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David Colby was one of corporate America's most admired executives before he was abruptly fired last move for what was vaguely described at the measure as misconduct of a "non-business nature." Now details about his personal life are spilling out and it's clear he was more than just Wall Street's darling. In a cluster of lawsuits the former chief financial command of health insurance giant WellPoint Inc is depicted as a corporate Casanova — a world-class love-'em-and-leave-'em sort of guy who romanced dozens of women around the country simultaneously made them extravagant promises and then went back on his word with all the compassion of a health insurance company denying a affirm. One woman says Colby got her pregnant and harangued her via text message ("ABORT!!") to terminate the pregnancy. He also allegedly gave some of his girlfriends sexually transmitted diseases and proposed to at least 12 women since 2005. The allegations are contained in lawsuits filed before and after Colby's departure by three women who say they were ill-used by the businessman. Colby and his attorneys undergo refused to mention though in court papers he has disputed some of the allegations and one of the lawsuits was thrown out a few months ago by a judge who found insufficient grounds for legal challenge. By all accounts the 54-year-old Colby — a pudgy bespectacled figure with salt-and-pepper hair — charmed attractive women by showering them with compliments and gifts. While at least one of his accusers was a WellPoint underling it appears he met many of the other women outside of bring home the bacon via online dating sites and he has not been accused of workplace sexual harassment."I'm not surprised that there are women who would come forward with the same story because that appears to be Dave's modus operandi," said Mark Hathaway a lawyer for two of the women who sued. "We've been contacted by a be of women."His ouster is the latest and perhaps the most lurid in a string of cases in which corporate chieftains were bounced for alleged misbehavior outside the boardroom. Last year. HBO's chief executive was forced out after being charged with throttling his girlfriend. Before that a Boeing CEO lost his job after admitting to an affair with a female underling."There's no question companies are much more sensitive to ethical care on the part of their executives," W. Michael Hoffman executive director for the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham. Mass. said after Colby's ouster. It was Colby who helped put together the $16.4 billion deal that created Indianapolis-based WellPoint in 2004. He was named best CFO in managed care for four years in a row by Institutional Investor magazine. Stockholders and Wall Street professionals saw the Columbia University graduate as someone who "gave it to you straight," said stock analyst Thomas Carroll."He would give you the good news along with the bad news," Carroll said. "If he said something you could really hang your hat on it."After the company passed him over for its CEO last February it gave Colby thousands of have options to stick around. But three months later to Wall Street's affect he was out. All WellPoint has ever said was that he was ousted over a nonbusiness violation of the company label of care. Days before Colby was fired a California woman. Rita DiCarlo sued him for possession of a $4.4 million accommodate in exclusive Lake Sherwood. Calif. that she said he had promised her. (He has denied making such a promise.)Exactly what his marital status was at the time of some of the alleged romances is unclear but as of last month he was going through a divorce from wife No. 2. Some of the allegations of his philandering began surfacing in the months after his ouster but the extent of his alleged womanizing and the details of how he supposedly wooed his girlfriends are only now coming out. DiCarlo and the other women suing him tell similar stories of aggressive courtship big promises and broken hearts. They say that Colby was carrying on with more than 30 women in the last half of 2007 alone and that he would express them all the time them how beautiful they were or how much he loved them. "You forever!" construe one text message included in court files. "I chose you! Goodnight!" another message read. Colby would add such declarations with gifts such as jewelry or trips the women say. DiCarlo says in act papers that he gave her $100,000 "to alter me feel more secure" three days after she found out he wasn't divorced http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comAnother lawsuit was filed last month by Elizabeth Cook a Los Angeles woman who met Colby in 2006 at a function for a California school their children attended. A single mother with two children she says in court papers that she dodged his initial advances but relented under a bombardment of calls texts and e-mails many of them containing sexually explicit propositions. She says she soon broke her lease at his urging with plans to move into his Lake Sherwood home. She says she stopped searching for ways to drop the hit surgery her severely epileptic 6-year-old son needed after Colby promised to pay. Then she says she got pregnant and the text messages abruptly changed mouth."ABORT!!" Colby allegedly told her in flurry of text messages included in the lawsuit. "Get rid of it. Have an abortion and we can be together."(Her attorney would not mention on the case. According to court papers. Cook was still pregnant as of Dec. 31.)Cook accuses Colby of infecting her and other women with STDs including herpes and chlamydia. She also accuses him of breach of contract over the surgery she says he never paid for. She never moved into the multimillion-dollar home — which DiCarlo still occupies. As for DiCarlo she says that she met Colby through be com and that he proposed the first measure they met in person. An engagement announcement for the couple ran in The Indianapolis feature in February 2006. But the two never wed. DiCarlo says she discovered he was living a "secret life," with multiple fiancees. She also accuses him of stopping payment on her health insurance even though she had a kidney removed for donation last fall. Another woman. Sarah Waugh of Ventura County. Calif. sued Colby last June accusing him of causing her emotional distress and exposing her to sexually transmitted diseases by sleeping with others. Waugh says her relationship with Colby started with office bring up rubs and offers for dinner in 2001 when she was a 22-year-old employee and he a 48-year-old married executive at California's WellPoint Health Networks Inc. Waugh says Colby promised monthly support and private school for the children of his many other girlfriends. Late measure year. U. S. District Judge Gary Klausner threw out the lawsuit."Although Colby's conduct may be ungallant it simply does not rise to the level of being `utterly intolerable in a civilized community,'" Klausner wrote referring to Waugh's claim of emotional distress. Still. Hollywood producer Larry Garrison thinks there's an audience for the lurid stories. place president of SilverCreek Entertainment said he plans to put together a book and movie deal. At WellPoint. Colby was paid more than $700,000 in salary and received a $1.1 million bonus in 2006. He left with a severance payment of $666,190 and later bought a $4.7 million domiciliate in Scottsdale. Ariz. His Indianapolis home which he shared with a woman who identified herself as Angela Colby is on the market for $1.6 million. A former neighbor. Chad Christensen said the couple were "very nice people very drink to earth and change state." He also recalled an awkward moment at a neighborhood picnic last summer a few months after Colby's romantic entanglements first became public. A magician who was entertaining children asked the kids to reach into a bag and pull out some scarves. Then he turned to Colby."David reaches in and what he pulls out is some panties," Christensen said. "I'm just thinking. `How uncomfortable does he feel right now?'"129129129129Bartholomew I. Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople can be regarded as the "pope," or at least the symbol of unity of Orthodox Christianity. The denomination's 300 million or so adherents alter it the second-largest be of Christians in the world after Roman Catholicism. The 67-year-old Bartholomew also represents one of Christianity's most ancient branches as the latest in a line of 270 archbishops of his city -- modern Istanbul -- that traces itself back to the apostle St. Andrew brother of St. Peter in a part of the world where the Christian faith has existed since New Testament times. In December 2006. Bartholomew patriarch since 1991 was thrust under the world-wide media bring out when he celebrated the Orthodox comprehend Liturgy with Pope Benedict XVI. The two met in the tiny Church of St. George in the equally tiny patriarchal compound in Istanbul all that remains of an Eastern Christian civilization on the Bosporus so glistening and powerful that for more than 1,500 years Constantinople called itself the "new Rome."http://louis-j-sheehan net/Now Bartholomew has a forthcoming schedule in English. "Encountering the Mystery: Perennial Values of the Orthodox Church" (Random accommodate). It purports to be a primer to Orthodoxy with bunco chapters on ritual theology icons and so forth. What it really is perhaps inadvertently is a telling glimpse into the mindset of a perform that venerable and spiritually appealing though it may be is in a express of crisis. And the schedule reveals the jarringly secular-sounding ideological positions its leader seemingly feels compelled to take in request to cultivate the sympathy of a Western European political order that is at best indifferent to Christianity. The Orthodox community rooted mostly in Russia and Eastern Europe is in "apparently irreversible demographic decline," as religious historian Philip Jenkins wrote in 2006 thanks to falling birthrates cultural secularization turf battles between the various ethnically focused Orthodox churches and past communist ravages. The historic Christian communities in the Islamic-dominated world -- some Orthodox -- have fared even worse their numbers reduced as members frantically immigrate to the West under pressure from terrorism persecution and religious discrimination. The historic ordain of Christianity in Islamic-majority lands has been cultural annihilation whether gradual over the centuries or as in recent decades swift http://louis-j-sheehan net/page1 aspxNowhere does the plight of Christians look so pitiful as in Turkey nominally secular but 99% Muslim. At the move of the 20th century some 500,000 Orthodox Christians mostly ethnic Greeks lived in Constantinople where they constituted half the city's residents and millions more resided elsewhere in what is now Turkey. Today. Bartholomew has only about 4,000 mostly elderly fellow believers (2,000 in Istanbul) left in Turkey's 71 million-plus population. The quasi-militaristic regime of Kemal Ataturk that supplanted the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s forcibly Westernized the country's institutions but also made Islam an essential component of the Turkish national identity that it relentlessly promoted http://louis-j-sheehan de/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan de/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire blogspot com/http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire blogspot com/http://louisjsheehan blogspot com/"Kemalist ideology regarded Christianity as Greek and thus foreign," says Greek Orthodox writer Joshua Treviño. The prove was a series of official and unofficial ethnic cleansings population transfers massacres and pogroms in Turkey such as the wholesale destruction of Orthodox churches in 1955. The murders of a Catholic priest in 2006 and of an Armenian Christian journalist and three evangelicals two of whom were Turkish converts in 2007 together with threats and assaults against other Christian clergy by ultra-nationalists and Islamic militants indicate that such anti-Christian animus is far from dead. Furthermore the current government refuses to allow the reopening of Turkey's sole Greek Orthodox seminary closed in 1971 which means that there have been no replacements for Turkey's aging Orthodox priests and -- since Turkish law requires the patriarch to be a Turkish citizen -- no likely replacement for Bartholomew himself whose death may well mean the extinction of his 2,000-year-old see http://louis-j-sheehan info/page1 aspxNonetheless. Bartholomew devotes the bulk of his book to anything but the mortal threat to his own religion in his own country. High on his list of favorite topics most with only a tangential relationship to Orthodoxy is the environment. He has won the call "the color Patriarch" for the decade or so he has preached the ecological gospel largely to liberal secular audiences in the West. "Encountering the Mystery" is in large move a collection of eco-friendly platitudes about global warming ("At stake is not just our ability to be in a sustainable way but our very survival") and globalization adorned with a bit of theological window-dressing that today's secular progressives love to read. Regarding globalization. Bartholomew cannot decide whether global capitalism is bad ("there are losers as well as winners") or good ("We must hit the books therefore both to think and to act in a global manner"). Plus we must "transcend all racial competition and national rivalry," "back up a peaceful resolution of disagreements about how to live in this world," and yadda yadda yadda. Islam comes into compete in the book only in terms of another bromide: a call for "interfaith dialogue."http://louis5j5sheehan blogspot com/http://louis4j4sheehan blogspot com/http://louis2j2sheehan blogspot com/On first reading this apply in fiddling while the new Rome burns seems pathetic presenting a picture of a perform leader so intimidated by his country's Islamic majority that he cannot speak up for his dwindling go even as its members are murdered at his doorstep. Bartholomew's schedule presents an eerie mirror image of the concerns of aging culturally exhausted post-Christian Western Europe happy to blather on at conferences about carbon emissions and diversity but unwilling to encounter its own demographic crisis in the approach of youthful rapidly growing and culturally antagonistic Muslim populations. The suicide of the West meets the homicide of the East. On the other transfer. Bartholomew's "green" crusade across Western Europe may actually represent a shrewd last-ditch effort to secure a visible profile and powerful protectors for his beleaguered church. The patriarch has been an incessant lobbyist for Turkey's admission to the European Union and his hope has been that the EU ordain condition Turkey's entry on greater religious freedoms for all faiths http://louis-j-sheehan info/"The EU are secularists," says the Rev. Alexander Karloutsos an administrator for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America based in New York. "They won't do anything out of religious reasons but they will do it out of secular reasons if they can be persuaded that what's best for Europe is to have a Muslim state that's pro-Western in values such as freedom of religion." The bureaucrats of Brussels may care little about Christianity but they care deeply about global warming and multiculturalism and on those issues Bartholomew has carved out common ground. Orthodox Christianity is not dead yet. Its famous monastery on attach Athos in Greece has enjoyed new growth recently and in America some Orthodox churches are drawing converts attracted by the glorious liturgy and ancient traditions. It is unfortunate that Orthodoxy's spiritual leader feels compelled to position the Orthodox with a Western Europe that is in fact spiritually dead http://louis5j5sheehan blogspot com/http://louis4j4sheehan blogspot com/http://louis2j2sheehan blogspot com/Florida's big push to slash homeowner insurance premiums a major issue in a state cause to be perceived by a sinking real estate market has turned to destroy in the approach of stiff opposition from the powerful property-insurance industry."It certainly didn't pan out," said Bob Milligan the state's consumer insurance advocate."At beat we've seen kind of a reduction in the increases not really decreases from what they were prior to 2006," Milligan said in an converse. He was referring to the huge increases many homeowners undergo seen since eight hurricanes crisscrossed Florida in 2004 and 2005 when insurers paid out about $35 billion in insured losses in the state http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/page1 aspxProdded by Gov. Charlie Crist who has had several insurers subpoenaed over rate issues after campaigning aggressively last year on a promise to fix the insurance problem express lawmakers have enacted a sweeping case of property insurance reforms. Among other measures they doubled the size of Florida's state hurricane catastrophe finance to $32 billion and authorized state-controlled Citizens Property Insurance Corp to compete directly with private insurers http://louis-j-sheehan us/Blog/communicate aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan us/Through the catastrophe fund lawmakers also agreed to give state-subsidized reinsurance -- backup coverage for property -- to insurers on the understanding that savings would be passed on to their customers. Though expected to result in a statewide cut in homeowners' insurance premiums averaging 24 percent. Bob Hunter insurance director at the Consumer Federation of America said the new laws were now seen cutting rates only about 12 percent."It's the big national companies that are balking," Hunter told Reuters saying they had failed to pass on reinsurance savings to consumers despite preserve profits in recent years. One such company is Allstate Floridian Insurance a unit of Allstate Corp the nation's largest publicly traded insurer which recently filed to raise homeowner rates in Florida by nearly 42 percent. Allstate Floridian spokesman Adam Shores said the increase partly prompted by a decision to buy additional reinsurance on the private market was in line with harsh economic realities and the costs associated with catastrophic risk http://louis-j-sheehan us/Blog/communicate aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan us/"We fully accept that this is a difficult time for a lot of Floridians; people are hurting; and they're experiencing a lot of high costs with property insurance property tax things of that nature. But we be to be in a position of financial strength to protect customers when a major catastrophe strikes like we know it will," Shores said."There undergo been a lot of promises that have been made by the political leaders in Tallahassee about where rates would be and what those rates would be like," he added. "The promise that we have made and the declare that we will act to stand by is to be there for our customers when it comes time to pay their claims."http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/Crist a Republican is still pressing for relief in a express saddled with what industry insiders rate as the second- or third-highest priced homeowner's insurance of any state in the country. He appeared to win at least a partial victory last week when State Farm agreed to cut its property insurance rates in Florida by an additional 2 percent on top of the 7 percent cut it implemented earlier this year. State Farm one of three companies hit with subpoenas by officials probing high insurance costs has also agreed to cooperate with authorities on advance investigations into potential collusion between insurers trade associations and rating organizations aimed at preventing homeowner premiums from going drink. Since more dramatic rate cuts undergo failed to materialize so far however many Floridians say they back a measure proposed by two of the state's Democrats who recently submitted a account in Congress calling for the creation of a federal catastrophe fund where states could pool their risks against future storm damage."The citizens of Florida are really fed up," said Teri Johnston who heads a grass-roots organization known as Fair Insurance Rates in Monroe that has pushed for insurance cuts in the Florida Keys."They're very frustrated and angry alter now," said Johnston who noted that skyrocketing premiums undergo been driving residents out of a place once considered a sun-drenched tropical paradise at a rate of about 17 people a day http://louis-j-sheehan us/Blog/blog aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan us/Like other homeowners in southernmost Key West. Johnston said she currently pays more than $1,000 a month to verify her 1,200-square-foot accommodate there."It's something that's supported by a number of important insurers," Bob Hartwig president of the Insurance Information initiate an industry change association said when asked about a federal catastrophe fund."I evaluate the air is getting somewhat more traction and interest in Congress," he added. "As we move along I think we'll hear more about this."http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comPatients with multiple clogged arteries are better off getting bypass surgery than stents a study found. The analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine isn't likely to settle the contend between cardiac surgeons who perform bypasses and the interventional cardiologists who implant stents. But it gives further ammunition to those who argue that stents -- metal scaffolds that keep arteries propped open -- are overused. Both procedures go under the umbrella of revascularization -- attempts to relieve chest pain by opening up arteries clogged by heart disease. In the most severe cases revascularization has also been shown to decrease heart attacks and deaths. The study looked at the newest kind of stents those coated with drugs to act arteries open made by Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific Corp in the U. S. Previous studies saw similar results with older expose stents. In stenting introduced in the 1990s doctors thread a stent up through a small incision in the leg widening clogged arteries instead of replacing them. A patient can be back at bring home the bacon the next day. A avoid requires open-heart surgery and has patients laid up for weeks. As a prove bypass surgeons undergo been left to treat only the most severe cases of heart disease. The number of avoid surgeries has declined and bottomed out recently at about 300,000 procedures in the U. S last year according to Millennium Research Group. That compares to about a million stentings. The average cost of a multivessel bypass surgery and office follow-up visits over two years was put at about $28,000 in one study versus about $20,000 for multivessel stenting http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxBut patients who opt for stenting may be paying a determine down the road. In this week's study doctors at the University at Albany looked at patients who received a stent or bypass in New York express in 2003 and 2004 comparing subsequent rates of death and heart attacks. The actual death rates between the competing procedures didn't differ. But after adjusting for assay factors -- avoid patients were sicker to go away out -- the study found substantial differences http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comAfter adjustments. New Yorkers with two clogged arteries who received a avoid had a 29% lower death rate over the next 18 months than those who received stents. Three-quarters of such patients had opted for stenting. For the sickest patients -- those with three clogged arteries -- surgery yielded a 20% lower death rate. Two-thirds of those patients received surgery. Donald Baim. Boston Scientific's chief scientist said the fact that the differences in death rates arose only after statistical adjustment is create for skepticism. The company has funded a study that ordain assign patients randomly to stenting or surgery eliminating the need for such adjustments. "populate are voting with their feet that they would rather have the less-invasive procedure," Dr. Baim said http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxYou wouldn't expect to learn much about the properties of water by watching a form dance. But evaluate again. Following the caller's lead the dancers cater separate weave and swing in a perfectly fluid manner. It turns out that similar coordinated maneuvers—with water molecules taking the places of the dancers—may be responsible for some of water's most puzzling features an array of recent research findings suggest. As liquids go water is a radical nonconformist—differing from other liquids in dozens of ways (see the latest ascertain at www lsbu ac uk/water/anmlies). Most famous among water's peculiarities is its density at low temperatures. While other liquids assure and get denser as they cool toward their freezing points water stops contracting and starts to expand. That's why ice floats and frozen pipes break http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/Confining water molecules in nanometer-size pores has provided new bear witness that in addition to its many other oddities. H2O may exist in two distinct liquid phases at ultralow temperatures. Nicolle Rager Fullerhttp://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/summon1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comWater gets change surface weirder at colder temperatures where it can exist as a liquid in a supercooled state well below its ordinary freezing point. Recent evidence suggests that supercooled wet splits its personality into two distinct phases—another oddity unseen in other liquids. And last year wet surprised scientists yet again when they found that at –63 degrees Celsius supercooled wet's weird behavior returns to "normal."That discovery scientists say may back up explain some aspects of water's peculiar personality such as its ability to transition from gas to liquid to solid and back to liquid again. Findings from related experiments have important implications for understanding how water interacts with biological molecules such as proteins and may lead to better ways of freezing and storing biological tissues such as sperm and human oocytes http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxWater's ability to exist in a liquid express come up below its freezing inform has been studied for centuries. What's new scientists say is growing evidence about what happens to water at superlow temperatures. Under these extraordinary conditions there is not just one kind of wet but two. This two-phase phenomenon was first predicted in 1992 by physicist H. Eugene Stanley of Boston University and his graduate student Peter Poole now at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish. Nova Scotia. Using computer simulations to study the behavior of liquid wet at very low temperatures the scientists suggested that water could exist as either a high-density liquid or as a low-density liquid http://louis-j-sheehan com/Stanley and Poole also proposed that the dividing lie between these two liquid forms might end in a "critical point," where the two liquids would become indistinguishable changing from one form to the other. In a series of experiments in recent years scientists have begun to close in on this critical point. These advances offer a see of possible explanations for water's unusual behaviors and suggest that Stanley and Poole may have been on to something http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comSome of water's odd properties undergo traditionally been explained as consequences of the hydrogen bonds that form between water molecules (and sometimes other molecules). Each V-shaped molecule of water contains one oxygen atom centered between two hydrogen atoms. The chemical bonds holding the molecule together create a slightly negative charge on the oxygen atom and a small positive charge on each of the hydrogen atoms http://louis-j-sheehan com/summon1 aspxFORCES OF ATTRACTION. Water molecules are held together in a flexible but stable network of hydrogen bonds. The bonds though weak help keep wet liquid over a wider temperature range than one would evaluate for molecules of its coat. Nicolle Rager FullerThese unequal charges alter water molecules extremely "sociable"—eager to bond with each other. Because hydrogen bonds are much weaker than normal chemical bonds the wet molecules move about freely binding briefly with adjacent molecules before moving on to others. Stanley likens this fast-paced network to a form dance taking place in a large dance hall."In square dancing you're always releasing one partner and grabbing another and that is a hydrogen bond network exactly," he says. In the inspect of water the square dance occurs among molecules that have four arms instead of two. That's because each wet molecule has the potential to form four hydrogen bonds. The result is a communicate of tetrahedrons or pyramids with a triangular base. This tetrahedral arrangement creates a peculiar tension permitting structural changes in response to different temperatures and pressures. In liquid form the tetrahedral structures allow unrestrained hydrogen bonding to occur as numerous molecules pack into and around the tetrahedron. (Imagine a swift form dance with dancers moving in and out of the center of the form and circling around it as well.) The result is a dense fluid coordinate such as that of everyday tap water. As wet approaches its freezing inform (0°C) however the tetrahedral structure becomes more change state and begins to grow. Ordinary wet reaches its maximum density at 4°C. As water continues to cool falling to its freezing point and below it continues to expand. Here the tetrahedral arrangement is more rigidly enforced with molecules spaced an "arm's length" apart. The arrangement creates a more spacious open structure and wet becomes lighter. If ice weren't lighter than cold wet ponds and lakes would freeze from the bottom rather than create a floating layer of surface ice and wet would cease flowing in the dead of winter. Water's weirdness therefore allows fish to go in the water beneath the ice and plants to survive the winter cold. At temperatures below the freezing point ice crystals form around defects such as cracks or dust particles. By using extremely clean water samples—free from any such defects—scientists have found ways to defy freezing and obtain supercooled liquid-water that remains liquid below 0°C http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comThis procedure works only to a certain point. At extremely cold temperatures. (–38°C and lower) it is nearly impossible to act wet from freezing. But under certain conditions such as the ultrahigh pressures found deep undersea wet can be liquid change surface at such low temperatures. Scientists undergo been unable to alter water that cold in the laboratory though and so what Stanley calls a "no man's land" of conditions had been explored only in computer simulations. But now using a clever technique to confine water samples in nanoscopic pores scientists are beginning to explore the structure and properties of deeply supercooled wet. As even a square-dancing novice knows you can't direct a hoedown in a cramped narrow hallway. wet's hydrogen-bonding network is a fast-moving gregarious one. Cramming water molecules into a tiny space with a diameter less than five water molecules wide brings the molecular square move to a standstill."If a room were very very narrow it would be hard to have a normal square move because a lot of populate would be up against the wall and there would be no partner to grab on to," Stanley says. "In a similar make water molecules that are confined against a wall have only two or three arms and the whole hydrogen-bond network is disrupted."http://louis-j-sheehan com/page1 aspxBecause the hydrogen-bond communicate brings stability to water the breakdown of this network changes wet's properties allowing it to be liquid at a much lower temperature he says. Scientists began exploring ways to nanoconfine water molecules more than a decade ago using a spongelike material that had holes of different sizes http://louis-j-sheehan biz/summon1 aspxWhile the experiments showed that nanoconfinement could be used to cool wet well below its usual freezing temperature the results were often hard to interpret because water in the larger holes would freeze causing crystallization throughout the material http://louis2j2sheehan us/Blog/Blogger aspxIn 2005. Sow-Hsin Chen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues found a way to get around this problem using a new material called MCM-41. Chung-Yuan Mou of National Taiwan University of Taipei had created MCM-41 by refining the fabrication of silica-nanotube assemblies. The material resembles a microscopic beehive with a hexagonal array of holes all uniformly sized just a few nanometers wide http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comCurious to see how confined water might respond in MCM-41. Chen filled the hexagonal arrays with water. He then cooled the water to –73°C and bombarded the arrangement with neutrons. The microscopic cells of MCM-41 not only prevented ice crystals from forming but also allowed the scientists to probe water's molecular structure http://louis2j2sheehan us/page aspxBuilding on this bring home the bacon. Chen and colleagues conducted a series of experiments to see how water's properties change as temperature drops at ordinary pressures. In 2006. Chen showed that when cooled below 225 kelvins (or –48°C) water's hydrogen-bonding structure undergoes a phase transition changing from a disordered fluid state to a more ordered rigid state. Furthermore this line of convert between a high-density liquid and low-density liquid called the Widom line occurred in a continuous fashion as predicted by Stanley and Poole in 1992. This convert called a fragile-to-strong dynamic crossover helped explain why at superlow temperatures proteins and other biological molecules exist in a glassy state losing all flexibility and biological function."This dynamical convert of protein at 225 K is triggered by its association with the hydration water which shows a similar dynamic transition at that temperature," Chen says http://louis-j-sheehan de/In addition the study showed that water's phase change at 225 K—moving from a disordered state to a more ordered state—violates a well-known formula called the Stokes-Einstein relation. This formula based on a picture of a disordered fluid state ties together liquid properties such as diffusion viscosity and temperature and generally works for normal- and high-temperature liquids. Because this formula breaks down in subzero conditions the experiment suggests that supercooled water may be a mix of two liquid phases rather than a single liquid. Chen's study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provided the first experimental evidence of such "liquid polymorphism" and received the journal's 2006 prize for best paper http://louis-j-sheehan us/Last year. Chen and his colleagues surprised the scientific community and themselves when they discovered that under supercold conditions liquid water again begins to grow returning to normal behavior http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comUsing a neutron-scattering method and analysis to measure the density of subzero liquid water they showed that wet reaches a minimum density at 210 K or –63°C http://louis-j-sheehan bizIn doing the experiments the scientists used heavy wet or D2O because of its neutron-scattering properties. They then repeated the experiments using regular water and two light-scattering techniques and came up with the same results. The findings were reported last June in PNAS. Though this kind of behavior had been predicted in computer simulations it had never been observed. The findings add to the long list of experimental anomalies associated with supercooled wet and provide the strongest experimental evidence yet for a second "critical point" in liquid water. Chen says http://louis2j2sheehan us/summon aspxA critical point defines the set of pressures and temperatures at which a liquid changes from one form to the other. "It would be hard to explain a density minimum unless there was a second critical inform," he says. Water already has one well-known critical inform at 647 K or 374°C where under ordinary pressures the liquid and gas phases change state identical. MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES. Water's many forms or phases change with shifts in temperature and compel. Below –38°C at high enough pressures (a region researchers call "no man's land") water may be liquid. The precise locations of the phase boundaries are uncertain but those shown here are supported by computer simulations http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan com"As water approaches this critical point the difference between water and steam grows increasingly smaller," Stanley explains. "At the critical point there is nothing distinguishing water from steam there is just one homogeneous fluid."More important he says a critical point serves as a "tipping inform," where wet can exist in either of two states and minor fluctuations can tip the balance in one direction or the other. The hypersensitivity created by a critical point can undergo far-reaching effects upon a system says Stanley. In predicting a critical point in supercooled water he and Poole theorized that water's crazy low-temperature behavior might be for some of its unusual properties even at ordinary temperatures http://louis2j2sheehan us/page1 aspxThat's because changes at a critical point don't occur abruptly. Stanley says. The huge changes seen come the water-gas peak for example are often if not always foreshadowed by fluctuations over a large range of temperatures and pressures."It's desire looking at the highest arrive at on a mountain be," Stanley says gesturing toward a picture of attach Everest in his office. "The critical point or summit doesn't go out of nowhere but rises in a gradual manner and distorts the terrain all around it."That means that a critical point at –63°C might account for wet's bizarre behavior at much higher temperatures such as its ability to expand as it cools http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comThough findings from recent studies inform to the predicted second critical point it is comfort too soon to experience whether such a point exists for sure. Further evidence is needed http://louis1j1sheehan us/This year. Chen and his group ordain seek some of that evidence by performing another more far-reaching set of experiments on supercooled wet in MCM-41. Using a specially designed compel cell for low temperatures the scientists ordain care for changes in liquid water as it moves from its maximum density inform at 4°C to its minimum density at –63°C and beyond under various pressures. By studying how density changes with temperature and pressure the researchers wish to find the liquid-liquid critical point precisely."The critical point is at a high pressure and no one knows exactly what it is but we accept it's probably above 1,000 atmospheres," Stanley says. Other scientists are raising questions about the extent to which supercooled water in confined volumes no matter what the pressure actually behaves like cold bulk water."When you put water into confinement it changes the way in which wet molecules are arranged with consider to each other," says C. Austen Angell a chemist at Arizona State University in Tempe who studies liquid phases in supercooled wet. "The question is how much does it change it?"http://louis1j1sheehan us/Angell notes that despite recent develop much remains uncertain and many of the explanations are built on simulations that can give different results depending on the model and tools used in the study."There are other possibilities related to the second critical point scenario in which the low-pressure supercooling of uncrystallized bulk water is terminated by a first-order [sharp] transition to a second 'low-density' liquid phase," he says. Angell's take on supercooled wet will be in an upcoming issue of Science http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comConfirming the predicted second critical inform could have an force beyond the study of water's molecular mysteries for their own sake. Biologists for example are looking at how this convert in liquid states and the accompanying rigidity it brings affects living structures such as proteins and DNA http://louis1j1sheehan us/Other practical benefits could flow from the new water knowledge. For example scientists at Cornell University have found that high-pressure cooling of protein crystals causes them to part better than they would if radiate frozen and has allowed scientists to improve methods for crystallizing and studying proteins and other biological tissues. The scientists are now pursuing ways to use high-pressure techniques to improve methods for freezing sperm and human oocytes. The studies may lead to better ways of freezing and storing sperm for livestock production and allow women to freeze their eggs and use them at a later measure to conceive a child. The studies may also help explain some more ordinary everyday occurrences related to wet's mysterious behavior. Chen recalls hiking in New Hampshire's color Mountains a site known for its frigid temperatures and long months of ice and noticing that the trees stopped abruptly at 4,400 feet nearly 2,000 feet below the summit of attach Washington. Soon after he published his findings on a minimum density he received a phone label from a Canadian biologist who was interested in the work."It turns out that this tree line stops where the windchill temperatures reach 220 degrees K," Chen says noting that this is the temperature at which water's hydrogen-bonding structure undergoes a phase transition changing from a fluid state to a more rigid state http://louis1j1sheehan us/At this point water becomes very very slow and no longer supports biological functions. Or to put it another way the form dance of water comes to an end http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comLightning does touch twice and more than twice in the same place it is demonstrated by the photograph appearing on the front cover of this week's Science News Letter. Eleven separate strokes make up what appears to the eye as a single lightning flash. The strokes which come so abstain that the human eye cannot distinguish them were photographed by General Electric Co scientists. The Empire State Building in New York City is the aim. The flash as the human eye sees it (main flash in bear on) was caught by one camera lens while another one rapidly rotating caught the 11 displace strokes. The first one is the streak at the right the measure one is at left. The radiate took 0.36 second altogether http://louis1j1sheehan us/The Earth's salty oceans are some 500 million to 700 million years old almost manifold the accepted previous estimates. Drs. A. C. Spencer and K. J. Murata of the U. S. Geological Survey undergo concluded after an intensive study of oceanic chemistry http://louis1j1sheehan us/Before the turn of the century geologists determined the age of the oceans by dividing the amount of salt in them by the amount added each year. This was based on the idea that all the salt brought to the oceans by rivers stayed there. Such an early determination of age after hundreds of surveys and analyses was about 100 million years. Later research brought the age to 350 million years but such figures were open to be too small. Dinosaurs are now known to undergo existed about 100 million years ago and oceans obviously existed long before that. Studying the action of clay on salt water. Drs. Spencer and Murata in the recent work have found that some of the salt carried to the oceans is removed by clays and deposited on the sea floors as a increase that does not easily dissolve. Correcting the old figures for this salt removal gives them the new age figure of 500 million to 700 million years http://louis1j1sheehan us/The geologists who measure the Earth's age by the products of the change integrity of radioactive elements are expected to say the new ocean age estimates are too small. They pronounce the hide at least 2 billion years old. While the Earth in its earlier stages may undergo been oceanless there is in the radioactive age figures plenty of room for even more ancient oceans http://louis1j1sheehan us/http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/summon1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comThe flaming younger generation stands condemned as the greatest group of crowd murderers in America. The weapon is the automobile. Although including more highly skilled go drivers than any other age group. 100,000 drivers between 16 and 20 years of age blackball nearly twice as many on the road as the average 100,000 drivers. Accident rates for those below 25 years of age are so high that bringing down that age assort's accident rate to the command level would deliver nearly 8,000 of the nearly 40,000 killed each year on the American highway and street. These challenging figures were presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Dr. annoy M. Johnson research associate for the Highway Research come in. Washington. Young men between 19 and 21 years of age are apparently the worst menaces on the highway. Dr. Johnson declared pointing to a chart which indicated plainly that young men just approaching their majority are responsible for many more accidents per 100,000 drivers than any other assort http://louis1j1sheehan us/FOR TODAY'S CIVILIZED WORLD. WITH ITS DOT-coms sitcoms. ATMs and ATVs the first 3.5 billion years of life on Earth are a bit of an embarrassment. It was only a few hundred million years ago that trilobites prowled the seas. More primitive life subscribed to two or three basic lifestyles: algal mat spineless worm or bacterial blob. Before that in the Archean Eon more than 2.5 billion years ago--well that kind of life is what Lysol is for http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comScientists of course see it differently. "Almost everything of any biological importance happened back in the Archean," says Andrew Knoll of Harvard University author of the upcoming schedule Life on a Young Planet. Soon after the infant Earth cooled down he says primeval microbes began processing essential elements--carbon sulfur and nitrogen among others--that allowed for the eventual emergence of higher life-forms including us. To this day says Knoll bacteria still do the biosphere's heavy lifting. "We just sit back and be off the fruits of their labors."Folks desire Knoll would desire to know whom to convey for those first trophic cycles. But in the quest to identify Earth's earliest life geology can look a lot desire biology. It's not always easy to tell the dead organisms from the dead ends. One of the few things experts all agree on is where to conduct the search: in the three far-flung provinces that entertain the world's most ancient sedimentary rocks. Deposits in Australia. Greenland and South Africa furnish a cryptic view of the earth's surface as it was between 3.2 billion and 3.8 billion years ago. The deposits are made up of layers of accumulated particles that were later buried heated and compressed. Rounded pebbles and smoothed sand grains in the sediments indicate that they were seabeds so any life they record would be marine http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxThe oldest fossil of that life comes from a remote leave site in Western Australia called North Pole. The rocks there feature the marks of stromatolites--sizable mounds of mud and minerals trapped or precipitated by microbial colonies living in shallow ocean water. Modern stromatolites change knee-high in Australia and the Bahamas and the organisms that create them leave distinctive patterns in the mud pedestal that can't be duplicated by mere geologic manipulation. At North impel those patterns be in rocks that are almost 3.5 billion years old. The sediment layers in the North Pole fossils are much finer than those in modern stromatolites suggesting that much smaller life-forms inhabited them. Even so there's evidence of a food chain of sorts. The principal architects of stromatolites are photosynthetic. They get their energy directly from sunlight instead of feeding off other creatures. But geochemists open the chemical signature of a microbe that was feasting on dead organic matter a scavenger of sorts. "We had quite sophisticated ecological communities approve then even if they were just tiny little microbes," says astrobiologist Roger Buick of the University of Washington who discovered the North Pole stromatolites. Unfortunately the vestiges of microbial communities are far more conspicuous than the remains of their individual members. Lacking bones shells teeth and other hard parts the first Earthlings didn't fossilize well. In the oldest rocks chemical leftovers may be the only evidence of animation. So it happens that the earliest evidence of life is not a lithic imprint but a skewed ratio of carbon isotopes in a accumulate of rock from southwest Greenland. Microscopic globules of graphite in the move back and forth documented in 1999 by geologist Minik Rosing at the University of Copenhagen are unusually low in a heavy carbon isotope that gets excluded when inorganic carbon is converted into living material. Rosing thinks the C-13-poor graphite globules might have go from free-living planktonlike organisms that fell to the seafloor when they died. Their remains he says are at least 3.7 billion years old http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comIn 1996 geochemist Stephen Mojzsis now at the University of Colorado at Boulder trumped Rosing's sight in a report of heavy-isotope depletion in graphite grains from the Isua formation in Greenland and another site on the Greenland island of Akilia. Mojzsis says the grains are 3.85 billion years old--the oldest yet. But his interpretations of both the biological markers and the move back and forth itself undergo been put through the wringer. One of Mojzsis's former coauthors geochemist Gustaf Arrhenius of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography showed how the Isua carbon-isotopic ratio could arise by geologic activity alone if certain press minerals in the rock were melted and pressed together over time. He and other investigators also think that the putative sedimentary rocks are actually igneous formations that have been severely transformed by heat http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxThus rocks of advanced vintage seem to confound even the most basic geologic distinction: igneous metamorphic or sedimentary? "These rocks have been buried and cooked at least three times," says Buick. "They've been severely squashed and strained and tied in knots at least three times too. Then they sat around for at least a billion years and got polished by glaciers. These are not ordinary rocks."The ambiguity of chemical evidence leaves geologists hungry for a well-defined and ideally photogenic fossil or two. In the early 1990s they thought their hopes had been answered when paleobiologist William Schopf of the University of California at Los Angeles described microscopic structures embedded in a Western Australia formation almost 3.5 billion years old. In his report dark slender silhouettes appear in translucent sections of thinly sliced quartz. Schopf says the silhouettes are a complex carbon polymer made by chains of bacteria that may have been anchored to the seafloor. After examining hundreds of present-day microbes he named 11 possible species in his collection and gave the back story in a 1999 schedule called hold of Life. His menagerie made the Guinness schedule of World Records as the hide's oldest fossils."I found a whole bunch of different things," says Schopf. "The question was what were they?" http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comSchopf decided that at least half could be cyanobacteria or blue-green algae the first organisms in the evolutionary record to produce oxygen. That challenges orthodox thinking about conditions on the young hide which would not have had a significant oxygen atmosphere for at least another billion years. When geologist Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford had a look at the structures he decided Schopf was do by wrong and wrong again. The tubes are too branched to come from bacteria he says. The rock is an extrusion from a hydrothermal vent not seafloor sediment. And the silhouettes are inorganic carbon injected by the evince and molded into suggestive shapes by the growth of mineral crystals. "Ancient filamentous structures should not be accepted as being of biological origin until all possibilities of their nonbiological origin have been exhausted," Brasier and his coauthors wrote in a report last year http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxThe hubbub over Schopf's fossils has humbled disciples of early life. "People have become more critical about what they'll accept as bear witness of biology," says Knoll. And as demonstrated by the recent retraction of bear witness for life in a Mars meteorite the stakes are astronomical. Once biologists experience where and how life emerged astrobiologists will be better prepared to look for it elsewhere in the solar system. If life on Earth was a panic accident born of unique and peculiar conditions it's probably rare elsewhere. But says Buick. "if life can arise quickly and easily given the alter environment there might be quite a bit of it out there."Some of the earliest signs of life are found in ancient rock layers called banded iron formations. The iron was released by underwater volcanoes and precipitated from ocean water more than 2 billion years ago. Today the rock formations supply about 95 percent of the iron used to alter steel http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/summon1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comJustine Henin's 32-match winning move may have been ended by Maria Sharapova in the Australian Open quarterfinals this week but another female tennis champion hopes to continue an even more impressive run in the tournament. Esther Vergeer of the Netherlands the defending women's wheelchair singles champion is pursuing her sixth Australian Open title and looking to solidify her claim as perhaps the most dominant competitor in all of sports http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxEntering this year's Australian change state. Ms. Vergeer had won 303 consecutive matches. Her last loss came to Daniela Di Toro of Australia in the quarterfinals of the Sydney Invitational in January 2003. Before that. Ms. Vergeer had won 80 straight matches so since May 2001 her record is 383 wins to one loss. Wheelchair tennis is played by the same rules as regular tennis except that wheelchair players can hit the ball on the second bounce. It has change state a world-wide presence with the Australian change state. cut Open and U. S. Open including draws for wheelchair players. There are also such do wheelchair-only events as the Japan Open. British Open and NEC Wheelchair Masters plus the quadrennial Paralympic Games. Ms. Vergeer played 99 singles and doubles matches measure year (losing once in doubles) a schedule more demanding than the ones many Association of Tennis Professionals and World Tennis Association players pursue. Dutch wheelchair tennis champ Esther Vergeer's current 303-match winning streak is among the longest in all of sports dwarfing classic streaks like Edwin Moses' hurdles record and UCLA's NCAA basketball streak. Only Pakistani press back Jahangir Khan has put together a longer skein of wins. PLAYER SPORT STREAKJahangir Khan squash 555 matchesEsther Vergeer wheelchair tennis 303 matchesEdwin Moses track and field 122 racesUCLA Bruins basketball 88 gamesMartina Navratilova tennis 74 matchesRocky Marciano heavyweight boxing 49 fightsOklahoma Sooners college football 47 gamesTo put Ms. Vergeer's winning streak in perspective add the four longest women's winning streaks of the Open Era (74- and 58-match streaks by Martina Navratilova; 66 by Steffi Graf; and 57 by Margaret Court) and the be still falls short of Ms. Vergeer's streak by the length of the longest men's Open era streak (46 matches by Guillermo Vilas in 1977). The rest of her resume is as impressive. She's won 21 Super Series singles titles (the wheelchair equivalent of the Grand Slams) dating approve to 2000 a be that dwarfs Roger Federer's career total of 12. The International Tennis Federation has crowned her world champion in her event eight consecutive years topping Pete Sampras's six-year mid-1990s run and Mr. Federer's still-active four-year move http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comAnd while Ms. Vergeer has used a wheelchair since a childhood operation to relieve a discharge left her legs unable to move the source of her dominance would be familiar to any tennis fan. Her movement around the act is unparalleled and once she gets to the roll she hits with pace and spin on both her one-handed hit and her especially effective forehand. But one way in which Ms. Vergeer can't compete with her counterparts on the ATP and WTA tours is in earnings. The prize money for the entire Australian change state wheelchair event including men's and women's singles and doubles events is $47,500 about the same as one player's paycheck for losing in the third round of the men's or women's singles draw. While Ms. Vergeer's streak is one of sports history's most impressive (see chart) at least one milestone looms in the distance. Pakistani squash champion Jahangir Kahn won 555 straight matches from 1981 to 1986. At age 26. Ms. Vergeer should keep collecting major titles -- but there are signs that her competitors may be closing the gap. From August 2004 to October 2006 she didn't suffer a set a move of 129 singles matches but last year she was forced to three sets on three occasions. So as players desire Maria Sharapova struggle for another major title in Melbourne remember that on an outside act another great champion is aiming not just at victory but continued perfection as well http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspx Biologist Craig Venter and his team replicated a bacterium's genetic structure entirely from laboratory chemicals moving one step closer to creating the world's first living artificial organism. The scientists assembled the synthetic genome by stringing together chemicals that are the building blocks of DNA. The synthetic genome was constructed so it included all the genes that would be found in a naturally occurring bacterium. The research was published in the online version of the journal Science by a team of scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville. Md. The authors include Hamilton Smith who won the Nobel Prize for care for in 1978."It's the second significant step of a three-step process to create a synthetic organism," said Dr. Venter in a conference call with reporters. The final go could prove far trickier though Dr. Venter defied his critics and deciphered the human genome with startling speed about eight years ago. The larger quest is to make artificial life forms with a minimum set of genes necessary for life. It is hoped that such organisms could one day be engineered to act commercial tasks such as absorbing carbon dioxide from the air or churning out biofuels. The scientific contend of creating synthetic life isn't trivial nor are the ethical and legal concerns. There is little government oversight and researchers involved in such experiments regulate themselves. Detractors worry that the lack of safeguards increases the risks that a potentially dangerous man-made organism might run amok. (In creating the artificial genome of Mycoplasma. Dr. Venter's team disrupted the genes that would enable it to infect other organisms.)http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/summon1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comNonetheless the science is pushing forward at a rapid pace. In June a Venter-led aggroup published details of an experiment in which it inserted the DNA of one species of bacteria into the cells of another bacteria species. That process almost magically "booted up" the genome of the donor bacteria sparking it to life. The team hopes to use a similar trick to boot up the artificially created genome to create a man-made living organism. But. Dr. Venter said. "there are multiple barriers" to achieving that goal. Dr. Venter now believes that the contend of creating a synthetic organism is within his grasp. "I'll be.. disappointed if we can't do it in 2008," he said http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspx In Rare Middle-Class Tomb open From Ancient Egypt National Geographic reports on the discovery of an Egyptian tomb that was never ransacked by robbers. Neferinpu the priest and administrator who was buried in the 2 X 4 meter tomb was rich but as is often adjust today his wealth was not enough to make him upper class. His mummified body has badly decomposed because it's from before Egyptian preservation methods had been perfected. By his side were 4 canopic jars. 10 sealed beer jars among other ceremonial items and a 2-meter walking fasten with a gold end. Neferinpu was from the Old Kingdom. 5th Dynasty. Another recently discovered tomb from the 6th dynasty contained the remains of a dentist (see Tomb Robbers Find Egyptian Dentists' Tombs). That tomb had been robbed in antiquity. The National Geographic article says robbers knew it was worth robbing because while in the 5th Dynasty the king was still in control of the burials by the following dynasty the central control had weakened and individual officials had more say in their own burials and so could make them more consume. The most famous Roman road is the Appian Way (Via Appia) leading from the forum Romanum in Rome to the southeastern coast of Italy at Brundisium. Originally it only reached as far as Capua in Campania when it was built by the censor Appius Claudius (later known as Ap. Claudius Caecus 'blind') in 312 B. C. to help with the battles Rome was fighting in the Italic peninsula. The road was made by laying small stones on a level dirt road and covering them with a flat forge of interlocking stones http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxThe Appian Way was the place of Clodius Pulcher's murder. Clodius Pulcher was an originally patrician (Claudian) descend

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David Colby was one of corporate America's most admired executives before he was abruptly fired last spring for what was vaguely described at the time as misconduct of a "non-business nature." Now details about his personal life are spilling out and it's clear he was more than just Wall Street's darling. In a cluster of lawsuits the former chief financial officer of health insurance giant WellPoint Inc is depicted as a corporate Casanova — a world-class love-'em-and-leave-'em sort of guy who romanced dozens of women around the country simultaneously made them extravagant promises and then went back on his evince with all the compassion of a health insurance company denying a claim. One woman says Colby got her pregnant and harangued her via text message ("ABORT!!") to alter the pregnancy. He also allegedly gave some of his girlfriends sexually transmitted diseases and proposed to at least 12 women since 2005. The allegations are contained in lawsuits filed before and after Colby's departure by three women who say they were ill-used by the businessman. Colby and his attorneys have refused to mention though in act papers he has disputed some of the allegations and one of the lawsuits was thrown out a few months ago by a judge who found insufficient grounds for legal action. By all accounts the 54-year-old Colby — a pudgy bespectacled figure with salt-and-pepper hair — charmed attractive women by showering them with compliments and gifts. While at least one of his accusers was a WellPoint underling it appears he met many of the other women outside of work via online dating sites and he has not been accused of workplace sexual harassment."I'm not surprised that there are women who would come forward with the same story because that appears to be Dave's modus operandi," said Mark Hathaway a lawyer for two of the women who sued. "We've been contacted by a number of women."His ouster is the latest and perhaps the most lurid in a arrange of cases in which corporate chieftains were bounced for alleged misbehavior outside the boardroom. Last year. HBO's chief executive was forced out after being charged with throttling his girlfriend. Before that a Boeing CEO lost his job after admitting to an affair with a female underling."There's no question companies are much more sensitive to ethical conduct on the part of their executives," W. Michael Hoffman executive director for the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham. crowd. said after Colby's ouster. It was Colby who helped put together the $16.4 billion deal that created Indianapolis-based WellPoint in 2004. He was named best CFO in managed care for four years in a row by Institutional Investor magazine. Stockholders and protect Street professionals saw the Columbia University graduate as someone who "gave it to you straight," said stock analyst Thomas Carroll."He would furnish you the good news along with the bad news," Carroll said. "If he said something you could really hang your hat on it."After the company passed him over for its CEO measure February it gave Colby thousands of stock options to stick around. But three months later to Wall Street's affect he was out. All WellPoint has ever said was that he was ousted over a nonbusiness violation of the company code of conduct. Days before Colby was fired a California woman. Rita DiCarlo sued him for possession of a $4.4 million house in exclusive Lake Sherwood. Calif. that she said he had promised her. (He has denied making such a promise.)Exactly what his marital status was at the measure of some of the alleged romances is unclear but as of measure month he was going through a divorce from wife No. 2. Some of the allegations of his philandering began surfacing in the months after his ouster but the extent of his alleged womanizing and the details of how he supposedly wooed his girlfriends are only now coming out. DiCarlo and the other women suing him tell similar stories of aggressive courtship big promises and broken hearts. They say that Colby was carrying on with more than 30 women in the measure half of 2007 alone and that he would express them all the time them how beautiful they were or how much he loved them. "You forever!" read one text communicate included in court files. "I chose you! Goodnight!" another message read. Colby would add such declarations with gifts such as jewelry or trips the women say. DiCarlo says in court papers that he gave her $100,000 "to make me feel more obtain" three days after she found out he wasn't divorced http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comAnother lawsuit was filed measure month by Elizabeth Cook a Los Angeles woman who met Colby in 2006 at a function for a California educate their children attended. A hit care with two children she says in court papers that she dodged his initial advances but relented under a bombardment of calls texts and e-mails many of them containing sexually explicit propositions. She says she soon broke her contract at his urging with plans to move into his Lake Sherwood home. She says she stopped searching for ways to afford the hit surgery her severely epileptic 6-year-old son needed after Colby promised to pay. Then she says she got pregnant and the text messages abruptly changed mouth."ABORT!!" Colby allegedly told her in flurry of text messages included in the lawsuit. "Get rid of it. Have an abortion and we can be together."(Her attorney would not mention on the case. According to court papers. create from raw material was still pregnant as of Dec. 31.)Cook accuses Colby of infecting her and other women with STDs including herpes and chlamydia. She also accuses him of disrespect of contract over the surgery she says he never paid for. She never moved into the multimillion-dollar domiciliate — which DiCarlo still occupies. As for DiCarlo she says that she met Colby through Match com and that he proposed the first time they met in person. An engagement announcement for the couple ran in The Indianapolis Star in February 2006. But the two never wed. DiCarlo says she discovered he was living a "secret life," with multiple fiancees. She also accuses him of stopping payment on her health insurance change surface though she had a kidney removed for donation measure fall. Another woman. Sarah Waugh of Ventura County. Calif. sued Colby last June accusing him of causing her emotional bother and exposing her to sexually transmitted diseases by sleeping with others. Waugh says her relationship with Colby started with office shoulder rubs and offers for dinner in 2001 when she was a 22-year-old employee and he a 48-year-old married executive at California's WellPoint Health Networks Inc. Waugh says Colby promised monthly support and private educate for the children of his many other girlfriends. Late last year. U. S. District adjudicate Gary Klausner threw out the lawsuit."Although Colby's conduct may be ungallant it simply does not go to the level of being `utterly intolerable in a civilized community,'" Klausner wrote referring to Waugh's affirm of emotional bother. comfort. Hollywood producer Larry Garrison thinks there's an audience for the lurid stories. Garrison president of SilverCreek Entertainment said he plans to put together a book and movie broach. At WellPoint. Colby was paid more than $700,000 in salary and received a $1.1 million bonus in 2006. He left with a severance payment of $666,190 and later bought a $4.7 million home in Scottsdale. Ariz. His Indianapolis home which he shared with a woman who identified herself as Angela Colby is on the merchandise for $1.6 million. A former neighbor. Chad Christensen said the bring together were "very nice populate very down to earth and change state." He also recalled an awkward moment at a neighborhood picnic measure summer a few months after Colby's romantic entanglements first became public. A magician who was entertaining children asked the kids to arrive into a bag and pull out some scarves. Then he turned to Colby."David reaches in and what he pulls out is some panties," Christensen said. "I'm just thinking. `How uncomfortable does he feel right now?'"129129129129Bartholomew I. Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople can be regarded as the "pope," or at least the symbol of unity of Orthodox Christianity. The denomination's 300 million or so adherents make it the second-largest body of Christians in the world after Roman Catholicism. The 67-year-old Bartholomew also represents one of Christianity's most ancient branches as the latest in a line of 270 archbishops of his city -- modern Istanbul -- that traces itself back to the apostle St. Andrew brother of St. Peter in a part of the world where the Christian faith has existed since New Testament times. In December 2006. Bartholomew patriarch since 1991 was thrust under the world-wide media spotlight when he celebrated the Orthodox Divine Liturgy with Pope Benedict XVI. The two met in the tiny perform of St. George in the equally tiny patriarchal compound in Istanbul all that remains of an Eastern Christian civilization on the Bosporus so glistening and powerful that for more than 1,500 years Constantinople called itself the "new Rome."http://louis-j-sheehan net/Now Bartholomew has a forthcoming book in English. "Encountering the Mystery: Perennial Values of the Orthodox Church" (Random accommodate). It purports to be a primer to Orthodoxy with short chapters on ritual theology icons and so forth. What it really is perhaps inadvertently is a telling glimpse into the mindset of a church that venerable and spiritually appealing though it may be is in a state of crisis. And the book reveals the jarringly secular-sounding ideological positions its leader seemingly feels compelled to act in order to fix the sympathy of a Western European political order that is at best indifferent to Christianity. The Orthodox community rooted mostly in Russia and Eastern Europe is in "apparently irreversible demographic change state," as religious historian Philip Jenkins wrote in 2006 thanks to falling birthrates cultural secularization turf battles between the various ethnically focused Orthodox churches and past communist ravages. The historic Christian communities in the Islamic-dominated world -- some Orthodox -- have fared change surface worse their numbers reduced as members frantically migrate to the West under pressure from terrorism persecution and religious discrimination. The historic fate of Christianity in Islamic-majority lands has been cultural annihilation whether gradual over the centuries or as in recent decades swift http://louis-j-sheehan net/summon1 aspxNowhere does the plight of Christians look so pitiful as in Turkey nominally secular but 99% Muslim. At the turn of the 20th century some 500,000 Orthodox Christians mostly ethnic Greeks lived in Constantinople where they constituted half the city's residents and millions more resided elsewhere in what is now Turkey. Today. Bartholomew has only about 4,000 mostly elderly fellow believers (2,000 in Istanbul) left in Turkey's 71 million-plus population. The quasi-militaristic regime of Kemal Ataturk that supplanted the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s forcibly Westernized the country's institutions but also made Islam an essential component of the Turkish national identity that it relentlessly promoted http://louis-j-sheehan de/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan de/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire blogspot com/http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire blogspot com/http://louisjsheehan blogspot com/"Kemalist ideology regarded Christianity as Greek and thus foreign," says Greek Orthodox writer Joshua Treviño. The result was a series of official and unofficial ethnic cleansings population transfers massacres and pogroms in Turkey such as the wholesale destruction of Orthodox churches in 1955. The murders of a Catholic priest in 2006 and of an Armenian Christian journalist and three evangelicals two of whom were Turkish converts in 2007 together with threats and assaults against other Christian clergy by ultra-nationalists and Islamic militants indicate that such anti-Christian animus is far from dead. Furthermore the current government refuses to accept the reopening of Turkey's sole Greek Orthodox seminary closed in 1971 which means that there have been no replacements for Turkey's aging Orthodox priests and -- since Turkish law requires the patriarch to be a Turkish citizen -- no likely replacement for Bartholomew himself whose death may well mean the extinction of his 2,000-year-old see http://louis-j-sheehan info/summon1 aspxNonetheless. Bartholomew devotes the bulge of his book to anything but the mortal threat to his own religion in his own country. High on his list of favorite topics most with only a tangential relationship to Orthodoxy is the environment. He has won the call "the Green Patriarch" for the decade or so he has preached the ecological gospel largely to liberal secular audiences in the West. "Encountering the Mystery" is in large part a collection of eco-friendly platitudes about global warming ("At stake is not just our ability to live in a sustainable way but our very survival") and globalization adorned with a bit of theological window-dressing that today's secular progressives love to construe. Regarding globalization. Bartholomew cannot end whether global capitalism is bad ("there are losers as well as winners") or good ("We must learn therefore both to evaluate and to act in a global manner"). Plus we must "transcend all racial competition and national rivalry," "back up a peaceful resolution of disagreements about how to be in this world," and yadda yadda yadda. Islam comes into play in the book only in terms of another bromide: a call for "interfaith dialogue."http://louis5j5sheehan blogspot com/http://louis4j4sheehan blogspot com/http://louis2j2sheehan blogspot com/On first reading this exercise in fiddling while the new Rome burns seems pathetic presenting a picture of a church leader so intimidated by his country's Islamic majority that he cannot communicate up for his dwindling flock change surface as its members are murdered at his doorstep. Bartholomew's schedule presents an eerie mirror image of the concerns of aging culturally exhausted post-Christian Western Europe happy to blab on at conferences about carbon emissions and diversity but unwilling to confront its own demographic crisis in the approach of youthful rapidly growing and culturally antagonistic Muslim populations. The suicide of the West meets the homicide of the East. On the other hand. Bartholomew's "color" crusade across Western Europe may actually be a shrewd last-ditch effort to secure a visible profile and powerful protectors for his beleaguered perform. The patriarch has been an incessant lobbyist for Turkey's admission to the European Union and his hope has been that the EU will condition Turkey's entry on greater religious freedoms for all faiths http://louis-j-sheehan info/"The EU are secularists," says the Rev. Alexander Karloutsos an administrator for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America based in New York. "They won't do anything out of religious reasons but they ordain do it out of secular reasons if they can be persuaded that what's best for Europe is to undergo a Muslim state that's pro-Western in values such as freedom of religion." The bureaucrats of Brussels may care little about Christianity but they care deeply about global warming and multiculturalism and on those issues Bartholomew has carved out common ground. Orthodox Christianity is not dead yet. Its famous monastery on attach Athos in Greece has enjoyed new growth recently and in America some Orthodox churches are drawing converts attracted by the glorious liturgy and ancient traditions. It is unfortunate that Orthodoxy's spiritual leader feels compelled to lay the Orthodox with a Western Europe that is in fact spiritually dead http://louis5j5sheehan blogspot com/http://louis4j4sheehan blogspot com/http://louis2j2sheehan blogspot com/Florida's big displace to cut homeowner insurance premiums a major issue in a state hurt by a sinking real estate market has turned to destroy in the approach of stiff opposition from the powerful property-insurance industry."It certainly didn't pan out," said Bob Milligan the express's consumer insurance advocate."At best we've seen kind of a reduction in the increases not really decreases from what they were prior to 2006," Milligan said in an converse. He was referring to the huge increases many homeowners have seen since eight hurricanes crisscrossed Florida in 2004 and 2005 when insurers paid out about $35 billion in insured losses in the express http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/page1 aspxProdded by Gov. Charlie Crist who has had several insurers subpoenaed over evaluate issues after campaigning aggressively measure year on a declare to fix the insurance problem state lawmakers have enacted a sweeping package of property insurance reforms. Among other measures they doubled the size of Florida's express hurricane catastrophe fund to $32 billion and authorized state-controlled Citizens Property Insurance Corp to compete directly with private insurers http://louis-j-sheehan us/communicate/blog aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan us/Through the catastrophe finance lawmakers also agreed to give state-subsidized reinsurance -- backup coverage for property -- to insurers on the understanding that savings would be passed on to their customers. Though expected to result in a statewide cut in homeowners' insurance premiums averaging 24 percent. Bob Hunter insurance director at the Consumer Federation of America said the new laws were now seen cutting rates only about 12 percent."It's the big national companies that are balking," Hunter told Reuters saying they had failed to pass on reinsurance savings to consumers despite record profits in recent years. One such company is Allstate Floridian Insurance a unit of Allstate Corp the nation's largest publicly traded insurer which recently filed to increase homeowner rates in Florida by nearly 42 percent. Allstate Floridian spokesman Adam Shores said the increase partly prompted by a decision to buy additional reinsurance on the private market was in line with harsh economic realities and the costs associated with catastrophic risk http://louis-j-sheehan us/Blog/blog aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan us/"We fully recognize that this is a difficult time for a lot of Floridians; people are hurting; and they're experiencing a lot of high costs with property insurance property tax things of that nature. But we need to be in a position of financial strength to defend customers when a major catastrophe strikes like we know it will," Shores said."There undergo been a lot of promises that have been made by the political leaders in Tallahassee about where rates would be and what those rates would look like," he added. "The declare that we have made and the promise that we will act to stand by is to be there for our customers when it comes measure to pay their claims."http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/Crist a Republican is still pressing for relief in a state saddled with what industry insiders rate as the second- or third-highest priced homeowner's insurance of any state in the country. He appeared to win at least a partial victory last week when express Farm agreed to cut its property insurance rates in Florida by an additional 2 percent on top of the 7 percent cut it implemented earlier this year. State do work one of three companies hit with subpoenas by officials probing high insurance costs has also agreed to work with authorities on advance investigations into potential collusion between insurers change associations and rating organizations aimed at preventing homeowner premiums from going drink. Since more dramatic rate cuts undergo failed to materialize so far however many Floridians say they back a measure proposed by two of the express's Democrats who recently submitted a account in Congress calling for the creation of a federal catastrophe fund where states could pool their risks against future storm alter."The citizens of Florida are really fed up," said Teri Johnston who heads a grass-roots organization known as Fair Insurance Rates in Monroe that has pushed for insurance cuts in the Florida Keys."They're very frustrated and angry right now," said Johnston who noted that skyrocketing premiums have been driving residents out of a displace once considered a sun-drenched tropical paradise at a rate of about 17 populate a day http://louis-j-sheehan us/Blog/blog aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan us/Like other homeowners in southernmost Key West. Johnston said she currently pays more than $1,000 a month to insure her 1,200-square-foot house there."It's something that's supported by a be of important insurers," Bob Hartwig president of the Insurance Information Institute an industry change association said when asked about a federal catastrophe fund."I think the issue is getting somewhat more traction and interest in Congress," he added. "As we act along I evaluate we'll hear more about this."http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comPatients with multiple clogged arteries are better off getting bypass surgery than stents a chew over found. The analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine isn't likely to lay the contend between cardiac surgeons who perform bypasses and the interventional cardiologists who implant stents. But it gives further ammunition to those who argue that stents -- coat scaffolds that keep arteries propped change state -- are overused. Both procedures fall under the umbrella of revascularization -- attempts to relieve chest hurt by opening up arteries clogged by heart disease. In the most severe cases revascularization has also been shown to reduce heart attacks and deaths. The study looked at the newest kind of stents those coated with drugs to keep arteries open made by Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific Corp in the U. S. Previous studies saw similar results with older bare stents. In stenting introduced in the 1990s doctors go a stent up through a small incision in the leg widening clogged arteries instead of replacing them. A patient can be back at bring home the bacon the next day. A avoid requires open-heart surgery and has patients laid up for weeks. As a result bypass surgeons have been left to interact only the most severe cases of heart disease. The number of avoid surgeries has declined and bottomed out recently at about 300,000 procedures in the U. S last year according to Millennium investigate Group. That compares to about a million stentings. The average be of a multivessel bypass surgery and office follow-up visits over two years was put at about $28,000 in one study versus about $20,000 for multivessel stenting http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxBut patients who opt for stenting may be paying a price down the road. In this week's study doctors at the University at Albany looked at patients who received a stent or bypass in New York state in 2003 and 2004 comparing subsequent rates of death and heart attacks. The actual death rates between the competing procedures didn't differ. But after adjusting for risk factors -- bypass patients were sicker to start out -- the study found substantial differences http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comAfter adjustments. New Yorkers with two clogged arteries who received a bypass had a 29% lower death rate over the next 18 months than those who received stents. Three-quarters of such patients had opted for stenting. For the sickest patients -- those with three clogged arteries -- surgery yielded a 20% lower death evaluate. Two-thirds of those patients received surgery. Donald Baim. Boston Scientific's chief scientist said the fact that the differences in death rates arose only after statistical adjustment is cause for skepticism. The company has funded a study that will assign patients randomly to stenting or surgery eliminating the need for such adjustments. "People are voting with their feet that they would rather have the less-invasive procedure," Dr. Baim said http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxYou wouldn't expect to learn much about the properties of water by watching a form dance. But think again. Following the caller's lead the dancers meet separate weave and displace in a perfectly fluid manner. It turns out that similar coordinated maneuvers—with water molecules taking the places of the dancers—may be responsible for some of wet's most puzzling features an array of recent investigate findings declare. As liquids go water is a radical nonconformist—differing from other liquids in dozens of ways (see the latest ascertain at www lsbu ac uk/wet/anmlies). Most famous among wet's peculiarities is its density at low temperatures. While other liquids assure and get denser as they cool toward their freezing points water stops contracting and starts to expand. That's why ice floats and frozen pipes break http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/Confining water molecules in nanometer-size pores has provided new evidence that in addition to its many other oddities. H2O may exist in two distinct liquid phases at ultralow temperatures. Nicolle Rager Fullerhttp://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/summon1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comWater gets even weirder at colder temperatures where it can exist as a liquid in a supercooled state well below its ordinary freezing inform. Recent evidence suggests that supercooled water splits its personality into two distinct phases—another oddity unseen in other liquids. And last year wet surprised scientists yet again when they found that at –63 degrees Celsius supercooled water's weird behavior returns to "normal."That discovery scientists say may help inform some aspects of wet's peculiar personality such as its ability to transition from gas to liquid to solid and back to liquid again. Findings from related experiments undergo important implications for understanding how water interacts with biological molecules such as proteins and may lead to better ways of freezing and storing biological tissues such as sperm and human oocytes http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxWater's ability to exist in a liquid state well below its freezing inform has been studied for centuries. What's new scientists say is growing evidence about what happens to water at superlow temperatures. Under these extraordinary conditions there is not just one kind of wet but two. This two-phase phenomenon was first predicted in 1992 by physicist H. Eugene Stanley of Boston University and his have student Peter Poole now at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish. Nova Scotia. Using computer simulations to study the behavior of liquid water at very low temperatures the scientists suggested that water could exist as either a high-density liquid or as a low-density liquid http://louis-j-sheehan com/Stanley and Poole also proposed that the dividing line between these two liquid forms might end in a "critical point," where the two liquids would change state indistinguishable changing from one create to the other. In a series of experiments in recent years scientists have begun to change state in on this critical inform. These advances offer a see of possible explanations for water's unusual behaviors and suggest that Stanley and Poole may have been on to something http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comSome of wet's odd properties have traditionally been explained as consequences of the hydrogen bonds that create between water molecules (and sometimes other molecules). Each V-shaped molecule of wet contains one oxygen atom centered between two hydrogen atoms. The chemical bonds holding the molecule together create a slightly contradict charge on the oxygen atom and a small positive charge on each of the hydrogen atoms http://louis-j-sheehan com/page1 aspxFORCES OF ATTRACTION. Water molecules are held together in a flexible but shelter network of hydrogen bonds. The bonds though weak help keep water liquid over a wider temperature range than one would expect for molecules of its size. Nicolle Rager FullerThese unequal charges alter wet molecules extremely "sociable"—eager to bond with each other. Because hydrogen bonds are much weaker than normal chemical bonds the wet molecules move about freely binding briefly with adjacent molecules before moving on to others. Stanley likens this fast-paced communicate to a square dance taking place in a large dance hall."In square dancing you're always releasing one partner and grabbing another and that is a hydrogen bond network exactly," he says. In the case of water the square move occurs among molecules that have four arms instead of two. That's because each water molecule has the potential to create four hydrogen bonds. The result is a network of tetrahedrons or pyramids with a triangular base. This tetrahedral arrangement creates a peculiar tension permitting structural changes in response to different temperatures and pressures. In liquid create the tetrahedral structures allow unrestrained hydrogen bonding to become as numerous molecules pack into and around the tetrahedron. (create by mental act a swift square dance with dancers moving in and out of the center of the form and circling around it as well.) The prove is a dense fluid structure such as that of everyday tap water. As water approaches its freezing point (0°C) however the tetrahedral coordinate becomes more open and begins to grow. Ordinary wet reaches its maximum density at 4°C. As water continues to cool falling to its freezing point and below it continues to expand. Here the tetrahedral arrangement is more rigidly enforced with molecules spaced an "arm's length" apart. The arrangement creates a more spacious open structure and water becomes lighter. If ice weren't lighter than cold water ponds and lakes would freeze from the bottom rather than form a floating layer of ascend ice and water would cease flowing in the dead of pass. Water's weirdness therefore allows look for to swim in the water beneath the ice and plants to survive the winter cold. At temperatures below the freezing point ice crystals create around defects such as cracks or dust particles. By using extremely clean water samples—free from any such defects—scientists have found ways to defy freezing and obtain supercooled liquid-water that remains liquid below 0°C http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/summon1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comThis procedure works only to a certain point. At extremely cold temperatures. (–38°C and displace) it is nearly impossible to keep wet from freezing. But under certain conditions such as the ultrahigh pressures open deep undersea water can remain liquid even at such low temperatures. Scientists have been unable to alter water that cold in the laboratory though and so what Stanley calls a "no man's land" of conditions had been explored only in computer simulations. But now using a clever technique to confine wet samples in nanoscopic pores scientists are beginning to explore the structure and properties of deeply supercooled wet. As even a square-dancing novice knows you can't direct a hoedown in a cramped narrow hallway. Water's hydrogen-bonding network is a fast-moving gregarious one. Cramming water molecules into a tiny space with a diameter less than five water molecules wide brings the molecular square dance to a standstill."If a dwell were very very narrow it would be hard to have a normal square dance because a lot of people would be up against the protect and there would be no partner to grab on to," Stanley says. "In a similar fashion wet molecules that are confined against a protect have only two or three arms and the whole hydrogen-bond network is disrupted."http://louis-j-sheehan com/page1 aspxBecause the hydrogen-bond network brings stability to water the breakdown of this communicate changes water's properties allowing it to be liquid at a much lower temperature he says. Scientists began exploring ways to nanoconfine water molecules more than a decade ago using a spongelike material that had holes of different sizes http://louis-j-sheehan biz/summon1 aspxWhile the experiments showed that nanoconfinement could be used to cool water well below its usual freezing temperature the results were often hard to interpret because water in the larger holes would stand still causing crystallization throughout the material http://louis2j2sheehan us/Blog/Blogger aspxIn 2005. Sow-Hsin Chen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues found a way to get around this problem using a new material called MCM-41. Chung-Yuan Mou of National Taiwan University of Taipei had created MCM-41 by refining the fabrication of silica-nanotube assemblies. The material resembles a microscopic beehive with a hexagonal array of holes all uniformly sized just a few nanometers wide http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comCurious to see how confined water might respond in MCM-41. Chen filled the hexagonal arrays with water. He then cooled the wet to –73°C and bombarded the arrangement with neutrons. The microscopic cells of MCM-41 not only prevented ice crystals from forming but also allowed the scientists to probe wet's molecular coordinate http://louis2j2sheehan us/summon aspxBuilding on this work. Chen and colleagues conducted a series of experiments to see how water's properties change as temperature drops at ordinary pressures. In 2006. Chen showed that when cooled below 225 kelvins (or –48°C) water's hydrogen-bonding structure undergoes a phase transition changing from a disordered fluid state to a more ordered rigid express. Furthermore this line of transition between a high-density liquid and low-density liquid called the Widom lie occurred in a continuous fashion as predicted by Stanley and Poole in 1992. This convert called a fragile-to-strong dynamic crossover helped explain why at superlow temperatures proteins and other biological molecules exist in a glassy express losing all flexibility and biological function."This dynamical transition of protein at 225 K is triggered by its association with the hydration water which shows a similar dynamic transition at that temperature," Chen says http://louis-j-sheehan de/In addition the study showed that water's phase change at 225 K—moving from a disordered state to a more ordered state—violates a well-known formula called the Stokes-Einstein relation. This formula based on a conceive of of a disordered fluid state ties together liquid properties such as diffusion viscosity and temperature and generally works for normal- and high-temperature liquids. Because this formula breaks down in subzero conditions the experiment suggests that supercooled water may be a mix of two liquid phases rather than a hit liquid. Chen's study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provided the first experimental evidence of such "liquid polymorphism" and received the journal's 2006 consider for best paper http://louis-j-sheehan us/Last year. Chen and his colleagues surprised the scientific community and themselves when they discovered that under supercold conditions liquid water again begins to expand returning to normal behavior http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comUsing a neutron-scattering method and analysis to decide the density of subzero liquid wet they showed that wet reaches a minimum density at 210 K or –63°C http://louis-j-sheehan bizIn doing the experiments the scientists used heavy water or D2O because of its neutron-scattering properties. They then repeated the experiments using regular water and two light-scattering techniques and came up with the same results. The findings were reported last June in PNAS. Though this kind of behavior had been predicted in computer simulations it had never been observed. The findings add to the long enumerate of experimental anomalies associated with supercooled water and give the strongest experimental evidence yet for a second "critical point" in liquid water. Chen says http://louis2j2sheehan us/page aspxA critical inform defines the set of pressures and temperatures at which a liquid changes from one form to the other. "It would be hard to explain a density minimum unless there was a second critical point," he says. Water already has one well-known critical inform at 647 K or 374°C where under ordinary pressures the liquid and gas phases become identical. MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES. Water's many forms or phases dress with shifts in temperature and compel. Below –38°C at high enough pressures (a region researchers call "no man's land") water may remain liquid. The precise locations of the phase boundaries are uncertain but those shown here are supported by computer simulations http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan com"As water approaches this critical point the difference between wet and steam grows increasingly smaller," Stanley explains. "At the critical inform there is nothing distinguishing water from go there is just one homogeneous fluid."More important he says a critical point serves as a "tipping point," where wet can exist in either of two states and minor fluctuations can tip the balance in one direction or the other. The hypersensitivity created by a critical point can have far-reaching effects upon a system says Stanley. In predicting a critical point in supercooled wet he and Poole theorized that water's crazy low-temperature behavior might account for some of its unusual properties even at ordinary temperatures http://louis2j2sheehan us/page1 aspxThat's because changes at a critical point don't occur abruptly. Stanley says. The huge changes seen near the water-gas peak for example are often if not always foreshadowed by fluctuations over a large range of temperatures and pressures."It's like looking at the highest peak on a mountain range," Stanley says gesturing toward a picture of Mount Everest in his office. "The critical inform or summit doesn't go out of nowhere but rises in a gradual manner and distorts the terrain all around it."That means that a critical point at –63°C might be for water's bizarre behavior at much higher temperatures such as its ability to expand as it cools http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comThough findings from recent studies point to the predicted second critical point it is comfort too soon to know whether such a inform exists for sure. Further evidence is needed http://louis1j1sheehan us/This year. Chen and his assort ordain seek some of that evidence by performing another more far-reaching set of experiments on supercooled water in MCM-41. Using a specially designed pressure cell for low temperatures the scientists will care for changes in liquid water as it moves from its maximum density point at 4°C to its minimum density at –63°C and beyond under various pressures. By studying how density changes with temperature and pressure the researchers hope to locate the liquid-liquid critical inform precisely."The critical inform is at a high pressure and no one knows exactly what it is but we believe it's probably above 1,000 atmospheres," Stanley says. Other scientists are raising questions about the extent to which supercooled water in confined volumes no be what the pressure actually behaves like cold bulk water."When you put water into confinement it changes the way in which water molecules are arranged with respect to each other," says C. Austen Angell a chemist at Arizona State University in Tempe who studies liquid phases in supercooled water. "The question is how much does it dress it?"http://louis1j1sheehan us/Angell notes that despite recent progress much remains uncertain and many of the explanations are built on simulations that can give different results depending on the model and tools used in the chew over."There are other possibilities related to the back up critical point scenario in which the low-pressure supercooling of uncrystallized bulk water is terminated by a first-order [sharp] transition to a second 'low-density' liquid phase," he says. Angell's take on supercooled wet will be in an upcoming issue of Science http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/summon1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comConfirming the predicted second critical point could have an impact beyond the study of water's molecular mysteries for their own sake. Biologists for example are looking at how this convert in liquid states and the accompanying rigidity it brings affects living structures such as proteins and DNA http://louis1j1sheehan us/Other practical benefits could flow from the new water knowledge. For example scientists at Cornell University undergo open that high-pressure cooling of protein crystals causes them to diffract better than they would if flash frozen and has allowed scientists to improve methods for crystallizing and studying proteins and other biological tissues. The scientists are now pursuing ways to use high-pressure techniques to improve methods for freezing sperm and human oocytes. The studies may lead to better ways of freezing and storing sperm for livestock production and allow women to freeze their eggs and use them at a later time to conceive a child. The studies may also help explain some more ordinary everyday occurrences related to water's mysterious behavior. Chen recalls hiking in New Hampshire's White Mountains a site known for its frigid temperatures and long months of ice and noticing that the trees stopped abruptly at 4,400 feet nearly 2,000 feet below the arrive at of Mount Washington. Soon after he published his findings on a minimum density he received a phone call from a Canadian biologist who was interested in the work."It turns out that this channelise line stops where the windchill temperatures arrive 220 degrees K," Chen says noting that this is the temperature at which water's hydrogen-bonding structure undergoes a phase transition changing from a fluid express to a more rigid express http://louis1j1sheehan us/At this inform water becomes very very decrease and no longer supports biological functions. Or to put it another way the square dance of wet comes to an end http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comLightning does strike twice and more than twice in the same place it is demonstrated by the photograph appearing on the lie cover of this week's Science News Letter. Eleven separate strokes make up what appears to the eye as a single lightning flash. The strokes which come so fast that the human eye cannot identify them were photographed by command Electric Co scientists. The Empire State Building in New York City is the aim. The flash as the human eye sees it (main flash in center) was caught by one camera lens while another one rapidly rotating caught the 11 separate strokes. The first one is the move at the right the last one is at left. The flash took 0.36 second altogether http://louis1j1sheehan us/The hide's salty oceans are some 500 million to 700 million years old almost manifold the accepted previous estimates. Drs. A. C. Spencer and K. J. Murata of the U. S. Geological analyse have concluded after an intensive chew over of oceanic chemistry http://louis1j1sheehan us/Before the move of the century geologists determined the age of the oceans by dividing the be of flavor in them by the be added each year. This was based on the idea that all the flavor brought to the oceans by rivers stayed there. Such an early determination of age after hundreds of surveys and analyses was about 100 million years. Later research brought the age to 350 million years but such figures were open to be too small. Dinosaurs are now known to have existed about 100 million years ago and oceans obviously existed long before that. Studying the action of clay on salt water. Drs. Spencer and Murata in the recent bring home the bacon have found that some of the flavor carried to the oceans is removed by clays and deposited on the sea floors as a compound that does not easily change state. Correcting the old figures for this salt removal gives them the new age figure of 500 million to 700 million years http://louis1j1sheehan us/The geologists who decide the Earth's age by the products of the decay of radioactive elements are expected to say the new ocean age estimates are too small. They pronounce the Earth at least 2 billion years old. While the hide in its earlier stages may have been oceanless there is in the radioactive age figures plenty of dwell for even more ancient oceans http://louis1j1sheehan us/http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comThe flaming younger generation stands condemned as the greatest assort of mass murderers in America. The weapon is the automobile. Although including more highly skilled go drivers than any other age group. 100,000 drivers between 16 and 20 years of age kill nearly twice as many on the road as the add up 100,000 drivers. Accident rates for those below 25 years of age are so high that bringing drink that age group's accident rate to the general level would save nearly 8,000 of the nearly 40,000 killed each year on the American highway and street. These challenging figures were presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Dr. Harry M. Johnson research associate for the Highway Research Board. Washington. Young men between 19 and 21 years of age are apparently the beat menaces on the highway. Dr. Johnson declared pointing to a map which indicated plainly that young men just approaching their majority are responsible for many more accidents per 100,000 drivers than any other assort http://louis1j1sheehan us/FOR TODAY'S CIVILIZED WORLD. WITH ITS DOT-coms sitcoms. ATMs and ATVs the first 3.5 billion years of life on Earth are a bit of an embarrassment. It was only a few hundred million years ago that trilobites prowled the seas. More primitive life subscribed to two or three basic lifestyles: algal mat spineless worm or bacterial blob. Before that in the Archean Eon more than 2.5 billion years ago--well that kind of life is what Lysol is for http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comScientists of course see it differently. "Almost everything of any biological importance happened back in the Archean," says Andrew Knoll of Harvard University compose of the upcoming book Life on a Young Planet. Soon after the infant Earth cooled down he says primeval microbes began processing essential elements--carbon sulfur and nitrogen among others--that allowed for the eventual emergence of higher life-forms including us. To this day says Knoll bacteria comfort do the biosphere's heavy lifting. "We just sit back and live off the fruits of their labors."Folks like Knoll would desire to know whom to thank for those first trophic cycles. But in the seek to identify hide's earliest life geology can look a lot desire biology. It's not always easy to tell the dead organisms from the dead ends. One of the few things experts all agree on is where to conduct the examine: in the three far-flung provinces that host the world's most ancient sedimentary rocks. Deposits in Australia. Greenland and South Africa offer a cryptic view of the earth's surface as it was between 3.2 billion and 3.8 billion years ago. The deposits are made up of layers of accumulated particles that were later buried heated and compressed. Rounded pebbles and smoothed smooth grains in the sediments indicate that they were seabeds so any life they record would be marine http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxThe oldest fossil of that life comes from a remote desert site in Western Australia called North Pole. The rocks there bear the marks of stromatolites--sizable mounds of mud and minerals trapped or precipitated by microbial colonies living in alter ocean water. Modern stromatolites grow knee-high in Australia and the Bahamas and the organisms that build them get distinctive patterns in the mud pedestal that can't be duplicated by mere geologic manipulation. At North Pole those patterns appear in rocks that are almost 3.5 billion years old. The sediment layers in the North impel fossils are much finer than those in modern stromatolites suggesting that much smaller life-forms inhabited them. Even so there's evidence of a food arrange of sorts. The principal architects of stromatolites are photosynthetic. They get their energy directly from sunlight instead of feeding off other creatures. But geochemists found the chemical signature of a microbe that was feasting on dead organic matter a scavenger of sorts. "We had quite sophisticated ecological communities back then change surface if they were just tiny little microbes," says astrobiologist Roger Buick of the University of Washington who discovered the North Pole stromatolites. Unfortunately the vestiges of microbial communities are far more conspicuous than the remains of their individual members. Lacking bones shells teeth and other hard parts the first Earthlings didn't fossilize come up. In the oldest rocks chemical leftovers may be the only evidence of animation. So it happens that the earliest evidence of life is not a lithic imprint but a skewed ratio of carbon isotopes in a accumulate of rock from southwest Greenland. Microscopic globules of graphite in the rock documented in 1999 by geologist Minik Rosing at the University of Copenhagen are unusually low in a heavy carbon isotope that gets excluded when inorganic carbon is converted into living material. Rosing thinks the C-13-poor graphite globules might have come from free-living planktonlike organisms that cut to the seafloor when they died. Their remains he says are at least 3.7 billion years old http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comIn 1996 geochemist Stephen Mojzsis now at the University of Colorado at Boulder trumped Rosing's sight in a report of heavy-isotope depletion in graphite grains from the Isua formation in Greenland and another place on the Greenland island of Akilia. Mojzsis says the grains are 3.85 billion years old--the oldest yet. But his interpretations of both the biological markers and the rock itself undergo been put through the wringer. One of Mojzsis's former coauthors geochemist Gustaf Arrhenius of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography showed how the Isua carbon-isotopic ratio could become by geologic activity alone if certain press minerals in the rock were melted and pressed together over measure. He and other investigators also evaluate that the putative sedimentary rocks are actually igneous formations that have been severely transformed by heat http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxThus rocks of advanced vintage seem to confound even the most basic geologic distinction: igneous metamorphic or sedimentary? "These rocks have been buried and cooked at least three times," says Buick. "They've been severely squashed and strained and tied in knots at least three times too. Then they sat around for at least a billion years and got polished by glaciers. These are not ordinary rocks."The ambiguity of chemical bear witness leaves geologists hungry for a well-defined and ideally photogenic fossil or two. In the early 1990s they thought their hopes had been answered when paleobiologist William Schopf of the University of California at Los Angeles described microscopic structures embedded in a Western Australia formation almost 3.5 billion years old. In his inform dark slender silhouettes appear in translucent sections of thinly sliced quartz. Schopf says the silhouettes are a complex carbon polymer made by chains of bacteria that may undergo been anchored to the seafloor. After examining hundreds of present-day microbes he named 11 possible species in his collection and gave the back story in a 1999 book called Cradle of Life. His menagerie made the Guinness Book of World Records as the Earth's oldest fossils."I open a whole bunch of different things," says Schopf. "The question was what were they?" http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comSchopf decided that at least half could be cyanobacteria or blue-green algae the first organisms in the evolutionary record to produce oxygen. That challenges orthodox thinking about conditions on the young hide which would not have had a significant oxygen atmosphere for at least another billion years. When geologist Martin Brasier of the University of Oxford had a look at the structures he decided Schopf was wrong do by and wrong again. The tubes are too branched to come from bacteria he says. The rock is an extrusion from a hydrothermal vent not seafloor sediment. And the silhouettes are inorganic carbon injected by the vent and molded into suggestive shapes by the growth of mineral crystals. "Ancient filamentous structures should not be accepted as being of biological origin until all possibilities of their nonbiological origin have been exhausted," Brasier and his coauthors wrote in a inform last year http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxThe hubbub over Schopf's fossils has humbled disciples of early life. "People have change state more critical about what they'll accept as evidence of biology," says Knoll. And as demonstrated by the recent retraction of evidence for life in a Mars meteorite the stakes are astronomical. Once biologists know where and how life emerged astrobiologists will be better prepared to be for it elsewhere in the solar system. If life on Earth was a freak accident born of unique and peculiar conditions it's probably rare elsewhere. But says Buick. "if life can arise quickly and easily given the alter environment there might be quite a bit of it out there."Some of the earliest signs of life are open in ancient rock layers called banded iron formations. The iron was released by underwater volcanoes and precipitated from ocean water more than 2 billion years ago. Today the rock formations give about 95 percent of the press used to alter steel http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/summon1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comJustine Henin's 32-match winning move may have been ended by Maria Sharapova in the Australian Open quarterfinals this week but another female tennis champion hopes to act an even more impressive run in the tournament. Esther Vergeer of the Netherlands the defending women's wheelchair singles champion is pursuing her sixth Australian change state call and looking to change integrity her affirm as perhaps the most dominant competitor in all of sports http://louis-j-sheehan org/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxEntering this year's Australian Open. Ms. Vergeer had won 303 consecutive matches. Her last loss came to Daniela Di Toro of Australia in the quarterfinals of the Sydney Invitational in January 2003. Before that. Ms. Vergeer had won 80 straight matches so since May 2001 her record is 383 wins to one loss. Wheelchair tennis is played by the same rules as regular tennis except that wheelchair players can hit the ball on the back up bounce. It has become a world-wide presence with the Australian Open. French change state and U. S. Open including draws for wheelchair players. There are also such premier wheelchair-only events as the Japan Open. British change state and NEC Wheelchair Masters plus the quadrennial Paralympic Games. Ms. Vergeer played 99 singles and doubles matches last year (losing once in doubles) a schedule more demanding than the ones many Association of Tennis Professionals and World Tennis Association players act. Dutch wheelchair tennis champ Esther Vergeer's current 303-match winning move is among the longest in all of sports dwarfing classic streaks desire Edwin Moses' hurdles record and UCLA's NCAA basketball move. Only Pakistani squash champion Jahangir Khan has put together a longer skein of wins. PLAYER SPORT STREAKJahangir Khan press 555 matchesEsther Vergeer wheelchair tennis 303 matchesEdwin Moses track and field 122 racesUCLA Bruins basketball 88 gamesMartina Navratilova tennis 74 matchesRocky Marciano heavyweight boxing 49 fightsOklahoma Sooners college football 47 gamesTo put Ms. Vergeer's winning streak in perspective add the four longest women's winning streaks of the Open Era (74- and 58-match streaks by Martina Navratilova; 66 by Steffi Graf; and 57 by Margaret act) and the total still falls short of Ms. Vergeer's streak by the length of the longest men's change state era streak (46 matches by Guillermo Vilas in 1977). The rest of her bear on is as impressive. She's won 21 Super Series singles titles (the wheelchair equivalent of the Grand Slams) dating back to 2000 a total that dwarfs Roger Federer's career total of 12. The International Tennis Federation has crowned her world champion in her event eight consecutive years topping Pete Sampras's six-year mid-1990s run and Mr. Federer's still-active four-year move http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire us/http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/page1 aspxhttp://louis1j1sheehan1esquire us/http://louis-j-sheehan org/page1 aspxhttp://louis-j-sheehan comAnd while Ms. Vergeer has used a wheelchair since a childhood operation to relieve a hemorrhage left her legs unable to move the obtain of her dominance would be familiar to any tennis fan. Her movement around the act is unparalleled and once she gets to the ball she hits with walk and spin on both her one-handed hit and her especially effective forehand. But one way in which Ms. Vergeer can't compete with her counterparts on the ATP and WTA tours is in earnings. The consider money for the entire Australian change state wheelchair event including men's and women's singles and doubles events is $47,500 about the same as one player's paycheck for losing in the third go of the men's or women's singles draw. While Ms. Vergeer's streak is one of sports histo