Advantage Outsiders
With the balance tilted against it, the Taliban regime will soon find itself vanquished.

Lull Before The Storm
Amid calls for a quick and decisive end to the conflict, Afghanistan has been abuzz with talk of an imminent Northern Alliance ground war against the Taliban.

History's Pointers
The Soviet Union's 10 years campaign in Afghanistan — a conflict that led to a humiliating withdrawal and, some say, its eventual breakup
— can be a learning experience for
the US.

NEWSNOTES

Tradition Trumps: It's a huge boost to traditional systems of medicine. The first draft of the National Policy on Indian Systems of Medicine, released recently, encourages research on the fundamental principles of Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha. Intellectual property rights, protecting the knowledge on local health traditions and expanding infrastructure are on the cards. But most important, traditional medicine practices will be standardised, regulated, and data on safety monitored. If that's strictly enforced, quacks are on their way out.

BABY FILE

Reason to Quit: Smoking during pregnancy has long been linked with low infant birth weight and other ill effects. But merely cutting back will not help. Doctors at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Maryland, US, found low birth weight even among babies of women who smoked less than five cigarettes a day. The solution: quitting altogether.

Turtle Navigators: Migrating baby loggerhead turtles "read" the earth's magnetic field to swim across the Atlantic Ocean and back. Turtle genes recognise magnetic fields that mark regions from where the amphibian changes direction to stay on course. Its path follows a current called the North Atlantic gyre which has warm water and abundant food.

Vulnerable Eyes: Women who work with organic solvents on a regular basis during pregnancy are likely to give birth to babies with vision problems, including colour blindness, found a study by Dr Gideon Koren and his colleagues from the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. Solvents are present in paints, degreasing solutions and adhesives.

Curing Camera: A tiny camera may help treat breast cancer, a disease that kills millions of women. The micro-endoscope-as thin as a few strands of human hair-is inserted through the nipple and sends clear magnified images of the inside of the milk ducts to a video monitor. By detecting the earliest pre-cancerous changes in cells, the progression of the disease can be stopped, and a biopsy avoided. "This procedure is a revolutionary approach in the fight against breast cancer," says

Dr Nicholas Beechey-Newman of Guy's Hospital, London. "In the next three-four years, it may be possible to prevent breast cancer altogether."

Need Another Reason? Why bother with sex? For good scientific reasons, apparently. Sex, from nature's perspective, is a complicated, energy-consuming process of reproduction. Much easier to duplicate the genetic material and split it into two-a process called asexual reproduction, which is followed by lower living beings. But sex, US scientists have now discovered, also provides a crucial advantage. It makes it easier to pass on the beneficial genetic changes and allows the species to drop their genetic "baggage" of harmful mutations behind. The result: better chances of survival in a changing world.

HEALTH
RENAL DISEASE

Dialysis Gets Cheaper

It's not due to lack of suitable treatment that patients with kidney failure die in India. It's usually lack of money. Kidneys are vital for the body-they clear the waste products that would otherwise become toxic. Every year, more than one lakh new patients reach the final stages of renal (kidney-related) diseases. Yet only 4,000 get kidney transplants. Another 5,000 settle for dialysis, where the kidney's role is fulfilled through artificial means.

The common procedure, haemodialysis, is very uncomfortable. In five-hour hospital sessions three times a week, the patient's blood is drained, cleansed by a machine outside the body, and returned to the body. This costs Rs 12,000-Rs 22,000 a month. A more comfortable option is peritoneal dialysis in which an abdominal membrane acts as a filtering device. Using local anaesthesia, a small plastic tube is inserted into the abdominal cavity and linked to two plastic bags outside the body. The first bag contains the dialysis fluid which empties into the cavity. Waste products from the body empty into this fluid, which then drains into the second bag. All this requires is regular replacement of the bags, a task that can easily be done at home. And now that the fluids are being manufactured in India, the price has dropped from more than Rs 40,000 to Rs 15,000 a month.

This procedure is safer for children and diabetics or heart disease patients, says A.K. Bhalla, senior consultant nephrologist at Delhi's Ganga Ram Hospital. It's also more affordable. But it is still a long way from being a treatment for the masses.

—Supriya Bezbaruah

MetroScape

Looking Glass

Mumbai Restaurant:
India Jones

Mumbai Puppetry Festival: Toccata

Bangalore Restaurant: Chung Wah

Kolkata Exhibition : Life Is Beautiful