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Acts of Cruelty

October 30, 2007 10:28 PM

Edythe London is a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, specializing in what happens in the brains of drug addicts.  "Dr. London's research has advanced the study of substance abuse and the development of new approaches and probes for studies of brain function," says her university web page.

Some of the work in her lab involves experiments on vervet monkeys, which brought objections from a group called the Animal Liberation Front.  On Oct. 20 her Los Angeles home was flooded out with a garden hose.  The damage was reported by the university to be $20-40,000. The FBI and the LAPD are on the case.  They've labeled it an act of domestic terrorism.

Now the ALF's press office has posted a statement--whose source it would not identify--from people claiming credit.  The text below is verbatim, and the full copy is HERE.

"Edythe London, your job as administrator of the UCLA center that addicts primates to methamphetamines is dispicable. You appear to make all of the sick perverted vivisectors who addict primates to meth possible. Have you ever even witnessed the innocent monkeys that your mad scientists have addicted to methamphetamines as they convulse throughtout excrutiating withdrawl symptoms?"

Gene Block, the chancellor of UCLA, replied, "I condemn in the strongest possible terms this deplorable and illegal act of extreme vandalism, which resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in damage, and I reiterate the university’s steadfast commitment to the legal use of animals in research to benefit society."

The press office of the Animal Liberation Front includes this disclaimer at the bottom of its web page:

"The Animal Liberation Press Officers do not engage in illegal activities, nor do they know any individuals who do. Rather, the Press Office receives and posts communiques from anonymous parties and provides comment to the media."

The communique they posted ended this way:

"One more thing Edythe, water was our second choice, fire was our first. We compromised because we in the ALF don't risk harming animals human and non human and we don't risk starting brush fires.It would have been just as easy to burn your house down Edythe. As you slosh around your flooded house consider yourself fortunate this time.

"We will not stop until UCLA discontinues its primate vivisection programe.

"We are the ALF."

October 30, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)

This Space for Rent

October 29, 2007 4:28 PM

There's an old bit of snarkiness that comes up whenever some entrepreneur talks of challenging NASA for the heavens: "The way to make a small fortune in space is to spend a large one."

John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace is the latest to have the experience. Carmack made his fortune in videogames--"Quake" and "Doom" are his--and over the last few years he's been trying to launch suborbital rockets.  "The team currently consists of a bunch of guys, a girl, and an armadillo named Widget," says his website playfully.

But on Sunday his latest invention--a prototype lunar lander--crashed in flames in New Mexico.  "Today is officially a bad day," was the quote he gave.  Our friends at Wired have a picture HERE. (Picture credit: Chris Jonas.)

Elon Musk, the inventor of PayPal, has been spending some of his millions too, on a satellite-launching company called SpaceX.  He's found the going rough too.  Their first test rocket exploded 25 seconds after launch last year; the upper stage on their second test shut down a minute early.

Burt Rutan, the iconoclastic, inventive father of SpaceShipOne, has been the most successful so far, having flown 100 km above the ground three times in 2004.  But if you go to the homepage of his firm, Scaled Composites, you'll find a sad tribute to three workers who died and three who were injured in an accident on the ground this summer.

There's a good perspective piece HERE.  Turns out it really is rocket science after all.

One winner in all this is NASA.  They, and various aerospace giants, have been offering cash prizes to see if outsiders have outside-the-box ideas.  (After all, argue proponents, Charles Lindbergh was chasing a prize.)  On Sunday, John Carmack's team was hoping to win $350,000.  Instead, they have a heap of wreckage--and the prize-offerers have barely spent anything.

October 29, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

James Watson Steps Down

October 25, 2007 8:49 AM

James Dewey Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, seems to concede he brought this on himself. Last week, as you'll recall, he was quoted as suggesting that Africans were generally less intelliigent than westerners.

The explosion that followed was international. The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory near New York, where he was chancellor, said it was "bewildered and saddened" by his comments. He apologized, saying he couldn't believe he'd said what he'd been quoted as saying.

Not enough. This morning he released this statement:

This morning I have conveyed to the Trustees of the Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory my desire to retire immediately from my position as its
Chancellor, as well as from my position on its Board, on which I have
served for the past 43 years. Closer now to 80 than 79, the passing on
of my remaining vestiges of leadership is more than overdue. The
circumstances in which this transfer is occurring, however, are not
those which I could ever have anticipated or desired.

That the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is now one of the world's
premier sites for biological research and education has long warmed my
heart. So I am grateful that its Board now will allow me to remain
along my beloved Bungtown Road. Forty-nine years ago, as a newly
appointed young Assistant Professor at Harvard, I gave my first course
on this pernicious collection of diseases of uncontrolled cell growth
and division. Cancer, then an intellectual black box, now, in part
because of research at the Laboratory, is almost full lit. Though
important facts remain undiscovered, there is no reason why they
should not soon be found. Final victory is within our grasp. Strong in
spirit and intensely focused, I wish to be among those at the victory
line.

The ever quickening advances of science made possible by the success
of the Human Genome Project will also soon let us see the essences of
mental disease. Only after we understand them at the genetic level can
we rationally seek out appropriate therapies for such illnesses as
schizophrenia and bipolar disease. For the children of my sister and
me, this moment can not come a moment too soon. Hell does not come
close to describing the impact of psychotic disorders on human life.

This week's events focus me ever more intensely on the moral values
passed on to me by my father, whose Watson surname marks his long ago
Scots-Irish Appalachian heritage; and by my mother, whose father,
Lauchlin Mitchell, came from Glasgow and whose mother, Lizzie Gleason,
had parents from Tipperary. To my great advantage, their lives were
guided by a faith in reason; an honest application of its messages;
and for social justice, especially the need for those on top to help
care for the less fortunate. As an educator, I have always striven to
see that the fruits of the American Dream are
available to all.

I have been much blessed.

October 25, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (51) | TrackBack (0)

Why do People Choose to Live in Harm's Way?

October 24, 2007 1:47 PM

Maybe the wind is shifting, the air is cooling, and the fires are coming under control.  Still plenty of pain to go around.

In the meantime, some of you have posted a difficult question in the last couple of days: why, when people know it's risky to live in the California hills, do they do it anyway?  Don't they know better?  Santa Ana winds are a regular feature of fall there, drought is a growing reality, and let's not even get into the issue of earthquakes.

We've done stories on this before, and the answer seems to be that the very things that sometimes make a place hazardous also make it appealing.  Most people probably don't choose where in the country to live--they're there because of jobs or family or birth--but when they do, they don't see crisis looming.

In the years following Hurricane Andrew, Prof. Jay Baker of Florida State University was commissioned by the Army Corps of Engineers to survey people along the Atlantic Coast.  He found people very aware of the risk--but not worried that it would affect them personally.  Their daily reality is that it's nice to be near the ocean.

"Even in places that had very severe hurricane experiences, over time people tend to forget quite how bad it was," he told me a few years ago.

"More people think that they would be safe in a major hurricane in North Carolina today than believed that in 1995."

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel economics winner at Princeton, has also looked at this issue.  In essence, he argues, people in California may know, at least in the abstract, that they potentially live in harm's way--but in their day-to-day lives, they see sunny weather and pretty views. 

Dan Cray has a piece in Time in which he quotes Kahneman: "People are terrified of the word nuclear, but the people who live next to a nuclear station are perfectly content with it." People, he says, "become much less frightened when something hasn't blown up in several years."

Wildfires?  For most people, goes this argument, they're an abstract threat.  Thoughts welcome, as always.

October 24, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Fire From Above

October 22, 2007 3:55 PM

The numbers, as you've seen elsewhere on our site, are staggering--a quarter of a million people evacuated from the fire zones in California.  And the fires flared up from almost nothing.

The fires are large enough that they're visible from NASA's Aqua satellite.  The second of the two images here was shot at 2:50 p.m. PDT yesterday.  You can click on the pictures for a larger version, and HERE for a raw image of the bottom picture.  The smoke, blown westward by the Santa Ana winds, easily stretches more than a hundred miles out over the Pacific.

NASA's Earth Observatory website points out that Aqua's sister satellite, called Terra, had passed over the area only three hours before, and taken the top image--showing only thin-looking smoke from several hot spots north of Los Angeles.  More HERE.

If you haven't seen it already, we have a slide show of what it's like in the fire zones.  Click HERE to look.  And I hope you'll keep the people there in your thoughts.

October 22, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (35) | TrackBack (0)

Not Long Ago, in this Very Galaxy

October 19, 2007 1:01 PM

Gina Sunseri has sent this from Houston:

"Luke Skywalker's original Jedi lightsaber is now aboard the space shuttle Discovery, ready for the scheduled Oct. 23 launch with the STS-120 astronauts.  Star Wars fans from around the world are invited to log onto www.starwars.com and send their best wishes to the shuttle crew.   The official Star Wars web site will put all of the messages on a CD and present them to the astronauts at the public debriefing at NASA's Space Center Houston once they return from the ISS.   

"Unfortunately the shuttle crew won't get to play with it or take it out on a spacewalk."

October 19, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Watson Apologizes

October 18, 2007 10:32 PM

James D. Watson, quoted in Sunday's Times of London as suggesting black Africans had inferior intelligence, has now put out a statement of apology:

"I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said," Watson, 79, said in a statement he gave to the AP. "To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief."

Meanwhile, the Cold Spring Harbor Lab, where he's chancellor, announced Thursday night it is suspending Watson from administrative duties, "pending further deliberation by the Board."

Meanwhile, criticism continues to pour in. Details HERE.

Francis Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project: "Jim has a penchant for making outrageous comments that are basically poking society in the eye."

Mike Botchan, a molecular biologist at Berkeley, as quoted by AP: "I think Jim Watson is now essentially a disgrace to his own legacy. And it's very sad for me to say this, because he's one of the great figures of 20th century biology."

October 18, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (40) | TrackBack (0)

James Watson: Pushback

October 18, 2007 1:31 PM

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on New York's Long Island, home base to James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, has posted a response to his quoted words about race and intelligence:

"Statement by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Board of Trustees and President Bruce Stillman, Ph.D. Regarding Dr. Watson’s Comments in The Sunday Times on October 14, 2007

“The comments attributed to Dr. James Watson that first appeared in the October 14, 2007 edition of The Sunday Times U.K. are his own personal statements and in no way reflect the mission, goals, or principles of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Board, administration or faculty.  Dr. Watson is not the President of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and was not speaking on behalf of the institution.

"The Board of Trustees, administration and faculty vehemently disagree with these statements and are bewildered and saddened if he indeed made such comments.  Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory does not engage in any research that could even form the basis of the statements attributed to Dr. Watson."  The statement is HERE.

The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has responded too:

"Professor James Watson’s comments about the genetic inferiority of Africans, and of black people being less intelligent than white people, represent racist propaganda masquerading as scientific fact.

'Such discredited racist theories seek to establish a genetically based racial hierarchy of the human race and have been condemned by leading scientists throughout the world.

"His comments provide a pseudo-scientific rationale for the racist concept of white superiority.

"That a man of such academic distinction could make such ignorant comments, which are utterly offensive and incorrect and give succour to the most backward in our society, demonstrates why racism still has to be fought."  The rest of his statement is HERE.

Staffers at Cold Spring Harbor say they're not disclosing how to reach Watson.  For the record, the new book he's in London to promote is called "Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science."

(AP photo: Watson poses with a model of DNA in 2004.)

October 18, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

James Watson, DNA Decoder, on Race and Intelligence

October 17, 2007 7:54 PM

James Watson, who shared a Nobel Prize in 1962 for the structure of DNA, has, ever since, been both an eminence-grise and bete-noir of the science world.  Sunday's Times of London ran a lengthy profile of him by Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, described as a "former protegee," and about two thirds of the way in was this paragraph about race and intelligence:

"He says that he is 'inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa' because 'all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours-–whereas all the testing says not really,' and I know that this 'hot potato' is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that 'people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.' He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because 'there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level.' He writes that 'there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.' "

Perhaps it took a few days for people to notice the quote, but they have now.  Watson, 79, is in Britain to promote a new book; late Wednesday the Science Museum of London said he is no longer welcome to deliver a lecture there.  And Britain's Independent newspaper reports that "The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission...said it was studying Dr. Watson's remarks "in full."

As Hunt-Grubbe writes, Watson has courted controversy before, accused of insensitive comments about race and sex. 

We've tried to reach the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where Watson is Chancellor, but have not heard back.

(AP photo of Watson in London in June.)

October 17, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (140) | TrackBack (0)

The Poplar Field

October 16, 2007 5:13 PM

Prof. Sharon Doty, an environmental scientist at the University of Washington, leads a team that has created a sort of super tree.  They take poplar trees, insert a gene from rabbits--and the result is a plant that soaks up and neutralizes a dozen different kinds of pollutants, many of them cancer-causing. 

They published their findings in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; the abstract of the paper is HERE. 

It's quite a list: trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride, carbon tetrachloride, benzene, and chloroform, stuff you sometimes find in brownfields or superfund sites.  Planting some trees, and letting their roots do the cleanup work, is far better than digging up soil and trying to figure out what to do with it.

On the other hand, what do you get when you cross a rabbit and a tree?  Maybe just an otherwise-normal tree that neutralizes pollutants, or maybe--well, maybe something with some hidden property that people won't like when they find it.

Lisa Stiffler of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has written a piece about this, which you can find HERE. She quotes Prof. Andrew Light, who works in environmental philosophy at the University: "it's really a question of trading some of the unknown risks of planting genetically modified trees with the positive environmental benefits," says Light. "This is a real dilemma for the environmental community."

Most of us would probably favor the known benefit (pollution-eating) over the unknowable risk (some kind of B-movie mutation)--but that's easy to say because there have been studies suggesting we're predisposed to favor the known over the unknown.  Let's leave that part aside for now.  Thoughts welcome, as always.

October 16, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

Google Earth Shows More Chinese Submarines

October 15, 2007 4:40 PM

Back in July, Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists created something of a stir when he reported the sighting of a new Chinese nuclear-missile submarine, known as a Jin-class SSBN (Type 094). 

Now he writes, China has at least two, and perhaps three. 

How does he illustrate this?  From spy satellites or by going into restricted territory (as others have done)?  No, you can see them by poking around Google Maps.  The location is HERE.

We had posts about this back in July.  You can find them, with background information, HERE and HERE.  The first sighting was made at a bse called Xiaopingdao.  This newer one, he says, is at a shipyard at the city of Huludao, about 400 km (or 250 miles) east of Beijing.

"Whether China has now launched two or three Jin-class SSBNs is still unclear," writes Kristensen. "The image of the first SSBN discovered at Xiaopingdao in July 2007 was taken on October 17, 2006. The new image of the two SSBNs at Huludao was taken six and a half months later on May 3, 2007. One possibility is that the Xiaopingdao SSBN returned to Huludao for repair or further adjustment and was captured on the 2007 photo together with the second SSBN. Another possibility is that the two Huludao SSBNs are indeed the second and third boats of the new Jin-class SSBN."

The Chinese Navy has not, as best we can tell, announced anything about its submarines.  But it's also not hiding them.

October 15, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (23) | TrackBack (0)

Everybody Has an Angle

October 15, 2007 2:09 PM

"That giant bang you heard last week was the sound of Sean Hannity's head exploding," writes Jeff Giles, a freelance film reviewer, on Rotten Tomatoes today.

Everybody has an opinion about Al Gore and the Nobel Peace Prize, and if you poke around today you'll have a hard time finding a single mind that was changed by it.  Those who liked him before are thrilled; those who disliked him before aren't.

William Gray, the noted hurricane forecaster, has long said he doubts there's a human contribution to climate warming, and Steve Lyttle of McClatchy Newspapers quoted him speaking to a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. 

"We're brainwashing our children," said Gray, 78, a professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie ('An Inconvenient Truth') and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."  The full piece is HERE.

"We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realize how foolish it was," Gray is quoted as saying.

RedState writes that the peace prize has frequently been given to "some of the most disreputable and discredited characters in history," from Gorbachev to Sadat to Mandela to Jimmy Carter.

"...there’s really only one thing that all of these people and groups have in common. They have not all contributed measurably to world peace, nor have they all benefited humanity in any meaningful way. What they have all done, however, is demonstrate a clear talent for self-promotion. In that respect, Al Gore definitely deserves his Nobel Prize, and he deserves the company he now keeps."

On the other hand there's Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and columnist for the New York Times, who writes today, "The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right."

As Krugman writes, the Wall Street Journal's editorial Saturday didn't even mention Gore's name, instead listing people who "put their own lives and livelihoods at risk by working to rid the world of violence and oppression. Let us hope they survive the coming year so that the Nobel Prize Committee might consider them for the 2008 award." 

Finally, it's worth noting that RealClimate.org, which describes itself as "Climate science from climate scientists," has not had a post since the award was announced.  I reached one of the contributors to the site, Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies,  who says not to read anything into that; "We don't regard ourselves as a news site."  He says they've been talking about writing something--about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organization with which Mr. Gore shared the prize.

And their site now lists the Nobel under "Other IPCC News."

October 15, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (47) | TrackBack (0)

Notes From a Life

October 12, 2007 4:47 PM

"Once again, President Bush has been dragged slowly, kicking and screaming, toward the correct position."

That's Al Gore, going after one of his best-known adversaries--but it's not the one you'd think.  He's talking about the first President Bush, in a speech from the Senate floor on May 12, 1989, reacting to plans for a White House climate-change conference.

There's been so much about Al Gore's Nobel reported already that it seems there's very little new to say.  But we went into our archives and found plenty of old ones.

Mr. Gore in 1990, taking another swipe at the White House:

"If prime ministers or presidents cannot or will not provide environmental leadership, then with or without them, we will do whatever it takes to protect the global environment."

Mr. Gore as Vice President in 1995:

"Continuing this buildup of greenhouse gases will cause the climate to change.  The operative word in that sentence is not 'may;' it is 'will.'"

And here he is in 1998:

"Global warming is no longer a theory, it is a reality, and it is time to act."

Gore has said he found his calling when he studied under Prof. Roger Revelle, his mentor when he was an undergraduate at Harvard.  He mostly dropped the issue during the 2000 campaign, but other than that, he really hasn't changed his message. 

One last quotation: from the elder President Bush, during the 1992 campaign:

"You know why I call him Ozone Man?  This guy is so far off in the environmental extreme, we'll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American.  This guy's crazy!"

(Photo above: Rep. Al Gore Jr. in 1986.)

October 12, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

The Flight of Monarchs

October 10, 2007 6:39 PM

This time of year--through means still mysterious to scientists--Monarch Butterflies seem to take note that the sun is no longer as high in the sky as it was through the summer.  That's their cue to pick up and start their migration southward to central Mexico, a journey that can take 2,000 miles.

UPDATE: Several of you wrote asking to see the video of the piece we did for World News Wednesday night.  You should be able to find it HERE.

Our staff also put together a slide show of the butterflies.  You can find it at this LINK. (Note: apologies to anyone who tried this before and found the link broken.  It ought to work now.)

"We know why they're doing it," says Chip Taylor of the University of Kansas.  "They have to get out of town, they have to get to Mexico because they're going to freeze their little--their little antennae off." 
Prof. Taylor is the leader of a project called Monarch Watch, and we got to watch his work for a piece for World News.  Each year he recruits some 15,000 people--schoolchildren, gardeners, nature lovers--to help track the butterflies on their way south.  The volunteers catch monarchs, tag them with little numbered stickers supplied by the project, and let them go.

If one of the tagged butterflies is spotted by another volunteer, each sticker has an e-mail address and a unique code.  Enter the numbers into a computer in Taylor's lab, and you get a picture of just how the monarchs travel.

They can go 80 miles in a day--2,000 miles in a month.  It's not clear how they navigate, whether by the sun or by wind currents or whether they can sense the earth's magnetic field.  They travel over land.  Somehow, a butterfly in Utah knows it should follow a different compass heading than one in Georgia to reach the warmth of Mexico. 

Taylor steered us to one of the many "way stations" volunteers have planted around the country--gardens with milkweed, butterfly bushes, and other plants on which the butterflies thrive.  I was surprised how many butterflies there were, even in Manhattan, next to a highway. 

Yes, Taylor says, the monarchs' habitat is threatened by herbicides and new subdivisions.  But the butterflies' numbers, he says, appear to be pretty good of late.

Enjoy the pictures, and poke around Taylor's website.  If the butterflies have left your part of the world, they'll be back next year.

October 10, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)

Cleaning the Air and Clearing the Docket

October 09, 2007 1:04 PM

A reality of environmental protection is that a great deal of it is forced on companies by laws or regulations, and, at least on the federal level, the vast majority of them end up in court.  Usually for years.

The EPA, trumpeting the "largest single environmental settlement in history" today, says it's gotten American Electric Power, one of the world's largest electric companies, "to cut 813,000 tons of air pollutants annually at an estimated cost of more than $4.6 billion, pay a $15 million penalty, and spend $60 million on projects to mitigate the adverse effects of its past excess emissions."  Their full statement is posted HERE, and the consent decree (a 104-page agreement filed for public comment in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio) is HERE.

The EPA says the settlement will save $32 billion a year in health costs for Americans with heart and lung problems.

American Electric Power has a different take: the settlement is not a record, says the company, and its value is that it's "bringing an end to almost eight years of litigation regarding alleged violations of the New Source Review (NSR) provisions of the Clean Air Act. AEP admits no violations of law, and all claims against AEP were released."  See the rest of their release HERE. 

The company tells Jason Ryan of our staff that the government is including $2.6 billion the company already spent on emission control improvements at their power plants since 2004.  By that measure, the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989--still in the courts--was a larger settlement. 

But, to many, the AEP case has gone on long enough.  The settlement stems from a suit filed in November 1999, in the closing days of the Clinton administration.  The government then was trying to force AEP to clean up the emissions from coal-fired plants it ran in five states from Indiana to Virginia, arguing that they contributed to smog and acid rain in the northeast.

This morning on Salon, Andrew Leonard argues that in the Bush years, the EPA made a "bald-faced attempt to betray its reason for existence" and weaken the rules for coal-burning power plants, but was blocked by a federal appeals court. 

"One could not ask for a clearer demonstration of the political priorities of the Democratic and Republican parties with respect to the environment," writes Leonard. "The pro-acid rain GOP attempted to make it easier for power companies to pollute. A Democratic administration attempted to make it harder. After a battle royale, the environment came out the winner. This time."

(AP Photo above of AEP's Gavin power plant in Cheshire, Ohio, one of the 16 included in the settlement.)

October 9, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Stem Cells Win a Nobel

October 08, 2007 11:13 AM

Good morning from a plane.  The Nobel Prize for medicine often goes to researchers most of us have never heard of, for work that seems only passingly related to anything in our lives. Every now and than, though, it makes a statement.

This morning the prize went to three scientists, two of them American and one British, "for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells."

They did not use human embryonic stem cells, but the buzzword (or phrase) is there, and I'll be curious to see if there is any pushback.

One of the winners, Mario Capecchi of the University of Utah, has a particularly striking story to tell. Italian-born and now 70, he was four when the Gestapo arrested his mother and took her to Dachau. He lived in the streets, begging for or stealing food, for more than four years, until World War II ended and his mother was released. They moved to America. He was nine. He couldn't read. He couldn't speak English.

Now he has won a Nobel, for work on stem cells.

Read more here: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=3701150

October 8, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Sputnik and the American Edge

October 04, 2007 3:10 PM

The headline, if you scan the various stories written for this fiftieth anniversary of the space age, seems to be that we no longer live in the space age.  We've moved on...to the information age, the war on terror, the age of anxiety, or something else, but there's been a lot of ink (or electrons, or whatever) spent in the last few days on how America's in danger of losing its edge in technology.

Research Corporation, a foundation that promotes science education, has sent out a report warning that "we face the likelihood of losing our global lead in scientific research for the first time in more than half a century."  Sounds very similar to what was written after the Sputnik surprise.

General Kevin Chilton, a former astronaut who is now commander of the U.S. Strategic Command at Offut Air Force Base, worries about that Chinese anti-satellite test back in January. "The 50th anniversary of Sputnik reminds us of the challenges we face in the space domain," he writes in today's Los Angeles Times. "When the Soviet satellite terrified our nation, we rose to the challenge and achieved legendary successes in the space race. Although we now enjoy a tremendous advantage in space, we cannot afford to rest on our laurels."

Hillary Clinton weighed in too this morning, with an anniversary speech saying we must "end the Bush Administration’s war on science."  Her version is HERE; read more HERE.

My favorite item, though, is an old clip from the game show "Name that Tune" on October 4, 1957.  One of the contestants that night was a young Marine Corps Major named John Glenn.  He was teamed with a ten-year-old boy named Eddie Hodges.

The producers of a documentary called "Sputnik Mania" sent it to us.  In it, Glenn (who would not become an astronaut until 1959) is asked by the emcee what he thinks of the Soviet launch.

"Well, to say the least, George, they're out of this world," he says to polite laughter.  He speculates that it could lead to "space travel, or moon travel, something we'll probably run into, maybe in Eddie's lifetime here, at least."  The camera pans to his teammate.

"Eddie, would you like to take a trip to the moon?" the emcee asks.

"No sir, I like it fine down here."

October 4, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

An Earth in the Making

October 03, 2007 1:26 PM

424 light-years away, in a double-star system known as HD 113766, the Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted what astronomers say is a huge belt of dust and debris.  They know enough from studying other stars to expect that what they're seeing is a planet in the making, as the dust grains clump together to form rocks, and the rocks collide to form mini-planets, and the mini-planets eventually coalesce into something that could be the size of Mars or larger--there's enough material for that. 

Now here's where it gets interesting:

--The star is about the same type and size as our Sun. 

--The dust is mostly silicates and metal sulfides, materials you would find in lava on Earth. 

--And the belt of material, when they do the math, is probably at the right distance from the star in the middle to make liquid water possible.

Carey Lisse of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has been watching HD 113766; he and colleagues are publishing a paper in the Astrophysical Journal, and will report their findings to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society next week.  The paper is HERE.  They report the star is probably 10 to 16 million years old. 

"The timing for this system to be building an Earth is very good," says Lisse in a statement.  "If the system was too young, its planet-forming disk would be full of gas, and it would be making gas-giant planets like Jupiter instead. If the system was too old, then dust aggregation or clumping would have already occurred and all the system's rocky planets would have already formed."  You can find more HERE.  And you can click HERE for a large version of the artist's conception by Tim Pyle and Dr. Lisse.

Is this indeed another Earth in the making?  We'll update you in a few eons.

(Artist's conception courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL.)

October 3, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (22) | TrackBack (0)

Carbon Tax

October 02, 2007 2:15 PM

The Canadian province of Quebec, as far as we know, has become the first government of size in North America to impose a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and everyone there is still wondering what it might mean.

It's a small tax right now--0.8 cents (Canadian, though the Canadian and U.S. dollars are currently worth about the same) on a liter of gasoline--and it's supposed to be aimed strictly at energy-producing companies.  But there have been complaints from other companies, warning of a trickle-down effect to them, and loss of competitiveness with firms elsewhere. 

Rep. John Dingell, who chairs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has proposed a carbon tax for the U.S.  “A fee on carbon emissions requires a tithe from all citizens and industries,"he says in a statement, "but no one entity will be unfairly leveled with a devastating burden.  More importantly, it provides an incentive for change in our economy and our way of life.  I welcome public input on how this policy proposal can best balance our environmental and economic concerns and I look forward to receiving feedback.”

Dingell's critics--witness this response from Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club--accuse him of cynicism: "First, Dingell has seemingly designed his strategy to fail, and admits as much -- which is not something a legislative craftsman as skilled as he would normally do. And, two, he has done so at a time when Congress is debating the most popular mechanism for reducing oil consumption -- tougher fuel economy standards -- which Dingell and GM loathe."

Such a tax does have defenders, who say it's necessary, and can be done in a fair way that is revenue-neutral.  They argue that there's a wonderful way to avoid paying: do the right thing and use less energy. 

What say you?

October 2, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (56) | TrackBack (0)

Steve Fossett: Four Weeks On

October 01, 2007 1:03 PM

Never say never, but Steve Fossett's trail seems very, very cold.  He took off from a Nevada airstrip four weeks ago today.  Searchers, made hopeful by the radar trails revealed last week by the Air Force, spent the weekend looking for Fossett's single engine plane in an area southeast of there. They came up empty-handed.

As of this morning, Nevada's Department of Public Safety says the planes have once again stopped looking.  Authorities promise that if new leads develop, they'll follow them, but for now, there are none.

The Reno Gazette Journal posted a story from the Associated Press this morning.  Reno is the closest city of size, and their story is four paragraphs long.

Did Fossett have reason to want to disappear?  They say they've thought of that.  Was there foul play?  They say they've looked into that possibility too.

People are still invited to go to Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" site and look over newly-posted satellite images that may provide clues.  The idea of the site is to enlist people to do what artificial intelligence does not (at least not yet) do well--pick out unusual things in a picture.  Their preview page is HERE, but so far nobody's seen anything.

Perhaps, as people have noted before, Fossett's disappearance is a reminder that for all the technology we've developed, the world is still a large place, and it's still possible for a small plane to disappear in the rugged, unpopulated terrain of the American west.

Fossett's own website, SteveFossett.com, has a mesage from Sept. 26: "On behalf of the entire Steve Fossett team, we would like to thank everyone who has written to the office and the website over these past three weeks to share their prayers and kind wishes for Steve's safe return. In addition, we thank everyone participating in the search via the Amazon Mechanical Turk / Google Earth initiative."

October 1, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)