science and technology

By BRETT JOHNSON
Scripps Howard News Service
Friday, May 04, 2007

The night sky is going, going...gone?

More than two-thirds of the nation's population can no longer see the Milky Way with the naked eye. As more and more of us cluster in cities and urban areas, the lights we use for our various creature comforts are increasingly blotting out the heavens above the gallery of planets and stars and occasional comets and meteors that have inspired poets, authors, songs and more romantic impulses this side of a bouquet of flowers.

The culprit is called light pollution, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.

David Crawford, founder and executive director of the International Dark-Sky Association in Tucson, Ariz., looks at light-pollution projections creeping across the nation's map out to 2025 and doesn't like what he sees.

"If it doesn't get under control, it'll be gone for everyone," said Crawford. "I'm optimistic in the long haul but my goodness, it's a battle in the short term. More and more, it's becoming an issue. In most places, it's getting worse."

The group contends that as much as 30 percent of all outdoor lighting is excessive and misdirected.

"It's wasteful and it's not very green," Crawford said. "Wasted light is wasted energy."

It's not only about seeing Saturn or Jupiter from the park or enjoying a pristine view of the stars on a camping trip in a national park; it's also about lights shining in backyards or windows at night. The group and others contend this largely could be solved by turning the lights toward the ground, putting shields or caps over them, and using more efficient lighting.

It sounds simple, and Crawford points to success stories such as Flagstaff, Ariz., and elsewhere. Hundreds of places now have light pollution ordinances, he said, and his group in the next few months will unveil a model ordinance that all can use. The biggest and most pervasive problem is glare from streetlights.

But the group has run into a blur of apathy and ignorance attitudes along the lines of "this is the way lighting's always been done," "it's too big for me to deal with" or the wondering query "what's the loss?" The night sky suffers in silence.

"You lose it and you don't know it's gone," said Edwin Krupp, longtime director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. "We in general are ambivalent about light pollution because it's not affecting the way we breathe or the quality of our food."

Crawford, who goes around the country talking up the issue, estimates that less than 10 percent of the nation's communities have good lighting.

"The stars have become an endangered species," said Krupp. "Our profligate use of light has meant the loss of the night sky. It's a sky most people don't even know exists, unless they get out of the territory."

The territory is getting harder to leave. In 1900, the U.S. population was still 60 percent rural and 40 percent urban, according to Census Bureau data; now, 83 percent of us or roughly five of every six live in urban areas. The 17 percent who live in non-urban areas do so on land that covers four-fifths of the country.

The U.S. population is about 302 million and growing. That's a lot of lights.

It can be argued, Krupp said, that celestial bodies discovered by some observatory telescopes years ago would escape their detection today. While Griffith Observatory is important because it reminds people of the night sky, Krupp concedes that there they produce it artificially.

"If there's a meteor shower or comet visible, our standard advice is, 'Get out of town,'" he added.

Magic can await those that do. Get out in the wilds of Montana, say, and the night sky bursts forth, flooding the senses. Largely uninhibited and with more of them out, the stars glow intensely and seem closer, as if they are one gigantic chandelier about to fall on top of you. The experience can be breathtaking and almost alarming.

Krupp knows that sensation from those who finally take in the night view, saying, "I regularly hear from people who got out to the mountains or the desert and could not believe what they saw."

The veteran sky gazer and author sees light pollution as a big issue for society in general.

"It's not just the astronomers who are the losers," Krupp said. "It's all the rest of us who benefit from the expansion of the imagination seeing the night sky. It's part of our heritage, our common experience."

It has inspired deep thought and flavored a broad spectrum of the arts, he noted. That won't dry up totally if the night sky disappears, but it'd be nice if the heavens remained a visual and viable cultural wellspring.

Scripps Howard News Service
Friday, May 04, 2007

The facts of light

People's reaction to light pollution, says International Dark-Sky Association founder David Crawford, "depends on what their trigger issues are."

If they live in a place where lights from a neighbor's home or from a parking lot are shining in their window at night, or if they live in a big city where they can't see the stars, they might care. If not, they might not care.

Here are a few basic, boiled-down pointers:

_ Direct the light toward the ground rather than letting it escape skyward.

_ Have shields and caps put over lights.

_ Use motion sensors on outdoor lights so they only come on when needed.

_ Use more energy-efficient lighting.

Going to more efficient lighting, such as low-pressure sodium vapor lighting, can save money in the long run, Crawford and other proponents say.

Many existing lights can be retrofitted. Many stylish fixtures are now available, they say.

All this and a lot more is covered at the Dark-Sky Association's Web site, http://www.darksky.org, which is an impressive repository for all things lighting.

The site includes a fixtures directory (covering residential, landscape, industrial and many other types of lighting), a manufacturers directory and a discussion of lighting laws, among other features.

By ANITA SRIKAMESWARAN
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, May 03, 2007

A "digital dissection" using sophisticated CT scanning technology has changed the way scientists view a 2,000-year-old mummy of an Egyptian child.

They now think the youngster was a boy about 4 or 5 years old who was missing a right front tooth and was around 2 1/2 feet tall. He appeared to be developing normally and likely died of an acute cause, perhaps an infection.

Before the scan was conducted, experts at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine had thought the child was 8 or 9 years old and had an unusually large head, suggesting that a genetic condition might have contributed to his death.

The mummy had been X-rayed in the 1940s and in 1986.

This time, "we've unwrapped it by examining it with clinical diagnosis tools that we use in ordinary people," said Dr. Jeffrey Towers, chief of musculoskeletal radiology at the medical school. "We've done a digital dissection of this specimen, leaving the specimen intact."

While anthropology curator Sandra Olsen and other experts from the museum and medical school watched, he toured the mummy from tip to toe and back again, noting the head was bent forward so the chin rested on the chest, the arms were crossed over the chest with the hands at the shoulders, the spine appeared curved, and more.

"There are 1,700 images here, so this kind of takes a while," Towers noted. As is typical in mummification, the brain, heart, intestines and other organs were removed.

Refinement of the scans vividly revealed that an 8-inch wooden stake had been inserted into the skull and through the upper spine, possibly to support the head during preparation of the remains.

Other curiosities included what appeared to be a bit of bone near the nasal cavity "that's not ordinarily there. I don't know what to make of that."

There was no obvious indication of the cause of death, Towers said.

"Could have been pneumonia, could have been a lot of things," he said. "I don't see evidence of physical trauma, other than the preparation that was performed. I don't see evidence of a genetic disease or a developmental disease."

Carnegie Museum scientists initiated closer study of the mummy because they had thought the child had an enlarged head, or macrocephaly, and wanted to figure out why. If the child were 8 or 9, as once thought, the head would be disproportionately big. But if detailed dental scans support preliminary findings indicating an age between 3 and 5, the head size could be normal.

The mummy dates to Dynasty XXX of the Early Ptolemaic period, from 380 to 250 B.C. It was found in a cemetery in Abydos, Egypt, with 11 others, including four children.

The museum acquired the mummy in 1912 from Swiss Egyptologist Henri Edouard Naville. It has been on display for most of the last 50 years.

In addition to determining the sex and age of the child, the researchers hope to create a three-dimensional computer image of the head for exhibit, as well as study.

The scans will make it possible to develop an exact cast of the child's skull, which can then be given to an artist for reconstruction. More than 2,000 years after death, it might be possible to see the child's face.

(Anita Srikameswaran can be reached at anitas(at)post-gazette.com. To comment or for more stories visit scrippsnews.com)

By ANDRE PICARD
Toronto Globe and Mail
Thursday, May 03, 2007

John Roder was an internationally recognized cancer researcher doing groundbreaking work. But when he learned his son Nathan was suffering from schizophrenia, Roder dropped everything and turned his attention to understanding the complex brain disorder.

The about-face was unusual, particularly moving from cancer, a high-profile, richly funded area, to mental health, which is under-funded, marginalized and cloaked in stigma.

But the move is now paying dividends in a big way.

In a paper published Thursday in the journal Neuron, Roder, a senior investigator at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, along with a team of Canadian and Scottish scientists, has pinpointed one of the elusive genetic causes of schizophrenia.

The article demonstrates for the first time that a malfunctioning gene can cause the disorder. Further, it offers a tantalizing clue that the big three psychiatric disorders _ depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia _ may have the same underlying genetic cause.

"From a psychiatric point of view, that's important. It could change the way we think about diagnosis and open the door to new treatments," Roder said.

But, he added wistfully, "It's not a cure."

In other words, this breakthrough won't help Nathan, at least not in the short term.

"I'm realistic. I know that my research is mostly for others. If there's a payoff for my son, it won't be tomorrow. It may be five or 10 years away," Roder said.

Still, the high-profile paper does provide validation for the sharp turn in his career trajectory, and a bit of hope in an area where good news is in short supply.

By his own admission, Roder said, "You would have to be 'crazy' yourself to work in the mental health field without personal motivation."

His motivation was a teenaged son gripped by a cruel disease.

Nathan was an excellent student, but near the end of his high-school years in 2001, he began acting strangely, with odd gesticulations and quirky theories.

"Suddenly, I knew all the answers to the questions of the universe," he said in an interview. "But I was oblivious to how weird I was being."

A school friend recognized the signs and symptoms of schizophrenia, an illness characterized by delusions, hallucinations and disturbances in thinking, and which usually develops into a full-blown illness in late adolescence.

Nathan got help quickly and has largely controlled his illness with medication. He is an accomplished musician and studied computer programming in college but, at age 25, still lives at home and is unable to hold down a full-time job.

The diagnosis devastated his parents.

"You have hopes and dreams for your kids and they don't include schizophrenia," said Maria Roder, Nathan's mother. "It took a while to accept that this would be a long-term illness and a lifetime commitment on our part."

But Mrs. Roder said she also realized that as an educated, well-to-do family, they also had the means to help break the stigma surrounding mental illness, and schizophrenia in particular.

"You just have to be brave enough to say we have this illness in our family and it's amazing how people open up," she said.

While Mrs. Roder became a caregiver for her son and an advocate for others suffering from mental-health problems, Dr. Roder's coping mechanism was to turn to what he knew best _ science.

"The only thing I could do was change my research focus," he said. "I thought I could make a difference."

"You could say it wasn't a great career move," Roder deadpanned. "Mental health is where cancer was 30 years ago."

On the Web: http://www.neuron.org