. market, he said. "We are more convinced than ever that our core U.S. business can grow."

Not enough, said Credit Suisse analyst Robert Moskow. "My concern is that the international footprint they now have in these emerging markets is very tiny. The real focus internally seems to be squeezing more growth out of the domestic market." Mr. Moskow has the equivalent of a "hold" rating on Hershey stock; his firm has an investment-banking relationship with Hershey.

Hershey has struggled in recent years as it neglected core brands in favor of pushing limited-edition products. That opened the door for Mars to introduce new Dove dark chocolates and other items that stole market share from Hershey.

Mr. West told investors that Hershey marketers have talked to tens of thousands of consumers to determine why and how often they buy candy. They identified six core consumer groups, including "loyal indulgers," or older consumers who are loyal to specific brands, and "engaged exploring munchers," who are the least price-sensitive and most profitable.

The company is now developing products targeted at these groups, Mr. West said. New Reese's Whipps -- a chocolate bar with a fluffy peanut butter and nougat filling -- is aimed at consumers seeking less fat, while Reese's Select Clusters -- chocolate-covered pieces of nuts, peanut butter and caramel that resemble turtle candies -- target consumers who want to indulge. To appeal to women between the ages of 25 and 49, the company launched creamy bite-size pieces of milk or dark chocolate called Hershey's Bliss. Hershey has also worked with Starbucks Corp. to develop a new line of chocolates in such flavors as Caramel Macchiato and Madagascar Vanilla Bean.

Mr. West said the company will increase marketing spending about 20% this year to more than $155 million, and plans an additional 20% increase next year. The company is also trying to make grocery-store candy aisles easier to shop by testing new displays that group products by purchasing occasion, such as movie candy, gifts and items for the candy dish.

My father was planning a trip to Europe one summer afternoon when he went to the bathroom and didn't return. My mother found him dead of a heart attack on the bathroom floor. My husband's grandfather's heart gave out as he was walking down the sidewalk in New York.

Everybody knows somebody who has had a sudden, fatal heart attack, and it's many people's secret fear. More than 300,000 Americans die of heart disease without making it to the hospital each year; most of them from sudden cardiac arrest, according to the American Heart Association. In about half of those cases, the heart attack itself is the first symptom.

Deaths from cardiovascular disease in general have dropped dramatically in recent years, but it is still the No. 1 killer of men and women in the U.S. -- claiming more lives than cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, accidents and diabetes combined.

That's in part because, for all the advances doctors have made in understanding risk factors, lowering cholesterol with statins and propping open narrowed arteries with stents, most heart attacks are caused when tiny bits of plaque break loose and burst like popcorn kernels, forming clots that block arteries. That prevents blood from reaching areas of heart muscle, which start to die. It's hard to predict when that might happen -- which is why people who never knew they had heart disease, and people who thought it was under control, still have sudden heart attacks. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

WHEN TO CALL 911

• Common heart-attack signs in men:
-Pressure, fullness in chest that may come and go
-Discomfort in arms, neck, back, jaw
-Shortness of breath
-Lightheadedness
• Women more likely to have:
-Sudden sweating
-Shortness of breath
-Nausea/vomiting
-Back or jaw pain

"We have terrific therapies that were unimaginable 25 or 30 years ago," says E. Scott Monrad, director of the cardiac catheterization lab at Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y. "But one of the biggest risks is dying before you even get to see a doctor."

Last weekend, scores of commentators on health and political blogs offered theories about what might have been done to save NBC's Tim Russert, who died of a sudden heart attack at work Friday. Few details were released, other than that the much-loved "Meet the Press" moderator was being treated for asymptomatic coronary artery disease, had diabetes and an enlarged heart, and had a stress test in April.

Many blog-posters argued that Mr. Russert should have had an angiogram -- an invasive diagnostic test in which the coronary arteries are injected with dye and X-rayed to spot blockages. But even if he had had the procedure an hour before the attack, doctors might not have seen anything to be alarmed about. More than two-thirds of heart attacks occur in arteries that are less than 50% narrowed by plaque buildup -- and those are often too small to show up on an angiogram or cause much chest pain.

Similarly, the stress test Mr. Russert had is better suited to detecting significantly narrowed arteries than the small, soft unstable kind of plaque that often causes fatal blood clots.

Indeed, about a third of people who have heart attacks don't have the usual risk factors, such as family history of heart disease, abdominal fat, high blood pressure or high cholesterol.
RISK FACTORS

The symptoms that make up "metabolic syndrome" put people at high risk for heart attack, stroke and diabetes. (Smoking and heavy alcohol consumption also raise the risk.)
• Waist more than 40 inches for men; 35 inches for women
• Blood pressure over 130/85mmHg
• Fasting glucose over 110 mg/dl
• Triglycerides over 150 mg/dl
• LDL cholesterol over 100 mg/dl
• HDL cholesterol under 40 mg/dl

"Time and again we see examples of unexpected cardiac disease in people who didn't know they had it," says Prediman K. Shah, director of cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, one of many experts who think wider use of coronary calcium CT scans could help spot more people at risk of soft-plaque blockages. The noninvasive procedure takes about 15 minutes and costs a few hundred dollars. But few insurers cover it because there is scant evidence that treating people on that basis saves lives.

At a minimum, seeing a picture of the calcium lining their arteries can be a wake-up call for patients to take their coronary-artery disease seriously and to be diligent in taking medication, exercising and making other healthy lifestyle changes.

Mr. Russert's family and physicians haven't disclosed how his coronary artery disease was diagnosed, or how he was being treated. NBC colleagues said the 58-year-old journalist had been working to control his condition with exercise and diet, though his weight was an ongoing struggle. He had also returned from a family trip to Italy the day before, following a grueling -- but exhilarating -- political primary season. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

Not all heart attacks are fatal. Most of the 1.2 million Americans who had one last year survived. If the area of oxygen-starved heart muscle is small, or in the right ventricle, the heart can often keep pumping, allowing the patient to make it to a hospital, where doctors can break up the blockage with a clot-dissolving drug or catheterization. The situation becomes rapidly fatal if the heart starts beating wildly, and ineffectively, as it struggles to keep pumping. Unless it is jolted back into a normal rhythm within a few minutes, the patient's brain will starve for oxygen and shut down.

Some patients with enlarged hearts like Mr. Russert's are candidates for internal defibrillators that can continuhttp://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
ously monitor heart rhythm and keep it regular automatically. Vice President Cheney, who has survived four heart attacks, has one.

Many airports, shopping malls, schools and offices have portable Automatic External Defibrillators, or AEDs, on hand as well. They're designed to automatically assess a victim's heart rhythm and administer an electrical jolt as needed. The NBC office reportedly didn't have an AED, but an intern performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Mr. Russert until paramedics arrived with a defibrillator.

"The earlier CPR is started, the higher the rate of success," says Dr. Monrad, who says he has had several cases in which vigorous CPR in the field bought precious time and saved a life. On average, however, only a small percentage of people in full cardiac arrests are successfully revived.

More widespread use of AEDs and wider CPR training could save some future victims' lives. Some bloggers suggested that more-aggressive treatment of Mr. Russert's artery disease might have bought him some time, though most experts declined to speculate.

But stents, angioplasty and bypass surgery are only stop-gap measures that don't do anything to halt the progress of the underlying disease. "Everytime I do a procedure on a patient, the family comes up and says, 'Now we don't have to worry anymore,' but that's the wrong message," says Dr. Monrad. "Physicians have to be tough on the standards we set for patients, and patients have to be tougher about the kind of lifestyle choices they make."

The heart has many mysteries that scientists are still unraveling, such as what causes those killer bits of plaque to rupture, the role of inflammation, the complex interplay of diet, vitamins and amino acids like homocysteine. Even the size of cholesterol particles is under scrutiny. "The more small LDL particles you have, the higher your risk of heart disease," says Larry McCleary, a former pediatric neurosurgeon at Denver Children's Hospital who had a heart attack while on rounds at age 46, and has since lost weight, reduced his blood pressure and triglycerides, and exercises daily.

"It's important that each person take responsibility for taking care of themselves," says Edmund Herrold, a clinical cardiologist in New York City and professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. "Get a regular checkup. Watch your weight and your blood pressure and your cholesterol and if you have diabetes, keep that under control. Exercise. Take an aspirin every day. Eliminate meat. There's no guarantee, but you can dramatically lower the risk of a cardiac event if you pay attention to these issues."

During the last American food-and-gas-price crisis, in the 1970s, one of my colleagues on the Berkeley student newspaper told me that he and his semi-communal housemates had taken a vote. They’d calculated they could afford meat or coffee. They chose coffee.

The decision was slightly less effete than it sounds now — the Starbucks clone wars were still some years off, so he was talking about choosing Yuban over ground chuck. But it nonetheless said something about us as spoiled Americans. Riots were relatively common in Berkeley in those days. But they were never about food. (That particular revolution was starting without us on Shattuck Avenue, where Chez Panisse had just opened.)

However, elsewhere on the globe, people were on the edge of starvation. Grain prices were soaring, rice stocks plummeting. In Ethiopia and Cambodia, people were well over the edge, and food riots helped lead to the downfall of Emperor Haile Selassie and the victory of the Khmer Rouge.

Now it’s happening again. While Americans grumble about gasoline prices, food riots have seared Bangladesh, Egypt and African countries. In Haiti, they cost the prime minister his job. Rice-bowl countries like China, India and Indonesia have restricted exports and rice is shipped under armed guard.

And again, Thomas Malthus, a British economist and demographer at the turn of the 19th century, is being recalled to duty. His basic theory was that populations, which grow geometrically, will inevitably outpace food production, which grows arithmetically. Famine would result. The thought has underlain doomsday scenarios both real and imagined, from the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to the Population Bomb of 1968.

But over the last 200 years, with the Industrial Revolution, the Transportation Revolution, the Green Revolution and the Biotech Revolution, Malthus has been largely discredited. The wrenching dislocations of the last few months do not change that, most experts say. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
But they do show the kinds of problems that can emerge.

The whole world has never come close to outpacing its ability to produce food. Right now, there is enough grain grown on earth to feed 10 billion vegetarians, said Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University and the author of “How Many People Can the Earth Support?” But much of it is being fed to cattle, the S.U.V.’s of the protein world, which are in turn guzzled by the world’s wealthy.

Theoretically, there is enough acreage already planted to keep the planet fed forever, because 10 billion humans is roughly where the United Nations predicts that the world population will plateau in 2060. But success depends on portion control; in the late 1980s, Brown University’s World Hunger Program calculated that the world then could sustain 5.5 billion vegetarians, 3.7 billion South Americans or 2.8 billion North Americans, who ate more animal protein than South Americans.

Even if fertility rates rose again, many agronomists think the world could easily support 20 billion to 30 billion people.

Anyone who has ever flown across the United States can see how that’s possible: there’s a lot of empty land down there. The world’s entire population, with 1,000 square feet of living space each, could fit into Texas. Pile people atop each other like Manhattanites, and they get even more elbow room.

Water? When it hits $150 a barrel, it will be worth building pipes from the melting polar icecaps, or desalinating the sea as the Saudis do.

The same potential is even more obvious flying around the globe. The slums of Mumbai are vast; but so are the empty arable spaces of Rajasthan. Africa, a huge continent with a mere 770 million people on it, looks practically empty from above. South of the Sahara, the land is rich; south of the Zambezi, the climate is temperate. But it is farmed mostly by people using hoes.

As Harriet Friedmann, an expert on food systems at the University of Toronto, pointed out, Malthus was writing in a Britain that echoed the dichotomy between today’s rich countries and the third world: an elite of huge landowners practicing “scientific farming” of wool and wheat who made fat profits; many subsistence farmers barely scratching out livings; migration by those farmers to London slums, followed by emigration. The main difference is that emigration then was to colonies where farmland was waiting, while now it is to richer countries where jobs are.

Malthus’s world filled up, and its farmers, defying his predictions, became infinitely more productive. Admittedly, emptying acreage so it can be planted with genetically modified winter wheat and harvested by John Deere combines can be a brutal process, but it is solidly within the Western canon. My Scottish ancestors, for example, became urbanites thanks to the desire of English scientific farmers (for which read “landlords and bribers of clan chiefs”) to graze more sheep in the highlands. Four generations later, I got to mull the coffee-meat dilemma while actually living on newsroom pizza.

So it ultimately worked out for one spoiled Scottish-American. But what about the 800 million people who are chronically hungry, even in riot-free years?

Dr. Friedmann argues that there is a Malthusian unsustainability to the way big agriculture is practiced, that it degrades genetic diversity and the environment so much that it will eventually reach a tipping point and hunger will spread.

Others vigorously disagree. In their view, the world is almost endlessly bountiful. If food became as pricey as oil, we would plow Africa, fish-farm the oceans and build hydroponic skyscraper vegetable gardens. But they see the underlying problem in terms more Marxian than Malthusian: the rich grab too much of everything, including biomass. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

For the moment, simply ending subsidies to American and European farmers would let poor farmers compete, which besides feeding their families would push down American food prices and American taxes.

Tyler Cowen, a George Mason University economist, notes that global agriculture markets are notoriously unfree and foolishly managed. Rich countries subsidize farmers, but poor governments fix local grain prices or ban exports just when world prices rise — for example, less than 7 percent of the world’s rice crosses borders. That discourages the millions of third world farmers who grow enough for themselves and a bit extra for sale from planting that bit extra.

Americans are attracted to Malthusian doom-saying, Dr. Cowen argues, “because it’s a pre-emptive way to hedge your fear. Prepare yourself for the worst, and you feel safer than when you’re optimistic.”

Dr. Cohen, of Rockefeller University, sees it in more sinister terms: Americans like Malthus because he takes the blame off us. Malthus says the problem is too many poor people.

Or, to put it in the terms in which the current crisis is usually explained: too many hard-working Chinese and Indians who think they should be able to eat pizza, meat and coffee and aspire to a reservation at Chez Panisse. They get blamed for raising global prices so much that poor Africans and Asians can’t afford porridge and rice. The truth is, the upward pressure was there before they added to it.

America has always been charitable, so the answer has never been, “Let them eat bean sprouts.” But it has been, “Let them eat subsidized American corn shipped over in American ships.” That may need to change.

If Sok Chear had her way, she would slice the elderly man into ribbons and pour salt into his wounds. She would beat him up and torture him and give him electric shocks to make him talk.

For Ly Monysar, even that would not be enough. “Only killing them will make me feel calm,” he said. “I want them to suffer the way I suffered. I say this from the heart.”

Sok Chear, an office worker, and Ly Monysar, a security guard, are two of the millions of Cambodians who suffered for four years in the late 1970s under the brutal Communist Khmer Rouge, which caused the deaths of 1.7 million people.

Three decades later, five aging former Khmer Rouge leaders are in custody and awaiting trial. And Sok Chear and Ly Monysar have an innovative role to play in the tribunal, where the first case is expected to begin this autumn.

They are two of hundreds of people who have applied to the court to be recognized officially as victims of the Khmer Rouge and to bring parallel civil cases against them.

They will have a chance not to beat and torture them but to seek mostly symbolic reparations — a monument, perhaps, or a museum or trauma center.

It is a controversial experiment in this unusual hybrid tribunal, which is administered jointly by the United Nations and the Cambodian government and comprises elements of Cambodian and international law.

“For the first time in history, the internal rules of a tribunal will give victims of crimes the possibility to participate as parties,” said Gabriela González Rivas, deputy head of the tribunal’s victims unit.

Victims have been included in other comparable tribunals, like the International Criminal Court, but their role has been more limited. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

As civil parties, the victims here will have standing comparable to those of the accused, including rights to participate in the investigation, to be represented by a lawyer, to call witnesses and to question the accused at trial, according to a court statement.

“Participation in these types of proceedings is a tool of empowerment,” Ms. Rivas said. “People can tell their story, feel that what happened to them is a consideration, a recognizing that what happened to them shouldn’t have happened.”

The inclusion of victims is part of the evolution and refining of the mechanisms of international justice, said Diane Orentlicher, special counsel of the Open Society Justice Initiative, in a telephone interview from New York.

“There has been a growing recognition, after 15 years of international and hybrid courts like this one, not to exclude victims from the justice that is being dispensed on their behalf,” she said. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
The Cambodia tribunal has been accused of compromising international standards of justice with its awkward admixture of Cambodian law and its vulnerability to manipulation by the country’s strongman, Prime Minister Hun Sen, who exercises control over the Cambodian judiciary.

The participation of victims is drawing more criticism, partly from people concerned for the rights of the accused and the preservation of the presumption of innocence.

Victor Koppe, a defense lawyer for one of the Khmer Rouge leaders, Nuon Chea, called the presumption of innocence “the most fundamental issue” in the case.

“The question is whether or not everything in this tribunal is institutionalized in such a way that only guilty verdicts can come,” he said.

Other critics say the court is being distracted by social agendas from its core task of seeking justice for crimes against humanity.

“I would put this under the category of therapeutic legalism,” said Peter Maguire, an expert on international justice and author of “Facing Death in Cambodia.”

“This is an invention of the 1990s, where people freighted the trials with all this baggage,” Mr. Maguire said. “How do you measure closure, how do you measure truth, how do you measure reconciliation? These are not empirical categories.”

These added elements can also encumber an already tortuously slow process, the critics say.

Almost two years of the tribunal’s budgeted three-year mandate have passed since it was set up in August 2006, after nearly a decade of contentious negotiation between the United Nations and the Cambodian government.

Nearly a year has passed since the first of the five defendants was charged in the case. Most analysts are confident that more money will be found from international donors to extend the life of the tribunal, which began with a budget of $53 million. But as Mr. Maguire put it, this court needs to get hustling.

So far, Ms. Rivas said, about 1,300 people who say they were victims have applied to participate. About half seek to be civil parties, while the other half offer evidence that could be submitted to prosecutors. Most names have been channeled through a documentation center or through human rights groups.

Ten people have been accepted so far as civil parties, she said.

As the number grows, it is likely that they will be combined into class actions representing religious or ethnic groups, victims of particular crimes or other parties.

Theary Seng, 37, a Cambodian-born American lawyer who lost her parents to the Khmer Rouge, is organizing two groups of orphans — including Sok Chear, Ly Monysar and herself — to bring civil cases.

In February at a pretrial hearing, Ms. Seng became the first and so far the only victim to address the court, standing face to face with Nuon Chea, whom she blames for the deaths of her parents.

Though her words were addressed to the court, she said, her eyes were locked directly with those of Nuon Chea, 82, the most senior of the five imprisoned leaders — the man Sok Chear said she wants to flay.

In a short statement, Ms. Seng contrasted the legal protections that Nuon Chea is receiving with the arbitrary arrest and abuse she said she and her younger brother suffered as children under the Khmer Rouge.

Noun Chea, the Khmer Rouge ideologue, was sometimes known as Brother Number Two to Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, who died in 1998. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

“He was stoic, stoic,” Ms. Seng said, recalling the confrontation. “He’s completely stoic. Eighty percent of the time I was addressing him in my statement. He didn’t break the stare.”

Nearly one-fourth of the Cambodian population died between 1975 and 1979 from execution, torture, starvation and overwork in the mass labor brigades the Khmer Rouge created.

Today, though, most of the survivors are as stoic as their victimizers. When asked about the tribunal, most simply say they want to know who caused their suffering and why.

But the approach of the court sessions has aroused the feelings of many people, and those who have applied to participate are among those with the strongest emotions.

Sok Chear, 32, who said she was raped and brutalized as a girl by the Khmer Rouge, remains inconsolable over the loss of her father, an engineer, who disappeared into the hands of the black-clothed cadre and never returned.

“We were always waiting for him to come home, but he never came,” she said. “We were always waiting and waiting. Even now, I still look around — maybe my father is still alive.”

Tears still come when she talks about him.

“He gave me rice to eat and I want to repay him,” she said, “even one plate of rice, my gift to him, even one plate for him to eat from his daughter.”

Ly Monysar, 41, is a broken man, poor and sick and bitter, his voice quavering as he tells of the loss of his entire family when he was 9.

He sustains himself with fantasies of revenge every bit as chilling as the calculated brutality men like Nuon Chea are accused of.

“I want to kill all those people who did this to me,” he said. “And if I can’t, I’ll come back in the next life and find them. I’ll create my own genocidal regime and take my revenge on them all.”

Books have Amazon, and classified advertisements have Craigslist. Prostitutes have The Erotic Review.

In a little-known success story, TheEroticReview.com has come to dominate the country’s prostitution scene, which is increasingly migrating from the street corner to the Internet.

But now the site’s founder, David Elms, is in jail awaiting trial in Los Angeles in a case unrelated to the site, leaving the fate of his influential underground world uncertain. In dozens of conversations and in postings on the Internet in recent weeks, prostitutes have expressed concern that if The Erotic Review goes offline it could hurt business. But in the same breath, many are rejoicing about the potential downfall of Mr. Elms.

One escort agency that was banned from the site has accused Mr. Elms of antitrust violations, suggesting that he abuses his power over the sex trade. Other critics say he accepts, and sometimes demands, sex or money to promote certain women and agencies.

He has denied the accusations.

The Web site, which is still in operation, allows visitors to rank their experiences with prostitutes on a scale of 1 to 10, as well as to leave comments. It gets 500,000 to 1 million unique visitors each month, according to companies that track Web traffic.

“He is the most influential man in the prostitution business in America,” said Jason Itzler, the former head of NY Confidential, an escort ring. Mr. Itzler was released from prison last year after serving 30 months for the attempted promotion of prostitution.

Mr. Elms, 37, was jailed this month on accusations that he failed five drug tests since October, a violation of his probation from a 2006 drug and gun conviction. If he is found to have violated his probation, he could be sentenced to four years in prison.

Mr. Elms usually does not say much publicly about his Web site, asserting that reporters twist his words. But in an interview with MSNBC.com in 2006, Mr. Elms said that he started The Erotic Review in 1999 because he wanted to empower the customers of prostitutes.

“I was getting ripped off,” he said. “There was no way to hold people accountable for their actions.”

The house in Hawthorne, Calif., where Mr. Elms lives is modest, with a well-kept yard. The only unusual signs are a surveillance camera over the porch and the late-model Mercedes sports car parked out front with the vanity license plate “Will She.”

The Erotic Review works like many consumer review sites. Visitors to the site can look for prostitutes by city or area code and find contact information, personal Web sites, physical attributes like height and body type, and numeric rankings.

More broadly, the Internet is changing prostitution. In recent years, thousands of prostitutes have posted their own Web sites, including their pictures and contact information. They are called Net walkers. The Internet, they say, has let them more easily reach clientele, particularly high-paying customers, and vet them.

Robert Weisberg, a professor of criminal law at Stanford, said that prostitution promoted online — even if overtly advertised — might not pique law enforcement interest because the crime usually received little attention.

Jodi Michelle Link, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who specializes in sex and vice crimes, said prosecuting Mr. Elms for his connection to The Erotic Review could be difficult for free speech reasons. She also said that the prostitutes who said they had been asked by Mr. Elms for sexual favors would have trouble making a criminal case against him because they could simply choose not to participate on his site.

As The Erotic Review has become more popular, Mr. Elms has attracted criticism. In April, a lawyer for an escort service based in Phoenix, MystiqueUSA, wrote a letter to Mr. Elms threatening him with an antitrust lawsuit for banning the agency and its escorts from the site. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

“There is no question that your Erotic Review site clearly meets the legal standard of a unique facility whose use is essential to effectively compete in the upscale escort services market,” the lawyer wrote. The letter accused the Web site of favoring escort agencies that did not want competition.

Officials at MystiqueUSA would not comment. But on the home page of its Web site, it expresses regret over the assertions in the letter and apologizes to Mr. Elms.

Ms. Link, the deputy district attorney, said the criminal charges against Mr. Elms stemmed from a night in 2006 when the police were called to a hotel where they found him with 3.8 grams of cocaine and a loaded semi-automatic weapon. A prostitute was there and said Mr. Elms had forced her to perform oral sex at gunpoint, but there was not enough evidence to press charges on that accusation, Ms. Link said.

Aseity

For years, when the artist Steven Parrino wasn’t jamming power chords on his electric guitar or tinkering with his motorcycle in his garagelike studio in Brooklyn, he was recycling his unsold paintings: twisting them into eccentric new shapes, smashing their stretcher bars or stabbing them repeatedly with scissors.

His destructive approach to art making earned him the admiration of some fellow artists, but it also concealed a painful reality: There was no market for his work. In eight years and five solo New York shows, his former dealer José Freire said, he sold only two of Mr. Parrino’s paintings, one for $9,000 and the other for $10,000.

Then, on New Year’s Day 2005, Mr. Parrino died from injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident. Demand for his art has since increased, and in September a Parrino retrospective that had toured European museums surfaced at the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue. With Gagosian’s high-profile endorsement and a limited number of works for sale — only two paintings and a dozen drawings out of 56 exhibited works — the top price for a Parrino in that show reached nearly $1 million.

Mr. Parrino’s posthumous ascent was not an anomaly.

While Gagosian was busy folding unsold Parrinos into its seasonal repertory, Zwirner & Wirth was plotting a comparable resuscitation of the career of Al Taylor, who died in 1999 of lung cancer. And Jay Gorney and his colleagues at Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery were busy tapping collectors and auction houses for paintings by Jack Goldstein, who committed suicide in 2003. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

Call it the Dawn of the Dead Artist. The message from the market is as clear as it is macabre. In a quest for fresh material, blue-chip contemporary-art dealers are finding a healthy source of revenue buried six feet under.

With the soaring prices of contemporary art, dealers admit that they have a strategic incentive to seek dead artists and give them recognition. “It’s supply and demand,” said David Zwirner, the Chelsea dealer and co-owner in Zwirner & Wirth, which represents Mr. Taylor’s estate. He said the limited inventory imposed by an artist’s death can end up increasing prices.

“Although overall market conditions are not our only motivation, we are a for-profit gallery,” he added. “There is a commercial angle, or we’d be going out of business.”

All dead artists are not created equal, however. Several other important factors are at work in the surge of interest in Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein. First, all three were active in the 1980s, a period now considered hot.

“It’s very infrequent to find an artist of this period that you’d never even heard of,” said Zwirner & Wirth’s director, Kristine Bell, referring to Mr. Taylor.

Second, each artist’s work fits into the context of each gallery’s artists. Mr. Parrino, for example, is right at home in the somewhat macho male club at Gagosian, which shows the likes of Richard Prince and Richard Serra. And Mr. Taylor’s playful use of materials and droll one-liners aligns with Zwirner & Wirth artists like Richard Tuttle and Fred Sandback, for whom the gallery already has an established and devoted client base.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash, where Mr. Gorney described programming as “intergenerational, and gravitating toward artists who challenge media genres,” seems a cozy niche for Mr. Goldstein’s provocative disregard for traditional image making.

And even if they did not strike gold during their lifetimes, Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein had earned the respect of their peers, as van Gogh had before he died, adding to the credibility of their newfound status.

Despite the market parallels, the work of the three artists could hardly be more different. In his embrace of the American road, for example, Mr. Parrino, born in 1958, mined multiple sources, from zombie movies to underground literature to punk rock and extreme metal. (He often gave reverb and feedback performances in conjunction with his exhibitions.) Convinced that painting was dead, he then tried to jump-start it. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

A onetime assistant to Robert Rauschenberg, Mr. Taylor shunned heroic impulses. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
Combining discarded objects like broomstick handles with absurdist gestures and lighthearted wordplay, Mr. Taylor even based a series of work on dog-urine stains, a joking reference to the so-called accidents and heroic mark making of Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis.

Spectacle was a primary focus for Mr. Goldstein, who had himself buried alive in 1972 while a student at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. With a stethoscope attached to his chest, he breathed air from plastic tubes while a red light above ground flashed to the rhythm of his beating heart. Like his performances Mr. Goldstein’s short films, his recordings of sound effects — like barking dogs and fog horns — and eventually his paintings combined a West Coast embrace of landscape with an almost scientific interest in technical strategies for image making.

With the significance of contemporary artists typically measured by their success on the market, Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein saw others — often their friends — faring much better than they were. Still, they refused to cater to dealers and collectors. In 1998, for example, Mr. Parrino responded to a Swiss dealer’s complaint that he couldn’t sell Mr. Parrino’s work by sending a fax to Marc-Olivier Wahler, then a curator at the Centre d’Art Neuchatel Switzerland. The fax instructed Mr. Wahler to remove all of his works from the dealer’s Geneva commercial gallery.

“Do not worry about damaging anything (damage is good),” it read. “Nothing will be for sale. All will be thrown out after the show.” Seeing his unsold works strewn across the floor of the gallery, Mr. Parrino coolly proceeded to cover their surfaces with black enamel and carve them up with an electric saw.

“Steven was extremely anarchic, especially in relation to gallerists,” said Jutta Koether, a German-born artist who was a friend and frequent collaborator of Mr. Parrino. “He’d been put through the ringer so much. He was like, ‘I don’t have to do this if I don’t want to.’ ”

Far less aggressive in his tactics, Mr. Taylor quietly gave up painting in 1984, when he found it hard to pay for paint and canvases. The following year he began incorporating found objects into three-dimensional works. He stubbornly referred to them as “drawings in space” and refused to promote them to dealers.

“Al was not an art businessman at all,” said his widow, Debbie, in an interview. “He would have never gone around to David Zwirner and said, ‘Would you come to my studio?’ And he wouldn’t have let me do that while he was living. He wasn’t into the audition.”

Instead he relied on word-of-mouth support from his friends, among them the painter Cy Twombly, Mrs. Taylor said.

Mr. Goldstein, for his part, abandoned hard-to-sell films and sound recordings for the more lucrative medium of painting in 1979, only to be criticized for his flagrant use of assistants. “Now it’s totally commonplace to have technicians doing the nitty-gritty,” said the photographer James Welling, a friend of Mr. Goldstein. “But when Jack was doing this, it was considered extreme. People said he didn’t make his own paintings.”

Although Mr. Goldstein’s sales gained momentum in the late 1980s, his gnawingly competitive spirit and addiction to heroin alienated his friends and supporters.

“Jack had a very short temper and made a point of burning bridges,” Mr. Welling said.

Mr. Goldstein dropped out of sight and spent several years living in a trailer in East Los Angeles with no running water or electricity. His career was being resuscitated somewhat in 2003 when he was found hanging from a tree on his parents’ property in San Bernardino, Calif.

After Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein died, admirers of their work assumed responsibility for what the artists had been unwilling — or unable — to do for themselves.

In late 2006 a retrospective of Mr. Parrino’s work organized by the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva was en route to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris when Blair Thurman, a friend and an adviser to his estate, called Andisheh Avini at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Mr. Avini was developing programming for a newly opened series of low-ceilinged, fluorescently lighted rooms at Gagosian’s headquarters on Madison Avenue.

“Blair thought that space kind of screamed for Steven’s work,” Mr. Avini recalled, adding that he proposed a Parrino show to Larry Gagosian, who embraced the idea.

Likewise, after several false starts, Mrs. Taylor approached Zwirner & Wirth, sending them a small selection of her husband’s catalogs. The package sat for several months among a stack of similar parcels until the summer of 2006, when a gallery assistant showed it to Ms. Bell.

Ms. Bell scheduled a visit to the artist’s TriBeCa studio. There, she said, Mrs. Taylor pulled out portfolio after portfolio of drawings arranged by year, beginning with 1974-75 and ending with Mr. Taylor’s death in 1999. Ms. Bell arranged for a visit with Mr. Zwirner, who said he was “blown away” by the work.

After devoting a room in its booth at Art Basel Miami in December to Mr. Taylor, Zwirner & Wirth presented a tightly focused show of drawings and three-dimensional pieces made from 1985 to 1990, just after the artist gave up painting, at its Upper East Side gallery. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

At the Art Chicago fair in April and most recently at Art Basel in Switzerland, Ms. Bell said, the work sold well. Mr. Taylor’s drawings now fetch up to $20,000, and three-dimensional works range from $40,000 to $200,000. “It was a classic rediscovery,” Mr. Zwirner said. As for Mr. Goldstein, his paintings now top out at around $250,000.

With Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s support and a planned retrospective of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Mr. Goldstein’s place in the contemporary art pantheon is all but secured.

Still, the market’s embrace of Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein within a decade of their respective deaths elicits some skepticism. “On the one hand, it’s incredibly romantic,” the artist Robert Longo said in an interview. “These artists are finally getting their due. On the other hand, it’s about a commodity. There’s a limited supply.”

Comparisons to van Gogh are inevitable. The art dealer Theo van Gogh was not successful at selling his brother Vincent’s work, said Joachim Pissarro, director of the Hunter College Art Galleries and a co-curator of “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night,” opening in September at the Museum of Modern Art. Then six months after Vincent’s suicide, Theo also died, leaving the unsold trove of van Gogh’s artwork to his wife, Johanna.

“Johanna was a very shrewd businesswoman,” Mr. Pissarro said. “She knew how to sell a legend. But Vincent was also very, very respected among artists.

“Had van Gogh lived a few years longer, he would have been a millionaire.”
une 23, 2008
Media Talk
For Tom Petty Fans, the True Sound of Vinyl, Also Captured on a CD
By ROBERT LEVINE

The vinyl version of the new album from Mudcrutch, the recently reunited band from the early ’70s that features Tom Petty, comes with a CD that buyers can play in their cars or rip to make MP3 files. Those who do will notice that it is abnormally quiet — and that the CD holder instructs listeners to play it on a good stereo and turn it up.

One reason CDs sound different from LPs is that mastering engineers can make them louder in much the same way commercials sound louder than television shows. This is done by raising the level of the softer sounds, so there is less difference between a bass drum and a whispered vocal. This dynamic compression, as it is called in the audio world, can make songs jump out at listeners who hear them on the radio.

But it can also cause fatigue over time — and audiophiles hate it. So Warner Brothers Records, Mr. Petty’s label, decided to package the vinyl LP that comes out on Tuesday with a CD that was made from the same master. After Ryan Ulyate, a Mudcrutch co-producer, played the regular CD and the LP masters for Tom Biery, the executive vice president for promotion at Warner Brothers Records who also oversees vinyl releases, they decided to use the LP master for the CD.

“Everyone is in love with the way vinyl sounds,” Mr. Biery said. “We started talking about how cool it would be to let people have that experience anywhere they are.”

On a reasonable stereo, the difference between the regular CD and the CD packaged with the LP is noticeable: the drums hit harder, because they’re much louder than the other sounds, and the vocals jump out. “When we did the regular CD, we had to deal with the realities of the marketplace, and we came up with a good compromise,” said Mr. Ulyate, who produced the album with the guitarist Mike Campbell. “But this is a different experience.”

It is not an experience for everyone. Background noise can block some of the quieter passages, and those who use the CD to rip files for an iPod will find that Mudcrutch sounds quieter than other bands. Mr. Biery said that Warner Brothers Records made only 3,500 copies of the LP, but that he thought the company would soon make more, since vinyl sales were rising.

“I think that with the right titles, there’s a market for this in limited quantities,” said Joel Oberstein, president of the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, a music store marketing company. “There’s a new generation of audiophiles now.”

Mary Walls thought she was home-free after annual mammograms found no recurrence of the breast cancer she'd suffered in 1996. Then last fall she also got an ultrasound screening, which showed two questionable areas in her right breast.



• The American Cancer Society issued these guidelines1 on use of MRI for breast-cancer screening last year.
• Here is the abstract2 for a study published JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, that looked at the use of ultrasound.
• Here are abstracts for two studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine (here3 and here4) that look at the use of MRI for screening.

After a biopsy confirmed that the two spots were malignancies, the Matteson, Ill., human-resources consultant got a lumpectomy, chemotherapy and radiation. "I don't think I'll ever trust just mammography by itself again," says Ms. Walls, 62, who received the ultrasound after deciding to participate in a research study her doctor was helping to conduct.

For many years, women worried about breast cancer have been given a simple prescription: annual mammograms, or X-rays of the breasts, typically starting at age 40. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
Now, doctors are increasingly advising some women who may be at higher risk for the disease to consider supplementing a mammogram with other, potentially more sensitive tests.

For those women whose family background, genetics or other factors signal a high level of concern, a growing number of physicians are suggesting magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, which is typically the most sensitive form of screening. Some doctors are also recommending ultrasound, the sound-wave technology often used during pregnancy to view a fetus. Ultrasound can cost $100 or less, compared with $1,000 or more for an MRI. But ultrasound also is less sensitive than an MRI. Health insurers say they generally pay for ultrasound screening, but guarantee coverage of MRI screening only for women at high risk.

The heightened interest in additional screening follows new guidelines issued by the American Cancer Society last year. The cancer society recommended annual MRIs, in addition to mammograms, for women with certain genetic mutations tied to breast cancer and those whose family history signaled a significantly elevated lifetime danger of the disease, among other high-risk categories.

Backing the recommendation were a series of studies that showed an MRI could detect cancers missed by mammography. One study published in 2004 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that in high-risk women, MRIs detected 32 out of 45 breast cancers, while mammograms picked up 18, including some missed by the MRI screening. The two types of screening, plus physical exams, together found 41 of the cancers. The cancer society hasn't issued any recommendations regarding ultrasound screening, but says it continues to accumulate research data. One downside: the risk that MRI and ultrasound screenings can produce many false positives, creating needless anxiety in some patients.

After the cancer society's guidelines came out, Jerry Gehl, medical director of the St. Vincent Breast Center in Little Rock, Ark., started routinely recommending an MRI to high-risk patients, in addition to mammograms. In general, though, he doesn't urge patients to get an MRI if they face only a somewhat-elevated risk. "You have to draw that line somewhere," he says.

Stacy Adams, 36, got a breast-screening MRI for the first time in April at Dr. Gehl's suggestion after also getting a mammogram. Ms. Adams, a receptionist at a radiology clinic, says her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at 31, and her grandmother was similarly diagnosed at 35. Ms. Adams says her tests showed there were no malignancies, and she plans to keep getting both screenings. "I'm just terrified I'm going to miss something," she says.

The American Cancer Society, in its 2007 guidelines, also identified a group of women at an above-average risk of developing breast cancer and for whom MRI might be helpful. But the society concluded there wasn't enough evidence to recommend for or against the scans. This group included breast-cancer survivors and women with dense breast tissue. Dense breasts, which are more common in younger women, are harder to read with a mammogram. Fatty tissue provides clearer contrasts.

"It's not very reassuring to hear 'your mammogram is normal, but it's only because we can't see anything at all,'" says Robert Smith, director of cancer screening at the cancer society. For women at average risk of breast cancer, the cancer society's guidelines opposed MRI as part of routine screening.

The cancer society also says that women can be separated into different screening-recommendation categories using computerized risk models that focus mainly on family history. Those with a lifetime breast-cancer risk of around 20% or more should supplement annual mammograms with MRI screenings, while those with a 15% to 20% risk are in the middle group, and women with a lifetime risk of less than 15% can stick with just the annual mammograms. More information is available at http://CAonline.AmCancerSoc.org5. Search for "MRI screening."

Major private insurers Aetna Inc., WellPoint Inc. and Cigna Corp. say they pay for annual MRI screening in women at high risk of breast cancer, typically using criteria close to those of the cancer society. For women who fall short of high risk, but who still have a somewhat elevated chance of developing breast cancer in their lifetimes, insurers may not always pay. "Our policies provide benefits in situations in which there is adequate evidence to make a specific recommendation," says Bob McDonough, Aetna's head of clinical policy research and development.

For ultrasound screening, Cigna doesn't require prior authorization, so "it's at the discretion of the physician," says Douglas Hadley, director of the company's coverage policy unit. Dr. McDonough of Aetna says the insurer is for the moment "simply covering [ultrasound] without scrutinizing its use." WellPoint says it also doesn't require prior authorization for breast ultrasound screening.

Medicare covers mammograms, but the federal insurance plan for older people won't pay for ultrasound or MRI as part of routine screening. The program can pay for the exams if a doctor feels they are medically necessary, a plan spokesman says.

A study published in May in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, highlighted the use of ultrasound as a supplement to mammograms. The study, conducted by American College of Radiology researchers, looked at women at a somewhat-elevated level of risk. It found that of 40 women diagnosed with breast cancer, mammograms raised red flags for 20, while mammography plus ultrasound detected 31.

But the study also highlighted a downside of ultrasound -- it generated many false positive readings. MRI screenings also carry this risk. Though the false alarms may result simply in extra time and stress pursuing additional scans, some women also get unnecessary biopsies. Often, these involve little more than a needle stuck into the breast, with no scarring or long-term effects.

But biopsies can also be quite invasive. Sharon Nelson, 54, who had cancer in her right breast nearly a decade ago, had a scare when an MRI in 2003 picked up potential trouble spots in both breasts. Alarmed that her disease may have returned, and worried about her health while her two daughters were still young, she got biopsies that involved removal of significant tissue. There was no cancer, but she was left with a visible indentation in her healthy left breast. "It's hard to have a surgery that wasn't necessary," says Ms. Nelson, a nurse at a breast-health nonprofit center in Arcata, Calif.

Medical practitioners are divided about the proper role of ultrasound in breast-cancer screening. Wendie Berg, a radiologist at a clinic in Lutherville, Md., who was the lead author of the study published in JAMA, says she recommends ultrasound screening to some women who don't have evidence of very high risk that would justify an MRI. "It is a judgment call. The denser the breast, the more difficult the mammogram is to read, the more likely I am to recommend an ultrasound," she says. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

But Constance Lehman, a University of Washington professor of radiology who led a study published last year in the New England Journal on MRI screening, says she never advises ultrasound for patients. "We find it ineffective as a screening tool," she says. "It's not even in the same ballpark" as an MRI.

Here's a prediction: Zimbabwe's Morgan Tsvangirai will win this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

He would be its worthiest recipient since the prize went to Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi (one of the prize's few worthy recipients, period) in 1991. He deserves it for standing up – politically as well as physically – to Robert Mugabe's goon-squad dictatorship for over a decade; for organizing a democratic opposition and winning an election hugely stacked against him; and for refusing to put his own ambition ahead of his people's well-being when the run-off poll became, as he put it last weekend, a "violent, illegitimate sham."

Here's another prediction: Mr. Tsvangirai's Nobel will have about as much effect on the bloody course of Zimbabwe's politics as Aung San Suu Kyi's has had on Burma's. Effectively, zero.

Zimbabwe is now another spot on the map of the civilized world's troubled conscience. Burma is also there, along with Tibet and Darfur. (Question: When will "Free Zimbabwe" bumper stickers become ubiquitous?) These are uniquely nasty places, and not just because uniquely nasty things are happening. They're nasty because the dissonance between the wider world's professed concern and what it actually does is almost intolerable.

Look at the legislation that has been proposed or passed in the U.S. Congress on Darfur. There is the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act (H.R. 3127), signed by President Bush into law in 2006, which sanctions officials identified as responsible for the genocide. There is House Resolution 992, which urges the president to appoint a special envoy to Sudan. (The president did appoint an envoy; care to remember his name?) http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

There is the 2007 Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act, which allows (but does not require) U.S. states and municipalities to divest from companies doing business in Sudan. There is Senate Resolution 559, urging the president to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur. There is the Clinton Amendment, the Reid Amendment, the Menendez Amendment, the Durbin/Leahy Amendment, the Jackson Amendment, the Lieberman Resolution, the Obama/Reid Amendment and the Peace in Darfur Act.

This is a partial list. Meantime, here are the accumulating estimates of the conflict's toll on Darfuri lives. September 2004: 50,000, according to the World Health Organization. May 2005: between 63,000 and 146,000 "excess deaths," according to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at Belgium's Catholic University of Louvain. March 2008: 200,000 deaths, according to U.N. officials. April 2008: The U.N. acknowledges the previous month's estimate might have undercounted about 100,000 victims.

In a video clip for the Save Darfur coalition, Barack Obama offered that the genocide is "a stain on our souls." His proposal for removing it? "Ratcheting up sanctions" on the Sudanese government and making "firm commitments in terms of the logistics, and the transport and the equipping" of an international peacekeeping mission for Darfur. No word, however, as to whether Mr. Obama would actually risk the lives of American soldiers to stop the slaughter.

It's a similar story in Zimbabwe. The U.N. Security Council met yesterday to discuss the crisis, while British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told parliament "the world is of one view: that the status quo cannot continue."

But, of course, the status quo will continue. Just possibly, Mr. Mugabe and his senior ministers will no longer be allowed to travel to Europe, though that does nothing for the people of Zimbabwe. Other sanctions will have no effect: The regime is already busy expelling relief workers and seizing food aid. Mr. Mugabe wants "his people" to die – it means fewer mouths to feed, and fewer potential opposition supporters to jail, maim or murder.

A solution for Zimbabwe's crisis isn't hard to come by: Someone – ideally the British – must remove Mr. Mugabe by force, install Mr. Tsvangirai as president, arm his supporters, prevent any rampages, and leave. "Saving Darfur" is a somewhat different story, but it also involves applying Western military force to whatever degree is necessary to get Khartoum to come to terms with an independent or autonomous Darfur. Burma? Same deal.

International relations theorists, including prominent Obama adviser Susan Rice, justify these sorts of interventions under the rubric of a "Responsibility to Protect" – a concept that comes oddly close to Kipling's White Man's Burden. So close, in fact, that its inherent paternalism has hitherto inhibited many liberals from endorsing the kinds of interventions toward which they are now tip-toeing, thousands of deaths too late.

So let's by all means end the hand-wringing and embrace the responsibility to protect, wherever necessary and feasible. Let's spare the thousands of innocents, punish the wicked, oppose tyrants, and support democrats – both in places where it is now fashionable to do so (Burma) and in places where it is not (Iraq). If that turns out to be Mr. Obama's foreign policy, it will be a worthy one. It does come oddly close to the Bush Doctrine.

America's house prices are falling even faster than during the Great Depression

As house prices in America continue their rapid descent, market-watchers are having to cast back ever further for gloomy comparisons. The latest S&P/Case-Shiller national house-price index, published this week, showed a slump of 14.1% in the year to the first quarter, the worst since the index began 20 years ago. Now Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale University and co-inventor of the index, has compiled a version that stretches back over a century. This shows that the latest fall in nominal prices is already much bigger than the 10.5% drop in 1932, the worst point of the Depression. And things are even worse than they look. In the deflationary 1930s house prices declined less in real terms. Today inflation is running at a brisk pace, so property prices have fallen by a staggering 18% in real terms over the past year.

http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

William Thomas Burns M.D.
, died June 15, 2008 in Atlantic City Medical Center after suffering a massive stroke.
He was born in Harrisburg, Sept 6, 1921 to Mildred and Walter Burns
He was a graduate of Harrisburg Academy, Bucknell University and the Temple University School of Medicine. At Harrisburg Hospital he was chairman of the Utilization Committee (1968), Constitution and By-Laws Committee (1969), Chairman of the OB-GYN Department (1977-1980), Co-Director of the OB-GYN Residency Program (1978-1980), President of the Medical Staff (1980) and served on the Board of Managers (1981-1984). From 1994-1995 he was on the board of trustees at Homeland Center.
Dr. Burns took three trips to Indian Reservations to volunteer medical services at Chinle Indian Reservation in Arizona and Pipe Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Also, in 1960 he served on the hospital ship Hope in Peru.
He was a member of Camp Hill Presbyterian Church and the West Shore Country Club.
"D.B." was proud of the years in practice in OB-GYN in Harrisburg. He was very proud the family and enjoyed watching the children grow and mature. He will be greatly missed by the extended family.
He was preceded in death by his wife, Marjorie Clayton Burns and his son, Walter Thomas Burns. "D.B." is survived by his wife Shirley, a daughter Bonnie Huzey (Tom) of Knoxville, PA; and step-children, Vickie Bowman (Jim) of Camp Hill, Anna Bierce (David) of Tallmadge, Ohio, and Anna Bissette (Brad) of Mechanicsburg and Peter Neavling (Lisa) of Camp Hill; five grandchildren, three great grandchildren and eight step-grandchildren
Memorial services will be at noon, Saturday, June 28 in Camp Hill Presbyterian Church. Burial will be at the convenience of the family. Visitation will follow services in the church.
Musselman Funeral Home and Cremation Services, Inc. Lemoyne is handling arrangements.

http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET

Stanton Terry Friedman (July 29, 1934) is a professional ufologist, currently residing in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
Friedman graduated from the University of Chicago, earning a Bachelor of Science (1955) and Master of Science (1956) degree in nuclear physics. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NETFriedman used to bill himself as "The Flying Saucer Physicist" due to his nuclear physics degrees. He currently refers to himself as a "scientific ufologist." (Moseley & Pflock 2002:201-2) Friedman was employed for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for such companies as General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse, TRW Systems, Aerojet General Nucleonics, and McDonnell Douglas where he worked on highly advanced, classified programs on nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and various compact nuclear power plants for space applications. Since the 1980s, he has done related consultant work in the Radon-detection industry. Friedman is a member of the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and AFTRA.

In 1970 Friedman departed full-time employment as a physicist to pursue the scientific investigation of UFOs. Since then, he has lectured at more than 600 colleges and 100 professional groups in 50 states, nine provinces, and 16 foreign countries. Additionally, he has worked as a consultant on the topic. He has published more than 80 UFO related papers and has appeared on hundreds of radio and television programs. He has also provided written testimony to Congressional hearings and appeared twice at the United Nations. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET(About the Author: (Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience) :)

He is the original civilian investigator of the Roswell and supports the hypothesis that it was a genuine crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. (See Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident.)His publications regarding Roswell have been criticized by skeptics, but his meticulous investigation has produced convincing evidence, including sworn statements by eye-witnesses and government documents to support his conclusions. Friedman has also been criticized among skeptics for refusing to accept that all of the Majestic 12 papers are fakes, although he has found evidence that some are hoaxes.http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET

Friedman has criticized the scientific SETI program to search for extraterrestrial life, and has successfully debated against its director on the extraterrestrial hypothesis. He has also threatened those who have slandered him with legal action.

In 1968 Friedman argued to a Committee of The House Of Representatives that the evidence suggests that earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial vehicles.

Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Ph.D. (May 6, 1942) is an optical physicist employed by the U.S. Navy, and a leading UFO researcher.

He is listed in Who's Who in Technology Today and American Men and Women of Science. In addition, he is a noted contemporary UFO investigator specializing in technical analysis and photoanalysis of UFO cases. The following information is derived primarily from his website's biography page. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

Dr. Maccabee received a B.S. in physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., and then at American University, Washington, DC, (M.S. and Ph. D. in physics). In 1972 he commenced his long career at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, presently headquartered at Dahlgren, Virginia. He has worked on optical data processing, generation of underwater sound with lasers and various aspects of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) using high power lasers.

He has been active in UFO research since the late 1960s when he joined the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and was active in research and investigation for NICAP until its demise in 1980. He became a member of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) in 1975 and was subsequently appointed to the position of state Director for Maryland, a position he still holds. In 1979 he was instrumental in establishing the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) and was the chairman for about 13 years. He presently serves on the National Board of the Fund.

His UFO research and investigations (which, he often stresses, are completely unrelated to his Navy work) have included the Kenneth Arnold sighting (June 24, 1947), the McMinnville, Oregon (Trent) photos of 1950, the Gemini 11 astronaut photos of September, 1966, the New Zealand sightings of December, 1978, the Japan Airlines (JAL1628) sighting of November 1986, the numerous sightings of Ed Walters and others in Gulf Breeze, Florida, 1987 - 1988, the "red bubba" sightings, 1990-1992 (including his own sighting in September, 1991), the Mexico City video of August, 1997 (which he deemed a hoax), the Phoenix lights sightings of March 13, 1997, and many others.

He has also done historical research and was the first to obtain the secret "flying disc file" of the FBI (what he calls "the REAL X-Files"). In addition, he has collected documents from the CIA, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, and other government agencies.

Maccabee is the author or coauthor of about three dozen technical articles and more than a hundred UFO articles over the last 30 years, including many which appeared in the MUFON UFO Journal and MUFON Symposium proceedings. Among his papers was a reanalysis of the statistics and results of the famed Battelle Memorial Institute Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, a massive analysis of 3200 Air Force cases through the mid 1950s. (See Identified Flying Objects (IFOs)). Another was a reanalysis of the results of the Condon Committee UFO study from 1969. (Like many others, Maccabee concluded that Edward Condon lied about the results.)

In addition, he has also written or contributed to half a dozen books on the subject of UFOs and appeared on numerous radio and TV shows and documentaries (some given below) as an authority on the subject.

Maccabee is also an accomplished pianist who performed at the 1997 and 1999 MUFON symposia. He lives in Frederick County, Maryland.

The defining quality of great children's literature is persistence: It stays with the reader with undiminished vitality into adulthood. There is a certain type of gloomy old man who, for A.A. Milne's readers, will always be an Eeyore; children who read "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" understand her befuddlement at the curious ways of the world only more acutely as they grow older.

No children's book has had a greater influence on the minds and attitudes of young English-speakers than "The Jungle Book" (1894) and its companion, "The Second Jungle Book" (1895), written by Rudyard Kipling while he was living in Brattleboro, Vt. These exciting tales and thumpingly rhythmic poems tell of the childhood and coming of age of Mowgli, a baby lost in the Indian jungle after a tiger attacks his village, who is adopted and raised by a pack of wolves and grows up to become a great hunter. Baloo, the wise, patient bear, teaches the "man-cub" the Law of the Pack, the animals' code of chivalry in the bloody battlefield of the forest.
[Jungle Book image]
Christopher Serra

What makes "The Jungle Book" so absorbingly vital, the reason it has persisted, is its naturalism. In Beatrix Potter's "The Tale of Peter Rabbit," Mrs. Rabbit goes to the baker to buy brown bread and currant buns for her baby bunnies; Mowgli learns to hunt and kill for food, and to escape being hunted and killed by his implacable foe, the tiger Shere Khan. The architect of Kipling's jungle was Darwin, both in that it's governed by the principle of the survival of the fittest, and in its relative paucity of sentimentality for an age that had an insatiable sweet tooth.

Another fundamental reason "The Jungle Book" has maintained unsurpassed prestige in the competitive jungle of children's books is that it was literally institutionalized in 1916, when Robert Baden-Powell created the Cub Scouts based on "Mowgli's Brothers," the first story. The largest captive audience of boys ever created still adopts the names of Kipling's animals in their games, and recites a promise to do their best to do their duty to God and country, to help other people -- and to obey the Law of the Pack.

In tone, Baden-Powell's version of "The Jungle Book" veers closer to Beatrix Potter than to the original; yet the most significant departure of the Cub Scout's Promise from Kipling is its declaration of duty to God. Although Kipling routinely (in every sense) invoked the Christian God in his patriotic verse, he himself was an atheist. This passionate champion of the British Empire was just as hostile to Christian missionaries as he was to Hindu pandits; if there was a religion he admired, it was Islam. In conversation, he habitually referred to the deity as Allah.

God plays no part in Kipling's jungle; more crucially, neither does Empire, the principal theme of Kipling's life and work. Writing about animals, ironically, enabled him to observe humanity (for the animals in the stories are plainly people) without the strictures of nationalism, which eventually strangled and embittered his thinking.

Written precisely on the cusp of the cinema era, "The Jungle Book" predicts that medium's power to move and excite -- a compliment returned in at least a dozen film versions. Events are narrated boldly, in a verbal equivalent of real time, and are often told from multiple points of view. Unencumbered by the need to proclaim the glory of Empire, "The Jungle Book" permitted Kipling to glory in pure storytelling, always his greatest gift. Henry James, an unlikely friend and defender, who once called him "the most complete man of genius" he had ever known, considered "The Jungle Book" to be Kipling's finest work.

In no way does the rationalist-nationalist genius more closely resemble Darwin than in the scientific accuracy of his observations of wildlife. The best-known story in "The Jungle Book" is "Rikki-tikki-tavi," one of the many non-Mowgli tales, about the doughty mongoose who does battle with Nag the cobra. Here, the snake makes his terrifying entrance:

"From the thick grass at the foot of the bush there came a low hiss -- a horrid cold sound that made Rikki-tikki jump back two clear feet. Then inch by inch out of the grass rose up the head and spread hood of Nag, the big black cobra, and he was five feet long from tongue to tail. When he had lifted one-third of himself clear of the ground, he stayed balancing to and fro exactly as a dandelion-tuft balances in the wind, and he looked at Rikki-tikki with the wicked snake's eyes that never change their expression, whatever the snake may be thinking of."

Kipling not only conveys a vivid sense of danger and wickedness but also describes the appearance and defensive behavior of Naja naja, the Indian cobra, with as precise an eye as any herpetologist.

He saw just as clearly into the workings of a boy's mind. (There are no girls in Kipling's jungle.) Boys, he knew, like to be petted by their mothers so long as there are no other boys around to see it, but they understand that the playground is the real world. The cruelty of Mowgli's code has been familiar to generations of children, who have instinctively felt the rightness of its central tenet: "The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack." That first moment of reading a home truth that one already knows but has never seen put down in words is where the life of a reader begins. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

Even as a youngster, Rollie looked older and wiser than his years. His white mustache sprouted longer by the month, until it flamed from his cheeks like a German kaiser's. Sometimes, it all but hid his mouth.

In the last few years, though, the tribulations of age — not just the appearance of it — have begun catching up with Rollie. It wasn't immediately noticeable on the outside. But his keepers are reminded each time they get a look past the Emperor Tamarin's flowing whiskers, and into his jaws.

The tiny monkey, used to crunching away on raw sweet potato and celery, has surrendered all but 6 of his 32 teeth to the toll of time.

At 17, Rollie — a resident of Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo — is a senior citizen of his species. In the wilds of the Amazon, his keepers say, he almost certainly would never have made it this long.

In captivity, he's got plenty of company.

The Golden Years have arrived at the nation's zoos and aquariums, and that is taking veterinarians and keepers, along with their animals, into a zone of unknowns.

Do female gorillas, now frequently living in to their 40s and 50s, experience menopause?

Can an aging lemur suffer from dementia?

How do you weigh the most difficult choice — between prolonging pain and ending life — when the patient is a venerable jaguar who's been around so long she's come to feel like a member of the family?

All of those questions hang on a larger one that, until recent years, has been left to educated guesswork based on limited evidence.

"How old is geriatric? How old do animals really live?" says Sharon Dewar, a spokeswoman for the Lincoln Park Zoo, whose keepers have adjusted to Rollie's toothlessness by serving him a diet of soft-cooked veggies. "That's the million-dollar question."

Zeroing in on the answer takes years of tracking births, deaths and the age of animal populations. But zoos, which have pooled information on animal births and genealogy since the 1970s, are drawing some early conclusions. For example, records show that the median age of Siberian tigers living in zoos in the two decades ending in 1990 was a little over 11 years old. Since then, however, the median age of those tigers has topped 15 years old.

The increase in animal longevity is no mystery. Just as with people, health care for animals has become much more sophisticated.

At the San Antonio Zoo, keepers noticed that George, a 37-year-old tapir, was slowing down. In the mornings, his legs seemed stiffer, and he had trouble getting up. The diagnosis was clear: arthritis.

At first they put him on dietary supplements. They moved on to Adequan, a prescription that helped ease the discomfort further. Still, wasn't there more they could do? The problem is there's no textbook for how to treat a geriatric tapir.

Reasoning that tapirs are not so different from horses, the zoo called in a specialist who performed acupuncture on George, inserting tiny needles at various medians in an effort to ease the pain.

Since then, George "acts like he's five years younger," says Rob Coke, the zoo's senior staff veterinarian.

Even as San Antonio and other zoos have improved on health care, they've also become much more careful and cooperative in managing animal populations, tracking their animals to make decisions about breeding. Keepers focus on more than just keeping animals healthy, creating habitats and social environments that will make them happy and less-stressed.

The result is more robust animals, with the potential to live longer. That potential is realized because life in a zoo or aquarium grants animals an exception to nature's laws of survival. In the wild, weaker animals fall victim to predators, parasites and poachers before they ever have a chance to grow too old.

"Life as a wild animal is tough," says Steve Feldman of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Without predators, and treated for disease, animals are far outliving their wild counterparts.

At the Minnesota Zoo, a pair of bottlenose dolphins have reached 44 and 42 years old, and in Florida a couple have reached their 50s.

"We know from studying the teeth of animals (dolphins) that have washed up on beaches, in studies I've looked at, that there are no animals that old," says Kevin Willis, an expert on animal life expectancy at the Minneapolis zoo, in the Twin Cities suburb of Apple Valley.

But old age subjects animals to wear and tear and changes in physiology that they would never have known otherwise.

On a recent afternoon at the New York Aquarium, the uncertainties of animal aging are evident in the case of a California sea lion named Fonzie.

For years, he was one of the top performers for the crowds in the stands of the aquarium's amphitheater. But at 21, he's definitely slowing down. He started hobbling. The corneas on his eyes turned cloudy. He lost interest in his trainers. His weight dropped to 552 pounds. Under the X-ray, veterinarians noticed subtle changes in his bone structure.

"You know how it is when you have arthritis and in the winter time your bones creek because it's so damp and cold?" says Kate McClave, who runs the aquarium's onsite hospital. "Well, it's a similar thing for a marine mammal."

To help, vets moved Fonzie to an indoor pool where the water temperature is a closely controlled 55 degrees and he is protected from winter winds, and put him on anti-inflammatories. Nearly three months later, the eggplant-shaped mammal lumbers in to the checkup room with all the grace of a sandbag, his breath fragrant with fish. In exchange for a finned snack, he submits himself to the probe of a stethoscope, a few eye drops, an ultrasound and a look inside his mouth.

"This is one of our few patients that will actually say 'ahhhh'," says Paul Calle, senior veterinarian for the Wildlife Conversation Society, which runs the aquarium.

Careful treatment appears to have eased Fonzie's discomfort and he's ready to rejoin the other sea lions. But his days as a performer are probably over. At the aquarium, his seniority is far from unusual. Immediately after his exam, keepers moved on to take a blood sample from Spook, a 43-year-old gray seal believed to be the oldest on record. Earlier in the week, the aquarium lost a sand tiger shark named Bertha who, at 65, also held an age record.

That longevity confronts zoo managers with mysteries and doubts they've never really had to deal with before.

"The simple question was: 'Does a 41-year-old gorilla need to be on birth control?' And nobody really knew," says Sue Margulis, curator of primates at Lincoln Park.

Years ago, there wouldn't have been much need to consider such a question. Even today, a gorilla that reaches 30 is getting up there. Now, though, the question applies to far more than the one gorilla at nearby Brookfield Zoo that provoked it. When Margulis and a fellow researcher set out to study the possibility of menopause in gorillas, they looked at 30 gorillas in 17 zoos around the country. Of those, 22 are considered geriatric, including one who's now 55.

They found that about a quarter were no longer going through monthly menstrual cycles, while others were in transition. But while gorillas in menopause spent much less time with the male silverbacks, most were quite healthy. In the wild, female gorillas typically leave the group in which they're born. In zoos, older female gorillas stick around, sometimes playing a grandmother role in childcare that is likely unique to captivity.

At the St. Louis Zoo, the uncertainties of aging have keepers wondering about the well-being of Ruffles, a black-and-white ruffed lemur. At 31, he's a sage.

Some of Ruffle's problems are easily identifiable and treatable. He gets an anti-inflammatory pill twice a day — he likes it tucked inside a grape — to combat the pain of spinal arthritis. When blood tests showed he had liver problems, he was put on medication for that, as well. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

But there's no easy diagnosis for another symptom. At times, Ruffles seems to be staring off into nowhere.

"Dementia is one of those things that's very difficult to pin down just because we can't use the same sort of testing as we do with humans," says Joe Knobbe, St. Louis' zoological manager of primates.

Ruffles has good days and others that could be better. The best keepers can do is make him comfortable, including installing a tiny hanging platform where the lemur, who no longer climbs like a young primate, enjoys resting with a blanket.

Many zoos have been making similar changes to animal habitat to ease geriatric residents into retirement. At the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a black bear named Spike and his sister Missoula are no longer youngsters. The 22-year-old siblings both have arthritis and Missoula has a problem with inner ear infections that makes it difficult for her to keep her balance. They struggled to climb to their den on the third tier of an exhibit featuring steep, rugged artificial cliffs.

"You start seeing these changes and you realize that if you just let it go, eventually it's going to be a problem where they can't get up there," said Craig Ivanyi of the museum, which is just outside Tucscon. "You realize it's just a matter of time."

So in December, keepers moved to the pair into retirement in a new, specially designed enclosure, with gently graded ramps and a large, sloping pool. Spike and Missoula will spend their lives there, off-exhibit, while the zoo renovates the old enclosure so that when new bears arrive, they will be able to age in place.

Ivanyi says that, even with the bears now too old to be exhibited, the zoo is obligated to take care of them and make them comfortable as long as their quality of life can be assured. The challenge for his institution and others is deciding what to do when quality of life begins to ebb away.

Even in old animals that appear healthy, examination after death often finds they "suffer from a range of health problems that may not have been apparent when they were alive," a group of mostly Swiss veterinarians wrote in an article published last year in the journal Animal Welfare.

"Zoos often unwittingly condemn their animals to long painful lives," wrote the authors, calling on zoos to use a scoring system to evaluate geriatric animals' quality of life in order to make more informed decisions about euthanasia.

Animals don't make diagnosis easy. Their instincts remain rooted in the wild, where survival requires covering up weaknesses and infirmities. But keepers who spend years watching these animals sense when something's wrong.

At the El Paso Zoo, keepers noticed six years ago that Sheba, their regal black jaguar, was faltering. Worsening arthritis made it difficult for her to climb. Her kidneys were failing. Cataracts limited her ability to see.

Keepers fashioned a hammock from old firehose, and hung it low so she could climb in more easily, but even that became difficult. At day's end, Sheba would retire from the exhibit space to be near her keepers as they cleaned up, quietly absorbing the sound of their voices.

But by last fall, as Sheba neared her 27th birthday, it became clear that pain and weakness were winning out. That left the zoo's veterinary staff, managers and keepers with a very difficult choice.

"It's a lot easier to second-guess yourself when you say, well, she probably would've lived four more days, slipping slowly down the slope," said Victoria Milne, the zoo's veterinarian.

They decided not to wait. On Nov. 8, vets anesthetized Sheba, then administered a solution by intravenous drip that, in a few seconds, shut down the big cat's body for good.

Then, as she lay there, keepers, vets and other zoo workers gathered around the cat they'd cared for for 17 years. Some whispered a few words, others reached out to lay a hand on her glossy black coat as they wept.

Like many of the zoo's other geriatric animals, their girl had lived a long, full life. But that didn't make it any easier to say goodbye.

The universe's first stars were the rock stars of the stellar world: they lived fast and died young, burning out in only a few hundred thousand years. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

But new research suggests some of them might still be around as a result of interactions with dark matter, which halted their growth and curbed their blazing excess.

"These stars can be frozen for timescales longer than the age of the universe," said Gianfranco Bertone of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics in France.

Such frozen stars might still linger at the centre of the Milky Way, scientists say, and could provide important insights into the elusive nature of dark matter.

Many of the stellar firstborns, called population III stars, are thought to have formed inside dense dark matter clouds.

If dark matter particles are made up of heavier versions of already known particles, an idea known as supersymmetry, as many scientists believe, they could lose energy through interactions with normal matter and sink to the centres of the stars.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Trapped, the dark matter particles would collide and annihilate into a spray of elementary particles and energy.

A star that captured enough dark matter particles would still emit radiation, but its fires would no longer be fuelled by nuclear reactions. As a result, it would be caught in a state of arrested development.

Previous modelling work suggested population III stars could remain in this frozen state for hundreds of thousands of years before using up enough local dark matter to resume normal stellar evolution.

However, new research by Bertone and his team shows that if the first stars were born in exceptionally dense dark matter regions – such as those near the centres of galaxies, they could remain frozen indefinitely.
Bigger and colder

"There could be conditions in the early universe where stars form in big enough reservoirs of dark matter to last until the present day," Bertone told New Scientist.

And the team says these stars could be detected. "A frozen star would appear much bigger and colder than a normal star with the same mass and chemical composition," says colleague Marco Taoso.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Indeed, astronomers might have chanced across such stars already without knowing it, comments Igor Moskalenko of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, US.

Finding primordial dark matter stars would provide long-sought evidence for supersymmetry, Moskalenko told New Scientist: "If we find the dark matter burners, it would mean that the dark matter indeed consists of supersymmetrical particles, or 'superpartners'."
Stellar resurrections

Other types of stars might also be transformed by dark matter. Present-day stars born in regions of high dark-matter density could also be affected, scientists say.

Dark matter might even have the power to resurrect dead stars. White dwarfs, the corpses of Sun-like stars, are extremely dense and could make excellent dark matter absorbers.

If a roving white dwarf were to wander into a region of abundant dark matter, it could be transformed into a dark matter burner, Moskalenko says: "They could shine like 30 Suns just because they are burning dark matter."