We know that there are complex organic molecules in space. Just like individual atoms, molecules can emit light at very specific colors, and by finding those colors of emitted light we can detect the molecules. In general, the light is actually in the radio wavelength part of the spectrum, so giant radio telescopes are used to find them. The observations are a bit tricky, because molecules have lots of ways of emitting different kinds of light, so the total energy the molecule has to emit at any particular color gets gets spread out over all the different colors. Think of it this way: the more lottery winners there are, the less each winner gets from the contest. In the same way, because molecules can emit light in many colors, each color gets less of the total energy, making it fainter and harder to detect.
So molecules, especially complex organic ones like amino acetonitrile, are pretty faint emitters and hard to see. But scientists at Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, did it. They identified 51 different specific colors of radio light coming from a dense hot cloud of gas near the galactic center, and those colors are tagged as being from our friend above. This cloud, called B2, is a known haven for organic molecules such as formaldehyde, ethyl alcohol, and acetic acid (given those last two, my guess is that alien winemakers in B2 have their successes and failures).
Amino acids are the building blocks of life, as biologists are fond of saying; they are the basis of proteins and our DNA is coded to make them. Finding them in space is an interesting task, because that would mean the conditions to form amino acids are easy to come by. Plus, it’s possible for them to literally rain down from space. Amino acids have been found in meteorites, for example. But never in space.
So finding amino acetonitrile is a big step in finding a proper amino acid in space. It means that another big piece of the amino acid puzzle is available in space, and that’s encouraging. Finding a true amino acid source in space may just mean we need to be more diligent and look more carefully.
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http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/2008/03/22/try/
It’s there, and announcing its presence, but it’s whispering.
A few days ago I wrote about how the Cassini Saturn probe dove through water ice plumes erupting from the surface of the icy moon Enceladus. The pictures were incredible, but it may very well be that the other detectors got the big payoff.
They detected organic compounds in the plumes.
Now remember, organic molecules don’t necessarily mean life. What Cassini detected were heavy carbon-based molecules, including many that are the building blocks for making things like amino acids and other compounds necessary for life as we know it.
[…] it is now unambiguous that the jets emerging from the south polar fractures contain organic materials heavier than simple methane — acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, propane, etc. — making the sub-surface sources of Enceladus’ dramatic geological activity beyond doubt rich in astrobiologically interesting materials.
It’s been supposed for some time that Enceladus, like Jupiter’s moon Europa, has a subsurface ocean. The surface itself is mostly water ice, implying strongly that any ocean would have water as well. The plumes erupt out from cracks in the surface, and when Cassini dove through them it got to directly sample the interior of Enceladus. And it tasted organic compounds, 20 times as dense as previously thought.
There was a second discovery as well: the cracks were much warmer than expected. They were at an admittedly chilly -93 Celsius, but that’s 17 Celsius higher than thought. Two plumes come from the warmest of these regions as well.
Coupled together, these two items indicate that if there is an ocean beneath the frozen crust of the moon, then it’s reasonably warm, and rich in organic compounds. We don’t know how life started on Earth, but it’s a good guess that an ocean thick with organic compounds was involved at some point.
This is a fantastically provocative and interesting development! The ingredients for life exist on a tiny moon orbiting a ringed giant, and better yet they sit in a mixing bowl that has been churning away for billions of years. What lies beneath that hidden face?
Gov. David A. Paterson reimbursed his campaign committee this week for two stays at a Manhattan hotel that he has acknowledged using to carry on an extramarital affair, his aides said Friday.
Mr. Paterson used his campaign’s American Express Platinum Card to pay for the hotel stays — one night in November 2002 and another in April 2003, totaling $253 — but he has no recollection of the circumstances, and no records could be found to shed light on them, according to the aides.
Henry T. Berger, an election lawyer for Mr. Paterson, also told reporters that the governor used his campaign credit card to buy furniture and men’s clothing in 2004, but reimbursed the committee at the time for the $2,138 in spending.
The remarks by Mr. Berger, made to reporters in his office at the Empire State Building, came as the governor and his aides try to put to rest any suggestion of wrongdoing and move on from his acknowledgment Tuesday that he had extramarital affairs.
Mr. Paterson had been asked by reporters about his campaign’s spending on stays at the hotel, which is not far from his Harlem home. State election law prohibits the use of campaign money for personal expenses, but if politicians promptly reimburse a campaign they can usually avoid any penalties.
In repaying the committee for the hotel stays, the governor was not admitting that they were related to an affair, Mr. Berger said, adding that he found nothing improper in any of the expenditures that he reviewed.
Mr. Berger, whom Mr. Paterson asked to review his campaign finances, said he examined a series of expenses reporters had asked about, as well as records of Mr. Paterson’s Senate campaigns going back to 1999. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/
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He said he did not expect Mr. Paterson to make any additional reimbursements.
“We were able to find either backup documentation or clear recollection from David or his then-staff as to everything, except for the two events,” he said, referring to the hotel stays at what was then a Quality Inn on the Upper West Side.
The session, which was also attended by the governor’s spokesman, Errol Cockfield, grew strained at times as reporters pressed for explanations for various hotel stays and payments to women. Mr. Cockfield took exception to some of the questioning.
“In some cases,” he said, “the inquiries have bordered on being sexist by suggesting that many of the women involved in campaign work for the senator, women doing legitimate work, were somehow romantically linked to the senator.”
Mr. Paterson, who was catapulted into the governorship Monday after Eliot Spitzer resigned in a prostitution scandal, has struggled to answer questions about whether he improperly used campaign money in the relationships he said he had with other women during a troubled time in his marriage.
He has given conflicting accounts, alternately denying and then saying it was possible that he inadvertently used his campaign credit card for personal expenses. He stressed that if he had used the card for personal expenses, he would have repaid the committee.
Mr. Berger also provided a new explanation for a $500 campaign payment to a state employee with whom Mr. Paterson had an affair, one that conflicted with the version of events that the governor offered earlier in the week. In his recollection of the payment, Mr. Paterson had said that it was made to reimburse her for a contribution she made on his behalf to the 2002 gubernatorial campaign of H. Carl McCall, a Democratic former state comptroller.
Such an expenditure would have been illegal, since campaign contributors cannot be reimbursed by someone else, and state election records showed no donation from the woman to Mr. McCall. On Friday, Mr. Berger said that Mr. Paterson’s recollection was wrong, and that the $500 was actually payment for her work updating the campaign committee’s donor database.
Mr. Cockfield also responded to questions about another woman, who campaign records show was paid $1,000 in 2002 for staff work. The New York Post reported Friday that the woman denied having worked for the campaign, but Mr. Cockfield discounted that, saying she either did not remember it or was simply trying to avoid being dragged into the story.
“That woman did, in fact, do work for the campaign staff and was paid for it,” he said.
“Sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so full of dreams,” says John Merrick in the play The Elephant Man. He might have been speaking for the Boskops, an almost forgotten group of early humans who lived in southern Africa between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
http://www.soulcast.com/post/show/117748/move
http://louis0j0sheehan.livejournal.com/15433.html
http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com/2008/03/08/gravity/
Judging from fossil remains, scientists say the Boskops were similar to modern humans but had small, childlike faces and huge melon heads that held brains about 30 percent larger than our own.
That’s what fascinates psychiatrist Gary Lynch and cognitive scientist Richard Granger. “Just as we’re smarter than apes, they were probably smarter than us,” they speculate. More insightful and self-reflective than modern humans, with fantastic memories and a penchant for dreaming, the Boskops may have had “an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine.” Lynch and Granger base their characterization on our current understanding of how the human brain works, describing in detail its physiology and structure and comparing it with the brains of other primates. They also explore what the Boskops’ big brains tell us about evolution (why didn’t they survive?) and about the future of human intelligence (can we engineer bigger brains?). These are questions, one suspects, that even the smallest-brained Boskop would have approved of.
The Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, is one of the oldest and largest UFO investigative organizations in the United States.
MUFON was established as the Midwest UFO Network in Quincy, Illinois, on May 30, 1969, by Walter H. Andrus, Allen Utke, John Schuessler, and other scientific-minded researchers. Most of MUFON's early members had earlier been associated with APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization).
The organization now has more than 3,000 members worldwide, with a majority of its membership base situated in the continental United States. MUFON operates a worldwide network of regional directors for field investigations of UFO sightings reports, holds an annual international symposium and publishes the monthly MUFON UFO Journal.
The stated mission of MUFON is the scientific study of UFOs for the benefit of humanity through investigations, research and education.
Along with CUFOS (the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies) and FUFOR (the Fund for UFO Research), MUFON is part of the UFO Research Coalition, a collaborative effort by the three main UFO investigative organizations in the US whose goal is to share personnel and other research resources, and to fund and promote the scientific study of the UFO phenomenon.
MUFON is currently headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado under the direction of James Carrion.
Even before the alleged Dulce Base achieved notoriety, many cattle mutilations were said to occur in the Dulce area, and there were also allegations of UFOs visiting the area. http://pub25.bravenet.com/journal/post.php?entryid=23334
In the 1970s, New Mexico State Police officer Gabe Valdez investigated mutilations in the region.
Dulce Base conspiracy theories were first circulated in the 1980s. According to researcher Greg Bishop (Bishop, 2005), the claims of Paul Bennewitz are the earliest source for the Dulce Base stories. Bennewitz was a New Mexico businessman and physicist who operated Thunder Scientific Corporation, a company which manufactured high-altitude testing equipment mostly for use at Kirtland Air Force Base.
According to Bennewitz, he uncovered evidence of a highly secret U.S. Air Force program designed to monitor satellites launched by the Soviet Union. Bennewitz was already interested in reports of UFOs, alien abduction and cattle mutilations, and he interpreted the secret program as evidence of extraterrestrials on earth.
Bennewitz communicated his findings to civilian UFO group APRO, who dismissed him as a deluded crank. In late 1980, Bennewitz contacted Kirtland AFB officials. For most of the 1980s, U.S Air Force Sergeant Doty and/or ufologist William Moore would relate reams of mostly spurious information to Bennewitz as part of a disinformation campaign designed to distract him from secret military projects at Kirtland.
Bennewitz accepted nearly all of the information as reliable, and focused his energies towards writing a document he called "Project Beta.” Over the years, Bennewitz grew ever more paranoid, and his health deteriorated so badly that he had a nervous breakdown and retired from the UFO research scene before his 2005 death.
Since Bennewitz introduced the story of the Dulce Base, the conspiracy theories have grown, and have flourished on the World Wide Web.
According to some UFO conspiracy theories, a joint alien/U.S. military underground base exists, perhaps devoted to genetics. The theories regarding Dulce sometimes state that alien technology was traded for permission to engage in human and animal mutilations. A battle was said to have taken place there between aliens and humans, though the time of this alleged encounter varies from the 1970s to the 1980s. Some sources allege that horrific genetic experiments are conducted in lower levels of the facility (usually level 6 or 7, depending on the source); these levels are sometimes referred to as "Nightmare Hall."
According to the legend, Project Aquarius (1966) was a plan for investigation of UFOs, carried out and funded by the CIA. Bishop notes that Bennewitz is the earliest source for the Project Aquarius tale. This project was slated to begin after December 1969 when Project Grudge and Project Blue Book were closed. In 1969, the base was built northwest of Dulce in joint agreement between CIA and aliens from space. The base is allegedly located on the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation. The entrance is on Mount Archuleta (or Archuleta Mesa). The base gets water and electricity from the Navajo River, and dumps waste water back into the same river. The U.S. government occupies the upper levels of the underground base, while the aliens control the lower levels.
Vibrations from the ground near the town of Dulce have allegedly caused speculations of an underground facility; however, these are more likely minor earthquakes, which are known to occur in the area. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/
http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com/2841488/ Military helicopters have also been said to be "unusually milling" around the deserted area, although these claims are, at present, unproven.
There is a claim that the area was partially scanned with ground-penetrating radar, producing 'interesting' results, but these results are not currently available.
Some less substantial evidence includes supposed 'leaked documents', videos and witness reports. Allegedly, a collection of security camera tapes and technical documents were stolen from the base by a disgruntled security officer. These were stored in an unknown location along with the officer's 'flash', a weapon, resembling a flashlight, which is claimed to emit some form of directed radiation. The actual documents which were stolen have not been revealed to the public, however a collection of drawings based on the documents and surveillance footage is available. Sometime in the 1990's a Japanese documentary producer had a 1-minute animation produced, based on the alleged contents of the stolen information. This animation is available on the internet and was never claimed by its creators to be actual footage. There are also a small number of black-and-white photographs available, which are signed "TAL". It has been suggested that these photographs are actually from the Cheyenne Mountain facility.
Many people have supposedly witnessed UFOs in the area.
Many details of the lore surrounding the Dulce base—vast underground bases with many subterranean levels, battles with alien or underground creatures, etc.—resemble those of the alleged Montauk Project.
In popular media, the computer video game Half-Life appears to be based on the Dulce base lore.
This is just a quick followup to the news of the naked-eye GRB from a few days ago. I’ve been getting email and seeing things popping up in other astroblogs, so I figured I’d chime in.
I want to mention that given the distance and brightness of the burst, it is most likely the single most luminous event ever witnessed by humans. I think that’s somethin’ right there.
The image above is from Swift: it was taken by the X-Ray Telescope on board the satellite mere minutes after the burst was detected. Having seen a few Swift X-ray images, let me say that that sucker was bright. Very cool.
In news from the ground: Pi of the Sky is a GRB hunting robotic telescope in Poland, and it has great images and animations of the GRB seen as it was on the rise, even as Swift was detecting the gamma rays. This is a very cool idea: telescopes on the ground with very wide fields of view look at the same part of the sky at the same time as Swift. Remember, Swift is a satellite in low Earth orbit, and it sees a large portion of the sky at once. When gamma rays from a GRB are detected by Swift, it immediately (in a few seconds!) sends down the rough coordinates of the burst so other telescopes can observe it as quickly as possible — many GRBs fade to invisibility in seconds. So a telescope looking at the same part of the sky as Swift cuts down even those precious seconds, getting the burst simultaneously in optical light as Swift sees the gamma-rays.
In this case, it paid off incredibly: they caught the burst actually getting brighter, which is rare all by itself. But to have that happen with a burst of this distinction, well, that’s a major coup. Hats off to the astronomy folks in Poland for getting this. Of course, they gave us Copernicus, so they have a long history in ground-breaking astronomy.
Reports are pouring in from all over the world (and I mean all over and above it), and at the moment it’s mostly technical data: brightness, spectra, and so on. I suspect in the next few days a more coherent picture of this burst will emerge, but it will get better when it fades enough to look for the host galaxy — the galaxy in which the burst occurred. Sometimes the galaxy can be seen well enough to show that the burst came from a place in it where stars are actively being born. That implies this was a young supermassive star that exploded, the kind that doesn’t live long enough to wander out from its stellar nursery. Spectra of the galaxy can give an idea of the chemical content of it, how much of elements like iron and calcium can be seen, hinting again at physical conditions in the galaxy.
No problems so far, the immigration agent told the American citizen and his 22-year-old Colombian wife at her green card interview in December. After he stapled one of their wedding photos to her application for legal permanent residency, he had just one more question: What was her cellphone number?
The calls from the agent started three days later. He hinted, she said, at his power to derail her life and deport her relatives, alluding to a brush she had with the law before her marriage. He summoned her to a private meeting. http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&pop=1&indicate=1
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http://louis-j-sheehan.myblogvoice.com/louis-j-sheehan-1023071-205297.htm
And at noon on Dec. 21, in a parked car on Queens Boulevard, he named his price — not realizing that she was recording everything on the cellphone in her purse.
“I want sex,” he said on the recording. “One or two times. That’s all. You get your green card. You won’t have to see me anymore.”
She reluctantly agreed to a future meeting. But when she tried to leave his car, he demanded oral sex “now,” to “know that you’re serious.” And despite her protests, she said, he got his way.
The 16-minute recording, which the woman first took to The New York Times and then to the Queens district attorney, suggests the vast power of low-level immigration law enforcers, and a growing desperation on the part of immigrants seeking legal status. The aftermath, which included the arrest of an immigration agent last week, underscores the difficulty and danger of making a complaint, even in the rare case when abuse of power may have been caught on tape.
No one knows how widespread sexual blackmail is, but the case echoes other instances of sexual coercion that have surfaced in recent years, including agents criminally charged in Atlanta, Miami and Santa Ana, Calif. And it raises broader questions about the system’s vulnerability to corruption at a time when millions of noncitizens live in a kind of legal no-man’s land, increasingly fearful of seeking the law’s protection.
The agent arrested last week, Isaac R. Baichu, 46, himself an immigrant from Guyana, handled some 8,000 green card applications during his three years as an adjudicator in the Garden City, N.Y., office of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the federal Department of Homeland Security. He pleaded not guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges of coercing the young woman to perform oral sex, and of promising to help her secure immigration papers in exchange for further sexual favors. If convicted, he will face up to seven years in prison.
His agency has suspended him with pay, and the inspector general of Homeland Security is reviewing his other cases, a spokesman said Wednesday. Prosecutors, who say they recorded a meeting between Mr. Baichu and the woman on March 11 at which he made similar demands for sex, urge any other victims to come forward.
Money, not sex, is the more common currency of corruption in immigration, but according to Congressional testimony in 2006 by Michael Maxwell, former director of the agency’s internal investigations, more than 3,000 backlogged complaints of employee misconduct had gone uninvestigated for lack of staff, including 528 involving criminal allegations.
The agency says it has tripled its investigative staff since then, and counts only 165 serious complaints pending. But it stopped posting an e-mail address and phone number for such complaints last year, said Jan Lane, chief of security and integrity, because it lacks the staff to cull the thousands of mostly irrelevant messages that resulted. Immigrants, she advised, should report wrongdoing to any law enforcement agency they trust.
The young woman in Queens, whose name is being withheld because the authorities consider her the victim of a sex crime, did not even tell her husband what had happened.
A slim, shy woman who looks like a teenager, she said she had spent recent months baby-sitting for relatives in Queens, crying over the deaths of her two brothers back in Cali, Colombia, and longing for the right stamp in her passport — one that would let her return to the United States if she visited her family.
She came to the United States on a tourist visa in 2004 and overstayed. http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&pop=1&indicate=1
When she married an American citizen a year ago, the law allowed her to apply to “adjust” her illegal status. But unless her green card application was approved, she could not visit her parents or her brothers’ graves and then legally re-enter the United States. And if her application was denied, she would face deportation.
She had another reason to be fearful, and not only for herself. About 15 months ago, she said, an acquaintance hired her and two female relatives in New York to carry $12,000 in cash to the bank. The three women, all living in the country illegally, were arrested on the street by customs officers apparently acting on a tip in a money-laundering investigation. After determining that the women had no useful information, the officers released them.
But the closed investigation file had showed up in the computer when she applied for a green card, Mr. Baichu told her in December; until he obtained the file and dealt with it, her application would not be approved. If she defied him, she feared, he could summon immigration enforcement agents to take her relatives to detention.
So instead of calling the police, she turned on the video recorder in her cellphone, put the phone in her purse and walked to meet the agent. Two family members said they watched anxiously from their parked car as she disappeared behind the tinted windows of his red Lexus.
“We were worried that the guy would take off, take her away and do something to her,” the woman’s widowed sister-in-law said in Spanish.
As the recorder captured the agent’s words and a lilting Guyanese accent, he laid out his terms in an easy, almost paternal style. He would not ask too much, he said: sex “once or twice,” visits to his home in the Bronx, perhaps a link to other Colombians who needed his help with their immigration problems.
In shaky English, the woman expressed reluctance, and questioned how she could be sure he would keep his word.
“If I do it, it’s like very hard for me, because I have my husband, and I really fall in love with him,” she said.
The agent insisted that she had to trust him. http://blogs.ebay.com/mytymouse1/home/_W0QQentrysyncidZ526811010
“I wouldn’t ask you to do something for me if I can’t do something for you, right?” he said, and reasoned, “Nobody going to help you for nothing,” noting that she had no money.
He described himself as the single father of a 10-year-old daughter, telling her, “I need love, too,” and predicting, “You will get to like me because I’m a nice guy.”
Repeatedly, she responded “O.K.,” without conviction. At one point he thanked her for showing up, saying, “I know you feel very scared.”
Finally, she tried to leave. “Let me go because I tell my husband I come home,” she said.
His reply, the recording shows, was a blunt demand for oral sex.
“Right now? No!” she protested. “No, no, right now I can’t.”
He insisted, cajoled, even empathized. “I came from a different country, too,” he said. “I got my green card just like you.”
Then, she said, he grabbed her. During the speechless minute that follows on the recording, she said she yielded to his demand out of fear that he would use his authority against her.
The charges against Mr. Baichu, who became a United States citizen in 1991 and earns roughly $50,000 a year, appear to be part of a larger pattern, according to government records and interviews.
Mr. Maxwell, the immigration agency’s former chief investigator, told Congress in 2006 that internal corruption was “rampant,” and that employees faced constant temptations to commit crime.
“It is only a small step from granting a discretionary waiver of an eligibility rule to asking for a favor or taking a bribe in exchange for granting that waiver,” he contended. “Once an employee learns he can get away with low-level corruption and still advance up the ranks, he or she becomes more brazen.”
Mr. Maxwell’s own deputy, Lloyd W. Miner, 49, of Hyattsville, Md., turned out to be an example. He was sentenced March 7 to a year in prison for inducing a 21-year-old Mongolian woman to stay in the country illegally, and harboring her in his house.
Other cases include that of a 60-year-old immigration adjudicator in Santa Ana, Calif., who was charged with demanding sexual favors from a 29-year-old Vietnamese woman in exchange for approving her citizenship application. http://louis-j-sheehan.myblogvoice.com/louis-j-sheehan-1023071-205297.htm
The agent, Eddie Romualdo Miranda, was acquitted of a felony sexual battery charge last August, but pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery and was sentenced to probation.
In Atlanta, another adjudicator, Kelvin R. Owens, was convicted in 2005 of sexually assaulting a 45-year-old woman during her citizenship interview in the federal building, and sentenced to weekends in jail for six months. And a Miami agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement responsible for transporting a Haitian woman to detention is awaiting trial on charges that he took her to his home and raped her.
“Despite our best efforts there are always people ready to use their position for personal gain or personal pleasure,” said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Our responsibility is to ferret them out.”
When the Queens woman came to The Times with her recording on Jan. 3, she was afraid of retaliation from the agent, and uncertain about making a criminal complaint, though she had an appointment the next day at the Queens district attorney’s office.
She followed through, however, and Carmencita Gutierrez, an assistant district attorney, began monitoring phone calls between the agent and the young woman, a spokesman said. When Mr. Baichu arranged to meet the woman on March 11 at the Flagship Restaurant on Queens Boulevard, investigators were ready.
In the conversation recorded there, according to the criminal complaint, Mr. Baichu told her he expected her to do “just like the last time,” and offered to take her to a garage or the bathroom of a friend’s real estate business so she would be “more comfortable doing it” there.
Mr. Baichu was arrested as he emerged from the diner and headed to his car, wearing much gold and diamond jewelry, prosecutors said. Later released on $15,000 bail, Mr. Baichu referred calls for comment to his lawyer, Sally Attia, who said he did not have authority to grant or deny green card petitions without his supervisor’s approval.
The young woman’s ordeal is not over. http://web.mac.com/lousheehan/Site/Garage_Before_and_After.html
Her husband overheard her speaking about it to a cousin about a month ago, and she had to tell him the whole story, she said.
“He was so mad at me, he left my house,” she said, near tears. “I don’t know if he’s going to come back.”
The green card has not come through. “I’m still hoping,” she said.
Researchers found that specific variations in a stress-related gene appeared to be influenced by trauma at a young age — in this case child abuse. That interaction strongly increased the chances for adult survivors of abuse to develop signs of PTSD.
Among adult survivors of severe child abuse, those with the specific gene variations scored more than twice as high (31) on a scale of post-traumatic stress, compared with those without the variations (13).
The worse the abuse, the stronger the risk in people with those gene variations.
The study of 900 adults is among the first to show that genes can be influenced by outside, nongenetic factors to trigger signs of PTSD. It is the largest of just two reports to show molecular evidence of a genetic influence on PTSD.
"We have known for over a decade, from twin studies, that genetic factors play a role in vulnerability to developing PTSD, but have had little success in identifying specific genetic variants that increase risk of the disorder," said Karestan Koenen, a Harvard psychologist doing similar research. She was not involved in the new study.
The results suggest that there are critical periods in childhood when the brain is vulnerable "to outside influences that can shape the developing stress-response system," said Emory University researcher and study co-author Dr. Kerry Ressler.
The study appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. http://www.myface.com/index.php?do=/public/account/submit/add-blog/added_3049/
Several study authors, including Ressler, reported having financial ties to makers of psychiatric drugs.
Ressler noted that there are probably many other gene variants that contribute to risks for PTSD, and others may be more strongly linked to the disorder than the ones the researchers focused on.
Still, he and outside experts said the study is important and that similar advances could lead to tests that will help identify who's most at risk. Treatments including psychotherapy and psychiatric drugs could be targeted to those people, Ressler said.
About a quarter of a million Americans will develop PTSD at some point in their lives after being victimized or witnessing violence or other traumatic events. Rates are much higher in war veterans and people living in high-crime areas.
Symptoms can develop long after the event and usually include recurrent terrifying recollections of the trauma. Sufferers often have debilitating anxiety, irritability, insomnia and other signs of stress.
Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said the study is particularly valuable for the light it sheds on military veterans, who are known to be vulnerable to PTSD.
He said the results help explain differences in how two people see the same roadside bomb blast. One simply experiences it as "a bad day but goes back and is able to function." The other later develops paralyzing stress symptoms.
"This could be quite a wave that will hit us over the months and years ahead," Insel said. His agency paid for the study.
Study participants were mostly low-income black adults, aged 40 on average, who sought non-psychiatric health care at a public hospital in Atlanta. http://louis2j2sheehan.bloggerteam.com/
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They were asked about experiences in childhood and as adults and gave saliva samples that underwent genetic testing.
Almost 30 percent of participants reported having been sexually or physically abused as children. Most also had experienced trauma as adults, including rape, attacks with weapons and other violence.
Researchers focused on symptoms of PTSD rather than an actual diagnosis, and found that about 25 percent had stress symptoms severe enough to meet criteria for the disorder, Ressler said.
Childhood abuse and adult trauma each increased risks for PTSD symptoms in adulthood. But the most severe symptoms occurred in the 30 percent of child abuse survivors who had variations in the stress gene.
Researchers were not able to determine if the symptoms were reactions to the child abuse or to the more recent trauma — or both, said co-author Rebekah Bradley, also of Emory University.
The study is an important contribution to a growing body of research showing how severe abuse early in life can have profound, lasting effects, said Duke University psychiatry expert John Fairbank, co-director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. He was not involved in the research.
1 Who invented relativity? Bzzzt—wrong. Galileo hit on the idea in 1639, when he showed that a falling object behaves the same way on a moving ship as it does in a motionless building.
2 And Einstein didn’t call it relativity. The word never appears in his original 1905 paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” and he hated the term, preferring “invariance theory” (because the laws of physics look the same to all observers—nothing “relative” about it).
3 Space-time continuum? Nope, that’s not Einstein either. The idea of time as the fourth dimension came from Hermann Minkowski, one of Einstein’s professors, who once called him a “lazy dog.”
4 But Einstein did reformulate Galileo’s relativity to deal with the bizarre things that happen at near-light speed, where time slows down and space gets compressed. That counts for something.
5 Austrian physicist Friedrich Hasenöhrl published the basic equation E = mc2 a year before Einstein did.
6 Never heard of Hasenöhrl? That’s because he failed to connect the equation with the principle of relativity. Verdammt!
7 Einstein’s full-time job at the Swiss patent office meant he had to hash out relativity during hours when nobody was watching. He would cram his notes into his desk when a supervisor came by.
8 Although Einstein was a teetotaler, when he finally completed his theory of relativity, he and his wife, Mileva, drank themselves under the table—the old-fashioned way to mess with the space-time continuum.
9 Affection is relative. “I need my wife, she solves all the mathematical problems for me,” Einstein wrote while completing his theory in 1904. By 1914, he’d ordered her to “renounce all personal relations with me, as far as maintaining them is not absolutely required for social reasons.”
10 Rules are relative too. According to Einstein, nothing travels faster than light, but space itself has no such speed limit; immediately after the Big Bang, the runaway expansion of the universe apparently left light lagging way behind.
11 Oh, and there are two relativities. http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com/
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So far we’ve been talking about special relativity, which applies to objects moving at constant speed. General relativity, which covers accelerating things and explains how gravity works, came a decade later and is regarded as Einstein’s truly unique insight.
12 Pleasure doing business with you, chum(p): When Einstein was stumped by the math of general relativity, he relied on his old college pal Marcel Grossmann, whose notes he had studied after repeatedly cutting class years earlier.
13 Despite that, the early version of general relativity had a major error, a miscalculation of the amount a light beam would bend due to gravity.
14 Fortunately, plans to test the theory during a solar eclipse in 1914 were scuttled by World War I. Had the experiment been conducted then, the error would have been exposed and Einstein would have been proved wrong.
15 The eclipse experiment finally happened in 1919 (you’re looking at it on this very page). Eminent British physicist Arthur Eddington declared general relativity a success, catapulting Einstein into fame and onto coffee mugs.
16 In retrospect, it seems that Eddington fudged the results, throwing out photos that showed the “wrong” outcome.
17 No wonder nobody noticed: At the time of Einstein’s death in 1955, scientists still had almost no evidence of general relativity in action.
18 That changed dramatically in the 1960s, when astronomers began to discover extreme objects—neutron stars and black holes—that put severe dents in the shape of space-time.
19 Today general relativity is so well understood that it is used to weigh galaxies and locate distant planets by the way they bend light.
20 If you still don’t get Einstein’s ideas, try this explanation reportedly from The Man Himself: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”
1 The practice of burying the dead may date back 350,000 years, as evidenced by a 45-foot-deep pit in Atapuerca, Spain, filled with the fossils of 27 hominids of the species Homo heidelbergensis, a possible ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.
2 Never say die: There are at least 200 euphemisms for death, including "to be in Abraham's bosom," "just add maggots," and "sleep with the Tribbles" (a Star Trek favorite).
3 No American has died of old age since 1951.
4 That was the year the government eliminated that classification on death certificates.
5 The trigger of death, in all cases, is lack of oxygen. Its decline may prompt muscle spasms, or the "agonal phase," from the Greek word agon, or contest.
6 Within three days of death, the enzymes that once digested your dinner begin to eat you. http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Ruptured cells become food for living bacteria in the gut, which release enough noxious gas to bloat the body and force the eyes to bulge outward.
7 So much for recycling: Burials in America deposit 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid—formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol—into the soil each year. Cremation pumps dioxins, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide into the air.
8 Alternatively . . . A Swedish company, Promessa, will freeze-dry your body in liquid nitrogen, pulverize it with high-frequency vibrations, and seal the resulting powder in a cornstarch coffin. They claim this "ecological burial" will decompose in 6 to 12 months.
9 Zoroastrians in India leave out the bodies of the dead to be consumed by vultures.
10 The vultures are now dying off after eating cattle carcasses dosed with diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory used to relieve fever in livestock.
11 Queen Victoria insisted on being buried with the bathrobe of her long-dead husband, Prince Albert, and a plaster cast of his hand.
12 If this doesn't work, we're trying in vitro! In Madagascar, families dig up the bones of dead relatives and parade them around the village in a ceremony called famadihana. The remains are then wrapped in a new shroud and reburied. The old shroud is given to a newly married, childless couple to cover the connubial bed.
13During a railway expansion in Egypt in the 19th century, construction companies unearthed so many mummies that they used them as fuel for locomotives.
14 Well, yeah, there's a slight chance this could backfire: English philosopher Francis Bacon, a founder of the scientific method, died in 1626 of pneumonia after stuffing a chicken with snow to see if cold would preserve it.
15 For organs to form during embryonic development, some cells must commit suicide. Without such programmed cell death, we would all be born with webbed feet, like ducks.
16 Waiting to exhale: In 1907 a Massachusetts doctor conducted an experiment with a specially designed deathbed and reported that the human body lost 21 grams upon dying. This has been widely held as fact ever since. It's not.
17 Buried alive: In 19th-century Europe there was so much anecdotal evidence that living people were mistakenly declared dead that cadavers were laid out in "hospitals for the dead" while attendants awaited signs of putrefaction.
18 Eighty percent of people in the United States die in a hospital.
19 If you can't make it here . . . More people commit suicide in New York City than are murdered.
20 It is estimated that 100 billion people have died since humans began.
Beginning this spring, the genomic start-up company Navigenics will sell spit kits for $2,500 to those curious enough to learn more about their DNA. Along with results telling you the genetic disorders you can look forward to, you receive advice on how to reduce your chances of developing up to 20 diseases and an offer of genetic counseling sessions.
But paying $2,500 to find out that you are predisposed to Alzheimer’s, which has no cure and few treatment options, could seem like a raw deal. That’s why it seemed a bit unfair when, after spending millions to have his entire genome sequenced, Craig Venter found out that he has the apolipoprotein E gene, predisposing him to Alzheimer’s. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com/
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But Venter is unfazed. In fact, he has no regrets about the finding. Instead he is trying to do something about it—hoping to push back the onset of the disease by taking drugs, changing his diet, and exercising.
“I don’t feel like I have the threat of Alzheimer’s disease hanging over my future,” says Venter. The only person in his family since the early 16th century to have dementia was his great-grandmother, so the familial type of Alzheimer’s, which is responsible for about 3 percent of cases, is not likely. It’s the type called sporadic Alzheimer’s disease that Venter is trying to avoid; it causes 97 percent of cases.
For those of us lucky enough to reach age 85, half of us will suffer Alzheimer’s. By 2050, one in 85 people around the world will suffer from it—four times the current number.
Venter is taking proactive measures. He now takes statins, cholesterol-lowering drugs that are the top-selling medications in the United States, because he has heard from friends in the pharmaceutical industry that statins could prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s. Statins reduce the amount of cholesterol the liver produces by blocking the enzyme needed to make it. But it’s unclear if statins have an effect on cholesterol in the brain.
Jerome Goldstein, director of the San Francisco Alzheimer’s and Dementia Clinic, isn’t convinced they are all that effective. It’s true that “bad” cholesterol impairs your brain function, Goldstein says, but without cholesterol in your brain, you don’t form nerves. He prescribes statins to treat his patients with Alzheimer’s disease because it might possibly delay the disease’s progression. Giulio M. Pasinetti, director of the Center of Excellence for Research in Alzheimer’s Disease at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, is more adamant about statins’ lack of effectiveness, saying that large-scale clinical studies have proved that they don’t have any effect on the cholesterol in the brain.
“Thank god statins don’t change it,” says Pasinetti. "You don’t want to interfere with the fine-tuned mechanism associated with the function of the brain by changing the cholesterol level in the brain.”
Pasinetti’s research is based on more holistic, natural treatments. Pasinetti has shown that polyphenols in red wine reduce cognitive decline—and may prevent it—in mice genetically altered to develop Alzheimer’s; he hopes to prescribe red wine (and grape juice varieties) to humans in the future. Pasinetti also suggests that exercising regularly, restricting caloric intake, and choosing healthy nutrients will go a long way to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
Goldstein agrees. “There are other things you can do that will prolong life. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com/
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Walk a mile a day. Solve crossword puzzles. Read instead of watching TV. Take certain vitamins. Take good health measures. Control cholesterol.”
Although no one agrees just how to deal with the knowledge that one is likely to get Alzheimer’s, millions of dollars is spent on research into the disease each year. With personal genetic testing ready to take off, that’s good news for the many people who will be learning their genetic predispositions.
On September 4, geneticist Craig Venter invited the world to take a peek at his DNA. The first person ever to do so, the entrepreneur and science showman published his entire individual genetic sequence in a scientific journal. Replicating Venter’s $70 million technological feat is too costly for most of us, and it’s not clear what good it would serve to know that, like Venter, one has a genetic marker for wet earwax—or Alzheimer’s disease, which can’t be prevented or cured.
Venter’s stunt is nevertheless a fitting symbol for 2007, a year marked by milestones in the quest for personalized medicine. “This will be seen as the year things turned the corner,” says Huntington Willard, director of the Duke Institute for Genome Science and Policy in Durham, North Carolina. “Patients are receiving genomic tests and benefiting from them; there are real live people being taken care of now.”
In February, for example, the Food and Drug Administration approved MammaPrint, a test designed to help breast cancer patients. MammaPrint surveys 70 genes in tumor cells, checking whether they’re turned on or off in an individual patient. By reading each patient’s total gene activity profile, doctors can predict whether a tumor is likely to spread and thus whether the patient needs to undergo chemotherapy in addition to surgery. The company behind the test, Agendia, based in the Netherlands, estimates that it will spare 60,000 American women unnecessary chemotherapy each year.
This year also marked the debut of a raft of tests based on genomics, the analysis of entire genomes. These tests are based on a catalog of human variation called the HapMap, which was released in 2005. HapMap is a directory of “single nucleotide polymorphisms,” or SNPs, places in the genome where differences between individuals (in the form of single chemical letters) appear in the DNA code. SNPs act like signposts, marking larger chunks of the genome that vary among individuals. By comparing SNPs in patients with a disease to SNPs in the HapMap, scientists can easily pinpoint the SNPs that are unique to that disease. Such SNPs can then guide scientists to the nearby genes that cause the disease, the same way a corner gas station might serve as a landmark to guide visitors to your neighborhood and eventually to your house.
Even before they determine the genetic culprit in a disease, however, scientists can use its SNP pattern to identify those who have the genetic signature of risk for that disease. This year, scientists found SNPs linked to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and a long list of other ailments.
A number of companies are already selling tests based on these new findings. Iceland-based deCODE Genetics, for example, announced its launch in April of T2, a new SNP-–screening test for type 2 diabetes. Other companies are promising to bundle multiple SNP-based tests together, providing consumers a more complete health profile. Navigenics, for one, a company based in Redwood Shores, California, promises to “use the latest genetic science to illuminate the future of your health and arm you with the knowledge to change it for the better.”
A personal genome may one day become part of everyone’s medical record, providing powerful information about an individual’s genetic predispositions.
“Using genomics to make predictions about health is a powerful paradigm,” says Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com/
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“We’re going to see a lot of these tests as we reveal more and more genetic changes linked to disease.”
The tests offered so far, however, cannot predict for sure whether a person will develop a given disease. Currently available tests reveal only the risk that one could become ill. It is unclear how that will help patients, Willard says: “How do you respond to a test that says your risk is elevated by 25 percent? That’s pretty meaningless; it’s open to all sorts of misinterpretation.” An employer, for instance, might refuse to give a high-stress job to an individual with an SNP profile unique to heart attack victims—even if that profile raises the risk of a heart attack only slightly.
Unfortunately, this year, lawmakers punted legislation designed to prevent such discrimination. In April, Congress was set to pass the long-delayed Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. The bill aims to prevent insurance or workplace discrimination based on genetic test results. It sailed through the House of Representatives, and President Bush promised to sign it. But at the last minute, Tom Coburn, Republican senator from Oklahoma, placed a hold on the bill because of its language concerning embryos and fetuses, among other things. The bill is now stalled.
This has not deterred those like Venter, who want to bare their genetic foibles to the world. Nobel Prize–winner James Watson, for instance, announced the completion of his personal genome sequence in May. He promised to publish it but hasn’t yet. Others, like futurist and tech guru Esther Dyson, are having parts of their genomes sequenced in a project led by geneticist George Church of Harvard University and MIT.
We don’t yet know enough about the genetic roots of disease to help these early adopters learn much from their genomes. But that will change, and scientists predict that a personal genome may one day become part of everyone’s medical record, providing powerful information about an individual’s genetic predisposition to disease.
Although that day is still a long way off, it’s much closer than it used to be, thanks to this year’s first steps toward personalized medicine, says Kathy Hudson, director of Johns Hopkins University’s Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. “For a long time, all the action in genomics was in the lab,” she says. “Now it’s spilling out into the real world, and that’s really exciting.”
In the traditional view of photosynthesis, the energy carried by photons streaming from the sun is transferred by bouncing from one chlorophyll molecule to the next, a process that ultimately builds simple carbohydrates from water and carbon dioxide. But last spring, a team led by Graham Fleming, deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, reported that the process is much more interesting than that.
Using ultrafast lasers, they found that the interaction between the sun’s energy and the chlorophyll molecules in a bacterium relies on a piece of quantum mechanical weirdness known as superposition, where a single photon’s energy can temporarily be in many different states at once. This allows photosynthesis to probe all the possible reaction pathways within the various chlorophyll molecules. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com/
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The most efficient pathway is selected and energy is transferred through the bacterium as the superposition collapses.
“This is similar to quantum computing in some sense,” says Greg Engel, a member of Fleming’s team. “This is how quantum computing realizes its incredible efficiency and its ability to solve very complex problems, because it can evaluate many solutions at once.”
Superstrong pulses in Earth’s magnetic field can drive electrons to near light speed, physicists reported in June. These “killer” electrons can cripple satellites and they present a radiation threat to astronauts. Scientists have long wondered how they accumulate enough energy to zip around in space.
Qiugang Zong, of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, led a team of physicists who analyzed data from the European Space Agency and NASA’s Cluster spacecraft, four satellites situated at the edge of Earth’s magnetic field. The satellites observed the pulses in the wake of an October 2003 magnetic storm triggered by a coronal mass ejection—a plasma spitball shot out by the sun—that slammed into Earth’s magnetosphere. The influx of energetic particles created waves in our planet’s magnetic field, Zong’s team discovered. As the pulses approached Earth, the ultralow frequency waves made the planet’s magnetic field lines oscillate and accelerated electrons traveling along the field lines to extraordinarily high speeds.
“ULF waves are standing waves that stay in their location and vibrate like a string,” Zong says. “It’s amazing that the wave power transfers to the killer electrons.” Zong’s study represents the first time this process has been observed directly.
The storm that the Cluster spacecraft witnessed damaged several satellites and caused power outages in Sweden. Astronauts in the International Space Station were ordered into a heavily shielded module during the storm. http://louis2j1sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/
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Fortunately for surface-–dwelling –humans, Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere do a good job protecting us from such killer electrons.
From April to September 2007, the largest outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever since 2003 unfolded in the Kasaï Occidental province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. When the outbreak first came to international attention, authorities thought it was one of the largest ever, with approximately 400 suspected cases and more than 170 deaths. As the circumstances surrounding the outbreak came into better focus, those numbers came down. On October 3, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported around 25 confirmed cases, although not every potential contact had yet been screened for the virus.
Researchers aren’t sure where the outbreak originated or how it spread, but Ebola is usually caused by contact with a person or animal harboring the Ebola virus. Funeral traditions in the Congo, which often involve touching and washing the body, can help transmit the virus.
Unlike other outbreaks, which have occurred in city hospitals, the recent cases have been confined to more remote villages. “We haven’t detected one like this in a setting like this before,” says Armand Sprecher, a public health specialist with Doctors Without Borders.
Concurrent infections of typhoid and Shigella dysentery have complicated tracking the outbreak, according to Pierre Rollin, a virologist with the Centers for Disease Control, which responded to the outbreak, along with the local ministry of health, the WHO, the Public Health Agency of Canada, and Doctors Without Borders. Outbreaks like this may happen more frequently than we think, Rollin says, but go undocumented because they occur in very rural areas.
New genetic evidence suggests that evolution has continued to shape our species powerfully over the past 100,000 years. By looking for signals based on how much DNA mutates over generations, researchers found clues that as much as 10 percent of the human genome may be linked to these recent adaptive genetic changes.
Cornell University population geneticist Scott Williamson and colleagues analyzed over a million genetic variations in DNA samples from 24 individuals, including African Americans, European Americans, and Chinese. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/
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They were looking for regions in the genome where a beneficial mutation is carried by everyone in a population. Then, by looking at the variability in the DNA surrounding the mutation, the team could figure out how long ago the mutation spread through the population.
More than a hundred sites in the genome showed strong evidence of recent selection, including genes that affect muscle tissue, hair, hearing, immune-system function, skin pigmentation, sense of smell, and the body’s response to heat stress.
For some of the traits, it’s easy to identify evolutionary pressures that could have favored certain mutations. Immune-function genes are logical targets for selection because, as Williamson explains, “If an individual carries a mutation that provides disease resistance, that confers a clear selective advantage.”
Changes to skin pigmentation pathways probably reflect selective pressures related to sunlight exposure that humans experienced as they spread out from humanity’s origins in Africa to other parts of the world and adapted to local environments. In other cases, such as the hair follicle genes, the forces driving our recent evolution remain a mystery.
While the corpses of their enemies still lay on the battlefield, the victors celebrated by slaughtering cattle and holding a gigantic feast. Then they dumped the war dead into a pit, heaved in the animal bones from their repast, and tossed their plates on top of the pile.
Now—nearly six millennia later—the unearthing of these remnants in what is now northeastern Syria is a spectacular archaeological find, one of several important discoveries made recently at Tell Brak, a 130-foot-high mound jutting above the northern fringe of the Mesopotamian plain.
Archaeologists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard University say Brak was one of the earliest and largest cities in the region—and therefore the world. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
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That assertion is shaking up Near Eastern archaeology, since scholars long assumed that the first substantial cities arose in southern Mesopotamia in today’s Iraq.
The remains of the battle date to about 3800 B.C., nearly a thousand years before writing, manufacturing-style craftsmanship, and other urban activities took a firm hold in the region. Yet the citizens of Brak were already using imported materials to make fine goods in large workshops, including a marble-and-obsidian chalice and a stamp seal with the image of a lion being caught in a net—a classic symbol of kingship in the ancient Near East.
Furthermore, this was no mere village: Close examination reveals the settlement extending over an astonishing 136 acres in the period of 4200 to 3900 B.C., larger than other settlements of the time, with the sole exception of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. The team of archaeologists, led by Joan Oates of Cambridge, will return to Brak in the spring to continue their work.
A misplaced tooth held the clue to the identity of one of the world’s most powerful queens, Hatshepsut, and it took the detective work of Egypt’s Indiana Jones, Zahi Hawass, to figure it out. Alone near midnight at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Hawass—the secretary general for Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities—decided to scan a box with Hatshepsut’s name on it. To his surprise, a single molar in the box perfectly matched the space left by a missing tooth in the mouth of one of the museum’s unidentified mummies.
DNA analysis bore out Hawass’s suspicion that the mummy was indeed Hatshepsut, perhaps the greatest discovery since that of King Tutankhamen in 1922. While King Tut had his name all over his tomb, Hatshepsut had been removed from hers and put into an unmarked crypt, stowed safely away from raiders, says Angelique Corthals, a biomedical Egyptologist at the University of Manchester in England. Corthals took preliminary DNA samples that confirmed Hatshepsut’s identity by matching the mummy’s mitochondrial DNA with that of her supposed great-grandmother, Ahmose Nefertari.
Hatshepsut, who often dressed like a man to affirm her kinglike status, ruled 3,500 years ago during Egypt’s 18th dynasty, at a time when female rulers were almost unheard of, says Hawass. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
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The obese queen is believed to have suffered from diabetes, and CT scans show she had bone cancer and died when she was about 50. Still, Corthals believes, at a time when tooth infections could be fatal, it was a tooth abscess that did her in, piercing the legend that her stepson, Thutmose III, killed her.
Although the immune system is constantly patrolling for foreign invaders, it attacks neither the bacteria in the gut nor those intestinal cells exposed to the bacteria. Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute this year announced that a previously unrecognized population of cells in the lymph nodes signals the immune system to tolerate conditions that would normally prompt an attack.
Immunologists already knew that a population of cells called dendritic cells can teach T lymphocytes, also called T cells—key instigators of an immune response—how to react to a particular protein. When the dendritic cells are in a calm environment, they communicate tolerance to T cells. If the dendritic cells are in an environment with microbes or tissue inflammation, they tell the T cells to start an immune system attack. That paradigm left no explanation for how T cells learn to tolerate the conditions in the gut, where cells are constantly in the presence of bacteria.
The surprising finding, reports immunologist Shannon Turley in the January 2007 issue of Nature Immunology, is that dendritic cells share this job with another group of cells far removed from the intestine. Stromal cells that reside in the lymph nodes throughout the body manufacture proteins identical to those made by gut cells and use them to train T cells to ignore certain proteins. “No one would have thought that this sort of system would exist,” Turley says. “We had trained ourselves to think that dendritic cells could do it all, both tolerize and induce immunity to everything. That is probably not true. We probably need backup mechanisms.”
Last May, a Siberian reindeer herder named Yuri Khudi chanced upon the world’s most intact mammoth remains, unearthed by erosion of a riverbank, and promptly turned them over to the natural history museum in the Russian town of Salekhard. The frozen woolly mammoth, named Lyuba in honor of Khudi’s wife, had died at the age of about 4 months. She is estimated to have lived between 40 thousand and 30 thousand years ago.
“What makes it so special is that it is more complete and better preserved than any comparable mammoth specimens that have ever been found,” says University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher. “This is a chance to look at mammoth anatomy in its entirety.” http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com/
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The carcass is scheduled to visit Japan for a full-body CT scan before being moved to St. Petersburg for a detailed autopsy.
Paleontologists will focus especially on the chemical and isotopic composition of Lyuba’s baby tusks. Because tusks grow in layers, like tree rings, they hold a record of the animal’s diet and health, as well as the range of temperatures and humidity through which she lived. Such data are key to understanding the environment leading up to the mass extinction that ended the mammoth’s reign. “Good specimens like Lyuba help us to understand these broad issues much more clearly,” Fisher says.
When staffers from the New York State Museum dug out two massive fossils from a Catskills quarry, they solved a 130-year-old mystery. The fossils—a frond-encircled treetop and a long, slender trunk—have also forced scientists to redraw their mid-Devonian (about 385 million years ago) landscapes to include tall trees.
The mystery was the identity of the Gilboa stumps—swollen tree-stump fossils discovered in the 1870s in the same New York county and named for the nearby town. Distinctive ridges at the base of the latest trunk fossil matched those on the old Gilboa stumps. Named Wattieza, the tree resembles modern-day palms and has usurped the conifer-like Archaeopteris as Earth’s oldest tree by some 25 million years, as reported last April in the journal Nature.
Given their abundance, the Gilboa stumps have long been thought to represent some kind of forest, an evolutionary first. Scientists imagined they were big, but not that big, says William Stein, paleobotanist at Binghamton University in upstate New York. At 26 feet, the fossilized trunk was three times taller than any known plant from the period. “We all have to be amazed with the scale of these things,” Stein says.
Size has not been the only surprise. The type of plant it was—more tree fern than conifer—forces a major rethinking of “how modern-scale forests actually came into being,” says Stein. “Here we have a plant that’s big and it’s producing a ton of [leaf] litter.” Dominant plants like Wattieza set the tone for an ecosystem during the Devonian period, which is when Earth’s modern ecology was formed, Stein says. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com/
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“Wherever the plants go, the animals follow.”
The temples of Angkor are architectural marvels and international tourist attractions. But in an August paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, archaeologists from Australia, Cambodia, and France reported using a combination of ground surveys and aerial scans to create a broader, more comprehensive map of the ancient Cambodian ruin, confirming that it was once the center of an incredibly vast city with an elaborate water network.
Lead researcher Damian Evans, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney, says the true extent of the city is apparent only from above. Between A.D. 800 and 1500, Angkor’s complex canals, roads, irrigated fields, and dense settlements sprawled across more than 1,160 square miles, almost the size of Rhode Island—and far beyond the area protected within the UNESCO World Heritage Site’s zone today. The city was the preindustrial world’s largest urban complex, made possible by some of the most complicated hydraulic works the world had ever seen.
American technology played a critical role in the analysis. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory flew a 747 specially equipped with ground-scanning radar over the site, teasing out subtle differences in elevation and soil content. Added to conventional aerial photography and confirmed through ground surveys, the radar images showed that Angkor was unsustainable. Stripping off the area’s natural forest cover exposed the complex irrigation systems to unexpected erosion and flooding. “They very intensively reengineered the landscape wherever they went,” Evans says. “When you start creating these incredibly elaborate engineering works, it’s inevitable that you create problems. Angkor engineered itself out of existence.”
Korean researcher Woo Suk Hwang claimed in 2004 to have created a human embryonic stem cell line using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Over the following two years, his results were discredited. This year, however, a report from researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute revealed that Hwang was indeed a pioneer—albeit by unwittingly exploiting an altogether different approach to creating embryonic stem cells.
To create an embryonic stem cell line using SCNT, a biologist sucks out the nucleus of an egg cell and replaces it with the nucleus of another cell—ideally one taken from the patient in need—creating a patient-specific stem cell line. Ongoing attempts to create human stem cell lines using SCNT have yet to achieve success.
Another process, called parthenogenesis, could yield stem cell lines that are genetically matched to a patient—in this case, the egg donor. http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com/
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In parthenogenesis, an egg is prodded to develop into an embryo without fertilization. Human parthenogenetic embryos are not viable—they run into developmental snags and cannot give rise to a person—but the stem cells derived from these embryos could still have research or therapeutic value.
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Hwang claimed his stem cells did not result from parthenogenesis, but George Daley, head of the study, showed that the genome of Hwang’s cell line has a genetic signature that indicates it sprang from a parthenogenetic embryo.
Since 2004, several groups have reported creating stem cell lines through parthenogenesis. But Daley says his study shows “with very, very high certainty that the first Hwang line was in fact also the world’s first parthenogenetic line.”
To escape prying predators, fragile fauna often become masters of the art of disguise. Take the leaf insects of Southeast Asia: They so strongly resemble leaves that they blend in with the surrounding foliage. Because the 37 species of leaf insect now live in one corner of the planet, entomologists had assumed that their camouflage was a relatively recent adaptation.
In January 2007, however, researchers announced the discovery of the first fossil leaf insect: a well-preserved, 47-million-year-old specimen from Messel, Germany. Named Eophyllium messelensis, the insect looks almost identical to its modern relatives, indicating the group is ancient, was once widespread, and has hardly changed in millions of years.
Biologist Sonja Wedmann, then at the Institute of Paleontology at the University of Bonn, analyzed the fossil after it was dug up from oil shale deposits in what was once a small lake formed by volcanic activity. The period when the insect lived, the Eocene, was one of the warmest in history, and lush tropical or subtropical rain forest surrounded the lake; the two-and-a-half-inch-long adult male most likely sat and snacked upon the leaves of plants from the laurel or the pea family.
So complete is the fossil—its head, antennae, thorax, wings, legs, and leaf-shaped abdomen intact—that it provides key clues on how it hid from predatory birds and primates: Its curved forelegs form a notch into which the insect could tuck its head. “We can infer that the fossil leaf insect showed the same behavior as extant leaf insects do,” Wedmann says. http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com/
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“It is hiding its head between the legs and sitting still on the leaf during the day, and when it is disturbed, it rocks from side to side like a leaf.”
Delivering more than just pretty pictures, the Cassini spacecraft returned an impressive collection of photographic firsts of Saturn and its environs this year. They include views of an improbable hexagonal feature, containing a huge system of swirling clouds, at the planet’s north pole, as well as never-before-seen views of the top and bottom of Saturn’s rings.
Voyager provided the first glimpses of the hexagonal cloud structure some 27 Earth years (about one Saturn year) ago. This time, Cassini, which entered orbit around Saturn in June 2004, was able to capture the entire object. The origin of the hexagon—so large that two Earths could be lined up across its diameter—is a mystery. “Clouds circulate around the feature like cars on a racetrack,” says Kevin Baines, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Studying this formation may give us a better idea of how fast Saturn rotates on its axis, Baines says, a measurement that is difficult to make because of the planet’s fast
The latest images of Saturn’s rings, which show propeller-shaped clumps and moonlets shattered by an ancient impact, are also giving astronomers a lot to think about. Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team, says the ring pictures may even help us figure out how Earth formed: “If we understand how icy particles in the outer solar system behave, then we can refine our understanding of how the early solar system formed from that same material.”
Unlike other cells in mammals, eggs lack centrosomes—crucial stabilizing structures that organize strandlike proteins called spindles, which pull chromosomes apart during cell division. How eggs form without centrosomes—a long-standing mystery—was solved in August by biologists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany.
To create an egg, a progenitor cell called an oocyte divides into two daughter cells: a hulking egg cell and a wimpy polar body. The oocyte’s chromosomes must be carefully sorted so that a representative half goes to each daughter cell. http://louis4j4sheehan.blogspot.com/
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If not, the egg can end up with too many or too few chromosomes, leading to infertility or developmental disorders like Down syndrome.
“Why is the division of egg cells—which is so important at the start of animal life—why is that not very reliable?” asks Jan Ellenberg, unit coordinator and senior scientist at EMBL.
Using a powerful microscope to observe mouse oocytes as they split, Ellenberg’s group found that the spindles assembled into two coherent structures, one for the future egg and one for the future polar body.At first, spindles appeared throughout the cell in a sort of mesh. Next, they began to attract each other, forming around 80 different organizing centers. After gathering into a big blob around the chromosomes, the many microtubule organizing centers then began to repel each other. The tug-of-war as the spindles attracted and repelled one another eventually gave rise—over several hours (compared with the 10 to 15 minutes it takes other body cells to divide)—to two distinct structures, yanking the chromosomes to opposite poles.
The team also noticed that during fertilization, the many organizing centers disassembled, re-creating the mesh throughout. This flexibility might help explain why eggs use such an unusual mechanism: Microtubule organizing centers are also critical for bringing together the egg and sperm nuclei after fertilization.
In September, a team of surgeons and immunologists at Duke University proposed a reason for the appendix, declaring it a “safe house” for beneficial bacteria. Attached like a little wiggly worm at the beginning of the large intestine, the 2- to 4-inch-long blind-ended tube seems to have no effect on digestion, so biologists have long been stumped about its purpose. That is, until biochemist and immunologist William Parker became interested in biofilms, closely bound communities of bacteria. http://louis4j4sheehan.blogspot.com/
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In the gut, biofilms aid digestion, make vital nutrients, and crowd out harmful invaders. Upon investigation, Parker and his colleagues found that in humans, the greatest concentration of biofilms was in the appendix; in rats and baboons, biofilms are concentrated in the cecum, a pouch that sits at the same location.
The shape of the appendix is perfectly suited as a sanctuary for bacteria: Its narrow opening prevents an influx of the intestinal contents, and it’s situated inaccessibly outside the main flow of the fecal stream. Parker suspects that it acts as a reservoir of healthy, protective bacteria that can replenish the intestine after a bacteria-depleting diarrheal illness like cholera. Where such diseases are rampant, Parker says, “if you don’t have something like the appendix to harbor safe bacteria, you have less of a survival advantage.”
The world’s biggest flower—which weighs 15 pounds and smells of rotting flesh—evolved from one of the world’s smallest, say the scientists who have finally figured out to which plants Rafflesia is most closely related.
It has been hard to place Rafflesia in a family tree because it is a parasite and lacks many of the characteristics typically used to classify plants. “Its stems, leaves, and roots are dwarfed,” says Charles Davis, the Harvard University evolutionary biologist who collected the flowers in the jungles of Borneo. “It basically has a little threadlike body that winds its way through the host, and you wouldn’t otherwise know it was there except that every now and again it will produce this great big flower.”
Since even the DNA for photosynthesis is missing, Davis and his colleagues turned to mitochondrial and other slowly evolving genes. They pinpointed Rafflesia’s ancestors as flowers with blooms less than one-tenth of an inch across, while Rafflesia blossoms reach three feet in diameter. “It would be like magnifying me to the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza,” Davis says.
Chihuahuas, Boston terriers, and Pomeranians have this much in common: They’re tiny. Part of what makes them that way is the mutation of a single gene called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1), according to a group of researchers from the University of Utah, Cornell University, and the National Human Genome Research Institute.
The researchers began their study by looking at dogs of one breed, the Portuguese water dog, and found that those with one type of mutation of IGF1 were 15 to 20 percent smaller. The researchers ultimately studied 3,000 dogs from 143 different breeds to determine how that gene mutation was distributed across the species. They discovered that the smallest breeds, like Chihuahuas, all had the same gene variant that would make them small. Similarly, 100 percent of the largest dogs, like Great Danes, had a variant that would make them big.
The group was surprised that so many small-dog breeds shared the same mutation. “It didn’t need to be that a gene that determines size within breeds would determine size across breeds, but that is how it turned out,” says Carlos Bustamante, an assistant professor of biological statistics and computational biology at Cornell, who crunched the numbers for the project. “Below a few kilograms, it’s staggering. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com/
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More than 85 percent had the gene variant, about as ‘smoking gun’ of a correlation as we’ve seen.”
Domestic dogs are descended from gray wolves, which have only the big version of the IGF1 gene. Bustamante imagines that the small –mutation probably arose around the start of –domestication. “You had junky dogs living on the outside of –settlements,” he says, “so a small mutation might be advantageous—you could get closer to a village without scaring everyone.” The researchers believe the mutation became fixed within different breeds during 300-odd years of artificial selection—that is, dog breeding.
However it arose, the switch is not limited to the Canidae family. Mice who’ve had that section of their genes knocked out wind up 40 percent smaller. And, scientists say, humans who share 90 percent of the amino acids found in small-dog IGF1 tend to be the more diminutive specimens of our species.
Astronomers got a new perspective on the sun in April, when NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) probes began sending back the first three-dimensional images of our nearest star. NASA built the twin spacecraft to learn more about coronal mass ejections, or CMEs—billion-ton spitballs of electrically charged particles that sporadically fire off from the sun. When CMEs slam into Earth, their electric fields can blow out the circuits of communications satellites or overload regional power grids. “Anything that’s electromagnetic can be affected by their charged particles,” says NASA astrophysicist Madhulika Guhathakurta, a program scientist for STEREO.
Despite their destructive power, CMEs are so wispy that they are hard to observe without blotting out the sun’s light, and seeing them from only one vantage point, such as the Earth, makes it difficult to determine their 3-D structure. “All you’re seeing is stuff that’s moving across the plane of the sky, like the shadow of a smoke ring,” Guhathakurta says. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com/
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“If you want to model it—if you want to know its mass, if you want to know its velocity—you need a three-dimensional view.”
In addition to providing 3-D images of solar eruptions and the sun’s surface, STEREO will help space-weather forecasters figure out which CMEs are likely to make earthfall; this may extend the warning time for space squalls—now only hours—to several days.
The new spacecraft are also clarifying the broader relationship between the sun and the rest of the solar system. “We literally live in the outer atmosphere of the sun,” Guhathakurta says.
Although avian flu made few headlines in 2007, the virus continued to claim lives in Asia, particularly in Indonesia. The good news is that this year the FDA approved the first bird flu vaccine and announced plans to stockpile it for emergency use during a crisis.
The H5N1 strain of bird flu first appeared in Hong Kong in 1997 and since then has infected more than 330 people, killing more than 200. In 2007, the virus—which normally infects birds and occasionally jumps from birds to humans—affected seven countries, prompting experts to warn that it could gain the ability to jump from person to person and trigger a pandemic.
In April, the FDA approved a two-shot vaccine made by Sanofi Pasteur. In a clinical trial, this vaccine protected 45 percent of the adults who received the highest dose against infection from H5N1. The government said its goal was to stockpile enough doses of the Sanofi vaccine to protect 20 million people as a stopgap measure until a more potent vaccine is available.
The year 2007 also brought an innovation that could significantly speed up ordinary flu vaccine production. In the conventional method, the virus is grown in fertilized hens’ eggs, which can take up to six months. John Treanor, professor of medicine at the University of Rochester, and researchers at Connecticut-based Protein Sciences instead infected caterpillar cells with an insect virus—a baculovirus engineered to produce flu virus protein from three ordinary flu strains. In a preliminary study published in the April Journal of the American Medical Association, the researchers found that the vaccine produced by this method protects against the two strains to which the subjects were exposed and most likely protects against the third. The same method could be used to create vaccines for all flu strains at least a month faster than at present.
In the meantime, Canada saw an outbreak of another deadly bird flu strain—H7N3—in September. “We can’t afford not to be concerned,” says Robert Webster, a leading bird flu expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. “If you’re a chicken farmer, there’s always a pandemic going on.”
In 2003, breast cancer rates dropped rapidly, and several studies in 2007 cited decreased use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) as the likely cause. The drop in hormone use dates back to July 2002, when the Women’s Health Initiative, a 15-year study tracking the health of more than 160,000 women, abruptly ended its long-term study of estrogen-progestin hormone replacement therapy because women taking the drugs faced an elevated risk of invasive breast cancer and heart disease.
As a result, doctors wrote 20 million fewer prescriptions for HRT in 2003. Then, when researchers measured the incidence of breast cancer between 2001 and 2004, they found it had dropped by almost 9 percent, according to a report in April in the New England Journal of Medicine. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
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“That big a drop actually reduced the risk levels to those of about 20 years ago,” says Peter Ravdin of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, the first author on that study. During the 1990s, he adds, “the levels had been gradually increasing” by about 1 percent per year in the United States.
The research doesn’t conclusively show that the drop in HRT use lowered the incidence of breast cancer, Ravdin says. Another factor in the lower numbers could be that 3 percent fewer women had mammograms in 2003 than in 2000, reducing the likelihood of a cancer’s being detected. Yet, according to two studies published in August, breast cancer rates also dipped among smaller groups of women who had been screened regularly, making reduced detection an unlikely cause. Other data supporting a link to HRT: The rates fell only among women 50 and older, and estrogen-receptor-positive cancers—whose growth is stimulated by estrogen—decreased by nearly 15 percent.
The research doesn’t change the national guidelines for women considering hormone replacement therapy, says Ravdin, adding, “[HRT] confers a small amount of additional risk, which, as long as you’re going to be taking it for a short period, for most people, is an acceptable level.” Longer exposure, he says, would make the risk of developing cancer much higher.
There may be another good reason to eat fish, a food containing a fatty acid called omega-3. Researchers have found that a diet enriched with omega-3 helps repair and prevent retinal damage in mice, a discovery with potential for preventing blindness in premature infants and adults suffering from age-related macular degeneration.
Nature Medicine published the omega-3 study, written by a team that included Harvard University ophthalmology researcher Kip Connor, in June. “With just a 2 percent change in dietary omega-3, there was a 40 to 50 percent decrease in the disease pathology,” Connor says.
The researchers fed almost identical diets to two groups of female mice nursing litters. One diet was enriched with 2 percent omega-3 fatty acid, mirroring a Japanese diet, the other with 2 percent omega-6 fatty acid, similar to a typical American diet.
The litters were also exposed to high levels of oxygen, which causes a loss of blood vessels in retinal tissue. When oxygen levels are restored to normal, the eye senses it as a lack of oxygen and responds by growing new blood vessels, which often leads to excessive growth and damage to vision. This happened to the offspring of the mothers receiving omega-6, but the pups receiving omega-3 through their mothers’ milk grew new vessels at a healthy rate.
In humans, abnormal and excessive blood vessel growth related to decreased oxygen supply is the most common cause of blindness in premature babies, diabetics, and the elderly. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
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It affects some 4 million people in the United States alone. Connor and other researchers are studying the impact of omega-3 –and -6 on human eyesight and will release the results later in 2008.
Human-generated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is slowly acidifying the ocean, threatening a catastrophic impact on marine life. And just as scientists are starting to grasp the magnitude of the problem, researchers have delivered more bad news: Acid rain is making things worse.
Scientists estimate that one-third of the world’s acid rain falls near the coasts, carrying some 100 million tons of nitrogen oxide, ammonia, and sulfur dioxide into the ocean each year. Using direct measurements and computer models, oceanographer Scott Doney of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and his colleagues calculated that acid rain causes as much as 50 percent of the acidification of coastal waters, where the pH can be as low as 7.6. (The open ocean’s pH is 8.1.)
The findings increase the urgency of confronting the crisis of ocean acidity, says Richard Feely, a collaborator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the laboratory, researchers have seen some effect on just about every ocean creature that forms a calcium carbonate shell, says Feely, including algae—the tiny creatures at the crucial bottom of the deepwater food chain—and coral, whose skeletons grow more slowly in water with a pH even slightly lower than normal. Soon-to-be-released field experiment findings “seem to be showing the same kind of thing,” Feely says. That’s bad news, he adds, since a third of the world’s fish species depend in part on coral reefs for their ecosystems.
Wednesday, 19 March 2008 17:24
People in Chiredzi and Zaka are without meal or grain, despite
supplies being available at nearby depots, The Zimbabwean has learnt.
Reports from the area say that people are now suffering because of the
lack of the staple grains and some have resorted to sleeping outside the
Grain Marketing Board depots in the hope of food.
"It is being described as the worst that it has ever been," said one
source. "There is however a large stack of grain at the Grain Marketing
Board depot 10km out of Chiredzi. This is controlled by Zanu (PF), and there
is also grain at PG Timbers in Chiredzi, which is supposedly controlled by
one of the NGOs. What are they waiting for; why are they not distributing
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In Zaka, opposition candidates have said the army and police, aware of
how hungry the people are, are now backing them.
"[They] say that they must work hard and win the elections before
everybody dies of hunger and sickness," said the source.
"Going negative" usually happens in politics, not the bond market. But one corner of the bond world has gone alarmingly negative lately.
The real yield on five-year Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, TIPS, has turned negative for the first time since the Treasury Department started issuing the securities in 1997.
Late yesterday, they yielded -0.026%, meaning the return investors get on these securities is a little less than the inflation rate.
The principal investors get back on TIPS bonds are adjusted to account for inflation. At first blush, a negative TIPS yield seems to suggest investors are so worried about inflation that they're willing to lose a little money to avoid getting hit by an even worse bout of inflation down the road.
Inflation expectations are certainly rising. One way to tell is by measuring the gap between the TIPS yield and the yield on the five-year Treasury note. That has spread to more than 2.6% from less than 2% on Jan. 22, when the Fed made its emergency rate cut. This means the market expects the consumer-price index to grow on average by 2.6% over the next five years, higher than the Fed's comfort zone.
But it's too early to say the Fed is losing its inflation-fighting credibility. At 2.6%, inflation expectations are still within the range they've been in the past two years. That's one reason the Fed can argue with a straight face that inflation expectations are well-anchored.
Other factors are buffeting TIPS. The credit-market seizure has driven investors to only the safest assets, and TIPS eliminate just about any risk an investor can imagine, besides the government going broke.
If fear weren't running rampant about the broader economic outlook, says Joe Shatz, senior government-bond strategist at Merrill Lynch, TIPS wouldn't be so out of whack.
Investors Punish Immelt With P/E Discount
In a letter to General Electric shareholders in the firm's annual report, to be released today, Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt says, "We don't believe in excuses, and you won't hear any from us."
But he could have a lot of explaining to do when he follows up the letter with a 30-minute Webcast aimed at individual-investor shareholders tomorrow.
GE shares are roughly 15% below their level when Mr. Immelt took over in September 2001.
The share price isn't the only thing that's down. Investors have also reduced the premium they're willing to pay for GE shares. They are trading at 13 times this year's expected earnings, according to Goldman Sachs. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
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That's a slight discount to the Standard & Poor's 500. In the summer of 2001, just before Mr. Immelt's predecessor, Jack Welch, retired, GE traded at a 35-40% premium to the market, Goldman notes.
Tomorrow's talk is partly aimed at quelling concerns over GE's financial-services business and highlighting the company's strong industrial businesses.
In his shareholder letter, Mr. Immelt touts sales of aircraft engines and power turbines, among other products, in global markets. GE sales to emerging markets could hit $40 billion this year, up from $19 billion in 2004. If only he could get the share price to rise like that, investor calls would be a lot easier.
On March 16, 1968 the angry and frustrated men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal Division entered the Vietnamese village of My Lai. "This is what you've been waiting for -- search and destroy -- and you've got it," said their superior officers. A short time later the killing began. When news of the atrocities surfaced, it sent shockwaves through the U.S. political establishment, the military's chain of command, and an already divided American public.
My Lai lay in the South Vietnamese district of Son My, a heavily mined area where the Vietcong were deeply entrenched. Numerous members of Charlie Company had been maimed or killed in the area during the preceding weeks. The agitated troops, under the command of Lt. William Calley, entered the village poised for engagement with their elusive enemy.
As the "search and destroy" mission unfolded, it soon degenerated into the massacre of over 300 apparently unarmed civilians including women, children, and the elderly. Calley ordered his men to enter the village firing, though there had been no report of opposing fire. According to eyewitness reports offered after the event, several old men were bayoneted, praying women and children were shot in the back of the head, and at least one girl was raped and then killed. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
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For his part, Calley was said to have rounded up a group of the villagers, ordered them into a ditch, and mowed them down in a fury of machine gun fire.
William Calley Word of the atrocities did not reach the American public until November 1969, when journalist Seymour Hersh published a story detailing his conversations with a Vietnam veteran, Ron Ridenhour. Ridenhour learned of the events at My Lai from members of Charlie Company who had been there. Before speaking with Hersh, he had appealed to Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon to investigate the matter. The military investigation resulted in Calley's being charged with murder in September 1969 -- a full two months before the Hersh story hit the streets.
As the gruesome details of My Lai reached the American public, serious questions arose concerning the conduct of American soldiers in Vietnam. A military commission investigating the massacre found widespread failures of leadership, discipline, and morale among the Army's fighting units. As the war progressed, many "career" soldiers had either been rotated out or retired. Many more had died. In their place were scores of draftees whose fitness for leadership in the field of battle was questionable at best. Military officials blamed inequities in the draft policy for the often slim talent pool from which they were forced to choose leaders. Many maintained that if the educated middle class ("the Harvards," as they were called) had joined in the fight, a man of Lt. William Calley's emotional and intellectual stature would never have been issuing orders.
Calley, an unemployed college dropout, had managed to graduate from Officer's Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1967. At his trial, Calley testified that he was ordered by Captain Ernest Medina to kill everyone in the village of My Lai. Still, there was only enough photographic and recorded evidence to convict Calley, alone, of murder. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
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He was sentenced to life in prison, but was released in 1974, following many appeals. After being issued a dishonorable discharge, Calley entered the insurance business.
Two tragedies took place in 1968 in Viet Nam. One was the massacre by United States soldiers of as many as 500 unarmed civilians-- old men, women, children-- in My Lai on the morning of March 16. The other was the cover-up of that massacre.
U. S. military officials suspected Quang Ngai Province, more than any other province in South Viet Nam, as being a Viet Cong stronghold. The U. S. targeted the province for the first major U.S. combat operation of the war. Military officials declared the province a "free-fire zone" and subjected it to frequent bombing missions and artillery attacks. By the end of 1967, most of the dwellings in the province had been destroyed and nearly 140,000 civilians left homeless. Not surprisingly, the native population of Quang Ngai Province distrusted Americans. Children hissed at soldiers. Adults kept quiet.
Two hours of instruction on the rights of prisoners and a wallet-sized card "The Enemy is in Your Hands" seemed to have little impact on American soldiers fighting in Quang Ngai. Military leaders encouraged and rewarded kills in an effort to produce impressive body counts that could be reported to Saigon as an indication of progress. GIs joked that "anything that's dead and isn't white is a VC" for body count purposes. Angered by a local population that said nothing about the VC's whereabouts, soldiers took to calling natives "gooks."
Charlie Company came to Viet Nam in December, 1967. It located in Quang Ngai Province in January, 1968, as one of the three companies in Task Force Barker, an ad hoc unit headed by Lt. Col. Frank Barker, Jr. Its mission was to pressure the VC in an area of the province known as "Pinkville." Charlie Company's commanding officer was Ernest Medina, a thirty-three-year-old Mexican-American from New Mexico who was popular with his soldiers. One of his platoon leaders was twenty-four-year-old William Calley. Charlie Company soldiers expressed amazement that Calley was thought by anyone to be officer material. One described Calley as"a kid trying to play war." [LINK TO CHAIN OF COMMAND DIAGRAM] Calley's utter lack of respect for the indigenous population was apparent to all in the company. According to one soldier, "if they wanted to do something wrong, it was alright with Calley." The soldiers of Charlie Company, like most combat soldiers in Viet Nam, scored low on military exams. Few combat soldiers had education beyond high school.
Seymour Hersh wrote that by March of 1968 "many in the company had given in to an easy pattern of violence." Soldiers systematically beat unarmed civilians. Some civilians were murdered. Whole villages were burned. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
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Wells were poisoned. Rapes were common.
On March 14, a small squad from "C" Company ran into a booby trap, killing a popular sergeant, blinding one GI and wounding several others. The following evening, when a funeral service was held for the killed sergeant, soldiers had revenge on their mind. After the service, Captain Medina rose to give the soldiers a pep talk and discuss the next morning's mission. Medina told them that the VC's crack 48th Battalion was in the vicinity of a hamlet known as My Lai 4, which would be the target of a large-scale assault by the company. The soldiers' mission would be to engage the 48th Battalion and to destroy the village of My Lai. By 7 a.m., Medina said, the women and children would be out of the hamlet and all they could expect to encounter would be the enemy. The soldiers were to explode brick homes, set fire to thatch homes, shoot livestock, poison wells, and destroy the enemy. The seventy-five or so American soldiers would be supported in their assault by gunship pilots.
Medina later said that his objective that night was to "fire them up and get them ready to go in there; I did not give any instructions as to what to do with women and children in the village." Although some soldiers agreed with that recollection of Medina's, others clearly thought that he had ordered them to kill every person in My Lai 4. Perhaps his orders were intentionally vague. What seems likely is that Medina intentionally gave the impression that everyone in My Lai would be their enemy.
At 7:22 a.m. on March 16, nine helicopters lifted off for the flight to My Lai 4. By the time the helicopters carrying members of Charlie Company landed in a rice paddy about 140 yards south of My Lai, the area had been peppered with small arms fire from assault helicopters. Whatever VC might have been in the vicinity of My Lai had most likely left by the time the first soldiers climbed out of their helicopters. The assault plan called for Lt. Calley's first platoon and Lt. Stephen Brooks' second platoon to sweep into the village, while a third platoon, Medina, and the headquarters unit would be held in reserve and follow the first two platoons in after the area was more-or-less secured. Above the ground, the action would be monitored at the 1,000-foot level by Lt. Col. Barker and at the 2,500-foot level by Oran Henderson, commander of the 11th Brigade, both flying counterclockwise around the battle scene in helicopters.
My Lai village had about 700 residents. They lived in either red-brick homes or thatch-covered huts. A deep drainage ditch marked the eastern boundary of the village. Directly south of the residential area was an open plaza area used for holding village meetings. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
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To the north and west of the village was dense foliage.
By 8 a.m., Calley's platoon had crossed the plaza on the town's southern edge and entered the village. They encountered families cooking rice in front of their homes. The men began their usual search-and-destroy task of pulling people from homes, interrogating them, and searching for VC. Soon the killing began. The first victim was a man stabbed in the back with a bayonet. Then a middle-aged man was picked up, thrown down a well, and a grenade lobbed in after him. A group of fifteen to twenty mostly older women were gathered around a temple, kneeling and praying. They were all executed with shots to the back of their heads. Eighty or so villagers were taken from their homes and herded to the plaza area. As many cried "No VC! No VC!", Calley told soldier Paul Meadlo, "You know what I want you to do with them". When Calley returned ten minutes later and found the Vietnamese still gathered in the plaza he reportedly said to Meadlo, "Haven't you got rid of them yet? I want them dead. Waste them." Meadlo and Calley began firing into the group from a distance of ten to fifteen feet. The few that survived did so because they were covered by the bodies of those less fortunate.
What Captain Medina knew of these war crimes is not certain. It was a chaotic operation. Gary Garfolo said, "I could hear shooting all the time. Medina was running back and forth everywhere. This wasn't no organized deal." Medina would later testify that he didn't enter the village until 10 a.m., after most of the shooting had stopped, and did not personally witness a single civilian being killed. Others put Medina in the village closer to 9 a.m., and close to the scene of many of the murders as they were happening.
As the third platoon moved into My Lai, it was followed by army photographer Ronald Haeberle, there to document what was supposed to be a significant encounter with a crack enemy battalion. Haeberle took many pictures. He said he saw about thirty different GIs kill about 100 civilians. Once Haeberle focused his camera on a young child about five feet away, but before he could get his picture the kid was blown away. He angered some GIs as he tried to photograph them as they fondled the breasts of a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese girl.
An army helicopter piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson arrived in the My Lai vicinity about 9 a.m. Thompson noticed dead and dying civilians all over the village. Thompson repeatedly saw young boys and girls being shot at point-blank range. Thompson, furious at what he saw, reported the wanton killings to brigade headquarters.
Meanwhile, the rampage below continued. Calley was at the drainage ditch on the eastern edge of the village, where about seventy to eighty old men, women, and children not killed on the spot had been brought. Calley ordered the dozen or so platoon members there to push the people into the ditch, and three or four GIs did. Calley ordered his men to shoot into the ditch. Some refused, others obeyed. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
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One who followed Calley's order was Paul Meadlo, who estimated that he killed about twenty-five civilians. (Later Meadlo was seen, head in hands, crying.) Calley joined in the massacre. At one point, a two-year-old child who somehow survived the gunfire began running towards the hamlet. Calley grabbed the child, threw him back in the ditch, then shot him.
Hugh Thompson, by now almost frantic, saw bodies in the ditch, including a few people who were still alive. He landed his helicopter and told Calley to hold his men there while he evacuated the civilians. Thompson told his helicopter crew chief to "open up on the Americans" if they fired at the civilians. He put himself between Calley's men and the Vietnamese. When a rescue helicopter landed, Thompson had the nine civilians, including five children, flown to the nearest army hospital. Later, Thompson was to land again and rescue a baby still clinging to her dead mother.
By 11 a.m., when Medina called for a lunch break, the killing was nearly over. By noon, "My Lai was no more": its buildings were destroyed and its people dead or dying. Soldiers later said they didn't remember seeing "one military-age male in the entire place". By night, the VC had returned to bury the dead. What few villagers survived and weren't already communists, became communists. Twenty months later army investigators would discover three mass graves containing the bodies of about 500 villagers.
The cover-up of the My Lai massacre began almost as soon as the killing ended. Official army reports of the operation proclaimed a great victory: 128 enemy dead, only one American casualty (one soldier intentionally shot himself in the foot). The army knew better. Hugh Thompson had filed a complaint, alleging numerous war crimes involving murders of civilians. According to one of Thompson's crew members, "Thompson was so pissed he wanted to turn in his wings". http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
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An order issued by Major Calhoun to Captain Medina to return to My Lai to do a body count was countermanded by Major General Samuel Koster, who asked Medina how many civilians has been killed. "Twenty to twenty-eight," was his answer. The next day Colonel Henderson informed Medina that an informal investigation of the My Lai incident was underway-- and most likely gave the Captain "a good ass-chewing" as well. Henderson interviewed a number of GIs, then pronounced himself "satisfied" by their answers. No attempt was made to interview surviving Vietnamese. In late April, Henderson submitted a written report indicating that about twenty civilians had been inadvertently killed in My Lai. Meanwhile, Michael Bernhart, a Charlie Company GI severely troubled by what he witnessed at My Lai discussed with other GIs his plan to write a letter about the incident to his congressman. Medina, after learning of Bernhart's intentions, confronted him and told him how unwise such an action, in his opinion, would be.
If not for the determined efforts of a twenty-two-year-old ex-GI from Phoenix, Ronald Ridenhour, what happened on March 16, 1968 at My Lai 4 may never have come to the attention of the American people. Ridenhour served in a reconnaissance unit in Duc Pho, where he heard five eyewitness accounts of the My Lai massacre. He began his own investigation, traveling to Americal headquarters to confirm that Charlie Company had in fact been in My Lai on the date reported by his witnesses. Ridenhour was shocked by what he learned. When he was discharged in December, 1968, Ridenhour said "I wanted to get those people. I wanted to reveal what they did. My God, when I first came home, I would tell my friends about this and cry-literally cry." In March, 1969, Ridenhour composed a letter detailing what he had heard about the My Lai massacre[LINK TO LETTER]and sent it to President Nixon, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and numerous members of Congress. Most recipients simply ignored the letter, but a few, most notably Representative Morris Udall, aggressively pushed for a full investigation of Ridenhour's allegations.
By late April, General Westmoreland, Army Chief of Staff, had turned the case over to the Inspector General for investigation. Over the next few months, dozens of witnesses were interviewed. It became apparent to all connected with the investigation that war crimes had been committed. In June, 1969, William Calley was flown back from Viet Nam to appear in a line-up for identification by Hugh Thompson. By August, the matter was in the hands of the army's Criminal Investigation Division for a determination as to whether criminal charges should be filed against Calley and other massacre participants. On September 5, formal charges, included six specifications of premeditated murder, were filed against Calley.
Calley hired as his attorney George Latimer, a Salt Lake City lawyer with considerable military experience, having served on the Military Court of Appeals. Latimer pronounced himself impressed with Calley. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
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"You couldn't find a nicer boy," he said, adding that if Calley was guilty of anything it was only following orders "a bit too diligently."
Meanwhile, the issue of the My Lai massacre had gotten the attention of President Nixon. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird briefed Nixon at his San Clemente retreat. The White House proceeded with caution, sensing the potential of the incident to embarrass the military and undermine the war effort. The President characterized what happened at My Lai as an unfortunate aberration, as "an isolated incident."
In November, 1969, the American public began to learn the details of what happened at My Lai 4. The massacre was the cover story in both Time and Newsweek. CBS ran a Mike Wallace interview with Paul Meadlo. Seymour Hersh published in depth accounts based on his own extensive interviews. Life magazine published Haeberle's graphic photographs.
Reaction to the reports of the massacre varied. Some politicians, such as House Armed Services Subcommittee Chair L. Mendel Rivers maintained that there was no massacre and that reports to the contrary were merely attempts to build opposition to the Viet Nam war. Others called for an open, independent inquiry. The Administration took a middle course, deciding on a closed-door investigation by the Pentagon, headed by William Peers, a blunt three-star general.
For four months the Peers Panel interviewed 398 witnesses, ranging from General Koster to the GIs of Charlie Company. Over 20,000 pages of testimony were taken. The Peers Report criticized the actions of both officers and enlisted men. The report recommended action against dozens of men for rape, murder, or participation in the cover-up.
The Army's Criminal Investigation Division continued its separate investigation. Most of the enlisted men who committed war crimes were no longer members of the military, and thus immune from prosecution by court-martial. A 1955 Supreme Court decision, Toth vs Quarles, held that military courts cannot try former members of the armed services "no matter how intimate the connection between the offense and the concerns of military discipline." Decisions were made to prosecute a total of twenty-five officers and enlisted men, including General Koster, Colonel Oran Henderson, Captain Medina. In the end, however, only few would be tried and only one, William Calley, would be found guilty. The top officer charged, General Samuel Koster, who failed to report known civilian casualties and conducted a clearly inadequate investigation was, according to General Peers, the beneficiary of a whitewash, having charges against him dropped and receiving only a letter of censure and reduction in rank. Colonel Henderson was found not guilty on all charges after a trial by court martial. Peers again expressed his disapproval, writing "I cannot agree with the verdict. If his actions are judged as acceptable standards for an officer in his position, the Army is indeed in deep trouble."
Captain Ernest Medina faced charges of murdering 102 Vienamese civilians. The charges were based on the prosecution's theory of command responsibility: Medina, as the officer in charge of Charlie Company should be accountable for the actions of his men. If Medina knew that a massacre was taking place and did nothing to stop it, he should be found guilty of murder. (Medina was originally charged also with dereliction of duty for participating in the coverup, but the offense was dropped because the statute of limitations had run.) Medina was subjected to a lie-detector test which tended to show he responded truthfully when he said that he did not intentionally suggest to his men that they kill unarmed civilians. The same test, however, tended to to show that his contention that he first heard of the killing of unarmed civilians about 10 to 10:30 A.M. was not truthful, and that he in fact knew non-combattants were being killed sometime between 8 A.M. and 9 A.M., when there would still have been time to prevent many civilian deaths. The prosecution, led by Major William Eckhardt, was unable, however, to get the damaging lie-detector evidence admitted. Medina's lawyer, flamboyant defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, conducted a highly successful defense, forcing the prosecution to drop key witnesses and keeping damaging evidence, such as Ronald Haeberle's photographs, from the jury. After fifty-seven minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted Medina on all charges. (Months later, when a perjury prosecution was no longer possible, Medina admitted that he had suppressed evidence and lied to the brigade commander about the number of civilians killed.)
The strongest government case was that against Lt. William Calley. On November 12, 1970, in a small courthouse in Fort Benning, Georgia, young Prosecutor Aubrey Daniel stood to deliver his opening statement: "I want you to know My Lai 4. I will try to put you there." Captain Daniel told the jury of six military officers the shocking story of Calley's role in My Lai's tragedy: his machine-gunning of people in the plaza area south of the hamlet; his orders to men to execute men, women, and children in the eastern drainage ditch; his butt-stroking with his rifle of an old man; his grabbing of a small child and his throwing of the child into the ditch, then shooting him at point-blank range. Daniel told the jury that at the close of evidence he would ask them to "in the name of justice" convict the accused of all charges.
Daniel built the prosecution's case methodically. For days, the grisly evidence accumulated without a single witness directly placing Calley at the scene of a shooting. One of the early witnesses was Ronald Haeberle, the army photographer whose pictures brought home the horror of My Lai Another was Hugh Thompson, My Lai's hero. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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Defense attorney Latimer's handling on cross of Haeberle, Thompson, and other witnesses led many courtroom observers to conclude that his glowing reputation was undeserved. His questioning of Haeberle, whose credibility was largely irrelevant, was pointless. His attempt to question Thompson's heroism "failed utterly," according to Richard Hammer, author of The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley.
In the second week of the trial Daniel began to call his more incriminating witnesses. Robert Maples, a machine gunner in the first platoon, testified that he saw Calley near the eastern drainage ditch, firing at the people below. Maples said that Calley asked him to use his machine gun on the Vietnamese in the ditch, but that he refused [TESTIMONY OF MAPLES]. Dennis Conti provided equally damning evidence. Conti testified that he was ordered to round up people, mostly women and children, and bring them back to Calley on the trail south of the hamlet. Calley, Conti said, told us to make them "squat down and bunch up so they couldn't get up and run." Minutes later Calley and Paul Meadlo "fired directly into the people. There were burst and shots for two minutes. The people screamed and yelled and fell." Conti said that Meadlo "broke down" and began crying.
The prosecution's final witness was its most anticipated witness. Paul Meadlo had been promised immunity from military prosecution in return for his testimony in th
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