Contrary to the TV sitcom where the wife experiencing strong labor pains screams at her husband to stay away from her, women rarely give birth alone. There are typically doctors, nurses and husbands in hospital delivery rooms, and sometimes even other relatives and friends. Midwives often are called on to help with births at home. Assisted birth has likely been around for millennia, possibly dating as far back as 5 million years ago when our ancestors first began walking upright, according to University of Delaware paleoanthropologist Karen Rosenberg. She says that social assistance during childbirth is just one aspect of our evolutionary heritage that makes us distinctive as humans. Rosenberg, who is a professor and chairperson of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware, presented a talk on natural selection and childbirth on Feb. 13 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago. It was part of the symposium ‘The Invisible Woman in Evolution: Natural Cycle and Life-Cycle Events,’ which Rosenberg co-organized. The meeting’s theme, ‘Our Planet and Its Life: Origins and Futures,’ commemorated the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the […]
WASHINGTON — The northeastern U.S. coast is likely to see the world’s biggest sea level rise from man-made global warming, a new study predicts. However much the oceans rise by the end of the century, add an extra 8 inches or so for New York, Boston and other spots along the coast from the mid-Atlantic to New England. That’s because of predicted changes in ocean currents, according to a study based on computer models published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience. An extra 8 inches - on top of a possible 2 or 3 feet of sea rise globally by 2100 - is a big deal, especially when nor’easters and hurricanes hit, experts said. ‘It’s not just waterfront homes and wetlands that are at stake here,’ said Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who wasn’t part of the study. ‘Those kind of rises in sea level when placed on top of the storm surges we see today, put in jeopardy lots of infrastructure, including the New York subway system.’ For years, scientists have talked about rising sea levels due to global warming - both from warm water expanding and […]
Putting limits on some kinds of genetic research has always been a bit like trying to regulate spam.Somehow those unwanted and often-offensive junk e-mail messages continue to invade our inboxes, despite a five-year-old federal law that was supposed to lead to punishment for the most egregious senders. Linking such an irksome inconvenience to the far larger ethical issues raised by research that has the potential to alter the course of human development might seem perilously flippant. But the link is this: If the scientific and technological activities that concern us are occurring mostly overseas, the laws and regulations we impose in our country often have little impact. The problem with spam is that much of it is flung by e-mail servers outside the reach of any authority in this country. Likewise, the genetic research that might be most troublesome to many Americans may take place in labs that are far beyond the bounds of U.S. law. The same is also true of the most promising areas of genetic investigation. President Obama alluded to that in his announcement last week overturning President George W. Bush ‘s 2001 limits on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research. ‘Some […]
Creating the thinking machine has been one of science’s most alluring quests. Artificial intelligence enables computers to win at chess and model systems as complex as the climate. But even ardent advocates realize something is missing: the creative originality that breaks molds and charts new paths remains a human hallmark. Professor James A. Hendler, now senior constellation professor of the Tetherless World Research Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, at the time a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as well as head of the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory and the Advanced Information Technology Laboratory at the University of Maryland-a person competent to speak on the subject-confessed the expert opinion of his field when he admitted that the self-awareness of consciousness is not on the perceptible horizon, ‘If you think of awareness as just a point where suddenly things are conscious-I don’t see that happening.’1 The great fear of our fathers, that machines would replace us or that we would all be turned into interchangeable uniform cogs serving vast combines like Charlie Chaplin and Karl Marx envisioned, has proven a dark fantasy. Along with Communism and Freudianism, the mechanistic standardized future was one of the great failed myths […]
WASHINGTON — President Obama called for a sweeping revamp of the nation’s food safety net today, appointing new leadership at the Food and Drug Administration and promising to infuse it with new money. Obama noted that just 5 percent of food processors are inspected in a given year. ‘That is a hazard to public health,’ Obama said in his weekly address. ‘It is unacceptable.’ The president said that will change under his choice for FDA commissioner, Margaret Hamburg, who he named today. He charged Hamburg with overseeing a new Food Safety Working Group. Its goal: revamping outdated laws that have changed little since the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Americans’ faith in the nation’s food supply has been shaken in the past couple of years by diseased cows and recent outbreaks of tainted spinach, tomatoes and peanut products that made hundreds sick and killed nine people, including 72-year-old Shirley Almer. ‘She was let down in the worst possible way by the very government whose responsibility it is to protect its citizens’ health and safety,’ Shirley Almer’s son Jeffrey Almer told Congress last month. The fear of tainted food affects every family. . ‘I […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
