Beer is the answer. (Now, what was the question?)

Why are some people more attractive than others ?
Paradox of evolutionary theory, often cited by creationists, is explained at last. Researchers believe they have solved a mystery that has puzzled evolutionary scientists for years ... if 'good' genes spread through the population, why are individuals so different?
The so-called 'lek paradox', that sexually-selecting species like humans should have much less individuality than is the case, has been seized upon by creationists as an argument that Darwin's theories are fundamentally flawed.
The problem with current evolutionary theory is that if females select the most attractive mates, the genes responsible for attractive features should spread quickly through a population, resulting in males becoming equally attractive, to the point where sexual selection could no longer take place.
However, new research by Professor Marion Petrie and Dr Gilbert Roberts at Newcastle University, England, suggests that sexual selection can in fact cause greater genetic diversity by a mechanism not previously understood.
Professor Petrie theorised that since genetic mutations can occur anywhere in the genome, some will affect the 'DNA repair kit' possessed by all cells. As a result, some individuals have less efficient repair kits, resulting in greater variation in their DNA as damage does unrepaired.
Although unrepaired DNA is generally harmful - causing tissue to degenerate or develop cancers - it is useful in some parts of the genome, such as those parts resposible for disease defence where variation can help in the resistance to disease. It has long been known that greater variation of DNA in the disease defending regions makes it more likely that an individual can resist attacks by bacteria and viruses.
Using a computer model to map the spread of genes in a population, Professor Petrie demonstrated that the tendency towards reduction in genetic diversity caused by sexual selection is outweighed by the maintenance in greater genetic diversity generated by mutations affecting DNA repair.
The research is published today (28 March 2007) in the academic journal, Heredity, part of the Nature Publishing Group.
Professor Petrie, of the Evolution and Behaviour Research Group in the School of Biology at Newcastle University, said: 'We started this research ten years ago and our model has now produced a good fit with what we observe in terms of genetic variation, which leads us to believe that our theory is correct.' 'We find that sexual selection can promote genetic diversity despite expectations to the contrary.'
In 2005, Professor Petrie and colleagues demonstrated that men with greater genetic diversity in disease defence regions of the genome — and therefore better prospects of passing disease resistance to their offspring — had a number of physical features which women found attractive. The research involved testing men for genetic diversity and showing photographs of them to women, who allocated scores for attractiveness. These scores were found to correlate strongly to genetic diversity.
Source: University of Newcastle upon Tyne

For Occam's Razor,read on


'Beer goggles' effect explained

Alcohol is not the only factor in the beer goggles formula

Scientists believe they have worked out a formula to calculate how "beer goggles" affect a drinker's vision.
The drink-fuelled phenomenon is said to transform supposedly "ugly" people into beauties - until the morning after.
Researchers at Manchester University say while beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder, the amount of alcohol consumed is not the only factor.
Additional factors include the level of light in the pub or club, the drinker's own eyesight and the room's smokiness.

The distance between two people is also a factor.


KEY TO FORMULA
Beer goggles equation
An = number of units of alcohol consumed
S = smokiness of the room (graded from 0-10, where 0 clear air; 10 extremely smoky)
L = luminance of 'person of interest' (candelas per square metre; typically 1 pitch black; 150 as seen in normal room lighting)
Vo = Snellen visual acuity (6/6 normal; 6/12 just meets driving standard)
d = distance from 'person of interest' (metres; 0.5 to 3 metres)

They all add up to make the aesthetically-challenged more attractive, according to the formula.
The formula can work out a final score, ranging from less than one - where there is no beer goggle effect - to more than 100.
Nathan Efron, Professor of Clinical Optometry at the University of Manchester, said: "The beer goggles effect isn't solely dependent on how much alcohol a person consumes, there are other influencing factors at play too.
"For example, someone with normal vision, who has consumed five pints of beer and views a person 1.5 metres away in a fairly smoky and poorly lit room, will score 55, which means they would suffer from a moderate beer goggle effect."
The research was commissioned by eyecare firm Bausch & Lomb PureVision.
A poll showed that 68% of people had regretted giving their phone number to someone to whom they later realised they were not attracted.
A formula rating of less than one means no effect. Between one and 50 the person you would normally find unattractive appears less "visually offensive".
Non-appealing people become suddenly attractive between 51 and 100. At more than 100, someone not considered attractive looks like a super model.

Researchers reveal the tangle under turbulence

Picture the flow of water over a rock. At very low speeds, the water looks like a smooth sheet skimming the rock's surface. As the water rushes faster, the flow turns into turbulent, roiling whitewater that can overturn your raft.
Turbulence is important in virtually all phenomena involving fluid flow, such as air and gas mixing in an engine, ocean waves breaking on a cliff and air whipping across the surface of a vehicle. However, a comprehensive description of turbulent fluid motion remains one of physics' major unsolved problems.
Now, in a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters, MIT researchers report that they have visualized for the first time a convoluted tangle underlying turbulence. This work may ultimately help engineers design better planes, cars, submarines and engines.
Researchers have long suspected that there's a hidden but coherent structure underlying turbulence's messy complexity, but there has been no objective way of identifying it, said MIT research group leader George Haller, professor of mechanical engineering, who also heads Morgan Stanley's Mathematical Modeling Center in Hungary.
"The fluid mechanics community has not reached a consensus even on an objective definition of a vortex, or whirlpool effect, let alone the definition of structures forming turbulence. The mathematical techniques we have developed give a systematic way to identify the material building blocks of a turbulent flow," Haller said.
To picture the skeleton of turbulence, the MIT researchers analyzed experimental data obtained from co-authors Jori Ruppert-Felsot and Harry Swinney of the University of Texas at Austin. The Texas group used water jets to force water from below into a rotating tank of fluid. They seeded the resulting complicated flow with luminescent buoyant particles. When illuminated with a laser, the miniscule polystyrene spheres were visible as they raced around the vortices and jets.
While the particles looked cool, "most important to our analysis were the particles' velocities, which our collaborators obtained by recording the particles' motion with a high-resolution camera, then using a software tool to figure out which particle moved where in a split second," Haller said. "This gave us a high-quality map of the whole velocity field of the turbulent flow at each time instance."
The technical analysis of the velocity field was carried out by MIT mechanical engineering graduate student Manikandan Mathur, whose work is jointly supervised by Haller and co-author Thomas Peacock, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

Using involved mathematical tools, Mathur uncovered a convoluted tangle embedded in the flow. "With this approach, we isolated the very source of turbulent mixing, not just its effect on dye or smoke as earlier studies did," said Mathur.
The complexity they found surprised the MIT team. They knew that in turbulent flow, unsteady vortices appear on many scales and interact with each other. What they didn't know was that the complicated, constantly evolving flow patterns are driven by two competing armies of particles constantly being pulled together and pushed apart.
The researchers identified a complex network of two types of curves formed by two distinct groups of particles. The first type of curve, which the researchers colored red, attracts other fluid particles. At the same time, the second type, colored blue, repels other fluid particles. Both sets of curves evolve with the flow.

Imagine that the particles visible in the turbulent water are like an army of ants being chased through a bowl of mixed-up red and blue spaghetti. "The ants love red spaghetti and want to stay close to it, but they hate blue spaghetti and won't touch it. And they have to keep running in the bowl under these constraints, stuck in an endless maze forever," said Haller.

The resulting images, which look like dense, tangled masses of blue and red fibers, are snapshots of this stunning, constantly deforming structure. "The chaotic tangle forms the skeleton of turbulence as fluid is simultaneously attracted to, and repelled by, its different components," Haller said.
The MIT researchers call their discovery the "Lagrangian skeleton" of turbulence because their particle-based approach is motivated by the work of 19th-century mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange. "Lagrange developed mathematical tools still used today for calculating mechanical and fluid motion," said Peacock.
Among many applications, the new results promise to aid the early detection of clear air turbulence that causes those unexpected jolts in airplanes; they may also help control the spread of oceanic pollution. "Most certainly, they will lead to a better appreciation of ants running in a bowl of spaghetti," said Haller.

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Flaming Space Junk (my new band)

File photo of the Earth pictured from space. Flaming space junk from a Russian satellite narrowly missed hitting a Chilean airliner over the Pacific Ocean, reports said Wednesday. The pilot of a LAN Chile Airbus A340 en route to New Zealand told air traffic controllers he had seen pieces of flaming space junk falling about eight kilometres (four miles) in front of the plane and behind it, TV3 said.
Flaming space junk from a Russian satellite narrowly missed hitting a Chilean airliner over the Pacific Ocean, reports said Wednesday.
The pilot of a LAN Chile Airbus A340 en route to New Zealand told air traffic controllers he had seen pieces of flaming space junk falling about eight kilometres (four miles) in front of the plane and behind it, TV3 said.
The aircraft was not struck by any of the debris and later landed safely in Auckland.
Airways New Zealand, which manages New Zealand's air traffic, said it had been warned by Russian authorities that an obsolete satellite was due to fall into the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday.
But the debris had apparently fallen into the area 12 hours earlier than the time advised by the Russians.
A spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority, which is responsible for air safety, said it would launch an inquiry after it was advised of the details of the incident.

Is Beauty Truth and Truth Beauty?: Scientific American

By Martin Gardner

WHY BEAUTY IS TRUTH: A HISTORY OF SYMMETRY
by Ian Stewart
Basic Books, 2007
The title of Ian Stewart's book (he has written more than 60 others) is, of course, taken from the enigmatic last two lines of John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn":

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

But what on earth did Keats mean? T. S. Eliot called the lines "meaningless" and "a serious blemish on a beautiful poem." John Simon opened a movie review with "one of the greatest problems of art--perhaps the greatest--is that truth is not beauty,beauty not truth. Nor is it all we need to know." Stewart, a distinguished mathematician at the University of Warwick in England and a former author of this magazine's Mathematical Recreations column, is concerned with how Keats's lines apply to mathematics. "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare," Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote. To mathematicians, great theorems and great proofs, such as Euclid's elegant proof of the infinity of primes, have about them what Bertrand Russell described as "a beauty cold and austere," akin to the beauty of great works of sculpture.
Stewart's first 10 chapters, written in his usual easygoing style, constitute a veritable history of mathematics, with an emphasis on the concept of symmetry. When you perform an operation on a mathematical object, such that after the operation it looks the same, you have uncovered a symmetry. A simple operation is rotation. No matter how you turn a tennis ball, it does not alter the ball's appearance. It is said to have rotational symmetry. Capital "H" has 180-degree rotational symmetry because it is unchanged when turned upside down. It also has mirror reflection symmetry because it looks the same in a mirror. A swastika has 90-degree rotational symmetry but lacks mirror reflection symmetry because its mirror image whirls the other way.
Associated with every kind of symmetry is a "group." Stewart explains the group concept in a simple way by considering operations on an equilateral triangle. Rotate it 60 degrees in either direction, and it looks the same. Every operation has an "inverse," that cancels the operation. Imagine the corners of the triangle labeled A, B and C. A 60-degree clockwise rotation alters the corners' positions. If this is followed by a similar rotation the other way, the original positions are restored. If you do nothing to the triangle, this is called the "identity" operation. The set of all symmetry transformations of the triangle constitutes its group.
Stewart's history begins with Babylonian and Greek mathematics, introducing their basic concepts in ways a junior high school student can understand. As his history proceeds, the math slowly becomes more technical, especially when he gets to complex numbers and their offspring, the quaternions and octonions. The history ends with the discoveries of Sophus Lie, for whom Lie groups are named, and the work of a little-known German mathematician, Joseph Killing, who classified Lie groups. Through this historical section, Stewart skillfully interweaves the math with colorful sketches of the lives of the mathematicians involved.
Not until the book's second half does Stewart turn to physics and explain how symmetry and group theory became necessary tools. A chapter on Albert Einstein is a wonderful blend of elementary relativity and details of Einstein's life. Next comes quantum mechanics and particle theory, with several pages on superstrings, the hottest topic in today's theoretical physics. Stewart is a bit skeptical of string theory, which sees all fundamental particles as inconceivably tiny filaments of vibrating energy that can be open-ended or closed like a rubber band. He does not mention two recent books (reviewed in the September 2006 issue of Scientific American) that give string theory a severe bashing. Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics denounces string theory as "not a theory at all," only a mishmash of bizarre speculations in search of a viable theory. Peter Woit's book is entitled Not Even Wrong, a quote from the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli. He once described a theory as so bad it was "not even wrong."
Read on...

Is string theory beautiful? Its promoters think so. Smolin and Woit believe that its recent absorption into a richer conjecture called M-theory has turned the former beauty of strings into mathematical structures as ugly as the epicycles Ptolemy invented to explain the orbits of planets as they circle the earth.
We are back to the mystery of Keats's notorious lines. In my opinion, John Simon is right. Even beautiful mathematical proofs can be wrong. In 1879 Sir Alfred Kempe published a proof of the four-color map theorem. It was so elegant that for 10 years it was accepted as sound. Alas, it was not. Henry Dude�ney, England's great puzzle maker, published a much shorter and even prettier false proof.
In The New Ambidextrous Universe I write about the vortex theory of atoms. This popular 19th-century conjecture had an uncanny resemblance to superstrings. It maintained that atoms are not pointlike but are incredibly tiny loops of energy that vibrate at different frequencies. They are minute whirlpools in the ether, a rigid, frictionless substance then believed to permeate all space. The atoms have the structure of knots and links, their shapes and vibrations generating the properties of all the elements. Once created by the Almighty, they last forever.
In researching vortex theory, I came across many statements by eminent physicists, including Lord Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell, suggesting that vortex theory was far too beautiful not to be true. Papers on the topic proliferated, books about it were published. Scottish mathematician Peter Tait's work on vortex atoms led to advances in knot theory. Tait predicted it would take several generations to develop the theory's mathematical foundations. Beautiful though it seemed, the vortex theory proved to be a glorious road that led nowhere.
Stewart concludes his book with two maxims. The first: "In physics, beauty does not automatically ensure truth, but it helps." The second: "In mathematics beauty must be true--because anything false is ugly." I agree with the first statement, but not the second. We have seen how lovely proofs by Kempe and Dudeney were flawed. Moreover, there are simply stated theorems for which ugly proofs may be the only ones possible.
Let me cite two recent examples. Proof of the four-color map theorem required a computer printout so vast and dense that it could be checked only by other computer programs. Although there may be a beautiful proof recorded in what Paul Erd�s called "God's book"--a book that, he suggested, included all the theorems of mathematics and their most beautiful proofs--it is possible that God's book contains no such proof. The same goes for Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem. It is not computer-based, but it is much too long and complicated to be called beautiful. There may be no beautiful proof for this theorem. Of course, mathematicians can always hope and believe otherwise.
Because symmetry is the glue and tape that binds the pages of Stewart's admirable history, a stanza from Lewis Carroll's immortal nonsense ballad The Hunting of the Snark could serve as an epigraph for the book:
You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue:
You condense it with locusts and tape:
Still keeping one principal object in view--
To preserve its symmetrical shape.

Sensing the earth's symmetrical sweep,
wings wide, wide and out,
I leap.
Blue on blue, the sky and water
each knows its place,
One to lead and one to follow,
The gravity of heaving hollows
will press no rein
upon the curve of space.
-So, with the universe,
What tangled theories of strings!
Of particles and waves
She springs.
The All/the Nothing, empty twins,
senseless and blind,
'Til cloven by a spiral grace,
two gazed upon a self-same face.
From monolith, asunder,
love's symmetry, that double star, defined.

ScienceDaily: New Treatment Vacuums Away Blood Clots: Prevents Disability

New Treatment Vacuums Away Blood Clots: Prevents Disability

Science Daily — A new technique safely and effectively removes blood clots in the body faster, reducing patient risk for pulmonary embolism and disability. The treatment was also shown to have a positive impact on patients’ quality of life, relieving symptoms such as pain and swelling, as well as greatly improving their ability to be active.

New treatment can remove blood clots in the leg non-surgically. (Credit: Image courtesy of Society of Interventional Radiology)

The “rapid lysis” technique combines a clot-dissolving drug with a clot removal device, thus improving the breaking up and dissolving of the clot, which is then vacuumed out of the vein and into the catheter, nonsurgically clearing away the deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Blood flow is restored throughout the leg, resolving symptoms. Patients in the study had extensive, large volume DVT that commonly ran the length of the leg from the ankle to the pelvis, and often into the vena cava.

Although the body may eventually dissolve clots, in the time needed to do so, permanent damage to the vein may occur, causing permanent disability and pain. In addition, previous studies have shown that clots in the larger veins will rarely clear on their own. The research was presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology’s 32nd Annual Scientific Meeting.

“The new combination technique offers a significant advancement in the treatment of DVT, often allowing the interventional radiologists to break up the clot in one treatment. It has worked on even the largest, most difficult clots and could become the new standard technique, potentially changing the way all DVT patients are treated,” says Mark J. Garcia, M.D., interventional radiologist at Christiana Care Health System, Wilmington, DE.

This treatment worked on the largest, most difficult clots, allowing resolution of DVT quickly and safely while restoring blood flow in the vein. The treatment can reduce the length of a hospital stay, thus reducing costs. The current standard catheter-directed thrombolysis treatment uses a clot-dissolving drug only and, although highly effective, can take two to four days to work. This increases the patients’ risk of bleeding as well as increasing their stay in the ICU. Although the catheter-directed thrombolysis technique has been available for about a decade, many DVT patients don’t receive it.

Instead, many patients are treated with blood thinners alone which can help prevent a life threatening pulmonary embolism, but do not help dissolve the clot. Long-term studies show that fifty percent of people with leg DVT treated with blood thinners alone develop the sequela of DVT, known as post-thrombotic syndrome. Post-thrombotic syndrome is caused by a combination of damage to the vein valves, as well as blocked blood flow in the vein from residual thrombus (clot). This condition is characterized by chronic leg pain and swelling which can lead to skin thickening and ulceration.

“Post-thrombotic syndrome is a common complication of DVT that is under-recognized and potentially preventable if we are able to dissolve the clots early, before permanent damage to the vein occurs,” says Garcia. “If we treat these patients within 14 days of their onset of symptoms, we are very successful in clearing the clot. Because the treatment is more rapid, safe and effective, patients are more likely to receive it and prevention of permanent damage is more likely to occur.”

About the AngioJet® Rheolytic™ Thrombectomy System

The interventional radiologist uses imaging to guide a catheter and the device into the vein and advances it to the blood clot. The device then sprays a diluted clot-dissolving drug into the clot at high force, helping to break up the clot and deliver the drug to a larger surface area throughout the clot. This enables the drug to remove the clot more quickly and efficiently. A powerful saline jet within the device creates a vacuum that draws the clot into the catheter, thus removing it from the body as the catheter is withdrawn. The interventional radiologist pulls back the device in a spiral motion which allows for greater removal of clot.

About the Study

102 patients (sixty-two percent male and thirty-eight percent female) with a mean age of 47 were treated for 118 cases of large volume DVT. Fifty-one percent of the patients treated had complete clot removal as well as restoration of blood flow. Thirty-one percent of the patients had a substantial amount (fifty-nine percent) of the clot removed with blood flow restored. Eleven percent had partial and four percent had minimal clot removal. Forty-three percent of patients were completed at the initial setting and did not need further infusion of medicine to dissolve clot. Follow-up ultrasound exams at six months showed 78 percent veins to be open with no DVT and eighty-three percent open at 12 months with no DVT. The quality of life survey, up to one year, showed that since treatment, sixty-eight percent had no pain, sixty-seven percent had no more swelling and seventy-eight percent no longer had heat or burning discomfort.

“Being able to restore blood flow once the clot is removed is imperative to ensuring the long-term success of this treatment. As long as the vein is open and blood freely flows, there is less likelihood the patient will develop another clot,” added Garcia.

About DVT

Deep vein thrombosis occurs in the deep veins that lie near the center of the leg. These veins are surrounded by powerful muscles that contract and force deoxygenated blood back to the lungs and heart. One-way valves prevent the back-flow, or reversal of blood flow, between the muscle and heart contractions. When the circulation of the blood slows down due to illness, injury or inactivity, blood can accumulate or “pool,” which provides an ideal setting for clot formation. The standard initial treatment with blood thinners is important to prevent a life-threatening pulmonary embolism, but does not dissolve the existing clot.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Society of Interventional Radiology.

Tragic -yet, somehow, I still manage to laugh

Warning: Women with children should visit the ladies room before viewing.
Mom My Ride

The Groovy Side of Chaos

Our Fractal Universe
Our Fractal Universe

The Groovy Side of Chaos!

Fractal Theory: The study of how order, structure, and pattern arise from extremely complicated, apparently chaotic systems.

Our Fractal Universe

Light's Lifetime

Superconducting mirrors made of copper covered by a thin layer of niobium. These mirrors are able to store microwave photons up to one-tenth of a second (Image: Michel Brune)
Photon's life cycle 'watched' in full
* 18:00 14 March 2007
* NewScientist.com news service
* Amarendra Swarup
For the first time the birth, life and death of a single photon – a particle of light – has been "watched" in real time.
Previously, scientists were restricted to momentary glances because the mere act of measurement absorbed and destroyed the delicate quantum particles.
Now, Serge Haroche and colleagues at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, have succeeded in tracking photons over an average lifetime of 0.13 seconds – long enough for a photon to travel one-tenth of the way to the Moon.
At the heart of their remarkable achievement lies a small box-like cavity, walled with ultra-reflective, superconducting mirrors, which is cooled to just 0.5° above absolute zero (-273.15°C). Photons appear and disappear randomly within the cavity due to tiny energy fluctuations in space that cause quantum particles to blink in and out of existence. However, once there, the photon is trapped, bouncing billions of times between the mirrored walls before it decays.
Trapped and annihilated
To observe the photon, the researchers passed rubidium atoms across the cavity one at a time. A single rubidium atom is unable to absorb a single photon, because the photon is not the correct package of energy to boost the rubidium atom to a different energy state.
However, the photon's electric field slightly shifts the atom’s energy levels by a measurable amount (once the atom has emerged), which the team used to determine whether there were any trapped photons.
“This is not performed at the expense of the photon energy, so if one is detected, it is still there afterwards for successive rubidium atoms, allowing us to track it,” says Haroche. “A typical signal has a sequence of atoms at one energy level, meaning an empty cavity, suddenly interrupted by atoms at another energy level, signalling the photon birth. Later, a jump in the opposite direction signals the photon annihilation.”
“This is a very important fundamental achievement as no one has ever seen a photon a second time,” says Ferdinand Schmidt-Kaler at the University of Ulm in Germany. “It also has significant implications for the rapidly evolving field of quantum computing.”
Quantum computing relies on transferring qubits – quantum bits of information – between different energy states to vastly speed up calculations. According to Schmidt-Kaler, the results demonstrate a stream of atomic qubits can be fully controlled by the qubit state of a trapped photon – a notable achievement, since such operations are fundamental to quantum computers.

Journal reference: Nature (vol 446, p 297)

More, Horatio, than ever dreamt in your philosophy...

The universe is a string-net liquid
In 1998, just after he won a share of the Nobel prize for physics, Robert Laughlin of Stanford University in California was asked how his discovery of "particles" with fractional charge, now called quasi-particles, would affect the lives of ordinary people. "It probably won't," he said, "unless people are concerned about how the universe works."
Well, people were. Xiao-Gang Wen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michael Levin at Harvard University ran with Laughlin's ideas and have come up with a prediction for a new state of matter, and even a tantalising picture of the nature of space-time itself. Levin presented their work at the Topological Quantum Computing conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, early this month.
The first hint that a new type of matter may exist came in 1983. "Twenty five years ago we thought we understood everything about how matter changes phase," says Wen. "Then along came an experiment that opened up a whole new world."
In the experiment, electrons moving in the interface between two semiconductors behaved as though they were made up of particles with only a fraction of the electron's charge. This so-called fractional quantum hall effect (FQHE) suggested that electrons may not be elementary particles after all. However, it soon became clear that electrons under certain conditions can congregate in a way that gives them the illusion of having fractional charge - an explanation that earned Laughlin, Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui the Nobel prize (New Scientist, 31 January 1998, p 36).
Wen suspected that the effect could be an example of a new type of matter. Different phases of matter are characterised by the way their atoms are organised. In a liquid, for instance, atoms are randomly distributed, whereas atoms in a solid are rigidly positioned in a lattice. FQHE systems are different. "If you take a snapshot of the position of electrons in an FQHE system they appear random and you think you have a liquid," says Wen. But step back, and you see that, unlike in a liquid, the electrons dance around each other in well-defined steps.
“The position of the electrons in this material appears random like in a liquid, but they also move in well-defined steps”
It is as if the electrons are entangled. Today, physicists use the term to describe a property in quantum mechanics in which particles can be linked despite being separated by great distances. Wen speculated that FQHE systems represented a state of matter in which entanglement was an intrinsic property, with particles tied to each other in a complicated manner across the entire material.
This led Wen and Levin to the idea that there may be a different way of thinking about matter. What if electrons were not really elementary, but were formed at the ends of long "strings" of other, fundamental particles? They formulated a model in which such strings are free to move "like noodles in a soup" and weave together into huge "string-nets".
“What if electrons were not elementary, but were formed at the ends of long strings of other, fundamental particles?”
Light and matter unified:
Read on...

The pair ran simulations to see if their string-nets could give rise to conventional particles and fractionally charged quasi-particles. They did. They also found something even more surprising. As the net of strings vibrated, it produced a wave that behaved according to a very familiar set of laws - Maxwell's equations, which describe the behaviour of light. "A hundred and fifty years after Maxwell wrote them down, here they emerged by accident," says Wen.

That wasn't all. They found that their model naturally gave rise to other elementary particles, such as quarks, which make up protons and neutrons, and the particles responsible for some of the fundamental forces, such as gluons and the W and Z bosons.
From this, the researchers made another leap. Could the entire universe be modelled in a similar way? "Suddenly we realised, maybe the vacuum of our whole universe is a string-net liquid," says Wen. "It would provide a unified explanation of how both light and matter arise." So in their theory elementary particles are not the fundamental building blocks of matter. Instead, they emerge from the deeper structure of the non-empty vacuum of space-time.
"Wen and Levin's theory is really beautiful stuff," says Michael Freedman, 1986 winner of the Fields medal, the highest prize in mathematics, and a quantum computing specialist at Microsoft Station Q at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "I admire their approach, which is to be suspicious of anything - electrons, photons, Maxwell's equations - that everyone else accepts as fundamental."
Other theories that try to explain the same phenomena abound, of course; Wen and Levin realise that the burden of proof is on them. It may not be far off. Their model predicts specific arrangements of atoms in the new state of matter, which they dub the "string-net liquid", and Joel Helton's group at MIT might have found it.
Helton was aware of Wen's work and decided to look for such materials. Trawling through geology journals, his team spotted a candidate - a dark green crystal that geologists stumbled across in the mountains of Chile in 1972. "The geologists named it after a mineralogist they really admired, Herbert Smith, labelled it and put it to one side," says team member Young Lee. "They didn't realise the potential herbertsmithite would have for physicists years later."
Herbertsmithite (pictured) is unusual because its electrons are arranged in a triangular lattice. Normally, electrons prefer to line up so that their spins are in the opposite direction to that of their immediate neighbours, but in a triangle this is impossible - there will always be neighbouring electrons spinning in the same direction. Wen and Levin's model shows that such a system would be a string-net liquid.
Although herbertsmithite exists in nature, the mineral contains impurities that disrupt any string-net signatures, says Lee. So Helton's team made a pure sample in the lab. "It was painstaking," says Lee. "It took us a full year to prepare it and another year to analyse it."
The team measured the degree of magnetisation in the material, in response to an applied magnetic field. If herbertsmithite behaves like ordinary matter, they argue, then below about 26 °C the spins of its electrons should stop fluctuating - a condition called magnetic order. But the team found no such transition, even down to just a fraction above absolute zero.
They measured other properties, too, such as heat conduction. In conventional solids, the relationship between their temperature and their ability to conduct heat changes below a certain temperature, because the structure of the material changes. The team found no sign of such a transition in herbertsmithite, suggesting that, unlike other types of matter, its lowest energy state has no discernible order. "We could have created something in the lab that nobody has seen before," says Lee.
The team plans further tests to visualise the position of individual electrons, looking for long-range entanglement by firing neutrons at the crystal and observing how they scatter. "We want to see the dynamics of the spin," says Lee. "If we tweak one [electron], we can see how the others are affected."
This intrigues Paul Fendley, a quantum computing specialist at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville (see "Silicon for a quantum age"). "It's reasonable to hope that we are seeing something exotic here," he says. "People are getting very excited about this."
Even if herbertsmithite is not a new state of matter, we shouldn't be surprised if one is found soon, as many teams are hunting for them, says Freedman. He says people wrongly assume that particle accelerators are the only places where big discoveries about matter can be made. "Accelerators are just recreating conditions after the big bang and repeating experiments that are old hat for the universe," he says. "But in labs people are creating [conditions] that are colder than anywhere that has ever existed in the universe. We are bound to stumble on something the universe has never seen before."
From issue 2595 of New Scientist magazine, 15 March 2007, page 8-9

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

For Rats Who Just Want to Forget the Whole Thing

Published online: 11 March 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070305-17
Wipe out a single memory
Drug can clear away one fearful memory while leaving another intact.
Kerri Smith -Nature.com
A single, specific memory has been wiped from the brains of rats, leaving other recollections intact.
The study adds to our understanding of how memories are made and altered in the brain, and could help to relieve sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of the fearful memories that disrupt their lives. The results are published in Nature Neuroscience1.
The brain secures memories by transferring them from short-term to long-term storage, through a process called reconsolidation. It has been shown before that this process can be interrupted with drugs. But Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New York University and his colleagues wanted to know how specific this interference was: could the transfer of one specific memory be meddled with without affecting others?"Our concern was: would you do something really massive to their memory network?" says LeDoux.
Scary music
To find out, they trained rats to fear two different musical tones, by playing them at the same time as giving the rats an electric shock. Then, they gave half the rats a drug known to cause limited amnesia (U0126, which is not approved for use in people), and reminded all the animals, half of which were still under the influence of the drug, of one of their fearful memories by replaying just one of the tones.
When they tested the rats with both tones a day later, untreated animals were still fearful of both sounds, as if they expected a shock. But those treated with the drug were no longer afraid of the tone they had been reminded of under treatment. The process of re-arousing the rats' memory of being shocked with the one tone while they were drugged had wiped out that memory completely, while leaving their memory of the second tone intact.
LeDoux's team also confirms the idea that a part of the brain called the amygdala is central to this process - communication between neurons in this part of the brain usually increases when a fearful memory forms, but it decreases in the treated rats. This shows that the fearful memory is actually deleted, rather than simply breaking the link between the memory and a fearful response.
Greg Quirk, a neurophysiologist from the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico, thinks that psychiatrists working to treat patients with conditions such as PTSD will be encouraged by the step forward. "These drugs would be adjuncts to therapy," he says. "This is the future of psychiatry - neuroscience will provide tools to help it become more effective."

Ever Wonder Y ? Sure, it could be genes -Y not?

Gene variations contribute to aggression and anger in women

Ever wonder why some women seem to be more ill-tempered than others? University of Pittsburgh researchers have found that behaviors such as anger, hostility and aggression may be genetic, rooted in variations in a serotonin receptor gene.
Indrani Halder, Ph.D., of the Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine Program at the University of Pittsburgh, will present the findings today at the American Psychosomatic Society's Annual Meeting, held in Budapest, Hungary.
Previous studies have associated the hormone serotonin with anger and aggression in both humans and animals and have shown that increased serotonin activity is related to a decrease in angry and aggressive behaviors. In the study being presented today, researchers sought to determine if this relationship was genetically determined. The study is the first to look at the relationship between variations in the serotonin receptor 2C gene and anger and hostility.
Completed at the University of Pittsburgh's Behavioral Physiology Laboratory, the study looked at 550 unrelated women of European descent. In order to find normal variations in genes and behavior, the women were not prescreened for behavioral type. Researchers found that those who had one or both of two alterations in the promoter region of the serotonin receptor 2C gene were more likely to score lower on two common tests for anger, hostility and aggression.
These findings may aid in establishing a potential marker for certain conditions associated with aggression and anger.
"Aggression and hostility are predictors of hypertension, glucose metabolism and heart diseases," said Dr. Halder. "The genetic marker we found for hostility also may be useful for predicting a person's predisposition to such diseases."

Source: University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences

On The (Sound) Track Of Anesthetics

Nerve impulses sound, not electricity

Science Daily — Danish scientists challenge the accepted scientific views of how nerves function and of how anesthetics work. Their research suggests that action of nerves is based on sound pulses and that anesthetics inhibit their transmission.

The figure shows a biological membrane at its melting point. The green molecules are liquid, and the red are solid. Molecules of anesthetics reduce the number of red areas so that the sound pulse can no longer transport its signal. The nerve is anesthetised. (Credit: Illustration by Heiko Seeger, PhD.)

Every medical and biological textbook says that nerves function by sending electrical impulses along their length. "But for us as physicists, this cannot be the explanation. The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that no such heat is produced," says associate professor Thomas Heimburg from the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University. He received his Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany, where biologists and physicists often work together -- at most institutions these disciplines are worlds apart. Thomas Heimburg is an expert in biophysics, and when he came to Copenhagen, he met professor Andrew D. Jackson, who is an expert in theoretical physics. They decided to work together in order to study the basic mechanisms which govern the way nerves work.

Physics explains biology
Nerves are 'wrapped' in a membrane composed of lipids and proteins. According to the traditional explanation of molecular biology, a pulse is sent from one end of the nerve to the other with the help of electrically charged salts that pass through ion channels in the membrane. It has taken many years to understand this complicated process, and a number of the scientists involved in the task have been awarded the Nobel Prize for their efforts. But -- according to the physicists -- the fact that the nerve pulse does not produce heat contradicts the molecular biological theory of an electrical impulse produced by chemical processes. Instead, nerve pulses can be explained much more simply as a mechanical pulse according to the two physicists. And such a pulse could be sound. Normally, sound propagates as a wave that spreads out and becomes weaker and weaker. If, however, the medium in which the sound propagates has the right properties, it is possible to create localized sound pulses, known as "solitons", which propagate without spreading and without changing their shape or losing their strength.
The membrane of the nerve is composed of lipids, a material that is similar to olive oil. This material can change its state from liquid to solid with temperature. The freezing point of water can be lowered by the addition of salt. Likewise, molecules that dissolve in membranes can lower the freezing point of membranes. The scientists found that the nerve membrane has a freezing point, which is precisely suited to the propagation of these concentrated sound pulses. Their theoretical calculations lead them to the same conclusion: Nerve pulses are sound pulses.

Anesthetized by sound

How can one anesthetize a nerve so that feel ceases and it is possible to operate on a patient without pain? It has been known for more than 100 years that substances like ether, laughing gas, chloroform, procaine and the noble gas xenon can serve as anesthetics. The molecules of these substances have very different sizes and chemical properties, but experience shows that their doses are strictly determined by their solubility in olive oil. Current expertise is so advanced that it is possible to calculate precisely how much of a given material is required for the patient. In spite of this, no one knows precisely how anesthetics work. How are the nerves "turned off"? Starting from their theory that nerve signals are sound pulses, Thomas Heimburg and Andrew D. Jackson turned their attention to anesthesia. The chemical properties of anesthetics are all so different, but their effects are all the same - curious!
But the curious turned out to be simple. If a nerve is to be able to transport sound pulses and send signals along the nerve, its membrane must have the property that its melting point is sufficiently close to body temperature and responds appropriately to changes in pressure. The effect of anesthetics is simply to change the melting point -- and when the melting point has been changed, sound pulses cannot propagate. The nerve is put on stand-by, and neither nerve pulses nor sensations are transmitted. The patient is anesthetized and feels nothing.

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

Technology Review: Connecting Your Brain to the Game

Technology Review: Connecting Your Brain to the Game
Emotiv Systems, an electronic-game company from San Francisco, wants people to play with the power of the mind. Starting tomorrow, video-game makers will be able to buy Emotiv's electro-encephalograph (EEG) caps and software developer's tool kits so that they can build games that use the electrical signals from a player's brain to control the on-screen action.

Emotiv's system has three different applications. One is designed to sense facial expressions such as winks, grimaces, and smiles and transfer them, in real time, to an avatar. This could be useful in virtual-world games, such as Second Life, in which it takes a fair amount of training to learn how to express emotions and actions through a keyboard. Another application detects two emotional states, such as excitement and calm. Emotiv's chief product officer, Randy Breen, says that these unconscious cues could be used to modify a game's soundtrack or to affect the way that virtual characters interact with a player. The third set of software can detect a handful of conscious intentions that can be used to push, pull, rotate, and lift objects in a virtual world.

The notion of using brain activity to interact with computers isn't new. A number of schools--such as the University of Minnesota; University of California, San Diego; and Purdue--have research labs devoted to decoding thoughts from the brain and manipulating cursors on a screen, which is especially useful for disabled people. In addition, companies have cropped up in the past couple of years claiming to offer an effective brain-computer interface for video games or for biofeedback purposes. For instance, S.M.A.R.T. BrainGames, a company based in San Marcos, CA, sells games and EEG caps designed to treat people with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

To use Emotiv's system, a person puts on the EEG cap and adjusts it to her head, making sure that most of the sensors touch the scalp. The system automatically picks up blinks and emotional states. However, in order to move virtual objects, such as a box on a computer screen, a person must go through a series of training sessions in which she concentrates for about 10 seconds on mentally moving the box. Tan Le, one of Emotiv's cofounders, says that there is a large amount of machine learning built into the software, so the more a person concentrates on a specific task, the more precisely the system follows the mental instructions.

Since Emotiv's technology is currently patent pending, the company will not disclose the details of its system. However, Le claims that the company's heads of research--optics expert Allan Snyder and former Bell Labs chip engineer Neil Weste--have made a number of scientific discoveries that are worthy of academic research papers. But so far, none have been published, and no game manufacturer has publicly committed to using the technology.

Physicists reveal water's secrets

Physicists reveal water's secrets
It's essential to all life, and numerous research papers are published about it every year. Yet there are still secrets to reveal about water, that seemingly simple compound we know as H2O.
Equipped with high-speed computers and the laws of physics, scientists from the University of Delaware and Radboud University in the Netherlands have developed a new method to "flush out" the hidden properties of water--and without the need for painstaking laboratory experiments.
Their new first-principle simulation of water molecules--based exclusively on quantum physics laws and utilizing no experimental data--will aid science and industry in a broad range of applications, from biological investigations of protein folding and other life processes, to the design of the next generation of power plants.
The research is reported in the article "Predictions of the Properties of Water from First Principles" in the March 2 issue of Science.
Krzysztof Szalewicz, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware, led the scientific team, which included Robert Bukowski, a former UD postdoctoral researcher who is now at Cornell University, and Gerrit Groenenboom and Ad van der Avoird from the Institute for Molecules and Materials at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands. The UD research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
We all know a molecule of water chemically as H2O--two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom. Sounds simple, doesn't it? But liquid water is much more complex than that.
"Water as a liquid is not simple at all and has several properties different from most other liquids," Szalewicz said. "For example, a well-known anomaly of water is that its density is highest at four degrees Celsius above the freezing point. Thus, ice floats on water, whereas the solid state of other compounds would sink in their liquids."
Among its many properties, water also can absorb large amounts of heat before it begins to get hot, and it releases heat slowly during cooling. Otherwise, pools of water, from puddles to oceans, might boil during the day or freeze solid at night, regardless of the season.
Water's unique characteristics are directly related to its molecular structure and the ability of water molecules to form hydrogen bonds with other water molecules.
The hydrogen side of the water molecule has a slight positive charge, while a slight negative charge exists on the opposite side of the molecule.
"For a long time, most researchers agreed that, in its liquid state, each water molecule coordinates on average with four other water molecules by forming hydrogen bonds," Szalewicz said. "However, a 2004 paper in Science claimed that this coordination takes place with only two molecules, a discovery that, if correct, would turn over the whole water paradigm."
The experimental claim was not dismissed right away, Szalewicz said, because existing theoretical models of liquid water were "parameterized" or coordinated to a specific class of experiments.
"However, the ambiguities about the structure of liquid water may be resolved if the structure is predicted directly from the laws of physics," Szalewicz said.
Through the use of quantum mechanics, the application of the laws of physics at the microscopic level, the scientists were able to generate a new theoretical framework for describing the structure and behavior of the water molecule atom by atom.
"This became possible recently when fast multiprocessor computers enabled very accurate solutions of the equations of quantum mechanics describing the forces that water molecules exert on each other," Szalewicz said. "Once these forces are known, one can find motions in an ensemble of water molecules and predict all the properties of liquid water."
The UD researchers used clusters of Linux computers to perform the large-scale computer calculations required for the research. The study took several months to complete.
The result is a new model -- the first that can accurately predict both the properties of a pair of water molecules and of liquid water.
Among its many applications, the research should help scientists better understand water in not only its liquid form, but in other states as well, such as crystalline forms of ice, and water in extreme conditions, including highly reactive "supercritical" water, which is used to remove pollutants in wastewater and recover waste plastic in chemical recycling, Szalewicz said.
Source: University of Delaware

A snowmelt stream
I first dove in
christening fire on my skin.
The whiteness of the pebbled bed
shimmers, dreamlike, in my head.
Frozen, timeless,
there, it lingers
As if upon that icy instant
all time began to spin.

The rain deluged
those mountain years,
defined the compass of my sphere
gossamer shrouds consoled the trees,
irresolute solace, imperfect ease.
On hills, on horseback
defiant, rode I.
Galloping wet-faced into the rain,
it scoured away the tears.

To the sun, then, I slipped
upon the waves
sailing abeam the foam-laced caves.
I served, a concubine to the sea,
though he never meant to marry me.
So, I ran aground
In warm tidepools.
There, washed the sea-salt from my hair
-Then I set the sails ablaze.

Cancer treatment is first to directly target tumor blood vessels in patients

Cancer treatment is first to directly target tumor blood vessels in patients
Cancer treatment is first to directly target tumor blood vessels in patients
March 05, 2007 - A clinical trial has for the first time proven that an antibody called J591 specifically targets an antigen found in high amounts on both prostate tumors and on blood vessels of all solid tumors, according to a study by medical researchers at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City.

Since the prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) exists only on tumors and not other tissues, J591 armed with a drug or radiation offers a way to selectively target cancer while leaving healthy tissues unharmed, thereby resulting in very low levels of toxicity and fewer side effects for patients.


While the study, published in the Feb. 10 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, was designed to prove that J591 could exclusively target tumors (it did not try to reduce tumor size), researchers now have a vehicle for selectively transporting drugs or a radioactive isotope to destroy the blood vessels that feed tumors, thereby cutting off the cancer’s blood supply.

“This was a proof-of-principle study designed purely to confirm that we could successfully target tumor vasculature without targeting normal tissue,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Neil H. Bander, a urological cancer specialist at the medical center and the Bernard and Josephine Chaus Professor of Urological Oncology at Weill Cornell Medical College. “Now that we have confirmed specific and accurate targeting, in subsequent studies we will arm the J591 antibody with drugs or radioactivity, and then we will assess tumor response. We are already using such armed antibodies in patients with prostate cancer and have been able to show significant anti-tumor activity.”
The research team used a radioactive tracer, attached to the antibody, to follow J591’s progress throughout the body. The trial involved 27 cancer patients with a wide range of solid tumors — including kidney, bladder, lung, breast, colorectal, pancreatic and skin. All patients had widespread disease that had failed conventional treatments.
PSMA has been an attractive target for cancer drug development because it is not only present in high amounts in prostate cancers but it also is the only known molecular target that is present on tumor blood vessels but not on normal blood vessels.
Other researchers are developing drugs that indirectly starve tumors of blood by reducing the growth of new blood vessels. But, such therapies are less effective against more advanced tumors with established blood vessels. By directly targeting tumor blood vessels, however, J591 treatments could destroy the tumor’s blood supply and shrink even advanced tumors.
“In the future, we envision a multipronged attack on the tumor — for example, combining therapies aimed directly at the malignant cells, along with therapies to both directly kill the tumor’s blood supply as well as prevent it from regrowing,” Bander said....read on...

Welcome to The Journal of Mundane Behavior (and have a nice day)

The Mundane Behavior of Strip Club Regulars: A Book Review
Katherine Frank. G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 331 pgs. $19.95. ISBN 0-8223-2972-7
Reviewed by Lisa Johnson, English, Coastal Carolina University
...The focus of G-Strings and Sympathy is on the strip club regular—men who frequent a club or a number of clubs daily, weekly, or monthly, who find these visits satisfying and consider it a significant personal practice (xxiv). Resisting the cultural tendency to sensationalize strip clubs and what goes on inside them, Frank instead analyzes strip club patronage in relation to parallel leisure practices, seeing in the strip club regular many of the same characteristics attributed to the contemporary “tourist” of John Urry’s work in The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990). The strip club provides a space separate from home and work in which to relax, socialize, and engage in conspicuous consumption; through architecture and ambience, it combines the masculinized pleasures of sports bar, golf club house, and Tahitian beach. While some customers attribute the appeal of the strip club to the excitement of the exotic—the sexual, racial, and economic otherness encountered there—many regulars consistently downplay the erotic and exotic aspects of this space in interviews with Frank, adopting a blasé attitude of “seeing through” the illusions of the dancers’ costumes, stage names, and performed lasciviousness. This inversion of the exotic with the everyday is for regulars a way of constructing themselves as worldly and perceptive, not the dupes of feminine wiles and capitalist exploitation that mainstream American culture might see them as. They are “post-tourists” of the red light district, articulating a personal aesthetics of the mundane, unshocked and unhussled.
G-Strings and Sympathy is at least as interested in the other half of these men’s lives—their relationships and marriages—as it is in the time they spend at “Diamond Doll’s” or “Tina’s Revue.” Yet Frank examines the link between marriage and the sex industry in a way that resists simplistic truisms about intimacy, honesty, and fantasy. “[S]trip clubs,” writes Frank, “are not necessarily antithetical to marriage, as some social theorists and community members would like to think, but neither are they unrelated to it. In fact, visits to the clubs are related to particular ways of practicing marriage (and heterosexual relationships more generally) that make this a desirable venue for some men” (xxi). Drawing on the work of psychologist Otto Kernberg and the field of object relations, Frank interprets the behaviors of strip club regulars in terms of triangulation; the male customer can play out certain fantasies of introducing a rival to his wife without the wife necessarily knowing or witnessing the imagined struggle. In this way, he expresses what some psychologists perceive as inherent in intimacy and long-term romantic commitments: aggression towards the love object. The strip club, then, is used as a tool to maintain an otherwise uncomfortable monogamy imperative. It is not antithetical to marriage; it is marriage’s exotic alter-ego.
read on...

Doing Something About It

Med Students Make Life-Saving Delivery By Bike
Two Saint Louis University Medical School students are fighting death from malaria one mosquito net at a time.
Andy Sherman and Jesse Matthews are determined to stop the spread of the disease, which they say is both preventable and deadly, by purchasing and delivering by bicycle mosquito nets to villages of West Africa.
The students are holding a benefit concert on Sunday, March 4 to raise money for NetLife, http://netlifeafrica.org/default.aspx, the grassroots non-profit agency they created to fight malaria.
This summer will be the second trip to West Africa for the third year medical school students. In 2005, Sherman and Matthews raised $5,500, enough to purchase 605 mosquito nets, which protected 1,800 people in seven small Senegal villages that were so remote trucks couldn't get to them. They delivered the nets by bicycle.
This summer they will return to Senegal for about 10 weeks and hope to increase the number of lives they touch by delivering 1,000 nets to 10 villages. As part of their project, they teach education sessions that prepare villagers to spread the word about how to prevent the malaria.
They're getting academic credit for their work though an international elective course offered by Saint Louis University's department of community and family medicine.
Mosquitoes that carry malaria are most active from dusk to dawn. That's why mosquito nets that are hung over beds are an effective and simple way of attacking the problem that is the leading cause of death in young African children.
Sherman became aware of the problem when he was in Africa with the Peace Corps before he started medical school. He saw people in West African villages had a particularly high rate of malaria because they were not protected by mosquito nets. Any allocation of mosquito nets went to those who live in large cities.
"I saw a lot of people suffering from malaria," he said. "Malaria is a preventable illness that exists on a massive scale."
Sherman saw children, many of whom had diarrhea 80 to 90 percent of the time, who would contract malaria with deadly consequences. "It was a very emotional experience."
Sherman returned to the United States, started medical school and with his friend and fellow med school student, Jesse Matthews, launched NetLife. The movement is picking up steam: a group of California students looking for a grassroots cause to support have donated $1,000, which will buy 200 nets. NetLife also has negotiated a deal with a London-based group to buy nets for less than it paid two years ago.

La lune est rouge au brumeux horizon

La lune est rouge au brumeux horizon ;
Dans un brouillard qui danse, la prairie
S'endort fumeuse, et la grenouille crie
Par les joncs verts où circule un frisson ;
Verlaine

The Moon will turn a shade of copper red this Saturday when it will be fully eclipsed by the Earth whose shadow will blot out all but a tiny bit of refracted solar light.
A a blood-red Moon is seen over the Caribe area in Havana, 2004. The Moon will turn a shade of copper red this Saturday when it will be fully eclipsed by the Earth, whose shadow will blot out all but a tiny bit of refracted solar light.
The Moon will turn a shade of copper red this Saturday when it will be fully eclipsed by the Earth, whose shadow will blot out all but a tiny bit of refracted solar light.
Star gazers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa will have a front-and-center view of the eclipse in a late-night sky, with the zenith occurring at 23:21 GMT.
On the east coast of North America, the Moon will already be eclipsed when it rises at around sunset, while in Asia early risers will get a glimpse of the lunar blackout as the Moon sets.
Total lunar eclipses occur when the Sun, the Earth and the Moon are all in alignment and the Moon travels into the broad cone of shadow cast by the Earth.
The Moon does not become invisible, though, because there is still residual sunlight that is deflected towards it by the Earth's atmosphere, most of which is light in the red part of the spectrum.
That causes the Moon to appear as a dark colour, usually a coppery red, orange or even brown.
The Earth's shadow will begin to creep over the Moon -- a stage known as the penumbral eclipse -- at about 20:18 GMT on Saturday, according to NASA, and will recede entirely some six hours later at 02:23 GMT on Sunday.
The period of total eclipse will be relatively short, lasting from 22:40 to 23:57 GMT, a total of 77 minutes.
Total lunar eclipses normally occur roughly every couple of years, but those who miss the one this weekend will get another chance to see the moon disappear on August 28. The last took place on October 28, 2004.
Total solar eclipses happen when the Moon crosses between the Earth and the Sun.

NASA eclipse homepage