Intracortical remodeling during human bone development – a histomorphometric study

This is a fascinating paper about bone remodeling. Essentially, it sampled a bunch of people's bone to find out what the bone looks like when the people are growing. It's very interesting to me, because I care about things like this (hello, corrections!). It's probably not very interesting to you if you don't. I have a .pdf if you want a copy.

Anyway, the point of this article is mostly to do with cortical porosity, which I'm not particularly interested in. It gives a pretty good outline of the process of remodeling and much of what it talks about is very interesting, if completely useless for my thesis.

The full citation:
Rauch, F; Travers, R & Glorieux, FH. 2007. Intracortical remodeling during human bone development - a histomorphometric study. Bone 40:274-280.

The Healing Power of Jane Austen

Being an Austenite and a Pemberlian, I found this article particularly interesting. The idea of fiction as medicine is not one I'm unfamiliar with, but I've never seen it so clearly and bluntly expressed as it is here. I too delve into particular favourite books based on my mood. If I feel the need to cry, the chapter where Beth dies in Good Wives (the second volume of Little Women and not given the separate title in the US) is a guarantee and the one I almost always turn to. On the other hand, I'm very good at making myself cry. It's really helpful in LARPs, even if it does give me a headache. Austen, Alcott, Blyton, Tolkien - these are all authors I turn to when I feel that there's something not quite right, something missing. After reading Austen or Alcott I almost always feel uplifted and just better about myself. I could say the same about LotR, but I don't usually read it for that purpose as it takes too long and has a more variable effect on me. It worries me greatly that a large proportion of people are taking tv as medication these days, without it having quite the same effect. Perhaps that's just my opinion, but people who aren't readers miss out on so many role models and examples - not just of how to behave and pull yourself through adversity, but how not to behave. And while you can argue that many of the moral messages are overly religious and outdated, they have the same impact. The moralising, preachy tone of Little Women doesn't bother me in the slightest. I delight in it. It's part of the reason I read it. For them, the story of Jesus is the blueprint of how to live a good life. For me, reading Little Women shows the advantages of doing what needs to be done, what is necessary, before you do what you want and have fun. I know many other people will have different choices for their "medicating literature" and I'm always interested in the choices that people make in terms of what they read in this way.

Non-Believing Clergy

I'm certainly taking advantage of the whole 'post as much as you like' thing!

Bum sent me the link to this article, which I recommend reading if this is a topic that interests you. I am an atheist. I do not particularly want to be an atheist (most likely due to suffering from 'belief in belief' as they put it in the article), but I'm yet to find something I can actually believe. I have considered taking the veil, but haven't because I feel that would be completely hypocritical, given my atheism. I have never suffered from what the men in this article suffer from. I am coming from the opposite direction. I have never believed in anything, despite multiple attempts. That's part of why I like the Unitarian Church, they're all about supporting your individual spiritual journey. Even so, admitting to being an unwilling atheist does not make for pleasant conversation, so I tend not to do it. Believers immediately want to convert you to whatever they believe and get upset when you question things and don't just believe. I suspect that they are as unable to comprehend my continual scepticism and disbelief as I am unable to comprehend their blind faith. Atheists can't understand why you might want to believe in anything. These are sweeping generalisations, but they're based on the people I know.

The point, is not to pontificate on myself, but to say that we need more papers like this and we need for more people to be aware of such studies. Perhaps one day atheism will not be so stigmatised and there will be one less thing in the world to fight over.

Why Turnover Rate Matters

Hedges, REM; Clement, JG; Thomas, CDL & O'Connell, TC. 2007. Collagen turnover in the adult femoral mid-shaft: modeled from anthropogenic radiocarbon tracer measurements. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 133:808-816.

Highlights:
* Due to the testing of nuclear weapons, the amount of atmospheric 14C almost doubled in the 1960s and then began to decrease slowly.
* Collagen turnover is important in archaeological science because it affects both the precision of 14C dates and the accuracy of dietary reconstructions.
* Terrestrial food sources have the same ratio of 14C to the other carbon isotopes as the atmosphere, though the signal can take as much as a year to appear.
* d13C and d15N were measured as well as 14C. The d-values for males and females were significantly different.
* Between the ages of 20 and 80 years, the turnover rate of collagen decreases from about 4 to 3%/year for females and from 3 to 1.5%/year for males.
* "Human femoral bone collagen isotopically reflects an individual's diet over a much larger period of time than 10 years, including a substantial portion of collagen synthesised during adolesence."

Comments:
The reason I'm interested in this paper is precisely because the turnover rate is important in palaeodietary studies, which is what I'm doing. Now that last conclusion, the one I quoted directly is particularly important to me. Our current dietary reconstructions are fairly broad and spotting changes that occurred in later life is particularly difficult. Which is the entire point of my project. If we can separate out the different stages, then those dietary changes should be fairly easy to see.


Shin, JY; O'Connell, TC; Black, S & Hedges, REM. 2004. Differentiating bone osteonal turnover rates by density fractionation: validation using the bomb 14C atmospheric pulse. Radiocarbon 46:853-861.

Highlights:
* Using bone density fractionation [bdf] to separate older, denser bone from yougner, lighter bone.
* The method can be used to remove diagenetically altered bone from archaeological samples.
* Adequate milling is essential for the method's success.
* Results show that the lighter fractions have 14C values that correspond wtih more recent parts of the bomb curve.
* The results were less clear in those individuals that were older at the time of the 14C peak, presumably due to already decreased turnover rates.

Comments:
The importance of this paper lies in the fact that it's another tantalising glimpse of the method at work. The conclusion drawn by the authors is that bdf does in fact separate the bone into older-denser and younger-lighter fractions. It offers a hint at the conclusions of the paper above, with regard to the slow turnover rates after cessation of growth and the long residence times of bone. Adequate milling might be something to consider in the case of Wendell.