Gina Kolata

The White House wentpink this month,awash for a night in ro-

se-coloured light. Delta AirLines painted a huge pinkribbon on one of its planes,dressed flight attendants inpink, and has been sellingpink lemonade to passeng-ers. Police departments star-ted using pink handcuffs.Ford is selling “pink war-rior” car decals.

Pinkwashing, as somebreast cancer activists call it,has become an October rite,to “raise awareness” of bre-ast cancer. Those who promo-te the pink campaigns saythey raise millions of dollarsto fight the disease.

“When I see Delta flightattendants dressed in pink, I

thank them,” said DanielaCampari, senior vice presi-dent for marketing at theAmerican Cancer Society.

But many women withbreast cancer hate the spec-tacle. “I call it the puke cam-paign,” said MarleneMcCarthy, the director of the

Rhode Island Breast CancerCoalition, who has metasta-tic breast cancer. Breast can-cer awareness, critics char-ge, has become a sort of feel-good catch-all, and the ubiqu-itous pink a marketing op-portunity for companies. Forall the awareness, they note,

breast cancer incidence hasbeen nearly flat and therestill is no cure for womenwhose cancer has spread be-yond the breast to other or-gans, like the liver or bones.

“A lot of us are done withawareness. We want action,”Karuna Jaggar, executive di-rector of Breast Cancer Ac-tion, an activist group said.Some broader women’s he-alth groups agree. “The pin-kification of October isn’thelping women,” said CindyPearson, executive directorof National Women’s HealthNetwork.

Such questions and skep-ticism come as some organi-zations are dialing back re-commendations for the veryscreening measures the cam-paigns promote, recognizingthat mammograms can lead

to harm like overdiagnosis— finding and treating can-cers that would never havebecome life-threatening —and false-positive results.

Certainly some organiza-tions that receive moneyfrom pink campaigns spendat least part of it on research,but the campaigns have rare-ly made science their mainfocus. And how much of themoney from pink productsgoes to any breast cancercause at all is also unclear.

On October 2, the Natio-nal Breast Cancer Coalition,a nonprofit group, put out anews release calling for “ac-tion, not awareness”. The co-alition’s new campaign iscalled Breast Cancer Deadli-ne 2020 and has a researchcomponent, the Artemis Pro-ject, that involves working

with scientists and fundingagencies on developing effec-tive prevention measures(including a vaccine) — bothprimary prevention and pre-vention of metastasis in tho-se who do get the disease.While the chance of successmay be slim on the group’s2020 timetable, it is part of theorganization’s emphasis onscience and research.

The idea for a pink ribbon,which soon turned into exten-ding pink to anything and eve-rything, began 25 years agowith a 68-year-old Californiawoman, Charlotte Haley, who-se sister, daughter, and grand-daughter had breast cancer.Haley decided to make a pe-ach-coloured ribbon to drawattention to what she felt waspaltry funding for breast can-cer research. NYT NEWS SERVICE

Breast Cancer Patients Say Its Become A Marketing Gimmick With No Action On GroundA growing dislike for October ‘pinkification’

PINKWASH: The White House illuminated with pink to observeBreast Cancer Awareness Month

AFP

Researchers have identified a new genus andspecies of small ape that roamed Earth 11.6

million years ago—before the evolutionary splitof humans/great apes (hominids) and gibbons.Named Pliobates cataloniae, the new specieshas important implications for reconstructingthe last common ancestor of the two groups(the living hominoids). “The discovery providesa missing chapter to the beginning of ape andhuman history,” said professor Sergio Almecija.“We used to think that small apes evolved fromlarger-bodied apes, but this new species tells usthat small and large apes may have co-existedsince hominoids originated. Alternatively,Pliobates might indicate that great apes evolvedfrom gibbon-size ape ancestors,” said Almecija.

SHORT CUTS

SURF MASTER: Tillman, an English bulldog who in2009 set a Guinness World Record as the fastestskateboarding canine, died in southern Californiaon Thursday. Tillman was 10 years old

Extinct ape species resetsscale on human ancestors

Reuters

Washington: Low-fat diets do not lead togreater weight loss in the long term com-pared to low-carbohydrate or Mediterra-nean diets of similar intensity, accordingto a new study.

Researchers in US did a systematic re-view and meta-analysis of all randomisedtrials comparing the effectiveness of low-fat diets to other diets, including no diet, atimproving long-term weight loss (at least 1year) in non-pregnant adults.

They took into account the intensity ofthe diets which ranged from just pamph-lets or instructions at the beginning of theprogramme to intensive multi-compo-nent programmes including counsellingsessions, meetings with dieticians, fooddiaries, and cooking lessons.

Analysis of 53 studies involving 68,128adults showed no difference in the avera-ge weight loss between reduced-fat dietsand higher-fat diets. PTI

‘Low-fat diet futilefor weight loss’

Toronto: A close encounterwith Jupiter about four bil-lion years ago may have re-sulted in another planet’sejection from the solar sy-stem , scientists have found.

The existence of a fifth gi-ant gas planet at the time ofthe solar system’s formationwas first proposed in 2011, re-searchers said. For years,scientists have suspected theouster was either due to Sa-turn or Jupiter.

“Our evidence points toJupiter,” said Ryan Cloutier,a PhD candidate in Universi-ty of Toronto’s departmentof astronomy & astrophy-

sics and lead author of thestudy. Planet ejections occuras a result of a close planeta-ry encounter in which one ofthe objects accelerates somuch that it breaks free fromthe massive gravitational

pull of the Sun.Cloutier and his collea-

gues developed computer si-mulations based on modern-day trajectories of Callistoand Lapetus, the regular mo-ons orbiting around Jupiterand Saturn respectively.

They then measured thelikelihood of each one produ-cing its current orbit in theevent that its host planet wasresponsible for ejecting thehypothetical planet, an inci-dent which would have cau-sed significant disturbanceto each moon’s original orbit.Ultimately they came to theirconclusion on Jupiter. PTI

Jupiter bumped planet fromsolar system 4bn years ago

Washington: A recently une-arthed dinosaur bone has unvei-led a 66-million-year-old familysecret that tyrannosaurs, inclu-ding the T. rex, were not shy about eating their own kind, sci-entists say.

The tyrannosaur bone has pe-culiar teeth marks that stronglysuggest it was gnawed by anothertyrannosaur. “We were out inWyoming digging up dinosaurs

in the Lance Formation when wefound the bone,” said paleontolo-gist Matthew McLain. The groo-ves were clearly those of an ani-mal pulling the flesh off the bonein a direction perpendicular tothe bone, in the same way hu-mans eat a piece of fried chicken.But one groove stood out.

It was located at the largerend of the bone and containedsmaller parallel grooves caused

by the diner’s head turning, sothat the serrated edges of its te-eth dragged across the bone.

Serrated teeth rule out croco-diles and point directly to a the-ropod dinosaur like T. rex. Thefact that the only large theropodsfound in the Lance Formationare two tyrannosaurs—T. rex orNanotyrannus lancensis—eli-minates all interpretations butcannibalism, said McLain. PTI

66m yrs on, study reveals T. rex was a cannibal

Ralph Blumenthal

High in the skies overKazakhstan, space-age technology has re-

vealed an ancient mystery onthe ground.

Satellite pictures of a re-mote and treeless northernsteppe has revealed colossalearthworks — geometric figu-res of squares, crosses, linesand rings the size of several fo-otball fields, recognizable on-ly from the air and the oldestestimated at 8,000 years old.

The largest, near a Neolit-hic settlement, is a giant squa-re of 101raised mounds, its op-posite corners connected by adiagonal cross, covering moreterrain than the Great Pyra-mid of Cheops. Another is akind of three-limbed swasti-ka, its arms ending in zigzagsbent counterclockwise.

Described last year at aconference in Istanbul as uni-que and previously unstudi-ed, the earthworks, in theTurgai region of northernKazakhstan, number at least260 — mounds, trenches andramparts — arrayed in fivebasic shapes. Spotted on Go-ogle Earth in 2007 by a Kazakheconomist and archaeologyenthusiast, Dmitriy Dey, theso-called Steppe Geoglyphsremain deeply puzzling andlargely unknown.

“I’ve never seen anythinglike this,” said Compton J.Tucker, a senior biosphericscientist for Nasa. This week,Nasa put space photographyof the region on a task list forastronauts in the Internatio-

nal Space Station. “I don’t think they were

meant to be seen from the air,”Dey, 44, said, dismissing out-landish speculations invol-ving aliens and Nazis. (Longbefore Hitler, the swastikawas an ancient and near-uni-versal design element.) Hetheorized that the figures bu-ilt along straight lines on ele-vations were “horizontal ob-servatories to track the move-ments of the rising sun.”

Persis B. Clarkson, an ar-chaeologist said these figuresand similar ones in Peru andChile were changing viewsabout early nomads.

“The idea that foragers co-uld amass the numbers of pe-ople necessary to undertakelarge-scale projects—like cre-ating the Kazakhstan geoglyphs—has caused archaeologists to deeply rethink the nature and ti-ming of sophisticated large-scale human organization as one that predates settledand civilized societies,”Clarkson said. NYT NEWS SERVICE

Earthworks found inKazakhstan deepen

ancient mystery

One of the enormous earthworkconfigurations is known asUshtogaysky Square, namedafter a village in Kazakhstan

Digitalglobe, via NASA

PLANETARY ENCOUNTER

Reuters

© National Geographic Creative/Corbis

FAMILY SECRET OUT

iTOONS SUNIL AGARWAL & AJIT NINAN

THE TIMES OF INDIA, PUNE SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2015 19TIMES TRENDS

Times of India, Pune, October 31, 2015 Pp.19