Scientific Gossip (38-2)
Contains 100% gossip from concentrate
Elderly Steam
Geologists are showing interest in the long-term behavior of steam. Water vapor that has been confined in subterranean chambers or elsewhere for decades or or more is known as "permasteam." (Permasteam is analagous in some ways to permafrost, arctic or antarctic ground that has remained frozen for an extended period. Permasfrost has intrigued scientists since the early ninteenth century.) Are there chemical reactions that take place in permasteam and no where else? Many have speculated the existence of what might be regarded as long-lived intermediate chemical compounds. The theory could help guide new experiments aimed at better understanding the internal behavior of a diversity of systems, including geothermal springs, steam electric generators and restaurant steam tables.
The Language of All Mothers?
Patrick Brady has applied for funding to tape record the utterances of first-time mothers during the hours prior to giving birth. Brady, a retired linguistics professor at Havasu State University in Arizona, is testing a theory that relates the patterns of a mother's pre-partum speech to her child's first twenty years of emotional development. Developmental psychologists have long suspected that mothers who replace more than forty percent of their verbs with obscenities during labor are increasing the chance that their child will have a calm infancy and adolescence.
Nuts to Mental Therapies?
Long-term improvement or a worsening in the condition of schizophrenic patients may owe more to ever-changing medical definitions of the disease than to any treatment, according to researchers at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Researchers at other institutions are curious about whether this is also true of other mental disorders.
Insomnia and the Intelligent Machine
Intense light is sometimes used to reset the biological clock of people
who suffer from sleep disorders. Insomniacs who use computers at all
hours of the night may soon be able to take advantage of this so-called "light
therapy." Light therapy was developed by observing the changes in
insomniacs' sleep patterns from season to season. Several PC manufacturers
are proposing to design computer screens that alter their intensity in
accordance with an individual's sleep pattern. PC users would be able,
in theory, to reliably program their own wake/sleep pattern.Earthbound
Garbage
NASA is not going to act on a proposed scheme to ship garbage to the Kuiper
Belt. The Kuiper Belt is a hypothesized ring of fragmentary material orbiting
approximately four billion miles from the sun - hypothesized in that it
is too far away for astronomers to have directly observed it actually exists.
Because it lies outside all national boundaries, the region has been seen
by some as a legally and perhaps environmentally safe dumping ground for
Earth's surplus trash. The Kuiper Belt is distant enough, too, that the
material would be unlikely to interfere with earth-orbiting satellites.
After two years of unofficial study, NASA has concluded that the orbiting
garbage scheme is "infeasible with current technology." A congressional
inquiry has been proposed to discover why it took two years to reach that
decision.
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