By Pam Eastlick
Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.
Greetings everyone! I’ve just returned from a marvelous ‘staycation’ and as I squired my friend around our beautiful island, I appreciated its astounding beauty all over again. Always a treat!
It’s been a while since we delved into the medical file and there are a couple of items about things we can do to make us healthier. One you’ve heard before, but the other one may surprise you.
According to a recent study published on the British Medical Journal website, walking more every day not only takes off the pounds, it also reduces the risk of diabetes. The research was done in Australia and it involved 592 middle aged adults who took part in a national study to map diabetes levels across Australia between 2000 and 2005.
At the start of the study, participants completed a detailed diet and lifestyle questionnaire and underwent a thorough health examination. They were also given a pedometer and instructed how to use it. Participants were monitored again five years later. Other lifestyle factors, such as diet, alcohol and smoking were taken into account.
After examining their data, the authors estimate that a initially sedentary person who changed their behavior over five years to meet the popular 10,000 daily step guideline (that’s about 5 miles a day) would have a threefold improvement in insulin sensitivity compared with a person who increased his or her steps to meet the more recent recommendation of 3,000 steps (about a mile and a half) for five days a week. These associations were independent of food intake and appeared to be largely due to weight loss over the five years.
So walking every day will definitely lower your chance of developing diabetes, but there’s something else you can do to improve your health and the health of your children and it’s really surprising. Don’t be too clean!
According to a recently published paper by Dr. Guy Delespesse, a professor at the University of Montreal in Canada, allergy symptoms like hay fever, eczema, hives and asthma have become widespread in developed countries because of excessive cleanliness.
Dr. Delespesse has discovered there’s an inverse relationship between the level of hygiene and the incidence of allergies and autoimmune diseases. The more sterile the environment a child lives in, the higher the risk they will develop allergies or an immune problem in their lifetime.
In 1980, 10 percent of the Western population suffered from allergies. Today, that figure has risen to 30 percent. In 2010, one out of 10 children is asthmatic and the mortality rate resulting from this affliction increased 28 percent between 1980 and 1994.
Dr. Delespesse says that allergies and other autoimmune diseases like Type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis are the result of our immune system turning against us. The bacteria in our digestive system are essential to digestion but they also serve to educate our immune system and teach it how to react to strange substances.
Although hygiene reduces our exposure to harmful bacteria it also limits our exposure to beneficial microorganisms. As a result, the bacterial flora of our digestive system isn’t as rich and diversified as it used to be.
I grew up on a farm and there wasn’t any antibacterial soap in our house. I think that’s a big factor in the fact that I rarely get sick. As a doctor once told me, “You have a Godzilla immune system!” So let your children play outside. Let them get dirty and don’t be so quick with the antibacterial soap. You just might be doing them a favor!
By Pam Eastlick
Greetings All,
This weekend is the Perseid meteor shower and it’s also public show week.
I’m including an adaptation of this week’s Tropical Skies below that tells you all about the Perseid shower and how to see it. There’s a little squiggle about this week’s public shows at the end.
And don’t forget that Tropical Skies is heard every week on KPRG, your public radio station! (And the material can also magically appear in the Friday column in the PDN Autoplagiarism can be a wonderful thing!)
Hope to see you this weekend and I hope you see some Perseids!
Pam
The peak days for the Perseid meteor shower are tomorrow 12 August and Saturday 13 August. We’re in a much better place to view this year’s Perseid shower than they are in the mainland US. The problem with the Perseids on the mainland this year is that full moon is Saturday the 13th for them and the light from the almost full moon will wash out the light from the meteors and prevent mainlanders from seeing the shower. Full Moon isn’t until Sunday morning for us. Here on Guam, the Sun also rises later and on Friday morning the 12th we have an hour window between moonset at 4:20 a.m. and the beginning of morning twilight at 5:30 a.m. to see this famous meteor shower. On Saturday morning, the moon sets at 5:20 a.m. giving you about half an hour before the onset of twilight.
Where do you look for the meteors? Just watch the Sun set tonight. That direction is west. Then turn 90 degrees to the right and you’ll be facing north. Set your alarm for 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. on either Friday or Saturday morning, go outside and face north. If it’s raining or overcast, go back to bed. If it’s relatively clear in that direction, pull up a lawn chair and sit down. Measure 4 fist-widths up from the horizon and you should see an M in the sky. That M is the constellation Cassiopeia the Queen and Perseus the Hero is slightly above and to the right of the M. You should see streaks of light that come from that point and radiate all over the sky; at least one a minute. See if you can spot the bugs hitting the windshield this weekend!
It’s also public show week in the Planetarium. Our first show at 6:30 p.m. is Summer Skies, the show that tells you all about what’s up there.
Since we have such wonderful things in our early evening sky for public show week, our second show will be Quality Time with the Star Lady where I answer your questions about the sky and the things in it. Then when it gets dark enough, we’ll go outside and (weather permitting) have a look at the REAL sky and the real planets! So join us tonight, tomorrow night or Saturday night for a marvelous look at Guam’s summer skies!
By Pam Eastlick
Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.
There was a very important announcement last week from the people who run one of the robots we have in orbit around Mars. They’ve found what appears to be unmistakable evidence that there’s flowing water on Mars.
Those dark streaks at the bottom of the picture are seasonal. They appear when the weather warms up on Mars (maximum temperature on Mars around 70F) and they disappear when it gets cold. The planetary scientists think that flowing salty water made them. Salty water has a lower freezing point that fresh water and they think that the salt may be around 30 parts per thousand, about the same as Earth’s oceans.
There was more big news from Mars about four years ago when it was discovered that there was methane in the atmosphere of Mars. Now the chemicals in the air of Mars (mainly carbon dioxide) destroy methane and there should be NO methane in the air of the Red Planet.
Now Italian researchers report that atmospheric methane on Mars lasts less than a year. They used data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft to track the evolution of the gas over three Martian years.
They report that there are only small amounts of methane present and it apparently comes from very localized sources. Methane levels are highest in autumn in the northern hemisphere, with localized peaks of 70 parts per billion, although methane can be detected across most of the planet at this time of year. There’s a sharp decrease in winter, with only a faint band between 40-50 degrees north. Concentrations start to build again in spring and rise more rapidly in summer, spreading across the planet.
There are three regions in the northern hemisphere where methane concentrations are systematically higher: Tharsis and Elysium, the two main volcano provinces, and Arabia Terrae, which has high levels of underground water ice. Levels are highest over Tharsis, where geological processes like hydrothermal and geothermal activity could be ongoing.
Methane was first detected in the Martian atmosphere by ground based telescopes in 2003 and confirmed a year later by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. Last year, observations using ground based telescopes showed the first evidence of a seasonal cycle.
To our knowledge, there are only two things that can produce methane on Mars. The first, mentioned above, is volcanic activity. Now, there are no active volcanoes on Mars because if there were, those orbiting spacecraft would see them. But there could be gas seeps from underground activity that Mars Express and Mars Global Surveyor wouldn’t see.
The other thing that produces methane is life. Third grade boys produce methane, cows produce lots of methane. Earth’s life produces abundant methane. But for life as we know it, you need liquid water. (Read the first part of the article again). And does it seem logical to you that the methane concentration would be seasonal with more being produced in summer, if the prime producers were methane seeps from underground geologic activity?
If there is life on Mars, it is probably no more complex than bacteria, but it means that the life on our planet is NOT the only life in the universe. And THAT is a very important concept!
