Oscar the cat makes his grand entrances just as life is about to leave. A hop onto the bed, a fastidious lick of the paws, then a snuggle beside a nursing home patient with little time left. Oscar’s purr, when keeping close company with the dying, is so intense it’s almost a low rumble. ‘He’s a cat with an uncanny instinct for death,’ said Dr. David M. Dosa, assistant professor at the Brown University School of Medicine and a geriatric specialist. ‘He attends deaths. He’s pretty insistent on it.’ In the two years since Oscar was adopted into the third-floor dementia unit of the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, he has maintained close vigil over the deaths of more than 25 patients, according to nursing staff, doctors who treat patients in the home, and an article in tomorrow’s New England Journal of Medicine, written by Dosa. When death is near, Oscar nearly always appears at the last hour or so. Yet he shows no special interest in patients who are simply in poor shape, or even patients who may be dying but who still have a few days. Animal behavior experts have no […]
Obesity tends to spread throughout a person’s social and family ties, even as far as a friend’s friend’s friend, researchers found. When individuals become obese, it dramatically increases the chance that their friends, siblings, and spouse will also gain weight, Nicholas A. Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., of Harvard, and James H. Fowler, Ph.D., of the University of California San Diego, reported in the July 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Surprisingly, the researchers found, the greatest effect was not among those sharing the same genes or the same household, but among friends, even those living apart. What appears to be happening, the investigators said, is that obese persons change what they see as appropriate body size, and they come to think it is acceptable to be bigger, inasmuch as those among them are bigger, and this sensibility spreads. Other mechanisms might include food consumption, but the data did not permit a detailed examination of this factor, they said. To estimate the nature of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing to the obesity epidemic, the researchers analyzed a densely interconnected social network of 12,067 people. These individuals were assessed repeatedly from […]
No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years. But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time-the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning-is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now. Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental […]
Automated conception, using a production line version of IVF treatment, is being developed in Japan. Scientists are working on a miniature ‘womb-on-a-chip’ which can churn out early-stage embryos after being fed with sperm and eggs. Once manufactured, the pinhead-sized embryos could then be implanted into a woman’s womb, or frozen. advertisement The researchers, from the University of Tokyo, hope the device will boost the success rate of in-vitro fertilisation. Conventional IVF involves moving or washing eggs or embryos with culture fluid, causing changes in temperature and acidity. This can lead to problems, resulting in failed treatment cycles. To improve the process Dr Teruo Fujii’s team in Tokyo has produced a ‘lab-on-a chip’ just two millimetres across in which up to 20 eggs can be fertilised at a time. Within the device, which acts like an automated artificial womb, embryos are grown until they are ready for implantation. Endometrial cells, which line real wombs, are also grown in the womb chip so that the chemicals they produce can nourish the embryos. ‘We are providing the embryos with a much more comfortable environment, mimicking what happens in the body,’ Dr Fujii told New Scientist […]
The number of National Guard troops along the Arizona-Mexico border will be trimmed in half by the end of next month. As the presidentially mandated Operation Jumpstart mission begins its second year in support of the U.S. Border Patrol, the number of troops is being reduced as planned. It will be trimmed from 6,000 to 3,000 nationally and from 2,400 to 1,200 in Arizona, said National Guard Capt. Kristine Munn. The pullout began July 1 and is scheduled to be completed by Sept. 1. Since arriving in June 2006, National Guard soldiers have helped free up agents to patrol by manning radios and control rooms, and repairing vehicles, roads and fences. They have also provided extra eyes and ears on the border with observation posts called entrance identification teams stationed along the border on hills or peaks. The federal government has spent $899,416 on the mission in fiscal years 2006-07, said Lt. Col. Mike Milord, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau in Virginia. It is scheduled to run through the end of fiscal year 2008, which ends in September 2008. The downsizing of the National Guard forces will be detrimental to the Border Patrol’s efforts to slow […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
