Periscope

DON’T throw that placenta away. Umbilical cord, thelifeline that sustains a baby in the womb, could provide a new lease of life to childrendoomed by ‘bad’ genes. A new study concludes that 80 per cent of children whowould otherwise have died of inherited immune disorders lived when they got a transplantof donated ‘cord blood’ from the umbilical cord, rich in Illustrations by blood stem cells that have the ability to become any blood cell and can be used toreplenish a damaged immune system. "Diseases, which in the past have been thoughtincurable, can now be cured if detected early and referred to appropriate resource-centresthat can treat paediatric patients with umbilical cord transplant," says Dr RickHowrey of Duke University in North Carolina, who led the study. Howrey and colleaguesstudied 50 young children who got transplants of umbilical cord blood from unrelateddonors. Of them, 45 grew new bone marrow and 34 are still alive. Overall, 68 per cent ofthe children survived.

Give Diesel The Boot

THOSE opposing the proposed ban on diesel vehicles inDelhi, note well: new research supports the charge that the stench, particles and fumesfrom diesel exhausts are clearly much more harmful than those of petrol vehicles. Dieselcars have improved considerably over the last 10 years, but exhaust emission controltechnology in petrol-driven cars has developed much faster. This is the result of a studycommissioned by the Swedish government and performed by the Swedish EnvironmentalProtection Agency. Diesel vehicles use 20 to 25 per cent less fuel. When they areadvertised, great stress is put on this fact as being very positive for the environment,as it helps to combat global warming. However, since combusting one litre of diesel oilproduces about 15 per cent more carbon dioxide than a litre of petrol, an increase indiesel car sales from 1 to 20 per cent reduces carbon dioxide emissions by a mere 1-2 percent. On the other hand, emissions from new diesel cars are estimated to be 3-4 times morecarcinogenic than emissions from petrol cars. Also, a modern diesel vehicle emits about10-15 times more particulates than its modern petrol counterpart.

Communication, The Old-Fashioned Way

FOR decades, archaeologists have assumed that cave artistswho painted Europe’s Stone Age masterpieces were intelligent and communicative. Butfollowing a study of the artistic abilities of an autistic girl named Nadia born in 1967,Nicholas Humphrey of the New School for Social Research in New York is convinced that thecave painters were "not the first artists of the age of symbolism but the last of theinnocents". Humphrey found uncanny similarities between the cave paintings at twosites in France—Chauvet and Lascaux—and Nadia’s drawings. Like Nadia, thecave artists often drew animals haphazardly on top of one another, a habit, which inNadia’s case, may reflect her autism, Humphrey says. Unlike normal children, autisticchildren often find it easier to focus on details in messy scenes and see camou-flagedobjects. Humphrey thinks artistic talent flowered in both the cave artists and Nadia, notin spite of mental deficiencies, but because of them. For, when Nadia finally acquired afunctional vocabulary around the age of 12, her abilities petered out. He thinks somethingsimilar may have happened to cave artists. "The loss of naturalistic painting was theprice that had to be paid for the coming of poetry," he claims.