Some so-called fish stories turn out to be the real thing. In February, New Zealand fishermen plying the waters of the Ross Sea near Antarctica hauled up a real live sea monster in the very act of devouring an Antarctic toothfish.

The creature was a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni)—yes, bigger than a merely giant squid: It weighed in at nearly half a ton and measured an estimated 33 feet. “This is the largest squid ever seen,” says Steve O’Shea, a marine biologist at the Auckland University of Technology. “But there’s no way we’ve got the maximum specimen.” http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx


Remains in the stomach of a sperm whale caught in 1925 were the first evidence of colossal squid, which are believed to inhabit the deep, freezing-cold waters around Antarctica. Sperm whales sometimes bear deep scars that may be the result of violent tussles with the razor-sharp hook rings of the squids’ tentacles.
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When they more closely examine this recent catch, O’Shea says, they will be able to determine its sex and age, which should provide a better idea of how large the elusive squid can grow. O’Shea says he’s excited by the squid carcass but would rather observe one in the wild: “I want to see it alive more than anything.”

Humpback whales migrate farther than any other mammal, say researchers who tracked them along their more than 5,000-mile route. But why do they go so far? Although some believe the humpbacks do it to avoid killer whales, these scientists conclude that water temperature alone is what guides them. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx


Researchers at the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington, tracked seven whales—which they recognized by the markings on their tail flukes—from their summer feeding grounds in the Antarctic Ocean to their winter breeding grounds off the Pacific coast of Central America. They also determined sea surface temperatures at similar breeding grounds all over the world, using satellite readings from the National Oceanographic Data Center.
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The researchers found that humpbacks reproduce only in warm waters, 70 to 83 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of latitude. Coastal upwelling in the Southern Hemisphere results in cool waters as far north as the equator in the Pacific, driving the whales all the way to Panama and Costa Rica for the southern winter.
The long journey, contrary to expectations, may actually end up conserving energy. Calves born in these warm waters, where they feed exclusively by nursing, can put their energy into growing rather than into keeping warm. This could make for larger adults that have more offspring.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” Robert Frost wrote when moved by the sight of a contemporary forest. But a coal mine in Illinois has revealed woods that, if not lovelier, are certainly darker and deeper—and a good bit older.

“You can walk in a single direction for a long distance, through this bizarre Lord of the Rings, cathedral-like thing,” says Scott Elrick, a geologist with the Illinois State Geological Survey, who studied the 300-million-year-old fossilized forest. “As you look up, you see gray flat shale, impressions on that shale, or entire trees, or tree stumps. . . . It’s the worm’s-eye view. You’re looking up at what the forest floor used to look like.” http://louis1j1sheehan.us/


The fossil ceiling, held up by 6-foot-high, 80-foot-wide pillars of coal, goes on for 4 square miles. No other known preserved forest comes close in size. And thanks to tidal rhythms, the mud deposited on top of this forest is layered, so years can be counted as with the rings of a tree. The 15 feet of sediment that blankets the fossils was laid down in four months—instantaneously in geologic time. The mine runs along a fault line, leading Elrick to surmise that an earthquake dropped one side of the fault and caused flooding. Because the subsequent influx of sediment was “not a catastrophic tsunami thing but more of a slow-motion event, all the small itty-bitty plants are in place.” http://louis-j-sheehan.de/

The slow pace at which that mud flowed in preserved an incredible diversity of flora. “We had lycopod trees 6 feet wide and 100 feet long, ground cover things, sphagnum moss, delicate little ferns next to these big, huge, honking trees. It’s crazy—we haven’t seen anything like this before,” Elrick says. At the moment, no one else is likely to see it either: The mine, now empty of coal, is closed.

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.
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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. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/

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. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
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. “Wherever the plants go, the animals follow.”

Biologist Craig Venter and his team replicated a bacterium's genetic structure entirely from laboratory chemicals, moving one step closer to creating the world's first living artificial organism.

The scientists assembled the synthetic genome by stringing together chemicals that are the building blocks of DNA. The synthetic genome was constructed so it included all the genes that would be found in a naturally occurring bacterium.

The research was published in the online version of the journal Science by a team of scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md. The authors include Hamilton Smith, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1978.

"It's the second significant step of a three-step process to create a synthetic organism," said Dr. Venter, in a conference call with reporters. The final step could prove far trickier, though Dr. Venter defied his critics and deciphered the human genome with startling speed about eight years ago.

The larger quest is to make artificial life forms with a minimum set of genes necessary for life. It is hoped that such organisms could one day be engineered to perform commercial tasks, such as absorbing carbon dioxide from the air or churning out biofuels. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/


The scientific challenge of creating synthetic life isn't trivial, nor are the ethical and legal concerns. There is little government oversight, and researchers involved in such experiments regulate themselves. Detractors worry that the lack of safeguards increases the risks that a potentially dangerous man-made organism might run amok. (In creating the artificial genome of Mycoplasma, Dr. Venter's team disrupted the genes that would enable it to infect other organisms.)

Nonetheless, the science is pushing forward at a rapid pace. In June, a Venter-led team published details of an experiment in which it inserted the DNA of one species of bacteria into the cells of another bacteria species. That process almost magically "booted up" the genome of the donor bacteria, sparking it to life.

The team hopes to use a similar trick to boot up the artificially created genome, to create a man-made living organism. But, Dr. Venter said, "there are multiple barriers" to achieving that goal. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/


Dr. Venter now believes that the challenge of creating a synthetic organism is within his grasp. "I'll be...disappointed if we can't do it in 2008," he said.

Geologists and biologists know where to look for the earliest life--but the rocks are hard to read
FOR TODAY'S CIVILIZED WORLD, WITH ITS DOT-coms, sitcoms, ATMs, and ATVs, the first 3.5 billion years of life on Earth are a bit of an embarrassment. It was only a few hundred million years ago that trilobites prowled the seas. More primitive life subscribed to two or three basic lifestyles: algal mat, spineless worm, or bacterial blob. Before that, in the Archean Eon more than 2.5 billion years ago--well, that kind of life is what Lysol is for.
Scientists, of course, see it differently. "Almost everything of any biological importance happened back in the Archean," says Andrew Knoll of Harvard University, author of the upcoming book Life on a Young Planet. Soon after the infant Earth cooled down, he says, primeval microbes began processing essential elements--carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen, among others--that allowed for the eventual emergence of higher life-forms, including us. To this day, says Knoll, bacteria still do the biosphere's heavy lifting. "We just sit back and live off the fruits of their labors."
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Folks like Knoll would like to know whom to thank for those first trophic cycles. But in the quest to identify Earth's earliest life, geology can look a lot like biology. It's not always easy to tell the dead organisms from the dead ends. One of the few things experts all agree on is where to conduct the search: in the three far-flung provinces that host the world's most ancient sedimentary rocks. Deposits in Australia, Greenland, and South Africa offer a cryptic view of the earth's surface as it was between 3.2 billion and 3.8 billion years ago. The deposits are made up of layers of accumulated particles that were later buried, heated, and compressed. Rounded pebbles and smoothed sand grains in the sediments indicate that they were seabeds, so any life they record would be marine.
The oldest fossil of that life comes from a remote desert site in Western Australia called North Pole. The rocks there bear the marks of stromatolites--sizable mounds of mud and minerals trapped or precipitated by microbial colonies living in shallow ocean water. Modern stromatolites grow knee-high in Australia and the Bahamas, and the organisms that build them leave distinctive patterns in the mud pedestal that can't be duplicated by mere geologic manipulation. At North Pole, those patterns appear in rocks that are almost 3.5 billion years old. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
The sediment layers in the North Pole fossils are much finer than those in modern stromatolites, suggesting that much smaller life-forms inhabited them. Even so, there's evidence of a food chain of sorts. The principal architects of stromatolites are photosynthetic. They get their energy directly from sunlight instead of feeding off other creatures. But geochemists found the chemical signature of a microbe that was feasting on dead organic matter, a scavenger of sorts. "We had quite sophisticated ecological communities back then, even if they were just tiny little microbes," says astrobiologist Roger Buick of the University of Washington, who discovered the North Pole stromatolites.
Unfortunately, the vestiges of microbial communities are far more conspicuous than the remains of their individual members. Lacking bones, shells, teeth, and other hard parts, the first Earthlings didn't fossilize well. In the oldest rocks, chemical leftovers may be the only evidence of animation. So it happens that the earliest evidence of life is not a lithic imprint but a skewed ratio of carbon isotopes in a chunk of rock from southwest Greenland. Microscopic globules of graphite in the rock, documented in 1999 by geologist Minik Rosing at the University of Copenhagen, are unusually low in a heavy carbon isotope that gets excluded when inorganic carbon is converted into living material. Rosing thinks the C-13-poor graphite globules might have come from free-living planktonlike organisms that fell to the seafloor when they died. Their remains, he says, are at least 3.7 billion years old. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
In 1996 geochemist Stephen Mojzsis, now at the University of Colorado at Boulder, trumped Rosing's find in a report of heavy-isotope depletion in graphite grains from the Isua formation in Greenland and another site on the Greenland island of Akilia. Mojzsis says the grains are 3.85 billion years old--the oldest yet. But his interpretations of both the biological markers and the rock itself have been put through the wringer. One of Mojzsis's former coauthors, geochemist Gustaf Arrhenius of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, showed how the Isua carbon-isotopic ratio could arise by geologic activity alone, if certain iron minerals in the rock were melted and pressed together over time. He and other investigators also think that the putative sedimentary rocks are actually igneous formations that have been severely transformed by heat.
Thus, rocks of advanced vintage seem to confound even the most basic geologic distinction: igneous, metamorphic, or sedimentary? "These rocks have been buried and cooked at least three times," says Buick. "They've been severely squashed and strained and tied in knots at least three times too. Then they sat around for at least a billion years and got polished by glaciers. These are not ordinary rocks."
The ambiguity of chemical evidence leaves geologists hungry for a well-defined, and ideally photogenic, fossil or two. In the early 1990s they thought their hopes had been answered when paleobiologist William Schopf of the University of California at Los Angeles described microscopic structures embedded in a Western Australia formation almost 3.5 billion years old. In his report, dark, slender silhouettes appear in translucent sections of thinly sliced quartz. Schopf says the silhouettes are a complex carbon polymer made by chains of bacteria that may have been anchored to the seafloor. After examining hundreds of present-day microbes, he named 11 possible species in his collection and gave the back story in a 1999 book called Cradle of Life. His menagerie made the Guinness Book of World Records, as the Earth's oldest fossils. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
"I found a whole bunch of different things," says Schopf. "The question was, what were they?"
Schopf decided that at least half could be cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, the first organisms in the evolutionary record to produce oxygen. That challenges orthodox thinking about conditions on the young Earth, which would not have had a significant oxygen atmosphere for at least another billion years. When geologist Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford had a look at the structures, he decided Schopf was wrong, wrong, and wrong again. The tubes are too branched to come from bacteria, he says. The rock is an extrusion from a hydrothermal vent, not seafloor sediment. And the silhouettes are inorganic carbon injected by the vent and molded into suggestive shapes by the growth of mineral crystals. "Ancient filamentous structures should not be accepted as being of biological origin until all possibilities of their nonbiological origin have been exhausted," Brasier and his coauthors wrote in a report last year. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
The hubbub over Schopf's fossils has humbled disciples of early life. "People have become more critical about what they'll accept as evidence of biology," says Knoll. And, as demonstrated by the recent retraction of evidence for life in a Mars meteorite, the stakes are astronomical. Once biologists know where and how life emerged, astrobiologists will be better prepared to look for it elsewhere in the solar system. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/If life on Earth was a freak accident born of unique and peculiar conditions, it's probably rare elsewhere. But, says Buick, "if life can arise quickly and easily, given the right environment, there might be quite a bit of it out there."
Some of the earliest signs of life are found in ancient rock layers called banded iron formations. The iron was released by underwater volcanoes and precipitated from ocean water more than 2 billion years ago. Today the rock formations supply about 95 percent of the iron used to make steel.

wider, and longer than we thought; its volume is 10 times more than what we estimated only six years ago. We’re talking about an extreme event, certainly on the order of the 2004 Indian Ocean disaster.”

With eyewitness video of that disaster lingering in everyone’s minds, it took little imagination to visualize the physical destruction that must have hit Palaikastro, Mallia, and elsewhere along the Cretan coast. But evidence suggests that the Minoans survived the disaster for at least a generation or two; the real end came later, in an outbreak of fiery vandalism. Throughout Crete, temple-palaces were burned and ransacked, and there are no obvious signs of battle, invasion, or natural disaster at these ruins. Of all the great Minoan palaces, only Knossos survived; eventually it was taken over by the Mycenaeans, the mainland Greeks who prospered as the fortunes of Crete declined.

A leader of the Palaikastro team, Belgian archaeologist Jan Driessen, contends that the wave of destruction was the tail end of a spiral of instability that the Thera catastrophe set in motion. A steep drop-off in the number of Minoan sites suggests that there had been a famine or an epidemic, one perhaps touched off by the environmental effects of the eruption combined with the later tsunami.

There may have been a spiritual crisis as well. At Palaikastro, archaeologists found that a shrine had been violently destroyed and a cult statuette deliberately smashed and burned. Driessen suggests there may have been a reaction against the religious cult represented by the statuette, perhaps as part of a populist uprising against the elite in their villas and temple-palaces. The loss of life and livelihood after the eruption may have aggravated problems of class difference and widened the gap between the elite and the commoners, which Driessen says “existed already in Minoan society.”

The terrifying scale of the Thera eruption, followed by the devastating force of the giant tsunami it created, may have led to a gradual unraveling of the values and beliefs that had sustained this brilliant civilization for so long. In his poem “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Eliot writes these famous lines: “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”
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For the Minoans, it appears their world ended with both.


In 2007, excavators of a remote site in southeastern Iran reported finding evidence of a writing system that dates back more than 4,000 years. Featuring odd geometric symbols, three baked mud tablets unearthed near the Iranian city of –Jiroft could reveal much about a sophisticated and independent urban culture that flourished between the Mesopotamian and Indus Valley civilizations. However, many scholars are skeptical about the authenticity of the finds, which they –suspect may have been planted by locals.

Archaeologists first began digging at large mounds near Jiroft in 2001 after flash floods uncovered ancient graves nearby. The team has since found evidence of a large city dating to 2500 B.C.

Then, in 2005, a worker brought Yousef Madjidzadeh, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation, a tablet covered with strange symbols on the front and back, saying he dug it up in his village a few hundred yards away. Last winter, Madjidzadeh ordered his team to dig at the spot, where they uncovered two more tablets. The three appear to show a progression: The first has 8 simple geometric signs; the second includes 15 slightly more complex signs, while the third has a total of 59 signs. The variants might be precursors to Elamite, the writing system used on the Iranian plateau in the late third millennium B.C. They could also be unrelated or, as some have said, fakes. Madjidzadeh vows to return in 2008 to uncover more tablets and silence his critics.







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.
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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.”








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. 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.”



Women who have struggled through a miscarriage are often desperate for clues to what went wrong, and what they can do differently the next time. But doctors seldom have solid answers.

The latest research seems only to muddy the picture. A study by Kaiser Permanente in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology this week reports that women who consumed the equivalent of two cups of coffee or more daily had twice the miscarriage rate as those who avoided caffeine. Yet a study from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in the journal Epidemiology this month, found that drinking more moderate amounts of caffeine didn't increase a woman's risk of miscarrying.
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Either way, caffeine consumption is just one small piece of this heartbreaking puzzle for many couples. A host of other problems can sabotage a developing fetus, and if patients are aware of their options, they might be able to fill in at least a little of that puzzle.

Roughly one million pregnancies in the U.S. end in miscarriage every year, according to the National Center on Health Statistics. Most miscarriages occur in the first trimester, and some 60% are thought to be due to a random genetic error in the egg or the sperm or the first crucial cell divisions. No amount of prenatal care or dietary precautions will make a difference in these cases.

Even if the baby is genetically normal, other problems can doom the pregnancy. Some can be tested for, and treated, if doctors investigate. But they seldom do. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists now recommends looking into possible causes after a woman has had two consecutive miscarriages. But because miscarriages are so common and so often thought to be genetically based, many OB/gyns still don't look for other explanations unless a woman has had at least three. And many insurers won't pay for tests to investigate "recurrent miscarriage" until a woman has had three.

In the meantime, the admonition is to "just try again" -- which can be very frustrating for couples to hear, particularly if they postponed childbearing and had trouble conceiving. And the chance of miscarrying gets higher after the mother reaches 35.

"You almost want something to be wrong so you can treat it," says Kelly Maguire, a counselor for Resolve, a support group for fertility issues, who had four miscarriages before having two healthy babies. "My experience is, it's all up to you and how much you push your doctor."

Among the things women can do to find explanations is to press for a genetic analysis of the miscarried tissue, if it's feasible to save. If it's abnormal, that alone will explain the miscarriage. But it's a good idea to seek genetic tests of both parents that could reveal whether the problem is likely to recur.

After a second miscarriage the mother should be tested for imbalances of hormones, including thyroid, prolactin and progesterone, as well as for polycycstic ovarian syndrome. Some are easily treatable. Autoimmune disorders such as antiphospholipid antibodies can cause blood clots that clog vessels in the placenta. Those may be treatable with baby aspirin and blood thinner. Bacterial infections, including some that linger for years with no symptoms, can also thwart pregnancy, and can be treated with antibiotics. A uterine abnormality may limit the space for the fetus. That can be seen on a sonogram, and in some cases, corrected by surgery.

To be sure, many recurrent miscarriages remain a mystery even after lengthy investigations. But that number is getting smaller all the time, says Jonathan Scher, a Manhattan OB/gyn who treats patients with recurrent pregnancy loss. "Patients who miscarry back to back should not take no for an answer. It's very old fashioned to accept 'it's nature way,' " he says. "Miscarriage doesn't always have to happen. Today, we can find answers in many cases, and in many cases, treatment is available."

In some cases, Dr. Scher even works with perinatal pathologists to seek clues from a patient's prior miscarriages if tissue from a D&C was sent to a pathology lab. Some states require such slides to be saved for years, and they can reveal traces of clotting problems or infection, as well as genetic problems.
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How environmental agents might fit in is less well understood. But most OB/gyns have been telling pregnant women for years to go easy on caffeine, as well as to quit smoking and drinking alcohol and to avoid other hazards, such as cat litter and undercooked meat. As a result of the Kaiser study, the March of Dimes has lowered its recommended caffeine limit to 200 mg from 300 mg daily.

"Reducing caffeine won't prevent a miscarriage that's destined to happen," says Tracy Flanagan, Kaiser's director of women's health in Northern California. "But this does give women the opportunity to do something that may reduce their risk."

miles south of Crete’s capital, Heraklion. Late-19th-century excavations by Sir Arthur Evans revealed Knossos to be a vast, intricately engineered, multistory building, complete with flushing toilets, statuettes of bare-breasted priestesses, and frescoes of athletes vaulting over bulls. In 1900, Evans discovered an impressive stone throne, from which he believed the legendary King Minos and his descendants had presided over Bronze Age Crete. In the 1980s, however, a new generation of archaeologists, including Joseph Alexander “Sandy” MacGillivray, a Montreal-born scholar at the British School at Athens, began questioning many of Evans’s assumptions. Smaller-scale versions of Knossos have turned up at nearly every Minoan settlement across Crete, and scholars now suspect there was no single king but rather many independent polities.

MacGillivray also became interested in how the civilization ended. At Palaikastro, in the island’s far northeastern corner, MacGillivray and his colleague Hugh Sackett have excavated seven blocks of a Minoan town of perhaps 5,000 inhabitants, their plastered and painted houses arranged in a network of tidy paved and drained streets. One striking find was the foundations of a fine mansion, paved with fancy purple schist and white limestone and designed around an airy central courtyard “of Knossian pretensions,” as MacGillivray puts it. “But after the house was destroyed by an earthquake, it was abandoned and never rebuilt, and that preserved some things we had a hard time explaining.”

The house was dusted with a powdery gray ash, so irritating that the diggers had to wear face masks. Chemical analysis showed that the ash was volcanic fallout from the Thera eruption, but instead of resting in neat layers, the ash had washed into peculiar places: a broken, upside-down pot; the courtyard’s drain; and one long, continuous film in the main street outside. It was as if a flash flood had hosed most of the ash away, leaving these remnants behind. Some powerful force had also flipped over several of the house’s paving slabs and dumped fine gravel over the walls—but this part of the site lies a quarter of a mile from the sea and far from any stream or river.

That wasn’t the only oddity. Another building “looked like it had been flattened, the whole frontage facing the sea had been torn off, and it made no sense. And we asked ourselves, could a wave have done this?” MacGillivray says.



The strangest and most significant find, however, was a soil layer down by the beach that looked like nothing MacGillivray had ever seen in four decades as a field archaeologist. A horizontal band of gravel about a foot thick was stuffed with a mad jumble of broken pottery, rocks, lumps of powdery gray ash, and mashed-up animal teeth and bones. Perhaps an exceptionally violent storm had inflicted this chaos, MacGillivray considered, but he began to suspect that a tsunami was the more likely culprit.



MacGillivray invited Hendrik Bruins to Palaikastro. The Dutch-born geoarchaeologist and human ecologist had a reputation as a skillful analyst of the thorny dating controversies that beset archaeology in the Middle East, but figuring out the chaotic layer overlooking the beach presented a novel scientific challenge. “Identifying a tsunami deposit is a completely new field,” Bruins explains. “Until the early 1990s, earth scientists didn’t even recognize that tsunamis do more than just destroy the coast—they leave distinctive deposits behind as well. I needed to do a lot of different tests to convince myself, as well as my colleagues, that we were dealing with a tsunami and not something else, like debris from a storm surge.”
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    Another building looked like it had been flattened. Could a wave have done this?

Bruins sent thin sections of the chaotic deposit to micropaleontologist Chaim Benjamini, a colleague at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Benjamini identified the tiny round shells of foraminifera and fragments of red coralline –algae; these marine organisms suggested that the ocean, rather than a river or a flash flood, had been involved. If the marine organisms had been scooped up from below sea level and dumped on the elevated promontory, something much bigger than a storm surge must have pounded the coast of ancient Crete.

The strange pattern of gravel deposits in the town offered further evidence of a deep oceanic disturbance. Then there were lumps of gray ash in the beach layer, “resembling unstirred instant-soup lumps at the bottom of a cup,” according to Bruins. He sent samples of these lumps to two state-of-the-art geochemistry labs in Germany, which analyzed the sample’s geochemical signature. The results of both tests were identical: a perfect match between Theran ash and the “soup lumps” on the beach.

Finally, there was the question of when all this disruption occurred. Bruins sent fragments of cattle bones and seashells from the chaotic layer to the radiocarbon dating lab at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Because of well-known problems in calibrating dates from 3,500 years ago, he knew the lab would be unable to pin down the exact calendar age of the samples, but the uncalibrated measured age of the cattle bones closely matched the latest equivalent dates for the cataclysm on Thera.

All the clues pointed to one answer: A giant wave had struck Palaikastro Bay while freshly fallen ash from Thera was still lying about, inundating the town for miles inland and streaking it with strange patterns of ash. But could even a giant wave be big enough to wipe out an entire civilization?
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MacGillivray consulted Costas Synolakis, an energetic Greek-born earth scientist at the *University of Southern California, where he pioneered the predictive computer model used by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. Synolakis’s first attempts to model tsunamis in the early 1990s began as a solitary exercise. Everything changed after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Synolakis visited Banda Aceh, the city in northwestern Sumatra closest to the epicenter of the undersea quake, where hundred-foot waves had destroyed a city of more than 150,000 people in minutes. “It was a surreal, absurdist landscape,” he says. “It took an effort of imagination to conceive that people had ever lived there.” Almost overnight, Synolakis’s expertise in computer modeling of tsunamis became a focus of worldwide scientific and media attention.

In 2000, Synolakis had con- sulted on a study to model a hypothetical Minoan tsunami. He found that no matter how steep the waves were when they started out at Thera, they dissipated quickly, reaching only three to nine feet at most when they hit Crete, some 70 miles away. The study concluded that such waves could have been “disruptive,” but not devastating, to Minoan Crete.

Synolakis was still thinking that way when he visited Palaikastro in May 2006. Then MacGillivray took him down to the beach. “The moment I looked at that debris layer, I was absolutely stunned,” Synolakis says. “The image that came to me, right then and there, is what I saw everywhere after the December 2004 tsunami: a blanket of cultural debris, broken dishes, broken glass, bits of bone, people’s belongings scattered everywhere. It looked exactly like that kind of debris carpet, and you don’t get it in a smaller tsunami. The presence of this chaotic deposit suggested that the tsunami was at least three or four meters [10 to 13 feet] at the shoreline.” What had begun as a casual visit now turned into a full-blown research project. Synolakis hired a boat and took depth measurements of the seabed in Palaikastro Bay. When he tested the hillside behind the Minoan town to establish how far the wave had penetrated inland, he found what appeared to be more layers of chaotic debris at an astounding 90 feet above sea level.
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About 60 miles to the west of Palaikastro, near the palace of Mallia, the research team found yet another strikingly similar chaotic deposit. Plugging in all the new data, Synolakis drastically revised his tsunami model. “When we put it all together,” he says, “we’re looking at a wave that’s on the order of 15 meters [50 feet] when it hits the shore at Palaikastro. This is a gigantic w

o Battle of Honey Springs
          o Grant's Early Battles
    * Minden Games
          o Bat          tleship Captain: Tactical Naval Combat, 1890-1945
          o Pacific Salvo!
    * MMP
          o Case Blue (in the Operational Combat series)
          o Few Returned (in the Advanced Squad Leader series)
          o Red Star Rising, The War In Russia, 1941-1944
          o Starter Kit #3 - Tanks (in the Advanced Squad Leader series)
          o Talavera/Vimeiro (in the Napoleonic Brigade series)
    * New England Simulations
          o Overlord: D-Day and the Beachhead Battles (expansion for The Killing Ground)
    * OSG
          o 1813: The Year That Doomed The Empire
          o The Habit of Victory
    * Outpost 31
          o The thing
    * Panzer Digest (Minden Games)
          o #1: Falaise Pocket/Advanced Salvo! 1939-194/Penal Battalion/Longstreet's Disaster
          o #2: Swordfish at Taranto/Field of Honour/The Evacuation of Konigsberg
    * Pegasus
          o The War Game: World War Two
    * Perfect Captain
          o Spanish Fury: Voyage
      Pratzen Editions
          o Le Grand Empire
    * Red Sash Games
          o Türkenkrieg: The Russo-Austro Turkish War, Balkan Theatre 1737-39
    * Riachuelo Games
          o Monte Castelo and Gothic Line
          o Riachuelo's Naval Battle
          o Unternehmung 25
    * Schutze Games
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 o Aleutian Campaign
          o Sands of Iwo Jima
    * Sierra Madre Games
          o How We Became Human
    * Luiz Silva
          o Congo
    * Simmons Games
          o Napoleon's Triumph
    * Strategos
          o #2: Iwo Jima
    * Strategy and Tactics magazine (Decision Games)
          o #241: Twilight of the Ottomans: World War I in the Middle East
          o #242: They Died With Their Boots On 2: Pershing and Mad Anthony
          o #243: Sea Lords: The Vietnam War in the Mekong Delta
          o #244: Drive on Moscow
          o #245: The Triple Alliance War
          o #246: Manila '45: Stalingrad of the Pacific
          o #247: Holy Roman Empire: Wars of the Reformation, 1524-38
    * TCS (Roberto Chiavini)
          o Edgehill (reprint)
          o First Newbury
          o Dunbar
          o Gliders from the Sky: the Fall of Eben Emael
          o I Obey (reprint)
          o Innocence lost (reprint)
          o Montebello (reprint)
          o Prussia Rising
    * Richard Trevino
          o Charge at the Alamo
    * Vae Victis magazine
          o #73: Magenta 1859/Reichshoffen 1870/St. Nazaire 1942
          o #74: Ultimus Romanorum
          o #75: Orel 1919/Incredible Armada
          o #76: Les deux Bretagne (1341-1364)
          o #77: Eylau 1807
          o #78: La Bataille de Hongrie 1944-5/Otterburn
    * Valley Games
          o Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage
    * Dan Verssen Games
          o Down With The Empire
          o Marine Air (expansion set for Hornet Leader II)
          o World War I Bombers (a Down In Flames expansion)
    * Warfrog
          o 1630 Something (rev. ed.)
    * Worthington Games
          o Cowboys: The Way of the Gun
          o Prussia's Defiant Stand
    * Z-Man Games
          o Duel in the Dark

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The effects of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 are only too well known: It knocked the hell out of Aceh Province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, leveling buildings, scattering palm trees, and wiping out entire villages. It killed more than 160,000 people in Aceh alone and displaced millions more. Similar scenes of destruction were repeated along the coasts of Southeast Asia, India, and as far west as Africa. The magnitude of the disaster shocked the world.

What the world did not know was that the 2004 tsunami—seemingly so unprecedented in scale—would yield specific clues to one of the great mysteries of archaeology: What or who brought down the Minoans, the remarkable Bronze Age civilization that played a central role in the development of Western culture?

Europe’s first great culture sprang up on the island of Crete, in the Aegean Sea, and rose to prominence some 4,000 years ago, flourishing for at least five centuries. It was a civilization of sophisticated art and architecture, with vast trading routes that spread Minoan goods—and culture—to the neighboring Greek islands. But then, around 1500 B.C., the Minoan world went into a tailspin, and no one knows why.


In 1939, leading Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos pinned the blame on a colossal volcanic eruption on the island of Thera, about 70 miles north of Crete, that occurred about 1600 B.C. The event hurled a plume of ash and rock 20 miles into the stratosphere, turning daylight into pitch darkness over much of the Mediterranean. The explosion was recently estimated to be 10 times as powerful as the 1883 eruption of Krakatau in Indonesia, which obliterated 300 towns and villages and killed at least 36,000 people. So extreme was the Thera eruption that many writers linked it to Plato’s legend of Atlantis, the magnificent island city swallowed up by the sea. Marinatos’s theory was bolstered in 1967 when he dug up the ruins of Akrotiri, a prosperous Minoan town on Thera that had been buried in volcanic ash. Akrotiri became famous as a Bronze Age Pompeii because the ash preserved two-story dwellings, exquisite frescoes, and winding streets almost intact.

On further examination, though, the ruins did not confirm the theory. It turned out that the pottery on Akrotiri was not from the final phase of Minoan culture; in fact, many Minoan settlements on Crete continued to exist for at least a generation or two after the Thera cataclysm. Archaeologists concluded that the Minoans had not only survived but thrived after the eruption, expanding their culture until they were hit by some other, unknown disaster—perhaps some combination of fire, earthquake, or foreign invader. Thera’s impact, it seemed, had been overestimated. But startling new evidence is forcing archaeologists to rethink the full fury of the Thera explosion, the natural disaster it may have triggered, and the nature of the final blow to the once-great Minoan civilization.
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Each summer, thousands of tourists encounter the Minoans at the spectacularly restored ruins of Knossos, an 11-acre complex four 

          o Facing the Blitz (maps/scenarios in the Advanced Tobruk series)
          o Grossdeutschland at Stonne 1940 (compatible with Advanced Squad Leader)
          o Hot Stove Pack (in the Advanced Tobruk series)
          o Parkers Crossroad (expansion for Darkest December in the Advanced Tobruk series)
          o Roman Glory (supplement compatible with Advanced Squad Leader)
          o So Full of Fire (expansion in the Advanced Tobruk series)
          o Sudden Full Contact (compatible with Advanced Squad leader)
          o Stonne (in the Advanced Tobruk series)
          o Toktong Pass 1950 (in the Advanced Tobruk series)
          o Warfighting Guide #1 (in the Advanced Tobruk series)
          o The Western Front 1944 (scenario pack for the Advanced Tobruk series)
          o Witches Cauldron (compatible with Advanced Squad leader)
    * Days of Wonder
          o Memoir '44 Air Pack (Memoir '44 Expansion Set)
    * Decision Games
          o Land Without End
          o Luftwaffe (rev. ed.)
          o Nine Navies War
          o Storm of Steel
    * Devir
          o Espana 1936
    * Ediciones Rotura
          o 1936 Guerra Civil (English ed.)
    * Kelly Everit
          o Imperial Ambitions
    * Fantasy Flight Games
          o Tide of Iron
    * Feucht
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          o First Strike
    * Fiery Dragon
          o Algeria (reprint)
          o Barnard's Star (reprint)
          o Byzantium Reborn (rev ed.)
          o Operation Whirlwind (reprint)
    * Firefight Games
          o Blow by Blow: Pakistan Invades India, September 1965
          o Cossack Revenge: Denikin's Abyss, March 1920
          o Crazy Horse, Black Shield, White Cloud
          o Kakhovka
          o Heroic Frenzy
          o The Koltov Corridor: Disaster at Brody (East Front), July 1944
          o Meatgrinder
          o One Bullet, One German
          o Operation Fischfang: Smashing the Allies at Anzio, Feb. 1944
          o Operation Westindien
          o Remagen 1945
          o Storm Over Taierzhuang: Samurai Stalingrad 1938
          o Vencr O Morir: Kundt's Pocket at Campo Via, Dec. 1933
          o Wicked Narrows: Rome's Disaster at Kalkreis, Sept. 9, 2 AD
    * @games online
          o Malaya
          o Watchtower (in the Action Front! Series)
    * GMT Games
          o 1914, Twilight in the East
          o Asia Engulfed
          o Combat Commander: Vol. II - Mediterranean
          o Combat Commander Battle Pack #1: Paratroopers
          o Conquest of Paradise
          o Gergovia (module for Caesar: Conquest of Gaul)
          o Glory III
          o The Great War in Europe (rev. ed of The Great War in Europe and The Great War in the Near East)
          o Monmouth (in the American Revolutionary War series)
          o Ran (in the Great Battles of History series)
          o Samurai (in the Great Battles of History series, reprint)
          o Squadron Pack 2: Bombers (in the Down in Flames series)
          o Sword of Rome Expansion
    * Grenier Games
          o Operation Weserübung
    * Guild of Blades
          o The American Revolution
          o Battle of Thermopylae (2nd ed.)
          o Beyond Hadrian's Wall (rev. ed.)
          o The War To End All Wars (3rd ed.)
    * Hasbro
          o Axis & Allies: Guadalcanal
    * Hexasim
          o Marne 1918-Friedensturm (English ed.)
    * Eric Hotz & Phil Hall
          o Blue Max/Canvas Eagles
    * Interformic
          o Unbreakable
    * Dave Kershaw
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          o ACW Solitaire
    * Khyber Pass Games
          o Prairie Aflame, The Northwest Rebellion, 1885
          o Rosebud: Prelude to Little Bighorn
    * L2 Design Group
          o War at Sea (3rd ed.)
          o Waterloo: Fate of France
    * Little Page of Games
          o Hohenfriedeberg
    * Lock 'n Load Publishing
          o Battle Pack Alpha (scenario pack for the Lock 'n Load series)
          o Corps Command: Totensonntag
          o Island War Deluxe
          o Not One Step Back
          o Omaha Beach (reprint from Armchair General)
          o Swift and Bold (expansion to Band of Heroes)
          o Valley of Tears (reprint from Armchair General)
          o World at War: Eisenbach Gap
    * Lost Battalion Games
          o The Kaiser's Pirates
    * LPD Games
          o Across the Wide Missouri
          o Battle of Gettysburg

disease has proved difficult. A report last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 85 SNPs that had been cited as possible heart-attack genes and found evidence for all of them wanting.
But otherwise, finding validated SNPs linked to cardiovascular
As part of its studies, Celera tested 35 different SNPs in patients who had suffered heart attacks. Only the KIF6 mutation turned out to have a strong statistical link. The 9p21 gene wasn't among those Celera tested.

"We think this marker will stand up to [validation] in spades," said Thomas J. White, chief scientific officer at Celera and a co-author of one of the new papers.

The KIF6 finding resulted from a collaboration between Celera and academic researchers who led four previously published landmark studies, including three large randomized trials that demonstrated the effectiveness of statin drugs in preventing heart attacks.

DNA samples were obtained at or near the trials' beginnings. Since researchers now know which patients had heart attacks and which were treated with statins, they could see what genetic differences might have influenced outcomes.
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For instance, in a study called Care that originally compared Bristol-Myers Squibb Corp.'s Pravachol against placebo in patients who had already had heart disease, 12.4% of KIF6 mutation carriers treated with placebo suffered heart attacks compared with 8.1% of those who didn't have the mutation. Researchers said that translated to a relative 50% increased risk after adjusting for other factors.

Among KIF6 carriers who got Pravachol, there were 37% fewer heart attacks compared with placebo. Among noncarriers, there were 14% fewer heart attacks on the drug than on placebo, suggesting those with a genetic variant responded better to the drug.

Researchers conducted a similar look at a study called Prove-It, in which the maximum dose of Pfizer Inc.'s Lipitor proved superior to a moderate dose of Pravachol in preventing heart attacks and death among people on the verge of a heart attack. The genetic analysis showed that nearly all of the benefit from Lipitor occurred in carriers of the KIF6 mutation.

In each case, the benefits weren't related to how much a statin lowered cholesterol.

Separately, the researchers looked at DNA taken from participants in the 25,000-patient Women's Health Study at Harvard Medical School and found that the KIF6 variant was associated with a 34% increased risk of heart attacks among women.

Researchers said further study of KIF6 could help identify mechanisms for how heart disease develops and possibly new targets for drugs to treat it.

Bristol-Myers sponsored the original statin trials and provided access to the DNA for two of the current papers, but neither Bristol-Myers nor Pfizer funded the new analysis, which Celera paid for.
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More than one in 20 patients undergoing breast surgery later developed infections at incision sites, according to a new study, a complication that was more common than thought.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates the infection rate following breast removal surgery at 2%, although earlier surveys put it at anywhere between 1% and 28%.

In the two-year study published in this month's issue of the Archives of Surgery, 5.3%, or 50, of nearly 950 patients developed infections within a year of their procedures, inside and outside the hospital. The average time between surgery and infection was 47 days.

"The surgical site infection rates following breast surgery seem to be much greater than the nationally reported incidence of 2% and much higher than what is expected for clean surgical procedures," Margaret Olsen of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis wrote in her report.

The cost of follow-up medical care was put by the study at roughly $4,000 a patient.

Roughly one in eight women in the study who had a cancerous breast removed and then underwent breast reconstruction with an implant developed an infection. The infection rate was 7% among those who had breast reconstruction using tissue from the abdomen, where infections also struck. Infections occurred in 4% of women having a mastectomy, and among 1% of those having breast-reduction surgery.
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Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts wants to start paying doctors and hospitals a flat fee per patient per year, the Boston Globe reports. The sum would depend on the age and illnesses of the patient, and there would be big bonuses for progress on measures such as access to the care and control of diabetes and high blood pressure.

The system evokes “capitation,” the per-patient payment systems that had a brief wave of popularity in the 1990s. But Blue Cross says its new plan would protect against problems such as undertreatment and underpayment that sunk capitation the first time around. “We have no interest in returning to the heyday of managed care or denying care,” Blue Cross exec Andrew Dreyfus told the Globe.

The big insurer says it’s bringing back the flat fee in yet another effort to slow the growth of health care spending and create more financial incentives for doctors to focus on patient outcomes.

Big health systems the Globe spoke with said they supported the principles behind the plan, but worried about the impact on revenues, and about being held responsible for care and costs over which they have limited control.

Health-care policy wonks and advocates seemed warm to the plan. John McDonough, who runs Mass.-based Health Care for All, told the paper it was promising. “What we have now is killing us financially, and in some cases medically,” he said.

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*  Against the Odds magazine (ATO)
          o #19: Not War But Murder
          o #20: A Fatal Attraction
          o Biafra!
          o Look Away! The Fall of Atlanta
          o Wintergewitter
    * Alea magazine (Ludopress)
          o #32: Dios Patria y Rey
    * Armchair General Magazine
          o Brothers By My Side
          o Lee at Gettysburg
          o Operation Iraqi Freedom
    * Avalanche
          o Alamein
          o Alaska's War (supplement in the Panzer Grenadier series)
          o East of Suez (in the Second World War at Sea series)
          o Eastern Fleet (in the Second World War at Sea series, reprint)
          o Edelweiss Expanded Edition (supplement in the Panzer Grenadier series)
          o Fronte Russo (supplement in the Panzer Grenadier series)
          o Iron Curtain (in the Panzer Grenadier series)
          o Mediterranean (in the Great War at Sea Series, reprint)
          o Napoleonic Battles: Austerlitz
          o Queen of the Celts (in the Rome at War series)
          o Sea of Troubles (supplement inthe Great War at Sea series)
          o Soldier Kings (reprint)
          o South Africa's War (supplement in the Panzer Grenadier series)
          o They shall not pass
          o Tiger of Malaya
          o White Eagles (supplement in the Panzer Grenadier series).
          o Zeppelins (in the Great War at Sea series)
    * Battle-Market
          o #1: Hanba'al/Chinggis Khan/Zeppelin
          o #2: Ma'alinti Rangers: Black Hawks Down/Tannenberg/Grunwald 1410: Downfall of the Teutonic Order
    * Bayonet Games
          o Strike Force Hunter
          o Warfighter 101: Maneuver Warrior
    * BSO
          o Blackshirt, The Italian Invasion of Egypt, 1940
    * Roger Campbell
          o Brown Water Submarines
    * Canons en Carton
          o Auerstaedt 1806 (in the Jours de Gloire series)
          o Friedland 1807 (in the Jours de Gloire series)
          o Swords and Crown (in the Au fil de l'Epée series)
          o Saalfeld 1806 (in the Jours de Gloire series)
          o Schleiz 1806 (in the Jours de Gloire series)
    * Clash of Arms
          o Campaigns of King David
          o Close Action: Monsoon Seas
    * Lou Coatney
          o Moscow Defended!
    * Columbia Games
          o Athens & Sparta
          o Wizard Kings (2nd ed.)
    * Compass Games
          o Red Storm Over the Reich
          o Silent War (reprint)
    * Cool Stuff Unlimited
          o Doro Nawa (reprint)
          o Jerusalem (reprint)
          o Verdun (reprint)
    * Command and Strategy magazine (UGG)
          o #6: Operation Walküre
    * Critical Hit
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          o Action at Carentan (scenario in the Squads & Leaders series)
          o Advanced Tobruk (3rd ed.)
          o Arnhem Master Set (2nd ed. of Arnhem-Defiant Stand and Oosterbeek Perimeter)
          o Arnheim Third Bridge (supplement compatible with Advanced Squad Leader. 2nd ed.)
          o Battle For The High Ground (scenario pack for the Advanced Tobruk series)
          o Busting the Bocage (supplement compatible with Advanced Squad Leader, 3rd ed.)
          o CSIR Nikitovka (in the Advanced Tobruk series).

Defendants in high-profile lawsuits typically keeps their mouths shut, letting their lawyers and or public relations experts do the talking. But not John Yoo, the Berkeley Law professor and former Bush administration official who was sued by convicted terrorist Jose Padilla and Padilla's Yale Law School lawyers earlier this month. He's not taking this lawsuit lying down, and he vented this weekend on the WSJ's op-ed page. (Click here for prior Law Blog coverage on the suit.)

Yoo summarizes the lawsuit nicely: "Padilla wants a declaration that his detention by the U.S. government was unconstitutional, $1 in damages, and all of the fees charged by his own attorneys." He warns of the dangers of this litigation. "The lawsuit by Padilla and his Yale Law School lawyers is an effort to open another front against U.S. anti-terrorism policies," he writes. "If he succeeds, it won't be long before opponents of the war on terror use the courtroom to reverse the wartime measures needed to defeat those responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on 9/11."

Yoo, an architect of the White House's policies on detaining terrorist suspects, spends much of the essay detailing Padilla's odyssey and the history of detaining alleged wartime criminal like him. He then decries the lawsuits filed against him and other Bush administration officials (e.g., Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and Wolfowitz).

Yoo says the "qualified immunity" doctrine, which holds that government officials cannot be sued personally unless they had intentionally violated someone's clearly established constitutional rights, isn't enough:

The legal system should not be used as a bludgeon against individuals targeted by political activists to impose policy preferences they have failed to implement via the ballot box . . . .
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The prospect of having to waste large sums of money on lawyers will deter talented people from entering public service, leading to more mediocrity in our bureaucracies. It will also lead to a risk-averse government that doesn't innovate or think creatively. Government by lawsuit is no way to run, or win, a war.















Genentech Inc.'s discovery of two new genes linked to lupus raised hopes of earlier diagnosis and better targeted treatment of the autoimmune disease, which affects an estimated 1.5 million Americans.

Genentech already has two experimental drugs in Phase III, or late stage, studies to treat lupus: a compound called an anti-CD20 antibody, and its older drug Rituxan, widely used as a cancer treatment. The latest advance restores the company's momentum in combating lupus after two patients who had taken Rituxan -- not yet an approved treatment for the illness -- died of brain infections in December 2006. The two patients weren't study subjects and had other risk factors, Genentech has said.

Chief Executive Art Levinson this month highlighted his hopes that the lupus trials will help boost the flow of important data emerging from Genentech's pipeline of new drugs in development this year after "a quiet period."

Analysts fear the South San Francisco, Calif., biotech giant's earnings growth could flatten unless it can score another big hit to supplement revenue from its blockbuster Avastin.

A number of other companies also are developing lupus treatments, including Amgen Inc., a biotech rival based in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Discovery of the new genes, labeled BLK and ITGAM, was reported by Genentech scientist Timothy W. Behrens and his colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine's online edition on Sunday. The report coincided with that of a rival team from the International Consortium for Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Genetics in the journal Nature Genetics.

Dr. Behrens's team believes the BLK gene influences one component of the immune system -- B cells -- while the ITGAM gene affects another, T-cells, in ways that trigger the immune system to attack a lupus patient's own body like friendly fire.

Scientists hope the findings will improve the diagnosis and targeted treatment by predicting patient response to drugs. Lupus attacks many organ systems and can cause death, often from cardiovascular damage. Women and minorities suffer the brunt of lupus cases.

"Way too many young women have strokes and heart attacks," Dr. Behrens said. "This disease attacks blood vessels and every organ has a blood supply, so it manifests itself in the kidney, brains, joints, heart."
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Dr. Behrens added that lupus is often difficult to diagnose and that "it's not unusual for someone to go several years with vague and undiagnosed symptoms."

Genentech's findings are relevant to continuing studies because Rituxan targets B cells, the very cells that express the newly discovered BLK gene. But BLK and ITGAM are just two of about 10 genes linked to the immune disorder, which may eventually be discovered to be linked to another 20 or 30 genes, Dr. Behrens said. The findings may help predict who can benefit from treatment, though Dr. Behrens cautioned the timeline for such applications is uncertain.

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The Behrens paper not only adds to the growing number of genes linked to lupus, but is significant in that it uses a powerful genetic-testing technology that is yielding insights into many previously unrecognized genes linked to disease, said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a unit of the National Institutes of Health.

The findings aren't expected to produce a full picture of the disorder just yet, because none of the study subjects was African-American, a group that suffers disproportionately from lupus.

Researchers said they identified a genetic variant that is linked to both an increased risk of a heart attack and a person's chances of preventing such an attack by taking a cholesterol-lowering pill called a statin.

The variation, in a gene called KIF6, is present in nearly 60% of the population, the researchers found. In four large studies involving a total of more than 30,000 patients, carriers of the mutation had a risk of heart attacks, strokes or death related to heart disease as much as 55% higher than those who didn't have it.

The impact of the variant was independent of such conventional cardiovascular risk factors as smoking status, cholesterol levels and diabetes.

Discovery of the KIF6 variant was announced by Celera Group-Applera Corp., an Alameda, Calif., diagnostics company known for having mapped the human genome in 2000 in a high-profile race with a government-funded project. Details are reported in three studies being published Jan. 29 by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and now available on the publication's Web site.

The interaction of KIF6 with statin therapy "is a very interesting and unexpected finding," said Marc Sabatine, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, and a co-author of one of the papers. While it would be "premature" to base treatment decisions on a patient's KIF6 status, he said, the results "take us one step closer to personalized medicine" in which doctors use genetic data to tailor therapy for patients.

Celera plans to launch "in the coming months" a genetic test for about $200 for the KIF6 variant through its recently acquired Berkeley HeartLab unit, said Kathy Ordoñez, president at Celera.
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But the KIF6 gene -- for "kinesin-like protein family member 6" -- hasn't previously been linked to heart disease, nor has it shown up in several other genome scans probing DNA for heart-disease genes. Some experts said more study is needed to confirm the findings and determine KIF6's role in evaluating and treating patients at risk for cardiovascular disease.

"It's quite provocative," said Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of Scripps Genomic Medicine and a cardiologist at the Scripps Clinic, La Jolla, Calif. "It could be a marker but there are a lot of question marks surrounding it."

The report is the latest in a flurry of studies linking tiny single-letter variations called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, in a person's DNA with risk of disease. Researchers hope that such discoveries will shed light on the biology illnesses, reveal potential new drug targets, and drive the field of personalized medicine.

The hunt for SNPs related to heart disease is especially intense. Earlier this month, deCode Genetics Inc. of Iceland reported that a variant of the gene 9p21 is associated with risk of two serious vascular conditions, aneurysms of the abdominal aorta and the brain. The gene is established as increasing heart-attack risk, Dr. Topol said. DeCode recently began selling a $200 test for the gene.

Jose Padilla, an American once accused of plotting with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb," was sentenced yesterday to a relatively lenient prison term of more than 17 years on unrelated charges.

Prosecutors, who long ago dropped the dirty-bomb claim that made Mr. Padilla infamous, had sought life terms for Mr. Padilla and two co-defendants, but a federal judge said authorities never proved Mr. Padilla was a terrorist.


"There is no evidence that these defendants personally maimed, kidnapped or killed anyone in the United States or elsewhere," U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke said. "There was never a plot to overthrow the United States government."

Judge Cooke took into account the harsh, isolated conditions Mr. Padilla faced during the 31⁄2 years he was held in a brig in Charleston, S.C., without charge, as an enemy combatant after his 2002 arrest. Defense lawyers claim he was tortured by the military, but U.S. officials denied that, and Judge Cooke never used the word torture.

After a three-month trial, Mr. Padilla, 37 years old, and co-defendants Adham Amin Hassoun, 45, and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, 46, were convicted in August of being part of a support cell that sent recruits, money and supplies to Islamic extremists world-wide, including al Qaeda. Mr. Padilla was billed as a star recruit, while Mr. Hassoun was the recruiter and Mr. Jayyousi served as a financier and propagandist in the cell's early years, according to trial testimony.

Mr. Padilla was added to the case in late 2005, just as his legal challenges to continued detention without criminal charge were reaching the Supreme Court. Mr. Padilla was declared an enemy combatant a month after his highly publicized arrest on the purported radioactive dirty-bomb plot, but those allegations were quietly discarded.

The strongest evidence in the case was a form Mr. Padilla completed in 2000 to attend an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan that was recovered by the CIA shortly after the U.S. invasion in late 2001. Prosecutors repeatedly invoked the al Qaeda connection and used a video of an old Osama bin Laden interview in an attempt to link the three to the world's most notorious terrorist.

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Ultimately, Judge Cooke said at the sentencing hearing, there was not enough evidence linking Mr. Padilla and the other two men to specific acts of terrorism or victims.

Sentencing guidelines had suggested a range of 30 years to life for all three, but Judge Cooke used her discretion to go below even the minimum. Mr. Padilla got 17 years and four months; Mr. Hassoun, 15 years and eight months; and Mr. Jayyousi, 12 years and eight months. Their prison time will probably be even less counting months already served in pretrial detention and automatic reductions for good behavior, their lawyers said.

Judge Cooke said life sentences should be reserved for the most serious terrorist offenders, such as Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui or Terry Nichols, convicted in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

"I feel good about everything. This is amazing," said Mr. Padilla's mother, Estela Lebron. "He's not a terrorist. ... He's just a human being."

All three men are likely to appeal their convictions and sentences, their lawyers said. But even they were surprised at the leniency shown by Judge Cooke. "It is definitely a defeat for the government," said Mr. Hassoun's lawyer, Jeanne Baker.

The Justice Department praised the efforts of prosecutors and investigators in the case, which centered on tens of thousands of FBI wiretap intercepts collected over eight years. "Thanks to their efforts, the defendants' North American support cell has been dismantled and can no longer send money and jihadist recruits to conflicts overseas," said Kenneth L. Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security.
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London's East End is notorious for its criminals, from serial murderer Jack the Ripper to mobsters the Kray twins.

The latest candidate for this rogue's gallery is Janet Devers, a 63-year-old woman who runs a vegetable stall at Ridley Road market. Her alleged crime: selling goods only by the pound and the ounce.

Ms. Devers, whose stall has been in the family for 60 years, faces 13 criminal charges stemming from not selling her produce by the kilogram and the gram. She stands accused of breaking a European Union-instigated rule that countries must use metric measures to standardize trade. The rest of Europe is metric.



But Brits drink their milk and beer by the pint. On the road they rack up miles. Imperial measurement "is what we know, how we are. Who's to tell us to change?" said Scott Lomax, a fellow vegetable-stall owner.

Ms. Devers, who pleaded not guilty in a court appearance on Friday, is being lionized for her stand in Britain's feisty tabloids. If convicted, she could be fined as much as $130,000.

"It's disgusting," said Ms. Devers of the charges. "We have knifings. We have killings," she said. "And they're taking me to court because I'm selling in pounds and ounces."

And, equally illegally, in bowls. Ten of the counts against her relate to purveying produce, such as hot Scotch-bonnet peppers, by the bowl.

The United Kingdom wrote an exemption into its measurements law to meet the EU metric requirement in 2000, as Brussels allowed. It stated that traders must use metric weights, but they could use imperial measures as well. The problem is that Ms. Devers allegedly didn't have metric prices on all of her produce when she was charged late last year, and two of her scales only measured in pounds and ounces.
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The British imperial system dates back at least to medieval times. Notable holdouts still using it are Britain and the U.S. It doesn't help that the metric system was created over 200 years ago across the Channel in France, England's ancient archrival.



Aversion to the metric system is one of many signs of the U.K.'s lingering reluctance to integrate with its continental neighbors. Britain shuns the euro in favor of the pound sterling, drives on the left-hand side of the road and has a tradition of "euroskeptic'' politicians who thrill some sections of the public by bashing the Continent.


One recent overcast Thursday afternoon at Ridley Road market in Hackney, a low-income district in East London, shoppers from Turkish, Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities browsed the stalls. Shouts from traders touting deals like "50p a basket of mangoes" mingled with reggae music blasting from a stall that sells posters and T-shirts.

Insulated from the chilly January day in a faux-fur- trimmed hat, Ms. Devers chatted up customers from behind her covered stall piled with eggplant, ginger, green beans (£1 a pound for the beans). Though her signs currently carry prices in pounds as well as the equivalent in kilograms, she said her customers prefer pounds -- and sometimes complain when she uses kilos that she's trying to cheat them.

"I always shop in pounds," said Sophia Levicki, a 60-year-old part-time shop clerk and a regular at Ms. Devers's stall. "If it's good enough and cheap enough, I'll buy it," she added, as she asked for two pounds of shiny, purple-skinned eggplant.

Nearby stall owner Mr. Lomax added prices in kilos as well as pounds to his signs after warnings from local authorities in recent years. "The customers don't understand kilos," he said. Like many stall owners he uses metric scales, which he got after the EU metric directive was introduced into U.K. law in 2000.

Ms. Devers's trouble with the law began one Thursday this September, when two representatives from the local government council, accompanied by two policemen, came up to her stall and seized her imperial scales. They told Ms. Devers she was using illegal scales and that she wasn't allowed to weigh in pounds and ounces, she said. "I was furious," said Ms. Devers, who asked the police officers if the council was allowed to do that, to which they responded that it was.
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Around Christmas, a 67-page letter landed in her mail. It outlined 13 criminal charges against her, including one charge of improper pricing of goods and two charges related to using imperial scales. She also faces 10 counts related to selling by the bowl.

"I think it's so ridiculous," she said, noting that pricing per bowl is common practice because customers perceive it as good value. "If they're going to do me for bowls, they have to do the whole country."

Alan Laing, an official with the local authority that is prosecuting Ms. Devers, said that "making sure traders comply with weights-and-measures legislation is also part of the job."






Ms. Devers wouldn't be the first to be pounded down by the metric law. Four market-stall owners -- including her brother -- lost an appeal to the High Court in 2002 for not using metric measurements. They received conditional discharge -- which means no further action is taken as long as they don't break the law again within a specific period of time. A group campaigning to pardon them is helping coordinate financing for Ms. Devers's case and calls them "metric martyrs."

It's about "who governs Britain," says campaigner Neil Herron, from Sunderland, England.

With the help of her brother, Ms. Devers found lawyers willing to take on the case for a nominal fee. Their planned legal strategy is to argue various technicalities such as a loophole for imperial scales that predate the law. They plan to lean on what they see as a recent softening in Brussels. After pressure from U.K. companies as well as others that trade with Britain and the U.S., the European parliament recently adopted legislation that would let the U.K. continue to use imperial alongside metric measures indefinitely, instead of phasing it out by next year. The measure is awaiting European Council approval.

Her legal team may also call customers as witnesses to say that they like paying pounds for pounds, one of the lawyers involved said.

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Ms. Devers faces fines of up to $10,000 per charge, or a total of about $130,000. "It would ruin me," said Ms. Devers, who declined to detail her earnings. She says she canceled a planned trip to New York with her twin sister, because having a criminal record could make entering the U.S. difficult.

On Friday afternoon, Ms. Devers appeared in Thames Magistrates Court in East London. She pleaded not guilty.

Her barrister, Nicholas Bowen, mocked the nature of her alleged crimes. "If somebody sells a punnet of strawberries at Wimbledon is that a criminal offense?" he asked. A punnet, as all Britons know, is roughly the equivalent of a couple of handfuls -- or about half a liter.

Ms. Devers and her legal team won a victory of sorts. The magistrate granted their request that the case be tried by a jury. Jurors, with perhaps some shoppers among them, will likely be sympathetic, Mr. Herron says.

Ms. Devers smiled as she left the courthouse to go back to her stall. The scales of justice sit, she said, "in the hands of the people."


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A Carthusian monastery might best be described, paradoxically, as a community of hermits. The monastery is headed by a prior (there are no Carthusian "abbeys"), and is populated by choir monks and lay brothers.

Each choir monk (that is, a monk who is or who will be a priest) has his own hermitage, usually consisting of a small dwelling (traditionally a one-room lower floor for storage of wood for a heating stove, and for a workshop as all monks engage in some manual labor; and a second floor consisting of a small entryway with a picture or statue dedicated to Mary, mother of Jesus as a prayer spot, and a larger room with bed, table for eating meals, desk for study as all monks engage in study, and choir stall/seat and kneeler for prayer), set in a corner of a highly walled garden, wherein the monk may meditate and grow flowers or vegetables.

The individual hermitages are lined up so that the door into the garden of each may be reached by a corridor. Near the door is a turnstile, so that meals and other items may be passed in and out of the hermitage without the monk having to meet the bearer.

The monk lives most of his day here: he meditates, prays most of the hours of the Liturgy of the Hours on his own (yet still following the full ceremonial as if praying publicly), eats his meals, studies and/or writes (Carthusian monks have published scholarly and spiritual works), works in his garden, works at some manual trade, etc. He leaves the cell daily only for three prayer services in the monastery chapel (including the community and his own individual Mass), and occasionally for conferences with his superior. Additionally, once a week, the monks take a 4-hour walk together in the countryside during which they may speak (they go two by two, changing partners every half hour), and on Sundays and feastdays a community meal is taken silently. Twice a year there is a day-long community recreation, and he may receive an annual visit from immediate family.

They have no "active" ministry: they do no pastoral work, charitable work, or missionary work; they admit no retreatants (other than select persons who are contemplating actually entering the monastery as monks); they have no contact with the outside world. Their contribution is their life of prayer, which they undertake on behalf of the whole church and the whole world.

In addition to these choir monks there are lay brothers, monks under slightly different types of vows who spend less time in prayer and more time in manual labor and who live slightly more communal lives with one another. The laybrothers provide the material assistance to the choir monks: cooking the meals, undertaking physical repairs, providing the choir monks with books from the library, managing supplies and so on.

All of the monks live lives of silence: there is no "vow of silence," as is sometimes parodied, but as with many monastic groups, the monks cultivate a spirit of exterior silence (speaking only when truly necessary) to help achieve an interior serenity.

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Carthusian nuns live similarly to the monks, but with some differences. Choir nuns tend to lead somewhat less eremitical (hermit-like) lives, while still maintaining a strong commitment to solitude and silence.

Today Carthusians live very much as they originally did, without any relaxing of their rule. Thus, there has been no "reform" movement as with other orders: there are no Carthusians "of the strict observance" or the like. Thus Pope Innocent XI coined the phrase Cartusia numquam reformata, quia numquam deformata. Literally this translates to "The charterhouse has never been reformed, for it has never been deformed"

Faster than a speeding bullet — and bigger than a Wal-Mart.

That's how residents near the west Texas town of Stephenville described an object they spotted in the sky one night last week.

Dozens of the town's residents — including a pilot and a police officer — said a UFO hovered over the farming community for about five minutes last Tuesday before streaking away into the night sky.

Pilot Steve Allen saw the object when he was out clearing brush off a hilltop near the town of Silden. Allen described the unidentified object as being an enormous aircraft with flashing strobe lights — and it was totally silent.

He said the UFO sped away at more than 3,000 mph, followed by two fighter jets that were hopelessly outmaneuvered. Allen said it took the aircraft just a few seconds to cross a section of sky that it takes him 20 minutes to fly in his Cessna.

The veteran pilot said the UFO, an estimated half-mile wide and a mile long, was "bigger than a Wal-Mart."

Military Dismisses Sighting

The Stephenville Empire-Tribune, which has written about the mysterious object, said about 40 people saw the thing — though some were too sheepish to admit the sighting until others came forward.

Police officer Leroy Gatin said he was walking to his car when he saw a red glow that reminded him of pictures he'd seen of an erupting volcano.

He said the object was suspended 3,000 feet in the air. Gatin said he was so awestruck that he called his son to come and see — but he didn't talk much about it until he saw a story about a UFO in the local paper.

Military officials, however, were skeptical. They said the residents are letting their imaginations run wild and passed it off as an optical illusion. They said it was likely nothing more than a reflection of sunlight on two airliners.

Officials at a nearby air force base also said their fighter pilots didn't chase down anything that night.
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The incident was eerily similar to a UFO sighting a little more than a year ago at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.

As many as 12 United Airlines employees spotted the object and filed reports with United.

Combining a megapowerful magnet, multiple detectors, and carefully tweaked contrast, a new MRI technique developed at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provides an unprecedented look at the fine structure of the brain. Using an MRI machine equipped with a magnet more than twice as powerful as one in an ordinary device, the researchers created a way to measure the magnetic field changes caused by tissue properties to optimize contrast in the image. They were also able to compensate for the magnetic field fluctuations created by the patients’ breathing. The technique revealed never-before-seen patterns in the white matter and gray matter of the human brain.

Picking up on such differences may help researchers look more deeply into the brain’s subdivisions, allowing them to map it in greater detail. It may also bring about advances in diagnosing diseases like Alz–heimer’s and multiple sclerosis, both of which involve abnormal iron accumulation in the brain. For patients, the new technique may mean that “you could more accurately—and maybe earlier—diagnose a disease,” says NIH physicist Jeff Duyn.
Only eight MRI machines this powerful exist in the United States, and all are housed in research, rather than clinical, settings. Each costs around $5 million, and that’s before the expense of setup—which includes installing 380 tons of shielding material to prevent every metal object in the building from being sucked into the magnet.
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Chinese researchers announced (pdf) in March that they had created glass that can be bent into right angles without shattering. But this isn’t glass as we know it: The new glass is opaque, twice as strong as window glass, and made of metal.

As solids, metals have an orderly atomic structure; in liquid metals, the arrangement becomes random, as in glass. To create metallic glass, scientists supercool liquid metals, effectively “freezing” the random array in place. These bulk metallic glasses, or BMG, are two to three times stronger than the crystalline form of the metals.

Superstrong BMG has already been used in the manufacture of high-tech golf clubs and tennis rackets; in 2001, the collector on NASA’s Genesis spacecraft, which caught particles from the solar wind, was made of BMG.
But since the 1980s, when scientists began making BMG, the materials have exhibited a fatal flaw. Paradoxically, the stronger they are, the more vulnerable they are to cracks, says Wei Hua Wang, a physicist who helped develop the new glass at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A tiny fracture in the original type of BMG spreads quickly and becomes catastrophic.

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To create a glass that is both strong and flexible, Wang and his colleagues altered an existing BMG recipe, combining zirconium, copper, nickel, and aluminum. Realizing that small changes in the metal mixture would lead to large variations in brittleness, they sought a combination that would keep cracks from spreading. “The plasticity of the glass is very sensitive to the composition,” Wang explains.

After two years, the scientists produced bendable BMG. It contains hard areas of high density surrounded by soft regions of low density. The result: When a crack begins in one place, it dissipates quickly in the surrounding regions, leaving the whole flexible.
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To better understand man's best friend, Hungarian scientists are working on computer software that analyzes dog barks. It could help humans recognize basic canine emotions, Hungarian ethologist Csaba Molnar told Reuters. Mr. Molnar and his colleagues at Budapest's ELTE University have tested software which distinguishes the emotional reaction of 14 dogs of the Hungarian Mudi herding breed to six situations: being alone, seeing a ball, fighting, playing, encountering a stranger or going for a walk. "A possible commercial application could be a device for dog-human communication," the scientist added. The iDog, perhaps?

The promise of an MHC-based match is not only that your partner's old laundry will smell better but all sorts of other benefits too. The biological compatibility created by complementary immune systems apparently promises better orgasms, a lower likelihood of cuckoldry, more happiness and so on. Nor are heterosexuals the only ones who can benefit. Gay men and women respond as strongly to MHC-derived smells as straight people do—though, as might be expected, their response is to the smell of people of the same sex, rather than the opposite one.

Indeed, the only people for whom MHC matching might not be expected to work are women on the Pill. Chemical contraception, which mimics pregnancy, messes up the system because of an intriguing twist. When women are pregnant, they prefer the smell of MHCs that are similar to their own. This means they are happier in the company of their relatives, which may, as the previous article also suggests, bring evolutionary benefits of its own.

ScientificMatch.com does not rely entirely on the MHC. Besides sending off a swab taken from the inside of their cheek and a cheque for $1,995, hopeful singles have to answer the usual questionnaire about income, background and details such as whether they would prefer a skiing holiday to one spent sketching. They are not, however, asked whether they wear their T-shirts for three days on the trot.


January 4, 2008, 8:09 am
Breast Cancer Test Errors Cause Faulty Treatment
Posted by Jacob Goldstein

The era of personalized medicine won’t work unless we can also find our way into the era of reliable diagnostic testing. And in the case of breast cancer — one of the diseases with good personalized drugs for certain types of tumors — the diagnostic tests aren’t working very well, the WSJ reports.

As a result, many women who would benefit from drugs such as Genetech’s Herceptin or GlaxoSmithKline’s Tykerb are going without because faulty tests say their tumors wouldn’t respond to the drugs. At the same time, errant tests also cause other women are to take drugs that aren’t right for their type of tumor.
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“If we tried to market pregnancy tests with this rate of inaccuracy, they would be taken off the market,” says Allen Gown, chief pathologist of PhenoPath Laboratories in Seattle, told the WSJ. “It means there are a lot of women being treated inappropriately.”

A study published last year and led by Genentech researchers reviewed how well labs performed Her-2 tests, which are used to determine whether a woman should take Herceptin. It found that 14% to 16% of those judged positive for Her-2 were actually negative. Of those judged negative, 18% to 23% were in fact positive.

That sort of high error rate could lead to tighter oversight of labs. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that regulates the testing sites, is examining tougher quality-control requirements. At the moment, labs have to pass outside proficiency checks on 83 types of tests — a list that was devised 15 years ago and doesn’t include the breast-cancer tests.
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What is the clinical relevance of gene profiling? What is going to happen to the healthcare economic system with the introduction of increasingly expensive new drugs that benefit only a small percentage of patients who receive them? Hence the headlong rush to develop tests to identify molecular predisposing mechansims whose presence still does not guarantee that a drug will be effective for an individual patient. Nor can they, for any patient or even large group of patients, discriminate the potential for clinical activity among different agents of the same class. In the new paradigm of requiring a companion diagnostic as a condition for approval of new targeted therapies, the pressure is so great that the companion diagnostics they’ve approved often have been mostly or totally ineffective at identifying clinical responders (durable and otherwise) to the various therapies. Cancer cells often have many mutations in many different pathways, so even if one route is shut down by a targeted treatment, the cancer cell may be able to use other routes. Targeting one pathway may not be as effective as targeting multiple pathways in a cancer cell. Another challenge is to identify for which patients the targeted treatment will be effective. And tumors can become resistant to a targeted treatment. The drug no longer works, even if it has previously been effective in shrinking a tumor. Drugs are combined with existing ones to target the tumor more effectively. Most cancers cannot be effectively treated with targeted drugs alone. Understanding “targeted” treatments begins with understanding the cancer cell. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0

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Comment by gpawelski - January 4, 2008 at 11:38 am

I am a little confused re my treatment plans. I havw been diagnosed with invasive breast cancer with HER 2 positive along with ER (90%) and PR(40%) positive.

Some one suggested that it is rare to find all three factors positive and suggested to have a retest. Your site is kind of supporting that there could be false positives or negatives in certain case and a second test is advised.

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I am in Toronto, I already have two cycles of CMF chemo. Now waiting for radiation, herceptin and hormone treatment after another surgery at the end of the chemo cycles.

Where do I stand? What do I suggest to my medical team? They seem to be knowing what they are doing. I wonder whether they are aware of your researches and findings.

What is your opinion about supplementary or complementary treatment of Homeopathy?
Where would I see any answers you might be posting?

A friend of mine send me this link from Wall Street Journal.

Thank you,
Confused
Comment by Confused from Toronto, Canada - January 4, 2008 at 11:57 am

I wonder what the reason is for these diagnostic inaccuracies? Is it (a) the equipment that detects the analyte in the blood/tissue sample? (b) is the problem with the analyte (marker)? (c) is it a sample storage/handling issue? (d) maybe its the folks reading the test results???
Comment by The Laughing Cavalier - January 4, 2008 at 12:53 pm

You might want to double check about your understanding…it is triple negative is the rarest not triple positive. I think your treatment seems fine for a triple positive br cancer.
Comment by Reality - January 4, 2008 at 1:37 pm

Gene profiling tests, important in order to identify new therapeutic targets and thereby to develop useful drugs, are still years away from working successfully in predicting treatment response for individual patients. Perhaps this is because they are performed on dead, preserved cells that were never actually exposed to the drugs whose activity they are trying to assess. However, it will never be as effective as the cell culture method, which exists today and is not hampered by the problems associated with gene expression tests. That is because they measure the net effect of all processes within the cancer, acting with and against each other in real time, and it tests living cells actually exposed to drugs and drug combinations of interest.
Comment by gpawelski - January 4, 2008 at 1:42 pm

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statistically valid testing has proven that the women with certain hormone and gene profiles respond differently to different regimens of treatment. Women with certain profiles should NOT receive treatment as it is ineffectively. Gene test cost is around $3000 - but he cost of treatment can be $15000 or more - so the question is - is the balance - of testing vs excessive treatment, right?
Comment by OncoAdmin - January 4, 2008 at 6:41 pm

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.


Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

"He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of it," says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.

Ms. Neuwirth, a professor of Arabic studies at Berlin's Free University, now is overseeing a revival of the research. The project renews a grand tradition of German Quranic scholarship that was interrupted by the Third Reich. The Nazis purged Jewish experts on ancient Arabic texts and compelled Aryan colleagues to serve the war effort. Middle East scholars worked as intelligence officers, interrogators and linguists. Mr. Spitaler himself served, apparently as a translator, in the German-Arab Infantry Battalion 845, a unit of Arab volunteers to the Nazi cause, according to wartime records.

During the 19th century, Germans pioneered modern scholarship of ancient texts. Their work revolutionized understanding of Christian and Jewish scripture. It also infuriated some of the devout, who resented secular scrutiny of texts believed to contain sacred truths.

The revived Quran venture plays into a very modern debate: how to reconcile Islam with the modern world? Academic quarrying of the Quran has produced bold theories, bitter feuds and even claims of an Islamic Reformation in the making. Applying Western critical methods to Islam's holiest text is a sensitive test of the Muslim community's readiness to both accommodate and absorb thinking outside its own traditions.


"It is very exciting," says Patricia Crone, a scholar at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and a pioneer of unorthodox theories about Islam's early years. She says she first heard that the Munich archive had survived when attending a conference in Germany last fall. "Everyone thought it was destroyed."

The Quran is viewed by most Muslims as the unchanging word of God as transmitted to the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. The text, they believe, didn't evolve or get edited. The Quran says it is "flawless" and fixed by an "imperishable tablet" in heaven. It starts with a warning: "This book is not to be doubted."

Quranic scholarship often focuses on arcane questions of philology and textual analysis. Experts nonetheless tend to tread warily, mindful of fury directed in recent years at people deemed to have blasphemed Islam's founding document and the Prophet Muhammad.

A scholar in northern Germany writes under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg because, he says, his controversial views on the Quran risk provoking Muslims. He claims that chunks of it were written not in Arabic but in another ancient language, Syriac. The "virgins" promised by the Quran to Islamic martyrs, he asserts, are in fact only "grapes."
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Ms. Neuwirth, the Berlin professor now in charge of the Munich archive, rejects the theories of her more radical colleagues, who ride roughshod, she says, over Islamic scholarship. Her aim, she says, isn't to challenge Islam but to "give the Quran the same attention as the Bible." All the same, she adds: "This is a taboo zone."

Ms. Neuwirth says it's too early to have any idea what her team's close study of the cache of early texts and other manuscripts will reveal. Their project, launched last year at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities, has state funding for 18 years but could take much longer. The earliest manuscripts of the Quran date from around 700 and use a skeletal version of the Arabic script that is difficult to decipher and can be open to divergent readings.

Mystery and misfortune bedeviled the Munich archive from the start. The scholar who launched it perished in an odd climbing accident in 1933. His successor died in a 1941 plane crash. Mr. Spitaler, who inherited the Quran collection and then hid it, fared better. He lived to age 93.

The rolls of film, kept in cigar boxes, plastic trays and an old cookie tin, are now in a safe in Berlin. The photos of the old manuscripts will form the foundation of a computer data base that Ms. Neuwirth's team believes will help tease out the history of Islam's founding text. The result, says Michael Marx, the project's research director, could be the first "critical edition" of the Quran -- an attempt to divine what the original text looked like and to explore overlaps with the Bible and other Christian and Jewish literature.

A group of Tunisians has embarked on a parallel mission, but they want to keep it quiet to avoid angering fellow Muslims, says Moncef Ben Abdeljelil, a scholar involved in the venture. "Silence is sometimes best," he says. Afghan authorities last year arrested an official involved in a vernacular translation of the Quran that was condemned as blasphemous. Its editor went into hiding.

Many Christians, too, dislike secular scholars boring into sacred texts, and dismiss challenges to certain Biblical passages. But most accept that the Bible was written by different people at different times, and that it took centuries of winnowing before the Christian canon was fixed in its current form.

Muslims, by contrast, view the Quran as the literal word of God. Questioning the Quran "is like telling a Christian that Jesus was gay," says Abdou Filali-Ansary, a Moroccan scholar.

Modern approaches to textual analysis developed in the West are viewed in much of the Muslim world as irrelevant, at best. "Only the writings of a practicing Muslim are worthy of our attention," a university professor in Saudi Arabia wrote in a 2003 book. "Muslim views on the Holy Book must remain firm: It is the Word of Allah, constant, immaculate, unalterable and inimitable."


Ms. Neuwirth, the Berlin Quran expert, and Mr. Marx, her research director, have tried to explain the project to the Muslim world in trips to Iran, Turkey, Syria and Morocco. When a German newspaper trumpeted their work last fall on its front page and predicted that it would "overthrow rulers and topple kingdoms," Mr. Marx called Arab television network al-Jazeera and other media to deny any assault on the tenets of Islam.
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Europeans started to study the Quran in the Middle Ages, largely in an effort to debunk it. In the 19th century, faith-driven polemical research gave way to more serious scientific study of old texts. Germans led the way.

Their original focus was the Bible. Priests and rabbis pushed back, but scholars pressed on, challenging traditional views of the Old and New Testaments. Their work undermined faith in the literal truth of scripture and helped birth today's largely secular Europe. Over time, some turned their attention to the Quran, too.

In 1857, a Paris academy offered a prize for the best "critical history" of the Quran. A German, Theodor Nöldeke, won. His entry became the cornerstone of future Western research. Mr. Nöldeke, says Ms. Neuwirth, is "the rock of our church."

The Munich archive began with one of Mr. Nöldeke's protégés, Gotthelf Bergsträsser. As Germany slid towards fascism early last century, he hunted down old copies of the Quran in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. He took photographs of them with a Leica camera.

In 1933, a few months after Hitler became chancellor, Mr. Bergsträsser, an experienced climber, died in the Bavarian Alps. His body was never given an autopsy; rumors spread of suicide or foul play.

His work was taken up by Otto Pretzl, another German Arabist. He too set off with a Leica. In a 1934 journey to Morocco, he wangled his way into a royal library containing an old copy of the Quran and won over initially suspicious clerics, he said in a handwritten report about his trip.

The Nazis began to use Arabists early in the war when German forces began pushing into regions with large Muslim populations, first North Africa and then the Soviet Union. Scholars were used to broadcast propaganda and to help set up mullah schools for Muslims recruited into the German armed forces.

Mr. Pretzl, the manuscript collector, appears to have worked largely in military intelligence. He interrogated Arabic-speaking soldiers captured in the invasion of France, then, according to some accounts, set off on a mission to stir up an Arab uprising against British troops in Iraq. His plane crashed.


Responsibility for the Quran archive fell to Mr. Spitaler, who had helped collect some of the photos. During the war, Mr. Spitaler served in the command offices in Germany and later as an Arabic linguist in Austria, gaining only a modest military rank, records indicate.

After the war, he returned to academia. Instead of reviving the Quran project, he embarked on a laborious but less-sensitive endeavor, a dictionary of classical Arabic. After nearly half a century of work, definitions were published only for words beginning with two letters of the 28-letter Arabic alphabet.
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Mr. Spitaler rarely published papers, but was widely admired for his mastery of Arabic texts. A few scholars, however, judged him overly cautious, unproductive and hostile to unconventional views.

"The whole period after 1945 was poisoned by the Nazis," says Günter Lüling, a scholar who was drummed out of his university in the 1970s after he put forward heterodox theories about the Quran's origins. His doctoral thesis argued that the Quran was lifted in part from Christian hymns. Blackballed by Mr. Spitaler, Mr. Lüling lost his teaching job and launched a fruitless six-year court battle to be reinstated. Feuding over the Quran, he says, "ruined my life."

He wrote books and articles at home, funded by his wife, who took a job in a pharmacy. Asked by a French journal to write a paper on German Arabists, Mr. Lüling went to Berlin to examine wartime records. Germany's prominent postwar Arabic scholars, he says, "were all connected to the Nazis."

Berthold Spuler, for example, translated Yiddish and Hebrew for the Gestapo, says Mr. Lüling. (Mr. Spuler's subsequent teaching career ran into trouble in the 1960s when, during a Hamburg student protest, he shouted that the demonstrators "belong in a concentration camp.") Rudi Paret, who in 1962 produced what became the standard German translation of the Quran, was listed as a member of "The Institute for Research on and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life." Despite their wartime activities, the subsequent work of such scholars is still highly regarded.

By the mid-1970s, Mr. Spitaler in Munich was nearing retirement at the university there. He began moving boxes into a room set aside for the dictionary project at Bavaria's Academy of Sciences. His last doctoral student in Munich, Kathrin Müller, who was working on the dictionary, says she looked inside one of the boxes and saw old film. She asked Mr. Spitaler what it was but didn't get an answer. The boxes, she now realizes, contained the old Quran archive. "He didn't want to explain anything," she says.

In the early 1980s, when the archive was still thought to be lost, two German scholars traveled to Yemen to examine and help restore a cache of ancient Quran manuscripts. They, too, took pictures. When they tried to get them out of Yemen, authorities seized them, says Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, one of the scholars. German diplomats finally persuaded Yemen to release most of the photos, he says.
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Mr. Puin says the manuscripts suggested to him that the Quran "didn't just fall from heaven" but "has a history." When he said so publicly a decade ago, it stirred rage. "Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents," read one letter to the Yemen Times. "Allah, help us against our enemies."

Berlin Quran expert Ms. Neuwirth, though widely regarded as respectful of Islamic tradition, got sideswiped by Arab suspicion of Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching post in Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical revisionist scholar during a lecture in Germany.

Around 1990, Ms. Neuwirth met Mr. Spitaler, her old professor, in Berlin. He was in his 80s and growing frail, but remained sharp mentally. He "got sentimental about the old times," recalls Ms. Neuwirth. As they talked, he casually mentioned that he still had the photo archive. He offered to give it to her. "I had heard it didn't exist," she says. She later sent two of her students to Munich to collect the photo cache and bring it to Berlin.
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The news didn't spread beyond a small circle of scholars. When Mr. Spitaler died in 2003, Paul Kunitizsch, a fellow Munich Arabist, wrote an obituary recounting how the archive had been lost, torpedoing the Quran project. Such a venture, he wrote, "now appears totally out of the question" because of "the attitude of the Islamic world to such a project."

Information about the archive's survival has just begun trickling out to the wider scholarly community. Why Mr. Spitaler hid it remains a mystery. His only published mention of the archive's fate was a footnote to an article in a 1975 book on the Quran. Claiming the bulk of the cache had been lost during the war, he wrote cryptically that "drastically changed conditions after 1945" ruled out any rebuilding of the collection.

Ms. Neuwirth, the current guardian of the archive, believes that perhaps Mr. Spitaler was simply "sick of" the time-consuming project and wanted to move on to other work. Mr. Lüling has a less charitable theory: that Mr. Spitaler didn't have the talents needed to make use of the archive himself and wanted to make sure colleagues couldn't outshine him by working on the material.
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Mr. Kunitzsch, the obituary author, says he's mystified by Mr. Spitaler's motives. He speculates that his former colleague decided that the Quran manuscript project was simply too ambitious. The task, says Mr. Kunitzsch, grew steadily more sensitive as Muslim hostility towards Western scholars escalated, particularly after the founding of Israel in 1948. "He knew that for Arabs, [the Quran] was a closed matter."

Ms. Müller, Mr. Spitaler's last doctoral student, says the war "was a deep cut for everything" and buried the prewar dreams of many Germans. Another possible factor, she adds, was Mr. Spitaler's own deep religious faith. She opens up a copy of a Quran used by the late professor, a practicing Catholic, until his death. Unlike his other Arabic texts, which are scrawled with notes and underlinings, it has no markings at all.

"Perhaps he had too much respect for holy books," says Ms. Müller.

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A new kind of dating agency relies on matching people by their body odour

ONE of life's little mysteries is why particular people fancy each other—or, rather, why they do not when on paper they ought to. One answer is that human consciousness, and thus human thought, is dominated by vision. Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the other senses. However, as the multi-billion-dollar perfume industry attests, beauty is in the nose of the beholder, too.

ScientificMatch.com, a Boston-based internet-dating site launched in December, was created to turn this insight into money. Its founder, an engineer (and self-confessed serial dater) called Eric Holzle is drawing on an observation made over a decade ago by Claus Wedekind, a researcher at the University of Bern, in Switzerland.

In his original study Dr Wedekind recruited female volunteers to sniff men's three-day-old T-shirts and rate them for attractiveness. He then analysed the men's and women's DNA, looking in particular at the genes that build a part of the immune system known as the major histocompatability complex (MHC). Dr Wedekind knew, from studies on mice, that besides fending off infection, the MHC has a role in sexual attractiveness. It changes odours in ways the mice can detect (with mice, the odours are in the urine), and that detection is translated into preferences for particular mates. What is true for mice is often true for men, so he had a punt on the idea that the MHC might affect the smell of human sweat, as well.
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It did. Women preferred T-shirts from men whose MHC was most different from their own. What was more, women with similar MHCs favoured the use of similar commercial perfumes. This suggests that the role of such perfumes may be to flag up the underlying body scent rather than mask it, as a more traditional view of the aesthetics of body odour might suggest.

That makes evolutionary sense. The children of couples with a wide range of MHC genes, and thus of immune responses, will be better protected from disease. As the previous article suggests, that could be particularly important in a collaborative, group-living species such as humanity. Moreover, comparing MHCs could be a proxy for comparing kinship, and thus help to prevent inbreeding.
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A new and hitherto unknown atmospheric gas, a combination of oxygen and nitrogen, exists 10 to 25 miles above the Earth's surface, Drs. Arthur Adel and C.O. Lampland of the Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Ariz., announced to the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the Indianapolis meeting.

It is nitrogen pentoxide, its molecule consisting of two atoms of nitrogen and five of oxygen. It is probably the rarest of gases of the air, present only in the outer regions where the ultraviolet rays of the sunlight bring oxygen and nitrogen into combination.

Existence of the new gas in the ozone layer of the atmosphere was demonstrated by delicate spectroscopy of the far infrared region of the spectrum. If the new gas existed nearer to Earth in the air around us, it would not be detectable by the most refined chemical and physical methods. Because the nitrogen pentoxide takes out certain portions of the sunlight as it comes through the atmosphere to Earth, its existence could be detected.

The situation of Lowell Observatory high on a mountain in a dry atmosphere contributed to the discovery.
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What use was there for a ball-and-socket jointed bone at the back of a dinosaur's skull?

Charles W. Gilmore, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the U.S. National Museum, would like to know.

At the back of the skull of a hadrosaur, a rooster-crested monster that once lived in Montana, he has found a bone arrangement that has never been found in any other kind of skull. A relatively small, triangular bone bears on its front edge a socket or cup, which fits neatly over a ball-shaped projection on the bone in front of it.

Whatever was the use of this unique skull-joint, it could hardly have been to make room for the hadrosaur's massive brain. For the hadrosaur's brain was anything but massive. It couldn't have weighed more than 2 or 3 ounces. It was enough to see, hear, and probably smell with, but that was about all. But then, very likely a dinosaur never bothered to think—except possibly once in a while about another dinosaur.


    
1) The bigger the telescope the better, right? So what if your scope is the size of the Earth?
A technique called interferometry combines the light from telescopes that are widely separated, and with it you can make a virtual telescope that’s the same size as the distance between the physical telescopes. If those ’scopes are on opposite sides of the Earth, you get a telescope thousands of miles across. Using this technique, astronomers have made phenomenal measurements, including actually seeing the rotation of the galaxy M33 as well as its physical motion across the sky; something that had never been done before. They have been able to see the effects of the Sun’s motion around the Milky Way’s center, even though a full orbit takes 240 million years!



2) One long-standing mystery in astronomy is an apparent fountain of antimatter streaming out from the center of the Galaxy. What’s causing it? Most astronomers assumed it was coming from the giant supermassive black hole there, but now observations indicate it’s actually being accelerated by binary stars, where one of the two orbiting stars is a neutron star or black hole.
The cloud of antimatter is detected because it gives off gamma rays, which are a very high energy form of light. The gamma rays from the Galactic center are not centered on the center (hmmm, remember to edit that line), but extend a little bit more on the western side. This matches the distribution of the black hole or neutron star binaries. These binaries can generate antimatter when regular matter from the normal (sunlike) star swirls around the denser object.
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3) The most luminous objects in the Universe are, ironically and paradoxically, the faintest.
Huh? 
 Black holes can generate fantastic amounts of light as matter falling in to the hole first forms a disk around it. The disk is hot, and magnetic forces (along with friction and gravity) can make it extremely bright, as bright as billions of stars like the Sun. Supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies are big, and have proportionately big disks which can outshine the rest of the galaxy in which it sits. We call these active galaxies, and there are different kinds (quasars, blazars, Seyferts) depending on the various characteristics of the galaxy.
It turns out, though, that in many cases our view of these black holes is blocked by tick gas and dust in the galaxy. The folks at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have figured out a way to detect a fingerprint of these obscured galaxies, and found 887 hidden quasars that were previously unknown, by far the largest such sample ever made. What this means is that we have to be careful in the future about what objects we can and cannot see — astronomers may say "We expect to see XXX of these kind of galaxies and see none, which means our cosmology is wrong," we can take it with a judicious grain of salt.


Space is a dangerous place. Stars explode, black holes gobble up matter… but some violent events are so huge they affect entire galaxies, mayhem on a scale so vast it numbs the mind.
Galaxies are island universes, cities of billions or even hundreds of billions of stars. Some galaxies, like our Milky Way, live pretty much on their own, but others live in vast complexes called clusters. These galaxy clusters may have hundreds or thousands of denizens, all orbiting each other due to their mutual gravity, looking something like bees buzzing around hive.
But there is more there than just the matter we see. Dark matter is there as well; invisible stuff that adds to the gravity of the cluster due to its mass, but gives off no light. However, it betrays its presence in two ways: its gravity changes the motion of the galaxies in the cluster, and it distorts the light from more distant galaxies due to gravitational lensing.
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A team of astronomers has used the Hubble Space Telescope to examine the galaxy cluster Abell 901/902 (they call their project STAGES: Space Telescope A901/902 Galaxy Evolution Survey). They wanted to very carefully map out many aspects of the cluster: how many galaxies it contains, what kinds of galaxies they are (spirals, ellipticals, etc.), and, using lensing, determine where the dark matter is. By making a map of all of these characteristics, they hoped to be able to understand the history of the cluster, since the present configuration of the cluster can provide clues to its past.
For the first time, these cosmic archaeologists were able to map out the dark matter of this cluster, and found four very large concentrations of it scattered throughout Abell 901/902. These clumps of invisible stuff are enormous: they total a stunning 100 trillion times the Sun’s mass, or 500 times the mass of our entire galaxy.
Needless to say, that much mass exerts a powerful gravitational pull. Galaxies round the clumps are falling in toward them, inexorably drawn in by the clumps’ gravity. And as they fall in from the suburbs to the downtown regions, they change. They slam into the thin gas between galaxies, which can blow out the gas inside the galaxies (like leaving you car window open on a highway can air out the inside of the car), for one. But as the galaxies fall in, the inevitably interact with one another, colliding and merging as the make the downhill slide. This distorts the galaxies’ shapes, and that in turn allows the astronomers to determine the past history of the objects.
What’s interesting is that they found that galaxies tend to be more distorted on their way in to the centers of the clusters than they are when they are actually at the center. It appears that as they fall, they have time to interact and merge, changing their shape, but once they aproach the center they are falling so quickly they simply don’t have time to distort much as they pass each. Also, it takes time to settle in at the center, so the galaxies at the center appear to be very old, and have finished their transformation from being unsettled and twisted into more sedate, round, elliptical galaxies. The astronomers also determined that the galaxies at the edge of the cluster still produce stars, but by the time they reach the center that has mostly turned off. Their gas — needed to make stars — gets blown out of the galaxies on the way in, and the mergers trigger vast bursts of star formation, which also uses up the gas.
These discoveries were possible only through the use of Hubble, Spitzer, and other telescopes, each of which unpeeled another layer of the puzzle. I’ll note that for Hubble’s part, this represents the largest area of sky ever observed by the grand dame of space ’scopes; it took 80 separate pointings of Hubble to complete the survey of the cluster, and they mapped the locations and shape of 60,000 galaxies in all, a truly staggering amount.
One last thought: the Milky Way is more or less alone in space, being part of a loose collection of other galaxies. But we are headed toward the Andromeda galaxy, and in a couple of billion years we’ll collide and merge with it. I hope that in this far flung future, some distant astronomers can use our own violent fate to learn a little more about the Universe, too. It only seems fair.
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One of the more amazing aspects of looking into deep, deep space is that the path there is tortured and twisted. Space itself can be distorted by mass; it gets bent, like a road curves as it goes around a hill. And like a truck that must follow that road and steer around the hill, a photon must follow the curve of space.
Imagine a distant galaxy, billions of light years away. It emits light in all directions. One particular photon happens to be emitted almost — but not quite — in our direction. Left on its own, we’d never see it because it would miss the Earth by thousands or millions of light years.
But on its travels, it passes by another massive galaxy. This galaxy warps space, and the photon does what it must do: it follows that curve in pace, and changes direction… and it just so happens that the curve is just right to send it our way.
The intervening galaxy is essentially acting like a lens, bending the light. If the more distant galaxy is exactly behind the lensing galaxy, we see the light from that more distant galaxy distorted into a perfect ring, a circle of light surrounding the lens. We call this an Einstein Ring. If the farther galaxy is off to the side a bit, we see an arc instead of a complete ring. Gravitationally lensed arcs and rings are seen all over the sky, and they can be used to determine the mass of the intervening galaxy! The more mass, the more distorted the light from the farther galaxy. So the Universe has given us a nice method to let us weigh it.
In a surprising twist, astronomers have found a new type of lensed galaxy: a double ring! In a rare alignment, there are two distant galaxies aligned behind an intervening lensing galaxy. They’re like beads on a wire, lined up just right such that both more distant galaxies are lensed by the nearer one. In this case, the lens is about 3 billion light years away, and the other two are 6 and 11 billion light years away, an incredible distance.
This image is amazing, but it is also a powerful scientific tool. It allows us to measure not just the mass of the lensing galaxy, but also the amount of mysterious dark matter nearby. We cannot see the dark matter, but it too bends light, and contributes to the lensings. By observing lenses like this, we can take a sample of dark matter in the Universe, and that’s a crucial first step in understanding it. Even better, these double rings allows us to measure the amount of total mass not just in the nearest galaxy, as is usual, but also in the middle galaxy as well, since it distorts the light from the galaxy behind it (turns out it’s a rather lightweight one billion solar masses; our own Galaxy has more than 100 times that mass, so the middle galaxy is considered a dwarf).
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This is a beautiful happenstance; it gives us a measure of the Universe at two points, with one being for free. In fact, Tommaso Treu, the astronomer at U.C. Santa Barbara who investigated this lens, points out that if we can find as few as 50 of these double rings, we can get a much better idea of the distribution of not just dark matter, but also the even more mysterious dark energy in the Universe. That’s one of the biggest goals of modern astronomy… and we may get a handle on it due to a coincidental ring toss.