Tame your brain to keep your cool
28 October 2006
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IT SEEMS that emotional self-control really does come from within.
Previous studies have shown that people can learn to control the activity levels of specific brain regions to alter, for example, pain levels, when shown real-time "neurofeedback" from fMRI brain images. Now a similar approach may help psychopathic criminals increase their emotional fluency.
Niels Birbaumer and Ranganatha Sitaram from the University of Tübingen in Germany found that by showing healthy volunteers the activity levels of the insula, a brain region important in emotional processing, represented in real time as a thermometer bar on a screen, the volunteers could control their emotional responses.
After four training sessions they had learned to raise and lower their insula activity levels, in turn changing how they rated the emotional quality of disturbing or neutral images.
Three psychopathic prison inmates who lacked a normal insula response trained the same way. After four days, one appeared to have learned to raise his insula activity towards more normal levels. It opens a potential avenue for treating emotional disorders such as psychopathy or social phobia, the team told a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia, last week.

Think Twice

Cosmetic surgery special:
When looks can kill

19 October 2006

Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. Rachel Nowak

Last year, 291,000 American women had bags implanted in their breasts, 324,000 Americans had fat vacuumed out of their bodies, and 231,000 had fat, skin and muscle cut from around their eyes. Add less common operations such as buttock lifts, pectoral implants and vaginal rejuvenations, as well as "minimally invasive" procedures such as Botox injections, and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons estimates that Americans underwent at least 10.2 million cosmetic surgery procedures last year. Cosmetic surgery has gone mainstream.
Like any other surgical procedure, cosmetic operations can never be completely free of risk. Although anyone contemplating cosmetic surgery is likely to have talked over with their surgeon the risks to their physical health, there are some forms of ill health associated with the procedures that are far less likely to be mentioned. In particular, people who go under the knife in the quest for a more attractive body or face are more likely than the average person to be suffering from psychiatric problems. There is mounting evidence that those who choose to undergo cosmetic surgery are more likely to commit suicide. What isn't known is just how much people's mental health is being placed at risk by the burgeoning nip and tuck culture.
A related question is whether cosmetic surgery brings any long-term mental health benefits. After all, implicit in the advertisements and promotional TV shows is the promise not merely of bigger breasts or flatter stomachs, but also the idea of a psychological lift. "We have to believe that cosmetic surgery will improve our self-esteem and body image, and make us feel better about ourselves. If not, we're wasting an awful lot of time, effort and money," says David Sarwer of the Center forHuman Appearance and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia. Yet while cosmetic surgery is booming, research into the mental well-being of recipients has not kept pace, says Katharine Phillips, a psychiatrist at Brown Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island.
The results of the few quality studies that have been done are equivocal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, cosmetic surgery patients are more likely than average to have a poor body image. More striking is Sarwer's finding that 18 per cent of a sample of patients having cosmetic surgery were taking drugs to treat a psychiatric condition, typically an antidepressant (Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, vol 114, p 1927). Only 5 per cent of patients undergoing non-cosmetic plastic surgery were taking similar drugs.
That in itself doesn't mean cosmetic surgery is a bad idea, says Sarwer. These patients also invest more than others in their appearance, fitness and health, and the greater use of psychiatric medicines may be a sign that they pay equal attention to their mental health.
Short-term satisfaction
Numerous studies have found that most patients seem satisfied with their procedures, at least in the short term, and surgery might even improve body image. A 2002 study led by Thomas Cash of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, found a woman's perception of her body image improves for at least two years after she has had breast implants, while a 2005 study of general cosmetic procedures by Sarwer's team found it improves for at least one year (Aesthetic Surgery Journal, vol 25, p 263). Whether such improvements in body image last longer than a few years is not known, and studies of patients' self esteem, depression rates and perceived quality of life are inconclusive.
However, findings from epidemiological studies of a link between cosmetic surgery and suicide are firmer and more disturbing. Five recent studies, including a US study of over 13,000 women who received breast implants and another from Canada of 24,000 (American Journal of Epidemiology, vol 164, p 334), set out to investigate the alleged link between silicone breast implants and cancers, autoimmune diseases and other disorders. Though they failed to confirm any such connection, another striking link did emerge: women who have received breast implants are two to three times as likely to kill themselves as those who have not. "The only consistent finding from all the studies has been the unexpected one of suicide," says Joseph K. McLaughlin, director of the International Epidemiology Institute in Rockville, Maryland, who ran some of the studies.
The suicide risk revealed by these studies could turn out to be an underestimate, as deaths due to suicides are frequently attributed to other causes. For example, an update to the US study this year found that women with breast implants also have a higher risk of suffering a fatal road accident and some of those deaths could be suicides, suggests study leader Louise Brinton of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland (Epidemiology, vol 17, p 162). Meanwhile, McLaughlin has been re-examining death notices of Swedish women with implants. He says that early indications suggest that suicide may turn out to be even more common than reported in these women (BMJ, vol 326, p 527).
Other surgical cosmetic procedures may also be associated with a suicide risk, although it has yet to be quantified for most of them. The largest mortality study, conducted in Canada, found the suicide risk was almost doubled for the 25,000 women who received breast implants and 16,000 women who underwent other cosmetic procedures. A Danish study also found a moderate increase in suicide risk in breast reduction patients (Archives of Internal Medicine, vol 164, p 2450).
There is also anecdotal evidence to suggest that it's not just women who are at risk. According to Leroy Young, a plastic surgeon in private practice in St Louis, Missouri, the patients most prone to violence against themselves, and their surgeons, are young, narcissistic males who have had nose or penis surgery. "There's a plastic surgery aphorism - don't operate on the male mid-line," he says.
Trying to get at the reasons behind this increased risk of suicide is difficult. Some commentators even argue that the findings so far may not be relevant to women currently considering breast implants, as most of the women in the studies got their implants decades ago. "It's a very different world now," says James Wells, a plastic surgeon in private practice in Long Beach, California. "The implants are better, how we assess the patients is better, and implant failure rate is lower." This does not reassure epidemiologists such as Brinton and McLaughlin, who have continued to search for clues to what is behind the increased risk of suicide.
One possibility - admittedly very remote, but not yet ruled out - is that leaks from implants can alter women's brain chemistry, triggering suicide in some. Another idea is that women with breast implants commit suicide more often because they are also more likely to use drugs or alcohol. The findings of the US study are consistent with that hypothesis, as it found that women who had breast implants were more likely than other women to die for reasons related to drug and alcohol use.
A more plausible explanation is that women who receive implants have personality traits or psychiatric disorders that go undetected by surgeons or are ignored by them, and that these put the women at risk of suicide. This view is backed up by the Danish study, which discovered that 8 per cent of women who had breast implants had earlier been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, the most common diagnoses including "neurosis and personality disorders" and "substance or alcohol abuse". Half the women with breast implants who committed suicide had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital before their surgery. It is unclear whether these women were predisposed to suicide and were tipped over the edge by a poor response to cosmetic surgery. "There are some who contend that patients who receive implants demonstrate a host of psychological problems that put them at risk for eventual suicide," says Brinton. "Whether this is the sole explanation or whether patient dissatisfaction after the operation is also involved is not yet clarified."
Another condition that is common among people having cosmetic surgery is body dysmorphic disorder or "imagined ugliness".

Marriage

Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of American households, have finally slipped into a minority, according to an analysis of new census figures by The New York Times.
Lisa Weiss, a social worker, and Jonathan Bander, an accountant, are living together in New York City and are planning to marry in May.
The American Community Survey, released this month by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples — with and without children — just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier.
The numbers by no means suggests marriage is dead or necessarily that a tipping point has been reached. The total number of married couples is higher than ever, and most Americans eventually marry. But marriage has been facing more competition. A growing number of adults are spending more of their lives single or living unmarried with partners, and the potential social and economic implications are profound.
“It just changes the social weight of marriage in the economy, in the work force, in sales of homes and rentals, and who manufacturers advertise to,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research group. “It certainly challenges the way we set up our work policies.”
While the number of single young adults and elderly widows are both growing, Professor Coontz said, “we have an anachronistic view as to what extent you can use marriage to organize the distribution and redistribution of benefits.”
Couples decide to live together for many reasons, but real estate can be as compelling as romance.
“Owning three toothbrushes and finding that they are always at the wrong house when you are getting ready to go to bed wears on you,” said Amanda Hawn, a 28-year-old writer who set up housekeeping near San Francisco with her boyfriend, Nate Larsen, a real estate analyst, after shuttling between his apartment and one she shared with a friend. “Moving in together has simplified life,” Ms. Hawn said.
The census survey estimated that 5.2 million couples, a little more than 5 percent of households, were unmarried opposite-sex partners. An additional 413,000 households were male couples, and 363,000 were female couples. In all, nearly one in 10 couples were unmarried. (One in 20 households consisted of people living alone).
And the numbers of unmarried couples are growing. Since 2000, those identifying themselves as unmarried opposite-sex couples rose by about 14 percent, male couples by 24 percent and female couples by 12 percent.
Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said gay couples were undercounted because many gay people were reluctant to disclose their sexual orientation. But he said that inhibition seemed to be fading.
“I would say the increase is due to people feeling more comfortable disclosing that they are gay or lesbian and living with a partner,” he said.
The survey did not ask about sexual orientation, but its questionnaire was designed to distinguish partners from roommates. A partner was defined as “an adult who is unrelated to the householder, but shares living quarters and has a close personal relationship with the householder.”
Some of the biggest gains in unmarried couples were recorded in unexpected places. In the rural Midwest, the number of households made up of male partners rose 77 percent since 2000.
The survey revealed wide disparities in household composition by place. The proportion of married couples ranged from more than 69 percent in Utah County, Utah, which includes Provo, to 26 percent in Manhattan, which has a smaller share of married couples than almost anyplace in the country. But Manhattan registered a 1.2 percent increase in married couples since 2000, in contrast to the rest of New York City and many other places.
Among counties, the highest proportion of unmarried opposite-sex partners was in Mendocino, Calif., where they made up nearly 11 percent of all households.
The highest share of male couples was in San Francisco, where, according to the census, they accounted for nearly 2 percent of all households. In Manhattan, they made up 1 percent of households. Hampshire County, Mass., home to Northampton, had the highest proportion of female couples, at 1.7 percent. Some of the highest numbers of unmarried couples were recorded in the South, which as defined by the census, has the largest population of any region.

Dieting

October 7, 2006
No More Mystery Meat
By MARCELLE S. FISCHLER
I miss the cookies and the fries,” Max Gold-Landzberg said.
Sitting in the cafeteria at John Jay High School in Cross River, N.Y., Max, 17, a senior, chomped on a roast beef and cheese sandwich on a whole wheat roll.
Last year he would have had the sandwich on a regular roll, Max said, but white-bread products are no longer sold in this Westchester County school, which has introduced some of the most sweeping menu changes in the region. Even the pizza now has a whole wheat crust. And instead of Max’s favorite potato chips, there is white cheddar popcorn.
“It’s a good idea because obesity and all that is a serious problem,” Max said. He wasn’t enticed, though, by the healthier choices on the hot food line like herb-roasted chicken and stir-fried veggies.
Neither were his table mates, who were grumbling about the new higher prices — to $3 from $1.75 for a hot lunch and to $4.75 from $3.95 for a roast beef sandwich — as well as the revamped menu.
Across the table from Max, Alex Magid, 16, who was brown-bagging it, polished off a salami, pepperoni and Parmesan sandwich on a white roll, a few Double Stuf Oreos and some pretzels, washed down with a Snapple Iced Tea.
Last year Alex bought lunch at school, at least sometimes. Now he brown-bags it daily. “I have loved the French fries ever since freshman year, and now they are gone for my senior year,” he said.
Faced with a new federal law requiring school districts to outline nutrition goals this year, schools across the region have been scrambling to eliminate trans fats, toss their deep fryers and reduce the overall sugar content in food, while still keeping their pickiest clients — the students — on board.
The federal law, which took effect on July 1, required public school districts around the country that receive government subsidies for meals to develop “wellness policies” outlining nutrition and exercise goals before classes began this fall. Connecticut has taken further steps by banning sugary drinks from cafeterias and vending machines in kindergarten to grade-12 school buildings. New Jersey will do the same by next fall, along with forbidding schools to sell anything that lists sugar in any form as a principal ingredient. New York has been slower to adopt such legislation, but some school districts, under pressure from parents to revamp their menus, are not waiting for state regulations.
In many lunchrooms, school food directors have taken up the challenge. French fries are baked, if they haven’t disappeared entirely. Vending machines are being restocked with bottled water and juice instead of Gatorade. Snacks like baked soy and fruit chips are replacing deep-fried potato chips. Soft pretzels are shrinking; frozen-fruit bars fill the Chipwich racks.
John Jay and other schools in the Katonah-Lewisboro district have gone so far as to substitute vegetable frittatas and whole wheat vegetable lasagna for hamburgers and French fries. John Jay’s cafeteria this year also eliminated processed foods, trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup, and stocked the salad bar with beans, nuts and low-fat dressings. (After trying to add tofu, however, the school had to drop it when it went uneaten.)
“The federal policy date gave us a goal post,” said Mary Ann Petrilena, a member of the district’s food committee, made up of teachers, administrators, parents and students. The committee sent out a districtwide survey last winter and received more than 2,200 responses.
“The feedback was overwhelmingly, ‘yes, the community would like to see healthier foods in the cafeteria, and yes, the community would be willing to pay more for healthier food,’ ” Ms. Petrilena said.
Few districts have done as much as Katonah-Lewisboro. Local school boards vary enormously in how they are interpreting the federal mandate, said Dr. Susan Rubin, founder of the Westchester Coalition for Better School Food.
“Some school districts have taken this to heart and made some significant changes, and other school districts have done nothing but a little window dressing,” Dr. Rubin said.
On Long Island, there are also wide variations, said Josephine Connolly-Schoonen, a registered dietitian and assistant clinical professor of family medicine at Stony Brook University, who is working with 93 schools to add substance to their wellness policies.
“Each school district develops its own policy; that is only a general statement,” Ms. Connolly-Schoonen said. The Heart Links program, financed by the New York State Health Department, helps districts make it work — for example, by suggesting that a school limit the amount of sugar in snacks to 15 grams per serving, about the amount in three Pepperidge Farm Double Chocolate Milano cookies.
Some districts are easing into the transition by offering baked chicken nuggets and turkey tacos in elementary and middle schools, but tiptoeing around rules in high schools, where students are more likely to balk.
At the high schools in Norwalk, Conn., where a new food service, Whitson’s Culinary Group, was hired to improve nutrition in line with a new policy passed by the school board last spring, themed food stations were introduced, with soup and salad, deli wraps, pizza, Mexican dishes and hot dishes like eggplant rollatini and double beef hot dogs with a side of Tater Tots. White bread is still on the menu, but being phased out.
In New Jersey, where school menus, starting next September, will be among the most tightly regulated in the nation.

Brazil´s Elections

October 3, 2006
News Analysis
In Brazil Balloting, Leader Finds His Base May Turn to Sand
By LARRY ROHTER
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct. 2 — Until the very end, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil was predicting victory in the first round in his campaign for re-election.
He was wrong, and now he faces what promises to be the most draining, potentially dangerous campaign of his long career, against an opponent he and many others had discounted.
Mr. da Silva, a 60-year-old former factory worker and labor leader who has been beleaguered by one scandal after another for nearly two years, polled 48.65 percent of the vote in the presidential election on Sunday, short of the majority he needed to avoid a runoff on Oct. 29.
That outcome assured a second chance for Geraldo Alckmin of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, who won 41.6 percent of the vote.
“This is going to be an interesting second round — clarifying, I hope,” a chastened Mr. da Silva said Monday afternoon at a news conference in Brasília. “I have to convince the people.”
Mr. da Silva had appeared to be on his way to a resounding victory until mid-September, when the police caught operatives of his leftist Workers Party trying to buy a contrived dossier they apparently thought would incriminate Mr. Alckmin’s party in a kickback scandal. That skullduggery, which Mr. da Silva says supporters carried out without his approval or knowledge, put him on the defensive, where he remains.
“This second round is starting with Lula declining and Alckmin rising, which could lead to even more surprises if it continues,” said Rubens Figueiredo, a political analyst and consultant in São Paulo. “Public opinion has shifted in a short time because of the dossier case, which still hasn’t run its course.”
As a result, the second round that Mr. da Silva neither wanted nor expected promises to be extraordinarily hard-fought and full of contrasts. The differences are not so much of ideas — both parties have been fighting for the same space left of center since Mr. da Silva tacked toward the center in order to win in 2002 — but of personality and political style.
Mr. da Silva, who has been a candidate in all five of Brazil’s presidential elections since a military dictatorship ended in 1985, is excitable, voluble and charismatic, the poor peasant lad who has made good and wants everyone to know it.
Mr. Alckmin, a mild-mannered 53-year-old anesthesiologist, is none of that, which was originally considered a liability but now looks attractive to voters who say they yearn for honesty and competence.
“Put a cassock on Alckmin and he’d look just like a priest from a small-town parish,” said Jairo Nicolau, a political science professor at Candido Mendes University, in Rio de Janeiro.
“Or to put it another way, he talks like that brilliant but boring professor that everyone remembers from school, the kind of guy who knows the price of a square meter of asphalt and really likes the details of administration.”
This is the third time that Mr. da Silva is competing in a second round, but the first time as the incumbent. In contrast with the outcome in 2002, when he won nearly everywhere and ended up with more than 60 percent of the vote, he faces a situation in which 11 of the country’s 27 states voted in favor of his rival in the first round, including all the states in the industrialized, more prosperous south.
The most unpredictable factor in the vote, however, is what Tereza Cruvinel, a columnist for the daily O Globo, calls “the police dimension” of the campaign. The federal police are still investigating the case, and every day seems to bring another round of headlines that further incriminate operatives of Mr. da Silva’s party and damage his image.
“The longer this drags on, the more the opposition has a banner to exploit,” Mr. Nicolau said. “Lula needs to bring the campaign to his strong area, what he has achieved, and he can’t do that right now. This needs to be resolved as quickly as possible, because if it goes on for another 10 or 15 days, it is going to be devastating for him, or even lethal.”
Mr. Alckmin knows that, and has already begun hammering away at Mr. da Silva and his entourage, saying his own victory would mean “ethics defeating corruption.” In an interview published Monday, he also insinuated that a cover-up was under way to protect Mr. da Silva and others close to him until after the election.
“The problem is not just the purchase of the dossier, which is itself extremely grave,” Mr. Alckmin said in the interview, in O Estado de São Paulo. “It is lamentable that 15 days later, the origins of the money, the origins of the dollars, the holders of the bank accounts are not known. Nothing has been explained.”
The image of piles of neatly wrapped American dollars and Brazilian reals stacked on a table, published in newspapers one day before the vote, resonated powerfully throughout Brazil.
As one newspaper columnist pointed out, the $792,000 involved would be enough to feed for a month 28,000 of the families enrolled in the Family Allowance program, the backbone of Mr. da Silva’s efforts to aid the poor.
“If the electoral tribunal permits it, you’re going to see that image over and over again in Alckmin’s television advertisements,” said Mr. Figueiredo, the political analyst.
Mr. da Silva’s campaign advisers say they hope to shift the focus away from the dossier, which the president compared in his news conference on Monday to shooting himself in the foot. They want to focus on the economy, which is stable, if growing slowly; inflation, which has been contained; the minimum wage, which has risen, and social welfare programs like the Family Allowance.
“The president’s orientation is to continue showing what we’ve done and to compare that with the previous government,” Tarso Genro, one of the few remaining close advisers to Mr. da Silva who has not been forced to resign, indicted, expelled from Congress or investigated by the police, told reporters in Brasília on Sunday night. “There’s going to be a lot of debate now that it’s not an unequal debate of three against one.”
At the last minute, Mr. da Silva pulled out of a debate with his three main opponents last week.
This time, though, Mr. da Silva has to take part in debates, “no matter what the dangers,” Mr. Figueiredo said. “The risks are higher for him and the situation favors Alckmin, because he’s not carrying the ethical burden that Lula is, but Lula has to show he does not disrespect voters.”

Brazil´s Plane Crash

October 3, 2006
On the Road
Colliding With Death at 37,000 Feet, and Living
By JOE SHARKEY
SÃO JOSE DOS CAMPOS, Brazil, Oct. 1 — It had been an uneventful, comfortable flight.
With the window shade drawn, I was relaxing in my leather seat aboard a $25 million corporate jet that was flying 37,000 feet above the vast Amazon rainforest. The 7 of us on board the 13-passenger jet were keeping to ourselves.
Without warning, I felt a terrific jolt and heard a loud bang, followed by an eerie silence, save for the hum of the engines.
And then the three words I will never forget. “We’ve been hit,” said Henry Yandle, a fellow passenger standing in the aisle near the cockpit of the Embraer Legacy 600 jet.
“Hit? By what?” I wondered. I lifted the shade. The sky was clear; the sun low in the sky. The rainforest went on forever. But there, at the end of the wing, was a jagged ridge, perhaps a foot high, where the five-foot-tall winglet was supposed to be.
And so began the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life. I would be told time and again in the next few days that nobody ever survives a midair collision. I was lucky to be alive — and only later would I learn that the 155 people aboard the Boeing 737 on a domestic flight that seems to have clipped us were not.
Investigators are still trying to sort out what happened, and how — our smaller jet managed to stay aloft while a 737 that is longer, wider and more than three times as heavy, fell from the sky nose first.
But at 3:59 last Friday afternoon, all I could see, all I knew, was that part of the wing was gone. And it was clear that the situation was worsening in a hurry. The leading edge of the wing was losing rivets, and starting to peel back.
Amazingly, no one panicked. The pilots calmly starting scanning their controls and maps for signs of a nearby airport, or, out their window, a place to come down.
But as the minutes passed, the plane kept losing speed. By now we all knew how bad this was. I wondered how badly ditching — an optimistic term for crashing — was going to hurt.
I thought of my family. There was no point reaching for my cellphone to try a call — there was no signal. And as our hopes sank with the sun, some of us jotted notes to spouses and loved ones and placed them in our wallets, hoping the notes would later be found.
I was focused on a different set of notes when the flight began. I’ve contributed the “On the Road”column for The New York Times business-travel section every week for the last seven years. But I was on the Embraer 600 for a freelance assignment for Business Jet Traveler magazine.
My fellow passengers included executives from Embraer and a charter company called ExcelAire, the new owner of the jet. David Rimmer, the senior vice president of Excel Aire, had invited me to ride home on the jet his company had just taken possession of at Embraer’s headquarters here.
And it had been a nice ride. Minutes before we were hit, I had wandered up to the cockpit to chat with the pilots, who said the plane was flying beautifully. I saw the readout that showed our altitude: 37,000 feet.
I returned to my seat. Minutes later came the strike (it sheared off part of the plane’s tail, too, we later learned).
Immediately afterward, there wasn’t much conversation.
Mr. Rimmer, a large man, was hunched in the aisle in front of me staring out the window at the newly damaged wing.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
He fixed me with a steady look and said, "I don’t know."
I saw the body language of the two pilots. They were like infantrymen working together in a jam, just as they had been trained to do.
For the next 25 minutes, the pilots, Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino, were scanning their instruments, looking for an airport. Nothing turned up.
They sent out a Mayday signal, which was acknowledged by a cargo plane somewhere in the region. There had been no contact with any other plane, and certainly not with a 737 in the same airspace.
Mr. Lepore then spotted a runway through the darkening canopy of trees.
“I can see an airport,” he said.
They tried to contact the control tower at what turned out to be a military base hidden deep in the Amazon. They steered the plane through a big wide sweep to avoid putting too much stress on the wing.
As they approached the runway, they had the first contact with air traffic control.
“We didn’t know how much runway we had or what was on it,” Mr. Paladino would say later that night at the base in the jungle at Cachimbo.
We came down hard and fast. I watched the pilots wrestle the aircraft because so many of their automatic controls were blown. They brought us to a halt with plenty of runway left. We staggered to the exit.
“Nice flying,” I told the pilots as I passed them. Actually, I inserted an unprintable word between “nice” and “flying.”
“Any time,” Mr. Paladino, said with an anxious smile.
Later that night they gave us cold beer and food at the military base. We speculated endlessly about what had caused the impact. A wayward weather balloon? A hot-dogging military fighter jet whose pilot had bailed? An airliner somewhere nearby that had blown up, and rained debris on us?
Whatever the cause, it had become clear that we had been involved in an actual midair crash that none of us should have survived.
In a moment of gallows humor at the dormlike barracks where we were to sleep, I said, “Maybe we are all actually dead, and this is hell — reliving college bull sessions with a can of beer for eternity.”
About 7.30 p.m. Dan Bachmann, an Embraer executive and the only one among us who spoke Portuguese, came to the table in the mess hall with news from the commander’s office. A Boeing 737 with 155 people on board was reported missing right where we had been hit.
Before that moment, we had all been bonding, joking about our close call. We were the Amazon Seven, living now on precious time that no longer belonged to us but somehow we had acquired. We would have a reunion each year and report on how we used our time.
Instead we now bowed our heads in a long moment of silence, with the sound of muffled tears.