It seems almost certain that San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds will pass Hank Aaron as baseball’s all-time home-run king sometime this summer, but his pursuit has generated little public interest.

There may be several reasons for this, ranging from Bonds’ prickly personality to the suspicion that he may have used performance-enhancing drugs later in his career, say two Duke University professors.

“Career home runs is perhaps the most single hallowed record in American sports. And baseball itself is a sport obsessed by numbers and record-keeping more than any other,” said Orin Starn, a professor of cultural anthropology who studies sports and society. “This makes the lack of fanfare around Bonds nearing Aaron’s mark especially puzzling, and yet also revealing about the state of American sports and society.”

Adolescents who are chronically exposed to family turmoil, violence, noise, poor housing or other chronic risk factors show more stress-induced physiological strain on their organs and tissues than other young people.

However, when they have responsive, supportive mothers, they do not experience these negative physiological changes, reports a new study from Cornell.

But the research group also found that the cardiovascular systems of youths who are exposed to chronic and multiple risk factors are compromised, regardless of their mothers’ responsiveness.

The study, led by environmental and developmental psychologist Gary Evans, is published in the March issue of Developmental Psychology. It is the first study to look at how maternal responsiveness may protect against cumulative risk as well as the first, according to the researchers, to look at cardiovascular recovery from stress in children or youths.

Evans said that the findings suggest that the physiological toll of coping with multiple risk factors is significantly greater than with that of coping with a single event, even if that event was rather severe. “Moreover the burden appears to register in physiological systems that help us regulate our responses to stress,” said Evans, the Elizabeth Lee Vincent Professor of Human Ecology and professor of human development and of design and environmental analysis in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology.

To study stress-induced physiological changes in young teens, the researchers — including three students who were undergraduates at the time and a graduate student — used an index called allostatic load. This is a measure of stress-induced changes in neuroendocrine hormonal systems, cardiovascular responses and metabolism that indicate the severity of wear and tear that cumulative strain puts on organs and tissues.

“Allostatic load may very well turn out to be the primary mechanism of how risk, stress and other sources of environmental demands get under the skin and into the body,” said Evans.

In some studies, he noted, high allostatic loads are correlated with a greater incidence of physical, mental and cognitive disorders. The new data, Evans said, may therefore explain, at least in part, “why income and racial inequalities are so pervasive and persistent in our society. Low-income kids and especially low-income kids who are nonwhite bear a disproportionate burden of cumulative risk exposure.”

The researchers also found that when stressed by a mental arithmetic problem, the cardiovascular systems of adolescents who had been exposed to chronic risk factors responded less actively to the stressor and were slower to physiologically recover.

The results are based on surveys, blood pressure measurements and urine samples from 207 seventh- and eighth-grade children in rural upstate New York who had participated in a first wave of the study while they were in elementary school.

“We oversampled low-income children given our interest in risk and poverty,” said Evans. He said they chose a rural, white community “given that the majority of children in America who are poor are white and that rural poverty constitutes greater and more persistent material deprivation than urban poverty.”

The co-authors include graduate student Pilyoung Kim and former undergraduate students Albert Ting ‘98, Harris Tesher ‘03 and Dana Shanis ‘03.

America’s industrial revolution generated economic and social gains unparallelled in recorded human history. Vast supplies of natural resources including fossil fuels, low-cost labor, and the inventiveness of 19th century businessmen served to ignite and drive industrial development.

Efficiency was the goal and men the likes of Gillette, Hoover, Hughes, Ford and Otis invented devices and processes that helped people become more productive in their daily lives. People could travel farther in less time, first by train, then by car and then airplane. People spent less time performing hard monotonous routine work [Gillette – safety razor, Hoover – vacuum, Otis - elevator].

The concept of efficiency was applied to the manufacture of the goods themselves when Henry Ford invented the automotive assembly line. By producing more goods in less time, Ford was able to pay his workers enough that many of them could afford to purchase an automobile. Ford expanded the market for automobiles by creating a market out of Ford employees and implementing a franchise system that put a dealership in every city in North America. Ford focused on maximizing efficiency, leaving quality to be determined as a function of cost.