World Vignettes

A mere slip of a girlISLAMABAD: A twelve-year-old girl living in Rawalpindi is just 20 inches in height, Pakistani press reports have said. ...

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A mere slip of a girl

ISLAMABAD: A twelve-year-old girl living in Rawalpindi is just 20 inches in height, Pakistani press reports have said. Sitting between a younger brother and sister of normal size, the girl whose name is Kanwal looked like a doll in a picture published by the Dawn newspaper yesterday.

“She was just six to seven inches in height at the time of birth and could be easily held in the palm of a hand,” the paper quoted Kanwal’s parents as saying. “Her bed was as tiny as a box of cigarettes,” they said. The report said some people revered Kanwal as divine and came to her to invoke her blessing. Doctors attributed the girl’s abnormal height to growth hormone imbalance and poor health of her mother, the newspaper said.

Home for Iceman

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BOLZANO: The famed man in the ice — the 5,300-year-old mummified remains of a neolithic hunter found in the Tyrolean Alps — went on public display for the first time yesterday at Bolzano’s new archaeological museum. Theiceman’s corpse, the object of seven years of intensive scientific scrutiny, is on display in a specially designed refrigerated case, where he rests at minus 20 degrees celsius to prevent his body from thawing and decomposing. Lighting is dim to protect the iceman’s tissues and he is visible only through a small visor in the case. The iceman is treated carefully to preserve his remains for scientists of the future to study.Also on exhibit are the clothing and tools found with the iceman by a pair of mountaineers in September 1991 who spotted his body protruding from the ice of a receding glacier at more than 10,000 feet elevation at the border between Austria and Italy.

The discovery electrified the scientific world. For the first time scientists could study the body of a stone age villager, fully outfitted and carrying with him the instruments of his daily life.

Right initials

NEW ORLEANS: Maybe names really will hurt you. People with initials such as ace or god are likely to live longerthan those whose names spell out words like ape, dud, rat or pig, a study suggests. The study, conducted by researchers from the University of California at San Diego, looked at 27 years’ worth of California death certificates. People with monograms such as `joy’ or `wow’ had a better chance of living longer and were less likely to commit suicide or die in an accident than those with neutral or meaningless initials such as jay or wlw, or those named, say, bum or ugh, said psychologist Nicholas Christenfeld.