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10th Planet Appears Barely Larger Than Pluto
(Kenneth Chang, New York Times, April 11, 2006)
The 10th planet turns out to be barely larger than Pluto, a new photograph by the Hubble Space Telescope shows. . . . The object — still officially unnamed but currently tagged with the designation 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena — covered an area only 1.5 pixels across in the digital image taken by Hubble, but that was enough to extract the diameter: 1,490 miles, give or take 60 miles. Pluto has a diameter of 1,422 miles. . . . While small, 2003 UB313 is surprisingly bright, reflecting 86 percent of the light that hits it. . . . "It's just crazy," said Michael E. Brown, a professor of planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology who discovered 2003 UB313 in January 2005 and who also led the analysis of the Hubble image. "We were shocked how bright it was." . . . Pluto, already considered bright, reflects 60 percent of its incoming light. . . . A previous estimate by researchers at the University of Bonn had put the diameter at 1,900 miles. But that calculation, based on measurements taken from the ground, had a greater uncertainty of 250 miles. . . . Astronomers have not decided whether to officially call 2003 UB313 a planet or demote Pluto. In recent years, many astronomers have said Pluto should just regarded as a member of the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. . . . Given that 2003 UB313 is almost a twin of Pluto, at least in terms of size, the ultimate fate of terminology for the two distant objects could well be the same.

posted by Lorenzo 4:18 AM

 

Drug firms 'inventing diseases'
(BBC NEWS, April 11, 2006)
Pharmaceutical firms are inventing diseases to sell more drugs, researchers have warned. . . . Disease-mongering promotes non-existent diseases and exaggerates mild problems to boost profits, the Public Library of Science Medicine reported. . . . Researchers at Newcastle University in Australia said firms were putting healthy people at risk by medicalising conditions such as menopause. . . . Report authors David Henry and Ray Moynihan criticised attempts to convince the public in the US that 43% of women live with sexual dysfunction. . . . They also said that risk factors like high cholesterol and osteoporosis were being presented as diseases - and rare conditions such as restless leg condition and mild problems of irritable bowel syndrome were exaggerated. . . . The report said: "Disease-mongering is the selling of sickness that widens the boundaries of illness and grows the markets for those who sell and deliver treatments. . . . "It is exemplified mostly explicitly by many pharmaceutical industry-funded disease awareness campaigns - more often designed to sell drugs than to illuminate or to inform or educate about the prevention of illness or the maintenance of health." . . . The researchers called on doctors, patients and support groups to be aware of the marketing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry and for more research into the way in which conditions are presented. . . . They added: "The motives of health professionals and health advocacy groups may well be the welfare of patients, rather than any direct self-interested financial benefit, but we believe that too often marketers are able to crudely manipulate those motivations. . . . "Disentangling the different motivations of the different actors in disease-mongering will be a key step towards a better understanding of this phenomenon."

posted by Lorenzo 12:10 PM