THURSDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2014 • THE BULLETIN
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SCIENCE
HAPPENINGS European leaders will meet in Brussels amid growing indications that pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainians could meet next weekfor talks under European auspices.
HISTORY Highlight:In1944, in a pair of related rulings, the U.S.Supreme Court, in Korematsu v. United States, upheld, 6-3, the government's wartime evacuation of people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, from theWest Coast (the decision was limited to the exclusion policy, and did not take up the issue of internment), while in Ex parte Endo,the justices unanimously agreed that "concededly loyal" Americans of Japaneseancestry could not continue to bedetained. (Both rulings came aday after the U.S. Department of Warsaid it was lifting the internment policy.) In1865,the13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, was declared in effect by Secretary of State William Seward. In1892, Tchaikovsky's ballet "The Nutcracker" publicly premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia. In1912,fossil collector Charles Dawson reported to the Geological Society of London his discovery of supposed early human remains at agravel pit in Piltdown. (More than four decades later, Piltdown Man was exposed as ahoax.) In1915, President Woodrow Wilson, widowed theyear before, married Edith Bolling Galt at her Washington home. In1940,Adolf Hitler ordered secret preparations for Nazi Germany to invadethe Soviet Union. (Operation Barbarossa was launched in June1941.) In1958, the world's first communications satellite, SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment), nicknamed "Chatterbox," was launched by the United States aboard an Atlas rocket. In1969, Britain's Houseof Lords joined the Houseof Commons in making permanent a1965 ban onthedeath penalty for murder. In1972, the United States beganheavybombing ofNorth Vietnamese targets during the Vietnam War. (Thebombardment ended 11days later.) In1992, Kim Young-sam was elected South Korea's first civilian president in three decades. Ten years ago: Theformer Iraqi general known as"Chemical Ali," Ali Hassanal-Majid, went before a tribunal of judges in the first investigative hearings of former members of Saddam Hussein's regime. (Al-Majid was executed in January 2010.) Five years ago: The infamous iron sign bearing the Nazis' cynical slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Sets YouFree) that spanned the mainentrance to the former Auschwitz death camp in Polandwas stolen. (The sign was later recovered; six suspects in the theft were later jailed.) One year ago:A presidential advisory panel released areport recommending sweeping changes to government surveillance programs, including limiting the bulk collection of Americans' phone records by stripping the National Security Agency of its ability to store that data in its own facilities.
BIRTHDAYS Actor-producer Roger Smith is 82. Rock singer-musician Keith Richards is 71. Movie producer-director Steven Spielberg is 68. Movie reviewer Leonard Maltin is 64. Actor Ray Liotta is 59. Comedian Ron White is 58. Actor Brad Pitt is 51. Professional wrestler-turned-actor "Stone Cold" Steve Austin is 50. Country/ rap singer CowboyTroy is 44. Rapper DMX is 44.Actress Katie Holmes is 36. Singer Christina Aguilera is 34. — From wire reports
eec oes ea son sience
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Digital sound reconstruction allows researchers to listen to heartbeats that
That's all, folks: Death and mayhem in children'scartoons By Monte Morin
my advice: skip over the first
Los Angeles Times
5 minutes."
Think t here's nothing
were recorded by 19th-century physicians.
of popcornand aclassicchildren's animated film? Guess again, say Canadian researchers. When it comes to big-
By Ron Cowen
screen murder and mayhem,
Efforts to record the pattern of human heartbeats — the V
I
M
S
4 minutes and 3 seconds into
the film. (Compare that with "Tarzan," where the main character's parents are killed
by a leopard 4 minutes and 8 seconds into the movie.)
kids' animated films pack the deadliest wallop of all top-grossing films, according to a statistical survival analysis published this week
New York Times News Service
wavylines so familiar onhospital monitors — go back at least
The reason? Nemo's mother gets eaten by a barracuda
more wholesome than a tub
The authors c onducted
their research by watching 135 top-grossing North American films since 1937.
in the journal BMJ.
The films included 45 children's animated movies and
tist pressed a weighted plate against an artery, connected it
"Rather than being the 90 dramatic films for adults. innocuous form of entertain- (Children's' films that fea-
to a stylus made of a strand of
ment they are assumed to be,
tured only robots, planes or
hair, and traced the pulsations on a moving strip of paper
children's animated films cars were excluded, as the are rife with on-screen death concept of mortality for a and murder," w r ote l e ad non-living, yet anthropomorstudy author Ian Colman, an phizedcharacteris unclear, associate professor ofepide- the authors wrote.) miology at the University of The r esearchers f ound Ottawa, and his colleagues. that two-thirds of the carAmong other findings, toons depicted the death Colman and his colleagues of an important character, found that murder occurred compared with half of those three times more often in in adult dramas. top-grossing animated chilResearchers ob s e r ved d ren's films than it did i n deadly animal attacks in five comparable adult dramas. films ("A Bug's Life," "The
8
-
T
to 1854, when a German scien-
blackened by the soot of an oil
lamp. Now, using innovative digital processing techniques to turn
pictures of repeating waveforms into sounds, an artist and a sound historian have
Library and Artifact Collections of the Bakken Museum vla The New YorkTimes
The19th-century device called a sphygmograph was used to
converted that mute pattern of record pulses. An artist and a historian used digital processing lines into the rhythmic lub-dub techniques to listen again to the pulses of people who have been of a heart. And working with dead for more than a century. a slightly newer medical chart, they have resurrected in sound
the pulse of a 100-year-old 19th-century physiologist and work "needs to be in the mediFrenchman whose heart start- cinema pioneer. In 1865, Mar- cal literature." ed beating in 1769, 20 years be- ey used a new type of stethoThis fall, after the exhibit fore the French Revolution. scope in which two membranes opened, Feaster and RobleThe artist, Dario Robleto, filled with water were pressed to discovered a photographwas doing research on artifi- against a patient's chest; in- ic chart created in 1869 by a cial hearts for a conceptual art stead of attaching them to rub- French physician, Charles Ozainstallation in Houston when ber listening tubes — as Karl nam, depicting the pulse of a he met the historian, Patrick Rudolph Koenig, the inventor 100-year-old Frenchman, one Feaster, while both were on a of that type of stethoscope, Monsieur Leger, a few months fellowship at the Smithsonian had done — he connected the before his death. Feaster conInstitution in 2011. (Feaster had membranes to a recording verted the tracings into sound, already discovered a technique device. The wavy lines gen- bringing to life the pulse of a to give voice to pictorial pat- erated by the device were the man born in the 18th century. terns that were never intended earliest recorded sounds of a Robleto traces his fascinato be heard, like those on an beating heart. Feaster relied tion with the human heartbeat oscilloscope.) on software normally used to to a recording hefirstheard Together, the two scoured old play movie soundtracks — the when he was 6 or 7. Home sick medical journals, delving into same method he and his col- from school, he heard a news the history ofhow 19th-century leagues have used since 2008to report giving a toll-free number physicians recorded the pulse give voice to pictorial tracings created by NASA to hear the and heartbeat of patients and of human speech that predate sounds of space. Expecting to sounding out the information Thomas Edison's phonograph hear a communication from an in a way that had never been by 20 years. alien civilization, he asked his attempted. After digitizing Marey's re- mother to dial the number"We're really, in a certain cording, which displayed the only to be disappointed and besense, bringing these physio- amplitude of t h e h e artbeat wildered, for all he could hear logical processes back to life," changing over time, Feaster was static. said Feaster, 43. "I'm not sure edited the image into a form But he became haunted by what we stand to learn from that the film soundtrack soft- the recording, convinced he these recordings, but there is ware could convert into a WAV had missed something importa certain sense of access to file.The resurrected sounds ant. Only years later did he the pulse from hearing it that I "demonstrate that thresholds learn that the noisy passage don't think anybody would get we once thought were perma- was actually electrical recordfrom just looking at a wavy line nentbarriers to accessinghisto- ings of the heart and brain on apiece of paper." ry aresometimes more porous waves of a young writer, Ann To Dr. O.H. Frazier, a car- and malleable," said Robleto, Druyan. diac surgeon and researcher 42, the conceptual artist. In September, after years at the Texas Heart Institute in Many of the audios, along of c onversation w i t h the Houston (and a co-inventor of a with Robleto's sculptures and a rtist, Druyan came to t h e beatless artificial heart), the re- models of the artificial heart, installation. "I can't believe I was listencordings "open up a new arena are part of his new installation, "The Boundary of Life Is Qui- ing to your heart when I was a tobe studied." "The heart sounds were in- etly Crossed," on exhibit at the little boy," he told her. strumental in heart diagnoses Menil Collection in Houston During a public talk at the in the old days," Frazier said. through Jan.4. Menil,Druyan harked back to "That was when medicine was Frazier, the heart surgeon, the much older heartbeats. "I found it so satisfying, so really an art." said the exhibit reminded him Until the mid-19th century, of the French phrase "cri de gratifying," she said, "to know charting a pulse required the coeur," or cry from the heart. In that there were scientists 150 doctor to cut into an artery and the recordings,heartbeats "are yearsago who were firsttrying place a metal device or a glass crying out over a century or to figure out how to record the tube inside. There were no hu- more," he said, adding that the sounds we make." man volunteers, and studies
In fact, the parents of main
Croods," "How to Train Your
Dragon," "Finding Nemo" and "Tarzan"); gunshot slaychildren's flicks, and were ings in three films ("Bambi," five times as likely to meet "Peter Pan" and "Pocahonan untimely end than they tas"); and fatal stabbings in were in films for adults. two films ("Sleeping Beauty" "There was no evidence and "The Little Mermaid"). characters were the primary
targets of on-screen death in
to suggest these results had
T he authors n ote
NEW YEAR'S EVE (: ELE B RATION at Broken Top Club
were limited to animals. The
first known recording occurred Dec. 12, 1846, when a German physician, Carl Ludwig, took the pulse of a horse. It was Karl von Vierordt,
IlO ur HandSHllrtV
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a German physiologist, who invented the elaborate device
that charted human pulses noninvasively. He called it the
sphygmograph, or "pulse writer," and in 1854 he used it to trace45 feeble pulsesofJohann
Hahn, a 71-year-old patient who suffered from pulmonary emphysema. To give voice to the tracings, Feaster digitized von Vierordt's wavy line inscriptions. For the
height of the line, which represents an increase or decrease
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in the amount of blood pres-
sure, he assigned higher and lower sound frequencies — giving the greatest volume to places in the waveform where the pressure changed abruptly, and lower volume to places where
the pressure remained relatively constant. Rapid changes in pressure trace the opening and dosingofheart valves. Feaster used a di fferent technique to create audio files
of cardiac tracings compiled by Etienne-Jules Marey, a
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changed over time since children's literature and the 1937, when Snow W h ite's works of the brothers Grimm stepmother, the evil queen, have long featured gruesome was struck by l ightning, deaths. forced off a cliff, and crushed However, as child mortaliby a boulder while being ty rates have decreased over chased by seven vengeful the centuries, the researchdwarves," the authors wrote. ers say death has become an The analysis appeared increasingly taboo subject in BMJ's tongue-in-cheek to discuss with children. As Christmas issue this week, such, many youngsters may which has explored such be unprepared for what they topics as the on-screen tip- encounter in a G-rated Displing habits of James Bond, ney film. "Exposure to o n -screen the propensity for "idiotic" behavior in male Home sa- death and violence can be piens, and why your doctor's frightening to young chilwaiting room has such old dren and can have intense magazines. and long-lasting effects," The cartoon study, accord- authors wrote. "This might ing to authors, was inadver- be particularly problematic tently inspired by some ad- when children have not been vice Colman received from prepared, through candid a friend: "You're watching discussion with parents or 'Finding Nemo' with your caring adults, to face these children this evening? Take themes."
J oin u s i n o u r l o u n g e o r A ward W i n n i n g R e s t a u r a n t i
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