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In the Fact File section we bring you a new collection of quick facts each week. (Click on the links below for more facts)

 
 

1321/ In 1995 a woman sued her former therapist on the grounds that three weeks on Prozac had achieved more than three years of therapy.

1322/ About 40 per cent of the current population of the United States will develop cancer at some point in their lives. Half of these people will be cured and the other half will eventually die of the disease. In the mid-1990s cancer claimed more than half a million lives every year in the US alone.

1323/ During the 1990s, one third of the cancer deaths in the US were due to the use of tobacco, largely cigarettes.

1324/ A tumour mass one centimetre in diameter may contain as many as a billion cells. At first glance, the number seems huge, but it pales next to the number of cells in the body as a whole - more than ten thousand times more. So a cancer this size is rarely life threatening. In most places in the body, it probably will not compromise the functioning of a vital organ. Most tumours need to be far larger before they become lethal.

1325/ In 1930, the annual rate of mortality from cancer in the United States was 143 per hundred thousand of population. By 1990, the rate had increased to 190 per hundred thousand.

1326/ Peyton Rous of the Rockefeller Institute in New york discovered the first known tumour virus in 1909. It was called RSV or 'Rous's Sarcoma Virus'.

1327/ After 1909, Peyton Rous abandoned research on the virus he had discovered, convinced that it held no relevance for understanding the root causes of human cancer. Other reserachers then picked up the baton and studied it over the next 60 years. In 1966, by then in his mid-eighties, Rous received the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for the work he had done more than half a century earlier.

1328/ The first systematic study of mating genetics was carried out in the 1860s by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, who hybridized different strains of pea plants. His work was forgotton for a generation, then rediscovered in 1900. It formed the foundation of modern genetics and led to the notion that biological information is transmitted in the discrete packets that came to be called genes.

1329/ In 1964 a Harris poll found that 15 per cent of US adults were dieting. By 1992, 70 per cent of women and 50 per cent of men were dieters, as were 80 per cent of seventh-grade girls. The dieting rate for British fifteen-year-olds is 68 per cent.

1330/ A 1981 US report on levels of twelve basic nutrients found that dieting girls from fifteen to eighteen years old were seriously deficient in eleven of them.

1331/ Methane hydrates are found on the continental shelves. They are molecules of methane that have been locked up inside a 'cage' of frozen water so that they are trapped. Methane hydrates are very common in the ocean: it is estimated that over a trillion tones of carbon are buried as methane hydrate. The amount of methane hydrate off the coast of Florida and Georgia alone is enough to satisfy the energy needs of the United States for the next 200 years.

1332/ A Harvard University study of 40,000 nurses found that the 20 per cent with the lowest fat intake had the highest rate of cancer.

1333/ There are over six billion humans who collectively account for over 300 million tons of biomass. By contrast there are fewer than a thousand mountain gorillas in the world (most authorities reckon the number at about 600) and even before we started slaughtering them and eroding their habitat there may not have been more than ten times that number. Help by Adopting a Gorilla here

1334/ Genetic fingerprinting in crime detection has come along way recently. In Britain alone, by mid-1998 320,000 samples of DNA had been collected by the Forensic Science Service and used to link 28,000 people to crime scenes. Nearly twice as many samples have been used to exonerate innocent people though.

1335/ Nearly four times as many potential jurors will convict if told that a DNA match has a chance probability of 0.1 per cent than if told one in a thousand match the DNA - yet they are the same facts.

1336/ Roughly forty per cent of Europeans have type O blood, forty per cent have type A blood, fifteen per cent have type B blood and five per cent have type AB blood. The proportions are similar in other continents, with the marked exception of the Americas, where the Native American population was almost exclusively type O, save for some Canadian tribes, who were very often type A, and Eskimos, who were sometimes type AB or B.

1337/ In fruit flies, Michael Rose has been selecting for longevity for twenty-two years: that is, in each generation he breeds from the flies that live the longest. His 'Methuselah' flies now live for 120 days, or twice as long as wild fruit flies, and start breeding at an age when wild fruit flies usually die. They show no signs of reaching a limit.

1338/ Ernest Rutherford, while working with Frederick Soddy at McGill University, Montreal in 1902, proposed the theory of radioactive decay. Radioactive decay is the process by which radioactive elements can transform into other elements by the loss of energy in the form of particles or rays.

1339/ It was Frederick Soddy who coined the term 'isotopes' (which means 'the same place' in Greek) because, by being chemically identical, these previously unknown radioactive substances occupied the same place on the periodic table.

1340/ Rock magnetism and changes in magnetic polarity were observed as early as 1853 by the Italian scientist Melloni, who showed that the direction of magnetisation of some ancient lavas from Mt Vesuvius was the same as the direction of the Earth's magnetic field.

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