Drunk Walking Makes New Year's the Deadliest Day

ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2009) — This is the time of the holiday season when New Year's partiers are inundated with warnings about the risks of drinking and driving.

Little is ever heard, though, about the risks of drinking and walking, which can be just as dangerous, said trauma surgeon Dr. Thomas Esposito at Loyola University Health System in Maywood.

"Alcohol impairs your physical ability to walk and to drive," Esposito said. "It impairs your judgment, reflexes and coordination. It's nothing more than a socially acceptable, over-the-counter stimulant/depressant."

A trauma surgeon for more than 20 years, Esposito has witnessed the tragic aftermath of drunken walking professionally and personally. Several years ago, Esposito's cousin of his opted to walk instead of driving home from a party where he had been drinking.

"A driver, who I don't believe was intoxicated, did not see him and hit him and he was killed," said Esposito, who is also professor of surgery and chief of the division of trauma, surgical critical care and burns in the department of surgery, Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. "They found him on the side of the road on New Year's Day."

In 2005, the journal Injury Prevention reported that New Year's Day is more deadly for pedestrians than any other day of the year. From 1986 to 2002, 410 pedestrians were killed on New Year's Day. Fifty-eight percent of those killed had high blood alcohol concentrations.

Alcohol also plays a significant role in the deaths of pedestrians throughout the year, according to information from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. In 2007, their research found that "37 percent of fatally injured pedestrians 16 and older had blood alcohol concentrations at or above 0.08 percent." Of those killed at night, 54 percent had high blood alcohol levels.

During the period from July 2008 to June 2009, of the 86 patients ages 16 and older who were treated at Loyola after being struck by cars, 18 were found to have some level of alcohol in their system. Of that number, 14 had blood alcohol concentrations at or above 0.08 percent, the legal definition for impaired driving in Illinois.

"If they had been driving and were stopped by police, they would have been arrested for driving under the influence," Esposito said.

Esposito added that the number doesn't include the people who suffer injuries in their homes from unintentional causes and violence after drinking.

"It's not just walking outside. All the time we see people who have been drinking that have fallen down the stairs or tripped at home and injured themselves. Others have decided to pick a fight using a knife or with someone holding a gun," Esposito said.

If you drink and plan to walk on New Year's Eve or any other day of the year, you have to take special care, Esposito said. Don't wear dark clothing at night that can make it difficult for drivers to see you. Walk solely on the sidewalks and cross at designated crossings. Also, it's a good idea to walk in a group, which is easier for drivers to spot, and try to walk with at least one person who has not been drinking, a designated chaperone or escort.

Drivers need to take extra care when in locations where people drink, such as areas with large numbers of bars, since intoxicated pedestrians have slower reflexes and can be unpredictable, Esposito said. People throwing parties in which alcohol is consumed have an equal obligation to watch over their guests who are walking home as they do with the ones who may be driving.

"You have to be able to assess someone's perceived ability to safely get from one place to the other," Esposito said. "If their mode of transportation is a car, you do things to prevent them from driving. If that mode of transportation is their legs, then you either drive them or make them stay at home."

Even if a guest who is walking and who has been drinking is staying on the premises, you should be aware that they can trip and fall down the stairs, Esposito said.

"So you don't want to send them up to the second-story bedroom," Esposito said.

Unfortunately, Esposito said his cousin took none of those precautions. He was wearing dark clothing, was alone and walking in the street when he was hit.

"His death has had a devastating effect on the family, especially on his parents," Esposito said. "They required a lot of professional, psychological support and they really have never been the same, especially around the holidays."

Birth Control Pill for Men?

— A new research report published in the December 2009 print issue of The FASEB Journal could one day give men similar type of control over their fertility that women have had since the 1960s. That's because scientists have found how and where androgenic hormones work in the testis to control normal sperm production and male fertility. This opens a promising avenue for the development of "the pill" for men.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2009)

The discovery also offers hope to those who cannot have children because of low sperm counts. Although the research was conducted in mice, a similar effect is likely to obtain in other mammals, such as humans.

"This study provides a new opportunity to identify how androgens control sperm production, which could provide new insight for the development of new treatments for male infertility and perhaps new male contraceptives," said Michelle Welsh, Ph.D., co-author of the study, from the Centre for Reproductive Biology at The Queen's Medical Research Institute in Edinburgh, UK.

To make this discovery, Welsh and colleagues performed studies in two groups of mice. The first group of mice was normal, but the second group of mice was missing a gene from the peritubular myoid cells in the testis. This gene that was missing codes for the androgen hormone receptor, and when missing, sperm production was significantly decreased when compared to the normal group. The result was infertility.

"Although 'the pill' arguably has been liberating for women since its development in the 1960s, a similar birth control drug for men has been elusive," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "Not only does this research pinpoint androgenic hormones and their cellular receptors as prime targets for the development of new birth control drugs, but it promises to speed the development of new agents to boost sperm production."

Physicists Beginning to See Data from the Large

ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2010) — Three Iowa State University physicists who took winter trips to the Large Hadron Collider for meetings and experimental work are starting to see real data from the planet's biggest science experiment.

Finally.

The multibillion-dollar collider made international news on Sept. 10, 2008, when it sent its first beam of protons around 17 miles of underground tunnel near Geneva, Switzerland. But breakdowns in the machine's high-current electrical connections forced a complete shutdown for more than a year of repairs and tests.

Physicists from around the world cheered on Nov. 20, 2009, when the collider once again sent protons racing through its tunnel. Three days later the machine recorded its first proton-proton collisions. And on Nov. 30 it set a new world record when it accelerated two beams of protons to a total energy of 2.36 trillion electron volts.

Physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, shut down the collider on Dec. 16 to prepare for even higher energy collisions later this year.

"The data look just beautiful," said Soeren Prell, an Iowa State associate professor of physics and astronomy.

Prell has been looking at the first data recorded with the ATLAS experiment's silicon pixel detector. The pixel detector is the innermost part of ATLAS, one of two giant, general purpose detectors at the collider. ATLAS will measure the paths, energies and identities of the particles created when protons or lead ions collide at unprecedented energies. The pixel detector uses 80 million pixels to make precise measurements as close to the particle collisions as possible.

Prell said the pixel detector is already sending physicists fairly clean data with very little background noise. But, he said, physicists still have to work to make sure the pixel detector is properly aligned and calibrated. It has a resolution down to 10 millionths of a meter and so it has to be just as precisely aligned.

The detector's data also has to be distributed to physicists around the world for study and analysis. Jim Cochran, an associate professor of physics and astronomy, is the ATLAS experiment's analysis support manager for the United States. It's his job to make sure researchers have the data they need for their analyses.

And, so far, the experiment's analysis system has been able to keep up with the data. But that's going to be a bigger challenge when the collider is turned back on in February and begins running at higher energies and much higher collision rates.

"One of the concerns I've had is whether we'll be able to handle the data loads we're expecting," Cochran said. "We have to have our computing systems optimized so we can do it. We've already had 700,000 collision events, and that's nothing compared to what's coming."

That's just one of the reasons Chunhui Chen, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, is telling people that big, new, Nobel-winning physics from the Large Hadron Collider won't happen right away. There's just too much data to collect, distribute and analyze.

But, "This is a very big moment," said Chen, who's working on the ATLAS experiment's pixel detector and the ATLAS trigger system that recognizes and records interesting collision events. "Potentially, we'll be able to see some new physics."

That could include the Higgs boson, a particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. The model theorizes that space is filled with a Higgs field and particles acquire their masses by interacting with the field. Detection and study of the Higgs could answer basic questions about why matter has mass and how particles acquire mass.

Physicists also hope the higher energies made possible by the Large Hadron Collider could answer big physics questions about matter and antimatter, dark matter, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, a grand unified theory or perhaps something entirely unexpected.

"One hundred years ago physicists discovered special relativity and quantum mechanics," Chen said. "We know our understanding of physics is incomplete. We don't know what's beyond our understanding. And so this is going to be a long research program. It will take years of dedicated study to really unearth the secrets of the universe."