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London’s sewer system holds enough fat to fill nine double-decker buses! It comes from people pouring bacon juice and the like down the drain, and apparently causes flooding in 7,000 homes a year. Yes, true (there’s even a video)! Yes, gross!
Five months after 19-year-old Anwari Begum’s wedding, her body was found charred beside two empty kerosene cans near her home in South Delhi, India. Years later, a court found Begum’s husband and mother-in-law guilty of her murder. Their motive: The young bride had not paid a large enough dowry.
Fire accounts for 2 percent of all deaths in India, according to a report published recently in The Lancet by Veena Das, chair of the Krieger School’s Department of Anthropology, and colleagues from Harvard University. Women, most between the ages of 15 and 34, account for nearly two-thirds of those deaths, the study found.
In 1967, British archaeologist Nicholas Flemming discovered Pavlopetri, a 3,600-year-old town submerged four meters underneath the southern tip of Greece. The next year, divers measured the 500-square-meter site with tape measures. Now, Jon Henderson and colleagues from the University of Nottingham are using sonar technology to create a comprehensive 3D map of the site.
Last week, Nature News published an interview with Henderson. It’s a fascinating read. Here’s his explanation of how the technology works:
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Is autism more common in children of some ethnicities than in others?
Last fall, I wrote about a mysterious cluster of autism among Somali children in Minnesota. At the time, the Minneapolis school system reported that although Somalis make up just 6 percent of the city’s public school population, they comprise 17 percent of the special education students labeled ‘autistic’.
Public health clusters are usually suspect, but in a report released last week, the Minnesota Health Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that, among 3- and 4-year-old children, those of Somali origin are two to seven times more likely to be placed in preschool programs for autism. The report also found other ethnic trends in these classes: just two Asians and one Native American between 2005 and 2007.
The report is unusual, sure, but it is hardly solid evidence. For one thing, the autism diagnoses weren’t standardized: some of the children received their diagnosis from school evaluators, others from medical doctors.
Second, there are any number of social factors that could explain the numbers. For instance, Asian and Native American children with autism may be more likely to go to private schools instead of public ones. Because some Somali parents have been outspoken about the disorder’s prevalence in their community, school evaluators may also be more likely to give a Somali child a diagnosis of autism.
The report made no attempt to explain why autism numbers may be higher in Somali communities. Some scientists claim that the disorder may result from a deficiency of Vitamin D, but this, too, is far from proven.
What would convince me are comprehensive surveys of autism prevalence in ethnic communities across the world — something that, so far at least, is sorely lacking.
Last Wednesday, at an annual meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Wales, psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald gave a lecture with a novel thesis: Charles Darwin, father of evolution, had Asperger’s syndrome—a form of high-functioning, verbal autism. My skeptical hat is definitely on here, but that’s intriguing, right?
According to the Daily Telegraph, Fitzgerald pointed out that Darwin, among other things:
-hoarded and catalogued insects and shells as a child;
-was obsessed with chemistry and gadgets in college;
-had an extraordinary attention to detail (eight years studying barnacles, remember);
-had extensive collections (I’ll say);
-had difficulties with social interaction;
-was emotionally immature and had a fear of intimacy;
-wrote letters compulsively, but they rarely included social elements;
-and took long, solitary walks, following same route every day.
I think it’s a bit preposterous to diagnose a historical figure with an extremely complex spectrum behavioral disorder 127 years after his death. Nevertheless, with dozens of daily news items about autism as a disability (including many written by me), it’s nice to see someone focusing on how people with autism might contribute to society.
Money quote from Fitzgerald:
“It is suggested that the same genes that produce autism and Asperger’s syndrome are also responsible for great creativity and originality…
Asperger’s syndrome gave Darwin the capacity to hyperfocus, the extra capacity for persistence, the enormous ability to see detail that other people missed, the endless energy for a lifetime dedication to a narrow task, and the independence of mind so critical to original research.”
Sorry, peoples, I can’t help it, the following disgusting story is just too good not to post. You’ve been warned.
When scientists want to measure how much arsenic—a toxin floating around in air and water that can lead to various cancers and skin growths—someone has been exposed to, they usually look at hair or blood samples.
But now, geologists from the University of Leicester have devised a way to measure arsenic levels in, yes, toenail clippings.
The scientists, after collecting toenail clippings, irradiating them, and finally running them through plasma-mass spectrometry, found that people living near a former arsenic mine had elevated levels of arsenic in their toenails (shocking, I know). None of the participants have arsenic-related health problems.
“There is definitely more research needed to look at – amongst other things – a larger sample of volunteers, to see if the values change with time (it is quite possible the high values recorded are a one-off for that person, or due to slow toenail growth concentrating harmless quantities of arsenic), and to look at the possible pathways by which the arsenic is ingested. Coupling our analyses with regular blood measurements would be very revealing,” said head researcher Gawen Jenkin in a statement.
I have no idea what problems arise in hair or blood analyses, nor why toenail clippings would solve said problems, because the press release was rather sparse. The full study, however, will be available in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring‘s website sometime tonight.
Happily, the press release did answer some of my other probing questions:
However the researchers are definitely NOT requiring people to send in their toenail clippings. Neither can you assess arsenic contamination simply by looking at your toenails.
LOLZ! Thanks for clearing that up!
In November, after receiving a legal threat from Israel-based Nemesysco Limited company, the journal International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law removed a 2007 paper damning the company’s technologies from its website.
The censored paper, titled ‘Charlatanry in forensic speech science: a problem to be taken seriously’, was written by two Swedish speech scientists who argued that, contrary to Namesysco’s claims, its voice-analysis technologies cannot help in “truth-detection investigation activities”. The news now isn’t so much the legitimacy of the claim, but the tension of academic freedom vs. slander in scientific journals.
Four out of seven key leaders on the Swedish Research Council (a government agency) have now “signed a statement expressing concern over the retraction of the article from the journal’s website,” reports Nature News:
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Every baby born in Denmark, within the first few days of life, receives a unique, 10-digit identification number. The baby’s name and number become a part of the Danish Medical Birth Registry, a comprehensive electronic record of the birth details — from birth weight and length to parents’ smoking habits — established in 1968.
“[The identification number] is nearly tattooed on your forehead, you cannot get rid of it,” says Poul Thorsen, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Aarhus. “It’s fixed to you and anything you do for the rest of your life.”
For Max Planck Forschung‘s newest issue, a special report on China, the journal’s editorial board chose what they thought was “an elegant Chinese poem” to adorn the cover (see image at right).
Unfortunately for the Max Planck Institute, the elite scientific organization in Munich that publishes the journal, the text was not poetry, but an advertisement for a strip club! They got punk’d!
“The use of traditional Chinese characters and references to ‘the northern mainland’ seem to indicate the text comes from Hong Kong or Macau, and it promises burlesque acts by pretty-as-jade housewives with hot bodies for the daytime visitor,” the Independent reported on Tuesday.
Apparently, many Chinese internet readers were outraged at the error, even suggesting that the Institute did it on purpose to insult their country. The MPI issued an official apology, though the language was, uh, weak:
“To our sincere regret … it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning, which are not immediately accessible to a non-native speaker.”
Right…and just what are the other levels of meaning in an advertisement for a brothel?! APOLOGY FAIL.
(Hat tip: Great Beyond)
Paging Dan MacArthur! Looks like his fellow Australians are finally entering the genome race, and starting with—what else?—the complete genomic sequence of a kangaroo.
So far, scientists at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Kangaroo Genomics (KanGO) have made a (fairly crude) map of the tammar wallaby species’s genome. They’re now working on finishing the complete sequence.
From Nature News:
The Kangaroo Genome Project is giving Australia “visibility and respectability in the international genomic community”, says KanGO director Jenny Graves. But she says it is “disappointing that Australia really missed the genomics bus”.
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