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Thursday, May 15, 2003
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In this widely acclaimed film, set on the impressive island-abbey of Mont Saint Michel in France, Liv Ullmann, Sam Waterston, and John Heard portray very dissimilar vacationers caught up in a spontaneous and life-affirming sweep of self-expression and new ideas. MindWalk played in numerous theaters in the United States and has been shown repeatedly on cable television. It had a record run for over two years in a matinee theater in Los Angeles. (05/15/03) | |
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San Francisco's Exploratorium has put together a nifty site dedicated to CERN, the world's largest particle accelerator located on the French/Swiss border near Geneva. At this mecca of the particle physics world, scientists study how atomic particles behave when they're sped up to lightning-fast velocities. Click around and you'll be able to follow a proton as it careens through miles of looping tunnels and complex machinery. You can also manipulate batteries in a mock-up linear accelerator to see how it is the protons get sped up. You'll discover what crucial questions physicists hope to answer by studying subatomic particles, such as whether there is there an anti-universe and how the Big Bang contributed to the formation of the universe's fundamental building blocks. And you can meet some of the interesting people who work at the CERN center—including the Cernettes, a rock band with hits like "Microwave Love," "Collider," and "My Sweetheart Is A Nobel Prize." (05/15/03) | |
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Discover Magazine -- The world's population bomb may not go off after all. Demographers assumed that development and education were the principal ways to reduce fertility rates in countries with soaring population growth. However, recent surveys, satellite data, and number crunching presented and analyzed at a United Nations meeting in March show that fertility rates are declining in some less-developed parts of the world. Mexico, Indonesia, and the Philippines have slowed their longstanding high rates of the 1950s to a replacement level of 2.1 children per couple. Thailand has dropped from 6.6 to 1.9; Iran's rate is down to an even 2. India's fertility rate of 6 in the 1950s has now dropped to 3.3. The widespread availability of contraceptives may be the biggest factor behind the decline. ... If these trends continue, the population of the world may reach 9 billion by 2050 and level off at around 10 billion by the end of the century—1 or 2 billion fewer than earlier predictions. "It won't double again, and no one sees it going to 12," said Chamie. "It's like a slow-moving oil tanker: It's slowing down, but it will take awhile to stop." (05/15/03) | |
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Discover Magazine -- Physicists have fabricated impressive-looking microscopic gears, a first step toward building molecular machines that might one day fabricate novel materials or dispense drugs in the body. So far the devices are purely for show, however, because the bonds between molecules are so strong at these tiny scales that the parts stick together like seized engines. Kouji Miura, a physicist at the Aichi University of Education in Kariya, Japan, says he has a solution: Lubricate the works with the world's smallest ball bearings. Miura and his colleagues sandwiched buckyballs, round carbon molecules that look like hollow, multifaceted soccer balls, between two layers of graphite. The researchers found that the facets of the buckyballs would briefly stick to the graphite, then slip, then stick again. This interlocking motion allowed the molecules to roll and rotate smoothly over the graphite surface. And once the buckyballs get moving, "they are completely frictionless," says Miura. An injection of bucky-lube could allow those tiny gears to turn smoothly. (05/15/03) | |
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Discover Magazine -- A new breed of robots may boost European milk yields by up to 20 percent, milking cows at more regular intervals and in the absence of farmers. ... A growing body of research shows that cows give more milk when milked at times of their own preference, which is usually between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. The new robots, which will work around the clock, can therefore milk cows up to four times a day rather than twice a day, as farmers traditionally do. ... The milking robots will be placed so that cows pass through the milking unit in order to reach their hay or fodder. Each cow has a numbered collar around its neck. As it passes through, the robotic machine reads the cow's number and calculates when it was last milked. If appropriate--usually at four- to five-hour intervals--the robot will automatically milk the cow again. In preliminary trials, the cows "loved" the new robots. (05/15/03) | |
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New York Times -- The trees were doing just fine in this tiny mountain hamlet, before the people in the odd white suits showed up the other day. Indeed, in a manner commonly seen in Japan, the pines grow straight and tall here, as neat as columns. But that did not stop members of the group, which calls itself the Pana Wave Laboratory, from wrapping the trees in white sheets — halfway up the mountainside, in fact — when they pitched camp with a score of vehicles, all white, behind an abandoned school. Ever since they started roaming Japan in caravan formation late last month, the movements of the group, which predicts that the world will come to an end on Thursday, with a reversal of the earth's magnetic poles and cataclysmic earthquakes, has been the object of a mass media frenzy of the kind that periodically sweeps Japan. In most places where they have stopped, their unusual dress and behavior — they do not believe in bathing, and reportedly eat only instant noodles — has scared the wits out of the locals, for whom memories of another doomsday sect, Aum Shinrikyo, are all too fresh. (05/15/03) | |
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New York Times: Health -- Europeans are more likely to develop high blood pressure than are residents of the United States and Canada, which also puts them at higher risk of suffering a fatal stroke, researchers said today. It was unclear why surveyed adults from six European nations had higher blood pressure than Americans and Canadians, but researchers cited the usual culprits like diet, exercise, stress and genetic makeup. Germans had the highest rates of hypertension, at 55 percent of adults from 35 to 74 years old with blood pressure at or above a 140/90-mm Hg threshold. Only 27 percent of Canadians had blood pressure that high; 28 percent of adults in the United States did. Finland was next highest with 49 percent of adults suffering from hypertension, followed by Spain (47 percent), England (42 percent), and Sweden and Italy (38 percent). The condition can lead to strokes and cardiovascular disease, wrote the study's author, Katharina Wolf-Maier of the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University in Chicago. And 41.2 per 100,000 Europeans die from strokes versus 27.6 per 100,000 Canadians and Americans. The study, published this week in The Journal of the American Medical Association, was based on cumulative data taken from eight earlier surveys. (05/15/03) | |
5:58:09 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
6/3/2003; 5:44:52 AM.
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