Old Bombs, New Solutions
In the United States about 11 million acres contain UXO. Across the Atlantic it is estimated that 12 million unexploded shells are buried around Verdun, France, alone. Out of sight, however, is not out of mind: The State Department reports there are 300 civilian casualties annually in Laos from UXO dating back to the Vietnam War. The long-standing problem the Thayer team aims to solve is the inability of conventional metal-detection devices to distinguish UXO from harmless metallic objects. “Our approach has consistently performed better than that of other teams during live-site studies where we were the only group to correctly identify all UXO items,” says professor Fridon Shubitidze, the team’s lead researcher. LINK

Reality Bites
Anthropologist Nathaniel Dominy’s research into the dietary habits of Borneo’s orangutans may advance the understanding of human evolution. “We are interested in how orangutans cope with food-limited environments because it may give us a glimpse into what early human ancestors were facing,” Dominy says. Early humanoids had teeth that were similar to orangutan teeth. Dominy believes orangutans’ diet may have exerted a selective pressure on their molar teeth, and that by examining the physical properties of orangutan food, he can learn more about the evolution of human teeth. Dominy and his colleagues published their study in a 2011 winter online issue of Biology Letters, a journal of England’s Royal Society. LINK

Arsenic: The Need to Regulate
What could possibly be unhealthy about organic baby formula sweetened with brown rice syrup? Arsenic. Researchers at Dartmouth’s trace element analysis lab tested cereal bars, energy shots and 49 infant formulas that substituted organic brown rice syrup for high fructose corn syrup and found that some of them contained arsenic levels much higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s limit for arsenic in drinking water. The risk to infants drinking the formulas is not well studied. What is known is that a lifetime of drinking well water with elevated levels of arsenic increases the risk for a variety of cancers and heart problems. And therein lies the catch. There are no U.S. regulations applicable to arsenic in what we eat. “There is an urgent need for regulatory limits on arsenic in food,” says Brian Jackson, a professor of environmental analytical chemistry and director of the lab. Environmental Health Perspectives published the lab’s research last winter. LINK

Seeing Isn’t Believing
Prosopagnosia is a mental condition that impairs the ability to recognize faces. Sometimes prosopagnosia is caused by a stroke. In other cases the brain fails to develop properly. That’s the focus of research conducted by psychology professor Brad Duchaine and a team of graduate and undergraduate students. They want to better understand the affliction’s neurological basis. Psychologists consider prosopagnosia a “selective” deficit because despite the facial recognition problems it brings on, other cognitive functions remain normal. “These are intelligent people who have good jobs and get along fine but they can’t recognize faces,” says Duchaine. Lesley Stahl interviewed Duchaine on 60 Minutes last spring. During the program he demonstrated what life is like for people with prosopagnosia by showing Stahl upside down photos of familiar faces and asking her to name them. The journalist could not identify any of the faces—including her daughter’s. LINK

Life at Home
A majority of Americans say they want to die at home, but many doctors feel compelled to treat patients—even those with terminal cancer—aggressively in a hospital. The end result is that 60 percent of Americans die in a hospital, according to a recent study by the Geisel School. Although the study didn’t conclude why this is happening, lead author Dr. Nancy Morden suggests that the medical reimbursement system may be part of the disconnect between what a patient wants and the hospital’s choice of treatment. For example, continuing chemotherapy for terminal cancer patients in their last few weeks of life generates more revenue than results. Morden’s study offers clinicians a simple prescription to improve the situation: “Each hospital needs to examine the care it provides to patients believed to be nearing death, and question its alignment with patient preferences—whether they be for early supportive care or aggressive treatment in the last days of life.” LINK

A State of Concern
Government professor Michael Herron predicts that changes made last year to Florida’s voting law will make it harder for the Sunshine State’s African-American and Hispanic voters to replicate their traditional voting patterns in the next election. Florida reduced the number of early voting days from 14 to eight and eliminated early voting on the Sunday before Election Day. Herron and Daniel Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida, examined Florida’s 2008 general election results. They learned that Democrats early-vote more than Republicans on the last Sunday before Election Day and that African-American and Hispanic voters in particular tend to early-vote on that Sunday. On the other hand, white voters are less apt to vote that day. LINK

Mysteries of the Black Hole
Using the 12-meter Atacama Pathfinder telescope in Chile, Dartmouth astronomer Ryan Hickox can peer back 10 billion years and examine ancient “starburst” galaxies, which form new stars at exceptionally high rates. Hickox and his colleagues spent more than a year and a half making observations that demonstrate a link between new starburst galaxies and the older, more massive galaxies in the universe. At one time starburst galaxies were making new stars at a rate that was 1,000 times greater than galaxies today, but this star-making machinery slows down after 100 million years. Hickox believes black holes are responsible. “We don’t understand exactly how the black holes form in the early universe, but we think that once galaxies get big enough they almost always have a black hole in the center,” he says. Once the black hole grows and gets big enough, it will get powerful enough that it can then blow away the gas and shut off both star formation and its own quasar activity.” Hickox’s paper appeared in January’s Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. LINK