19

TRENDS

TIMES

THE TIMES OF INDIA, PUNE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2015

A growing dislike for October pinkification

iTOONS

SUNIL AGARWAL & AJIT NINAN

Breast Cancer Patients Say Its Become A Marketing Gimmick With No Action On Ground
AFP

Gina Kolata

he White House went

pink
this
month,
awash for a night in rose-coloured light. Delta Air
Lines painted a huge pink
ribbon on one of its planes,
dressed flight attendants in
pink, and has been selling
pink lemonade to passengers. Police departments started using pink handcuffs.
Ford is selling pink warrior car decals.
Pinkwashing, as some
breast cancer activists call it,
has become an October rite,
to raise awareness of breast cancer. Those who promote the pink campaigns say
they raise millions of dollars
to fight the disease.
When I see Delta flight
attendants dressed in pink, I

PINKWASH: The White House illuminated with pink to observe

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

thank them, said Daniela

Campari, senior vice president for marketing at the
American Cancer Society.
But many women with
breast cancer hate the spectacle. I call it the puke campaign,
said
Marlene
McCarthy, the director of the

SHORT CUTS
Reuters

SURF MASTER: Tillman, an English bulldog who in

2009 set a Guinness World Record as the fastest
skateboarding canine, died in southern California
on Thursday. Tillman was 10 years old

Extinct ape species resets

scale on human ancestors

esearchers have identified a new genus and

species of small ape that roamed Earth 11.6
million years agobefore the evolutionary split
of humans/great apes (hominids) and gibbons.
Named Pliobates cataloniae, the new species
has important implications for reconstructing
the last common ancestor of the two groups
(the living hominoids). The discovery provides
a missing chapter to the beginning of ape and
human history, said professor Sergio Almecija.
We used to think that small apes evolved from
larger-bodied apes, but this new species tells us
that small and large apes may have co-existed
since hominoids originated. Alternatively,
Pliobates might indicate that great apes evolved
from gibbon-size ape ancestors, said Almecija.

Rhode Island Breast Cancer

Coalition, who has metastatic breast cancer. Breast cancer awareness, critics charge, has become a sort of feelgood catch-all, and the ubiquitous pink a marketing opportunity for companies. For
all the awareness, they note,

Low-fat diet futile

for weight loss
Washington: Low-fat diets do not lead to
greater weight loss in the long term compared to low-carbohydrate or Mediterranean diets of similar intensity, according
to a new study.
Researchers in US did a systematic review and meta-analysis of all randomised
trials comparing the effectiveness of lowfat diets to other diets, including no diet, at
improving long-term weight loss (at least 1
year) in non-pregnant adults.
They took into account the intensity of
the diets which ranged from just pamphlets or instructions at the beginning of the
programme to intensive multi-component programmes including counselling
sessions, meetings with dieticians, food
diaries, and cooking lessons.
Analysis of 53 studies involving 68,128
adults showed no difference in the average weight loss between reduced-fat diets
and higher-fat diets. PTI

breast cancer incidence has

been nearly flat and there
still is no cure for women
whose cancer has spread beyond the breast to other organs, like the liver or bones.
A lot of us are done with
awareness. We want action,
Karuna Jaggar, executive director of Breast Cancer Action, an activist group said.
Some broader womens health groups agree. The pinkification of October isnt
helping women, said Cindy
Pearson, executive director
of National Womens Health
Network.
Such questions and skepticism come as some organizations are dialing back recommendations for the very
screening measures the campaigns promote, recognizing
that mammograms can lead

to harm like overdiagnosis

finding and treating cancers that would never have
become life-threatening
and false-positive results.
Certainly some organizations that receive money
from pink campaigns spend
at least part of it on research,
but the campaigns have rarely made science their main
focus. And how much of the
money from pink products
goes to any breast cancer
cause at all is also unclear.
On October 2, the National Breast Cancer Coalition,
a nonprofit group, put out a
news release calling for action, not awareness. The coalitions new campaign is
called Breast Cancer Deadline 2020 and has a research
component, the Artemis Project, that involves working

with scientists and funding

agencies on developing effective prevention measures
(including a vaccine) both
primary prevention and prevention of metastasis in those who do get the disease.
While the chance of success
may be slim on the groups
2020 timetable, it is part of the
organizations emphasis on
science and research.
The idea for a pink ribbon,
which soon turned into extending pink to anything and everything, began 25 years ago
with a 68-year-old California
woman, Charlotte Haley, whose sister, daughter, and granddaughter had breast cancer.
Haley decided to make a peach-coloured ribbon to draw
attention to what she felt was
paltry funding for breast cancer research. NYT NEWS SERVICE

Digitalglobe, via NASA

Ralph Blumenthal

Jupiter bumped planet from H

solar system 4bn years ago
Toronto: A close encounter
with Jupiter about four billion years ago may have resulted in another planets
ejection from the solar system , scientists have found.
The existence of a fifth giant gas planet at the time of
the solar systems formation
was first proposed in 2011, researchers said. For years,
scientists have suspected the
ouster was either due to Saturn or Jupiter.
Our evidence points to
Jupiter, said Ryan Cloutier,
a PhD candidate in University of Torontos department
of astronomy & astrophy-

Reuters

PLANETARY ENCOUNTER

sics and lead author of the

study. Planet ejections occur
as a result of a close planetary encounter in which one of
the objects accelerates so
much that it breaks free from
the massive gravitational

pull of the Sun.

Cloutier and his colleagues developed computer simulations based on modernday trajectories of Callisto
and Lapetus, the regular moons orbiting around Jupiter
and Saturn respectively.
They then measured the
likelihood of each one producing its current orbit in the
event that its host planet was
responsible for ejecting the
hypothetical planet, an incident which would have caused significant disturbance
to each moons original orbit.
Ultimately they came to their
conclusion on Jupiter. PTI

Times of India, Pune, October 31, 2015 Pp.19

66m yrs on, study reveals T. rex was a cannibal

Washington: A recently unearthed dinosaur bone has unveiled a 66-million-year-old family
secret that tyrannosaurs, including the T. rex, were not shy
about eating their own kind, scientists say.
The tyrannosaur bone has peculiar teeth marks that strongly
suggest it was gnawed by another
tyrannosaur. We were out in
Wyoming digging up dinosaurs

Earthworks found in
Kazakhstan deepen
ancient mystery

National Geographic Creative/Corbis

FAMILY SECRET OUT

in the Lance Formation when we

found the bone, said paleontologist Matthew McLain. The grooves were clearly those of an animal pulling the flesh off the bone
in a direction perpendicular to
the bone, in the same way humans eat a piece of fried chicken.
But one groove stood out.
It was located at the larger
end of the bone and contained
smaller parallel grooves caused

by the diners head turning, so

that the serrated edges of its teeth dragged across the bone.
Serrated teeth rule out crocodiles and point directly to a theropod dinosaur like T. rex. The
fact that the only large theropods
found in the Lance Formation
are two tyrannosaursT. rex or
Nanotyrannus lancensiseliminates all interpretations but
cannibalism, said McLain. PTI

igh in the skies over

Kazakhstan,
spaceage technology has revealed an ancient mystery on
the ground.
Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern
steppe has revealed colossal
earthworks geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines
and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest
estimated at 8,000 years old.
The largest, near a Neolithic settlement, is a giant square of 101raised mounds, its opposite corners connected by a
diagonal cross, covering more
terrain than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Another is a
kind of three-limbed swastika, its arms ending in zigzags
bent counterclockwise.
Described last year at a
conference in Istanbul as unique and previously unstudied, the earthworks, in the
Turgai region of northern
Kazakhstan, number at least
260 mounds, trenches and
ramparts arrayed in five
basic shapes. Spotted on Google Earth in 2007 by a Kazakh
economist and archaeology
enthusiast, Dmitriy Dey, the
so-called Steppe Geoglyphs
remain deeply puzzling and
largely unknown.
Ive never seen anything
like this, said Compton J.
Tucker, a senior biospheric
scientist for Nasa. This week,
Nasa put space photography
of the region on a task list for
astronauts in the Internatio-

One of the enormous earthwork

configurations is known as
Ushtogaysky Square, named
after a village in Kazakhstan

nal Space Station.

I dont think they were
meant to be seen from the air,
Dey, 44, said, dismissing outlandish speculations involving aliens and Nazis. (Long
before Hitler, the swastika
was an ancient and near-universal design element.) He
theorized that the figures built along straight lines on elevations were horizontal observatories to track the movements of the rising sun.
Persis B. Clarkson, an archaeologist said these figures
and similar ones in Peru and
Chile were changing views
about early nomads.
The idea that foragers could amass the numbers of people necessary to undertake
large-scale projectslike creating
the
Kazakhstan
geoglyphshas
caused
archaeologists to deeply
rethink the nature and timing of sophisticated largescale human organization
as one that predates settled
and
civilized
societies,
Clarkson said. NYT NEWS SERVICE