Colon

Today we present Science Quadrant, a look at some wonderful ideas developed by brilliant scientists who still vividly remember that the rest of us made fun of them in high school.Our lead item concerns an exciting medical breakthrough:Robot in your colonWe found out about this thanks to alert reader Alice Waugh, who sent us the May 18, 1994, issue of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Tech Talk, featuring an article about an MIT student who has invented a miniature remote-controlled robot designed to crawl far into your large intestine.

Many of the Orioles inscribed Eric Davis' No. 24 on their caps and batting helmets last night. They spoke of the importance of prayer, and believing that someone as courageous as Davis can overcome anything, even cancer.Tony Tarasco joined the tribute, but not before having to collect himself. Once news of Davis' colon cancer had been passed along by club officials before the game, Tarasco took a seat on one of the steps leading to the dugout and lowered his head into his arms.On Friday, doctors removed one-third of Davis' colon, including a baseball-sized cancerous mass.

Dave Colon stares in disbelief at the thin brown band, this dagger through his heart, this imperfection, this disfigurement in his near-perfect front lawn. He's too good-natured to do much more than swallow the pain, but there's no use denying the injury. Ever since those cable TV installers dug their narrow trench one week earlier, the strip of dead grass has been standing out like a scar."I wish I had a can of green spray paint," he says wearily. "They tried to be careful. They made a slit.

Doracon Contracting Inc. has built itself into a multimillion-dollar company with a long list of projects to its name, including part of the digging at the site of the Ravens football stadium. But as a black-owned business starting out in 1988, the Baltimore company needed help finding jobs. It got that help from state and city laws aimed at increasing minority contracts for public projects. "What you get from these programs is access," said Doracon president and founder Ronald Lipscomb.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- One of the few qualified to make a fashion statement in designer sweats, gold-studded athletic shoes and a T-shirt, Eric Davis climbed from the first base dugout, his needle in midseason form.Locked onto his target, Davis announces, "Hey, old man, they'll put a jersey on anybody."Orioles first-year coach, future Hall of Famer and fellow Los Angelino Eddie Murray acknowledges the barb with a smile, a laugh and a hug. It is a sure sign the Orioles' era of good feeling has arrived when Davis, the projected starting right fielder, can talk about what lies ahead of him as a baseball player.

Adding folic acid to flours, pastas and rice has reduced the rate of spina bifida and anencephaly in the United States, sparing 1,000 babies each year from these devastating birth defects. But a recent study suggests those health gains may have come at a cost: an extra 15,000 cases of colon cancer annually. The report, from Tufts University, is the latest to raise a cautionary note about a public-health policy that has been largely viewed as a success. "Have we done more harm than benefit?"

Shadows stir; the season shifts. As I sit in the first winter sunshine, reading the morning papers, the print rises up, coldly poised, perfected in a way that the writing I am next to read is not. In stacks of student essays, language flies across the open page as wildly as the last brown leaves across the campus quad. Pens in hand, the faculty gear up to rake the prose about, trimming a sentence here, planting commas there, carting off redundancy.As winter chill sets in, I look at warm young faces and wish it were the semi-colon they yearned to learn.

Of the 60,000 Americans who die from colon cancer each year, 5,000 to 10,000 carry a gene that predisposes them to the disease. With the recent announcement that scientists have now isolated that gene, there is a way to identify those people and help them take the kinds of precautions that could vastly prolong their lives.Dr. Bert Vogelstein of the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center and )) Dr. Albert de la Chapelle, his collaborator in Helsinki, Finland, estimate that the gene could be carried by one of every 200 people, giving them a 95 percent chance of developing colon cancer.

Teams of scientists at Johns Hopkins and several other research labs have isolated a gene responsible for a rare inherited form of colon cancer. On the way, they also found the suspected triggers for the more common forms of the disease. The discoveries, reported in the journals Science and Cell, illustrate the promise of progress to come in mapping out the human genome.Several years ago, Bert Vogelstein of the Hopkins Oncology Center found a series of "tumor suppressor genes" that act like brakes, controlling cell growth.

Some call it the cat condo. Others the Clinton Street Beach and Cat Club.Twenty to 40 wild alley cats live in a secluded and dilapidated southeast Baltimore fertilizer bag warehouse overlooking the harbor. They are fed by a band of animal lovers, some of them anonymous, who make daily trips there. City police also keep an eye on the animals' safety.Canton's cat condo is more properly known as "15 Building," a wooden structure on the grounds of the busy Lebanon Chemical Corp. in the 2500 block of S. Clinton St.For as long as anyone can remember, this remarkable and highly independent animal colony has lived within the joists and crawl spaces of a graffiti-covered building.