Wednesday, November 5, 1997
Community Briefs
Banning bar smoke won’t burn up profits
Jumping into a fray that has pitted cigarette-wielding drinkers
against anti-smoking activists, an UC San Francisco researcher
recently published a study claiming that banning tobacco won’t hurt
business at pubs, brewhouses and bars.
As of Jan. 1, bars will join restaurants and other
establishments as smoke-free — a fate that has many bar owners
worried that profits will be hurt as smoking customers stay
home.
But according to a report by Stanton A. Glantz, a professor of
medicine in the Division of Cardiology at UCSF, and research
associate Lisa Smith, already existing local ordinances that make
bars smoke-free appear to have no impact on business. Their study
appears in the October issue of the American Journal of Public
Health, published this week.
"Legislators and government officials can enact health and
safety regulations to protect patrons and employees in restaurants
in bars from the toxins in secondhand tobacco smoke without fear of
adverse economic consequences," Glantz said.
Gardeners protest the stiff price of silence
Gardeners protesting a ban on gasoline-powered leaf blowers
marched on Los Angeles City Hall in their bare feet Tuesday,
contending the ordinance will force them into poverty.
About 200 demonstrators, wearing green T-shirts and carrying
picket signs, marched from the Los Angeles County Social Services
Department to City Hall.
"We walked barefoot to show that … they are virtually taking
our shoes and our shirts off our back," said Adrian Alvarez,
spokesman for the Association of Latin American Gardeners.
Gardeners contend that the ban will cost them time, money and
customers because electrical blowers and other devices are less
efficient.
The protest was staged on the city’s election day to emphasize
the law was approved without "the voice and opinions of the
taxpaying gardeners," Alvarez said.
The ordinance, passed in July, bans the use of the noisy
gas-powered blowers within 500 feet of a home with each violation a
misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000
fine.
Researchers find halo around the Milky Way
Scientists from UC Riverside joined researchers at other
universities in announcing the discovery of a huge cloud of
high-energy gamma-rays that form a halo extending into outer space
from the Milky Way.
The new, unexpected distribution of gamma rays, mapped by NASA’s
Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, forms an aurora many thousands of
light years thick and possibly surrounding the entire Milky Way,
the galaxy containing Earth, according to Dave Dixon, an assistant
research physicist at Riverside.
"Looking in any other wavelength, there is nothing out there
that should be obviously making gamma rays. These gamma rays are
providing the first evidence that some high energy process is
occurring out there," Dixon said.
The project’s scientists analyzed data collected by the
Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET), one of four
instruments aboard the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, which is
orbiting Earth on a satellite to measure and record invisible gamma
rays which cannot be detected on the ground because Earth’s
atmosphere absorbs them.
Gamma rays are of great interest to astrophysicists because they
may offer clues to some of the most violent events in the universe,
such as the process of a dying star becoming a supernova and the
birth of a galaxy.
Compiled from Bruin staff and wire reports.