Residents of Daraganj look at 26-year-old Sunil Sahu’s wounded arm, allegedly caused by an unidentified flying object they call Moohnochwa, in Allahabad, India.

SHANWA, India (AP) — It comes in the night, a flying sphere emitting red and blue lights that attacks
villagers in this poor region, extensively burning those victims it does not kill.

At least that’s what panic-stricken villagers say. At least seven people have died of unexplained injuries
in the past week in Uttar Pradesh state.

“A mysterious flying object attacked him in the night,” Raghuraj Pal said of his neighbor, Ramji Pal,
who died recently in Shanwa. “His stomach was ripped open. He died two days later.”

Many others have suffered scratches and surface wounds, which they say were inflicted while they
slept. In the village of Darra, 53-year-old Kalawati said she was attacked last week and displayed blisters on her blackened forearms.

“It was like a big soccer ball with sparkling lights,” said Kalawati, who uses only one name. “It burned my skin. I can’t sleep because of pain.”

Doctors dismiss the stories as mass hysteria.

“More often than not the victims have unconsciously inflicted the symptoms themselves,” said Narrotam
Lal, a doctor at King George’s Medical College in Lucknow, the state capital.

The police have another explanation: bugs.

“It is a three-and-a-half-inch-long winged insect” that leaves rashes and superficial wounds, Kavindra P. Singh, a superintendent of police, told the Press Trust of India news agency.

Police drew this conclusion after residents of one village found insects they had never seen before.

Villagers are unconvinced.
In the most affected area, the Mirzapur district, 440 miles southeast of New Delhi, people have stopped sleeping outdoors despite the sweltering heat and frequent power outages.

Villagers also have formed protection squads that patrol Shanwa, beating drums and shouting slogans
such as, “Everyone alert. Attackers beware.”

Some accuse district officials of inaction and failing to capture the “aliens.” One person died Thursday
in nearby Sitapur when police fired shots to disperse a 10,000-strong crowd demanding that authorities capture the mysterious attackers.

“People just block the roads and attack the police for inaction each time there’s a death or injury,”
said Amrit Abhijat, Mirzapur’s district magistrate, who claims he has captured the UFO on film.

18 AUGUST 2002: THE LANGUAGE
GENE?

From the 15
August New York Times:

Language Gene Is Traced to
Emergence of Humans

By NICHOLAS WADE

A study of the genomes of
people and chimpanzees has yielded a deep insight into

the origin of language,
one of the most distinctive human attributes and a

critical step in human evolution.

The analysis indicates that
language, on the evolutionary time scale, is a very

recent development, having
evolved only in the last 100,000 years or so.

The finding supports a novel
theory advanced by Dr. Richard Klein, an

archaeologist at Stanford
University, who argues that the emergence of

behaviorally modern humans
about 50,000 years ago was set off by a major genetic

change, most probably the
acquisition of language.

The new study, by Dr. Svante
Paabo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute

for Evolutionary Anthropology
in Leipzig, Germany, is based on last year’s

discovery of the first human
gene involved specifically in language.

The gene came to light through
studies of a large London family, well known to

linguists, 14 of whose 29
members are incapable of articulate speech but are

otherwise mostly normal.
A team of molecular biologists led by Dr. Anthony P.

Monaco of the University
of Oxford last year identified the gene that was

causing the family’s problems.
Known as FOXP2, the gene is known to switch on

other genes during the development
of the brain, but its presumed role in

setting up the neural circuitry
of language is not understood.

Dr. Paabo’s team has studied
the evolutionary history of the FOXP2 gene by

decoding the sequence of
DNA letters in the versions of the gene possessed by

mice, chimpanzees and other
primates, and people.

In a report being published
online today by the journal Nature, Dr. Paabo says

the FOXP2 gene has remained
largely unaltered during the evolution of mammals,

but suddenly changed in
humans after the hominid line had split off from the

chimpanzee line of descent.

The changes in the human
gene affect the structure of the protein it specifies

at two sites, Dr. Paabo’s
team reports. One of them slightly alters the

protein’s shape; the other
gives it a new role in the signaling circuitry of

human cells.

The changes indicate that
the gene has been under strong evolutionary pressure

in humans. Also, the human
form of the gene, with its two changes, seems to have

become universal in the
human population, suggesting that it conferred some

overwhelming benefit.

Dr. Paabo contends that humans
must already have possessed some rudimentary form

of language before the FOXP2
gene gained its two mutations. By conferring the

ability for rapid articulation,
the improved gene may have swept through the

population, providing the
finishing touch to the acquisition of language.

“Maybe this gene provided
the last perfection of language, making it totally

modern,” Dr. Paabo said.

The affected members of the
London family in which the defective version of

FOXP2 was discovered do
possess a form of language. Their principal defect seems

to lie in a lack of fine
control over the muscles of the throat and mouth,

needed for rapid speech.
But in tests they find written answers as hard as

verbal ones, suggesting
that the defective gene causes conceptual problems as

well as ones of muscular
control.

The human genome is constantly
accumulating DNA changes through random mutation,

though they seldom affect
the actual structure of genes. When a new gene sweeps

through the population,
the genome’s background diversity at that point is much

reduced for a time, since
everyone possesses the same stretch of DNA that came

with the new gene. By measuring
this reduced diversity and other features of a

must-have gene, Dr. Paabo
has estimated the age of the human version of FOXP2 as

being less than 120,000
years.

Dr. Paabo says this date
fits with the theory advanced by Dr. Klein to account

for the sudden appearance
of novel behaviors 50,000 years ago, including art,

ornamentation and long distance
trade. Human remains from this period are

physically indistinguishable
from those of 100,000 years ago, leading Dr. Klein

to propose that some genetically
based cognitive change must have prompted the

new behaviors. The only
change of sufficient magnitude, in his view, is

acquisition of language.

17 AUGUST 2002: THE KIDS
ARE NOT ALRIGHT.

Cover story for Time
Magazine this week:

 

Young and Bipolar

Once called manic depression,
the disorder afflicted adults. Now it’s striking

kids. Why?

BY JEFF KLUGER AND SORA
SONG

It wasn’t every day that
Patricia Torres raced down the streets of Miami at 70

m.p.h. But then it wasn’t
every day that her daughter Nicole Cabezas

hallucinated wildly, trying
to jump out of the car, pulling off her clothes and

ranting that people were
following her, so this seemed like a pretty good time

to hurry. Nicole, 16, had
been having problems for a while now˜ever since she

was 14 and began closeting
herself in her bedroom, incapable of socializing or

doing her schoolwork, and
contemplating suicide.

The past few months had been
different, though, with the depression lifting and

an odd state of high energy
taking its place. Nicole’s thoughts raced; her

speech was fragmented. She
went without sleep for days at a time and felt none

the worse for it. She began
to suspect that her friends were using her, but that

was understandable, she
guessed, since they no doubt envied her profound gifts.

“I was the center of the
universe,” she says quietly today. “I was the chosen

one.”

Finally, when the chosen
one was struck by violent delusions˜the belief that she

had telekinetic powers,
that she could change the colors of objects at

will˜Torres decided it was
time to take Nicole to the hospital. Emergency-room

doctors took one look at
the thrashing teenager, strapped her to a gurney and

began administering sedatives.
She spent two weeks in the hospital as the

doctors monitored her shifting
moods, adjusted her meds and talked to her and

her parents about her descent
into madness. Finally, she was released with a

therapy plan and a cocktail
of drugs. Six months later, doctors at last reached

a diagnosis: she was suffering
from bipolar disorder.

While emotional turmoil is
part of being a teenager, Nicole Cabezas is among a

growing cohort of kids whose
unsteady psyches do not simply rise and fall now

and then but whipsaw violently
from one extreme to another. Bipolar

disorder˜once known as manic
depression, always known as a ferocious mental

illness˜seems to be showing
up in children at an increasing rate, and that has

taken a lot of mental-health
professionals by surprise. The illness until

recently was thought of
as the rare province of luckless adults˜the

overachieving businessman
given to sullen lows and impulsive highs; the

underachieving uncle with
the mysterious moods and the drinking problem; the

tireless supermom who suddenly
takes to her room, pulls the shades and weeps in

shadows for months at a
time.

But bipolar disorder isn’t
nearly so selective. As doctors look deeper into the

condition and begin to understand
its underlying causes, they are coming to the

unsettling conclusion that
large numbers of teens and children are suffering

from it as well. The National
Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association

gathered in Orlando, Fla.,
last week for its annual meeting, as doctors and

therapists face a daunting
task. Although the official tally of Americans

suffering from bipolar disorder
seems to be holding steady˜at about 2.3 million,

striking men and women equally˜the
average age of onset has fallen in a single

generation from the early
30s to the late teens.

And that number doesn’t include
kids under 18. Diagnosing the condition at very

young ages is new and controversial,
but experts estimate that an additional 1

million preteens and children
in the U.S. may suffer from the early stages of

bipolar disorder. Moreover,
when adult bipolars are interviewed, nearly half

report that their first
manic episode occurred before age 21; 1 in 5 says it

occurred in childhood. “We
don’t have the exact numbers yet,” says Dr. Robert

Hirschfeld, head of the
psychiatry department at the University of Texas in

Galveston, “except we know
it’s there, and it’s underdiagnosed.”

If he’s right, it’s an important
warning sign for parents and doctors, since

bipolar disorder is not
an illness that can be allowed to go untreated. Victims

have an alcoholism and drug-abuse
rate triple that of the rest of the population

and a suicide rate that
may approach 20%. They often suffer for a decade before

their condition is diagnosed,
and for years more before it is properly treated.

“If you don’t catch it early
on,” says Dr. Demitri Papolos, research director of

the Juvenile Bipolar Research
Foundation and co-author of The Bipolar Child

(Broadway Books, 1999),
“it gets worse, like a tumor.” Heaping this torment on

an adult is bad enough;
loading it on a child is tragic.

Determining why the age-of-onset
figures are in free fall is attracting a lot of

research attention. Some
experts believe that kids are being tipped into bipolar

disorder by family and
school stress, recreational-drug use and perhaps
even a

collection
of genes that express themselves more aggressively in each

generation.
Others
argue that the actual number of sick kids hasn’t changed at

all; instead, we’ve just
got better at diagnosing the illness. If that’s the

case, it’s still significant,
because it means that those children have gone for

years without receiving
treatment for their illness, or worse, have been

medicated for the wrong
illness. Regardless of the cause, plenty of kids are

suffering needlessly. “At
least half the people who have this disorder don’t get

treated,” says Dr. Terrence
Ketter, director of the bipolar disorder clinic at

Stanford University.

Yet scientists are making
progress against the disease. Genetic researchers are

combing through gene after
gene on chromosomes that appear to be related to the

condition and may offer
targets for drug development. Pharmacologists are

perfecting combinations
of new drugs that are increasingly capable of leveling

the manic peaks and lifting
the disabling lows. Behavioral and cognitive

psychologists are developing
new therapies and family-based programs that get

the derailed brain back
on track and keep it there. “We did a good job for a

long time of putting a lid
on [the disorder],” says Dr. Paul Keck, vice chairman

of research at the University
of Cincinnati College of Medicine. “Now the goal

is to completely eradicate
the symptoms.”

For Lynne Broman, 37, of
Los Angeles, just taming the disorder would be more

than enough. A single mom,
she is raising three children, two of whom˜Kyle, 5,

and Mary Emily, 2˜are bipolar.
At the moment it’s Kyle who is causing the most

trouble. He has been expelled
from six preschools and two day-care centers in

his short academic career
and has made a shambles of their once tidy home. Kyle

was hospitalized for violent
outbursts at age 4 and still has periods when he

goes almost completely feral.
He once threw a butcher knife at his mother,

nearly striking her before
she ducked out of the way. “That day started out

fine,” Broman says, “but
he turned on me like a rabid dog.”

Until quite recently, a child
who behaved like this would have been presumed to

have either Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD) or oppositional

defiant disorder. Bipolar
would not even have been considered. And with good

reason: the classic bipolar
profile, at least as it appears in adults, is almost

never seen in kids.

Most bipolar adults move
back and forth between depressions and highs in cycles

that can stretch over months.
During the depressive phase, they experience

hopelessness, loss of interest
in work and family, and loss of libido˜the same

symptoms as in major (or
unipolar) depression, with which bipolar is often

confused. The depressive
curtain can descend with no apparent cause or can be

triggered by a traumatic
event such as an accident, illness or the loss of a

job.

But in bipolar disorder,
there is also a manic phase. It usually begins with a

sort of caffeinated, can-do
buzz. “Sometimes the patients find the highs

pleasant,” says Dr. Joseph
Calabrese, director of the mood-disorders program at

Case Western University
in Cleveland. As the emotional engine revs higher,

however, that energy can
become too much. Bipolars quickly grow aggressive and

impulsive. They become grandiose,
picking fights, driving too fast, engaging in

indiscriminate sex, spending
money wildly. They may ultimately become

delusionally mad.

With kids, things aren’t
nearly so clear. Most children with the condition are

ultra-rapid cyclers, flitting
back and forth among mood states several times a

day. Papolos, who co-wrote
The Bipolar Child, studied 300 bipolar kids ages 4

through 18, and he believes
he has spotted a characteristic pattern. In the

morning, bipolar children
are more difficult to rouse than the average child.

They resist getting up,
getting dressed, heading to school. They are either

irritable, with a tendency
to snap and gripe, or sullen and withdrawn.

By midday, the darkness lifts,
and bipolar children enjoy a few clear hours,

enabling them to focus and
take part in school. But by 3 or 4 p.m., Papolos

warns, “the rocket thrusters
go off,” and the kids become wild, wired, euphoric

in a giddy and strained
way. They laugh too loudly when they find something

funny and go on long after
the joke is over. Their play has a flailing,

aggressive quality to it.
They may make up stories or insist they have

superhuman abilities. They
resist all efforts to settle them and throw tantrums

if their needs are denied.
Such wildness often continues deep into the

night˜which accounts in
part for the difficulty they have waking up in the

morning. “They’re like Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” says Papolos, “which is how

their parents describe them.”

Preverbal toddlers and infants
cannot manifest the disorder so clearly, and

there is no agreement about
whether they exhibit any symptoms at all. However,

many parents of a bipolar
say they noticed something off about their baby almost

from birth, reporting that
he or she was unusually fidgety or difficult to

soothe. Broman insists she
knew her son Kyle was bipolar even when he was in the

womb. “This child never
slept inside,” she says. “He was active 24 hours a day.”

For Broman, making that diagnosis
may not have been hard since the condition, as

Ketter puts it, “is hugely
familial.” Broman herself is bipolar, though her

illness was not diagnosed
until adulthood. Children with one bipolar parent have

a 10% to 30% chance of developing
the condition; a bipolar sibling means a 20%

risk; if both parents are
bipolar, the danger rises as high as 75%. About 90% of

bipolars have at least one
close relative with a mood disorder.

For all that, when the disorder
does appear in a child, the diagnosis is often

wrong. ADHD is the likeliest
first call, if only because some of the manic

symptoms fit. The treatment
of choice for ADHD is Ritalin, a stimulant that has

the paradoxical ability
to calm overactive kids. But giving Ritalin to a bipolar

child can deepen an existing
cycle or trigger one anew. Brandon Kent, a

9-year-old from La Vernia,
Texas, in whom ADHD was diagnosed in kindergarten

(they did not yet know he
was bipolar), took Ritalin and paid the price. “It

sent him into depression,”
says his mother Debbie Kent. “Within a couple of

months, he was flat on the
couch and wouldn’t move.” By some estimates, up to

15% of children thought
to have ADHD may actually be bipolar.

Similar misdiagnoses are
made when parents and doctors observe symptoms of the

low phase of the bipolar
cycle and conclude that a kid is suffering from simple

depression. Treat such a
child with antidepressants like Prozac, however, and

the rejiggering of brain
chemistry may trigger mania. Some researchers believe

that nearly half of all
children thought to be depressed may really be bipolar.

For most kids, the consequences
of not identifying the illness can be severe,

since the bipolar steamroller
gets worse as children get older. Though they tend

to be verbally skilled and
are often creative, bipolars find school difficult

because the background noise
of the disorder makes it hard for them to master

such executive functions
as organizing, planning and thinking problems through.

The most serious symptoms
may appear when kids reach age 8, just when the

academic challenge of grade
school starts to be felt. “They’re being asked to do

things that they’re very
poor at,” Papolos says, “and it’s a blow to their

self-esteem.” If school
doesn’t kick the disorder into overdrive, puberty often

does, with its rush of hormones
that rattle even the steadiest preteen mind.

Still, all these natural
stressors and the new awareness of the disorder may not

be enough to account for
the explosion of juvenile bipolar cases. Some

scientists fear that there
may be something in the environment or in modern

lifestyles that is driving
into a bipolar state children and teens who might

otherwise escape the condition.

One of the biggest risk factors
is drugs. People with a genetic predisposition

to bipolar disorders live
on an unstable emotional fault line. Jar things too

much with a lot of recreational
chemistry, and the whole foundation can break

away, especially when the
drugs of choice are cocaine, amphetamines or other

stimulants. “We do think
that use of stimulating drugs is playing a part in

lowering the age of onset,”
says Hirschfeld.

Stress too can light the
bipolar fuse. Many latent emotional disorders, from

depression to alcoholism
to anxiety conditions, are precipitated by life events

such as divorce or death
or even a happy rite of passage like starting college.

And bipolar disorder can
also be set off this way. “Most of us do not think

environmental stress causes
the disorder,” says Dr. Michael Gitlin, head of the

mood-disorders clinic at
UCLA. “But it can trigger it in people who are already

vulnerable.”

A decidedly more complicated
explanation may be gene penetrance; not every

generation of a family susceptible
to an illness develops it in the same way.

Often, later generations
suffer worse than earlier ones because of a genetic

mechanism known as trinucleotide
repeat expansion. Defective sequences of genes

may grow longer each time
they are inherited, making it likelier that

descendants will come down
with the illness. This phenomenon plays a role in

Huntington’s disease and
could be involved in bipolar. “There’s a stepwise

genetic dose that can increase
the risk,” theorizes Ketter.

The first part of determining
how those genes work is figuring out where they

are hiding, and the National
Institute of Mental Health is looking hard.

Investigators at eight research
centers around the country, working under an

nimh grant, are studying
the genomes of 500 families with a bipolar history to

see what genetic quirks
they share. So far, at least 10 of the 46 human

chromosomes have shown irregularities
that may be linked with the condition. The

most interesting is chromosome
22, which has been implicated not only in bipolar

disorder but also in Schizophrenia
and a little-known condition called

Velo-Cardio-Facial syndrome,
which has Schizophrenia links as well. The seeming

relatedness of disorders
that so prominently feature delusions has not been lost

on researchers, though with
so much still unknown about chromosome 22˜to say

nothing of the other nine
tentatively linked with bipolar˜no one is ready to

draw any conclusions. “There
are probably genetic variants that cut across

multiple systems in the
brain,” says Dr. John Kelsoe, psychiatric geneticist at

the University of California,
San Diego.

While this wealth of chromosomal
clues makes fascinating work for geneticists,

it promises little for bipolar
sufferers, at least for the moment. What they

want is relief˜and fast.
Thanks to rapid advances in pharmacology, they are

finally getting it. In fact,
children on a properly balanced drug regimen

supplemented with the right
kind of therapy can probably go on to lead normal

lives.

For decades, the only drug
for bipolar patients˜and one that is still an

important part of the pharmacological
arsenal˜was lithium. It works by

regulating a number of neurotransmitters,
including dopamine and norepinephrine,

as well as protein kinase
C, a family of chemicals that help determine the

neurotransmitter amounts
that nerve cells release. With its hands on so many of

the brain’s chemical levers,
lithium can help bring bipolars back to

equilibrium. For 30% of
sufferers, however, it has no effect at all; for others,

the side effects are intolerable.
“It’s still a miraculous drug,” says Keck.

“But some people simply
don’t respond to it enough.”

New drugs are stepping into
the breach. Rather than rely on the imprecise relief

that a single drug like
lithium provides, contemporary chemists are

investigating a battery
of other medications. Depakote, an anticonvulsant

developed to calm the storms
of epilepsy, was found to have a similarly soothing

effect on bipolar cycling,
and it was approved in 1995 to treat that condition

too. The success of one
anticonvulsant prompted researchers to look at others,

and in the past five years,
several˜including Lamictal, Tegretol, Trileptal and

Topamax˜have been put to
use.

Anticonvulsants are not the
only drugs being reformulated. Also showing promise

are the atypical antipsychotics.
The best-known antipsychotic, Thorazine, is a

comparatively crude preparation
that controls delusions by blocking dopamine

receptors. In the process,
it also causes weight gain, mood flattening and other

side effects. Atypical antipsychotics
work more precisely, manipulating both

dopamine and serotonin and
suppressing symptoms without causing so many

associated problems. There
are numerous atypical antipsychotics out there,

including Zyprexa, Risperdal
and Haldol, and many are being used to good effect

on bipolar patients.

For any bipolar, the sheer
number of drug options is a real boon, as what works

for one patient will not
necessarily work for another. When Brandon Kent, the

9-year-old Texas boy, started
taking Depakote and Risperdal, his body began to

swell. Then he switched
to Topamax, which made him lethargic. Eventually he was

put on a mix of Tegretol
and Risperdal, which have stabilized him with few side

effects. Kyle Broman in
Los Angeles is having a harder time but has grown calmer

on a combination of Risperdal
and Celexa, an antidepressant that for now at

least does not appear to
be flipping him into mania.

But drugs go only so far.
Just as important is what comes after medication:

therapies and home regimens
designed to help patients and their families cope

with the disorder. Early
last year the National Institute of Mental Health

launched a five-year, $22
million study, the Systematic Treatment Enhancement

Program for Bipolar Disorder
(step-bd) to refine bipolar therapies. Some 2,300

volunteers are participating
in the program, and enrollment is expected to reach

5,000. Of all the treatments
the STEP-BDdoctors are studying, the most basic and

perhaps the most important
one for children and teens involves lifestyle

management.

>From infancy, kids can easily
be unsettled by disruptions in their circadian

cycles, as parents of newborns
and toddlers learn whenever they try to change

nap times. Bipolars, regardless
of age, are also reactive to fluctuating

schedules; many things can
destabilize patients, but Keck believes that sleep

deprivation and time-zone
changes are the most upsetting.

For this reason, parents
of bipolar kids are urged to enforce sleep schedules

firmly and consistently.
Bedtime must mean bedtime, and morning must mean

morning. While that can
be hard when an actively manic child is still throwing a

tantrum two hours after
lights-out, a combination of mood-stabilizing drugs and

an enforced routine may
even bring some of the most symptomatic kids into line.

Teens, who are expected
to do a lot more self-policing than younger children,

must take more of this responsibility
on themselves, even if that means a

no-excuses adherence to
a no-exceptions curfew.

Also important is diet. Caffeine
can be a mania trigger for bipolars, so teens

are advised to stay away
from coffee and tea. Bipolar kids of all ages must also

be careful with less conspicuously
caffeinated foods such as sodas and

chocolate. And for adolescents
and teens, staying free of alcohol and drugs is

critical. Not only is the
risk of addiction high, but treatment of the

underlying bipolar problem
is much more difficult if the patient’s mind is

clouded by recreational
chemicals.

For children old enough to
benefit, the second leg of treatment is individual

therapy, which includes
social-rhythms work˜learning to balance meals, sleep,

studies and recreation.
If a triggering incident such as a divorce or death

kicked the condition off,
the doctor can help the child process that too.

The last, perhaps hardest
element of treatment is family therapy. Bipolar

disorder, like Schizophrenia,
depression and certain anxiety conditions, is

powerfully influenced by
surroundings. When an identical twin suffers from

bipolar, the other twin
has only a 65% chance of developing it too. Conversely,

adopted children with no
genetic legacy for bipolar have a 2% chance of coming

down with the condition
if they are raised in a home with one nonbiological

bipolar parent. Clearly,
something is in play besides mere genes, and that

something is environment.
Raise a child in a steady and stable home, and you

reduce the odds that the
illness will gain a toehold, which is why counselors

work hard to teach parents
and kids how to minimize family discord.

One strategy is to avoid
too much negatively expressed emotion. Tough love, for

example, is a good idea
in principle, but in some situations it can do more harm

than good, especially if
it makes kids who can’t control their behavior feel

worse about themselves.
When family arguments do break out, they need to be

conducted in a controlled
way. Psychology professor David Miklowitz of the

University of Colorado encourages
families to avoid what he calls the “three

volley,” a provocation followed
by a rejoinder, then a rebuttal. Hold the

volleys to just one or two,
and you’ll avoid some domestic breakdowns.

The most important thing
parents and siblings can do is simply to serve as the

eyes and ears of the bipolar
child. A teen in a depression can’t see the hope

beyond the gloom. A child
in a manic cycle can’t see the quiet reality behind

the giddiness. It’s up to
people whose compasses are more reliably functioning

to step in and point the
way. Says Dr. Gary Sachs, director of the Bipolar

Treatment Center at Boston’s
Massachusetts General Hospital and principal

investigator for the STEP-BDproject:
“Treatment is modeled on Homer’s Odyssey.

When Odysseus gets blown
off course, he asks the help of his crew.”

In the future, kids should
be getting yet more assistance as they sail. At the

Stanley Research Center,
in Massachusetts General Hospital, investigators are

beginning a yearlong study
of at least 10 bipolar drugs, comparing the merits of

each and the ways they can
best be combined. Others are looking at such

unconventional treatments
as omega-3 fatty acids, found in fish oil, which may

inhibit the same brain receptors
that lithium affects. Elsewhere, researchers

are running brain scans
to determine which lobes and regions are involved in

bipolar disorder and how
to target them more accurately with drugs.

Investigators also hope
to develop a blood test that will allow bipolar disorder

to be spotted as simply
as, say, high cholesterol, eliminating years of

incorrect diagnoses and
misguided treatments.

Getting all this work done
right˜and getting the treatments to the kids who need

it˜is one of the newest
and most challenging goals of the mental-health

community. Doctors who recognize
bipolar disorder and know how to handle it are

in critically short supply.
Growing up is hard enough for children who are

bipolar. The last thing
they need is a misdiagnosis and treatment for something

they don’t have.

˜Reported by Dan Cray and
Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Jeanne DeQuine/Miami,

Melissa Sattley/Texas, Cristina
Scalet/New York and Maggie Sieger/Chicago

15 AUGUST 2002:
AT HOME WITH JOHN WATERS

From the New
York Times:

AT HOME WITH JOHN WATERS

Bad Taste Is Its Own Reward

By JOHN LELAND

 

IN his Greenwich Village
apartment last week, John Waters was wearing a loopy T-shirt ensemble by
Yohji Yamamoto and listening to Solomon Burke ˜ and if there is a more
inviting way to spend a hot afternoon in New York City, it would be hard
to imagine. He had a thin line of mustache, gum-ball-striped socks and
a suntan.

Next to Mr. Waters was a
small photograph of Mme. Chiang Kai-shek and a slightly larger one of Divine.
“I’m obsessed with her,” he said, referring to the former of the two divas.
“She lives in New York, so I try to spy on her. I ask her doorman, `Does
she get pu pu platters?’ And he of course refuses to answer.”

Mr. Waters is famously associated
with the city of Baltimore, where he has lived most of his 56 years, and
where he has set all of his movies, including “Hairspray,” which has now
morphed into a big, sherbety musical that opens tonight on Broadway. “Baltimore
to me is what I write about, what inspires me,” he said.

But for the last 11 years,
he has also kept a pied-à-terre in a neatly groomed prewar building
in the Village. He divides his year among a large Tudor-style house in
Baltimore, a summer apartment in Provincetown, Mass., and this very genteel
one-bedroom in New York.

The house in Baltimore has
an electric chair, Mr. Waters’s addition to a building that used to spook
him when he walked by as a child. The apartment in New York is filled with
modern art and has a pillow with a needlepoint picture of an electric chair.
His mother did the needlepoint.

“I have a whole life here,”
he said. “I have dinner parties, I go to a lot of galleries. I really keep
up on that. That’s the main thing I do here. And I go to movies I can’t
see everywhere else.” Mr. Waters offered a cup of coffee and finished his
menu of Gotham pastimes. “I take the subway everywhere,” he said. “I ride
in the first car, to look at the rats. You can see them jumping out of
the way on certain lines. The F line’s not bad for that.”

It stands to reason that
you cannot become John Waters, auteur of such Oscar-free classics as “Female
Trouble” and “Hag in a Black Leather Jacket,” without drinking long and
deep of the cultural gutters of downtown Manhattan. Baltimore may have
its gothic charms, but if the Dutch explorers had not settled this other
lustrous, grubby isle, the world might never know the cinematic sensation
of Odorama.

Mr. Waters offered a tour,
beginning in the living room with a witty sculpture by George Stoll. On
an ordinary toilet-paper holder, mounted in a wall, Mr. Stoll, who had
a small role in Mr. Waters’s 1972 movie “Pink Flamingos,” replaced the
tissue with a roll of chiffon. Mr. Waters needed approval from the condominium
to install it. He could only imagine what the super thought.

To facilitate his vision
of semi-patrician Manhattan, he hired a Baltimore decorator named Henry
Johnson, the first time he had ever used a professional. “I told him I
just wanted a symphony in puke green, and I got it,” Mr. Waters said. He
had always considered that his signature color. There’s a slightly different
shade in each room.

Mr. Waters explained: “When
I was a child I wanted my skin to be that color, like the Wicked Witch
of the West. Now, as I get older, it’s getting close. It’ll match the apartment.”

Mr. Waters has written and
directed 11 movies since 1969, including his most recent, “Cecil B. DeMented”
and “Pecker,” working on tight budgets and tighter shooting schedules.
He makes about 30 speaking appearances a year, mostly on college campuses,
and exhibits his photographs ˜ pictures taken from television, then recombined
to create storyboards for wholly different movies ˜ at the American Fine
Arts gallery in New York. The New Museum of Contemporary Art is planning
a retrospective of his photographs for 2003 or 2004. He is also helping
to write a book about sex in art and working on his next screenplay, “A
Dirty Shame,” about peculiar carnal appetites brought on by a head injury.

During downtime, he managed
to act as a pedophile priest in “Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat,” directed
by the splatter legend Herschell Gordon Lewis. He is in “deep development”
on an animated series about his life. And he has been consulting on “Hairspray.”

Accordingly, Mr. Waters has
marshaled his life into rigid routines, a kind of regimented weirdness.
He writes each day’s schedule on an index card and crosses off tasks as
he accomplishes them; at the start of each week he plans every meal before
preparing his shopping list, and he says he never has any groceries left
over. He makes it a point to drink every Friday night, “like a coal miner
with a paycheck in his pocket,” and arranges his home life to accommodate
his compulsiveness.

The apartment reflects Mr.
Waters’s work habits, which are both perverse and meticulously disciplined.
In a plastic case on his desk, he has Polaroid snapshots of everyone who
has ever visited the apartment, including the reporter and photographer
of this article.

“I separate things,” he said.
“I don’t ever think up my movies the same place I think up my artwork.
I write every morning from 8 to 11:30. I have to think up weird things.
That’s my job. And then the rest of the day I figure out how to make that
into money.”

Above his desk in Greenwich
Village is a drawing by Mike Kelley showing fumes rising out of a garbage
dump, which Mr. Waters considered an appropriate image for his work space.

“I’m really organized,” he
said. To write anything, he added, “I need Bic pens and Evidence legal
pads, the only ones I like.”

“I use Scotch tape and scissors,
and move it around like a computer,” he said. “Then, when my first draft
is done, my assistant types it and I start cutting it up. I’ve written
all my books and movies like that.

“Now you can’t take scissors
on airplanes, which makes it hard. I have to have scissors everywhere,
because I need them to write. Sometimes on lectures I make them give me
a pair of scissors. That’s my only star demand, that in my room I have
a pair of paper scissors. You can’t call me a difficult speaker because
of that.”

Mr. Waters began his affair
with New York when he was 17. He had a high school girlfriend at the time,
and the two would hitchhike up from Baltimore. “We used to walk around
this neighborhood and ask strangers, `Can we stay with you?’ And they’d
say yes. I hitchhiked in Manhattan, which I don’t even think people did
then. I think no one picked us up.”

The boundaries of his New
York extended to the exploitation theaters of Times Square, where he used
to take speed and consume four movies in a row, and to the dormitories
of New York University, which removed him for smoking marijuana. He progressed
from Max’s Kansas City to the Mudd Club to Squeezebox; from flophouses
on Eighth Street to the couches of friends like Cookie Mueller, who appeared
in many of his movies, and Dennis Dermody, a movie critic at Paper magazine.
“I always wanted to live in New York,” he said, “but I didn’t want to live
badly in New York. I wanted to wait until I could get a nice place.”

But now, he said, parts of
his city are disappearing or gone. He misses the lunch counter at Bigelow
drugstore, where the staff was rude to everyone but regulars, and the Women’s
House of Detention in the Village. Since the omnisexual club Squeezebox
closed last year, he hasn’t had a regular place to drink. “Greenwich Village
is no longer the hotbed of rebellion,” he said. “But still many writers
live here, many artists. It’s still the same kind of people.”

With the arrival of “Hairspray”
on Broadway, Mr. Waters threatens to become a New York institution himself.
He admitted that he was nervous about the opening, especially because the
show has had so much advance buildup. As a fan of delightfully bad movies,
he acknowledges that there is no such thing as a good bad play. “A bad
play is literally torture,” he said. “Even good bad movies as a breed are
almost gone. `Showgirls’ is the last good bad classic. That is the `Citizen
Kane’ of good bad movies of the last 20 years.”

Mr. Waters plans to attend
tonight’s opening with his parents and some members of the original film
crew. Though his parents lent him money to make his early movies, they
rarely attended them. “That would just be parent abuse,” Mr. Waters said.
“They were so relieved when I made `Hairspray.’ They want it to be made
into everything, so they don’t have to go to any more openings, just go
to openings of that all the time.”

Sometime soon after, he will
escape to Provincetown, where he has gone for 38 years, ever since someone
told him it was a weird place. “I have a different set of friends in each
place that I see in the same way,” he said. Among his paintings in New
York is a foggy seascape by his Provincetown landlady, the artist Pat de
Groot. He can still hitchhike when he is there, and his apartment is “small
enough so I can’t have guests, which is great.”

And tomorrow night, if you
raise a glass in the direction of Cape Cod, chances are he’ll be raising
one too.

14 AUGUST 2002: “OUTSIDE,
LOOKING OUT.”

From the current issue of
BOMB
magazine

JOHN ZORN: One of the reasons
I started Tzadik, which is my own label, is to

keep things in print. I
got tired of labels dropping things out of print when

they don’t sell. Tzadik
is driven by the need to keep important work in print

forever, as a catalogue.
You know, if we sell it, that’s great, but . . .

MICHAEL GOLDBERG(artist/interviewer):
How many titles has Tzadik put out?

JZ:   About 250
now.

MG:  Whoa! Are you doing
it pretty much yourself?

JZ:   I have about
two or three people, we don’t have an office, we don’t even

have a dedicated phone line.
We do it out of our own homes, and we make it work.

MG:  That’s extraordinary.
And does it make money to pay for itself?

JZ:   It breaks
even. We lose ten, twenty grand every year. But then the people

who are working say, Look,
I’ll kick this back in, I don’t need to take this

profit share. It’s very
cooperative.

MG:  That’s wonderful.
So they’re really believers.

JZ:   Yeah, these
are believersˆwhich is hard to findˆpeople who care. And I’ve

been lucky. So it survives
because of goodwill, and because there are still

idealistic people in the
world.

MG:   Not many.

JZ:   Well, you’re
one.

MG:  Yeah, but I figure
I’m a little crazy.

JZ:   You can’t
be idealistic in this world and not be crazy. Because they’ve

created such a deep structure
now, you can’t get in. And we don’t want to get

in, we’re on the outside.
But we’re not on the outside looking in, we’re on the

outside looking out. So
I feel we’re in a very healthy place. The idealists will

always be in society, and
we will survive.

13 AUGUST 2002: “JEWISH
GARAGE JAZZ WITH A SICK SENSE OF HUMOR”

Rabbinical
School Dropouts: Cosmic Tree

Tzadik #7168

Released June 2002

  1. Dung Gate

2. Pillow Rock

3. Warp to Level Three

4. Cosmic Tree

5. Solarium Khosidl

6. Jebusite Hypothesis

7. Sweet Beat

8. Yanatan Hakatan

9. Mosquito from Megiddo

10. Nuclear Jet Set

11. Integretron

12. Semitic Slam

The Rabbinical School Dropouts
is as crazy a group of kooks as you could want. Sun Ra, the Hampton Grease
Band, Frank Zappa and the Klezmatics all rolled into one, the music of
the Friedmann brothers is fresh and imaginative. Their ten-member big band
(featuring oboe, mandolin, bassoon, theremin, toy piano, tablas, etc.)
storms through a dozen creative originals touching upon klezmer, jazz,
funk, Latin, rock, and varied mishegoss along the way. Jewish garage jazz
with a sick sense of humor from Long Beach, California.

12 AUGUST 2002: ‘CONGRATULATIONS
HUMANS, YOU ARE NOW CONTROLLING THE WEATHER!’ OR, ‘HOW NOW, BROWN CLOUD.’

‘Asian Brown Cloud’ poses
global threat

The lives of millions
of people are at risk, both from the toxic haze and the weather change
it brings, the study shows

By CNN’s Marianne Bray and
wire reports

August 12, 2002 Posted:
8:33 AM EDT (1233 GMT)

HONG KONG, China — A dense
blanket of pollution, dubbed the “Asian Brown Cloud,” is hovering over
South Asia, with scientists warning it could kill millions of people in
the region, and pose a global threat.

    In the
biggest-ever study of the phenomenon, 200 scientists warned that the cloud,
estimated to be two miles (three kilometers) thick,

is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year from respiratory
disease.

    By slashing
the sunlight that reaches the ground by 10 to 15 percent, the choking smog
has also altered the region’s climate, cooling the ground while heating
the atmosphere, scientists said on Monday.

    The
potent haze lying over the entire Indian subcontinent — from Sri Lanka
to Afghanistan — has led to some erratic weather, sparking
flooding in Bangladesh, Nepal and northeastern India, but drought in Pakistan
and northwestern India.

    “There
are also global implications, not least because a pollution parcel like
this, which stretches three kilometers high, can travel half way round
the globe in a week, ” U.N. Environment Program chief Klaus Toepfer told
a news conference in London on Sunday.

    The U.N.’s
preliminary report comes three weeks before the Earth Summit in Johannesburg,
which opens on August 26, where all eyes will be on how not to overburden
the planet.

Global threat

While haze hovers over other
parts of the world, such as above America and Europe, what surprised scientists
was just how far the cloud extended, and how much black carbon was in it,
according to A P Mitra from India’s National Physical Laboratory.

    While
many scientists once thought that only lighter greenhouse gases, such as
carbon dioxide, could travel across the Earth, they now say that aerosol
clouds can too.

    “Biomass
burning” from forest fires, vegetation clearing and fossil fuel was just
as much to blame for the shrouding haze as dirty industries from Asia’s
great cities, the study found.

    A large
part of the aerosol cloud comes from inefficient cookers, where fuels such
as cowdung and kerosene are used to cook food in many parts of Asia, says
Mitra.

Acid rain

Using data from ships, planes
and satellites to study Asia’s haze during the northern winter months of
1995 to 2000, scientists were able to track its journey to pristine parts
of the world, such as the Maldives, to see how it affected climate.

    They
discovered not only that the smog cut sunlight, heating the atmosphere,
but also that it created acid rain, a serious threat to crops and trees,
as well as contaminating oceans and hurting agriculture.

    “It was
much larger than we thought,” said Mitra. The report suggested the pollution
could be cutting India’s winter rice harvest by as much as 10 percent.

    The report
calculated that the cloud — 80 percent of which was man-made — could
cut rainfall over northwest Pakistan, Afghanistan, western China and western
central Asia by up to 40 percent.

    While
scientists say it is just early days and they need more scientific data,
they do say the regional and global impact of the haze will intensify over
the next 30 years, with an estimated five billion people living in Asia.

    Nobel
laureate Paul Crutzen — one of the first scientists to identify the causes
of the hole in the ozone layer and also involved in the U.N. report —
said up to two million people in India alone were dying each year from
atmospheric pollution.

    In the
next phase of the project, scientists will collect data from the entire
Asian region, over more seasons with more observation sites and refine
their techniques.

    But because
the lifetime of pollutants are short and they can be rained out, scientists
are hopeful that if Asians use more efficient ways of burning fuel, such
as better stoves, and cleaner sources of energy, time has not run out.

The Associated Press &
Reuters contributed to this report.

11 AUGUST 2002: THIS
NEW DARK UNIVERSE

from theJuly 23, 2002 New
York Times:

In the Beginning …

By DENNIS OVERBYE

It has always been easy to
make fun of cosmologists, confined to a dust mote lost in space, pronouncing
judgment on the fate of the universe or the behavior of galaxies billions
of light-years away, with only a few scraps of light as evidence.

    “Cosmologists
are often wrong,” the Russian physicist Lev Landau put it, “but never in
doubt.”

    For most
of the 20th century, cosmology seemed less a science than a religious war
over, say, whether the universe had a beginning, in a fiery Big Bang billions
of years ago, or whether it exists eternally in the so-called Steady State.

    In the
last few years, however, a funny thing has happened. Cosmologists are beginning
to agree with one another. Blessed with new instruments like the Hubble
Space Telescope and other space-based observatories, a new generation of
their giant cousins on the ground and ever-faster computer networks, cosmology
is entering “a golden age” in which data are finally outrunning speculation.

    “The
rate at which we are learning and discovering new things is just extraordinary,”
said
Dr. Charles Bennett, an astronomer at the Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md.

    As a
result, cosmologists are beginning to converge on what they call a “standard
model” of the universe that is towering in its ambition. It purports to
trace, at least in broad strokes, cosmic history from the millisecond after
time began, when the universe was a boiling stew of energy and subatomic
particles, through the formation of atoms, stars, galaxies and planets
to the vast, dilute, dark future in which all of these will have died.

    The universe,
the cosmologists say, was born 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang. Most
of its material remains resides in huge clouds of invisible so-called dark
matter, perhaps elementary particles left over from the primordial explosion
and not yet identified.

    Within
these invisible clouds, the glittery lights in the sky that have defined
creation for generations of humans are swamped, like flecks of foam on
a rolling sea. A good case can be made, scientists now agree, that the
universe will go on expanding forever.

   
In fact, recent observations have suggested that the expansion of the universe
is speeding up over cosmic time, under the influence of a “dark energy”
even more mysterious than dark matter.

    Recently,
a group of astronomers led by Dr. William Percival at the University of
Edinburgh combined data from a variety of observations to compile, based
on the simplest theoretical model, what they say is the most precise enumeration
yet of the parameters that cosmologists have been fighting about for all
these decades.

    The universe,
they calculated, is 13.89 billion years old, plus or minus half a billion
years. Only 4.8 percent of it is made of ordinary matter. Matter of all
types, known and unknown, luminous and dark, accounts for just 27.5 percent.
The rest of creation, 72.5 percent, is the mysterious dark energy, they
reported in a paper submitted last month to The Monthly Notices of the
Royal Astronomical Society.

    It is
a picture that in some ways is surprisingly simple, satisfying long-held
theoretical prejudices about how the universe should be designed. Continued
agreement with coming experiments may mean that science is approaching
the end of a “great program” of cosmological tests that began in the 1930’s,
Dr. P. J. E. Peebles of Princeton and Dr. Bharat Ratra of Kansas State
University said in the draft of a coming article for The Reviews of Modern
Physics.

    In other
ways this new dark universe is utterly baffling, a road map to new
mysteries. Dr. Marc Davis, a cosmologist at the University of California
at Berkeley, called it “a universe chock full of exotics that don’t make
sense to anybody.”

    Moreover
there are some questions that scientists still do not know how to ask,
let alone answer, scientifically. Was there anything before the Big Bang?
Is there a role for life in the cosmos? Why is there something rather than
nothing at all? Will we ever know?

    “We know
much, but we still understand very little,” said Dr. Michael Turner, a
cosmologist at the University of Chicago.

The Big Question: Expanding
Forever, Or Big Crunch?

The dim caves of Lascaux,
the plains of Stonehenge and the dreamtime tales of Australian aborigines
all testify to the need to explain the world and existence. This quest
took its present form in 1917. That was when Albert Einstein took his new
general theory of relativity, which explained how matter and energy warp
space-time to produce gravity, and applied it to the universe.

    Einstein
discovered that the cosmos as his theory described it would be unstable,
prone to collapse under its own gravity. Astronomers, however, were sure
that the universe was stable. So Einstein added a fudge factor that he
called the cosmological constant to his equations. It acted as a long-range
repulsive force to counterbalance gravity.

    In 1929,
the astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding.
The sky was full of distant galaxies all rushing away from us and one another,
as if propelled by what the British astronomer Dr. Fred Hoyle later called
derisively a “big bang.” The universe was not stable and, thus, did not
require counterbalancing. Einstein abandoned his constant, referring to
it as his biggest blunder. But it would return to haunt cosmologists, and
the universe.

    Hoyle’s
term stuck, and the notion of an explosive genesis became orthodoxy in
1965, when Dr. Arno Penzias and Dr. Robert Wilson, radio astronomers at
Bell Laboratories, discovered a faint uniform radio glow that pervaded
the sky. It was, cosmologists concluded, the fading remnant of the primordial
fireball itself.

    Relieved
of their fudge factor, the equations describing Einstein’s universe were
simple. Dr. Allan Sandage, the Carnegie Observatories astronomer, once
called cosmology “the search for two numbers” ˜ one, the Hubble constant,
telling how fast the universe is expanding, and the other telling how fast
the expansion is slowing, and thus whether the universe will expand forever
or not.

    The second
number, known as the deceleration parameter, indicated how much the cosmos
had been warped by the density of its contents. In a high-density universe,
space would be curved around on itself like a ball. Such a universe would
eventually stop expanding and fall back together in a big crunch that would
extinguish space and time, as well as the galaxies and stars that inhabit
them. A low-density universe, on the other hand, would have an opposite
or “open” curvature like a saddle, harder to envision, and would expand
forever.

    In between
with no overall warpage at all was a “Goldilocks” universe with just the
right density to expand forever but more and more slowly, so that after
an infinite time it would coast to a stop. This was a “flat” universe in
the cosmological parlance, and to many theorists the simplest and most
mathematically beautiful solution of all.

    But the
sky did not yield those cosmic numbers easily, even with the help of the
200-inch Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain in Southern California, dedicated
in 1948, which had been built largely for that task. Dr. Hubble wrote of
measuring shadows and searching “among ghostly errors of measurement for
landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.”

The Dark Side: Invisible
Matter Molds Galaxies

It was not till the mid-70’s,
a quarter-century after the Palomar giant began operating, that groups
of astronomers reached the tentative conclusion that the universe they
could see ˜ stars, gas, planets and galaxies ˜ did not have nearly enough
gravitational oomph to stop the cosmic expansion.

    “So the
universe will continue to expand forever and galaxies will get farther
and farther apart, and things will just die,” Dr. Sandage said at the time.

    But the
Great Argument was just beginning. Apparently there was a lot of the universe
that astronomers could not see. The stars and galaxies, were moving as
if immersed in the gravity of giant invisible clouds of so-called dark
matter ˜ “missing matter” the Swiss astronomer Dr. Fritz Zwicky labeled
it in the 1930’s.

    Many
galaxies, for example, are rotating so fast that they would fly apart unless
they were being reined in by the gravity of halos of dark matter, according
to pioneering observations by Dr. Vera Rubin of the Carnegie Institution
of Washington and her colleagues. Her measurements indicated that these
dark halos outweighed the visible galaxies themselves from 5 to 10 times.
But there could be even more dark matter farther out in space, perhaps
enough to stop the expansion of the universe, eventually, some theorists
suggested. Luminous matter, the Darth Vaders of the sky said, is like the
snow on mountaintops.

    But what
is the dark matter? While some of it is gas or dark dim objects like stars
and planets, cosmologists speculate that most of it is subatomic particles
left over from the Big Bang.

    Many
varieties of these particles are predicted by theories of high-energy physics.
But their existence has not been confirmed or detected in particle accelerators.

    “We theorists
can invent all sorts of garbage to fill the universe,” Dr. Sheldon Glashow,
a Harvard physicist and Nobel laureate, told a gathering on dark matter
in 1981.

    Collectively
known as WIMP’s, for weakly interacting massive particles, such particles
would not respond to electromagnetism, the force responsible for light,
and thus would be unable to radiate or reflect light. They would also be
relatively slow-moving, or “cold” in physics jargon, and thus also go by
the name of cold dark matter.

    As Earth
in its travels passed through the dark-matter cloud that presumably envelops
the Milky Way, the particles would shoot through our bodies, rarely leaving
a trace, like moonlight through a window.

    But the
collective gravity of such particles, cosmologists say, would shape the
cosmos and its contents.

    Gathering
along the fault lines laid down by random perturbations of density in the
early universe, dark matter would congeal into clouds with about the mass
of 100,000 Suns. The ordinary matter that was mixed in with it would cool
and fall to the centers of the clouds and light up as stars.

    The clouds
would then attract other clouds. Through a series of mergers over billions
of years, smaller clouds would assemble into galaxies, and the galaxies
would then assemble themselves into clusters of thousands of galaxies,
and so forth.

    Using
the Hubble and other telescopes as time machines ˜ light travels at a finite
speed, so the farther out astronomers look the farther back in time they
see ˜ cosmologists have begun to confirm that the universe did assemble
itself from the “bottom up,” as the dark matter model predicts.

    Last
year, two teams of astronomers reported seeing the first stars burning
their way out of the cloudy aftermath of the Big Bang, when the universe
was only 900 million years old. The bulk of galaxy formation occurred when
the universe was a half to a quarter its present age, cosmologists say.

    “The
big news in the last decade is that even half a universe ago the universe
looked pretty different,” said Dr. Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories
in Pasadena. Galaxies before then were small and irregular, with no sign
of the majestic spiral spider webs that decorate the sky today.

    We would
barely recognize our own Milky Way galaxy, if we could see it five billion
years ago when the Sun formed, he said.

    “By eight
billion years back, it would be unrecognizable,” said Dr. Dressler.

    Yet there
are still many questions that the cold dark matter model does not answer.
Astronomers still do not know, for example, how the first stars formed
or why the models of dark matter distribution don’t quite fit in the cores
of some kinds of galaxies. Nor have the dark matter particles themselves
been unambiguously detected or identified, despite continuing experiments.

    Some
astronomers suggest that the discrepancies stem from the inability of simple
mathematical models to deal with messy details of the real world.

    “It’s
a huge mystery exactly how stars form,” Dr. Richard Bond of the Canadian
Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics said. “We can’t solve it now. So
it’s even harder to try to solve them back then.”

    But others,
notably Dr. Mordehai Milgrom, a theorist at the Weizmann Institute in Israel,
have suggested that modifying the gravitational laws by which dark matter
was deduced in the first place would alleviate the need for dark matter
altogether.

The Bang’s Fuel: Inflating
One Ounce To a Whole Universe

Clues to what had actually
exploded in the Big Bang emerged as an unexpected gift from another great
scientific quest: physicists’ pursuit for a so-called theory of everything
that would unite all physical phenomena in a single equation. Unable to
build machines powerful enough to test their most ambitious notions on
Earth, some theorists turned to the sky.

    “The
Big Bang is the poor man’s particle accelerator,” Dr. Jakob Zeldovich,
an influential Russian cosmologist, said.

    Physicists
recognize four forces at work in the world today ˜ gravity, electromagnetism,
and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But they suspect, based on data
from particle accelerators and high-powered theory, that those are simply
different manifestations of a single unified force that ruled the universe
in its earliest, hottest moments.

    As the
universe cooled, according to this theory, there was a fall from grace,
and the laws of physics evolved, with one force after another “freezing
out,” or splitting away.

    In 1979,
Dr. Alan Guth, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, realized
that a hypothesized glitch in this process would have had drastic consequences
for the universe. Under some circumstances, a glass of water can stay liquid
as the temperature falls below 32 degrees, until it is disturbed, at which
point it will rapidly freeze, releasing latent heat in the process. Similarly,
the universe could “supercool” and stay in a unified state too long. In
that case, space itself would become temporarily imbued with a mysterious
kind of latent heat, or energy.

    Inserted
into Einstein’s equations, the latent energy would act as a kind of antigravity,
and the universe would blow itself apart, Dr. Guth discovered in a calculation
in 1979.

    In far
less than the blink of an eye, 10-37 second, a speck much smaller than
a proton would have swollen to the size of a grapefruit and then resumed
its more stately expansion, with all of normal cosmic history before it,
resulting in today’s observable universe ˜ a patch of sky and stars 14
billion light-years across. All, by the magical-seeming logic of Einstein’s
equations, from about an ounce of primordial stuff.

    “The
universe,” Dr. Guth liked to say, “might be the ultimate free lunch.”

    Dr. Guth
called his theory inflation. Inflation, as Dr. Guth pointed out, explains
why the universe is expanding. Dr. Turner of the University of Chicago
referred to it as “the dynamite behind the Big Bang.”

    As modified
and improved by Dr. Andrei Linde, now at Stanford, and by Dr. Paul Steinhardt,
now at Princeton and Dr. Andreas Albrecht now at the University of California
at Davis, inflation has been the workhorse of cosmology ever since. One
of its great virtues, cosmologists say, is that inflation explains the
origin of galaxies, the main citizens of the cosmos. The answer comes from
the paradoxical-sounding quantum rules that govern subatomic affairs. On
the smallest scales, according to quantum theory, nature is lumpy, emitting
even energy in little bits and subject to an irreducible randomness. As
a result, so-called quantum fluctuations would leave faint lumps in the
early universe. These would serve as the gravitational seeds for future
galaxies and other cosmic structures.

    As a
result of such successes, cosmologists have stuck with the idea of inflation,
even though, lacking the ability to test their theories at the high energies
of the Big Bang, they have no precise theory about what might have actually
caused it. “Inflation is actually a class of theories,” said Dr. Guth.

    In the
latest version, called “chaotic inflation,” Dr. Linde has argued that quantum
fluctuations in a myriad of theorized force fields could have done the
trick.

    Indeed,
he and others now say they believe that inflation can occur over and over,
spawning an endless chain of universes out of one another, like bubbles
within bubbles.

    “The
universe inflates on top of itself,” Dr. Linde told a physics conference
this spring in Princeton. “It’s happening right now.”

The Golden Age: New Devices
Detect Primordial Glow

If the inflationary theorists
are right, the universe we see, the 14 billion light-years, is just a tiny
piece of a much vaster universe, or even a whole ensemble of them, forever
out of our view.

    According
to the theory, therefore, our own little patch of the cosmos should appear
geometrically “flat,” the way a section of a balloon looks flat when viewed
close up. This was the universe long thought to be the most beautiful and
simple.

    But it
required, by the logic of Einstein’s general relativity, that there be
much more dark matter, or something, to the universe, enough to “flatten”
space-time, than astronomers had found.

    In fact,
this prescription was so hard to reconcile with other observations, of
galaxies and their evolutions, that by 1991 some astronomers and press
reports suggested that the entire theoretical edifice of inflation to blow
up the universe and cold dark matter to fill it, not to say the Big Bang
itself, might have to be junked.

    So it
was with a sigh of relief that cosmologists greeted the announcement in
April 1992 that NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, satellite had
succeeded in discerning faint blotches in the primordial cosmic radio glow.

    These
were the seeds from which, inflation predicted, large cosmic structures
would eventually grow.

    “If you’re
religious, it’s like seeing God,” said Dr. George Smoot, a physicist from
the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who led the COBE team.

    Astronomers
say COBE signaled a transition in which heroic ideas about the universe
began to be replaced by heroic data, as long-planned new telescopes and
other instruments went into operation.

    A year
later, skywalking astronauts corrected the Hubble telescope’s myopic vision.
The cosmic background radiation has come in for particular scrutiny from
new radio telescopes mounted in balloons and on mountaintops. The news
has been good, though not decisive, for inflation.

    For three
years, a series of increasingly high-resolution observations has confirmed
that the pattern of blotches stippling the remnant of the primordial fireball
is consistent with the predictions from inflation and cold dark matter.
The instruments have now mapped details small enough to have been the seeds
of modern clusters of galaxies.

    “I’m
completely snowed by the cosmic background radiation,” Dr. Guth said. “The
signal was so weak it wasn’t even detected until 1965, and now they’re
measuring fluctuations of one part in 100,000.”

    Perhaps
most important, the analysis of the fluctuations indicates that the universe
has a “flat” geometry, as predicted by inflation. That was a triumph. Although
observations could not prove that inflation was right, a nonflat universe
would have been a blow to the theory, and to cosmological orthodoxy.

    “Inflation,
our boldest and most promising theory of the earliest moments of creation,
passed its first very important test,” Dr. Turner said at the time.

    The most
precise measurements of the cosmic background, at least in the near future,
are generally expected to come late this year from NASA’s Microwave Anisotropy
Project, or MAP, satellite, which was launched into space last year on
June 30. MAP will be followed by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite,
in 2006.

    It is
highly unlikely that MAP or Planck will be able to detect what Dr. Turner
calls “the smoking gun signature of inflation.” The violent stretching
of the universe should roil space-time with so-called gravitational waves
that would leave a faint imprint on the cosmic fireball.

    Detecting
those waves would not only confirm inflation, but also might help scientists
establish what caused the inflation in the first place, giving science
its first look at the strange physics that prevailed when creation was
only about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old.

The Universe’s Fate: Bleak
Implications Of `Dark Energy’

In 1998, two competing teams
of astronomers startled the scientific world with the news that the expansion
of the universe seemed to be speeding up under the influence of a mysterious
antigravity that seems embedded in space itself and that is hauntingly
reminiscent of Einstein’s old, presumably discredited, cosmological constant.

    “Dark
energy,” the phenomenon was quickly named.

    If dark
energy is real and the acceleration continues, the galaxies will eventually
speed away from one another so quickly that they couldn’t see one another.
The universe would become cold and empty as the continued acceleration
sucked away the energy needed for life and thought.

   
It would be “the worst possible universe,” for the quality and quantity
of life, said Dr. Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Case Western
Reserve University.

    Dr. Edward
Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, called the discovery
of dark energy “the strangest experimental finding since I’ve been in physics.”

    The discovery
was a surprise to the astronomers involved. Neither team had expected to
find the universe accelerating. They had each set out to measure by how
much the expansion of the universe was slowing because of the gravity of
its contents and thus settle the question of its fate.

    One team
was led by Dr. Saul Perlmutter, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley. The other
team was a band of astronomers led by Dr. Brian Schmidt of Mount Stromlo
and the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.

    Each
group employed far-flung networks of telescopes, including the Hubble,
and the Internet to find and monitor certain exploding stars, or supernovas,
as cosmic beacons. Such explosions, the death rattles of massive stars,
are powerful enough to be seen clear across the universe when the universe
was younger and, presumably, expanding faster.

    Leapfrogging
each other across the universe, the two teams, propitiously for their credibility,
arrived at the same answer at the same time: the cosmos was not slowing
at all; it was speeding up.

    Dr. Perlmutter,
who had once resented the competition, conceded, “With only one group,
it would have been a lot harder to get the community to buy into such a
surprising result.”

    “This
was a very strange result,” said Dr. Adam Riess, a member of Dr. Schmidt’s
team. “It was the opposite of what we thought we were doing.”

    The results
have sent Einstein’s old cosmological constant to the forefront of cosmology.
Despite his disavowal, the constant had never really gone away and had
in fact been given new life by quantum physics. Einstein had famously rejected
quantum’s randomness, saying God didn’t play dice.

    But it
justified, in retrospect, his fudge factor.

    According
to the uncertainty principle, a pillar of quantum theory, empty space was
not empty, but rather foaming with the energy of so-called virtual particles
as they flashed in and out of existence on borrowed energy. This so-called
vacuum energy could repel, just like Einstein’s old cosmological constant,
or attract.

    The case
for dark energy got even stronger a year later, when the cosmic background
observations reported evidence of a flat universe. Because astronomers
had been able to find only about a third as much matter, both dark and
luminous, as was needed by Einstein’s laws to create a flat geometry, something
else had to be adding to it.

    The discovery
of dark energy exemplified Dr. Zeldovich’s view of the universe as the
poor man’s particle accelerator, and it caught the physicists flat-footed,
somewhat to the pride of the astronomers.

    “A coming
of age of astronomy,” Dr. Dressler called it.

    What
is dark energy? The question now hangs over the universe.

    Is it
really Einstein’s old fudge factor returned to haunt his children? In that
case, as the universe expands and the volume of space increases, astronomers
say, the push because of dark energy will also increase, accelerating the
galaxies away from one another faster and faster, leading to a dire dark
future.

    Other
physicists, however, have pointed out that the theories of modern physics
are replete with mysterious force fields, collectively called “quintessence,”
that might or might not exist, but that could temporarily produce negative
gravity and mimic the action of a cosmological constant. In that case,
all bets on the future are off. The universe could accelerate and then
decelerate, or vice versa as the dark energy fields rose or fell.

    A third
possibility is that dark energy does not exist at all, in which case not
just the future, but the whole carefully constructed jigsaw puzzle of cosmology,
might be in doubt. The effects of cosmic acceleration could be mimicked,
astronomers say, by unusual dust in the far universe or by unsuspected
changes in the characteristics of supernovas over cosmic time. As a result,
more groups are joining the original two teams in the hunt for new supernovas
and other ways to measure the effects of dark energy on the history of
the universe.

    Dr. Perlmutter
has proposed building a special satellite telescope, the Supernova Astronomy
Project, to investigate exactly when and how abruptly the cosmic acceleration
kicked in.

The Nagging QuestionsA
Grand Synthesis, But Hardly Complete

For all the new answers
being harvested, some old questions linger, and they have now been joined
by new ones.

    A flat
universe is the most mathematically appealing solution of Einstein’s equations,
cosmologists agree. But they are puzzled by the specific recipe, large
helpings of dark matter and dark energy, that nature has chosen. Dr. Turner
called it “a preposterous universe.”

    But Dr.
Martin Rees, a Cambridge University cosmologist, said that the discovery
of a deeper principle governing the universe and, perhaps, life, may alter
our view of what is fundamental. Some features of the universe that are
now considered fundamental ˜ like the exact mixture of dark matter, dark
energy and regular stuff in the cosmos ˜ may turn out to be mere accidents
of evolution in one out of the many, many universes allowed by eternal
inflation.

    “If we
had a theory, then we would know whether there were many big bangs or one,”
Dr. Rees said. The answers to these and other questions, many scientists
suspect, have to await the final unification of physics, a theory that
reconciles Einstein’s relativity, which describes the shape of the universe,
to the quantum chaos that lives inside it.

    Such
a theory, quantum gravity, is needed to describe the first few moments
of the universe, when it was so small that even space and time should become
fuzzy and discontinuous.

    For two
decades, many physicists have placed their bets for quantum gravity on
string theory, which posits that elementary particles are tiny strings
vibrating in a 10- or 11-dimensional space. Each kind of particle, in a
sense, corresponds to a different note on the string.

    In principle,
string theory can explain all the forces of nature. But even its adherents
concede that their equations are just approximations to an unknown theory
that they call M-theory, with “M” standing for matrix, magic, mystery or
even mother, as in “mother of all theories.” Moreover, the effects of “stringy
physics” are only evident at energies forever beyond the limits of particle
accelerators.

    Some
string theorists have ventured into cosmology, hoping, to discover some
effect that would show up in the poor man’s particle accelerator, the sky.

    In addition
to strings, the theory also includes membranes, or “branes,” of various
dimensions. Our universe can be envisioned as such a brane floating in
higher-dimensional space like a leaf in a fish tank, perhaps with other
brane universes nearby. These branes could interact gravitationally or
even collide, setting off the Big Bang.

    In one
version suggested last year by four cosmologists led by Dr. Steinhardt
of Princeton, another brane would repeatedly collide with our own. They
pass back and forth through each other, causing our universe to undergo
an eternal chain of big bangs.

    Such
notions are probably the future for those who are paid to wonder about
the universe.

    And the
fruits of this work could yet cause cosmologists to reconsider their new
consensus, warned Dr. Peebles of Princeton, who has often acted as the
conscience of the cosmological community, trying to put the brakes on faddish
trends.

    He wonders
whether the situation today can be compared to another historical era,
around 1900, when many people thought that physics was essentially finished
and when the English physicist Lord Kelvin said that just a couple of “clouds”
remained to be dealt with.

    “A few
annoying tidbits, which turned out to be relativity and quantum theory,”
the twin revolutions of 20th-century science, Dr. Peebles said.

    Likewise,
there are a few clouds today like what he called “the dark sector,” which
could have more complicated physics than cosmologists think.

    “I’m
not convinced these clouds herald revolutions as deep as relativity and
quantum mechanics,” Dr. Peebles said. “I’m not arguing that they won’t.”

    As for
the fate of the universe, we will never have a firm answer, said Dr. Sandage,
who was Hubble’s protégé and has seen it all.

    “It’s
like asking, `Does God exist?’ ” he said.

    Predicting
the future, he pointed out, requires faith that simple mathematical models
really work to describe the universe.

    “I don’t
think we really know how things work,” he said.

    Although
Dr. Sandage does not buy into all aspects of the emerging orthodoxy, he
said it was a fantastic time to be alive.

    “It’s
all working toward a much grander synthesis than we could have imagined
100 years ago,” he said. “I think this is the most exciting life I could
have had.”

10 AUGUST 2002: THE STORY
OF THE MC5…ON FILM.

World premiere at the Chicago
Underground Film Festival:

OPENING NIGHT

THURSDAY AUGUST22 7:00pm

“MC5 * A True Testimonial”

Dave Thomas

Documentary Video 140 min
2002

“The MC5 was like an aberration,
a really lucky stroke of guys who were hugely passionate in the mid to
late 60s who were driven by an arrogant idealism that was a lot more physical
and a lot more testosterone-driven than most Rock around it˜and they were
so cool and they kicked it out so hard that they scared everybody away.”
ˆ Dave Wyndorf, Monster Magnet

Brothers and Sisters, The
Chicago Underground Film Festival is proud to present the world premiere
of „MC5 * A True Testimonial,‰ an in-depth revelation of the last great
untold story of the 1960s, the story of the MC5.

One of the most electrifying
acts to ever storm a rock-‚n‚-roll stage, the MC5’s Detroit performances
in the late 60s are legend. Their debut album, „Kick Out the Jams,‰ set
a high-energy sonic standard rarely matched in the thirty years since its
release. The MC5’s uncompromising stance and radical affiliations placed
them, briefly, at the musical forefront of a generation bent on political
and cultural change. In the midst of the most turbulent years in our nation’s
history, the MC5 embraced the promise and embodied the possibilities of
a real American Revolution.

For their efforts the MC5
were rewarded with critical indifference, broken contracts, police hassles
and the censorship and suppression of their music. The MC5 became, in their
own words, “perfect targets for the double-cross.” Relegated to some dark
and forgotten corner of rock history, they have become little more than
a curiosity, a footnote, victims of the American Ruse.

But their legend has lived
on, and while the influence of the MC5 continues to resurface in Punk,
in Heavy Metal, in Grunge, entire generations know little of their actual
story. Through rare film and television footage, still photographs, and
interviews with all of the key players, the whole story of the MC5 is brought
to life again. This is a story of stars and bars and drag strips and riots;
Panthers and pot-busts; this is the real story of five genuine American
heroes who had FBI files before they had a recording contract. The story
of a revolution fueled by twin guitars and decked out in sequined suits;
a story of the fire and of the smoke behind the American Dream.

Right Now, . . . it’s time
to Get Down With It, . . . it’s time to Testify, . . . it’s time to tell
the true story of one of the most unique and influential American Rock-Œn‚-Roll
bands: the MC5 and their place in Rock‚s and America‚s History.

Are you ready to Testify?

THANKS: JOE C.