There was a lot of debate this week over just how much traffic the most popular weblogs receive compared to traditional media web sites and/or newspaper circulation. Here’s my take on how popular some of these sites are. This week I was picking up some comic books for my wife when the clerk said to me, “Hey, didn’t I see your name mentioned on Instapundit this week?” Okay, that’s one popular web site.
Day: April 13, 2002
If The World’s Population Was Shrunk to 100 People . . . You’d Have an E-Mail Hoax
People are always sending me a copy of an e-mail that begins, “If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people,” and then purports to say that so many would be illiterate, only a few would be wealthy, etc.
Snopes.Com has an excellent debunking of this e-mail. Suffice it to say the claims in the e-mail are filled with errors.
Source:
Aisle of Man. Snopes.Com.
Environmentalists vs. Animal Rights Activists
A federal appeals court this week heard a case that pits the National Audubon Society against animal rights groups such as the Humane Society of the United States and the Doris Day Animal League over a 1998 California referendum that banned leg-hold traps.
In November 1998, California voters approved Proposition 4 which banned body-gripping and padded leg-hold traps. The Audubon Society sued soon afterward arguing that the state of California had no authority to prevent federal wildlife managers from using the traps on federal land.
In 2000, a district court agreed, and the animal rights groups appealed.
The Audubon Society points out that without the ability to trap, protecting endangered species from predators becomes next to impossible.
TheHuman Society of the United States’ Wayne Pacelle said his organization offered a settlement but the Audubon Society was unreasonable. “We basically agreed that state law does not trump the Endangered Species Act,” Pacelle told The Mercury News.
But the Audubon Society says that the HSUS settlement did not go far enough, noting that there is also a need to protecting species that are not necessarily endangered.
The appeals court is expected to return its decision sometime in 2003.
Source:
Lawsuit tests conflicting animal rights. Paul Rogers, Mercury News, April 8, 2002.
In Defense of Animals Activist Sues March of Dimes
The San Francisco Examiner reported this week that Alfred Kuba, who runs a chapter of In Defense of Animals, has filed a lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court against the March of Dimes.
The lawsuit claims that March of Dimes’ “Be a Hero” “campaign is unfair, fraudulent and misleading in that it does not advise potential supporters that they will be supporting invasive animal research.”
According to Kuba, “They’ve [March of Dimes] been doing it [animal research] for decades, and it’s a money-maker for them. They’re not concerned about the health of the babies, they are worried about the cash.”
Of course the reality is that animal research funded by the March of Dimes has been instrumental in advancing the health of children and infants around the world.
Source:
Lawsuit rips into March of Dimes. Dan Evans, The San Francisco Examiner, April 8, 2002.
Researchers Partially Regenerate Spinal Cord in Rats
Researchers at King’s College London reported in Nature that they had managed to restore movement to rats that were paralyzed by injuries to the spinal cord.
Normally spinal cord cells do not regenerate for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that following an injury, scar tissue forms in the spinal cord which forms a barrier that nerve cells are unable to cross.
Researchers at King’s College used a bacterial enzyme called chondroitinase ABC that destroys molecules in the scar tissue and allows nerve cells a pathway to grow back.
Dr. Elizabeth Bradbury, who led the research, told The BBC,
After damage to spinal cord tissue, a complex jungle of molecules is deposited in the scarred area. Chondroitinase ABC acts like a ‘molecular machete’, cutting a path through the jungle of molecules that usually prevent spinal cord nerves growing back into these damaged areas.
When they applied the enzyme to rats, the animals recovered most — though not all — of their pre-injury neurological functioning. The rats were able to walk again, but did not completely recover all functioning in their spinal cord.
What does this mean for the ultimate goal of treating spinal cord injuries in human beings? Restoring neurological function is a complex task that will involve solving a number of distinct, but related, problems. This researcher suggests one approach to soling one of those problems.
As Dr. Bradbury told The BBC,
This is a great advance but not some sort of miracle cure. There are still many other blocks that must be overcome before complete spinal cord repair can be achieved in humans. In terms of treating people, we could see clinical trials involving this treatment as part of a multi-targeted therapy starting within the next five years.
Source:
Severed spinal cord regenerated. The BBC, April 10, 2002.