| An Art Park Sprouts (for Now) Where New Buildings Were to Grow A new 37,000-square-foot outdoor exhibition and performance space will open in Lower Manhattan on Friday. nytimes.com |
Organic Wine-Makers Look to Greener Packaging Dear EarthTalk: Apparently boxed wine (instead of bottled) is becoming all the rage for environmental reasons. What are the eco-benefits of boxed wine over bottled? --Justin J., Los Angeles, CA [More] rss.sciam.com |
Stopping Infections: The Art of Bacterial Warfare (preview) Most bacteria are well-behaved companions. Indeed, if you are ever feeling lonely, remember that the trillions of microbes living in and on the average human body outnumber the human cells by a ratio of 10 to one. Of all the tens of thousands of known bacterial species, only about 100 are renegades that break the rules of peaceful coexistence and make us sick.Collectively, those pathogens can cause a lot of trouble. Infectious diseases are the second leading cause of death worldwide, and bacteria are well represented among the killers. Tuberculosis alone takes nearly two million lives every year, and Yersinia pestis , infamous for causing bubonic plague, killed approximately one third of Europe’s population in the 14th century. Investigators have made considerable progress over the past 100 years in taming some species with antibiotics, but the harmful bacteria have also found ways to resist many of those drugs. It is an arms race that humans have been losing of late, in part because we have not understood our enemy very well. [More] rss.sciam.com |
History Worth Lingering For With gardens and nearby museums, Battery Park deserves to be seen as a destination, not just a launching pad to go elsewhere. nytimes.com |
Natural Immunity: What Happens When We Simply See a Sick Person Humans have a natural aversion to those who are ill. When we see others who seem under the weather, we experience a powerful emotional response--disgust--and do our best to avoid those who might be contagious. Now a study shows that seeing sick people can even prompt changes in the immune system.Researchers at the University of British Columbia showed subjects one of two different slide shows--either a depiction of people brandishing guns or images of individuals who were obviously ailing. Immediately after the subjects viewed the slide shows, researchers drew their blood, exposed each sample to bacteria and then measured the levels of a substance known as interleukin-6 (IL-6), which is secreted by white blood cells as a response to stress or trauma. Although the subjects rated the gun photographs as being more stressful than the illness images, the blood work told a different story. Whereas the gun images prompted a mere 7 percent increase in IL-6, levels of the substance were elevated 24 percent after viewing pictures of sick people. [More] Immune system - British Columbia - White blood cell - Stress - Interleukin 6 rss.sciam.com |