Strange Machines

We have been down with gastric flu all week and haven’t done much. I’m so grateful my parents could help out while we all rested to recover. Which goes to show parents never stop parenting. I’ve already promised my kids I’ll help out with their kids…

When Bear was almost 3, Boy died.

He saw Boy in his dying spasms and watched me weep as we brought him to the emergency hospital and weep even more when he died. He waited while I held Boy in my arms for a long time telling him I loved him and was sorry I didn’t spend more time with him.

The next day he followed us as I brought Boy’s body for cremation and watched me embrace Boy, let him go and wait the three hours for his cremation. He also saw me bring back his ashes in an urn and was curious to see his bones, which I declined because I told him, Mom would be sadder. He accepted.

He saw me go to the hospital and I gave birth to Kitten 2 days later and then life revolved around the 2 children. Occasionally he would ask to see Boy’s bones as the urn is on my dresser but I would gently say no.

That same year in December my grandma fell very ill. He saw me stay with her in the hospital, hold her hand and stroke her hair while talking gently to her. We explained to him that Mama was dying, like Boy did. He nodded.

We were all there before she died. At her wake and funeral he was there all the while and he went up to her in her coffin to say goodbye.

He knows everything dies and seems to accept it. Maybe he has seen it happen twice and thought it isn’t so terrible. We don’t bring it up much but perhaps because he lived it and saw us live through it and go on with our lives that he realized it isn’t something terrible to fear, it is simply a part of life.

I have brown thumbs but these flowers bloomed!

Bear’s Smithsonian T-Rex finds notoriety scaling our bookshelf and then the stereo.

More evidence that houseplants clean our air.

The experiment was conducted by Dennis Decoteau of Penn State’s Department of Horticulture with a snake plant, spider plant, and golden pothos inside “experimental chambers in a greenhouse equipped with a charcoal filtration air supply system to measure ozone depletion rates.”

While it took 75 minutes for ozone levels to come down in plantless chambers, air in chambers with plants reached the target in just 50 minutes. He speculates the plants take in the ozone through their stomates (tiny pores used for gas exchange) and then break it down once inside the plant.

The article also recommended keeping plants in our rooms because:

* Plant-filled rooms contain up to 60 percent fewer airborne molds and bacteria than rooms without plants, studies show.

* People who work in offices with windows and plants are happier than others, according to a study of 450 office workers in Texas and the Midwest. In fact, 82 percent of the participants who worked with plants and windows around said they felt “content” or “very happy,” compared with 58 percent in windowless plant-less offices who said the same.

* Plants seem to make people more contemplative and self-reflective, according to one ethnologist.

For 47 more houseplants that clean your air, check out How to Grow Fresh Air: 50 House Plants that Purify Your Home or Office.

My sinuses have cleared since I put houseplants in my bedroom (since January actually). To date, we have a large Areca Palm (temperamental thing), 2 Snake Plants (hardy), 6 Corn Plants (easiest to manage), and 1 Spider Plant (who goes out for sun and rotates with its brethren outside). These are ideal for an air conditioned bedroom in the tropics. My poor Peace Lily just died. RIP dear fellow.

Another alarming article about the dreadful effects of cigarette smoke on children. Point of the article is, don’t smoke at home and don’t go anywhere where there is third-hand cigarette smoke sitting on furniture or carpeting (or any surface for that matter) if you don’t want your children’s health affected.

A New Cigarette Hazard: ‘Third-Hand Smoke’

By RONI CARYN RABIN
Published: January 2, 2009

Parents who smoke often open a window or turn on a fan to clear the air for their children, but experts now have identified a related threat to children’s health that isn’t as easy to get rid of: third-hand smoke.

That’s the term being used to describe the invisible yet toxic brew of gases and particles clinging to smokers’ hair and clothing, not to mention cushions and carpeting, that lingers long after second-hand smoke has cleared from a room. The residue includes heavy metals, carcinogens and even radioactive materials that young children can get on their hands and ingest, especially if they’re crawling or playing on the floor.

Doctors from MassGeneral Hospital for Children in Boston coined the term “third-hand smoke” to describe these chemicals in a new study that focused on the risks they pose to infants and children. The study was published in this month’s issue of the journal Pediatrics.

“Everyone knows that second-hand smoke is bad, but they don’t know about this,” said Dr. Jonathan P. Winickoff, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

“When their kids are out of the house, they might smoke. Or they smoke in the car. Or they strap the kid in the car seat in the back and crack the window and smoke, and they think it’s okay because the second-hand smoke isn’t getting to their kids,” Dr. Winickoff continued. “We needed a term to describe these tobacco toxins that aren’t visible.”

Third-hand smoke is what one smells when a smoker gets in an elevator after going outside for a cigarette, he said, or in a hotel room where people were smoking. “Your nose isn’t lying,” he said. “The stuff is so toxic that your brain is telling you: ’Get away.’”

The study reported on attitudes toward smoking in 1,500 households across the United States. It found that the vast majority of both smokers and nonsmokers were aware that second-hand smoke is harmful to children. Some 95 percent of nonsmokers and 84 percent of smokers agreed with the statement that “inhaling smoke from a parent’s cigarette can harm the health of infants and children.”

But far fewer of those surveyed were aware of the risks of third-hand smoke. Since the term is so new, the researchers asked people if they agreed with the statement that “breathing air in a room today where people smoked yesterday can harm the health of infants and children.” Only 65 percent of nonsmokers and 43 percent of smokers agreed with that statement, which researchers interpreted as acknowledgement of the risks of third-hand smoke.

The belief that second-hand smoke harms children’s health was not independently associated with strict smoking bans in homes and cars, the researchers found. On the other hand, the belief that third-hand smoke was harmful greatly increased the likelihood the respondent also would enforce a strict smoking ban at home, Dr. Winickoff said.

“That tells us we’re onto an important new health message here,” he said. “What we heard in focus group after focus group was, ‘I turn on the fan and the smoke disappears.’ It made us realize how many people think about second-hand smoke — they’re telling us they know it’s bad but they’ve figured out a way to do it.”

The data was collected in a national random-digit-dial telephone survey done between September and November 2005. The sample was weighted by race and gender, based on census information.

Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician who heads the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, said the phrase third-hand smoke is a brand-new term that has implications for behavior.

“The central message here is that simply closing the kitchen door to take a smoke is not protecting the kids from the effects of that smoke,” he said. “There are carcinogens in this third-hand smoke, and they are a cancer risk for anybody of any age who comes into contact with them.”

Among the substances in third-hand smoke are hydrogen cyanide, used in chemical weapons; butane, which is used in lighter fluid; toluene, found in paint thinners; arsenic; lead; carbon monoxide; and even polonium-210, the highly radioactive carcinogen that was used to murder former Russian spy Alexander V. Litvinenko in 2006. Eleven of the compounds are highly carcinogenic.

(Source: NYT)

I was really sad to read that stress during pregnancy can affect one’s baby, as evidenced here, here, here, here, and here.

I’ve been through an immense amount (to my reckoning) of unneeded stress through the tail end of my first trimester till today with virtually no support from anyone. Hence I worry about my baby girl’s brain development. Trying to stay positive has been an uphill battle.

Advice from the first article: people needed to develop greater sensitivity to pregnant women’s needs.

Yet most people are insensitive to pregnant women’s needs, simply judging from a poll taken among friends. Worse if you’re having your second. I’ve been accused of being a bad mother, lazy, negligent, emotional, overreactive… the list goes on.

It doesn’t feel like there’s any solution.

I’m a real laid back Mom. As a teen, danger was my middle name. I have the proud scars and trophies to show for it. And a fond memory of a black Kawasaki trail bike I spray painted myself, whom I named Tommy Ray after a character in Clive Barker’s grand novel The Great and Secret Show.

As a kid, I loved to play in the mud, climb trees, windows, the gate, just about everything and I never fell. I loved the outdoors and I loved risky adventures. We had a small garden filled with lots of plants and trees where a little girl could bring her stuffed animal friends and play make believe. It was a wonderful, happy, stress-free childhood.

I intend for Bear to have the same.

So it is to no surprise that I not only encourage my son to climb, jump, play in mud, I also teach him safety rules. For instance, when he climbs, he must concentrate on what he’s doing, and he must hold on with both hands. If he needs help, he must ask. And I’ll only let him climb places which I deem safe, which is almost anywhere.

These days I am lazy and loathe the sun, but I will slather on sunblock and be prepared to swelter just so my boy can enjoy the park nearby and visit the lovely jungle trails at our zoo. And oh he loves it. He’ll swing like a monkey on the handrails while we wait for the tram and race through the path like a speeding bullet. He’s the most active child I know.

Research agrees risky fun play is critical for survival skills like making judgement calls and assessing danger, especially in this modern world:

According to the study, kids need the adventure of “risky” play: “Risk-taking increases the resilience of children,” said one researcher. “It helps them make judgments,” said another. They list examples of risky play that should be encouraged including fire-building, den-making, watersports, paintballing, boxing and climbing trees.

Arnon Lotem, a researcher at Tel Aviv University, found that modern people have adopted risk-taking behaviors similar to those of animals like rats and bees. And this behavior, Prof. Lotem says might not prepare humankind for the types modern dangers we face every day — like crossing the street, accepting a high-risk mortgage, driving on the freeway, or flying a plane.

(Sources: New Study: Kids Need the Adventure of “Risky” Play; Humans Evolved to Fear Snakes, Not High-Risk Mortgages or Risks at Traffic Lights)

Most recently I finished reading Gregory Benford’s The Sunborn, a hard SF novel about life on Pluto (and other wildcards).

He introduced a new form of life which never occurred to me before and I felt so enthralled about the abundance and diversity of life itself (read Deep-Sea Alien Abode Discovered for starters).

Even though we haven’t found anything alive outside our planet yet doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Now this translates into probabilities rather than concrete proof in the form of Drake Equation. But Benford’s novel does raise an interesting issue – that perhaps other forms of life may be in a form that we are unable to detect with our instruments after all.

My own theory, is that we’re so far in the corner of the Universe, so far from the excitement of the centre that no one has detected us nor us them. The Universe is a huge place, but the laws of physics does limit travel (even as planet-sized beings) through its vastness.

Still, when I think about the magnitude and grandeur of this place we live in, I am grateful to exist even for this microsecond to breathe it in and know that I am a part of it.

Unfortunately for us humans (and cats too, sorry) we’re unable to regenerate any of our parts with our stem cells like our invertebrate relative, the sea squirt. Not yet at least but scientists are working on it.

… regeneration (for the sea squirt) began from dozens of tiny compartments loaded with stem cells, which the researchers dubbed regeneration niches. “In mammals, many adult organs and tissues contain specific stem cells that are involved in repair and some restricted regeneration abilities,” biologist Ram Reshef at Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa said.

Regenerating our bits would mean a longer life as we turn in our old parts for new ones. It’s one of the touted killer apps for longevity and anti-aging advocates. Right now, all we have is calorie restriction and it’s often a tough one to follow (think: pineapple tarts).

While the stem cells the researchers looked at are much like stem cells in adult mammals that give rise to our tissues and organs, “the huge difference is that they culminate in an entire organism,” Reshef said. The most important implication of their finding is the possibility that vertebrate adult tissue stem cells may exhibit the same capabilities to generate any cell in the body, he added.

Reshef and his colleagues are currently teasing apart the molecular mechanisms by which the sea squirt accomplishes its whole body regeneration and to compare that process with similar mechanisms in other invertebrates and vertebrates. “We speculate that vertebrates altered or suppressed parts or all of this ability,” Reshef said.

Hope for us, no?

(Source: LiveScience – Sea Squirt Regrows Entire Body from One Blood Vessel)