THE WOW! FACTOR

Tapuae meets technology

2011-09-27T18:00:00.000-07:00

By Jess Toomey
A primary school teacher is using modern satellite technology to pinpoint marine life on a section of Taranaki’s rocky shores.
West End School teacher Warren Smart is using Geographical Information System (GIS) and Global Positioning System (GPS) to locate and record marine life at the Tapuae Marine Reserve near New Plymouth.
Warren, who has been teaching for 26 years, is doing this as part of a Teachers Fellowship in Primary Science for the last six months of this year.
He applied to the Royal Society of New Zealand for the fellowship early this year because he wanted to improve his science teaching.
“It’s good to be doing something different and learning new skills,” he says.
Warren is working alongside marine biologist Erin Zydervelt from the Taranaki Regional Council (TRC) and scientist Elise Smith from the Ngamotu Marine Reserve Society.
The 48-year-old is doing a quadrat study in the reserve and is using GIS and GPS to help track wildlife and plants and will be putting data on the society’s online map.
“I’m hoping to add information about what can be found at the reserve so when other people go down there, these will act as a guide for them,” he says of the technology.
He has taken photos of an orange sponge that grows on the side of rock pools and can name different types of limpets and shellfish.
Warren is also using an underwater camera to capture different types of species living in rock pools and taking video and photos of the marine reserve.
On top of this, he is updating wiki posts, which is set up for other interested teachers and he has his own blog: http://tapuaecalling.blogspot.com/.
This keeps a regular update of what he’s doing. His latest post shows him viewing soft sediment samples under a microscope at the TRC.
Jess Toomey is a WITT journalism student doing STAR

Getting hooked on exercise

2011-09-10T00:40:00.000-07:00

By Virginia Winder
It’s spring in New Zealand and like the lambs, we’re leaping to life.
Many of you may have started hitting the walkways and roads to slough off the winter kilos to get fit and feel good.
But how on earth do you continue that exercise kick so it becomes part of your life?
Try hitting the books and browsing sports magazines to get inspiration.
Among the dozens of promising titles in New Plymouth’s Puke Ariki library one stands out: Fighting Globesity – a practical guide to personal health and global sustainability by Phillip (son of Les and Colleen) and Jackie Mills.
“Sustainability starts with your own body,” they write. “If we can start to win the battle against obesity and inactive ageing, then many of the trillions of dollars spent on chronic illness can be diverted into more important endeavours such as saving rainforests and subsidising sustainable energy programmes.”
Over a picture of large man, are the words: “Like an overweight person, as a race we are simply consuming more than we can healthily maintain. This over-consumption is not only bad for our bodies but also bad for the world.”
Before we move on to tips on getting going, staying motivated and sustaining exercise for life, let’s have a look at some of the scary facts recorded in A Portrait of Health: Key Results from the 2006/2007 New Zealand Health Survey:
• One in four adults were obese (26.5%).
• One in five children (aged 2 to 14 years) were overweight (20.9%) and one in 12 (8.3%) were obese.
• One in seven adults (13.6%) were taking medication for high blood pressure. This equates to 425,500 adults.
• One in 12 adults (8.4%) were taking medication for high blood cholesterol.
• One in 20 adults (5.2%) had been diagnosed with ischaemic heart disease.
• One in 20 adults (5.0%) had doctor-diagnosed diabetes (excluding diabetes during pregnancy). This equates to 157,100 adults.
• Half of all adults (50.5%) met the definition of being regularly physically active. Overall, one in seven (15.0%) adults were sedentary, reporting less than 30 minutes of physical activity in the previous week.
Those statistics are people and they are putting huge pressure on the New Zealand health system. But much of the above can be remedied through healthy eating and exercise. It sounds so easy, but in our time-poor, fast-food, cheap-fizz, take-the-car society; it’s become the hardest thing many people face.
Yes, what we eat is an issue, but today we are dealing with how to get going and keep moving.
This is the tough part.
Experts say that 25% of people who start a new exercise programme quit within the first week and another 25% quit within the first six months.
And the most frequent reason for giving up is lack of time.
So, make exercise as important as your job, whether you’re a mother or a corporate boss.
But first, you need to choose a sport – and that’s anything that takes your fancy. You can run, bike, dance, swim and zumba your way to fitness, or you can decide to take up yoga, tai chi, tennis, basketball or touch rugby – the list is long.
Then you need to set a goal and here, there are two schools of thoughts.
One is to set realistic goals and the other is to dream big.
The Mills opt for the Big Hairy Audacious Goals, a term coined by Good to Great author Jim Collins.
“We believe that everyone should set major fitness goals; powerful aims that create a much more holistic impetus to exercise,” they say. “There’s a power in allowing yourself to dream, in visualising yourself at your very best. It can be incredibly inspiring and motivating. Great coaches use this technique very effectively.”
They also say you may never reach your goal, but you will get fit and have fun on the journey.
Next, work out a training schedule and set small, manageable goals that you can attain. It could be walking further, adding a hill or steps in to your routine, running faster than before, doing more press ups or increasing the daily steps on your pedometer.
Start a training diary and write down your plans and goals, then record your daily results. This will help you see how far you have come.
The magazines and books (there’s a dozen of each at my elbow) have pages and pages of advice.
Here are 20 top tips:
1. Exercise with friends, so that this becomes not just fitness time but friendship time. My sister has been in a walking/running group for more than 20 years and these women support each other in all areas of their lives.
2. Wear a pedometer and aim for 10,000 steps a day. This will not only tell you how active you are, but also give you a goal to do more.
3. We are what we think. Counter your negative inner talk with positive mantras, like: “Go for it,” and “I can do it”. Or have a key word that stokes your fire, like: “Warrior,” or “power”.
4. Find a mentor to inspire you, give you advice and ongoing encouragement. Or you could employ a personal fitness trainer to get you started and keep you on track.
5. Watch a sports event live and imagine you are out there too – and you can be, will be.
6. Upwards and onwards. When you’re out walking, cycling or running, don’t just go for the flat. Hills will improve your cardio fitness, muscle power and speed, so embrace those upward hauls as your friends. Wherever possible, take stairs.
7. Imagine the rewards of getting fit. It could be weight loss, better health, taking part in or winning a race, or you could organise a reward. This could be something like a trip to Paris if you reach a weight goal or complete a marathon. Remember to celebrate the small steps on the way too.
8. Find your inner motivation. If you’re competitive, make your goal a race. If your life is out of control, think of sport as your way of regaining balance in your life. For others it might be the need to beat depression – regular workouts help your brain release those natural “feel-good” chemicals.
9. Small steps and strokes. Start your exercise programme gently so that you don’t injure yourself, or overdo it so much you hurt and can’t face the thought of doing it again. Also, if you start off swimming 40 lengths of your community pool, what are you going to do the next day – what are can you aim for? So start with 10 lengths and build up.
10. Have your gear all ready to go. If you’re going to train in the morning, have all your clothes, shoes, or togs, towel and goggles out so you just need to change and head out. You could also do this if you are exercising later in the day.
11. Make a pact. Find a friend or family member to go on this fitness journey with you. Talk about your goals, your rules for getting out there, including exercising in the rain and organise a regular time to meet up. You’re less likely to let down a friend than yourself.
13. Variety is the spice of sport. If you’re running, cycling or walking, take different routes and stride out with different people. Or mix it up. Go swimming one day, biking the next, head to the gym for a weight workout and then take a Zumba class.
14. Be inspired. Read stories about people who have gone from fat to thin, from slug to slogger, from loser to winner.
15. Work at making it a habit. Develop a routine to exercise at the same time every day and do it. For those workaholics out there, consider exercise as work and put it in your diary or timetable. Sport will increase your brain power and giving you thinking time.
16. Plan holidays that have a physical element to them. This could be a skiing, canoeing, surfing, tramping or biking holiday. Explore New Zealand and the world the natural way.
17. Move whenever you can. Walk or bike to work or into town. In fact, ditch the car for a month unless you have to travel more than 10km. Don’t scoot around your office sitting on your wheeled chair, get up and walk. Wander round the house during TV ad breaks (but don’t head to the fridge or pantry).
18. Get a dog. Not only do you have a constant companion, but you have a barking, whining, nagging reason to go for a walk or run out every single day. Who can resist those pleading “take me out” eyes?
19. Have fun. Exercise needs to be something that you enjoy and look forward to. So listen to music or an audio book when you’re out. Choose upbeat music that will get you going or a thrilling novel that will inspire you to do an extra block to find out what happens next.
20. Go public. In 2009, my son, husband and I pledged to swim in the sea every day of the year and I wrote about it in the newspaper. When strangers started asking how the swimming was going, there was no backing out. Come hell or high water we were going to do it – and we did. Now I’ve started a blog and gone extremely public about my own fitness and life-balance goals.
In the end, it’s all about keeping on keeping on, say Phillip and Jackie Mills.
Never give up. “Coax and cajole yourself through those difficult early stages,” they write. “If you fail, don’t worry; failing is part of learning to succeed. Keep trying; you’ll get there in the end. It will be worth it.”

Stress of busyness

2011-09-02T20:41:00.000-07:00

By Virginia Winder
If you’re too busy to read this story, then this article is for you.
So stop for a moment, take 15 minutes and read about how your ultra-busyness is not sustainable.
You see, in this online, mobile technology, tweet-a-thought, text-contact, GPS world, we never switch off. Literally, we are bombarded with information, thoughts, friend requests and work expectations at every waking moment.
Not only are we running out of natural resources, many of us are running out of time. That’s down time, quiet time, family time, thinking time, home time, exercise time and time out.
If having a shower is your only peace time in your daily race, then you need to have a serious think about your life, especially if you’re working in excess of eight-hour days and also find yourself labouring away at weekends.
Yes, you’re out there, you 14-hour-a-day sloggers, who can’t stop thinking about work and whose relationships, body and mind are starting to fall apart.
Even those of you who are teetering that way, should pay attention – if you spend all your days working then you’re in danger of burnout or, as one friend found out, break down.
At dinner with friends the other night, I quipped that snapping an Achilles tendon was her body’s way of slowing her down and perhaps that was the message to be learnt.
Her reply was swift: “No, it showed me I need to speed up. I spent 10 years sitting behind a desk and now I exercise every single day.”
My friend now lives by the “use it or lose it” principle spelled out in the book by the same name by Peter Snell and Garth Gilmour – but sustainable exercise story will come later.
For now, we are looking at business, or in this case busyness, and finding out about making more time for yourself without failing in your job.
To do this I took time out and went to the library at Puke Ariki and borrowed 13 books, many of them with tantalising titles, including The 4-Hour Workweek (Timothy Ferris), The Power of Less (Leo Babauta) and The Great Office Detox – minimise stress and maximise job satisfaction (Dawna Walter).
Let’s get some advice from the experts.
Babauta kindly begins his book with a comparison between two reporters. One goes for high volume, putting out about 30 short, fairly limited articles per week. This reporter’s high work rate is noticed and earns praise from the editor.
The other decides to go for just one story, but chooses a subject that will “knock your socks off”. She brainstorms, thinks, researches, conducts a wide variety of interviews, spends time writing it, polishing her work and checking all the facts. The story is an award winner.
“The first reporter was thinking high-volume, but short-term. The second reporter focused on less, but did much more over the long term,” writes Babauta. “That’s the power of less.”
People can choose between doing a lot and opting for high impact. The latter is definitely more sustainable and can lead to long-term contributions to society, your career and your bank balance.
Babauta, a freelance writer from Guam, recommends changing habits slowly (in fact he recommends slowing down in general) and try adopting these, one a month, for a year.
1. Set your three Most Important Tasks (MITs) each morning.
2. Single-task.
3. Process your in-box to empty.
3. Check email just twice a day.
5. Exercise every day.
6. Work while disconnected, with no distractions.
7. Follow a morning routine of your own making. This could involve watching the sunrise with a cup of tea or coffee at hand, meditating, doing yoga, going for a walk, writing, choosing your MITs, reviewing goals, having a gratitude session.
8. Eat more fruit and veggies every day.
9. Keep your desk decluttered.
10. Make a short list of your four to five most important commitments, asking yourself what do you love most and what is most important to you? Say no to commitments and requests that aren’t on your short list.
11. Declutter your house for 15 minutes a day.
12. Stick to a five-sentence limit for emails.
In her book, Get a Life, Not a Job, work psychologist Paula Caligiuri offers advice that our parents told us, including eating well, exercising and getting enough sleep.
If you are working every waking moment, then it’s highly likely you are failing on these three as well. Trust me, this way of life is not sustainable and you will suffer from mental or physical burnout, whichever comes first.
Caligiuri also recommends seeking volunteer opportunities, reducing energy-sapping work-related cynicism (or get a new job) and taking a holiday. “The downtime can increase your energy, creativity and productivity,” she says of the latter.
She also doesn’t believe in time management. “You need to rethink your relationship with time. You need to fall in love with the 24 hours you have each day. Love your time. Respect your time. Protect your time.”
We all know people who do this and admire them for it. I have friends that only work four day weeks, others who have one afternoon that is entirely there’s, and many who will do absolutely no work at the weekend. Ever.
Dawna Walter deals with the greatest time waster of them all: Procrastination.
“The obvious way to conquer procrastination is to tackle the things you hate doing first thing each day and get them out of the way,” she writes. “You will release all the anxiety that may have built up about them and can then get to grips with the remainder of your day without worry.”
Easy to say, of course, especially because procrastination is often caused by fear of failure or being uncertain what to do. People can simply get paralysed by perfection, Walter says.
To get over this, get used to losing. She recommends playing a game – bowls, cards, charades or trivia – with friends or family once a week and viewing it as therapy. “There will always be someone who can play better, faster or have the luck of the draw. You will soon discover that the world doesn’t come to an end as a result of not being the best.”
That in turn, will help you overcome fear of failure and break through the procrastination barrier.
Entrepreneur Timothy Ferris lives by the 80:20 law propagated by Italian Vilfredo Pareto (1848 to 1923).
“Pareto’s Law can be summarised as follows: 80 per cent of the outputs result from 20 per cent of the inputs.”
When Ferris came across Pareto’s law, he had been working 15-hour days, seven days a week, was feeling completely overwhelmed and generally helpless. “Faced with certain burnout or giving Pareto’s ideas a trial run I opted for the latter.”
Ferris put aside an entire day to ask himself:
1. Which 20 per cent of sources are causing 80 per cent of my problems and unhappiness?
2. Which 20 per cent of sources are resulting in 80 per cent of my desired outcomes and happiness?
When he answered those questions and then acted on eliminating problem customers and focusing on what he did want, Ferris’ life changed forever for the better.
Robert Holden’s book Success Intelligence: Timeless Wisdom for a Manic Society is also a life changer.
He talks of the need to join The Space Programme.
One day a highly successful lawyer who suffered from a nervous breakdown came to see Holden, the founder of The Happiness Project. “He told me: ‘I curse the day I installed my car phone. My car was my thinking space. I got all my best ideas driving to work. It was also my place to unwind. I used to listen to Vivaldi on the freeway home. But my car phone made my car into another office and I became extremely busy and I lost my space’.”
Holden says we all need space to think and simply to be empty, so we can be filled again. He is also an advocate for less is more: Less urgent – more wise; less activity – more vision; fewer hours – more success; less effort – more imagination; less struggle – more ease; less waste – more efficiency; less stress – more peace; and less ego – more God (or spirituality).
We will finish this story on being sustainable in your work practices with Holden’s wise words on simplicity. “The decision to simplify things is a gift because it returns you to your essence and to what you most value. Greater simplicity helps to avoid excess busyness and unnecessary effort. It increases effectiveness and it welcomes grace and inspiration. It also preserves your sanity. Talk time to reflect on how you could simplify your life and work to enjoy greater success.”

This story was first published in the Taranaki Daily News on 30/8/11

Living the now of mindfulness

2009-05-08T16:09:00.000-07:00

By Virginia Winder
The Tasman Sea is roaring like an angry taniwha and the woman walking barefoot just beyond its surging clutches notices everything.
She inhales salt air tossed on a westerly wind, feels soft cool sand suck at her feet and watches a black dog tear along the beach, tongue lolling from a canine grin.
Then, madly, she plunges into the sea, focused only on each wave that rushes at her. Then she dives under a big wall of tumbling white froth and holds on to the sand, feeling the power of water pass over her.
She pops up, takes a deep gulp of air and faces the next wave.
For her, nothing else exists but her body and the sea. Every worry is gone, every looming bill, every job waiting to be done, every smudge of sorrow, all gone, left on dry land in what feels like another life.
This woman is in an absolute state of mindfulness, a concept that is finding favour with university scientists from Boston to Dunedin.
Earlier this year, a story in The Wow! Factor detailed research from Otago University that showed how women taught relaxation techniques and mindfulness had better relationships with food and, after two years, had maintained their weight or even shed a few kilos – all without dieting.
Study co-author Caroline Horwath, from the university’s human nutrition department, used relaxation response training modelled on the Harvard Mind/Body Medical Institute’s symptom reduction programme. Mindfulness was a big component of this.
Now, in Taranaki, a man from India is teaching mental health clients this new and yet ancient way of being – and it’s changing their lives.
Dr Samir Heble, 37, works for the Taranaki District Health Board and is one of the youngest clinical directors of mental health in New Zealand.
He came to New Zealand seven years ago from Goa in India. “I was seeing the different types of illnesses in the Western cultures and I felt the treatments we were doing were helping some but not everybody.”
He thought something from the Eastern cultures might be helpful and decided to run courses on mindfulness, a philosophy that he lives, breathes and writes about.
“Mindfulness is a concept that derived from Buddhism more than 2500 years ago. The basic principle is radical acceptance.”
However, he makes it clear that he is not a Buddhist and the programme is not based on religion.
“What mindfulness basically means is living in the present moment and accepting every moment is unique and has a special grandeur,” he says.
He acknowledges that both the past and future are important. “However, a lot of the time we get so engrossed in the past or engrossed in thinking about the future that we fail to relish and enjoy the present moment.”
In his courses, Dr Heble teaches how to focus on the now. Those who take his courses aren’t in crisis mode, but are heading towards recovery or are well and need tools to stay healthy.
“I tell the clients that this is one of the truths in life, but I don’t tell them it is the truth.”
He believes there are many other ways of living and if people have already found useful tools or treatments, Dr Heble doesn’t tell them to give these up. “I don’t tell them they should stop medicines or other therapies like CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy) because all that is equally as important. It (mindfulness) is another asset to what they already have.”
From a mindfulness perspective, a person’s mind is like a guest house. “All our thoughts, emotions, feelings, wishes, hopes, desires, ambitions, dreams, aspirations, projects, disappointments, pleasures are guests. Some of these are wanted guests and some are unwanted guests.”
People tend to only welcome the wanted guests and not the unwanted guests, like anger, frustration, grief. “That’s what creates the unease or the suffering, because the more we won’t take those unwanted guests in, the more they keep knocking at the door.”
Dr Heble teaches his clients to acknowledge both the joys and pains of life – the wanted and unwanted guests. “As soon as the unwanted are acknowledged, they tend to knock less and people will feel more at ease.”
Then he teaches people how to let go – that’s where a concept he calls “radical acceptance” comes to the fore.
In the first session he asks the group two questions – what is happiness and how do we find it.
The answers, 99 per cent of the time, refer to finding happiness via external forces – through pets, nice partners, good jobs, wealth and more. “From a mindfulness point of view, happiness doesn’t depend on external conditions; it’s a state of mind.”
It’s important for people to deal with thoughts and feelings in a non-judgemental way and remember that thoughts are just thoughts and are not necessarily truths.
“In some people’s lives their minds are like a balloon. If the wind is strong it goes in this particular direction and if the wind is stronger this way it goes in this direction,” he says, moving his head from side to side.
“No matter how strong the wind is we should be able to keep in one place.”
Dr Heble also turns to nature for some powerful lessons about the impermanence of life. “Whatever rises will fall. There are no exceptions.”
In his courses, he illustrates points with poetry and often uses his own works. “My grandfather was one of the national poets of India.”
He is talking of Balkrishna Bhagwant Borkar who, in 1967, received the Padmashree, an Indian national award, for services to literature and education.
People doing Dr Heble’s courses are also encouraged to write their own poetry or find words that inspire them.
The first workshop was held in the middle of last year, the second in November and December and the latest one began this month. The third course is being facilitated by the health board’s community adviser, Nic Magrath.
“It’s a six-week course, but mindfulness is a life-long process,” Dr Heble says.
There are about 20 people in the group and many have found the lessons helpful.
One patient says it has transformed her life. “I feel empowered and in control of my life for the first time in six years.”
The woman, who cannot be named because of privacy reasons, says the techniques are simple to use. “It’s made a huge difference to me. I use the skills I’ve learnt every day to cope with situations.”
She says big crowds no longer cause her anxiety. “I can go to the supermarket and out to dinner with friends – I never used to be able to do those things.”
Dr Heble says another woman who used to be lonely, no longer feels that way because mindfulness has taught her that she is part of nature.
“We are all made up of molecules and are part of the great cosmos,” he says.
“When I told that to one of the ladies in an earlier group, all the loneliness went away from her life. Each time she starts feeling lonely she looks out the window at the sun and the mountain and she feels part of the whole big universe and she’s not depressed now,” he says.
Mindfulness is about letting go of self, of ego and all expectations.
“One must hope and dream, and have aspirations, but do not have expectations because expectations are not always met and expectations are the root cause of most suffering,” he says.
But mostly, it’s about focusing on the moment.
The woman in the sea is deeper now.
She watches a wave rushing towards her and turns ready to ride it. Just at the instant before it breaks she begins swimming furiously towards land, feeling the sea lift her and throw her forward in a rush of white water and speed.
And she’s flying, lost in a pure moment of mindfulness.

Freaky Facts to keep in mind

2009-05-07T15:20:00.000-07:00

1. Mindfulness is being used in research programmes around the world to help people improve their physical and mental health. It’s been trialled for many things, including the treatment of fibromyalgia, stress reduction, helping people to stop smoking and for cancer outpatients with sleep, mood, stress and fatigue symptoms.

2. One of the world’s leading advocates of mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn.
He is the founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He teaches mindfulness meditation as a technique to help people cope with stress, anxiety, pain and illness. “The present is the only time that any of us have to be alive, to know anything, to perceive, to learn, to act, to change, to heal.”

3. Harvard Medical School is also backing mindfulness. It says mounting evidence shows mindfulness can increase life enjoyment, expand the ability to cope with illness, and possibly improve physical and emotional health. It says one of the more popular ways to practice mindfulness is through meditation, which involves sitting or lying down quietly for 20 or 30 minutes, once or twice a day.

4. The practice of mindfulness is being taught and researched at universities all around the world. Even Bangor University in northern Wales now has the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice. It is committed to the relief of suffering and the promotion of wellbeing through the application of mindfulness-based approaches.

5. Mindfulness has been integrated with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy to help people with mental illness. Researchers say the integrated treatment is a paradigm shift in psychotherapy.

NZ pigeons flock to park

2009-02-02T15:41:00.000-08:00

By Virginia Winder

Pukekura Park is the New Zealand pigeon capital of the world.
So says Taranaki ornithologist David Medway who has been taking count of the plump birds that swoop-whir overhead like miniature Hercules helicopters.
“We have got more pigeons in New Plymouth city than any other city in New Zealand. I think I’m pretty safe in saying that because there are some cities like Hamilton that don’t have any pigeons and they are busy trying to attract them back.”
The native pigeon (Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae), also known as kereru, has become firmly established in the New Plymouth park and Medway believes there are about 20 birds in residence.
“It’s because of the variety of food that’s provided by the vegetation in the park year round that we are able to maintain such a good population.”
Also, the pigeons’ major foes – possums, ship rats (Rattus rattus) and stoats – are either in such low proportions in the park they don’t pose problems, or simply not there at all.
Perhaps that’s why they don’t venture far from the park boundaries.
During the day some of the pigeons will make flying visits to neighbouring properties, but generally, they don’t go far.
“But they tend to go back into the park – that’s their home base,” says the Friends of Pukekura Park vice-president.
When the Department of Conservation surveyed the park three or four years ago, they discovered the birds stuck close. “They were somewhat surprised at the little movement of pigeons here compared to elsewhere. In other areas, such as Invercargill, where they did their studies, pigeons travel kilometres to get to food sources, but they don’t need to do that here.”
Medway can back this up through his own observations.
“I embarked on a definitive study in Pukekura Park about 10 years ago,” says the retired lawyer.
He visits the park three to four times a week, for a few hours at a time, quietly, methodically, recording his observations of the birdlife.
During his studies, Medway has found that not only is the 52-hectare botanical garden (including the adjoining Brooklands Park) the native pigeon capital; it’s also the tui centre of the world. But that’s another story.
He also notes that pigeons are not easy to spot because after feeding they perch silently in trees for a couple of hours. “You might actually walk under a dozen pigeons and not even know they are there.”
Pigeons are herbivores, but they don’t just go for native plants.
That’s why Pukekura Park, which boasts a wide botanical collection of both home-ground plants and exotics, is such a bird magnet.
Because of this, Medway has had to become an amateur botanist and learn about the plants that lure the birds.
One of his most surprising discoveries is the fact that New Zealand pigeons are partial to magnolias. But not all varieties.
Medway says he’s never seen a pigeon eating a Magnolia grandiflora, or any other evergreen magnolia.
But he has seen them dining on the deciduous, especially sargentiana robusta, stellata and soulangeana magnolias. “The big old historic magnolia on the Brooklands lawn is Magnolia soulangeana.”
“The part the pigeons eat depends on the season. They eat the leaf buds and new leaves, flower buds and flowers of quite a variety of magnolias and magnolia cultivars.”
To make this clear here, the New Zealand pigeon doesn’t like all deciduous magnolia. Just like a person picking from a box of chocolates, the birds have their favourites.
Medway doesn’t know why they prefer some and ignore others.
“My studies show that from about June to October the pigeons in the park are feeding primarily on the foliage and flowers of a variety of different magnolias,” he says.
“That’s pretty unique in New Zealand because I know of nowhere else where pigeons rely to such an extent on magnolia. That’s one thing special about here.”
In fact, he hasn’t found any mention of pigeons feeding on magnolia anywhere else in the New Zealand and so plans to publish a scientific paper on the topic.
The pigeons do eat other plants, he says.
“In the later periods, they also rely on the new leaves of kowhai,” he says.
Bird watching is about being open-minded. “You’re learning all the time.”
But he is a man of pedantic accuracy.
He doesn’t totally dismiss stories of pigeons “drunk” on fermented fruits, or birds too full on berries to fly. But he does wonder if they are urban myths. “In my 50 or so years of bird observations I’ve never seen any of those things. I don’t deny that those things could happen, all I’m saying is I’ve never seen.”
But he has observed many pigeons munching magnolia.
And so, when he says Pukekura Park is the New Zealand pigeon capital, it’s best to believe him.
Caption: A New Zealand pigeon eating a loquat fruit in Pukekura Park. Photo: James Harmsen

NB: This story first appeared in the Taranaki Daily News on January 5, 2009

Freaky Facts about kereru

2009-02-02T15:26:00.000-08:00

1) In Northland the New Zealand pigeon has the Maori name kuku or kukupa. Other places it’s known as kereru. On the Chatham Islands the native pigeon is called parea, but that’s a different species altogether, called Hemiphaga chathamensis.
2) The kereru has an important job helping the spread of native trees. Since the moa became extinct, back in the 1500s, the native pigeon is now the only seed disperser with a bill big enough to swallow large fruit, such as those of karaka, tawa and taraire, the DOC website says.
3) A New Zealand pigeon is a big bird. They can measure up to 51cm from tail to beak, and weight 650g.
4) Nest-making is not one of the kereru’s greatest skills. The pigeon throws together a flimsy nest of twigs and lays a single egg, which takes 28 days to hatch. Both parents take turns to sit on the egg.
5) Pigeon chicks are fed on a fruit smoothy mixture that helps them grow fast. This is made from a protein-rich milky secretion that comes from the walls of their parents’ crops, which is mixed fruit pulp. The chicks generally leave the nest after 40 days.

When the silverfish start to dance...

2007-09-18T03:03:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER

A SMUDGE on the car windscreen won’t go away.

A squirt of water and quick flick of windscreen wipers makes no difference, neither does a firm, fast rub with a cloth on the inside glass.

Damn. The smudge has become a silverfish that slips out of sight.

Within minutes it’s joined by a line of quicksilver critters doing a zigzag dance in the peripheral vision of the driver’s eyes.

Slow-moving commuter traffic becomes a terrifying distortion of movement and flashing metal. So, with exaggerated care, the young woman noses her car to the side of the motorway and waits until a policeman finds her slumped over the steering wheel, hands covering light-sensitive eyes.

I got a police escort that day more than 20 years ago, because the man in blue knew what was going on in my head.

He was a migraine sufferer too. We are among 400,000 New Zealanders affected by this neurological disorder.

Of those sufferers, called migraineurs, 300,000 are women. The 3:1 ratio can possibly be blamed on hormone irregularities, which are listed among the triggers for this invisible illness.

Lack of sleep, stress, relaxation after stress, fatigue, overuse of over-the-counter pain relievers, irregular exercise, bright lights and smoke are named as other possible migraine starters. So is diet, including cheese, red wine and yes, coffee. Double damn.

While there are hundreds of research programmes going on around the world, scientists have yet to locate the definitive cause of this often debilitating disease.

“It is thought a migraine attack is triggered within the brain itself,” says the National Headache Foundation, in the United States.

The foundation says that once an attack begins, it is believed the pain and other symptoms of migraine stem from an inflammatory process.

This may be caused by an interaction between the trigeminal nerve (the fifth cranial nerve responsible for sensation in the face) and blood vessels in the coverings of the brain.

The brain chemical, serotonin, is linked to this inflammation, but its role is not yet clear.

Scientists in Japan are studying this connection.

While researchers have yet to pin down the underlying culprit, or culprits, there is no doubt it’s painfully real for the afflicted.

“Migraine is a legitimate, biological disease characterised by throbbing head pain, usually located on one side of the head, often accompanied by nausea and sensitivity to light and/or sound,” the American foundation says.

“Migraine is more common than asthma, diabetes or congestive heart failure,” its website says.

Similar information is echoed throughout the internet, including on the Neurological Foundation of New Zealand’s site.

“Though the causes are not precisely known, it is clear that migraine is a genetic disorder,” it says.

Global research isn’t good news for children of migraineurs. If one parent is a sufferer, there’s a 50% chance their children will also be afflicted. But if both parents get migraines, there’s a 75% probability their kids will inherit the illness.

The highest incidence of migraine occurs in both men and women aged between 20 and 45, but even toddlers can get migraines.

In fact children can get stomach migraines, which present as severe tummy aches.

Among all sufferers, only about 20% of people experience visual disturbances that herald the onset of a pounding head. This telltale sign is called a migraine aura.

People may see light flashes, blind spots, shimmering lights, or zigzag lines.

Or a smudge on a windscreen that turns into silverfish…

Unlocking the migraine puzzle

2007-09-18T02:32:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
AN Auckland University scientist is trying to unlock the key to migraine treatment.
Senior lecturer Dr Debbie Hay is leading a study into a group of molecules believed to play a role in the painful illness.
Dr Hay, from the university’s School of Biological Sciences, uses a lock-and-key metaphor to explain the basis of her study and how it is opening the door to migraine knowledge.
The key is a hormone called calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), which is found in people’s nerves.
“People who have migraines have more of this in their blood,” she says.
This hormone fits into a lock, called a receptor.
When this happens, it causes blood vessels to open up. In medical terms, the hormone is a naturally occurring vasodilator. Migraine pain is thought to be caused by blood vessels in the brain opening up, allowing more blood to flow through them.
“That’s one of the reasons we think CGRP might be involved in migraines,” Dr Hay says.
But she is frank about scientists’ knowledge of the hormone’s role in migraines. “We don’t know if it’s causative or part of the process.”
In fact, the hormone is proving a bit of a mystery. “We don’t know exactly why we have it…we don’t know its true function yet. We know it has this relationship with migraines.”
Clinical trials overseas have shown that a new drug, which prevents the key fitting into the lock, or the hormone activating the receptor, is effective in treating migraines.
“The problem is that it has to be given by injection, which is not ideal,” Dr Hay says.
“We need to be able to design a better drug.”
This is where her research programme comes in. “I’m working very much at the molecular level to see how this drug interacts with the receptor so we might be able to design more useful drugs.”
a $492,000 biomedical grant from the Health Research Council of New Zealand is funding the three-year Auckland study.
“It’s an ongoing thing – it contributes to the global drug discovery process.”
Dr Hay says her work does not involve human samples or clinical trials, but she does consider the reality of her research. “I know people in the building who have migraines and I’m always very interested in them; it’s always important to talk to the end user.”

FREAKY FACTS... A pain in the head

2007-09-16T23:45:00.000-07:00

1) The World Health Organisation ranks migraines in the top 20 of disabling medical conditions.
2) Botox treatment for frown lines may also help prevent migraines, according to a case report in Auckland.
3) Migraines cost the American taxpayers $US13 billion ($NZ18.4b) in missed work or reduced productivity annually.
4) Spanish researchers have found that treating inflammation in the eye’s trochlea tendon can relieve migraine pain.
5) Famous migraineurs include Elvis Presley (right), Albert Einstein, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Cervantes, Pascal, Nietzsche, Robert E. Lee and Karl Marx.

Exercise key to fit brain, body

2007-09-11T22:45:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
MEDICAL research keeps proving a phrase that’s become a cliché – use it or lose it.
And eat a healthy balanced diet.
It may not be rocket science, but it is brain science.
“It’s the same old message really,” says David Bilkey (right), of Otago University.
“We know exercise has been shown to promote neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons in the brain.”
Mental exertion is just as important.
The associate professor of psychology says that that studies show that people with higher education are less likely to be affected by Alzheimer’s, a disease that destroys the brain.
People who have studied or regularly “work” their brains make more synapses or connections in the brain,
Dr Bilkey says. “That reduces the chances of damage, or makes it (the brain) more resistant to damage.”
As we age, our brain plasticity, or flexibility to make new connections, lessens. When we’re young, especially prior to the age of five or six, and again at adolescence, our brains make and remake a huge number of connections.
Higher education promotes even further connections, Dr Bilkey says.
Imagine the connections as streets in a village, one that eventually becomes a massive city. That’s how the brain works.
So, people who continue to use their brains, train their minds, and keep learning, will end up with a brain resembling a metropolis with an intricate network of highways, main roads and side streets.
“As we age, we are losing connections between neurons and the ability to alter those connections, so we are having to work with fewer resources.”
So you might lose a few hundred motorways and a couple of thousand cul-de-sacs, but when you’ve got millions of others still firing the messages around, it’s not such a big loss.
But if you’re a village it’s not so good.
So, let’s head back into the big city; this time London.
Dr Bilkey, who specialises in location memory, is interested in the outcome of a study on taxi drivers in the British capital.
It shows that cabbies who have been on the job for a long time and who know how to navigate London with ease, have bigger brains. “The longer you work as a taxi driver, the larger your hippocampus is,” he says, about the area of the brain first affected in Alzheimer’s patients.
The size increase is simply because the cabbies have an improved capacity to remember information about locations and navigation.
Birds who cache their food in many different places, which they later must return to, also have increased brain size in the part equivalent to the human hippocampus, Dr Bilkey says.
He believes people need to think of their brain as being a muscle. “If you use it, it will get larger and better, and if you don’t, it will atrophy.”
Muscles also waste away when they’re not used – as many people who’ve had a limb in plaster will know.
The same happens to anybody who doesn’t exercise, especially ageing people who decide they’re too old to keep going.
Garth Gilmour (right), a former journalist and the author of 21 books on sportspeople and fitness, implores people to keep going.
His big message is this: “The exercise you do should be will within your abilities to do and you need to enjoy it.”
He recommends walking, doing housework and gardening as simple ways to remain fit. “Stay away from gymnasiums,” he says.
But always head for steps. “My wife and our love our stairs,” he says, citing why he keeps living in a two-storey house, while other elderly people opt for units and no gardens.
The never-retired writer says using your brain is just as important as a physical work out. He tells people to read, do crosswords or other puzzles, plus talk and listen to people to remain mentally agile.
“Keep the mind moving, but sitting up, blobbing in front of the television isn’t exercising your brain. You are being dumbed down by TV.”

Keep going to keep on going

2007-09-11T22:24:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
GARTH GILMOUR needs a holiday.
For the past few years the former journalist has been working on two books at one time, both with and about Olympic gold runner and scientist Peter Snell, who was born at Opunake.
Instead of taking time out, Gilmour is painting the inside of his Milford house.

He also mows the lawns of the large section and cuts the hedges, works in the garden and skips up and down the stairs of the two-storey home he shares with his fit wife, Kay.
His exercise of choice is cycling. For years he jogged great distances, but in his own words: “I have knackered knees from my late and overenthusiastic running burst…”
He has a bike for long rides in the open air, and one inside set on rollers for days when the great outdoors is unappealing.
You see, he is a man who acts on what he says, sagely, following the advice and information laid out in Use It or Lose It, the science book he co-wrote with Snell.
The book’s sub-heading says: Be Fit, Live Well – Keys to Successful Ageing for Men and Women.
This is the second edition of Use It or Lose It, first published last year. The new version will include information about the benefits of the fatty acid, Omega 3.
Its relaunch coincides with the release of Peter Snell – From Olympian to Scientist, destined for bookshops in November.
In December, Gilmour turns 82. “It’s just a number – it just gets a bit bigger each year.”
This is his second double.
He began is book-writing career working on No Bugles No Drums (about Peter Snell) and Run For Your Life (with running coach and jogging guru Arthur Lydiard, pictured with Gilmour left), both released in 1965.
The new Snell biography condenses the earlier book, and also tells the story of a boy who failed at school but ended up with a PhD in exercise physiology.
Snell has now been awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas, where he is an associate professor and director of the human performance laboratory.
He’s also a long-time orienteering runner and, of course, champion.
The secret to both men’s success is simple – don’t even think about stopping.
But I think Gilmour deserves a holiday.

FREAKY FACTS...Ticking time bombs

2007-09-11T22:08:00.000-07:00

1) We all have our own ticking time bombs. Human cells contain telomeres, which hold the vital genetic information needed to continue cell activities. Our cells also produce telomerase, an enzyme that repairs damaged telomeres. But this stops in later life, killing most of us in our 70s and 80s.
2) You don’t have to be a born genius to become one. American educator Benjamin Bloom carried out a study of exceptional people in many fields, which led him “to see great talent as less an individual trait than a creation of environment and encouragement”. He continues: “We were looking for exceptional kids and what we found were exceptional conditions.”
3) Writing linear study notes using a black or blue pen uses much less than half the capacity of our cerebral cortex, where our long-term memory is stored.
4) Listening to a talking book uses 80% more of our creative intelligence than watching television.
5) Each of the 10 billion neurons in the human brain has a possibility of connections of 1 with 28 noughts after it. If that’s what a solo neuron can do, the capacity of connections our brain can make, if written out, would be 1 followed by 10.5 million kms of noughts.

Dreams may hold key to memory transfer

2007-09-03T01:56:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
IT’S 5am and I’m accessing a massive database including fresh information downloaded overnight.
For the past week, I have been transferring “need-to-know” stuff from temporary files into this database.
The transfer always happens in the deep, dark night.
For several hours yesterday, those temporary files were crammed with scientific research on the brain’s ability to learn, retain and retrieve information.
With ease, all that data is coming back to me now.
The interviews, the articles in magazines, online and in books, are all there waiting to be accessed.
All because I slept on it.
I am, of course talking about memory.
Mine.
And yours – although what you choose to download won’t be the same as mine. Even if we watched the same movie or listened to the same piece of music, we would consciously and unconsciously store different information.
That’s why court witnesses almost always have different versions of the same event, even though they swear (on the Bible) that they are being honest and accurate.
While we may glean different information, we all go through the same memory transferral process.
This involves moving information from our temporary files, a kind of short-term memory stored in our hippocampus, to our massive neuro-database, called long-term memory found in our cortex.
To do this job, we need to sleep.
More specifically, we need to dream, says Otago University’s Anthony Robins (left).
Just exactly why we dream has been a puzzle to scientists, philosophers and great thinkers for hundreds of years.
Sigmund Freud believed dreams were our subconscious way of expressing fears and the suppressed sexual urges we prefer not to face or act on in waking life.
Robins has another theory, one he’s discovered because of memory loss.
The associate professor of computer science is a leading figure in the university’s Memory: Mechanism, Processes and Applications research team, made up of 30 academic staff and about 150 students.
This in-depth study, which encompasses many of the university’s departments, has been running for a decade now.
But the more Robins continues his research using artificial neural networks (ANN), built to simulate how our brains work, the more he believes he’s discovered something startling.
It’s this: When the artificial network is fed new data it deletes the old. This is called “catastrophic forgetting”.
However, when a “rehearsal” of that existing information is played through the network while new data is added, none of the old is lost.
But Robins realised that rehearsing or playing every piece of information stored in the network was impractical and meant having to have a second memory system.
So he tried another tack. “I have proposed a mechanism, pseudorehearsal, which is similar to rehearsal but does not require the storage and access of old information.”
To explain further, Robins uses a musical metaphor.
“The ANN (network) is like an orchestra that can learn lots of pieces – say 50 all at once. But if the orchestra learns another piece tomorrow, it forgets the first 50 pieces.”
But if the orchestra “jams” or “makes stuff up” in a pseudorehearsal of the old, it can retain music already learnt and add the fresh piece with no loss of information.
He surmises that brains have evolved to overcome the problem faced by the artificial network. This is where dreams come into play, because they are our own “pseudorehearsal” of stored information or our own jamming sessions. This explains why they are a bizarre mixture of fact and fiction.
“In order to learn new things, the brain has to have the time to jam and to wander randomly over bits and pieces of old information or made-up fantasy stuff,” Robins says.
Another piece of information Robins has learnt from his research is that recollections are not set in stone.
“Memory is not based on any one fixed structure – it has to keep re-encoding itself,” he says.
Every time we access a memory, we are re-recording it. “A memory is a piece played live by an orchestra.”
That’s opposed to being like a digital or tape recording, which is the same every time it’s played. Think of a single you hear on the radio – often you see it performed live and it’s annoyingly or pleasantly different to the recorded version. The live version may be sung by the same person, but they often change a word here and there, add an extra emphasis on a note, or simply forget the lyrics and improvise. Also, the band may be different, because there’s a new lead guitarist or drummer.
“Our memories are houses of sand, not cement,” Robins says.

FREAKY FACTS... stuff to remember

2007-09-03T01:36:00.000-07:00

1) If you’re one of those people who doesn’t recognise people in the street or can’t remember faces, there may be a scientific reason why. It’s possible that you suffer from what scientists call developmental prosopagnosia, or face blindness.
2) This could be a casino owner’s nightmare – a person who can memorise the order of an entire pack of freshly shuffled cards in less than 30 seconds. That’s what Ben Pridmore did at this year’s United Kingdom Memory Championships. He managed the feat in 26.28 seconds, beating the previous world record of 31.16 seconds.
3) The marathon version of the card-pack trick is even more mind boggling. In 2002, eight-times world memory champion Dominic O’Brien recalled 54 inter-shuffled decks of playing cards after only looking each of the 2808 cards once. But the Englishman did make eight mistakes, four of which he corrected himself after being told he was wrong.
4) A woman in her 40s is being studied by neurobiologists in California because of her near-perfect ability to recall nearly every detail in her life from when she was 18 months old. She can even remember things like the dates of every Easter going back to 1980 and what she did on those days.
5) Neurobiology scientists at Boston University believe they are close to cracking the memory code by reading the minds of mice. But unravelling human memory is some way off, but will be possible, if or when, non-invasive and highly sensitive monitoring instruments are developed.

Doctors latching on to leeches

2007-08-27T01:47:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
HOW the worm turns – or in this case leeches.
The reviled creature is having a revival in the medical world, after being ousted by antibiotics in the first half of last century.
Now they are back and science is leeching from the leeches.
Research has isolated at least 115 bioactive ingredients from the leech, Hirudo medicinalis, and its almost identical cousin H. verbena. There’s been a mix up in the lab as to which is which and it turns out scientists in some parts of the world, including the United States, may have been testing H. verbena, when they thought it was the other species.
Just who’s who in the leech world, doesn’t stop the slimy creature from offering hope and healing for people everywhere.
Today, leeches are being used directly for pain relief; to help stimulate blood flow when limbs have been reattached; and have been tested as a treatment for patients with lower leg ulcers caused by varicose veins.
Scientists have also extracted hirudin, a peptide or protein found in the salivary glands of the medicinal leech. This is a powerful anticoagulant or blood thinner, which stops or breaks down clotting.
It saved an American man’s life last month.
Daryl Vinson’s heart was only working at 10%, and the Los Angeles man’s future looked grim unless he had a new organ. A donor was found, but doctors faced a major hurdle.
The former air traffic controller was allergic to the mainstream blood thinner heparin, an important drug needed in transplant surgery.
In a do-or-die move, the transplant team from Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in LA created a substitute anticoagulant using a synthetic form of the leech saliva protein. The resulting drug, bivalirudin, was used, successfully, and Vinson got his new heart in an uncomplicated three-hour operation on July 25.
Leeches have also been used to help save a Nelson fisherman’s fingers. The man had four fingers of his right hand amputated during an accident on board a trawler at Farewell Spit on July 8.
He was flown to Hutt Hospital where plastic surgeons Chris Adams and Charles Davis reattached three of his fingers. They couldn’t save his little finger because it was too badly crushed.
To help with the recovery, one leech after another was put on the end of the man’s ring finger to improve blood flow.
Following surgery there can be a problem with circulation, which prevent sufficient blood and nutrients getting to the reattached body part. But a leech can fix that problem by sucking out dead blood cells and secreting its saliva, containing anti-clotting properties.
The leeches are grown in laboratories so they are considered to be medically clean.
Doctors may look at employing them for treating ulcers, because a study in India has shown great success in treating these long-lasting wounds.
The study, documented in the Indian Journal of Medical Research, looked at 20 men with a mean age of 43 years, who had varying degrees of inflammation and swelling caused by venous ulcers. These are wounds caused by improper functioning of valves in the veins of the lower legs.
None of the patients had diabetes, anaemia or any other illness.
The men had between one and four leeches placed around the ulcer area during a session. The number of applications of leeches varied from 2 to 20, depending on the severity of the wound and the oedema (swelling).
Results from the study were startling.
“Leech therapy effectively decreased oedema and limb girth in 95% of patients, decreased hyperpigmentation (tissue darkened by inflammation) in 75% of patients and resulted in ulcer healing in all the patients, probably by the sucking up of venous blood leading to venous decongestion,” the doctors reported.
And people suffering from arthritis pain can also take heed.
A team of German doctors from the Essen-Mite Clinic in Essen conducted a pilot study involving 16 osteoarthritis patients, who had knee pain for more than six months.
As well as adding exercise, physiotherapy, relaxation therapy and dietary changes to their treatment regime, 10 of the subjects received leech treatment for the pain.
This involved placing four medicinal leeches on the inflamed knee and leaving them for 80 minutes. The other six patients were given conventional pain treatment.
The researchers recorded pain levels three days prior to starting pain treatment and 28 days after treatment had finished.
Once again, the outcome was nothing short of miraculous.
Not only did the leech therapy give the sufferers significant pain relief within 24 hours – it lasted for four weeks without side effects or infections.
In contrast, those who received conventional drug treatment reported no relief from pain.
The German researchers explained that the relief was due to the anaesthetic properties of that sensational saliva, with might contain morphine-like substance and anti-inflammatory enzymes able to penetrate deep into the joints.
Meanwhile, the Beth Israel Medical Centre in New York has begun offering leech therapy to patients with osteoarthritis in their knees.
Sometimes humans are slow learners – or simply think everything from the past is passed its use-by date.
Leeches, you see were first used for medicinal purposes back in 2000BC.
It’s heartening to see we’re finally catching on.

FREAKY FACTS... Give this sucker a break

2007-08-27T01:33:00.000-07:00

1) A leech should never be pulled off because they can leave teeth or other mouthparts behind that can become infected. Lemon juice, vinegar, fire (not recommended), salt and even tiger balm can be used make a leech let go. Or you can just wait until they have had their fill and drop off.
2) You won’t feel any pain if a leech latches on to you. This bloodsucker has built-in anaesthesia, so when its three mouths and 300 razor-sharp teeth sink into your flesh, you’ll be none the wiser.
3) In one suck session, a leech can draw off six times its body weight in blood. While this may sound greedy, the blubbery creature won’t need to feed for another six months – or more.
4) Back in the 1800s, aquatic leeches were used as weather forecasters. When this type of leech finds itself in water with low oxygen counts, it floats towards the surface. So old-time weather watchers would place a leech in a glass of water and if there was a fall in atmospheric pressure, the critter would rise, predicting bad weather.
5) Leeches may be used to help humans, but they aren’t all good news – especially if you’re smallish and fury. Four to five large leeches can suck the life from a rabbit in just half an hour.

Turmeric - the ultimate wonder drug

2007-08-26T22:32:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
THERE’S a possible wonder drug hiding in your spice drawer.
It’s that warm, earthy, golden-orange powder, which tends to stain your bench and clothes, and turn your fingers tobacco-yellow after you’ve been dipping naan bread into Indian curry.
Yes, it’s turmeric.
And scientists the world over are hailing it as a preventative and a cure for, well, just about anything.
The list is long. Research shows that it’s an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and digestive aid. It’s also a potential weapon in the battle against breast, prostate, lung, colon and skin cancers, along with Alzheimer’s, arthritis, heart disease and peptic ulcers. Other studies show it prevents blood clots and lowers harmful cholesterol.
Its main ingredient, curcumin, is the “miracle” component of the spice. That’s also what provides that almost day-glo yellow hue to foods such as American mustard and Maggi chicken stock cubes.
Turmeric spice is derived from the roots of the Curcuma longa. This is an herbaceous perennial plant of the ginger family, Zingiberaceae, and is native to tropical South Asia. It needs temperatures between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius and a high rainfall to thrive. With climate change, Taranaki could soon be an ideal spot for a turmeric plot.
In medical terms, this spice is hot.
A Google search on “turmeric research” brings up 772,000 results – a daunting task for any online spice-truth seeker.
It mostly comes down to rats and mice, which are the “guinea pigs” in most of the turmeric studies.
At the University of Arizona researchers found that joint inflammation in rats was reduced by the spice.
The scientists did further studies to find what part of the turmeric root was the active anti-inflammatory ingredient. Like most research, the key was found to be curcumin.
The study revealed that an extract containing the colouring agent, but free of essential oils, was the most effective treatment for rheumatoid arthritis in lab rats.
The researchers believe that curcumin triggers a reaction that causes a joint-attacking protein to remain dormant in the body. The spice extract also blocks a pathway in the body that had previously been linked to bone loss. This has led researchers to believe it could also be used to treat osteoporosis.
Lead researcher Janet Funk says curcumin may also work in the treatment of other inflammatory conditions such as asthma, multiple sclerosis and bowel disease.
At this stage, the scientists say new drugs may be developed as a result of the research, but more clinical trials will be needed before they recommend turmeric supplements for treatment.
The bad news is they say that eating more of the spice is unlikely to have an effect on the diseases investigated in the study.
But cancer researchers in Houston are more optimistic about the positive effects from ingesting turmeric.
“Curcumin, as you know, is very much an essential part of the Indian diet,” says research leader Bharat Aggarwal, from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Centre.
Aggarwal says earlier studies suggest that people who eat diets rich in turmeric have lower rates of breast, prostate, lung and colon cancer.
The centre’s latest tests, carried out on mice, show that curcumin helps stop the spread of breast cancer tumour cells to the lungs.
Studies are also being carried out on people because there are no fears about safety using the spice, which has been used in India for about 2500 years.
“What's exciting about this agent is that it seems to have both chemo preventive and therapeutic properties. If we can demonstrate that it is efficacious in humans, it could be of tremendous value, but we’re a long way from being able to make any recommendations yet,” Aggarwal says.
The Harvard Medical School in Boston has also been testing curcumin.
“In animal models, curcumin and its derivatives have been shown to inhibit the progression of chemically induced colon and skin cancers,” an extract from research being done by the department of dermatology says.
“The genetic changes in carcinogenesis in these organs involve different genes, but curcumin is effective in preventing carcinogenesis in both organs. A possible explanation for this finding is that curcumin may inhibit angiogenesis.”
In person-on-the-street speak, carcinogenesis means the creation of cancer, while angiogenesis is a normal bodily process that helps wounds heal through the growth of new blood vessels from existing vessels. But it’s also a fundamental step in the transition of tumours from a dormant state to a malignant or aggressive state.
The Harvard study, therefore, indicates that turmeric can stop tumours growing and spreading through the body.
Turmeric also gets the big tick from the University of Maryland, which reports that laboratory studies suggest that curcumin may reduce the destructive activity of parasites or roundworms.
Conclusion of the online seeker: Add the golden girl of spice to your daily diet, but don’t go overboard. Too much of a good thing can definitely turn bad. Just know that turmeric is of huge interest to the scientific world and 1.13 billion Indians can’t be wrong. Eat curry.

Special spice of India

2007-08-26T22:17:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER

NEW ZEALAND-BASED Indians say turmeric has a special place in health, food and culture in their home country.
“It’s a special spice because we are using the turmeric in every curry to make a good flavour and a good colour,” says Gavinder Grewal, from New Plymouth’s India Today restaurant.
“It’s really good for health.”
She says that if someone is injured, they are given a drink of turmeric and milk, and if they cut themselves, the yellow spice is mixed with mustard oil and placed on the wound.
“It’s very good for the skin too,” Gavinder says.
Her brother-inlaw, Sunny Grewal, says turmeric works like an antibiotic. He recommends mixing a spoonful in a glass of water, with sugar and/or lemon to make it taste better.
“I was talking to grandma last night and she said in her day, every two or three weeks, they were given a drink of turmeric to keep the bugs away,” he says.
“People eat fresh turmeric for health – that’s the best way.”
Sunny says the fresh root looks like orange ginger, and can be used in dishes in the same way as its plant cousin. But he warns people to use it sparingly as the flavour is strong.
New Plymouth woman Madhu Rai swears by turmeric. “If your body is sore, you have turmeric in hot milk. It’s good for internal wounds, like when you have a baby.”
She also says in its root state, pure turmeric can be used as an antiseptic.
The spice also has a role in weddings.
Turmeric is blended with sandalwood oil and the women of the home rub the mixture all over the bride’s body. The same is done to the groom by the men of his house. This is part of a purification ritual, because the bride is going from one home to another.
Afterwards, the bride and groom each shower and dress in their marriage clothes ready for the ceremony.

FREAKY FACTS... Root of many names, uses

2007-08-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

1) Turmeric is used as a food covering and is listed as the additive E100 or as curcumin.
2) This multi-healing spice has many names. Turmeric (spelt tumeric on a Gregg’s packet) is also known as Indian saffron, haldee and yellow ginger; in France, Spain and Italy it’s called curcuma; and in Thailand its given name is kamin.
3) Yellow turmeric paper can be used to test for alkalinity, which turns brown. 4) When the turmeric roots or “rhizomes” are dug up, they are popped into boiling water for an hour. This is to stop the root sprouting, help with the drying process and evenly distribute the colour through the rhizome.
5) Once turmeric has been boiled and dried, it becomes rock hard through the gelatinisation of starches. This means the spice is almost impossible to grind domestically.

Warming world facing termination

2007-08-26T21:34:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
IT’S do or die time for human civilization.
That was the most powerful message to come out of a climate change conference for journalists in Wellington, New Zealand.
This dire warning comes, not from a new-age hippie, but a balding, bespectacled man in a suit.
“I think in the next 20 years we, human beings, are going to know whether or not the progressive effects, the impacts we are having on the planet, are going to terminate our civilization,” says Environment Ministry deputy chief executive Lindsay Gow (right).
He is talking about the end of the world as we know it.
“That’s the bad news. The good news is I think, amongst us, as a global civilization, we’ve got more than an enough capacity to meet that challenge and a combination of just smart thinking, doing a lot of little things and progressive use of smart technology is going to do it.
“We don’t have to be despondent. It’s not the sort of thing we have to shy away from. In fact it’s very exciting – it really is. It’s a huge challenge and New Zealand can make an enormous lot out of it,” Gow says.
Climate change writer Gareth Renowden agrees.
“I would say New Zealand is the lucky country. The reason being is that we are probably going to warm more slowly than everywhere else in the world,” says the author of the just-released book, Hot Topic (below).
“We are surrounded by great big cold oceans that are going to act like air conditioners for us. So while the Northern Hemisphere could be warming really quickly, we’ll probably be quite well off.”
The warming climate may also be good news for agriculture and horticulture during the next 20 or 30 years because it will help grass growth and provide more warmth to ripen grapes.
“It could mean 30% more area for growing wine across the country – you could be growing wine in Gore, which could be quite nice. Well, we’ll know when we drink it,” Renowden says.
“Beyond those 30 years it’s really difficult to say what will happen. I’m not very optimistic, frankly, unless we really do pull our fingers out globally.”
Although New Zealand is likely to be OK, thank you very much, it will be vulnerable trade-wise, because of world weather factors.
“If climate change is rapid and damaging in Europe or North America or Asia, we’ll feel that because it will be affecting our economy. If people suddenly stop being interested in buying New Zealand wine because they are struggling to deal with floods, we’ll feel that at our end as well.”
Because this country is so far from places like Europe, Renowden says we will be greatly affected if there is a crackdown on food miles. These are measured in terms of how much carbon is released from the burning of fuel to export products to the other side of the world.
There could also be restrictions on air travel, which would hurt New Zealand’s tourism industry. “This is isn’t a subject we can afford to lose on, because if it becomes established in Britain, for instance, that it’s really bad news to fly to New Zealand, even if it’s affecting only 10% of people, that’s 10% reduction in business from Britain and that’s very, very bad news for what’s our biggest export industry.”
To survive in this new economic climate, New Zealand has to join the carbon credit trading market, which it looks like doing.
Climate Change Minister David Parker says the Government is seriously considering bringing in a cap-and-trade market for carbon credits.
This simply means that big companies would buy permits to have a carbon cap rating put on them. If the company reached its target, it would be deemed carbon neutral. If it went under its cap by becoming even more environmentally savvy, it would get carbon credits, which it could sell.
Other businesses might go over their emissions, so to compensate they would be forced to buy carbon credits from New Zealand or overseas companies or miss out on trade opportunities.
It’s possible that carbon credits could become the most tradable commodity in the world, above oil and coffee.
Renowden says being carbon neutral will be a must, especially when dealing with Europe, which has taken an aggressive position on carbon trading.
If New Zealand doesn’t do anything, its exporters could face hefty penalties in the form of a carbon tariff or tax.
“But to be realistic, if we join the carbon club and get on with meeting the global targets, then we will be free to trade.”
Businesses are leading the way in bringing down emissions, Renowden says.
So, it’s possible and probable that it will be industries, not governments, which will save the planet.

Switching off for greater good

2007-08-26T21:26:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
THE man in charge of weather in New Zealand is switching off for the greater good.
Climate Change Minister David Parker, whose title instantly conjures images of a weather wizard from a Harry Potter novel, is doing his bit to stop global warming.
“In the flat I’m in I make sure I turn off the heated towel rail when I’m not there,” the list MP says, of his Wellington digs.
“I buy energy efficient light bulbs, unless it’s one (light fitting) that doesn’t take one.”
Talking to reporters at a climate change conference in the capital, Parker goes way beyond his own bathroom.
“There’s no doubt that climate change is happening,” he says.
The impact of melting polar caps and rising sea levels hit home when he attended an international conference on the heated subject earlier this year.
For two days, talking heads from around the globe talked about storms, escalating temperatures and the alarming increase of C02, which acts like a thermal drape preventing heat from the sun leaving Earth’s atmosphere.
While the topic was tossed about like a softball, a leader from Bangladesh sat patiently listening to the exchanges.
Parker says the man finally made his pitch. “He said ‘if the sea was to rise by one metre, we would have to move 30 million people’.”
That one comment stunned the father of three, who goes on to talk about the home-blown effects. “For New Zealand the results are less extreme but nevertheless serious. It will be wetter in the west and drier in the east.”
Parker also says there will be more storms and describes why in domestic terms: “It’s just like boiling a kettle – as it heats up it lets off more steam.”
Just like the sceptics, who Parker fobs off with facts and figures. “The scientists are more than 90% sure they are right.”
And with a warning: “The world only has a decade or two to get their emissions under control. The governments of the world are united on this subject.”
Apart from, he says earlier, the United States, Kazakhstan, and Australia, who are not among the 163 countries who have signed the Kyoto Protocol to combat global warming.

FREAKY FACTS... The heat is on

2007-08-26T21:19:00.000-07:00

1) Everything we do now towards reducing the greenhouse gases heating up our planet won’t be felt for another 30 years. This is called the climate commitment.
2) The world has already been heating up for 30 years, with global temperatures increasing 0.6 degrees Celsius overall. We now face another three decades of fast warming, with temperatures expected to again rise 0.6 degrees.
3) The main greenhouse gases caused by people’s activities are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and ozone. Water vapour is also an important greenhouse gas.
4) About 64% of the warming effect of greenhouse gas increases over the last 200 years is due to carbon dioxide, produced mainly because of human activities through using fossil fuels, deforestation and agriculture.
5) Records show that 11 of the last dozen years were among the 12 warmest on record worldwide – and it’s getting warmer.

Serious side of coffee

2007-08-14T02:55:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
THERE’S no stopping a coffee roaster browning beans.
Especially not those producing short, sharp, shots in New Plymouth, New Zealand.
“I’ll call you back in 10 minutes – I’m in the middle of roasting some beans,” says Inca-Fe’s Karen Hodson.
Ozone roaster Paul Newbold keeps checking the colour of his batch, leaping to action as the barrel roaster beeps, then opens the hatch for the hot beans to pour out for a quick cooling.
Wild Cat’s Jude Nagel explains why a coffee roaster relies on fine timing as surely as a stand-up comedian.
“It’s a matter of 30 seconds,” she says. “It’s so temperamental – a couple of flicks (of her bean testing scoop) and a couple of looks, then it’s gone too far.”
She roasts beans from Papua New Guinea, Columbia, Kenya and Guatemala in a 5kg Probat machine for her boutique business in central New Plymouth. Nagel holds green beans from different countries in each hand. Those from PNG are slightly larger and smoother than those from Columbia, which have a mottled appearance and cook faster.
These are all high-quality Coffea arabica beans, as opposed to the lower-quality Coffea canephora beans, known as robusta, not used by New Zealand roasters.
There is a third kind of bean, Coffea liberica, which has an acrid taste and has little economic significance worldwide.
She heats her machine up to 210 degrees Celsius, then adds the beans. The temperature immediately drops to 150 degrees and she ups the gauge to maintain an even heat of 160 degrees.
“You put in 5kg and get out 4.9kg,” she says, explaining how moisture is lost.
Nagel picks up a bucket of fresh beans and peels back the lid so the aroma of a French roast is released. “It’s the C02 that’s coming out.”
On storage, she recommends that people take their beans out of the bag they come in, pour them into an air-tight container and keep in a cool, dark place, like a pantry.
“And definitely not the fridge or freezer – that dries out the beans.”
Paul Newbold is hot on the roasting process, which he has been doing for eight years. “I’m definitely going for 10. I’ll be the old guy they won’t be able to get rid of,” he grins.
The Ozone roaster sweats behind a 12kg machine (a 45kg machine waiting in the wings), checking his batch with a practiced eye while talking.
He designs roasting profiles (cooking methods) for the origin beans Ozone gets from around the globe.
Newbold won’t reveal any of his secret recipes, but talks generically about the batches and more specifically about chemistry of roasting beans.
He says the first stage of coffee roasting is called endothermic, when the beans absorb heat. The second step, often called the first crack, happens when the beans double in size and turn light brown.
They then release energy or heat, which is called the exothermic step. This is followed by a short endothermic period, and then another exothermic step called the second crack, which is quicker.
“Most New Zealand roasters take 15 to 20 minutes to roast their beans,” Newbold says.
The cooling process should be done in under four minutes. “Otherwise the beans go dull – it mutes the flavours,” he says.
Jamie and Karen Hodson are immersed in the science of coffee, with a white board covered in chemical reactions and explanations.
Their expertise is the tasting, or “cupping” process, which Newbold also does at Ozone.
On their Inca-Fe boardroom table glasses are lined up like a five-against-five tequila slam competition.
Each 150ml glass is filled 8.25 grams of freshly roasted and ground beans. On one side, the beans have been dry processed while green and those on the other half have gone through the wet process. This means the just-picked beans have been fermented in water for 72 hours before being dried.
Our job is to sniff the grinds of each kind.
The dry-processed beans smell of blueberry and vanilla. Those put through the wet method have hints of Indian spices and are earthier.
“It’s quite a strict protocol for cupping,” says Karen. “This is the international standard for rating coffees.”
Jamie continues: “Cupping coffee is much the same as tasting wine and you are meant to spit. You have to, otherwise you’d go nuts.”
Next, just-boiled water is poured on the grinds until the glass is filled. After four minutes the sniffing starts again.
“Once the process starts, you don’t talk,” Jamie says.
He has cupped for up to two hours, testing 20 coffees in one session. “It’s quite intense.”
The now-steeped dry coffee smells of nutmeg and sugar, while the wet one gives off a whiff of hazelnut and maybe almonds.
Next we use a spoon to “break the cake” on the surface of the cup. The dry coffee is back to blueberry and the wet is now clearly hazelnut and vanilla.
Then it’s time to taste. We each have a larger cup to spit into, before sucking up coffee from a spoon. Karen and Jamie suck up their brew like kids supping soup.
They aren’t being bad mannered; it’s important to get air in with the taste test so the smell of the coffee is sucked up into the nasal passages.
“Flavour is made up of 80% aroma,” Karen explains.
The crema, or reddish-brown foam on a good cup of espresso, is similar to the head on a beer. “They are effervescent bubbles that burst. That’s why it’s important to have crema on espresso drinks.”
Just to prove a point, after the cupping is over, she makes flat whites with surfaces rich with deep veins of fragrant crema.
Learning the science of coffee is a big buzz.

Winding, wild path to best beans

2007-08-14T02:46:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
COFFEE lover Jamie Hodson has been living up to his business card.
“Poisonous snakes, narrow mountain passes, crazy bus drivers; the lengths I go to produce a good cup of coffee,” it reads.
The New Zealand man has been doing all that in Peru, in search of the best beans for Inca-Fe, the coffee roasting company he and wife Karen, together with Joop Verbeek and his Peruvian wife Carmen, have set up in the wilds of Waiwhakaiho, on the outskirts of New Plymouth.
This is a serious science, so Jamie and Joop went straight to the source. The men spent three weeks of seeking, sampling and securing sacks of green beans straight from coffee farmers and co-ops in the South American country.
Their quest began in Lima, population 8 million, and took them over the Andes to the lush, high-altitude jungles of Peru where the coffee grows.
“It’s the most beautiful and the most heinous,” Hodson says of the journey.
On the way they were forced off the road by mad drivers, and passed through the potently polluted city of La Roja.
“They have acid rain because they have smelters going and no restrictions,” he says. “Then two hours later you turn a corner and it goes from dust to jungle.”
The men met coffee growers, pickers and sellers, and tasted cup after cup of organic coffee, which literally left them flying. “Yeah, we did swing on a few jungle vines,” Hodson says.
As well as ordering stacks of sacks, the pair brought home a 30kg stash of samples, which led to a delay at Auckland International Airport. The beans were taken to the laboratory for testing to make sure they were free of pests, impurities and anything that could endanger New Zealand’s environment.
The beans were clean and now the pure science begins – roasting, blending, tasting and making.
All this for the love of coffee.

FREAKY FACTS... What's the buzz?

2007-08-14T02:29:00.000-07:00

1) A cup of coffee and a dose of daily exercise may prevent skin cancers, according to a new study by American scientists.
2) Research shows coffee may help manage asthma and even control attacks when medication is unavailable, halt a headache, boost moods and even prevent dental cavities.
3) Coffee is best grown at high altitudes, between 800 and 2000 metres above sea level, in hot countries, between Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
4) Cafes in Italy, New Zealand and Australia sell expressly espresso. That means they are only countries in the world to have 100% espresso-based café markets.
5) New Zealand is the land of the long white coffee. Together with Australia, it serves 98% of espresso-made drinks with milk. Italy serves just 5% of its coffee with milk.

Path to obesity begins in womb, study shows

2007-08-14T02:12:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
BLAME your mother if you’re overweight.
Sounds Freudian and perhaps a bit mean, but a breakthrough study on obesity indicates the path to becoming a podgy adult begins in the womb.
Scientists at Auckland’s Liggins Institute, led by director Professor Peter Gluckman, have been experimenting on rats to see if, or how, the nutrition of an unborn baby shapes his or her future.
Their research shows that if a mother has a poor diet during pregnancy, her developing child, or foetus, will predict a life where there is a shortage of food and will set its system to store fat.
This works if the child is born into a life of lack; but there’s a major mismatch when a wee one programmed for famine instead faces a feast, especially one high in fat and thick with fast food.
“It’s a fundamental breakthrough that says that the developmental stage is important, or even more important, in determining the way we live as adults,” Gluckman says.
Our inbuilt prediction system has buttons, which get pushed based on the information and environment a baby learns from in the womb and just after birth.
Gluckman says these buttons are called gene switches, which determine whether a child takes the high road to health or low road to obesity, heart disease and diabetes.
But wait – there’s hope. The direction can be reversed.
Sorry, not for us adults, or for kindergarten-aged kids and older. Your fat fate has already been sealed (although diet and exercise can make a difference).
Back to the rats. In a joint research programme with the University of Southampton in England, Gluckman and his team used the hormone, leptin, to dose the newborn offspring of rats that had been undernourished during pregnancy, and were at risk of growing into obese adults.
Leptin is a naturally occurring hormone that regulates appetite and signals to the body when it has eaten enough. The name leptin comes from the Greek word leptos, meaning thin.
“The pups that were treated with leptin went on to develop normally and did not become obese,” the study says.
Gluckman says early intervention, therefore, offers a chance for babies to turn off the obesity gene switch.
“We have proven it’s possible to do it,” he says, by cellphone from Southampton in England, where he is meeting colleagues.
But the window of opportunity is small. “We suspect, but cannot yet prove, that it’s from conception to a few days after birth,” he says, referring to the rats.
People are likely to have a better chance of change. “For humans – a year or two after birth.”
Gluckman envisages babies being tested to see which gene switch has been turned on, then treated to ensure they are on the path to being slim and healthier.
“Now we have got to find ways to do it that would be biologically meaningful and contextually possible for a human child.”
He doesn’t imagine radical or invasive treatment; instead he foresees the babies will be treated with a programme of nutrition and vitamins to get switched on for the true environment they will face – a world of plenty.
There are two processes that make the timeframe for reversal so brief, he says.
“One – the system itself becomes less plastic as it gets older.”
This means that when an organism is developing, its future is being moulded by its environment, taking signals from what is happening around them.
“Two – the switches do less.”
He says gene switches work throughout life, allowing us to grow, develop and build muscles. But as we grow, the switches don’t react so well, if at all.
Gluckman (left) likens the early gene switch process to what happens with honeybees.
Larvae that are fed royal jelly grow bigger, stronger and turn into queen bees, which can reproduce.
But if genetically identical larvae are fed on other substances, they turn into worker bees, which are smaller. “Imagine trying to have an adult bee turn from a worker bee into a queen bee – it’s not possible,” he says.
That’s why some adults struggle so badly with their weight. They were destined, from the birth, to be big.
So, to help break the cycle of obesity, mothers need to eat a balanced, nutritious diet.
Because that old adage “I’m eating for two” is turning out to be true.

FREAKY FACTS... Weighty matters

2007-08-14T02:08:00.000-07:00

1) Earth is getting weighed down with big people, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) figures. It says there are 1.6 billion overweight people and 400 million who are obese. If the weight-gain epidemic continues, the organisation predicts that by 2015, about 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese.
2) New Zealand adults are tipping the scales towards being too big, with 60% of men and 40% of women deemed as overweight. Of these, 20% are obese.
3) The most obese nations of the world are in the western Pacific. In Nauru, 80% of men are obese and 78% of women. Tonga is next, with 47% of men and 70% of women recorded as obese; and in Samoa the obesity rates are men (33%) and women (63%).
4) In New Zealand, Pacific island children are the heaviest with more than 60% either overweight or obese. Overall, nearly one-third of Kiwi kids are overweight (21%) or obese (10%).
5) The WHO defines overweight as having a body mass index (BMI) of more than 25, and obesity as having a BMI of 30 or more. BMI is a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in metres (kg/m2).

Sand slugs come slip-sliding from mountain

2007-07-24T03:01:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER

OAKURA man Gary Bruckner is standing in a wave-tumbling storm checking out the Kumara Patch.
But the board rider and teacher (right) isn’t sizing up the surf on Taranaki’s wild west coast; he’s sampling the sand.
To put it in literal terms, he was doing research for his Beaches and Littoral Sand Transport of Taranaki study, backed by the Royal Society of New Zealand and administered by the Government.
Put even simpler, he was watching sand movements along the coast between the Hangatahua (Stony) River and Kaihihi Rd (where the Okato pub is).
Or, in other words, he was surveying a sand slug, which is a large amount of sand that gets moved along the coastline.
In Taranaki, along with the weather, how much snow is on the mountain and the surf conditions, the coming and going of our black iron sand is a common topic of small talk.
That’s why Bruckner took last year off to stake out the Kumara Patch, one of Taranaki’s most-famous surf spots at Okato.
The Californian primary school teacher, who with wife Becky became a New Zealand permanent resident in 1990, was fascinated by the region’s ever-changing beaches.
He was used to white sandy beaches that stayed basically the same. In his new land, he noticed how Surf Highway 45’s beaches transformed dramatically from storm to storm, and sometimes for no apparent reason at all.
Bruckner refers to Ahuahu Rd. “I was amazed to see how much sand filled up that bay.”
He became curious: “Where is all the sand coming from and where is going to?”
The first time he walked the Kumara patch beach, it was all just rocks (see picture below, taken in March 2006). “No sand whatsoever.”
Then in 1998, there was a huge slip on Mt Taranaki and the Stony River filled up with sediment, destroying fishing holes, and pouring sand on to the beach, covering the rocks.
“That’s the first time I saw the accretion of it,” he says.
Accretion is the building up of a beach, which is the complete opposite to erosion.
Experts from the Taranaki Regional Council told Bruckner it took five years for the Stony River to flush itself out and all the fishing holes to come back.
A great fishing year was expected in 2003, with the trout back and thriving. But the mountain was having none of that. Another large slip fell into the river, filling it up all over again and sending another sand slug sliding along the coast towards New Plymouth.
The predominant swell direction, which comes out of the south-west, hits beaches like Opunake straight on. But around the bump, it comes at an angle, pushing the sand along.
The bays along the coast fill up with sand, then when they can’t take any more, the excess is washed along to the next bay.
New Plymouth oceanographer Peter McComb describes it like this: “A bay is like a cup. When you keep filling the cup, it will get filled to overflowing. Then the sediment (sand) has to be spread elsewhere.”
Dr McComb, of MetOcean Solutions, is a “big picture” man.
He says if it wasn’t for Mt Taranaki providing the heavy-duty rock armour for the region via eruptions, the bump would have been flattened thousands of years ago.
Even now the mountain continues to protect the coast by sending slips down the rivers to replenish the sand.

“If you turned off the rivers, eventually all the sediment would be stripped off the beaches.”
He describes the mountain as a “sand factory”, with the Stony River the most efficient chute for delivering sand because of its steepness.
The latest sand slug is making a difference to the beaches, but it’s not all good news. While Oakura Beach’s sand erosion problem has gone – for now – so have a number of good paua collecting spots.
Dr McComb says that while the beaches are growing at this point in time, geological time tells a different story. “Five thousand years ago the beach was right out here,” he says using an opaque window like a white board to draw a line out from Taranaki, flattening the bump into a gentle rise.
“Twenty thousand years ago, the Maui platform would have been dry just about.”
Bruckner’s study only encompassed a twitch of the eye, not even a blink in the time scale. He also focused on just a 2.38km stretch of beach, which he marked out with five stakes.
His studies took him there every week and sometimes more, especially in stormy weather when change was often more obvious.
He regularly took GPS readings to see how far the sand stretched into the sea and measured the changing contours of the sand.
During his year of sand watching, he saw the beach grow and go dramatically.
In September last year, the sand just north of the Stony River stretched 85 metres towards the sea. In October, it measured 100m and December it went right out to 150m, covering more and more rocks. “I have the information for January – it went out even further,” he says.
Even a wee lagoon formed high up on the beach, providing a private swimming hole for his family (pictured, right).
Bruckner has graphed and mapped his results, which show the beach is definitely growing.
He’s now passing the baton, or the stake in this case, to a Waikato University masters student, who will be supervised by coastal oceanography Professor Terry Healy.

Dr McComb welcomes the study, which begins in December.
He’s hoping it reveal new scientific data about the shifting sands of Taranaki.

FREAKY FACTS... A few grains of truth

2007-07-24T02:54:00.000-07:00

1) Sand is classified as any sediment between 0.125 and 2.0mm and is measured by using sieves.

2) A child’s beach bucket holds 3,500,000,000 grains of sand.

3) You can hunt treasure along the coast of Namibia in south-west Africa because there are teeny diamonds in the sand.

4) Someone who collects sand is called an arenophile.

5) The grains are green in Guam. The sand’s hue comes from olivine, a mineral found in basalt lava. The waves around the island wash out the lighter grains of sand, leaving the denser olivine crystals to create the green beach.

Midnight Assembly offers indie online network

2007-07-15T22:48:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER

ONE dark night Alex Matthews went hunting and came up empty-handed.
The teenager from Northland was armed only with a computer, a giant net, high ideals and a curious mind. His domain was the globe.
Matthews (pictured) is one of millions of young people who meets and makes friends, shares hopes and dreams, on the internet.
“This was during the time that I avoided school like the plague, and took some time to think about the world,” he says, thinking back to 2003. “I was on my computer looking for an organisation that represented the positive, proactive youth of the world.”
The then 15-year-old couldn’t find what he was looking for.
“I thought ‘hell, I have just found one of the world’s biggest niches’,” he says.
“I was so stoked. There was no question about it; I had to create the organisation.”
So he did.
It’s called Midnight Assembly.
Matthews (now 19) says the website is an online community for people who want to change the world.
If you can imagine Bebo, MySpace and even YouTube as pop music played on mainstream radio, Midnight Assembly is alternative music that would be aired on student radio by a DJ who does it for love not money.
Unlike the commercial sites, Midnight Assembly is a charitable trust, which raises money through grants, donation, sponsorship, fundraising events, “ambitious philanthropists” (take note Sam Morgan) and more.
It has three trustees. Matthews is chairman, Jason Hansen is secretary and Stephane Jansen is treasurer. Building of the site began in November 2003; it was launched in March 2004 and became a legal charity in 2005.
Matthews and Hansen met online, realised they had a shared vision and became friends.
Now they are trying to get their message out there, taking on the big sites. Like Taranaki Fresh Milk competing against Fonterra.
“The whole Bebo thing – I have no interest in them,” Hansen says. “They are good for keeping contact with people, but this (Midnight Assembly) is more than a communication device.”
Matthews agrees. “We can offer certain human emotions that the corporate online societies can’t. They exist to make a profit.”
To get a clearer idea of this online youth community, let’s look at the group’s pamphlet blurb.
“MA exists to create a new culture. A new generation of thinkers. A new future, which has self-improvement, self-awareness, proactivity and idealism at its heart,” it reads.
“More importantly, it’s not what we are – it’s what went want to be,” Matthews says, in person.
The idea is that this virtual world can step out of the computer to make things happen in real life.
“Youth cafes, art exhibitions, music concerts, software development, fashion, trading, an artists’ collaborate,” he lists the aims. “We only exist to make a useful service.”
Matthews fizzes when talking about Midnight Assembly, a secular site, whose name stems from a poem he wrote at age 12, and now relates to what he describes as “the most insomniac generation that ever existed”.
So these wide-awake livewires hope to inspire people to design and build architecturally progressive youth centres in prime inner-city locations around the world. These would have citizen’s advice bureaus, free community space for barbecue pits, sports and “whatever”.
“The new generations of Aotearoa and the wider world need a positive vision for the future of civilization. A holistic solution needs a holistic approach and it needs to flow and be exciting,” the pamphlet reads.
“We are a tribe in a global village,” Matthews says.
“We are creating the kind of culture that we think will be needed to secure a positive future for humanity,” he says.
Matthews now lives in Wellington, but “the where” is unimportant when you can instantly play backgammon with someone from Turkey, chat face-to-face via webcam with an old mate in London for free on Skype and zoom in on your own home using Google Earth.
The borders are coming down, as fast as the Berlin Wall, and internet communities are now real. The revolution of new thinkers is here, probably online, in a room somewhere, hunting in the dark.
And this time, http://www.midnight-assembly.net/ is there, just waiting to be found.

Late Gates nearly misses cyberspace race

2007-07-15T22:29:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER

MICROSOFT man Bill Gates nearly missed the internet revolution because of security fears.
Surfing the net was banned in all Microsoft offices in the first half of the 1990s to prevent rival companies getting access to the company’s trade secrets.
Each day, thousands of sensitive emails circulated around the 30,000 onsite intranet PCs and Gates (pictured) didn’t want this information going further.
So, to go online, employers had to sign in and out of computers in the main library or browse the net at home.
It wasn’t until 1994, when Netscape launched its free search engine service, which was downloaded by millions of people worldwide, that Gates realised that cyberspace was the way of the future.
Now, his free Microsoft Network (MSN) is one of the world’s leading social networks, along with rivals Bebo, MySpace and Facebook.

FREAKY FACTS... Web weaving world together

2007-07-15T21:52:00.000-07:00

1) Google is the number one search engine in the world, with almost three times the audience of nearest rival, Yahoo Search.
2) About 61% of New Zealand’s adult internet users bought something online in March this year, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.
3) The internet was invented back in 1969 by the United States Department of Defence as a means of communication in case it was attacked by Russia.
4) The world wide web was invented by an Englishman called Tim Berners-Lee in Switzerland in 1989. The first website was built at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (art at CERN, pictured) located north-west of Geneva. It was first put online on August 6, 1991.
5) Type “Bill Gates” into his own MSN Live Search engine and it comes up with 3,091,656 results. Rival search engine Google presents 21,100,100.

Twisted sisters have struck before

2007-07-09T03:36:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
AN exposed region of New Zealand has been walloped by a spate of tornadoes – and it’s not the first time.
That’s why, at this stage, weather experts don’t believe the July 4 and 5 events that hit Taranaki, on the west coast of the North Island, can be linked to global warming.
Between 1951 and 1970, the region was struck by 28 twisters, says weather expert Dr Richard Turner, of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) in Wellington.
The worst year in that period was 1956, when five whipped through Taranaki.
From 1971-90 there were a dozen twisters, which is another name for the speedily spinning elongated triangles of wind produced by thunderstorms.
We are now in another high-occurrence period, with 19 tornadoes recorded since 1991, including the region’s strongest twister and now the largest number in one hit.
According to storm experts online, a series of twisters from one thunderstorm is called “a family” of tornadoes.
About seven struck Taranaki at 5.30pm on July 5, with at least two of the family – we can called them twisted sisters – storming through homes at Oakura (see cars moved about in above picture, courtesy of Taranaki Daily News, photographer, Mark Dwyer).
There was also a lone wind the day before, on July 4, which whirled its way through central New Plymouth.
All of the tornadoes were spawned by thunderstorms rumbling over the Tasman Sea.
But there is no clear relationship between the tornadoes and a weather pattern, like El Nino, says Dr Turner, a mesoscale research meteorologist.
For now, he’s ruling out any links to global warming.
That’s backed up by National Climate Centre leader Dr David Wratt, also of Niwa.
“The conditions that lead to tornadoes are not built into climate change models,” Dr Wratt says.
But there have been significant changes in temperatures, which have been going up.
“There is more heavy rain in the west and less in the east, and that could be to do with climate change,” Dr Wratt says.
“There is some evidence there have been strengthening winds to the south of New Zealand.”
Dr Turner says the other place prone to tornadoes is Greymouth, which is on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. With the Southern Alps behind, it has similar conditions to Taranaki. But it’s the Central Plateau, not Mt Taranaki, which affects the weather’s big picture.
Unlike the United States, where the prairies or flat expanses of land are the most prone to twisters, New Zealand’s tornadoes are born offshore and then head towards terra firma.
“They form out to sea because there’s a good supply of moisture for the thunderstorm,” Dr Turner says.
Thunderstorms have columns of swiftly rising air, called updrafts. Sometimes these change direction, causing them to spin. When the outstretched spinning air is contracted, it rotates even faster.
“Like a skater spinning with arms outstretched and then when they bring their arms in, they speed up,” he explains. “The updraft can rotate at a rapid rate. Then the downdrafts come and they have the spin as well.”
This updraft, which is in the middle of the storm, sucks up moisture from the sea.
“And we get heavy rain out of it, or hail, which is a sign that spinning air is coming down closer to the surface.”
It’s from angry storms like these that tornadoes take shape, or get squeezed out of.
“Often times you can get thunderstorms rapidly rotating, but no tornadoes form. I don’t know if anybody has any really good answer as to why.”
Dr Turner says nobody has forecast a tornado in New Zealand. “You can kind of predict the environment that tornadoes can occur reasonably well. The problem is, nine times out of 10 a tornado won’t develop.”
In the US, there are “tornado watches”, which tell people that thunderstorms with the power of producing twisters are coming. Once the whirling winds touch down, the watch turns into a “warning.
“One problem with Taranaki, they tend to come off the sea, which means you can’t get away.”
Also, they happen too fast for a warning to be effective.
The worst tornado to hit Taranaki occurred on August 15, 2004, near Waitara. Most members of a farming family were asleep when a twister hit their home, which was lifted off its foundations and demolished. Two people died in the natural disaster.
That event was an F3 on the Fujita Scale, which goes from 0-5, with an F6 being “off the scale”.
Last week’s tornadoes were rated between F0 and F2.
New Zealand’s most disastrous tornado struck Frankton in Hamilton on August 25, 1948. It killed three people, injured 80 and damaged 163 homes, but was only rated as an F2. “It does not have to be an F5 to cause major damage,” Dr Turner says.

FREAKY FACTS... wildly whirling winds

2007-07-09T03:22:00.000-07:00

1) The world's deadliest tornado hit Bangladesh on April 26, 1989, in Bangladesh. As many as 1300 people were initially reported killed and 12,000 injured as a tornado cut a 13km-long track, up to 1.6kms wide.
2) Three out of four tornadoes in the world, hit the United States.
3) The fastest-spinning tornado ever recorded hit Wichita Falls, Texas, on April 2, 1958. It reached speeds up to 460km/h. This puts it in the “inconceivable” or F6 range on the Fujita scale.
4) In New Zealand, which is in the Southern Hemisphere, tornadoes rotate clockwise. In the Northern Hemisphere they spin anti-clockwise.
5) Hundreds of dead ducks fell from the sky 40kms away from the end of a tornado that whirled through Great Bend, Kansas, on November 10, 1915. That twister was so strong that debris from the town was found 137km away.

Educating fresh young minds

2007-07-02T20:09:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
TERRORISTS have planted bombs in an oil refinery in Singapore.
One explodes, pouring oil into the surrounding sea, endangering marine life and the beauty of this tropical place.
The rest of the bombs are ticking away and need to be defused, but it’s too dangerous for any human to enter the refinery site.
Instead, a crack team is charged with the task of sending in robots to deal with the bombs and mop up the oil.
The future of Singapore rests on the shoulders of these highly focused individuals.
They are just eight years old.
Thankfully, the scenario is fictitious.
But the Rulang Primary School students (pictured above, courtesy of Futurelab/Stakeholder Design) are making the robots, programming them and designing the computer software to direct them. They are also creating a communication plan to keep the “frightened” Singapore residents updated during the emergency and are also designing a business plan.
British science educator Sean McDougall says the year-long project is captivating the Rulang school students and the benefits will be obvious down the track.
“By the time they are 20 or 21, they will have a 10-year head start over children in the UK,” he says, during Efest, an online learning and technology conference held in Wellington, New Zealand, from June 25-27, 2007.
McDougall (pictured, left) isn’t there in person, but he is live and telling jokes about his home city, Belfast in Northern Ireland.
Like a sci-fi movie come to life, the managing director of Stakeholder Design is sitting in London in front of a camera. This is filming him, while at the same time he is watching us on his screen.
We can hear him, see him, interact with him and vice versa. He even takes our photograph and we raise our arms and faces obligingly.
On our stage is another, bigger screen, which he also controls from London. This projects a mixed-media powerpoint presentation involving film, photographs, graphics, graphs, and anything visually enticing to do with education.
We see the students of Rulang school concentrating on their robots and are also delivered a pictorial history lesson.

The latter painfully points out how our classrooms have failed to evolve in 200 years, while the students, who sit slumped in rows staring at an upfront teacher, are now cellphone-wielding communicators, who spend half their lives in cyberspace.
On the big screen, McDougall zooms in on some of the educational exceptions, including one captivating students through the movement and magic of water.
At Luckwell Primary School in Bristol the students have been given the task of making an “intelligent fountain” for their school.
They have all been creating designs and thinking about how it could move, look, react, sound and change.
On screen, teacher Sarah Payton talks about how the youngsters have been delighted by the idea of a real partnership with the teachers in making something come to life.
“They were really, really excited about it… that what they had to say was as important as what the teachers had to say,” she says.
McDougall says that with support from Futurelab, a multi-column programmable fountain is being built at the school and should be squirting water by September.
“The fountain is being fitted with stereo microphones and motion detectors, so it will be able to watch and listen as people pass by,” he says.
It will act like a speed camera so if kids run past too fast the water will stop. It can be used as a vote counter, and will even star as the lead performer in a school production called The Magic Wishes, in which the fountain chooses to be able to see, hear and have feelings.
Before making the big step from design ideas to fountain, the children are taught to take small steps – or their prototypes are. As part of the process, the students all make inexpensive robots, many with crayon feet that draw as they move. These are called "drawbots" (pictured, courtesy of Futurelab/Stakeholder Design).
The “wows” are heard as small sighs of longing by the teachers and parents who fill the Wellington Town Hall.
After his presentation, McDougall directs an activity in New Zealand’s capital, where we are his own thinking robots, and then takes questions from the floor.
But I corner him afterwards, via the now-traditional means of email, to ask his involvement in the projects, beginning with the Singapore mission.
Q: Who devised this school project – was it yourself?
A: “I wish! Actually, it was devised by teachers at Rulang Primary School in Singapore, using Lego Mindstorms robot components.”
He has had more involvement at Luckwell.
Q: What is your role in this project?
A: “I came up with the idea and am facilitating the process of discovery and creation. This really is a learning journey that has helped people to come together and figure out what the future of teaching and learning might look like.”

FREAKY FACTS... thinking outside the jar

2007-07-02T19:56:00.000-07:00

SCIENCE education revolutionary Sean McDougall shares his favourite freaky facts:
1. The world’s longest-running experiment is establishing the viscosity or fluidity of tar (which is actually a liquid). A piece of tar has been suspended for the last 77 years and, so far, it has produced just eight drops.
2. If you take production processes into account, it takes 170 litres of water to produce one pint of beer.
3. If you ask 1000 people to guess how many sweets are in the jar, they will almost certainly all be wrong. But if you then add up all their answers and divide it by 1000, the average will be within 1% of the right answer.
4. The elephant is the only animal on Earth with four knees facing in the same direction.
5. Albert Einstein kept identical suits so that he didn’t have to waste time thinking what to wear.

Darker side of chocolate

2007-06-29T02:18:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
THE mood-boosting properties of chocolate aren’t as uplifting as we hoped.
Three scientists from the Black Dog Institute in Australia have studied theories about the sweet treat and found them wanting.
Professor Gordon Parker (pictured), Isabella Parker and Heather Brotchie have not only found chocolate is no quick fix for depression; it could possibly make it worse.
The trio explored the theories that the dark-brown confectionary corrects a deficiency in the regulation of mood, that it corrects an imbalance in the diet, is addictive, is highly pleasurable and is a means of coping during a negative mood.
“Each of these theories is examined and – with the exception of the pleasurable effects of chocolate – all are found to lack substance,” they say in a research paper.
People who suffer from depression lack the neurotransmitter serotonin, but there is no evidence this is boosted by eating chocolate.
Instead, the chemical dopamine, which supports the positive reward system, including the anticipation of pleasure, is possibly activated by chocolate.
On the definitive front, the central OPOID system, which activates the sense of pleasure, is triggered by chocolate.
Their findings are simple, and sound like an advert for a confectionary company: “…chocolate is craved because of its unique sensory attributes, and eating chocolate is the only way to satisfy that craving.”
But they don’t think that “craving” qualifies as an addiction, and say that scientists the world over cannot agree on whether chocolate, or any other food, can be addictive.
People suffering from negative moods, or depression, crave carbohydrates (or sugars), not necessarily chocolate.
The Black Dog Institute scientists found that down or depressed people reach for junk food, but when they feel great tend to prefer healthy foods.
But the bad news is studies reveal that depressed people, who consume chocolate or other carbohydrates looking for a quick mood fix, actually end up going down.
While they might get temporary relief, it doesn’t last.
Carbohydrate consumption causes reduced energy levels in the longer-term and helps develop and maintain the depression.
“Furthermore, other studies have shown that resisting the craving produces a more positive emotional mood both in the short and long term,” the scientists say.
“Overall, emotional eating has not been found to have any real or lasting benefit upon a negative mood and in fact repeated emotional eating may in fact contribute to a negative mood.”

Chocolate hot as heart food

2007-06-27T02:53:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
SCIENTISTS are proving what lovers and females have known for eons – chocolate is good for the heart.
The darker the better the researchers say, because cocoa is rich with antioxidants that help prevent heart disease and strokes. These lifesaving chemicals also hunt and destroy cancer-causing free-radicals in our bodies.
New York researchers carried out a study comparison to find out the level of antioxidants in cocoa, green tea, black tea and red wine.
Cocoa won hands down. “It was almost two times stronger than red wine, two to three times stronger than green tea, and four to five times stronger than black tea,” says the Cornell University team, led by Chang Y. Lee.

“If I had made a prediction before conducting the tests, I would have picked green tea as having the most antioxidant activity,” he says.
Chang recommends having the top three in a day, with hot cocoa at breakfast, green tea in the afternoon and a red wine at night.
“Although you can enjoy cocoa either hot or cold, the hot version tends to trigger the release of more antioxidants than its cold counterpart.”
The researchers say it’s better to have the drink, with low-fat milk, than a chocolate bar. A 40-gram block contains about 8 grams of saturated fat, while a cup is just a fraction of that.
New Zealanders are switching on to the health benefits of cocoa-rich chocolate in a big way, says Whittaker’s marketing manager Philip Poole, Wellington.

The company introduced its 72% cocoa-infused block, Dark Ghana, just 18 months ago. “It’s our best-selling block now, which surprised us I must say,” he says.
Dark Ghana does not contain milk solids. “Which makes it very popular with people who have an allergic reaction to milk, and also with vegans,” he says, referring to the strict vegetarians.
Whittaker’s have also introduced its 62% cocoa blocks, Cacao and Mocha, which are also proving popular. “The dark chocolate sales have gone up 13% in the past year,” Poole says.
He puts the increase down to people becoming more discerning about what they eat and publicity about the health benefits of the side of dark chocolate.
“There are a number of studies that show the higher cocoa content, the higher level of flavanols that have these potential health benefits,” he says.
“They perhaps reduce the instance of heart disease and strokes. They have a similar effect to the ones in red wine,” he says.
Further studies from researchers from Germany and the United States have found the flavanol, epicatechin, which improves circulation, is prevalent in cocoa.
Harvard Medical School Professor Norman Hollenberg believes epicatechin is so important it should be considered a vitamin.
Hollenberg has spent years studying the Kuna people of Panama, who drink up to 40 cups of cocoa each week.
He discovered that the risk of stroke, heart failure, cancer and diabetes is reduced to less than 10% among the Kuna community.
“If these observations predict the future, then we can say without blushing that they are among the most important observations in the history of medicine,” Hollenberg, is reported as saying.
“We all agree that penicillin and anaesthesia are enormously important, but epichatechin could potentially get rid of four of the five most common diseases in the world.”

FREAKY FACTS... Mmmm chocolate

2007-06-27T02:42:00.000-07:00

1) Chocolate does melt in your mouth. Its melting point is 36 degrees Celsius, which is about the temperature of your tongue.
2) By eating 42.5 grams of milk chocolate, you get the same amount of protective compounds as in a 141-gram glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.
3) Chocolate manufacturers use 40% of the world’s almonds and 20% of the world’s peanuts.
4) The dull white film that appears on the surface of chocolate is called fat bloom. This is a problem of appearance only, as the chocolate is still edible.
5) About 28 grams of milk chocolate contains 6mg of caffeine, little more than the amount found in a cup of decaffeinated coffee.

Keeping eye on southern sky

2007-06-27T02:06:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
A BUNCH of Taranaki amateur astronomers have landed the job of patrolling the southern sky as part of an international collaboration.
The flipside is that astronomers at the Jarnac Observatory in Vail, Arizona, will also be able to check out the sky Down Under. And vice versa.
The night watchers, including comet spotter Rodney Austin, have been donated a $13,000 telescope (pictured) by American astronomer David Levy and his wife Wendee, plus the National Sharing the Sky Foundation.
Levy is a bright star in astronomy, especially because of his comet spotting. He has found 22 of the long-tailed icy gas-and-dust trails.
Together with Eugene and Caroline Shoemaker, he discovered Shoemaker-Levy 9. That’s the comet that collided with Jupiter in 1994, producing the most spectacular explosions ever witnessed in the solar system.
Austin says the brand new 14-inch Ritchey-Chretien reflector telescope touched down about a month ago.
“It came out of the blue,” he says.
Just like the offer of the telescope, made by Meade in the US.
Last year, Levy was a keynote speaker at the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand conference in New Plymouth.
“David fell in love with the place,” says Austin (pictured). “There wasn’t a cloud over the province for 10 days. We got talking one day and he said ‘we have this foundation and we would like you to have one of these telescopes’.”
From Vail, Levy tells his version.
“We were very impressed with the enthusiasm of the people there during our visit in June and July of 2006,” he says.
“And then after we returned to the US, we tried letting them have a remote observing session with our telescope here in Arizona. That also was successful. We thought that collaboration would be beneficial.”
Levy explains why. “They get a nice telescope with which they can observe the southern sky and we hopefully get to use it remotely once the details are worked out.”Using an internet programme, the Taranaki team gets the opportunity to look at the flipside of space.
“They should be able to make Northern Hemisphere observations as well,” Levy says.
Austin says the remote observing, including the practice session, is a breakthrough for Kiwi amateur astronomers.
“As a training run, during a massive thunderstorm we had here, a group of us operated David Levy’s telescope in Arizona by remote control. As far as we know that was the first time in New Zealand that a bunch of amateurs operated a telescope overseas remotely.”
The donation is another first. “There have only been four telescopes donated so far, and we are the only ones outside the United States,” Austin says.
The Taranaki telescope is to be housed at a secret location in north Taranaki. Austin says to keep whereabouts of the star-watching instrument safe, its whereabouts cannot be revealed.
But this is not a closed-scope affair.
“It’s not going to be a visual telescope – it’s going to have a camera,” he says. “It will take images. The idea of the project is we will use it to patrol the southern sky looking for new comets and asteroids, which are bits of rock in the orbit around the sun,” he says of the latter.
It was also be able to record novae and supernovae (exploding stars) and minor planets. The stargazers then go over the photographs taken, looking for changes in planets and any foreign bodies.
While it’s not officially a New Plymouth Astronomical Society project, members are involved and those who have expertise will be able to contribute, he says.
Housing for the telescope is still being built, but it’s expected to be up-and-scanning by summer. Then the universe will be at their fingertips.

FREAKY FACTS... So much space

2007-06-27T01:42:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
THE universe is unimaginably huge and filled with unknown stars, planets – and who knows, even life.
Just so you get an inkling of how huge the great beyond is, think about this.
Scientists estimate there are 10 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and about 10 billion galaxies in the universe.
It’s so big in fact, that the span of space is mainly measured in light years, or how far light can travel in a vacuum in one year.
That confounding figure is 9,460,730,472,580.8km or in more readable terms, nearly 10 trillion kilometres.
Here are some more staggering statistics:

1) If you were travelling at the speed of light you could fly around Earth’s equator seven-and-a-half times in just one second.
2) More than one million Earths could fit in our closest star – the Sun.
3) About 40,000 tonnes of cosmic dust falls to Earth each year.
4) Jupiter is as heavy as 317 Earths.
5) Wind speeds on Neptune, where the atmosphere is mainly made up of hydrogen, reach 2000km/h – 10 times as fast as the strongest tropical storms on earth.

Comet discovery better than a galaxy

2007-06-18T23:08:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
WHEN stargazer Rodney Austin found his first comet he shrugged it off as “just another bloody galaxy”.
The New Zealand astronomer found Comet Austin 1982 M1 (pictured) on a miserable night 25 years ago, on June 18.

With his telescope awkwardly mounted on a grass verge about 15km up a country road near the city of New Plymouth and the sky becoming increasingly hazy, Mr Austin was ready to head home.
He was making a final sweep of space, when he found something. “A fuzzy thing passed through the field and I thought ‘oh, just another bloody galaxy’.”
But when he got his low-resolution charts out, he found there was nothing marked there. He then opened his high-resolution charts, but once again found no sign of a galaxy.
With excitement rising, he headed home to his parents’ house where he battled his way through boxes stacked in his bedroom to find extensive field charts of space.
To his delight, Mr Austin found nothing marked on the documents, which meant only one thing. “It’s a comet – it can only be a comet.”
He checked comet documents to see if anyone else had found one in this area of the sky. “There wasn’t a comet within 90 degrees of it.”
Then it hit him. “It was like being punched in the stomach and I thought ‘I’ve done it, I’ve found one’. Then I thought, ‘now what do I do? It’s half-past four in the morning’.”
So he went to bed, leaving a note for his mother to wake him up because something big had happened.
“She came in and I was as white as a sheet. I sat up in bed and said ‘I found a comet’.”
Next, he got up and rang the Mt John Observatory in the South Island and told the woman on duty of his sighting. “She said ‘that’s interesting’.”
Her comment told him what he wanted to hear: “I knew I had a new comet. You see if it hadn’t been reported it was my comet.”
And it was. Three days later Comet Austin was ratified to him.
Mr Austin has found two more comets since – one in 1984 and another in 1989. The latter got a huge amount of publicity. “It was predicted to do what Comet McNaught did, but failed. If it had, I would probably still be walking on cloud nine and living on the proceeds.”

MAD SCIENTISTS - smile for the camera

2007-06-18T22:37:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER

COMET man Rodney Austin never assumes we are alone in the universe – and he’s extra polite just in case.
“When I go out there and set up my telescope, I always give the sky a wave because you never know who might be waving a friendly tentacle back,” the New Zealand astronomer says.
There are 236 other named planets around other stars and billions of galaxies in the universe. “There have to be planets that have life,” he says.
“Astronomy is full of nuts.”
The one the 62-year-old Taranaki man believes is most worthy of the mad scientist mantle is American astronomer and mathematician Percival Lowell (1855-1916).
While earlier stargazers claimed they could see canals on Mars, Lowell took it a step further, claiming they were irrigation channels (above) built by an intelligent life form.
“He even came up with a method to communicate with the Martians,” Austin says.
Despite being an eccentric, the scientist founded the Lowell Observatory on Mars Hill in Flagstaff, Arizona, and led the search for the ninth planet.
But he never saw the discovery of Pluto, because he died 14 years before it was spotted in 1930. Last year, Pluto lost its planet ranking, when it was officially re-classified as a dwarf planet.

Vaccine helps fight cancer

2007-06-13T04:26:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
THERE’S a war going on against cancer in Wellington.
At the Malaghan Institute, scientists are making a three-pronged attack on the disease, which causes nearly one third of deaths in New Zealand today.
One group, led by Professor Mike Berridge, is studying cancer stem cells (pictured) where the disease begins.
Another, headed by Professor Franca Ronchese is researching the different cells of our immune system responsible for fighting cancer.
The third group is the one at the frontline battling the disease in real-life patients.
This is the vaccine research group, led by Dr Ian Hermans, which is using the body’s own immune system to clean-up tumour sites in stage three melanoma patients.
Stage three is when the cancer has spread, or migrated to another part of the body and formed a new tumour. This is called a secondary growth or metastases.
It’s time to go into war-speak for better understanding of this campaign.
Imagine our bodies as land being fought over. In this land are many good citizens, which we will call normal cells. But some of these cells turn bad, dividing uncontrollably to form a group of abnormal cells called a tumour. This can invade and destroy the good citizens, taking over the land.
This is when the troops, in the form of the immune system, need to rally.
The “sergeants” are called dendritic cells, who tell the “soldiers”, or T cells, what to attack.
But there’s a problem. Because the cancer originates from normal cells or “good citizens” within the body, the sergeants often don’t recognise the enemy as foreign invaders.
To be able to fight back, the sergeants need to be able to know who to destroy.
This is where clinical trials project manager Julie Walton (left) steps in to “train” the dendritic cells of patients to identify the enemy within.
When Walton receives a tumour biopsy with sufficient usable cells from the Wellington Cancer Centre, she begins to prepare a vaccine for the person the cancer has come from.
She first kills the tumour cells so they don’t cause further cancer when injected back into the patient. The dead cells are then fed to dendritic cells grown from the patient’s own blood. The “sergeants” digest the tumour into tiny pieces and learn that this is the enemy.
The result is the vaccine, which is injected back into the patient. This time, the sergeants can recognise the invader and can correctly instruct the T cell soldiers to hunt out and destroy the tumour.
To ensure the immune system is fully informed, each patient in the clinical trial gets 13 vaccinations.
“As far as we know, we don’t know any type of cancer it won’t work with,” Walton says.
But the vaccine is not the start of the process.
Surgery and other cancer treatments are used first, followed by the immune system rearguard action to “clean up the last little bits of tumour remaining”.
“The biggest limiting factor with this is that we believe it only works with smaller tumours,” she says.
It takes 10 days to make the vaccine, and often involves 10- to 12-hour stretches of uninterrupted lab work
Walton says the vaccine research is a collaborated effort with the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane and started in 2004.
The trial aims to put 200 volunteer patients through the treatment and is now half way through. New Zealand is covering 10% or 20 of the patients involved and is on track to do so.
Volunteers are referred to the Malaghan Institute by their surgeon or oncologist, or other hospital specialist.
Asked if the trial is proving successful, Walton says it is too early to say.
However, the institute’s website states: “Previous clinical trials run by the Malaghan Institute have proven the validity of a vaccine for cancer, which is created in the laboratory from the patients’ own immune system cells and their cancer.”
Let’s hope the good citizens win.

Horseradish enzyme may hold key

2007-06-13T02:09:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER

HORSERADISH is at the centre of one cancer research project in Canterbury.
This is not the concoction you might dollop on your Sunday roast, but an extract from the plant, which is a member of the brassica family.
The Christchurch School of Medicine and Health Sciences study is looking at a possible new gene therapy approach to cancer treatment using the enzyme, horseradish peroxidase (pictured).
Researchers are observing whether the enzyme can activate the painkiller, paracetamol, into a compound that kills cells.
The school, which is part of the University of Otago, is doing other major trials into preventing, curing and treating cancer, especially leukaemia.

FREAKY FACTS... the cancer epidemic

2007-06-13T01:46:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
WHILE we may one day face another flu pandemic, bird delivered or not, we are already facing a full-blown crisis.
Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the Western World, including New Zealand. It’s only surpassed by heart disease.
Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in New Zealand women. For Kiwi men, prostate cancer is the No 1 foe.
But, according to the World Health Organisation and World Cancer Research Fund, we can do our best to reduce the risks.
Eating a healthy diet with five daily portions of fruit and vegetables, not smoking, staying physically active and maintaining a healthy weight, can cut the risk of cancer up to 40%.

Other scary cancer facts:
1) In 2005, more than 7.6 million people died of cancer out of 58 million deaths worldwide.

2) Based on projections, cancer deaths will continue to rise with an estimated 9 million people dying from cancer in 2015, and 11.4 million dying in 2030.
3) Child cancer patients in Third World countries have only a 20% rate of survival, while their counterparts in developed countries have an 80% chance of beating the disease.

4) There are more than 100 types of cancers and any part of the body can be affected.

5) One-fifth of all cancers worldwide are caused by a chronic infection, for example human papillomavirus (HPV) causes cervical cancer and hepatitis B virus causes liver cancer.

Sensor pod holds unlimited learning

2007-06-03T22:28:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
MICHAEL FENTON holds a black match-box-sized box and waves it like a sword.
The Inglewood High School teacher is showing how students might play laser tag with it at lunch-time.
Or they could use the “pod”, as he calls it, to measure, well, just about anything.
This wee sensor can gauge light, sound, heart rates, moisture, vibrations and even respiration. It runs on a watch cell battery and collects information in a microchip. It sends the data to a bigger black box, about the size of a block of butter. This is called the “hub”.
The hub feeds the data into a computer, which uses the software Fenton has written to interpret the material. On screen are four different graphs, showing what has been measured.
Fenton says the pod will be able to measure eight separate elements at once and be viewed on screen.
He (left, with student) envisages it being used to monitor an experiment in a school laboratory overnight and the students being able to check progress by logging on to the school’s website.
It could also be used to measure the pH balance of liquid, count cars, activate alarms and even help schoolchildren keep fit via the laser tag.
But can it make a cup of coffee?
Fenton says yes.
The pod can be two-way. It can send out signals and receive them, so could be easily rigged to switch on a coffee machine.
This may sound far-fetched, but the Taranaki scientist has been testing his Real-world Interactive Games and Electronics Link (RIGEL) system in true-life situations.
His lab rats are his students. It’s OK, they don’t get harmed, but they do get to extend their minds, think outside the box and come up with things to measure.
One of his year 13 students, Robert McEwen (17), has been trying it out in his own time.
“He’s bought some of this stuff (equipment) to try this at home,” Fenton says.
Another student, Sam McSweeney (17), has been enjoying calculus because of RIGEL and its inventor. “He puts it into real-life problems – like using a car.”
The pod can be used to measure engine performance, a fact that has revved up the boys in his class.
Fenton hopes it does way more than that. “This truly of national significance,” he says. “It can be used for cross-curriculum learning.”
The Ministry of Education is always talking about this concept, says Fenton, who has taught biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computing and electronics to tertiary level as well as at various secondary schools.
So, after two years quietly pottering away, he’s come up with a gizmo that embraces that idea.
“I can imagine that every student in a school could be issued with the device as part of their stationery – RIGEL becomes as essential as having pens or a calculator.”
He says the pods will cost about $10 per student, which is tens if not hundreds of dollars cheaper than any sensor system now on the market.
“They (other systems) are called data loggers, so this is the Kiwi No 8 wire version, but it works pretty well I reckon.”

MAD SCIENTIST - Dr Who comes to life

2007-06-03T20:10:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER

TARANAKI inventor Michael Fenton grew up on a square-meal diet of science-fiction television.

He feasted on the likes of Star Trek, Lost in Space, Dr Who and Land of the Giants.

“When I became a scientist I never did any of that stuff; nobody makes you invisible by accident,” Fenton says.

He’s done his best to create a few illusions for his daughters though.

Over the years, the Dr Who fan has co-created a full-sized Dalek robot (right), which the girls can climb into and make talk.

He’s also built a Tardis, which is a time machine in the shape of a police phone box. Daughter Jamie (14) says it makes the appearing and disappearing sounds it does on the British TV show.

For Christmas presents he creates computer games for his girls, including one featuring the cartoon character, SpongeBob SquarePants.

So far, his daughters have not been transported to alternate universes, been turned into flies or made invisible. And he’s never had to tell wife Christine: “Honey I shrunk the kids.”

Moving plates bending, stretching NZ

2007-05-20T23:39:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
NEW ZEALAND is in warp time – and it’s shaking us up.
No, we haven’t stopped the clock or begun scorching through worm holes in space. Instead, our landmass is slowly distorting.
It’s because we living on the edge, says GeoNet project director Ken Gledhill.
“We live on the boundary between the Pacific and Australian (tectonic) plates,” he says.
Global Positioning Systems show how our island nation is being pushed and pulled by these underground forces (pictured).
“It’s like a scissor action,” he says. “Us in Wellington are getting crushed and the people in the Bay of Plenty are being pulled apart.”
He is of course talking of our body of land, not our human frames.
“Where I’m sitting the plates are pushing together 5cm a year,” he says.
“The main effects on the upper surface are earthquakes.”
The GeoNet website explains. “The Earth’s entire outer surface is like a hard shell, which is made up of smaller pieces called ‘plates’. Under New Zealand, two of these plates are colliding with huge force causing one to slowly grind under the other; this ongoing process causes our earthquakes.”
Since May 1, there have been more than 30 decent shakes in New Zealand – four of which have been in Taranaki.
The strongest local shudder was 4.2 on the Richter Scale, recorded at 6.43pm on May 13. It was a short, sharp shock centred 10km south-west of New Plymouth, was 10km deep and felt like a truck passing by.
Nationwide, the biggest tremor was more than 10 times stronger than the New Plymouth jolt. It hit Nelson in small hours of May 14, measuring 5.4 on the scale and was 90km deep.

FREAKY FACTS...to get you quaking

2007-05-20T23:23:00.000-07:00

THE formiddable power of our Earth is seen in the wake of big shakes. Here are Five Freaky Facts to consider.
1) The largest earthquake recorded in the world in the last 200 years was the 1960 magnitude 9.5 earthquake in Chile. It caused 5700 deaths and produced a large tsunami that made it to New Zealand, flooding the Gisborne Harbour (pictured).
2) The only earthquake ever predicted was in Haicheng, China, on February 4, 1975. Few lives were lost in the 7.3-magnitude quake because 900,000 people had been evacuated.
3) The highest tsunami ever recorded hit Lituya Bay, Alaska, on July 9, 1958. It was 524 metres high, which would have swamped the world’s tallest building, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.
4) The biggest known earthquake in New Zealand was the 1855 Wairarapa quake. It measured 8.2 on the Richter Scale and shifted about 5000 km2 of land vertically.
5) Charles Richter, the man who invented the seismic scale, was a nudist. His wife disapproved of this so divorced him and moved to France.

Rockin' down Shake Highway 45

2007-05-20T23:04:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER

MT TARANAKI is soundly asleep, but you could still be shaken awake by a quake.
That’s according to seismologist Steve Sherburn, who is an expert on Taranaki’s tremors.
In the past 60 days there have been more than 30 shallow shudders on the coast, with about 25 of those in the Okato area, 26km south-west of New Plymouth, on the west coast of New Zealand's North Island.
Many have been too light to make the GeoNet website “recent quakes” section, but they do appear as splodges on a map that makes coastal Taranaki look like a teenager with severe acne.
New Plymouth looks worse, as if the pimples have become infected. While there has been less activity beneath the city, the quivers have been bigger.
Sherburn, from GNS Science in Taupo, says the cluster of quakes is normal for us. “The pattern that we see is fairly typical of what’s normal for Taranaki.”
That’s because of the Cape Egmont Fault Zone, which is a line of faults that run north-east and south-west off Cape Egmont. They are mostly offshore where there are no recorders, but the faults come onshore at the extreme west of the bump.
The fault belt heads towards Nelson and up towards New Plymouth, so the lines would look like 2o’clock on a watch face.
Our region is shaken between 200 and 300 times a year. “Some years there will be a lot more than that.”
New Zealand’s most active area is Matata in the Bay of Plenty, where there have been more than 700 earthquakes since November last year.
In Taranaki, we are having a normal year, says Sherburn, who has been one of Taranaki’s major fault-finders. A few years back he set up 70 seismic recorders around the region. For six months he monitored the movement of the ground and learnt something that will reassure those who fear our volcano could suddenly erupt.
In the whole time he took those recording, there were only three earthquakes under the mountain and they were “bog standard fault shakes”.
Sherburn is absolutely certain they had nothing to do with moving molten rock or gaseous liquids – nor have any quakes since.
“When volcanoes are waking up they produce a characteristic earthquake.”
These are, rather obviously, called “volcanic earthquakes” and their movement is not like a fault jolt.
“It’s more of a rocking than a sharp shaking,” he says.
It can, therefore, be picked up instantly by a seismologist, which is good news for those living in the shadow of Mt Taranaki.
“There is no evidence that it’s waking up,” he says. “Because we are not getting any now, hopefully when it does start to wake up, we will notice and, hopefully, get quite a long period of warning.”
But don’t start relaxing yet – there’s still the matter of the moving plates and our fault belt. Perhaps our surfing route could be renamed Shake Highway 45?

Time to tap into hidden power of waves

2007-05-16T02:36:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
THE oil and gas may run out, but the surf won’t. Taranaki’s wild Tasman Sea (right) could be the next natural resource to be harnessed in the search for a renewable energy source.
In fact, the waters surrounding New Zealand are just waiting to be tapped to make electricity, according to John Huckerby, executive officer of the Aotearoa Wave and Tidal Energy Association (AWATEA).
The acronym is a Maori word that means “new dawn” or “new beginning”, which the group believes is appropriate for this emerging technology. The full title explains the two ways the sea can provide energy – tidal and wave power.
The latter applies to Taranaki, especially the exposed south-west coast.
There are three types of wave device design but only two would be viable for Taranaki, Huckerby says.
One is the Pelamis Wave Energy Converter, which is the world’s most advanced technology.
“Some people call them the sea snake,” he says. “They look like commuter trains.”
The other is called a point absorber device, which sits vertically in the water.
Both use the motion of the passing sea swell to produce electricity.
“Wave and tidal energy is sustainable, clean, available, reliable and forecastable, We believe that New Zealand can source a significant proportion of its new energy supply from marine energy in the medium term.”
Huckerby says wave power Down Under is already a reality.
“It’s not commercial yet, but that’s not far away.”
An experimental wave device has been tested in Lyttelton Harbour since November last year, he says.
Other countries have waded right in. Britain has spent more than £50m ($NZ135m) in marine power projects. Earlier this year, £4 million ($NZ10.8m) funding was tabled to enable ScottishPower to build the UK’s first wave farm. Four Pelamis devices, with a combined output of 3 MW, will be placed off the Orkney Islands (below, left).

The world’s first commercial wave farm, the Agucadora Wave Park in Portugal, will be established later this year, utilizing the Pelamis device.
“The New Zealand Government has recognized the potential for this country,” Huckerby says.
If and when wave power projects take off, Taranaki’s wave riders won’t lose their special spots.
“No, the surfing community can be rest assured that it is unlikely to have an impact on them,” Huckerby says.
“It would be a coincidence if a project was near a surfing break – surprisingly, breaking waves have already lost a lot of their energy. The sites for surfing and wave power generation should be mutually exclusive.”
Instead, our region could safely ride the wave of a new energy resource that won’t run out.
Interest for Taranaki, particularly with its strong marine-related industries, is growing.

FREAKY FACTS... This one's for Simon

2007-05-16T02:20:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
THE dinosaur age is a passing phase.
It tends to hit kids, mostly boys, between the ages of seven and 13. Any longer and you could have a palaeontologist on your hands.
My husband wasn’t and isn’t a fan of the Rex family. He’s not an anti-evolutionist, it’s just that he doesn’t get the fascination with big beasts from millions of years back.
He prefers the Brutus maximums of the oval ball-throwing kind.
Our nephew in Lower Hutt, however, loves anything Jurassic. He can recite a whole list of spiny-saurus creatures from 213 to 144 million back.
In this family, we prefer their mythical look-alikes – dragons. But I was a follower of the Flintstones, although our Dino has always been a dog.
This week’s Five Freaky Facts are for Simon, and his mega-minded mates.
1) The word dinosaur actually means “fearful lizard”, and was first used by Englishman Sir Richard Owen in the 1840s when reporting on British fossil reptiles.
2) Not all dinosaurs were big. The carnivore, Compsognathus, which walked the earth about 131 million years ago, was about the size of a chicken.
3) The largest was the plant-eating Brachiosaurus, with a long neck and tail. It weighed about 31,480kg, stood 14 metres tall and was about 22 metres long.
4) In terms of life spans, we would playfully describe them as dinosaurs. Scientists believe that some dinosaurs lived for up to 300 years.
5) We know the movies Jurassic Park and King Kong are pure fantasy, especially because they mix their monsters. No Stegosaurus ever saw a Tyrannosaurus – the former having been extinct for about 80 million years before the new tyranny arrived.
Also, the Brontosaurus was a fossil before the T. rex appeared on the scene.

MAD SCIENTIST - Naked truth

2007-05-16T01:13:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
Eureka! Eureka! – there’s a tale behind these famous words.
While reading a book about Galileo, I learnt the legend of Archimedes and his bath-time brilliance.
My husband looked at me amazed. “What, you didn’t know that story?”
There’s always a first time for learning something, and maybe I was just more focused on the phrase than the reason for the exuberant expression.
From now on, I’ll be the one looking down my supercilious snout at those who don’t know the Eureka! story. To save you that embarrassment, here it is.
Greek mathematician, physicist and engineer, known as Archimedes of Syracuse (287BC-212BC), came up with the principles of buoyancy while taking a bath.
The king of the day suspected his crown maker of adding base metal to his headpiece, but he didn’t know how to find the facts without having it melted down.
This got Archimedes thinking.
The answer to the puzzle came when he was getting into his bath and water slapped over the side.
He realised that an object could be measured by the amount of water it displaced.
If the king’s crown was immersed in water, then the water it pushed out could be weighed. Archmides was so delighted with his discovery he leapt from the bath and, as legend has it, streaked bare through the town shouting: “Eureka! Eureka!”
The sting in the tale for the crown maker was that Archimedes proved the king had been tricked.
But more importantly, the scientist showed that metals have different specific gravities, which can be measured against the density of water. So there it is – the naked truth.

FREAKY FACTS... Loo IQ

2007-05-16T00:58:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
WOMEN have a trivial secret that makes them brighter with the cycle of the moon.
Especially those under the influence of Libra.
This has nothing to do with astrology and everything to do with, well, sanitary pads.
Some advertising boffin decided that if men can peruse the paper and magazines in the loo, us women can read the adhesive strips from our monthly protectors to improve our minds.
There are hundreds more where these come from, and they are purely the domain of us dames.
Here are Five Freaky Facts females may find familiar:
1) The koala is one of the few land animals that does not require water to survive.
2) The brain is 74% water.
3) When glass breaks, the cracks move faster than 5000km/h.
4) To survive, most birds must eat at last half their own weight in food each day.
5) On a clear, dark night a human can see a candle burning 50km away.

MAD SCIENTIST - Newton's 'elixir of life'

2007-05-16T00:45:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
Gravity man Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) has a lot in common with Harry Potter’s nemesis, Lord Voldemort.
Instead of focusing all his attentions on unravelling the theory of gravity, optics and laying the foundations for calculus, the Englishman had a long-time obsession with alchemy.
For more than 30 years, the Cambridge University academic sought the “philosopher’s stone”, also known as the elixir of life.
While this may sound like he wanted to live forever – and in a way he has through his scientific discoveries – Newton was chasing every alchemist’s dream. His aim was to turn base metals into gold or silver, a goal which remains the stuff of fairytales.
Newton was an incredibly focused thinker, who would sometimes lock himself in his laboratory for six weeks at a time, often forgetting to sleep or eat.
His experiments were also dangerous, especially when he was exploring the world of optics.
He once inserted a large needle “betwixt my eye and the bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could” to test another scientist’s theory that light was a pressure pulsating through the ether.
Thankfully for all of us, Newton didn’t suffer any lasting injuries from his self-inflicted tests, which now come with a warning – don’t try this at home.

Bets Mt Taranaki blowing top in 50 years

2007-05-05T23:05:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
IF betting agencies took punts on natural disasters, you’d be wise to put your money on New Zealand's Mt Taranaki blowing its top in the next 50 years.
You might not be around to collect the winnings, but your descendants would be toasting your foresight with an expensive bottle of champers, probably far from the poison ash fallout. Perhaps Paris.
Massey University scientists have fresh evidence the Egmont Volcano, as it’s known in geological terms, may have a history of violence even worse than previously thought.
So bad, that if it continues its destructive track record, there’s 50-50 chance it will act up before 2057.
Associate professor in statistics Mark Bebbington (left) has been calculating the odds based on a five-metre-deep core sample taken from Lake Umutekai, south-east of New Plymouth in New Zealand's North Island.
Imagine the sample as a standing pole with a series of horizontal stripes made up of alternating layers of ash and soil.
The ash tells the scientists when an eruption occurred and the soil in-between shows them how much time passed between volcanic events. The longest lull appears to be 450 years, while the shortest span is placed at 10 years.
Dr Bebbington says the ash at the bottom has been dated at 10,000 years old, while the top layer is just 1500 years old. The sample shows there have been 104 events in those 8500 years. But scientists know the mountain’s last blast was in 1854.
Unlike Split Enz, geologists and statisticians believe history does in fact repeat.
“Basically, volcanoes are recurrent systems,” Dr Bebbington says.
“The wild card is that we are saying that the past is the best model for the future.”
With that in mind, it appears Mt Taranaki could be in another long sleeping spell.
But then again scientists believed Mt St Helens was an extinct volcano. In 1980, the mountain proved, catastrophically, how wrong those experts were.
Not Massey’s mountain specialists. They know the 2518-metre-high cone is just biding its time to vent.
After examining the figures and working out a distribution system on that one core sample, Bebbington says there is a 33-50% chance of Taranaki becoming active in the next half-century. “That’s fairly conservative,” he says of the estimate.
That’s because there’s more. In fact, another core, this sample taken last year from Lake Rotokare, south-east of the mountain near Eltham.
“It appears there were quite a number of events in that sample that don’t correspond with the one from Lake Umutekai,” he says. What this means is that the chance of an eruption just rose – along with the eruption count from days gone by.
“My gut feeling is that there have been somewhere between 150 and 200 (volcanic) events,” Bebbington says of that 10,000-year period.
While the new numbers don’t go back as far as the 450-year slumber period, the ash deposits show that wind direction has a lot to do with reading the life-lines of volcanoes.
In other words, if the wind was blowing a different way during the volcanic explosion, the ash may have landed somewhere else.
The discrepancies between the two core samples show this.
But Bebbington says scientists are still trying to match up the geochemistry of the ash samples, so a final reading on the mountain’s fiery future is yet to be revealed.
Just know, there are sensitive seismic recorders all over the rising landmark, which is being (thankfully) stubbornly still.
There is movement though. “East off the end of Taranaki there’s some activity there,” Bebbington says.
These deep-earth rumbles may be a sign, a hint from down-under, that the sleeper is about to awake.

Maori sweet potato from afar

2007-04-29T04:19:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
THE great kumara conundrum is set to be solved, throwing up a bit of long-distance controversy on the way.
As you’ve tucked into your Sunday roast, or battled your way through bumpy purple skin inadequately armed with a (sweet) potato peeler, you may have presumed the roots of this vegetable are firmly embedded in Polynesian soil.
Not so.
Fresh studies from Massey University show the kumara hails from South America.
PhD student Andrew Clarke says linguists learnt long ago the word “kumara” is not actually Maori, but a word given to the sweet potato by South American Indians.
“The major thing we are interested in is whether Polynesians sailed to South America about 1000 years ago during which they collected the kumara,” says Clarke, who is studying at Massey’s Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution in Palmerston North, New Zealand.
“It was definitely in Polynesia about 1000 years ago,” he says.
Fossilised kumara found in the Cook Islands confirm this and now genetic fingerprinting shows that a family of sweet potato from Peru is closely related to those from Polynesia.
Maori brought kumara to New Zealand when they settled in these southern islands 700 years ago, and Captain Cook found it when he charted these waters in the 1760s.
While this may all sound ho-hum, the kumara connection points to a contentious scenario previously way beyond European imaginings, Clarke says.
If the kumara does indeed come from South America, then Polynesians must have undertaken massive ocean voyages through wild seas many years before Europeans could sail these areas. “It’s controversial because it’s such a long way to sail and then you are sailing into the wind,” he says.
Easter Island is the closest to the continent and that’s still 3000kms away, he says.

Kauri says 'no' to theory

2007-04-29T04:14:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
WHILE people today face the rising tides of global warming, some Kiwi scientists are debating flooding theories from the past.
Way back – about 30 million years ago – in the Oligocene period New Zealand was allegedly completely under water.
This hypothesis, released in a paper last year, is being refuted by Associate Professor Peter Lockhart from Massey University and a mighty tree.
“The kauri says ‘no’. It’s an example of a plant group that’s got an unbroken heritage with Gondwana,” he says, referring to the land mass New Zealand was part of before it began breaking away from Australia about 80 million years ago.
Fossil records and molecular clock dating show kauri was here 100 million years ago and has survived through the ages.
Dr Lockhart does agree that a great deal of New Zealand was under water in the Oligocene period, but for the kauri to have continued its family tree, unbroken, proves without doubt, the completely submersed theory can’t be right.
And what about our wee living dinosaur: “Where was the tuatara during this time – was it hanging out in hamburger bars in Sydney?”

Brains even brainier

2007-04-29T03:58:00.000-07:00

By VIRGINIA WINDER
REMEMBER that old threat thrown at people with a liking for liquor: “You’ll kill your brain cells and they won’t grow back.”
Here’s a slight reassurance – only the killing part is right.
Research from Auckland University’s brain research team has shown that we do grow new brain cells.
Professor Richard Faull and his team discovered that amazing fact back in 2003.
This year, they have made another major breakthrough.
“We have found the pathway which the new brain cells follow in the human brain,” Prof Faull says.
This finding offers new hope for people suffering from Huntington’s, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, plus stroke victims.
“It’s not a cure; it’s another means whereby we can help people with brain disease in the future,” he says.
“By knowing how stem cells move around, we can now look at new ways to regenerate cells and repair damage to the areas of the brain affected by these conditions.”
Prof Faull, originally from Tikorangi in Taranaki, has the more brains than anyone else – literally.
He is responsible for amassing the world’s largest human brain bank, which has provided the neurological material for his team to study.