DEEP FREEZE

Today we read the paper, had some coffee, put down the paper and went to check our freezer. We found some leftover casserole from last May and some chocolate ice cream that was white fuzzy with ice crystals. We found a few "dust- bunnies" under the freezer, too. Now if you are Aventis, you have discovered 90-million doses of smallpox vaccine. This seems a bit harder to misplace than casserole, but we are glad (we think) that they found it.
Vaccine: the word comes from "vaca," which is Latin for cow. Hence, we have Vacarros -- Latin cowboys. How the medical term and cows got linked together is directly related to smallpox. Cowpox is very similar to smallpox; however, folks survive cowpox more often. Edward Jenner (not to be confused with Richard Jenny, who said, "Never, but never, fry bacon naked") did some experimenting and observing of folks who'd had cowpox and determined that if you caught cowpox, smallpox would pass you by. This was too late (1798) for the American War of Independence, but medicine was still thinking in terms of 
prevention (rare for the time). Variolation was sort of a vaccine. In this case, a medical person would find a patient who was just starting to get the smallpox blisters, but was otherwise healthy. A blister would be punctured with a toothpick or the like, and the contents gathered in a quill. The variolation would be done by introducing the virus via a small scratch to a healthy patient. It was hoped the healthy patient would contract a mild case of smallpox and then be immune. It would on all be about one in 1,000 patients variolated. George Washington insisted that all of the men under his command be variolated. Most of the time this was done while the soldier was waiting for arms, clothing and other accouterments during the in-processing.In 1977, the WHO (World Health Organization) declared smallpox as wiped out. We can only hope to keep it that way.

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SOMETHING NEW IN SPACE

Astronomers searching for globular star clusters in a nearby galaxy have discovered an entirely new class of objects, unlike anything previously described. Much larger and fainter than typical globular clusters, the new objects were first detected in Hubble Space Telescope images of the lenticular galaxy NGC 1023. The discovery of these "faint extended clusters" was made by Jean Brodie, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and researcher Soeren Larsen. The astronomers described their most recent observations of the objects -- which they refer to informally as "faint fuzzies" -- in a report submitted to the Astronomical Journal. "It's no surprise that these objects had never been seen before, because they are very faint," Brodie says. "In all the data archives from the Hubble Space Telescope, there are only four galaxies for which we have good enough observations to be able to detect them." Astronomers have traditionally recognized two star clusters: open clusters of young stars in relatively small numbers, and globular clusters, of hundreds of thousands of densely packed, very old stars. 

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"SILENCE MACHINE" KILLS UNWANTED NOISE

Soon people will be able to silence sounds they don't want to hear, such as a power drill, without blocking the sounds they want to hear, such as a telephone, according to researchers at the University of Huddersfield in Yorkshire, 
United Kingdom. Selwyn Wright, an engineer, has developed what he calls the "Silence Machine," New Scientist reports. It works by analyzing the stream of sound waves from a noise source, and generating sound that is exactly out of phase to neutralize the incoming sound waves. The concept is already being used in noise-cancelling headphones worn by passengers in aircraft to hear the in-flight movie in peace. But Wright's system is the first that can block out a particular source of noise to produce a personal "sound shadow" in which 
everything but the unwanted noise will still be audible. Signal processors in the computer measure the frequency of every component in the noise signal, and use this information to create the anti-noise-sound with an identical frequency 
but the opposite phase. This means that a peak in the noise wave meets a trough in the anti-noise, canceling out the sound. 
 

By ALEX CUKAN(UPI) Copyright 2002 by United Press 
International and Heavy Sci. All rights reserved.
 

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