January 7, 2010
Newsmakers
HUMAN FUTURES: Peter Ward, UW professor of Earth and space sciences, crushed some cliches with lively responses in an article about the future of human evolution on the Web site LiveScience.com. Will humans evolve into creatures with huge heads to hold their huge brains, as seen in Star Trek? No, says Ward. “We’re already anatomically right on the edge of how big our heads can go.” Or will we split into master and slave races as imagined by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine? “That’s crap,” said Ward. “Why would that happen? Are we like blind cavefish? After we get Google, do we get stupider? Intelligence is coded on too many genes to just lose a trait like intelligence. That’s not going to happen.”
Ward also suggests that humans might converge as populations mix. “I kind of view us all as eventually having chocolate-covered hair and medium stature, getting rid of all extremes,” he said. “Of course, the big elephant in the room, the change from the past that you cannot ignore when talking about the future of human evolution, is genetic engineering.” Read the article here.
OSCILLATION: The study of media and its impact on attention skills such as studying is still in its infancy, according to a late-autumn health story in The New York Times that quotes Dimitri Christakis, UW professor of pediatrics and director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development. “The pace of science has not kept up with technology,” Christakis said. Commenting on a recent study that shows decreased productivity in adults who were multitasking. “The truth is you don’t really multitask, you just think you do; the brain can’t process two high-level cognitive things,” he said. “What you are actually doing, he went on, is “oscillating between the two.”
But Christakis speculated that teenagers might have some advantages in multitasking — partly because of greater mental dexterity and partly — “and this is the part we don’t understand … because they have come of age with these technologies.” Christakis added that parents are digital immigrants while children are digital natives. Read the story here.
AUTO-PILOT ANXIETY: Jonathan Bricker, an assistant professor of psychology, was heavily quoted in a New York Times story about the Northwest Airlines pilots who were huddled over their computers while their plane flew 150 miles past its destination. “The more sophisticated aircraft become in eliminating human error, the more we rely on them and (pilots) may not be attentive,” Bricker told the Times. While automation arguably makes planes safer, automated controls could make nervous fliers. “Add this to their file cabinet of fears,” Bricker added. Read the story here.
PASS THE HUHU: Two UW faculty members — John A. Marzluff, professor of forest resources and and John S. Edwards, professor emeritus of zoology — were quoted in an entertaining article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about researchers eating and the creatures they study. The article quotes Marzluff on the pleasures of eating roadkill: deer, elk, moose and even crow. “It is very good to eat crow, you know,” he told the Times. “Especially with a fine merlot. Really, it is good — rich, exotic, not too gamey.”
Edwards discussed, among other things, the consumption of huhu, which the article said is what New Zealand’s Maori people call the larvae of a large, wood-boring beetle, Prionoplus reticularis. Edwards said huhu are “index-finger size, soft-bodied, and juicy with a creamy veal taste. They are fine raw but better sauteed and lightly salted, with a nice dry sherry.” Hungry for more? Read the story here.
WOOD SMOKE: In a recent health story in U.S. News & World Report, Dr. Catherine Karr, assistant professor of pediatrics, said wood stoves rank alongside auto traffic as a risk factor for bronchitis, the leading cause of hospitalization in the first year of life. “Those infants who had more exposure to wood-burning appliances were more likely to show up in doctors’ offices or be hospitalized for bronchiolitis,” said Karr, lead author of a recent report in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. The study “lets families know about concerns about infant exposure to traffic and wood-burning appliances,” Karr said. She added that such appliances should be avoided or at least used as safely as possible. Her study included such pollution, she said, because “here in the Pacific Northwest, we have more exposure to wood-burning stoves than in other places.”
POT AND THE A.M.A.: A UW medical student helped spark the American Medical Association’s recent suggestion that the federal government reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous, “Schedule I” drug with no accepted medical use, according to a November article in the Los Angeles Times. The student, Sunil Aggarwal, researched the effect of marijuana on 186 chronically ill patients. “I had reason to believe that there was medical good that could come from these products, and I wanted to see AMA policy reflect that,” Aggarwal said.
Newmakers is a periodic column reporting on the coverage of the University of Washington by the national press and broadcasting services.
