Zack and Sam in Your-ami (Miami)

Zack, bottomless, is undergoing potty training. Here he entertains his sister.

Docs, Read This Q.D.

Medical quality maven Avery Comarow has just posted an item that doctors should read q.d.--that is, every day--to remind them of an easy way to prevent one kind of medical error.

Climate Change Will Grip the Heavens' Spigots

An article in the Washington Post today describes the likely effects of global warming on precipitation patterns around the globe. It quotes (on the second page) Richard Seager of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory saying that Dust Bowl-like droughts in the first half of this century will create "climate refugees." That phrase still gives me the willies.

The graphic that appears with the story indicates that Europe and Mexico are going to get particularly walloped by the drying--and what little rain does fall will fall more intensely; the article also quotes Stanford's Stephen Schneider referring to "more gully washers."

Darklessness

I've been thinking about it a lot recently. Now I'm typing about it--in the darkness. Or at least as close as my world is going to get to darkness this morning. I woke up at exactly 5:00 a.m., according to the only artificial light in my bedroom, the three glowing red digits of my alarm clock. And yet I could see quite clearly: my closet, the door, the art on the walls. And, of course, the outlines of the blinds on my windows, which do not fully obscure the urban light spilling in from the street outside. Even with the alarm clock's face completely covered by my hand, I could see just as clearly as before, by the city's glow, the artificial world around me.

Hence my small rebellion: I'm typing by the soft light of my laptop screen, and that light from the windows--and nothing more. It's still too much, in a sense. I can almost feel the ebb of melatonin from my blood. Among other things, that nocturnal hormone protect people against cancer. But melatonin flees the light, so my level of it is presumably now falling because of the increased brightness of my immediate environment. (That said, I just took 3 milligrams of the stuff in a pill, in an artificial effort to offset the effect of the artificial light.)

Darkness-less (or is it darklessness?) rarely leaves my mind these days. It was hard not to think about it when, for example, I went stargazing--meteor-watching, actually--with some friends earlier this week. Sunday night was said to be the annual peak of the Perseid meteor shower, so we drove to the darkest spot we could find within a few miles of our Washington, D.C., homes. Our driver turned off the headlights as we approached the site, knowing that other stargazers with darkness-adjusted eyes would already be there. To help our own eyes adjust, we used no flashlights as we climbed out of the car and laid out a blanket. And even then, we saw only a few shooting stars in the hour-plus that we spent lying on our backs beneath the sky. How many did we miss, how many passed unseen before our eyes, obscured by the glow of our nation's capital?

David Owen offers an answer of sorts--and much, much more--in a beautiful piece he wrote for the current issue of the New Yorker:

"Today, a person standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night would be unable to discern much more than the moon, the brighter planets, and a handful of very bright stars--less than one per cent of what Galileo would have been able to see without a telescope."

So, in another place, in another time, the three or four streaks of light that I glimpsed while watching the Perseids might have been complemented with several hundred other shooting stars. Instead, those glowing rocks, eclipsed by the spillage of light from the city, eluded my eyes. I returned home that night a bit disappointed. Like my vigil itself, the final glory of those meteors--the blazing arcs they traced in their self-destroying entry into earth's atmosphere--had been in vain. The light seared all.

Our world, it seems, has grown darkless.

A Bad Time to Blog

A short item buried in the Metro section of today's Washington Post offers a reminder, if we needed one, not to use corded electronic equipment when the weather is threatening.

On Wednesday, July 4, a D.C.-area fellow got a jolt when, during a thunderstorm, power surged into his house and into the computer perched on his legs. He's okay, thank Physics, but he -- and I -- relearned an important lesson: You don't have to be struck directly to be harmed by lightning.

Ironically, I, another D.C.-area resident, didn't even notice the July 4 storm. I was at my friend Stan's apartment, and we were too absorbed in setting up his blog, The Food Sleuth, to notice the storm outside.

We were using a corded desktop. Good thing we didn't experience a power surge.

Wheat Dust Can Cause Celiac Disease

In a brief, unusual report (password required) in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, researchers report a pair of cases of celiac disease in farmers who inhaled gluten while feeding their animals.

Celiac disease is condition that some people develop if they consume wheat gluten or certain related proteins. A gluten-free diet is the best way to reverse the abnormal reaction and prevent it from recurring. But a gluten-free diet, which was prescribed to the farmers by a doctor, didn't work. It was only after considerable investigation that researchers realized the farmers were still consuming the stuff: Gluten got kicked into the air each time they filled their animals' troughs, and they were swallowing enough of it to trigger symptoms.

When the farmers took additional precautions -- wearing a mask in one case and avoiding the task of filling troughs in the other -- the celiac disease resolved. Sounds like an episode of "House, M.D.," doesn't it?

As Cancer Drug, Shark Cartilage Fails Again

Yesterday, cancer researchers reported at a meeting in Chicago that a drug derived from shark cartilage is not an effective treatment against an aggressive form of lung cancer. That study is at least the second test of the putative cancer drug to produce disappointing results.

To date, no clinical trial has found shark cartilage to be effective against cancer in people. The accumulating evidence suggests that the lucrative market for shark cartilage supplements is based on, shall we say, shark oil.

Two years ago, Science News reviewed the evidence for and against shark cartilage. In lab tests, the substance has been found to counter angiogenesis, or the formation of new blood vessels, which is an important process supporting tumor growth. However, several previous trials involving cancer patients, including one that used the same drug as was used in the new study, have found no benefit associated with consumption of shark cartilage.