Watching the World
Bloodless Surgery
● A technique for open-heart surgery without blood transfusion, used initially only on Jehovah’s Witnesses, has been performed successfully on almost a hundred youngsters at the Children’s Hospital in Buffalo, New York, says an Associated Press report. “We felt if these [Witness] patients are doing so well,” said the chief of cardiac surgery, “why don’t we do it for other patients?” The technique involves lowering the infant’s body temperature from the normal 98.6°F. (37°C.) to about 75°F. (24°C.), which reduces the blood flow to half its normal rate, lessening the blood loss. The infant’s blood is also diluted with an equal or larger amount of a mineral-and-nutrient solution. The diluted blood, though having only about one third the normal oxygen-carrying capacity, is found to circulate better than undiluted blood and places less strain on the lungs and kidneys during surgery. Those findings were “something of a surprise” to the doctors.
Doomsday Nearer?
● The “doomsday clock,” a feature of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was advanced another minute last January to three minutes before midnight. The move was made at the advice of 47 prominent scientists, including 18 Nobel laureates, because of the stalled disarmament talks and the unabated arms race between the superpowers. “More ominous” than just the number of nuclear weapons stockpiled, says the magazine, is the “inclination of the leaders of the nuclear powers to talk and act as though they were prepared to use these weapons.” The “Bulletin Clock” has been advanced and set back through the years to indicate the intensity of “the threat of nuclear doomsday hovering over humanity.” The present move to three minutes before midnight is the closest in 30 years.
UN Budget
● While the effectiveness of the United Nations in keeping peace is apparently diminishing, its operating cost is not. The UN Secretariat has 16,000 workers, compared to 3,982 in 1948. Its annual budget now stands at about $4 billion (U.S.). More than three quarters of it goes toward paying the salaries of its nearly 50,000 employees around the world. Estimates are that for the next two years it will spend $23.3 million in management and maintenance of its buildings, $19 million for utilities and almost $2 million for elevator operations. The organization will also spend $10 million for printing operations and $70 million in promotional efforts to enhance its image. The UN is funded by contributions from member nations, and taxpayers in the United States pay about one fourth of the total bill.
Moral Epidemic
● “Britain’s declining sexual morals are threatening an epidemic of cancer in women,” says Liverpool’s Daily Post. The British Medical Journal reports that in the last 15 years there was a threefold to fourfold increase in indications of premalignant conditions in women under age 40. Researchers attribute it to the fact that “today’s ‘highly mobile’ people are likely to have had several sexual partners.” Commenting on the rapid increase of cervical cancer in “that section of the population who copy sexual mores portrayed so explicitly night after night on television,” a gynecologist said: “You have cases of girls of 19 with positive smears who are dead by the mid-twenties.” Each year more than 2,000 women die of cervical cancer in Britain.
Brazil’s Waning Church
● “Brazil, the largest Catholic country of the world, is now a paradise for popular sects that grow in the same proportion in which the Catholic Church loses its faithful.” That was a caption appearing in O Estado de S. Paulo in a series of articles entitled “Empty Churches.” There are fewer and fewer priests in churches that are always empty, says the paper. In contrast, Oriental philosophies, Pentecostal movements, voodooism and spiritism are all on the upsurge, with meeting places packed to overflowing. Pope John Paul II recently expressed concern about those who have left the church and appealed to the clergy and the laity alike to “show special interest” in such ones “so that once again they may have a vital part in the Church.” The articles claimed that, among other things, political meddling and a lack of spirituality have disenchanted many.
Modern Stradivarius?
● For years, scientists have been trying to uncover the secrets that account for the beautiful tones of the violins made by 17th- and 18th-century Cremonese masters such as Stradivari and Guarneri. While scrutinizing a Guarneri cello, Joseph Nagyvary, a biochemist at Texas A & M University, discovered that the cell walls of its wood are punctuated with tiny openings that in ordinary dry wood are closed by a natural glue. “Open chambers will obviously resonate in a way that is different from closed ones,” said Nagyvary. Then he realized that “the wood used in Cremona had floated down from the mountains to the sea, where it sat in a salt-water bay of the Adriatic.” The salt water evidently dissolved the glue and opened up the air chambers of the cells. Using wood treated with a similar process in his lab, Nagyvary had four violins made. The result? He and other scientists and musicians are convinced that these violins are a close match of Cremonese instruments in tone and volume.
Baby Dumping
● A wave of “baby dumping” has shocked the nation of Zimbabwe. “At least 50 babies have been found abandoned” in the first eight months of 1983, according to The Sunday Mail of Zimbabwe, and “nobody knows how many other babies have been abandoned to die” without being found. Perhaps “abandoned” is too mild a word. The horror of it all was driven home when it was learned that unwed mothers were involved in “the burying of innocent infants in ant-hills, the dumping of bodies into streams or rivers, the mangling of newly-born flesh and the attempt to flush such remains down the toilet.” The state has recommended remedies such as sex education in primary schools and more homes for unwed mothers, apparently to little avail.
City Face-Lift
● Apparently some of New York City’s officials feel that the many burned-out and abandoned buildings in the city are too much of an embarrassment. So a program was launched to “improve the images of rundown neighborhoods” by covering the unsightly spots with about $100,000 (U.S.) worth of “large vinyl decals depicting shutters, potted plants, Venetian blinds and window shades” to give them a “lived-in” look, reports The New York Times. Naturally, the question is: Why spend so much money on decals instead of on improving the buildings? Until sufficient funds to rebuild such neighborhoods can be located, says the mayor, this is the city’s way to show “we do care.” But the Times retorts: The investment “would symbolize not Government’s interest in struggling neighborhoods but its desire to hide unpleasant realities.”
Japanese Health Service
● Japan’s Health and Welfare Ministry reports that there are 149 doctors, 54 dentists and 105 pharmacists for every 100,000 people in that country today. This means the Health Ministry’s goal of 150 doctors per 100,000 people by 1985 is all but met, well ahead of schedule. In fact, “the ministry is concerned that if doctors increased at the current rate, there will be a surplus of doctors soon,” says the Asahi Evening News. In spite of this, studies in seven major cities and rural areas show that city people are facing increasing risk of death due to bowel and breast cancer, and in the rurals, death due to cancer of the gallbladder is on the rise. The 1982 population statistics released by the Ministry show that cancer accounted for nearly one fourth of all deaths in Japan.
Did the Birds Know?
● Much publicity was given to the collapse of a 100-foot (30-m) section of the Mianus River bridge in Connecticut in 1983. The New York Times states that in 1978 it was estimated that 52,000 starlings were roosting beneath the bridge. In 1979 there were only 12,000 roosting under it. In 1980 the number had dropped to six and since then none were to be found there. So the question is: What did the starlings know? The Audubon people commented that they “don’t interview birds; they only count them.”
Robots Are Here
● More than 30,000 industrial robots are already in use worldwide, says The German Tribune, and the number can swell to 300,000 by 1990. About 60 percent of them are in the United States and Japan. Germany has about 11 percent of the total and is catching up fast. So far, robots are used mainly in the auto industry. At Volkswagen, for example, “robots have been doing between 14 and 25 per cent of production work,” and the figure is expected to increase to 60 percent. The modern breed of robots is said to be “increasingly dexterous and intelligent.” With TV cameras as eyes, they can recognize specific objects and adapt to new jobs. The technology is developing so fast that what was considered a breakthrough just two years ago is now out of date.
Pain-Detection Tool
● For years, a real dilemma for legal and medical experts has been determining the veracity of personal-injury claims. Is the victim really in great pain, or is he feigning it so as to get a large monetary settlement? A new method of pain detection—thermography—may be the answer. “The technique uses infrared sensors to make a multi-colored picture of temperature variations on the skin,” says a report in The Globe and Mail of Canada. Pain in soft tissue, which cannot be detected by X ray, will show up in the infrared picture because of temperature differences due to muscle spasms or constriction of blood vessels. Courts in several states in the United States have accepted thermograms as evidence, and the Supreme Court of Ontario has recently done so. Thus, thermography may be a blessing to the honest sufferer and help to expose the malingerer.
Powerful Mosquito Killer
● Scientists believe they have developed “a new weapon capable of wiping out legions [of mosquitoes] within minutes,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. It is a larvicide, not a chemical derivative, that “is neither carcinogenic nor harmful to surrounding plant and animal life,” states the report. So far it seems to be “poisonous only to the larvae of mosquito and a couple of other pests.” Entomologists conclude that it is “extremely effective.”