Canada plans bigger anti-smoking warnings
OTTAWA, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Canada says it will increase the size of anti-smoking warnings on cigarette packages to cover three-quarters of the surface of the packs.
The federal government says the new health warnings will feature images of an iconic Canadian cancer victim covering 75 percent of the packages of cigarettes and little cigars, Postmedia News reported Wednesday.
The significant increase in the size of the warning comes after the House of Commons health committee threw its weight behind a long-standing movement to enlarge the mandatory ads from the current level of half the packs' surface area.
Some of the warnings will feature pictures of former Canadian model Barb Tarbox, who died in 2003 of lung cancer. Tarbox became famous before her death for her high-profile campaign to persuade young people to not smoke.
A toll-free number for a national helpline for smokers and a Web site for more information will be an addition to the new warnings.
Anti-smoking activists have long lobbied for larger warnings.
"Size is extremely important to the effectiveness" of the warnings, Rob Cunningham of the Canadian Cancer Society said. "The larger the size, the greater the impact."
Pioneer transplant donor dies at 79
BOSTON, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- A man who donated a kidney in 1954 in the world's first human organ transplant that resulted in long-term survival has died in Maine, his family said.
Ronald Herrick, 79, died this week in Augusta, Maine, in a rehabilitation center where he was recuperating from heart surgery in October, The Boston Globe reported.
On Dec. 23, 1954 in Boston, Dr. Joseph Murray removed a kidney from Ronald and implanted it in Ronald's twin brother, Richard, in a groundbreaking transplant procedure that would eventually bring Murray a Nobel Prize.
Ronald's kidney gave Richard eight more years of life. Previous transplant recipients had lived for only a few months at best.
"It was just one of those things that was kind of out of this world, I thought," Herrick, a math teacher who retired in 1997, told National Public Radio in 2004 on the 50th anniversary of the transplant.
"It was something that hadn't been done before, you knew nothing about it," he said. "So I thought about it a long time. ... My stomach was churning many a morning going to school."
Herrick is survived by his wife, Cynthia, an older brother and a younger sister, the Globe reported.
Bird brains could give ancient flight clue
EDINBURGH, Scotland, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Scottish researchers say reconstructing the brains of extinct birds could provide clues to when they evolved into creatures of flight.
Scientists say overwhelming evidence suggests birds evolved from dinosaurs around 150 million years ago, but what is still unknown is exactly how such birds took to the air, LiveScience.com reported Thursday.
Researchers for National Museums Scotland are focusing on changes in the size of a part of the rear of the brain known as the flocculus, responsible for integrating visual and balance signals during flight, which allows birds to judge the position of other objects in mid-flight.
"We believe we can discover how the flocculus has evolved to deal with different flying abilities, giving us new information about when birds first evolved the power of flight," Stig Walsh, senior curator of vertebrate palaeobiology, says.
Investigators are scanning fossils of a half-dozen extinct species and the skulls of roughly 100 modern birds in great detail.
For the modern birds, the researchers "are particularly interested in species that are closely related where there are flying and flightless examples, such as cormorants, pigeons, parrots and ducks," Walsh said.
This could reveal whether the flocculus becomes smaller with the loss of flight, he said.
New detector could speed nuclear cleanup
CORVALLIS, Ore., Dec. 30 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say they've developed a radiation detecting and measuring device that promises faster and cheaper cleanup of radioactively contaminated sites.
Scientists at Oregon State University say hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on cleanup of major sites contaminated by radioactivity, primarily from the historic production of nuclear weapons during and after World War II. These include the Hanford site in Washington, Savannah River site in South Carolina, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The new detector is quicker and more accurate than previous measuring devices, an OSU release said Thursday.
"Unlike other detectors, this spectrometer is more efficient, and able to measure and quantify both gamma and beta radiation at the same time," David Hamby, an OSU professor of health physics, said. "Before this two different types of detectors and other chemical tests were needed in a time-consuming process.
"This system will be able to provide accurate results in 15 minutes that previously might have taken half a day," Hamby said. "That saves steps, time and money.
"Cleaning up radioactive contamination is something we can do, but the process is costly, and often the question when working in the field is how clean is clean enough," Hamby said. "At some point the remaining level of radioactivity is not a concern. So we need the ability to do frequent and accurate testing to protect the environment while also controlling costs."
