Coal 55.coa.332 Louis J. Sheehan

After watching videos of mountaintop-mining impacts on local communities (including poisoned water supplies, catastrophic erosion of downstream residential soils, and local health problems), reporters on a Society of Environmental Journalists field trip to West Virginia coal country were primed to spend a day witnessing horrors and devastation. Imagine our surprise, then, when we learned the second mountain-mining operation that we visited was practicing good environmental stewardship.

This particular operation was even employing state-of-the-art land reclamation techniques — ones pioneered at nearby Virginia Tech.

The surprise, of course, is not that some operations exhibit responsible practices but that such practices are often off the radar screens of the news media and public. Which is, I suspect, why our tour leaders — newspaper reporters in coal country — thought it was important we meet the people at Pritchard Mining, working sites on Four Mile Mountain.

The first surprise: We expected to see another lopped-off mountain summit, denuded of all visible life. Instead, we saw greenery at a number of places and an actual stand of trees atop a tall wall of rock. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com/

We asked Pritchard Mining president Andrew Jordon why that forested area had not been mined. Oh, it has, he assured us, up to about 10 years ago. Then its rocky surface was covered with a layer of topsoil and planted with trees. Young trees.

MOUNTAIN MINING’S NEW FACEPritchard Mining’s president, Andrew Jordon, has taken his cues from Virginia Tech scientists, on how to short-circuit by up to 200 years the development of diverse, mature-looking forests.J. Raloff

Today, many of them are now 10 to 15 feet tall. Some of the faster growing ones are even being logged selectively for timber, Jordon told me.

What about that blue-green material we saw thinly blanketing parts of the scraped-clean upper surfaces of Kayford Mountain, a few hours earlier?

That funky, grass-seeded stuff doesn’t really reclaim a scarred mountain surface, at least not quickly, noted Virginia Tech forestry professor James A. Burger. He was one of at least seven experts traveling on a bus full of reporters and other SEJ-meeting attendees. Appalachia has been home to the most diverse hardwood forests, Burger notes. Once they’re clear-cut, it generally takes some 300 years for such woodlands to completely recover, he says.

But his 30 years of research has indicated that by planting a mix of the trees that would ultimately dominate mature hardwood forests along with some of the understory trees (such as dogwoods) that would ordinarily fill in the lower reaches, foresters can speed the recovery of woodlands. Perhaps cutting up to 200 years off of the process of achieving mature, harvestable hardwoods.

Key to helping getting a forest reestablished on rocky surfaces, he says, is carpeting them with an engineered soil substitute (small rocks from easily fractured and weathered minerals).

And that’s what Jordon’s company has done. It starts planting trees as soon mining has finished on some part of the mountain. Rocky Hackworth, Pritchard Mining’s vice president and general manager, had just finished overseeing the planting of some 500 trees, we learned.

To date, Jordon says, his 18-year-old company has reclaimed some 2,200 acres of land while mining 1.5 million tons of bituminous coal. An estimated 6 million tons more coal should be recoverable at this site, he says. Pritchard Mining is no longer just an energy company, argues this local-born-and-bred miner: “We are practicing environmentalists.”

Keep in mind that we were directed to the Pritchard operations by the West Virginia Coal Association. Jordon is the immediate past chairman of this Charleston-based industry group. So Jordon’s company might not be representative so much as a good face to a generally very dirty industry. But it does show that money can be made extracting coal in ways that don’t greatly jeopardize the health of its neighbors and permanently scar the local environment. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com/

That said, it may still take the better part of a century before this area, once home to dense stands of hardwoods, regains its towering oak.

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

math 333e.33e Louis J. Sheehan

The severe psychiatric ailment known as bipolar disorder takes individuals on an emotional roller-coaster ride over dizzying peaks of agitation, euphoria, and grandiose thinking and through valleys of soul-numbing depression. New evidence suggests that an unappreciated facet of bipolar disorder has nothing to do with rampaging emotions. It involves a deterioration of mathematical reasoning, at least among teenagers.

Reasons for the emergence of math difficulties in adolescents who develop bipolar disorder remain unclear, according to a report in the January American Journal of Psychiatry. The illness may affect any of several brain areas that have been implicated in mathematical reasoning, propose Diane C. Lagace of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and her colleagues.

“[Our] findings suggest that remedial academic interventions in mathematics are warranted for adolescents with treated bipolar disorder,” the scientists conclude. These “novel findings” need to be confirmed in larger samples of teens and adults with bipolar disorder, the investigators add.

Dalhousie researchers had previously noted a link between math problems and bipolar disorder. Their 1996 review of medical and academic records for 44 teenagers with the illness found that they had performed well in school until the onset of psychiatric symptoms. While the students received treatment for bipolar disorder over the next 4 years, their school performance deteriorated far more in math than in any other subject.

In the new study, the scientists administered academic and intelligence tests to three groups of teens: 44 taking prescribed medications for bipolar disorder and whose symptoms had largely diminished, 30 who had responded well to treatments for major depression, and 45 who had no past or current psychiatric ailment.

The teenagers with bipolar disorder scored much lower on a broad range of math problems than those in the other two groups did, the researchers say. This math deficit appeared regardless of whether the participants had a limited or unlimited amount of time to solve each problem. Girls with bipolar disorder scored much lower on math tests than their male counterparts. A less pronounced sex disparity in math scores appeared in the other two groups.

In contrast, the three groups of teen participants displayed no differences in scores on reading, spelling, and nonverbal intelligence tests.

Intriguingly, school records for the teens with bipolar disorder show that their math grades dropped noticeably beginning about 1 year before their psychiatric condition was diagnosed, says Dalhousie psychiatrist Stanley P. Kutcher, a study coauthor. The onset of math troubles long before exposure to psychoactive medication underscores Kutcher’s suspicion that brain changes associated with bipolar illness disturb math reasoning.  http://blogs.ebay.com/mytymouse1/home/_W0QQentrysyncidZ755826010

Previous research hadn’t looked for any math-related brain regions that may be affected by bipolar disorder. Preliminary brain-scan studies at Dalhousie suggest that teens with this condition have smaller tissue volumes in a frontal-brain area that contributes to math calculations, Kutcher says. http://blogs.ebay.com/mytymouse1/home/_W0QQentrysyncidZ755826010

The unexpected link of bipolar disorder to math problems deserves closer scrutiny, comments psychologist David C. Geary of the University of Missouri in Columbia. “I’d be skeptical of this finding until it’s replicated in more studies,” says Geary, who studies the causes of various math deficits. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

hippocampus 4773.rred Louis J. Sheehan

http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com

A small, inner-brain region called the hippocampus boasts a well-earned reputation as a memory hub. However, researchers disagree about whether the hippocampus specializes in remembering only experiences or instead coordinates recall of both experiences and factual information.

Support for the structure’s double-barreled role comes from a group of six adults who suffered rare brain damage limited largely to the hippocampus. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com  The analysis appears in a pair of reports in the April 10 Neuron.

“It looks like the human hippocampus is normally needed for semantic [factual] memories as well as for episodic [event] memories,” says Larry R. Squire of the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, who directed the investigations.

Passage of time loosens the injured hippocampus’ cloaking of both forms of memory, Squire adds. All six brain-damaged patients remembered facts and events from more than a decade before their injuries occurred. They largely lacked recollections for material encountered in the 10 years before hippocampus damage and in its aftermath.

The patients, ages 36 to 64, had developed brain damage and memory loss after age 30 as a result of medical conditions such as viral encephalitis.

The first study explored factual memory. Five of the patients and 12 adults with uninjured brains answered multiple-choice questions about notable news events that occurred between 1950 and 2002.

Then, all six patients and 14 adults with healthy brains heard a list of famous and fictitious names. Famous names referred to people who became well known before 1970. Half remain alive today, and half had died between 1990 and 2001.

Participants decided whether each name referred to a famous person and, if so, whether that person was still alive.

Patients remembered little about news events that happened after they suffered brain damage or in the 10 years before, Squire’s team found. However, patients and healthy adults alike recalled much of the news from the distant past and identified most of the famous people they had known about for decades. Only the patients, though, couldn’t remember which famous people had died since 1990.

In a second study, the six patients with hippocampus damage and two others with broader injuries to the brain region that includes the hippocampus reported detailed autobiographical memories from childhood and adolescence. Their reports contained as much detail, including factual information, as those of 25 healthy adults. Previous studies had documented amnesia in these patients for personal events that occurred in the years shortly before and after their injuries.

In a commentary published with the new studies, Wendy A. Suzuki of New York University says the findings contrast with an earlier report that three children with hippocampus damage retained enough new factual knowledge to perform adequately in school. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com

The brain may undergo dramatic reorganization to shore up factual memories after hippocampus damage in childhood, Suzuki proposes. It’s also possible that even without marked brain changes, memories of day-to-day experiences in the classroom enable such children to pass their tests, Squire says.

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire