A Poisonous Beauty Among the Samurai and Us

By: | September 16, 2010

In 18th century Japan, samurai women modeled themselves after the great beauties of the day. Like courtesans and geishas, they turned their faces into artists’ canvases, concealing their skins beneath a thick white paste. Then they applied the paint–thin charcoal lines for eyebrows, delicate crimson for mouths, and a dark black tint for their teeth. All this artifice, all this feminine allure came at a steep price, however. This week, Japanese researchers revealed that high levels of lead in ancient cosmetics likely poisoned generations of samurai children.

The Japanese team, led by Tamiji Nakashima, an anatomist at the University of Occupational and Environmental Health in Kitakyushu, Japan, became suspicious of the women’s makeup after testing skeletal remains from the Edo period ( A.D. 1603 to 1867). Skeletons from the samurai class contained surprisingly high levels of lead, far higher than that found among fishers  and farmers in the lower classes. Moreover samurai women were twice as contaminated as samurai men.

Puzzled, Nakashima and his colleagues began searching for the source. Historical accounts showed that the white foundation paste so loved by samurai women contained white lead. Brushing it on to their skins and inhaling paste particles, the women slowly poisoned themselves and unwittingly passed on the contaminant to their nursing babies. As a result, some young samurai children possessed enough lead in their systems to cause severe developmental disabilities.

Could something similar happen today? Out of curiosity, I decided to check with the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. Continue reading →

Strawberries in Space

By: | September 15, 2010
A fifteen-foot tall strawberry in front of City Hall in Strawberry Point, Iowa

I admit it: I’m a worry wart. Among the myriad topics that can perturb me is the question: is it safe to eat a strawberry? Sure, strawberries are rich in Vitamin C: just eight of them contain more of the vitamin than a medium size orange, according to the California Strawberry Commission. But conventionally-grown strawberries also have high pesticide residues, according to the Pesticide Action Network and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Pesticide Data Program.

Let’s not forget, either, that 90 percent of the nation’s strawberries are grown in California, where conventional farms still fumigate the soil with ozone-depleting methyl bromide. That’s due to be phased out under the terms of the Montreal Protocol, only to be possibly replaced by methyl iodide, a known carcinogen and neurotoxin. (In fact, so harmful is it considered that dozens of distinguished scientists, including Nobel laureates, have petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to prevent the registration of methyl iodide as a soil fumigant.)

The good news is that a new study shows that organic strawberries are not only tastier and more nutritious but also leave the soil healthier and with a more genetically diverse population of microorganisms. Continue reading →

Internet Astronomy

By: | September 14, 2010
Reddish elliptical, bluish spiral in Draco

In 2007, the Galaxy Zooites — 100,000 housewives, high school students, helicopter pilots, physicians, school teachers, truck drivers, secretaries, and a mobile home park manager from all over the world – got together on the internet under the guidance of some astronomers and classified galaxies.  Galaxies tend to be either spirals or ellipticals, computers are lousy at identifying shapes, humans are superb at it.  So the Zooites look at a picture of a galaxy, click “spiral,” next picture, click “elliptical,” and so on for a gazillion galaxies.  Toward the end of the year, one Zooite posted to the forum a picture of small, round, green galaxy.   Round or elliptical galaxies are huge and almost always reddish.  Spiral galaxies are less huge but still large and almost always bluish. Galaxies that are small are almost never round and certainly not green. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose & Some Urgent Questions

By: | September 13, 2010

I’ve never understood how we go about ascribing character traits to animals. Every cat I’ve known fits Abstruse Goose’s checklist, but aren’t we both just making stuff up?  No dog I ever had could remotely be described as “faithful” or “devoted;” they’re in it for the free lunch, period. Continue reading →

The Salmon Forest

By: | September 10, 2010

Something astonishing happened on Canada’s west coast in late August and early September, something that took my breath away. The sockeye salmon returned to the Fraser River in such vast numbers that fishery scientists could scarcely believe what was happening.  In July, they predicted a run of 11.4 million salmon. Four weeks later, when the sockeye began massing at the mouth of the Fraser, they bumped up the estimate to 25 million.

Then, on September 1st, as the fish began their arduous journey upriver, researchers came up with a new figure. As many as 34 million fish, they calculated, had entered the river–the largest Fraser River run since 1913. People flocked to the docks, snapping up fish at a $1 a pound.  Barbeques sizzled,  and all Vancouver seemed to be caught up in a kind of salmon euphoria,  a caloric contentment that looked to be contagious.

Lurking just beneath the festive surface, however, was a deep puzzlement. Recent years have seen a catastrophic decline in the Fraser River sockeye stocks, most likely due to a lethal combination of overfishing, habitat loss, climate change and diseases spread by fish farms. Last year, fewer than 2 million sockeye turned up–less than 2 percent of the river’s estimated peak levels–prompting the Canadian government to launch an official public inquiry into what had gone so terribly wrong. Continue reading →

Why Canada Doesn’t Boil

By: | September 9, 2010
Boiling

Heat rises, cold falls, and like a pan of soup on a hot stove, the earth boils, exceedingly slowly.  The boiling is called convection:  columns of heat rise from the earth’s hot core, move up through the viscous solidity of the mantle, cool at the crust, roll over and fall back down.  The crust that rolls along the top of the mantle is broken into continental plates which move with the boil, pushing up and apart where heat is rising, sinking under and down where the cold falls.  And thus the continents are recycled.  It’s all just physics.  But certain parts of the continents called cratons – places in, for instance, Canada, South Africa, Australia  — don’t recycle.  They just sit there while their plates move around them, they’re a couple hundred kilometers deep, they’re like stable keels, and how they manage the stability has been a mystery. Continue reading →

Lethal Weapon, Cretaceous Style

By: | September 8, 2010

Without a doubt, this one of the most beautiful and sinister-looking fossils I have seen in recent years. It is the exquisitely preserved hindlimb of a brand new species of carnivorous dinosaur, Balaur bondoc, discovered in Romania and described eight days ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  This creature dates to the Late Cretaceous, a time when rising seas had swallowed much of Europe, leaving only a sprinkling of islands. Balaur stalked one of those islands.

What we’re looking at here is the business end of this beast: a foot perfectly evolved for disemboweling prey. The big toe, the uppermost in the photo, is equipped with a large sickle claw that could extend outward to slash the soft underbelly of its prey. And if this weren’t lethal enough, the toe next to it was similarly adapted, making Balaur, whose name derives from the ancient Romanian word for “dragon,” a double threat. Continue reading →

Great Science Classics

By: | September 7, 2010
Happy Children

I’m a keen reader of the New York Times Book Review, and thanks to the wonderful New York Public Library, I’m able to read bestsellers soon after they are published. However, I’ve often thought that old books – both the classics and the more obscure tomes that one finds tucked away in dusty old bookshops – deserve their own reviews. Some are beautifully written but often ignored. Others are just plain weird, but worth a look (and a laugh). So here goes with my first “really old book review”: Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872.

Continue reading →