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Death and Your Digital Trail

April 30, 2008 3:30 PM

Someone has posed a heartbreaking question on Slashdot this morning: "A good friend of mine had her younger brother apparently commit suicide last week. He was a young, promising CS major who was close to being accepted into a very prestigious school." 

There was no suicide note, no explanation for the young man's death, says the writer.  "Some members of the family are hoping to find something, anything, that might explain why this all went down. Since I'm the most computer-skilled person the family knows, they have asked me if I could help them try to find some information. My possible approaches are: his Linux laptop, his university, Gmail And Hotmail email accounts, and a second MySpace profile that apparently has been tagged as private. How ethical would it be to, say, try to crack his root password in a situation like this?"

Read the full post HERE, plus the hundreds of comments that have come in.

It's a sad issue, which has taken on new layers of complexity in the digital age.  Each of us leaves a trail behind -- letters, financial statements, whatever -- and in days gone by they were passed on to our families when we died.  If your uncle passed away, and letters in the attic revealed he'd once had an extramarital affair -- well, there would be extra pain, but no question as to whether the family had the right to see those letters.

Today, though, we have email accounts, and Facebook pages -- and passwords, lots of them, creating the feeling that even in the wide-open world of the Internet, what you leave there is private.  Does it change when you die?

Actually, there is precedent for the case of the young man on Slashdot.  Here's one example.  Three years ago I did a World News piece on Lance Cpl. Justin Ellsworth, a Marine killed on patrol in Iraq.  His family asked Yahoo! if they could have his archived emails, just as a way of remembering him, and Yahoo resisted.

"The commitment we've made to every person who signs-up for a Yahoo! Mail account is to treat their email as a private communication," the company told me.  "Email often involves many individuals who have privacy expectations...."  To this day, when you register at many websites, the fine print will stipulate that your account will be deleted after you die.

Cpl. Ellsworth's family took the case to court, and won.  Yahoo sent them a CD-ROM and paper copies.  They have a website in his memory HERE.  They urged other families to get their loved ones to share their passwords, perhaps in a sealed envelope, just in case.

There's a coda to the story, though.  The email account contained hundreds of spam messages, but it turned out Cpl. Ellsworth had saved almost none of the emails he had written, and his family so much wanted.

April 30, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)

Hit 'em Where it Hurts

April 29, 2008 3:04 PM

The Kaiser Family Foundation is out with a survey on the rising cost of health care, and it's enough to give you a stomach ache.

In tough times there are other things on people's minds -- 44 percent of those surveyed said paying for gasoline was a "serious problem" -- but look at some of their numbers on what medical bills do to people:

--20% said they had been contacted by a collection agency because of unpaid medical bills in the last five years.

--20% said they "had difficulty paying other bills."

--17% said they "used up all or most of [their] savings" because of illness.

--12% said they had "been unable to pay for basic necessities."

The summary is HERE.  The numbers above are from p. 2 of the pdf file.

The Los Angeles Times reacted to one number in particular: "7% of Americans said they or someone in their household decided to marry in the last year so they could get healthcare benefits via their spouse."

A few days ago we did a World News story on a study of robotic heart-bypass surgery; read it HERE or watch it HERE.  The doctors who did the work suggested it may catch on, not because it's less painful for patients, not because it may provide longer-lasting benefits, but because it gets people out of the hospital and back to work more quickly, thus saving their employers money.

Ouch.

April 29, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)

Is God 'Obsolete'?

April 28, 2008 2:27 PM

Often the best part, for me, of writing this page is reading your comments.  After thirteen hundred on natural selection and intelligent design (after the release of Ben Stein's "Expelled"), we're actually crashing that page on some computers.

So let's pick up the conversation here, if you'd like to continue.  And to add some new material, let me offer the following from the John Templeton Foundation: a debate titled  "Does science make belief in God obsolete?"  

"Absolutely not!" writes physicist William D. Phillips.

"No, but it should," writes Christopher Hitchens, author of "God is not Great."

The foundation assembled a diverse group of thinkers for its "conversation," and their answers to the question are both reasoned and passionate.

Click HERE to take a look at their essays.  The foundation took out full-page newspaper ads in Sunday papers to publicize its debate.  Sir John Templeton, who made his fortune in mutual funds, makes it clear that his personal faith is strong, writing that he hopes his foundation will support the work of those who might deepen our "knowledge and love of God." 

April 28, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (400) | TrackBack (0)

So You Want to Be an NBA Star: Do You Have the Genes?

April 26, 2008 4:45 PM

ABC News' Mike Lee reports from London: Something new is going on with the use of DNA that could make a very few lucky people rich, and devastate the hopes and dreams of many others. And it raises huge ethical issues for most of us, on top of the DNA issues we already worrying about.

Aside from being great athletes, what do you suppose Mohammad Ali, Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong, and Tiger Woods all have in common?  If you believe some scientists, the logic is that they were all born to be great sports achievers because there are specific genetic traits that can predict exceptional athletic ability.

Of course this idea of predestined achievement by a few, and conversely predestined under-achievement by the many, goes against the teachings of a lot of philosophers and self-improvement gurus who say that most of us are capable of greatness. But, it seems, the lab boys disagree.

We use DNA to solve murders, screen for predisposition to diseases, study the evolution of prehistoric creatures, and match up children with their biological parents when a polygamy sect is broken up.

We debate how science can use DNA for the better good, while protecting society from the use of DNA to custom-build certain kinds of humans through DNA engineering.  That may seem a distant, maybe impossible, prospect.

But what you may not realise is that DNA profiling, which in scientific terms is off shelf technology, is now being used to identify a pre-disposition to "enhanced athletic performance."

In other words, we are on the verge of trying to identify the next generation of super athletes, and possibly on the verge of one of the great all-time robberies of the human spirit, the will to win based on pure desire, guts and determination.

Here is the background. According the Guardian newspaper of London, a leading sports scientist by the name of Dr. Henning Wackerhage of the school of medicine sciences at Aberdeen University, has been approached by an unnamed professional sports organization about the possibility of screening players to discover whether they have a genetic key to sports excellence.

"A football club was interested in doing genetic testing of athletes," he told the Guardian, and added, "It was a genetic performance test."

Dr. Wackerhage was not immediately available to speak with ABC News, but when he is, we will put more questions to him.

In Britain is it not illegal to carry out such tests, although it is not clear whether any organizations have yet to try. In Australia, one genetics company reportedly offers a $90 test the lab claims will identify whether customers have the fast-twitch muscle function gene called ACTN3, which is said to be found in leading sprinters.

Other genes associated with high athletic performance include PPARdelta, which controls human growth, and genes that regulate erythropoietin, a hormone that regulates the production of red blood cells.  Those are the little guys that deliver oxygen from the lungs to muscle tissue. The more efficient the delivery, the better the muscles perform.

Wackerhage published a scientific paper re-counting that have produced enhanced performance in mice and rats through "gene doping" and DNA screening for high performance potential.  He later also suggested that it might be possible to produce the human equivalent of a Formula One car by using genetic mutations (or engineering).

So some bright spark at a British soccer club got wind of the idea and called the professor.

"My advice was that there are questions of legality with an employer doing genetic tests on its employees.  They wanted to conduct a test (on current players) that is specific to genetics," Wackerhage said.

However, UK Sport, the group that governs drug testing in Britain, is quoted as saying it had no power to prevent clubs using genetic screening on players because it was not specifically prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

So where might this all lead? At the very least it appears that it is now possible to identify genetic traits found in top athletes, as well as potential top athletes at birth.

What will this do to the noble profession of sports scouts?

Instead of sitting through videotape of hundreds of high school football, basketball or baseball games every year looking for a promising rookie, will these legends of the sports world be replaced by clerks who go online and scan a lab’s data bank for genetic draft picks?

And what will happen to one of the greatest things about sports, the will to overcome what nature has given you and excel through hard work, guts and determination?

Huw Jennings, youth development manager at the Football Association Premier League, told the Guardian: "While you may be able to identify athletic ability, the road from promising youngster to top professional is far from smooth, and it doesn’t necessarily follow that talented athletes will become talented footballers."

Perhaps.  But DNA athletic profiling could fall hard on youngsters who need the traditional values of sports to help them develop into well-adjusted adults.  If they are told they are being bumped from their Little League team because their lab tests were dodgy, what will that do to future generations?

Despite some wonderful uses of DNA science, parents, would-be sports stars, and sports fans may eventually have to ask whether this is one scientific achievement too far.

April 26, 2008 in Science, Sports | Permalink | User Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

Rough Landing

April 22, 2008 4:28 PM

Peggy A Whitson is now the single most experienced astronaut in American history.  When she landed Saturday with two crew mates, she had spent 377 days of her life in space.

But re-entry, in Russia's Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft, was not as planned.  There is now a story from the Russian news agency Interfax, saying the crew was in "serious danger" as they came down.

The ship landed on the steppes of Kazakhstan about 295 miles short of its target.  It took 45 minutes for a rescue helicopter to reach her and her two crew mates -- Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and South Korean astronaut So-yeon Yi.

Their ship, says Interfax, entered the atmosphere with its hatch facing forward instead of its heat shield.  The story quotes an unidentified Russian space official as saying the hatch was damaged, as well as a valve that equalizes air pressure between the inside and outside of the ship after it enters the atmosphere.

"The fact that the entire crew ended up whole and undamaged is a great success. Everything could have turned out much worse," the official is quoted as saying.  "You could say the situation was on a razor's edge."

It's the second time in a row, and the third in eleven flights for this series of Soyuz spacecraft, that a landing has gone awry.  Each time the capsule has made a "ballistic" re-entry instead of a guided one.

Yi was the first South Korean ever to fly in space, and the re-entry scared her.  The crew members felt ten times the force of gravity as they were slowed by the Earth's atmosphere.  The ship unexpectedly lost contact with the ground.  After it landed its parachute is reported to have caught fire.

What went wrong?  Did the landing capsule have trouble separating from its guidance and power module, as may have happened before?  Was there a short circuit in the guidance system, as there apparently had been on the previous flight? 

William Gerstenmaier, NASA's space operations chief, gave a telephone press conference this afternoon -- though he emphasized he doesn't have any answers.  "We've detected something on two flights significant enough that it needs to be understood," he said.  "But the good news is that we have the right people working on this.  The Russians are taking this extremely seriously." 

NASA says it is much too early to draw any long-term conclusions about the long-term reliability of the Russian ferry craft.  After the space shuttles are retired in 2010, the plan is to rely on Russian Soyuz ships for several years to get American astronauts to the space station.

(NASA Photo: Whitson and crew mates before launch in October.)

April 22, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

Evolution: Now Showing at a Theater Near You

April 18, 2008 8:35 AM

The Ben Stein anti-Darwinist film, "Expelled," opens today in 1,100 Theaters.  We've posted before on it (look back HERE and HERE), so we thought we'd give you a sampling of what others have to say so far:

Ronald Bailey at REASON Magazine has a headline: "Flunk This Movie! Ben Stein's new anti-science movie Expelled is all worldview and no evidence."

He writes that "despite its topic, the film is entirely free of scientific content -- no scientific evidence against biological evolution and none for "intelligent design" (ID) theory is given. Which makes sense because biological evolution is amply supported by evidence from the fossil record, molecular biology, and morphology."

Matt Barber, writing at TOWNHALL.COM: "If you're already a person of faith, prepare to have your faith strengthened. And even if you're not, you can't possibly walk away without at least admitting that the debate over who we are and how we got here is far from over."

Jeffrey Kluger of TIME (who covers science, not film), says Stein "quickly wades into waters far too deep for him. He makes all the usual mistakes nonscientists make whenever they try to take down evolution, asking, for example, how something as complex as a living cell could have possibly arisen whole from the earth's primordial soup. The answer is it couldn't -- and it didn't. Organic chemicals needed eons of stirring and slow cooking before they could produce compounds that could begin to lead to a living thing. More dishonestly, Stein employs the common dodge of enumerating all the admittedly unanswered questions in evolutionary theory and using this to refute the whole idea. But all scientific knowledge is built this way. A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish."

John Rennie, Editor in Chief of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, has posted an extensive package on the film.  In his own review he writes, "Unfortunately, Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film's attacks -- all recycled from previous pro-ID works -- would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency."

Greg Stier, head of Dare 2 Share Ministries in Colorado, writing in the CHRISTIAN POST: "It was a funny, thought provoking, dangerous, serious, engaging (and did I mention “funny”?) documentary. I have been a fan of Ben Stein since his “Bueller, Bueller” days, but now he is a rock star to me. He was so tongue-in-cheek that he almost bit it off."

Sean P. Means of the SALT LAKE TRIBUNE complains he was not able to see the film in advance: "To keep a movie away from critics is usually a sign that things are really, really bad."

He concludes, "I can't help but be struck by the irony of Stein's own words in the movie's introduction (which is also on YouTube):

"'In my experience, people who are confident in their ideas are not afraid of criticism. So that tells me the Darwinists are afraid. They're hiding something.'

"What, pray tell, are Stein and the "Expelled" producers hiding? And what are they afraid of?"

And this from Charles Colson, who, like Stein, worked in the Nixon Administration, and later founded Prison Fellowship Ministries: "I urge you to go see Expelled when it opens at a theater near you. Believe me, in this case the truth really is stranger -- and more compelling -- than any fiction the film’s detractors could possibly dream up."

April 18, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (1343) | TrackBack (0)

Anyone Out There? Maybe Not

April 18, 2008 8:05 AM

In 1961 a young radio astronomer named Frank Drake came up with a formula to estimate how many planets in our galaxy may be home to intelligent life. 

It became known as the Drake Equation, and when its inventor factored in the number of stars, the percentage likely to have planets around them, the percentage of those planets likely to be right for life, and so forth, he concluded the universe must be teeming with sentient beings.

The Drake Equation looks like this...

...and there's an explanation of the variables in it HERE.  Take a look at the calculator on the right (or at THIS ONE) if you want to play exobiologist yourself.  If you're like Drake, you'll conclude that there are myriad civilizations out there trying to get in touch with us.

But are there?  We haven't heard from them, hard as Drake and his colleagues have worked at SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.

Now comes Dr. Andrew Watson, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, who says the odds of finding beings like us elsewhere is very, very low -- perhaps as little as 0.01 percent over the four billion years that a given planet like ours is likely to be friendly to life.  (Hat tip to Tuan Nguyen of our staff for catching this.)

Watson is hardly alone in his belief; Don Brownlee and Peter Ward wrote a book called "Rare Earth" in 2000, in which they argued that our planet was extremely unusual--not only did it have liquid water, not only was it the right size to hold an atmosphere, but it also had a giant neighbor (Jupiter) to draw away asteroids and other debris that might otherwise have pummeled it as the Solar System formed.  Find a good discussion with them, Drake and others, HERE.

The factor Watson introduces to the argument is that, as he argues, there's a finite window for life on Earth--and we came into being relatively late in that window.  The Sun is slowly growing in intensity (no, lest we digress in that direction, not enough to explain the warming of recent decades), so that Earth has "only" (his quotes, not mine) about a billion years before it gets fried. 

"Structurally complex life is separated from prokaryotes [probably the Earth's first living cells] by several very unlikely steps and, hence, will be much less common than prokaryotes," he writes in the journal Astrobiology. "Intelligence is one further unlikely step, so it is much less common still."

The full text of Watson's paper is HERE.  And there's a writeup from the University HERE.

Bummer, eh?  But Dr. Drake's disciples at SETI keep up their work, funded largely by such benefactors as the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.  Maybe someday they will prove the Watsons of the world wrong.

April 18, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (74) | TrackBack (0)

Duck!! Not.

April 16, 2008 2:01 PM

There is an asteroid, known to astronomers as 99942 Apophis, that caused a bit of a stir when it was first spotted in 2004.  An early calculation showed it had a 2.7 percent chance of hitting the Earth on April 13, 2029.

Everyone's become much calmer since then; the latest calculation was that it stood a one-in-45,000 chance of hitting us.  But then came a 13-year-old German schoolboy named Nico Marquardt.

Agence France-Presse (see their story HERE), quoting the German paper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, reports that young Mr. Marquardt did some math for a local science competition, and decided Apophis will miss us in 2029 -- but then stand a one-in-450 chance of hitting us on its next pass, seven years later, on April 13, 2036. 

450 instead of 45,000?  According to AFP, what Nico figured on, but grownups hadn't, was that during its 2029 pass, the asteroid might hit one of the 8,000 satellites currently in Earth orbit.  If that happens, Nico was quoted as saying, "Es könnte knapp werden." ("It could become tight.")

The rest of the newspaper piece is HERE, if you read German.  If not, you may want to try FreeTranslation.com.  The story soon spread worldwide; look HERE and HERE for examples.

Apophis follows an elliptical orbit around the sun, passing roughly between Earth and Mars, and occasionally making close passes.  NASA has an interactive diagram HERE, and if you run it forward to 2029 and 2036, Apophis does swing by.

The newspaper says Nico wrote a theme called "Der Killerasteroid Apophis" (do you need a translation of that?), which came to the attention of someone at the European Space Agency...which passed it on to someone at NASA...which confirmed the kid's numbers.

So I called around NASA, where I mostly got blank stares, if that's what you can call them over the phone -- except for one long-time acquaintance who said, "NASA didn't confirm jack." 

This afternoon they put out a statement: "The Near-Earth Object Program Office has not changed its current estimates for the very low probability (1/45,000) of an Earth impact by Apophis in 2036.

"Contrary to some recent press reports, NASA has had no correspondence with the young German student who has claimed that the Apophis impact probability is far higher.

"This student's conclusion was reportedly based upon the possibility of a collision with an artificial satellite during the asteroid's close approach in April 2029.  However, the asteroid will not pass near the main belt of geosynchronous satellites and the chance of a collision with a satellite is exceedingly remote."

A team at JPL's Solar System Dynamics Group, led by Jon Giorgini, published a paper in January in the journal Icarus, confirming that Apophis will safely miss us in 2029, and calculating that the chances of an impact in 2036 are only one in 45,000.  But there are uncertainties because the asteroid, less than a thousand feet in diameter, may be rotating, or brighter on one side than the other (sunlight, causing heating and other effects, can slightly alter its path), or it may be pulled in one direction or another by other asteroids.  Their paper is HERE, and there's a good summary HERE.

Just remember that at the moment, Apophis is more than 147 million miles away, that Earth is less than 8,000 miles in diameter, and that for all this to be a non-issue, it only has to miss us by...a hundred miles.

April 16, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (43) | TrackBack (0)

Carbon Tax: 'Off the Table'

April 16, 2008 8:07 AM

Rep. John Dingell, the veteran Michigan Democrat who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has put out a statement:

Dingell Takes Carbon & Gas Tax Proposals Off the Table
Congressman Declares Policies Too Burdensome on Working Families During Economic Downturn"

The statement reads in part, "Economists and other experts continue to inform us that a carbon tax is the most effective and efficient way at getting at the problem of global warming.  A few months back I put forward for conversation the idea of a carbon fee, a gas tax and a reduction in the mortgage interest deduction for very large McMansions -- policies intended to reduce our carbon emissions and combat global warming.   When I initially began looking at this proposal, the price of a gallon of gas was significantly lower than it is today and the economy was not in recession.  Times have changed; our economy has taken a hard downward turn and now is not the time for us to put any additional financial burden on the working families of Michigan or this nation. 

"The reality is that this proposal is off the table for now."  The full statement is not online at the moment, but a lot about Rep. Dingell's stand on global climate can be found HERE.

So a carbon tax is off the table -- but in reality, it had never really been on the table either.  As the Wall St. Journal opined last July, "His point is to force his colleagues--and the voters--to be more honest about the cost of their global-warming posturing." (See the full piece HERE.)

"I sincerely doubt that the American people are willing to pay what this is really going to cost them," Dingell said last July in an interview on C-SPAN.  He and his staff later insisted his proposals for a carbon tax and a 50-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax were not acts of cynicism; take a look at David Leonhart's New York Times column last September.   

But enough of that.  President Bush presents his own climate-change proposals Wednesday afternoon, and Washington is already bracing.

April 16, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

The 'Green Nobel Prize'

April 14, 2008 1:17 PM

Rosa Hilda Ramos, say her admirers, took on the polluters and won.  She's a local activist in Puerto Rico, in Cataño, a low-income section of San Juan. 

Today she will be cited as one of the six winners of this year's Goldman Environmental Prizes, sometimes described as the 'Green Nobel Prize.'  The award, in her case, is $150,000, though she's apparently unlikely to keep the money for herself.

Cataño is reported by the EPA to have the highest rates of cancer and respiratory disease in Puerto Rico, and environmental groups blamed PREPA, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.  After her mother died of cancer in 1990, Ms. Ramos formed an activist group and brought suit against the power company.

Eventually the EPA stepped in, and after a long legal battle, PREPA paid $7 million in fines.  Ms. Ramos lobbied the EPA to take the money and use it to protect a nearby wetland -- valuable as open space in an industrial area, and as a natural buffer against the threat of flooding.

The Goldman prizes, awarded annually since 1990, come from a foundation set up by Richard Goldman and his late wife Rhoda (she was a descendant of Levi Strauss, the blue jeans maker). 

Of course, the environmental crusaders cited by the Goldman foundation are less than appreciated by the companies with which they did battle; witness the case of two other winners, Pablo Fajardo and Luis Yanza, from Ecuador.  They did battle with Texaco, which they alleged spilled 17 million gallons of oil into waterways and soild in the Ecuadorian Amazon from 1964 to 1990.

Texaco has since been bought by Chevron, which has a posted its side of the argument HERE, and issued a statement objecting to the award: "Chevron regrets that the organizers of the Goldman Environmental Prize were skillfully misled into naming Mr. Fajardo and Mr. Yanza as prize winners.

"While both Mr. Fajardo and Mr. Yanza are being lauded as environmental crusaders, the truth is their actions have protected the culprit -- state-owned oil company Petroecuador. They have even tried to block clean up efforts and extended miserable conditions for those they say they are defending.

"These two men have twisted the facts in a legal case waged against Chevron for pure financial gain. Fictitious claims of cancer made by their associates have been thrown out of Federal Court in San Francisco. Mr. Fajardo and Mr. Yanza are ignoring the ongoing pollution in Ecuador by Petroecuador and are using it to seek billions of dollars in damages for decades ago operations in the region by Texaco Petroleum. Chevron became a convenient but unjust lawsuit target after it acquired Texaco in 2001."

(Photo above of Ms. Ramos by Tom Dusenbery for the Goldman Prize.)

April 14, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

The God of Fear

April 11, 2008 6:44 PM

Quickly, before the opportunity passes, I wanted to share an image from a few days ago.

It is of Phobos, the larger of the two moons of Mars, as seen by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, from a distance of about 4,000 miles.  Phobos is only about 13 miles in diameter, which means its gravity is about a thousandth as strong as Earth's.  No (I've asked), an astronaut would not be able to achieve escape velocity by jumping, but neither is the gravity strong enough to have pulled the little world, when it was young and molten, into a spherical shape. 

Deimos, the other known Martian moon, is only about seven miles across, which makes one wonder how the astronomer Asaph Hall spotted them from more than 35 million miles away in 1877.

NASA says the reddish colors -- and the bluish ejecta from relatively young craters -- are realistic, but exaggerated to help separate them.  There's more HERE, including some images for which you'll need 3-D glasses.

A tiny, cold world.  Makes you grateful that spring has arrived here on Earth's northern hemisphere.

April 11, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Too Hot to Touch

April 11, 2008 4:06 PM

You can wash your lettuce until there's nothing left of it.  But nothing we routinely do in America -- not even rinsing produce in chlorine disinfectants -- will get rid of all the bacteria that cause food poisoning. 

That's the view, at least of a group of Agriculture Department researchers.  They say the most effective solution they see is irradiation -- exposing food to a beam of charged particles.  Brendan A. Niemira, from the USDA's Agricultural Research Service near Philadelphia, was on a team making a presentation yesterday in New Orleans to the American Chemical Society, saying they found irradiation killed 99.9 percent of the E. coli found in spinach and lettuce leaves.  Conventional rinsing, they said, never got past the surface, and were almost useless when bacteria congregated in "biofilms," colonies where they form protective outside layers.

Irradiation is one of those subjects that's festered for years; witness this decade-old BACKGROUNDER from the University of Georgia.  Niemira's colleague Ben Miller, of the University of Rochester, told Dr. Diane Kang of our Medical Unit, "Irradiation has a bad rep with the public," but he called it "great" -- a safe way to remove contaminants from fresh food.  40 other countries have approved its use, and the FDA allows limited use on meats.

The CDC has some background info HERE; the folks who wrote it are all for it.  They say it kills pathogens, and does not make your food radioactive.

But what do you think of when you think of radiation?  Cancer?  Genetic damage?  Unknowable risks?  The FDA has been in the process of reviewing food irradiation for broader use, and has provoked responses such as THIS one last year from the Center for Food Safety: "Radiation can do strange things to food, by creating substances called 'unique radiolytic products.'  These irradiation byproducts include a variety of mutagens -- substances that can cause gene mutations, polyploidy (an abnormal condition in which cells contain more than two sets of chromosomes), chromosome aberrations (often associated with cancerous cells), and dominant lethal mutations (a change in a cell that prevents it from reproducing) in human cells. Making matters worse, many mutagens are also carcinogens."

Believers insist it's safe.  Doubters are not persuaded.  In the meantime, you have to eat.

(Above: the FDA's current symbol, required on food that's been irradiated.  How often have you seen it?)

April 11, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)

Saving the Wild Without Roping it All Off

April 10, 2008 3:32 PM

Protecting nature's diversity of species seems to set off fights in the wealthiest countries and the poorest. 

But it doesn't have to be that way.  After a massive survey of the island of Madagascar, scientists say they can protect the world's wildlife with a new, carefully targeted approach.

They talk of "biodiversity hot spots" -- and if you identify them you can make a tremendous difference without much pain.

"Approximately 50% of plant and 71 to 82% of vertebrate species are concentrated in biodiversity hot spots covering only 2.3% of Earth's land surface," write Claire Kremen of the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues, in Friday's edition of the journal SCIENCE.  They cited figures from Russ Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, who's scoured the globe, looking for economically viable ways to protect wildlife.

Kremen et al catalogued more than 2,300 species found only on Madagascar, which is known both for its variety of wildlife -- and for the widespread poverty there.  Their paper is only online by subscription, but there's a Berkeley release HERE.

The government of Madagascar has promised to protect ten percent of its land for nature, and environmentalists are not about to turn down the offer.  The purpose of the survey was to decide how to pick good places.

The old approach would have been to find the largest endangered animals and cordon off the forest around them, hoping -- often wrongly -- that smaller species would also be protected while they were at it.  It often set off a time-worn conflict, environmentalists and scientists wanting to defend the wild, while people nearby complained about the land around them being declared off limits.

The new approach is to figure out where the most promising places are for all sorts of plants and animals -- the hot spots.  On Madagascar, they weren't necessarily in forests.  Lowland plains, seacoasts, even a good watering hole, can have value as well. 

And protecting these places need not be bad for people.  Mittermeier and others forcefully argue that nature, undisturbed, can attract tourists, or harbor the ingredients for new medicines -- all sorts of possibilities that may ultimately bring people more income than slashing and burning forests for subsistence farming.

I've done stories before with Mittermeier, who's based in Virginia but spends much of his time in some of the world's most remote places.  We camped with him in a forest village in Suriname, on the northern edge of the Amazon basin in South America.  He slept easily.  I and my crew hardly slept at all.

(Photo: a stump-tailed chameleon from Madagascar, courtesy Julie Larsen Maher for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which joined in the survey.)

April 10, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Better than Fine? People Say They Take Medicines to Help Concentrate

April 09, 2008 3:42 PM

When you hear complaints about performance-enhancing drugs, you usually think of ballplayers or runners.  But what about the rest of us?  Turns out a surprising number of people use "cognitive-enhancing" prescription medications to help themselves through work, tests they have to take at college, talks they have to give.

Editors at the journal NATURE got curious, especially when there was heated response to an EDITORIAL they ran on this last November. 

So they did an informal online survey of visitors to their website, and say they got some surprising results: "One in five respondents said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory."  You can read their summary, written by Feature and Commentary Editor Brendan Maher, HERE.

They asked about three types of drugs:

--Ritalin (methylphenidate), the stimulant often used to control ADHD, which is also known on some college campuses as a "study aid."  (The quotation marks are NATURE's, not mine.)
--Provigil (modafinil), a medication that increases alertness and allows people to go without sleep.
--Beta blockers, commonly used for cardiac arrhythmia or high blood pressure, that are also known to control anxiety. 

Keep in mind that this was not a controlled study--people were answering if they wanted, not because they were part of a representative group.  NATURE's readership is not typical as well, consisting in large part of people on campuses or in research institutions.  But the numbers are consistent with some past studies of college students.

"This is really just a finger in the breeze," Maher wrote to me in an e-mail.  "It’s not scientific, but it points to areas where maybe more research should take place."

Of those who said they took the medicines, Maher adds, "Almost all respondents (96%) thought people with neuropsychiatric disorders who have severe memory and concentration problems should be given cognition-enhancing drugs. But perhaps surprisingly, a high four-fifths thought that healthy adults should be able to take the drugs if they want to. And 69% reported that they would risk mild side effects to take such drugs themselves."

Maher says 1,400 people from 60 countries answered the survey.  Most of them didn't answer questions about where they got the medications, but of the few (201) who did, slightly more than half said they had prescriptions, and a third ordered them online.  More discussion HERE.

If you have a deadline or a test to pass, or you have to speak in public, is it cheating to take a pill?  Do you make yourself "Better than Well," to borrow the title of a 2003 book by bioethicist Carl Elliott?  Or is modern medicine offering a benefit that we will one day routinely accept?

April 9, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (37) | TrackBack (0)

America's Carbon Footprint

April 08, 2008 1:02 PM

Take a look at the map included in this post.  The Vulcan Project, a team at Purdue University, has plotted where in America carbon dioxide emissions are the greatest.

At first glance, the map looks very pretty -- and very predictable.  But it isn't.  Darker colors -- the greens, reds and browns -- correspond to higher concentrations of CO2, and they appear to be darkest where the population density is greatest. (Note how cities come out dark, including the entire northeast corridor from Boston to New York to Washington.) 

But the scientists, who say they've worked to figure out where carbon amounts are raised or lowered by the presence of natural "sinks," such as forests and water, that absorb carbon dioxide, say they got some surprises when they plotted this high-res map.  See how much beige you find in the southeast, and in Midwestern states such as Indiana and Ohio?  That, they say, is best explained by coal-fired power plants and cement plants.  There's a lot more information HERE, and from the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program HERE.

You can click on the map, or HERE, to enlarge.  There's a video as well, HERE.

The Vulcan Project, which gets funding from NASA and the Department of Energy, will be succeeded by one called Hestia, which will try to plot carbon dioxide emissions for the whole planet. It will get help from a new satellite, the Orbital Carbon Observatory.

The data for the map above dates from 2002.  How precise is it?  Take a look at the green line crossing northern Nevada.  That turns out to be Interstate 80, wending its way from San Francisco to New York, heavy on truck traffic in an otherwise very open part of the country.

April 8, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (32) | TrackBack (0)

It's Not the Sun

April 07, 2008 8:02 AM

Those who doubt that human activity is warming the climate sometimes suggest that earthly temperatures are tied to the natural cycles of the Sun. 

Two British physicists decided to test this idea.  They say they came up dry.

The paper, by Terry Sloan of Lancaster University and Arnold Wolfendale of Durham University, is in Environmental Research Letters; find the abstract and links to the full paper HERE.

The idea -- the one they set out to check -- was that solar wind, the charged particles coming our way from the Sun, has an effect on cloud cover, and, therefore, on temperature.  Solar activity rises and falls in eleven-year cycles, as well as having longer, less rhythmic patterns.

So they looked at measurements of solar activity over two eleven-year cycles, and compared them to weather records.  In one cycle, solar wind correlated to cloud cover about a quarter of the time.  In the other, they say they saw no relationship at all.

"This is of vast significance because if the skeptics are right, it would mean we're wasting our time trying to cut greenhouse gases," the researchers said in a statement. "But we couldn't find the link they were proposing which means we are right to be cutting carbon emissions."

There's further explanation by Richard Black of the BBC; take a look HERE.  He quotes the leading proponent of the cosmic-ray theory as being undeterred.

(False-color image of the Sun's disc from the SOHO spacecraft.  NASA/ESA)

April 7, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (54) | TrackBack (0)

The Long Journey of the Leatherback Turtle

April 04, 2008 8:02 PM

There are migratory animals in this world, and then there are leatherback turtles.  Scientists have tracked one 13,000 miles -- halfway across the world -- apparently in search of food.

We did a World News piece on the leatherbacks, and the work being done on them by researchers at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

"They really are a remarkable creature and we don't know a lot about them,” said NOAA’s Peter Dutton.

The turtles are hard to track because they’re remarkably difficult to find in the ocean.  Scientists say the turtles are solitary travelers, often diving thousands of feet, then surfacing only briefly for air.

So the scientists set out by boat and chase plane to find turtles where they could.  Peter’s brother John Dutton, a filmmaker, chronicled the search for a documentary called "Jurassic Journey."   A link to his production company is HERE; excerpts from "Jurassic Journey" are HERE, and they’re worth watching.

"It is a cryptic, seldom-seen species," said Scott Benson, Peter Dutton’s research colleague.  "Many people here" -- even on the staff at the Science Center, he said -- "have never seen this animal."

In a report to a recent conference, the scientists said they successfully attached satellite transmitters to nine leatherbacks in the Pacific.  They knew the turtles were migratory animals, but there was one that surprised them.

Over a period of 695 days, it swam from Papua, Indonesia...northeast across the Pacific to Hawaii...and on to the coast of Oregon, where it stopped to feast on jellyfish, the staple of the leatherbacks' diet.

Then it headed back toward Hawaii, and it probably went beyond, but by then the transmitter finally failed. 

12,774 miles, sometimes at a pace of 35 miles a day. 

This is of more than passing curiosity.  Leatherbacks are considered threatened on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the U.S.  Some scientists think their numbers in the Pacific have declined 95 percent, as people in tropical countries catch them on the beaches where they lay their eggs, and fishing boats snare them as "bycatch" -- accidental victims -- in their nets.  More information is at Seaturtle.org

The long migration, may, in fact, help protect them.  It spreads them around, so that if conditions are bad in one place, other turtles may survive elsewhere. 

How do they live on the long journey, if the only food they really want is the jellyfish in one part of the ocean?

"Oh, they snack," Scott Benson told me.  "Think of yourself on a long car trip.  You may pull into a McDonald’s on the way, but the real meal is at grandma’s house when you get there."

(World Wildlife Fund, N.J.Tangkepayung/AP Photo)

April 4, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

The Cost of Controlling Climate Change

April 03, 2008 2:08 PM

A veteran climate scientist, a policy analyst and an economist say it will be far more expensive than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated to cut down on the greenhouse gases often blamed for the problem.

They've published a commentary in today's edition of NATURE, saying the IPCC may actually be too optimistic by a factor of four.  (Yes, the IPCC is the organization that shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize with a certain political figure.)

The authors are Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado, Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Christopher Green of McGill University in Montreal. 

"Two thirds or more of the energy efficiency improvements and decarbonization of energy supply required to stabilize greenhouse gases is already built into the IPCC reference scenarios," they write, adding that growth in China and India have made things more complex.  "The IPCC plays a risky game in assuming that spontaneous advances in technological innovation will carry most of the burden of achieving future emissions reductions, rather than focusing on creating the conditions for such innovations to occur."  Find the full text HERE.

There's also a news article on it at Nature.com, which you can find HERE.

All three men are on record as saying warming is not to be ignored.  "Human-caused climate change is real and requires attention by policy makers to both mitigation and adaptation -- but there is no quick fix; the issue will be with us for decades and longer," Pielke wrote in testimony to the House Government Reform Committee in 2006.

But the warning in today's commentary is hotly disputed by Joseph Romm, who worked in the Energy Department in the 1990s and is the author of "Hell and High Water--and What You Should Do."  Romm calls Pielke a "delayer" of action on climate, and calls the commentary "pointless and misleading if not outright dangerous."

"Five years ago the American Enterprise Institute “proved” that the lowest IPCC emissions projection is too high, and they backed up their conclusion with actual 1990s data, whereas Pielke, Wigley, and Green have “proven” that the highest IPCC emissions projection is too low, and they backed up their conclusion with actual data from this decade," he writes.  He goes into some detail in his post at ClimateProgress.org; read it HERE.

This is dense stuff.  It helps you understand why the climate issue is such a turnoff to a lot of people.  But in the meantime, Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund has, with Miriam Horn, published an upbeat book called "Earth: the Sequel."  In it, they lay out dozens--if not hundreds--of promising ideas which they say will help stop warming...and make their inventors rich in the process. 

"Twenty years from now some thirty-five-year-old is going to say the reason he's a billionaire is that he read this book when he was fifteen," writes Michael Lewis ("The New New Thing") in a jacket blurb.  At last count, the book was number 28 on the New York Times nonfiction-hardcover bestseller list.

April 3, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (25) | TrackBack (0)

A Planet is Born

April 02, 2008 8:38 AM

There's a beautiful image today from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Scotland, and we hope you'll like it.

It is a computer-generated simulation of a young star, say astronomers, with a vast disc of rock and dust around it gradually forming a new  planet -- the bright dot in the upper right.  Dr. Jane Greaves of the University of St. Andrews is reporting on it today at an astronomy meeting in Belfast.  She and colleagues observed it with radio telescopes in the U.S. and Britain.

The star is called HL Tau, in the constellation Taurus the Bull, and it is believed to be only about 100,000 years old  -- a baby in astronomical terms.  (The Sun is 4.6 billion years old.)  It's about 520 light years away from us.  According to the team studying it, it's the youngest planet ever seen taking shape.

"We see a distinct orbiting ball of gas and dust, which is exactly how a very young protoplanet should look," says Greaves in a statement. "The protoplanet is about 14 times as massive as Jupiter and is about twice as far from HL Tau as Neptune is from our Sun."

Click HERE for more from the Royal Observatory, including the raw observations on which the simulation was based, and  (at the bottom of the page) an animated version of the simulation -- a view, in other words, of a solar system in the  making.

April 2, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)

A Black Hole? In Switzerland?

April 01, 2008 8:34 AM

In a giant lab deep beneath the Alps, physicists have spent $8 billion and 14 years assembling a machine called the Large Hadron Collider, in which they hope to smash protons together to simulate the conditions right after the Big Bang.

In the arcane world of particle physics, the collider, at a lab called CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) is hallowed ground.  This, to many scientists, is where the origins of the universe will most likely become plain.

Just one minor detail: what if the collider, as it sends particles to pulverize each other at nearly the speed of light, just happens to swallow up the Earth and a fair amount of the universe around it?

Two men, Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho, have filed suit in Federal District Count in Hawaii to stop the collider before it powers up this summer.  They say there's a chance -- small but not answered to their satisfaction -- that CERN's experiments could accidentally create a tiny Black Hole, or that the colliding particles could create new ones: "strangelets" in the parlance of particle physicists.  Neither of the plaintiffs is a scientist.  Mr. Wagner is a lawyer; Mr. Sancho lives in Spain.

Nearly every scientist who's addressed the question says it's far fetched at best, but in the interest of thoroughness, and perhaps good public relations, CERN convened a panel to discuss the matter.  Their report was due in January.

Sancho and Wagner made their complaint on the grounds that CERN (the U.S. Energy Department is one of many international partners) had not filed an environmental impact statement.  Scientists from Europe are not obliged to show up at a court in Hawaii -- but if the Earth were to be swallowed up in the course of the experiments, there would be an environmental impact on Hawaii.

Mr. Wagner has been here before.  He brought suit against Brookhaven National Laboratory on New York's Long Island, which was planning a related experiment in 1999.  I covered it.  I talked to Michio Kaku, a physicist at the City University of New York who has worked extensively in string theory, and Kaku, usually an animated speaker, turned deadpan.  "The amount of matter is so small that it can't possibly create a black hole," he said. 

The Brookhaven collider has been smashing gold ions since 2000.  Of course, if a black hole did suddenly consume us all, would we ever feel a thing?

April 1, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (89) | TrackBack (0)