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From: Osher Doctorow [log in to unmask], Sat. Sept. 29, 2001 11:31PM Continuing my study of the effects of aging on the digestive-renal-excretory systems, the effects of adding holes to such systems (as in advanced aging) is to make the Gaussian or total curvature more negative geometrically. What this means is that for each hole that is added, the system in a very small neighborhood of any point looks less and less like a sphere or ellipsoid (egg-shaped) and more and more like an hourglass or trumpet horn (especially toward the front part of the trumpet where there is more bending). For constant curvature surfaces, spheres have no holes and positive curvature, tori (singular torus) or doughnuts have zero curvature and 1 hole, and objects with 2 or more holes have negative curvature. Members of Evidence-Based-Health may be interested in comparing these results with tensegrity and Buckminster Fullerene results on shapes of viruses (see these keywords on the internet, for example), where spherical versus flattened and other shapes have some interesting relationships geometrically to stability. Technically, we are now talking geometry and topology, not just geometry, which is even more interesting since we may expect new results in relationship to health. Osher Doctorow