Mothers with no previous history of mental illness face the greatest risk for postpartum psychosis during the first month after childbirth, a new study suggests.
Postpartum depression is a common problem for many women in the days following delivery. But about one in 1,000 new mothers develops postpartum psychosis, a serious mental illness involving delusional thoughts, hallucinations and the inability to distinguish between reality and imagination.
The new study found that first-time mothers who suffer postpartum psychosis faced the highest risk in the first month after delivery, and that the problem can strike women who had no previous history of mental illness.
In the study, published online February 9 in PLoS Medicine, epidemiologist Unnur Valdimarsdóttir of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and colleagues used hospital records to track first-time mothers during the 90 days following childbirth. Of the almost 750,000 women in the study, 892 developed postpartum psychosis, with most cases reported within a month of childbirth. The rapid reduction in hormone levels after childbirth could trigger the psychosis in some women, the authors suggest.
Earlier studies show that schizophrenic women face the greatest risk of psychosis when hormone levels are low. Trauma associated with the pregnancy and birth itself could also contribute to postpartum psychosis, Valdimarsdóttir says.
The study found that about half of the women who developed postpartum psychosis had no previous history of hospitalization for mental illness. “Postpartum psychosis could be the only psychotic episode a woman ever experiences,” says Valdimarsdóttir. “But for a significant number of women, childbirth can set off a recurring psychotic disorder.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Genetics can also play a role. “Perhaps the hormonal fluctuations trigger psychosis in women who already have a genetic predisposition for developing mental illness,” comments Donna Stewart, a psychiatrist at the University of Toronto. “Even women who had never been hospitalized for mental illness could have received outpatient care, or had a family history of psychiatric problems.” http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
The researchers found that the risk of developing psychosis increased for mothers over the age of 35. “This could be because older first-time mothers are more likely to have a problematic pregnancy,” Valdimarsdóttir says. Other factors, such as higher infant birth weight and maternal diabetes, lessened the risk. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Mothers with diabetes tend to have larger babies, says Valdimardóttir, but why maternal diabetes would lessen the risk of postpartum psychosis is not known. “Perhaps it’s because these mothers are more closely monitored throughout their pregnancy,” Valdimarsdóttir suggests. http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Saturday, January 10, 2009
urine 2.uri.99919 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Children can eliminate their bodies' loads of agricultural pesticides by eating organically grown products, a 15-day experiment suggests. The finding bolsters the case that people dining on organic food avoid potentially toxic pesticides, but it doesn't directly address whether such foods provide health benefits.
"Organic food is a viable intervention to control pesticide exposure," environmental health specialist Doug Brugge of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston says of the new study. "What you would like, in addition, is evidence that those reductions are associated with health improvements." http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
Pesticides known as organophosphates can cause problems in childhood neurological development. In the past decade, the U.S. government has restricted the use of many of these chemicals. However, the organophosphates malathion and chlorpyrifos are still legally used on many conventional crops. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
Chensheng (Alex) Lu of Emory University in Atlanta and his collaborators recruited 23 families in suburban Seattle. Before the study, each child, age 3 to 11 years, ate only conventionally grown produce and had no other known exposures to organophosphates. Some of the same researchers had earlier found evidence that switching a child to an organic diet reduces organophosphate concentrations in the body (SN: 2/22/03, p. 120: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030222/bob9.asp).
Lu's team bought organic-food items and gave them to the children's parents. On days 4 through 8 of the study, the families were asked to substitute the organic foods—including fruits and vegetables, fruit juices, cereals, and pastas—for conventionally grown products. The researchers asked parents to use the substitute products to prepare the same meals that each child would normally eat. After day 8, the families resumed using conventional products.
The parents collected two daily urine samples from each child, and the researchers tested the samples for by-products of malathion, chlorpyrifos, and several less-common organophosphates.
Malathion and chlorpyrifos by-products were present in all the children's urine before and after the 5 days of organic eating. During the organic-food period, however, those by-products were undetectable in most of the urine samples, the researchers report in an upcoming Environmental Health Perspectives.
Organic diets might not substantially reduce organophosphate exposure in all children. Some urban homes contain residues of the pesticides left from efforts to battle insect infestations, Brugge says.
Nevertheless, he adds, "in a population that does not have other pesticide exposures, eating organic foods virtually eliminates organophosphate-pesticide burden in the children." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
"Organic food is a viable intervention to control pesticide exposure," environmental health specialist Doug Brugge of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston says of the new study. "What you would like, in addition, is evidence that those reductions are associated with health improvements." http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
Pesticides known as organophosphates can cause problems in childhood neurological development. In the past decade, the U.S. government has restricted the use of many of these chemicals. However, the organophosphates malathion and chlorpyrifos are still legally used on many conventional crops. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
Chensheng (Alex) Lu of Emory University in Atlanta and his collaborators recruited 23 families in suburban Seattle. Before the study, each child, age 3 to 11 years, ate only conventionally grown produce and had no other known exposures to organophosphates. Some of the same researchers had earlier found evidence that switching a child to an organic diet reduces organophosphate concentrations in the body (SN: 2/22/03, p. 120: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030222/bob9.asp).
Lu's team bought organic-food items and gave them to the children's parents. On days 4 through 8 of the study, the families were asked to substitute the organic foods—including fruits and vegetables, fruit juices, cereals, and pastas—for conventionally grown products. The researchers asked parents to use the substitute products to prepare the same meals that each child would normally eat. After day 8, the families resumed using conventional products.
The parents collected two daily urine samples from each child, and the researchers tested the samples for by-products of malathion, chlorpyrifos, and several less-common organophosphates.
Malathion and chlorpyrifos by-products were present in all the children's urine before and after the 5 days of organic eating. During the organic-food period, however, those by-products were undetectable in most of the urine samples, the researchers report in an upcoming Environmental Health Perspectives.
Organic diets might not substantially reduce organophosphate exposure in all children. Some urban homes contain residues of the pesticides left from efforts to battle insect infestations, Brugge says.
Nevertheless, he adds, "in a population that does not have other pesticide exposures, eating organic foods virtually eliminates organophosphate-pesticide burden in the children." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
joy of 6.joy.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . In 1961, the British scientist and physician Alex Comfort wrote a novel (his fifth) called “Come Out to Play,” in which his alter ego, Dr. George Goggins, opens a clinic with his girlfriend to teach patients advanced sexual techniques. There he develops a compound called 3-blindmycin, which has the power to turn people on: “not raise the libido,” Comfort later told a journalist, “but thaw the superego, the part of the mind that says ‘mustn’t.’ ” In a climactic scene, an explosion releases a cloud of 3-blindmycin over Buckingham Palace, leaving throngs of uninhibited Englishmen in its wake. Years afterward, Comfort said he’d always hoped that Peter Sellers would play him if the book were made into a film; for his leading lady, he pictured Sophia Loren.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Hollywood seems not to have been interested in the story. But if someone were to make a bio-pic of Comfort’s own life it might well feature a scene intercutting that aphrodisiacal cloud with images from Comfort’s most famous book, the 1972 best-seller “The Joy of Sex.” That, too, was a kind of explosion, intended to unleash its readers’ sexual potential by counteracting their ignorance and shame. “The Joy of Sex,” which has sold more than twelve million copies worldwide, was an “unanxious account of the full repertoire of human heterosexuality,” according to its author. It was the English answer to Japanese pillow books, illustrated texts designed to show couples where to put what, and was further enhanced by helpful advice: for instance, “Never, never refer to pillow-talk in anger later on (‘I always knew you were a lesbian,’ etc.).” http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.wordpress.com
With its discreet cover and its content divided into Starters, Main Courses, and Sauces & Pickles, the book was loosely modelled on “Joy of Cooking,” the culinary how-to book that had transformed the way its readers thought about food. Comfort wanted to do the same thing with making love—help people gain a sense of proficiency with the subject matter, and ultimately render them capable of “Cordon Bleu sex.” But people had never been ashamed to cook. “The Joy of Sex” was something new. Unbridled eroticism “could well be the major contribution of the Aquarian revolution to human happiness,” Comfort wrote. He cautioned that people who failed to come to terms with an aggressive sexuality were “apt to end up at My Lai or Belsen.”
Comfort’s fellow-Britons were already familiar with his immoderate style of self-expression and his utopian thinking when “The Joy of Sex” appeared. Comfort often aired his “anarcho-pacifist” views on the BBC, and he had published several political polemics, in addition to his novels, books of poetry, and what was at the time the preëminent textbook on gerontology. Comfort was brilliant and multitalented, but there was a certain pat, self-satisfied idealism to much of his nonscientific work. In 1941, George Orwell wrote an eviscerating review of Comfort’s novel “No Such Liberty,” deploring “the argument which is implied all the way through, and sometimes explicitly stated, that there is next to no difference between Britain and Germany, political persecution is as bad in one as in the other, those who fight against the Nazis always go Nazi themselves.” Orwell noted, “If I treat Mr. Comfort’s novel as a tract, I am only doing what he himself has done already.” http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com
Comfort had a tendency to focus single-mindedly on a given notion or project at the expense of any kind of balance: while he was a student at Highgate School, in London, he became convinced that he could concoct a superior version of gunpowder. He blew off much of his left hand. By the time he was finished with his experiments, his thumb was the only remaining digit. Later in his life, when he was practicing medicine, he said that he found this claw he’d created “very useful for performing uterine inversions.” After he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, his enthusiasms led him to accumulate six degrees, including a doctorate in biochemistry.
Comfort turned his attention to sexual liberation with a similar zeal. He offered readers a creation myth for “The Joy of Sex” on the first page, claiming that the book was based on a manuscript that an anonymous and particularly sexually advanced couple had presented to him in his capacity as a biologist. “I have done little to the original draft apart from expansion to cover more topics,” Comfort wrote. “The authors’ choice of emphases and their light-hearted style have been left alone.” In fact, both the choice of emphases and the lighthearted style were Comfort’s; he wrote every word of “The Joy of Sex,” though his credit on the book says “edited by.” Comfort later claimed that he had made up this randy authorial couple because in England at the time it was frowned upon for physicians to write mass-market books, “an implementation of the principle that doctors don’t advertise—of which I thoroughly approve, by the way,” he remarked to a journalist in 1974. But it was also probably a subterfuge, to protect the feelings of his wife of thirty years, Ruth Harris. For more than a decade, Comfort had been sleeping with Ruth’s best friend, Jane Henderson. (Comfort met both women at Cambridge.) http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com Comfort and Henderson took dozens of Polaroids of their erotic experiments, which they gave to the publisher Mitchell Beazley along with Comfort’s manuscript—originally titled “Doing Sex Properly.” The artists Charles Raymond and Christopher Foss were charged with transforming those photographs into pencil drawings, although the couple they depicted looked nothing like Comfort and Henderson.
If you are a child of the seventies and were raised on “The Joy of Sex,” you are not likely to have forgotten the illustrations. The woman depicted in these drawings is lovely, and, even nearly forty years later, quite chic. Her gentleman friend, however, looks like a werewolf with a hangover. He is heavily bearded; his hair is long, and, it always seemed, a little greasy. His eyelids are usually at half-mast, adding to his feral appearance. In some of the pictures, you can practically smell him. (The smell is unpleasant.)
It isn’t easy watching beauty get pawed by the beast, and our narrator does not help matters. “At a certain level and for all men,” Comfort informs us, “girls, and parts of girls, are at this stimulus level unpeople.” In “The Joy of Sex,” a male is a man, a female is a girl, and a vagina is, to “males generally, slightly scarey: it looks like a castrating wound and bleeds regularly, it swallows the penis and regurgitates it limp, it can probably bite and so on.” Men can get past such fears, of what Freudians called the vagina dentata, but Comfort cautions that “they are the origins of most male hangups including homosexuality.” The penis, by contrast, “has more symbolic importance than any other human organ.” Lest there be any confusion: “Vibrators are no substitute for a penis.” Comfort even enlists his fictional female narrator to argue the point for him. Under the heading “Women (by her for him),” Comfort writes of male genitalia, “It’s less the size than the personality, unpredictable movements, and moods which make up the turn-on (which is why rubber dummies are so sickening).” At times, “The Joy of Sex” has the feel of a penis propaganda pamphlet.
There was not a lot of feminist outcry about the book when it was published, probably because in 1972 there was so much else for feminists to cry about. There was, however, a feminist alternative: the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” The book announced on its original, 1971 jacket that it was “By and for Women,” and with its democratic inclusion of numerous voices it had the vibe of a consciousness-raising group. (In fact, it was the product of one.) “Our Bodies, Ourselves” covered much of the same material as “The Joy of Sex,” just with a different tone. It, too, had illustrations of a hirsute couple having intercourse in a series of positions. Both books said that everybody was bisexual, that sex should be a mutually satisfying, full-body experience, and that the communication of turn-ons could be of great benefit to this enterprise. And both books espoused the (distinctly seventies) notion that sex could be a value-neutral experience, as natural as eating, which undermined the traditional belief that sex ought to be in the service of procreation within the bounds of matrimony. “Our Bodies, Ourselves” added information on health, nutrition, self-defense, childbearing, and a rather more involved section on lesbianism. (“The Joy of Sex” has a drawing of two naked ladies kissing under the heading “Bisexuality,” while “Our Bodies, Ourselves” includes a chapter entitled “In Amerika They Call Us Dykes.”) If “The Joy of Sex” was like “Joy of Cooking”—though in some ways it was closer to Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” what with its strong authorial voice and affection for elaborate undertakings, to which Comfort assigned French names like pattes d’araignée, cuissade, and feuille de rose—“Our Bodies, Ourselves” was like the “Moosewood Cookbook.” http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com Everything in it was healthful, enlightened, nourishing.
Here’s a trick you might try at home sometime: pick almost any recipe in the “Moosewood.” Now add bacon. You will find that the addition of this decidedly unwholesome ingredient makes the food taste much better. “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” likewise, lacked a certain trayf allure. The revised edition of the book—even the original—is a fantastic resource for educating young women (and very sophisticated girls) about their physicality. But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little vegan.
Of course, there are endless alternatives now. If you are young and sassy, for example, you might enjoy “Sex: How to Do Everything,” by two women who call themselves Em & Lo and have a penchant for frisky wordplay. A character in John Updike’s “The Witches of Eastwick” thinks that “marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness.” If this rings true to you, you might be interested in “The Best-Ever Sex Handbook: Successful Techniques and New Ideas for Long-Term Lovers.” If you are Wiccan, there’s “Wicked Voodoo Sex,” in which the author, Kathleen Charlotte, promises to help you reclaim your “wanga.”
But none of those books have been huge best-sellers or cultural touchstones in the way that “The Joy of Sex” and “Our Bodies, Ourselves” were. Partly, this is because “Joy” and “Our Bodies” were a part of a movement that radically reformed the way the English-speaking world conceives of sexuality. At this point, only on Opposite Day is sex under-publicized in America. And there is also the matter of the World Wide Web. As the puppets in the Broadway musical “Avenue Q” sing, “The Internet is for porn.” Of course, the Internet is for everything, but it’s particularly good for quick answers: When was the Ming period? How do you prepare a truly fluffy frittata? And what is “The Flying Camel”? http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.wordpress.com
Into the mobbed marketplace of how-to books and limitless Googling, Crown is releasing a new edition of “The Joy of Sex” ($29.95). Comfort himself revised his book several times; now Susan Quilliam, a British “relationship psychologist and agony aunt” (as her Web site describes her), has endeavored to modernize the text for a new, post-feminist era. Gone are some of the most outrageous Comfortisms, such as “Don’t get yourself raped,” or his dubious assessment of the rhythm method—“It may well account for the slightly higher incidence of abnormal babies among Catholic users through stale eggs getting fertilized.” Deodorant is no longer “banned absolutely,” as it was by Comfort, and armpit shaving is not referred to as “ignorant vandalism.” Finally, and crucially, rear-entry intercourse is no longer called sex “à la Négresse.” http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.wordpress.com
Quilliam has succeeded in bringing “The Joy of Sex” up to current standards. Instead of opening with a crack about “one-legged ladies,” as Comfort did, Quilliam adds a well-written section on special considerations for disabled readers, which is sensitive without being condescending. The book is still emphatically straight, but Quilliam has given it a gay-positive tone, in sharp contrast to Comfort’s advice that if you might be that way inclined it was better not to experiment too much with a partner of the same sex, lest you let the gay genie out of the bottle. The original drawings have been replaced, with a mixture of modest photographs and impressionistic sketches. The hairiness has been eliminated, and the attractiveness gap between the man and the woman has been bridged. But the people in these pictures do not look as if they were in any kind of sexual ecstasy. Rather, they have the smug smiles of a couple whose 401(k)s have just appreciated. They look as if they were in a Viagra commercial, which is to say that they look like two people who have never, ever had sex.
Once you remove those memorable drawings and Comfort’s batty, phallocentric prose, what you are left with is something that bears little resemblance to the subversive, explosive original. “The Joy of Sex” redux becomes generic—Cook’s Illustrated with boobies. What was revolutionary in 1972 seems obvious now, and to present the material otherwise feels silly and square. It is difficult, for example, to take seriously the claim made by the new “Joy” that anal sex is “one of the last taboos,” when it was listed as fair game in Comfort’s text nearly forty years ago—and appears in both the Kamasutra (of the third century) and the Chinese “Rou Pu Tuan,” from the Ming period (1368-1644; I Googled it). Quilliam hews to Comfort’s basic premise that too much weirdness in sex is just as bad as too little, and the new edition retains Comfort’s assertion that “exclusive obsessions in sex are very like living exclusively on horseradish sauce through allergy to beef; fear of horseradish sauce, however, as indigestible, unnecessary, and immature, is another hangup, namely puritanism.” But, if procreation is no longer the goal of sex, why is one erotic practice more nutritious than the next? Who gets to decide what is horseradish and what is beef?
One is reminded of a line in Comfort’s poem “Notes for My Son,” in which he says, “Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom / Look carefully—see who it is.” Comfort’s freethinking did not extend beyond the boundaries of his own inclinations, and he said as much in his text. “We have tried to stay wide open, but it is always difficult to write about things one doesn’t enjoy, and we have left out long discussion of the very specialized sexual attitudes . . . which aren’t really love or even sex in quite our sense of the word.”
Comfort and his wife, Ruth, divorced shortly after “Joy” came out: the unpleasantness of his infidelity seems to have been heightened for Mrs. Comfort when her husband became internationally known as “Dr. Sex.” In 1973, a few months later, Comfort married his mistress and muse, Jane, and the two moved to Santa Barbara so that Comfort could assume a post at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal think tank. The move also gave them closer proximity to the Sandstone, a clothing-optional community of utopian swingers in Topanga Canyon, which was reportedly visited by Timothy Leary, Sammy Davis, Jr., Betty Dodson, and the porn star Marilyn Chambers, and which Comfort and Jane had frequented since 1970. “Often the nude biologist Dr. Alex Comfort, brandishing a cigar, traipsed through the room between the prone bodies with the professional air of a lepidopterist strolling through the fields waving a butterfly net,” Gay Talese wrote in “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.”
But Jane, according to a friend who was interviewed by the journalist Pagan Kennedy, eventually tired of group sex and open marriage. (Sexual fads may come and go, but jealousy is forever.) At the same time, Comfort’s relationship with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions soured, and he became involved in lawsuits with the center over breach of contract. In 1985, Comfort and Henderson returned to England, where he lived the rest of his life, more or less monogamously, in Kent.
Comfort suffered a massive brain hemorrhage in 1991, at the age of seventy-one, and Jane died shortly thereafter. From then until Comfort’s death, in 2000, his son from his first marriage, Nicholas, was Comfort’s caretaker and took over the business of managing “The Joy of Sex.” “He was good about talking about sex in the abstract, but when he had to tell me about the facts of life he was embarrassed,” Nicholas Comfort told a reporter on the occasion of the book’s thirtieth anniversary. “He got it all over with quite quickly and hoped I wouldn’t ask any questions.” ♦
Hollywood seems not to have been interested in the story. But if someone were to make a bio-pic of Comfort’s own life it might well feature a scene intercutting that aphrodisiacal cloud with images from Comfort’s most famous book, the 1972 best-seller “The Joy of Sex.” That, too, was a kind of explosion, intended to unleash its readers’ sexual potential by counteracting their ignorance and shame. “The Joy of Sex,” which has sold more than twelve million copies worldwide, was an “unanxious account of the full repertoire of human heterosexuality,” according to its author. It was the English answer to Japanese pillow books, illustrated texts designed to show couples where to put what, and was further enhanced by helpful advice: for instance, “Never, never refer to pillow-talk in anger later on (‘I always knew you were a lesbian,’ etc.).” http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.wordpress.com
With its discreet cover and its content divided into Starters, Main Courses, and Sauces & Pickles, the book was loosely modelled on “Joy of Cooking,” the culinary how-to book that had transformed the way its readers thought about food. Comfort wanted to do the same thing with making love—help people gain a sense of proficiency with the subject matter, and ultimately render them capable of “Cordon Bleu sex.” But people had never been ashamed to cook. “The Joy of Sex” was something new. Unbridled eroticism “could well be the major contribution of the Aquarian revolution to human happiness,” Comfort wrote. He cautioned that people who failed to come to terms with an aggressive sexuality were “apt to end up at My Lai or Belsen.”
Comfort’s fellow-Britons were already familiar with his immoderate style of self-expression and his utopian thinking when “The Joy of Sex” appeared. Comfort often aired his “anarcho-pacifist” views on the BBC, and he had published several political polemics, in addition to his novels, books of poetry, and what was at the time the preëminent textbook on gerontology. Comfort was brilliant and multitalented, but there was a certain pat, self-satisfied idealism to much of his nonscientific work. In 1941, George Orwell wrote an eviscerating review of Comfort’s novel “No Such Liberty,” deploring “the argument which is implied all the way through, and sometimes explicitly stated, that there is next to no difference between Britain and Germany, political persecution is as bad in one as in the other, those who fight against the Nazis always go Nazi themselves.” Orwell noted, “If I treat Mr. Comfort’s novel as a tract, I am only doing what he himself has done already.” http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com
Comfort had a tendency to focus single-mindedly on a given notion or project at the expense of any kind of balance: while he was a student at Highgate School, in London, he became convinced that he could concoct a superior version of gunpowder. He blew off much of his left hand. By the time he was finished with his experiments, his thumb was the only remaining digit. Later in his life, when he was practicing medicine, he said that he found this claw he’d created “very useful for performing uterine inversions.” After he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, his enthusiasms led him to accumulate six degrees, including a doctorate in biochemistry.
Comfort turned his attention to sexual liberation with a similar zeal. He offered readers a creation myth for “The Joy of Sex” on the first page, claiming that the book was based on a manuscript that an anonymous and particularly sexually advanced couple had presented to him in his capacity as a biologist. “I have done little to the original draft apart from expansion to cover more topics,” Comfort wrote. “The authors’ choice of emphases and their light-hearted style have been left alone.” In fact, both the choice of emphases and the lighthearted style were Comfort’s; he wrote every word of “The Joy of Sex,” though his credit on the book says “edited by.” Comfort later claimed that he had made up this randy authorial couple because in England at the time it was frowned upon for physicians to write mass-market books, “an implementation of the principle that doctors don’t advertise—of which I thoroughly approve, by the way,” he remarked to a journalist in 1974. But it was also probably a subterfuge, to protect the feelings of his wife of thirty years, Ruth Harris. For more than a decade, Comfort had been sleeping with Ruth’s best friend, Jane Henderson. (Comfort met both women at Cambridge.) http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com Comfort and Henderson took dozens of Polaroids of their erotic experiments, which they gave to the publisher Mitchell Beazley along with Comfort’s manuscript—originally titled “Doing Sex Properly.” The artists Charles Raymond and Christopher Foss were charged with transforming those photographs into pencil drawings, although the couple they depicted looked nothing like Comfort and Henderson.
If you are a child of the seventies and were raised on “The Joy of Sex,” you are not likely to have forgotten the illustrations. The woman depicted in these drawings is lovely, and, even nearly forty years later, quite chic. Her gentleman friend, however, looks like a werewolf with a hangover. He is heavily bearded; his hair is long, and, it always seemed, a little greasy. His eyelids are usually at half-mast, adding to his feral appearance. In some of the pictures, you can practically smell him. (The smell is unpleasant.)
It isn’t easy watching beauty get pawed by the beast, and our narrator does not help matters. “At a certain level and for all men,” Comfort informs us, “girls, and parts of girls, are at this stimulus level unpeople.” In “The Joy of Sex,” a male is a man, a female is a girl, and a vagina is, to “males generally, slightly scarey: it looks like a castrating wound and bleeds regularly, it swallows the penis and regurgitates it limp, it can probably bite and so on.” Men can get past such fears, of what Freudians called the vagina dentata, but Comfort cautions that “they are the origins of most male hangups including homosexuality.” The penis, by contrast, “has more symbolic importance than any other human organ.” Lest there be any confusion: “Vibrators are no substitute for a penis.” Comfort even enlists his fictional female narrator to argue the point for him. Under the heading “Women (by her for him),” Comfort writes of male genitalia, “It’s less the size than the personality, unpredictable movements, and moods which make up the turn-on (which is why rubber dummies are so sickening).” At times, “The Joy of Sex” has the feel of a penis propaganda pamphlet.
There was not a lot of feminist outcry about the book when it was published, probably because in 1972 there was so much else for feminists to cry about. There was, however, a feminist alternative: the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” The book announced on its original, 1971 jacket that it was “By and for Women,” and with its democratic inclusion of numerous voices it had the vibe of a consciousness-raising group. (In fact, it was the product of one.) “Our Bodies, Ourselves” covered much of the same material as “The Joy of Sex,” just with a different tone. It, too, had illustrations of a hirsute couple having intercourse in a series of positions. Both books said that everybody was bisexual, that sex should be a mutually satisfying, full-body experience, and that the communication of turn-ons could be of great benefit to this enterprise. And both books espoused the (distinctly seventies) notion that sex could be a value-neutral experience, as natural as eating, which undermined the traditional belief that sex ought to be in the service of procreation within the bounds of matrimony. “Our Bodies, Ourselves” added information on health, nutrition, self-defense, childbearing, and a rather more involved section on lesbianism. (“The Joy of Sex” has a drawing of two naked ladies kissing under the heading “Bisexuality,” while “Our Bodies, Ourselves” includes a chapter entitled “In Amerika They Call Us Dykes.”) If “The Joy of Sex” was like “Joy of Cooking”—though in some ways it was closer to Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” what with its strong authorial voice and affection for elaborate undertakings, to which Comfort assigned French names like pattes d’araignée, cuissade, and feuille de rose—“Our Bodies, Ourselves” was like the “Moosewood Cookbook.” http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com Everything in it was healthful, enlightened, nourishing.
Here’s a trick you might try at home sometime: pick almost any recipe in the “Moosewood.” Now add bacon. You will find that the addition of this decidedly unwholesome ingredient makes the food taste much better. “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” likewise, lacked a certain trayf allure. The revised edition of the book—even the original—is a fantastic resource for educating young women (and very sophisticated girls) about their physicality. But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little vegan.
Of course, there are endless alternatives now. If you are young and sassy, for example, you might enjoy “Sex: How to Do Everything,” by two women who call themselves Em & Lo and have a penchant for frisky wordplay. A character in John Updike’s “The Witches of Eastwick” thinks that “marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness.” If this rings true to you, you might be interested in “The Best-Ever Sex Handbook: Successful Techniques and New Ideas for Long-Term Lovers.” If you are Wiccan, there’s “Wicked Voodoo Sex,” in which the author, Kathleen Charlotte, promises to help you reclaim your “wanga.”
But none of those books have been huge best-sellers or cultural touchstones in the way that “The Joy of Sex” and “Our Bodies, Ourselves” were. Partly, this is because “Joy” and “Our Bodies” were a part of a movement that radically reformed the way the English-speaking world conceives of sexuality. At this point, only on Opposite Day is sex under-publicized in America. And there is also the matter of the World Wide Web. As the puppets in the Broadway musical “Avenue Q” sing, “The Internet is for porn.” Of course, the Internet is for everything, but it’s particularly good for quick answers: When was the Ming period? How do you prepare a truly fluffy frittata? And what is “The Flying Camel”? http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.wordpress.com
Into the mobbed marketplace of how-to books and limitless Googling, Crown is releasing a new edition of “The Joy of Sex” ($29.95). Comfort himself revised his book several times; now Susan Quilliam, a British “relationship psychologist and agony aunt” (as her Web site describes her), has endeavored to modernize the text for a new, post-feminist era. Gone are some of the most outrageous Comfortisms, such as “Don’t get yourself raped,” or his dubious assessment of the rhythm method—“It may well account for the slightly higher incidence of abnormal babies among Catholic users through stale eggs getting fertilized.” Deodorant is no longer “banned absolutely,” as it was by Comfort, and armpit shaving is not referred to as “ignorant vandalism.” Finally, and crucially, rear-entry intercourse is no longer called sex “à la Négresse.” http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.wordpress.com
Quilliam has succeeded in bringing “The Joy of Sex” up to current standards. Instead of opening with a crack about “one-legged ladies,” as Comfort did, Quilliam adds a well-written section on special considerations for disabled readers, which is sensitive without being condescending. The book is still emphatically straight, but Quilliam has given it a gay-positive tone, in sharp contrast to Comfort’s advice that if you might be that way inclined it was better not to experiment too much with a partner of the same sex, lest you let the gay genie out of the bottle. The original drawings have been replaced, with a mixture of modest photographs and impressionistic sketches. The hairiness has been eliminated, and the attractiveness gap between the man and the woman has been bridged. But the people in these pictures do not look as if they were in any kind of sexual ecstasy. Rather, they have the smug smiles of a couple whose 401(k)s have just appreciated. They look as if they were in a Viagra commercial, which is to say that they look like two people who have never, ever had sex.
Once you remove those memorable drawings and Comfort’s batty, phallocentric prose, what you are left with is something that bears little resemblance to the subversive, explosive original. “The Joy of Sex” redux becomes generic—Cook’s Illustrated with boobies. What was revolutionary in 1972 seems obvious now, and to present the material otherwise feels silly and square. It is difficult, for example, to take seriously the claim made by the new “Joy” that anal sex is “one of the last taboos,” when it was listed as fair game in Comfort’s text nearly forty years ago—and appears in both the Kamasutra (of the third century) and the Chinese “Rou Pu Tuan,” from the Ming period (1368-1644; I Googled it). Quilliam hews to Comfort’s basic premise that too much weirdness in sex is just as bad as too little, and the new edition retains Comfort’s assertion that “exclusive obsessions in sex are very like living exclusively on horseradish sauce through allergy to beef; fear of horseradish sauce, however, as indigestible, unnecessary, and immature, is another hangup, namely puritanism.” But, if procreation is no longer the goal of sex, why is one erotic practice more nutritious than the next? Who gets to decide what is horseradish and what is beef?
One is reminded of a line in Comfort’s poem “Notes for My Son,” in which he says, “Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom / Look carefully—see who it is.” Comfort’s freethinking did not extend beyond the boundaries of his own inclinations, and he said as much in his text. “We have tried to stay wide open, but it is always difficult to write about things one doesn’t enjoy, and we have left out long discussion of the very specialized sexual attitudes . . . which aren’t really love or even sex in quite our sense of the word.”
Comfort and his wife, Ruth, divorced shortly after “Joy” came out: the unpleasantness of his infidelity seems to have been heightened for Mrs. Comfort when her husband became internationally known as “Dr. Sex.” In 1973, a few months later, Comfort married his mistress and muse, Jane, and the two moved to Santa Barbara so that Comfort could assume a post at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal think tank. The move also gave them closer proximity to the Sandstone, a clothing-optional community of utopian swingers in Topanga Canyon, which was reportedly visited by Timothy Leary, Sammy Davis, Jr., Betty Dodson, and the porn star Marilyn Chambers, and which Comfort and Jane had frequented since 1970. “Often the nude biologist Dr. Alex Comfort, brandishing a cigar, traipsed through the room between the prone bodies with the professional air of a lepidopterist strolling through the fields waving a butterfly net,” Gay Talese wrote in “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.”
But Jane, according to a friend who was interviewed by the journalist Pagan Kennedy, eventually tired of group sex and open marriage. (Sexual fads may come and go, but jealousy is forever.) At the same time, Comfort’s relationship with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions soured, and he became involved in lawsuits with the center over breach of contract. In 1985, Comfort and Henderson returned to England, where he lived the rest of his life, more or less monogamously, in Kent.
Comfort suffered a massive brain hemorrhage in 1991, at the age of seventy-one, and Jane died shortly thereafter. From then until Comfort’s death, in 2000, his son from his first marriage, Nicholas, was Comfort’s caretaker and took over the business of managing “The Joy of Sex.” “He was good about talking about sex in the abstract, but when he had to tell me about the facts of life he was embarrassed,” Nicholas Comfort told a reporter on the occasion of the book’s thirtieth anniversary. “He got it all over with quite quickly and hoped I wouldn’t ask any questions.” ♦
Thursday, December 25, 2008
rank
http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.wordpress.com
Power has its perks, even for laboratory-housed monkeys. When moved from individual to group cages, socially dominant male monkeys exhibit a brain-chemistry change that fosters resistance to using drugs such as cocaine, a new study finds.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
This alteration increases the amount of so-called dopamine D2 receptors, a molecular gateway on brain cells controlled by the chemical messenger dopamine.
Earlier studies implicated these receptors in pleasurable responses to drugs and other stimuli.
In contrast, male monkeys at the bottom of the social pecking order display no boost in the D2 receptors when housed with other monkeys, say neuroscientist Michael A. Nader of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., and his colleagues. Unlike their more dominant cage mates, the low-ranking monkeys readily self-administer large amounts of cocaine.
These findings raise the possibility that a person's vulnerability to drug abuse can be influenced by brain-altering environmental factors, Nader's group concludes in an upcoming Nature Neuroscience.
"This is the first demonstration in primates that a social stressor, such as a dominance hierarchy, can regulate levels of dopamine D2 receptors," remarks psychiatrist Nora D. Volkow of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. "It provides a potential biological mechanism to explain why people in lower social classes are generally at higher risk for drug abuse."
Nader and his coworkers used a scanning technique called positron emission tomography (PET) to study D2 receptors in the brains of 20 male macaque monkeys that had been housed in individual cages for 1� years. PET scans were repeated after the monkeys were moved into larger cages, grouping four animals per cage, and given time to establish social hierarchies.
The scans revealed comparably low numbers of dopamine D2 receptors in all individually housed monkeys and in low-ranking monkeys in the groups. In dominant monkeys, D2-receptor numbers increased sharply. These animals also displayed relatively low concentrations of dopamine in the junctions, or synapses, between brain cells.
Excess synaptic dopamine leads to an oversensitivity of the brain's reward pathway and creates a susceptibility to drug abuse, the researchers theorize.
Loss of control over environmental factors may have triggered such a dopamine pattern in low-ranking monkeys, they hold. When the scientists implanted intravenous lines, subordinate animals quickly learned to press a lever to receive infusions of cocaine in increasing doses and largely ignored a lever controlling delivery of saline solution.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
In dominant monkeys, the surge in dopamine D2 receptors indicates they use dopamine efficiently for cell-to-cell communication, Nader's group contends. These monkeys showed no preference for receiving intravenous cocaine over a saline solution.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Whether these findings have correlates among people remains an open question, the researchers note. In line with the new study, earlier PET data indicated that people with low dopamine D2-receptor numbers report more pleasurable responses to stimulant drugs than those with high D2 numbers do. "We're going to have to start paying much closer attention to the social rank of individuals in studies of the biology of drug abuse," Volkow says.
Power has its perks, even for laboratory-housed monkeys. When moved from individual to group cages, socially dominant male monkeys exhibit a brain-chemistry change that fosters resistance to using drugs such as cocaine, a new study finds.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
This alteration increases the amount of so-called dopamine D2 receptors, a molecular gateway on brain cells controlled by the chemical messenger dopamine.
Earlier studies implicated these receptors in pleasurable responses to drugs and other stimuli.
In contrast, male monkeys at the bottom of the social pecking order display no boost in the D2 receptors when housed with other monkeys, say neuroscientist Michael A. Nader of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., and his colleagues. Unlike their more dominant cage mates, the low-ranking monkeys readily self-administer large amounts of cocaine.
These findings raise the possibility that a person's vulnerability to drug abuse can be influenced by brain-altering environmental factors, Nader's group concludes in an upcoming Nature Neuroscience.
"This is the first demonstration in primates that a social stressor, such as a dominance hierarchy, can regulate levels of dopamine D2 receptors," remarks psychiatrist Nora D. Volkow of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. "It provides a potential biological mechanism to explain why people in lower social classes are generally at higher risk for drug abuse."
Nader and his coworkers used a scanning technique called positron emission tomography (PET) to study D2 receptors in the brains of 20 male macaque monkeys that had been housed in individual cages for 1� years. PET scans were repeated after the monkeys were moved into larger cages, grouping four animals per cage, and given time to establish social hierarchies.
The scans revealed comparably low numbers of dopamine D2 receptors in all individually housed monkeys and in low-ranking monkeys in the groups. In dominant monkeys, D2-receptor numbers increased sharply. These animals also displayed relatively low concentrations of dopamine in the junctions, or synapses, between brain cells.
Excess synaptic dopamine leads to an oversensitivity of the brain's reward pathway and creates a susceptibility to drug abuse, the researchers theorize.
Loss of control over environmental factors may have triggered such a dopamine pattern in low-ranking monkeys, they hold. When the scientists implanted intravenous lines, subordinate animals quickly learned to press a lever to receive infusions of cocaine in increasing doses and largely ignored a lever controlling delivery of saline solution.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
In dominant monkeys, the surge in dopamine D2 receptors indicates they use dopamine efficiently for cell-to-cell communication, Nader's group contends. These monkeys showed no preference for receiving intravenous cocaine over a saline solution.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.US
Whether these findings have correlates among people remains an open question, the researchers note. In line with the new study, earlier PET data indicated that people with low dopamine D2-receptor numbers report more pleasurable responses to stimulant drugs than those with high D2 numbers do. "We're going to have to start paying much closer attention to the social rank of individuals in studies of the biology of drug abuse," Volkow says.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
fermi 44.fer.000002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Curtain up! Light the lights! In its first four months of monitoring the heavens from orbit, NASA’s Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope has unveiled the activity of celestial objects that emit powerful gamma rays — photons that pack 20 million to more than 300 billion times the energy of visible light. The orbiting observatory features the first detectors in space capable of recording the most energetic of these photons. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO
For now, Fermi’s flurry of first findings — which include new discoveries about gamma-ray bursts as well as the energetic radiation emitted by rapidly spinning stellar corpses called pulsars, several never before recorded — poses new puzzles. But ultimately the discoveries will offer new insight into the origin of these powerful emissions and the activity of some of the most enigmatic objects in the cosmos, says Peter Michelson of Stanford University, principal investigator of Fermi’s Large Area Telescope, the device on the observatory that records the high-energy emissions.
Michelson and his Stanford colleague Aurelien Bouvier presented some of the discoveries on December 8 in Vancouver at the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics. Other reports will follow later this week at the conference.
Some of the new findings focus on gamma-ray bursts, the ephemeral flashes of light that signal the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang. Long-duration bursts — those lasting more than about a second or two — may be the birth cries of black holes, as jets of material zoom out of collapsing stars. Short bursts may signal the final coalescence of two elderly neutron stars or black holes.
In his talk, Bouvier announced that the Large Area Telescope had for the first time captured high-energy emissions from three gamma-ray bursts. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
In each case, the telescope did not record any energetic radiation until well after Fermi’s other instrument, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, had recorded the low-energy components of the same bursts.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET
The time delay between the onset of high- and low-energy emissions — which amounted to five seconds in a burst discovered on September 19 and dubbed GRB 080916C — suggests that the high-energy gamma rays from bursts might be produced at a different place or by different particles than the lower-energy radiation, says Bouvier.
It may be easier — and quicker — for electrons, which are relatively lightweight, to rev up to high speeds and crash into each other, producing the early, lower-energy part of these bursts, says Bouvier. It’s possible that protons, which are heavier and therefore take longer to accelerate, contribute to the higher-energy component some time later.
And there could be another, more intriguing — and much more speculative — explanation for at least part of the delay, Bouvier adds. The highest energy photons — 13 gigaelectron volts — from the September 19 event arrived 16.5 seconds later than the lowest energy emissions. Spectra of the visible-light afterglow of the burst reveal an origin in a remote galaxy 12.2 billion light-years from Earth.
Many theories of quantum gravity predict that spacetime on its tiniest scale isn’t continuous but is as malleable and variable as sea foam. Because of this foaminess, not all photons would travel at the same speed. Those with higher gravitational potential — higher energies, according to Einstein’s E=mc2 — would travel slightly slower through space and arrive slightly later than lower-energy photons. The effect would be tiny, but over a journey of 12.2 billion light-years, it might be detectable.
Two of the three bursts detected by the Large Area Telescope — the September 19 event as well as a burst recorded on August 25 — belong to a class of bursts that last for more than a second. But on October 24, the telescope for the first time recorded extremely high-energy emissions from a short gamma-ray burst, one that lasted for only a few tenths of a second.
The Fermi data “support the picture that while the progenitors of long and short bursts are different … the sources of the outflow in both cases share many similarities and are probably sharing the same physical mechanism,” comments Ehud Nakar of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Also at the conference, Michelson reported that the Large Area Telescope has now recorded 15 previously unknown pulsars in our galaxy. These 15 rapidly rotating neutron stars, the dense cinders left behind when massive stars explode, have been found to emit only gamma rays, not pulses of radio waves as most of the 1,800 known pulsars do. If Fermi continues to find gamma-ray–only pulsars at such a high rate, it could double the population of known pulsars. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
For now, Fermi’s flurry of first findings — which include new discoveries about gamma-ray bursts as well as the energetic radiation emitted by rapidly spinning stellar corpses called pulsars, several never before recorded — poses new puzzles. But ultimately the discoveries will offer new insight into the origin of these powerful emissions and the activity of some of the most enigmatic objects in the cosmos, says Peter Michelson of Stanford University, principal investigator of Fermi’s Large Area Telescope, the device on the observatory that records the high-energy emissions.
Michelson and his Stanford colleague Aurelien Bouvier presented some of the discoveries on December 8 in Vancouver at the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics. Other reports will follow later this week at the conference.
Some of the new findings focus on gamma-ray bursts, the ephemeral flashes of light that signal the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang. Long-duration bursts — those lasting more than about a second or two — may be the birth cries of black holes, as jets of material zoom out of collapsing stars. Short bursts may signal the final coalescence of two elderly neutron stars or black holes.
In his talk, Bouvier announced that the Large Area Telescope had for the first time captured high-energy emissions from three gamma-ray bursts. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
In each case, the telescope did not record any energetic radiation until well after Fermi’s other instrument, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, had recorded the low-energy components of the same bursts.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET
The time delay between the onset of high- and low-energy emissions — which amounted to five seconds in a burst discovered on September 19 and dubbed GRB 080916C — suggests that the high-energy gamma rays from bursts might be produced at a different place or by different particles than the lower-energy radiation, says Bouvier.
It may be easier — and quicker — for electrons, which are relatively lightweight, to rev up to high speeds and crash into each other, producing the early, lower-energy part of these bursts, says Bouvier. It’s possible that protons, which are heavier and therefore take longer to accelerate, contribute to the higher-energy component some time later.
And there could be another, more intriguing — and much more speculative — explanation for at least part of the delay, Bouvier adds. The highest energy photons — 13 gigaelectron volts — from the September 19 event arrived 16.5 seconds later than the lowest energy emissions. Spectra of the visible-light afterglow of the burst reveal an origin in a remote galaxy 12.2 billion light-years from Earth.
Many theories of quantum gravity predict that spacetime on its tiniest scale isn’t continuous but is as malleable and variable as sea foam. Because of this foaminess, not all photons would travel at the same speed. Those with higher gravitational potential — higher energies, according to Einstein’s E=mc2 — would travel slightly slower through space and arrive slightly later than lower-energy photons. The effect would be tiny, but over a journey of 12.2 billion light-years, it might be detectable.
Two of the three bursts detected by the Large Area Telescope — the September 19 event as well as a burst recorded on August 25 — belong to a class of bursts that last for more than a second. But on October 24, the telescope for the first time recorded extremely high-energy emissions from a short gamma-ray burst, one that lasted for only a few tenths of a second.
The Fermi data “support the picture that while the progenitors of long and short bursts are different … the sources of the outflow in both cases share many similarities and are probably sharing the same physical mechanism,” comments Ehud Nakar of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Also at the conference, Michelson reported that the Large Area Telescope has now recorded 15 previously unknown pulsars in our galaxy. These 15 rapidly rotating neutron stars, the dense cinders left behind when massive stars explode, have been found to emit only gamma rays, not pulses of radio waves as most of the 1,800 known pulsars do. If Fermi continues to find gamma-ray–only pulsars at such a high rate, it could double the population of known pulsars. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
ethanol 55.eth.10083 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Switching the nation's vehicles from gasoline to mostly ethanol will not reduce air pollution, a new study finds. The work joins other evidence questioning the benefits of ethanol fuel.
Mark Z. Jacobson, an atmospheric scientist at Stanford University, created a model that takes into account how the chemicals emitted in car exhaust transform through reactions in the atmosphere. He combined the resulting chemical profile with population and health-effects data to determine the risks associated with each of the fuels.
Jacobson looked at emissions from E85, the 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline blend considered a potentially large-scale replacement for gasoline. He examined a scenario based on expected emissions in 2020, the first year that he says that E85-ready cars might dominate the roads.
Jacobson's calculations predicted health effects in response to ozone and carcinogens attributable to an all-gasoline fleet or an all-E85 fleet. He found that E85 use may increase asthma, hospitalizations, and death caused by ozone exposure by about 9 percent in Los Angeles and by 4 percent, on average, across the nation. The rise in ozone-related problems partially stemmed from larger releases of two ozone precursors—acetaldehyde and formaldehyde—from E85 as compared with gasoline.
Acetaldehyde and formaldehyde are also two of the four major human carcinogens in E85 and gasoline exhaust. E85 use lowered atmospheric concentrations of the other two major carcinogens—1,3-butadiene and benzene—as compared with gasoline use. The results regarding cancer "somewhat cancel each other out," notes Jacobson, "so there's not much difference between E85 and gasoline.
"The bottom line is, you aren't getting an improvement in air quality," Jacobson says. Although the ozone effects suggest that E85 could pose a larger health risk to the public than gasoline, he hesitates to emphasize that result because of the uncertainty inherent in some of his projections. His study appears in the June 1 Environmental Science & Technology.
Jacobson says that other renewable energies offer a better solution. "To solve global warming and air pollution health problems, we need to focus on technologies we know are addressing these problems," he says. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Timothy E. Lipman, a research scientist working on energy at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees. "There are other ways to substitute for petroleum that are likely to yield better greenhouse-gas and air-quality benefits," he says. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
The study "should remind policy makers and others to be really skeptical about claims that E85 will improve air quality," comments Jana B. Milford, an environmental engineer at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The atmospheric-chemistry model that Jacobson developed is well regarded, she says, although he has examined only one scenario. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
"It's a solid study," Milford says, "but it won't be the last word." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Mark Z. Jacobson, an atmospheric scientist at Stanford University, created a model that takes into account how the chemicals emitted in car exhaust transform through reactions in the atmosphere. He combined the resulting chemical profile with population and health-effects data to determine the risks associated with each of the fuels.
Jacobson looked at emissions from E85, the 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline blend considered a potentially large-scale replacement for gasoline. He examined a scenario based on expected emissions in 2020, the first year that he says that E85-ready cars might dominate the roads.
Jacobson's calculations predicted health effects in response to ozone and carcinogens attributable to an all-gasoline fleet or an all-E85 fleet. He found that E85 use may increase asthma, hospitalizations, and death caused by ozone exposure by about 9 percent in Los Angeles and by 4 percent, on average, across the nation. The rise in ozone-related problems partially stemmed from larger releases of two ozone precursors—acetaldehyde and formaldehyde—from E85 as compared with gasoline.
Acetaldehyde and formaldehyde are also two of the four major human carcinogens in E85 and gasoline exhaust. E85 use lowered atmospheric concentrations of the other two major carcinogens—1,3-butadiene and benzene—as compared with gasoline use. The results regarding cancer "somewhat cancel each other out," notes Jacobson, "so there's not much difference between E85 and gasoline.
"The bottom line is, you aren't getting an improvement in air quality," Jacobson says. Although the ozone effects suggest that E85 could pose a larger health risk to the public than gasoline, he hesitates to emphasize that result because of the uncertainty inherent in some of his projections. His study appears in the June 1 Environmental Science & Technology.
Jacobson says that other renewable energies offer a better solution. "To solve global warming and air pollution health problems, we need to focus on technologies we know are addressing these problems," he says. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Timothy E. Lipman, a research scientist working on energy at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees. "There are other ways to substitute for petroleum that are likely to yield better greenhouse-gas and air-quality benefits," he says. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
The study "should remind policy makers and others to be really skeptical about claims that E85 will improve air quality," comments Jana B. Milford, an environmental engineer at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The atmospheric-chemistry model that Jacobson developed is well regarded, she says, although he has examined only one scenario. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
"It's a solid study," Milford says, "but it won't be the last word." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
clue 66.clu.44444 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Combining the skills of the late Jacques Cousteau and Louis Leakey, two Canadian researchers have gone off the deep end to address one of the biggest questions in anthropology: How did people first make their way to the Americas? Using sophisticated underwater techniques, the scientists have mapped out a now-flooded route that could have provided an entry point into the New World during the last ice age. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
"What they're doing is very pioneering. It's a beautiful bit of science," comments archaeologist E. James Dixon of the Denver Museum of Natural History. The Canadian research adds weight to the idea that maritime Asians migrated down the coast of North America instead of hoofing it overland, as anthropologists have traditionally believed.
Daryl W. Fedje of Parks Canada in Victoria, British Columbia, and Heiner Josenhans of the Geological Survey of Canada in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, carried out the new study off the coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands, just south of Alaska. The researchers used high-resolution sonar to complete a detailed bathymetric map of the underwater landscape. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
The chart, published in the February Geology, shows a drowned world of former river valleys, flood plains, and ancient lakes that would have been above sea level at the end of the last glacial epoch, more than 10,000 years ago. During the ice age, so much of the world's water was locked up in continental glaciers that the height of the oceans dropped by 120 meters.
The narrow seas separating Siberia and Alaska dried up, forming a temporary land bridge between the two continents. Using the new map, Fedje and Josenhans went out to collect samples from the coastal seafloor. They found a pine tree stump and other woody debris that date to 12,200 years ago, according to the carbon-14 method. This is the earliest direct evidence that forests had returned to the formerly ice-covered area. Other sites yielded shells from edible shellfish dating almost to the same time.
Such clues show how the coastline, which was frozen until about 14,000 years ago, was growing more hospitable. "At this time, 12,000 years ago, it would have been a suitable place for people to live and be moving across," says Fedje.
The researchers also found a stone tool at a location now 53 m below sea level. They have dated this site to 10,000 years ago, making the tool one of the earliest human artifacts along the northwest coast of North America. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
The new evidence goes against the long-held assumptions of anthropologists who theorized that the first human immigrants must have been hunters following mammoths and other large game via an inland route to the North American Great Plains. Once people passed over the land bridge to Alaska about 12,000 years ago, according to the older theory, they trekked through a narrow corridor between two remaining giant ice sheets, one covering northeast North America and the other blanketing the Rocky Mountains and their northern extension.
Recently, however, archaeologists have discovered evidence of people reaching South America by 12,500 years ago, well before the ice-free inland corridor would have been passable. "People are looking increasingly toward the coast as an alternative option for getting to the lower 48 states and other portions of the New World," says archaeologist David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "That's why this kind of [mapping] work is interesting and important, because it's helping to show us when such routes would have been open, viable, and possibly traversable."
Meltzer notes, however, that coastal migrants must have arrived well before the time of the forests documented by Fedje and Josenhans, in order to spread all the way to the southern end of South America by 12,500 years ago.
"What they're doing is very pioneering. It's a beautiful bit of science," comments archaeologist E. James Dixon of the Denver Museum of Natural History. The Canadian research adds weight to the idea that maritime Asians migrated down the coast of North America instead of hoofing it overland, as anthropologists have traditionally believed.
Daryl W. Fedje of Parks Canada in Victoria, British Columbia, and Heiner Josenhans of the Geological Survey of Canada in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, carried out the new study off the coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands, just south of Alaska. The researchers used high-resolution sonar to complete a detailed bathymetric map of the underwater landscape. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
The chart, published in the February Geology, shows a drowned world of former river valleys, flood plains, and ancient lakes that would have been above sea level at the end of the last glacial epoch, more than 10,000 years ago. During the ice age, so much of the world's water was locked up in continental glaciers that the height of the oceans dropped by 120 meters.
The narrow seas separating Siberia and Alaska dried up, forming a temporary land bridge between the two continents. Using the new map, Fedje and Josenhans went out to collect samples from the coastal seafloor. They found a pine tree stump and other woody debris that date to 12,200 years ago, according to the carbon-14 method. This is the earliest direct evidence that forests had returned to the formerly ice-covered area. Other sites yielded shells from edible shellfish dating almost to the same time.
Such clues show how the coastline, which was frozen until about 14,000 years ago, was growing more hospitable. "At this time, 12,000 years ago, it would have been a suitable place for people to live and be moving across," says Fedje.
The researchers also found a stone tool at a location now 53 m below sea level. They have dated this site to 10,000 years ago, making the tool one of the earliest human artifacts along the northwest coast of North America. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
The new evidence goes against the long-held assumptions of anthropologists who theorized that the first human immigrants must have been hunters following mammoths and other large game via an inland route to the North American Great Plains. Once people passed over the land bridge to Alaska about 12,000 years ago, according to the older theory, they trekked through a narrow corridor between two remaining giant ice sheets, one covering northeast North America and the other blanketing the Rocky Mountains and their northern extension.
Recently, however, archaeologists have discovered evidence of people reaching South America by 12,500 years ago, well before the ice-free inland corridor would have been passable. "People are looking increasingly toward the coast as an alternative option for getting to the lower 48 states and other portions of the New World," says archaeologist David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "That's why this kind of [mapping] work is interesting and important, because it's helping to show us when such routes would have been open, viable, and possibly traversable."
Meltzer notes, however, that coastal migrants must have arrived well before the time of the forests documented by Fedje and Josenhans, in order to spread all the way to the southern end of South America by 12,500 years ago.
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