The Mode-Gakuen Spiral Towers: a New Twist on School Design

Scholastic architecture doesn’t get much better than these stunning Mode-Gakuen Spiral Towers in Nagoya, Japan. The shimmering towers corkscrew 36 stories [170 m] above the busy streets of Nagoya, Japan, and house educational facilities for three different disciplines in three tapered ‘wings’ - fashion design, computer programming and a medical support. Architectural group Nikken Sekkei included a host of ecological features in the towers including a double-glassed air flow window system and a natural air ventilation system.

Photo by Japan-Photo.de

Building green can be a challenge in major metropolitan areas due to significant political, social and practical hurdles; the double-glassed ventilation system in the Spiral Towers is certainly a step in the right direction. Though certainly not new, a typical double-glassed air flow system significantly reduces heating and cooling loads by passing indoor/outdoor air (exhaust air/return air) between two panes of glass. The cavity between the panes typically includes blinds which can be shut according to heating/cooling requirements. It’s a system that has been hugely successful at significantly reducing heating and cooling loads in large buildings and one that continues to spread across the globe.

But how does it stay up? The Spiral Towers appear quite precarious from the street, but their basic structure is simple; a strong inner truss tube acts as a central pillar supporting the three, gently tapering wings. The truss tube is constructed of concrete-filled, steel tubular columns with structural braces affixed around the base and the entire structure is fitted with some of the most robust seismic engineering in the region.

The Spiral Towers are stunning, and the concept behind the design adds yet another layer of beauty. The twisting glass and steel spiral is meant to evoke, “the enthusiasm of students from three schools, twining and rising up to the sky then departing to the real world.” Students from the three schools: Nagoya Mode Gakuen , HAL Nagoya and Nagoya Isen —are sure to benefit from the both the gorgeous design and the green measures that have gone into this great new building.

+ Nikken Sekkei

Via World Architecture News

Photos by Robin White and Tsutomu Hamada

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Ask the Experts: Why are octuplet births so rare in humans?

By Brendan Borrell

A litter of one: Evolutionary Biologist Robert Sikes explains why humans are not designed to have a gaggle of newborns.

Late last month, a team of 46 doctors and nurses in the Los Angeles suburb Bellflower pulled eight babies from the belly of a 33-year-old woman. The octuplets—the second known set to have been born in the U.S.—were nine weeks premature and were delivered in just five minutes via caesarean section.

The feat shifted from a source of biological wonderment to opprobrium as it was revealed that the mother, Nadya Suleman, an unemployed, graduate student who lives with her parents, already had six other children, ages two to seven. Many people expressed outrage that taxpayers had been footing the bill for her other children (through Social Security disability payments and food stamps) when the Associated Press estimated her medical costs could be $1.3 million in addition to the $2.7 million estimated to raise all 14 children to the age of 17. Police are even investigating death threats against her, and the once-celebrated mom of many has reportedly gone into hiding.

Although humans typically give birth to a single child per pregnancy, twins, triplets and larger "litters" have become more common with the rise of in vitro fertilization, the technique Suleman undertook whereby eggs are fertilized by sperm in a laboratory and later implanted into the uterus. Because of the cost of each implantation and the likelihood that one or more embryo will not survive, doctors typically implant three fertilized eggs into a woman's womb to up the chances of a viable birth. Some believe that Suleman's fertility doctor, Michael Kamrava, implanted more than that, violating professional ethical guidelines, although not breaking any U.S. laws. Kamrava, a general practitioner who lacks board certification for obstetrics and gynecology, has one of the worst records for successful in vitro implantations in the country, according to Forbes.

Economic and ethical considerations aside, humans are not biologically equipped to handle so many offspring per birth. Suleman's babies ranged in weight from 1.5 to three pounds (0.7 to 1.4 kilograms), and low-birth weight correlates with lower intelligence and a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to BBC reports. Premature infants, common in multiple births, face a greater risk of breathing problems, brain and organ damage and, later in life, developmental problems and cerebral palsy.

Meanwhile, other mammals, like dogs and rodents, are perfectly capable of having more than 10 babies in a litter. What makes them different from primates? To find out more about the evolution of litter size, we spoke to Robert Sikes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, who has studied the northern grasshopper mouse, an animal that has between one and six offspring at a time.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows]

How many offspring do most mammals have at a time? What about other animals?
Lots and lots of mammal species have singletons (a litter of one), and a few have large litters. The lab rat has litters of 10 or more, although part of that may have been a result of breeding in the lab. Many dogs will have litters in the mid-teens.

If you look at animals like salmon, they are going to produce hundreds of thousands of eggs. Many invertebrates are going to produce lots of eggs, as well.

How has variation in litter size evolved?
Organisms that have large litters or a large number of offspring tend to live in an unstable, boom-or-bust environment. They produce many offspring, and many don't make it. If you look at salmon, that's a great example: maybe a couple of eggs are going to survive. If the population is constant over time, each individual is replacing itself in the next generation. Whereas a female may produce 1,000 eggs, only two survive.

On the other hand, organisms that inhabit stable environments have fewer offspring and they allocate more energy to those offspring. Mammals certainly do this. Even within mammals, species that have large litters tend to inhabit more variable environments than those that inhabit more stable environments.

Those mammals that inhabit stable environments tend to have very altricial young: they are born naked with the eyes closed and they are helpless without the mom. Precocial young are well-furred at birth, eyes open, and don't need a lot of attention from mom.

What are some examples of this?
Cotton rats are small rodents common throughout the U.S. They are kind of a "weedy" species. Their litter size is highly variable. They have lots of young when resources are plentiful and smaller litters when resources are scarce.

On the other hand, wood rats have a much smaller and very stable litter sizes, but they allocate a heck of a lot more energy to each individual offspring. Cotton rats don't nurse as long and their pups are weaned at much smaller sizes and the size at which they are weaned is quite variable. Wood rats nurse for a longer period of time and are weaned at a larger size.

Humans are altricial and fit in pretty far toward the 'stable environment' side of the spectrum. We usually have a single offspring. That offspring is helpless at birth. It requires a long period of complete maternal dependence.

The evolutionary lineage we came from—the great apes—are similar in that respect.

So we are not built to have octuplets?
Humans are ill equipped to handle large litters. Evolution has simply not set us up to do that well.

Typically, litter size in nature is matched by the number of mammary glands we have. We have two. How do you nurse the additional offspring?

If you look at the energetic cost of offspring, as the litter size increases, the cost of nursing those young increases dramatically. In the grasshopper mice I work with, a mother rearing a litter of one is going to increase her food intake by 50 percent. A mouse mother rearing the maximum number of offspring, six, is going to triple her food intake. It takes a lot of energy to produce this milk. Do the mice compensate? Yes, but they cannot completely meet those needs. The mouse mother is eating three times as much and eating so much, she can't process any more food. These mice are at the upper end of their digestive efficiency during lactation, and the intestine lengthens to help extract as many nutrients as they can. Young from a litter of two are generally larger than animals from a litter of three and those are typically larger than a litter of six; the larger the young, the better the chance of survival. If the mother mouse is nursing that much longer, then she has to be foraging longer, and when mothers are out foraging they are subject to predation.

What happens in humans? If we were subject to natural selection, octuplets would be a tough load to bear. Obviously, with our technological abilities, we can step outside of those physical constraints. Human mothers rearing two, four, six and eight offspring are almost certainly not just nursing enough to meet the energetic demands of those young. [They will likely be using infant formula.]

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Scientists warn of first ever case of human mad cow disease from blood plasma

By Patrick Hennessy and Laura Donnelly

Scientists fear there could be a second wave of the human variant of mad cow disease, which was caused by cattle being fed the remains of other cattle in the 1980s Photo: EPA

The man was one of thousands of haemophiliacs who received blood plasma transfusions in the years before strict controls were brought in to eliminate the spread of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).

Until now, scientists had maintained that the 4,000 people who may have received plasma from infected donors were at very low risk of developing the fatal brain disease. Warnings were issued to them as a "highly precautionary measure".

But the Health Protection Agency is expected to announce on Tuesday that an elderly man, who died from other causes, contracted vCJD from plasma.

Although vCJD has been transmitted by blood donations in the past, leading to three deaths, no cases of infection had ever been linked to plasma, which is used to clot blood. Scientists had believed the processing and dilution of the product before it is injected into patients significantly reduced the risks.

BSE expert Professor Hugh Pennington, Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology at Aberdeen University said the findings would have "significant implications" for thousands of people who had been given plasma before the dangers were suspected.

"This looks like pretty grim news for a group of people who have been through fire and water for so long; they have already had increased exposure to hepatitis B and HIV," he said.

Warnings were sent to 4,000 haemophiliacs, and patients suffering from other rare blood conditions in 2004 to warn them that they had had received transfusions from 200 batches of blood products at risk of contamination with vCJD. The plasma was collected from nine people who went on to develop the brain-wasting disease.

All 4,000 were advised not to give blood or donate organs and to warn doctors and dentists that they had been put at risk by the use of plasma.

To date, 164 people have died from vCJD in Britain, with most cases linked to eating meat infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

Prof Pennington said details of the way the new link had been detected would be crucial in determining further investigations.

"There is a lot more we still need to know. The fact that this person is elderly, when most of the deaths from vCJD have been young people, and that they died from another cause, is another area for research," he said, suggesting that it might mean that the disease progressed more slowly in some people.

He said restrictions over blood donation, which mean anyone who has had a transfusion cannot donate, and that all plasma is now taken from stocks in the United States, meant the risks to those receiving blood or plasma now were "vanishingly low".

The brain-wasting disease vCJD was first detected in the mid 1990s. Most vCJD patients have been infected after eating BSE contaminated meat. The number of deaths peaked in 2000, when there were 28 deaths. That number has dropped to about five cases a year since 2005.

The epidemic of BSE in the 1980s and 1990s was caused by cattle being fed the remains of other cattle in the form of meat and bone meal, causing an infectious agent to spread.

More than 4 million cattle were slaughtered after almost 200,000 were infected with the fatal neurodegenerative disease.

Scientists recently warned that Britain could see a second wave of the vCJD, affecting as many as 300 people, after discovering that genetic differences can affect how long it takes a person to incubate the disease.

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