Resident Alien in the City

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

2007-08-16T17:14:00.000-04:00

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
By John Borland Email 08.14.07 | 2:00 AM

CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith built a search tool that traces IP addresses of those who make Wikipedia changes.
Photo: Jake Appelbaum

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.

This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.

Share Your Sleuthing!

Cornered any companies polishing up their Wikipedia entries? Spotted any government spooks rewriting history? Try Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner yourself, then submit your finds and vote on other readers' discoveries here.

The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.

Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush.

The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."

A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.

Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community.

As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy users of the system. Former Montana Sen. Conrad Burns' office, for example, apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice" to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content following it.

Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested changes come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.

The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however. Employees at the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias.

One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions, with specific details that read like a popular history book or an eyewitness' memoir.

Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.

Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals, particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.

For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.

The Top 10 Worst Heredity Conditions

2007-08-03T20:24:00.000-04:00

The Top 10 Worst Heredity Conditions
livescience.com

BALDNESS

Although baldness is common in men, scientists don't understand much about why so little is going on up there. Genes do play a role, but your mom is not the only one at fault. Baldness is likely due to abnormalities in several genes from one or both parents. People with a rare type of permanent baldness called alopecia universalis, lose hair all over their bodies and carry defective 'hairless' genes.

LACTOSE INTOLERANCE

The Chinese distaste for milk was thought to be a cultural one, until scientists in the 1960s discovered lactose intolerance in Asians, Africans, and southern Europeans. Within the past 10,000 years, a genetic change allowed the ability to digest milk to evolve, but only where dairy farming was the norm. If you can't tolerate milk, your relatives probably left cow udders alone.

ACNE

Go ahead and fault your parents for your pimples. Studies have shown that many school-age boys with acne have a family history of the skin condition. As well, having parents who endured a bad case of zits makes one more likely to suffer from severe acne too.

HAVING TWINS

Although identical twins are random events, fraternal twins pop up in families again and again. A mother doing double diaper duty carries a gene that makes her release multiple eggs during ovulation, called hyperovulation. Although a man who carries the gene will probably not father twins, passing the family trait to his daughter could make him a grandfather of twins. This is why twins sometimes appear to skip generations, even though there's no evidence that twins are more likely to occur every other generation.

HEART DISEASE

A family history of heart disease, diabetes, stroke or high blood pressure isn't good for your heart. Children of parents with heart and blood vessel diseases are more likely to develop them too. Plus, a person with a congenital heart defect is slightly more likely to have a baby with a heart defect.

OBESITY

Super size fries and a heavy set of genes is a recipe for obesity. One scientific theory suggests the same genes that helped our ancestors survive famines are now working against people living in places where food is plentiful. Genes have been shown to be the cause of obesity disorders such as Bardet-Biedl syndrome and Prader-Willi syndrome. Many of today's bulging waistlines have only to do with eating too much of the wrong foods, however.

BULLYING

Next time you're in the principal's office with a pink slip for roughhousing on the playground, point the finger at your family. A gene that increases an individual's risk for violence has been discovered. Researchers have also found aggressive behaviors in boys are more likely to be inherited than non-aggressive antisocial behaviors like stealing someone's lunchbox. But genes play a bigger role in female thieves.

COLOR BLINDNESS

Ten million men in the U.S. cannot distinguish red from green. Yet the disorder only affects less than 600,000 American women. Why? The genes for red and green receptors sit near each other on the X-chromosome. Men only have one X-chromosome, which they inherit from their mother. Meanwhile, women have two, and a normal gene can often balance out a defective one.

BREAST CANCER

The cause of most breast cancers is still a mystery, however researches have discovered that mutations in particular genes, such as BRCA1 and BRCA2, cause some cancers. Women who inherit the mutation tend to get cancer early in life and in both breasts. Men with BRCA1 have an increased risk of prostate cancer, while BRCA2 increases the likelihood of cancers in the male breast, prostate, pancreas, and elsewhere.

ALCOHOLIM

Children of alcoholics are not destined to be alcoholics too. But recent research reports about 50 percent of the risk for alcoholism is genetically determined. The environment accounts for the other risky half. The disease is considered genetically complex, meaning that several genes come into play and they can affect individuals differently.

Top 10 Aphrodisiacs

2007-08-03T20:13:00.000-04:00

Top 10 Aphrodisiacs
livescience.com

Rhino Horn

It's sad how our effort to promote the survival of our species through copious copulation has run other species to the brink of extinction. Rhino horn, prized by some as an alleged aphrodisiac, offers no such sexual power; and its (illegal) use in Chinese medicine for other ailments is questionable. The horns look a little like an erect penis, and in traditional medicine that's sometimes enough to mean that grinding them up and eating them will make one's own penis erect. At best, they contain nutrients, such as phosphorus, which gave our nutrient-poor ancestors a little more energy.

Spanish Fly

Not a fly and not strictly from Spain. That basically sums up the lies behind this potentially deadly aphrodisiac. Spanish Fly is ground-up blister beetle, indigenous to Europe. The beetle contains a caustic acid-like juice called cantharidin. When this stuff is ingested and eventually excreted, it causes a burning and swelling sensation in the urinary tract misconstrued as sexual stimulation. The only problem is that cantharidin is toxic, and the victims are usually women who unwittingly consume the powder in a drink. Most Spanish Fly sold today is just pepper or something to make you feel hot.

Alcohol

Alcohol, a false aphrodisiac, merely lowers inhibitions and raises the level of one's irrationality. Even worse, booze and other party drugs such as cocaine and ecstasy (MDMA) contribute to erectile dysfunction, according to Karen Boyle, director of Reproductive Medicine and Surgery unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore: "These drugs effect blood flow by their actions on arteries and veins and [negatively] impact testosterone levels, and thus libido." A few drinks are fine, but relying on alcohol to get in the mood could be a sign of a deeper problem.

Chocolate

Nope, but so what. Chocolate has phenylethylamine and serotonin, two chemicals that light up pleasure areas in the brain. Chocolate is similar to sex in that it makes you feel good. This doesn't imply, and no studies have shown that chocolate increases sexual desire. Hershey's Kisses might lead to kisses, but the passion was likely firmly in place beforehand.

Oysters

Many foods (bananas, asparagus, carrots, avocados) are considered aphrodisiacs because they resemble the penis or testicles. Oysters resemble a vagina. The Romans placed the oyster high on their list of prized aphrodisiacs. Casanova, the legend goes, would eat 50 raw oysters for breakfast. Yet interestingly, oysters (and pine nuts, another ancient aphrodisiac) are high in zinc, which is necessary for sperm production. Raw oysters are also high in D-aspartic acid and N-methyl-D-aspartate, which increased testosterone levels in one study on male rats, which could in theory increase libido, according to Karen Boyle of Johns Hopkins Hospital. "The data is questionable and mixed, but oysters do make a nice appetizer," she said.

Yohimbe, Tribulus and Maca

There are several traditional herbs under study for their aphrodisiac properties, and three leading contenders are yohimbe, tribulus and maca. Any combination of these might be pulverized, capsulated and sold as "natural Viagra." Most level-headed researchers, however, will warn you to stay away from this kind of stuff. Too much yohimbe, a bark from a West African evergreen tree, can kill you, which is not the kind of stiffness most guys are after. You never know what you're getting when you buy so-called natural cures. Many drugs come from plants; aspirin was isolated from willow bark. So yohimbe and the like are being studied to see if there are medicinal properties that can be isolated and turned into a reliable treatment for sexual dysfunction.

Viagra

There's a reason why "natural Viagra" ads clog your email inbox. Viagra works, and scheisters are trying to cash in Pfizer's billion-dollar success story. Viagra is not an aphrodisiac, per se. One needs sexual stimulation for the drug to work. (Your heightened sexual desire is likely in place, making you buy Viagra.) Before the dawn of Viagra and similar prescription drugs about a decade ago, urologists had little success in treating erectile dysfunction with medication. Viagra increases blood flow to the penis and blocks the blood from leaving, helping men maintain an erection. There are side effects, some serious, for a small percentage of users, but guys don't seem to care.

Psychoanalysis

Sometimes sexual dysfunction in men and women is a result of depression, fatigue or psychological disorder. Psychiatrists, counselors and sex therapists can often serve as a powerful aphrodisiac to enhance your libido. Psychoanalysis: sounds sexy, doesn't it?

Getting In Shape

As reported by Johns Hopkins researchers two weeks ago in the American Journal of Medicine, erectile dysfunction is highly correlated with poor physical health and inactivity. More than 50 percent of subjects with diabetes and 44 percent of those with high blood pressure had trouble achieving an erection either "sometimes" or "always." Ditto for the 26 percent of subjects who reported such sedentary behavior as watching three or more hours of television per day. Those who are fit tend to have more self-confidence, too. "Being in shape, eating healthfully, not smoking and not drinking are all ways to prevent obesity, diabetes, hypertension, kidney disease, peripheral vascular disease and hypercholesterolemia - - things that significantly impact blood flow," said Dr. Karen Boyle of Johns Hopkins Hospital. "I counsel all of my patients about making these lifestyle changes for 'penile health.'"

Respect

Dr. Ruth often speaks of respecting your sex partner and understanding his or her needs. Sex need not be centered on vaginal penetration and male ejaculation. There are a variety ways to please your partner sexually. And the most meaningful sexual relationships begin with respect. Try it with your lover. It can be a real turn-on.

10 Things About You

2007-08-03T20:02:00.000-04:00

10 Things You Didn't Know About You
livescience.com

10 Your Stomach Secretes Corrosive Acid
There's one dangerous liquid no airport security can confiscate from you: It's in your gut. Your stomach cells secrete hydrochloric acid, a corrosive compound used to treat metals in the industrial world. It can pickle steel, but mucous lining the stomach wall keeps this poisonous liquid safely in the digestive system, breaking down lunch.

9 Body Position Affects Your Memory
Can't remember your anniversary, hubby? Try getting down on one knee. Memories are highly embodied in our senses. A scent or sound may evoke a distant episode from one's childhood. The connections can be obvious (a bicycle bell makes you remember your old paper route) or inscrutable. A recent study helps decipher some of this embodiment. An article in the January 2007 issue of Cognition reports that episodes from your past are remembered faster and better while in a body position similar to the pose struck during the event.

8 Bones Break (Down) to Balance Minerals
In addition to supporting the bag of organs and muscles that is our body, bones help regulate our calcium levels. Bones contain both phosphorus and calcium, the latter of which is needed by muscles and nerves. If the element is in short supply, certain hormones will cause bones to break down--upping calcium levels in the body--until the appropriate extracellular concentration is reached.

7 Much of a Meal is Food For Thought
Though it makes up only 2 percent of our total body weight, the brain demands 20 percent of the body's oxygen and calories. To keep our noggin well-stocked with resources, three major cerebral arteries are constantly pumping in oxygen. A blockage or break in one of them starves brain cells of the energy they require to function, impairing the functions controlled by that region. This is a stroke.

6 Thousands of Eggs Unused by Ovaries
When a woman reaches her late 40s or early 50s, the monthly menstrual cycle that controls her hormone levels and readies ova for insemination ceases. Her ovaries have been producing less and less estrogen, inciting physical and emotional changes across her body. Her underdeveloped egg follicles begin to fail to release ova as regularly as before. The average adolescent girl has 34,000 underdeveloped egg follicles, although only 350 or so mature during her life (at the rate of about one per month). The unused egg follicles then deteriorate. With no potential pregnancy on the horizon, the brain can stop managing the release of ova.

5 Puberty Reshapes Brain Structure, Makes for Missed Curfews
We know that hormone-fueled changes in the body are necessary to encourage growth and ready the body for reproduction. But why is adolescence so emotionally unpleasant? Hormones like testosterone actually influence the development of neurons in the brain, and the changes made to brain structure have many behavioral consequences. Expect emotional awkwardness, apathy and poor decision-making skills as regions in the frontal cortex mature.

4 Cell Hairs Move Mucus
Most cells in our bodies sport hair-like organelles called cilia that help out with a variety of functions, from digestion to hearing. In the nose, cilia help to drain mucus from the naval cavity down to the throat. Cold weather slows down the draining process, causing a mucus backup that can leave you with snotty sleeves. Swollen nasal membranes or condensation can also cause a stuffed schnozzle.

3 Big Brains Cause Cramped Mouths
Evolution isn't perfect. If it were, we might have wings instead of wisdom teeth. Sometimes useless features stick around in a species simply because they're not doing much harm. But wisdom teeth weren't always a cash crop for oral surgeons. Long ago, they served as a useful third set of meat-mashing molars. But as our brains grew our jawbone structure changed, leaving us with expensively overcrowded mouths.

2 The World Laughs with You
Just as watching someone yawn can induce the behavior in yourself, recent evidence suggests that laughter is a social cue for mimicry. Hearing a laugh actually stimulates the brain region associated with facial movements. Mimicry plays an important role in social interaction. Cues like sneezing, laughing, crying and yawning may be ways of creating strong social bonds within a group.

1 Your Skin Has Four Colors
All skin, without coloring, would appear creamy white. Near-surface blood vessels add a blush of red. A yellow pigment also tints the canvas. Lastly, sepia-toned melanin, created in response to ultraviolet rays, appears black in large amounts. These four hues mix in different proportions to create the skin colors of all the peoples of Earth.

Top 10 Ancient Capitals

2007-08-03T19:43:00.000-04:00

livescience.com
Top 10 Ancient Capitals

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Photo Credit: Cahokia Mounds State Historic Park, courtesy of State of Illinois, NPS photo

Cahokia

With upwards of 30,000 inhabitants at its peak in about 1100 AD, Cahokia, Illinois remained North America's first and biggest real city until the Northeast's population exploded in the late 18th century. This urban center of the Mississippi culture had organized leadership, commerce and a penchant for mound-building. Monk's Mound, the largest at 100 feet tall, dominates the site and was probably a mighty foundation for the home of the resident spiritual leader.

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Photo Credit: Terracotta Warriors inside the Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum, 3rd century BC.

Xi'an

The Chinese city of Xi'an was the central stronghold for all of the country's most important ancient dynasties going back 3,000 years. Tourists flocking to see the city's Terra Cotta Army, 6,000 unique and life-size statues buried to protect the tomb of the great Zhou emperor Qin Shi Huang, has made Xi'an famous in modern times. That will only multiply when the emperor's sprawling mausoleum, rumored to hold invaluable treasures and rivers of mercury, is finally opened by archaeologists.

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Photo Credit: Jan Derk

Great Zimbabwe

At 1,800 acres in breadth and the only one of its kind in Africa, the complex of Great Zimbabwe confounded early European colonialists, who couldn't believe that sub-Saharan peoples were capable of its creation. They were, in fact, and built the complicated structures sometime after 1200 AD, when a wide-reaching empire of about 20,000 Shona cattlemen ruled the area.

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Photo Credit: Stockxpert

Thebes

Most people think of Cairo and the Great Pyramids when they think of ancient Egypt, but the heartbeat of the magical pharaonic dynasties actually beat much further up the Nile at Thebes. Thebes was the ruling capital of ancient Egypt during its most dominant eras, beginning with the Old Kingdom 4500 years ago, and is home to two of its most revered temples at Karnak and Luxor. Most of Egypt's holy rulers are also buried nearby in the famous Valley of the Kings.

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Photo Credit: Tenochtitlan, looking east. From the mural painting at the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City. Painted in 1930 by Dr Atl.

Tenochtitlan

Legend--and bits and pieces of historical fact--indicates that Tenochtitlan was once the world's biggest and most beautiful city. The capital of the great Aztec empire, which eventually morphed into today's Mexico City, had about 300,000 inhabitants when Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1521. Despite being built atop a lake according to the wishes of an important Aztec deity, ancient engineers made Tenochtitlan as efficient as any city in Europe with a complex system of causeways and canals.

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Photo Credit: Stockxpert

Cuzco

All roads in the Incan empire once lead to Cuzco, bustling capital in the Andes Mountains from the early 1400s until its discovery by European explorers in 1532. To retreat from the big city, Incan kings would head to their summer home of Machu Picchu further up in the mountains.

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Photo Credit: A 16th century depiction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (by Martin Heemskerck)

Babylon

Famous for its "wondrous" hanging gardens, the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon had as turbulent a history as its location in present-day Iraq suggests. Everyone from the ancient Assyrians to Alexander the Great wanted to get their hands on this strategic location, and it would become the capital for many ruling groups over a period of several thousand years. King Nebuchadnezzar II, creator of the gardens, led the city during its splendid architectural heyday around 600 BC.

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Photo Credit: Stockxpert

Constantinople

Today it's shared by two continents as the Turkish city of Istanbul, but ancient Constantinople never once had to share the spotlight after Rome fell from grace in the 4th century AD. From that date through the Middle Ages, Constantinople was the world's largest and richest city, becoming the center of the new Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire and finally the Ottoman Empire. Art and learning flourished in its universities and cathedrals, including the spectacular Hagia Sophia.

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Photo Credit: Kevin T. Glowacki and Nancy L. Klein

Athens

Democracy, math, philosophy, the Olympics...what didn't come out of Athens, the ethereal capital of ancient Greece? Athens fought long and hard, in conflicts on the sea and on land, to become leader of all Aegean city-states by the early 5th century BC. It celebrated its victories by building great temples like the Parthenon, the iconic symbol of art and architecture in ancient Greece. A plague--likely typhoid fever--contributed to the empire's fall.

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Photo Credit: Heather Whipps

Rome

It's impossible to stroll through modern Rome and not bump into reminders of its ancient past. The Forum, the Colosseum and the Pantheon, just to name a few, are lasting testaments to the capital of an empire once made up of 2.5 million square miles, three continents and about 100 million people. The empire reached its zenith in 117 AD, when the emperor Trajan ruled from Rome and months-long gladiator games were held to celebrate the city's glory.

Patients Suffer Dejà Vu ... Over and Over

2007-08-03T19:37:00.000-04:00

Patients Suffer Dejà Vu ... Over and Over
By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Managing Editor
posted: 30 January 2006 01:34 pm ET

Imagine suffering from chronic dejà vu. You don't even go to the doctor because you feel like you've already been there.
"We had a peculiar referral from a man who said there was no point visiting the clinic because he'd already been there, although this would have been impossible," said psychologist Chris Moulin, who runs a memory clinic at the University of Leeds in the UK.
So Moulin has started the first known study of the condition.
Dejà vu hits most of us now and then. We're struck by the sensation that we have experienced an event before, even though we can't fully remember it or perhaps know it didn't really happen. The sensation is fleeting, so researchers can't study it.
But Moulin figures chronic dejà vu sufferers offer an opportunity to do research that might unlock the secrets of the everyday variety.
The man who thinks he's been to Moulin's clinic even gave details of the visit that never occurred. He has dejà vu so bad that he doesn't watch TV news because he feels like he's seen it all before, Moulin said. Things get tricky when the man is asked to predict what's ahead, however.
"When this particular patient's wife asked what was going to happen next on a TV program he'd claimed to have already seen, he said, 'How should I know? I have a memory problem!'"
Moulin and colleagues have since found other patients, now that they know what to look for.
The condition can cause depression and is sometimes diagnosed as a state of delusion. But Moulin's team believes it to be a dysfunction of memory.
"The exciting thing about these people is that they can 'recall' specific details about an event or meeting that never actually occurred," Moulin said. "It suggests that the sensations associated with remembering are separate to the contents of memory, that there are two different systems in the brain at work."
The problem might involve a memory circuit that is overactive or stuck in the "on" position.
The researchers plan now to use brain scans in an effort to pinpoint the problem.

What Causes Déjà Vu?
Sunday September 10, 2006

That distinct illusion of having been there and done that has no explanation. The parapsychologist will tell you it's a past life experience. Yogi Berra will remind you it seems like you've felt it before. And most scientists will throw their hands up. Some believe déjà vu involves emotional responses to similar events; others figure the brain short circuits, sending an event to memory just a split second before putting it into consciousness.

Its fleeting nature makes déjà vu about as easy to study as the afterlife. Some people have a chronic variety, though, and so one study is attempting to get inside their minds. Chris Moulin, who runs a memory clinic at the University of Leeds in the UK and is doing the research, describes one patient who illustrates how déjà vu might be related to memories being mixed up by the brain: "When this particular patient's wife asked what was going to happen next on a TV program he'd claimed to have already seen, he said, 'How should I know? I have a memory problem!'"

Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind

2007-08-03T19:19:00.000-04:00

Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind

10 DREAMS
If you were to ask 10 people what dreams are made of, you'd probably get 10 different answers. That's because scientists are still unraveling this mystery. One possibility: Dreaming exercises brain by stimulating the trafficking of synapses between brain cells. Another theory is that people dream about tasks and emotions that they didn't take care of during the day, and that the process can help solidify thoughts and memories. In general, scientists agree that dreaming happens during your deepest sleep, called Rapid Eye Movement (REM).

9 REM SLEEP
Fruit flies do it. Tigers do it. And humans can't seem to get enough of it. No, not that. We're talking about shut-eye, so crucial we spend more than a quarter of our lives at it. Yet the underlying reasons for sleep remain as puzzling as a rambling dream. One thing scientists do know: Sleep is crucial for survival in mammals. Extended sleeplessness can lead to mood swings, hallucination, and in extreme cases, death. There are two states of sleep--non-rapid eye movement (NREM), during which the brain exhibits low metabolic activity, and rapid eye movement (REM), during which the brain is very active. Some scientists think NREM sleep gives your body a break, and in turn conserves energy, similar to hibernation. REM sleep could help to organize memories. However, this idea isn't proven, and dreams during REM sleep don't always correlate with memories.

8 PHANTOM FEELINGS
It's estimated that about 80 percent of amputees experience sensations, including warmth, itching, pressure and pain, coming from the missing limb. People who experience this phenomenon, known as "phantom limb," feel sensations as if the missing limb were part of their bodies. One explanation says that the nerves area where the limb severed create new connections to the spinal cord and continue to send signals to the brain as if the missing limb was still there. Another possibility is that the brain is "hard-wired" to operate as if the body were fully intact--meaning the brain holds a blueprint of the body with all parts attached.

7 BIOLOGICAL CLOCK
Residing in the hypothalamus of the brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or biological clock, programs the body to follow a 24-hour rhythm. The most evident effect of circadian rhythm is the sleep-wake cycle, but the biological clock also impacts digestion, body temperature, blood pressure, and hormone production. Researchers have found that light intensity can adjust the clock forward or backward by regulating the hormone melatonin. The latest debate is whether or not melatonin supplements could help prevent jet lag--the drowsy, achy feeling you get when "jetting" across time zones.

6 MEMORY
Some experiences are hard to forget, like perhaps your first kiss. But how does a person hold onto these personal movies? Using brain-imaging techniques, scientists are unraveling the mechanism responsible for creating and storing memories. They are finding that the hippocampus, within the brain's gray matter, could act as a memory box. But this storage area isn't so discriminatory. It turns out that both true and false memories activate similar brain regions. To pull out the real memory, some researchers ask a subject to recall the memory in context, something that's much more difficult when the event didn't actually occur.

5 LAUGHTER
Laughter is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Scientists have found that during a good laugh three parts of the brain light up: a thinking part that helps you get the joke, a movement area that tells your muscles to move, and an emotional region that elicits the "giddy" feeling. But it remains unknown why one person laughs at your brother's foolish jokes while another chuckles while watching a horror movie. John Morreall, who is a pioneer of humor research at the College of William and Mary, has found that laughter is a playful response to incongruities--stories that disobey conventional expectations. Others in the humor field point to laughter as a way of signaling to another person that this action is meant "in fun." One thing is clear: Laughter makes us feel better.

4 NATURE V. NURTURE
In the long-running battle of whether our thoughts and personalities are controlled by genes or environment, scientists are building a convincing body of evidence that it could be either or both! The ability to study individual genes points to many human traits that we have little control over, yet in many realms, peer pressure or upbringing has been shown heavily influence who we are and what we do.

3 AGING
Living forever is just for Hollywood. But why do humans age? You are born with a robust toolbox full of mechanisms to fight disease and injury, which you might think should arm you against stiff joints and other ailments. But as we age, the body's repair mechanisms get out of shape. In effect, your resilience to physical injury and stress declines. Theories for why people age can be divided into two categories: 1) Like other human characteristics, aging could just be a part of human genetics and is somehow beneficial. 2) In the less optimistic view, aging has no purpose and results from cellular damage that occurs over a person's lifetime. A handful of researchers, however, think science will ultimately delay aging at least long enough to double life spans.

2 DEATH
Living forever may not be a reality. But a pioneering field called cryonics could give some people two lives. Cryonics centers like Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, store posthumous bodies in vats filled with liquid nitrogen at bone-chilling temperatures of minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (78 Kelvin). The idea is that a person who dies from a presently incurable disease could be thawed and revived in the future when a cure has been found. The body of the late baseball legend Ted Williams is stored in one of Alcor's freezers. Like the other human popsicles, Williams is positioned head down. That way, if there were ever a leak in the tank, the brain would stay submerged in the cold liquid. Not one of the cryopreserved bodies has been revived, because that technology doesn't exist. For one, if the body isn't thawed at exactly the right temperature, the person's cells could turn to ice and blast into pieces.

1 CONSCIOUSNESS
When you wake up in the morning, you might perceive that the Sun is just rising, hear a few birds chirping, and maybe even feel a flash of happiness as the fresh morning air hits your face. In other words, you are conscious. This complex topic has plagued the scientific community since antiquity. Only recently have neuroscientists considered consciousness a realistic research topic. The greatest brainteaser in this field has been to explain how processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences. So far, scientists have managed to develop a great list of questions.

Leonardo Da Vinci's 10 Best Ideas

2007-08-03T19:07:00.000-04:00

livescience.com
Leonardo Da Vinci's 10 Best Ideas

10.

IMAGE CREDIT: By Permission of the British Library Arundel 263, f.4v,11

Mirror Writing

Was it a ploy to thwart Renaissance copycats peeking at his notes, or just a way to avoid the inky mess of writing left-handed? Whatever his motives, Da Vinci sure liked mirror writing: most of his journals are scrawled in reverse.

9.

IMAGE CREDIT: By Permission of the British Library Arundel 263, f.24v

Scuba Gear

Da Vinci's fascination with the sea spurred many designs for aquatic exploration. His diving suit was made of leather, connected to a snorkel made of cane and a bell that floated at the surface. Proving the artist was also practical, the suit included a pouch the diver could urinate in.

8.

IMAGE CREDIT: Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci

The Revolving Bridge

Always a fan of the quick getaway, Da Vinci thought his revolving bridge would be best used in warfare. The light yet sturdy materials, affixed to a rolling rope-and-pulley system, allowed an army to pick up and go at a moment's notice.

7.

IMAGE CREDIT: Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci

The Winged Glider

Da Vinci's imagination was filled to capacity with ideas for flying machines, including several gliders equipped with flappable wings. This open-shelled model, fitted with seats and gears for the pilot, did not include a design for a crash helmet.

6.

IMAGE CREDIT: Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci

The Triple-Barreled Cannon

More thinker than fighter, Da Vinci's distaste for conflict didn't stop him from dreaming up designs for more efficient cannons like this one. His jacked-up triple-barrel would have been a deadly weapon on the battlefield, fast and light with lots of extra fire power.

5.

IMAGE CREDIT: Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci

The Aerial Screw

Modern scientists agree it may never have lifted off the ground, but Da Vinci's "helicopter" design is still one of his most famous. The curious contraption was meant to be operated by a four-man team and could have been inspired by a windmill toy popular in Leonardo's time.

4.

IMAGE CREDIT: Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci

The Ideal City

Living in a Milan wrought with plague, Da Vinci envisioned a more efficient city he'd be proud to call home. His architectural draughts are highly detailed and even include horse stables with fresh air vents.

3.

IMAGE CREDIT: Courtesy of Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci

The Self-Propelled Car

It's no Ferrari, but Da Vinci's designs for a self-propelled vehicle were revolutionary for his day. His wooden "car" moved by the interaction of springs with geared wheels. Scientists at one museum in Florence built a replica in 2004 and found it worked as Da Vinci intended.

2.

IMAGE CREDIT: stock.xchng

Geologic Time

Plate tectonics? No sweat. While most of his contemporaries explained inland, mountain-top mollusk fossils as leftovers from the Great Flood, Da Vinci thought otherwise. He supposed (right) that the mountains must once have been coastline before many years of gradually shifting upwards.

1.

The Vitruvian Man

Da Vinci modeled his perfect human form after the proportions laid out by Vitruvius, an ancient Roman architect. The angry-looking man drawn by Da Vinci has reason to smile - he's now considered one of the most recognizable figures on earth.

Top 10 Battles for the Control of Iraq

2007-08-03T18:50:00.000-04:00

Top 10 Battles for the Control of Iraq

10.

This fragment from the Stele of the Vultures, erected by Eannatum of Lagash, now at the Louvre Museum, Paris depicts the battle of Umma with Eannatum of Lagash defeating the king of Umma.

2525 BC - Battle between Lagash and Umma
By 3000 BC, the Sumerians had developed into the earliest civilization of Mesopotamia. The societies were organized into city-states, which warred constantly over the control of water. Two of these, Lagash and Umma, sat 18 miles apart and feuded for generations over the fertile region known as Gu'edena. In 2525, King Eannatum of Lagash defeated Umma using armored soldiers in phalanx formations, and also chariots pulled by onagers (wild asses), an invention frequently credited to the Sumerians. How do we know of this battle? It was recorded by the king on a stone monument, "the Stele of the Vultures."

9.

Sargon overthrew the Sumerian king at Nippur and established what became known as the first empire in human history, becoming the king of Akkad.

Around 2300 BC - Military campaigns of Sargon the Great

Sargon of Akkad may have been the world's first empire-builder. Legend states that he was found floating in a basket and brought up by a gardener. Later it is known he became a cupbearer to King Ur-Zazaba of Kish in Sumer. Sargon rose from obscurity to overthrow Lugalzaggisi of Uruk, famously forcing the defeated ruler into a yoke and leading him to the gate of Enlil, a god, at Nippur. Sargon also attacked 34 Sumerian cities. In the process, he tore down the walls of the vanquished, imprisoned 50 ensis (city-state rulers), and "cleaned his weapons in the sea" (Persian Gulf). Thus the Akkadian empire rose and the Mesopotamian military tradition was born.

8.

Shalmaneser I was the king of Assyria. He restored the temple at Assur, established a royal residence at Nineveh, and removed the capital from Assur to Calah, just south of Nineveh.

Around 1263 BC - Assyrian King Shalmaneser I defeated Shattuara II of Hanigalbat

Assyria developed around the city of Ashur on the upper Tigris, weaker than other states appearing after Hammurabi's dynasty, including the Kassites and the Hurrians/Mitanni. Assyria was long ruled by the Mitanni, but regained autonomy during the Middle Assyrian Empire. In his second year of rule, Shalmaneser I attacked the breakaway state of Uruatru in southern Armenia. Shattuara II of Hanigalbat, leading the rebellion with the aid of the Hittites, blockaded the mountain passes and waterholes. With a desperation born of thirst, the Assyrians pounded the Mitanni kingdom into submission. Afterwards, Shalmaneser claimed to have blinded 14,400 men, a nasty bit of psychological warfare. His inscriptions mention the utter devastation of nine fortified temples, 180 Hurrian cities, and the Hittite and Ahlamu armies. Obviously, the Assyrians were not well-liked.

7.

The last Persian Great King of the Achaemenid dynasty, Darius III Codomannus, is remembered in history for being defeated by Alexander the Great.

331 BC - Battle of Gaugamela

In 334 BC, Alexander III ("The Great") crossed the Hellespont (Dardanelles) with 7000 cavalrymen and over 30,000 infantrymen. During this expedition, Alexander defeated the king, Darius III, at the Battle of Issus. Darius retreated to the Plain of Gaugamela, near Arbela (Irbil). There he massed a enormous army and ordered the plain cleared for his scythed chariots and war elephants. Darius' army stood in a massive line. Alexander's outnumbered Macedonian forces attempted to draw the Persians away from the prepared ground. In countering, the Persian cavalry opened gaps in their own line, into which Alexander led his personal cavalry. The Persian chariots charged the Macedonians, which yielded and then decimated their drivers with projectiles. Alexander's elite cavalry turned and attacked from the rear. When Darius saw his troops in disarray, he fled, prompting a full retreat. Alexander had ended the Persian empire founded by Cyrus II.

6.

Marcus Licinius Crassus, a Roman businessman and politican, was infamous for ordering the mass crucifiction of more than 6000 of Spartacus' slave army along the Appian Way.

53 BC - Battle of Carrhae

Marcus Licinius Crassus became governor of Syria in 55 BC. A triumvir with Pompey and Julius Caesar, he sought to increase his reputation by invading Parthian Mesopotamia. With seven legions, about 44,000 men, he crossed the Euphrates. However, he strayed from the river into the open desert. Near Carrhae (Harran), the Parthians approached with 10,000 mounted archers. The Romans held a theoretical advantage, but lacked desert warfare experience (fighting at midday in June?), and staggered before the Parthian arrows, fired from compound bows. Also, the Parthian commander, General Suren, had thoughtfully brought 1000 camels to re-supply his archers with arrows. Surrounding the Romans, the Parthians turned the battle into dusty target practice. Only 10,000 Gauls were reported to survive. In attempting to surrender, Crassus was killed. Roman prestige plunged in the east.

5.

Once viewed as primitive and unorganized, the Arabs, united by Islam in the mid-600s AD soon conquered the Persian Empire.

637 AD - Battle of Al-Qadisiyah

The Persian Sasanians ruled Mesopotamia from 224 AD. They thrived for centuries, but eventually became distracted by fighting the Romans and amongst themselves. Ultimately, an unlikely outside force would topple them. The Arabs had been tribesmen, unorganized and militarily primitive. The new religion of Islam, founded by Muhammad, united the tribes. In 634, the Arab campaign against the Sassanians began. 18,000 Arab tribesmen, led by General Khalid ibn al Walid ("The Sword of Islam") reached the Euphrates delta and began battling the Iranians (Persians), who were rallied by their hero, Rustam. A decisive battle occurred at Al-Qidisiyah, a village south of Baghdad. Though outnumbered six to one, the Arabs defeated the Iranians, exhausted by many battles against the Byzantines. Rustam was killed. The Arabs shortly captured the Sassanid capital at Ctesiphon, ending their dynasty and introducing Islam to the region.

4.

16th Century representation of Hulagu Khan's seige of the Fort at Alamut in Iran. Hulagu, Ghengis Khan's grandson, conquered much of Southwest Asian, including what are now modern day Iraq and Iran.

1258 AD - Mongols besiege Baghdad

Mesopotamia had become known as "Iraq," the center of a large Muslim caliphate. The Abbasid ruling family established a new capital at Baghdad, which prospered. Early in the 13th Century AD, the Mongol leader, Temujin, organized the Mongol tribes into a marauding army over 700,000 strong, and began conquests of China, Persia, and Eastern Europe. He renamed himself Chinggis (Genghis) Khan ("World Conquerer"). A generation later, his grandson, Hulagu, was dispatched to capture the remainder of southwest Asia. In 1258, Hulagu besieged Baghdad, then sacked most of it, slaughtering as many as 800,000 of the inhabitants. He killed the scholars, erecting a pyramid of their skulls, and executed the caliph, al-Musta'sim, the 37th and final Abbisid ruler of a line that had lasted 500 years. Iraq was reduced to tribal culture, never to regain world prominence.

3.

During his reign, Suleyman the Magnificent, led the Ottoman Empire into its golden age, making it one of the world's cultural, political and military leaders.

1534 AD - Capture of Baghdad by Suleyman the Magnificent

In the early 1500's, the Ottomans began their rise to power as the next great Islamic state. The first ruler was Sultan Selim I ("The Grim"). His victory in 1514 at the Battle of Chaldiran over the Safavids of Iran paved the way for Ottoman expansion into northern Iraq, as the Safavids had conquered Iraq in 1509. Son of Selim, Suleyman I ("the Magnificent") succeeded to the throne in 1520, and by 1522 turned his attention to the Safavids, first negotiating a truce with Archduke Ferdinand of Hungary, leaving himself free to wage the first of three major campaigns against Persia. In 1534, he took the cities of Baghdad and most of Iraq from the Persians, an enormous success, leading to almost four centuries of Ottoman rule in Iraq.

2.

Ctesiphon is an ancient city on the Tigris, founded by the Parthians. It was here that British troops first engaged Turkish forces before Kut-al-Amara.

1915 AD - Siege of Kut-al-Amara

In World War I, England realized it must protect its Iraqi oil production interests against the German-Turkish alliance. In 1914, British forces began the Mesopotamian campaign at Al Faw. After several easy victories, an attempt on Baghdad was launched. However, the Anglo-Indian forces, commanded by Sir Charles Townshend, were undermanned and their supplies overstretched. In November, 1915, the British approached the ruins of Ctesiphon, on the Tigris 20 miles SE of modern Baghdad. The Turks, under Nur-ud-Din, had positioned about 18,000 experienced men in two trenches on either side of the river. The better-prepared Turks fended off the British, who dragged themselves back to occupied Kut-al-Amara. The Turks besieged the city for 143 days, ultimately forcing a British surrender. 10,000 men went into brutal captivity. The following year, the British finally took Baghdad, but the Siege of Kut-al-Amara was the army's greatest military defeat.

1.

Will McDermott from Phoenix, Az., provides security as Marines from the 1st Battalion 5th Marines break down a door while searching buildings for weapons in Fallujah, Iraq, Monday, April 19, 2004. (AP Photo/John Moore)

2003 AD - Operation Iraqi Freedom

Saddam Hussein's presidency of Iraq included a failed invasion of Kuwait in 1990 that precipitated the Persian Gulf War. Following the war, US officials suspected Iraq of cease-fire violations, including the production of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In dealing with United Nation arms inspectors, Hussein proved intractable for more than 12 years. On March 20, 2003, a combined military force consisting of 300,000 primarily US and British troops entered Iraq through Kuwait. The reported pretext for the invasion was to locate and destroy chemical, nuclear, and biological WMDs, and depose Hussein. To date, no WMDs have been found. Baghdad fell on April 9. President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1, however, coalition forces remain to stabilize the country, experiencing frequent insurgent attacks. On December 13, Hussein was captured near his home town of Tikrit. Coalition fighters continue to encounter fierce resistance. By May 10, 2007, more than 3382 American and coalition troops had died in Iraq with the civilian casualties estimated at about 62,570.

Top 50 Reasons Men and Women Have Sex

2007-08-03T18:22:00.000-04:00

Top 50 Reasons Men and Women Have Sex

By LiveScience Staff

posted: 31 July 2007 12:30 pm ET

A survey, detailed in the August issue of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, reveals what motivates a person to have sex. In all, the researchers found 237 reasons. Here are the top 50, first for women and then for men.

Top 50 reasons WOMEN have sex:

1. I was attracted to the person.

2. I wanted to experience the physical pleasure.

3. It feels good.

4. I wanted to show my affection to the person.

5. I wanted to express my love for the person.

6. I was sexually aroused and wanted the release.

7. I was "horny."

8. It’s fun.

9. I realized I was in love.

10. I was "in the heat of the moment."

11. I wanted to please my partner.

12. I desired emotional closeness (i.e., intimacy).

13. I wanted the pure pleasure.

14. I wanted to achieve an orgasm.

15. It’s exciting, adventurous.

16. I wanted to feel connected to the person.

17. The person’s physical appearance turned me on.

18. It was a romantic setting.

19. The person really desired me.

20. The person made me feel sexy.

21. The person caressed me.

22. It seemed like the natural next step in my relationship.

23. I wanted to become one with another person.

24. It just happened.

25. I wanted to increase the emotional bond by having sex.

26. I wanted the experience.

27. I wanted the adventure/excitement.

28. The person had an attractive face.

29. The person was a good kisser.

30. I wanted to intensify my relationship.

31. My hormones were out of control.

32. I wanted to try out new sexual techniques or positions.

33. I wanted to feel loved.

34. The person had a desirable body.

35. I wanted to celebrate a birthday or anniversary or special occasion.

36. I wanted to communicate at a "deeper" level.

37. I was curious about sex.

38. It was a special occasion.

39. The person was intelligent.

40. I wanted to say "I’ve missed you."

41. I wanted to keep my partner satisfied.

42. I got "carried away."

43. The opportunity presented itself.

44. The person had a great sense of humor.

45. I wanted to improve my sexual skills.

46. I was curious about my sexual abilities.

47. The person seemed self-confident.

48. I wanted to make up after a fight.

49. I was drunk.

50. I was turned on by the sexual conversation.

Top 50 reasons MEN have sex:

1. I was attracted to the person.

2. It feels good.

3. I wanted to experience the physical pleasure.

4. It’s fun.

5. I wanted to show my affection to the person.

6. I was sexually aroused and wanted the release.

7. I was "horny."

8. I wanted to express my love for the person.

9. I wanted to achieve an orgasm.

10. I wanted to please my partner.

11. The person’s physical appearance turned me on.

12. I wanted the pure pleasure.

13. I was "in the heat of the moment."

14. I desired emotional closeness (i.e., intimacy).

15. It’s exciting, adventurous.

16. The person had a desirable body.

17. I realized I was in love.

18. The person had an attractive face.

19. The person really desired me.

20. I wanted the adventure/excitement.

21. I wanted to feel connected to the person.

22. I wanted the experience.

23. It was a romantic setting.

24. The person caressed me.

25. The person made me feel sexy.

26. It seemed like the natural next step in my relationship.

27. I wanted to increase the emotional bond by having sex

28. I wanted to keep my partner satisfied.

29. The opportunity presented itself.

30. It just happened.

31. I wanted to intensify my relationship.

32. I wanted to try out new sexual techniques or positions.

33. My hormones were out of control.

34. The person was too "hot" (sexy) to resist.

35. I was curious about my sexual abilities.

36. I wanted to improve my sexual skills.

37. I wanted to become one with another person.

38. I saw the person naked and could not resist.

39. The person was a good kisser.

40. I wanted to feel loved.

41. I wanted to celebrate a birthday or anniversary or special occasion.

42. The person was too physically attractive to resist.

43. It was a special occasion.

44. I hadn’t had sex for a while.

45. The person had beautiful eyes.

46. I wanted to communicate at a "deeper" level.

47. I wanted to experiment with new experiences.

48. The person was intelligent.

49. I wanted to keep my partner happy.

50. I was curious about what the person was like in bed.

* Why We Have Sex: 237 Reasons Revealed

Brain electrodes help man speak again

2007-08-03T18:08:00.000-04:00

An undated X-Ray image of a patient with Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) leads implanted. A man with severe brain injuries who spent six years in a near-vegetative state can now chew his food, watch a movie and talk with family thanks to a brain pacemaker that may change the way such patients are treated, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. (Cleveland Clinic/Handout/Reuters)

Brain electrodes help man speak again

By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science WriterWed Aug 1, 2:53 PM ET

He was beaten and left for dead one night in a robbery while walking home in 1999. His skull was crushed and his brain severely damaged. The doctor said if he pulled through at all, he'd be a vegetable for the rest of his life.
For six years, the man could not speak or eat.
On occasion he showed signs of awareness, and he moved his eyes or a thumb to communicate. His arms were useless. He was fed through a tube.
But researchers chose him for an experimental attempt to rev up his brain by placing electrodes in it. And here's how his mother describes the change in her son, now 38:
"My son can now eat, speak, watch a movie without falling asleep," she said Wednesday while choking back tears during a telephone news conference. "He can drink from a cup. He can express pain. He can cry and he can laugh.
"The most important part is he can say, `Mommy' and `Pop.' He can say, `I love you, Mommy' ... I still cry every time I see my son, but it's tears of joy."
The progress of the patient, who remains unidentified at the family's request, is described more formally in a report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
Experts called the results encouraging but cautioned that the experimental treatment must be tried in more patients before its value can be assessed. The researchers are already proceeding with a larger study.
Before the electrodes were implanted, the man was in what doctors call a "minimally conscious state." That means he showed only occasional awareness of himself and his environment. In a coma or vegetative state, by contrast, patients show no outward signs of awareness.
There are no reliable statistics on how many Americans are in a minimally conscious state, but one estimate suggests 112,000 to 280,000. Doctors may try medications to improve their condition but no drugs have been firmly established as helpful.
The experimental treatment is called deep brain stimulation. It has been used for years in treating Parkinson's disease, although in this case the electrodes were implanted in slightly different places. The goal of the stimulation was to provide "drive" to areas of the brain that are critical for specific skills like speaking.
Similar stories of partial recovery from brain damage occasionally grab headlines, whether the improvement came from treatment or just out of the blue.
Terry Wallis of Arkansas lingered in a minimally conscious state for almost 20 years before he suddenly regained some ability to speak and move in 2003. In 2005, a former firefighter in Buffalo, N.Y., turned from being barely aware and almost mute for nearly a decade into a virtual chatterbox for 14 hours. His doctor had been trying a cocktail of drugs.
The man described in the Nature paper, despite his improvements, remains severely disabled in a rehabilitation facility for brain injury on the East Coast. (To preserve the man's anonymity, the researchers would not identify the facility or even reveal which state it is in).
He can't walk. While he has regained the ability to chew and swallow, he must be spoon-fed. He can demonstrate the motion of brushing his teeth, for example, but he can't actually do it. That's because tendons in his arms contracted after years of immobility, said study lead author Dr. Nicholas Schiff of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.
The man doesn't initiate conversation but can reply to others, generally with one to three words, said Dr. Joseph Giacino, a co-lead author of the Nature study.
Several weeks ago, he recited the first half of the Pledge of Allegiance without assistance, said Giacino, of the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J.
The man's electrodes are left on for 12 hours a day. He has continued to improve since the experiment formally ended in February 2006, the doctors said.
After the research was over, doctors started giving him the drug amantadine, which has shown some potential for treating people in a minimally conscious state. It's not clear whether amantadine can boost the effects of deep brain stimulation or vice versa, Giacino said.
Dr. James Bernat, a professor of neurology at Dartmouth Medical School who didn't participate in the new research, called the Nature report exciting and important. Further study is needed to sort out how many patients would respond and how to identify the minimally conscious patients with the best chance of being helped, he said.
He noted that a similar treatment did not help Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman in a vegetative state whose care triggered national controversy before her death in 2005. That's the typical outcome for electrical brain stimulation in vegetative states, he said.
Dr. Ross Zafonte of the University of Pittsburgh, who also was familiar with the study results, agreed that "we need to know more." He said the approach is "very interesting and holds great promise."
___
On the Net:
http://www.nature.com/nature

Anders Sandberg wants to emulate your brain

2007-08-03T10:51:00.000-04:00

Anders Sandberg wants to emulate your brain

George Dvorsky
Sentient Developments

2007-08-01

Transhumanists have long speculated about the possibility of uploading a brain into a computer. In fact, a big part of the supposed posthuman future depends on it.
Soooo, how the hell do we do it?
This is the issue that Swedish neuroscientist Anders Sandberg tackled for his talk at TransVision 2007. Uploading, or what Sandberg refers to as ‘whole brain emulation,’ has become a distinct possibility arising from the feasibility of the functionalist paradigm and steady advances in computer science. Sandberg says we need a strategic plan to get going.
Levels of understanding
To start, Sandberg made two points about the kind of understanding that is required. First, we do not need to understand the function of a device to build it from parts, and second, we do not need to understand the function of the brain to emulate it. That said, Sandberg admitted that we still need to understand the brain’s lower level functions in order for us to be able to emulate them.
The known unknown
Sandberg also outlined the various levels of necessary detail; we can already start to parse through the “known unknown.” He asked, “what level of description is necessary to capture enough of a particular brain to mimic its function?”
He described several tiers that will require vastly more detail:

• Computational model
• Brain region connectivity
• Analog network population model
• Spiking neural network
• Electrophysiology
• Metabolome
• Proteome
• Etc. (and all the way down to the quantum level)

Requirements
Sandberg believes that the ability to scan an existing brain will be necessary. What will also be required is the proper scanning resolution. Once we can peer down to the sufficient detail, we should be able to construct a brain model; we will then be required to infer structure and low-level function.
Once this is done we can think about running a brain emulation. Requirements here will include a computational neuroscience model and the requisite computer hardware. Sandberg noted that body and environment simulations may be added to the emulation; the brain emulator, body simulator and environment simulator would be daisy-chained to each other to create the sufficient interactive link. The developers will also have to devise a way to validate their observations and results.
Neural simulations
Neural simulations are nothing new. Hodgkin and Huxley began working on these sorts of problems way back in 1952. The trick is to perfectly simulate neurons, neuron parts, synapses and chemical pathways. According to Sandberg, we are approaching 1-1 for certain systems, including the lamprey spinal cord and lobster ganglia.
Compartment models are also being developed with miniscule time and space resolutions. The current record is 22 million 6-compartment neurons, 11 billion synapses, and a simulation length of one second real-time. Sandberg cited advances made by the development of IBM’s Blue Gene.
Complications and Exotica
Sandberg also provided a laundry list of possible ‘complications and exotica’:

• dynamical state
• spinal cord
• volume transmission
• glial cells
• synaptic adaptation
• body chemical environment
• neurogensis
• ephaptic effects
• quantum computation
• analog computation
• randomness

Reverse engineering is all fine and well, suggested Sandberg, but how much function can be deduced from morphology (for example)?
Scanning
In regards to scanning, we’ll need to determine the kind of resolution and data needed. Sandberg argued that nondestructive scanning will be unlikely; MRIs have been the closest thus far but are limited to less than 7.7 micrometers resolution. More realistically, destructive scanning will likely be used; Sandberg noted such procedures as fixation and ‘slice and scan.’
Once scanning is complete the postprocessing can begin. Developers at this stage will be left wondering about the nature of the neurons and how they are all connected.
Given advances in computation, Sandberg predicted that whole brain emulation may arrive sometime between 2020 and 2060. As for environment and body simulation, we’ll have to wait until we have 100 terraflops at our disposal. We’ll also need a resolution of 5x5x50nm to do meaningful work.
Conclusions
Sandberg made mention of funding and the difficultly of finding scan targets. He named some subfields that lack drivers, namely basic neuroscience, electrophysiology, and large scale scanning (so far). He did see synergies arising from the ongoing development and industrialization of neuroscience, robotics and all the various –omics studies.
As for the order of development, Sandberg suggested 1) scanning and/or simulation, then 2) computer power, and then 3) the gradual emergence of emulation. Alternately, 1) first computer power, then 2) simulation and finally 3) scanning followed by 4) the rapid emergence of simulation.
Any volunteers for slice and scan?
George Dvorsky serves on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. George is the Deputy-Editor of Betterhumans, co-founder and president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association, and the producer of Sentient Developments blog and podcast.

Gene for Left-Handed Trait Discovered

2007-08-03T00:07:00.000-04:00

Gene for Left-Handed Trait Discovered
Kate Ravilious
for National Geographic News
August 1, 2007

The gene most closely linked to left-handedness has been found, experts announced this week.
The gene, called LRRTM1, is also associated with a slight increase in developing certain mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.
Clyde Francks is lead author of a new study on the gene and a visiting fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University.
For right-handed people, he said, the right side of the brain usually controls emotion, while the left side of the brain tends to control speech and language.
In left-handers—about 10 percent of the world's population—the pattern is usually reversed.
"We think that this gene affects the symmetry of the brain," Francks said. "LRRTM1 is not essential for left-handedness, but it can be a strong contributing factor."
Brain asymmetry is also a factor in schizophrenia, a mental disorder that affects about one in a hundred people worldwide and results in impaired perception and severe behavioral changes.
The researchers were not surprised when LRRTM1 also showed a possible impact on a person's chances of developing schizophrenia.
But Francks stressed that left-handers should not be unduly concerned about this link.
"There are many factors which make individuals more likely to develop schizophrenia," he said, "and the vast majority of left-handers will never develop a problem."
Finding Symmetry
Francks and his colleagues discovered the LRRTM1 gene during a study of a hundred families with dyslexic children.
The team was initially searching for a link between dyslexia—a neurological learning disability—and whether a person was left- or right-handed.
When the researchers took genetic samples from all the families involved, they noticed that a particular chromosome showed a correlation with handedness.
"We then started to study the chromosome in detail and found this gene," said Francks, whose work appears in the July 31 online advance issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
People appear to inherit the gene from their fathers.
The team now intends to study the gene to try and tease out its full purpose and function.
"We need to find out what role it plays in brain development and at what point it is active, whether it is during fetal development, childhood, or adulthood," Francks said.
Paul Corry, director of public affairs at Rethink, a U.K.-based mental health charity, agrees that more work needs to be done to determine how the gene affects mental health.
LRRTM1 "may turn out to be part of a complex relationship between a range of genes and environmental factors that lead to people developing schizophrenia," Corry said.
The gene could also help scientists understand more about how humans evolved.
Most animals have brains that are more symmetric, experts note, including our closest genetic relatives, the apes.

The Whys of Mating: 237 Reasons and Counting

2007-08-01T07:13:00.000-04:00

The Whys of Mating: 237 Reasons and Counting
By JOHN TIERNEY

Scholars in antiquity began counting the ways that humans have sex, but they weren’t so diligent in cataloging the reasons humans wanted to get into all those positions. Darwin and his successors offered a few explanations of mating strategies — to find better genes, to gain status and resources — but they neglected to produce a Kama Sutra of sexual motivations.
Perhaps you didn’t lament this omission. Perhaps you thought that the motivations for sex were pretty obvious. Or maybe you never really wanted to know what was going on inside other people’s minds, in which case you should stop reading immediately.
For now, thanks to psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, we can at last count the whys. After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons — everything from “I wanted to feel closer to God” to “I was drunk.” They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.
The researchers, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, believe their list, published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation ever compiled. This seems entirely plausible.
Who knew, for instance, that a headache had any erotic significance except as an excuse for saying no? But some respondents of both sexes explained that they’d had sex “to get rid of a headache.” It’s No. 173 on the list.
Others said they did it to “help me fall asleep,” “make my partner feel powerful,” “burn calories,” “return a favor,” “keep warm,” “hurt an enemy” or “change the topic of conversation.” The lamest may have been, “It seemed like good exercise,” although there is also this: “Someone dared me.”
Dr. Buss has studied mating strategies around the world — he’s the oft-cited author of “The Evolution of Desire” and other books — but even he did not expect to find such varied and Machiavellian reasons for sex. “I was truly astonished,” he said, “by this richness of sexual psychology.”
The researchers collected the data by first asking more than 400 people to list their reasons for having sex, and then asking more than 1,500 others to rate how important each reason was to them. Although it was a fairly homogenous sample of students at the University of Texas, nearly every one of the 237 reasons was rated by at least some people as their most important motive for having sex.
The best news is that both men and women ranked the same reason most often: “I was attracted to the person.”
The rest of the top 10 for each gender were also almost all the same, including “I wanted to express my love for the person,” “I was sexually aroused and wanted the release” and “It’s fun.”
No matter what the reason, men were more likely to cite it than women, with a couple of notable exceptions. Women were more likely to say they had sex because, “I wanted to express my love for the person” and “I realized I was in love.” This jibes with conventional wisdom about women emphasizing the emotional aspects of sex, although it might also reflect the female respondents’ reluctance to admit to less lofty motives.
The results contradicted another stereotype about women: their supposed tendency to use sex to gain status or resources.
“Our findings suggest that men do these things more than women,” Dr. Buss said, alluding to the respondents who said they’d had sex to get things, like a promotion, a raise or a favor. Men were much more likely than women to say they’d had sex to “boost my social status” or because the partner was famous or “usually ‘out of my league.’ ”
Dr. Buss said, “Although I knew that having sex has consequences for reputation, it surprised me that people, notably men, would be motivated to have sex solely for social status and reputation enhancement.”
But then, men were also more likely than women to say they’d had sex because “I was slumming.” Or simply because “the opportunity presented itself,” or “the person demanded that I have sex.”
If nothing else, the results seem to be a robust confirmation of the hypothesis in the old joke: How can a woman get a man to take off his clothes? Ask him.
To make sense of the 237 reasons, Dr. Buss and Dr. Meston created a taxonomy with four general categories:

¶Physical: “The person had beautiful eyes” or “a desirable body,” or “was good kisser” or “too physically attractive to resist.” Or “I wanted to achieve an orgasm.”

¶Goal Attainment: “I wanted to even the score with a cheating partner” or “break up a rival’s relationship” or “make money” or “be popular.” Or “because of a bet.”

¶Emotional: “I wanted to communicate at a deeper level” or “lift my partner’s spirits” or “say ‘Thank you.’ ” Or just because “the person was intelligent.”

¶Insecurity: “I felt like it was my duty” or “I wanted to boost my self-esteem” or “It was the only way my partner would spend time with me.”

Having sex out of a sense of duty, Dr. Buss said, showed up in a separate study as being especially frequent among older women. But both sexes seem to practice a strategy that he calls mate-guarding, as illustrated in one of the reasons given by survey respondents: “I was afraid my partner would have an affair if I didn’t.”
That fear seems especially reasonable after you finish reading Dr. Buss’s paper and realize just how many reasons there are for infidelity. Some critics might complain that the list has some repetitions — it includes “I was curious about sex” as well as “I wanted to see what all the fuss was about” — but I’m more concerned about the reasons yet to be enumerated.
For instance, nowhere among the 237 reasons will you find the one attributed to the actress Joan Crawford: “I need sex for a clear complexion.” (The closest is “I thought it would make me feel healthy.”)Nor will you find anything about gathering rosebuds while ye may (the 17th-century exhortation to young virgins from Robert Herrick). Nor the similar hurry-before-we-die rationale (“The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none I think do there embrace”) from Andrew Marvell in “To His Coy Mistress.”
From even a cursory survey of literature or the modern mass market in sex fantasies, it seems clear that this new taxonomy may not be any more complete than the original periodic table of the elements.
When I mentioned Ms. Crawford’s complexion and the poets’ rationales to Dr. Buss, he promised to consider them and all other candidates for Reason 238.
You can nominate your own reasons at TierneyLab. You can also submit nominations for a brand new taxonomy: reasons for just saying “No way!” Somehow, though, I don’t think this list will be as long.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

"Why Humans Have Sex." (PDF) Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss. Archives of Sexual Behavior, August, 2007.

List of 237 Reasons for Having Sex (.doc). Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss.

"The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating." David Buss. Basic Books, 2003.

"To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time." Robert Herrick.

"To His Coy Mistress." Andrew Marvell.

"His Coy Mistress to Mr. Marvell." A. D. Hope, 2004.

The Real Transformers

2007-07-29T12:02:00.000-04:00

Stephen Lewis
Mertz Programmed for kindly conversation.

The Real Transformers
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG

I was introduced to my first sociable robot on a sunny afternoon in June. The robot, developed by graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was named Mertz. It had camera sensors behind its eyes, which were programmed to detect faces; when it found mine, the robot was supposed to gaze at me directly to initiate a kind of conversation. But Mertz was on the fritz that day, and one of its designers, a dark-haired young woman named Lijin Aryananda, was trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Mertz was getting fidgety, Aryananda was getting frustrated and I was starting to feel as if I were peeking behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz.
Mertz consists of a metal head on a flexible neck. It has a childish computer-generated voice and expressive brows above its Ping-Pong-ball eyes — features designed to make a human feel kindly toward the robot and enjoy talking to it. But when something is off in the computer code, Mertz starts to babble like Chatty Cathy on speed, and it becomes clear that behind those big black eyes there’s truly nobody home.
In a video of Aryananda and Mertz in happier times, Aryananda can be seen leaning in, trying to get the robot’s attention by saying, “I’m your mother.” She didn’t seem particularly maternal on that June day, and Mertz didn’t seem too happy, either. It directed a stream of sentences at me in apparently random order: “You are too far away.” “Please teach me some colors.” “You are too far away.”
Maybe something was wrong with its camera sensor, Aryananda said. Maybe that was why it kept looking up at the ceiling and complaining. As she fiddled with the computer that runs the robot, I smiled politely — almost as much for the robot’s sake, I realized, as for the robot maker’s — and thought: Well, maybe it is the camera sensor, but if this thing wails “You are too far away” one more time, I’m going to throttle it.
At the Humanoid Robotics Group at M.I.T., a robot’s “humanoid” qualities can include fallibility and whininess as much as physical traits like head, arms and torso. This is where our cultural images of robots as superhumans run headlong into the reality of motors, actuators and cold computer code. Today’s humanoids are not the sophisticated machines we might have expected by now, which just shows how complicated a task it was that scientists embarked on 15 years ago when they began working on a robot that could think. They are not the docile companions of our collective dreams, robots designed to flawlessly serve our dinners, fold our clothes and do the dull or dangerous jobs that we don’t want to do. Nor are they the villains of our collective nightmares, poised for robotic rebellion against humans whose machine creations have become smarter than the humans themselves. They are, instead, hunks of metal tethered to computers, which need their human designers to get them going and to smooth the hiccups along the way.
But these early incarnations of sociable robots are also much more than meets the eye. Bill Gates has said that personal robotics today is at the stage that personal computers were in the mid-1970s. Thirty years ago, few people guessed that the bulky, slow computers being used by a handful of businesses would by 2007 insinuate themselves into our lives via applications like Google, e-mail, YouTube, Skype and MySpace. In much the same way, the robots being built today, still unwieldy and temperamental even in the most capable hands, probably offer only hints of the way we might be using robots in another 30 years.
Mertz and its brethren — at the Humanoid Robotics lab, at the Personal Robotics Lab across the street in another M.I.T. building and at similar laboratories in other parts of the United States, in Europe and in Japan — are still less like thinking, autonomous creatures than they are like fancy puppets that frequently break down. But what the M.I.T. robots may lack in looks or finesse, they make up for in originality: they are programmed to learn the way humans learn, through their bodies, their senses and the feedback generated by their own behavior. It is a more organic style of learning — though organic is, of course, a curious word to reach for to describe creatures that are so clearly manufactured.
Sociable robots come equipped with the very abilities that humans have evolved to ease our interactions with one another: eye contact, gaze direction, turn-taking, shared attention. They are programmed to learn the way humans learn, by starting with a core of basic drives and abilities and adding to them as their physical and social experiences accrue. People respond to the robots’ social cues almost without thinking, and as a result the robots give the impression of being somehow, improbably, alive.
At the moment, no single robot can do very much. The competencies have been cobbled together: one robot is able to grab a soup can when you tell it to put it on a shelf; another will look you in the eye and make babbling noises in keeping with the inflection of your voice. One robot might be able to learn some new words; another can take the perspective of a human collaborator; still another can recognize itself in a mirror. Taken together, each small accomplishment brings the field closer to a time when a robot with true intelligence — and with perhaps other human qualities, too, like emotions and autonomy — is at least a theoretical possibility. If that possibility comes to pass, what then? Will these new robots be capable of what we recognize as learning? Of what we recognize as consciousness? Will it know that it is a robot and that you are not?
The word “robot” was popularized in 1920, in the play “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” commonly called “R.U.R.,” by the Czech writer Karel Capek. The word comes from the Czech “robota,” meaning forced labor or drudgery. In the world of R.U.R., Robots (always with a capital R) are built to be factory workers, meaning they are designed as simply as possible, with no extraneous frills. “Robots are not people,” says the man who manufactures them. “They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul.” Capek’s Robots are biological, not mechanical. The thing that separates them from humans is not the material they are made of — their skin is real skin; their blood, real blood — but the fact that they are built rather than born.
What separates the current crop of humanoid robots from humans is something harder to name. Because if roboticists succeed in programming their machines with a convincing version of social intelligence, with feelings that look like real feelings and thoughts that look like real thoughts, then all our fancy notions about our place in the universe start to get a little wobbly.
Eliminating the Cognition Box
We already live with many objects that are, in one sense, robots: the voice in a car’s Global Positioning System, for instance, which senses shifts in its own location and can change its behavior accordingly. But scientists working in the field mean something else when they talk about sociable robots. To qualify as that kind of robot, they say, a machine must have at least two characteristics. It must be situated, and it must be embodied. Being situated means being able to sense its environment and be responsive to it; being embodied means having a physical body through which to experience the world. A G.P.S. robot is situated but not embodied, while an assembly-line robot that repeats the same action over and over again is embodied but not situated. Sociable robots must be both, as well as exhibiting an understanding of social beings.
The push for sociable robots comes from two directions. One is pragmatic: if Bill Gates is right and the robots are coming, they should be designed in a way that makes them fit most naturally into the lives of ordinary people. The other is more theoretical: if a robot can be designed to learn the same way natural creatures do, this could be a significant boost for the field of artificial intelligence.
Both pragmatism and theory drive Rodney Brooks, author of “Flesh and Machines,” who until the end of last month was director of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, home to the Humanoid Robotics lab that houses Mertz. Brooks is an electric, exaggerated personality, an Australian native with rubbery features and bulgy blue eyes. That mobile face and Aussie accent helped turn him into a cult figure after the 1997 theatrical release of “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control,” a documentary by Errol Morris that featured Brooks — along with a wild animal trainer, a topiary gardener and an expert in naked mole rats — as a man whose obsessions made him something of a misfit, a visionary with a restless, uncategorizable genius.
As Brooks sat with me in his office and reflected on his career from the vantage point of a 52-year-old about to return to full-time research — a man going through what he called “a scientific midlife crisis” — a theme emerged. Each time he faced a problem in artificial intelligence, he said, he looked for the implicit assumption that everyone else took for granted, and then he tried to negate it. In the 1980s, the implicit assumption was that abstract reasoning was the highest form of intelligence, the one that programmers should strive to imitate. This led to a focus on symbolic processing, on tough tasks like playing chess or solving problems in algebra or calculus. Tasks that, as Brooks slyly put it in “Flesh and Machines,” “highly educated male scientists found challenging.”
But Brooks wanted to build an artificial intelligence system that did the supposedly simple things, not mental acrobatics like chess but things that come naturally to any 4-year-old and that were eluding the symbolic processing capabilities of the computers. These cognitive tasks — visually distinguishing a cup from a chair, walking on two legs, making your way from bedroom to bathroom — were difficult to write into computer code because they did not require an explicit chain of reasoning; they just happened. And the way they happened was grounded in the fact that the 4-year-old had a body and that each action the child took provided more sensory information and, ultimately, more learning. This approach has come to be known as embodied intelligence.
That’s where the robots came in. Robots had bodies, and they could be programmed to use those bodies as part of their data gathering. Instead of starting out with everything they needed to know already programmed in, these robots would learn about the world the way babies do, starting with some simple competencies and adding to them through sensory input. For babies, that sensory input included seeing, touching and balancing. For robots, it would mean input from mechanical sensors like video cameras and gyroscopes.
In 1993, Brooks started to develop a new robot, a humanoid equipped with artificial intelligence, according to this new logic. His motivation was more theoretical than practical: to offer a new way of thinking about intelligence itself. Most artificial-intelligence programs at the time were designed from the top down, connecting all relevant processes of a robot — raw sensory input, perception, motor activity, behavior — in what was called a cognition box, a sort of centralized zone for all high-level computation. A walking robot, for instance, was programmed to go through an elaborate planning process before it took a step. It had to scan its location, obtain a three-dimensional model of the terrain, plan a path between any obstacles it had detected, plan where to put its right foot along that path, plan the pressures on each joint to get its foot to that spot, plan how to twist the rest of its body to make its right foot move and plan the same set of behaviors for placing its left foot at the next spot along the path, and then finally it would move its feet.
Brooks turned the top-down approach on its head; he did away with the cognition box altogether. “No cognition,” he wrote in “Flesh and Machines.” “Just sensing and action.” In effect, he wrote, he was leaving out what was thought to be the “intelligence” part of “artificial intelligence.” The way Brooks’s robot was designed to start walking, he wrote, was “by moving its feet.”
This was the approach that Brooks and his team used to design their humanoid robot. This one couldn’t walk. The robot, named Cog, was stationary, a big man-size metal torso with big man-size arms that spanned six and a half feet when extended. But it was designed to think. Perched on a pedestal almost three feet high, it seemed to hulk over its human creators, dominating the Humanoid Robotics lab from 1993 until it was retired 11 years later and put on permanent display at the M.I.T. Museum. (It has been lent out as part of a traveling exhibit, “Robots + Us,” currently at the Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago.) Its presence was disarming, mostly because it was programmed to look at anything that moved. As one visitor to the lab put it: “Cog ‘noticed’ me soon after I entered its room. Its head turned to follow me, and I was embarrassed to note that this made me happy.”
Cog was designed to learn like a child, and that’s how people tended to treat it, like a child. Videos of graduate students show them presenting Cog with a red ball to track, a waggling hand to look at, a bright pink Slinky to manipulate — the toys children are given to explore the world, to learn some basic truths about anatomy and physics and social interactions. As the robot moved in response to the students’ instructions, it exhibited qualities that signaled “creature.” The human brain has evolved to interpret certain traits as indicators of autonomous life: when something moves on its own and with apparent purpose, directs its gaze toward the person with whom it interacts, follows people with its eyes and backs away if someone gets too close. Cog did all these things, which made people who came in contact with it think of it as something alive. Even without a face, even without skin, even without arms that looked like arms or any legs at all, there was something creaturelike about Cog. It took very little, just the barest suggestion of a human form and a pair of eyes, for people to react to the robot as a social being.
In addition, Cog was programmed to learn new things based on its sensory and motor inputs, much as babies learn new things by seeing how their bodies react to and affect their surroundings. Cog’s arm motors, for instance, were calibrated to respond to the weight of a held object. When a student handed a Slinky to Cog, the oscillators in its elbowlike joints gave feedback about the toy’s weight and position. After a few hours of practice, the robot could make the Slinky slither by raising and lowering its arms. If it was given a heavier Slinky or a drumstick, it would be able to adjust its motions accordingly. The learning was minimal, but it was a start — and it was, significantly, learning derived from the input of motors, gears and oscillators, the robot equivalent of muscles.
Cog was able to learn other things too, including finding and naming objects it had never seen before. (The robot had microphones for ears and was equipped with some basic speech recognition software and an artificial voice.) But while Brooks showed a kind of paternal delight in what the robot could do, he was hesitant to give it the label of “learning” per se. “I am so careful about saying that any of our robots ‘can learn,’ ” he wrote in an e-mail message. “They can only learn certain things, just like a rat can learn only certain things and a chimpanzee can only learn certain things and even [you] can only learn certain things.” Even now, 14 years after the Cog project began, each of today’s humanoid robots can still only learn a very small number of things.
Cynthia Breazeal came to Brooks’s lab as a graduate student in 1990 and did much of the basic computational work on Cog. In 1996, when it was time for Breazeal to choose a doctoral project, she decided to develop a sociable robot of her own. Her goals were as much pragmatic as theoretical; she said she hoped her robot would be a model for how to design the domestic robots of the future. The one she built had an animated head with big blue eyes, flirty lashes, red lips that curved upward or downward depending on its mood and pink ears that did the same. She called the robot Kismet, after the Turkish word for fate.
How Smart Can a Robot Be?
Kismet was the most expressive sociable robot built to that point, even though it consisted of only a hinged metal head on a heavy base, with wires and motors visible and eyes and lips stuck on almost like an afterthought. Breazeal is now 39 years old, an associate professor at M.I.T. and director of the Personal Robotics Group. She retains a polished, youthful prettiness, amplified these days by a late pregnancy with her third child. When she talks about Kismet, she is careful to call it “it” instead of a more animate pronoun like “he” or “she.” But her voice softens, her rapid-fire speech slows a little and it can be difficult to tell from her tone of voice whether she’s describing her robot or one of her two preschool-age sons.

The robot expressed a few basic emotions through changes in its facial expression — that is, through the positioning of its eyes, lips, eyebrows and pink paper ears. The emotions were easy for an observer to recognize: anger, fear, disgust, joy, surprise, sorrow. According to psychologists, these expressions are automatic, unconscious and universally understood. So when the drivers on Kismet’s motors were set to make surprise look like raised eyebrows, wide-open eyes and a rounded mouth, the human observer knew exactly what was going on.
Kismet’s responses to stimulation were so socially appropriate that some people found themselves thinking that the robot was actually feeling the emotions it was displaying. Breazeal realized how complicated it was to try to figure out what, or even whether, Kismet was feeling. “Robots are not human, but humans aren’t the only things that have emotions,” she said. “The question for robots is not, Will they ever have human emotions? Dogs don’t have human emotions, either, but we all agree they have genuine emotions. The question is, What are the emotions that are genuine for the robot?”
Unlike Cog’s, Kismet’s learning was more social than cognitive. What made the robot so lifelike was its ability to have what Breazeal called “proto-conversations” with a variety of human interlocutors. Run by 15 parallel computers operating simultaneously, Kismet was programmed to have the same basic motivations as a 6-month-old child: the drive for novelty, the drive for social interaction and the drive for periodic rest. The behaviors to achieve these goals, like the ability to look for brightly colored objects or to recognize the human face, were also part of Kismet’s innate program. So were the facial behaviors that reflected Kismet’s mood states — aroused, bored or neutral — which changed according to whether the robot’s basic drives were being satisfied.
The robot was a model for how these desires and emotions are reflected in facial expression and how those expressions in turn affect social interaction. Take the drive for novelty. With no stimulus nearby, Kismet’s eyes would droop in apparent boredom. Then a lovely thing happened. If there was a person nearby, she would see Kismet’s boredom and wave a toy in front of the robot’s eyes. This activated Kismet’s program to look for brightly colored objects, which in turn moved the robot into its “aroused” affective state, with a facial expression with the hallmarks of happiness. The happy face, in turn, led the human to feel good about the interaction and to wave the toy some more — a socially gratifying feedback loop akin to playing with a baby.
Kismet is now retired and on permanent display, inert as a bronze statue, at the M.I.T. Museum. The most famous robot now in Breazeal’s lab, the one that the graduate students compete for time with, looks nothing like Kismet. It is a three-foot-tall, head-to-toe creature, sort of a badger, sort of a Yoda, with big eyes, enormous pointy ears, a mouth with soft lips and tiny teeth, a furry belly, furry legs and pliable hands with real-looking fingernails. The reason the robot, called Leonardo (Leo for short), is so lifelike is that it was made by Hollywood animatronics experts at the Stan Winston Studio. (Breazeal consulted with the studio on the construction of the robotic teddy bear in the 2001 Steven Spielberg film “A.I.”) As soon as Leo arrived in the lab, Breazeal said, her students started dismantling it, stripping out all the remote-control wiring and configuring it instead with a brain and body that operated not by remote control but by computer-based artificial intelligence.
I had studied the videos posted on the M.I.T. Media Lab Web site, and I was fond of Leo even before I got to Cambridge. I couldn’t wait to see it close up. I loved the steadiness of its gaze, the slow way it nodded its head and blinked when it understood something, the little Jack Benny shrug it gave when it didn’t. I loved how smart it seemed. In one video, two graduate students, Jesse Gray and Matt Berlin, engaged it in an exercise known in psychology as the false-belief test. Leo performed remarkably. Some psychologists contend that very young children think all minds are permeable and that everyone knows exactly what they themselves know. Older children, after the age of about 4 or 5, have learned that different people have different minds and that it is possible for someone else to hold beliefs that the children themselves know to be false. Leo performed in the video like a sophisticated 5-year-old, one who had developed what psychologists call a theory of mind.
In the video, Leo watches Jesse Gray, who is wearing a red T-shirt, put a bag of chips into Box 1 and a bag of cookies into Box 2, while Matt Berlin, in a brown T-shirt, also watches. After Berlin leaves the room, Gray switches the items, so that now the cookies are in Box 1 and the chips are in Box 2. Gray locks the two boxes and leaves the room, and Leo now knows what Gray knows: the new location for the chips and cookies. But it also knows that Berlin doesn’t know about the switch. Berlin still thinks there are chips in Box 1.
The amazing part comes next. Berlin, in the brown T-shirt, comes back into the room and tries to open the lock on the first box. Leo sees Berlin struggling, and it decides to help by pressing a lever that will deliver to Berlin the item he’s looking for. Leo presses the lever for the chips. It knows that there are cookies in the box that Berlin is trying to open, but it also knows — and this is the part that struck me as so amazing — that Berlin is trying to open the box because he wants chips. It knows that Berlin has a false belief about what is in the first box, and it also knows what Berlin wants. If Leo had indeed passed this important developmental milestone, I wondered, could it also be capable of all sorts of other emotional tasks: empathy, collaboration, social bonding, deception?
Unfortunately, Leo was turned off the day I arrived, inertly presiding over one corner of the lab like a fuzzy Buddha. Berlin and Gray and their colleague, Andrea Thomaz, a postdoctoral researcher, said that they would be happy to turn on the robot for me but that the process would take time and that I would have to come back the next morning. They also wanted to know what it was in particular that I wanted to see Leo do because, it turned out, the robot could go through its paces only when the right computer program was geared up. This was my first clue that Leo maybe wasn’t going to turn out to be quite as clever as I had thought.
When I came back the next day, Berlin and Gray were ready to go through the false-belief routine with Leo. But it wasn’t what I expected. I could now see what I had seen on the video. But in person, I could also peek behind the metaphoric curtain and see something that the video camera hadn’t revealed: the computer monitor that showed what Leo’s cameras were actually seeing and another monitor that showed the architecture of Leo’s brain. I could see that this wasn’t a literal demonstration of a human “theory of mind” at all. Yes, there was some robotic learning going on, but it was mostly a feat of brilliant computer programming, combined with some dazzling Hollywood special effects.
It turned out Leo wasn’t seeing the young men’s faces or bodies; it was seeing something else. Gray and Berlin were each wearing a headband and a glove, which I hadn’t noticed in the video, and the robot’s optical motion tracking system could see nothing but the unique arrangements of reflective tape on their accessories. What the robot saw were bunches of dots. Dots in one geometric arrangement meant Person A; in a different arrangement, they meant Person B. There was a different arrangement of tape on the two different snacks, too, and also on the two different locks for the boxes. On a big monitor alongside Leo was an image of what was going on inside its “brain”: one set of dots represented Leo’s brain; another set of dots represented Berlin’s brain; a third set of dots represented Gray’s. The robot brain was programmed to keep track of it all.
Leo did not learn about false beliefs in the same way a child did. Robot learning, I realized, can be defined as making new versions of a robot’s original instructions, collecting and sorting data in a creative way. So the learning taking place here was not Leo’s ability to keep track of which student believed what, since that skill had been programmed into the robot. The learning taking place was Leo’s ability to make inferences about Gray’s and Berlin’s actions and intentions. Seeing that Berlin’s hand was near the lock on Box 1, Leo had to search through its internal set of task models, which had been written into its computer program, and figure out what it meant for a hand to be moving near a lock and not near, say, a glass of water. Then it had to go back to that set of task models to decide why Berlin might have been trying to open the box — that is, what his ultimate goal was. Finally, it had to convert its drive to be helpful, another bit of information written into its computer program, into behavior. Leo had to learn that by pressing a particular lever, it could give Berlin the chips he was looking for. Leo’s robot learning consisted of integrating the group of simultaneous computer programs with which it had begun.
Leo’s behavior might not have been an act of real curiosity or empathy, but it was an impressive feat nonetheless. Still, I felt a little twinge of disappointment, and for that I blame Hollywood. I’ve been exposed to robot hype for years, from the TV of my childhood — Rosie the robot maid on “The Jetsons,” that weird talking garbage-can robot on “Lost in Space” — to the more contemporary robots-gone-wild of films like “Blade Runner” and “I, Robot.” Despite my basic cold, hard rationalism, I was prepared to be bowled over by a robot that was adorable, autonomous and smart. What I saw in Leo was no small accomplishment in terms of artificial intelligence and the modeling of human cognition, but it was just not quite the accomplishment I had been expecting. I had been expecting something closer to “real.”
Why We Might Want to Hug a Desk Lamp
I had been seduced by Leo’s big brown eyes, just like almost everyone else who encounters the robot, right down to the students who work on its innards. “There we all are, soldering Leonardo’s motors, aware of how it looks from behind, aware that its brain is just a bunch of wires,” Guy Hoffman, a graduate student, told me. Yet as soon as they get in front of it, he said, the students see its eyes move, see its head turn, see the programmed chest motion that looks so much like breathing, and they start talking about Leo as a living thing.
People do the same thing with a robotic desk lamp that Hoffman has designed to move in relation to a user’s motions, casting light wherever it senses the user might need it. It’s just a lamp with a bulky motor-driven neck; it looks nothing like a living creature. But, he said, “as soon as it moves on its own and faces you, you say: ‘Look, it’s trying to help me.’ ‘Why is it doing that?’ ‘What does it want from me?’ ”
When something is self-propelled and seems to engage in goal-directed behavior, we are compelled to interpret those actions in social terms, according to Breazeal. That social tendency won’t turn off when we interact with robots. But instead of fighting it, she said, “we should embrace it so we can design robots in a way that makes sense, so we can integrate robots into our lives.”
The brain activity of people who interacted with Cog and Kismet, and with their successors like Mertz, is probably much the same as the brain activity of someone interacting with a real person. Neuroscientists recently found a collection of brain cells called mirror neurons, which become activated in two different contexts: when someone performs an activity and when someone watches another person perform the same activity. Mirror-neuron activation is thought to be the root of such basic human drives as imitation, learning and empathy. Now it seems that mirror neurons fire not only when watching a person but also when watching a humanoid robot. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, reported last year that brain scans of people looking at videos of a robotic hand grasping things showed activity in the mirror neurons. The work is preliminary, but it suggests something that people in the M.I.T. robotics labs have already seen: when these machines move, when they direct their gaze at you or lean in your direction, they feel like real creatures.
Would a Robot Make a Better Boyfriend?
Cog, Kismet and Mertz might feel real, but they look specifically and emphatically robotic. Their gears and motors show; they have an appealing retro-techno look, evoking old-fashioned images of the future, not too far from the Elektro robot of the 1939 World’s Fair, which looked a little like the Tin Man of “The Wizard of Oz.” This design was in part a reflection of a certain kind of aesthetic sensibility and in part a deliberate decision to avoid making robots that look too much like us.
Another robot-looking robot is Domo, whose stylized shape somehow evokes the Chrysler Building almost as much as it does a human. It can respond to some verbal commands, like “Here, Domo,” and can close its hand around whatever is placed in its palm, the way a baby does. Shaking hands with Domo feels almost like shaking hands with something alive. The robot’s designer, Aaron Edsinger, has programmed it to do some domestic tricks. It can grab a box of crackers placed in its hand and put it on a shelf and then grab a bag of coffee beans — with a different grip, based on sensors in its mechanical hand — and put it, too, on a shelf. Edsinger calls this “helping with chores.” Domo tracks objects with its big blue eyes and responds to verbal instructions in a high-pitched artificial voice, repeating the words it hears and occasionally adding an obliging “O.K.”
Domo’s looks are just barely humanoid, but that probably works to its advantage. Scientists believe that the more a robot looks like a person, the more favorably we tend to view it, but only up to a point. After that, our response slips into what the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori has called the “uncanny valley.” We start expecting too much of the robots because they so closely resemble real people, and when they fail to deliver, we recoil in something like disgust.
If a robot had features that made it seem, say, 50 percent human, 50 percent machine, according to this view, we would be willing to fill in the blanks and presume a certain kind of nearly human status. That is why robots like Domo and Mertz are interpreted by our brains as creaturelike. But if a robot has features that make it appear 99 percent human, the uncanny-valley theory holds that our brains get stuck on that missing 1 percent: the eyes that gaze but have no spark, the arms that move with just a little too much stiffness. This response might be akin to an adaptive revulsion at the sight of corpses. A too-human robot looks distressingly like a corpse that moves.
This zombie effect is one aspect of a new discipline that Breazeal is trying to create called human-robot interaction. Last March, Breazeal and Alan Schultz of the Naval Research Laboratory convened the field’s second annual conference in Arlington, Va., with presentations as diverse as describing how people react to instructions to “kill” a humanoid robot and a film festival featuring videos of human-robot interaction bloopers.
To some observers, the real challenge is not how to make human-robot interaction smoother and more natural but how to keep it from overshadowing, and eventually seeming superior to, a different, messier, more complicated, more flawed kind of interaction — the one between one human and another. Sherry Turkle, a professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at M.I.T., worries that sociable robots might be easier to deal with than people are and that one day we might actually prefer our relationships with our machines. A female graduate student once approached her after a lecture, Turkle said, and announced that she would gladly trade in her boyfriend for a sophisticated humanoid robot as long as the robot could produce what the student called “caring behavior.” “I need the feeling of civility in the house,” she told Turkle. “If the robot could provide a civil environment, I would be happy to help produce the illusion that there is somebody really with me.” What she was looking for, the student said, was a “no-risk relationship” that would stave off loneliness; a responsive robot, even if it was just exhibiting scripted behavior, seemed better to her than an unresponsive boyfriend.
The encounter horrified Turkle, who thought it revealed how dangerous, and how seductive, sociable robots could be. “They push our Darwinian buttons,” she told me. Sociable robots are programmed to exhibit the kind of behavior we have come to associate with sentience and empathy, she said, which leads us to think of them as creatures with intentions, emotions and autonomy: “You see a robot like that as a creature; you feel a desire to nurture it. And with this desire comes the fantasy of reciprocation. You begin to care for these creatures and to want the creatures to care about you.”
If Lijin Aryananda, Brooks’s former student, had ever wanted Mertz to “care” about her, she certainly doesn’t anymore. On the day she introduced me to Mertz, Aryananda was heading back to a postdoctoral research position at the University of Zurich. Her new job is in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and she will still be working with robots, but Aryananda said she wants to get as far away as possible from humanoids and from the study of how humans and robots interact.
“Anyone who tells you that in human-robot interactions the robot is doing anything — well, he is just kidding himself,” she told me, grumpy because Mertz was misbehaving. “Whatever there is in human-robot interaction is there because the human puts it there.”
Nagging, a Killer App
The building and testing of sociable robots remains a research-based enterprise, and when the robots do make their way out of the laboratory, it is usually as part of somebody’s experiment. Breazeal is now overseeing two such projects. One is the work of Cory Kidd, a graduate student who designed and built 17 humanoid robots to serve as weight-loss coaches. The robot coach, a child-size head and torso holding a small touch screen, is called Autom. It is able, using basic artificial-voice software, to speak approximately 1,000 phrases, things like “It’s great that you’re doing well with your exercise” or “You should congratulate yourself on meeting your calorie goals today.” It is programmed to get a little more informal as time goes on: “Hello, I hope that we can work together” will eventually shift to “Hi, it’s good to see you again.” It is also programmed to refer to things that happened on other days, with statements like “It looks like you’ve had a little more to eat than usual recently.”
Kidd is recruiting 15 volunteers from around Boston to take Autom into their homes for six weeks. They will be told to interact with the robot at least once a day, recording food intake and exercise on its touch screen. The plan is to compare their experiences with those of two other groups of 15 dieters each. One group will interact with the same weight-loss coaching software through a touch screen only; the other will record daily food intake and exercise the old-fashioned way, with paper and pen. Kidd said that the study is too short-term to use weight loss as a measure of whether the robot is a useful dieting aid. But at this point, his research questions are more subjective anyway: Do participants feel more connected to the robot than they do to the touch screen? And do they think of that robot on the kitchen counter as an ally or a pest?
Breazeal’s second project is more ambitious. In collaboration with Rod Grupen, a roboticist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, she is designing and building four toddler-size robots. Then she will put them into action at the Boston Science Museum for two weeks in June 2009. The robots, which will cost several hundred thousand dollars each, will roll around in what she calls “a kind of robot Romper Room” and interact with a stream of museum visitors. The goal is to see whether the social competencies programmed into these robots are enough to make humans comfortable interacting with them and whether people will be able to help the robots learn to do simple tasks like stacking blocks.
The bare bones of the toddler robots already exist, in the form of a robot designed in Grupen’s lab called uBot-5. A few of these uBots are now being developed for use in assisted-living centers in research designed to see how the robots interact with the frail elderly. Each uBot-5 is about three feet tall, with a big head, very long arms (long enough to touch the ground, should the arms be needed for balance) and two oversize wheels. It has big eyes, rubber balls at the ends of its arms and a video screen for a face. (Breazeal’s version will have sleek torsos, expressive faces and realistic hands.) In one slide that Grupen uses in his PowerPoint presentations, the uBot-5 robot is holding a stethoscope to the chest of a woman lying on the ground after a simulated fall. The uBot is designed to connect by video hookup to a health care practitioner, but still, the image of a robot providing even this level of emergency medical care is, to say the least, disconcerting.
Does It Know It’s a Robot?
More disconcerting still is the image of a robot looking at itself in the mirror and waving hello — a robot with a primitive version of self-awareness. A first step in this direction occurred in September 2004 with reports from Yale about Nico, a humanoid robot. Nico, its designers announced, was able to recognize itself in a mirror. One of its creators, Brian Scassellati, earned his doctorate in 2001 at M.I.T., where he worked on Cog and Kismet — to which Nico bears a family resemblance. Nico has visible workings, a head, arms and torso made of steel and a graceful tilt to its shoulders and neck. Like the M.I.T. robots, Nico has no legs, because Scassellati, now an associate professor of computer science at Yale, wanted to concentrate on what it could do with its upper body and, in particular, the cameras in its eyes.
Here is how Nico learned to recognize itself. The robot had a camera behind its eye, which was pointed toward a mirror. When a reflection came back, Nico was programmed to assign the image a score based on whether it was most likely to be “self,” “another” or “neither.” Nico was also programmed to move its arm, which sent back information to the computer about whether the arm was moving. If the arm was moving and the reflection in the mirror was also moving, the program assigned the image a high probability of being “self.” If the reflection moved but Nico’s arm was not moving, the image was assigned a high probability of being “another.” If the image did not move at all, it was given a high probability of being “neither.”
Nico spent some time moving its arm in front of the mirror, so it could learn when its motor sensors were detecting arm movement and what that looked like through its camera. It learned to give that combination a high score for “self.” Then Nico and Kevin Gold, a graduate student, stood near each other, looking into the mirror, as the robot and the human took turns moving their arms. In 20 runs of the experiment, Nico correctly identified its own moving arm as “self” and Gold’s purposeful flailing as “another.”
One way to interpret this might be to conclude that Nico has a kind of self-awareness, at least when in motion. But that would be quite a leap. Robot consciousness is a tricky thing, according to Daniel Dennett, a Tufts philosopher and author of “Consciousness Explained,” who was part of a team of experts that Rodney Brooks assembled in the early 1990s to consult on the Cog project. In a 1994 article in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Dennett posed questions about whether it would ever be possible to build a conscious robot. His conclusion: “Unlikely,” at least as long as we are talking about a robot that is “conscious in just the way we human beings are.” But Dennett was willing to credit Cog with one piece of consciousness: the ability to be aware of its own internal states. Indeed, Dennett believed that it was theoretically possible for Cog, or some other intelligent humanoid robot in the future, to be a better judge of its own internal states than the humans who built it. The robot, not the designer, might some day be “a source of knowledge about what it is doing and feeling and why.”
But maybe higher-order consciousness is not even the point for a robot, according to Sidney Perkowitz, a physicist at Emory. “For many applications,” he wrote in his 2004 book, “Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids,” “it is enough that the being seems alive or seems human, and irrelevant whether it feels so.”
In humans, Perkowitz wrote, an emotional event triggers the autonomic nervous system, which sparks involuntary physiological reactions like faster heartbeat, increased blood flow to the brain and the release of certain hormones. “Kismet’s complex programming includes something roughly equivalent,” he wrote, “a quantity that specifies its level of arousal, depending on the stimulus it has been receiving. If Kismet itself reads this arousal tag, the robot not only is aroused, it knows it is aroused, and it can use this information to plan its future behavior.” In this way, according to Perkowitz, a robot might exhibit the first glimmers of consciousness, “namely, the reflexive ability of a mind to examine itself over its own shoulder.”
Robot consciousness, it would seem, is related to two areas: robot learning (the ability to think, to reason, to create, to generalize, to improvise) and robot emotion (the ability to feel). Robot learning has already occurred, with baby steps, in robots like Cog and Leonardo, able to learn new skills that go beyond their initial capabilities. But what of emotion? Emotion is something we are inclined to think of as quintessentially human, something we only grudgingly admit might be taking place in nonhuman animals like dogs and dolphins. Some believe that emotion is at least theoretically possible for robots too. Rodney Brooks goes so far as to say that robot emotions may already have occurred — that Cog and Kismet not only displayed emotions but, in one way of looking at it, actually experienced them.
“We’re all machines,” he told me when we talked in his office at M.I.T. “Robots are made of different sorts of components than we are — we are made of biomaterials; they are silicon and steel — but in principle, even human emotions are mechanistic.” A robot’s level of a feeling like sadness could be set as a number in computer code, he said. But isn’t a human’s level of sadness basically a number, too, just a number of the amounts of various neurochemicals circulating in the brain? Why should a robot’s numbers be any less authentic than a human’s?
“If the mechanistic explanation is right, then one can in principle make a machine which is living,” he said with a grin. That explains one of his longtime ultimate goals: to create a robot that you feel bad about switching off.
The permeable boundary between humanoid robots and humans has especially captivated Kathleen Richardson, a graduate student in anthropology at Cambridge University in England. “I wanted to study what it means to be human, and robots are a great way to do that,” she said, explaining the 18 months she spent in Brooks’s Humanoid Robotics lab in 2003 and 2004, doing fieldwork for her doctorate. “Robots are kind of ambiguous, aren’t they? They’re kind of like us but not like us, and we’re always a bit uncertain about why.”
To her surprise, Richardson found herself just as fascinated by the roboticists at M.I.T. as she was by the robots. She observed a kinship between human and humanoid, an odd synchronization of abilities and disabilities. She tried not to make too much of it. “I kept thinking it was merely anecdotal,” she said, but the connection kept recurring. Just as a portrait might inadvertently give away the painter’s own weaknesses or preoccupations, humanoid robots seemed to reflect something unintended about their designers. A shy designer might make a robot that’s particularly bashful; a designer with physical ailments might focus on the function — touch, vision, speech, ambulation — that gives the robot builder the greatest trouble.
“A lot of the inspiration for the robots seems to come from some kind of deficiency in being human,” Richardson, back in England and finishing her dissertation, told me by telephone. “If we just looked at a machine and said we want the machine to help us understand about being human, I think this shows that the model of being human we carry with us is embedded in aspects of our own deficiencies and limitations.” It’s almost as if the scientists are building their robots as a way of completing themselves.
“I want to understand what it is that makes living things living,” Rodney Brooks told me. At their core, robots are not so very different from living things. “It’s all mechanistic,” Brooks said. “Humans are made up of biomolecules that interact according to the laws of physics and chemistry. We like to think we’re in control, but we’re not.” We are all, human and humanoid alike, whether made of flesh or of metal, basically just sociable machines.

Robin Marantz Henig is a contributing writer. Her last article for the magazine was about evolutionary theories of religion.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Mining of Data Prompted Fight Over Spying

2007-07-29T11:52:00.000-04:00

The National Security Agency (NSA) logo is shown on a computer screen inside the Threat Operations Center at the NSA in Fort Meade, Maryland, January 25, 2006.

Mining of Data Prompted Fight Over Spying
By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID JOHNSTON
July 29, 2007

WASHINGTON, July 28 — A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.
It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues.
The N.S.A.’s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.
The confrontation in 2004 led to a showdown in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, where Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, tried to get the ailing Mr. Ashcroft to reauthorize the N.S.A. program.
Mr. Gonzales insisted before the Senate this week that the 2004 dispute did not involve the Terrorist Surveillance Program “confirmed” by President Bush, who has acknowledged eavesdropping without warrants but has never acknowledged the data mining.
If the dispute chiefly involved data mining, rather than eavesdropping, Mr. Gonzales’ defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers, while legalistic, were technically correct.
But members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who have been briefed on the program, called the testimony deceptive.
“I’ve had the opportunity to review the classified matters at issue here, and I believe that his testimony was misleading at best,” said Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, joining three other Democrats in calling Thursday for a perjury investigation of Mr. Gonzales.
“This has gone on long enough,” Mr. Feingold said. “It is time for a special counsel to investigate whether criminal charges should be brought.”
The senators’ comments, along with those of other members of Congress briefed on the program, suggested that they considered the eavesdropping and data mining so closely tied that they were part of a single program. Both activities, which ordinarily require warrants, were started without court approval as the Bush administration intensified counterterrorism efforts soon after the Sept. 11 attacks.
A half-dozen officials and former officials interviewed for this article would speak only on the condition of anonymity, in part because unauthorized disclosures about the classified program are already the subject of a criminal investigation. Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used.
Nor would they explain what modifications to the surveillance program President Bush authorized to head off the threatened resignations by Justice Department officials.
An agency spokesman declined to comment on the data mining issue but referred a reporter to a statement issued earlier that Mr. Gonzales had testified truthfully.
The Justice Department announced in January that eavesdropping without warrants under the Terrorist Surveillance Program had been halted, and that a special intelligence court was again overseeing the wiretapping. The N.S.A., the nation’s largest intelligence agency, generally eavesdrops on communications in foreign countries. Since the 1978 passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, any eavesdropping to gather intelligence on American soil has required a warrant from the special court.
In addition, court approval is required for the N.S.A. to search the databases of telephone calls or e-mail records, usually compiled by American phone and Internet companies and including phone numbers or e-mail addresses, as well as dates, times and duration of calls and messages. Sometimes called metadata, such databases do not include the content of the calls and e-mail messages — the actual words spoken or written.
Government examination of the records, which allows intelligence analysts to trace relationships between callers and identify possible terrorist cells, is considered less intrusive than actual eavesdropping. But the N.S.A.’s eavesdropping targeted international calls and e-mail messages of people inside the United States, while the databases contain primarily domestic records. The conflict in 2004 appears to have turned on differing interpretations of the president’s power to bypass the FISA law and obtain access to the records.
President Bush has asserted that both his constitutional powers as commander in chief and the authorization for the use of military force passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks gave him legal justification for skirting the warrant requirement. Critics have called the surveillance illegal because it does not comply with the FISA law.
The first known assertion by administration officials that there had been no serious disagreement within the government about the legality of the N.S.A. program came in talks with New York Times editors in 2004. In an effort to persuade the editors not to disclose the eavesdropping program, senior officials repeatedly cited the lack of dissent as evidence of the program’s lawfulness.
In December 2005, The Times published articles describing the program, the data mining and the internal legal debate. The newspaper reported that the N.S.A. had combed large volumes of telephone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects.
Civil liberties groups, Congressional Democrats and some Republicans reacted to the disclosures with outrage, accusing the administration of operating an illegal surveillance program inside the United States. The uproar grew when USA Today reported in May 2006 more details of the N.S.A.’s acquisition from telephone companies of the phone call databases. In response to the articles, Mr. Bush confirmed the eavesdropping, saying it was limited to communications in and out of the United States involving people suspected of ties to Al Qaeda. He did not, however, confirm the data mining, nor has any other official done so publicly.
Mr. Gonzales defended the surveillance in an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2006, saying there had been no internal dispute about its legality. He told the senators: “There has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations, which I cannot get into.”
By limiting his remarks to “the program the president has confirmed,” Mr. Gonzales skirted any acknowledgment of the heated arguments over the data mining. He said the Justice Department had issued a legal analysis justifying the eavesdropping program.
Mr. Bush and other officials also have repeatedly cited Justice Department reviews as evidence of their care in overseeing the program, never mentioning the bitter conflict that unfolded behind the scenes.
Mr. Gonzales’s 2006 testimony went unchallenged publicly until May of this year, when James B. Comey, the former deputy attorney general, described the March 2004 confrontation to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Mr. Comey had refused to sign a reauthorization for the N.S.A. program when he was standing in for Mr. Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gall bladder surgery.
Mr. Comey described an intense fight that prompted the top leaders of the Justice Department to consider resigning in protest. Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card visited the bedside of Mr. Ashcroft, who was in pain and under sedation, to seek his signature on the reauthorization.
Mr. Ashcroft refused to do so. Mr. Comey testified that he thought the White House officials were trying to take advantage of a sick man.
On Tuesday, to respond to Mr. Comey’s account, Mr. Gonzales testified in a Senate appearance that he went to the hospital only after meeting with Congressional leaders about the impending deadline for the reauthorization. He said the consensus was that the program should go on, so he felt he had no choice but to seek Mr. Ashcroft’s approval.
At the hearing, Mr. Gonzales faced harsh questioning about why he had not previously acknowledged the 2004 standoff. In response, he asserted once again that there had not been disagreements about the surveillance program, insisting that the dispute involved “other intelligence activities.”
After the hearing, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, sent Mr. Gonzales a transcript of his testimony with pointed instructions — to “correct, clarify or supplement your answers so that, consistent with your oath, they are the whole truth.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Psychologists have identified 237 reasons why men and women have sex.

2007-07-27T23:39:00.000-04:00

Fancy burning some calories and getting closer to God?
Those are just two of the 237 reasons, according to largest ever study of its kind, that men and women give for having sex
By Roger Dobson
Published: 15 July 2007

Psychologists have identified 237 reasons why men and women have sex.
While love and attraction remain the clincher for many, for others it is about getting closer to God; gaining a promotion; revenge; or a way to get rid of a tension headache.
Some of those asked said it was a reasonably effective way of overcoming boredom or burning up calories, while a few were attracted by the idea that it kept them warm, helped them fall asleep, or eased the stress of the day.
The results of the biggest study of people's motivation for sex show that men are more likely to spring into action for physical reasons than women, whose motives were more likely to be based on emotions. Women were much more likely to say: ''I realised that I was in love." Men were more likely to say: "I wanted to increase the number of partners I had experienced."
"We identified 237 distinct reasons why people have sex," the researchers said. "The study provides perhaps the most comprehensive exploration to date of the reasons people give for having sexual intercourse. They ranged from the mundane – 'It feels good' – to the spiritual – 'I wanted to feel closer to God'. They ranged from altruistic – 'I wanted the person to feel good' to manipulative – 'I wanted to get a promotion'."
For the two-part study, reported in the Archives of Sexual Behavior this week, psychologists at the University of Texas quizzed more than 2,000 men and women aged 17 to 52.
"Why people have sex is a surprisingly little studied topic. One reason for its relative neglect is that scientists might simply assume that the answers are obvious," say the researchers.
While being attracted to the other person was the main reason for both men and women, the results show that for some the reasons were not so mainstream. Each of the 237 reasons was given the highest rating by at least one of the people taking part.
"The frequently endorsed reasons for having sex, reflect what motivates most people most of the time: attraction, pleasure, affection, love, romance, emotional closeness, arousal, the desire to please, adventure, excitement and opportunity," say the psychologists.
"The less frequently endorsed reasons, however, may be no less important. One person's seemingly trivial reason for having sex might well be another's magnificent obsession."

Catholicism alive in China

2007-07-27T23:35:00.000-04:00

THE PAST AND THE FUTURE: Bishop Jin Luxian and his chosen successor, Joseph Xing Wenzhi. Photo by Ritsu Shinozaki

The Atlantic Monthly | July/August 2007

Keeping Faith

Jin Luxian’s 50-year struggle to keep Catholicism alive in China, balance Rome and Beijing, and build a Church for “100 million Catholics”

by Adam Minter

O n a June day in 1982, Father Aloysius Jin Luxian, a 66-year-old Jesuit just released from prison, walked into Shanghai’s St. Ignatius Cathedral for the first time in 27 years. In his youth, the building had been one of the great churches in East Asia, celebrated for its delicate Gothic arches and colorful stained glass. Now the color was gone, replaced by clear glass and harsh sunlight that bleached the cracked columns and tiled floor. The steeples, once among the tallest in Shanghai, were missing, as was the altar beneath which he’d been ordained, in 1945. Jin had spent nearly three decades under house arrest, in reeducation camps, and in prison, so he had few illusions about the Chinese Communist Party’s attitude toward religion. But the damage to the church was still hard to bear. St. Ignatius, he learned, had been converted to a grain warehouse during the Cultural Revolution, and the authorities had spent three days burning most of the diocese’s Catholic books in front of the church.

Now services were being held again. But open prayers for the pope were strictly prohibited, and scant mention of the holy father could be found in any of the crudely printed books used in the cathedral. Mass was still in Latin, unintelligible to most Chinese. The current bishop had been ordained without approval from Rome, by a Communist government determined to erase the memory of Shanghai’s still-incarcerated bishop, Ignatius Kung (Gong) Pin-mei. Everything was under the direct control of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, the 25-year-old government agency that oversaw Chinese Catholic life.

Yet on Saturday nights, the church was packed, its pews filled with 2,500 or more parishioners. Morning Mass wasn’t quite as crowded, but it happened, and regularly. Elsewhere in Shanghai, four more Catholic churches were holding services, and they, too, were packed on Saturday nights. All these parishioners were attended to by 60 elderly priests, who’d submitted to living together in a single house, under strict CPA supervision, because they were determined to live openly as Catholic priests.

Priests had other options, including a nascent “underground” movement, whose members refused to worship in churches registered with the Religious Affairs Bureau, which oversaw the CPA. During the later years of his incarceration, Jin had become familiar with several priests who belonged to this movement, and he’d been impressed by their courage and piety. But the catastrophe that befell China’s Catholics in the 1950s had convinced him that the underground movement, with its determination to confront the Communist Party, would never be able to provide a stable spiritual home for the thousands of Catholics who openly attended Mass in Shanghai every week.

Jin had once hoped that a distinctively Chinese Church would replace the missionary Church of his youth, reconciling his devout Roman Catholicism with his Chinese identity. The old attempts at reconciliation had failed because they’d emphasized one identity over the other, leaving a church that seemed neither authentically Catholic nor Chinese. But now, with Rome separated from its Chinese followers, there was an opportunity to create a truly Chinese Church—for Jin, and for the Catholics he aspired to lead.

photo
BISHOP JIN in front of the restored stained-
glass windows in the Shanghai cathedral

T wenty-five years later, Father Jin—now bishop of Shanghai—sat across from me in his third-floor office, facing the cathedral’s restored steeples. “It was heartbreaking,” he said of the day he returned to the cathedral, and threw up his hands. “But what could I do?” We were talking in English, one of the five languages he speaks fluently. At 91, he’s a slight man, maybe five and a half feet tall, but his stiff posture gives him a sturdy presence, and when he took my hand to emphasize a point, I felt the metal of his bishop’s ring.

Though largely unknown outside of China, Jin is arguably the most influential and controversial figure in Chinese Catholicism of the last 50 years. He played a leading role in persuading the authorities to allow a prayer for the pope to be said during Masses in China’s registered, or “open,” churches and in developing a Chinese-language liturgy, and he was single-handedly responsible for training more than 400 priests—including several who became Vatican-recognized bishops—in Shanghai’s seminary. He’s also been an unabashed supporter of dialogue and compromise with the Communist government. He accepted ordination as a bishop without Vatican approval and has taken a leading role in China’s open churches, all of which still have to register with the Religious Affairs Bureau and are overseen by bishops appointed by the CPA in consultation with local congregations.

Defying canon law, as Jin has done on several occasions, is no small matter for a Catholic bishop. But Rome has tolerated his disobedience, largely because of what he’s accomplished in Shanghai. From his modern office, Jin looks out over a diocese that includes 141 registered churches, 74 priests (most under the age of 40), 86 nuns, 83 seminarians, and 150,000 laypeople. In Shanghai, at least, there’s been a significant rapprochement between the underground Church and the open one, particularly on the leadership level: Jin is the most prominent Chinese open-Church bishop who recognizes, albeit quietly, the authority of the pope.

Indeed, the line between China’s open and underground churches has been blurring for some time. There are members of the underground Church who still refuse to worship in open churches or to recognize the legitimacy of open-Church bishops. The open Church tends to be much more in line with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which translated the Mass into the vernacular and elevated the role of the laity; the underground Church tends to be nostalgic for the more hierarchical pre–Vatican II Church. But the reality of day-to-day life in the underground Church is more complex than the popular image of Christian believers hidden in Chinese catacombs would suggest. At least 90 percent of open-Church bishops have quietly reconciled with Rome, just as Jin did. In at least one diocese, a priest who served in the open Church was also ordained as an underground bishop. In other dioceses, underground priests have been known to hold Mass in open churches, often using missals and Bibles that Jin had translated and printed.

Nevertheless, the underground Church continues to be targeted by local governments wary of any social movement that refuses to recognize their authority (the national government is more tolerant). The harassment is most pronounced in rural areas, where many Catholics don’t have access to priests or registered churches. But Catholics are sometimes still persecuted in the cities, and today more than two dozen underground priests and bishops are reportedly in government custody.

Jin does not dismiss the suffering of underground Catholics, but he seems to believe it’s unnecessary, now that the sacraments are available in open churches. Explaining why accommodation, rather than resistance, is the right path for Chinese Catholics, he says his flock is in no position to confront the Chinese government, particularly at the behest of the wealthy overseas supporters of the underground Church. “I don’t wait for [the Communist] collapse,” he says. “I get things done now.” Besides, he adds, from the 1950s onward, he realized that Communist secret police “are everywhere, like God. So we can’t do secret activities. It’s stupid.”

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., a friend and admirer of Jin for nearly two decades, told me, “What I like about Jin is that he’s very Chinese and very Catholic at the same time.” It’s why McCarrick calls him “one of the most important churchmen in China of our time.” Jin isn’t so optimistic about his legacy. “The Vatican thinks that I don’t work enough for the Vatican, and the government thinks that I work too much for the Vatican,” he says. “It is not easy to satisfy both.”

Jin says that from the beginning his primary interest has been poor Catholics in China, “my Catholics.” Neither Beijing nor Rome has always had their best interests at heart, he suggests, and so he’s tried to step into the breach. In the process, he’s become a different sort of Catholic than he was when he was ordained (by a French priest, he points out)—a personal transformation that’s mirrored by the changes at work in China’s growing population of Catholics, both underground and open.

C hristianity first reached China in the seventh century, carried by Nestorians via the Silk Road, but it wasn’t until the mid-16th century, with the arrival of the Society of Jesus, that the Catholic Church established a permanent presence in the Middle Kingdom. After that, the faith made substantial inroads, thanks to Matteo Ricci, a brilliant Italian Jesuit who abandoned traditional evangelization techniques in favor of an “enculturated” approach that accommodated traditional Chinese beliefs and rituals, including the commonplace practice of venerating one’s ancestors.

The Jesuits’ tolerance for these “Chinese rites” generated controversy back in Rome, and in 1704, after a century of debate, Pope Clement XI was persuaded by the Jesuits’ rivals to condemn them as hopelessly tainted by superstition. The Chinese emperors, who’d been tolerant of the missionaries, were outraged—as Jin notes, “To be Chinese, it was most important to venerate ancestors”—and during the 1720s missionaries and then Christianity itself were banned in China.

Catholic missionaries reentered China a century later, thanks to the 1842 treaties that opened the Chinese mainland to both opium and European Christians. French Jesuits built their headquarters on the edge of the small fishing village of Shanghai, and soon after raised Shanghai’s first cathedral, a wooden predecessor to St. Ignatius that was completed in 1910. Catholicism—and Christianity in general—grew steadily in China throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and by the outbreak of World War I, Chinese Catholics numbered 1.2 million.

Jin claims that the first members of his family converted to Catholicism more than 10 generations ago, while they were servants in the house of a Shanghai aristocrat. His childhood was beset by tragedy: At 10 he lost his mother, at 14 his father, and at 18 his only sibling, an older sister. (“And yet I live to a very old age,” he observes. “Very curious, yes?”) His family had enrolled him in Shanghai’s Jesuit-run schools, and he entered the order in 1938, the year he turned 22. “I had lost everyone,” he says. “So I looked to be a soldier for God.”

Jin had always seen similarities between Catholicism and Chinese culture. Like many Chinese Christians, he was attracted to the Gospel of John and its mystical concept of Logos—or “the Word,” as embodied in Christ. “The Logos is like Chinese philosophy,” he says, referring to the Tao, a concept sometimes translated as “the Way.” Both the Tao and Logos, he explains, suggest a rational order in the universe, though in the case of Catholicism, that order is revealed physically in the figure of Christ.

Reconciling Chinese philosophy with Catholic theology was easier than reconciling the political demands of his two masters in this world. The year after Jin entered the Jesuit order, Pope Pius XII ended most of the restrictions on the Chinese rites, and in 1946 he established an independent hierarchy for China’s Church, so that it was no longer a missionary project. But there was still tension between being Catholic and being Chinese. As late as 1949, more than 80 percent of China’s dioceses remained under the control of European bishops who had little interest in relinquishing their sees to the Chinese. Like the pope and the Vatican hierarchy, many of these bishops—under the direction of Archbishop Antonio Riberi, the papal internuncio to China—supported Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalists, even after 1949, when the Communists triumphed and Chiang’s government fled to Taiwan. That created an identity crisis for Catholics on the mainland, many of whom shared Jin’s perception that the Communist victory marked “the recovery by China of full independence as well as her national self-respect.” As Jin remarked in a 1987 speech to German Catholics, “To remain Catholic, they could not remain Chinese.”

When the Communists swept into power, Jin was in Rome working on his doctorate in theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University. By the time he graduated, in 1950, Beijing had begun to restrict religious freedoms and expel foreign missionaries. “I knew that I would be arrested if I returned to China,” Jin says matter-of-factly. He returned anyway. “The missionaries were leaving, and China needed pastors.”

In 1951, in an attempt to persuade the Communists not to view the Church as a hostile, foreign-controlled entity, Jin proposed creating a conference of Chinese bishops that would run the Church in a manner that reflected Chinese, not European, interests. He was promptly reported to the papal internuncio, whose response, he says with a laugh, was: “This young priest talks nonsense!” Rebuked, Jin spent the next four years as the rector of Shanghai’s major seminary, training as many Chinese priests as possible to replace the departed missionaries.

But by then, little could be done to help China’s Catholics. The Communists had expelled Riberi in 1951 and officially severed diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Ignatius Kung Pin-mei, the bishop of Shanghai, emerged as China’s leading Catholic voice against the Communists. Jin considered Kung a friend but disagreed with his confrontational approach. “Kung believed that the Nationalists would win and come back,” he says. “I said, ‘No. How? It’s a small island—how can they conquer [mainland] China?’”

On September 8, 1955, Kung and Jin were arrested, along with 300 priests, nuns, and laypeople (an additional 800 Catholics were arrested a few weeks later). For the next five years, Jin was kept mostly in solitary confinement in Shanghai, his only human contact with the interrogators and the guards. He was allowed no books or other written materials. When I asked how he survived that period, he smiled and said that he’d memorized the Gospels as a young man. “I kept my faith, by praying and meditating on the Gospels, especially John.”

In 1960, Jin was convicted of counterrevolutionary activities and received an 18-year sentence. Kung was convicted of high treason and received a life sentence. Jin spent the ensuing years in various prisons and reeducation camps, where he worked as a farmer and, off and on, as a translator of foreign documents for the national Public Security Bureau. Ironically, after he finally got access to newspapers during the Cultural Revolution, his hope was shaken in a way it hadn’t been when he was in solitary confinement. “I heard that China was an atheist nation—that the missions, churches, Catholics, Buddhist temples, and Islamic mosques were all gone,” he says. “And I nearly lost my hope.” He pauses. “Almost.” Prayer sustained him, as it does today: Every morning, promptly at 7:30, he says a private Mass with a single attendant in the chapel next to his study. “I still pray the rosary,” he notes. “Now I have beads, and I didn’t in jail.”

Though Jin’s sentence was completed in the mid- ’70s, he remained a political prisoner in northern China until 1982. “I entered [prison] a young man,” he says, “and left an old one.” He emerged to find a Chinese Church that had been utterly transformed. In July 1957, at the behest of the Communist Party, a small group of Chinese Catholic leaders had held the first meeting of the Catholic Patriotic Association, whose stated policy was to ensure that “Chinese Catholics, cleric and lay, take charge of their own affairs and no longer act contrary to the interests of their country.” A year later, two Chinese bishops were ordained without papal approval, and over the next seven years, 49 more would be—until the Cultural Revolution ended the government’s limited toleration for religion.

The Vatican saw the ordinations as an affront, and Pope Pius XII wrote an encyclical letter reasserting his right to select bishops—and to excommunicate anyone who circumvented him. However, neither he nor his successors excommunicated any of the bishops consecrated under Communist supervision. Instead, the Vatican quietly recognized that, despite the illicit procedure, the bishops had been ordained by valid prelates, and thus were valid themselves. According to Anthony S. K. Lam, a scholar of the Chinese Church at Hong Kong’s Holy Spirit Study Centre, the “illicit but valid” designation is well-known. “If you are ordained by an illicit but valid bishop, you are a valid bishop,” he says. “But only the pope can say you are the bishop of Shanghai.”

When Jin emerged from prison in 1982, Shanghai had two bishops: Ignatius Kung Pin-mei, who was still incarcerated, and Aloysius Zhang Jiashu, a 90-year-old Jesuit who’d been consecrated under Communist supervision in 1960. Many in the city’s elderly Catholic community held Kung in the highest regard, but Zhang was a more controversial figure. The situation epitomized the larger dilemma facing Chinese Catholics: how to reconcile the Church that had spent more than a generation underground with the Church that was tainted by its links to Communism and estranged from the Holy See.

But an important fact was pushing the two churches toward reconciliation, or at least coexistence: Catholicism was growing. In 1980, China officially had 3 million Catholics (likely an underestimate due to poor census data), the same number it had had in 1949. Today, the best estimates place the Catholic population between 12 million and 15 million. No single explanation accounts for this increase, which is mirrored by the growth of other Christian denominations, but many people, including Jin, think that religion has been filling the vacuum created by the collapse of Marxism’s ideological credibility. Whatever the cause, the exploding numbers have reinforced the need to hold the Church in China together, despite the forces that threaten to tear it apart. This is the mission that has defined Jin’s career—one that began when he stepped out of prison and onto the tightrope he’s walked ever since.

W ithin a few months of Jin’s release, the Communist Central Committee published Document 19, the official policy on religion. Following party dogma, it declared religion to be a historical phenomenon that would disappear once socialism’s triumph was complete. In the interim, it called for steps that would strengthen the independence of Chinese religious institutions and insulate them from negative foreign influences, steps that included the reopening of seminaries to train a new generation of patriotic priests.

Under this policy, Jin was asked to take up his old responsibilities as rector of Shanghai’s seminary. Though the CPA would be looking over his shoulder, he saw the necessity: In all of China, there were at most 400 priests to serve 3 million Catholics. He believed that if the Church was to have any chance of survival, China would need young, well-educated priests, even if they were subjected to Communist propaganda during their training. Through a “foreign friend,” Jin requested permission from Rome. The response was that he should “wait for the collapse” of the Communist Party, then reopen the seminary. “They underestimated the Chinese Communist Party,” says Jin. And so, after “much prayer,” he acted in what he believed to be the best interests of China’s Catholics. “I didn’t obey the directive of Rome. I said, ‘Let the Catholic Church survive.’”

Initially at least, there was little to suggest that the seminary was Catholic. Without Vatican support, Jin had to look elsewhere for books and Bibles. “I had to go to Protestants,” he says. That set a precedent, and though he says he tries to obtain support and funding from Roman Catholic organizations whenever possible, since the early 1980s the Shanghai diocese has received significant funding for religious publishing and book purchases from non-Catholic Christian organizations sympathetic to his desire “to proclaim the word of God.”

Such developments didn’t help Jin’s already tenuous standing in Rome. “Once, I was present when John Paul [II] was given testimony on the dramatic suffering of the underground in Shanghai,” recalls Jeroom Heyndrickx, a Belgian priest who has served as an informal Vatican emissary to the Chinese Church since the early 1980s. “And then you hear that a man like Jin comes out and is officially recognized. That puts him in a very bad light.”

Jin’s fellow Jesuits in Taiwan were particularly critical of his approach. “In the early ’80s they accused me of being a traitor,” he says. “They said I was a secret Communist. They accused me of becoming a party member in prison and being a traitor to the Church.” Sighing, he adds, “Rome believed it”—for most of the 1980s, “people abroad considered me a Judas.”

Despite the negative reports that made their way to Rome, John Paul II showed a strong sympathy for China’s Church. As a former bishop of Krakow, he seemed to understand instinctively the compromises made by China’s Catholics, and in several speeches and encyclicals, he indicated his support for open as well as underground believers. According to Heyndrickx and two other people who closely observed Vatican China policy in the 1980s, John Paul II and his inner circle developed a positive perception of Jin in the mid-’80s, mostly as a result of reports emanating out of the newly reopened seminary. Heyndrickx recalls being asked by the pope to assess Jin’s character, and responding, “If he is not faithful, then neither am I.”

Jin’s loyalty was put to the test in January 1985, when he was chosen by Shanghai’s priests and the CPA to be ordained an auxiliary bishop (an assistant and possible successor) to Bishop Zhang. Few inside or outside of Shanghai believed that it was possible for Jin to remain a faithful Catholic—at least, a Roman Catholic—if he accepted the ordination. Yet Jin believed that to reject the appointment would not only place the seminary at risk but also open the Shanghai hierarchy to a priest more inclined toward the CPA and the Communist Party. Reluctantly, he accepted, and he says that on the day of the ordination, he was in need of “consolation.”

It arrived from an unlikely source: With Pope John Paul’s knowledge and tacit approval, Laurence Murphy, a past president of Seton Hall University and an informal intermediary and adviser to the Vatican on the Chinese Church, and Father John Tong, now the auxiliary bishop of Hong Kong, attended the ceremony. “That was kind of delicate,” Murphy told me, recalling that St. Ignatius was filled with “brass from the CPA.” Jin concedes that there might have been serious consequences had the CPA been aware of a Vatican-approved presence, and he admitted that Murphy and Tong had attended the ordination only after I asked him to confirm Murphy’s account. “It was not encouraged by me,” he said defensively. “I did not apply for that.” After a pause, he added, “They encouraged me, and it was helpful and consolation.”

I n 1982, shortly after he was released from prison, Jin petitioned the government to allow him to visit the imprisoned Bishop Kung. He was allowed to make three visits before Kung was released, in 1985 (with Jin signing a personal guarantee of his good behavior). Kung lived in Shanghai under house arrest, accepting visitors and maintaining friendly relations with Jin, who says Kung was “like a brother” at the time. Then in 1988, the same year that Bishop Zhang died and Jin succeeded him as the government-approved head of the Shanghai diocese, Kung received permission to seek medical treatment abroad, and after it was completed, he went into exile, living at his nephew’s home in Connecticut.

According to an American Church official involved in making the Vatican’s China policy, the Vatican strongly preferred that Kung remain in China, because it believed that he was uniquely positioned to heal the rift in China’s Church. Instead, against the wishes of John Paul II but with the tacit support of high-ranking Vatican officials who sympathized with the underground, Kung, working with his nephew, began deepening the rift. The situation grew even more confused when it was revealed that the pope had named Kung a cardinal in pectore—“in secret”—in 1979, during his imprisonment. Kung and his nephew formed the Cardinal Kung Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit that supports and agitates on behalf of the underground Church. For Jin, a favorite target of foundation attacks, Kung’s status and activities were an affront. “Cardinal Kung pushes all of the Catholics against the Chinese Communist Party, then he moves to the United States,” he says. “Very nice for him.” Jin has traveled abroad extensively (the government allows him to go anywhere but Rome), and he likes to point out that he too has plenty of “foreign friends” who could support him in exile if he chose that.

Instead, Jin used his standing as a bishop to begin the reforms that he’d wanted to see in China’s Church since the 1940s. In 1988, he made six trips to Beijing in hopes of persuading the Religious Affairs Bureau to, among other things, allow him to include a prayer for the pope in his diocese’s services; he obtained permission on the sixth visit. The next year, he received permission to have two Hong Kong priests and an American priest teach at the seminary. Soon after their arrival, the priests began preparing the seminarians to say Mass in the vernacular, and on September 30, 1989, the first Chinese-language Mass was celebrated in Shanghai. Father Joseph Zen, a Shanghai native and now the cardinal archbishop of Hong Kong, was the celebrant. The risk was significant: China’s religious authorities reserved the right to approve changes to the liturgy, and they’d long preferred Latin, largely because it couldn’t be understood by most Chinese.

Over the next several months, Jin says, he quietly ordered his priests and seminarians to take the new liturgy to Shanghai’s other churches. “Jin was the one who had the guts to implement the Mass,” says Father Thomas Law, a Hong Kong liturgist who was involved in the Mass at the chapel. “Nobody else.” The Chinese-language Mass wasn’t officially authorized on a national level until 1993. Soon afterward, the Shanghai diocese published its own translation, which was quickly disseminated throughout the country.

It was characteristic Jin. He has keen political instincts, and throughout his career he’s been able to use his standing as an open-Church bishop to achieve things that he never could have done in the underground Church. Though Jin won’t discuss his relationships with Chinese officials, those close to him claim that he has good relations at a very high level in Beijing and Shanghai. It’s a delicate balancing act, says Jeroom Heyndrickx: “He had to say things that sound correct to the regime that also protect his church.”

During one of our interviews, Jin contrasted himself with the outspoken Joseph Zen, who has become a well-known agitator against the CPA since taking over as archbishop of Hong Kong. “You cannot speak out as a bishop in a Communist country,” Jin says. “I can’t freely speak like Zen, because I must protect my diocese.” Withholding criticism of China’s religious authorities and their policies is perhaps the greatest compromise that the open-Church bishops choose to make.

At the same time, there are lines that Jin won’t cross. In the early 1990s, for instance, he was offered the chairmanship of the government-organized Chinese bishops’ conference, but declined the overture because he thought it would compromise his independence. The role was later assumed by Beijing’s Bishop Fu Tieshen, who, after his death in April 2007, was widely criticized for being little more than a mouthpiece for the Communist Party.

In conversation, Jin exhibits few doubts about his decisions, but occasionally his answers turn defensive. During one of our interviews, I asked about his impressions of the underground Church. He began to answer, then suddenly interrupted himself. “[The members of the underground Church] say they are loyal to the pope,” he said. “But I am as loyal as them. Why become bishop? I led the [Chinese] Catholics to pray for the pope and even printed the prayer! I reformed the liturgy. Before me, it was all in Latin. But the underground Church did nothing. If I stayed with them, I would do nothing, too.”

C ardinal McCarrick told me that he and Jin had a routine during the 1990s: “I would tell him, ‘I am going to visit the holy father soon. Is there anything that you would like me to tell him?’ And he would answer, ‘Tell the holy father that he has my prayers and blessings.’ And I would ask, ‘Anything else?’ And he would answer, ‘And the blessings of my priests, sisters, and congregations.’ And anything else? And he would pause and say, ‘Not at this time.’”

During the 1990s, according to several of his friends, Jin was frustrated that despite his accomplishments, he could not be recognized as the rightful bishop of Shanghai. (By 2000, roughly two-thirds of the open-Church bishops were reconciled with Rome.) Laurence Murphy says the reason was that Jin was unwilling to communicate, in writing or orally, that he was loyal to the pope. “Along with many others, he believed that the Vatican had been infiltrated by the Communists,” says Murphy. “And they didn’t want to trust anything to that bureaucracy, because they thought, ‘In 24 hours it will be known in Beijing.’”

Many in the Vatican doubted Jin’s loyalties well into the 1990s, in part because of allegations made by the Kung Foundation and others sympathetic to the underground Church. Kung himself ultimately refused to meet Jin in the United States, even though the Vatican had asked them to sit down together and try to repair the divide. Kung died in exile in 1999, and his auxiliary, Fan Zhongliang (who lived in Shanghai), succeeded him.

In 2000, at the behest of the Vatican, Fan visited Jin at his office in the basilica near the seminary. At the time, both bishops were in their 80s, and the Vatican had asked them to agree upon a successor. Their candidate would be submitted to the pope, then presented to the diocese’s priests for election and to the CPA for approval. At the very least, the Vatican intended to make clear that the auxiliary bishop would be an open-Church bishop, and that Fan—as an underground bishop—would have no successor. And if all went as planned, the two faces of Shanghai’s Church could be officially unified.

Fan proposed a priest who Jin says “didn’t know the diocese, and the diocese didn’t know him.” Jin’s preferred candidate, Joseph Xing Wenzhi, was unacceptable to Fan. During the years that followed, Fan became incapacitated by Alzheimer’s, a turn of events that Heyndrickx says gave the Vatican the opportunity to secretly recognize Jin as the de jure bishop of Shanghai (in the Vatican’s eyes, Jin is officially the coadjutor of the diocese). Jin will neither confirm nor deny that status, but it’s unquestioned among Church leaders in Europe and North America, and it was tacitly acknowledged at the June 2005 public consecration of Xing as Jin’s auxiliary. Had Jin not been reconciled with Rome, Xing’s ordination would have been declared illicit. Instead, it was attended by Vatican emissaries, hundreds of laypeople from the underground Church, several underground priests, and more than a dozen government representatives.

I n the months surrounding Xing’s ordination, Beijing hinted that the ascension of Pope Benedict XVI might offer an opportunity for a deal with Rome, and Benedict seemed to signal a desire to work with the Communist government. That September, he personally invited four mainland Chinese bishops, including Jin, to attend the Synod of the Eucharist in Rome the following month. The government refused on the bishops’ behalf, decrying Vatican interference in China’s affairs, but the point had been made: Jin and the two other open-Church bishops were legitimate in the eyes of the new pope. Jin left the Vatican’s letter of invitation on his desk for a month, explaining to anyone who asked that it “justified everything [he] had done.”

Then, as now, Beijing had two conditions for normalizing relations with the Vatican: the severing of the Vatican’s diplomatic ties with Taiwan (and as a consequence, the transfer of its embassy to the mainland) and an agreement not to interfere in China’s internal affairs. The Vatican has indicated that it’s prepared to meet the Taiwan condition, but the second issue, which encompasses the selection of bishops, is more difficult. Informally, the Vatican might be satisfied with a compromise similar to the process used to nominate Xing in Shanghai. However, public declarations to the contrary, it’s been suggested that both the government and the underground Church have a tacit interest in preventing a deal, since it would inevitably empower the open bishops and their conference, diminishing the government’s influence and the underground Church’s prestige.

Whether an immediate way can be found through the impasse may depend on what Benedict XVI has to say in a promised letter to Chinese Catholics. Leaked reports and the impressions of a source close to the drafting of the letter suggest that it will call, as John Paul II did, for reconciliation between the open and underground churches, and focus largely on pastoral concerns. Ultimately, it’s expected to portray China’s Catholics as largely united after a half century and to acknowledge that any diplomatic solution will need to accommodate both the vitality of the open Church and the struggles of the underground one.

Jin has watched the diplomatic ebb and flow between Rome and Beijing for 20 years, and he’s pessimistic about the short-term prospects for a deal. If he’s wrong, and rapprochement occurs suddenly, China’s Church could change dramatically: The Chinese hierarchy—still split between underground and open bishops in many dioceses—would be reunited, which could smooth over divisions within the Church, but also reopen old wounds. For now, though, Jin’s attempt at an intermediate way still seems likely to chart the future for China’s Catholics.

O f the many goals that Bishop Jin set for himself after leaving prison, none was more personal than the restoration of Shanghai’s cathedral. Over the two decades that followed, the steeples were replaced, the walls and columns were repaired, and a new altar was built. But cost constraints meant that the hundreds of Gothic window frames had to be filled with clear, rather than stained, glass. Even so, Jin did not give up hope that he might once again see the church lit with a mysterious glow, as it had been in his youth.

In 1991, while in Beijing on Church business, Jin was introduced to Wo Ye, the then 28-year-old daughter of Communist Party officials and a recent convert to Catholicism. Trained as a traditional porcelain painter, Wo was working as a newspaper art director. The two became fast friends, and Jin invited her to work for the Shanghai diocese as an artist. Since she had no training in church art, he offered to send her abroad for nearly a decade of study at Catholic institutions in Italy and the United States. Wo agreed, a first step toward restoring the stained glass.

In 2001, after Wo returned to China, formal planning for the project began. Work started the following year, with Wo supervising a staff of nuns from the diocese, and in the fall of 2006, they completed the first stage: 44 windows in ground-level nave chapels depicting the life of Jesus.

The results look nothing like the stained-glass windows of Europe. Images of Christ’s life are executed as variations on traditional Chinese paper cutouts, and the surrounding grillwork is based on Qing Dynasty window designs found in a busy Shanghai market. Chinese iconography complements the Gospel story—a magpie represents the birth of Christ, a coiled phoenix represents the risen Christ—and blazing Chinese characters explain the scenes. Over the next several years, the plan is to fill the upper-level windows with a golden bamboo garden meant to represent paradise and the middle level with figures important to China’s Church, rendered in a fashion that suggests traditional Chinese painting. “The old church appealed to 3 million Catholics,” says Jin. “I want to appeal to 100 million Catholics.”

During my last interview with Jin, Wo stopped by the office to say hello, settling into a chair beside the bishop. The conversation drifted, and Jin told a story that neither Wo nor I had heard before. In the late 1980s, he said, the Italian government invited him to Rome. Zhou Ziyang, then China’s prime minister, gave him permission to go. “The Chinese say, ‘Go and get the real feeling of the Holy See toward China,’” Jin said. “At the time, Zhou Ziyang was ready to normalize relations.” The Vatican was not. “Rome refused me.”

A priest close to the Vatican later wrote to me to say that he’d heard this “rumor” and speculated that Rome had refused permission because of Jin’s poor standing with people in Shanghai’s underground Church. Jin didn’t tell me this. Instead, he looked across the room at Wo, smiled, and asked when the cathedral would be completed.

“In time,” she answered.

The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200707/chinese-bishop.

Also See:

Interviews: "A Church for China"
Adam Minter discusses his article about Bishop Jin Luxian, the future of Catholicism in China, and life as a writer in Shanghai.

Flashbacks: "The Cross and the Star"
Articles from The Atlantic's archives illuminate the history of China's complex relationship with Christianity.

Follow-up:
In a letter dated May 27, 2007, and released at the end of June, Pope Benedict called for reconciliation among China's divided Catholics.

Click here to read Pope Benedict's letter.

Click here to read the Vatican's explanatory note.

Click here to read an analysis of the letter by Jeroom Heyndrickx, a Belgian priest who has served as a Vatican emissary to the Chinese Church since the early 1980s.

The yuck factor: How scientific research into revulsion is shaping our supermarkets

2007-07-27T23:28:00.000-04:00

The yuck factor: How scientific research into revulsion is shaping our supermarkets
Toenail clippings, creepy-crawlies, rotting food – scientists devote their research to the most disgusting things. But there are serious lessons to be learnt about revulsion.
By Simon Usborne
Published: 11 July 2007

You watch as a dead but sterilised cockroach is dipped for two seconds into a freshly poured glass of orange juice. Then you're offered a sip. Do you raise the glass to your lips and take a gulp – after all, there's nothing wrong with the juice – or do you turn up your nose in disgust and push it away?
That was the choice given to a group of scientists at a lecture by Professor Paul Rozin, a specialist in the psychology of disgust. Everyone rejected the juice, and if the very thought of it causes you emit a "yuck", Professor Rozin is proving his theory – the concept of touch-transference.
Rozin's research says that if something we perceive to be dirty or disgusting (such as a cockroach) touches something harmless (such as orange juice), in our minds the latter becomes "contaminated", even if the rational side of our brain knows there is nothing physically wrong with it.
Among the participants in Rozin's experiment were Andrea Morales, an assistant professor of marketing at Arizona State University, and Gavan Fitzsimons, a psychology and marketing professor at Duke University, North Carolina. The scientists were fascinated by Rozin's work and began to wonder how disgust could shape consumer behaviour.
An article Morales and Fitzsimons published in the Journal of Marketing Research last month suggests that as we push our trolleys around the supermarket, a lot more goes through our minds than how to nab the best bargain. According to their research, "disgusting" items on the supermarket shelf – such as lard, nappies, athlete's foot cream – can have a remarkable effect on the way we view other products that come into contact with them. "It's predominately a non-conscious effect," says Morales. "It sounds ridiculous to not want a packaged product that was touching another packaged product, but it's real."
So what separates a disgusting product from a desirable one? To find out, Morales drew up a list of the 200 top-selling food and non-food items from an average supermarket. She then asked volunteers to evaluate them using a 10-point scale of disgust. Scores above five indicated a moderate level of repulsion. These products included sanitary products and stomach medicines (" Just the word 'gastrointestinal' was enough to elicit a negative response," says Morales) as well as cat litter, dog food, and rubbish bags. Cigarettes topped the disgust chart.
"We didn't ask them to explain their choices," says Morales. " But in most cases you can kind of understand them." But there was one decision Morales couldn't explain. "There was an interesting reaction to mayonnaise," she says. "Half the population doesn't find it at all disgusting but the other half is grossed out by it."
With her "disgusting" trolley filled, Morales took a second basket of more appealing items such as biscuits and rice cakes, and arranged the products on a supermarket shelf for a number of tests. In all cases the items remained sealed, removing any risk of actual contact, much less contamination. The only variable was that in some instances the desirable products touched the disgusting ones, while in others they were separated by a few inches.
Volunteers were then asked to look at the shelf, but were not told why. After a few minutes they were asked questions such as "how much would you pay for this item?", or "how appealing do you find this item?" .
"The results were incredibly strong," says Morales. "We always found that in the touching conditions, ratings of the cookies or rice cakes would always be lower than when they were not touching." Even more surprising were the results of a second test in which participants were asked to evaluate the products more than an hour after viewing them, still not realising what the experiment was about. "The effect was the same," says Morales. "When my students hear the theory they always say it wouldn't happen to them, but they're amazed when they react in the same way."
British psychologist Dr David Lewis, an expert on the science of the supermarket, or "trolleyology", as it has become known, says these kinds of responses serve an important evolutionary function: "It seems irrational not to eat biscuits because they're on a shelf next to some nappies when both are wrapped up in layers of cellophane, but these inbuilt disgusts are designed to prevent us doing things which could harm us." Morales adds: "There are plenty of cases where the effect is rational – if a cockroach touches orange juice we know we shouldn't drink it – but we seem to have generalised what is rational to include cases where it simply doesn't apply."
So are supermarkets aware of product contagion? "They are generally aware of everything," says Dr Lewis, who has advised some of the UK's top retailers. "These aren't shops but machines designed to sell, and you'd be amazed how much thought goes into product placement."
But Morales suggests shop managers could do more. "Store layout is becoming more important as supermarkets start clustering products that wouldn't normally appear together." Morales points to "baby" aisles as a prime example where "disgusting" products such as nappies or wipes might appear next to baby food or toys. "If they separated them they'd sell more," she says.
Morales also advises supermarkets to let shoppers keep products apart away from the shelf. "They could put more separators in trolleys to keep things from coming into contact with each other. Or an extra bag to put diarrhoea medicine in."
Measures like this might seem unnecessary but Morales says they could affect profits. "Usually it takes a while for research like this to trickle down to managerial practice," she says. "But it's only a matter of time before they say, 'Wait – we should apply this.'"
This isn't the first time Morales has studied the psychology of disgust on the shop floor. She achieved similar results in earlier research into " consumer contamination". When picked up this newspaper, did you take the second one in the pile? If you did, you're not alone. "It's the same mechanism," says Morales. "We feel disgusted knowing someone else may have been in contact with the products we want to buy so we devalue these 'contaminated' products."
However irrational, this response serves the same evolutionary function: to prevent the spread of disease. If we know or assume an item has already been touched, we assume the "contaminator" has had a negative effect on it that could pose a risk. But in one experiment, where Morales hired models to handle T-shirts in a mock-up of a clothes shop, the opposite is also true.
It's no mystery that attractive sales assistants help sell more clothes, but Morales' research shows it's not as simple as that. In her experiment, shoppers who had seen someone attractive of the opposite sex touching a T-shirt were more likely to buy it. "It isn't enough for an attractive person to like a T-shirt – they have to touch it and 'transfer' their attractiveness on to it."
So what's next for Morales and Fitzsimons? A new study will take them back to the supermarket and to how we behave not when we see a disgusting product, but when we have to buy one. Preliminary research suggests that adding something nasty to our shopping list can affect what else we buy and even force us into making unplanned purchases.
"If we go in for antifungal foot cream, we might then subconsciously choose to get some soap to fight the feeling of disgust we have. We might also put off buying things like fruit and veg."
So could that spell the end of the in-store chemist and pet food aisle? " At f irst we thought the effect might cut down the size of the basket, so maybe that would have had implications on the kinds of products stores stock, but we found that it changes the types of products, not the quantity. If supermarkets sell more soap, well that's probably OK with them."

The anatomy of disgust

* International surveys have revealed universal sources of disgust, including bodily secretions, wounds, corpses, toenail clippings, decaying food, creepy crawlies, and people who are ill.

* Most scientists believe we are genetically hardwired to be disgusted by things that could make us ill, and that a "disgust gene" arose through the process of natural selection.

* Disgust grows as we learn what might pose a threat; babies presented with fake faeces find them fascinating, while older children and adults are repulsed.

* Studies have revealed culture-specific disgusts, including dog meat in the UK, food cooked by menstruating women in India, and fat people in the Netherlands.

* The way we express disgust is universal; we use the same facial expression, triggered by the anterior insular cortex part of the brain, and even the same word – "yuck".

Hard sell: the things that get left on the shelf

Baby food and nappies

It might seem logical to group baby products on the same supermarket aisle, but research suggests items that come into contact with nappies, with all their connotations, become contaminated in our minds.

Mayonnaise and soup

Researchers were surprised when many subjects singled out mayonnaise as a " disgusting" product which, when shelved next to more palatable products such as soup, might put customers off buying.

Feminine hygiene products and paper towels

According to research, tampons and face towels should never share shelf space. Psychologists say the "yucky" associations of hygiene products taint items that we choose for their cleansing qualities.

Diarrhoea medicine and aspirin

Anything with the word "diarrhoea" or "gastrointestinal" is enough to turn the stomach, and, on a subconscious level, could taint products such as aspirin, which ideally are seen by consumers to have cleansing connotations.

CCTV warning for Beijing kissers

2007-07-27T23:23:00.000-04:00

CCTV warning for Beijing kissers
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
CCTV

The next time you're in Beijing and fancy kissing someone in public, be warned - you could be caught on closed-circuit television, and labeled as a criminal by the computers who monitor the footage.
According to reports, Beijing's couples are being warned that 'intimate acts of lovers may be initially categorized as "kidnapping" or "robbery" by the computers, which are programmed to be sensitive to violations of safe distances.'
But fortunately, the young lovers' fate won't be decided purely by some emotionless machine which doesn't understand the concept of 'love'. In such situations, police officers monitoring the cameras will look at the footage of the kissing people to decide if the situation really is dangerous. Which is both reassuring, and slightly creepy.
But there will be some warning for amorous couples, the Xinhua news agency said. Signs will go up next month in areas covered by the cameras, saying in Chinese and English 'you are entering a camera-monitored zone.' Which should kill any romance nicely.
Closed-circuit cameras are becoming more common in Beijing, and Xinhua said that before next year's Summer Olympics the city plans to unify the monitoring of the cameras. There are currently networks monitored separately by the police, and transport, public utilities and maintenance departments.

Pot smoking linked to psychotic disorders

2007-07-27T23:19:00.000-04:00

Pot smoking linked to psychotic disorders
Heavy marijuana use doubles the risk, new research finds.
By Jia-Rui Chong, Times Staff Writer
July 27, 2007
People who smoke marijuana daily or weekly double their risk of developing a psychotic illness over their lifetime, according to a study published Thursday.
Among all cannabis users, including sporadic experimenters and habitual users, the lifetime risk of psychotic illness increased by 40%, the report said.
"It's not as if you smoke a joint and you're going to go crazy," said Richard Rawson, who directs the Integrated Substance Abuse Program at UCLA and was not involved in the study.
But he cautioned: "It's definitely not a good idea to use heavy amounts of marijuana."
The researchers found that the risk for psychotic illnesses did appear to increase with dose, suggesting that stopping marijuana use would decrease risk, said coauthor Dr. Stanley Zammit, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University and the University of Bristol in Britain.
Psychotic illnesses include schizophrenia and disorders with such symptoms as hallucinations or delusions.
Marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug in the U.S., according to the federal government. In 2006, about 42% of America's high school seniors reported having tried marijuana at least once, according to an annual report funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Marijuana can cause psychiatric problems because it throws off the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain, Zammit said.
Previous studies have had difficulty untangling marijuana's role in psychiatric disorders. Smoking the drug could be a symptom of a disorder rather than a cause.
The study by Zammit and colleagues, published in the medical journal the Lancet, reanalyzed data from seven long-term studies on psychotic illnesses and marijuana involving 61,000 participants.
The researchers filtered out about 60 factors, such as preexisting mental illness and the use of other illicit drugs, and considered IQ and social class, to try to isolate the effect of marijuana, Zammit said.
Most of the studies that were analyzed indicated a range of increased risk for frequent users from 50% to 200%, with the average being about 100%, or double the risk, Zammit said.
The researchers also studied the relationship between marijuana use and mood disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorder. They analyzed 22 studies involving 52,000 participants.
The researchers found that any marijuana use increased the lifetime risk for mood disorders by about 40%, and weekly or daily use increased the risk by about 50%.
The mood disorder studies were less successful in filtering outside factors, so the increased risk may be unrelated to smoking marijuana, Zammit said.
Dr. Victor Reus, a psychiatrist at UC San Francisco who was not involved in this study, said he was unconvinced by Zammit's conclusions for both psychotic and mood disorders.
Too many outside factors contribute to the disorders, and the studies Zammit used were too vague to draw hard conclusions, he said.
"There's a limit to what you can do with the data that's in these studies," he said.
--
jia-rui.chong@latimes.com

Scorpion venom offers improved cancer surgery

2007-07-27T23:17:00.000-04:00

Scorpion venom offers improved cancer surgery
By Sadie Gray
Published: 16 July 2007

A substance derived from scorpion venom could be the key to more effective treatment for a wide range of cancers, researchers say.
Turned into a "paint" which can distinguish even a small number of cancerous cells from healthy tissue, the venom would vastly improve surgeons' accuracy when removing tumours.
Scientists found that chlorotoxin, a chemical in the venom, would attach itself to cancer cells. Joined to a fluorescent marker, Cy5.5, it becomes a molecular beacon which emits light near the infra-red spectrum, illuminating whole tumours or even clusters of only a few hundred cancerous cells. When injected, it sticks to cancer cells within two minutes.
Precision is paramount in operations to remove tumours, when cancerous cells can be missed and left behind. It is especially important when dealing with the brain, where some 80 per cent of malignant cancers return at the edge of surgical sites and where surrounding neurons must not be damaged.
At the moment, surgeons use colour, texture and blood supply to tell cancerous from healthy tissue. The paint marks tumours with at least 500 times more sensitivity than a magnetic resonance imaging scan, which will only work if more than a million cancer cells are present. Lasting for two weeks, it also massively outperforms contrast agents currently used to show up cancers, which last only a few minutes.
The research team, from Seattle Children's Hospital and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Washington, found in tests on mice that they could illuminate brain tumours as small as 1mm in diameter. In another case they detected 200 prostate cancer cells travelling through a mouse's lymph system.
Dr James Olson, who led the team, said: "My greatest hope is that tumour paint will fundamentally improve cancer therapy. By allowing us to see cancer that would be undetectable by other means, we can give our patients better outcomes."
Dr Richard Ellenbogen, a paediatric neurosurgeon at Seattle Children's Hospital, co-wrote the study, which was published in the journal Cancer Research. He said: "This development has the potential to save lives and make brain tumour resection safer."
The researchers are due to start clinical trials in humans and say the paint could be used in surgery in as little as 18 months.
Experts in the UK say more research is needed into why the molecule only binds to tumour cells, and to ensure it is not toxic in humans. Professor John Griffiths, head of molecular imaging at Cancer Research UK's Cambridge Research Institute, said: "The big problem with surgery for brain cancer is that tumours can infiltrate normal brain tissue, making it very hard to tell where the tumour ends and the normal tissue begins. If you could light up the tumour cells by shining an infra-red beam on them, it might be very helpful."
Chlorotoxin:Cy5.5 could be used as a non-invasive screening tool for the early detection of skin, cervical, oesophageal, colon and lung cancers, and may help identify positive lymph nodes in patients with breast, prostate and testicular cancers.

Are You Right Eyed Or Left Eyed?

2007-07-27T20:18:00.000-04:00

Are You Right Eyed Or Left Eyed?

Science Daily — A person has two hands, two legs, two eyes, two cerebral hemispheres. But it is only at first sight that a human being is a symmetric creature. Firstly, we have a leading hand, the right one with the majority of people, secondly, we have a leading eye. Thirdly, the brain is functionally asymmetric: the left hemisphere (with the right-handers) is mainly connected with abstract-logical thinking and to a larger extent - with speech, the right hemisphere – with image sensitivity.
Coming back to eyes, the right eye is the leading one among the two thirds of people, and the left one among one third of people. Special tests have been developed to determine this. Do these individual differences influence the visual information perception process, for example, perception of texts, on the left and on the right? Investigations carried out at the Institute of Cognitive Neurology of the Modern University for the Humanities will help to answer this question.
The experiment involved all right-handed students, but some of them had the right eye leading, the others – the left eye leading. All probationers were offered to read a text on the PC screen, the text being placed either in the right or in the left part of the screen, while the probationers’ head was oriented to the center (in such conditions, visual information from the left half-field of vision was addressed to the right hemisphere, and vice versa). It has turned out that the “left-eyed” probationers read the text quicker when it is placed on the left, than the text placed on the right. As for the “right-eyed” individuals, no such differences were noticed with them.
More detailed analysis has proved that when the “left-eyed” probationers were reading the left-side text, the brain perceived (during a single eye fixation on some text fragment) more symbols than in case of reading the right-hand text.
In other words, in the left half-field of vision, glance fixation is characterized by higher “information capacity”. This is directly connected with the speed of reading: the more symbols the glance perceives during one fixation, the quicker a person reads. There is one more sign of successfulness of reading: in the course of reading, the glance periodically returns back to the already read word (apparently due to difficulty of perception). Thus, in the left-sided text, the “left-eyed” probationers made less returns than they did in the right-sided text, which means higher successfulness of the “left” text recognition. Besides, the majority of the “left-eyed” persons performed faster quick eye movements – saccades – to the left than to the right.
Physiologists can only make assumptions about the reasons for such differences.
As all the probationers are right-handed persons, the control over their leading right hand is performed by the left hemisphere. With the right-eyed, the same left hemisphere also controls the leading right eye. As for the left-eyed persons, the leading left eye is controlled by the right hemisphere, which is free from control over the leading hand’s movements.
And this works out better. Therefore, the “left-eyed” persons read quicker on their left.
Where can this knowledge prove useful? Apparently, it makes sense to take the leading eye into account for production of various video-products, for example, training ones. Special objects (spoons, door-handles) are produced, even though not in Russia, for the left-handed, but there is nothing special made for the “left-eyed” persons. Maybe this will be done in the future.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Informnauka / Russian Science News Agency.

Brain Cells Need MicroRNA To Survive

2007-07-27T20:01:00.000-04:00

Compared to healthy mouse Purkinje cells (left), those lacking the Dicer gene, which is required for cells to produce microRNAs, are significantly degenerated (right). The results suggest that the loss of microRNAs may be involved in neurodegenerative disorders. (Credit: Image courtesy of Rockefeller University)

Brain Cells Need MicroRNA To Survive

Science Daily — There are lots of things that brain cells need to survive. Add to that list microRNAs. New research from Rockefeller University shows that neurons that cannot produce microRNAs, tiny single strands of RNA that regulate the expression of genes, slowly die in a manner similar to what is seen in such human neurodegenerative disorders as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
Reporting in July 2 online edition of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, the researchers say that although no one has yet found microRNAs to be involved in any disease, their study in mice shows that these tiny snippets of RNA are essential for survival of mature neurons.
“This research tells us that microRNAs are needed if certain neurons are to function and survive, and that means they are likely involved in survival of other neurons as well,” says the study’s senior investigator, Paul Greengard, head of the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience. “That leads us to hypothesize that abnormalities in microRNA expression might be causing or modifying disease progression.”
The researchers specifically found that mice engineered to stop expression of microRNAs in cerebellar cortex neurons after birth experienced a slow decline in function, resulting in death of the neurons, known as Purkinje cells. Because this brain area helps control motor function, mice without functioning Purkinje neurons could no longer walk correctly.
Since the use of these particular cells was a model system testing deletion of microRNAs, the results can likely be extended to other types of neurons, such as those involved in memory and higher thinking, says the study’s lead author, Anne Schaefer, a postdoctoral fellow in Greengard’s lab. These findings are “very exciting,” she says. “There was no evidence that mature neurons, which are differentiated and don’t divide any more, would require microRNAs for their function or survival.”
Since their discovery in 1993, microRNAs have been found to be powerful regulators of gene expression, but mainly in cells that are developing. Differentiating neurons expressed a large variety of microRNAs, Schaefer says, and development stops if microRNAs cannot function. While these bits of RNA were also known to exist in mature neurons, no one knew if they play any role in the life of adult neuronal cells, she says.
To find out what role they do play, the research team cross-bred three different kinds of mice. One, created by co-author Dónal O’Carroll, in the Rockefeller Laboratory of Lymphocyte Signaling, is known as a “Dicer conditional” mouse. It gives researchers the ability to delete a gene known as Dicer, whose protein is required to produce microRNAs. They cross-bred these mice with another line, produced by researchers at the University of Hong Kong, that expresses a protein, Cre-recombinase, that inactivates Dicer in postnatal Purkinje cells. The offspring of these mice were then bred with a mouse engineered to express green fluorescent proteins when Dicer is deleted. In this way, the researchers were able to follow Dicer deletion and could then test for the presence of different microRNAs known to be expressed in the adult brain.
They found that some microRNAs were deleted right away but that others took longer, and during this time, the cells were basically stable although slowly degenerating. Eventually the “mice showed symptoms reminiscent of those seen in humans with neurodegenerative disorders, and by 18 weeks almost all of the Purkinje cells had died,” Schaefer says.
Whether changes in specific microRNAs contribute to human disorders remains to be seen, she says, but now researchers have ways to test that. They can compare microRNA expression between normal and diseased human brains and they can knock out specific microRNAs in their mouse model to determine which may be playing the more critical roles. “Now we have a roadmap for identification of genes which might be involved in neurodegeneration and that is very exciting,” Greengard says.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Rockefeller University.

Brain's 'Hearing Center' May Reorganize After Implant Of Cochlear Device

2007-07-27T19:58:00.000-04:00

Brain's 'Hearing Center' May Reorganize After Implant Of Cochlear Device

Science Daily — Cochlear implants--electronic devices inserted surgically in the ear to allow deaf people to hear--may restore normal auditory pathways in the brain even after many years of deafness.
The results imply that the brain can reorganize sound processing centers or press into service latent ones based on sound stimulation. Jeanne Guiraud, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Lyon, Edouard Herriot University Hospital, and Advanced Bionics, a firm that makes cochlear implants, worked with deaf subjects from 16 to 74 years old and found that younger subjects and those with a shorter history of deafness showed changes that mirrored patterns in people with normal hearing more closely.
"The results imply a restoration to some extent of the normal organization through the use of the cochlear implant," says Manuel Don, PhD, of the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles. "They also claim to find ties between the degree of restored organization and a hearing task. Such ties are of enormous importance in evaluating cochlear implant benefits." Don was not involved in this study.
Guiraud and her team studied 13 profoundly deaf adults who had received cochlear implants, on average, eight months before the study. Electrical stimulation to the ear allowed the team to locate where in the brain's auditory cortex various frequencies were processed and come up with a map for these tones. Their results demonstrated that in people who had cochlear implants for at least three months, normal frequency organization was somewhat restored.
"Our results strongly suggest that the recipient's auditory cortex presents a tonotopic organization that resembles the frequency maps of normal-hearing subjects," says Guiraud.
In the future, the team hopes to determine in detail the ways in which these maps may change as a result of cochlear implants by studying subjects immediately following implant surgery.
The work was a supported by a grant from Advanced Bionics Europe. The results were published in the July 18 Journal of Neuroscience.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Society for Neuroscience.

New bionic ear uses smart plastic
Judy Skatssoon
ABC Science Online

Tuesday, 12 April 2005
Hearing loss can cause cells in the ear to die
The bionic ear technology, which coaxes nerve cells to regrow, may also one day help to repair damaged spinal cords (Image: iStockphoto)
Scientists are building a new bionic ear coated in a smart plastic that boosts the growth of nerve cells in the inner ear when it's zapped with electricity.
The technology, which also has potential for healing spinal cord injuries, is being developed at the Australian Centre for Medical Bionics and Hearing Science, part of Melbourne's Bionic Ear Institute.
Collaborator, Professor Gordon Wallace of the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute at the University of Wollongong, says the polymer polypyrrole is unusual because unlike most plastics, it can conduct electricity.
It can also act as a host structure for the molecules that stimulate nerve regrowth, known as neurotrophins.
Passing a small electric current through the plastic releases the molecules and helps to reverse the death and degeneration of hearing cells that occurs after prolonged deafness.
"We can encompass these molecules in the polymer structure," Wallace says.
"We inject small amounts of electricity into the structure and that causes the release of the molecules and makes them available to the nerve cells.
"The polymer controls the timing of release, and where the molecules are released, to maximise interaction with nerve cells."
The device would be powered by a small battery.
Wallace says the cell regrowth will create a better connection between the brain and the device, improving hearing when there's a noisy background and making listening to music easier.
Other applications of polypyrrole including batteries, biosensors, artificial muscles and generating solar energy, he says.
Encouraging cells to grow back
Wallace says his team has already demonstrated in the lab that it's possible to incorporate a particular neurotrophin, NT3, into the polymer and stimulate its release.
Once released, NT3 induced damaged nerve cells to grow again, he says.
He says the next step for developing the new bionic ear is improving the structure of the plastic to ensure the growth factors are released within the right time frame and in the right amount.
"When this is ascertained it would be programmed into the material," he says.
A senior researcher at the bionics centre, which was officially opened by Prime Minister John Howard this week, says the technology is also being investigated for spinal cord repair.
Dr Adrian Cameron says a polymer-coated tube-shaped device loaded with growth factors could be implanted at the site of a spinal cord injury to help mend damaged nerve fibres, or axons.
"What we want to do is to reconnect the broken axons above the injury with the intact motor control centres below the injury," he says.
"We intend to use the polymer growth factor device as bridge."

How Can You Distinguish a Budding Pedophile From a Kid With Real Boundary Problems?

2007-07-26T08:28:00.000-04:00

How Can You Distinguish a Budding Pedophile From a Kid With Real Boundary Problems?
By MAGGIE JONES

In the early 1980s, a therapist named Robert Longo was treating adolescent boys who had committed sex offenses. Their offenses ranged from fondling girls a few years younger than they were to outright rape of young children. As part of their treatment, the boys had to keep journals — which Longo read — in which they detailed their sexual fantasies and logged how frequently they masturbated to those fantasies. They created “relapse-prevention plans,” based on the idea that sex-offending is like an addiction and that teenagers need to be watchful of any “triggers” (pornography, anger) that might initiate their “cycle” of reoffending. And at the beginning of each group session, the boys introduced themselves much as an alcoholic begins an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: “I’m Brian, and I’m a sex offender. I sexually offended against a 10-year-old boy; I made him lick my penis three times.”
Sex-offender therapy for juveniles was a new field in the 1980s, and Longo, like other therapists, was basing his practices on what he knew: the adult sex-offender-treatment models. “It’s where the literature was,” Longo, a founder of the international Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told me not long ago. “It’s what we’d been doing.”
As it turns out, he went on to say, “much of it was wrong.” There is no proof that what Longo calls the “trickle-down phenomenon” of using adult sex-offender treatments on juveniles is effective. Adult models, he notes, don’t account for adolescent development and how family and environment affect children’s behavior. Also, research over the past decade has shown that juveniles who commit sex offenses are in several ways very different from adult sex offenders. As one expert put it, “Kids are not short adults.”
That’s not to say that juvenile sexual offenses aren’t a serious problem. Juveniles account for about one-quarter of the sex offenses in the U.S. Though forcible rapes, the most serious of juvenile sex offenses, have declined since 1997, court cases for other juvenile sex offenses have risen. David Finkelhor, the director of Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, and others argue, however, that those statistics largely reflect increased reporting of juvenile sex offenses and adjudications of less serious offenses. “We are paying attention to inappropriate sexual behavior that juveniles have engaged in for generations,” he said.
The significant controversy isn’t whether there is a problem; it’s how to address it. In other words, when is parental or therapeutic intervention enough? What kind of therapy works best? And at what point should the judicial system get involved — and in what ways?
Longo and other experts have increasingly advocated for a less punitive approach. Over the past decade, however, public policy has largely moved in the opposite direction. Courts have handed down longer sentences to juveniles for sex offenses, while some states have created tougher probation requirements and, most significant, lumped adolescents with adults in sex-offender legislation.
The best-known example is Megan’s Law. Since 1994, federal legislation has required many sex offenders to register with the police, which can aid sex-crime investigations. But Megan’s Law, which went into effect in 1996, mandates that law enforcement also notify the public about certain convicted offenders in their communities. One of the ways states do this is through publicly accessible Web sites. At least 25 states now apply Megan’s Law, also known as a community-notification law, to juveniles, according to a recent survey by Brenda V. Smith, a law professor and the director of the National Institute of Corrections Project on Addressing Prison Rape at American University’s Washington College of Law. That means on many state sex-offender Web sites, you can find juveniles’ photos, names and addresses, and in some cases their birth dates and maps to their homes, alongside those of pedophiles and adult rapists.
Now that concept has reached the federal level. In May, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales proposed guidelines for the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, named for a 6-year-old boy (and son of John Walsh, the host of TV’s “America’s Most Wanted”) abducted from a Florida store and murdered in 1981. Among other things, the legislation, sponsored by Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican, and signed into law by President Bush last year, creates a federal Internet registry that will allow law enforcement and the public to more effectively track convicted sex offenders — including juveniles 14 and older who engage in genital, anal or oral-genital contact with children younger than 12. Within the next two years, states that have excluded adolescents from community-notification laws may no longer be able to do so without losing federal money.
Community notification makes people feel protected — who wouldn’t want to know if a sex offender lives next door? But studies have yet to prove that the law does, in fact, improve public safety. Meanwhile, when applied to youths, the laws undercut a central tenet of the juvenile justice system. Since juvenile courts were created more than 100 years ago, youths’ records have, with exceptions in some states, been sealed and kept out of the public’s hands. The theory is that children are less responsible for their actions, and thus less blameworthy, than adults and more amenable to rehabilitation. But by publishing their photographs and addresses on the Internet, community notification suggests that juveniles with sex offenses are in a separate, distinct category from other adolescents in the juvenile justice system — more fixed in their traits and more dangerous to the public. It suggests, in other words, that they are more like adult sex offenders than they are like kids.
Last year, an eighth grader at a Delaware middle school arrived one morning to find kids in the hallway pointing at him and snickering. At first, the boy, Johnnie, who asked me protect his privacy by identifying him by a friend’s nickname for him, was confused. He thought it might be because of his new haircut. Then one kid called him a rapist. Another jeered, “Hey, aren’t you a sex offender?” One teenage boy threatened to beat him up.
Four years earlier, when Johnnie was 11, he put his hand on his 4-year-old half-sister’s vagina over her underwear. And then several months later, he told her to perform oral sex on him, which she did. When Johnnie’s mother found out, she called the police. She may have felt she could no longer control Johnnie, who, according to his grandmother, both adored his sister (he made pancakes and snowmen for her) and tormented her (he punched and bullied her). Perhaps his mother also worried that her son might abuse other children. It’s hard to know what went through her mind that day, because she never explained it to Johnnie or to her own mother, with whom Johnnie eventually went to live. And she did not return my phone calls.
Johnnie, who has sandy-colored hair and freckles, did not resort to violence or use a weapon, according to police records, and when a detective interviewed him, the fourth grader admitted what he’d done. Soon after, Johnnie was sentenced to a residential juvenile-sex-offender program, where he spent 16 months. By the time he was released, he was considered a role model in his program, according to records that Johnnie’s therapist, Marc Felizzi, of the Delaware Guidance Services, received from the facility. His mother, though, had little interest in reuniting the family, so Johnnie bounced from a foster home to his uncle’s before going to live with his grandmother and then, ultimately, his father.
It was just two months after starting at a new school near his grandmother’s house that Johnnie’s childhood offense became the gossip of the hallways. It wasn’t entirely clear how kids found out. Johnnie heard that the mother of a girl to whom he’d written a love note discovered him on the Delaware Sex Offender Central Registry Web site. The mother may have typed in Johnnie’s last name. Or she may have been scanning her ZIP code for local sex offenders. In any case, she found him. And there on the Internet was a photo of Johnnie when he was 11, along with his address, birth date, height and weight at the time of his offense. Below that were two police charges: one was a misdemeanor for the touching over his sister’s underwear; the other was a felony for engaging his sister in oral sex, which because it involved mouth-to-genital contact was charged as “rape second degree.”
In dozens of interviews, therapists, lawyers, teenagers and their parents told me similar stories of juveniles who, after being discovered on a sex-offender registry, have been ostracized by their peers and neighbors, kicked out of extracurricular activities or physically threatened by classmates. Experts worry that these experiences stigmatize adolescents and undermine the goals of rehabilitation. “The whole world knows you did this bad thing,” notes Elizabeth Letourneau, an associate psychology professor at the Medical University of South Carolina and an expert on juveniles with sex offenses. “You could go to treatment for five years; you could be as straight as an arrow; but the message continues to be: You are a bad person. How does that affect your self-image? How does that affect your ability to improve your behaviors?”
It wasn’t long ago that therapists and victim advocates had to fight to get the justice system to take sex abuse by adults, much less by juveniles, seriously. If a case even made it past the police, the charges were often dismissed in court, notes Craig Latham, a Massachusetts psychologist who treats sex offenders and consults with law enforcement.
Around the same time, though, the victims’ rights movement began to burgeon, bringing much-needed attention to sexual abuse. Rape-crisis lines and centers were created; the federal government started providing states with money for victim services; and men, women and children went public with their stories about being sexually assaulted.
Robert Longo, now the director of clinical services at Old Vineyard Behavioral Health Youth Services, a psychiatric hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C., remembers appearing on “Donahue” and “Oprah” in the 1980s, making pronouncements like: “Sex offenders can’t be cured.” And: “Victims are damaged for life.” Neither statement was based on good research, he now says. “We were desperately trying to bring attention to the issue,” Longo says of himself and other sex-abuse experts, “and we went way overboard.”
Sex crimes became a media sensation. Though the overwhelming majority of offenses against kids — 80 percent to 90 percent — are committed by someone the victim knows, the news media focused on the rare and very chilling rapes and murders of young girls by strangers. Children as sex offenders became the next obvious step in our national anxiety about sex crimes, Philip Jenkins, author of “Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America” and a professor of religious studies and history at Pennsylvania State University, told me. “First it’s adult predators, and then it’s what about children? To draw attention, you have to up the ante. The issue moves up a notch, and you can’t move it back easily.”
Among states that do include juveniles in community-notification laws, there is little consistency in terms of who is eligible and for how long. Some jurisdictions allow for judicial discretion on whether to include juveniles or permit youths to petition to be removed after a number of years. In some states, a juvenile has to be 14 to be listed on public sex-offender registries. In others, they may be eligible at 10 or 12. And while some states list only a handful of youths on their Web sites, Kansas currently includes about 340 on the Internet, and Texas lists more than 3,400 people for offenses committed when they were juveniles. Meanwhile, in South Carolina, anyone — whether adult or child — who is placed on its Internet registry is there for life.
When I heard about these juveniles, I wondered who they were and what types of offenses they’d committed. How old were they? Had they used violence or assaulted numerous children? Would they become adult offenders? I asked Mark Chaffin, one of the country’s leading experts and the director of research at the Center on Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. Chaffin notes that while most juveniles who have committed sex offenses are boys around 13 or 14, in other ways they are not a homogeneous population. Though a small percentage — no one knows how many — will become adult rapists or pedophiles, the vast majority, 90 percent or more, will not, Chaffin says. Most have not committed violent assaults or abused multiple children repeatedly. Usually they have had sexual contact — from fondling to oral sex to intercourse — with a child who is at least two years younger than they are. Also, many of the juveniles have been sexually abused themselves, and as a consequence, they act out sexually, typically for a transitory period.
Some, whether they have been abused or not, are what therapists call “naïve experimenters” — overly impulsive or immature adolescents who are unable to approach girls or boys their own age; instead, they engage in inappropriate sexual acts with younger children. Others are generally delinquent juveniles for whom sexual abuse is just one of the ways they break laws, and according to studies, they are much more likely to commit a property crime than they are to commit a second sex offense. They are from working-class, middle-class and upper-middle-class homes, from intact families as well as very broken ones. There are also a number of children — how many is unclear — who are adjudicated for what some therapists would say is “playing doctor” or normative “sexual experimentation.” These are broadly considered to include sexual acts that are spontaneous, intermittent and “consensual” (legally, children under 16 usually cannot consent to sex) between youths within a couple of years age. Similarly, there are the so-called Romeo and Juliet cases, like the highly publicized one in Georgia involving Genarlow Wilson, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl at a party when he was 17. There have also been court cases of 12- and 13-year-old boys who grabbed girls’ breasts or buttocks in school hallways and were adjudicated as “sex offenders.”
It’s not hard to categorize an act in which a 12-year-old grabs a girl’s rear end. And, on the other extreme, it’s not difficult to classify a 17-year-old who rapes young children. But many juveniles adjudicated (a term used in juvenile court to indicate a determination of delinquency) for sex offenses fall somewhere in between, both in terms of ages and offenses. How, for instance, should we categorize a 13-year-old who rubbed his penis against the rectum of a 9-year-old? Or a 14-year-old who was sexually aroused and asked a kindergarten-age girl to lick his penis? Both were adjudicated in juvenile court and placed on an Internet registry. Their offenses don’t fall under what therapists consider childhood experimentation. Any parent would be very upset if her elementary-school daughter was asked to perform oral sex — much less if she did it — by an adolescent boy; and depending on the offense and circumstances, there could be lasting damage to the victim. But should these adolescents be in a different legal category than teenagers who commit robberies or physically assault young children?
Under the Adam Walsh Act, a 35-year-old who has a history of repeatedly raping young girls will be eligible for the public registry, and so will a 14-year-old boy adjudicated as a sex offender for touching an 11-year-old girl’s vagina. According to the law, the teenager will remain on the national registry for life. He will have to register with authorities every three months. And if he fails to do so — not an unlikely prospect for some teenagers, especially those without involved parents — he may be imprisoned for more than one year.
Also, under the proposed guidelines issued by the attorney general’s office in May, the law is retroactive: hundreds of juveniles who are on probation for sex offenses that preceded the law could be eligible for the nationwide registry. Regardless, the Adam Walsh Act sets only the minimum guidelines; many states will retain their own, more stringent community-notification laws for juveniles. Already the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia and other organizations are considering challenges to the law based on, among other things, the fact that juveniles are subject to the same registration requirements as adults without the benefit of a jury trial or similar protections.
Amie Zyla was 8 years old when a 14-year-old family friend named Joshua Wade molested her. Wade was adjudicated for a misdemeanor in juvenile court in Wisconsin, where he and Zyla lived, and sent to a residential juvenile facility. That was the last Zyla knew about Wade until almost a decade later, in 2005, when she heard a TV news report that Wade was arrested for sexually assaulting numerous children. At the time of his arrest, Wade was 23. Authorities said that Wade befriended children, molesting many in his apartment and secretly videotaping some of them in the shower. He is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.
It is a disturbing story that still haunts Zyla, who is now 19 and has become an advocate for including juveniles on public registries. If Wade had been subject to community notification as a teenager, parents and other community members would have been able to find out about his past record. During her testimony to the House Judiciary Sub-Committee in support of the Adam Walsh Act, Zyla said, “The simple truth is that juvenile sex offenders turn into adult predators.”
That was certainly the case for Wade, who showed signs of heading for trouble long before he became an adult. When he was at his juvenile treatment program for molesting Zyla, Wade made almost no progress and admitted that he had also assaulted numerous other children, according to records obtained by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. (His defense attorney said that the police were never able to confirm those assaults.) He was also considered a high-enough risk that he was sent to a detention facility following his juvenile program.
Experts say there are, indeed, warning signs that one teenager may be at higher risk for committing repeat offenses. Not surprisingly, a pattern of multiple sexual offenses is of greater concern than a single instance, and the prognosis for a 16- and 17-year-old is typically worse than it is for a 12- or 13-year-old boy. And though age alone doesn’t predict recidivism, a 16-year-old with a long list of criminal and antisocial behaviors, who fails to complete a court-mandated therapy program, as Joshua Wade failed to do, and has a clear and persistent sexual interest in very young children is at real risk for becoming a pedophile, experts say.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a diagnosis of pedophilia requires a person to be at least 16 years old and with “recurrent, intense, sexually arousing fantasies” over a period of six months or longer, that he acts upon with a child who is at least five years younger. Many sex-abuse therapists, however, say they’d be wary of diagnosing pedophilia in even a 16- or a 17-year-old. At 16, a teenager’s history of sexual interest is relatively short, notes David Prescott, a therapist and the president-elect of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, and it is still subject to change, compared with the history of a 40-year-old who is sexually attracted to young children.
Though there is no definitive way to predict, unfortunately, who will be the next Joshua Wade, some juvenile-assessment tests — which include questions about a youth’s sexual history, antisocial behavior and support system — can help clinicians evaluate the risk of that individual committing another offense. The questionnaires, however, have not been scientifically validated, and no single actuarial tool — even for adults — is airtight. For juveniles, the task is even trickier because, by definition, adolescence is a time of development and flux; a boy who seems at high risk for repeat offenses at 14 may no longer be so at 16. And a low-risk 14-year-old boy could become higher risk by the time he is 16. Indeed, the manual of one juvenile-assessment test highlights the complications: “No aspect of their development, including their cognitive development, is fixed or stable. In addition, their life circumstances often are very unstable. In a very real sense, we are trying to assess the risk of ‘moving targets.’ ”
The image of 15-year-old boys as moving targets is not terribly comforting for those of us worried about whether a neighborhood teenager might be a budding pedophile. And the fear of the unknown sexual predator certainly influences public policy. As Mark Green, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin and one of more than three dozen co-sponsors of the 2006 Adam Walsh Act, told me: “If we are going to have a sex-offender registry that’s a useful tool for authorities and the public, it has to cover a broad enough spectrum of offenders. I err on the side of covering more offenders because these crimes are so destructive to victims, families and communities.”
But the Adam Walsh Act and similar legislation may risk ensnaring low-risk teenagers who were never headed toward becoming adult sex offenders. Numerous studies show that recidivism for juveniles who commit sex offenses is about 10 percent. That’s lower than most other juvenile offenses, including property and drug crimes. It’s also a significantly lower recidivism rate than that of adult sex offenders, which ranges from about 25 percent to, for the most serious offenders, 50 percent or higher. (Official recidivism rates are lower than actual rates; some sex offenders commit later offenses that go undetected.) And though the Adam Walsh Act requires many first-time teenage offenders to publicly register for life, if an adolescent hasn’t committed another sex crime within five years of his first offense, research suggests that he is unlikely to do so, notes Mark Chaffin of the University of Oklahoma.
As Elizabeth Letourneau, the professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, explains, most adolescents don’t have the sexual deviancy that prompts an adult predator to offend repeatedly. “If you’re an adult child molester, you’re violating clear age and legal boundaries. You’re crossing over a lot of lines, so you have to be highly motivated,” she said. “Kids typically don’t cross as many lines when they offend; they do stupid things all the time because their brains aren’t developed.”
As research by the National Institutes of Health shows, our brains don’t finish maturing until we are in our mid-20s. In its 2005 Roper v. Simmons decision, the United States Supreme Court acknowledged this when it said that adolescents, even those as old as 17, were not eligible for the death penalty because they “cannot with reliability be classified among the worst offenders,” because of their immaturity.
The last part of the brain to develop is the frontal lobe, which is responsible for impulse control, moral reasoning and regulating emotions — the things that adolescents lack when they decide, if they make a conscious decision, to molest a younger kid. So, instead of being compulsive like pedophiles, adolescents tend to be impulsive, which means tactics like “grooming,” in which an offender woos a child for weeks or months before a sexual assault, tend not to apply to the majority of juveniles, Chaffin notes. It’s not that juveniles can’t distinguish right from wrong; it’s that they don’t perceive risks and consequences the way adults do — as parents of teenagers know all too well. “I’ve been arguing for a classification called ‘puberty in the first degree,’ ” said Timothy Kahn, a Seattle therapist who has treated and evaluated thousands of juveniles with sex offenses, “which gives them a break for what they do when they are 12, 13, 14.”
After being adjudicated for a sex offense, a juvenile is often sent to a community-based or residential treatment program, where he might spend anywhere from a few months to a few years or more. In some cases, a judge might recommend a residential program because a boy has sexually abused a family member and the family can’t adequately supervise him. But in other cases, adolescents wind up in residential programs simply because their community lacks outpatient programs.
Whether residential or outpatient, the treatment philosophies among the programs vary widely. Some focus on family dynamics and teaching boundaries and understanding social cues, as well as helping immerse juveniles in mainstream activities. Other programs embrace the model that Longo and some of his colleagues once practiced but now see as outdated, in which youths are treated much like adult offenders.
In a Newton, Kan., program, teenagers keep logs of their masturbation habits, in which they detail their fantasies and how often they masturbate to those fantasies, which therapists then read, in addition to working on anger management and doing other exercises. Some of the teenagers also participate in what’s known as psychodrama. During these exercises, a teenager stands in front of an audience of peers, parents and other relatives who attend the group therapy. Then, the teenager describes the victim — hair color, personality, age — and what the offender did.
The teenager often chooses a friend in the program to play the role of the victim, whose task it is to pepper the teenager with questions: “Why me?” “Did you molest other kids?” “I thought we were friends; will we ever be friends?” Then audience members offer their own questions, along with praise for the teenager’s bravery and honesty, during a process that lasts about an hour and a half. Jeffrey King, the director of the program, explains the rationale behind psychodrama, saying: “Sharing is a way of getting it out of their soul. If they are moving forward with treatment, they’ll be able to say, ‘I was only thinking of myself and getting my needs met.’ ”
But Longo argues that when these exercises re-enact offenses, they may shame boys and reinforce their self-image as “sex offenders” with bad, deviant traits rather than as kids needing lessons in setting boundaries and creating better relationships. Critics complain, too, that intensive monitoring of adolescents may have similar consequences. Adolescents in some therapy and probation programs, for example, aren’t allowed to go to playgrounds or swimming pools, even with adult supervision. “You can’t see what they are doing underwater,” a Colorado probation officer, DeeDee Cagle, told me, referring to the pool rule, which applies to adolescents with a single sexual offense, as well as those with multiple offenses.
But Barbara Bonner, a longtime expert on children and sex offenses and a co-director of the Adolescent Sex Offender Treatment Program at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, questions such practices. For 20 years, the program has been letting kids go on supervised visits to parks and swimming pools. “We’ve never had an incident,” she told me. Her program, whose population includes juveniles adjudicated for a wide range of offenses, does have rules: no baby-sitting; no supervisory role with young children; no pornography. But the program also makes a point of encouraging mainstream activities with peers as much as possible. “It’s different if a particular child has a history of going to the park and grabbing kids,” notes Bonner, who was recently the president of the International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. “But why make it a rule for everyone?”
Some programs also monitor adolescents by requiring them to undergo polygraphs. While the exams are not typical in other juvenile-delinquent programs, according to a 2002 report by the Safer Society Foundation, a sexual-abuse research and advocacy organization, about 44 percent of outpatient adolescent-sex-offender programs use polygraphs — up from 25 percent eight years earlier. Researchers have long questioned the reliability of the polygraph as a lie detector, and Elizabeth Letourneau says that adolescents may be particularly vulnerable to “admitting” to more than they actually did. “A polygrapher might say, ‘You failed this part; is there something else you’re not telling me?’ Then you may give up more information to try to pass.”
Judith V. Becker is a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and is considered one of the foremost experts in juvenile-sex-offender evaluation and treatment. She told me that she and her colleague Kurt Bumby have visited adolescent-sex-offender programs and asked teenagers if polygraphs ever failed to pick up lies the boys told. Yes, some of them said. Becker and Bumby also asked if the boys ever told the truth and polygraph results indicated it was a lie. That happened, too. Similarly, Mark Chaffin, co-director of an Oklahoma program for adolescents, said that teenagers there told counselors that in previous programs they felt pressured to confess to sex offenses they didn’t commit. “They thought they would never get out of there otherwise,” he told me. “It’s not an uncommon occurrence; it’s part of the culture of some facilities.”
Adolescents’ treatment progress may also be delayed by unfavorable results from a test known as PPG, or penile plethysmography, in which a band is placed around a boy’s genitals to measure his erectile response to audio or visual stimuli. Only about 10 percent of adolescent outpatient programs in the United States still use PPGs, according to a 2002 Safer Society report. “Years ago, people were using them on children as young as 11 and 12,” says Peter M. Byrne, the C.E.O. of Behavioral Technology Inc., which distributes PPG technology in the United States. Now Byrne doesn’t generally recommend PPG for anyone under the age of 16.
But according to Colorado’s state guidelines on juvenile sex offenders, adolescents 14 and older are eligible for PPGs. Cagle, the probation officer, told me that while she requires every adolescent client with a sex offense to undergo either a PPG or a much less invasive viewing time test, which measures sexual interest by the length of time someone looks at photographs, she prefers the PPG. “I like to know what kind of kiddo I’ve got,” she said. But no one has ever done a controlled trial of PPG comparing “normal” adolescents to those with sex offenses. “Kids are aroused by anything,” said Craig Latham, the psychologist, who along with other sex-abuse experts have been trying to ban the use of PPG with adolescents. “They are aroused by sitting there with this thing on their penises.”
Last October, Johnnie, the Delaware teenager on the sex-offender registry, sat slumped in a chair in his therapist’s office. After the bullying incidents at his middle school earlier in the year, he enrolled in an alternative school for juvenile delinquents. He wasn’t required to attend, and he didn’t particularly like it. But there wasn’t a lot of choice. And now he was telling his therapist, Marc Felizzi, about a new incident that took place two weeks earlier on the school bus. “He said, ‘Hey, dude, you’re a sex offender.’ And the other one said, ‘You tried to rape your sister!’ ”
Trying to catch Johnnie’s gaze, which was focused at his feet, Felizzi said: “Maybe you need to talk to a teacher and say you need to have your back covered. If you don’t tell someone at school and you smack some kid, you could pick up a new police charge,” Felizzi said. Johnnie had already been suspended for mouthing off to a teacher shortly after the incident on the school bus.
For much of his life, Johnnie has struggled with anger and depression. Twice, he spent several days in a psychiatric hospital. The first time was last year after he walked into oncoming traffic near his grandmother’s house; he told the police officer who found him that he wanted to die. The second time was several months ago. He had transferred to yet another school and sought out a counselor to tell her he felt both suicidal and so enraged at a fellow student who continually taunted him that he wanted to kill the student. “He was at the end of his rope, and he knew where to turn when he needed help,” said a school staff member who asked that I not use her name to protect Johnnie’s privacy. Johnnie, she told me, had no disciplinary problems at her school and is a “wonderful and very respectful student and a leader in the school.”
It has been five years since Johnnie sexually abused his sister and, though it is impossible to know with certainty if he has sexually assaulted anyone since then, no one I spoke to knew about any other offense: not the staff at his school, not Felizzi, not Johnnie’s prosecuting and defense attorneys. And Johnnie, whom Felizzi told me had always been forthcoming about his past, repeatedly told me he’s never sexually abused anyone else. “I was young and stupid,” he said, recalling what he did to his sister. “It was really terrible.”
In part, he said, his struggles with depression are related to his guilt about his sister, as well as his troubled relationship with his mother, who, family members told me, verbally and physically abused her son. Added to that, Johnnie was sexually assaulted by a family friend when he was 5. (In abusing his sister, Felizzi said, Johnnie “was re-enacting what was done to him.”) And then there’s the Internet registry. His first suicide attempt was two weeks after his sex offense became known at school. The day students found out, he told me, “my whole world dropped to the ground.”
Marc Felizzi has seen the pattern before. Kids Google one another’s names; curious neighbors type in their ZIP codes on sex-offender Web sites. And the problems begin. “A large part of treatment,” he said, “is coping mechanisms: ‘ What do I do when I’m found out?’ ”
I spoke to a 14-year-old girl who was on a state’s public registry. When she was 11, she repeatedly fondled a 7-year-old boy’s penis and had him touch her vagina; the incidents were then reported to authorities by a therapist. “I was going to try out for the basketball and volleyball teams,” she told me, but decided the team wasn’t worth the risk, after one of the players sent her an instant message on her computer: “What did you do? I saw you on the Internet!” While posted on the Internet registry, she said, she lost all of her friends but one. (“People think I’ve done something worse than I did,” she told me. “They think I’m not a virgin.”) She also received anonymous phone calls from guys wanting to “hook up” with her, while neighbors asked her family to move away. And her father was worried that his daughter’s Internet listing made her easy prey for adult men looking for adolescents who they assume are sexually experienced. But the girl is fortunate in one respect. She lives in a state that recently gave judges discretion about placing juveniles on public registries. Several months ago, her lawyer won a motion to have her information removed.
Lucy Berliner, the director of the Harborview Center for Sexual Assault and Traumatic Stress, in Seattle, notes that the stories of teenagers like these are only anecdotes; there are no studies on how community notification affects children’s development and self-image. And, as Berliner says, some juveniles stay on public registries for a limited period and are unscathed by it. But given that few labels carry as much stigma in our society as “sex offender,” it makes sense that some adolescents become depressed and isolated.
Certainly, one consequence of community notification is that as these adolescents move into adulthood, they may struggle to stay in the mainstream because they have a hard time finding and holding jobs. Becoming a teacher or a doctor or joining the military may be virtually impossible for those labeled as sex offenders on public registries. Even job prospects at Target, McDonald’s or any business that performs background checks aren’t promising. In interviews, people in their 20s told me that they have been either fired or turned down for jobs at retail stores, fast-food restaurants and social-service organizations after employers discovered they were adjudicated as juveniles for sex offenses.
Another unintended consequence may be that some families will remain silent to protect their children from decades on an Internet registry rather than seek intervention that would benefit both the victim and the offender. One mother I spoke to regretted not keeping quiet. When she discovered that her 11-year-old son had engaged in a sexual act with his younger sister (the mother wouldn’t specify the offense except to say that it did not involve penetration and no force was involved), she called a therapist. “I thought it was the right thing to do,” she told me. “I figured counseling would help.” She thought she knew how the law worked and that her son’s behavior might be reported to law enforcement. “But I thought: O.K., it will teach him a lesson. He’ll get a little probation, but his record will be sealed.” She didn’t realize that one year earlier her state had made children as young as 10 eligible for the state’s Internet sex-offender registry. Police entered her son’s DNA into a database. They took his fingerprints and mug shots. And they placed him on the state’s Web site. That’s where his photo and address have been for the past four years. “I feel it was my fault,” the mother told me. “I did it.”
Of all the worries the public registries create, though, the most frightening for many families is vigilantism. In 2005, a man killed two adult sex offenders he tracked through a Washington State community-notification Web site. And last year, a 20-year-old Canadian man with a list of 29 names and addresses from the Maine Sex Offender Registry went to the homes of two convicted offenders, shooting and killing them. Both men were strangers to the killer. One of the offenders had raped a child. The other was convicted for statutory rape; he was 19 when he had sex with his girlfriend, who was two weeks shy of her 16th birthday.
One question about juveniles with sex offenses that remains unanswered is what kind of treatment works best. New studies are, however, beginning to suggest potential directions. One of the most promising is what’s known as multisystemic therapy, which tries to minimize antisocial behavior by helping caregivers more effectively supervise their children. Multisystemic therapy typically focuses on improving parent-child bonds and encouraging teenagers’ involvement in class work and after-school activities, as well as healthy friendships. Two small, controlled studies with juveniles who committed sex offenses suggest MST reduces recidivism more effectively than individual psychotherapy and some other treatments. In a third, a federally financed clinical trial led by Elizabeth Letourneau, researchers are looking at 127 juveniles adjudicated for sex offenses, between ages 11 and 18, and their families. About half of the kids were randomly assigned to multisystemic therapy and half to a traditional sex-offender treatment program that focuses on, among other things, relapse prevention. Both programs are outpatient. (No published study, Letourneau notes, has ever shown that residential programs — which she and other critics contend are overused — are more effective than less costly outpatient programs.) According to Letourneau, early results from the MST study are promising.
And last year, Mark Chaffin, at the University of Oklahoma, and other researchers published the results of a longitudinal study of 135 children ages 5 to 12 who had sexual-behavior problems and participated in a therapy program. The program took just 12 weeks, during which counselors addressed inappropriate sexual behavior, concrete sexual-behavior rules, self-control techniques and sex education. Given that the children were under 13, it’s hard to know if the results can be replicated with older adolescents, though Chaffin has just such a study under way. But in the study of younger children, the 10-year recidivism rate was 2 percent. “You can’t get a whole lot lower than that,” Chaffin said. “That’s a functional definition of a cure.”
Best, of course, would be stopping juveniles before they offend. While some sex education in schools includes lessons on how kids can avoid perpetrators, it is much less common for children to learn how to avoid committing sex offenses themselves. “It is morally wrong,” said Timothy Kahn, the Seattle therapist, “to do nothing to educate kids about the laws and then have them have to register as sex offenders and they haven’t even hit puberty.”
In his book “An American Travesty: Legal Responses to Adolescent Sexual Offending,” Franklin E. Zimring, a professor of criminal law at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests, as an alternative to community-notification laws for juveniles something known as “time-conditional record sealing.” Under Zimring’s plan, if an adolescent with a sex offense goes on to commit another offense as an adult, law enforcement would be able to access the juvenile records to help assess the offender’s recidivism risk and make judicial decisions accordingly. “The number of career sex offenders who would be able to hide official records behind the protective policies of juvenile justice would fast approach zero,” Zimring writes. “The number of low-risk juveniles kept from permanent stigma would be quite large.” Other experts have suggested a restricted registration system that would allow certain child-centered employers — like camps and schools — to access high-risk juveniles’ records for several years to help ensure that those adolescents and young adults don’t work with children.
As Zimring notes, keeping juveniles off public Internet registries isn’t just a civil rights issue. “It’s also about bringing some kind of rationality into law enforcement,” he says, given that including low-risk offenders in these laws adds to police workloads with no proof that it’s actually effective.
In the meantime, if thousands of juveniles do accumulate on state and federal Internet registries, Mark Chaffin argues that at the very least we should be studying the impact on these adolescents. “We’d need to follow these kids for 10 years to look at their different experiences and outcomes,” he said. “Frankly, we could easily find these policies do more harm than good.”
As Elizabeth Letourneau told me recently, “If kids can’t get through school because of community notification, or they can’t get jobs, they are going to be marginalized.” And marginalized people, she noted, commit more crimes.
Maggie Jones is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her last article was about boys in Japan who refuse to leave their homes.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

The market for CDs has collapsed

2007-07-26T08:09:00.000-04:00

Millencolin

Off the record
by Robert Sandall
In recent years, the economics of pop music have been upended. The market for CDs has collapsed, and not even the rise of legal downloading can offset the damage to record companies. Meanwhile, demand for live performances has rocketed
Robert Sandall worked as director of communications for Virgin Records from 1996 to 2002

There is a story doing the rounds in the US that says a lot about the state of the music business. It concerns a young rock band who decided to stop selling their CDs at concerts. Selling CDs has, for many years, been a good way for an act to reclaim the margin that would otherwise have been snaffled by a retailer. But it made no sense to this band once they discovered that by selling CDs for $10 they were cannibalising sales of their $20 T-shirts.
There are two points to note here. First, that a simple garment with a logo stamped across it, probably manufactured for pennies in a third-world sweatshop, now costs twice as much as an album of digitally pristine, highly wrought music recorded in a state of the art western studio. Second, most bands, however successful, now make their money from live work and the merchandising opportunities that go with it, rather than from recordings.
The record companies know this, which is why when EMI re-signed Robbie Williams in 2002, the £80m deal guaranteed the label a share in the profits generated by Williams's tours. Such spinoffs are often now make or break issues in contractual negotiations. Gerd Leonhard, a music business consultant, predicts that by 2010, recorded music sales will make up only 30 per cent of a successful label's revenues. The rest will be generated by artists' extra-musical brand extensions. Like those $20 T-shirts.
The artists are getting wise to this new value chain. One of the hottest new names to emerge recently, the rave metal band Enter Shikari, have refused to sign any of the deals they have been offered, instead releasing their debut album Take to the Skies on their own label, Ambush Reality, in March. In the past, these tiny, so-called "indie," labels have usually been funded by majors anxious to covertly purchase credibility for their products with a young audience. The celebrated label Creation, home to Oasis and other Britpop stars in the 1990s, was owned entirely by Sony. Had it not been, the marketing spend which turned Oasis into a huge international draw would not have been available.
But this is not the case with Ambush Reality. The marketing of Take to the Skies was undertaken largely by the band themselves, who have played nearly 700 gigs since forming in St Albans in 2003. Word of mouth, coupled with the inevitable presence on MySpace, has done the rest. In November 2006, they became only the second unsigned band (after the Darkness) to sell out the 2,000-capacity Astoria in London. Five months later, Take to the Skies entered the British album chart at number four. In May, Enter Shikari started out on their first American tour.
They have set an inspirational example, not least by their single-minded prioritising of their performances. Groups used to tour, often at a loss, to stimulate sales of their latest album. Now it's the other way around. Hence the widely reported decision earlier this year by the Crimea, a band previously signed to Warner Bros, to release their new album as a free download. The band explained this not as an anarcho-hippie gesture in support of the principle that music ought to be free, but as a sensible promotional tactic. Their hope is that by disseminating their music online, they will expand their fan base and increase their returns from touring. Having seen the small size of the cheques they got from Warner, they know where not to look for their future income.
This view is shared by a far more famous former Warner artist: Prince. Anyone attending his shows at the London O2 arena in August will receive a free copy of his latest CD, Planet Earth, as did anyone who bought the Mail on Sunday on 15th July. Prince's new label, Sony/BMG, which did not know about the deal, has withdrawn the album from British shelves.
"Record sales as we know them are in long-term decline," says music business analyst Keith Jopling. "Whereas the wider music market—live, merchandising, streaming video and music social networking—is in rude health. After seven years of gradual change, we are about to see a major shift. Record companies are, at last, in a hurry to transform themselves into proper consumer marketing companies."
The catastrophic slide in the value of recorded music, and particularly in the price consumers are prepared to pay for it, has been felt hard on the high street. HMV announced in June that its profits had halved over the past year. Soon afterwards, the discount CD chain Fopp went out of business.
The industry that for years appeared to possess a licence to print money is reeling. The "big four" labels—Sony/BMG, Warner Music, EMI and Universal—have in recent years embarked on cost-cutting operations leading to major culls of staff: EMI's recorded music division has shrunk by almost half since 2001, from 9,388 employees worldwide to 4,818 today. Meanwhile, a senior industry executive reports that of this year's breakthrough British acts, just one, Mika, will make money for his record company. This decline in fortunes has been noticed in the financial markets: EMI is being bought up by private equity group Terra Firma, for £3.2bn.
Almost as soon as the offer was accepted, Terra Firma were reported to be in discussions with Warner to offload EMI's recorded music division. The side of EMI that interested Terra Firma was its song publishing arm, the world's largest and a profitable performer. It is regarded as a safer bet because the exploitation of song copyrights is not subject to the same feasts and famines as the hitmaking process. As well as receiving around 14 per cent of the profit on any CD sale, the publisher has its fingers in other pies, such as licensing fees for films, adverts or any of the other myriad outlets which now employ music. Once upon a time, EMI's publishing arm accounted for about a third of the market value of the whole group. Now it's the only part that's worth anything to the people who venture their capital. It is no coincidence that Terra Firma's offer valued EMI at about a third, in real terms, of what it nearly fetched ten years ago when a sale to its competitor Universal was mooted.
That decline roughly mirrors what has happened over the same period to the retail price of new—as opposed to catalogue reissue—CDs. When EMI's subsidiary Virgin put out the Spice Girls debut album in 1996, it sold for around £13 in Britain, from which the company cleared more than £5 in profit. New CDs now seldom cost more than £9, from which the label can expect to make £2, if it is lucky.
Although Britons still buy more CDs per head than anyone else—2.7 in 2006—the market for recorded music is in rapid decline. In the first quarter of 2007, the market for the top-selling 200 CDs in Britain shrank by 20 per cent compared to the same period in 2006. In the US, CD sales in 2007 are down by 15 per cent, in France 25 per cent, in Canada 35 per cent. The German market, once the largest in Europe, is now no bigger than that of the Netherlands.
The market for digital downloads was worth around $981m in the US last year, around a tenth of the value of the CD market. Yet the labels' great hope is that the slump in demand for physical formats will be offset by growth in the download market. This looks wildly optimistic. The latest figures from the US reveal that while paid-for downloads are increasingly popular—up 74 per cent in 2006 on the previous year—the surge in demand is slowing. And while the total value of music sales across all formats remained more or less static in 2004 and 2005, it declined by more than 6 per cent in 2006. The trade body of the American record industry, the RIAA, optimistically predicts that by 2011, the global online music market will be worth $6.6bn; three times what it currently amounts to. This situation will, as the RIAA delicately puts it, "leave the industry better positioned to offset physical sales."
Yet however it finds itself in 2011, the underlying truth is that recorded music, on or offline, has moved from being a high-margin, "high-end" product to a low-margin, low-prestige commodity. The album, for 35 years the basic, pricey unit of the industry—such a handy way of getting fans to shell out for ten songs when they might have wanted only three or four—increasingly seems, for young consumers, a clunky, old-fashioned and uneconomical way of building a music library on a portable MP3 player.
Far better to download songs; at the iTunes music store, tracks retail for 99 cents in America and 79p here. In Britain, at the end of the 1990s, CD singles sold for £4. Of that, the artist received about 50p, while the record company took as much as £1. Under the new web-style arrangement, the artist is lucky to get 10p, and the company might gross 30p.
This destruction of the value of individual recordings explains why, even if we were to carry on buying recorded music in the quantity we did at the end of the last century, the prospects for suppliers would still be bleak. However high the record companies worldwide pile their audio products in future, the only way they will be able to sell them is cheap. In Britain, the 10 per cent of singles still sold on CD now retail for just £1.49.
Record company insiders are aghast at the demise of what was, for the last two decades of the 20th century, their golden goose. And some of them know that they were partly responsible for killing it.
Arriving on the market in 1982, just after record sales began to revive following a three-year downturn, the compact disc ushered in the biggest boom in profits the record companies had known since 7" singles gave way to 12" LPs in the late 1960s. The CD persuaded many music fans to replace their vinyl collection with digital copies of music they had already paid for. And the rise of the CD permitted record companies to double the price of their basic product without incurring a huge uplift in costs. Even allowing for the royalty paid to the joint inventors of the CD—Philips and Sony—the discs were soon being manufactured for little more than it cost to crank out vinyl records on ancient presses.
Initial anxieties that consumers might be resistant to the more expensive format proved unfounded. Research revealed that music fans were more worried about the cost of acquiring a CD player than by the price of the discs. Paying £12 (£30 in today's money) for an album that, nearly everybody agreed, sounded better and was easier to manipulate than a vinyl LP, didn't feel steep in the mid-1980s. In 1994, the CD supplanted the cassette as the most popular platform for recorded music in western markets.
Yet in some ways the CD contained the seeds of its own destruction. One of the few industry moguls to raise his voice against the digital format in its early days was the late Maurice Oberstein, an American who was latterly head of the Polygram UK (later Universal) label. "Do you realise we are giving away our master tapes here?" he asked at an industry event. At the time, everybody was too busy counting the cash to listen. But as the advent of recordable CDs kickstarted a black economy in counterfeits in the 1990s, Oberstein was proved right.
Anybody who owned a CD could indeed use it as record companies had traditionally used master tapes: to clone thousands more, and quickly, using kit available on any high street. And at home, CD burning hardware on computers made it simple to produce copies in seconds. Developing markets in South America and southeast Asia collapsed under the weight of cheap copies. More damaging was the loss of the German market. Within the space of five years, the 82m Germans turned into a nation of CD copiers, paying pfennigs for albums that once cost 40DM.
Still, the market in the rest of the west, while not exactly booming, did hold up. The next development to shake up the music industry was the emergence in the late 1990s of illegal "file-sharing" websites, such as Napster. Online piracy, often identified by the media as the wrecker of the CD business, did seem a big threat at the time, although it was difficult to find hard data to support the claim that it damaged sales. Rather like the "Home Taping is Killing Music" campaign mounted by record companies in the 1980s, the arrival of illegal file-sharing coincided with an increase in legitimate sales of recorded music in the three largest markets: America, Japan and Britain. This supported the file-sharers' defence that their activities were no more harmful to music sales than the arrival of free radio airplay in the 1930s.
Instead, it has been the iTunes era of the 21st century—the creation of a growing legitimate online trade in cheap music—that has coincided with the drop-off in CD sales. The burgeoning popularity of portable MP3 players, notably Apple's iPod, seems to be turning the compact disc into the 21st-century equivalent of shellac—the precursor to vinyl.
Yet the music industry itself must take some of the blame for the decline of the CD. For the past 15 years, free covermounts on magazines and newspapers, licensed or even paid for by record companies, have diluted the perceived value of recorded music in general and CDs in particular. The practice of dumping free music CDs on the newsstands peaked in 2004, when 454 were licensed in Britain. It may seem odd that at the same time the industry was trying, and failing, to maintain a £10 price point for its premium CD products. But for years, record companies clung to the view that covermounts were a promotional benefit to them and their artists. Just as they allowed MTV to build its business by supplying it with free videos, they did newspaper and magazine publishers a huge favour on what turned out to be a hunch.
They maintained this position even after their trade body, the BPI, showed that the only beneficiaries of such giveaways were the publications carrying them. In the mid-1990s, Mark Ellen, editor of Q, Britain's leading rock title, described a CD giveaway as "like pinning a £10 note to the cover." When the Sunday Times gave away a free CD of old Oasis songs in 2000, it registered its highest circulation ever. In the following weeks, the BPI noted, retail sales of Oasis albums actually declined. But now even newspapers and magazines seem to have lost their appetite for covermounts. Last year, Q discontinued them on the grounds that the cost of manufacturing the discs was no longer justified by a spike in circulation. No clearer sign exists that, at least for musically savvy Q readers, you can't give CDs away.
Labels now tend only to use covermounts to showcase the music of new or developing acts. But old habits die hard. In April, EMI licensed Mike Oldfield's album Tubular Bells to the Mail on Sunday. The company charged Northcliffe Newspapers £200,000 for the right to dispense 2.3m CD covermounts of Britain's 11th bestselling album ever. The deal valued Oldfield's classic—the LP that launched Virgin as a successful record label in 1973—at a little over 8p a copy. This led the head of Woolworths, one of the largest of the dwindling band of CD retailers in Britain, to ask: "And how many copies of Tubular Bells do you think we will sell this week?"
It is difficult to prove that the rising popularity and price of live music has been directly affected by the superfluity and cheapness of the recorded stuff. But it seems more than a coincidence that just as fans are spending less on the tunes they listen to at home, they will pay unprecedented sums to hear them in concert. Ticket prices, especially for A-list artists, have soared.
Back in the 1980s, a seat at a concert by a superstar cost about the same as one CD album. By contrast, last summer you could have bought Madonna's entire catalogue for less than half of what it cost to see her perform at Wembley Arena. The best seats in Madge's house went for £160. With the Rolling Stones at Twickenham last August, a decent view would have set you back £150, or £350 for a seat on the side of the stage. To put this in historical perspective, when the Stones played Wembley in 1990, they took some stick for charging £25, top whack. Now that demand for live music is on the up, nobody bothers to complain about what it costs any more. Euphoria at the news earlier this year that the Police had reformed obliterated all concerns that it would cost £90 to see them play at Twickenham in September.
This is not a local phenomenon. The $690 (£345) it cost to watch Elton John at Las Vegas in May set a new record for an American rock show. In Hong Kong last year, Robbie Williams charged £180. Even the less prosperous citizens of Chile were asked to pay £80 to watch Coldplay in Santiago's Espacio Riesco, a considerable sum in a city where the average monthly salary is around £250. Ticket inflation with smaller bands is less intense. But even a relative unknown like the American singer-songwriter Laura Veirs charged £15 for her London show at Bush Hall this July. More telling is the ubiquitous presence of touts outside low-key venues where no secondary market for tickets existed ten years ago.
Attendance at arena rock shows grew by 11 per cent in Britain last year, and looks set to rise again in 2007. The bigger the concerts, the more we seem to like them. Hence the explosion in the festival trade. In 2007, there are 450 such large-scale gatherings scheduled, ranging from the recent Glastonbury festival to the one-day Underage festival in Hackney on 10th August, which claims to be the first to be aimed exclusively at 14 to 18 year olds.
A rediscovery, or a renewed appreciation, of the communal source of music-making—and listening— must lie near the root of this upending of the music business. As personal stereos and MP3 players have grown in popularity, so has an appreciation that music isn't just something that goes on between your ears. The guitarist of the American hardcore band Anthrax expressed this rather neatly: "Our album is the menu," he explained. "The concert is the meal."
In his book e-Topia, William Mitchell relates the increasing value of shared experience to the isolating nature of electronic or online virtual worlds. "In conducting our daily transactions, we will find ourselves constantly considering the benefits of the different grades of presence that are now available to us, and weighing these against the costs," he writes. Being in the same place at the same time as a live performance, music fans appear to have decided, is the rarest and most precious presence of all.

New Orleans Recovery Is Slowed by Closed Hospitals

2007-07-24T19:56:00.000-04:00

New Orleans Recovery Is Slowed by Closed Hospitals
By LESLIE EATON

NEW ORLEANS — At the tip of Bayou St. John in the Mid-City neighborhood here, the brown and white bulk of Lindy Boggs Medical Center looms behind a chain-link fence. Nineteen people died at the medical center after Hurricane Katrina, and now the hospital itself is dead, sold to developers who plan to replace it with a shopping mall.
On the surrounding streets — Bienville and Canal and Jefferson Davis — lies the wreckage of a once-bustling medical corridor. Doctors’ offices sit empty behind five-foot-high water marks, and nearby clinics wait to be demolished. In back of one medical building, a gaping refrigerator still holds jars of mayonnaise and Mt. Olive Dill Relish.
Harder to see, but just as tangible, people here say, are the other ripple effects of the flood and the closed hospital: workers displaced, houses for sale and, of course, patients forced to seek health care many miles away. If they have returned to New Orleans at all, that is, given the grave wounds to the health care system.
“I’ve been telling people, don’t bring your parents back if they are sick,” said Dr. David A. Myers, an internist who lived and worked in Mid-City before the flood and has moved his home and practice to the suburbs.
Of all the factors blocking the economic revival of New Orleans, the shattered health care system may be the most important — and perhaps the most intractable.
Except for tourism and retailing, health care was the city’s biggest private employer, and it paid much higher wages than hotels or stores. But there are now 16,800 fewer medical jobs than before the storm, down 27 percent, in part because nurses and other workers are in short supply.
Only one of the city’s seven general hospitals is operating at its pre-hurricane level; two more are partially open, and four remain closed. The number of hospital beds in New Orleans has dropped by two-thirds. In the suburbs, half a dozen hospitals in adjacent Jefferson Parish are open — but are packed.
Fixing the city’s health care system “is critical both for the short and the long term,” said Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. “Short-term, having confidence that the health care residents need will be available and accessible is vital for folks who are returning,” Mr. Kopplin said. “Long-term, it’s important for employers — and health care is a huge business in New Orleans."
Studies suggest that hundreds of doctors never returned. And some of those who did, especially specialists and young physicians, are leaving, said Dr. Ricardo Febry, president of the Orleans Parish Medical Society, which has lost more than 200 of its 650 members. The exodus has “been a steady trickle,” Dr. Febry said.
The city’s mortality rate appears to have risen sharply in 2006, although state and local officials disagree about the level and persistence of the increase.
With the stress of life in the flood-ravaged city, the limited health care and insurance, the lingering mold and the discomfort of living in trailers, doctors report that the patients they see are often far sicker than those they treated before the storm. And even residents with health insurance can have a difficult time finding someone to treat them.
Government officials and civic leaders are floating plans for the future of the city’s medical system, for a state-of-the-art hospital, for a cutting-edge system to cover the uninsured, even for a “bio-innovation center” that would be an engine for economic growth. The question is what will happen in the meantime, which is likely to be many years long.
“We have to find a way to survive to that point, to provide care, or our city will collapse,” said John J. Finn, president of the Metropolitan Hospital Council of New Orleans.
Waiting for Care
The problems with health care hit hardest on the poor and the newly uninsured, but they also affect doctors and patients, politicians and entrepreneurs, the displaced and the returned — and everyone at any level who has the misfortune to turn up in a jam-packed emergency room.
Consider the case of Bernadine R. Fields, 50, who learned firsthand how far people have to go for major medical care. A supervisor of city 911 dispatchers, Ms. Fields was among the many laid off after the storm.
The money she had saved for her retirement went for repairs to her house in New Orleans East. By last July, she could no longer afford the $367 a month it cost to continue her health insurance, or all the medicines she needed to treat her high blood pressure, or the $250 it would cost to see a doctor.
So she kept ending up in one of the few open emergency rooms, waiting for hours. After one of these episodes in April, she was told she needed transfusions to treat anemia — but there was not a bed available in New Orleans for an uninsured patient.
Ms. Fields finally got the treatment she needed — but only after an ambulance took her to the state-run hospital in Baton Rouge, 80 miles from her home and family. She stayed there four days.
“I devoted 15 years of my life to serving the public,” she said, “and when I need to be served, there is no one to count on.”
Ms. Fields’s neighborhood in the eastern section of the city, like other stretches of town, cannot recover unless medical care becomes available there, officials say, and neither can large sections of the economy. Doctors and hospitals, though, are reluctant to return unless the population does.
“I’m just hoping and praying nobody dies,” said Frederick C. Young Jr., president of the Methodist Health System Foundation, which is working with the city to try to reopen a hospital there.
The sharp contraction in the health care industry has economic effects, too, for coffee shops and florists and medical-supply companies. Marshall F. Gerson, whose family has owned the Ellgee Uniform Shop downtown for almost 70 years, said sales of scrubs and other medical uniforms had fallen to about half their pre-storm level.
“At this time of day when times were good, it was bustle-bustle here,” said Mr. Gerson, 63, standing in his shop late one recent afternoon. Now, “the foot traffic is almost nil.”
By working harder and selling more industrial and restaurant uniforms, Mr. Gerson has kept his business going but, he said, “I’m not a happy person when I get home.”
An Era’s End
The future of Mr. Gerson’s shop — and in many ways the future of health care in New Orleans — is bound up in the thorny question of what if anything will replace the hospital known as Big Charity.
Since it opened in 1939, Charity Hospital’s imposing building downtown has provided basically all the medical care — emergency, acute and basic — for the city’s poor, and served as a training ground for generations of doctors.
Despite some community protests, Louisiana State University, which ran the hospital, closed it permanently after the storm, saying it was too damaged by basement flooding. The state plans to replace it with a $1.2 billion complex that officials believe will attract insured patients as well as the poor, will also care for veterans and will serve as an economic catalyst for the city. But the hospital’s future is now the subject of a debate about the best use of federal health care dollars, even after the state agreed to pay $300 million to get the project off the ground.
The federal government would prefer that the state build a small hospital and use its federal dollars to buy private insurance for the poor. Dr. Frederick P. Cerise, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals, said that plan would help less than half of the uninsured.
On a positive note, the city’s trauma center, which treats gunshot wounds and other serious emergencies, reopened in February at University Hospital downtown, which like Charity is part of the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans. But the number of beds at University remains limited, and the building is so outdated that it will eventually have to be replaced, said Dr. Cathi Fontenot, the medical director.
In the meantime, the sick have to go somewhere. Often, that somewhere is Ochsner Medical Center, a huge private hospital complex in the western suburb of Metairie that looks like a mall, with a computerized grand piano that entertains patrons in a sunny atrium.
Before Hurricane Katrina, patients waited just 20 minutes to be seen, said Dr. Joseph Guarisco, chairman of emergency services at Ochsner, and surveys found that 99 percent were satisfied with their care.
After the storm, the number of people coming to the emergency room jumped, on some days reaching nearly twice the pre-hurricane volume. The number of psychiatric patients soared.
The uninsured, who had made up a small percentage of emergency patients at Ochsner, began accounting for more than a quarter of emergency room patients. Waiting times routinely topped an hour. The patient satisfaction rate fell to 34 percent.
This year, Dr. Guarisco reorganized the emergency room and cut the waiting time back to about 20 minutes.
But the other problems remain. “The hospital, post-Katrina, struggled financially,” Dr. Guarisco said, “and it still struggles to this day.”
Bad Time for a Fracture
No one thinks that emergency rooms are a good way to provide basic everyday health care, but government efforts to attract doctors and to open more neighborhood clinics have gotten off to a slow start.
Volunteers and nonprofit groups are trying to fill the breach, treating thousands of patients a month in more than a dozen low-cost clinics in the city. In many ways, the clinics have been a success for their patients, as they are elsewhere in the country, but they represent just a drop in the city’s ocean of medical need, health officials say.
Some were open before the storm but have expanded; others are new, like the Common Ground Health Clinic, which provides free medical care four days a week in an old corner store in the Algiers neighborhood, across the Mississippi from the French Quarter. People wait outside in the heat for the clinic to open, and it is always jammed.
One recent Tuesday, the patients included a city employee with a neck problem, a college student with uncontrolled menstrual bleeding, a bartender with high blood pressure and glaucoma, and Nellie M. Lindsey, 54, a scrap hauler who was suffering from what she called “cancer stones.”
Before the storm, Ms. Lindsey said, she would have sought treatment at Charity, but she is so happy with the Common Ground clinic — despite the long waits — that she took her adult sons and daughter there for checkups.
Most of the people who come to the clinic hold at least one job, and many are working two, said Anne Mulle, a family nurse practitioner who came from California after the storm to help and ended up staying.
In addition to longstanding problems like hypertension, diabetes and heart disease, most patients have anxiety, depression and stress, which are even harder to treat, the clinic staff says.
“We can take the health piece off your worry list,” said Dr. Ravi Vadlamudi, a Tulane University doctor who serves as the clinic’s volunteer medical director. “But we can’t get you a better job market or housing market; we can’t do anything about the schools; we can’t do much with police problems. I can’t do anything about most of what bothers you.”
For patients who need more complicated care, including mammograms, stress tests and vision treatments, the clinic can make referrals to St. Thomas Community Health Center, which Dr. Donald T. Erwin founded in 1987. The fact that clinics are now collaborating — and recently qualified for federal financing — is a new and welcome development in what can seem like a bleak medical landscape, Dr. Erwin said.
Another change he has seen, he said, is that even people with insurance are having a hard time finding doctors, getting tests and continuing prescriptions, so are turning up at his clinic, where they now make up about a quarter of the patients.
“Before the storm?” Dr. Erwin continued, and held a thumb and forefinger together to make a zero.
Counseling and mental health treatment are notoriously hard to find in New Orleans these days, and doctors say this is an especially bad time to break a leg, given the shortage of orthopedists.
Even patients with the means to pay and doctors who have returned can face long waits for treatment. Dr. Myers, the internist who used to practice in Mid-City, said recently that a new patient would probably have to wait two months for an appointment, though he would find a way to get existing patients in sooner. He estimates that 80 percent of those patients have returned.
Dr. Myers said he had been trying for months to lure another doctor to the area to join his practice.
“This is a great opportunity for people who have courage,” he said.
So far, he has found no takers.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Brad Loper/Dallas Morning News/Corbis

No Indictment in Katrina Hospital Deaths

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By MARY FOSTER Associated Press Writer

July 24,2007 | NEW ORLEANS -- A grand jury Tuesday declined to indict Dr. Anna Pou, the surgeon accused of killing four seriously ill patients in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Pou and two nurses were arrested last summer after Attorney General Charles Foti's investigation concluded they killed four people with a "lethal cocktail" at Memorial Medical Center during the chaotic conditions that followed the August 2005 storm.
Lawyers for the three said they acted heroically by staying to treat patients rather than evacuating.
Charges against the nurses, Lori Budo and Cheri Landry, were dropped after they were compelled to testify last month before the grand jury under legal guidelines that kept their testimony from being used against them.
The Orleans Parish grand jury had been investigating the charges since March.
Pou, whose specialty is eye, ear, nose and throat surgery, gave up her private practice after she was arrested. She has been teaching at LSU medical school in Baton Rouge.
When the levees broke in New Orleans following the hurricane's hit, 80 percent of the city flooded. The lower level Memorial Medical Center was under 10 feet of water, and electricity was out across the city. Inside the hospital, the temperature topped 100 degrees.
At least 34 people died at Memorial, many from dehydration during the four-day wait for rescuers to evacuate them.
The four Pou was accused of killing ranged in age from 61 to 90 years old. Foti said they would have survived if they hadn't been given morphine and midazolam hydrochloride, central nervous system depressants.

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

Medics in hurricane deaths probe

Rescue from Memorial hospital after Katrina flooding
Hospital officials said there were problems with its evacuation
US prosecutors have called dozens of hospital staff to give evidence over claims of a euthanasia policy in dealing with Hurricane Katrina victims.
A total of 73 staff at New Orleans' Memorial Hospital were issued with the subpoenas, a spokeswoman for Louisiana's attorney general said.
Those called include doctors, nurses, and support staff.
A spokesman for Tenet Healthcare Corporation, the hospital's owner, said it was co-operating with investigators.
Previously, Tenet said that 34 patients had died after the hospital was cut off by flood waters, and 24 of those had been in a facility on the hospital grounds run by a separate company.
In all, more than 970 people are known to have died in the city and the surrounding state of Louisiana, and more than 200 in neighbouring Mississippi.
Legal rights
Louisiana attorney general's office said on Tuesday it was investigating the deaths of more than 200 people in total at nursing homes and hospitals during and after the hurricane.
Allegations range from negligence to euthanasia, spokeswoman Kris Wartelle told Reuters news agency, adding that many were likely to be unsubstantiated.
However, on Wednesday prosecutors issued the 73 summonses "for all levels of personnel" at Memorial Hospital.
"All we can say is that we had to issue the subpoenas to get those people to talk to us," Ms Wartelle said.
Two weeks ago Tenet's assistant general counsel, Audrey Andrews, sent out a memo detailing the legal rights of staff and pointing out that employees could decide whether or not they wanted to be interviewed.
The Memorial Hospital denied any attempt to dissuade people from coming forward.
"We have never discouraged any employee from working with the Louisiana attorney-general's office," CNN quoted a spokesman as saying.
Two nursing home owners were charged with manslaughter in September over the deaths of 34 people at St Rita's home.
Mable Mangano and Salvador Mangano Sr were accused of ignoring mandatory orders to evacuate residents.

One In Four New York City Adults Has Elevated Blood Mercury Levels

2007-07-24T19:51:00.000-04:00

Fish Watches Man, Chinatown, NY 1980

One In Four New York City Adults Has Elevated Blood Mercury Levels

Science Daily — A quarter of adult New Yorkers have elevated blood mercury levels, according to survey results released by the Health Department, and the elevations are closely tied to fish consumption. Asian and higher-income New Yorkers eat more fish, and have higher average mercury levels, than others both locally and nationally. These mercury levels pose little if any health risk for most adults, but may increase the risk of cognitive delays for children whose mothers had very high mercury levels during pregnancy.
Blood Mercury Levels - NYC-HANES

These findings are the latest presented from New York City's Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NYC-HANES), the first such survey ever conducted by a U.S. city. It's possible that other cities have similarly high levels, or higher ones, but haven't yet documented them. Because mercury is a concern for the health of newborns, recommendations on mercury exposure are most important for pregnant and breastfeeding women.

* Among women 20-49 years old in New York City, the average blood mercury level is 2.64 µg/L (micrograms per liter), three times that of similarly-aged women nationally (0.83 µg/L).
* Approximately one quarter of New York City women in this age group have a blood mercury level at or above 5 µg/L, the New York State reportable level.
* People who eat fish three or fewer times each week have, on average, levels of mercury below the reportable level, while average readings exceed the reportable level among those who eat fish four or more times.
* Higher-income New Yorkers have higher mercury levels; New Yorkers in the highest income bracket average 3.6 µg/L, compared to 2.4 µg/L among the lowest income group.
* Average blood mercury levels are considerably higher among New York City Asian women (4.1 µg/L); nearly half (45%) have blood mercury levels at or above the State reportable level.
* Among Asians, foreign-born Chinese women have particularly high levels compared to the rest of New York City. Two thirds (66%) have mercury at or above the reportable level.
* Foreign-born Chinese New Yorkers eat an average of three fish meals per week, compared to about one among New Yorkers overall. About one quarter of Chinese New Yorkers eat fish five or more times each week, compared to fewer than one in 15 overall.

Health officials emphasized that fish is an important part of a healthy diet, and that moderate fish consumption has many health benefits. "For most people, frequent fish consumption is not a concern," said Daniel Kass, the Health Department's Assistant Commissioner for Environmental Surveillance and Policy. "Fish is a good source of protein and heart-healthy fats, and it's low in calories and unhealthy fats."

During pregnancy, however, mercury can pass from a mother's bloodstream to a developing fetus. Small amounts can also pass into breast milk. And exposure to significant amounts of mercury early in life may cause learning problems because the brain is still developing. "No one needs to stop eating fish, but some people may need to change the type and amount they eat," Kass said. "Young children, breastfeeding mothers, and women who are pregnant or planning pregnancy should eat fish that are lower in mercury and limit fish that are higher in mercury."

To help educate New Yorkers about which fish is right for them, the Health Department has developed recommendations for pregnant and breastfeeding women and young children. They're contained in a brochure entitled "Eat Fish, Choose Wisely," which is available in English, Spanish and Chinese through 311. The brochure provides advice about how to keep eating fish while keeping mercury exposure low:

* Choose fish lower in mercury.
* Don't eat fish that are high in mercury.
* Eat fewer, or smaller, servings of fish.
* Choose smaller fish.
* Eat a variety of fish.

The brochure lists fish by their level of mercury. High-mercury fish include Chilean sea bass, grouper, king mackerel, marlin, orange roughy, shark, swordfish, tilefish, tuna steaks and sushi grade tuna. A typical adult serving size is 4 to 6 ounces (a 4-ounce fish steak or fillet is about the size and thickness of a deck of cards). A child's serving should be smaller. To estimate serving sizes, read food labels or ask about weight.

People who eat larger portions can avoid excessive mercury by eating fish less often than recommended in the chart. Restaurant servings are often much larger than the recommended serving size.

The Health Department also reminds people about contaminants in fish caught in New York City's rivers and harbors. "Young adults and women who are pregnant or nursing and young children shouldn't eat fish caught in the East or Hudson Rivers or in New York Harbor," said Kass. They may contain harmful contaminants.

Increasing Awareness and Reducing Mercury Levels

The Health Department is working to raise awareness about how to make fish a healthy part of a person's diet. The agency has:

* Developed a brochure for women of childbearing age about how to choose fish and seafood to maximize health benefits and minimize potential risks
* Initiated a study to test mercury levels in fish sold in markets serving predominantly Asian communities
* Started developing culturally relevant guidelines on healthy fish consumption for the Asian community
* Alerted health care providers to talk with their patients -- especially women who are pregnant, planning a pregnancy or breastfeeding -- about reducing mercury intake from fish

About NYC-HANES

These findings are the latest presented from New York City's first-ever Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NYC-HANES), conducted in 2004. It was modeled after the federal National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). In NYC-HANES, the Health Department assessed a variety of health issues by visiting households to gather information, and conducted face-to-face interviews, physical exams, and laboratory tests at a health center. NYC-HANES is providing the clearest picture yet of New York City's physical and mental well-being. Information released earlier this year showed that 100,000 New Yorkers have seriously out of control diabetes, and that 430,000 New Yorkers suffer from depression. Findings from NYC-HANES also helped reveal the presence of mercury in some imported skin-lightening creams.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by New York City Health Department.

Sexonomics: From Asymmetric Information to Positive Externalities

2007-07-24T19:39:00.000-04:00

Sexonomics: From Asymmetric Information to Positive Externalities

By Emily Sands Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Filed under: Health & Medicine, Lifestyle
Good information about sexual health could lead to better—or at least safer—sex.

Good sex might be priceless, but there's still a market for it.

Ideally, such a market doesn't involve money—but demand is rampant, supply plentiful, and the exchange goes on every day in every way. It involves a good bit of utility, but also, as with any investment, a certain amount of risk. And, just like every other market (aside from those in the fantasy world of economics textbooks), the market for sex is imperfect.

Most importantly, asymmetric information pervades the market for sex. With an endless variety of desires, any individual knows more about his or her own sexual habits than any would-be partner: Is he actually interested? Does she like to mix things up? Will he want to cuddle after? Asymmetric information can be exciting.

But in the age of HIV/AIDS and the list of other STDs that permeate the contemporary love market, secrets about sexual health can be dangerous mysteries. And since no one wants to contract a sexually transmitted disease, whether herpes, syphilis, or, of course, HIV, it is in each healthy individual's best interest to choose healthy partners. But how?

Asymmetric information pervades the market for sex.

Abstinence or protection is not enough. Without the anchor of a soul (or sole) mate, Americans are sleeping around, creating many vectors for disease. According to a 2004 ABC News survey, the average American sleeps with 13 partners before settling down. More partners means more risk; and despite whatever condoms, gels, and blind faith people are relying on to protect them, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that 19 million new infections still occur each year.

Proper testing is a prerequisite to stemming the spread of STDs. Yet even the most conscientious currently have only limited incentive to get tested, especially for diseases that may have no noticeable symptoms. Most syphilis cases, for example, are transmitted by individuals oblivious to their infection. And while some who do get tested carry around their lab results, most do not. The current lab printouts are cumbersome and there is a stigma associated with even bringing up the topic. This creates a serious information problem.

The solution to this problem of viruses, trust, and lust may be for potential lovers to view their exchange not as an act of passion, but rather as one of market economics. Like any profitable transaction, if done correctly both parties benefit, and no one suffers negative externalities. While there's no way to force rationality on sex any more than on any other good, one solution for those of us willing to put dispassion before passion is, for lack of a sexier description, a medical identification card. The card would be far more credible than a mere "Baby, I'm clean" and far less cumbersome than sharing a full lab printout. It has the potential to increase trust and reduce the stigma of talking about STDs in the heat of passion.

Every time someone chooses to get tested for an STD, the lab can record on a wallet-sized card the patient's name and the dates on which he or she last tested negative for various diseases. The card proves the individual's medical status, and then each can choose to share—or not to share—his or her card with potential partners. Since every person is in control of his or her own information, this system raises no privacy concerns. It is even consistent with the infamously stringent Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Anyone with a shred of responsibility and the slightest intention of sowing his or her wild oats should get tested frequently and learn to share his or her card with potential partners before the candles are lit, or the last Cuervo shot poured. More important still, those who do share must expect reciprocity. Anyone who has been sexually conservative, or practiced safe sex, will be eager to get tested and then to share his or her card in order to be "rewarded" with similarly healthy partners. This will encourage frequent testing and card-sharing, thereby creating a self-enforcing equilibrium among healthy individuals.

Granted, anyone who has already contracted an STD will hesitate to share results. But withholding the card, in and of itself, is still good information. Even though we're supposed to respect people who "plead the Fifth," choosing not to share could reasonably be interpreted as a signal of higher risk. The message would be obvious, and the would-be partner could decide in turn whether or not to withhold sex.

Interestingly, individuals who already suffer from STDs will also be better off. They will benefit directly by being able to identify partners who share their disease. Some of the most conscientious of those suffering from STDs currently self-select similarly infected partners through internet dating sites like stdmatch.net. More generally, with additional incentives to get tested, curable STDs can be caught and treated in earlier stages, thereby reducing the likelihood of serious complications including infertility, cancer, and higher susceptibility to the ravages of HIV (S.O. Aral, "Sexually Transmitted Diseases: Magnitude, Determinants, and Consequences," International Journal of STD and AIDS 12, no. 4 (2001): 211-215).

This system would also engender positive externalities, benefiting more than just those directly involved in the coupling. First, reducing the spread of STDs will reduce the risks not only for couples who choose to share cards, but also for every one of their future potential partners—and, of course, for each of those future partners' future partners, ad infinitum. Second, notwithstanding the incalculable reduction in human suffering, the card system will reduce the medical costs of treating STDs, both because the rate of infection will fall, and because more testing will catch STDs at earlier stages, when they are generally less expensive to treat. The Center for Disease Control reports that the national cost of treating STDs is currently about $14.1 billion annually—all for diseases that are, in theory, 100 percent avoidable.

When it comes to our sexual health, we should all be risk averse. Thus, by reducing unnecessary and unwanted risk, this system will boost utility. In a world that approaches sex as rationally as it approaches business, the best new pickup line just might be, "Show me your card, and I'll show you mine." Now that's sexy.

Emily Sands is a research intern in health policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

U.N. Dealings With FDNY 'Unacceptable'

2007-07-20T18:52:00.000-04:00

U.N. Dealings With FDNY 'Unacceptable'

BY BENNY AVNI - Staff Reporter of the Sun
July 20, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/58772

UNITED NATIONS — Wednesday's steam pipe explosion happened several blocks away, but judging from recent angry exchanges between city and United Nations officials, if a similar emergency occurs at the U.N. building, rescue efforts are not likely to run nearly as efficiently as they did Wednesday on 41st Street and Lexington Avenue.
Increasingly contentious haggling over issues such as legal jurisdiction and procurement rights have stymied efforts to address hundreds of violations of safety codes discovered at the U.N. building recently, more than 50 years after it was built, U.N. leaders have been slow to address them, frustrating the city's commissioner for the United Nations, Marjorie Tiven, who is Mayor Bloomberg's sister.
Months after fire department officials discovered the violations, the pace at which the United Nations is moving to tighten cooperation between the world body and the FDNY is "unacceptable," Ms. Tiven wrote last week to the U.N. undersecretary-general for management, Alicia Bárcena Ibarra.
Ms. Bárcena, a Mexican national who in January replaced the American Christopher Burnham as management chief, has been unable to act quickly to resolve bureaucratic issues in order to address the code violations, according to several sources familiar with the negotiations between the city and the United Nations. Ms. Bárcena was out of the country yesterday and could not be reached for comment.
The American U.N. mission — at times frustrated with the U.N.'s bureaucratic trip wires that prevent quick action — has tried to work with both sides to overcome issues relating, among others, to the "host country agreement" under which the U.N. operates in New York. That agreement, as well as a number of other legal and procurement issues, was raised by the U.N. to explain its inability to comply with the terms set by the FDNY.
Ms. Tiven "has the right to be frustrated," the American U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, told The New York Sun yesterday. Resolving this issue, he said, "is in the U.N.'s interest, as well as in the city's larger interest. We are working to make sure that this happens as quickly as possible."
Agreements meant to assure the U.N.'s independence of its host country are important, one U.N. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
But when it comes to the staff's safety, such legal issues should take a back seat, he said. "What do they expect, the fire brigade of Fiji to come to our rescue? We are in New York," he said.
"The city has worked with the United Nations to improve fire and safety conditions there, as it does with all property owners," a spokesman for the mayor, Jason Post, said yesterday.
In her July 13 letter to Ms. Bárcena, Ms. Tiven demanding a timetable for completing the installation and renewal of such items as smoke detectors and the antiquated sprinkler system, in order to comply with city code. She also stressed the need to improve communication between the U.N.'s own fire team and the FDNY.
The letter was written a day after one in dozens of recent meetings between city and U.N. officials that according to Ms. Tiven are conducted "as part of the city's continuing efforts to ensure that the United Nations cures the 866 fire and safety violations issued on January 22, 2007."
According to the letter, Ms. Bárcena told Ms Tiven that legal and procurement issues have prevented the activation of a direct notification system between the U.N. and the FDNY. "It is unacceptable that this relatively uncomplicated item is still outstanding nearly seven months after you were notified of this deficiency," Ms. Tiven wrote.
"The U.N. is doing everything it can to meet standards," a U.N. spokeswoman, Marie Okabe, said yesterday.
A system for direct communication to the FDNY is "completed and inspected," she said, adding that the U.N. procurement and legal team is "finalizing negotiations" to activate it.
Code violations related to expensive items such as a sprinkler system, meanwhile, are "already included in the renovation budget," Ms. Bárcena told reporters during a recent press conference.
The renovation may take a while. According to a recent audit of the $1.2 billion blueprint known as the Capital Master Plan, U.N. bureaucratic and legal issues, as well as indecision on such matters as picking contractors, have created significant delays in the renovation.
Those delays are projected to balloon the CMP budget by "at least $148 million," according to the audit.
Late last year, according to a U.N. official, the fire department asked the U.N. for technical details relating to the ability of fire trucks to enter the campus in case of emergency.
To the surprise of city officials, the U.N. legal team objected to the city's legal rights to receive such data. The entry issue was later resolved, and the fire department was even allowed to carry out an inspection of the building — the first since the landmark building was erected in 1952.
The inspection discovered 866 fire and safety violations, which the city and the United Nations have attempted to resolve ever since.

Viagra may lessen effects of jet lag

2007-07-20T17:56:00.000-04:00

Circadian fix: Viagra may lessen effects of jet lag
N. Seppa

The leading drug prescribed for male impotence can counteract the lethargy caused by a disruption in the sleep cycle, a study in rodents suggests. Sildenafil, commonly known as Viagra, helps hamsters rebound from a 6-hour clock change such as a long eastbound plane flight produces.
To mimic conditions that can lead to jet lag, scientists habituated hamsters to a daily routine of 14 hours of light and 10 hours of darkness. The researchers then abruptly switched on the lights 6 hours early and continued the same light-to-dark routine from that point onward, simulating the effects of a flight from Chicago to London.
Just before changing the hamsters' routine, the researchers injected each animal with either sildenafil or saline solution. Then, they observed how long it took the hamsters to restart their daily habit of running on a wheel.
Hamsters receiving a large single dose of sildenafil resynchronized their body clocks and resumed their usual wheel routines within 6 days. Hamsters getting a lower dose took 8 days, whereas those receiving the inert injection took 12 days, the scientists report in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Circadian rhythm in mammals is controlled mainly by neurons in the hypothalamus, says study coauthor Patricia V. Agostino, a neuroscientist at the National University of Quilmes in Bernal, Argentina. When the vision system detects light, it sends stimuli to the hypothalamus and sets off a series of events that generate wakefulness. "Light is the main synchronizer of the circadian clock," Agostino says.
A compound called cyclic guanine monophosphate (cyclic GMP) plays a role in regulating circadian rhythm. In the hamster study, scientists measured the animals' blood concentrations of cyclic GMP 45 minutes before changing the light-dark schedule. Compared with hamsters receiving saline shots, the animals injected with sildenafil had double the amount of cyclic GMP. Sildenafil shuts down enzymes that would limit cyclic GMP production, but Agostino's team isn't certain that this is how the drug restores circadian rhythm.
"This resetting of the clock seems to be novel," says pharmacologist Joseph A. Beavo of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. He cautions that the new research is only on rodents, but since sildenafil is a widely used drug, a sampling of men who travel frequently and take it might turn up any stabilizing effect on circadian rhythm, he says.
Most travelers who experience jet lag find that the effects are strongest after an eastbound flight, which shortens the day and pushes the circadian clock forward. Interestingly, sildenafil's circadian re-adjustment worked only in animals whose circadian rhythms had been advanced, Agostino says. That suggests that the drug would work for eastbound travelers and airline personnel, as well as some shift workers, she says.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Science Service, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale Group

Researchers find distinctive patterns of cancer in Asian-Americans

2007-07-20T16:42:00.000-04:00

Researchers find distinctive patterns of cancer in Asian-Americans
By Denise Grady
Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Asian-Americans, both those born in the United States and new immigrants, have distinctive patterns of cancer incidence that doctors should consider when treating them, researchers have found.
A report appearing Wednesday in the journal CA is "one of the most comprehensive summaries of cancer among Asian-Americans," according to the American Cancer Society, which publishes the journal. The report is based on information on cancer cases collected by the state of California from 2000 to 2002 and focuses on five ethnic groups: Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. The state has a large Asian population, 3.7 million, and carefully sorts its cancer data by ethnic group.
When all cancers are combined, Asian-Americans actually have lower rates than other groups in the United States. But cancer is still a major cause of death for Asians, killing more of them than heart disease. Different groups appear prone to different types of cancer.
Groups that have been in the United States the longest are likely to develop cancers that are most common there, like breast and colorectal cancer, although their rates are still significantly below those of non-Hispanic whites. The risk of those cancers may be increased by obesity, inactivity, high alcohol intake and diets rich in fat and low in fruits and vegetables, and the rates in Asians seem to rise gradually as they adopt more American habits.
Recent immigrants, by contrast, tend to suffer from the same types of cancer that are predominant in their native countries, like stomach and liver cancer. In developing countries, those cancers are often caused by chronic infections with certain bacteria and viruses that are routinely treated or prevented in the United States.
"I was surprised to see the diversity in cancer among the ethnic groups," said Melissa McCracken, an epidemiologist with the cancer society and the first author of the report. "The group is not homogeneous. Clinicians need to be aware of that and to really extend their scope of attention to cancer due to infectious agents, not just typical chronic conditions."
Among the more striking findings in the report are that Vietnamese men have incidence and death rates from liver cancer that are seven times the rate in non-Hispanic white men, and Korean men and women are 5 to 7 times as likely as whites to develop stomach cancer. Other Asians are also prone to these cancers, but their rates are generally not as high.
The hepatitis B virus is endemic in Asia, McCracken said, and chronic infection is a major cause of liver cancer there and in recent immigrants.
Worldwide, the cancer society report says, 80 percent of liver cancer cases occur in developing countries, with 55 percent of the total in China. Pregnant women can transmit hepatitis B to the fetus, so it can persist in the population, along with the cancers that appear later.
Doctors should be aware of the problem, McCracken said, because there are treatments that can lower the risk of transmission from mother to baby. In others, antiviral drugs can fight the infection and lower the odds of cancer. Vaccination prevents the disease and has become routine for infants in the United States.
The high rates of stomach cancer are thought to have two causes. One is chronic infection with Helicobacter pylori bacteria, which is common in developing countries and treatable with antibiotics. Stomach cancer rates in the United States plummeted as refrigeration came into use. In Koreans, diet is also blamed, specifically foods that are preserved with nitrates and nitrites.
Stomach cancer is also a problem in Japan, and screening programs there have lowered death rates. But screening is not performed in the United States, so doctors should be on the lookout for symptoms in Asian patients, McCracken said.
Genetic differences among ethnic groups may play some role in determining susceptibility to various cancers, said Regina Santella, a professor of environmental health science at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Santella was not involved in the study. For example, she said, not all smokers get lung cancer, but research has shown that smokers who lack a certain gene - about 50 percent of the population lacks it - have a slightly increased risk of developing the disease.
Compared with other Asians, Chinese women have high incidence and death rates from lung cancer, the report notes. The reason is not known, since their smoking rates are low. But they do have high exposures to secondhand smoke at home and at work, and to cooking-oil vapors from high-temperature frying.
Among Filipinos, men have higher rates of prostate cancer than other Asians and women have the highest death rate from breast cancer. Breast cancer is linked to obesity and 33.5 percent of Filipino women are overweight, more than in other Asian groups.
Japanese-Americans have high rates of colorectal, stomach, prostate and breast cancer compared with other groups, the researchers found. Obesity may play a role, they said, noting that 52.5 percent of Japanese men and 28.3 percent of women are overweight, and many say they are relatively inactive.

The report is on the Internet at http://CAonline.AmCancerSoc.org.

War on Terrorism: New York and Los Angeles offer two models

2007-07-20T13:03:00.000-04:00

On the Front Line in the War on Terrorism
Judith Miller

Cops in New York and Los Angeles offer America two models for preventing another 9/11.

Three time zones, 3,000 miles, and a cultural galaxy apart, New York and Los Angeles face a common threat: along with Washington, D.C., they’re the chief American targets of Islamic terror. And both cities boast top cops, sometime rivals—the cities are fiercely competitive—who know that ensuring that a dog doesn’t bark will determine their legacies. After investing millions of dollars in homeland security, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York and Chief William J. Bratton of L.A. can both claim counterterror successes. What can we learn from their approaches? And will they be able to continue preventing terrorist attacks in their cities?

On the face of it, the nation’s two biggest metropolitan forces seem to have adopted kindred counterterrorism strategies. Both have roving SWAT or “Emergency Service Unit” teams, equipped with gas masks and antidotes to chemical and biological agents. Both have set up “fusion” centers to screen threats and monitor secret intelligence and “open-source” information, including radical Internet sites, and both have started programs to identify and protect likely targets. Both have tried to integrate private security experts into their work. Both conduct surveillance that would have been legally questionable before September 11. Both have sought to enlist support from mainstream Muslims and have encouraged various private firms to report suspicious activity.

Yet despite such similarities, the terror-fighting approaches of New York and L.A., like the cities themselves, reflect very different traditions, styles, and, above all, resources. New York, which knows the price of failure and thus has a heightened “threat perception,” sets the gold standard for counterterrorism—and has the funding and manpower to do it. Kelly, 65, views his highest priority as ensuring that al-Qaida doesn’t hit the city again. “When your city has been attacked, the threat is always with you,” he tells me. Deploying its own informants, undercover terror-busters, and a small army of analysts, New York tries to locate and neutralize pockets of militancy even before potentially violent individuals can form radical cells—a “preventive” approach, as Kelly calls it, that is the most effective way that police departments, small or large, can help fight terror.

In L.A., a city that has never been attacked, terrorism is a less pressing concern than gang violence and other crime. Lacking the political incentive, and hence the resources, to wage his own war on terror, Bratton, 59, has instead pooled scarce funds, manpower, and information with federal and other agencies—an approach that federal officials hold up as a model for police departments that can’t afford New York’s investment.

Both cities can claim victories that underscore the central role that law enforcement can—and should—play in homeland security. Just this June, the NYPD and the FBI announced that they had foiled a new Islamic terror plot against New York, this time to blow up fuel-tank farms at John F. Kennedy International Airport. While the plot was extremely unlikely to succeed—law enforcement had penetrated it from the start—the arrests revealed that Trinidad and other Caribbean ports have become fertile ground for Islamic militancy. Since September 11, the NYPD has broken up at least seven terror plots. What the LAPD calls its “coming of age” terrorism case—as yet not widely reported—commenced with a concerned landlord’s call just days after September 11. It eventually led police investigators to a small group of Islamic militants who may have provided support for the 9/11 hijackers (see box).

Yet neither Kelly nor Bratton can rest on his laurels. Those playing defense must be constantly vigilant, while al-Qaida and like-minded militants need to be lucky only once.

Size matters. The NYPD has long been one of the world’s largest law enforcement agencies. On September 11, 2001, it was employing some 50,000 people—36,000 sworn officers and about 14,000 civilians—to protect more than 8 million people. The next five largest U.S. police departments combined don’t have as many employees, Bratton ruefully observes. His own adopted city of L.A.—he’s originally from Boston—has a civilian and sworn force of 12,800 covering a city of nearly 4 million. As the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a Washington-based think tank, concludes in a new report, the NYPD has the resources “to do things that other departments cannot.”

Shortly after taking office under Mayor Michael Bloomberg in January 2002, Kelly began his second tour of duty as Gotham’s top cop by drawing on those considerable resources to revamp and expand the NYPD’s terror-fighting capabilities. He hired two key counterterrorism deputies from Washington, D.C.: David Cohen, a former deputy director of the CIA’s operations wing, to head the NYPD’s Intelligence Division; and Michael Sheehan, former State Department head of counterterrorism, to run the force’s new Counter Terrorism Bureau. Then he assigned more than 1,000 people to their units, the largest deployment of any American city to combat terrorism. With funds from the Police Foundation, a private group, he also sent liaison officers overseas to work alongside police departments in some of the cities most frequently targeted by terror, including Amman, London, and Singapore.

Each day, the Counter Terrorism Bureau’s 205 officers analyze worldwide threats to determine how many officers should deploy where; provide training for all members of the force; assess risks to targets; and develop plans for protecting key sites in and near the city. Much of the NYPD’s recent counterterrorism work has focused on the financial district in lower Manhattan, home to 75 of the city’s 367 most sensitive sites, information about which is kept in a giant red binder, the “Red Book.” Kelly is weighing a plan to erect a “ring of steel”—cameras, random screenings, and sophisticated sensors like those that London installed after its own subway and bus terror attacks in 2005—to help protect the 1.5-square-mile district and its 1 trillion daily financial transactions. The city is also spending $250 million to install cameras in its subway and transit system.

The cutting edge of the NYPD’s antiterrorism efforts, though, is David Cohen’s Intelligence Division. “We’re looking at ‘clusters,’ at how and where people get together, what they do and where they go, how they raise funds,” Kelly says during an interview at One Police Plaza. “This analytical work is not being done anywhere else in government. It’s all about prevention.”

Before September 11, the Intelligence Division mainly developed intelligence on narcotics and violent crimes, and sought to protect visiting dignitaries to the city—a glorified “escort service,” Kelly once scoffed. Now, its personnel devote 95 percent of their time to terrorism investigations, the PERF report concludes (and sources confirm). Kelly says that the division has 23 civilian intelligence analysts, with master’s degrees and higher from Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities; some have come from leading think tanks, even from the CIA—giving the force a capability, he says, “that exists no place else.” The division’s “field intelligence officers,” one assigned to each of the NYPD’s 76 precincts, keep tabs on people, crimes, and arrests that might have terrorism links. “Core Collection” officers develop confidential informants, who could give early warning about people being radicalized by militant associates or websites.

Cohen’s division also supervises undercover agents who infiltrate potentially violent groups. The identities of these covert warriors, and other details of the program, remain fiercely guarded secrets. But information occasionally turns up in federal prosecutions, such as the NYPD’s use of an undercover agent in helping to foil the June JFK airport conspiracy, and of both a Bangladeshi undercover officer and an Egyptian-born confidential informant in disrupting a 2004 plot by Islamic terrorists to bomb the Herald Square subway station. “I want at least 1,000 to 2,000 to die in one day,” one of the accused told the informant in the subway case, a stunned New York jury heard last year. Though the men had not acquired explosives, police arrested them shortly before the Republican national convention in August 2004, after nearly two years of surveillance. The key plotter, Shahawar Matin Siraj, a 22-year-old Pakistani, recently received a 30-year sentence. “This is the kind of homegrown, lone-wolf case that starts way below federal radar,” Cohen says. “But had these two guys acted on their intentions”—to “fuck this country very bad,” as Siraj threatened on tape—“a lot of New Yorkers would have died and been injured.”

Undercover work capitalizes on the NYPD’s 870-plus civilian and uniformed speakers of Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Farsi, Pashto, Turkish, and Urdu—more linguists than the FBI’s New York field office employs. Of the 470 or so in uniform, more than 200 are “master linguists” in high-priority languages. The latest police academy class boasted graduates hailing from 65 countries, Cohen notes. Some will doubtless work for the division’s Cyber Intelligence Unit, a 25-person group situated in unmarked headquarters in a Chelsea industrial building; others may wind up in the Prison Intelligence program at Rikers Island, where they will work with officials from probations, the New York State Police, and other agencies to monitor the spread of militancy.

Richard Falkenrath, a counterterrorism expert who worked in the Bush White House and succeeded Deputy Commissioner Sheehan last year, says that New York’s intelligence efforts are “awe-inspiring,” beyond anything he’s seen at the local, state, and even federal levels. “New York is far more action-oriented than the feds,” he says, “partly because it’s a lot easier and faster to take action.” Even rivals like Bratton, who served as New York’s police commissioner in the mid-nineties before falling out with his boss, Rudy Giuliani, share the admiration. “The NYPD’s intelligence operation is widely regarded as the gold standard,” Bratton concluded in an article coauthored for the Manhattan Institute (City Journal’s publisher) last fall.

What Bratton criticizes—and he’s not alone—is the NYPD’s alleged refusal to give other law enforcement agencies access to the intelligence that it has so doggedly gathered. “New York has perfected an array of intelligence-gathering initiatives,” he observes. “My concern is that at the federal level, there are too few dots to connect, and in New York, what they collect is not being shared. As a result, law enforcement is not being formed by this information.”

Kelly dismisses this as “old criticism.” But neither he nor his deputies deny that for years after September 11, relations between the department and the FBI were rancorous. The NYPD blames the strain on FBI resentment of Kelly’s creation of what are basically a miniature FBI and CIA within the force. After Kelly tried unsuccessfully to take over the FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Force—the nation’s first alliance between the bureau and local law enforcement, dating back to 1979—he stationed NYPD detectives overseas and authorized Cohen’s division to conduct its own surveillance and infiltration operations, despite FBI opposition. “For a long while,” Cohen says, “their attitude was: ‘If you’re not under our control, you’re out of control.’ ”

Kelly’s view that combating terrorism was “something we have to do ourselves” partly reflected the devastating effect of pre-9/11 intelligence failures on the law enforcement community. Not only did thousands of civilians die on 9/11; the city’s fire department lost 343 firefighters—the largest loss of life in one day in history for emergency responders; the Port Authority police suffered 37 deaths, the largest loss of life in one day in history for police; the NYPD itself lost 23 officers, the second-largest loss historically. “ ‘Trust us’ was no longer acceptable after 9/11,” observes Sheehan, who is writing a book on counterterrorism, Crush the Cell.

Tensions also grew between the FBI and Sheehan’s Counter Terrorism Bureau. In the summer of 2003, officials said, the FBI passed an unverified tip to the CTB that a “dirty bomb” might be on its way to New York. When Sheehan called a Friday afternoon meeting to discuss a possible deployment to the city of local, state, and federal investigators, emergency-response personnel, and nuclear-detection technology, the FBI began downplaying the threat. Furious, Kelly, Cohen, and Sheehan decided to use the tip to test the city’s emergency-response and intelligence teams in a massive drill. “What we learned from that episode was that when and if we needed federal assets, we were still on our own, even after 9/11,” a former senior city official complains.

Relations continued to deteriorate until the FBI replaced its senior leadership in New York in May 2005. Mark Mershon became the new head of the FBI’s 2,000-person New York field office (the bureau’s largest), and Joseph Demarest, Jr. took over its counterterrorism division. Both determined to repair what they saw as a crucial partnership. A turning point, both sides agree, came in November 2005, when FBI director Robert Mueller III visited the NYPD and had a private sit-down with Kelly. “The director was impressed by New York’s programs,” Demarest says. Mueller agreed with Kelly that New York was “big enough and enough of a target to warrant some independence,” an NYPD official recalled.

The FBI began seeing Cohen’s Intelligence Division not as a rival or nuisance but as an additional source of vital intelligence. Mueller also blessed Mershon’s desire to make the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force, with its 180 FBI and 125 police members, more inclusive. The senior-ranking NYPD official on the task force even became its “comanager.” “You get a real buy-in,” explains Demarest. “Important decisions are no longer made alone.” Cohen adds: “It’s hard to overstate how far we’ve come from the animosity of the early days.” He estimates that, though the FBI has the “first right of refusal” on tips and leads—35,000 have come in since the city set up its counter-terrorism hotline five years ago—the NYPD has pursued almost two-thirds of them.

NYPD officials insist that the department doesn’t deserve its reputation for arrogance and that its counterterrorism programs have always required cooperation with private businesses and other law enforcement agencies. Since launching Operation Nexus in 2002, notes Cohen, the NYPD has visited more than 30,000 businesses in New York and beyond, encouraging them to report suspicious purchases or other potentially terrorism-related activity.

Another initiative, Operation Shield, helps area businesses assess, and revise, security. The program also shares unclassified intelligence and security tips with private security firms. “Shield is all about sharing with the private sector on a real-time basis,” Kelly says. “Two days after the bombings in Mumbai”—the devastating simultaneous bombings of seven trains in India last year that killed over 200 and wounded hundreds more—“our lieutenant did a teleconference from there with 100 Shield members in our pressroom, giving more specifics about the attack than anyone else had.” A recent session, with more than 500 in attendance, discussed the chlorine bombs that American forces have faced in Iraq.

New York’s “fusion center,” the nation’s first, now includes counterterrorism reps from approximately 40 local, state, and federal agencies. The NYPD coordinates, too, with the numerous agencies that operate the city’s massive public transportation system, with its 6.5 million daily riders. The NYPD protects that system mostly with its own funds, since the federal government has spent only $386 million nationally on transit security—far less than the $24 billion it has spent bolstering aviation security. In 2007, Falkenrath disclosed in March, there had already been 22 subway bomb threats and 31 intelligence leads on subway attack plots.

Despite these outreach efforts, state officials and leaders in other cities still occasionally grumble that the NYPD is reluctant to work with other police departments or, more often, that it neglects to inform them about its operations on their turf. Michael Sheehan, quoting his former colleague Cohen, responds: “There is no such thing as intelligence sharing; there is only intelligence trading.” Even small police forces can develop useful tips and leads with the proper skills and a little creativity, he points out; that’s why the NYPD has invested considerable resources to train and work with police from the tristate area. “But yes,” Sheehan acknowledges, “we prefer to work with people who are seriously in the game—those that run informants and collect real information, rather than just circulate watered-down, nonspecific threat information provided by the Department of Homeland Security.”

Getting more partners “in the game” is the goal of Operation Sentry, the NYPD’s discreet new effort to forge counterterrorism partnerships within a 200-mile radius of the city. Recognizing that the 9/11 attacks began not in New York but in Boston and Portland, Maine, Kelly invited law enforcement officials from counties and cities as far away as Baltimore to a three-day meeting late last year to discuss such issues as the radicalization of Muslim youth and what New York has learned about how to identify terrorism-related conduct.

Francisco Ortiz, New Haven’s police chief, calls Sentry “invaluable.” Through Sentry, he now gets updates on regional threats as they unfold, as well as invitations to bimonthly sessions in New York featuring the latest threat assessments and training courses on improving security at sensitive sites. “They’re helping us become a better listening post in Connecticut for New York,” he says. Ortiz now intends to use some of his own 400-officer force to start a version of New York’s Nexus program to sensitize local businesses to potential threats. New York police trainers have already visited New Haven to help.

Utica police chief C. Allen Pylman finds the Sentry sessions “eye-opening”—particularly one that focused on the “Toronto 18” plot, disrupted last year, to behead the Canadian prime minister, bomb high-profile targets, and conduct random shootings in shopping malls. “My city of 65,000 people is not likely to be a target of terrorism,” Pylman notes. “But are there people here who may be supporting radical causes? Yes, I think so.”

In many ways, Los Angeles and New York might as well be on different planets. Tim Connors, the director of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Policing Terrorism, which has been advising the LAPD, argues that differences of geography, history, politics, and culture result in dramatically different attitudes toward, and resources for, fighting terrorism.

The sheer mass of sprawling territory that William Bratton’s 12,800-member force and other law enforcement agencies must cover is daunting. “What is New York at its widest—40 miles?” asks L.A. city councilman Jack Weiss, a champion of Bratton’s campaign for more funds and flexibility for the LAPD, especially its counter-terrorism efforts. “The city of Los Angeles alone is some 450 square miles. The county is 4,000 square miles, with 88 incorporated and unincorporated cities and the world’s seventh-largest economy. We have 45 separate police departments.” The FBI’s L.A. field office must protect 18 million residents in seven separate counties, says its head, J. Stephen Tidwell. “Ray Kelly has an army of 37,000. Well, nobody has an army here, so no one can do it by himself.”

“You’re talking about protecting a county that has multiple climates,” agrees John Sullivan, a lieutenant in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and an early champion of intelligence sharing and of redefining police as “first preventers” of terrorism. The county, he points out, contains 85 percent of California’s critical assets.

Civic culture and history also constrain Bratton’s terrorism-fighting capabilities. The LAPD’s notorious resort to illegal surveillance in the past led to extremely tight legal restrictions on whom it could monitor, and for what kinds of suspected offenses. Bratton is trying to loosen those restrictions, but Angelenos remain deeply suspicious of the police. Further, while most New Yorkers witnessed the 9/11 attacks, spent months breathing in air thick with ashes and the stench of scorched metal, lost friends and relatives, or knew people who knew victims, for Angelenos the day was “a disaster movie,” says Amy Zegart, a counterterrorism expert at UCLA. Terrorism—except in the L.A.-based TV show 24—is something that happens to others, not to them.

Another constriction is L.A.’s byzantine political system, dominated by competing fiefdoms and myriad jurisdictions with overlapping responsibilities. The California Highway Patrol, for example, polices the freeways that dissect Bratton’s territory. The Port of Los Angeles, through which some 45 percent of the nation’s cargo passes, has its own police force. So do the area’s airports. The biggest, best-funded local law enforcement office in the city isn’t even Bratton’s LAPD; it’s the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which has a sworn and civilian force of 16,216. And Sheriff Leroy Baca, a savvy elected politician, enjoys a $2.1 billion yearly budget—twice the LAPD’s. Of its $1.2 billion budget, the LAPD spends roughly $24 million on counter-terrorism; New York spends $204 million.

The Police Commission, a five-member panel appointed by the mayor, chooses Los Angeles’s chief cop and is likely to endorse Bratton for a second five-year term. But it’s the 15-member city council that approves Bratton’s budget and personnel levels. While Bratton could in theory shift officers from gang duty to counter-terrorism, Weiss tells me, it would be difficult without the council’s blessing. Nor can Bratton unilaterally create an LAPD career path in intelligence, as New York has done. Sacramento, seat of the state government, also wields far greater leverage over Los Angeles than Albany does over New York. “Everyone has a view on what we should and should not be doing,” Bratton says. “Even the L.A. Times seems to think it runs the police force.”

Such limitations make Bratton’s progress on counterterrorism since his appointment five years ago all the more remarkable. Working with Weiss and a handful of other supporters, he has added 75 officers permanently to the group of 33 who worked on terrorism before 9/11, and he has won the authority to hire or shift another 44 later. Still, the perpetual shortage of manpower and funds has made “sharing,” “jointness,” and “force multiplier” Bratton mantras. He has relentlessly sought to forge closer ties with other law enforcement and public-safety agencies in the region, particularly the FBI. “In this department, you need to justify exclusion,” Bratton says. The FBI’s Tidwell describes law enforcement cooperation in L.A. as “almost genetic,” a tradition, reinforced by Bratton and Baca, forged by decades of joint responses to earthquakes, fires, floods, and other natural disasters that plague the Southland. On the Joint Terrorism Task Force squads, to which Bratton has assigned some 15 officers, the FBI clearly leads. “And that doesn’t cause anyone any problems here,” Tidwell maintains. His office, too, has changed its own attitude toward sharing intelligence. “Our motto used to be ‘restrict and share what you must.’ It’s the opposite today.” Tensions between the LAPD and the Department of Homeland Security have also eased somewhat after DHS secretary Michael Chertoff met last year with the chiefs of the nation’s 15 largest police departments.

Homeland Security now has an official stationed full-time at L.A.’s crown jewel of “jointness”: the Joint Regional Intelligence Center, or “Jay-Rick,” which both Bratton and Chertoff hold up as a model for similar fusion centers soon to be operational in more than three dozen U.S. cities. Launched with a $4 million Homeland Security grant and opened last year in a concrete federal building in Norwalk, a 45-minute drive (without traffic) from downtown L.A., the center has 16 LAPD staffers and some 30 designees from other law enforcement and public-safety agencies. Inside, it resembles a modern-day newsroom: a vast open working space, shoulder-level partitions separating the analysts’ gray desks, computer screens everywhere, and wall-mounted television monitors showing various American and foreign-language news broadcasts.

The JRIC’s analysts don’t conduct investigations; instead, they vet tips and leads—nearly 25 new ones per week—to identify the 1 percent that prove serious. If someone threatens to spread anthrax in the city, for instance, the JRIC’s “threat squad” of some 20 analysts from federal and local agencies tries to figure out if the danger is real. Is the threat written or oral? From someone who seems scientifically knowledgeable? Have hospitals reported people with flu-like symptoms or who are having trouble breathing? Are adequate antibiotics on hand?

The JRIC’s heavy workload troubles Amy Zegart, among others. “The track-every-lead, confiscate-every-toenail-clipper approach may be a political winner, but it’s a counterterrorism loser,” she says. “Officials need to narrow the scope of inquiry to avoid more wild-goose chases rather than conduct them.” Experts also complain that it’s hard to tell who leads the JRIC. In theory, the LAPD, the sheriff’s office, and the FBI “comanage” the center. But what that might mean in an actual crisis is far from clear.

Moreover, the JRIC’s remote location makes it an unlikely assembly point in an emergency. John Miller, Bratton’s former deputy for counterterrorism and now an assistant FBI director in Washington, D.C., denies that the center’s location had anything to do with low rents, as some critics have charged. The choice of Norwalk, he says, ensured that the JRIC would be near, but not too near, logical targets in downtown and West L.A. Also, some officials say, since the FBI-led Joint Drug Intelligence Group already had an office in the building, it was relatively cheap and easy to link the bureau’s classified and unclassified computer lines to the fusion center’s. “The concept is right; the people are right; and they’ll grow into it,” Miller says.

However, staffing shortages prevent the center from operating “24/7,” as envisaged. Getting security clearances has also been a problem, according to Robert Fox, the LAPD lieutenant who comanages the center. “Clearances can take a year,” he says.

Al-Qaida in Hollywood?

A source of both frustration and pride within the LAPD, the “Hollywood case”—details of which haven’t yet become public—shows how good police work can break up terrorist networks. But this tangled saga also highlights unanswered questions that continue to surround the 9/11 plot. Two senior detectives from the LAPD’s Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Section agreed to discuss the case, provided that they weren’t identified by name, since both remain active terrorism investigators.

The inquiry, they say, began three days after 9/11, when the manager of an apartment building in the heart of Hollywood called the police about a group of French-speaking North Africans who kept rotating into and out of one of his units. Immediately after 9/11, he told police, the men shaved their beards, changed out of traditional Islamic garb, and stopped praying openly and attending the King Fahd mosque, one of the area’s largest, in neighboring Culver City. The manager also claimed that he’d seen the renters remove a license plate from their car, which they pushed to a side street, off the busier boulevard where they usually parked it.

The police quietly sent an officer with a bomb-sniffing dog. The car was clean, but the police impounded it, anyway, for failing to display its plates. They became more suspicious after a series of visits to the apartment. Located in a slightly run-down four-story building in a soon-to-be-gentrified neighborhood, it had no furniture save bedrolls on the floor—“earmarks of a classic safe house,” one of the detectives points out. Posters of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a known al-Qaida target, and New York’s glittering skyline adorned the walls. One officer spotted a pair of suitcases in the hallway: the luggage tags showed that they had been on a plane coming from Germany.

Learning that 9/11 bomber Mohammad Atta had belonged to a radical cell in Hamburg, “we knew enough to be worried,” a detective recalls. One of the North Africans, questioned by the police, claimed that the luggage belonged to his brother, who had recently arrived from Germany. But the police found no trace of the brother, either at the apartment or anywhere in L.A.

The North Africans told other inconsistent stories. Virtually all were jobless; several had registered to obtain pilot’s licenses or shown an interest in doing so. (The police later learned that enrolling in pilot’s school was a quick way of securing a student visa.) One was already a pilot. A police check of public records disclosed that he had claimed on an application to have attended a Florida flight school that, it later turned out, one of the 9/11 hijackers had also attended. Public records also showed that he had registered at an address in Arizona, not far from where a second hijacker had gone to flight school. “It wasn’t enough for the FBI at the start, but it was for us,” a detective notes.

The LAPD put the apartment and its residents—as well as their friends and associates, some 250 people in all—under surveillance. Eventually, it assigned more than 150 investigators and support employees to the case. Their focus eventually narrowed to a core of eight or ten suspects. “We knew we were dealing with a network of some kind,” a detective says. But investigators couldn’t prove that the group that they were watching was, as they suspected, an al-Qaida support cell in the heart of Hollywood.

When the police discovered that two of the men initially questioned were in the country illegally, they arrested them. One by one, others under surveillance were quietly arrested on various criminal charges—identity theft, illegal gun possession, and marriage and insurance fraud—none of which even mentioned terrorism. In some cases, immigration authorities deported the men on immigration charges. In other cases, suspects pleaded guilty and went to jail, or voluntarily left the country. One of the two men originally arrested on immigration charges bailed himself out of jail. The second secretly tried to obtain firearms in prison. Deported in 2002, both have now disappeared.

The investigation soon focused on a man who seemed to be at the cell’s hub—Qualid Benomrane, a North African taxi driver mentioned in a footnote of the 9/11 Commission Report. Arrested on immigration charges in early 2002, he told the police that prior to the attacks he had driven “two Saudis” around L.A. and to San Diego’s Sea World, after being introduced to them by Fahad al-Thumairy, a diplomat at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles. Benomrane also told police that someone at the consulate had asked al-Thumairy to take care of the two men.

According to the 9/11 report, Benomrane, shown pictures of Khaled al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the 9/11 hijackers, at first pulled their photos out of the group he was shown, but later claimed not to recognize them. The 9/11 commission investigators concluded that “the hypothesis that Benomrane’s ‘two Saudis’ were Hazmi and Midhar” couldn’t be substantiated.

But the LAPD detectives who investigated the case remain convinced that Benomrane and al-Thumairy were militants in the al-Qaida support network and that Benomrane’s passengers were, in fact, the two hijackers. “Our investigation found, for instance, that Benomrane had taken photos of the structural supports of the Golden Gate Bridge during a trip to northern California,” a detective says. The LAPD also discovered that Benomrane had taken his two Saudi passengers to a gas station where one of the two San Diego–based hijackers had worked before heading east to carry out his deadly mission. (The FBI, which participated in the investigation, declined comment since the inquiry was classified, but a commission investigator said that the bureau has no record of such a side trip.)

The LAPD investigators decided to question Benomrane in jail once more, but they never got the chance: he was deported on the eve of their visit to see him (a textbook example of one part of government’s not talking to another). Benomrane, too, has disappeared. But using standard policing tactics and procedures, the LAPD investigators broke up what they believe was a cell that supported al-Qaida’s 9/11 mission in ways still not fully understood. “We did all the right things without knowing it,” a detective notes, calling the case the LAPD’s “coming of age” in counterterrorism.

“Only the police are close enough to the ground to be able to go after terrorists like this by using standard criminal investigations,” argues Stephan C. Margolis, who now heads the LAPD’s Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Section. “The FBI has 12,000 agents for the entire country, only some of whom do counterterrorism. Local and state law enforcement includes some 800,000 people who know their territory. We are destined to be frontline soldiers in what could be a very long and complicated war.”

Operation Archangel, a second pillar of the LAPD’s counterterrorism effort (also financed by millions in Homeland Security funds), uses sophisticated computer software to identify, prioritize, and protect vulnerable targets—so far, 500 of them, ranging from Disneyland to nuclear plants, officials say. Archangel asks the owners and operators of these sites to provide the latest structural information—floor plans, air-conditioning and electrical-system locations, entrances and stairwells, and so on—which goes into a massive database; the software then assesses vulnerabilities and devises deterrence and prevention strategies, as well as emergency response plans. “We’re basically doing what we did before, but on steroids,” says Tom McDonald, the LAPD lieutenant who runs Archangel and sees it, as many federal officials do, as something that other cities can emulate.

If such a system sounds obvious, it isn’t, Miller points out. For instance, during the Columbine massacre, students had to help police sketch the school’s floor plan on top of a squad car with a marker. “Archangel is the kind of automated system you would need in an emergency,” Miller says.

But Archangel, located in the deliberately nondescript basement of an office building in West L.A., operates with just 15 people—one-third its projected staffing—and not around the clock. “We are hurt, not just in this program, by the fact that our city does not permit federal Homeland Security funds to pay for full-time city employees,” says Michael Downing, who spent time in London studying terrorism before taking command of the LAPD’s Counter-Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau this spring. “Resources are definitely a challenge.”

Another, adds McDonald, is the reluctance of some private businesses to associate openly with his program, fearing that being identified as targets will drive away business. Such concerns rule out L.A.’s adoption of the NYPD’s “in-your-face” exercises, like its random deployments of heavily armed police and vehicles to sites around the city. Bearing names like “Atlas” and “Hercules,” these displays of force, says Kelly, deter terrorists by showing them that New York is just too tough a target. “There’s less fear here than in New York, and less interest in generating fear,” says William McSweeney, chief of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Office of Homeland Security.

The lack of public urgency means that Bratton must work doubly hard to get the counterterrorism manpower, money, and information that he needs. And that, in turn, has involved lots of travel, for which he has faced criticism. While Kelly is famously a homebody—he’s taken no vacation since starting in October 2002 and has made only five day trips from the city since then—Bratton was out of town more than a third of 2005, and nearly as often last year. Staunchly defended by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Bratton says that the LAPD and the city benefit from the information and cooperation that he gets from his travels. The explanation has satisfied most critics. Nor do Angelenos balk at their chief’s $300,000-plus salary, much heftier than Commissioner Kelly’s $189,700.

Continuing to promote “jointness,” Bratton is now trying to get several cities to pool resources to station detectives overseas, as New York has for several years; these liaison officers would share their reports among those who helped finance their posts. Supported by the Manhattan Institute and the Department of Homeland Security, he is also planning a national police academy in Los Angeles to train police from across the country in intelligence-led policing skills. “The nation’s 18,000 local police departments have been crying out for such advanced training and broader strategic guidance,” says Jerry Ratcliffe, who teaches at Temple University and attended the first planning meeting.

Despite their differences, both the NYPD and the LAPD agree that a key way to crush incipient terrorist cells and thwart terrorism is to use local laws and follow locally generated leads, which, after all, is what good police departments do best. Relying on this low-key approach, Downing says, the LAPD has arrested some 200 American citizens and foreigners with suspected ties to terrorist groups since September 11. At present, he adds, his division has 54 open intelligence cases, involving at least 250 “persons of interest.” One of the most celebrated examples of the strategy is the 2005 Torrance case, in which the arrest of two men for robbing a gas station in that city eventually unraveled a militant Islamic plot to attack U.S. military facilities, synagogues, and other places where Jews gather in Los Angeles County. But L.A., Downing admits, still lacks the resources to develop its own undercover agents and informants. “We do that with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force,” he says.

Because most American cities resemble L.A. more than they do New York, Bratton’s priority of pooling resources and information is likely to be a more attractive, if less ambitious, model than New York City’s approach, which includes running its own undercover counter-terrorism operations. But Washington has begun to acknowledge the virtue of New York’s argument that thwarting terrorism requires better local intelligence about what potentially dangerous groups and individuals are planning. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security’s “Urban Area Security Initiative” began to offer grants to help local police strengthen their ability to collect and analyze intelligence. Our cities, L.A. and New York included, will be safer for it.

Research for this article was supported by the Brunie Fund for New York Journalism.

Humans Wear Diverse "Wardrobe" of Skin Microbes, Study Finds

2007-07-19T19:39:00.000-04:00

High magnification reveals a host of bacteria underneath a human toenail. A new analysis has shown that the billions of bacteria that inhabit human skin are not only highly diverse but also change their composition over time. Understanding how and why the microbes change could lead to better treatments from chronic skin disorders such as psoriasis and eczema. Image by Darlyne A. Murawski/NGS

Humans Wear Diverse "Wardrobe" of Skin Microbes, Study Finds
Ben Harder
for National Geographic News
February 6, 2007

The billions of microscopic critters that cloak your skin are a bit like fashionable threads—the ones you're wearing today may be out by next season.
That's the implication of a new study, which identified more than 240 distinct microbes on the forearms of six healthy people.
Each person's "wardrobe" of germs seems to be as unique as his or her sense of style. No two volunteers had all the same microbes on their flesh, though they did have some overlap, said study leader Martin J. Blaser.
"There's a lot of variation from person to person—tremendous variation," said Blaser, a microbiologist and infectious disease doctor at the New York University School of Medicine.
At the same time, he said, "we also found this kind of scaffold—a preserved set of organisms—that's pretty consistent."
People's microbial outfits seem to be coordinated: Left and right arms matched in any given test.
But volunteers who were tested repeatedly showed little similarity among the microbes they sported from one time to another.
"The skin is an extremely complex ecosystem [that's readily] affected by our environment," Blaser said.
"When we change our soap [or] shampoo [or] laundry detergent, when we change whether we're wearing a cotton shirt or a wool shirt, all of these are going to have an effect on our skin flora," he said. ("Flora" is microbiologists' term for microscopic life forms.)
Wardrobe Malfunction?
For their study, Blaser and three colleagues probed small skin samples from the six volunteers and found 1,221 signatures of nonhuman DNA.
From these they identified 182 distinct species, some of which are new to science. Eight to ten months later they retested four subjects and found 65 additional species.
The results appear this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Blaser notes that his research goal is not merely to census our most intimate microscopic companions.
He and other experts want to know whether certain skin microbes are connected to chronic inflammatory diseases such as psoriasis and eczema—which would make the critters our skin's version of a wardrobe malfunction.
David A. Relman is a microbiologist at Stanford University and chief of infectious diseases at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California.
"A lot of skin diseases look as if they ought to be caused by an infectious agent," Relman said. "But we don't have an infectious agent" to blame.
Relman suggests that "orchestrated manipulation" of the skin's ecosystem, perhaps with science-based cosmetic products, might someday suppress disease-causing skin bacteria and nurture friendly ones.
"A better understanding of the indigenous microbiota of the human body," he said, "will lead to much more prudent strategies for maintaining and restoring health."

Phantom-Limb Pain Eased With Virtual Reality

2007-07-19T19:36:00.000-04:00

Wearing high-tech headgear and a special glove that tracks the movements of his hand, an amputee completes tasks in a computer-generated environment, which is displayed on the goggles and the monitor behind him. In the virtual world, his missing limb is shown performing the movements of his remaining arm—a technique that doctors say can ease phantom pain associated with missing limbs. Photograph courtesy and © 2006 University of Manchester. All rights reserved.

Phantom-Limb Pain Eased With Virtual Reality
Amitabh Avasthi
for National Geographic News
January 18, 2007

For amputees suffering from phantom pain, a computer-generated cure might soon be at hand.
Virtual reality could hold the key to easing the often agonizing sensation of a missing limb that feels as if it is still there, experts say.
"Four of the five patients who used our virtual reality system reported significant reduction in pain," said Steve Pettifer, a computer scientist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.
"If further tests prove this is a successful technology, it could be used in hospitals or by people in their homes."
Phantom Pain
Pettifer says about 80 percent of all amputees experience some discomfort associated with a phantom limb or limbs—often sensations of shooting pains or electric shocks.
Some people feel as if their limbs are curled up in impossible positions. Others sense their clenched fingers painfully digging into their palms.
(Related: "Feeling No Pain: New Form of Rare Gene Disorder Decoded" [December 13, 2006.)
Physicians have long known about phantom pain. Ambroise Paré, a 16th-century French surgeon, described it in soldiers with amputated limbs and suggested that the pain originated in the brain.
But even today it is not fully clear what causes the mysterious sensations, said Vilayanur Ramachandran, a neurologist at the University of California, San Diego.
"It is an old misconception," he said, that phantom pain is in the sensory nerve endings—the shortened nerves that, before amputation, would have reached all the way to the toes or fingers.
"When you remove the arm, there is a part of the brain that is not getting any [signals]. So sensory input from the face takes over where the arm used to be."
Sometimes the signals get crossed, and any type of movement in the limb or in the face produces excruciating pain from the phantom appendage, he added.
Done With Mirrors
"These days the therapy for phantom pain involves a variety of painkillers and in some cases more extreme procedures, such as deep-brain stimulation, where an electrode is inserted into a region of the brain thought to be responding to phantom pain," said the University of Manchester's Pettifer.
Traditionally, an electrode is wired through the neck down to the chest. There, a small controller box generates a high-frequency signal to try and switch off the pain-causing part of the brain.
Pettifer and colleagues' less invasive virtual fix is modeled on Ramachandran's earlier work, which involved a cardboard box with a mirror on one side.
In that method, a person sits in front of the box and moves his or her arm. The reflection in the mirror appears to fool the person's brain into thinking the reflected limb is the missing appendage that is moving.
"The visual feedback," Ramachandran said, "seemed to alleviate pain."
Virtual Cure
But with the virtual system a patient wears a head-mounted display system with two tiny video screens, one for each eye. Each screen shows a virtual environment, providing a sense of three-dimensional vision.
The patient slips on a "data glove" with gauges that track finger movement. Three other sensors—one on the head and two on the remaining limb—detect the position and rotation of the user's body.
Once in the virtual environment, the user completes tasks such as touching a series of changing targets or batting away a ball floating in front of his or her face.
"These are all excuses to get them to move their limb," Pettifer explained.
"It is the good arm that is doing these movements. But in the virtual environment, they really see their missing arm perform the task," he said. "Like with the mirror box, it tricks a person's mind into thinking that the missing limb is moving."
Results vary, but researchers say a session on the system typically provides around two days of pain relief.
Four of the five people who have tested the system so far reported a significant reduction in phantom pain, and Pettifer's research team is planning large-scale clinical trials in February.
Albert Skip Rizzo is a psychologist at the University of Southern California's Integrated Media Systems Center. He said, "The surprising results provide a new way of understanding how the brain perceives [signals] from the body and how you can fool it with certain visual stimuli."
Reset Button
The University of California's Ramachandran thinks his and Pettifer's findings debunk a notion that there are fixed connections in the brain that one is born with, and that when these connections are damaged, there is little that can be done.
"It challenges the standard view of neurology over 50 years and argues that many of these neurological dysfunctions might just be a functional suppression that can be reversed, like touching a reset button," Ramachandran said.
The work, he added, may apply beyond phantom pain.
"People are using [the mirror system] for the rehabilitation of stroke victims [for regaining arm movement]. Even in something perceived as permanent, there might be partial recovery."
Ramachandran thinks Pettifer's virtual reality system may supplement existing therapies for phantom pain.
But several questions remain.
For starters, Pettifer admits, the device doesn't work for everybody.
"We don't know what type of subject it works on, whether there are different personalities that will respond or not, or which aspect of the virtual environment is most important in terms of helping the pain," he said.
"Once we understand more about these things, making a version of the system that can be put in clinics, or even in the home, is fairly straightforward," Pettifer said.
"It's the sort of thing that with a little modification could more or less be run from today's Xboxes or PlayStations."

Supercomputing Project Aims to Simulate Human Brain

2007-07-19T19:33:00.000-04:00

Supercomputing Project Aims to Simulate Human Brain
Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News
July 20, 2005

It may be the most complex structure in the universe, a tangled web of more than a hundred billion nerve cells. For centuries, scientists have studied it, yet very little is known about the way the human brain really works.
Now powerful new computing technology is enabling scientists to learn more about the brain than ever before.
At the forefront is a new initiative to create a software replica of the brain's neocortical column, the smallest network of neurons (nerve cells) and an elementary building block of the mammalian brain.
The project is seen as a first step toward the long-term goal of creating a 3-D computer simulation of the human brain.
"We are not trying to build a copy of the human brain, or some magical artificial intelligence device," said Henry Markram, who heads the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. His laboratory is collaborating with the computer giant IBM on the project.
"This is really a discovering of how the brain works," Markram said.
10,000 Trees
More than a hundred billion neurons make up the human brain, and the nerve cells are bunched in neocortical columns. These columns mark a jump in the brain's evolution that occurred 200 million years ago as mammals emerged from reptiles.
Since then the columns have multiplied within the mammalian brain to make more powerful minds.
In primates, and especially humans, this replication continued at such a rapid pace that the neocortex, the largest and most complex part of the brain, folded in on itself to make space for new columns. This is what gives the human brain its wrinkled shape.
The discovery of the neocortical column—which is half a millimeter (about two-hundredths of an inch) in diameter and two millimeters (about eight-hundredths inch) long and contains about 60,000 neurons—earned Torsten Wiesel of Rockefeller University in New York the Nobel Prize in 1981.
While scientists are able to make computer simulations of individual neurons, they have not been able to mimic the neocortical column, simply because of its complexity.
"Think of a forest, then imagine taking 10,000 trees and squeezing them together until there is essentially no space between them. That's what the neocortical column looks like," Markram said.
Blue Brain
To untangle this neurological forest, Markram is extracting tissue from the brains of rats, then subjecting the neurons in the brain sample to electrical stimulation. This enables him to find out how the neurons are connected.
"To reconstruct this puzzle, we must know where exactly the neurons connect," he said. "My lab's effort is to work out the code of communication [between the neurons]."
The information drawn from thousands of these experiments will be plugged into a supercomputer, named Blue Brain, to make a software replica of a column of the neocortex.
The Blue Brain computer, which became operational two weeks ago, is the latest installation of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputing system. It has a peak speed of 22.8 teraflops, meaning it can make 22.8 trillion calculations every second.
"Until recently this type of project just wasn't feasible," said Charles Peck, who leads the Blue Brain effort at IBM's research division in Yorktown Heights, New York. "With the advent of Blue Gene, we now have the opportunity to extend the kind of science we do."
The computer model will then be checked in experiments against the neocortical columns taken from rats to see if the model matches the brain's biological behavior.
The template column was obtained from a two-week-old rat in the part of the neocortex that processes touch sensory information. The template will form the basis for building columns from other brain regions in developing and aging rats, as well as in other species, including humans.
Psychiatric Disorders
Once one column has been accurately simulated, the researchers will try to replicate several neocortical columns. By modeling other areas of the brain, they hope to eventually build a computer-based model of the entire brain. This will take at least a decade.
Some skeptics, however, doubt that it is possible to even simulate the neocortical column. Although Markram acknowledges the challenges facing his project, he says the huge leaps in computing power make the effort possible.
"We're sitting on a hundred years of data," he said. "If that's not worth anything, then we should be questioning what we've been doing for a hundred years."
Markram stresses that the project will not create artificial intelligence but aims to better understand and explore brain functions.
"It doesn't mean people should be afraid that their brains are going to be replaced by artificial brains," he said.
Instead, he says computer simulations of the brain may be used to study how and why certain microcircuits in the brain malfunction, which is thought to be the cause of psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, and depression.
A brain research experiment that might take a full day, or even months, to conduct in a laboratory could potentially be done in seconds with a computer-based model of the brain.
"The ultimate goal [of this research] is to be able to ask questions about how the brain works that cannot be answered using traditional scientific techniques," Peck, the IBM scientist, added.

First Ever Brain "Atlas" Completed

2007-07-19T19:29:00.000-04:00

Scientists announced that they have completed a genetic map of the mouse brain, which they hope will reveal new insights into brain function and disease. All the data from the Allen Brain Atlas is freely available online, as are powerful applications for sifting through the enormous amounts of information. Here a view from one of those applications shows a cutaway view of a three-dimensional brain model. Image courtesy Allen Institute for Brain Science

First Ever Brain "Atlas" Completed
Aalok Mehta
National Geographic News
September 26, 2006

Scientists have made a complete "atlas" of the mouse brain, which they hope will spark a new era of insight into how the brain works and what happens when it breaks down.
The Allen Brain Atlas, launched with a hundred million U.S. dollars from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, provides an online, three-dimensional map showing where each of more than 21,000 genes is activated in the mouse brain.
Members of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, announced the completion of the project this morning.
"It's an extraordinary achievement," said Allan Jones, the Allen Institute's chief scientific officer.
"The atlas provides a comprehensive understanding of the genetic underpinnings of the brain."
"No one has ever done anything like this before," Arthur Toga, a professor of neurology at the University of California at Los Angeles's School of Medicine, told National Geographic News.
"It tells us not just what genes are there, but where they are," added Toga, who is a member of the brain atlas's scientific advisory panel.
Such detailed mapping allows scientists to develop a more integrated understanding of the connection between genes and anatomy, he explains.
"This is an enormously important and innovative accomplishment," Toga said, "and will likely form the foundation for many other investigations into fundamental questions of the brain."
Making a Difference
Microsoft's Allen, a noted philanthropist who helped fund SpaceShipOne, the first privately built craft to reach space, initiated the atlas project because of his longstanding fascination with neuroscience.
"For someone coming up in the commercial side of things, the more you learn about computers, the more you wonder how the brain works … in ways that no computer today can," Allen said.
He met with some of the field's top experts, who suggested that a three-dimensional map of gene expression in the mouse brain would revolutionize neuroscience.
The detailed mouse map holds a number of surprises, confirming just how complex an organ the brain really is.
About 80 percent of all genes are expressed in some form in the brain, says Jones, the Allen Institute's chief scientist—much higher than the 60 to 70 percent previous studies had indicated.
Almost none of these genes are expressed in only one region of the brain, he adds, providing insights into how drugs might affect different parts of the brain.
Massive Database
Jones led the team of scientists that began the brain atlas project three years ago.
They chose a mouse as their first subject, because it's easy to obtain genetically similar mice, simplifying the mapping process.
In addition, more than 90 percent of the genes in a mouse brain have a direct counterpart in humans, making mice brains powerful tools for modeling human brain function and diseases.
(See related: "Mice With Human Brain Cells Created" [December 2005].)
The researchers developed an automated process for creating extremely thin brain slices and marked these samples with chemical stains unique to each mouse gene.
In total, the team snapped more than 85 million images, containing a total of 600 terabytes of data—the equivalent of 20,000 iPods—Jones says. The resulting map is extremely precise, providing detail down to the cellular level.
A vital part of the project—taking up some one-third of the total budget, Jones estimates—was developing software that allows scientists to rapidly search and analyze the massive database.
Using these programs, all freely available on the brain map Web site, scientists can make a few mouse clicks to achieve what used to take months of experimentation.
More than 250 researchers are already using the Web site on a daily basis, Jones says.
The Next Step
The project's scope is analogous to flying above the Earth and seeing not just the surface but the locations of all the world's mineral and oil deposits below ground, says David Anderson, a biologist at the California Institute of Technology and another member of the project's scientific advisory panel.
"All the resources are mapped out for you—all the prospecting is done," he said, allowing researchers to focus on unraveling the mysteries of the brain instead of on laborious, time-consuming background work.
"That's the gift Allen has given me and my students and my colleagues."
For example, researchers working on new drugs can now quickly screen for genes expressed in regions of the brain associated with diseases such as autism or depression. Or they can see how drugs targeting one gene will affect various regions of the brain.
Scientists can also compare diseased brain tissue against the brain atlas to see how illnesses affect gene expression.
Maps of the human brain are also on the way, the Allen Institute's Jones says.
His research team next plans to take on the human neocortex, the outer, "wrinkly" part of the brain associated with higher functions such as consciousness, language, and sensory perception.

Amnesia Destroys Imagination as Well as Memory, Study Finds

2007-07-19T19:26:00.000-04:00

Amnesia Destroys Imagination as Well as Memory, Study Finds
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
January 17, 2007
Amnesia may rob people of their imaginations as well as their memories, new research suggests.
"What we've shown is that people with amnesia really are stuck in the present," said lead study author Eleanor Maguire of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.
"They can't recall the past, and now it seems that they can't even imagine the future or indeed richly imagine even fictitious experiences."
Amnesia, which is sometimes temporary, describes several conditions that involve partial or complete memory loss.
Brain damage, tumors, strokes, or even psychological issues that cause the brain to black out disturbing memories can cause the effect. (Related: "Beyond the Brain" in National Geographic magazine.)
Incomplete Picture
Reporting this week in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Maguire and colleagues examined patients who were "profoundly amnesic."
These patients were unable to acquire any new memories.
Several of the amnesiacs did have some past memories, but only of events that occurred 10 or even 20 years before the onset of their illness. Many had no detailed memories of anything that had ever happened in their lives.
The researchers asked the amnesiacs to imagine scenarios such as lying on a sandy beach and then to describe what the experience would be like—what they would see, hear, and smell.
But the patients could describe only fragmented scenes.
"They described many of the elements that would characterize the experience," Maguire said. "But they couldn't put them into a spatial context—they couldn't organize them into the location of that scenario."
"They would know there should be a sea, that there would be sand, but in the way they described it, they'd say, I just can't visualize the whole scene as you'd like," she added.
Without an environment or location to house a scene, amnesiacs may be unable to recreate or imagine normal experiences.
"If you think about memories, they are always somewhere, because things happen somewhere," Maguire explained. "So spatial context is very important for our experiences."
Placing a Memory
Scientists believe that the brain recalls past events by meticulously reconstructing the individual cues of an experience—the people, objects, and other aspects that composed the scene.
This process is thought to occur in a region of the brain known as the hippocampus, which was damaged in the amnesiac patients studied. (Related: "First Ever Brain 'Atlas' Completed" [September 26, 2006].)
The new study implies that similar processes in the hippocampus are also used to imagine future events, suggesting that memory and imagination are two sides of the same coin.
The hippocampus may provide the spatial context that binds and blends the people, objects, and other aspects of a memory—or an imagined event.
"Maybe the hippocampus," Maguire said, "is the basic scaffold around which memories are hung."

Cloned Meat Ruling Sparks Optimism, Outcry in U.S.

2007-07-19T19:18:00.000-04:00

A flock of cloned sheep relaxes on a Scottish farm. These sheep—created a year after the world's first cloned mammal, Dolly—lived with the famous ewe until she was euthanized in 2003 after developing a lung infection. Now, ten years after Dolly's debut, scientists have created copies of a barnyard's worth of species, including cats, dogs, goats, and deer—but no humans. Photograph courtesy ViaGen

Cloned Meat Ruling Sparks Optimism, Outcry in U.S.
Maryann Mott
for National Geographic News
January 3, 2007

The announcement last week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that products from clones are safe to eat has reignited debate over the safety and ethics of animal cloning.
After analyzing hundreds of peer-reviewed publications, the FDA deemed that milk and meat from cloned livestock and their offspring are no different than regular meat and dairy products sold in the U.S.
Gary Weaver, of the University of Maryland Center for Food, Nutrition, and Agriculture Policy in College Park, says cloning technology could improve the overall quality of supermarket products.
"When I buy steaks it's always a gamble," he said. "You can have two that look the same, [but] one is tender and the other is shoe leather."
With cloning "in ten years we might all be eating prime beef for a reasonable price."
Only 3 percent of U.S. beef is currently labeled as prime—the government's highest rating. Such high-quality meats are found mostly in upscale restaurants.
Many consumer groups argue that FDA's evaluation of cloned meats hasn't been thorough enough.
What's more, the groups say, the practice of cloning still raises too many ethical issues, including the possibility that large corporations could patent the genes of food animals.
George Siemon is CEO of the Organic Valley farmers cooperative in LaFarge, Wisconsin, which represents 922 farmers in 27 states.
"Allowing animal cloning … to be patented by profit-driven companies has too many unknown risks," Siemon said. "[It] is a detriment to farmers and the future of our food supply."
Clone Wars
A report with the U.S. government's final say on the controversial issue is expected by the end of this year.
If the government does approve cloned meat for sale, such products wouldn't hit supermarket shelves for at least five years, the University of Maryland's Weaver said.
In total only 600 cloned pigs, cows, and goats are believed to exist right now in the U.S.
Because of their rarity and price—some animals can cost upward of $170,000 (U.S.) each—clones would be mostly used as breeding stock to pass on naturally occurring, desirable traits, Weaver said.
For example, the fat content in beef and pork could be controlled to create healthier meat. The technology could also give rise to disease-resistant cattle (related photo: Kansas cattle).
Despite the FDA ruling, consumer groups argue that scientific evidence that cloned foods are safe for humans remains superficial.
In a statement released just before FDA's announcement, the nonprofit advocacy group the Center for Food Safety in Washington, D.C., cited a number of health and safety problems related to cloned livestock that the group says the agency has not properly addressed.
People eating cloned meat would be exposed to higher amounts of animal hormones related to the cloning process, the group says.
The animals themselves would suffer from the high incidence of disease and birth defects currently recorded in cloned animals.
"There is widespread concern among Americans and scientific concern that cloned food may not be safe and that cloning will increase animal cruelty," Joseph Mendelson, legal director for the Center for Food Safety, said in the release.
"We intend to pursue our legal action to compel FDA to address the many unanswered questions around cloned food."
Mixed Reactions
Meanwhile, Austin, Texas-based ViaGen is one of a handful of U.S. companies already working on livestock clones.
The company has successfully duplicated 250 farm animals in recent years, including individual horses, cows, and pigs.

(Related news: "Ten Years After Dolly, No Human Clones, But a Barnyard of Copies" [July 5, 2006].)

ViaGen president Mark Walton said cloning is just another tool that enables farmers to breed their best animals.
For decades other assisted reproductive technologies have been used in agriculture, such as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization.
In fact, he said, 90 percent of U.S. dairy cows are produced via artificial insemination and nearly half of the country's beef cattle are born through assisted reproduction.
Though cloning is a hot topic, he said, most people have little understanding of what it is, how it's done, and whether it's useful.
"Unfortunately," Walton said, "those who turn to the popular media for insight about this new breeding technology are as likely to encounter myths as they are to find facts."
So far consumer reaction to cloned foods appears to be mixed, especially in light of the fact that FDA is unlikely to require cloned products to be specially labeled.
A University of Maryland survey released last month found that six out of ten U.S. shoppers would consider buying meat and milk from cloned animals or their offspring if the FDA determined the products were safe.
But a December 2006 survey by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, an independent advisory group, found that 64 percent of those polled were uncomfortable with animal cloning.
And a survey conducted by the International Dairy Foods Association last summer found that 14 percent of women shoppers would turn away from all dairy products if milk from clones is introduced into the food supply.
Connie Tipton, president of the Washington, D.C.-based trade group, said it's too soon to know if dairy farmers will embrace cloning.
"There is currently no consumer benefit in milk from cloned cows," she said.

Ten Years After Dolly, No Human Clones, But a Barnyard of Copies
Maryann Mott
for National Geographic News
July 5, 2006

Is she a monster or a miracle?
This was the front-page question posed by Britain's Daily Mail newspaper in 1997.
The article was just one of hundreds of news reports on the world's first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep.
Born July 5, 1996, at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, Dolly was the genetic copy of a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe. Because of a patent application on the cloning process, her birth was kept a secret until February 27, 1997.
Researchers, religious leaders, and politicians immediately began debating the ethical implications of cloning mammals.
Specifically, the announcement of a cloned sheep sparked concern that human clones wouldn't be far behind.
The U.S. and British governments both called for reports on the implications of the achievement, while the Vatican urged a worldwide ban on human cloning.
A decade later human clones seem no closer to reality, but scientists have created copies of a barnyard's worth of animals.
In all, 15 wild and domestic species have been copied, including African wildcats, goats, Asian oxen, deer, and even an Afghan hound (photos: world's first cloned dog).
Cloned Dinner?
"It's really astonishing," said Irina Polejaeva, referring to the number of species cloned within the last decade.
Polejaeva is the chief scientific officer for Austin, Texas-based ViaGen—one of several U.S. companies offering commercial cloning services.
Americans can now buy a copy of a beloved cat for $32,000 or a clone of a champion horse for $150,000.
U.S. farmers and ranchers are also plunking down thousands of dollars to duplicate prize bulls, cows, and pigs.
It won't be long before milk from cloned livestock and meat from their offspring arrive on dinner tables, observers say.
Ranchers are waiting for a final report from U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on whether products of cloned animals are safe to eat. The report is expected sometime this year.
Wayne Pacelle is president of the Humane Society of the United States, based in Washington, D.C. He says commercial cloning is the ultimate in terms of frivolous uses of animals.
"We have gotten along fine for all of human history without relying on cloning and relying on reproduction as a means of procreation," he said.
Barnyard to Nursery
Meanwhile, cloning advocates say that every step of the cloning procedure has improved in the decade since Dolly's birth.
For example, health problems seen in early clones have declined to rates approaching those of other reproductive technologies.
Ian Wilmut led the team that created Dolly and is now a professor at Scotland's University of Edinburgh.
He says that the major cloning accomplishments of the last ten years have involved research projects where precise genetic changes were made to farm animals to benefit human health.
"One was to change pigs so that their organs are more likely to be suitable for transfer into people," he wrote in an email to National Geographic News. (Read "Cloned Pigs Modified for Use in Human Transplants.")
"At present, thousands of people die each year before an organ becomes available."
In 1997 Wilmut's research team unveiled Polly, a sheep altered to secrete a human blood-clotting protein in her milk.
Wilmut has since turned his attention from the barnyard to the nursery.
The geneticist hopes that one day cells derived from cloned human embryos will shed light on how to treat inherited human diseases.
In his new book, After Dolly: The Uses and Misuses of Human Cloning, he argues that cloned human embryos could provide great benefits to healthy reproduction.
When the technology is safe, he writes, scientists should be allowed to combine the cloning of human embryos with genetic modification to prevent the birth of babies with serious diseases.
"I want people to have new options when it comes to the most fundamental urge: to bring healthy children into this world," he writes.
"The use of genetic and reproductive technologies is not a step backwards into darkness but a step forward into the light."
But Wilmut seems unsure if cloning cats for companionship or horses for competitions are legitimate uses of the technology.
"At present many cloned animals die, and mothers have a difficult time giving birth to clones," he said.
"In these circumstances I think that you have to have a really great benefit from any use of cloning."
Goodbye, Dolly
On February 14, 2003, Dolly was euthanized after developing a lung infection.
A postmortem examination confirmed she had arthritis in her hind legs, though no evidence was found to link this ailment or her respiratory illness to the cloning process.
She is now on permanent display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
A flock of Dolly's farm mates, created about a year after Dolly, are healthy and living on a farm in Scotland, reports ViaGen's Polejaeva.
The company now owns the flock and is monitoring their health.

Cloned Pigs Modified for Use in Human Transplants
Bijal P. Trivedi
National Geographic Today
January 3, 2002

Two competing teams have cloned pigs that have been genetically modified to produce organs more suitable for transplantation into humans.
Pig organs are well suited for transplantation; they are approximately the same size as human organs and have similar plumbing, which makes reconnecting blood vessels much easier. Also, the size of pig litters tends to be large and pigs reproduce quickly, raising the prospect of a large supply of "spare" organs.
A problem with using pig organs, however, is that they are coated with sugar molecules that trigger acute rejection in people. Human antibodies attach themselves to these sugar molecules and quickly destroy the newly transplanted pig organ.
To circumvent the rejection, scientists are working to produce pigs that lack the sugar-producing gene.
In a significant step toward that goal, a team of scientists led by Randall Prather of the University of Missouri in Columbia created four cloned piglets in which one copy of the sugar-producing gene was "knocked out" (an organism receives two copies of a gene, one from the mother and one from the father). The piglets were born in September and October. A description of the work was published online by the journal Science.
Earlier this week, PPL Therapeutics PLC of Scotland, the company that helped clone Dolly the sheep, announced the birth of five cloned piglets that also lack a copy of the sugar-producing gene. The piglets were born December 25 and were named Noel, Angel, Star, Joy, and Mary.
By selectively breeding the experimental pigs, both teams of scientists hope to produce pigs lacking both copies of the gene. It's expected that the organs of these modified pigs could be transplanted into people without the problem of tissue rejection.
The new results are a significant advance over many other attempts at genetic modification in animals because in both of the studies, the scientists were able to modify—in this case, "knock out"—a gene at a specific location. Although genes from other organisms have been inserted into the genomes of sheep, cattle, and pigs, scientists have had little control over where on a chromosome the new gene is incorporated.
"This is the first time a specific genetic modification has been made in the pig," said Prather.
Prather's team at the University of Missouri and his colleagues at Immerge BioTherapeutics Inc. in Charlestown, Massachusetts, genetically altered fetal pig cells, which were used to create embryo clones. Of 3,000 genetically modified pig embryos that were implanted into 28 surrogate sows, only seven piglets were born, three of which died later.
The cloning of Dolly almost five years ago raised expectations of creating identical, genetically modified organs for transplantation into humans. The cloning of genetically modified piglets brings scientists closer to their goal of "xenotransplantation"—the transfer of cells and organs from one species into another.
A concern that has dampened the prospects of xenotransplantation is the possibility of spreading viruses from one species to another. Porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV), for example, is part of a pig's natural genetic makeup and does not cause any disease in the animal. There is no guarantee, however, that PERV would be harmless in humans.
To minimize the risk of spreading PERV, Prather's team used a line of pig—miniature swine—that was developed specifically for the purpose of transplantation. A major advantage of these pigs is that they are unable to spread PERV.
Prather's team expects to produce a miniature swine that lacks both copies of the sugar-producing gene within the next 18 months.

Mouse Testicles Yield Promising Stem Cells

2007-07-19T19:15:00.000-04:00

Photograph by Arnold Greenwell, courtesy Environmental Health Perspectives/NIH/USDA

Mouse Testicles Yield Promising Stem Cells
John Roach
for National Geographic News
March 24, 2006

German researchers announced today that they have isolated stem cells in adult mouse testicles that have properties similar to those of embryonic stem cells.
When injected into early mouse embryos, the cells contributed to the growth of various mouse organs, including heart, brain, and lungs.
If the method works in humans, it could provide an alternative source for stem cells, avoiding the ethical controversy of generating stem cells from human embryos, said the researchers from the Georg-August University of Göttingen.
"We can turn these into all kinds of tissue, from beating cardiac and vascular cells to neurons, skin cells, and liver cells," Gerd Hassenfuss, a member of the research team, told New Scientist magazine.
The discovery opens the possibility, at least for men, of a limitless supply of fresh stem cells tailored to their individual genetic makeup, according to the researchers.
"It definitely needs to be looked at in more detail, but it's exciting, totally exciting," said Renee Reijo Pera, codirector of the University of California, San Francisco ,Human Stem Cell Biology program.
Embryonic stem cells are unspecialized cells. They can grow into any type of cell found in the body.
Scientists hope embryonic stem cells can eventually be used to grow new tissue and replacement organs, and to cure a range of ailments from spinal cord injuries to Parkinson's disease.
To study human embryonic stem cells, researchers develop cell lines from stem cells, which are initially harvested from fertilized human eggs, such as those left over from in vitro fertilization.
Because harvesting destroys the embryo, the practice is controversial among some religious conservatives who regard it as a form of murder. (Read National Geographic magazine's "Stem Cells: The Great Divide.")
Testicle Tissue
In the study, to be reported next week in the journal Nature, researchers isolated sperm-producing stem cells from adult mouse testicles and showed that under certain conditions, some cells grew into colonies much as embryonic stem cells do.
The researchers had a success rate of 27 percent.
"These isolated [stem cells] respond to culture conditions and acquire embryonic stem cell properties," the team writes in Nature.
The researchers dubbed these cells multipotent adult germline stem cells (maGSCs).
Like embryonic stem cells, these testicle-derived cells can contribute to the development of multiple organs when injected into embryos, the researchers said.
Chris Higgins, director of the Medical Research Council's Clinical Science Center at Imperial College London told news@nature.com that the cells have been shown to have some, but not all, of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells.
"There needs to be further research before we really get excited about it," he said.
Prior to this research, Takashi Shinohara of Kyoto University in Japan found embryonic stem cell-like cells in mouse testicles but only in animals up to two days old.
The new research shows this is also possible with adult mice, Hassenfuss and colleagues write.
Human Trial
The German team believes these cells can also be established from tissue taken from adult human testicles.
Hassenfuss has already begun taking testicle-tissue samples with consent from patients undergoing operations for other conditions, New Scientist reports.
The cells must be taken from the testicle, as they are not available from a sperm or semen sample, he added.
If the technique works with humans, this "may allow individual cell-based therapy without the ethical and immunological problems associated with human embryonic stem cells," Hassenfuss and colleagues write in Nature.
"Furthermore, these cells may provide new opportunities to study genetic diseases in various cell lineages," the team added.
The University of California's Reijo Pera cautioned that the current study is only applicable to half the population.
"There's still women," she said. However, she added, the discovery should "spark incredible interest in identification of cells" that have similar properties.

Stem Cells Discovered in Amniotic Fluid, Scientists Announce

2007-07-19T19:08:00.000-04:00

Human embryonic stem cells like these can grow into many different kinds of human tissues, such as muscle cells or red blood cells. Scientists have recently found stem cells with similar properties in the amniotic fluid that surrounds the embryo during pregnancy. Image courtesy U.S. National Institutes of Health

Stem Cells Discovered in Amniotic Fluid, Scientists Announce
Scott Norris
for National Geographic News
January 8, 2007

Stem cells have been discovered in amniotic fluid, the liquid that surrounds a fetus during pregnancy, scientists have announced.
The cells appear to rival embryonic cells in their ability to give rise to all of the major tissue types present in the human body.
Researchers at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, used the amniotic stem cells to form bone, muscle, nerve, fat, blood vessel, and liver cells.
The report by Anthony Atala and colleagues appears in yesterday's edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology.
The finding raises new hope for advances in tissue repair and organ regeneration without the ethical objections that have surrounded embryonic stem cell research.
Such objections arise because embryonic stem cells must be harvested from a fertilized human egg, which is destroyed in the process.
In contrast, amniotic stem cells can be collected during a routine medical procedure that draws fluid from the womb without harming the developing fetus. The cells can also be taken from the placenta that is expelled after delivery.
In a teleconference Friday, Atala said that while it is too soon to know their full therapeutic potential, the new stem cells have advantages over other stem cell types because they are so potent and fast growing.
"I don't think these cells are going to replace [human embryonic stem cells], but they provide another choice and are more readily available," Atala said.
Engineering Organs
Amniotic fluid is known to be rich in fetal cells of various types, and physicians have already used some of these to clone "patches" of connective or muscle tissue for repairing certain birth defects.
Atala said the cells his group isolated are unique in their ability to form a range of cell types, while also possessing characteristics of adult stem cells that generate only a single type.
The researchers used special chemicals to coax the amniotic stem cells to develop different specialized structures and functions.
Cloned lines of the cells grew readily in the laboratory, with populations doubling every 36 hours.
Like embryonic stem cells, the amniotic cells retained their genetic makeup and showed no signs of aging over multiple generations.
After being grown in culture dishes, the human cells continued to grow and take on specialized functions when implanted into living mouse tissue.
Bone cells produced bony tissue in mice, for example, and nerve cells became established in areas of mice brains that had been damaged by disease.
"It's a very encouraging and hopeful discovery," said Roger De Filippo, a stem cell researcher at the University of Southern California.
"The fact that these cells can grow in standard culture dishes to very large numbers is a huge advantage for building organs."
But Arnold Kriegstein, director of the Institute for Regeneration Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, sounded a more cautious note.
"Some of the cell types they described were really not well developed," Kriegstein said. "We don't know yet what the true potential of these cells might be."
Potency and Potential
By harnessing the remarkable generative properties of stem cells, scientists hope to find new treatments for neurological injuries and degenerative diseases.
Controversy over embryonic stem cells led many researchers to focus on developing therapeutic techniques using adult stem cells.
Scientists are also working to develop techniques for harvesting embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos.
(Read "Stem Cells Can Be Collected Without Destroying Embryos, Scientists Show" [August 23, 2006].)
Other studies have tried to find alternative sources of stem cells with similar properties.
(Read "Mouse Testicles Yield Promising Stem Cells" [March 24, 2006].)
If techniques for engineering a range of tissue types from amniotic stem cells can be fully developed, the effects would be far reaching.
Atala suggests that banks of amniotic fluid could one day serve the medical needs of the general population.
"Theoretically speaking, if one had a bank of 100,000 specimens, one could supply 99 percent of the U.S. population with a perfect genetic match [of engineered tissues or organs] for transplantation," Atala said.
Ronald Green is a bioethicist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He called the new development "very promising—if the science pans out."
"We are very much in need of 'ethically universal' lines [of stem cells] that anyone can use, regardless of their views on the moral status of the human embryo," Green said.
"Every step toward alternatives that don't involve the destruction of human embryos is welcome."

Bionic Hand Unveiled in Britain

2007-07-19T19:06:00.000-04:00

Bionic Hand Unveiled in Britain

July 19, 2007—A new hope has arrived for amputees that would make Luke Skywalker feel right at home: a highly advanced bionic hand controlled by a patient's mind and muscles.
The newly released iLimb is the first prosthetic hand to have fully functional motorized digits that move and bend independently, its makers say. Electrodes taped to the skin transmit signals to tiny motors that power the fingers.
Previous artificial hands had only a thumb and forefinger that worked in a clawlike grasping action. But the new device allows amputees to carry out more delicate movements such as peeling a banana, typing on a computer, or eating with a knife and fork.
The iLimb is also covered by a semitransparent "cosmesis" that is computer modeled to look like human skin.
The hand, manufactured by Touch Bionics of Scotland, went on sale Tuesday in Britain for £8,500 (U.S. $17,454).
Fourteen amputees, including Iraq war veterans, were fitted with the robotic hand during an extensive trial period. One of these patients, Donald McKillop, 61, lost his right hand in an industrial accident nearly 30 years ago.
"They tell you to try and think as if you have two hands," McKillop told the Telegraph newspaper.
"It is a real learning curve, and every day it gets easier. I was amazed how much I could do within the first hour of trying it."

—Cori Sue Morris