News Category: News
Steep decline in health for women in 40s: study
Women’s health experts say challenges of balancing work and life are taking a dramatic toll
By Tiffany Crawford, Canwest News Service February 19, 2009
Canadian women experience a significant decline in health and quality of life between the ages of 40 and 50, compared to men of the same age, a Statistics Canada study suggests.
The study, released Wednesday, suggests women in their 40s experience more health problems—for example, illness linked to emotional stress—that lead to a poorer quality of life than their male counterparts during that particular decade, says one of the study’s authors, Heather Orpana.
The findings are no surprise to women’s health experts, who say many in this age group are worn out emotionally and physically from so-called “time-hunger” issues—trying to juggle careers, family and other caregiving responsibilities.
“They’re absorbing all of this in a very different way than from generations ago,” said Madeline Boscoe, executive director of the Canadian Women’s Health Network. “So much so that if you were to ask them questions about the quality of their life they would say they had lots of anxiety of some kind or another.”
According to the report’s data, from ages 40 to 50, women’s average health-related quality of life index fell by the equivalent of six percentage points, which is twice the threshold considered clinically important. The data for men in their 40s, on the other hand, did not drop significantly and instead the numbers stabilized, indicating a period of relative good health for men, but not for women.
“The numbers look like a really small decrease, but in actual fact it’s quite large in terms of the impact on one’s daily living,” said Orpana.
“It’s going from a state where you have pain or vision problems, for example, but you can still function to going to a state where you have pain or a vision problem that you can’t corr-
ect.”
Scott Schieman, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, says men in their 40s may perceive they have a better quality of life because they are confident in their careers and have more senior positions.
“Men in that age group are hitting their stride in their work careers,” he said. “They are also more likely [than women] to get the resources and rewards from the work role and that could be bolstering their sense of well-being.”
While women and men may have equally demanding jobs, men may not have the same stress of child rearing, he said, adding that men may be less anxious about their jobs.
“There’s more sharing of responsibilities going on, but if the burden of child care is falling more on women and they are trying to work at the same time that’s probably taking a major toll as well.”
Another reason why men might see their health-related quality of life as good is because they tend to ignore their health more than women, suggests Dr. Tom Freeman, chair of family medicine at the University of Western Ontario.
“Our socialization is different that way. Women are worrying about birth control and pap smears and regularly visit physicians, but it isn’t until around age 50 that men take any action,” he said.
“There is lots of speculation about why they don’t live as long as women and you know you wonder if they paid more attention to their health they would perhaps live longer?”
The study measured eight attributes: vision, hearing, speech, ambulation, dexterity, emotion, cognition, and pain and discomfort.
Participants were asked to grade each attribute ranging from severely impaired to no impairment.
Orpana said one of the reasons for this drop among women could be attributed to the emotional domain.
For example, of the women studied, those who said they went from being “somewhat happy” in their 30s to “somewhat unhappy” in their 40s would experience that decline in quality of life.
The reasons could be linked to emotional stress including relationship problems, problems with children, job stress or financial problems, said Orpana.
“We know that women are more likely to experience depression than men,” she said. “So that really implies that we need to look further at women in that decade to see why their health quality of life is decreasing so much.”
Band of Sisters - Breast Cancer Patients Test Role of Exercise
When Sue Grayston began chemotherapy last year, a brisk morning workout with musician Bif Naked wasn’t exactly what she was anticipating.
Grayston, a professor in the Faculty of Forestry and Canada Research Chair in Soil Microbial Ecology, found a breast lump in April 2008. She was diagnosed with cancer in May, underwent surgery in June, and began treatment shortly after.
Through a tip from her oncologist, she ended up at CARE (Combined Aerobics and Resistance Exercise), a research trial in UBC’s School of Human Kinetics that studies the role exercise plays in the lives of breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.
Grayston says the trial has had an unintended side effect: establishing a close-knit, emotional bond among patients, including the aforementioned Canadian rocker, that continues long after involvement with the study ends.
Women participating in CARE take part in one of three exercise programs over the course of four to six months: aerobics, high-intensity aerobics, or aerobics combined with strength-training.
Like other participants in the trial, Grayston’s progress at the small gym near Vancouver General Hospital was carefully monitored and recorded by a team of volunteers and UBC graduate students, led by research technician Diana Jespersen.
However, Grayston quickly found the program offered more than just data for CARE’s study.
“One thing they can’t measure at the moment is the support we get from the other women,” she says.
While the research will be published in oncology journals, and may lead to methods that could alter treatment for breast cancer, Grayston says it was the bond forged among the participants that helped her get through chemotherapy.
The trial has allowed her to connect with other women undergoing the same treatment, sharing tips on drugs and doctor’s visits—not to mention the best places in town to buy wigs (chemotherapy patients typically lose most of their hair).
“It’s just made it actually bearable. I don’t know how people could do this without support,” she says.
Led by Dr. Don McKenzie, director of Sports Medicine at UBC and Dr. Karen Gelman of the B.C. Cancer Agency, the trial is a joint venture between UBC, the University of Alberta and the University of Ottawa.
McKenzie is known worldwide for launching the Abreast in a Boat dragon boat racing program, following his study that debunked a long-held belief that upper-body exercise in women treated for breast cancer encouraged lymphedema, an irreversible swelling in the arm and chest.
He says the current research trial could mark a turning point for women undergoing breast cancer treatment.
“After 25 years, we’re starting to appreciate that exercise is as useful in intervention and health care as a lot of the other things we can do.”However, he concedes it can be difficult for a woman undergoing chemotherapy to find the motivation to begin exercising.
“Chemotherapy takes the wind out of your sails,” he says at the project’s small gym. Side effects vary greatly, but patients can experience anemia, nausea, fatigue and depression. It’s hardly the stuff that would prompt a visit to the treadmill.
If it weren’t for CARE, Bif Naked, the study’s first and most high-profile patient, says she would have had difficulty getting out of bed every day.
The Canadian rocker, known offstage as Beth Torbert, announced her breast cancer in a January 2008 interview with the CBC’s George Stroumboulopoulos.
“When I was diagnosed with breast cancer it came as a big surprise to me,” she says. “And had this not been in place for me, I wouldn’t have done anything. I would have probably just stayed in bed the whole time.”
Seventeen women have finished the program at UBC, and another 25 are currently involved. In all, 300 women will take part at the three universities.
For graduates of the UBC trial, their three-day-a-week exercise regimen has evolved into a weekly morning walking group, though Torbert jokes that she and her friends see it more as a gang.
“It’s really fascinating, psychologically and emotionally, how integral this group of people became to each other in very unusual circumstances,” she says. “It’s not that we cried together; we laughed together”.
“It’s probably somewhat unheard of for anyone to have a grand old time during breast cancer treatment, especially during chemotherapy, but I assure you, we have a riot.”
Priming the Brain to Recover from Stroke
For the 300,000 Canadians living with the aftermath of a stroke, partial paralysis and loss of independence is a daily reality.
Now a UBC brain stimulation technique that primes the brain to relearn and retain old movements is showing encouraging results for faster and more effective recovery. A wand, connected to a computer, is placed adjacent to persons head and a stimulus is applied.
“Currently, there are no drugs to help stroke patients regain mobility,” says Lara Boyd, UBC assistant professor of Physical Therapy in UBC’s Faculty of Medicine. “Thus far, physical therapy has proven to be an effective treatment for stroke patients to regain mobility. However, one of the biggest challenges is the time and amount of practice it takes for the brain to relearn an old movement.”
The two-part study tests a healthy brain first to ensure the technique is safe and that there are no adverse effects and then applies the same technique to a stroke-affected brain. The study is currently in the second phase.
Following a stroke, the affected part of the brain is no longer active because of the loss of blood flow, which causes brain cell death. The area of the brain affected by the injury determines the patient’s inability to move, see, remember, speak, reason and read and/or write.
“One of the reasons that it is so difficult for the brain to recover from a stroke and reorganize itself is that the side of the brain that is damaged becomes suppressed while the undamaged side becomes hyperactive,” says Boyd, who is a Canada Research Chair in Neurobiology of Motor Learning. “The left and right side of the brain become unbalanced. It becomes more difficult for the affected side of the body to move because the damaged side of the brain is suppressed. Conversely, the unaffected side of the body moves much easier because the undamaged side of the brain becomes hyperactive.”
This negative feedback loop helps explain why it becomes increasingly difficult for stroke patients to regain mobility.
“Fortunately, the brain is an amazingly dynamic organ that can reorganize itself,” says Boyd, whose current study looks at the benefits of applying an electromagnetic stimulus to the stroke affected section of the brain. “What we want to do is to stimulate and enhance brain cell reorganization around the damaged part of the brain.”
In doing so, Boyd believes that the brain can reorganize itself and find an alternate pathway to performing a previous movement.
The first part of the study tested individuals who had never suffered a stroke. The participants received an electromagnetic stimulus and were then asked to practice a specific movement. Participants who received the stimulus demonstrated increased and improved learning for 15 – 20 minutes following the stimulus.
“Preliminary results of our research on non-stroke patients show that if you pre-excite the brain by applying an electromagnetic stimulus, motor learning and retention of skill is improved and retained,” says Boyd. “We are currently applying this technique to the stroke affected brain and the available data is positive. We are quite optimistic that this approach will work and we expect results in the coming months.”
According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, each year, there are between 40,000 to 50,000 strokes in Canada and close to 16,000 Canadians die.
Colour Boosts Brain Performance and Receptivity to Advertising, Depending on Task: UBC Study
A new University of British Columbia study reconciles a debate that has long raged among marketers and psychologists: What colour most improves brain performance and receptivity to advertising, red or blue?
It turns out they both can, it just depends on the nature of the task or message. The study, which could have major implications for advertising and interior design, finds that red is the most effective at enhancing our attention to detail, while blue is best at boosting our ability to think creatively.
“Previous research linked blue and red to enhanced cognitive performance, but disagreed on which provides the greatest boost,” says Juliet Zhu of UBC’s Sauder School of Business, author of the study which will appear in the Feb. 5 issue of Science Express. “It really depends on the nature of the task.”
Between 2007 and 2008, the researchers tracked more than 600 participants’ performance on six cognitive tasks that required either detail-orientation or creativity. Most experiments were conducted on computers, with a screen that was red, blue or white.
Red boosted performance on detail-oriented tasks such as memory retrieval and proofreading by as much as 31 per cent compared to blue. Conversely, for creative tasks such as brainstorming, blue environmental cues prompted participants to produce twice as many creative outputs as when under the red colour condition.
These variances are caused by different unconscious motivations that red and blue activate, says Zhu, noting that colour influences cognition and behavior through learned associations.
“Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers’ red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution,” says Zhu, whose previous research has looked at the impact of ceiling height on consumer choices. “The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer.”
Conversely, blue encourages us to think outside the box and be creative, says Zhu, noting that the majority of participants believed incorrectly that blue would enhance their performance on all cognitive tasks.
“Through associations with the sky, the ocean and water, most people associate blue with openness, peace and tranquility,” says Zhu, who conducted the research with UBC PhD candidate Ravi Mehta. “The benign cues make people feel safe about being creative and exploratory. Not surprisingly it is people’s favourite colour.”
The study finds that these trends carry over to our receptivity to consumer packaging and marketing messages. Using a series of fictional ads and product packages, researchers explored how colour impacts our receptivity to consumer packaging and advertising.
It found that when the background colour was red, people formed more favorable evaluations of products when its ad featured specific product details as opposed to evocative, creative messaging. However, when the background was blue, the opposite pattern of results emerged.
Similarly, people were more receptive to a new, fictional brand of toothpaste that focused on negative messages such as “cavity prevention” when the background colour was red, whereas people were more receptive to aspirational messages such as “tooth whitening” when the background colour was rendered in blue.
For samples of advertisements used in the study or researcher photos, visit: http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/download
Top climate scientists leave as project funding dries up
Victoria professor one of those moving abroad to find promising opportunities
By Margaret Munro, Canwest News Service February 17, 2009
Katrin Meissner is determined to be on the forefront of understanding the climate change affecting everything from permafrost to bird migrations.
The celebrated young scientist at the University of Victoria had planned to build her career in Canada. But Meissner is packing up her young family and heading for Australia.
The University of New South Wales made her an offer she couldn’t refuse—a position as a senior lecturer, research opportunities and guaranteed daycare for her one-year-old son, which was the perk that sealed the deal.
“I didn’t really want to leave,” says Meissner, who is walking away from a coveted tenure-track position in Victoria. But she says the opportunities in Australia seem much more promising. ‘’Long-term it looks quite scary in Canada,” says Meissner.
It is a refrain heard across Canada as funding dries up at the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS), a prime source of funding for university-based projects underway from the Arctic to B.C. mountaintops.
Projects involving hundreds of scientists have entered their final phase and will shut down by March 2010. “They’re dead as of next spring,” says atmospheric physicist Richard Peltier of University of Toronto, noting that there is no new federal money in sight for new projects or to build on existing ones.
“It’s a shame to see it go down the tubes,” says Richard Lawford, at the University of Manitoba, who manages the four-year-old Drought Research Initiative funded by the foundation. The project is aimed at preparing for the country’s next water crisis. The last drought, from 1999 to 2004, cost an estimated $6 billion and 41,000 jobs.
Lawford says the team is keen to build on the project in a bid to ensure there is enough water for farmers and cities. But with CFCAS running out of cash, so is the project.
Young scientists and technical staff will be hardest hit. “That’s were the real pain comes in,” says Lawford, who fears many highly educated young scientists working on the drought project will head to the U.S. where science is expected to undergo a renaissance under President Barack Obama.
“We may have just trained them for the U.S.,” says Lawford. And expertise, which Canada will need to prevent rivers and reservoirs from running dry when the next drought hits, will be lost with them, he says.
Scientists across the country echo the concern and say there are signs the exodus has begun.
“In my lab, I have three going to Australia,” says Andrew Weaver, who leads a climate modelling team at the University of Victoria. Meissner, along with a PhD student and master students with newly minted Canadian degrees, is heading for a new climate change research centre in Australia.
Young scientists have always tended to move between labs. But with the foundation projects all coming to an end, senior researchers say Canada will have trouble attracting bright young climate scientists and keeping the ones it now has.
Atmospheric scientist James Drummond, who directs a remote polar lab on Ellesmere Island that is fast running out of money, says he has already lost a post-doctoral student to a NASA contractor in the U.S. He fears more will follow given Obama’s plan to spend more than $400 million on climate change research at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Drummond notes that Obama’s approach to science stands in sharp contrast to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s. His stimulus package disappointed many in Canada’s research community. It provided no funding increases for key science funding agencies and did not renew funding for others.
The Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, which got nothing in the budget, had been looking for a $25-million-a-year lifeline.
The foundation was set up by the federal government in 2000 and took over funding of climate and atmospheric research at Canadian universities from several federal programs that were phased out. The foundation, which received $60 million in 2000 and another $50 million in 2004, has financed 160 projects and 24 research networks.
“We’ve built up a number of very powerful research groups which are doing the country proud,” says Peltier, at the University of Toronto.
He heads the Polar Climate Stability Network, which received just over $5 million. The scientists have been assessing different components in the climate system—from the glaciers in Western Canada to the frigid waters flowing out of the Arctic.
“It really is a huge concern that the country’s investment in climate science is diminishing just at the time when we need it more than ever,” says Peltier, noting how climate change will impact everything from permafrost to extreme weather events.
Science grad happy with her life as the farmer of the family
By Carmen Cheung, Canwest News Service February 14, 2009
With daily routines determined by unpredictable weather patterns and the changing seasons, Valerie Hobbs is glad she likes what she does … a lot.
At her job, they plan and maintain equipment in the winter, plant seeds on the farm in the springtime, monitor the crop in the summer and harvest in the fall.
For Hobbs, a University of Waterloo graduate with a science degree, country life and farming were not what she envisioned herself doing. “I’d always sort of had an interest in business, saw myself probably moving to the city after I graduated,” she says with a laugh.
Now a new mother with a husband who works at a computer company in London, Ont., Hobbs is proud to be the farmer of the family.
“As a little person, I wouldn’t have told you I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” says Hobbs.
Hobbs specializes in the marketing side of work on the farm she runs in Woodstock, Ont., with her mother, who’s been a farmer since before Hobbs was born. The farm grows soybeans in rotation with other crops (soybeans one year, wheat the next and corn the year after that).
Aside from working on the farm, Hobbs has been on the board of directors of the Ontario Soybean Growers for the past four years.
The Ontario Soybean Growers represents 25,000 growers across Ontario, says Leo Guilbeault, chairman of the board of directors. The board, consisting of farmers from around Ontario, spend time looking at the “big picture” in market development for soybeans.
Guilbeault mentions not only the health benefits associated with soybeans, but the commercialization opportunities and the use of soybeans in other industries. For one, plastics and rubber materials made from soybean oil are friendlier to the environment than its petroleum counterpart, he says.
A third-generation farmer who loves waking up at 6:30 a.m. to his morning-paper-and-coffee routine, Guilbeault has been chairman of the Ontario Soybean Growers for two years now. Soybeans are the primary crop in his county, Essex.
“Every farmer down here grows soybeans,” says Guilbeault.
While Guilbeault’s favourite part of the job is the actual fieldwork, physical labour is not the only job that farmers have. Hobbs says she tends to stay where her skill set is.
“They don’t let me drive the combine too often,” she says with a chuckle.
Both Guilbeault and Hobbs have been chosen to represent Ontario Soybean Growers in the annual Faces of Farming calendar. Guilbeault was the face of November 2008, and Hobbs will be featured in the calendar as the poster girl for farming in November 2009, along with her mother and baby daughter—representing three generations of farming women.
Scientists unravelling mysteries of Saskatchewan meteorite
Researchers who found chunks of a meteorite in Saskatchewan last November believe they’re getting close to answering a key question: where in space did it come from?
University of Calgary graduate student Ellen Milley, who was part of the team that found space rocks in an area known as Buzzard Coulee southeast of Lloydminster, was at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon Monday to talk about what the team has learned.
So far, it looks like the meteorite didn’t come from the asteroid belt beyond the orbit of Mars, she said.
The road to reaching that conclusion began when the space rocks fell Nov. 20.
It was a night when hundreds of people across Western Canada witnessed a spectacular fireball across the sky caused by the estimated 10-tonne rock.
Video surveillance cameras at motels and gas stations captured the flashes of brilliant light and the shadows they cast. A week later, Milley was part of the team led by U of C geologist and geophysicist Alan Hildebrand at Buzzard Coulee. It was she who spotted the first meteorite fragment in a frozen pond.
Later, she studied the flashes and shadows from the various surveillance and amateur videos.
She used the information to plot the fireball’s path as it fell to Earth and then tried to figure out its orbit.
Milley’s tentative conclusion, which she discussed in Saskatoon Monday, was that it didn’t look like the space rock came from beyond the orbit of Mars.
“It looks like it’s a very kind of tight inner solar system orbit,” she said. “It’s not something that’s extended into the asteroid belt.”
If she’s correct, it would be the first time researchers have found debris from a meteorite so close to Earth, Milley said.
In terms of the composition, Milley and her colleagues have determined it’s a relatively common type of meteorite with a high iron content.
However, there is still much more to learn about it, they say.
More than 100 fragments have already been recovered, but this spring, researchers will be resuming their search for more.
They’ll be scouring the fields around Buzzard Coulee in search of an estimated two tonnes of rock that are believed to be studding the ground.
Monday, February 9, 2009 CBC News
In ‘Geek Chic’ and Obama, New Hope for Lifting Women in Science
By NATALIE ANGIER
NY Times January 19, 2009
With the inauguration of an administration avowedly committed to Science as the grand elixir for the nation’s economic, environmental and psycho-reputational woes, a number of scientists say that now is the time to tackle a chronic conundrum of their beloved enterprise: how to attract more women into the fold, and keep them once they are there.
Researchers who have long promoted the cause of women in science view the incoming administration with a mix of optimism and we’ll-see-ism. On the one hand, they said, the new president’s apparent enthusiasm for science, and the concomitant rise of “geek chic” and “smart is the new cool” memes, can only redound to the benefit of all scientists, particularly if the enthusiasm is followed by a bolus of new research funds. On the other hand, they said, how about appointing a woman to the president’s personal Poindexter club, the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology? The designated leaders so far include superstars like Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate, and Eric Lander, genome meister.
The Rosalind Franklin Society, a group devoted to “recognizing the work of prominent women scientists,” has suggested possible co-chairwomen for the panel. Its candidates include Shirley Ann Jackson, a nuclear physicist and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Shirley Tilghman, a molecular biologist and president of Princeton University. Others have proposed Jacqueline Barton, a chemist and MacArthur fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Or, given the increasing importance of brain research, how about a prominent female neuroscientist like Nancy Kanwisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Carla Shatz of Stanford University?
“People say, oh, we shouldn’t have quotas, but diversity is a form of excellence, and there are plenty of outstanding women out there,” Jo Handelsman, president of the Franklin society and a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin, said in an interview. “You don’t have to lower your standards in the slightest — you just have to pay attention.”
Some would like to see novel approaches to treating systemic problems that often work against women’s scientific ambitions. Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden of the University of California, Berkeley, have gathered extensive data showing stark male-female differences in the family structure and personal lives of academic researchers at the top tiers of the profession.
Surveying outcomes for 160,000 Ph.D. recipients across the United States, the researchers determined that 70 percent of male tenured professors were married with children, compared with only 44 percent of their tenured female colleagues. Twelve years or more after receiving their doctorates, tenured women were more than twice as likely as tenured men to be single and significantly more likely to be divorced. And lest all of this look like “personal choice,” when the researchers asked 8,700 faculty members in the University of California system about family and work issues, nearly 40 percent of the women agreed with the statement, “I had fewer children than I wanted,” compared with less than 20 percent of the men. The take-home message, Dr. Mason said in a telephone interview, is, “Men can have it all, but women can’t.”
From a purely Darwinian point of view, expecting a young woman to sacrifice her reproductive fitness for the sake of career advancement is simply too much, and yet the structure of academic research, in which one must spend one’s 20s and early 30s as a poorly compensated and minimally empowered graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, and the remainder of one’s 30s and into the low 40s working madly to earn tenure, can demand exactly that.
Nor do all young men in science accept the notion that their lab bench must double as a sleeping cot while their wives take care of the kids. In a new survey of 19,000 doctoral students at the University of California, Dr. Mason and her colleagues found that while two-thirds of the respondents either had or planned to have children, 84 percent of the women and 74 percent of the men expressed worry about the family-unfriendliness of their intended profession, and many had changed their plans accordingly. While 40 percent of the male science graduate students and 31 percent of the women said they had begun their Ph.D. programs intent on pursuing an academic career — still considered the premier path to science glory — a year or more into their studies, only 28 percent of the men and 20 percent of the women still hoped to become research scientists at a university.
Dr. Mason and other legal experts suggest that President Obama might be able to change things significantly for young women in science — and young men — by signing an executive order that would provide added family leave and parental benefits to the recipients of federal grants, a huge pool of people that includes many research scientists.
Whatever the impediments, women have made great strides in most areas of science. According to Joan Burrelli of the National Science Foundation, whereas 50 years ago women earned a piddling 8 percent of the science and engineering doctorates, by 2006 they claimed a 40 percent share. In 1973, only 6 percent of the Ph.D. scientists employed full time in academia, business or elsewhere were women; by 2006 the number had risen to 27 percent. Over that same time frame, women’s share of full professorships in the sciences quadrupled, to about 20 percent. Yet the stats vary sharply from field to field: 26 percent of full professors in the life sciences are women, but in physics, 6 percent.
For many female physicists, the mystery of women’s slow progress through their ranks is nearly as baffling as the research mysteries they confront in the lab. Of course, only 6 percent of physics professors are female; only 4 to 6 percent of the matter in the universe is visible. “Sound familiar?” Evalyn Gates, the assistant director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, said wryly.
She has urged her colleagues to attack the problem of low female numbers as they would any scientific problem, by systematically gathering data, checking their detectors, factoring out background noise. Yes, girls and women leak out of the pipeline in comparatively greater numbers than males for every scientific discipline, she said, but they fall out of physics first and fastest. Why should it be, she said, that almost half of high school students in Advanced Placement physics classes are girls, but women earn only a fifth of bachelor’s degrees in physics? What turns girls away from physics so early?
Some have suggested that girls just can’t handle the advanced math of physics. Yet in an analysis of high school students’ performance on standardized math tests, published last summer in the journal Science, Janet Hyde and her colleagues found no gender differences in average performance, and even at the uppermost tails of achievement the discrepancies were minor and inconsistent: among whites who scored in the top 1 percent, there were two boys for every girl, whereas among Asian top scorers, there was one full girl for every nine-tenths of a boy. Besides, said Dr. Gates, female students earn half of the bachelor’s degrees in another math-heavy discipline called — mathematics.
Others have insisted that women just don’t like physics, perhaps because it seems cold and abstract, concerned with things rather than the flesh-and-blood focus of female-friendly fields like biology. But such reasoning, Dr. Gates said, cannot account for the fact that women earn half of the undergraduate degrees in chemistry, which is not quite plush toy material. “Something different is going on with physics, and we don’t know what it is yet,” she said. The culture? Bubble-headed television shows like “The Big Bang Theory,” with its four nerdy male physics prodigies and the fetching blond girl next door?
The difficulties are not confined to America. Surveying some 1,350 female physicists in 70 countries, Rachel Ivie and Stacy Guo of the American Institute of Physics found that, worse than family balance issues or lack of day care options, was the problem of public perception. The women were passionate about their work. They didn’t choose physics; physics chose them. Yet 80 percent agreed that attitudes about women in physics needed a serious overhaul.
As long as we’re making geek chic, let’s lose the Einstein ’do and moustache.
Trees dying faster, scientists discover
Warming the likely culprit, says UBC professor who’s seen rate double in 17 years
By Gordon Hamilton, Vancouver Sun – January 23, 2009
On seven plots of ancient forest deep in the Capilano and Seymour watersheds, University of B.C. biogeography professor Lori Daniels has made an alarming discovery: The trees she is monitoring are dying off.
The death rate of the forest giants has, in fact, doubled since she first started studying them as a graduate student 17 years ago.
Now her finding is part of a comprehensive study of forests across western North American that links an increase in tree mortality to climate change.
Trees all across the West are dying at twice the rate they were 20 years ago, according to a report by Daniels and 10 other scientists to be published today in Science magazine.
“We are losing trees faster than we are gaining trees,” Daniels said in an interview Thursday.
In every instance, mortality rates have doubled, states the report, led by a U.S. Geological Survey team.
At the same time, average temperatures have climbed by one degree Celsius, making climate change the most likely cause, Daniels, an expert in old-growth forests, said.
The death rate is expected to continue to rise as temperatures go up, leading to sparser forests less able to act as carbon sinks, leading to even more warming.
The scientists say the trend is expected to continue.
Daniels studied more than 1,200 trees in old-growth forest plots on the North Shore. Beside noting the increasing death rate of older trees, she found that the undergrowth trees that would typically replace the old giants are suffering as well. They are not filling in the vacant spaces left when the veterans fall.
“It’s possible that if trees are stressed because of warmer temperatures causing them to die, the same stress is constraining their growth,” she said of evidence showing growth in younger trees is not as robust.
The U.S. Geological Survey team was put together by California scientist Phil van Mantgem, who noted increased mortality in Sequoia forests. He raised the issue with colleagues across the West, including Daniels, who had been monitoring their own plots for years, and the team was formed. The study, the largest of its kind in North America, gathered evidence from 76 plots in forests more than 200 years old.
The scientists conclude that tree death rates have doubled in 17 years in the coastal forests and in 29 years in Interior forests. Trees are dying across a wide variety of forest types, at all elevations. All sizes are dying and a variety of species, including pines, firs and hemlocks.
Mortality rates were less than one per cent a year when the scientists first began monitoring several decades ago, but are now two per cent, Daniels said.
“That might seem really small, but mortality rates work like interest in a bank account. They compound over time,” she said.
Over a 50-year period, out of 100 trees only 36 will survive at the current mortality rate, she said. Twenty years ago, 65 would survive.
That degree of change is alarming, she said.
Climate change is being pinpointed because the one-degree change in temperature means snow packs are smaller. That leads to longer dry periods in summer, when trees are stressed by drought, Daniels said.
“Increased temperature is going to change not only the metabolic rate in the trees, but their need for water. We have detected both an increase in temperature and an increase in the water deficit, which means there is a water shortage for these trees at the same time the temperature is going up,” Daniels said.
Warmer temperatures are also proving a boon to insect pests that are attacking and killing trees—from the mountain pine beetle, that’s devastated forests from northern B.C. to Colorado, to the tiny Western hemlock looper, which was responsible for a significant number of tree deaths in and around Daniels’ old-growth plots.
The findings of the team are not isolated. Researchers in B.C. have found increased tree mortality elsewhere. The obvious example is the Interior, where warmer winters are being blamed for the massive mountain pine beetle outbreak.
But on the B.C. coast in 2004, ministry of forests researchers began documenting an increasing death rate among yellow cedars. In the last four years, they have found more than 47,000 hectares of dying trees from the Alaska border to Kingcome Inlet. Insect pests and fungi have been ruled out, forest pathologist Stefan Zeglen said. They suspect a warmer climate has led to decreased snow packs. Snow disappears earlier in the year and exposes fragile tree roots to damaging spring frosts.
SCWIST President Elana Brief writes about attending a recent Women in Physics conference
In the January 2009 issue of the University of British Columbia’s Physics & Astronomy News, Dr. Elana Brief describes her experience at “Crossing Perspectives on Gender and Physics” a joint meeting of the Nordic Network of Women in Physics (NorWiP) and the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University.
You can find the article on page 8 here.
Profile of Board member Dr. Kim Hellemans
Animal allergy leads professor to true calling
Developing a lab allergy may have been devastating news to most PhD researchers, but for Kim Hellemans it was a blessing in disguise that allowed her to focus on her true calling – teaching.
“It feels like my spirit lights up inside me,” says Hellemans of teaching.
She was completing her second post-doctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia when she developed an allergy to lab rats used in her research. Hellemans explains that she developed an acquired lab allergy which often happens to people with pre-existing allergies. She became extremely sensitive to the rat dander and urine to the point where she found it extremely difficult to breath.
It was this and the constant feeling of being unfulfilled that pushed her to leave research to pursue a full-time teaching career and she couldn’t be happier. “I love the interaction and dynamism that comes from teaching,” says the professor who is now a member of Carleton’s psychology department.
Despite the fact that Hellemans’ focus is no longer research, she is still continuing to publish. Just last month, along with four other colleagues, she published a paper entitled, Prenatal Alcohol Exposure Increases Vulnerability to Stress and Anxiety-Like Disorders in Adulthood.
The study used an animal model of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) to explore whether the offspring of mothers who consumed alcohol during gestation increases depressive symptomatology when these rats are tested in adulthood. In humans, ninety-four per cent of adults or children born with FASD show some form of mental illness, including depression and addiction. In the Hellemans study, both males and females exposed to alcohol in utero showed significant increases in anxiety, which may be a symptom of depression (rather than its own disorder), particularly in women. Prenatal alcohol-exposed rats have a huge response to stress, and stress is a large factor in mental illness and addiction. The neural system responsible for mediating the stress response, and producing the hormone corticosterone (cortisol in humans), becomes hyperactive in these animals.
An important aspect of their research is that they studied both male and female rats, which isn’t the norm due to the complexity of the female ovarian cycle. According to Hellemans, in humans and other species (including rats), resting cortisol levels are much higher in females than males, and this may be one reason why women are more at risk for depression. As well, and based on the results from her study, females experience depression differently than males. She argues this is why it is important to study both sexes.
Hellemans says the next step of their study will examine the possibility of administering anti-depressants to pregnant female rats that consume alcohol throughout gestation, and whether this could offset the anxiety and depression which they observed in their earlier studies.
While Hellemans is dedicated to teaching and her career, she admits that a position in this field can be difficult for a woman. To help change this reality, Hellemans is entering her second term as a board member of the Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology (SCWIST) which is a non-profit association established to promote, encourage, and empower women working in science and technology. Hellemans says that women in this field often feel isolated and face many gender issues. The society is designed to support women through a series of workshops and brown bag seminars.
Hellemans explains that some of their SCWIST volunteers go into grade schools to discuss these issues and also have mentoring programs for young women in high school and at the undergraduate level. “We want to support these women when they begin as undergrads so they will stay and complete their degree and perhaps go onto grad studies,” says Hellemans.
While SCWIST is mostly active on the West Coast, members of the society are hoping to expand into Ottawa now that Hellemans is there.
UBC Researchers Discover Gene Mutation that Causes Eye Cancer
A University of British Columbia geneticist has discovered a gene mutation that can cause the most common eye cancer—uveal melanoma.
Catherine Van Raamsdonk, an assistant professor of medical genetics in the UBC Faculty of Medicine and a team of researchers, have discovered a genetic mutation in a gene called GNAQ that could be responsible for 45 per cent of the cases of uveal melanoma.
The findings, published today in Nature, will allow researchers to develop therapeutic interventions against some melanomas.
“We discovered that GNAQ regulates melanocyte survival,” says Van Raamsdonk. “When the GNAQ gene is mutated it leads to unregulated growth of melanocytes. Since cancer is a disease of unregulated cell growth, our findings led us to the discovery that a genetic mutation of the GNAQ gene causes uveal melanoma.”
Uveal melanoma is a cancer arising from melanocytes located in the uveal tract. The uveal tract is one of the three layers that make up the wall of the eye. A melanoma is unregulated growth of melanocytes. Melanocytes are also found in the skin and are cells linked to a life-threatening form of skin cancer.
The mutation to GNAQ leads to the activation of a signaling pathway that has previously been implicated in many other types of melanoma. The researchers also found that this mutation is a key factor in the development of a type of benign skin mole—blue naevi.
“Prior to our work, the mutations responsible for uveal melanoma were completely unknown,” says Van Raamsdonk. “No other research looked at mutations in GNAQ. The next step is to develop an effective treatment by targeting the specific biological processes that this mutated gene controls.”
Uveal melanoma, the most common eye cancer, affects one in 13,000 people. It is a highly aggressive cancer without any effective treatment options once it metastasizes. Although it only accounts for approximately five per cent of all melanomas, it represents the most common eye cancer in the United States.
The research was funded by a grant from the Canadian Institute for Health Research and performed with support from collaborators at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at Child & Family Research Institute in British Columbia, Stanford University and the University of California at San Francisco.
The Faculty of Medicine at UBC provides innovative programs in the health and life sciences, teaching students at the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels, and generates more than $200 million in research funding each year. http://www.med.ubc.ca
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is the Government of Canada’s agency for health research. CIHR’s mission is to create new scientific knowledge and to catalyze its translation into improved health, more effective health services and products, and a strengthened Canadian health-care system. Composed of 13 Institutes, CIHR provides leadership and support to more than 11,000 health researchers and trainees across Canada. http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca
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