01/16/2008
A Heart and Antarctic Melting
This will be brief. One of the hazards of old age is falling. My wife fell last week and was in the hospital overnight before returning home. However, the pain was not under control and she is back in the hospital. Through all this I have not thought about the column until today.
I had planned to write about colliding galaxies and the universe but two stories seemed much more important for us Earthlings. Both made media headlines. One was the rat heart story, which I found in a news report by Josephine Marcotty in the Star-Ledger. A team led by Doris Taylor at the University of Minnesota stripped a rat’s heart of all its cells, leaving only the network of connective tissue behind. The researchers then took living cardiac cells from newborn rats and put them inside the scaffolding from the stripped heart. According to the report, these cells then grew into a fully functioning beating heart!
This to me is a mind-boggling feat and the implications for curing human heart problems are enormous. Of course, the problems remaining to be solved are also enormous and the growth of a viable human heart may be decades away. I imagine a future step will be to implant one of these “synthetic” rat hearts into a rat and see what happens.
The other story is of more global concern and deals with global warming. For years I’ve been reading articles about the situation regarding the melting down in Antarctica, with its huge volume of ice. As I recall, researchers seemed to be finding that, while melting of certain portions of Antarctica was speeding up, others parts of that frigid continent were picking up ice from snowfall. Overall, I got the impression that perhaps the melting down there was relatively small compared to the alarming melting and warming in Greenland and the northern Polar Regions.
However, according to another article in the Star-Ledger from the Washington Post, the picture has changed. Quoting Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lead author of a paper published online in the journal Nature Science, this benign picture of the Antarctic melting has changed. Despite the fact that most of Antarctica has maintained the same cold land temperatures, Rignot says that there’s now no doubt that the continent is losing ice. Furthermore, it’s losing ice at an increasing rate. In fact, the amount of ice loss is approaching the rate of ice loss in Greenland.
The scientists are postulating that the loss of ice is accelerating due to warmer water in the so-called Antarctic Circumpolar Current that flows around much of Antarctica. The current doesn’t appear to be well understood but it seems as though changing patterns have brought the warmer waters closer to land and the speculation is that the current is melting the edges of the glaciers deep underwater.
Well, this has been a hurried column and it’s time to check up on my wife. To finish on a lighter note, I took another look at the hat I mentioned last week, when I described the hat as being of a plaid nature. I decided it was definitely not a plaid and showed the hat to Harry Trumbore, our StocksandNews cartoonist. He suggested it was more like a hound’s tooth design. You could fool me.
Allen F. Bortrum
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