Update: June 13, 2007

A LITTLE OF THIS, A LITTLE OF THAT

By Pam Eastlick for THE DEEP on line

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

In this week’s article, I thought I’d bring you a compendium of science stories that I’ve been accumulating.  No ‘in depth’ reporting here, just some fun (and not so fun) facts and interesting news you may not have heard.

JITTERING YOUR WAY TO GOOD HEALTH	Are you a coffee freak?  Do you drink far more java than is probably good for you?  There’s an interesting new study out that coffee may not be as bad for you as you thought.  As a matter of fact, this study says that drinking four or more cups of coffee per day may decrease the risk of your developing one of Guam’s most common ailments.  Gout. The subjects for the study were some 50,000 male health professionals between the ages of 40 and 75.  They were given questionnaires about their coffee intake as well as other caffeine containing foodstuffs like cola and chocolate.  In a different questionnaire the researchers documented 757 new cases of gout among the participants.

They then determined the relative risk of gout with the coffee intake of the participants and discovered that the risk for developing gout decreased with increasing coffee consumption.  The risk of gout was 40 percent lower for men who drank 4 to 5 cups a day and 59 percent lower for men who drank 6 or more cups a day than for men who never drank coffee.

Interestingly, neither tea drinking nor total caffeine intake had any effect on the incidence of gout among the subjects.  These results prompted the researchers to speculate that components of coffee other than caffeine were responsible for the beverage's gout-prevention benefits.  Among the possibilities, coffee contains the phenol chlorogenic acid, a strong antioxidant.

So if Dad and Tun Jose and Tun Joaquin and Uncle Vitu all suffer from gout, you just might want to visit the local coffee urn to try to prevent it from happening to you!

DIAGNOSING A KILLER
In light of the recent news about the young man with the drug resistant form of tuberculosis that was placed in government quarantine for the first time in over 40 years, I thought you might be interested in the fact that medical researchers have developed a new test for TB.  Tuberculosis is a great mimicker of other diseases and the definitive test for this horrid killer used to take at least three days and required hospitalization.  The new test takes one day and can be done on an outpatient basis.

The new test is cheap and just as effective as the old ones.  Given that TB is on the rise everywhere in the world and Guam has a very high incidence of infection, this new test is welcome news indeed!

Although we heard about the rouge waves that invaded Chuuk earlier in the year and Indonesia last month; we didn’t hear about the towering 35-foot tall waves that devastated France’s Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean when they slammed into the southern port of Saint Pierre on 12 May.  Although the origin of the waves that devastated Chuuk remains a mystery, the monsters that hit Reunion Island were generated by a single storm in the Indian Ocean.  Six days later, this same storm created waves 25 feet high that crashed into Indonesia coastlines from Sumatra to Bali, killing at least one person and causing some 1200 people to flee their homes.

WAVES IN THE WORLD OCEAN

These waves were tracked across the entire Indian Ocean for some 6, 000 miles over a nine-day period by ESA’s Envisat satellite.  European researchers are working on a global swell-tracking project that will use data from many satellites and other radar tracking methods to create a global network of virtual buoys.

Each virtual buoy will be able to detect and measure wavelength and direction of propagation as well as the height of swell systems crossing the ocean, complementing the sea forecast models used by weather centers and allowing alarms to be raised a few hours before these devastating swells hit coasts.  And since the Marianas have lots of coasts, it’s good for us too!

LOSING A SATELLITE: GAINING KNOWLEDGE
	In other satellite news, we’re gradually losing one of our major satellites; and it’s a good thing!  The Spitzer Space Telescope is the only major astronomical telescope that doesn’t orbit Earth.  Spitzer orbits the Sun in Earth’s orbit but lags behind your space ship as it speeds around the Sun.  Currently, Spitzer is about 40 million miles from Earth.  It will continue to drift farther and farther away at a rate of about 10 million miles per year. This distance between Spitzer and the Earth gives astronomers a great advantage.  They can use Spitzer in the same way that a human brain uses two eyes to tell how far away objects are, a principle called parallax.  Each of your eyes sees two slightly different views of the same thing.  Your brain then combines these views to give you depth perception.  In space, Spitzer acts as one eye, while an Earth-based telescope acts as the other.  With two very wide cosmic eyes, astronomers can use parallax to determine the exact location of faraway objects.
This artist's concept illustrates how Spitzer used parallax to allow astronomers to determine the distance to an invisible Milky Way object.  Different views from both Spitzer and telescopes on Earth were combined to give depth perception. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech-ESA/Hubble and Digitized Sky Survey 2)

There wasn’t any big countdown billboard or major news articles but there is a possibility that 23 May 2007 may live in infamy.  Researchers predicted that (based on previous data) on that day, the global urban population of 3,303,992,253 exceeded that of 3,303,866,404 rural people.  In other words, there are now officially more city mice than county mice. This happened in the United States almost 100 years ago.  Today, only 21 percent of our country’s poplulation is rural although some states – Maine, Mississippi, Vermont, and West Virginia – still have more city folk than country folk.  In North Carolina, a rural majority held until the late 1980s.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FARMERS GONE?

So what does this mean for the world?  Well, city populations and rural populations depend heavily on each other.  Cities refine and process rural goods for urban and rural consumers.  But if either cities or rural areas had to sustain themselves without the other, few would bet on the cities. As long as cities exist, they need rural resources – including the rural people and communities that help provide urban necessities.  Clean air, clean water, food, fiber, forest products and minerals all have their sources in rural areas.  Cities cannot stand alone; rural natural resources can.

In most places in the world, people in rural areas are much poorer than their city counterparts.  That’s the reason that people flock to the cities.  But the real question after 23 May 2007 is not what rural peoples can do for the new urban majority but what city people can do for poor rural people and the resources upon which cities depend for existence.  The sustainable future of the new urban world may well depend upon the answer.”