Short Cuts

By Cristina Opdahl

Ultra-ridiculous

"It's a physiological impossibility," says Claudia Berryman-Shafer of the Million Mile Ultra Run, a race in which, at press time, she was in second place with roughly 992,000 miles to go. "An infant," she notes, "would have to run 20 miles a day" to finish the race in a lifetime. Well, to be precise, 27.4 miles a day. Still, the 49-year-old Berryman-Shafer (who has competed in the Leadville 100) and the Million Mile Ultra's other 194 racers log their mileage into the race's Web site (www.he.net/~mmahoney/ultra/million.htm). The event was dreamed up and is electronically managed by ultrarunner Matt Mahoney of Melbourne, Florida, who with his wife, Joan Joesting-Mahoney, is also competing in the Million Mile Ultra. He's in 66th place; she's in 96th. Participants have 100 years — between 7 p.m. E.S.T. December 31, 1996, and 7 p.m. E.S.T. December 31, 2096 — to go the distance. Latecomers to the race shouldn't fret too much. "So far," says Mahoney, "everyone is behind the 10,000-mile-per-year pace needed to finish."

Playing Rough
Last spring, upperclassmen on the women's lacrosse team at the State University of New York-Potsdam made freshman players chug until several got sick. The punishment for making the girls hurl? The team forfeited its first three games. But the real brutality award goes to three Kappa Kappa Gamma sisters at Indiana's DePauw University, who in the fall of 1997 were caught branding pledges' hips with lit cigarettes. Is girl-on-girl hazing on the rise? Hank Nuwer, author of two books on the subject, answers, "We can only say it's reported a heck of a lot more." But it's still reported to the same old sources: The above incidents came to authorities' attention after the abused girls told their moms.

Pregnant With Meaning
Last summer, a 15-person research expedition sponsored by SUMMA, an Ohio-based medical network, traveled to India to test the hypothesis that estrogen and progesterone are the agents that help oxygen to saturate the blood. (The more oxygen your lungs pull out of thin air, the better a mountaineer you can be.) But the expedition stumbled onto its best data when a member fell ill with pulmonary edema at 17,000 feet and had to be evacuated to a Ladakh hospital at 11,400 feet. While he waited for his colleague to recover, the expedition's chief, Steve Wood, decided to test 70 pregnant and 60 nonpregnant Ladakhi women who happened to be getting checkups. In the blood of the pregnant women, Wood found significantly higher levels of oxygen. (Another altitude study found progesterone levels among pregnant women to be 100 times greater than those among nonpregnant women.) But Wood says his best studies on gender and altitude have involved lab rats; above 14,000 feet, the females were superior. However, says Wood, "when we castrated the male rats, they felt better." Testosterone, Wood thinks, inhibits breathing. Ouch.

Bean Counter
John Stiles will know in September whether his seven-year quest to grow decaffeinated coffee beans has proved successful. The Honolulu geneticist, who has done the math on the millions of $3 tall-skim-decaf lattes consumed each year, claims that his method wipes caffeine out of the plant itself. (He feeds seedlings a gene that searches for and then suppresses the caffeine gene.) If he's right, Stiles will be the first to naturally produce joe that has no kick. The decaffeination process now in use involves zapping beans with hot carbon dioxide, which leaches out the caffeine, but also a lot of the flavor. Stiles claims that in an experiment on a small sample of coffee plants, caffeine levels were just one percent of those in untreated plants. This month, he'll test a whole greenhouse full of similarly tinkered-with fledglings. Meanwhile, the coffee industry currently spends about one billion dollars decaffeinating beans. Stiles has done that math, too.

What's Good Enough for Popeye ...
Spinach leaves, long celebrated by certain cartoon sailors and the makers of warm bacon dressing, may also be the whole-foods answer to disposing of 500,000 tons of stockpiled weapons. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have been dropping small amounts of pulverized spinach leaves into beakers filled with water. They then add pinches of TNT or the warhead ingredients RDX and HMX, and what do you know?: Enzymes in the spinach eat up the explosives in as little as an hour. Field tests for TNT digestion should happen by late 1999, but trials involving RDX and HMX are some time off. Should spinach fail to serve its country, researchers say another subject holds promise: buttermilk.

The Notch Problem
Orthopedic surgeons have long known that women athletes tear their ACLs (anterior cruciate ligaments), an excruciating injury borne by all too many skiers, five to 10 times more often than their male counterparts. Theories abound on why this is so: womankind's relatively diminutive hamstrings, or sluggish reflexes, or less than optimum conditioning. But a recently released five-year study at Methodist Sports Medicine Center in Indianapolis refutes them all, and establishes a cause-and-effect relationship between ACL-hobbled knees and women's thigh bones. Orthopedic surgeons measured the intercondylar notch — a channel at the bottom of the femur that contains the ACL — from femur to knee on 714 afflicted male and female patients. The doctors found the notches on the women to be a whopping two millimeters narrower. "So we don't think [the ruptures] can be avoided," says research coordinator Tinker Gray. "We did find that after reconstruction with a 10-millimeter graft, very few ACLs tore again."

Made from the Happiest Cows on Earth
How's this for a paradox? Treat your cows right — rotate them from pasture to pasture to keep the grass plentiful and their stress levels down, house them in large and airy pens — and then slaughter them and turn their hides into boots. Saguache is the brand name of what's being advertised as an eco-friendly boot, and the man behind it, Mel Coleman, also produces hormone- and antibiotic-free meat from the rest of the cows, which live on his ranch in Saguache County, Colorado. Manufacturing the Saguache is the Deep E. Co., where the blood runs green. Last fall, the company invited actor Woody Harrelson to design a boot, the Headwater Hiker, made from hemp. (It appeared in stores in March.) And the sole of the Saguache — the boot comes in a high-top ($98) and a low-top ($92) — is made in part from recycled tire rubber. According to Coleman, the leather is "blemish-free," because the livestock were treated so well. Tell it to the cows.

Giving New Meaning to "Alterations"
Jeremy Scott, a Missourian turned Paris fashion designer, has said he's been influenced by plastic surgery, the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, and Chernobyl. The effect of the last on his spring and fall lines is obvious; his clothes look like they were dosed by way too much radiation. Or something. Among his creations: a useless pants leg sewn onto a skirt and various takes on the straitjacket — his spring collection featured T-shirt dresses that pin the arms against the body. We acknowledge that one does not expect to be able to climb a talus slope while wearing haute couture, but Scott seems to have something against a woman walking in his clothes, let alone using her arms. Fashion critics don't quite know what to do with him. We do: Drop him in a cooling tower.

New Balance's Answer to Gucci's Stiletto
It's a nice symmetry: a nerdy shoe company surviving off of out-of-date shoes. Boston-based New Balance, which doesn't even name its shoes but assigns them model numbers, had sales topping $550 million worldwide in 1997, up 16 percent from the year before. The spurt is due, in part, to two shoes in its European line, the 572 and 576. The pigskin runners, which have been around for at least a decade, are all the rage in Europe and Japan following their appearance in Lucien Pellat-Finet's spring 1997 Paris runway show. U.S. retailers then started requesting the shoes, and New Balance grudgingly obliged, shipping an estimated 50,000 pairs stateside in late August — and issuing a release that said, "We will not be promoting the 576's in any way." It seems that New Balance so resolutely wants to be known as an athletic-shoe and not a fashion-shoe company that it's willing to forgo the potential crossover sales. "New Balance has always been reluctant to follow fashion trends," the release said. So why'd they give the shoes' colors names like Moulin rouge, blue thunder, shamrock, and scarlet feather? If you missed the August shipment, purple, wheatfield, and teal 576's are due to arrive in October.