Watching the World
Disappearing Rain Forest
The Amazonian rain forest continues to disappear at an alarming rate. In each of the past three years, 4.8 million acres were lost, which equals about “seven football fields a minute,” reports Natural History magazine. After the land is cleared of valuable timber, the remaining vegetation is usually burned to make way for agriculture. However, “as trees and other plants are burned or decomposed by microbes, they release huge amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, increasing the greenhouse effect.” The effect of these gas emissions may be the “equivalent of destroying an additional 1 to 3 million acres of rainforest each year,” says the magazine.
Women and Heart Disease
Until the 1960’s, in Brazil cardiovascular disease was chiefly a male health problem, reports Veja magazine. However, things began to change when women joined the work force. When women were exposed to the same on-the-job “stress, smoking and fast-food diets” as men, more women developed heart disease. Although some believe that women have a measure of hormonal protection against coronary troubles, “after 35 years of age, the hormonal protection begins to decrease, exposing women to the same risk rates as men,” says the magazine. In 1995, heart attacks killed twice as many Brazilian women as breast cancer and uterine cancer combined.
Family Breakdown in Bolivia
More than 70 percent of Bolivians live in a state of poverty, reports the Bolivian Times. As a result, many children “abandon their fragmented family to live in the potentially crueler environment of the street.” There they are introduced to cocaine and such inhalants as paint thinner and glue. It is estimated that 88 percent of the drug consumption in Bolivia is by youths between 5 and 24 years of age. Illegal drug use has thus increased about 150 percent over the past 15 years. According to the Times, “many consider that a root cause of this increase is a breakdown in the traditional family structure.”
Neutrino Found to Have Mass
The neutrino is a tiny subatomic particle that has no electric charge, travels at nearly the speed of light, and rarely interacts with any kind of matter. It is said that neutrinos can easily zip right through the earth without hitting a single atom. Even so, these elusive particles recently received international attention when scientists at Takayama, Japan, announced that the neutrino has been found to contain mass. Since the cosmos is packed with neutrinos, some scientists assert that their combined mass might add enough mass to the universe to slow its expansion.
Ancient Synthetic Stone
Archaeologists have uncovered the first evidence of man-made stone, in Mashkan-shapir, an ancient city whose ruins lie in what is now southern Iraq. Geologists and archaeologists say that the stone was made by heating silt from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to melting temperatures and then slowly cooling it “to produce rock-hard slab resembling a type of volcanic rock called basalt,” reports The New York Times. There was a shortage of raw building materials in the area, so synthetic basalt “appears to have been manufactured in some quantity as a substitute for the natural basalt.” The man-made stone was used to build Mashkan-shapir some 4,000 years ago.
Precautions While Cooking
From 1990 to 1994, the most frequent cause of death among female burn victims at the Sumner Redstone Burn Center at Massachusetts General Hospital was clothing that caught fire while the victim was cooking, says Tufts University Health & Nutrition Letter. Often, the victims were women who were in their 60’s or older and whose loose-fitting sleeves dangled over a stove’s flame while they were reaching for a teapot. The following suggestions were made to help people prevent serious burns. While cooking, (1) don’t wear a bathrobe or other loose-fitting clothing, (2) use the front burners when possible to minimize the chance of getting burned while reaching for pots or pans, and (3) wear flame-resistant clothing.
Don’t Just Send the Children
When a third-grade student in a religious education class complained that there were so many rules for children but none for grown-ups, the teacher responded by asking the class to write down their own Ten Commandments for adults. According to the German Catholic weekly Christ in der Gegenwart, most pupils were concerned about goodness, peace, fairness, honesty, and truthfulness. One child’s list read: “1. Do not be unfair. 2. Do not scold so much. 3. Give us time. 4. Do not always disturb us. 5. Do not laugh at us. 6. Do not force us. 7. Admit that we are right once in a while. 8. Do not make your own rules. 9. Get along with one another. 10. Go to church yourselves, and do not just send the children.”
An Expression of Love?
“Love and sexual availability go hand in hand for young men,” states a report in the South African newspaper supplement Witness Echo, “and if adolescent girls resist sex they are likely to get beaten up.” Research among teenagers in a township in Cape Town revealed that “men control relationships, often using violence to force girls into having sex with them.” One study showed that 60 percent of the girls had been beaten by their partners, even for talking to other men. “Physical assault is so commonplace,” the report adds, “that many of their female peers see it as an expression of love.”
Music Influences Shoppers
In England a team of psychologists from the University of Leicester discovered that background music could influence the selections made by wine shoppers. “When French accordion music played, French wine outsold German varieties by a five-to-one ratio,” says National Geographic magazine. “But when German beer-hall music oompahed, buyers bought two bottles of German wine for every French bottle.” Interestingly, only a few buyers were aware that “music played a role in their decision,” says one of the researchers.
El Niño’s Good Side
The warm water phenomenon called El Niño has been “blamed for everything from killer storms in the United States to wildfires in Brazil and poor coffee crops in Kenya,” reports Reuters. However, despite the storms and drought, experts claim that El Niño also did some good. According to the report, Brazil’s coffee production is “expected to reach 35 million bags this season, the largest in a decade,” and “unexpected rainfall in unexpected places has replenished reservoirs and aquifers across the globe.” Said Ants Leetmaa, director of the U.S. Climate Prediction Center: “Water is a problem in much of the world. Many of these areas needed water. . . . Water managers were looking forward to El Nino.”
Trying to Return Members to the Fold
An estimated 1,500 people leave churches in the United Kingdom every week. Although more than 50 percent of the population claim to be Christian, only about 10 percent regularly attend church. Why? Churches in the United Kingdom have “often been accused of being irrelevant, out of touch and boring,” says clergyman Steve Chalk. In an effort to “encourage people back to church,” the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of Westminster are “giving their endorsement to a new initiative aimed at helping churches become more welcoming, relevant and challenging,” reports the BBC News. The churches hope to implement “10 practical goals” by January 2, 2000. They include: “We will make you welcome, we will be family friendly, we will make sure you can hear clearly, . . . we will help you explore answers to your deepest questions, . . . we will make sure your visit will be helpful but challenging.”