ecuador 334.002,6 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. People living in the lowlands of what's now southwestern Ecuador began to grow squash between 10,000 and 9,000 years ago, about the same time that residents of Mexico's southern highlands domesticated the vegetable (SN: 5/24/97, p. 322), according to a study in the Feb. 14 Science.

The comparably ancient roots of plant cultivation in these two regions indicate that "in South America, there was no single center of agricultural origins," conclude Dolores R. Piperno of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama, and Karen E. Stothert of the University of Texas at San Antonio. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com/

In the soil of two prehistoric sites in Ecuador, the scientists isolated and studied microscopic crystals from squash rinds that had been uncovered there. These ancient crystals were the same size as those in the squash's modern domesticated form, but not those in its present-day wild counterpart. Piperno and Stothert were able to date tiny bits of carbon that were trapped inside the ancient crystals as they formed. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

feds 0000199.9223 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. When materials scientist Joseph Michael and his team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., trained their high-powered electron microscope on anthrax spore samples the FBI had sent them in February 2002, they made two crucial discoveries: The first confirmed previous findings that the Bacillus anthracis spores mailed to U.S. Senate offices and various media outlets (shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks) contained silicon, a substance used to turn anthrax-causing spores into a biological weapon.

But it was Sandia's next discovery that marked a critical turning point in the feds's probe of the mysterious mailings, which killed five people, injured 17 and prompted thousands more who were potentially exposed to the deadly spores to take potent antibiotics—in particular, Ciprofloxacin (known to irritate the gastrointestinal tract and cause joint swelling). http://louis-j-sheehan.com Using highly sensitive transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), the researchers came to a startling realization: The silicon had grown organically inside the Bacillus anthracis samples, nothing had been added to weaponize the spores. "The silicon was not on the outside of the spore," says Michael, who headed up Sandia's investigation, "but rather incorporated on the inside."

It was this key information that helped the FBI to rule out the likelihood that a terrorist organization was behind the anthrax mailings and prompted the agency to turn its attention to U.S. government labs as the possible source of the anthrax. This move eventually led the agency to conclude that Bruce Ivins, a scientist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), a federal biodefense research laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., who initially assisted with the investigation, was the culprit. Ivins, 62, two months ago committed suicide as prosecutors prepared to charge him in connection with the mailings.

Post-9/11 Scare
FBI Director Robert Mueller, III, this week told a House panel that he plans to commission the National Academy of Sciences to review evidence compiled by the agency's Amerithrax Task Force to erase any remaining doubts that the mailed anthrax came from Ivins's lab—and close a case that began seven years ago when a batch of letters containing Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes the disease anthrax, were sent to several news outlets, including the New York Post and NBC News. http://louis-j-sheehan.com Although only the letters to the Post and NBC were discovered, the FBI concluded that contaminated letters were also responsible for anthrax infections at ABC News, CBS News and for the October 5, 2001, death of Robert Stevens, a photo editor for the National Enquirer publisher American Media, Inc., based in Boca Raton, Fla.

Anthrax infection begins within a week of exposure with a few days of fever, chills, chest heaviness, malaise and cough as the spores are absorbed by the lungs. Ultimately the bacteria produce toxins that damage the lungs and poison the blood, potentially sending the victim into septic shock that leads to organ failure and, in many cases, death.

By mid-October, spore-filled envelopes had also been discovered in the offices of former Sens. Tom Daschle (D–S.D.) and Patrick Leahy (D–Vt.), along with ominous messages, including: "You can not [sic] stop us. We have this anthrax" and "Are you afraid?" Buildings throughout Washington, D.C., including the Hart Senate Office Building, the main postal distribution facility and several offices of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration were shut down out of fear they had been contaminated. The feds tested 36 postal facilities in the D.C. area (including one where two postal workers died), finding spores at 15 of them. The Hart Building did not reopen until January 2002.

Investigating the Investigators
Congress has called for an investigation of the FBI's work on the anthrax case. One major misstep was revealed Tuesday, when the Los Angeles Times reported that Peter Jahrling, a former senior civilian scientist at the Fort Detrick facility, admitted that he had made an "honest mistake" seven years ago when he told top FBI brass that he believed anthrax spores he examined had been altered to make them more deadly.

Worried that a terrorist organization or a country sympathetic to al Qaeda might be involved, the U.S. Department of Justice in late 2001 commissioned a series of tests to determine whether the spores had been coated with a substance that would prevent them from clumping together, enabling them to hang in the air longer than they would normally, thereby increasing the chance of inhalation.

Early in the investigation, the FBI appeared to endorse the view that only a sophisticated lab could have produced the material used in the Senate attack, investigative journalist Gary Matsumoto wrote in the November 2003 issue of Science. In fact, in May 2002 16 scientists and physicians working for the government published a paper in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association, describing the Senate anthrax powder as "weapons-grade" and exceptional: "high spore concentration, uniform particle size, low electrostatic charge, treated to reduce clumping."

In addition, the August/October 2002 newsletter from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), a research organization that the government often turns to for help analyzing potentially pathological substances, reported that a mass spectrometry analysis found silica—a staple in professionally engineered germ warfare powders for decades—in the powder sent to Sen. Daschle. The silica was believed to be there to prevent the anthrax spores from aggregating and make it easier for them to disperse into the air, according to Matsumoto, who added that any such weaponized form of anthrax is "more than 500 times more lethal than untreated spores."

Finding the Right Technology
By the time the Sandia researchers began their work in February 2002, "we had heard just like everyone else that the spores had been weaponized," says Michael, who had proposed a study of the elemental composition of any materials found growing outside the spores.

The first step was to find the silicon. Michael was aware that FBI researchers had analyzed the samples with both scanning electron microscopy (SEM), which scans surfaces with a high-energy beam of electrons, and with energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDS), which analyzes x-rays emitted by a substance after it is hit with charged electrons. But at that point, no one had studied them with a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM), which transmits a focused beam of electrons through a small part of a specimen to form an image and could provide compositional information by examining the spores a few nanometers (one nanometer is 40 millionths of an inch) at a time, a higher resolution than SEM could provide, Michael says. http://louis-j-sheehan.com

This enabled Sandia researchers to not only detect the presence of a foreign substance such as silica, but also to determine its location on or inside the spore. "In the FBI's mind, it was important not only that trace amount of elements were present, but also…[to determine]…where those elements were located in the sample through microanalysis," says Paul Kotula, a Sandia material scientist who studied the samples with Michael.

The researchers could find no way that the silica could be placed inside the spore without leaving a residue on the spore's outermost layer. (They found none.) Instead, the researchers determined that the silica formed inside the spore naturally. After only a month examining the anthrax samples in March 2002, Michael and his team were convinced, contrary to other reports, that the anthrax used in the attacks had not been weaponized.

Some of the samples they worked with came from the USAMRIID, which employed both Ivins and Steve Hatfill, another government scientist the FBI pursued but who ultimately turned out to be a dead end. (He was vindicated in June when he won a $5.8 million settlement in June against the Justice Department.) According to Michael, neither he nor other Sandia researchers ever worked directly with any of the USAMRIID researchers, instead obtaining all of the samples they tested through the FBI. Nor did Sandia work with live anthrax; all of the samples they received were first inactivated or irradiated by the FBI.

Michael says he was surprised to hear that the feds were closing in on a scientist at USAMRIID (Ivins, who died of a prescription-drug overdose), but that he was "not surprised the person who did this had knowledge of microbiology."

In the end, it was at Sandia where scientists cracked the mystery behind the mailings. The problem was, says Michael, that he had to keep mum on his findings—which might have calmed a jittery nation still reeling from the 9/11 terror attack—until the FBI wrapped up its investigation. "That's been one of the really frustrating things for Paul and me," Michael says. "We knew the answers but couldn't tell anyone". Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

BAURES 0000125 LOUIS J. SHEEHAN

Louis J.Sheehan

An aerial view of part of Bolivia's Amazon features a curious network of zigzag and straight lines cutting across floodplains. A close-up view reveals the lines to be the remains of an earthworks project that includes a fishery operated by native peoples of the Baures region before Spanish conquest, a new study finds. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

The discovery casts light on engineering and environmental know-how that originated among Amazonian groups at least several thousand years ago, proposes Clark L. Erickson of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

"The people of Baures converted much of the landscape into an aquatic farm," Erickson contends. "Rather than domesticate the species that they exploited, [they] domesticated the landscape."

Aerial image shows Baures fish weirs running from lower left to upper right, circular artificial ponds, and a modern path from upper left to lower right.Erickson

It took ingenuity and planning to build the 326-square-mile web of causeways and fish-catching devices, or weirs, Erickson reports in the Nov. 9 Nature. The weirs trapped fish that migrated to and spawned in the savanna during seasonal flooding. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Inhabitants of the region also dug large holes near the fish traps to store water for the dry months, Erickson says. These artificial ponds contained fish, attracted game, and nurtured palm trees that bore edible fruit, he proposes.

Native South American groups still build fish weirs, although they usually construct them in year-round bodies of water. The savanna structures studied by Erickson are longer, more numerous, and more densely packed than modern fish weirs. Radiocarbon dating puts some bits of burned wood from the weirs at 300 years old, providing a minimum age for the earthworks.

The Baures weirs are 3-to-6-feet wide, with earthen sides rising 7 to 20 inches. Every 30 to 100 feet, the channels bend in a sharp angle that contains a funnel-like opening. Several prehistoric Baures communities may have used interconnected fish weirs and causeways for water management as well as fish catching, Erickson suggests. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

The Baures fishery adds to prior South American evidence of prehistoric irrigation canals, dams, and dikes, comments anthropologist Peter Stahl of the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Fish farming and root-crop cultivation (SN: 10/28/00, p. 280: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20001028/note12.asp) are prehistoric practices that might be adapted to tropical areas today in place of "reckless felling of the rainforest," remarks Warwick Bray, an independent archaeologist in Herts, England.

number

Three British men who suffered left brain damage that undermined their capacity to speak and understand language still possess a firm grasp of mathematics, a new study finds. This observation dramatically illustrates the presence of separate brain systems for language and numbers, at least in adults, say neuroscientist Rosemary A. Varley of the University of Sheffield in England and her coworkers.

The findings, however, are unlikely to resolve a long-running debate over whether children use language to develop their number sense. Some researchers argue that initial math insights arise from knowledge of the words for numbers or of grammatical rules for arranging words in phrases. Other scientists suspect that, from infancy on, language and math follow different mental and neural paths.

"I believe that dedicated brain mechanisms exist [from the start] for language and mathematics, but others on my team disagree with me," Varley says.

An account of the new investigation will appear in the March 1 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The men who participated ranged in age from 56 to 59. Burst or injured blood vessels had damaged left brain tissue at least 3 years before the researchers tested the men's skills.

Participants exhibited little facility with language and were especially poor at grammar. They spoke only in single words and sentence fragments. Moreover, they couldn't distinguish the meanings of simple sentences with subject and object reversed, such as "The lion killed the man" and "The man killed the lion."http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

Yet each participant readily solved mathematical problems, including those that require applying number-combination rules that the researchers view as analogous to grammatical rules for combining words and phrases. For example, the men successfully calculated answers to equations with reversed terms, such as 59-13 and 13-59. They also solved problems such as 36/(3 x 2), which have a structure similar to a sentence with dependent clauses.

The new study "provides additional evidence that mathematics and language are functionally and neuroanatomically independent," remarks neuroscientist Elizabeth M. Brannon of Duke University in Durham, N.C., in an editorial to be published with the study.

Such research, Brannon notes, can't exclude the possibility that the evolution of grammar in language provided a basis for mathematical rules or that children use early language discoveries as a foundation for learning about math.

Knowledge of mathematical rules by infants or nonhuman animals has yet to be demonstrated.

Investigators of two Brazilian cultures that lack words for numbers greater than 5 have concluded that language is necessary for people to conceive of and manipulate numbers. In tests, members of both cultures could identify large quantities that had been formed from two smaller quantities, say, 30 and 20, even though they couldn't name them. But precise arithmetic problems stumped these people.Louis J. Sheehan

Those findings don't necessarily show that language is necessary for mathematical thinking, contend two researchers in the January Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Rochel Gelman of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., and Brian Butterworth of University College London say that people who don't need more than a handful of discrete numbers in their everyday lives may still be using a rudimentary, language-independent counting system.

conclude

Despite sharing much of their genetic identity with people, chimpanzees exhibit previously unappreciated DNA distinctions, according to the first rigorous comparisons of the two species' complete genetic sequences. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis_J_Sheehan_Esquire_1

The new research "dramatically narrows the search for the key biological differences between the species," says geneticist Robert Waterston of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.

Waterston led an international consortium that analyzed the genetic sequence of a male common chimp and compared it with DNA data from people (SN: 4/19/03, p. 245: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030419/fob6.asp). Initial results from their study, and from four related studies, appear in the Sept. 16 Science and the Sept. 1 Nature.

Waterston's group found that the roughly 3 billion base pairs in the genomes of the two species have the same sequence 96 percent of the time. Even so, as many as 3 million base pairs, or DNA building blocks, residing within protein-encoding and other functional areas of the genome differ between chimps and humans.

The new cross-species comparison identified six DNA segments in people that appear to have been strongly shaped by natural selection over just the past 250,000 years. Gene functions in these regions are largely unknown.

Differences in the evolutionary duplication of complete or partial genes, not of individual base pairs, primarily distinguish chimp DNA from that of people, report Washington's Evan E. Eichler and his coworkers. Differing degrees of gene duplications account for 2.7 percent of chimp and human DNA, whereas single base pair differences represent 1.2 percent. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis_J_Sheehan_Esquire_1

In both chimps and people, the tip regions of chromosomes appear most volatile, showing signs of frequent gene duplication and migration of various genes from one location to another, according to a group led by Washington's Barbara J. Trask. Chromosome ends served as "hot spots" for generating DNA disparities among primate species, the scientists propose.

Intriguingly, mutations on the chimp Y chromosome have led to the inactivation of several genes, but no comparable mutations exist on the human Y chromosome, report David C. Page of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues. The researchers speculate that increasing inactivation of the chimp Y chromosome is linked to their high-volume sperm production and fierce competition to impregnate receptive females.

In yet another finding, Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his coworkers discovered that genes active in the brain have accumulated more changes in people than in chimps. Alterations of regulatory genes and protein-making genes have shaped human-brain evolution in equal measure, the scientists also conclude.

In related news, anthropologists have found in Kenya the first fossil of a chimp ancestor. The scientists unearthed three 500,000-year-old teeth that resemble those of common chimps today, report Sally McBrearty of the University of Connecticut in Storrs and Nina G. Jablonski of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Fossils of a human ancestor, perhaps Homo erectus, come from the same ancient soil layer that the teeth did. Human and chimp ancestors apparently lived side by side, the scientists conclude.

That's possible, but fossils from the same soil layer also could represent creatures that inhabited the area at different times, notes Jay Kelley of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

verbal

You can take a child out of a severely disadvantaged neighborhood and move to a nicer part of town, but you can't always take a bad neighborhood's harmful effects on verbal development out of the child. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

That's the implication of a new, long-term study of children from various Chicago neighborhoods. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.comKids living in the most disadvantaged communities displayed marked declines in age-appropriate verbal ability over a 7-year span, even after moving to better areas, reports a team led by Harvard University sociologist Robert J. Sampson.

On average, children who at some point lived in neighborhoods characterized by "concentrated disadvantage" exhibited decreases of 4 IQ points on later standardized tests of vocabulary and reading skills. Comparable verbal losses occur when a child misses 1 year of school. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

Concentrated disadvantage consists of a high rate of welfare recipients, high levels of poverty and unemployment, racial segregation, and large numbers of female-headed households and children per household.

Exposure to concentrated disadvantage exerted harsher verbal effects on the youngest kids, the researchers say.

"Taking steps to invest in neighborhoods directly, by creating safe public spaces and quality learning environments for children, is likely a cost-effective way to mitigate the harmful consequences of concentrated disadvantage," Sampson says.

The new findings will appear in an upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sampson's group studied 2,226 children, ages 6 to 12, living in poor, middle-class, and upper-class sections of Chicago. Kids and their parents or caretakers were tracked from 1995 through 2002. In that time, about half of the participants moved from one Chicago neighborhood to another or to other parts of the United States. Interviews with children and caretakers occurred at the study's start and twice more, every 2 to 3 years. At each interview, the children completed a vocabulary and reading test.

The researchers focused on the 772 African-American children in the study. Almost one-third of the black children lived in areas of concentrated disadvantage in 1995, compared with virtually no white or Hispanic children.

About 42 percent of the black children living in the worst neighborhoods in 1995 moved to a nondisadvantaged neighborhood later on. This group still showed a 4-point decline in verbal ability.

Concentrated disadvantage undermines verbal development in numerous ways, Sampson suggests. These include the lack of safe public places to play with others and minimal exposure to academic English.

Economist Greg J. Duncan of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., agrees that neighborhood disadvantage worsens the reading skills of black children in Chicago. Yet in 2006, his team reported that—contrary to Sampson's results—6- to 10-year-old black children in families given vouchers to move to better neighborhoods scored higher on reading tests within 4 to 7 years. These results emerged in Chicago and Baltimore but not in three other cities.

Sampson's analysis neglects the possibility that if smarter caretakers move to better neighborhoods, then children who move with them will be brighter—for partly genetic reasons—than those left behind, notes Linda Gottfredson, an education professor at the University of Delaware in Newark. Further research needs to track verbal ability in siblings from the same families, where some are full biological siblings and others half or less, she suggests.

ddt

Thirty-five years after the United States banned the pesticide DDT because it was toxic to both humans and the environment, the chemical is still polluting the Antarctic thanks to global warming. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com

Antarctica’s Adelie penguins have shown traces of DDT since scientists started tracking the data in the 1970s. But alarmingly, the DDT concentration has remained about the same, even as the world has cut its DDT use by 80 to 90 percent since the 1960s. Although DDT persists in the environment—as famously documented in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—its presence should decrease over time unless a new source is leaching DDT into the ecosystem, according to a study led by Heidi Geisz at the College of William and Mary. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com And Geisz’s team thinks they’ve figured out what the new source is: Glaciers.

Geisz says that DDT first travels to the Antarctic attached to airborne particles and then falls with snow. In other conditions, traces of the chemical would have gone straight into the food web, with krill eating plankton that have absorbed DDT and penguins then eating the krill. But DDT-carrying snow that falls onto a glacier will instead freeze and become absorbed into the glacier.

Now, as global warming melts Antarctica’s coastal ice sheets, the water carries with it DDT that had been deposited in long-ago snowstorms and trapped inside the glacier, possibly for decades. In their study, Geisz and her team say that DDT was found 6 meters below the surface of the Antarctic Peninsula in 1975, and she estimates that there could be up to 3.6 metric tons of DDT stored in the Antarctic ice sheet. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com With global warming worsening, the scientists say, between 1 and 4 kg of DDT will enter the Antarctic ecosystem every year. The Adelies and other creatures will be exposed to high concentrations of DDT, which has been shown to cause thin eggshells in birds. Sorry, penguins: The bad news just keeps on coming.