If you could bring back to life an extinct species of human being, should you?
It could soon be possible, with plans to reconstruct the genetic map of the Neanderthals.
There are so many fascinating questions you could answer … but I suppose you’d have to say it would hardly be fair to the individual created, and could they anyway be “Neanderthal” in our culture, brought up by Homo sapiens sapiens? Probably not. They’d be a cultural hybrid, if not a genetic one.
There’s still an awful lot of misinformation and unnecessary fear around about the contraceptive pill, as evidenced by a debate that I got into recently over on Blogcritics.
So a very interesting report in the Independent today:
The contraceptive pill saves the lives of up to 3,000 women a year in the UK and Europe, according to new medical research.
A number of studies now suggest that the Pill reduces the risk of ovarian cancer significantly. One study, reported in the British Journal of Cancer this week, found a protective effect of up to 50 per cent for Pill users, while another, reported in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention, found a similar effect after analysing data on the use of the Pill since its introduction.
According to the studies, women who use the contraceptive pill reduce their risk of developing ovarian cancer by more than a third, and the longer they take it for, the greater the protection …
…The report says women who used the Pill at some time are 30 per cent less likely to develop the cancer. The protection increases with the length of time a woman takes the Pill by around 5 per cent a year, to about 50 per cent protection for long-term use. The reduced risk was seen in women both with and without a family history or genetic predisposition to ovarian cancer.
Of course there are other potential problems – this is only focusing on one form of cancer, but I fear a lot of the knee-jerk “it must be bad for you” reaction has an underlying moral focus of – “it makes your life easier, frees you to sleep with whoever you want, so there must be a big negative in there”.
For at least a century, women have been subjected to unnecessary hysterectomies – a serious, painful operation with broad effects. This now far less common than it used to be, but it seems about 5,900 unnecessary hysterectomies are still being done in the UK each year.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are more operations in poorer, socio-economically deprived areas of the country than in wealthier, more educated areas.
But wherever you are, there’s a strong cautionary note down the bottom of the story:
He said that a study in the United States had found that 55 per cent of care was appropriate to patients’ needs, adding that there was “no reason to suspect†the situation was different in England.
“Doctor knows best” the majority of the time, but it is only a very slim majority.
… and now it is definitively the green thing to do. (Whew!)
A study by the UK pressure group Waterwise…. showed that new, water-efficient dishwashers used as little as nine litres of water per wash, although the average was between 12 and 16 litres. By contrast, washing and rinsing dishes by hand used as much as 63 litres.
According to the study, just under 30 per cent of households in the UK use a dishwasher, compared to 5 per cent in 1977. But growth rates have slowed and the number of households with dishwashers in the UK compares poorly with other European countries.
I’ve had a dishwasher ever since I’ve been in London, and couldn’t possibly live without it. (Having unfortunately misplaced along the way a former boyfriend who used to be so disgusted by the piles of dirty dishes in my sink that when he arrived for the weekend the first thing he’d do was wash them up – his mother had trained him well.)
Staying on the practical science side, a fun bit of whimsy: 340,282,366,920,938,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 new web addresses have been created.
Of the internet addresses available, more than three quarters are already in use, and the remainder are expected to be assigned by 2009. So, what will happen as more people in developing countries come online? The answer is IPv6, a new internet protocol that has more spaces than the old one: 340,282,366,920,938,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 spaces, in fact. “Currently there’s four billion addresses available and there are six billion humans on Earth, so there’s obviously an issue there,†said David Kessens, chairman of the IPv6 working group at RIPE, one of five regional internet registries in charge of rolling it out.
Not surprised but still pleased to read that British parents are having a wholly sane reaction to the possibility of young teens being given the cervical cancer vaccine.
Two vaccines, most effective in girls between 10 and the early teens, are expected to be licensed for girls and young women in Britain within 12 months. Although immunising girls before they are sexually active may prove controversial, parents surveyed for the government are said to be “very positive”, with mothers more interested in details than fathers.
What editors really want out of Australia are stories about sharks, crocodiles and other dangerous beasts (despite the fact such things are rare) devouring humans – preferably young, blonde female humans. Failing that, a pretty child cuddling a cut marsupial will do. (If you’re an Australian editor, you want these stories out of the Northern Territory.)
Thus, the perfect Australian story: KILLER KANGAROO. That it lived abour 10 million years ago is a mere technical detail, although that it is accompanied by “the demon duck of doom” doesn’t do any harm.
“There were meat-eating kangaroos with long fangs, and galloping kangaroos with long forearms, which could not hop,” he told The Australian newspaper.
Palaeontologist Sue Hand, who also participated in the dig, told Australian radio that other potentially frightening creatures were unearthed.
“Very big birds… More like ducks, earned the name demon ducks of doom, some at least may have been carnivorous,” she said.
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