Children whose reading and spelling problems get classified as dyslexia fail to note a critical rhythmic beat in spoken words, a new study suggests. This sound cue, which lasts for one-tenth to one-fifth of a second, marks the transition from a consonant sound to a speech segment beginning with a vowel.
Such rhythmic neglect may make it difficult to sound out words when reading, say psychologist Usha Goswami of University College London and her colleagues. In particular, problems may arise for words that are similar or that rhyme, such as seat, sweet, and street.LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.BIZ
The scientists first studied 24 children diagnosed with dyslexia and 49 others reading at an age-appropriate grade level. Kids in both groups were 9 years old. Only those with dyslexia had difficulty discerning the beat in continuous sounds containing sudden rises and falls in loudness, as in such speech transitions as sw�eet. Moreover, in a group of 11-year-olds, 14 superior readers performed much better on this task than 14 average readers, the researchers report in the August 6 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.BIZ
In the London study, children with dyslexia encountered few problems in discerning extremely short sound modulations, which correspond to individual units of speech. Other researchers suspect that dyslexia involves an inability to hear the difference between these sounds, such as p versus b. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Meat and Fish 443.mea.0001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
“Can Meat and Fish Consumption Be Sustainable?” That’s the provocative title of a press release just sent to us by the Worldwatch Institute, a small but by now venerable think tank that focuses on natural resource issues.
It’s also the theme of a chapter in Worldwatch’s 2008 State of the World report, its 25th annual book-length analysis of resource trends and economics. Here, its analysts take on the substantial—and often hidden—costs of producing animal protein to satisfy human hunger.
In 2006, Worldwatch reports, “farmers produced an estimated 276 million tons of chicken, pork, beef, and other meat—four times as much as in 1961.” As for fish: Some 140 million tons were hauled in globally during 2005, the most recent year for which data are available. “That was eight times as much as in 1950,” note Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg, the chapter’s authors.
Part of the growth in production reflects a growing demand, fueled by world population and growing wealth that allows meat consumption even within formerly impoverished nations. However, per capita consumption has also been rising. For meat, it’s doubled over the past 45 years; fish consumption quadrupled over a 55-year span.
Bottom line: “meat and seafood are the two most rapidly growing ingredients in the global diet,” Halweil and Nierenberg find, and “two of the most costly.” Demand for both are slated to go the way of oil—up, up, up, with prices following—as incomes in China, India, and hosts of developing countries rise.
Industrial meat production and fish harvests have dropped the economic cost of animal proteins in recent decades. But much of that fiscal savings has come at the expense of the environment. Wastes are not captured and destroyed or recycled. They’re allowed to run into the ground or waterways, degrading ecosystems all along the way. There are costs to this that are not captured in traditional accounting—but they’re costs nonetheless.
Anyone who has tried fishing in the Gulf of Mexico’s annual dead zone has experienced one cost of allowing livestock wastes from the upper Midwest to flow through the ground and into waters that feed the mighty Mississippi—and Gulf (See Limiting Dead Zones). Anyone who lives with the pervasive stench downwind of animal feedlots knows there’s a cost that these neighbors are being asked to subsidize with their discomfort—and perhaps health.
Fishers, in recent years, have been mining the ocean’s top and middle predators, substantially distorting the balance of ecosystems (SN: 6/4/05, p. 360). The net primary productivity of the oceans probably hasn’t changed much: that is to say, about the same mass of living cells probably inhabits it. However, instead of tuna, cod, sharks, and trout, the bulk of the mass may be shifting to alewives, smelt, jellyfish, and algae (see How Low Will We Go in Fishing for Dinner?: http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc98/2_7_98/fob1.html). One solution, fish farming, has proven moderately successful—but can also prove enormously harmful to nonfarmed species and the environment generally.
“Part of the reason that livestock and fish farms have become ecological disasters is that they have moved away from mimicking the environment in which animals exist naturally,” the Worldwatch report maintains.
There’s another problem as well. People the world over want to eat the same few species—cows, pigs, and lambs, salmon, tuna, and trout—even if their own environment cannot support the production of these animals. Moreover, as relatively large and high-in-the-food-chain animals, these species grow at the expense of hosts of plants, animals, and other energy inputs. The land and energy needed to produce 1,000 calories of grain, legumes (like soy), or algae is a fraction of what it takes to produce 1,000 calories of beef or catfish.
Many people don’t want to eat just greens, grains, and pulses (like beans). In truth, I don’t.
However, there is another source of animal protein that may prove dramatically more sustainable than fish and hoofed livestock. Insects.
Alright, it may take a bit of work to wrap your head around the idea of this—especially if you grew up in the States. We’re talking ants, grasshoppers, and beetles.
There was a time that the arrival of hordes of locusts blackening the skies was a time for rejoicing. Hungry farmers would see this as a smorgasbord of animal protein that could be gathered by the bucketsful. Eaten raw, fried with onion and chilis, or roasted for consumption throughout the months ahead, this was nutritionally high-quality animal protein. And you didn’t have to chase it. It came to you.
Those old enough to remember shipments of food aid to starving masses in Ethiopia and Somalia during the ‘70s and ‘80s may also remember scandals describing hundreds if not thousands of tons of wheat flour that arrived at its destinations spoiled by infestations of beetles, notes Victor B. Meyer-Rochow of Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. “But that’s really nonsense,” he argues, because those beetles were nutritionally more valuable than [the grain] that people were trying to protect.” http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
Bottom line, diets throughout the globe have been changing. And if we all want reliable access to animal protein, we may have to embrace mini-livestock—the six-legged kinds.
You’ll be able to read more about this topic—a serious one—soon in the pages of Science News and at Science News for Kids, our online sister publication. So stay tuned. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
And who knows, one day we may read that termites, popular for millennia in nations throughout the world, have become a growth industry for New Orleans. It’s home to permanent hordes of the Formosan variety (See Munching Along)—insects that weathered Hurricane Katrina far better than did the region’s tax payers. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
It’s also the theme of a chapter in Worldwatch’s 2008 State of the World report, its 25th annual book-length analysis of resource trends and economics. Here, its analysts take on the substantial—and often hidden—costs of producing animal protein to satisfy human hunger.
In 2006, Worldwatch reports, “farmers produced an estimated 276 million tons of chicken, pork, beef, and other meat—four times as much as in 1961.” As for fish: Some 140 million tons were hauled in globally during 2005, the most recent year for which data are available. “That was eight times as much as in 1950,” note Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg, the chapter’s authors.
Part of the growth in production reflects a growing demand, fueled by world population and growing wealth that allows meat consumption even within formerly impoverished nations. However, per capita consumption has also been rising. For meat, it’s doubled over the past 45 years; fish consumption quadrupled over a 55-year span.
Bottom line: “meat and seafood are the two most rapidly growing ingredients in the global diet,” Halweil and Nierenberg find, and “two of the most costly.” Demand for both are slated to go the way of oil—up, up, up, with prices following—as incomes in China, India, and hosts of developing countries rise.
Industrial meat production and fish harvests have dropped the economic cost of animal proteins in recent decades. But much of that fiscal savings has come at the expense of the environment. Wastes are not captured and destroyed or recycled. They’re allowed to run into the ground or waterways, degrading ecosystems all along the way. There are costs to this that are not captured in traditional accounting—but they’re costs nonetheless.
Anyone who has tried fishing in the Gulf of Mexico’s annual dead zone has experienced one cost of allowing livestock wastes from the upper Midwest to flow through the ground and into waters that feed the mighty Mississippi—and Gulf (See Limiting Dead Zones). Anyone who lives with the pervasive stench downwind of animal feedlots knows there’s a cost that these neighbors are being asked to subsidize with their discomfort—and perhaps health.
Fishers, in recent years, have been mining the ocean’s top and middle predators, substantially distorting the balance of ecosystems (SN: 6/4/05, p. 360). The net primary productivity of the oceans probably hasn’t changed much: that is to say, about the same mass of living cells probably inhabits it. However, instead of tuna, cod, sharks, and trout, the bulk of the mass may be shifting to alewives, smelt, jellyfish, and algae (see How Low Will We Go in Fishing for Dinner?: http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc98/2_7_98/fob1.html). One solution, fish farming, has proven moderately successful—but can also prove enormously harmful to nonfarmed species and the environment generally.
“Part of the reason that livestock and fish farms have become ecological disasters is that they have moved away from mimicking the environment in which animals exist naturally,” the Worldwatch report maintains.
There’s another problem as well. People the world over want to eat the same few species—cows, pigs, and lambs, salmon, tuna, and trout—even if their own environment cannot support the production of these animals. Moreover, as relatively large and high-in-the-food-chain animals, these species grow at the expense of hosts of plants, animals, and other energy inputs. The land and energy needed to produce 1,000 calories of grain, legumes (like soy), or algae is a fraction of what it takes to produce 1,000 calories of beef or catfish.
Many people don’t want to eat just greens, grains, and pulses (like beans). In truth, I don’t.
However, there is another source of animal protein that may prove dramatically more sustainable than fish and hoofed livestock. Insects.
Alright, it may take a bit of work to wrap your head around the idea of this—especially if you grew up in the States. We’re talking ants, grasshoppers, and beetles.
There was a time that the arrival of hordes of locusts blackening the skies was a time for rejoicing. Hungry farmers would see this as a smorgasbord of animal protein that could be gathered by the bucketsful. Eaten raw, fried with onion and chilis, or roasted for consumption throughout the months ahead, this was nutritionally high-quality animal protein. And you didn’t have to chase it. It came to you.
Those old enough to remember shipments of food aid to starving masses in Ethiopia and Somalia during the ‘70s and ‘80s may also remember scandals describing hundreds if not thousands of tons of wheat flour that arrived at its destinations spoiled by infestations of beetles, notes Victor B. Meyer-Rochow of Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. “But that’s really nonsense,” he argues, because those beetles were nutritionally more valuable than [the grain] that people were trying to protect.” http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
Bottom line, diets throughout the globe have been changing. And if we all want reliable access to animal protein, we may have to embrace mini-livestock—the six-legged kinds.
You’ll be able to read more about this topic—a serious one—soon in the pages of Science News and at Science News for Kids, our online sister publication. So stay tuned. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
And who knows, one day we may read that termites, popular for millennia in nations throughout the world, have become a growth industry for New Orleans. It’s home to permanent hordes of the Formosan variety (See Munching Along)—insects that weathered Hurricane Katrina far better than did the region’s tax payers. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Monday, October 6, 2008
Capecchi 5554r5 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. In 1996 Japan's Inamori Foundation asked Mario R. Capecchi to review his life and work in an acceptance speech for the prestigious Kyoto Prize. Capecchi dutifully described his pathbreaking research on a precision method for insertion or deletion of genes in mice. The most compelling part of the talk, however, had nothing to do with mouse chimeras or positive-negative selection. Rather Capecchi recounted memories of a childhood with the makings of a script Italian actor/director Roberto Benigni might use as an encore for his Academy Award-winning Life Is Beautiful.
Capecchi is living evidence that scientific creativity and genius can spring from the most improbable circumstances. Little more than 15 years before he began doctoral studies under Nobelist James D. Watson, an eight-year-old Capecchi was using the same intellect to avoid death on the streets of war-ravaged Italy. http://louis-j-sheehan.net
Capecchi was born on October 6, 1937, in the northern city of Verona, the offspring of a brief liaison between an Italian airman and an American poet. In 1941 the Gestapo arrested and sent his mother to the Dachau concentration camp. Hitler believed that like Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, the Bohemians, a group of artists who opposed the Nazis and Fascists, should be extirpated from society. In anticipation of being deported, Lucy Ramberg sold her possessions and gave the proceeds to a Tyrolean peasant family to care for the three-and-a-half-year-old Mario.
For a while, things went as well as they could in the middle of a war. On the farm, the boy watched the wheat harvest and would help crush wine grapes with his bare feet. One of his first direct encounters with the war came one afternoon when American airplanes strafed peasants in the field with machine-gun fire. Capecchi took a bullet in the leg, although the wound healed quickly.
After a year, his mother's money unexpectedly ran out, and the boy was put out on the street--Capecchi suspects that his father, an Italian fighter pilot, may have wrangled the remainder of the cash from his caretakers. Thus began a life-defining odyssey for the young boy, the effects of which persist to this day. The man who greets a visitor in his University of Utah office looking out onto the distant Oquirrh Mountains is five feet, four inches tall, perhaps eight inches or so shorter than he would be had he had enough to eat during those formative years.
From 1942 to 1946, Capecchi was in and out of orphanages, a hospital and the Balilla, Mussolini's youth army. These places, usually bereft of food and run by Dickensian masters, proved worse than simply fending for oneself on the street. So he spent most of his time plotting escapes. On the outside, he would live in bombed-out buildings and conspire with companions to steal bread and fruit from open-air shops. It was the best existence possible, despite having to protect himself with his fists and to witness frequent atrocities or their aftermaths, such as discovering a pile of body parts. At times he would live with his father, Luciano Capecchi, who would put up with him for a while and then throw him out. http://louis-j-sheehan.net "He was a very loose soul," as Capecchi remembers.
On his ninth birthday, a woman he did not recognize showed up at the hospital where he was confined in the northern Italian city of Reggio Emelia. He had been relegated there because he suffered from malnutrition, yet the hospital itself served only a bowl of chicory coffee and a crust of bread once a day. The woman looked much older than his vague memory of his mother, but Capecchi didn't care whether she was his mother or not. He only knew that she represented a ticket to freedom. Life in the hospital was marked by endless days of lying naked on a bed staring at the ceiling, wracked by famine-induced fevers. Three weeks later--a period that gave him the assurance that his orphanhood had ended--mother and son left on a boat for America
In the course of just a few weeks, Capecchi went from a collapsed civilization to the highly moralistic environment of a Quaker commune, where he and his mother settled with his uncle and aunt, 20 miles north of Philadelphia. http://louis-j-sheehan.net In contrast to the murderous rivalries that had fractured Europe, the commune harbored an ethnic melange that included Chinese, blacks and Jews. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Saturday, September 20, 2008
planes 0000190.221 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. The eureka moment for Bernie Krause, a bioacoustics expert, came when he was on the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya recording the natural ambient sounds of birds, animals, insects, reptiles and amphibians for the California Academy of Sciences. As a former player of the Moog synthesizer for George Harrison, the Doors and other 1960s rock musicians, he had made a spectrograph of a natural soundscape and realized that “it looked like a musical score,” he recalls. “Each animal had its own niche, its own acoustic territory, much like instruments in an orchestra.” http://louis-j-sheehan.net
How well these natural musicians played together, Krause concludes, says good deal about the health of the environment. He argues that many animals evolved to vocalize in available niches so they can be heard by mates and others of their kind, but noise from human activity—from airplanes flying overhead to rumbling tires on a nearby road—threatens an animal’s reproductive success.
Since the late 1960s Krause has collected over 3,500 hours of soundscapes from Africa, Central America, the Amazon and the U.S. He finds at least 40 percent of those natural symphonies have become so radically altered that many members of those orchestras must be locally extinct. “Forests and wetlands have been logged or drained, the land paved over, and human noise included, making the soundscape unrecognizable,” says Krause, who heads Wild Sanctuary in Glen Ellen, Calif., an archive of natural sounds. Lately he has traveled to Katmai National Park and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to look for unpolluted sound and still had to get away from roads to find it.
Thomas S. Schulenberg, a neotropical bird specialist at Cornell University and one of the authors of The Birds of Peru, agrees that sound is a useful tool for assessing the natural environment. Schulenberg traveled to Vilcabamba, a wilderness of wet cloud forest in eastern Peru, which Conservation International wanted to access for possible protection. Although the ornithologist carried a pair of binoculars, he showed up to their dawn chorus with a directional microphone and recorder. As Schulenberg puts it: “You can hear many times more birds than you can see.”
Schulenberg believes animals can adapt to some noise pollution, but there are limits, especially if the noise becomes a permanent feature of the environment. Writing in the Journal of Animal Ecology, biologist Henrik Brumm of the Free University of Berlin found that male territorial nightingales in Berlin had to sing five times as loud in an area of heavy traffic. “Does that have effects on the musculature they need to sing?” Schulenberg wonders. “Can they sing even louder, or are they going to eventually hit a wall and be washed out by human noise?” http://louis-j-sheehan.net
The U.S. National Park Service, under its Natural Sounds Program, wrestles with similar questions. Karen K. Trevino, the program director, cites studies showing that when exposed to the sounds of planes and helicopters, bighorn sheep forage less efficiently, mountain goats flee and caribou do not successfully reproduce as frequently. Senior acoustic specialist Kurt Fristrup of the National Park Service notes that human sounds cause problems other than acute annoyances. Namely, they can “mask some of the quieter yet important sounds of nature like footfalls and breathing—the cues that predators listen for to catch prey and that prey use to escape predators,” he says.
According to Krause, sound can also help determine how habitat destruction alters species populations. He did a 15-year study in Lincoln Meadow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a region that was selectively logged and of which loggers insisted there would be no change. Photographs showed little change, Krause found, but audio revealed a drastic drop in species diversity and density. Says Krause: “The transformation from a robust natural symphony to almost silent was quite alarming.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
waka 0000305 Louis J. Sheehan
Excavations at three sites in Guatemala's Petén rain forest have revealed previously unknown facets of both the early and later stages of ancient Maya civilization.
Work at one extensive site, called Cival, indicates that during its heyday, from 500 B.C. to A.D. 100, the city housed perhaps 10,000 people and was ruled by kings who lived in an elaborate ceremonial center, says Francisco Estrada-Belli of Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Artifacts from Cival's main plaza include two huge stucco masks that portray Maya gods. A cache of jade pieces probably served as an offering to the gods. An inscribed stone slab shows a striding figure wearing a chest plate decorated with symbols of kingship. Estrada-Belli asserts that the finds support his hypothesis that Maya of the Preclassic period, which ran from about 2000 B.C. to A.D. 250, achieved cultural feats comparable to those of the ensuing Classic-Maya era.
At the Classic-era site of Waka, researchers exploring the main palace found a chamber containing the remains of an apparent female ruler, suggesting that queens as well as kings reigned over the city. Pottery near the woman's body dates to between A.D. 650 and 750. A war helmet in the chamber resembles helmets usually associated with male Maya rulers, says David Freidel of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. http://louis2j2sheehan.us
Finally, images and writing on an altar stone discovered at Cancuén indicate that, around A.D. 790, the city's king expanded his power through regional alliances and clever politics. At that time, most Classic-era Maya kingdoms were in decline or collapsing, according to Vanderbilt's Arthur Demarest, who directs the Cancuén project. http://louis2j2sheehan.us
The three research groups announced the findings separately through press releases. http://louis2j2sheehan.us
Sunday, August 24, 2008
chisels
Louis J. Sheehan
PORCUPINES GNAWED ON STONE AGE MAN’S TOOLS — Razor sharp edges on some of the bone chisels of Middle Stone Age man in Africa were found to have been put there by the needle-sharp front teeth of porcupines, Dr. Raymond A. Dart of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, reports. But the fact that a magnifying glass showed up the telltale marks of rodent teeth on the Stone Age tools does not mean that ancient man himself did not do the original work in splitting and shaping the animal bones. At the Kalkbank Stone Age campsite … 3,619 bone fragments were collected. Of these, 903 had been gnawed by porcupines. “The first fact that emerges from the Kalkbank deposit,” Dr. Dart stresses, “is that porcupine gnawing, even when it affects 24.95% of the bones in a deposit, does not prove that porcupines collected or split the bones they gnawed.http://louis-j-sheehan.info
PORCUPINES GNAWED ON STONE AGE MAN’S TOOLS — Razor sharp edges on some of the bone chisels of Middle Stone Age man in Africa were found to have been put there by the needle-sharp front teeth of porcupines, Dr. Raymond A. Dart of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, reports. But the fact that a magnifying glass showed up the telltale marks of rodent teeth on the Stone Age tools does not mean that ancient man himself did not do the original work in splitting and shaping the animal bones. At the Kalkbank Stone Age campsite … 3,619 bone fragments were collected. Of these, 903 had been gnawed by porcupines. “The first fact that emerges from the Kalkbank deposit,” Dr. Dart stresses, “is that porcupine gnawing, even when it affects 24.95% of the bones in a deposit, does not prove that porcupines collected or split the bones they gnawed.http://louis-j-sheehan.info
Saturday, August 16, 2008
results
A class of recently developed medications for schizophrenia has rapidly become psychiatrists' treatment of choice. Small, pharmaceutical company–funded trials had suggested that the drugs are safer and more effective than a generation of antipsychotic substances that has been used since the 1950s. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
A new federally funded study of unprecedented size and length calls into question that conclusion. One of the older medications alleviates schizophrenia symptoms about as well as three of the newer, so-called atypical antipsychotics do, say psychiatrist Jeffrey A. Lieberman of Columbia University and his colleagues.
A fourth atypical antipsychotic, olanzapine, yielded slightly more reduction in symptoms than the other drugs did. However, 9 percent of those receiving olanzapine experienced substantial weight gain and metabolic disturbances that can cause diabetes and shorten life, more than twice the proportion for any other drug in the study.
Two-thirds of patients taking olanzapine stopped using it before the 18-month study ended, but three-quarters of participants randomly assigned to any of the other four drugs halted treatment before the study ended. Patients typically stopped using a drug because of lack of improvement or unacceptable side effects.
Schizophrenia patients typically try several antipsychotics before settling on one. "There's no question that atypical antipsychotics work, but they don't fulfill all expectations," says Lieberman.
Atypical antipsychotics cost up to 10 times as much as the older drugs do. Schizophrenia, which affects roughly 1 in 100 people around the world, is a chronic illness that includes hallucinations, delusions, confused thinking, and severe apathy. Antipsychotic medications primarily quell hallucinations and delusions. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
Lieberman's team studied 1,493 patients, 18 to 65 years old, who have schizophrenia. These volunteers were already receiving an antipsychotic medication and various types of psychosocial treatment at any of 57 clinical sites in the United States.
Initial results from the project, which ran from 2001 through 2004, appear in the Sept. 22 New England Journal of Medicine.
Participants began treatment with a new drug, randomly chosen from five medications. The four atypical antipsychotics were olanzapine, quetiapine, risperidone, and ziprasidone; the older drug was perphenazine.
The researchers were surprised to find that muscle rigidity, tremors, and other movement disorders that psychiatrists had primarily associated with older drugs occurred at the same low rate with all five medications tested. The most-common side effects for the drugs included sleep problems, constipation, and decreased sex drive.
Lieberman's data dovetail with earlier U.S. evidence (SN: 2/9/02, p. 83: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020209/fob2.asp) and with a recent clinical study in England, described at a schizophrenia conference in April. In the latter test, 250 patients with schizophrenia exhibited comparable improvement over 1 year, regardless of whether they had been randomly assigned to receive an atypical antipsychotic or an older drug.
"These results remind us that some people do very well on cheap and cheerful first-generation drugs," says psychiatrist Peter B. Jones of the University of Cambridge in England, who directed the British study.
The new studies "support the view that we have a big problem with all [antipsychotic] drugs," remarks psychiatrist William T. Carpenter Jr. of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. Drug companies still need to develop antipsychotic drugs that ease thinking disturbances and apathy, which play crucial disabling roles in schizophrenia, he says.
Olanzapine-induced weight gain and metabolic changes may be especially dangerous, Carpenter notes, because patients with schizophrenia typically smoke, rarely exercise, and eat poorly. "That scares the hell out of me," he says.
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