Geography

What's new: The risk of breast cancer is apparently higher in populations living far from the equator than it is for those in the sunny tropics. The finding: Researchers at UC San Diego reported in the recent issue of the Breast Journal that in countries where people are exposed to high levels of ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation from the sun, breast cancer rates are lower than in countries where UVB levels are low.

The same forces that formed the Andes produced the magnitude 8 earthquake that struck Peru's southern desert region Wednesday evening: the collision of two massive tectonic plates along South America's western coast. The Nazca plate under the eastern Pacific Ocean is ramming into the larger South American plate at a rate of about 3 inches a year, one of the fastest rates in the world, according to geophysicist Paul Earle of the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center.

Calistoga, Calif. IT was like a scene out of "High Noon." The mid-September grand opening party at Calistoga Cellars in downtown Calistoga was well underway when two dozen grape growers, the dirt from harvest still clinging to their jeans, gathered outside the tasting room. They dropped a bucket of grapes by the front door with a sign reading "Real Calistoga Grapes for Sale," crossed their arms and waited. Calistoga Cellars owner Roger Louer didn't disappoint them.

As development has sprawled far beyond the mountain ranges that rim the Los Angeles Basin, the roads that cut through the hills have become some of the most vulnerable in the nation to mishap or disaster. The loss of even a single traffic corridor can cause costly delays -- as the deadly fire that temporarily closed Interstate 5 last weekend proved once again.

People living along the southern Atlantic coast of the U.S., as well as those residing along the Mississippi River, die at a faster rate than the national average, while death rates are below the norm in the upper Great Plains, a new study shows. These patterns of mortality have been consistent for 35 years, Dr. Jeralynn Sittig Cossman and colleagues from Mississippi State University found. "Place matters, and it matters for a long period of time," Cossman said.

It keeps moving, but when I was a child growing up on the outskirts of Houston I believed that it was already all gone, that I had just missed it, the West, by only a single generation, or at the most two--as maybe every generation believes it has just missed the West. A?

In the world of organ transplantation, location is everything. After waiting more than a decade for a liver, Jonathan Van Vlack was deteriorating. His gut swelled with fluid, and toxins accumulating in his blood made him forget his own name. Still, he wasn't sick enough -- not in New York, where about 2,000 people statewide were vying for the same scarce livers. "He's having a very difficult time right now," his wife, Laura, nervously e-mailed a friend in March 2005.

Some questions have pat answers -- such as, "Does this dress make me look fat?" (\o7Of course not\f7.) More tricky is the question of whether a person's \o7address\f7 can make her fat. Many urban planners and health researchers think it can. In study after study, they have all but concluded that urban sprawl -- malls miles away, homes too far away for people to walk to shops, schools and parks -- contributes to obesity.

The Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn has found a mile-high mountain range on the giant moon Titan, scientists said Tuesday. The range, in the moon's southern hemisphere, is nearly 100 miles long. It is the tallest range on Titan found by Cassini, which has been investigating the Saturnian satellite for the last two years. Cassini scientists have dubbed the mountains Titan's Sierra Nevada.

They are one of the fastest-growing mountain ranges in the world. They are young, barely adolescent by geologic reckoning. Uplifted by the head-on collision of tectonic plates, the San Gabriel Mountains rest at a menacing steepness that periodically unleashes rivers of rock and mud into the subdivisions that nestle in its alluvial fans. The range's natural architecture is fire-friendly: Row after row of canyons and narrow clefts act as chimneys, funneling flames to the high ridges, where winds launch the fire into the Los Angeles Basin to the south or the Santa Clarita Valley to the north.