| 1321/
In 1995 a woman sued her former therapist on the grounds that
three weeks on Prozac had achieved more than three years of
therapy.
1322/ About 40 per cent
of the current population of the United States will develop
cancer at some point in their lives. Half of these people
will be cured and the other half will eventually die of the
disease. In the mid-1990s cancer claimed more than half a
million lives every year in the US alone.
1323/ During the 1990s,
one third of the cancer deaths in the US were due to the use
of tobacco, largely cigarettes.
1324/ A tumour mass one
centimetre in diameter may contain as many as a billion cells.
At first glance, the number seems huge, but it pales next
to the number of cells in the body as a whole - more than
ten thousand times more. So a cancer this size is rarely life
threatening. In most places in the body, it probably will
not compromise the functioning of a vital organ. Most tumours
need to be far larger before they become lethal.
1325/ In 1930, the annual
rate of mortality from cancer in the United States was 143
per hundred thousand of population. By 1990, the rate had
increased to 190 per hundred thousand.
1326/ Peyton Rous of
the Rockefeller Institute in New york discovered the first
known tumour virus in 1909. It was called RSV or 'Rous's Sarcoma
Virus'.
1327/ After 1909, Peyton
Rous abandoned research on the virus he had discovered, convinced
that it held no relevance for understanding the root causes
of human cancer. Other reserachers then picked up the baton
and studied it over the next 60 years. In 1966, by then in
his mid-eighties, Rous received the Nobel Prize in medicine
and physiology for the work he had done more than half a century
earlier.
1328/ The first systematic
study of mating genetics was carried out in the 1860s by the
Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, who hybridized different strains
of pea plants. His work was forgotton for a generation, then
rediscovered in 1900. It formed the foundation of modern genetics
and led to the notion that biological information is transmitted
in the discrete packets that came to be called genes.
1329/ In 1964 a Harris
poll found that 15 per cent of US adults were dieting. By
1992, 70 per cent of women and 50 per cent of men were dieters,
as were 80 per cent of seventh-grade girls. The dieting rate
for British fifteen-year-olds is 68 per cent.
1330/ A 1981 US report
on levels of twelve basic nutrients found that dieting girls
from fifteen to eighteen years old were seriously deficient
in eleven of them.
1331/ Methane hydrates
are found on the continental shelves. They are molecules of
methane that have been locked up inside a 'cage' of frozen
water so that they are trapped. Methane hydrates are very
common in the ocean: it is estimated that over a trillion
tones of carbon are buried as methane hydrate. The amount
of methane hydrate off the coast of Florida and Georgia alone
is enough to satisfy the energy needs of the United States
for the next 200 years.
1332/ A Harvard University
study of 40,000 nurses found that the 20 per cent with the
lowest fat intake had the highest rate of cancer.
1333/ There are over
six billion humans who collectively account for over 300 million
tons of biomass. By contrast there are fewer than a thousand
mountain gorillas in the world (most
authorities reckon the number at about 600) and even before
we started slaughtering them and eroding their habitat there
may not have been more than ten times that number. Help
by Adopting a Gorilla here
1334/ Genetic fingerprinting
in crime detection has come along way recently. In Britain
alone, by mid-1998 320,000 samples of DNA had been collected
by the Forensic Science Service and used to link 28,000 people
to crime scenes. Nearly twice as many samples have been used
to exonerate innocent people though.
1335/ Nearly four times
as many potential jurors will convict if told that a DNA match
has a chance probability of 0.1 per cent than if told one
in a thousand match the DNA - yet they are the same facts.
1336/ Roughly forty per
cent of Europeans have type O blood, forty per cent have type
A blood, fifteen per cent have type B blood and five per cent
have type AB blood. The proportions are similar in other continents,
with the marked exception of the Americas, where the Native
American population was almost exclusively type O, save for
some Canadian tribes, who were very often type A, and Eskimos,
who were sometimes type AB or B.
1337/ In fruit flies,
Michael Rose has been selecting for longevity for twenty-two
years: that is, in each generation he breeds from the flies
that live the longest. His 'Methuselah' flies now live for
120 days, or twice as long as wild fruit flies, and start
breeding at an age when wild fruit flies usually die. They
show no signs of reaching a limit.
1338/ Ernest Rutherford,
while working with Frederick Soddy at McGill University, Montreal
in 1902, proposed the theory of radioactive decay. Radioactive
decay is the process by which radioactive elements can transform
into other elements by the loss of energy in the form of particles
or rays.
1339/ It was Frederick
Soddy who coined the term 'isotopes' (which means 'the same
place' in Greek) because, by being chemically identical, these
previously unknown radioactive substances occupied the same
place on the periodic table.
1340/ Rock magnetism
and changes in magnetic polarity were observed as early as
1853 by the Italian scientist Melloni, who showed that the
direction of magnetisation of some ancient lavas from Mt Vesuvius
was the same as the direction of the Earth's magnetic field.
Click on the links below for more great
facts...
More
next week...
|
