By SHARON BEGLEY

Published: Oct 5, 2011

     Steve Jobs was right to be optimistic when, in 2004, he announced that he had cancer in his pancreas. Although cancer of the pancreas has a terrible prognosis—half of all patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer die within 10 months of the diagnosis; half of those in whom it has metastasized die within six months—cancer in the pancreas is not necessarily a death sentence. 

     The difference is that pancreatic cancers arise from the pancreatic cells themselves; this is the kind that killed actor Patrick Swayze in 2009. But cancers in the pancreas, called neuroendocrine tumors, arise from islands of hormone-producing cells that happen to be in that organ. Jobs learned in 2003 that he had an extremely rare form of this cancer, an islet-cell neuroendocrine tumor. As the name implies, it arises from islet cells, the specialized factories within the pancreas that produce and secrete insulin, which cells need in order to take in glucose from the food we eat. Unlike pancreatic cancer, with neuroendocrine cancer ''if you catch it early, there is a real potential for cure,'' says cancer surgeon Joseph Kim of City of Hope, a comprehensive cancer center in Duarte, California.

     But although neither Apple nor those close to Jobs were willing to discuss the treatments he elected or the course of his disease, interviews with experts on neuroendocrine tumors suggest that some of the choices he made did not extend his life and may have shortened it. [...] Despite the expert consensus on the value of surgery, Jobs did not elect it right away. He reportedly spent nine months on ―alternative therapies,‖ including what Fortune called ―a special diet.‖ But when a scan showed that the original tumor had grown, he finally had it removed on July 31, 2004, at Stanford University Medical Clinic. In emails to Apple employees immediately after, Jobs said his form of cancer ―can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was),'' and told his colleagues, ―I will be recuperating during the month of August, and expect to return to work in September.'' 

(Disponível em: <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/05/steve-jobs-dies-his-unorthodox-treatment-for-neuroendocrine-cancer.html?obref=obinsite>. Acesso em: 5 out. 2011).

Eating Disorders a New Front in Insurance Fight

By ANDREW POLLACK

Published: October 13, 2011

     People with eating disorders like anorexia have opened up a new battleground in the insurance wars, testing the boundaries of laws mandating equivalent coverage for mental illnesses. 

     Through claims and court cases, those with severe cases of anorexia or bulimia are fighting insurers to pay for stays in residential treatment centers, arguing that the centers offer around-the-clock monitoring so that patients do not forgo eating or purge their meals.

     But in the last few years, some insurance companies have re-emphasized that they do not cover residential treatment for eating disorders or other mental or emotional conditions. The insurers consider residential treatments not only costly — sometimes reaching more than $1,000 a day — but unproven and more akin to education than to medicine. Even some doctors who treat eating disorders concede there are few studies proving that residential care is effective, although they believe it has value. 

(Disponível em: <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/business/ruling-offers-hope-to-eating-disorder-sufferers.html?hp>. Acesso em: 5 out. 2011).

    A morte de Roberto Mitry teve ampla cobertura dos jornais. Editoriais condenaram com energia a escalada da violência e a falta de segurança dos cidadãos. Os outros cento e cinqüenta homicídios ocorridos naquele mês no Grande Rio, a maioria das vítimas, negros e mulatos pobres, havia recebido apenas a atenção parca e rotineira da imprensa, mas o assassinato de Mitry era uma novidade atraente – um homem rico da sociedade morto na cama com duas ninfetas. Os jornais publicaram glamourosas fotos das duas irmãs, Titi e Tatá, de topless em Ipanema; de Mitry a bordo de seu iate em Angra dos Reis; do edifício da Vieira Souto onde o milionário residia; do interior do apartamento destacando as valiosas obras de arte nele existentes. [...]

    Encontrei-me com Raul no necrotério do Médico Legal. A morte de Mitry deixara-nos perplexos. [...]

    “Mitry foi morto enquanto dormia. A expressão de horror no rosto das meninas indica que tiveram consciência de que estavam sendo mortas. Acreditamos que houve apenas um assassino, usando a mão direita. Não há dúvida, pela natureza e disposição dos ferimentos, de que ele é destro, e muito, muito hábil. Havia sangue no box do chuveiro, provavelmente das vítimas. [...]”

    Um homem de avental aproximou-se. “O doutor Sette Neto está esperando.” 

    “Sette Neto?” 

    “Ele.”

     “Pensei que tinha morrido.”

    Atravessamos um largo e comprido salão de paredes de ladrilho branco, passando por mesas de aço sobre as quais cadáveres nus aguardavam autópsia. 

    “Alguém disse que ele havia morrido.”

    “Esse tipo de gente não morre nunca.”

    “Lembra do nosso tempo?” 

    “Como eu poderia esquecer reminiscências tão agradáveis?”, respondi.

(FONSECA, Rubem. A grande arte. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990. p. 198-199)

                                    Why use biofuels for aviation?
The aviation industry has seen huge growth since its beginning. Today, more than two billion people enjoy the social and economical benefits of flight each year. The ability to fly conveniently and efficiently between nations has been a catalyst for the global economy and has shrunk cultural barriers like no other transport sector. But this progress comes at a cost.
In 2008, the commercial aviation industry produced 677 million tones of carbon dioxide (CO2 ). This is around 2% of the total man-made CO2 emissions of more than 34 billion tones. While this amount is smaller compared with other industry sectors, such as power generation and ground transport, these industries have viable alternative energy sources currently available. For example, the power generation industry can look to wind, hydro, nuclear and solar technologies to make electricity without producing much CO2 . Cars and buses can run on hybrid, flexible fuel engines or electricity.
-powered trains can replace
locomotives.
The aviation industry has identified the development of biofuels as one of the major ways it can reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Biofuels provide aviation with the capability to partially, and perhaps one day fully, replace carbon-intensive petroleum fuels. They will, over time, enable the industry to reduce its carbon footprint significantly.

Instrução: Leia o texto Status of same-sex marriage para responder a questão.

                                                 Status of same-sex marriage

Argentina

                                                                                                                                    (http://en.wikipedia.org/. Adaptado.)

     So a scientist walks into a shopping mall to watch people laugh. There’s no punchline. Laughter is a serious scientific subject, one that researchers are still trying to figure out. Laughing is primal, our first way of communicating. Apes laugh. So do dogs and rats. Babies laugh long before they speak. No one teaches you how to laugh. You just do. And often you laugh involuntarily, in a specific rhythm and in certain spots in conversation.
    You may laugh at a prank on April Fools’ Day. But surprisingly,  only 10 to 15 percent of laughter is the result of someone making a joke, said Baltimore neuroscientist Robert Provine, who has studied laughter for decades. Laughter is mostly about social responses rather than reaction to a joke. “Laughter above all else is a social thing,’’ Provine said. “The requirement for laughter is another person.’’  
    Over the years, Provine, a professor with the University of Maryland Baltimore County, has boiled laughter down to its basics. “All language groups laugh ‘ha-ha-ha’ basically the same way,’’ he said. “Whether you speak Mandarin, French or English, everyone will understand laughter. ... There’s a pattern generator in our brain that produces this sound.’’
    Each “ha’’ is about one-15th of a second, repeated every fifth of a second, he said. Laugh faster or slower than that and it sounds more like panting or something else. Deaf people laugh without hearing, and people on cell phones laugh without seeing, illustrating that laughter isn’t dependent on a single sense but on social interactions, said Provine, author of the book “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.’’   
    “It’s joy, it’s positive engagement with life,’’ said Jaak Panksepp, a Bowling Green University psychology professor. “It’s deeply social.’’ And it’s not just a people thing either. Chimps tickle each other and even laugh when another chimp pretends to tickle them. By studying rats, Panksepp and other scientists can figure out what’s going on in the brain during laughter. And it holds promise for human ills.
    Northwestern biomedical engineering professor Jeffrey Burgdorf has found that laughter in rats produces an insulin-like growth factor chemical that acts as an antidepressant and anxietyreducer. He thinks the same thing probably happens in humans, too. This would give doctors a new chemical target in the brain in their effort to develop drugs that fight depression and anxiety in people. Even so, laughter itself hasn’t been proven to be the best medicine, experts said.

     So a scientist walks into a shopping mall to watch people laugh. There’s no punchline. Laughter is a serious scientific subject, one that researchers are still trying to figure out. Laughing is primal, our first way of communicating. Apes laugh. So do dogs and rats. Babies laugh long before they speak. No one teaches you how to laugh. You just do. And often you laugh involuntarily, in a specific rhythm and in certain spots in conversation.
    You may laugh at a prank on April Fools’ Day. But surprisingly,  only 10 to 15 percent of laughter is the result of someone making a joke, said Baltimore neuroscientist Robert Provine, who has studied laughter for decades. Laughter is mostly about social responses rather than reaction to a joke. “Laughter above all else is a social thing,’’ Provine said. “The requirement for laughter is another person.’’  
    Over the years, Provine, a professor with the University of Maryland Baltimore County, has boiled laughter down to its basics. “All language groups laugh ‘ha-ha-ha’ basically the same way,’’ he said. “Whether you speak Mandarin, French or English, everyone will understand laughter. ... There’s a pattern generator in our brain that produces this sound.’’
    Each “ha’’ is about one-15th of a second, repeated every fifth of a second, he said. Laugh faster or slower than that and it sounds more like panting or something else. Deaf people laugh without hearing, and people on cell phones laugh without seeing, illustrating that laughter isn’t dependent on a single sense but on social interactions, said Provine, author of the book “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.’’   
    “It’s joy, it’s positive engagement with life,’’ said Jaak Panksepp, a Bowling Green University psychology professor. “It’s deeply social.’’ And it’s not just a people thing either. Chimps tickle each other and even laugh when another chimp pretends to tickle them. By studying rats, Panksepp and other scientists can figure out what’s going on in the brain during laughter. And it holds promise for human ills.
    Northwestern biomedical engineering professor Jeffrey Burgdorf has found that laughter in rats produces an insulin-like growth factor chemical that acts as an antidepressant and anxietyreducer. He thinks the same thing probably happens in humans, too. This would give doctors a new chemical target in the brain in their effort to develop drugs that fight depression and anxiety in people. Even so, laughter itself hasn’t been proven to be the best medicine, experts said.

 Instrução: Leia o texto para responder às questões de números 31 a 39.

               Brazil: the natural knowledge economy
Kirsten Bound – THE ATLAS OF IDEAS

    If you grew up in Europe or North America you will no doubt have been taught in school that the Wright Brothers from Ohio invented and flew the first aeroplane – the Kitty Hawk – in 1903. But if you grew up in Brazil you will have been taught that the real inventor was in fact a Brazilian from Minas Gerais called
Alberto Santos Dumont, whose 14-bis aeroplane took to the skies in 1906. This fierce historical debate, which turns on definitions of ‘practical airplanes’, the ability to launch unaided, length of time spent in the air and the credibility of witnesses, will not be resolved here. Yet it is a striking example of the lack of global recognition for Brazil’s achievements in innovation.
    Almost a century later, in 2005, Santos Dumont’s intellectual heirs, the company Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica (EMBRAER), made aviation history of a different kind when they unveiled the Ipanema, the world’s first commercially produced aircraft to run solely on biofuels. This time, the world
was watching. Scientific American credited it as one of the most important inventions of the year. The attention paid to the Ipanema reflects the growing interest in biofuels as a potential solution to climate change and rising energy demand. To their advocates, biofuels – most commonly bioethanol or biodiesel – offer a more secure, sustainable energy supply that can reduce carbon emissions by 50–60 per cent compared to fossil fuels.
      From learning to fly to learning to cope with the environmental costs of flight, biofuel innovations like the Ipanema reflect some of the tensions of modern science, in which expanding the frontiers of human ingenuity goes hand in hand with managing the consequences. The recent backlash against biofuels, which has seen them blamed for global food shortages as land is reportedly diverted from food crops, points to a growing interdependence between the science and innovation systems of different countries, and between innovation, economics and environmental sustainability.
    The debates now raging over biofuels reflect some of the wider dynamics in Brazil’s innovation system. They remind us that Brazil’s current strengths and achievements have deeper historical roots than is sometimes imagined. They reflect the fact that Brazil’s natural resources and assets are a key area of opportunity for science and innovation – a focus that leads us to characterise Brazil as a ‘natural knowledge economy’. Most importantly, they highlight the propitious timing of Brazil’s growing strength in these areas at a time when climate change, the environment, food scarcity and rising worldwide energy demand are at the forefront of global consciousness. What changed between the maiden flight of the 14-bis and the maiden flight of the Ipanema is not just Brazil’s capacity for technological and scientific innovation, but the rest of the world’s appreciation of the potential of that innovation to address some of the pressing challenges that confront us all.

By Peter Kornbluh

“For the better part of two years, a group of editors, journalism students, and human rights lawyers in Santiago, Chile, have been gathering evidence against their country’s leading media mogul, Agustín Edwards, to, at minimum, have him expelled from the press guild, the Academy of Chilean Journalists. The editor of the leftist magazine Puncto Final, Manuel Cabieses, has filed a formal petition accusing Edwards of violating the academy’s code of ethics by conspiring with the Nixon White House and the CIA between 1970 and 1973 to foment the military coup that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, thirty years ago this month. ‘Doonie’, as Edwards is known to his closest friends, is the patriarch of the press – a Chilean Rupert Murdoch. His media empire encompasses Chile’s renowned national newspaper, El Mercurio, a second national paper, Ultimas Noticias, and Santiago’s leading afternoon paper, La Segunda, along with a dozen smaller regional journals. In September 1970, when Chileans narrowly elected Allende, a Socialist, to the presidency, Edwards was widely considered to be the richest man in Chile – and the individual with the most to lose financially from Allende’s election.

The ethics charges against Edwards are likely to receive a boost from a careful analysis of formerly secret U.S. documents that shed considerable new light on CIA covert media operations in Chile. Since 1975, when a special congressional committee chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church issued its report, Covert Action in Chile: 1963-1973, it has been no secret that the CIA provided significant funding to El Mercurio, put reporters and editors on its payroll, and used the paper, in the committee’s words, as ‘the most important channel for anti-Allende propaganda.’ But with the declassification of thousands of CIA and White House records at the end of Clinton administration, the history of the ‘El Mercurio Project’ emerges in far greater detail. Among the key revelations in the documents:

• Even before Allende was inaugurated as president of Chile, Edwards came to Washington and discussed with the CIA the ‘timing for possible military action’ to prevent Allende from taking office. • President Nixon directly authorized massive funding in the newspaper. The White House approve close to $2 million dollars – a significant sum when turned into Chilean currency on the black market.

• Secret CIA cables from mid-1973 identified El Mercurio as among the ‘most militant parts of the opposition’ pushing for military intervention to overthrow Allende.

• In the aftermath of the coup, the CIA continued to covertly finance media operations in order to influence Chilean public opinion in favor of the new military regime, despite General Pinochet’s brutal repression.”

From: KORNBLUH, Peter. “The El Mercurio File”. Columbia Journalism Review. New York, p.14-15, September/October 2007.

By Peter Kornbluh

“For the better part of two years, a group of editors, journalism students, and human rights lawyers in Santiago, Chile, have been gathering evidence against their country’s leading media mogul, Agustín Edwards, to, at minimum, have him expelled from the press guild, the Academy of Chilean Journalists. The editor of the leftist magazine Puncto Final, Manuel Cabieses, has filed a formal petition accusing Edwards of violating the academy’s code of ethics by conspiring with the Nixon White House and the CIA between 1970 and 1973 to foment the military coup that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, thirty years ago this month. ‘Doonie’, as Edwards is known to his closest friends, is the patriarch of the press – a Chilean Rupert Murdoch. His media empire encompasses Chile’s renowned national newspaper, El Mercurio, a second national paper, Ultimas Noticias, and Santiago’s leading afternoon paper, La Segunda, along with a dozen smaller regional journals. In September 1970, when Chileans narrowly elected Allende, a Socialist, to the presidency, Edwards was widely considered to be the richest man in Chile – and the individual with the most to lose financially from Allende’s election.

The ethics charges against Edwards are likely to receive a boost from a careful analysis of formerly secret U.S. documents that shed considerable new light on CIA covert media operations in Chile. Since 1975, when a special congressional committee chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church issued its report, Covert Action in Chile: 1963-1973, it has been no secret that the CIA provided significant funding to El Mercurio, put reporters and editors on its payroll, and used the paper, in the committee’s words, as ‘the most important channel for anti-Allende propaganda.’ But with the declassification of thousands of CIA and White House records at the end of Clinton administration, the history of the ‘El Mercurio Project’ emerges in far greater detail. Among the key revelations in the documents:

• Even before Allende was inaugurated as president of Chile, Edwards came to Washington and discussed with the CIA the ‘timing for possible military action’ to prevent Allende from taking office. • President Nixon directly authorized massive funding in the newspaper. The White House approve close to $2 million dollars – a significant sum when turned into Chilean currency on the black market.

• Secret CIA cables from mid-1973 identified El Mercurio as among the ‘most militant parts of the opposition’ pushing for military intervention to overthrow Allende.

• In the aftermath of the coup, the CIA continued to covertly finance media operations in order to influence Chilean public opinion in favor of the new military regime, despite General Pinochet’s brutal repression.”

From: KORNBLUH, Peter. “The El Mercurio File”. Columbia Journalism Review. New York, p.14-15, September/October 2007.