viagra 7.via.0003004 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.sampa.com/louis-j-sheehan-esquire/blog

Four blue pills. Viagra. http://www.bebo.com/LouisS205

"Take one of these. You'll love it," the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes -- followed by a request for more pills.

For U.S. intelligence officials, this is how some crucial battles in Afghanistan are fought and won. While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country's roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations.

In their efforts to win over notoriously fickle warlords and chieftains, the officials say, the agency's operatives have used a variety of personal services. These include pocketknives and tools, medicine or surgeries for ailing family members, toys and school equipment, tooth extractions, travel visas, and, occasionally, pharmaceutical enhancements for aging patriarchs with slumping libidos, the officials said.

"Whatever it takes to make friends and influence people -- whether it's building a school or handing out Viagra," said one longtime agency operative and veteran of several Afghanistan tours. Like other field officers interviewed for this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity when describing tactics and operations that are largely classified.

Officials say these inducements are necessary in Afghanistan, a country where warlords and tribal leaders expect to be paid for their cooperation, and where, for some, switching sides can be as easy as changing tunics. If the Americans don't offer incentives, there are others who will, including Taliban commanders, drug dealers and even Iranian agents in the region.

The usual bribes of choice -- cash and weapons -- aren't always the best options, Afghanistan veterans say. Guns too often fall into the wrong hands, they say, and showy gifts such as money, jewelry and cars tend to draw unwanted attention.

"If you give an asset $1,000, he'll go out and buy the shiniest junk he can find, and it will be apparent that he has suddenly come into a lot of money from someone," said Jamie Smith, a veteran of CIA covert operations in Afghanistan and now chief executive of SCG International, a private security and intelligence company. "Even if he doesn't get killed, he becomes ineffective as an informant because everyone knows where he got it."

The key, Smith said, is to find a way to meet the informant's personal needs in a way that keeps him firmly on your side but leaves little or no visible trace.

"You're trying to bridge a gap between people living in the 18th century and people coming in from the 21st century," Smith said, "so you look for those common things in the form of material aid that motivate people everywhere."

Among the world's intelligence agencies, there's a long tradition of using sex as a motivator. Robert Baer, a retired CIA officer and author of several books on intelligence, noted that the Soviet spy service was notorious for using attractive women as bait when seeking to turn foreign diplomats into informants.

"The KGB has always used 'honey traps,' and it works," Baer said. For American officers, a more common practice was to offer medical care for potential informants and their loved ones, he said. "I remember one guy we offered an option on a heart bypass," Baer said.

For some U.S. operatives in Afghanistan, Western drugs such as Viagra were just part of a long list of enticements available for use in special cases. Two veteran officers familiar with such practices said Viagra was offered rarely, and only to older tribal officials for whom the drug would hold special appeal. While such sexual performance drugs are generally unavailable in the remote areas where the agency's teams operated, they have been sold in some Kabul street markets since at least 2003 and were known by reputation elsewhere.

"You didn't hand it out to younger guys, but it could be a silver bullet to make connections to the older ones," said one retired operative familiar with the drug's use in Afghanistan. Afghan tribal leaders often had four wives -- the maximum number allowed by the Koran -- and aging village patriarchs were easily sold on the utility of a pill that could "put them back in an authoritative position," the official said. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.sampa.com/louis-j-sheehan-esquire/blog

Both officials who described the use of Viagra declined to discuss details such as dates and locations, citing both safety and classification concerns.

The CIA declined to comment on methods used in clandestine operations. One senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the agency's work in Afghanistan said the clandestine teams were trained to be "resourceful and agile" and to use tactics "consistent with the laws of our country."

"They learn the landscape, get to know the players, and adjust to the operating environment, no matter where it is," the official said. "They think out of the box, take risks, and do what's necessary to get the job done."

Not everyone in Afghanistan's hinterlands had heard of the drug, leading to some awkward encounters when Americans delicately attempted to explain its effects, taking care not to offend their hosts' religious sensitivities.

Such was the case with the 60-year-old chieftain who received the four pills from a U.S. operative. According to the retired operative who was there, the man was a clan leader in southern Afghanistan who had been wary of Americans -- neither supportive nor actively opposed. The man had extensive knowledge of the region and his village controlled key passages through the area. U.S. forces needed his cooperation and worked hard to win it, the retired operative said.

After a long conversation through an interpreter, the retired operator began to probe for ways to win the man's loyalty. A discussion of the man's family and many wives provided inspiration. Once it was established that the man was in good health, the pills were offered and accepted.

Four days later, when the Americans returned, the gift had worked its magic, the operative recalled.

"He came up to us beaming," the official said. "He said, 'You are a great man.' "

"And after that we could do whatever we wanted in his area." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

bigger 5.big.002003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Progressively larger brains evolved in primates of all stripes, not just humans. We can thank a common capacity for solving a broad range of problems, from coordinating social alliances to inventing tools, according to a new study.http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com

This conclusion challenges a popular theory that big, smart brains arose primarily because they afforded advantages when it came to negotiating complex social situations during human evolution.

"The ability to learn from others, invent new behaviors, and use tools may have [also] played pivotal roles in primate-brain evolution," say Simon M. Reader of McGill University in Montreal and Kevin N. Laland of the University of Cambridge in England. In an upcoming report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the two zoologists chronicle links between an array of intelligent behaviors and enhanced brain size in primates.http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com

Reader and Laland examined approximately 1,000 scientific studies of behavior in 116 of the world's 203 known primate species. They identified 553 instances of animals discovering new solutions to survival-related problems, 445 observations of individuals learning skills and acquiring information from others, and 607 episodes of tool use.

The researchers then consulted previously obtained data on brain size relative to body size in different primates. In particular, they focused on the volume of the structures that make up what scientists call the executive brain, a frontal region thought to be crucial for complex thinking.

Species that have the proportionately largest executive brains are the ones that most often innovate, learn from others, and use tools, Reader and Laland contend. These three facets of intelligence vary together as primate brains enlarge, they say. There's no evidence in any species of an evolutionary trade-off between these traits, such as an increase in innovation accompanying a decline in social learning.

A related report by neuroscientist Barbara L. Finlay of Cornell University and her colleagues concluded that different brain regions in mammals enlarged all together during mammalian evolution, not in piecemeal fashion related to specific functions. Whole-brain evolution was driven by changes in the timing of early brain development in individuals, says Finlay. In all species, late-generated structures�including the executive brain�have grown the largest, Finlay's team asserted in the April 2001 Behavioral and Brain Sciences.http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com

Reader and Laland provide "important new evidence" that wide-ranging thinking skills shared by many primate species encouraged the evolution of large brains, comment psychologist Robert M. Seyfarth and biologist Dorothy L. Cheney, both of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, in a comment published with the new report.

They suggest that intellectual accomplishments unique to people, such as language use, may have played a smaller role in the evolution of our sizable brains than has often been thought.http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com

dead zone 6.dea.10010 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . For years scientists have known that nitrogen and phosphorus, which commonly enter freshwater lakes in chemical fertilizers, play a role in eutrophication—the process by which algal blooms, turbidity, and oxygen deficiencies turn a lake into a dead zone, largely devoid of animal life. A recent paper, published in August in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, presents a more nuanced picture. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com In a 37-year experiment with a lake in northern Ontario, scientists demonstrated that controlling phosphorus in particular is the key to reversing eutrophication.

The researchers polluted the lake with nitrogen and phosphorus over the years, gradually decreasing the amount of added nitrogen but keeping the input level of phosphorus constant. For the last 16 years they added only phosphorus. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com Algae continued to flourish in proportion to the amount of phosphorus dumped into the water, even without nitrogen.

The experiment revealed the dynamics of eutrophication. Cyanobacteria, the blue-green algae responsible for the most common algal blooms, are nitrogen fixing—meaning that they get nitrogen from the air. So eliminating nitrogen from the water by controlling nitrogen-based fertilizer doesn’t solve the problem. “Nitrogen is important in determining which species grow,” says Robert Hecky, a coauthor of the paper and a professor of lake ecology at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. “If we just control nitrogen, we’ll merely shift the balance in favor of the species that can fix nitrogen, giving the same algal biomass.” To bring dead zones back to life, phosphorus must be controlled. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

tree 7.tre.000100 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

In Libby, Mont., mining of asbestos-contaminated vermiculite—a natural insulating material—sickened or killed many workers and townspeople in recent decades. Now, a study finds that even 16 years after the vermiculite mine closed, area trees hold substantial amounts of asbestos, rendering them hazardous to a separate group of workers.

Logging is a major employer for people around Libby. With asbestos a potential contaminant in dust, Tony J. Ward of the University of Montana in Missoula and his colleagues wondered whether asbestos from the mining operations might have settled on local trees. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan

Ward, an atmospheric chemist, notes that his team found between 40 million and 530 million asbestos fibers per gram of bark on trees within 4 miles of the mine—"concentrations that are pretty staggering." Even 15 miles from the mine, but near a railway siding where trains took on vermiculite, tree bark holds up to 19 million fibers per gram, his team reports in the Aug. 15 issue of Science of the Total Environment. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise

Not only loggers but also locals who cut and burn wood for home heating face a risk from the fibers, Ward worries. He and his colleagues say that the findings also suggest that people who live far away from Libby but along former transportation routes for the vermiculite might face a health threat.

poops 44.poo.1020 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

You might think these scientists were potty training this whale shark based on their level of excitement when the giant fish (the world’s largest) finally had a bowel movement. The scientists, like some proud parents, even captured the moment on film. Researcher Mark Meekan described the rare poop, which he collected and stored in tiny vials, as “scientific gold” for the clues it would contain about the shark’s diet. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com

The researchers are studying the whale shark (Rhinsodon typus), a gentle cousin of the great white shark, to learn about the species’ mysterious feeding habits and migration patterns. DNA analysis of the poop confirmed that whale sharks, which can grow up to 12 meters long, sustain themselves on tiny red crab larvae. This also explains why they travel to Christmas Island, just south of Indonesia, where millions of red crabs spawn each year.http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com/

The researchers are also attaching temporary cameras and GPS trackers to the backs of whale sharks to get a whale-shark-eye’s view of their daily movements in deep waters. Some of the footage will be aired as part of a new BBC documentary on the whale shark. If only the researchers would take a cue from the puppy cam and start. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

Lucy

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Anthropologists generally regard an upright gait as essential for membership in the human evolutionary family. However, some of our earliest ancestors may have favored knuckle-walking on all fours, much as chimpanzees and gorillas do, according to a study in the March 23 Nature.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Brian G. Richmond and David S. Strait, both anthropologists at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., examined previously found wrist bones from several Australopithecus species. A. anamensis and A. afarensis—the latter represented by the famous skeleton known as Lucy—had wrists capable of locking the hands in place during knuckle-walking, the scientists say. A. anamensis lived just prior to 4 million years ago; A. afarensis existed from 4 million to 3 million years ago.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Later human ancestors, such as A. africanus, had flexible wrists unsuited to knuckle-walking, Richmond and Strait hold. These findings support genetic evidence for a close evolutionary linkage of humans to chimps and gorillas, they contend.

barium 662.bar.7 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The periodic table of elements in Justin Urgitis's office is unusual. It contains the same notations for all the elements, including carbon, silicon and germanium, in the same positions, as does any other. But his table at pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Inc., also boasts lavish pictures of his own samples of carbon, silicon and germanium on it, thanks to a large (and growing) collection at his home in Uncasville, Conn. In fact, it allows him to use that age-old line: "Want to come upstairs and see my barium?"

A small but growing number of element collectors—enabled by the vast marketplace of the Internet—can actually extend such invitations. Elements-seller Dave Hamric of Metallium, Inc., says he has about 2,000 names on his mailing list. Using the periodic table as a shopping list, they gather elements used either in technical applications or compounds mixed with other elements or in nearly pure form, amassing collections that can be beautiful, instructive and representative of the fundamental components of our universe.

Urgitis' longtime interest in chemistry is typical of his fellow element collectors. "In high school, I loved going to class and seeing the teacher's demonstration of something in the lab, maybe blowing something up," he says. He often proposed dangerous experiments that his teacher nixed, such as producing nitrogen triiodide, a contact explosive, in his high school lab. Then, in college, where he earned a degree in forensic chemistry, he began to acquire iodine, magnesium, aluminum, cobalt and other elements in pure or nearly pure form. The samples of these common elements can cost as little as a few dollars. http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com

One day, "it occurred to me that it would be fun to have samples of all of them," he remembers. He found some Web sites devoted to element collecting, and over the past five years has assembled a hoard of nearly every one that it is possible to acquire—82 of the 118 known or presumed elements, by his count though this number varies from collector to collector. (The remaining elements are too radioactive, expensive and/or rare to collect even in small quantities.)

Thirty years ago, before the Internet, an element collector could not have made such rapid progress. Sales venues like eBay now list thousands of specimens for sale at any one time, making collecting far less burdensome than searching in person through chemical supply stores and curiosity shops. "I have every stable element on the periodic table, plus thorium and radium," Urgitis says, and he treats these mildly radioactive elements carefully. http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com

Some collectors still acquire a few specimens for the collection the old-fashioned way. They pull tungsten filaments from lightbulbs, cannibalize silicon chips, find sulfur compounds in pharmacies, chip magnesium from campfire starters, and buy neodymium magnets. Or, like Heather Harrison, a mechanical engineer in Salt Lake City, they extract radioactive americium from smoke detectors. Harrison is a collector of old recordings, wine, and antiques (she spoke over a collectible telephone from the 1920s when interviewed for this article)—"the sort of person you'd read about someday being killed in an avalanche of her own collections," she says. "For me elements are just a part of that pattern," one she memorized in the form of the periodic table as a child. http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com

She began seriously acquiring elements three years ago and is currently about 15 specimens short of making her collection as complete as it can get. "I'm missing osmium, iridium and some of the remaining platinum-group metals," she says. Retailers typically make such precious elements affordable by selling them in minute quantities. Most collectors interested in buying the rare metal rhenium, for instance—as Harrison recently did—will have to be satisfied with a tiny amount, because its price in nearly pure form has fluctuated around $10,000 per ounce.

Harrison keeps her mercury, which is toxic, in a bottle cradled in foam and sealed in an airtight case. Her specimens of rubidium and cesium would ignite or explode with exposure to air, so she purchased them entombed within sturdy acrylic blocks. Many easily available elements such as sodium and fluorine are dangerous if touched, inhaled or allowed to combine with others. Collectors reduce the risks by researching the toxicity and dangers of every element they acquire, keeping their baubles out of the reach of pets and children, and adding to their collections in small quantities.

"You have to research every one of them for toxicity," says Harrison, who uses the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics as a guide. "Risks can be managed, but you need to understand what you have. The vast majority of elements are quite safe."

Given the perceived dangers, she does not share her enthusiasm for elements with everyone. "If I talk to people who are not scientifically inclined or are afraid of science, I might not want to say anything about it," she says. "They might get the idea that I'm a mad scientist who cares nothing about safety. I may be a mad scientist, but I'm far too safety conscious to be a real mad scientist." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

For these element collectors the risks are just part of the fun. "There are only a small number of icons that are universally recognized," says Theodore Gray, an element-collecting guru and Illinois software developer who manages a spectacular element resource at periodictable.com. "The periodic table is one of them. We don't often think of it as something populated by real objects, and it's a revelation when you can see it's made of real stuff, not just words printed in the table." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire