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In Search of the Mysterious Narwhal
Ballerina turned biologist Kristin Laidre gives her all to study the elusive, deep-diving, ice-loving whale known as the "unicorn of the sea"
Even before the hunters were off the phone, Kristin Laidre was out of her pajamas and struggling into a survival suit. She ran down to the beach, where a motorboat awaited. The night was frigid with ice-chip stars; the northern lights glowed green overhead. Laidre and a colleague sped past looming bergs and black cliffs plated with ice to the spot offshore where the villagers' boats were circling. The whale was there, a thrashing ton of panic amid the swells. Laidre could see its outline in the water and smell its sour breath.
The scientists and hunters maneuvered boats and began hauling in the nylon net that had been strung from shore and floated with plastic buoys. It was exceptionally heavy because it was soaking wet and, Laidre would recall, "there was a whale in it." Once the mottled black animal was in a secure hammock, they could slip a rope on its tail and a hoop net over its head and float it back to the beach to be measured and tagged.
But something was wrong. The whale seemed to be only partially caught—snagged by the head or tail, Laidre wasn't sure. The hunters screamed at each other, the seas heaved and the boats drifted toward the fierce cliffs. The hunters fought to bring the whale up, and for a moment it seemed as if the animal, a big female, was theirs—Laidre reached out and touched its rubbery skin.
Then the whale went under and the net went limp, and with a sinking heart Laidre shined her pale headlamp into water as dark as oil.
The narwhal was gone.
Kristin Laidre did not set out to wrestle whales in the devastatingly cold waters off Greenland's west coast. She wanted to be a ballerina. Growing up near landlocked Saratoga Springs, New York, where the New York City Ballet spends its summer season, she discovered the choreography of George Balanchine and trained throughout her teens to be an elite dancer. After high school, she danced with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, one of the nation's most competitive companies, and while practicing a grueling 12 hours a day performed in Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella and The Firebird.
Wearing hiking boots instead of toe shoes, she still carries herself with a dancer's grace, a perfect surety of movement that suggests she can execute a plié or stand up to a polar bear with equal competence. Laidre's three-year dance career ended after a foot injury, but she says ballet prepared her rather well for her subsequent incarnation as an arctic biologist and perhaps America's leading expert on narwhals, the shy and retiring cetaceans with the "unicorn horn"—actually a giant tooth—found only in the Greenlandic and Canadian Arctic.
"When you are a ballet dancer you learn how to suffer," Laidre explains. "You learn to be in conditions that aren't ideal, but you persist because you're doing something you love and care about. I have a philosophy that science is art, that there is creativity involved, and devotion. You need artistry to be a scientist."
Like the elusive whale she studies, which follows the spread and retreat of the ice edge, Laidre, 33, has become a migratory creature. After earning undergraduate and doctoral degrees at the University of Washington, she now spends part of her year at its Polar Science Center, and the rest of the time she works with collaborators in Denmark or Greenland, conducting aerial surveys, picking through whale stomachs and setting up house in coastal hunting settlements, where she hires hunters to catch narwhals. Along the way she has learned to speak Danish and rudimentary West Greenlandic.
The Greenlandic phrase she hears most often—whenever the weather blows up or the transmitters malfunction or the whales don't show—is immaqa aqagu. Maybe tomorrow.
That's because she's devoted to what she calls "possibly the worst study animal in the world." Narwhals live in the cracks of dense pack ice for much of the year. They flee from motorboats and helicopters. They can't be herded toward shore like belugas, and because they're small (for whales) and maddeningly fast, it's little use trying to tag them with transmitters shot from air rifles. They must be netted and manhandled, although Laidre is trying a variation on an aboriginal method, attaching transmitters to modified harpoons that hunters toss from stealthy Greenlandic kayaks.
"Narwhals are hopelessly hard to see, never come when you want them to, swimming far offshore and underwater the whole time," she says. "You think you'll catch a whale in three weeks, you probably won't. Whole field seasons go by and you don't even see a narwhal. There are so many disappointments. It takes great patience and optimism—those are my two words."
The species is practically a blank slate, which is what drew her to narwhals in the first place—that and the crystalline allure of the Arctic. By now she has analyzed scores of narwhal carcasses and managed to tag and follow about 40 live animals, publishing new information about diving behavior, migration patterns, relationship to sea ice and reactions to killer whales. Much of what the world knows about the narwhal's picky eating habits comes from Laidre's research, particularly a 2005 study that offered the first evidence of the whales' winter diet, which is heavy in squid, arctic cod and Greenland halibut. She is the co-author of the 2006 book Greenland's Winter Whales.
Basic questions drive her work. How many narwhals are there? Where do they travel and why? Greenland's government funds part of her expeditions, and her findings influence how the narwhal hunting season is managed. As Greenland modernizes, Laidre hopes to raise public awareness about the whales and their significance to the people and environment of the north. Especially now that the climate seems to be warming, narwhals, Laidre believes, will be seriously affected by melting.
"Most creatures on earth we know a lot more about," Laidre says. "We probably know a lot more about the brains of grasshoppers than we do about narwhals."
The alabaster beluga's dark cousin, the narwhal is not a conventionally beautiful animal. Its unlovely name means "corpse whale," because its splotchy flesh reminded Norse sailors of a drowned body. This speckled complexion is "weird," says James Mead, curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH); usually, he says, whales are a more uniform color. And unlike other whales, narwhals—which can live more than 100 years—die shortly in captivity, greatly reducing the opportunity to study them. "We've only had a glimpse of the beast," Pierre Richard, a prominent Canadian narwhal specialist, told me.
The whales mate in cracks of ice in the dead of winter, in pitch darkness, when the wind chill can drive the air temperature to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit. ("Not very romantic," Richard notes.) While shifting currents and winds create breaks in the ice, enabling the animals to surface and breathe, the whales must keep moving to avoid getting trapped. Because of the extreme cold, calves are born husky, about one-third the size of their 12-foot-long, 2,000-pound mothers. Like belugas and bowheads, which also inhabit arctic waters, narwhals are about 50 percent body fat; other whales are closer to 20 or 30 percent. No one has ever seen a submerged narwhal eat. Laidre led a study of the stomach contents of 121 narwhals that suggested they fast in summer and gorge on fish in winter.
Fond of bottom-dwelling prey like Greenland halibut, narwhals are incredibly deep divers. When Mads Peter Heide-Jorgensen, Laidre's Danish colleague and frequent collaborator, pioneered narwhal-tagging techniques in the early 1990s, his transmitters kept breaking under the water pressure. Five hundred meters, 1,000, 1,500—the whales, which have compressible rib cages, kept plunging. They bottomed out around 1,800 meters—more than a mile deep. At such depths, the whales apparently swim upside down much of the time.
The whales' most dazzling feature, of course, is the swizzle-stick tusk that sprouts from their upper left jaw. Though the whales' scientific name is Monodon monoceros, "one tooth, one horn," an occasional male has two tusks (the NMNH has two rare specimens) and only 3 percent of females have a tusk at all. The solitary fang, which is filled with dental pulp and nerves like an ordinary tooth, can grow thick as a lamppost and taller than a man, and it has a twist. On living whales, it's typically green with algae and alive with sea lice at its base. No one's sure precisely how or why it evolved—it has been called a weapon, an ice pick, a kind of dousing rod for fertile females, a sensor of water temperature and salinity, and a lure for prey. Herman Melville joked that it was a letter opener.
"Everybody has a theory on this," Laidre says with a sigh. (The question comes up a lot at cocktail parties.)
Most scientists, Laidre included, side with Charles Darwin, who speculated in The Descent of Man that the ivory lance was a secondary sex characteristic, like a moose's antlers, useful in establishing dominance hierarchies. Males have been observed gently jousting with their teeth—the scientific term is "tusking"—when females are nearby. The tooth, Laidre patiently explains, cannot be essential because most females survive without one.
In 2004, Greenland set narwhal-hunting quotas for the first time, despite some hunters' protests, and banned the export of the tusks, halting a thousand-year-old trade. Conservationists—newly roiled this past summer by the discovery of dozens of dead narwhals in East Greenland, the tusks chopped out of the skulls and the meat left to rot—want still more restrictions. It's estimated there are at least 80,000 of the animals, but nobody knows for sure. The International Union for Conservation of Nature this year said the species was "near threatened."
To track the whales, Laidre and Heide-Jorgensen have collaborated with hunters on Greenland's west coast and were just starting to build relationships in the village of Niaqornat when I asked to tag along. We would arrive in late October and the scientists would remain through mid-November, as darkness descended and the ice glided into the fjords, and the pods of whales, which they suspect summer in Melville Bay several hundred miles north, made their way south. It was a time frame that some of Laidre's colleagues in Seattle, many of them climate scientists who prefer to study the Arctic via buoy and robotic plane, considered vaguely insane.
Laidre, of course, was optimistic.
When Laidre, Heide-Jorgensen and I first reached the village, after a two-hour boat ride that involved rounding icebergs in the inky blackness of a late arctic afternoon, the sled dogs greeted us like hysterical fans at a rock concert while villagers crowded the boat, reaching in to pull out our luggage and hollering at Laidre in Greenlandic.
Niaqornat ( pop. 60) is on a tongue of land in Baffin Bay inside the Arctic Circle. The settlement sits hard against a white wall of mountains, where men hunting arctic grouse leave tiny red droplets in their footsteps on the slopes: blackberries crushed under the snow. Greenland has its own home-rule government but remains a Danish possession, and thanks to the Danish influence the town is fully wired, with personal computers glowing like hearths in almost every living room. But none of the houses, including the drafty three-room field station used by Laidre and other scientists, has plumbing or running water; the kerosene stoves that keep the water from freezing are easily puffed out by the ripping wind, which also brings waves bashing against the town's scrap of black beach.
With its tide line of pulverized ice crystals, the beach is the chaotic center of village life, scattered with oil drums, anchors and the hunters' little open boats, some of which are decorated with arctic fox tails like lucky giant rabbit's feet. There are waterfront drying racks hung with seal ribs, waxen-looking strips of shark and other fish, and the occasional musk ox head masked with ice. Throughout the town, sled dogs are staked to the frozen ground; there are at least three times as many dogs as people.
Signs of narwhals are everywhere, especially now that the tusk market has been shut down and hunters can't sell the ivory for gas money and other expenses. The whales' undeveloped inner teeth are strung up over front porches like clothespins on a line. A thick tooth is proudly mounted on the wall of the little building that serves as the town hall, school, library and church (complete with sealskin kneelers). It seems the fashion to lean a big tusk across a house's front window.
"There are months when no supplies are coming into the town, and people depend only on what they pull out of the sea," Laidre told me. "The arrival of these whales is a small window of opportunity, and hunters have to have an extremely deep knowledge of how they behave."
The narwhals typically arrive in November, darting into the fjord in pursuit of gonatus squid, and Niaqornat men in motorboats shoot the animals with rifles. But in the springtime, when the whales pass by again on their way north, the hunters work in the old way, driving their dog sleds out into the ice-covered fjord. Then they creep in single file, wearing sealskin boots so as not to make a sound—even a clenched toe can make the ice creak. They get as close as they can to the surfacing whales, then hurl their harpoons.
In the darkness they can tell the difference between a beluga and a narwhal by the sound of their breathing. And if the hunters can't hear anything, they search them out by smell. "They smell like blubber," a young man told me.
During the Middle Ages, and even earlier, narwhal tusk was sold in Europe and the Far East as unicorn horn. Physicians believed that powdered unicorn horn could cure ills from plague to rabies and even raise the dead. It seems also to have been marketed as a precursor to Viagra, and it rivaled snake's tongue and griffin's claw as a detector of poison. Since poisonings were all the rage in medieval times, "unicorn horn" became one of the most coveted substances in Europe, worth ten times its weight in gold. French monarchs dined with narwhal-tooth utensils; Martin Luther was fed powdered tusk as medicine before he died. The ivory spiral was used to make the scepter of the Hapsburgs, Ivan the Terrible's staff, the sword of Charles the Bold.
Historians have not definitively identified where the ancient tusks originated, though one theory is that the narwhals were harvested in the Siberian Arctic (where, for unknown reasons, they no longer live). But in the late 900s the Vikings happened upon Greenland, swarming with narwhals, their teeth more precious than polar bear pelts and the live falcons they could hawk to Arabian princes. Norse longboats rowed north in pursuit of the toothed whales, braving summer storms to trade with the Skraelings, as the Vikings called the Inuit, whom they despised.
It was Laidre's intellectual ancestors, the Enlightenment scientists, who ruined the racket. In 1638, the Danish scholar Ole Wurm refuted the unicorn myth, showing that the prized horn material came from narwhals, and others followed suit. In 1746, faced with mounting evidence, British physicians abruptly stopped prescribing the horn as a wonder drug (though the Apothecaries' Society of London had already incorporated unicorns into its coat of arms). Today, the tusks fetch more humble prices—about $1,700 a foot at a 2007 auction in Beverly Hills. (It has been illegal to import narwhal tusk into the United States since the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, but material known to have entered the nation earlier can be bought and sold.)
To the Inuit, the whale and its horn are hardly luxury goods. Greenlanders traditionally used every part of the animal, burning its blubber in lamps, using the back sinews to sew boots and clothes and the skin for dog sled traces. The tusks were tools of survival in a treeless landscape, used as sled runners, tent poles and harpoons. The tusks were also bleached and sold whole or carved into figurines (and, yes, Mr. Melville, letter openers). Even today, when iPods are sold at the Niaqornat village store, narwhals remain a vital source of food. Narwhal meat feeds dogs and fills freezers for the winter, a last nutritional opportunity before total darkness closes over the town like a fist. Mattak, the layer of skin and blubber that is eaten raw and rumored to taste like hazelnuts, is an Inuit delicacy.
When an animal is killed, word spreads by radio, and the whole town rushes down to the beach, shouting the hunter's name. After the butchering, families share the carcass, part of a traditional gifting system now almost unknown outside the settlements. "We make a living only because the whales come," Karl-Kristian Kruse, a young hunter, told me. "If narwhals didn't come, there would be nothing here."
The new whale quotas will probably make life more difficult in Niaqornat: before 2004, there were no limits on the number of narwhals hunters could catch, but in 2008 the whole village was allotted only six. "The scientists want to know how many whales there are," Anthon Moller, a 25-year-old hunter, said bitterly. "Well, there are a lot, more than ever before. With quotas it's hard to live."
When Laidre and Heide-Jorgensen first showed up to ask for help catching narwhals in nets and then—of all preposterous notions—letting them go, some men thought it was folly, even though the scientists would pay almost as handsomely as the Vikings. Now, two years later, having lost one whale after netting it and successfully tagging only one other, the hunters still weren't entirely persuaded. And yet, they were curious. They, too, wanted to know where the whales went.
There are no doorbells in Niaqornat, and no knocking. When the town's dozen or so hunters came over to the scientists' house, they just walked in, stomping their big boots politely, to give fair warning as much as to kick off the snow.
They were small, spare men, smelling of fish and wet flannel, with wind-burned skin, flared nostrils and dark eyes. Laidre offered coffee, along with a cake she'd baked that afternoon. They munched watchfully, some of them humming to themselves, while Heide-Jorgensen showed slides of the narwhal tagged in 2007, captured when Laidre was home in Seattle. To catch a unicorn, it is said, you need virgins for bait; to net a narwhal, and transfer it from ocean to beach and back again, a bunkhouse of cowboys would be handier. The whale bucked like a bronco as the hunters, led by one of Laidre's technicians, pinned a transmitter, about the size of a bar of soap, to the dorsal ridge. When at last the tag was secure, the technician was so relieved he smooched the animal's broad back. Then they walked it out with the tide and let it go. One of the hunters had videotaped the entire frothy episode on his cellphone; a year later, the villagers still watched it raptly.
"Kusanaq," Heide-Jorgensen told the hunters. "Beautiful. A great collaboration. This time we'll move the tag back a little and also put on a tusk transmitter."
He explained that he and Laidre would pay: 20,000 Danish kroner, or about $3,700, for a captured beluga, which the scientists were also studying; $4,500 for a qernertaq, or narwhal; $5,500 for a qernertaq tuugaalik, or tusked narwhal (hunters expect more for males because they're accustomed to selling the tusks); and $6,400 for an angisoq tuugaaq, or large tusked narwhal.
The hunters thought this over for a moment, then one raised his hand with a question: What would happen if the whale died?
In that case, the scientists explained, the meat would be divided equally among the villagers.
The scientists also screened a map of the tagged narwhal's travels, its movements traced in green. The whales can migrate more than 1,000 miles in a year. After leaving Niaqornat this one had wandered farther into the fjord in December and January, near Uummannaq, a bigger town with bars and restaurants, where many of the hunters had friends and rivals. Then in March it had turned north toward its summering grounds near Melville Bay, at which point the transmitter stopped working. The hunters eyed the crazy green zigzag with fascination. Though some had seen the data before in weekly e-mail updates from the scientists, it was still astonishing stuff. Some later said they'd enjoy daily updates: they wanted to track the narwhal like traders follow the stock market. When the hunters finally left, full of coffee, cake and respectful criticisms of Laidre's baking, the matter was decided. They would set nets in the morning.
Well, immaqa aqagu.
That evening, the temperature, which had sometimes reached the balmy 40s during the day—"Beluga weather," Heide-Jorgensen had said a bit contemptuously—plunged into the teens. Even inside the house, the cold was devouring. All night the wind whooped and the dogs sang and the waves bludgeoned the shore. By morning the dogs had curled into miserable little doughnuts in the snow. The hunters dragged their boats to higher ground. On the hills above town much of the snow had blown away, giving the black earth a dappled appearance, like narwhal skin. No nets would be set today, nor—if the weather report was accurate—for days to come.
"No nets and no underwear," said Laidre, whose personal field gear was due to arrive on a helicopter that almost certainly wouldn't show. "Life is not easy."
At times like these she almost envied colleagues who studied microscopic organisms in jars instead of whales in the raging North Atlantic. Her own brother, a graduate student at Princeton, was researching hermit crabs on the beaches of Ireland, where a cozy pub was never far away. Meanwhile, in Niaqornat, the wind was so vicious that Heide-Jorgensen got trapped in the community bathhouse for hours. The scientists took to singing the Merle Haggard song "If We Make It Through December." For days they made spreadsheets, calibrated transmitters, charged their headlamps—anything to keep busy.
There was some excitement when a young hunter, having learned that I had passed my whole life never having tasted narwhal mattak, arrived with a frozen piece from last year's harvest. (I had asked him what it tasted like, and he said, with a pitying gaze, "Mattak is mattak.") Hazelnut was not the flavor that came to my mind. But Laidre and Heide-Jorgensen tucked away great mouthfuls of the stuff, dipped in soy sauce. In the old days, foreign sailors who abstained from vitamin-C-rich whale mattak sometimes died of scurvy.
Several Niaqornat men who'd been out hunting belugas before the storm were stranded a few hundred miles away, but no one in town expressed concern; in fact, everyone seemed quite merry. Winter's arrival is good news on this part of Greenland's coast, because narwhals always follow the freeze.
The whales' fate is tied to the ice. Narwhal fossils have been found as far south as Norfolk, England, to which the ice cover extended 50,000 years ago. Ice protects narwhals from the orcas that sometimes attack their pods; the killer whales' high, stiff dorsal fins, which are like fearsome black pirate sails, prevent them from entering frozen waters. Even more important, Laidre says, narwhals beneath the pane of ice enjoy almost exclusive access to prey—particularly Greenlandic halibut, which may be why they are such gluttons in winter.
Occupying an icy world has its risks. Narwhals lingering too long in the fjords sometimes get trapped as the ice expands and the cracks shrink; they cut themselves horribly trying to breathe. In Canada this past fall, some 600 narwhals were stranded this way, doomed to drown before hunters killed them. These entrapments are called savssats, a derivative of an Inuit word meaning "to bar his way." Laidre believes that massive die-offs in savssats thousands of years ago may account for the narwhal's extraordinarily low genetic diversity.
Still, less ice could spell disaster for narwhals. Since 1979, the Arctic has lost an ice mass the size of nearly two Alaskas, and last summer saw the second-lowest ice cover on record (surpassed only by 2007). So far the water has opened mostly north of Greenland, but hunters in Niaqornat say they've noticed differences in the way their fjord freezes. Even if warming trends are somehow reversed, Laidre's polar-expert colleagues back in Seattle doubt that the ice will ever regain its former coverage area and thickness. Narwhals may be imperiled because of their genetic homogeneity, limited diet and fixed migration patterns. Laidre was the lead author of an influential paper in the journal Ecological Applications that ranked narwhals, along with polar bears and hooded seals, as the arctic species most vulnerable to climate change.
"These whales spend half the year in dense ice," she says. "As the ice's structure and timing changes, the whole oceanography, the plankton ecology, changes, and that affects their prey. Narwhals are a specialist species. Changes in the environment affect them—without a doubt—because they are not flexible."
For the past several years Laidre has been attaching temperature sensors along with tracking gear to captured narwhals. One morning in Niaqornat, she received an e-mail with an analysis of water temperature data collected by 15 tagged narwhals from 2005 to 2007. Compared with historical information from icebreakers, the readings showed warming of a degree or more in the depths of Baffin Bay. Laidre was ecstatic that her collecting method seemed to have worked, though the implications of rising temperatures were disturbing.
Indeed, there are already reports of more killer whales in the Arctic.
Once the gales stopped, it was cold but calm: perfect narwhal weather, Heide-Jorgensen declared. I sailed out to set nets with a hunter, Hans Lovstrom, whose boat kept pace with the kittiwakes, pretty gray-winged gulls. We knotted the rope with bare fingers; mine soon became too cold to move. Lovstrom told me to plunge my hands into the water, then rub them vigorously together. I pretended it helped.
Back in the village, social invitations began to flow into the scientists' little house. Would they like to come to a coffee party? A supper of seal soup? Youth night at the school? The colder the weather, the more the community seemed to warm to the scientists. The first time Laidre and Heide-Jorgensen spent a field season in Niaqornat, the village happened to hold a dance party. Someone strummed an electric guitar. Laidre danced with all the hunters, swooping through the steps of the Greenlandic polka, which European whalers had taught the Inuit centuries ago.
That's what everyone had been hollering about when we'd arrived at Niaqornat the first night—they remembered, and admired, the dancing scientist.
As long as the whales keep coming, maybe Greenland's hunting settlements won't be completely absorbed into the growing tourism culture that rents out aluminum igloos to rich foreigners and pays elite hunters to wear polar bear pants in the summertime and toss harpoons for show.
The Sunday before I left Greenland (Laidre would stay for several more weeks), the stranded beluga hunters chugged back to Niaqornat in their boat. Just before darkness fell, people made their way down to the water. Bundled-up babies were lifted high overhead for a better view; older children were ruddy with excitement, because beluga mattak is second only to the narwhal's as winter fare. The dogs yelped as the yellow boat, laminated with ice, pulled into the dock.
Bashful before so many eyes but stealing proud looks at their wives, the hunters spread tarps and then tossed out sections of beluga spine and huge, quivering organs, which landed with a slap on the dock. Last of all came the beluga mattak, folded in bags, like fluffy white towels. The dismembered whales were loaded into wheelbarrows and spirited away; there would be great feasting that night on beluga, which, like narwhal meat, is nearly black because of all the oxygen-binding myoglobin in the muscle. It would be boiled and served with generous crescents of blubber. The scientists would be guests of honor.
"When I'm old and in a nursing home, I'll think of the friends I have in the Arctic as much as my experiences with whales," Laidre had told me. "And I'm happy that my work helps protect a resource that's so important to their lives."
The hunters had good news, too. Hundreds of miles north, in the endless blackness of ocean and near-permanent night, they had crossed paths with a pod of narwhals, perhaps the first of the season, making their way south toward the fjord.
Abigail Tucker is the magazine's staff writer.


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Why Are Some People Better at Drawing than Others?
Since the dawn of human art-making, the divide has been clear: There are people who can effortlessly sketch an object's likeness, and people who struggle for hours just to get the angles and proportions right (by which point the picture is scarred by eraser marks, anyway). What separates the drawers from the drawer-nots?
Ongoing research is revealing the answer to this longstanding question. It seems that realistic drawing ability hinges on three factors: how a person perceives reality, how well he or she remembers visual information from one moment to the next, and which elements of an object he or she selects to actually draw.
If you're stuck on stick figures, the good news, according to researchers at the University College London, is that people can improve at all these mental processes with practice.
First, people who can't draw well aren't seeing the world as it really is. When we look at an object, our visual systems automatically misjudge such attributes as size, shape and color; research over the past three years shows at least some of these misperceptions translate into drawing errors. Paradoxically, in other circumstances the misperceptions help us make sense of the world. For example, objects appear larger when they are closer than when they are far away. Even so, the visual system practices "size constancy" by perceiving the object as being approximately one size no matter how far away it is. The visual system, "knowing" a distant object is really bigger than it appears, sends false information to the brain about what the eyeball is seeing.
People who have the most trouble judging apparent size, shape, color and brightness may also be the worst at drawing, recent research by Justin Ostrofsky and his colleagues at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York suggests. Those who draw well are better able to override these visual misperceptions and perceive what their own eyeballs are really seeing. [Red-Green & Blue-Yellow: The Stunning Colors You Can't See]
However, inaccurately perceiving the image is only part of the story, said Rebecca Chamberlain, a psychologist at University College London. Chamberlain and her colleagues recently conducted experiments investigating the role of visual memory in the drawing process. They believe that drawing skill results in part from an ability to remember simple relationships in an object ? such as an angle between two lines ? from the moment the angle is perceived to the moment it is drawn. Additionally, "drawing seems to involve focusing on both holistic proportional relationships as well as focus on detail isolated from the whole. Perhaps it is the ability to switch between these two modes of seeing that underpins successful drawing," Chamberlain told Life's Little Mysteries.
Furthermore, as detailed in December in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Ostrofsky and his colleagues found significant evidence that skilled artists are better at selecting which elements of an object need to be included to convey the object's form. And once the artists have selected an important element, they are better at focusing their attention on it and ignoring extraneous details nearby.
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The devil is in the details, and the researchers are still working out the interplay between all the factors that affect drawing accuracy. However, they can all be learned. "There is no doubt that practice is an important component of being able to draw," Chamberlain said. While some may be predisposed to be better at perceptual accuracy and visual memory than others, "the rest of us use tricks to emulate this." [6 Fun Ways to Sharpen Your Memory]
In research presented at a recent symposium at Columbia University and soon to be published by Columbia University Press, Chamberlain and her colleagues found practicing drawing significantly improved people's abilities over time, as rated by other people who participated in the study.
Based on their research, the psychologists recommended the following techniques for getting better at drawing: Focus on scaling a drawing to fit the size of the paper; anchor an object in its surroundings by showing how it sits in space; focus on the distance between elements of the object and on their relative sizes; and focus on the size and shape of "negative space," or the empty space between parts of the object. Lastly, they recommend thinking of "lines" as what they really are — boundaries between light and dark areas.
As Chris McManus, a member of the research team, noted, "There are few human skills which don't improve with practice."
Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries and join us on Facebook.
Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics writer and editor for Quanta Magazine. She holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her work on the building of the James Webb Space Telescope. Her work has also appeared in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science. She was the 2016 winner of the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, as well as the winner of the 2017 Science Communication Award for the American Institute of Physics.


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In times of turmoil, your board of directors should be your not-for-profit's rock-solid foundation. But what if your board is understaffed or simply doesn't provide the leadership your nonprofit requires? Think about rebuilding it — and the sooner the better. Financial, public health and other challenges are likely to remain a reality for the foreseeable future.
Assess what you have
Start the rebuilding effort by assessing your current board. Ask the following questions:
Does the board have too few, too many or the right number of members? The right board size depends on many factors, including your organization's size and complexity of operations.
Does its makeup represent a range of diversity and inclusiveness? Diversity can cover gender, race, religion, geography, age, expertise and other factors. Inclusiveness is how well the board's makeup mirrors your organization's mission.
How does each member align with your nonprofit's mission? Ask members to provide personal statements that define their passion for your cause and your nonprofit's specific approach to the cause.
How does each member contribute? Some nonprofits ask board members to sign contracts outlining their commitment — including the time they'll commit, the funds they promise to donate or raise, and the duties they'll perform. If you choose to have your board members sign such a contract, you'll want to make sure they hold up their end of the bargain.
Before recruiting new members, identify the talents your organization needs — for example financial expertise or local government experience. In general, qualified board members are enthusiastic about your mission, are good team players and are willing to commit the time to attend all or most board functions. Good communications and public speaking skills are desirable.
Find qualified candidates
Just as you would for a paid leadership position, assemble a pool of candidates for each board seat. In many organizations, current board members supply candidates' names. If you're finding it difficult to find the right people, try these strategies:
- When making public appearances, mention that you're looking for people interested in becoming active volunteers or board members.
- Ask friends, business colleagues and family members whether they know someone who would be a good candidate.
- Advertise in a local newspaper, alumni newsletter and your nonprofit's newsletter.
- Consider whether any current volunteers are qualified to serve as board members.
- Invite 20 community leaders to an informational luncheon to learn about your organization and ask each to recommend a potential board member.
After you've identified a group of prospective candidates, have each fill out an application that outlines at least some of your expectations. Also invite prospects to attend a board meeting to meet current members, see how the board functions, and be interviewed one-on-one.
Select the best
This process should provide you with enough information to select the best candidates and assemble a board capable of meeting current and future challenges. But if you're still struggling with governance issues, contact us for advice.
© 2020


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The Street View Best Streets Awards
Monday, 8th March 2010 by RobK
Forget the Oscars - these are the awards that count at Google Sightseeing! The guys at Google are planning to expand their Street View coverage of the UK in the near future, and to get us in the mood they asked the public to vote for their favourite British streets in three categories: the most picturesque, the best for fashion and the best for food.
Now more than 11,000 votes have been counted, and the three Best Streets in Britain have been named. Not all the winners are yet visible on Street View, but rumour has it that Google will be putting that right soon, so watch this space...
Most picturesque street: Shambles, York
It might seem odd that the name of the winner in this category normally describes something that's a total mess – but "shambles" originally referred to a meat market. This narrow medieval street in York is lined with timber-framed buildings, some of them more than 600 years old, which used to house at least two dozen butchers' shops. Raw meat would be displayed on shelves outside the shops, and the gutter down the middle of the street would run with blood and offal.
Today, there are no butchers on the Shambles itself (although there is still one on the adjacent Little Shambles) and things are somewhat less gory - chocolate shops and tea rooms are the order of the day.
At number 35, you can see the former home of Margaret Clitherow, who was arrested in 1586 for harbouring Catholic priests, and sentenced to death by "pressing" (being crushed beneath a heavy weight). She was made a saint in 1970 and the house is now a shrine.
Most picturesque street runner-up: Royal Crescent, Bath
This grand curve of Georgian houses was designed by John Wood the Younger and completed in 1774. There's no Street View yet, but Wikipedia has a good panorama of the whole street.
A couple of interesting bits of trivia about the Royal Crescent: firstly, although the facades of the houses are all uniform, you can see from the aerial view that the design of the houses behind varies widely, as each was built to a different specification for the original buyers. Second, it has been suggested that the crescent, together with the Circus (the circular road just to the east) and streets just to the south were laid out to represent Masonic symbols.
Most picturesque street runner-up: Grey Street, Newcastle upon Tyne
Another curving Georgian street, this one was built in the 1830s. Although pipped to the top spot in Google's awards, it headed a list of Britain's favourite streets as voted by BBC Radio 4 listeners in 2002. (If you're wondering about the rather drab name, it commemorates Earl Grey – yes, the same man who gave us funny-tasting tea.)
Best fashion street: Milsom Street, Bath
Another award for the city of Bath, which is not yet covered by Street View. The buildings here were originally grand town houses, but over time it has become a renowned shopping street, with small boutiques as well as Jolly's department store, which dates back to the 1830s and is now part of the House of Fraser chain. Find more photos of the area at Geograph.
Best foodie street: High Street, Stockbridge
The market town of Stockbridge lies in the valley of the River Test, one of Hampshire's famous trout streams. Its broad high street won the award for its range of pubs, inns, restaurants and specialist food shops1. Again there's no Street View yet, but you can find plenty more photos on Geograph.
You can see the full list of nominees here, with links to Street Views of those that are covered. But do you know better? Have you found a more picturesque, stylish or downright tasty street, in the UK or abroad? If it's on Street View, let's have a look at it...
Your correspondent can vouch for the quality of pies from the butcher's shop here. ↩


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In today's spirit of ecumenism, unity with the Catholic Church. Is that possible? Is Roman Catholicism simply another facet of the body of Christ that should be brought into union with its Protestant counterpart? Is Roman Catholicism simply another Christian denomination?
While there are many errors in the teaching of the Catholic Church (for example its belief in the transubstantiation of the communion wafer and its view of Mary), two rise to the forefront and call for special attention: its denial of the doctrine of sola Scriptura and its denial of the biblical teaching on justification. To put it simply, because the Roman Catholic Church has refused to submit itself to the authority of God's Word and to embrace the gospel of justification taught in Scripture, it has set itself apart from the true body of Christ. It is a false and deceptive form of Christianity.
The Doctrine of Sola Scriptura
In the words of reformer Martin Luther, the doctrine of sola Scriptura means that "what is asserted without the Scriptures or proven revelation may be held as an opinion, but need not be believed." Roman Catholicism flatly rejects this principle, adding a host of traditions and Church teachings and declaring them binding on all true believers—with the threat of eternal damnation to those who hold contradictory opinions.
In Roman Catholicism, "the Word of God" encompasses not only the Bible, but also the Apocrypha, the Magisterium (the Church's authority to teach and interpret divine truth), the Pope's ex cathedra pronouncements, and an indefinite body of church tradition, some formalized in canon law and some not yet committed to writing. Whereas evangelical Protestants believe the Bible is the ultimate test of all truth, Roman Catholics believe the Church determines what is true and what is not. In effect, this makes the Church a higher authority than Scripture.
Creeds and doctrinal statements are certainly important. However, creeds, decisions of church councils, all doctrine, and even the church itself must be judged by Scripture—not vice versa. Scripture is to be accurately interpreted in its context by comparing it to Scripture—certainly not according to anyone's personal whims. Scripture itself is thus the sole binding rule of faith and practice for all Christians. Protestant creeds and doctrinal statements simply express the churches' collective understanding of the proper interpretation of Scripture. In no sense could the creeds and pronouncements of the churches ever constitute an authority equal to or higher than Scripture. Scripture always takes priority over the church in the rank of authority.
Roman Catholics, on the other hand, believe the infallible touchstone of truth is the Church itself. The Church not only infallibly determines the proper interpretation of Scripture, but also supplements Scripture with additional traditions and teaching. That combination of Church tradition plus the Church's interpretation of Scripture is what constitutes the binding rule of faith and practice for Catholics. The fact is, the Church sets itself above Holy Scripture in rank of authority.
Because the Roman Catholic Church
has refused to submit itself to the
authority of God's Word and to
embrace the gospel of justification
taught in Scripture, it has set itself
apart from the true body of Christ.
The Doctrine of Justification
According to Roman Catholicism, justification is a process in which God's grace is poured forth into the sinner's heart, making that person progressively more righteous. During this process, it is the sinner's responsibility to preserve and increase that grace by various good works. The means by which justification is initially obtained is not faith, but the sacrament of baptism. Furthermore, justification is forfeited whenever the believer commits a mortal sin, such as hatred or adultery. In the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, then, works are necessary both to begin and to continue the process of justification.
The error in the Catholic Church's position on justification may be summed up in four biblical arguments. First, Scripture presents justification as instantaneous, not gradual. Contrasting the proud Pharisee with the broken, repentant tax-gatherer who smote his breast and prayed humbly for divine mercy, Jesus said that the tax-gatherer "went down to his house justified" (Luke 18:14). His justification was instantaneous, complete before he performed any work, based solely on his repentant faith. Jesus also said, "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life" (John 5:24). Eternal life is the present possession of all who believe—and by definition eternal life cannot be lost. The one who believes immediately passes from spiritual death to eternal life, because that person is instantaneously justified (see Rom. 5:1, 9; 8:1).
Second, justification means the sinner is declared righteous, not actually made righteous. This goes hand in hand with the fact that justification is instantaneous. There is no process to be performed—justification is purely a forensic reality, a declaration God makes about the sinner. Justification takes place in the court of God, not in the soul of the sinner. It is an objective fact, not a subjective phenomenon, and it changes the sinner's status, not his nature. Justification is an immediate decree, a divine "not guilty" verdict on behalf of the believing sinner in which God declares him to be righteous in His sight.
Third, the Bible teaches that justification means righteousness is imputed, not infused. Righteousness is "reckoned," or credited to the account of those who believe (Rom. 4:3–25). They stand justified before God not because of their own righteousness (Rom. 3:10), but because of a perfect righteousness outside themselves that is reckoned to them by faith (Phil. 3:9). Where does that perfect righteousness come from? It is God's own righteousness (Rom 10:3), and it is the believer's in the person of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 1:30). Christ's own perfect righteousness is credited to the believer's personal account (Rom. 5:17, 19), just as the full guilt of the believer's sin was imputed to Christ (2 Cor. 5:21). The only merit God accepts for salvation is that of Jesus Christ; nothing man can ever do could earn God's favor or add anything to the merit of Christ.
Fourth and finally, Scripture clearly teaches that man is justified by faith alone, not by faith plus works. According to the Apostle Paul, "If it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace" (Rom. 11:6). Elsewhere Paul testifies, "By grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast" (Eph. 2:8–9, emphasis added; see Acts 16:31 and Rom. 4:3–6). In fact, it is clearly taught throughout Scripture that "a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law" (Rom. 3:28; see Gal. 2:16; Rom. 9:31–32; 10:3).
In contrast, Roman Catholicism places an undue stress on human works. Catholic doctrine denies that God "justifies the ungodly" (Rom. 4:5) without first making them godly. Good works therefore become the ground of justification. As thousands of former Catholics will testify, Roman Catholic doctrine and liturgy obscure the essential truth that the believer is saved by grace through faith and not by his own works (Eph. 2:8-9). In a simple sense, Catholics genuinely believe they are saved by doing good, confessing sin, and observing ceremonies.
Adding works to faith as the grounds of justification is precisely the teaching that Paul condemned as "a different gospel" (see 2 Cor. 11:4; Gal. 1:6). It nullifies the grace of God, for if meritorious righteousness can be earned through the sacraments, "then Christ died needlessly" (Gal. 2:21). Any system that mingles works with grace, then, is "a different gospel" (Gal. 1:6), a distorted message that is anathematized (Gal. 1:9), not by a council of medieval bishops, but by the very Word of God that cannot be broken. In fact, it does not overstate the case to say that the Roman Catholic view on justification sets it apart as a wholly different religion than the true Christian faith, for it is antithetical to the simple gospel of grace.
As long as the Roman Catholic Church continues to assert its own authority and bind its people to "another gospel," it is the spiritual duty of all true Christians to oppose Roman Catholic doctrine with biblical truth and to call all Catholics to true salvation. Meanwhile, evangelicals must not capitulate to the pressures for artificial unity. They cannot allow the gospel to be obscured, and they cannot make friends with false religion, lest they become partakers in their evil deeds (2 John 11).
Adapted from John MacArthur, Reckless Faith: When the Church Loses Its Will to Discern (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1994). For a fuller treatment of Roman Catholicism, consult this resource.
© 2002 Grace Community Church. All rights reserved.


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During the 18th Century, Charles VII established his dominion in the South of Italy and decided to invest in
archeology and in the study of the ancient classical world. The discovery of the Roman ruins of Pompeii and Ercolano will influence art, culture, and architecture for centuries to come.
Image source: https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/ba711807-4b6b-4a43-ad75-7f0b3600c120 Author:by Averain
The Discovery of the Buried Cities
Herculaneum was unearthed in 1738 when king Charles VII ordered the building of his summer palace. Major excavations took place in 1748, when Alcubierre, a Spanish military engineer commissioned by the king, started to explore an area known as "La Cività". Excavations in the area of the Amphitheatre were not encouraging. In 1755, excavations brought to light the house of Julia Felix, the first building completely explored. Excavations in this period, because of the carelessness, caused the destruction of relics not deemed worthy enough for Charles VII's museum at Portici until the arrival of Karl Weber in Herculaneum, another interesting city to explore. Many people became aware of this happening in that part of Italy and, in the attempt to control what he saw as his, Charles VII denied the possibility to export antiquities in 1755. Visitors needed an invitation to see the discoveries. In the 1760s and 1770s, the interest in the preservation of Pompeii grew up a lot.
Image source: https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/d0c36f9e-b053-4527-a9b0-d3015d0eb812 Author:by Nick Bramhall
The Villa of the Papyri
The Villa was discovered by Karl Weber in 1750 and was an ancient estate for rich individuals. Villa of the Papyri was frozen for centuries and Weber drew a sketch of what the Villa would have looked like, using his knowledge and experience. His drawing featured the areas seen by him and his team, a bath, and several rooms. The villa's front stretched for more than 250 meters, and it is faithful to the classical scheme of a Roman home. The atrium was used as an entrance hall and was a link to many parts of the house.
Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_of_the_Papyri#/media/File:Herculaneum,_past,_present_and_future_(1908)_(14596218878).jpg
The first peristyle has 10 columns on each side and a swimming pool in the middle. A second peristyle could be reached through a "tablinum" (a room situated on one side of the atrium and opposite to the entrance). The living rooms went around the porticoes and terraces, giving to the owner's sunlight and a view of the sea. Many statues were still intact; statues of the epic writer Homer, or Pan and Hermes. Probably, one of the most important discoveries at the estate were books and scrolls. Many questions arose around the inhabitants of Herculaneum, the answers will come many years later.
The Ancient Cult of Apollo
This cult was of Greek origin and spread in Italy through colonies. The cult can be traced back to the 6th century B.C., inscripted on Etruscan bowls found during the excavations. Located in the forum, it is the most important religious building and has a very ancient origin. The temple was surrounded by columns with Ionic capitals, later replaced by Corinthian capitals. The Doric architrave of metopes and triglyphs was transformed into a continuous frieze with griffins, festoons, and foliage. Some statues are now exposed in the National Archeological Museum of Naples. The temple had 48 Ionic columns and was on a high podium, the entrance was a fusion of Greek and Italic ideas. Unusually, the cella is sited further back. It is still possible to see a white marble altar on a travertine base, with an inscription with the names of the quattuorviri (four officials of the Roman Empire) who dedicated it.
Image source: https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/3b851b86-12d3-44b7-b15e-499b459709a2 Author:by Amphipolis
Neoclassicism and Enlightenment, Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Neoclassicism is a revival of classic antiquity inspired from the classical period, during Enlightenment, "the period of rationality". The revival can be traced back to the birth of formal archaeology with Johann Joachim Winckelmann. The writings of this author were important in giving guidelines to this movement and distinguished between Ancient Greek and Roman art. Winckelmann believed that art should aim at "noble simplicity and calm grandeur". The Grand Tour brought a Neoclassical revival throughout Europe. Neoclassicism was strong in architecture, sculpture, and the decorative arts. Winckelmann played a key role in the dissemination of knowledge of the discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Joachim_Winckelmann#/media/File:Johann_Joachim_Winckelmann_(Anton_von_Maron_1768).jpg
An Engraver's View of Classic World
Giovan Battista Piranesi was born in Venice. He was famous for his etchings of Rome ("Views of Rome") and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" ("Le Carceri d'Invenzione"). His first work was "Prima Parte di Architettura e Prospettive" (1743), followed by "Varie Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna". Under Clement XIII he restored the choir of San Giovanni in Laterano and Santa Maria del Priorato. Venice and Rome revived through the Grand Tour. He underlined the poetic aspects of the ruins and humans appeared to echo the decay of the ruins. The late Baroque works influenced Piranesi's art that will play a key role in Neoclassicism. Piranesi was prompted by the relics found at Herculaneum and Pompeii. He wanted to see these discoveries in a new light, giving his emotions an important place in his engravings. Piranesi was interested in the Graeco-Roman debate, with Winckelmann who thought Greek culture was superior to the Roman, he thought it was vice-versa.
Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Labruzzi#/media/File:Pietro_Labruzzi_portrait_of_Giovanni_Battista_Piranesi.jpg
The Influence on 18th Century Art
Artists and writers were greatly inspired by the objects in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum. They strive to gain more knowledge on Pompeii grew after the beginning of the excavations. The eruption of Vesuvius became a recurring theme in paintings all over Europe. In France and England, the neo-classical style embraced by artists such as Joseph Wright of Derby and Pierre-Jacques Volaire showed contemporary renditions of the classical world. The discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum made these towns legendary with the same force that destroyed them.
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Litecoin's Charlie Lee: Decentralized Crypto 'Must Be Susceptible to 51% Attacks'
The creator of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, has stated that decentralized crypto is by definition "susceptible to 51% attacks"
A decentralized cryptocurrency is by definition vulnerable to 51 percent attacks, the creator of Litecoin (LTC) Charlie Lee stated in a tweet Jan. 7.
In the wake of recent news about unusual mining activity on the Ethereum Classic (ETC) network — which many continue to refer to as a 51 percent attack — Lee shared his observation, stating that:
"By definition, a decentralized cryptocurrency must be susceptible to 51% attacks whether by hashrate, stake, and/or other permissionlessly-acquirable resources. If a crypto can't be 51% attacked, it is permissioned and centralized."
Lee's statement was in response to another tweet stating that "if it can't be 51% attacked, it isn't decentralized," from Twitter user CryptoTesla. The tweet was made in response to Coinbase's announcement revealing it had detected "chain reorganizations" and double spends on ETC's blockchain yesterday, Jan. 7.
Today, Jan. 8, Coinbase updated the numbers to report that there were 12 additional reorganizations that included double spends totaling 219,500 ETC (about $1.1 million).
Coinbase announced they had suspend deposits and withdrawals of ETC on Jan. 5, with the freeze evidently still in place by press time.
On Jan. 7, ETC developers denied the reports that the hashpower consolidation was in fact a 51 percent attack, stating that it was "most likely selfish mining" and that double spends did not take place.
Later, the ETC team stated in a tweet that the increased hashrate might be attributed to the testing of new 1,400/Mh Ethash machines by application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) manufacturer Linzhi. However, Linzhi Shenzhen's director of operations denied these claims in a tweet that has since been deleted.
By press time, the ETC team has refrained from applying the term "51% attack" to the incident. One of their most recent tweets on the issue from today repeats a request to all crypto exchanges and mining pools to significantly increase confirmation time on all withdrawals and deposits.


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Surgery for Athletes
How is Surgery for Athletes Different from Non-Athletes?
Surgery for athletes is different from non-athletes as it is performed with the intention of returning the athlete to their sports activity at the earliest. Early recovery is important as the more time spent away from the sport, the more difficult it is to get back to competitive form. Surgery for athletes involves tissue repair and reconstruction using cutting-edge, minimally invasive techniques and is followed by intensive rehabilitation.
What are Sports Injuries?
A sports injury is physical trauma sustained by a direct impact, overuse, or application of greater force than the body can withstand during a sports activity.
What are the Common Sports Injuries Sustained by Athletes?
Athletes are always prone to injury as they are involved in strenuous physical activity. Some of the common types of sports injuries include:
- Strains: Tearing or overstretching muscles or tendons can lead to a strain. Tendons are fibrous thick cords of tissue that attach bones to muscle.
- Sprains: Tearing or overstretching the ligaments can lead to a sprain. Ligaments are tissues that attach bones to one another in a joint.
- Achilles Tendon Injury: The Achilles tendon is situated at the back of your ankle. During sports activity, this tendon may rupture leading to severe and sudden pain along with difficulty walking.
- Rotator Cuff Injury: A rotator cuff is a group of 4 muscles working together to enable shoulder movement in various directions. A tear in any of these muscles can lead to weakness of the rotator cuff and impaired shoulder movement.
- Concussion: An injury to the brain due to a blow to the head is defined as a concussion. People involved in contact sports such as American football or rugby are more prone to this kind of injury.
- Tennis or Golfer's Elbow: Athletes involved in gripping activities such as tennis and golf are prone to this type of injury where repetitive action causes the tendons of the forearm to become inflamed, making hand or wrist movements painful.
- Shin Splints: Shin splints are a painful condition that can develop in the tibia or lower leg bone due to excessive running.
- ACL Tear: The anterior cruciate ligament is one of the important ligaments that stabilize the knee. Sudden slowing down, pivoting or change in direction can cause an ACL injury, common in sports such as soccer and American football.
- Hip Flexor Strain: Hip flexors are muscles located on the upper front of your thigh. These muscles may be injured by activities such as sprinting, running on an incline, and making sudden starts or quick turns.
- Hamstring Strain: The hamstring muscles are situated in the back of the thigh. Lack of stretching or poor stretching techniques can lead to tight hamstrings which are prone to muscle pull injuries called hamstring strain. This is associated with bruising in the back of the thigh.
- Bone Fractures and Dislocations: A fracture is a break in the bone while a dislocation occurs when bones of a joint separate. These injuries are common in high-intensity contact sports such as rugby, soccer, and American football.
What are the Common Surgeries Performed on Athletes Sustaining Sports Injuries?
Some of the common surgeries performed on athletes include:
- Anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction for ACL tears
- Rotator cuff repair for treating rotator cuff injuries
- Arthroscopy of the elbow for treating Tennis elbow and Golfer's elbow
- Shoulder instability surgery such as labral repair
- Achilles tendon repair
- Cartilage restoration procedures to treat knee injuries causing cartilage deficits
- Fracture repair for bone fractures and dislocations
Expectations of Athletes Following Surgery and Effective Measures to Help You Return to Sports
The expectations of athletes who have undergone surgery are to get back to the game at the earliest and sustain a long injury-free sporting career. Your sports medicine specialist can help you get back to sports with specialized care plans including:
- Advanced surgical techniques
- Regenerative medicine options such as stem cell therapy and platelet-rich plasma therapy to promote healing of the injured tissue
- Physical therapy
- Advice on preventing injuries and re-injury to the same area
- Specific training programs based on your individual strength, weaknesses, and needs
- Advice on nutrition for sports


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The yuan has hit new record lows against the surging US dollar, with the internationally-traded yuan reaching its lowest point since 2011 and China's domestic currency hitting its weakest level since the 2008 global financial crisis. This depreciation comes as the dollar continues to rise against other major currencies due to the US central bank's recent interest rate hike. Asian stock markets, such as Hong Kong's Hang Seng, Japan's Nikkei, and South Korea's Kospi, have also experienced sharp declines.
The strong dollar has driven many investors to consider it a safe haven during times of economic instability. This has caused the dollar's value to increase against other currencies, such as the British pound, which reached an all-time low against the dollar earlier this week. Additionally, the dollar has hit a 20-year high against a group of leading global currencies. The yuan's decline exemplifies the effect of the strong dollar on global currencies, as well as the contrasting economic strategies employed by China and the United States.
The People's Bank of China (PBOC) has been lowering interest rates to stimulate economic growth following Covid-related lockdowns, while the US Federal Reserve is aggressively raising rates to control inflation. Joseph Capurso, head of international and sustainable economics at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, explains that a weaker yuan can benefit Chinese exporters by making their goods more affordable and increasing demand. However, he notes that exports account for only 20% of China's economy, and a weak yuan may not fully address domestic economic issues, such as the zero-Covid strategy and property crisis.
A weaker yuan may also lead to investor withdrawal and financial market uncertainty, which Chinese officials will want to avoid ahead of the upcoming Communist Party Congress. The yuan's depreciation has affected other regional currencies, such as the Australian and Singapore dollars and the South Korean won. Asia's emerging markets, which are increasingly dependent on the yuan due to their export relationships with China, are also vulnerable. Despite the strong dollar's impact on global markets, it is not expected to deter the Fed from continuing to raise interest rates.


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Happy 2007! Where is time going and how can I slow it down? Yikes. When I was young I would calculate how old I would be in the year 2000. When I looked ahead it seemed so far away and I would turn 36 years old in 2000. That sounded so old to me and now it seems so young looking back. New Year's has never been my favorite holiday, there is something kind of melancholy about the whole thing. I spent a quiet evening at home with my husband and kids. That's the best night to me anyway.
On to knitting, I have some projects going right now. I have a couple of original designs that I can't share yet, so I'll save those for a later date. I also have some projects that I can share. One of them is the beautiful entrelac shawl from Scarf Style by the talented Pam Allen. The shawl is called the Lady Eleanor Entrelac Stole by Kathleen Power Johnson. I am using up left over Noro Kureyon that I have gathered from various projects, and then I am filling in with some new skeins in 3 different colorways that will blend nicely together. I love the unblocked look of Kureyon, it is so alive. This is a great book and I have done many scarves from here already, and have been inspired be several others.
The entrelac is a fun way to knit if you don't mind turning back and forth across a row. It is mindless knitting once you have the pattern down. You can memorize it quickly. Did you see Eunny Jang's entrelac socks out of Trekking? These are at www.eunnyjang.com, click on October. Stunning! That I may try next. I need to start plowing through some of that sock yarn I am accumulating. The problem is that I really like fancy socks to knit, but I only wear the simple stockinette or rib socks. What to do...what to do... such a dilemma. I am kidding, it is silly. I may make a resolution to only knit stockinette stitch socks for 2007.
Do you make resolutions? I don't. I think having a goal is a good thing, but I do that anyway throughout the year. I have never given resolutions much thought at all. Maybe my lifelong resolution should just be to knit more in the new year than in the past year. Yeah, that should be achieveable. Ok, that's what it is every year from now on.
Have you seen Stupid Sock Creatures? My 15 year-old son got this book for Christmas and we spent new year's day making the larger creature together with my 13 year-old son. It was a joint effort from start to finish. What a fun way to pass the time while the football game was on tv. My younger son basically made the red creature on his own, I just helped with the mouth a bit. I love crafty boys. There is something so sweet about boys big and small making a craft project together.
This book is wonderful, I highly recommend it on many levels. The projects are great, but are meant as jumping off points which is my kind of instruction! The author, John Murphy, is super smart and talented. He puts his sketches and illustrations and doodles throughout the book. This is probably my favorite part of the book. I have wanted to do this kind of thing in my books, but it hasn't worked out yet. I still have hopes to publish my sketches, illustrations, watercolors and the like in a knitting book. I love that aspect of design and Stupid Sock Creatures is inspiring in this way. Socks off to John Murphy and Lark books!
The kids are still out of school this entire week and I love it.
I tried to do links in my text for this post, but obviously they didn't work. I'll get it next time or at least I will try again.
best, susie


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Nacho Duato's libretto based on the script by Ivan Vsevolozhsky and Charles Perrault's tale of the same name.
Musical Director and Conductor: Dmitri JurowskiStage Choreographer: Nacho Duato
Stage Designer, Costume Designer: Angelina Atlagich
Lighting Designer: Brad Fields
Assistant Stage Choreographer: Zhanna Ayupova
Assistant Lighting Designer: Alexander Kibitkin
2 hours 50 minutes
two intermissions
The performance premiered on 21st October 2016
It's princess Aurora's christening. Members of the royal household are waiting for the King Florestan and the Queen. Master of Ceremonies Catalabutte is checking the invitation list. The celebration begins. Aurora's godmother the Lilac Fairy appears surrounded by her retinue. Good Fairies congratulate the girl of the day.
Frightened servants discuss the arrival of another guest, the evil Carabosse Fairy, who hasn't received her invitation due to Catalabutte's negligence. King and Queen look disturbed, foreboding trouble. Carabosse Fairy appears. How can she be forgotten? To requite the wrongs she announces that Aurora will become the most beautiful and smart princess of all, but she will prick at a knitting needle and fall into eternal sleep.
Lilac Fairy softens the sentence of an evil Fairy. She predicts that Aurora will fall into sleep, but not forever – on one day a prince charmed by her beauty will wake her from everlasting sleep.
Act I
Princess Aurora is sixteen years old. This festive occasion gathers noble guests and suitors.
Aurora appears. Suitors are being introduced to her. The Princess is nice with everyone, ready to dance with each of them, but no one captures her preference. Suddenly, Aurora sees an old lady among the guests; she's holding a strange item in her hands, which draws her attention. Intrigued, the Princess takes the needle and starts dancing with it. Once she pricks a finger, Aurora faints and falls.
The guests are petrified to recognize the evil Carabosse Fairy. She exults in her victory.
Lilac Fairy, Aurora's protector soothes her parents. Princess Aurora will not die. She will only drag the whole kingdom into everlasting sleep. As the century goes by the Princess will wake up and the evil curse will fall.
Act II
A hundred years have passed. Prince Désiré is hunting in the forest with his friends and posse. The hunters and courtesans spend their time playing and entertaining. Once Prince Désiré is left alone, the Lilac Fairy appears before him. She tells him about Aurora. He is craving to see her. Prince Désiré and the Lilac Fairy are floating through the silent forest to the palace, wrapped up in slumber.
Carabosse Fairy and her servants reside in a park overrun with weeds. All of a sudden they hear the sound of the approaching Lilac Fairy.
Carabosse has no power over her.Désiré finds the Princess and brings her back with a kiss.
Act III
It's the wedding of Princess Aurora and Prince Désiré at King Florestan's palace. Guests from far and wide arrive to congratulate the lovebirds. The guests include characters from other tales – fairies and princes. The bride couple is dancing. The fairy-tale ends up with the triumph of good over evil, just like the Lilac Fairy predicted.


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The AUC's electronic filing tool used to manage, search and upload application documents
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Proceeding 28441
15/01/2024 10:00 am
15/01/2024 5:00 pm
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This mixture of aliphatic polyamines and volatile alkalising amines allows simultaneously to reach the following results:
To protect the whole system (feed section, steam boiler, steam and condensate network) without to interfere, if not in a positive way, in the heat transfer. The protection, micron wide, avoids the contact between the metal surface and the corrosive electrolyte, eliminating any kind of corrosion.
To maintain the ideal pH in every section of the plant, the partition ratio of the different alkalising, volatile elements having been selected for this purpose.
To eliminate the old corrosion and avoid the formation of any new one. (For old plants, please consult our technical assistance)
The plants remain very clean. Their protection is more effective and their efficiency is improved. (In case of very dirty plants or polluted condensate, please contact our technical service. We will choose the best treatment for your plant)
To decrease the boiler-blow down, saving energy, water and chemicals.
FINEAMIN 12 is almost bio-degradable and, if we except its alkaline pH, contains no dangerous products.
A system treated by FINEAMIN 12 can by drained in a sewage treatment plant with out any problem. (Respecting the local limits for pH and temperature)
FINEAMIN 12 is not dosed in a stoechiometric way. The dosage rate has not to be adjusted to every change of water condition.
It is injected generally in a single point of the plant, using the existing dosing pumps and tanks.
Before any start of FINEAMIN treatment, our technical service will visit your plant and determine the best way for dosing the FINEAMIN product.
You will find the physical and chemical characteristics of FINEAMIN 12 in the safety data sheet.
The determination of the FINEAMIN excess can be than using any kind of good quality photometer. We will supply the reagents for the analysis and the calibration curve.
FINEAMIN 12 can be delivered in drum of 30 kg, 60 kg, 210 kg and standard containers of 1000 kg.
It can be stored until 5 years (in closed containers and with temperatures from -5°C to 45°C).
The drums and containers of FINEAMIN must be kept always closed
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Calling for room service is kind of annoying, though it's one of the most first world-type of problems one could have. But that's just to say the hotel industry is behind, technologically speaking.
Startup AavGo is trying to fix that by bringing iPads into hotels to enable hotel staff to communicate among themselves, as well as enable hotel guests to easily communicate with staff — therefore getting rid of the need for room service phone calls and trips to the front desk.
This past week, AavGo's service between hotel guests and hotel staff officially launched at the five hotel brands at which it operates. Up until this point, AavGo only enabled communication between staff. That means guests at hotels like The Row Hotel and Hotel Strata can use the AavGo-provided tablet in their room to request things like food, toothpaste, extra pillows or maintenance.
"We're trying to eliminate the need of a phone call," AavGo co-founder Mrunal Desai told me. "And eliminate the need of going to the front desk. If the customer needs any kind of service from the hotel, you can request it from the tablet."
On the hotel side, not much is required, other than Wi-Fi. One competitor in this space is ALICE, which provides a system to run a hotel on a single platform and touts customers like Triumph Hotels, Sixty Hotels and Nylo Hotels. Last January, the startup raised a $9.5 million Series A round led by Expedia, which brought its total funding to $13 million.
The two services seem pretty similar, but Desai says a key differentiator is that AavGo is focused on more than just boutique hotels. Another key difference is that AavGo provides in-room tablets.
AavGo, which charges hotels $5 per room per month, aims to be live at 50 hotels by the end of this year. By December 2018, the goal is to hit 500 hotels. A couple of months ago, the startup closed a $1 million round of funding.


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