Watching the World
Open-Heart Surgery
◆ Do blood transfusions make major surgery safer and better? No, says a group of surgeons writing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. They call attention to “the obvious advantages of bloodless open heart surgery,” which “may be performed almost routinely. In our series these measures reduced blood [cell damage], with a remarkable preservation of blood elements, especially platelets, and a corresponding elimination of postoperative bleeding.” The doctors said that “the absence of serious postoperative lung complications was a most notable finding.” Why? “It was perhaps entirely due to the avoidance of [transfused] blood, thus preventing the [collection] and stagnation of foreign cells.” According to the surgeons, “the absence of serious [kidney] complications further supports the view that the avoidance of transfused blood minimizes [red blood cell collection] and [clumping] in the kidney.”
Anchoring the Nomads
◆ Saudi Arabia is working to entice its Bedouins to give up their millenniums-old wandering ways for stable farm life. A $27-million experimental sheep farm in the desert is training them in skills necessary to run their own small farms. But it is hard for the Bedouins to change. “Many wander back into the desert after only a short time on the farm,” reports The Wall Street Journal. Some families living in houses for the first time “develop claustrophobia and move back into their tents. Others simply refuse the new housing and set up shanties of flattened gasoline cans and packing-case sections that can be quickly dismantled and carried off into the desert whenever wanderlust strikes.”
Bicentennial Caution
◆ “It’s idiotic for people to come to this criminals’ paradise” for the U.S. Bicentennial, warns the head of the compliance and complaints division of the Federal Communications Commission. People who visit Washington, D.C., he says, “are asking to be mugged, raped or robbed.” Last year serious crime leaped over 20 percent in the Capitol area most visited by tourists. And at a congressional hearing the U.S. Parks Police Chief warned that, despite extra police, tourists would be “fair game” for criminals. He noted that, since few visitors can stay to testify against their attackers, most of them go free, making tourists especially enticing as victims.
Ancient Flood
◆ “In almost every culture,” observes Science News, “emerge strikingly similar tales of a great flood that swept away emerging civilizations and changed the face of the earth.” The article says that “new evidence gathered from seafloor cores . . . confirms the existence of such a universal deluge and offers a tentative explanation.” The cores, drilled from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, are said to indicate that “the surrounding seawater had suddenly become fresher” due to a huge surge of fresh water. Scientists ‘tentatively explain’ that this was caused by a rapidly melting glacier.
“Protection” by Guns
◆ Occasional lay preacher Ray Burgess, a member of the Alabama House of Representatives, told the lawmakers that his life was “a gift of God, and God gave me the ingenuity to protect that gift” (with a revolver). When the representatives almost passed a resolution banning guns on the House floor, Burgess agreed to stop carrying his at sessions. But he insisted that he would carry it elsewhere and boasted that every member of his family had one. Several months later, during a quarrel with his wife, the pistol that they were struggling over went off. He was shot in the head and recently died of the wound.
Venice No Longer Sinking
◆ The gradual sinking of Venice, Italy, into the Adriatic Sea has reportedly halted and may even be reversing. For a decade Venetians have been sealing thousands of artesian wells in the area. The resulting gradual buildup of underground water over which the city is built stopped the sinking. “The balance of supply and demand is being restored by natural processes,” exults Ottavio Vittori, head of the Venice National Research Center. He says that it may even be rising as much as four hundredths of an inch or so in five years. That is not much, but at least Venice is no longer sinking.
Baby Appetite Control?
◆ Breast-fed babies are known to have less tendency to obesity. Why? A London researcher notes that babies usually stop feeding well before the breast supply is exhausted and asks why. She theorizes that it may have something to do with the changes in the milk during feeding. Pale and watery at the start, it becomes thick and white toward the end, containing, she says, “four to five times as much [fat] and 1.5 times as much protein as at the beginning.” California medical school professor Derrick B. Jelliffe agrees that “it is possible that the baby gets biochemical clues from the feel of mother’s milk as well as the taste—which could well be important in controlling appetite.”
Firewood Shortage
◆ More than a third of mankind uses about half of the world’s cut timber with which to cook and heat. Now firewood is rapidly disappearing in many African and Asian countries, where more than 90 percent of the inhabitants rely on it, according to Worldwatch Institute. These people use wood at the rate of one to two tons per person a year, and may spend more than a quarter of their family income on it. Stripping the forests for firewood is causing soil erosion that ruins many thousands of acres annually. Wood scarcity also has necessitated greater use of dried cattle dung for fuel—diverting much-needed nutrients from the soil—at a rate of 300 million tons per year in India. “Even if we somehow grow enough food for our people in the year 2000,” worries one Indian official, “how in the world will they cook it?”
Waning Work Ethic
◆ Generous unemployment benefits are testing West German workers’ traditional industriousness. The Bavarian builders’ federation complains that it can hardly find skilled workers, though many are now unemployed. “There’s no denying the fact,” the federation observed, “that for a limited period workers prefer the status of unemployment—with high rates of [unemployment] benefit—to a job on basic pay.” Following this trend are U.S. workers recently surveyed. Reportedly, almost 40 percent would prefer not to work if given a choice—nearly double the figure for 1962. But more startling is the fact that over three quarters of youths from sixteen to twenty said they would rather not work.
Danish Dilemma
◆ What is to be done about two unmarried church pastors, one male and one female, who are both raising families? When the Danish ministry of ecclesiastical affairs told Lutheran priest Erik Bock legally to marry the mother of his children or resign, he refused. Then the Danish priests’ association came out in Bock’s defense, protesting that his private life is his own affair. Unmarried priest Gitte Berg, herself pregnant, also added her widely published support. The state Lutheran Church was perplexed, apparently hesitant to heed the Bible’s clear command to “quit mixing in company with anyone called a brother that is a fornicator . . . ‘Remove the wicked [person].’”—1 Cor. 5:11, 13.
Pilot-Light Waste
◆ Reportedly, natural gas Is becoming scarce in the U.S. Yet the State Public Service Commission recently calculated that gas appliance pilot lights waste enough natural gas in New York State alone to supply the annual needs of 220,000 homes! However, engineers warn, turning pilot lights off would make appliances dangerous, and to replace the pilots with electric igniters would be very costly. They recommend selecting appliances with electric ignitions when purchasing new ones. Pilots on hot-water heaters waste little gas, though, because their heat helps to maintain water temperature, rather than being lost.
Marketing Death
◆ The recent Air Force Association Convention in Washington, D.C., allowed weapons manufacturers to exhibit their latest merchandise. Congressmen and military personnel saw what Time magazine calls “a blend of bombs and blinking lights, where some of the most deadly armaments were packaged and promoted, in the words of one host, as though they were ‘toothpaste and tie clips.’” Models, performers and eager salesmen were on hand. Guests could even drop “bombs” in one exhibit. “No one spoiled the festive mood by pointing out that the object of the products was to kill people,” notes Time.
Sleep Without Drugs
◆ An amino acid found naturally in milk, meat and cheese may someday replace the addictive sedatives that so many use to induce sleep. Called l-tryptophane, it was administered to test subjects, who, reportedly, got to sleep in about half their usual time and slept forty-five minutes longer than before. Though researchers are not yet sure how l-tryptophane works, they theorize that it may stimulate production of a brain chemical related to sleep. The abundance of l-tryptophane in dairy products “may explain why many people find they sleep better if they drink a glass of warm milk before bedtime,” reports Newsweek magazine.
Philosophy Backfires
◆ Has today’s growing freedom to speak and act as one pleases decreased the rates of mental illness and suicide, as many forecast it would? No, says Professor Daniel Freedman, head of the University of Chicago’s Department of Psychiatry. Instead, he contends that such freedoms ‘may have driven both rates upward.’ According to Professor Freedman, the burden on people who now “must make [their] own decisions as to what is right or wrong” has created mental pressures that did not exist when society had “widely accepted standards for morals and manners.”
Jails Feel Recession
◆ “The economic depression is now even affecting prison labor,” reports Japan’s Daily Yomiuri. “Throughout the nation, 65 prisons had 300 [work] orders canceled or curtailed” in the past year. At one prison, orders for auto parts reportedly dropped by two thirds since April. Now, instead of performing the work usually done there under contract to outside businesses, some prisoners often “engage in sports activities during regular work hours.”
Women Doctors
◆ “It is a curious fact,” notes Britain’s medical journal The Lancet, “that as one travels eastward from the United States there is a steady increase in the proportion of women in the medical profession.” The magazine indicates that 8 percent of the doctors in the U.S. are women. The proportion rises to 17 percent in England and Wales, 40 percent in Czechoslovakia, 48 percent in Poland and 72 percent in the Soviet Union.
Water Warning
◆ Water remaining in pipes overnight may pick up harmful elements, according to water experts. So they suggest running tap water for a minute before using it for human consumption. Hot water is said to pick up even more unwanted elements than cold. According to the technical director of the Water Quality Research Council, they advise the public “never to use hot water for drinking or cooking.” He adds: “When you want hot water for these purposes, run fresh cold water and then heat it.”
Tourists’ Spending
◆ Of the 8.6 million tourists who visited the U.S. last year, which nationality spent the most money during their stay? Japanese tourists were the most liberal, spending an average of $569 each. West Germans and Frenchmen spent about $100 less.