Arizona Daily Star from Tucson, Arizona • Page 7

Tucson, Monday, April 1, 1991 ffijf Arizona 3atlg Star Section A Page Seven NATION 1 The party line's over; Connecticut hangs up i jf i-ihi nil! 1 4 kmtv 1 v. If. By Janet Capplello The Associated Press WOODBURY, Conn. In the bucolic towns of western Connecticut, where farmhouses and antiques shops dot the rolling hills, about 100 people are hanging onto a piece of the past: the telephone party line. But as the Woodbury Telephone Co.

starts to upgrade its equipment this spring, the holdouts will all be switched to private lines; forced into the age of computerized telecommunications. Woodbury Telephone, itself a relic from the days of small, independent phone companies, has received permission from state regulators to replace the last of its two- and four-party lines with private lines, i Southern New England Telephone which serves 1.5 million customers to Woodbury's 16,000 customers, eliminated its last party line in January. Around the nation, the number of party lines has been steadily decreasing, but one study in 1987 by the United States Telephone Association said there were still 2.8 million people on party lines. In 1985, there were 4.6 million party lines, the association said. Although the party line is going the way of hand-cranked telephones, J.

Garry Mitchell, Woodbury Telephone's president, sees no reason to mourn. He has been trying to abolish the "old-fashioned" lines for two decades. Party lines were popular from 1910 until the early 1960s, he said. Customers share a phone wire but have separate telephone numbers. Even the people with party lines, mostly older customers, say they've put up with occasional in-.

convenience, such as finding someone else already on the line, more for economy than out of a sense of nostalgia. Robert Keating, a 61-year-old Woodbury architect who grew up with a party line, says he has one now because it's the cheapest way to have separate telephone num- 1 bers for his home and the business he operates out of his house. In 1961, Woodbury Telephone charged $6 a month for a two-party line, $4.95 for a four-party line, and $7.25 for a private line. Today, those costs haven't risen more than 50 cents per month. Party lines were once standard telephone fare, because there wasn't enough equipment to provide private lines, Mitchell said.

The Associated Press Woodbury architect Robert Keating, 61, says he'll miss party lines because of their economy Rare spacewalk, landmark launch to mark mission CAPE CANAVERAL, Ha. (AP) American astronauts head into orbit this week for the first spacewalk in more than five years to test techniques for building the biggest Tin-kertoy ever, the space station, The five-day flight of Atlantis may be short for a shuttle mission, but it promises to be long on drama. In addition to the spacewalk, the crew will release the heaviest civilian spacecraft ever carried by a shuttle, an astronomical observatory weighing an astronomical 17 tons. "I expect a chorus all through the flight of people saying, 'Look at that' Oh, my said astronaut Jay Apt. Atlantis is scheduled to blast off at 9:18 a.m.

EST (7:18 a.m. Tucson time) Friday. The countdown begins tomorrow morning. The Gamma Ray Observatory will be hoisted from Atlantis' cargo bay and set in a 279-mile-high orbit on the third day of the five-day flight On the fourth day, Apt and Jerry Ross will spend six hours in the open bay testing tools and equipment for NASA's planned space station Freedom. Both men expect the excursion to be hard work but well worth the effort "The sense of no constraints and no bounds, the freedom that you have when you're outside in the pay-load bay, is pretty overwhelming," Ross said.

It will be NASA's 39th shuttle launch. The first one was 10 years ago this month. Atlantis' mission was supposed to be the second one this year. It assumed the No. 1 position when Discovery's March military flight was delayed until late April because of cracked door hinges.

Atlantis also has hinge cracks. But they are much smaller than those on Discovery and pose no danger, officials said. The five astronauts' main job aboard Atlantis will be orbital delivery of the monstrous $600 million Gamma Ray Observatory, or GRO. Only military spy satellites have been heavier. It is the second of NASA's four so-1 called Great Observatories, a top-of-the-line series intended to probe every kind of electromagnetic wavelength in the heavens.

The first Is the Hubble Space Telescope. 'Soon, because he just went by Freida Gauthier, 78, who has had a party line "ever since I had the phone over 40 years," talks fondly of the days when people got much of their news through party lines. "Other people would listen in to what was going on. That was fun." She quickly added that she herself had never eavesdropped. Some, party, lines accommodated up to 10 customers, usually all in one neighborhood.

Woodbury Telephone is being allowed to eliminate the service now because of a $1.8 million equipment upgrade, Mitchell said. Eliminating party lines also became imperative because of computerized 911 emergency response systems. Telephone lore has it that party lines were a great source of gossip for busybodies bold enough to eavesdrop on their neighbors' conversations. Norma Bennett, 72, a retired Woodbury operator, remembers the story about two women who were chatting on their party lines while a third listened in. "One said, 'I wonder when the mailman is And the one who was listening in answered, Human eggs may emit substance to lure sperm, study suggests suggesting the fluids contained some sort of attractant Only half the follicular fluids showed the attraction.

In a test of 62 follicular fluids from 40 women, researchers found that attractive fluids almost always came from eggs that could later be fertilized in the test tube, while unattractive fluids generally came from eggs that failed to be fertilized. The fluid's attractability varied from follicle to follicle within the same woman, researchers found. They also found that only a fraction of sperm responded to the signal, which may be a mechanism for attracting only the fittest sperm, the researchers wrote. Garbers said he thinks that the attracting substance, if it truly exists, is probably helpful but not necessary for fertilization. Still, the close relationship to success in egg fertilization In his study suggests "maybe there's more to it than that," he said.

The fluid comes from several sources, Garbers said in a telephone interview. But since it bathes the eggs in the follicle, researchers decided to look at it for evidence of some sperm-attracting substance from the egg. Such a substance had previously been found in sea urchins. The researchers used follicular fluid from women who were having eggs removed for test-tube fertilization, and took sperm from two fertile men. They poured some sperm into thimble-sized chambers, covered the sperm with a filter, and then poured in either follicular fluid or a standard laboratory chemical.

After 10 to 15 minutes, they removed the material above the filter and looked to see how much sperm had swum into it In tests involving more than 100 samples, the follicular fluids consistently accumulated more sperm than the laboratory substance did, even lead to a male contraceptive pill, he said. Garbers is a pharmacology professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute there. The work was done at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville when Garbers was there and at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Garbers and co-authors present the work in the April issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "This is very early and obviously requires a lot of additional work, but as a first step I think it's quite attractive," commented Dr.

Norbert Gleicher, president of the Center for Human Reproduction in Chicago. The research focused on follicular fluid, which is found in the saclike follicle along with the egg. At ovulation, the follicle releases the egg and fluid. By Malcolm Rltter The Associated Press NEW YORK Human eggs may help themselves get fertilized by sending out a homing signal for sperm, suggests a study that might lead to new approaches to fertility treatment and contraception. Scientists found evidence that some eggs emit a substance that attracts sperm, and that these eggs were far more likely to be fertilized.

Researchers have not identified or isolated any attracting substance, nor determined its origin, cautioned David Garbers, co-author of the study. But if an attractant can be found and purified, it might lead to treatment for some infertile women, he said. And a new contraceptive approach may develop if another substance can be found to block the attractant's effect, he said. A blocking substance that acts directly on sperm might PILLOWY SOFT SANDALS SALE ON AMERICA'S FINEST A PERFECT FIT FOR EVERY FOOT SOFTSPetS- SELECTED SANDALS $29.99 REGULAR-40-449 CO I QUALITY MATTRESS SETS YOU'LL FEEL BETTER IN THE MORNING. rAn PROMPT DELIVERY AND PUR HONEST COURTEOUS SERVICE, WE CAN'T BE BEAT.

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