The little mountain climber’s room
An environmental group is asking the Nepal government to consider installing portable toilets on Mount Everest for climbers caught short at the roof of the world.
Eco Himal says the thousands of trekkers who set off from the South Base Camp in Nepal each year would do a better job of keeping the place clean if they and their porters had somewhere civilised to go when nature called.
“Human waste is a problem, of course,” said the group’s director, Phinjo Sherpa. “I am merely suggesting that if we have public toilets they can be used.”
Many groups bring expedition toilet cans, but Phinjo Sherpa said porters were often left with little choice but the nearest snowdrift.
Environmental activists say Everest is littered with the detritus of past expeditions, including human waste and mountaineers’ corpses, which can take decades to decompose because of the extreme cold.
Phinjo Sherpa said installing the toilets would be discussed as part of a wider waste management plan being prepared by the government that would encompass popular peaks throughout the Everest region.
“If there could be two or three toilets that would be good but this is just at the planning phase. We will have to decide what is a good idea and what isn’t,” he said.
Climbers spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to reach the 8,848-metre (29,028-foot) summit of Everest, but campaigners say few pay much attention to the rubbish they leave behind. There is no definitive figure on how much trash has been left on the mountain, but the debris of 50 years of climbing has given Everest the name of the world’s highest dumpster.
The privately-funded Eco Everest Expedition, a Nepal-based coalition of environmentalists campaigning to keep the mountain clean, has collected more than 13 tonnes of garbage, 400 kilogrammes of human waste and four bodies since 2008. AFP
Man gets double hand transplant
An American man on Friday expressed his happiness at the prospect of touching his young grandchildren for the first time, following a rare double hand transplant at a Boston hospital.
Richard Mangino, 65, lost his arms below the elbows and his lower legs from an infection in 2002. After a 12-hour operation by a 40-strong surgical team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — best known for pioneering face transplants — he got donated hands. In his first remarks, he thanked the family of the donor.
“My family and I grieve for the loss of your loved one. I am humbled and overwhelmed with emotion. Thank you for this incredible gift,” he said in a statement.
But Mangino said his main emotion now was happiness at the prospect of regaining a more normal life and, above all, the ability to play with his grandchildren.
“The one miracle I have prayed for, since my oldest grandson Trevor was born, was to be able to feel the sense of touch again. To touch his and Nicky’s little faces, and stroke their hair, and to teach them to throw a ball. To me, that would be a miracle,” he said in the statement.
“And today, my miracle has come true. And I am eternally grateful.”
The father of three had until now used prosthetic limbs and had some success in living a normal existence, reportedly driving a car, playing guitar and using a computer.
However, those achievements were not easily managed; the loss of one limb requires a person to use a quarter to a third more energy.
“So if you lose four limbs, then you can imagine: one of your days is like two days for me,” he said.
“Just getting dressed before was a mountain. All those things I’ve been doing for the past nine years — people would say you are a miracle. And I would tell them it took 25 or 30 miracles a day to be that person. And now I won’t have to perform miracles now just to get up in the morning,” he said.
The transplant involved delicate connection of skin, tendons, muscles, ligaments, bones and blood vessels.
Only 21 double hand transplants have previously been made around the world, with the first in the French city of Lyon in 2000, according to the International Registry on Hand and Composite Tissue Transplantation.
Simon Talbot, the lead surgeon, said “the results so far have been an amazing success.”
However, Mangino needs months of therapy and it will take at least half a year for him to regain a sense of touch, the surgeon said. AFP
Egypt wants McMummies
A McDONALD’S restaurant in Staffordshire, UK, has been asked to return a pair of mummies buried in its foundations to Egypt.
The fast-food eatery in Tamworth has been established as the final resting place of two mummies excavated from Egypt at the end of the 19th century.
Local reverend William MacGregor displayed the mummies at a museum in his home of Bolehall Manor, but was forced to bury them in 1935 when the bodies started to decay.
According to The Scotsman, MacGregor asked for the mummies to be placed in the foundations of cinema being constructed in the town, which has since been turned into a McDonald’s.
“I think it’s important to study them and I would suggest that someone is invited to look at them,” said Dr Zahi Hawass, director of the Pyramids region in Cairo. “They should be given to a museum or handed back to Egypt.”
However, a spokesperson for McDonald’s claimed that a mission to retrieve the mummies was simply not viable.
“It is something we were completely unaware of, but it is fascinating,” they said. “We understand they are well within the foundations so an excavation is out of the question, unfortunately.”
SOURCE: dailytelegraph.com.AU
More virtual friends equals to ‘big brains’?
Scientists have found a direct link between the number of “friends” a person has on Facebook and the size of certain brain regions, raising the possibility that using online social networks might change our brains. The four brain areas involved are known to play a role in memory, emotional responses and social interactions.
So far, however, it is not possible to say whether having more Facebook connections makes particular parts of the brain larger or whether some people are simply pre-disposed, or “hard-wired,” to have more friends.
“The exciting question now is whether these structures change over time — this will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing our brains,” said Ryota Kanai of University College London (UCL), one of the researchers involved in the study.
They discovered a strong connection between the number of Facebook friends and the amount of “grey matter” in the amygdala, the right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where mental processing occurs.
The thickness of grey matter in the amygdala was also linked to the number of real-world friends people had, but the size of the other three regions appeared to be correlated only to online connections.
With more than 800 million active users worldwide, Facebook has become a major component of social interaction, especially among the young. Reuters
Cyclops of the sea
Talk about a one-of-a-kind discovery—an extremely rare cyclops shark has been confirmed in Mexico, new research shows.
The 22-inch-long (56-centimeter-long) fetus has a single, functioning eye at the front of its head — the hallmark of a congenital condition called cyclopia, which occurs in several animal species, including humans.
Earlier this year fisher Enrique Lucero León legally caught a pregnant dusky shark near Cerralvo Island (see map) in the Gulf of California. When León cut open his catch, he found the odd-looking male embryo along with its nine normal siblings. “He said, That’s incredible — wow,” said biologist Felipe Galván-Magaña, of the Interdisciplinary Center of Marine Sciences in La Paz, Mexico.
Once Galván-Magaña and colleague Marcela Bejarano-Álvarez heard about the discovery — which was put on Facebook — the team got León’s permission to borrow the shark for research. The scientists then x-rayed the fetus and reviewed previous research on cyclopia in other species to confirm that the find is indeed a cyclops shark.
Cyclops sharks have been documented by scientists before, also as embryos, said Jim Gelsleichter, a shark biologist at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. The fact that none have been caught outside the womb suggests cyclops sharks don’t survive long in the wild. Overall, finding such an unusual animal reinforces that scientists still have a lot to learn, Gelsleichter added.
“It’s a humbling experience to realize you ain’t seen it all yet.”
SOURCE: news.nationalgeographic.com
Tunes to snooze to
A Manchester band has created the most relaxing song ever, according to scientists.
It sounds as though sleepless nights could be a thing of the past, thanks to Marconi Union, a musical trio from Manchester. They have created a song they call Weightless which has become, officially, the most relaxing song ever. That is the verdict of the boffins who say that its sustaining rhythm, the harmonic intervals, the absence of a repeated melody and the use of “whooshing sounds and hums” all combine to make the perfect aural narcoleptic. It is so effective that drivers are being warned not to put it on the car stereo. Lest you think the relaxation quotient of a song is in the ear of the beholder, the scientists say otherwise, claiming with admirable precision that Weightless is 11 per cent more soporific than any other song.
SOURCE: dailytelegraph.com
Off with their wigs!
Ireland’s judges are to end the tradition of wearing horsehair wigs that dates back over 350 years to British colonial rule, the country’s Courts Service said Thursday.
“A change in Court Rules made today, will end the requirement for judges to wear wigs in court,” a statement said.
The Superior Courts Rules Committee, chaired for the first time by recently appointed Chief Justice Susan Denham — Ireland’s first female top judge — approved the court rules change that does away with the requirement for ceremonial wigs to be worn in the Supreme and High Courts.
A similar rule change will apply to judges in the Circuit Court after the change is signed into law by Justice Minister Alan Shatter.
Wigs have been worn in court as “a matter of rule, tradition and law” since about 1660, the time of the restoration of the English monarchy, and survived Ireland’s transition to independence in 1921. AFP
Table salt = Terabytes
Scientists in Singapore said Friday they have discovered a process that can expand the data storage capacity of computer hard disks six-fold using a common kitchen ingredient — table salt.
The discovery was made by Singapore’s national research institute the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, in collaboration with the National University of Singapore and the Data Storage Institute.
The institutions have “developed a process that can increase the data recording density of hard disks to 3.3 Terabits per square inch, six times the recording density of current models”, they said in a statement.
“This means that a hard disk drive that holds 1 Terabyte (TB) of data today could, in the future, hold 6 TB of information in the same size using this new technology.”
The discovery has been published in scientific journal Nanotechnology as well as the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology B. Scientists were able to boost data storage capacity by packing more bits — miniature structures which hold information — in neater patterns compared to the random configurations used in current hard disk drives.
“It’s like packing your clothes in your suitcase when you travel. The neater you pack them the more you can carry,” the statement said.
The method — called bit patterning — had previously not been feasible as scientists were unable to see the outlines of the bits clearly after they had been printed onto a film in a process much like developing photographs.
But adding table salt into the solution used for bit imaging allowed the outlines to stand out in sharp relief.
“It can give you a very high contrast. We are now able to see fine lines that would normally be blurred out,” Joel Yang, the Singapore scientist who discovered the salty recipe.
“Otherwise you can try your best to pattern these bits very closely but they will all end up being gigantic blurred-out blobs,” said Yang of the national research agency’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering.
Yang predicted that the salted bit-patterning process will be adopted by the industry by 2016 “when the current techniques run out of fuel and (hard drive manufacturers) need to find alternate methods” of increasing data storage space. AFP
Published in The Express Tribune, October 22nd, 2011.
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