This week in European sciences -- week 44
 

Overview
Die Zeit about the correlation of body-size and feeling well, also on a European analysis of one's favorite beer taste. The Guardian visits the Three Gorges dam in China, and reports on hyrdogen bus services now running in European cities. Der Spiegel writes about safety issues of motorbikes with airbags. Dagens Nyheter picks up again Damadian's claim for the Nobel prize, brings an interview of the head of ESA and reports on science issues involved in the investigation of the murder of Anna Lindh. Svenska Dagbladet on the fate of nuclear waste in Sweden. FAZ reports on the integration of distributed wind generators into the power grid. In addition: NY Times on effects of a solar strom hitting earth, and on health problems due to the wildfires in California. U.S. News & World Report about breast biopsies for women and needless tests. NY Times about a review of links between antidepressants and the risk for suicide in teenagers. Also Time magazine reports in a cover story on the uncertainties in medication of children with antidepressants.
 

Big Bodies and Beer

How are you? Stop! You need not answer. Everyone can see it. According to an article in the German weekly Die Zeit (October 30, 2003), the size of people is strongly related to the question of feeling well. Christoph Drösser writes about researchers in Munich, Germany, who correlate the average body-size with the economic and health situation of a person. Their results: The bigger you are, the better you feel. The scientists prove the thesis by looking back in history. Actually, the study gives surprising insights: People in Europe are still growing, Americans are dwindling. The demand of the researcher: The gross national product measuring the economic well-being of a country must be enlarged with bio-economical factors.
In addition, Eva Tenzer writes about the new European map of beerdrinkers. French people like it sweet, Germans prefer the bitter ones. About fifty different tastes has been identified to classify a beer. One finding of the study: Bavarians prefer international taste!
 

The Three Gorges Dam After the Flood

The water has risen 135 meters, 700,000 people have been relocated, and now the Three Gorges dam is producing electricity. Jonathan Watts returns from a trip to the Chinese masterpiece in engineering and reports on it in The Guardian (October 30, 2003). He visited places, talked to people and brought his impressions back to us. His key question: Does the dam really bring the environmental, human and econocmic disaster as predicted by many? It seems not. People he was talking to said life is better now. Most of them are either positive or fatalistic about the dam. The severe problem Watts figures out is water pollution. "Government is now doing all it can. But I'm not sure, it will be enough", a NGO member says.

Hydrogen Buses Are on the Move

The year 2003 seems to be something of a breakthrough year for hydrogen power, writes Sean Dodson in The Guardian (October 30, 2003). The EU-funded project Clean Urban Transport for Europe, Cute for short, gets up speed. In May, Madrid became the first city in the world to run a regular hydrogen bus service. They already run in Hamburg, Barcelona and Iceland. Other cities will follow soon. The buses, developed by DaimlerChrysler, have a range of about 200 Kilometers. They are fuelled with liquid hydrogen that is stored in a tank on the roof. Anyway, the project does not please everybody. The plans to open the UK's first hydrogen filling station has been suspended this month because of fears by local councillors. "All we want is to be sure that we are not going to get something that is going to blow up overnight", was said.
 

A Huge Solar Storm, but Little Impact is Seen

U.S. and Canadian officials warned airplane travelers Wednesday that they could be exposed to an usually high amount of radiaton , the result of a solar storm, which would impacted the earth that day. However, little impact was seen, Anahad O'Connor and Matthew L. Wald report in the New York Times (October 30, 2003). Scientists had warned that a solar cloud of high-speeding, charged particles would crash into the earth Wednesday and had the potential "to interfere with air travel, telecommunications and electricity generation over much of the planet." The FAA, for the first time, used an alert system to issue the warnings. The storm had the speed of close to five million miles an hour and hit Earth at about 1 a.m. Eastern Time. Another cloud was expected to potentially interfere with our planet before the end of the week.

Effects of Wildfire Smoke Vary, Experts Say

While no lasting health damage is expected from inhaling particles and smoke which hang over various cities, people with chronic pulmonary or cardiovascular diseases have to take precautions, say leading national media reports and health experts. David Tuller reports in The New York Times (October 30, 2003) that according to a spokesperson at the University of California at San Diego Medical Center emergency visits for respiratory problems have risen by 50 percent. Doctors mainly warn from the inhalation of particles that are smaller than three micrometers (millionth of a meter) and are invisible to the eye because they can cause asthma and other respiratory problems once they are inhaled.
 

Too many breast biopsies for women

The United States undertakes about twice as many breast biopsies for women with suspicious mammogram results than the British. Nonetheless, the Americans do not catch more cancer cases than the British, Josh Fischman reports in The U.S. News & World Report (October 28, 2003). He concludes that the United States wastes money on needless tests and provokes needless anxiety in tested women. But the conclusion also involves that British may have more effective mammogram tests.
 

F.D.A. Intensely Reviews Depression Drugs

The federal Food and Drug Administration wants to take a more careful look at the link between the use of antidepressants and the risk of suicide in teenagers and children, Gardiner Harris reports in The New York Times (October 28, 2003). "I think probably that we have backed off a little bit from the advisory issued in June, which recommended against using Paxil," F.D.A. official and psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Laughren is being quoted. "I believe our position now is that we just don't know." The F.D.A. plans to create a panel in February to examine possible connections between suicide and antidepressant drug therapy. The major task of the panel will be to determine whether children should use antidepressants. Previous clinical trials of Paxil concluded that children using the drug were more likely to attempt suicide and symptoms of depression did not necessarily improve while the children were on the drug. Consequently, the F.D.A. issued a warning in June "that physicians should avoid prescribing Paxil to children and teenagers," Harris writes. February's panel meeting is expected to be controversial because similar discussions about Prozac in 1991 caused much attention around the country. The reason for the review of many clinical studies on antidepressant treatments for children and teenagers stems from information that many subjects were incorrectly labeled as attempted suicide. "A number of cases seem doubtful," Laughren said, adding that one of the suicidal cases was labeled as such after she slapped herself repeatedly. In other doubtful instances, teenagers had inflicted non-life threatening cuts to themselves and were labeled suicidal.
 

Do Airbags for Motorbikes Bring More Safety?

Crashtests for motorbikes show that some kind of airbag might bring additional safety to the biker, Christian Wüst reports in Der Spiegel (October 27, 2003). Most accidents occur when a car driver turns left and hits the motorbiker on the side. The biker than faces heavy injuries by the car's ceiling edges. Researchers with the German advisory body Dekra now tested an airbag that is blown up to a ramp. In the event of an accident the biker slides over the car via the ramp, which prevents injuries. Critics say that such a concept is too simple to bring more safety to the biker. As a matter of fact there are 200 different types of accidents listed by the standard ISO 13232 for motorbikes. They must be tested to show the new airbag concept brings safety and not more trouble to the biker in other cases.
 

Damadian-Saga Continues

The "Damadian-Saga" continues in the pages of Swedish papers - no surprise there: the reputation of a redoubtable Swedish institution is at stake. Peter Stilbs, Profesoor of Physical Chemistry at Stockholm's Royal Insitute of Technology, dissects in Dagens Nyheter (October 26, 2003) the arguments put forward in the case. Stilbs displays no understanding for Damadian's campaign and labels him a charlatan. According to Stilbs, if there has to be a third laureate, it would have to be Erwin Hahn, who in 1949 discovered spin echo in magnetic resonance. Overlooking Hahn amounts, according to Stilbs, to a real blunder by the Nobel committee. In the meantime, Damadian confronts the Swedish readership with another one-page advertisment (October 27, 2003). This time he recounts in florid language how both the Nobel laureates Lauterbur and Mansfield have in the past acknowledged his contributions. Damadian closes his tale with another demand to get a share in the prize - and an appeal for reconciliation.
Sunday's science pages (October 26, 2003) are dedicated to a more morbid theme: Karin Bojs portrays Susanne Wiigh Mäsak who pioneered an environmentally-friendly method for burials: turning dead bodies into some kind of compost. The technique, which has entered the patent process in 35 countries, uses liquid nitrogen to freeze the body, which then is put into a vacuum-chamber where all water is removed. The remaining organic material is buried in a container made out of starch. Both materials are quickly broken down in the earth and do not pollute groundwater or the atmosphere.
Jean-Jacques Dordain, head of the European Space Agency, answers five question posed by Per Snaprud. Dordain speaks out against Europe sending people into space. Future space missions should be guided by needs - "no mission without a problem to solve" is Dordain's motto. The satellite navigation system Galileo should be a model for future ventures.
Like in the case of Olof Palme, the investigation into the murder of Anna Lindh continues to be an embarrasment for the Swedish police: this time, legal regulations concerning medical informed consent are in the headlines. Stefan Lisinski reports that the police managed to secure the prime suspect's blood sample from the so-called PKU-register. A blood sample of every Swedish newborn since 1975 is deposited in this biobank. A law that came into force at the beginning of the year spells out in detail for which purposes the samples can be used and criminal investigations are not mentioned. Hans Vallin, doctor at Huddinge Hospital, where the register is housed, says, however, that the hospital cannot say "no" if the police requests material while investigating a serious criminal offence. In an editoral, Nils Funcke (October 27, 2003) demands in strong words that the police respects the informed consents that the parents have signed when the blood samples of their children are deposited.
 

The Fate of Nuclear Waste: Is Transmutation an Option?

Andreas Nilsson reports in Svenska Dagbladet (October 26, 2003) on ways of dealing with nuclear waste. Sweden alone needs to deposit 8000 tons of radiactive waste material for 100,000 years. Research carried out at the Royal Insitute of Technology, Uppsala University and Chalmers Technical University deals with transmutation: the aim is to transform in a reactor highly radioactive material such as plutonium into low-radioactive substances which only needs several hundred years to diminish their radiation to levels comparable with uranium ore. Environmental scientist Tomas Kåberger is, however, critical towards such technological fixes. He points out that transformation increases the risks of leaks and that the fate of the radioactive material will be less easy to control. Furthermore, there are economic problems: atomic power technology has the unusual characteristic of becoming more and more expensive and thus behaves unlike other technologies.
 

Medicating Young Minds

A cover story in Time magazine (October 26, 2003) talks about the increase of children being placed on antidepressant and mental illness medication such as Prosac, and Ritallin. Author Jeffrey Kluger discusses pros and cons of medicating children and teenagers. His overall question is what the long-term effects of medicating an increasing large population of pre-adolescent are. "Lexapro is the perfect answer for anxiety all right, provided you're willing to overlook the fact that it does its work by artificially manipulating the very chemicals responsible for feeling and thought. Adderall is the perfect answer for ADHD, provided you overlook the fact that it's a stimulant like Dexedrine. Oh, yes, you also have to overlook the fact that the Adderall has left Andrea with such side effects as weight loss and sleeplessness, and both drugs are being poured into a young brain that has years to go before it's finally fully formed," Kluger writes. According to his report, about 5 million American kids take some sort of medication to control their psychological and mental disabilities. Why are the numbers of children diagnosed with such diseases increasing? Kluger says in part it is because grown-ups are more sensitive to the issue. Another part may indicate that the world has become more complex and harder to cope with. Also, medication to treat children's mental disorders are more developed and have less side effects. However, some doctors warn that the usage has outgrown the scientific knowledge about the medication's effects. "The problem," warns Dr. Glen Elliott, director of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute's children's center at the University of California, San Francisco, "is that our usage has outstripped our knowledge base. Let's face it, we're experimenting on these kids without tracking the results." What increased the worries of critics such as Elliott is the growing scientific evidence of how undeveloped a child's brain really is.
 

Renewable Energies in the Power Grid

For the huge utilities in Germany and Europe, the renewable energies like wind and solar power generation have some horror: How to integrate the many widespread generators in the power grid? Will we be facing more instabilities and blackouts when, for instance, in Germany ten percent of electricity will be produced by wind generators by the year 2010, asks Klaus Koch in FAZ on Sunday (October 26, 2003). The EU funded project "Dispower" (Distributed Power Generation) is supposed to answer these questions. Some engineers say that there is no limit for the renewables becoming integrated into the power distribution grid. Others, for instance at Siemens corporation, put the maximum at 20 percent. The problem is that alternate current (as the current comes out of the plug) has a frequency of exactly 50 Hertz, and each power generator feeding current into the grid has to do it synchronously. On the other hand, a slight shift in frequency gives the engineers information on the overall grid performance. Hence, feeding current too perfectly into the grid may also harm established diagnostic systems. Engineers consider simulating this frequency shift. The fact that the huge utilities in the meantime increased their spendings in distributed power generation like wind parks, solar energy or fuel cells show a pragmatic interest in the renewables.
 

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