ABCDE HEALTH&SCIENCE tuesday, october 5, 2010


‘HEADRUSH’ Awesome


experiments On after-school TV, Kari Byron does cool stuff, like microwaving steel wool. E3


THEGREENLANTERN The ultimate


recyclable We’re reusing water that’s been around for eons. But some uses are more benign than others. E3


CONSUMERREPORTS


Picking an insurance plan Some advice as open enrollment nears. E2


5,000,000


Science students get stars in


BY ERIC NIILER Special to The Washington Post When the giant Green Bank Telescope


inWest Virginia got stuck in one position a few years ago, astronomers collected a big pile of electronic data from one part of the sky but had nobody willing to sift through it. So they did what many of us do for


boring chores: They found some teenag- ers. They set teams of high school science


students to scanning thousands of com- puterized “star plots” in search of pul- sars, blinking beacons of deep-space ra- dio energy that offer clues to the makeup of the universe. It’s been a galactic trea- sure hunt, and twostudents have already hit the jackpot. One was Shay Bloxton, a junior from Summersville, W. Va., who discovered a pulsar last October. “WhenI first sawit, I didn’twantto get


my hopes up,” Bloxton said. “Then they confirmed it a few weeks later, and I was really excited.” To find that pulsar, Bloxton spent


hours at herhomecomputer usingdown- loaded software that translates the data gathered by the telescope into graphs. The graphs describe the strength, fre- quency and distance from Earth of a source of radio energy; a series of graphs makes up a star plot. “I looked through 2,000 individual


plots before I found one,” Bloxton said.“You have to be able to understand a bit of science andwhat a pulsar is. It’s not extremely difficult, but it takes a while.”


pulsar continued on E5 JOE MCNALLY/GETTY IMAGES Artists Adrie and AlfonsKennis crafted this re-creation of aNeanderthal woman whose subspecies roamed Eurasia for almost 200,000 years.


theory says these early humans should no longer be dismissed as brutes


DAYNA SMITH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


Grace Shin, center, ofGeorgeMason University helps Daeyong Jang, left, and Sam Tsen assess astronomical data.


Evolving BY MARC KAUFMAN S


Public officials have an obligation to do more for people with vision loss


BY SHEILA SOLOMON KLASS Special to The Washington Post


Each day on waking, as I pad barefoot


to the door to get the morning newspa- per, I wonder: Will I be able to read the headlines when I pick it up? Yes, the headlines. Headlines, after all, are largeandset in


bold type. That’s what it has come down to.Oh,sure, withmymagnifier Icandoit. But I never carry my magnifier to the door; that would be cheating on the daily test I set formyself. I’m legally blind because of macular


degeneration, and I have glaucoma. What the normal eye can see from 200


feet, I can see from only 20 feet or less. I can read normal-size print in a good strong light, if I hold the book close tomy face. One and a half million Americans share the disability of legal blindness with me. Additionally, I’man 82-year-old widow in lace-up orthopedic shoes who spends a lot of time on the subway happily going about her business. Until five years ago, I had no very


serious laments about my body, which has servedmewell and servesmestill. Butnow. . .myeyes aregoing.Macular


degeneration is the leading cause of vision loss inmyage group,andmy vision is practically gone. What worse punish- ment is there for an English teacher, for a writer of fiction whose major sport is reading, for a person who worships the printed word? I was a nearsighted kid, and I’ve worn


glassesmy whole life. I putthemonin the morning and took them off when I went to bed. I was “Four Eyes” to the bullies in


cientists are broadly rethinking the nature, skills and demise of the Neanderthals of Europe and Asia, steadily finding more ways that they were substantially like us and quite different from the limited, unchanging and ultimately doomed inferiors most commonly described in the past. ¶ The latest revision involves Neanderthals who lived in southern Italy from about 42,000 to 35,000 years ago, a group that had to face


fast-changing climate conditions that required them to adapt. ¶ And that, says anthropologist Julien Riel-Salvatore, is precisely what they did: fashioning new hunting tools, targeting more-elusive prey and even wearing identifying ornaments and body painting. ¶ Traditional Neanderthal theory has it that they changed their survival strategies only when they came into contact with more-modern early humans. But Riel-Salvatore, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver writing in the Journal of ArchaeologicalMethod and Theory, says that was not the case in southern Italy. ¶ “What we know is that the more-modern humans lived in northern Italy, more-traditional Neanderthals lived in middle Italy, and this group that adapted to a changing world was in the south—out of touch with the northern group,” he said.


neanderthal continued on E6 OH,YUCK


Please don’t sneeze inmy entree Chefs need sick leave, too. The Checkup, E2.


The estimated number of men suffering from “manopause”— a late-life drop in testosterone. AnyBODY, E2.


their eyes Volunteers using data from a stalled telescope discover two pulsars and hunt for more


Neanderthals reimagined E EZ


Legally — but not quietly — blind


the P.S. 16 schoolyard in Brooklyn, but those glasses enabled me to see clearly and read all I liked, and that was what mattered. Duringmy late adolescence,my moth-


er began to point out that my marital possibilities were being destroyed bymy eyeglasses. She nagged me constantly to go without them. I pointed out that if I obeyed her, I would surely be hit by an automobile or a trolley car. So I grew up wearing glasses, and,


miraculously, I married a nicemanmany years aftermymotherhadgivenup hope. During the decades that followed, my prescription changed and my lenses needed strengthening, but I saw and I read and I wrote with ease. Then came middle age, bringing with


it the clouding blight of glaucoma in both eyes, with all its terrors. For years I dosed myself with various eyedrops several


sight continued on E4 YVETTA FEDOROVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


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