World Vignettes

Officials at what is now the Japan red cross nursing university hospital kept the illustrious limb in its specimens room.

But because of redecorating work recently, it had to be moved to prestigious Waseda university, which Okuma founded in 1882, said hospital spokesman Akira Noguchi. After Waseda said it couldn’t find a suitable place to store the leg, officials of Okuma’s home town of Saga, 923 km southwest of Tokyo, expressed interest in taking it, Noguchi said.

The leg is likely to end up in the Okuma familytemple of Ryutaiji. The Okuma museum in Saga has expressed interest in the limb’s historical value. Okuma served as prime minister in 1898 and between 1914 and 1916.

He is remembered as an early Japanese champion of democratic principles.“That leg’s tougher than I thought,” the former premier’s granddaughter, Risa Okuma, was quoted as saying.

Moon madness
SYDNEY: The common belief that psychiatric patients are harder to cope with during a full moon is hogwash, an Australian researcher has said. Cathy Owen of the University of Sydney led a study of aggression among patients at five local psychiatric institutions. “Our results indicated that the moon does not influence violence and aggression in these hospital psychiatric settings,” said Owen, who set out to investigate the belief among many health professionals that there is a link between episodes of violence and a full moon. “I probably subscribed to it myself, so I was curious to see what a rigorous study would turn up,” Owen said. Theteam recorded 1,289 episodes of violence but could not establish a lunar link. “There were more incidents during the full moon but it didn’t bear statistical examination.”

Grandma killer
PHILADELPHIA: A 70-year-old woman was charged with first-degree murder, accused of suffocating eight of her ten children starting almost half a century ago.

Marie Noe smothered the children with a pillow or other soft object, district attorney Lynne M Abraham said yesterday. The children, all of whom were declared healthy at birth and were developing normally, were 13 days to 14 months old when they died over a 19-year period, beginning in 1949. At the time of the children’s deaths, Noe said they had died in their sleep. In each case, she was at home alone with the children.

Snoring woes
LONDON: Young men who snore and are constantly tired during the day are twice as likely to die of heart disease, according to a study published today. “The combination of snoring and excessive daytime sleepinessappear to be associated with an increased mortality rate but the effect seems to be age-dependent,” Dr Eva Lindberg of Uppsala University hospital in Sweden said in the study in the August issue of Thorax magazine.

The combination was more deadly in young men and seemed to be associated with cardiovascular disease. But the researchers found the risk decreased with age and had no effect on death rates pass the age of 60. Snoring alone did not carry any added risk.

Present tense
MUNICH: Does the present actually exist? This question has been asked by philosophers for centuries and has been answered in many different ways. Neural researchers now believe they know enough to state that the present lasts for about three seconds.

Professor Ernst Poeppel of Munich University, a leading expert on the brain, has collected a mass of evidence for the claim. He has been able to prove in tests that eye movements while driving and observing new objects change about every three seconds. The same, hesays, is true of the natural pauses in spoken sentences poetry in all languages also follows a three-second rhythm and motifs in music are arranged on the time pattern, too.

Polar pollution
OSLO: Polar bears fear nothing they can see in their icy domain but they can’t see pcbs, and scientists worry the bears are succumbing to the invisible invaders.

Last year, researchers in Norway’s remote Svalbard Islands reported they found seven female polar bears with vestigial male organs. Research team leader Andrew Derocher says the anomaly may be caused by toxic chemicals. Derocher, a Canadian affiliated with the Norwegian Polar Institute, will lead a team to the Svalbards to try to determine whether pcbs and other toxins have affected polar bears’ immune systems.