Isegoria

It’s beginning to look a lot like Newtonmas:

With the profusion of Christmas-related decorations, sales, and music, I thought it would be nice to offer a different kind of holiday suggestion, either instead of (if you don’t celebrate Christmas) or in addition to (if you do) the coming holiday.

Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642 (old style), so it seems natural to take advantage of that complete coincidence and celebrate his life and works as Newtonmas. This idea was first introduced to me by my high school Physics teacher, who said that, since we were in a public school and thus couldn’t celebrate any religious holidays, we would celebrate Isaac Newton’s birthday by singing physics carols (similar to these), and doing some fun experiments. It was long enough ago that I don’t remember everything we did, but I recall figuring out what the effect of flushing the toilets in the bathroom above the classroom was on the water pressure in the classroom sink, figuring out how long it would take a Slinky to make it down a set of the school stairs, and—my favorite—watching a Road Runner cartoon to make note of everything that happened that defied the laws of physics.

So it’s my suggestion to seize the opportunity to teach your kids some basics of physics. If you have older kids, you could try teaching them the basics of calculus, too. Of all the sciences, I’ve always thought that physics was the easiest one to teach in a fun way (did you ever do the monkey in a tree lesson?), mostly because you’re not generally working with volatile substances or dead animals, so safety is less problematic.

In Heal thyself: One doctor’s experiment, Anna Masellis — who survived Wilms’ tumor, a rare pediatric kidney cancer, as a child and went on to get her Ph.D. in oncology — describes how she fought pancreatic cancer as a 41-year-old:

A week later, I went in for a Whipple, the routine surgery to remove part of the pancreas. It was supposed to take seven hours but lasted less than one; the doctors discovered a 3.5-centimeter mass on my pancreas and rice-kernel-sized patches of cancer all over my abdominal cavity. The surgeon gently explained to my waiting family that the cancer had already spread too far to do the Whipple (and further tests would show tumors in my liver). Then he informed them that I might have only two months to live.

My mom took the news hard, which broke my heart, but from what I knew of the disease, I wasn’t surprised by the prognosis. Because of my advanced stage, the oncologist prescribed pain relief and gemcitabine, the most effective drug for pancreatic cancer, which temporarily staves off the disease in roughly 10 percent of patients. But that wasn’t going to be enough. From my research, I knew my approach had to be more aggressive — and that it was up to me to find the right experimental treatment plan.

I believed the best thing to do was attack the cancer from multiple angles at once, using a range of drugs. But in order to do that, I needed to find an oncologist who was willing to push the envelope with me.
[...]
I went through four cycles of chemo. It was grueling, and I was lucky to have friends who cooked for me and drove me to my appointments. Two months later, despite the prognosis, I was still alive. A month after that, in August, I had another CT scan: The mass on my pancreas had shrunk a hopeful 50 percent, and the liver lesions were also slightly reduced. I was thrilled — until I learned that a lesion on one of my abdominal muscles had grown by half a centimeter. Suddenly, my joy vanished; all I felt was devastated.

I went home and thought about what wasn’t working with the chemo and, ultimately, figured that the drugs may not have been reaching the inside of my abdomen well enough. I remembered a journal article I had read, which described a procedure in which medicine is surgically delivered into the peritoneal cavity, where it can bathe the tumor cells directly. It’s a method Dr. Bender had long used for ovarian cancer, one that only recently became standard treatment for that disease. Dr. Bender and I discussed the idea, and we agreed it was a good approach. The only glitch: We had to wait a month; my body needed to recuperate and build immunity after the last round of chemo, so I wouldn’t be susceptible to infection during surgery.

I was so energized to have a new strategy that it was hard to wait. Finally, in October, my surgeon installed a port between my lowest two ribs, where the drugs would be infused. He discovered that, despite the enlarged tumor, every abdominal cancer kernel had been obliterated. Gone! I’ll never forget the smile on his face when he told me. I smiled, too — I was making progress.

The abdominal infusions made my belly puff up, and I felt tiny electrical-shock sensations and harsh gastrointestinal cramping that lasted a week. In March 2007, after 18 weeks of treatment, my CT scan showed a clean abdomen. The news was incredible, but I still had a tumor on my pancreas, so I devised yet another regimen of chemo. Our hope was that switching therapies would keep the cancer from becoming resistant to treatment.

It’s been a year and a half since I was given only two months to live. The CT scan I had this past August showed no metastatic cancer anywhere, and the primary tumor on the pancreas had shrunk to 2 centimeters and formed calcified plaques, which most likely indicate dying or dead tissue. Even so, I have no delusions: Pancreatic cancer has a nearly 100 percent chance of recurring. Until that happens, I’m taking full advantage of the time I’ve been given. I spent the summer in Italy with my kids, I see friends and I pick up my squash racket to play when I can.

Foster care better than orphanages for kids' IQs — when the orphanage is in Romania, and the foster care is provided by specially trained parents:

In the study, U.S. researchers randomly assigned 136 young children in Bucharest’s six orphanages to either keep living there or live with foster parents who were specially trained and paid for by the study. Romania had no foster-care system in 2000 when the research began.

The team chose apparently healthy children. Researchers repeatedly tested brain development as those children grew, and tracked those who ultimately were adopted or reunited with family. For comparison, they also tested the cognitive ability of children who never were institutionalized.

By 4½, youngsters in foster care were scoring almost 10 points higher on IQ tests than the children left in orphanages. Children who left the orphanages before 2 saw an almost 15-point increase.

Nelson compared the ages at which children were sent to foster care. For every extra month spent in the orphanage, up to almost age 3, it meant roughly a half-point lower score on those later IQ tests.

Children raised in their biological homes still fared best, with average test scores 10 points to 20 points higher than the foster-care kids.

Whales may have evolved from raccoon-sized creature:

In the search for a missing evolutionary link to modern whales, scientists have come up with an unlikely land cousin — a raccoon-sized creature with the body of a small deer.

Prior molecular studies have proposed the hippo as the closest land relative of today’s whales, but researchers reporting in the journal Nature on Wednesday suggest a four-footed creature from India known as Indohyus, which probably hid in water in times of danger.

Asteroid may hit Mars in next month:

Mars could be in for an asteroid hit.

A newly discovered hunk of space rock has a 1 in 75 chance of slamming into the Red Planet on Jan. 30, scientists said Thursday.

“These odds are extremely unusual. We frequently work with really long odds when we track … threatening asteroids,” said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near Earth Object Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The asteroid, known as 2007 WD5, was discovered in late November and is similar in size to an object that hit remote central Siberia in 1908, unleashing energy equivalent to a 15-megaton nuclear bomb and wiping out 60 million trees.

A 1-in-75 chance seems much, much higher when the target is our planet.