Varicose veins occur when the one-way valves in the veins of the leg
malfunction. The resulting build-up of blood can lead to painful swelling and
ulcers. The usual treatment is to wear leg bandages, but this is often
uncomfortable and can lead to skin allergies.

A team from the KEM Hospital and the Seth G. S. Medical College in Bombay,
led by R. D. Bapat, has found that medicinal leeches (Hirudo
medicinalis) are highly effective at removing blood from around the vein,
avoiding the need for bandages. Twenty patients had leeches applied to the area
around their varicose ulcers. The team reports in the Indian Journal of
Medical Research (vol 107, p 281) that the leeches cured the ulcers in all
the patients and reduced serious swelling in 18 of them.

The researchers say that the treatment works because leeches prefer venous
blood to the oxygen-rich blood that flows through arteries.

Researchers at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in Dehra Dun say that
the number of landslides in the area has increased markedly over the past
decade. N. S. Virdi, a senior scientist at the institute, claims that as more
and more people have settled in the hills, trees have been cleared for
agriculture and the building of roads and settlements. Removing tree roots from
slopes destabilises the soil.

The institute has carried out surveys showing that building “without proper
feasibility studies” has caused erosion and rock slides. It also points to the
increase in terraced farms on slopes where there was once forest.

Even more worrying is the change in farming practices. Hill people
traditionally grew crops like millet, whose roots gave the soil some stability.
But an increasing number are turning to cash crops such as rice, which require
fields of standing water that weaken the porous rocks below.

A report by the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI) in Delhi points out
that while more than 50 per cent of the Almora hills—where the worst of
the recent landslides occurred—is forested, less than half that forest is
under state control. Tree-felling elsewhere is unregulated and
indiscriminate.

The report’s author, S. P. Banerjee, a visiting fellow at TERI, adds that
local geology also contributes to land-slides. The rocks are often fractured by
the dry cold of the Himalayan winter, making them highly susceptible to the
heavy monsoon rains in the summer.

The state-funded Agharkar Research Institute (ARI) in Pune, which specialises
in biotechnology, believes that a sulphur-eating microorganism called
Thiobacillus ferrooxidans should be used to extract uranium from India’s
depleted reserves.

Demand for uranium in India is likely to far outstrip supply. India’s nuclear
weapons programme will probably require between two and three times its known
reserves of uranium. “It becomes all the more important to exploit what we have
in the most efficient manner,” says Arvind Agate, the director of ARI. He cites
the example of the Stanrock uranium mine in Canada, where T.
ferrooxidans was used to extract uranium from an excavation that was
officially “mined out”.

T. ferrooxidans is commonly found in waste uranium ore or acidic
mine water. Feed it metal sulphides and it will produce the soluble form of
uranium from insoluble ore. From then on, says Agate, isolating the metal is
simple. He is “very encouraged” by the interest shown in microbial mining by the
Atomic Mineral Division of the Department of Atomic Energy.

India currently extracts uranium by the conventional method of concentration
and ion exchange. But the reagents required to do this are expensive, and the
byproducts are pollutants. The method is also impractical where the uranium
concentration in ore is low—and much of India’s known ore reserves contain
only between 0.05 and 0.08 per cent uranium.

Microbial mining, says Agate, can cut costs by half because bacteria provide
the reagent, so the method can be used to extract uranium from low-grade
ores.

To extract the uranium, low-grade ore is piled in a heap on an impermeable
surface and sprayed with a solution containing ferrous iron sulphide mixed with
the microbes (see “Mining with microbes”, 4 January 1992, p 17). T.
ferrooxidans then goes to work generating a ferric sulphate, a reagent that
transforms insoluble uranium to its soluble state.

The ferric ions oxidise uranate (insoluble tetravalent uranium) to its
soluble hexavalent state. The radioactive metal then dissolves in the acidic
solution and can be recovered by concentrating the solution and purifying it by
precipitation and ion exchange.

The Atomic Mineral Division is also looking at new uranium deposits. The
Bhaba Atomic Research Centre, which played a key role in May’s nuclear tests, is
involved in the extraction process.

Although the Jaduguda-Singhbhum belt of northern India looks to be the most
promising source of uranium at present, other mines could be established on the
Deccan plateau to the south of the Himalayas, where uranium deposits have been
found.

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is due to be ratified by the US
soon, although it will not come into force until India and Pakistan have also
ratified it. But critics are now claiming that the failure of the monitoring
network shows that the treaty cannot be properly policed.

The confusion started with India’s first test on 11 May. An automatic
detector at the Center for Monitoring Research in Arlington, Virginia—the
network’s temporary home until its headquarters in Vienna open later this
year—picked up the seismic data and interpreted it as an earthquake.

It became clear, once technicians had looked at the waveform, that it was “an
explosion, not a quake”, says Richard Stead, a seismologist at the centre. But
then the problem was assessing its size. “The blast registered clearly in
Pakistan, Canada, Russia, Australia and here,” says Frode Ringdal, scientific
director of the Norwegian Seismic Array near Oslo, which is also part of the
network. “All the traces show it was at most 25 kilotons.” But the Indian Atomic
Energy Commission says the thermonuclear bomb, plus the smaller fission bomb and
another device exploded in that test, yielded between 55 and 60 kilotons. “It’s
very hard to account for that much discrepancy,” says Stead. Others claim India
overestimated the size of the bombs.

“Since the CTBT forbids all tests, uncertainties in estimating size aren’t so
important,” says Roger Clark, a seismologist at the University of Leeds. What is
important, however, is that no one picked up any signal from the second test two
days later, in which India claims it exploded two devices yielding between 0.2
and 0.6 kilotons, enough for a battlefield nuclear weapon or the trigger of a
larger fusion weapon.

But experts point out that the monitoring network is not yet at full
strength. “We shouldn’t judge the system until it is fully up and running,” says
Clark. “When we have more countries feeding seismic data into the network, we
will be less likely to miss things.” In addition, a network of detectors to pick
up radioactivity in the atmosphere, which will aid verification, is still being
developed.

Meanwhile, Indian officials have revealed that the test preparations were
specially timed so that American satellites could not detect them. The
government also arranged the test firing of a missile on the east Indian coast
to “occupy” the Chinese surveillance system.

HEALTH workers and medical scientists in India are at the centre of a growing
row over allegations that they regularly recruit illiterate people into clinical
trials and sterilisation programmes without their informed consent.

The Indian government’s annual deadline for its “family welfare” programme
expires this week. The programme is designed to stem population growth, and
health workers each have their own targets for the number of people to sterilise
by the end of March. In rural areas all over the country, they set up temporary
camps where they encourage men and women to undergo an operation that will
prevent them from having children. After a few days, the health workers move on
and set up a new camp.

The operations are supposed to be voluntary, but critics are claiming that
workers often target uneducated women who are not aware of the potential health
risks. “My experience has been that the women are certainly not informed when
they come for the operation,” says one official at the Ministry of Health and
Family Welfare. “They have no idea, for instance, about what could happen if the
surgeon left a swab behind in the abdomen, or any other postoperative
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Consent for sterilisation involves no more than leaving a thumbprint on a
form. Health workers are supposed to encourage both men and women to have the
operation, yet a thousand times as many women as men are sterilised. The
government blames the “lack of male participation”, but some officials claim
that health workers simply find it easier to coerce women. Around 600 000 women
between the ages of 13 and 49 are sterilised each year in India—most of
them in the few months leading up to the deadline.

Meanwhile, medical researchers are also under the spotlight for using
subjects without their informed consent. The issue came to light last year when
the British Medical Journal refused to publish a study on cervical
cancer commissioned by the Indian Council of Medical Research, after discovering
that researchers had studied lesions without telling the women that they could
turn cancerous. The scientists justified their methods by arguing that the women
were illiterate and that informed consent was thus impossible.

Some officials inside the ministry of health have been pushing the government
to tighten up the consent procedure in clinical trials. They also want to
abandon the use of sterilisation targets for population control. India
officially discarded this approach after the UN population conference in Cairo
in 1994, but critics say the change has been no more than cosmetic. “Instead of
targets coming down from the top, they are now being set by workers on the
ground, and there hasn’t been any change in attitudes among them,” says one
critic.

It was not always like this in Jalsindhi, the idyllic village in Madhya Pradesh that Noorja calls home. The calamity facing Jalsindhi is the work of human hands: the village has the dubious distinction of being the first of 245 villages in the region earmarked for flooding by the Sardar Sarovar dam. Soon, Jalsindhi will be part of the 210 kilometres-long and 1.5 kilometres-wide reservoir that will submerge the villages in three states in western India.

Although the timing of the flood is uncertain, there is a good chance that the village will not survive the rains this year. “There was never any uncertainty in our lives,” says Noorja, commenting on how the dam has changed life in Jalsindhi, “now that is all there is.” Last year, without warning, his hut disappeared under a metre of water during the rains. He had to shelter in his brother’s house until the water receded. As he ploughs his land, he wonders aloud whether it is futile. If he does not sow his crop and his land is not flooded, there will be nothing to eat. And if it is, there will be nothing to eat anyway.

Jalsindhi is 25 kilometres upstream from the dam, and some villages in Gujarat and Maharashtra will be submerged along with it. What makes Jalsindhi special is that its residents are determined not to move even if the water comes into their homes. “If we drown, if our cattle die or our crops rot, it will be through no fault of ours, the government is to blame,” says Baba Mahariya, the village headman.

The villagers believe that the government’s rehabilitation package is not worth taking. The land being offered is in Gujarat, where the displaced villagers will have to face the hostility of the local people. The soil is even worse than they have now. There are no forests to gather wood from, no river to fish in and there are no pastures for their cattle to graze.

In fact, some of the people moved from the nearby villages of Akadia and Chilakhda have come back from the rehabilitation sites in Gujarat for just these reasons. Jalsindhi, however, has rejected the offer of resettlement outright.

At first it is difficult to understand why. Its 300 or so families have no electricity or drinking water. There is a school – a one-room mud hut – but none of the villagers can remember a teacher ever coming there. The nearest hospital is in the town of Kawant about 18 kilometres away. The only way to get there is by foot, over difficult hilly terrain. Which is why Jalsindhi can boast a helipad, built last year when ministers and government officials had to go there to persuade the villagers to leave, but decided the walk was too daunting. “Last year, the deputy chief minister of Madhya Pradesh made an aerial survey and dropped food and medicines from the sky, so that in case we drowned, we’d drown healthy and full,” says a smiling Baba Mahariya.

In 1994, the Save the Narmada Movement had planned a suicide mission in Jalsindhi which is one of its strongholds. Activists had decided to remain in a hut by the Narmada even if the waters rose. It did not rain hard enough then, but it is only a matter of time before the resolve of Jalsindhi’s villagers are tested by the might of the state. Today there is a temporary police camp nearby where the government plans to forcibly shift anyone indulging in these “publicity stunts”, now that persuasion has failed. The villagers have been told that the camp has been set up to “save them”. Says Lohariya, who lives in Jalsindhi and is an active member of the movement: “Isn’t it ironic, they first take away our livelihood and then come to ‘save’ us.”

Government officials say that the issue of rehabilitation has now become a revolution of rising expectations. But this is an excuse for not completing rehabilitation at least six months before the scheduled date of submergence, as specified in the tribunal set up to look into all issues on the projects in 1979. They also argue that the beneficiaries of the dam far outnumber the stubborn villagers who refuse to be moved. When the dam rises to its full height of 150 metres, the government says its network of canals will irrigate 40 million hectares of land, and bring drinking water to the thirsty areas of Kutch and Saurashtra in Gujarat.

All of this is debatable. What is not is that the dam will cost more to build than had ever been imagined. The World Bank, while comparing the Sardar Sarovar project to the Pak Mun project in Thailand had estimated the cost to be $11.4 billion – about three times the Indian government’s estimate. The dam, seen by the government’s think-tanks as a symbol of progress, stands at a height of 80 metres today. And a cash shortage has meant that there is no way the project will be completed before the year 2010, if at all. But even at that height, it is on the verge of erasing another symbol. Jalsindhi, has grown to stand for the courage of local populations daring to take on the state. Its legacy will remain long after it is swept off the map.

Adrian North, David Hargreaves and Alice Binns are following in the footsteps of Daniel Berlyne, a Canadian psychologist who proposed in the 1970s that people’s enjoyment of music increases as it becomes more complex only up to a certain level. After that point, the more complex the music gets, the more people dislike it.

Berlyne defined the complexity of a piece of music by how predictable it is: complex music is difficult to predict. And he used laboratory tests to back up his theory. But his work has been criticised for being conducted in controlled environments, and for employing simple sequences of tones, rather than rich music. “What we were trying to do through this research was test the validity of Berlyne’s theory in everyday conditions,” says North.

The researchers chose an advert for chocolate and asked 25 volunteers to describe an appropriate piece of backing music using a fixed list of adjectives. Next, they recorded a series of pieces over the advert, varying in appropriateness – according to the volunteers’ description and complexity. Finally, they screened the various versions in front of 78 people, chosen at random, who were told that the ad was being tested before being aired.

The results show that the group generally disliked highly complex music even if it seemed appropriate. They also gave the thumbs down to inappropriate pieces. The favourite piece of backing music was appropriate and moderately complex.

On top of questions about the music itself, the Leicester researchers also asked about its effect. They found that the more the listeners liked the music, the more inclined they felt to go and buy the chocolate – although North points out that this doesn’t mean they would actually buy it. “It could be inferred,” he says, “that music is linked to the likelihood that people will go and buy the product.”

Tim Berryman of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi does not entirely agree with the Leicester researchers’ conclusions. “We obviously put a lot of thought on the appropriateness of the music accompanying an advertisement,” he says. “But there aren’t any hard and fast rules about the degree of complexity of the music that makes a good ad.”

Berryman cites the example of a British Airways advert put together by his agency which used the relatively complex score from Delibes’s opera Lackmé. “But the ad is very successful and the score is now the theme music for British Airways advertisements,” says Berryman.

“Come ye masters of war,

You that build the big guns,

You that build the death planes,

You that build all the bombs,

I just want you to know I can see

through your mask.”

It is debatable whether Herbert York is a candidate for Dylan’s derision, but in his book, Arms and the Physicist, he’s trying hard. York started his scientific career very young – at age 20 – when he was, as the jacket says “swept into the century’s most daring and dangerous technical achievement, the making of the nuclear bomb”. This is York on his contribution to the “device” that destroyed Hiroshima: “I had helped either to make the Hiroshima bomb available a few days earlier, or to make the explosion a little more powerful … I was pleased with what I had been able to do.”

He expressed these thoughts just after the war. For the past thirty years, much like a poacher turned conservationist, York says that he has crusaded for a safer world.

In doing so, he had to take on some diplomatic responsibilities through his career. His book is a collection of essays, some written with collaborators, recording his experiences from his time with the Manhattan Project which saw the birth of the atomic bomb, to his role as US ambassador during the nuclear test ban negotiations in Geneva.

But York was a scientist to begin with, not a diplomat. From the very first essay (“Making weapons, talking peace”), his book reflects the dilemma of trying to be both at the same time. At another level, that is exactly what nuclear powers were trying to do before the Soviet Union came undone. And York notes that increasing nuclear capability to match the opposition is one way of buying time for negotiations. But he agonises over the fact that the Geneva negotiations failed because of the lack of political will on the part of Washington and Moscow (read the election of Ronald Reagan as president).

In fact, York claims to have worked fairly closely with many American presidents – from Dwight Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter. But though he goes off to meet one important person or another or to witness decisions that might have decided the fate of the world, he is seldom able to take his reader with him. That is probably because York is a better scientist than a writer.

“Older people require a high-quality diet rather than a high-quantity diet,” says Maggie Sanderson, dietitian and chair of the Distressed Gentlefolks Aid Association’s Homelife Trust. “They require a higher percentage of minerals and vitamins in their diet than young people because they have smaller appetites.” DGAA Homelife is developing a computer program to help carers provide elderly people with all the right ingredients for a healthy lifestyle.

The software was conceived as a follow-up to a report this month from another charity – the Caroline Walker Trust, which campaigns for better public health through improved diet. The report, Eating Well for Older People, gives nutritional guidelines, including tips on how to make meals more attractive.

But the report includes only a few sample menus. DGAA Homelife aims to expand on it by publishing a recipe book for old people’s homes. A disc containing the nutrition program will be sold alongside the book in around 18 months, says Peter Roberts of DGAA. So when residents have selected what they want to eat over the next week or month, all that the staff will have to do is run the menu through the computer. The program will analyse the menu for things like energy, fat, carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins and minerals, and suggest alterations.

Kuhn has used nuclear magnetic resonance microscopy to study the penetration of ointments and creams into the skin. “The quality of skin depends on its capacity to retain water,” he says. The fat content of skin creams helps by forming a film that traps water beneath it. NMR gives a clear picture of exactly how well this process works with different formulations.

NMR relies on the behaviour of atomic nuclei in a magnetic field. Different elements absorb characteristic high-frequency radio waves when a magnetic field is applied. This allows researchers to track specific molecules within the sample. Kuhn has used this information to find out where molecules of fat and water from the skin creams end up when they are applied to someone’s finger. Other technologies rely on slicing up the sample, so they can only be used on tissue cultures, not on people.

“NMR enabled us to see things in great detail, at a resolution of 10 micrometres, and therefore be very specific with our findings,” says Kuhn.

Previous attempts to use NMR on people achieved resolutions of only 70 micrometres. “Earlier experiments may not have been successful because they took nearly 45 minutes and it was very difficult to keep the object under investigation stable for long periods,” says Kuhn. Because the scale of the measurements is so small, any movement beyond 80 micrometres – which can be caused by a slight shiver – could affect the results. “The measurement time for this experiment is only about 8 minutes,” says Kuhn.

Because it can track the progress of specific chemicals in the skin, NMR can also find out whether specialised ingredients penetrate deeply enough into the skin to be as effective as manufacturers claim.

“The technique looks interesting for its wider uses since it seems able to provide so much more information,” says Ronald Marks of the dermatology department of the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. “It could be used in a range of medical investigations.” Kuhn has already begun conducting tests on people with psoriasis.

He has received 20 requests from cosmetics companies in Germany for more information. “Two companies have already placed orders with us to investigate their products,” he says.