As relatives wait, minister says stop circulating crash pictures.

 The Jakarta Post, Jakarta 

A senior minister says people should stop circulating pictures of the victims of the Sukhoi Superjet 100 that crashed near Mt. Salak in West Java.

“I have received information that pictures of the victims have already been circulating through mobile phones. This kind of action will be painful for the victims’ families. Please, stop it,” Coordinating People’s Welfare Minister Agung Laksono told reporters at Halim Perdanakusuma airport in East Jakarta on Saturday as quoted by kompas.com.

Agung's statement follows the circulation on BlackBerry Messenger on Friday of a photo purportedly taken at the crash site depicting the remains of two victims.

Meanwhile, dozens of relatives of the victims have assembled in front of the National Police Hospital in Kramat Jati, East Jakarta, where officials have taken five body bags containing the partial remains of victims and their personal effects for identification.

Officials have prepared tents in the hospital's courtyard, along with televisions tuned to news stations, for relatives as they wait.

Separately, Sr. Comr. Anton Castilani, chief of the National Police’s disaster victim identification unit, said autopsies of the victims might take weeks, months or even years given that the remains were not intact and decomposition had already begun.

Huge Asteroid Is Still the Central Villain in Dinosaurs’ Extinction

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

For some 30 years, scientists have debated what sealed the fate of the dinosaurs. Was an asteroid impact more or less solely responsible for the catastrophic mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous geological period, 65 million years ago? Or were the dinosaurs already undergoing a long-term decline, and the asteroid was merely the coup de grâce?

So three young researchers, led by Stephen L. Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University who is affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History, decided to test this hypothesis with a close examination of the fossil record over the 12 million years leading up to the mass extinction.

 For the study, the researchers departed from the practice of focusing almost exclusively on raw counts of the number of species over time. Instead, they analyzed changes in the anatomies and body plans of seven large groups of late Cretaceous dinosaurs for insights into their evolutionary trajectory.

 Groups that show an increase in variability, for example, might have been evolving into more species, giving them an ecological edge. But decreasing variability might be a warning sign of approaching doom.

 In science, alas, not all projects fulfill researchers’ ambitions. The findings of this one were mixed and generally inconclusive, Mr. Brusatte’s team reported in an article published online last week by the journal Nature Communications. At best, striking a positive note, the team wrote that the “calculations paint a more nuanced picture of the last 12 million years of dinosaur history.”

 As Mr. Brusatte explained, the late Cretaceous “wasn’t a static ‘lost world’ that was violently interrupted by an asteroid impact.” Some dinosaurs, he noted, “were undergoing dramatic changes during this time, and large herbivores seem to have been mired in a long-term decline, at least in North America.”

 The findings showed that duck-billed hadrosaurs and horned ceratopsids, two groups of large-bodied, bulk-feeding plant eaters (meaning they ate just about anything and everything) might have declined in diversity at this time. In contrast, small herbivores like the ankylosaurs and pachycephalosaurs, and the meat-eating tyrannosaurs and coelurosaurs, appeared to be holding steady or perhaps increasing in diversity. So, too, were the enormous herbivorous sauropods like apatosaurs.

 The results were not uniform on different continents. While hadrosaurs declined in North America, their diversity seemed to have been increasing in parts of Asia. The fossil record in many regions was insufficient for reliable analysis, meaning that the extinction debate will continue.

 Besides Mr. Brusatte, the other authors were Richard J. Butler of the University of Munich, Albert Prieto-Márquez of the Bavarian State Collection for Paleontology and Geology in Munich, and Mark A. Norell, an American Museum paleontologist who is Mr. Brusatte’s doctoral adviser.

 Dr. Norell said the study of skeletal changes in groups of species over time was “a novel way” to assess their prospects for survival over the long haul. “It would be nice to have more fossils to see how much these results are real,” he said.

Paul C. Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago who had no part in the study, agreed that such investigations of life at the end of the Cretaceous had been “limited by the coarseness of the data where you really need it.” He questioned whether the research technique, though useful in studying simpler invertebrates, could be applied successfully to dinosaurs.

 “It’s an interesting study, and they are quality researchers,” Dr. Sereno said, “but I don’t think it changes the picture over all: Extinctions aren’t a simple process, but ultimately the asteroid was the major factor at the end of the Cretaceous.”

Painted Maya Walls Reveal Calendar Writing

 By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: May 10, 2012

Hacking through jungle growth and clearing away rubble, archaeologists made their way to excavate a house buried at the edge of ruins of a large Maya city in the remote Petén lowlands of northeastern Guatemala. It turned out to have been the studio for royal scribes with a taste for art and a devotion to the heavens as the source of calculations for the ancient culture’s elaborate calendars.

Inside, two of the three standing masonry walls were decorated with a faded but still impressive mural, including a painting of a seated king with a scepter and wearing blue feathers. It seemed that, like the Alec Guinness character in the 1958 movie “The Horse’s Mouth,” no Maya artist could abide a wall without a touch of inspired paint. The third wall, on the east side, appeared to have served as the scribes’ blackboard.

 On its badly eroded surface, along with black-painted human figures, were scrawled Mayan glyphs and columns of numbers in the form of bars and dots (bars for the number 5 and dots for 1), based on observations of motions of the Sun, the Moon and planets. The glyphs were delicately painted in red or black. From time to time, thin coats of plaster had been applied over texts to provide a clean slate for new calculations. Still other texts were incised into the plaster surface. 

  The early-ninth-century workshop of scribes and calendar priests was the first important discovery in the ruins of a Maya city known today as Xultún, found a century ago but largely unexplored until the past few years. Archaeologists said the calendar writing on the wall appeared to be already well advanced several centuries earlier than the examples previously known, mainly from the Dresden Codex, a bark-paper book from the period shortly before the Spanish arrived in the early 16th century.

 Rest assured, however, that nothing written on those walls foretells the world coming to an end on Dec. 21, 2012, as some have feared through a misinterpretation of the Maya Long Count calendar. That date is simply when one cycle of the Maya calendar ends and a new one begins.

 The discovery at Xultún, made by a team led by William A. Saturno of Boston University, was reported in the journal Science, published online on Thursday, and at a teleconference with reporters. The National Geographic Society, which supported the excavations, will describe the research in the June issue of its magazine.

  “For the first time,” Dr. Saturno said, “we get a real look at this kind of work space in a Maya city and the scribes’ tight connections to the royal court.”

 David Stuart, professor of Mesoamerican art and writing at the University of Texas at Austin, who deciphered the glyphs, said, “This is tremendously exciting,” noting that the columns of numbers interspersed with glyphs inside circles was “the kind of thing that only appears in one place — the Dresden Codex.”

 Some of the columns of numbers, for example, are topped by the profile of a lunar deity and represent multiples of 177 or 178, numbers that the archaeologists said were important in ancient Maya astronomy. Eclipse tables in the Dresden Codex are based on sequences of multiples of such numbers. Some texts “defy translation right now,” he said, and some writing is barely legible even with infrared imagery and other enhancements.

 Dr. Stuart was an author of the report, along with Dr. Saturno; Anthony F. Aveni, professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University; and Franco Rossi, an archaeologist at Boston University.

 One goal of the Maya calendar keepers, the researchers wrote in the journal article, “was to seek harmony between sky events and sacred rituals.” They observed that the calculations appeared to represent various calendrical cycles the Maya were noted for: the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars.

 They said the sets of the Xultún calculations were “undoubtedly carefully contrived” and “may have been devised to create schemes for synchronizing predictable events connected with the movement of Mars, Venus, the Moon and possibly Mercury.” Why these particular calculations, ranging in duration from 935 to 6,703 years, were used is uncertain, the researchers said.

 The principal scribe, who may have been related to the royal family, also left his mark on the north wall, near the presumed king’s picture. Four long numbers there represent dates that stretch over 7,000 years. The scientists said this was the first place that seems to tabulate all these cycles in this way. Another number scratched in the plaster records a date that translates to A.D. 813. This was in the last century of the Classic Period, before the Maya civilization collapsed into Post-Classic decline.

 Xultún is a 12-square-mile site where archaeologists estimate that tens of thousands of people once lived. Its first temples and monuments were constructed in the first centuries B.C., only five miles from other Maya ruins at San Bartolo, where in 2001 Dr. Saturno uncovered some of the oldest extant wall paintings at a large ceremonial center. The last known carved monument at Xultún dates to A.D. 890, in the twilight of the Classic Period.

 One of Dr. Saturno’s students, Maxwell Chamberlain, came upon the scribes’ buried studio two years ago while following looters’ trenches through the rain forest. The first surprise was that any of the paintings and writings had survived the humidity of the Guatemalan lowlands. The building, part of a larger elite residential complex, was designated No. 54 of 56 structures when mapped by Harvard scientists in the 1970s. Archaeologists suspect that thousands of other houses remain uncounted.

 Although there may be reasons to worry about the future, the researchers emphasized that nothing in Maya beliefs or calendars warranted hoisting “The End Is Nigh” placards. A change in the Long Count cycle, said Dr. Aveni, an astroarchaeologist, is like the odometer of a car rolling over from 120,000 to 130,000. “The car gets a step closer to the junkyard as the numbers turn over,” he said. “The Maya just start over.”

Cutbacks Hurt a State’s Response to Whooping Cough

By KIRK JOHNSON

Published: May 12, 2012

MOUNT VERNON, Wash. — Whooping cough, or pertussis, a highly infectious respiratory disease once considered doomed by science, has struck Washington State this spring with a severity that health officials say could surpass the toll of any year since the 1940s, before a vaccine went into wide use.

Although no deaths have been reported so far this year, the state has declared an epidemic and public health officials say the numbers are staggering: 1,284 cases through early May, the most in at least three decades and 10 times last year’s total at this time, 128.

 The response to the epidemic has been hampered by the recession, which has left state and local health departments on the front lines of defense weakened by years of sustained budget cuts.

 Here in Skagit County, about an hour’s drive north of Seattle — the hardest-hit corner of the state, based on pertussis cases per capita — the local Public Health Department has half the staff it did in 2008. Preventive care programs, intended to keep people healthy, are mostly gone.

 The county’s top medical officer, Dr. Howard Leibrand, who is also a full-time emergency room physician, said that in the crushing triage of a combined health crisis and budget crisis, he had gone so far as to urge local physicians to stop testing patients to confirm a whooping cough diagnosis.

 If the signs are there, he said — especially a persistent, deep cough and indication of contact with a confirmed victim — doctors should simply treat patients with antibiotics. The pertussis test can cost up to $400 and delay treatment by days. About 14.6 percent of Skagit County residents have no health insurance, according to a state study conducted last year, up from 11.6 percent in 2008.

 “There has been half a million dollars spent on testing in this county,” Dr. Leibrand said late last week. “Do you know how much vaccination you can buy for half a million dollars?” And testing, he added, benefits only the epidemiologists, not the patients. “It’s an outrageous way to spend your health care dollar.”

 State health officials estimate that because of incomplete testing and the assumption that many people with mild cases are not seeking medical treatment, perhaps as few as one in five pertussis cases is being recorded and tracked, suggesting that the outbreak is far more widespread than the numbers indicate.

 Pertussis was once a dreaded disease of childhood — killing 5,000 to 10,000 Americans a year from the 1920s through the 1940s — but is now a risk mostly to infants, to whom it is fatal in about 1 percent of cases. Most of the victims in Washington, as in previous outbreaks in other states, are between 8 and 12.

 “It’s the largest epidemic I’ve ever seen,” said Becky Neff, the only registered nurse in the 3,700-student Burlington-Edison School District, in Skagit County. Ms. Neff said she had seen 142 suspected and confirmed cases, or about 3.8 percent of the student population from kindergarten through 12th grade.

 But with only two nurses processing the disease reports she sends over to the county, down from five a few years ago, Ms. Neff said she had stopped even trying to ask for confirmation.

 “They don’t have time to call and say who’s positive and who’s negative,” she said.

 The pertussis vaccine is commonly given in childhood, and many states require it for children of school age. But Washington State, according to a federal study last year of kindergarten-age children, had the highest percentage of parents in the nation who voluntarily exempted their children from one or more vaccines, out of fear of side effects or for philosophical reasons.

 So-called underimmunization — in which children do not get the full series of vaccinations — could also be a factor in compounding the outbreak, said Mary Selecky, Washington State’s secretary of health.

 Last year, the Washington Legislature passed a law requiring parents to prove that they had consulted a physician before declining vaccinations for their children.

 “We had the easiest opt-out law in the nation until last year, so what we also had was the highest percent of parents opting out,” Ms. Selecky said.

 Officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which sent three epidemiologist investigators to Washington last week, said the number of pertussis cases had been rising gradually nationwide for several decades, with periodic regional outbreaks. In 2010, California had its worst bout with pertussis in decades.

 Dr. Thomas Clark, an epidemiologist at the C.D.C., said changes in the vaccine may be partly responsible. The formula was altered beginning in the early 1990s to reduce side effects, which means that its immunizing effects do not last as long, he said.

 Most of the victims in the Washington outbreak and other recent ones received their early childhood vaccinations, Dr. Clark said. An early immunization, even if it does not keep a patient from getting the illness, generally produces a milder case, he said, since the victim would still have some residual resistance.

 Ms. Selecky said immunizations were meant to protect not only individuals but also the broader population: the so-called herd immunity threshold. If a large enough segment of the population is unprotected from a disease — generally considered 5 percent to 15 percent, depending on the disease — even people with some degree of immunity through vaccination can have an elevated risk, she said.

 Before the law was passed, Washington’s vaccination exemption rate was more than 6 percent.

 But the drumbeat of publicity about the pertussis outbreak could be changing some minds.

 Mary Ann Mercer, 74, a retired schoolteacher, went to Skagit County’s walk-in clinic on Thursday morning for a vaccination after hearing news reports. She never had whooping cough as a child, she said, and never thought of it much until recently.

 “It’s just precautionary,” she said after receiving her shot.

 Her husband, Roger Mercer, who ran a local Blue Cross insurance plan before his retirement, sat anchored to his chair in the waiting area.

 “I’m a coward,” he said.

Off the Shelf When You Text Till You Drop

By BRYAN BURROUGH

Published: May 12, 2012

I DON’T know about you, but I’ve always found the debate about what our mobile devices are doing to us — to our behaviors, our manners, our minds — at least as interesting as reports about what we’re doing with these devices.

What about that gent who was talking loudly into his Android phone on the Metro-North train this morning? Was he really that obnoxious before we all went wireless — or did the device somehow change him? And what about all those young people who spend hours upon hours texting and sexting and Facebooking? What kinds of adults will they become?

 Is the casual anonymity of Internet discussion turning us into boors? What did we once do with all the hours we now spend obsessively checking e-mail and texts? Smoke?

 Larry D. Rosen, a California psychologist, is less concerned with techno-boorishness than with the very real possibility that all these new personal gadgets may be making some of us mentally ill — especially those who are prone to narcissism, for example, or to depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

 In “iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us” (Palgrave Macmillan), Dr. Rosen surveys the existing research, throws in a bit of his own and suggests ways that users of new technologies can avoid behavioral pitfalls.

 As much as the topic interests me, I was initially skeptical of this book. For one thing, it’s a little proud of itself. The word “iDisorder,” which Dr. Rosen repeats throughout, suggests an author trying very hard to coin a term. He is among the few authors I’ve seen who refers to his own book as “groundbreaking.”

 Yet “iDisorder” is a pleasant surprise — lean, thoughtful, clearly written and full of ideas and data you’ll want to throw into dinner-party conversation. Did you know that psychologists divide Twitter users into “informers,” those who pass along interesting facts, and “meformers,” those who pass along interesting facts about only themselves? Or that 70 percent of those who report heavily using mobile devices experience “phantom vibration syndrome,” which is what happens when your pocket buzzes and there’s no phone in your pocket? (I thought I was the only one.) Or that heavy use of Facebook has been linked to mood swings among some teenagers? Researchers are calling this “Facebook depression.” (And I thought that my children were just having a lot of bad days.)

 One strength of “iDisorder” is Dr. Rosen’s cleareyed view of technology and its uses. He doesn’t oppose it. In fact, his view is quite the opposite. What we need, he says, is a sense of restorative balance and self-awareness. It is unavoidable that many of us will fall prey to an iDisorder, he says, but “it is not fatal and we are not doomed to spend time in a mental institution or a rehab center.” By using a few simple strategies, he says, “we can safely emerge from our TechnoCocoons and rejoin the world of the healthy.”

 The book’s chapters focus on mental health challenges linked to heavy technology use. They include how social media sites may spawn narcissism (no surprise there) and how constantly checking our wireless mobile devices (he calls them W.M.D.’s, a great acronym) can lead to obsessive-compulsive disorder. Others look at how technology addiction can lead to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and at how all that medical data available online has created a class of people known as “cyberchondriacs.” Perhaps most interesting of all, Dr. Rosen examines how the constant use of technology may be rewiring our brains. One study he cites calls the impact on memory the “Google effect,” that is, an inability to remember facts brought on by the realization that they are all available in a few keystrokes via Google.

 AT the end of each chapter, Dr. Rosen details a list of things that can be done to combat each techno-disorder. These tend to be a bit repetitive and common-sensical, but that doesn’t make them any less useful. One often-suggested solution is to take a “tech break.” In other words, if overusing your iPad is making you crazy, maybe you should stop using it so much. I know: duh. But still.

 For those combating some form of techno-addiction, Dr. Rosen advises regularly stepping away from the computer for a few minutes and connecting with nature; just standing in your driveway and staring at the bushes, research shows, has a way of resetting our brains.

 Parents will find this book particularly helpful. Dr. Rosen suggests a whole set of remedies for children’s techno-addiction. Two popular methods are to make sure your child gets a full night’s sleep, and to convene regular family dinners where technology is forbidden at the table. This is especially useful, it appears, in reintroducing children to normal interaction after hours spent in cyberconversation.

 For those worried about their own heavy use of technology, or their family’s, this book could be a helpful starting point for understanding the consequences, and for overcoming them.

Herd’s Fate Lies in Preservation Clash

By LAURA BEIL

COROLLA, N.C. — Come summer, the beaches of this barrier island will be choked with cars and sunbathers, but in the off-season the land is left to wild horses. Smallish, tending toward chestnut and black, they wander past deserted vacation rentals in harems of five or six.

 Thousands of them once roamed the length of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the likely descendants from mounts that belonged to Spanish explorers five centuries ago. Now their numbers have dwindled to a few hundred, the best known living on federal parkland at Shackleford Banks.

 But the largest herd, which has recently grown to almost 140 strong, occupies more than 7,500 acres of narrow land that stretches from the end of Highway 12 in Corolla (pronounced cor-AH-la) to the Virginia border, 11 miles north. Lacking natural predators, and trapped by fences that jut into the choppy Atlantic, the herd is becoming so inbred that its advocates fear a genetic collapse in mere generations.

 These supporters are leading a campaign to save the Corolla herd, and they have powerful allies in Congress. In February, the House passed a bill that would sustain the herd at about 120 and allow the importing of new mares from Shackleford for an introduction of fresh genes.

 Wildlife conservationists say the issue is not so simple. The beaches, marshes, grasslands and forests near Corolla are a stopover for flocks of endangered migratory birds, and nesting ground for sea turtles. Much of the horses’ range belongs to the Currituck National Wildlife Refuge, and defenders of the native habitat fear the herd’s current size strains the ecosystem.

 The future of the horses raises larger questions about whether one animal should be preserved at the expense of others — and who gets to decide.

 “This is about values,” said Michael Hutchins, executive director of the Wildlife Society, representing wildlife biologists and managers, which opposes the House measure. “I like horses; I think they are fascinating animals. I also deeply value what little we have left of our native species and their habitats.”

 Both sides invoke science to their cause. But data are sparse and a comprehensive study of the horses’ impact is not expected before next year.

 In the arena of political and public sentiment, the horses win hands down. Bonds between horse and human have existed for centuries; it is the animal that has pulled plows, and carried armies and settlers forward in the name of civilization.

 “God has put such a beautiful thing here — how can you not want to protect them?” said Betty Lane, 70, who has lived here for more than 40 years, driving her S.U.V. as part of a citizen patrol to protect the horses. (She stopped after mistaking a reporter for a tourist trying to get too close to the horses, in defiance of local law.) She wore a necklace bearing the name Spec, for a stallion killed by a hit-and-run driver on the beach.

 Dedication to wild horses runs so deep here and elsewhere that many supporters even chafe at the notion of calling the animals “non-native,” citing fossil records that horses lived in North America more than 11,000 years ago before going extinct along other Pleistocene creatures like mastodons.

 The wild horses of Corolla did not arise here, but they are domestic animals that have lost their domesticity. Though skeptics question whether the horses are indeed Spanish, an inspection from the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and other groups has noted the horses’ short backs, low-set tails and other traits that make them distinct from other North American stock. A DNA analysis published February in Animal Genetics also points to a common origin for the horses, suggesting they may be a living relic of an Iberian breed that exists nowhere else.

 The study also confirms fears that the horses are growing perilously inbred. “There are wild herds with lower diversity, but not many,” said Gus Cothran, an expert in equine genetics at Texas A&M University who is lead author of the report. He says a herd of 60 could survive, provided a new mare entered the group every generation (about eight years). The federal bill sets a herd size at 110 to 130, the minimum number Dr. Cothran says could slow genetic erosion if the horses remain isolated.

 “We are not asking for hundreds of horses,” said Karen McCalpin, director of the Corolla Wild Horse Fund, which protects and cares for the horses, and leads public education about them. The heart of the disagreement with wildlife conservationists is over how many horses the habitat can bear. “If they were that detrimental for the environment,” she asked, “wouldn’t that be evident by now?”