Green: Damaging the Earth to Feed Its People

 Associated PressA farmer applied anhydrous ammonia to a field southwest of Stephen, Minn.

On a warming planet, humanity faces a great challenge in feeding itself at reasonable cost in the coming century, as I explain in Sunday’s paper. An issue I raise only in passing in the article is that agriculture itself is one of the earth’s greatest environmental threats.

To put a finer point on it, farming and livestock grazing are not just potential victims of climate change — they are major causes of it.

Humans are cultivating almost 40 percent of the land surface of the earth, and nearly a third of all the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet comes from agriculture and forestry. Those emissions are linked not only to the factors that many people tend to think about, like the fossil fuels burned in transporting food; that, in fact, is only a minor source of emissions.

Nitrogen fertilizer, though essential to producing food for seven billion people, is one large source of emissions, and not only because it requires natural gas to produce. After it is spread on farmers’ fields, a portion of it turns into a potent greenhouse gas that escapes into the atmosphere. (As many people know, some nitrogen also washes into rivers and streams, ultimately making its way to the ocean, where it contributes to dead zones at the mouths of many of our great rivers, including the Mississippi.)

The biggest of all the ways that agriculture contributes to climate change, though, is the chopping down of forests to make way for farms and cattle grazing. The world’s forests are enormous stores of carbon dioxide, and when they are cleared, the vegetation that is burned or allowed to decay oxidizes into carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas. In recent years, changes in land use have accounted for some 25 percent of the carbon dioxide being emitted on the planet, and the bulk of those changes are driven by agriculture.

As my colleague Elisabeth Rosenthal has reported here and here, efforts are under way to slow deforestation. But scientists say that alone will not be enough. Somehow, even as humanity increases the production of food over the coming decades, it must reduce the environmental footprint of agriculture. The alternative is continued ecological degradation and a worsening of climate change, which in turn would make food production harder.

When you view the problem in that light, the challenge of feeding ourselves becomes that much larger.

I visited the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico in February, near the end of the wheat-growing season. This institution was the original starting point for the Green Revolution, which raised agricultural output across much of the planet.

While it saved humanity from mass starvation, the Green Revolution has often been attacked on the left for having spread environmentally unsustainable practices to developing countries. Most agronomists now acknowledge that it did, in fact, cause many environmental problems, although they contend that these have sometimes been exaggerated, and were in any case necessary at the time to prevent famine.

Perhaps it will come as a surprise to many to learn that the sustainability of agriculture has become a major focus at the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement.

The director general, Thomas A. Lumpkin, told me that the real task at hand was not just to increase food output, but to make agriculture so productive that humanity could begin to restore some of what it has destroyed.

“We need to be really bold here,” he said in an interview. “It’s not just that agriculture needs to keep food prices reasonable. We need to find a way to make a dramatic contribution to the greenhouse-gas problem. We need to make farming so productive that we can get off half the agricultural land out there, so that we can return it to nature.”

That is a tall order indeed, and how it might be done is not clear. But the center in Mexico, like many other institutes around the world, is exploring various strategies. One approach, known as conservation agriculture, has begun to gain some traction. It involves minimal tillage of the soil, leaving straw and stubble in place as a soil cover, and various other techniques that conserve water and nutrients and allow carbon to build up in the soil.

In some ways this approach resembles organic farming of the sort that has caught on in the West. But it differs in that farmers are still allowed to use inorganic fertilizers and to make judicious use of herbicides. “I’m not for or against organic agriculture,” Bram Govaerts, one of the researchers in Mexico who is studying this method, told me when I visited. “I am for rational agriculture.”

Conservation agriculture has not been proven to work in all farming scenarios, and even when it does work, yields sometimes fall during the initial changeover period. It can require new machinery, a barrier for many farmers. But in many places, after a transition of several years, the method has been shown to increase organic matter in the soil, raise yields, lower costs, increase resilience to drought and other stresses, and reduce the use of nitrogen and water.

Technology adapted to the needs of small farmers may be able to help. When I was in Mexico, I met Jared Crain, a student at Oklahoma State University. He was working to improve a hand-held sensor that uses the color of plants to tell when they need nitrogen fertilizer.

Such machines are available in the West for thousands of dollars, but the one Mr. Crain was working on might sell for $200 or so, making it accessible to villages or to agricultural extension agents in developing countries. The idea is to cut the excessive use of fertilizer that is common in many of the areas touched by the Green Revolution.

As conservation agriculture becomes more advanced, improved crop varieties are likely to be an important part of the picture. Gary Toenniessen is director of agricultural programs at the Rockefeller Foundation, of New York, which provided the original funding for the work that led to the Green Revolution. “The Green Revolution varieties were ecological weaklings,” he told me in an interview. “They had shallow roots, short stems and couldn’t compete with the weeds. They needed tender loving care from the farmer. Given tender loving care, they put all their energy into grain production.”

The task now for plant breeders is to preserve and enhance the yield gains of the Green Revolution, while creating varieties with deeper root systems that can survive on less water and fertilizer and are also strong enough to germinate through a dense cover of decaying vegetative material from the previous season.

Conventional breeding can accomplish some of that. But many experts say the biggest gains will eventually come from the genetic engineering of crop varieties. For example, Monsanto is on the verge of winning approval for a transgenic corn plant designed to protect crops from moderate drought; a project is under way to make that trait available to African farmers.

Such varieties could presumably be employed in irrigated agriculture as a way to cut down on water use; and in the future, transgenic varieties might allow lower use of nitrogen fertilizer, directly tackling one of the major sources of greenhouse gases from agriculture.

As such approaches become more widespread, I am guessing that critics of crop biotechnology will face a choice: Do they embrace technologies that violate their ideological precepts but offer potentially big environmental gains, or do they continue to oppose them?

In fact, among many of the experts I interviewed, I detected a great weariness with the ideological battles that have surrounded the food system in recent years. Like it or not, they said, the reality is that the agricultural system is only going to get more intensive as the human population rises and diets grow richer.

“We’re not going to be abandoning conventional agriculture,” said Jonathan A. Foley, a University of Minnesota scientist. “So why don’t we fix it?”

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Green: U.S. Orders TransCanada to Shut Pipeline

 

After a series of spills, the United States Department of Transportation has ordered the TransCanada Corporation to suspend operation of its one-year-old Keystone 1 pipeline, which carries oil extracted from oil sands in the Canadian province of Alberta to the United States. The order was issued by the department’s Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

“Effective immediately, this order prevents TransCanada from restarting operations on their Keystone crude oil pipeline until P.H.M.S.A. is satisfied with the ongoing repairs and is confident that all immediate safety concerns have been addressed,” the agency said. It issued the order in response to two incidents in May involving oil leaks from small-diameter pump-station pipe fittings.

TransCanada’s Keystone 1 is under particular scrutiny because the company has applied to build and operate a much larger pipeline, the Keystone XL, which would run from Canada to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. That pipeline would pass under some of the Midwest’s most productive farmland and through its major aquifer.

Just last month, the Keystone 1 pipeline suffered two leaks, according to the Sierra Club, one of which involved over 10,000 gallons of oil.

Environmental experts have raised concerns about the possibility of leaks from Keystone XL, in part because TransCanada has been granted waivers that effectively allow it to use thinner steel than would normally be required in the United States. They add that the company’s pipelines are particularly vulnerable because oil from tar sands is more corrosive than conventional oil and is pumped under higher pressures and temperatures.

“I find that the continued operation of the pipeline without corrective measures would be hazardous to life, property and the environment,” Jeffrey Wiese, an administrator at the department, wrote in issuing the order.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has to decide whether to approve the Keystone XL project and is expected to render her opinion by the end of the year. In making a decision, she will have to weigh both energy and environmental concerns to determine whether the pipeline is in the national interest.

While oil from Canada’s oil sands is dependable fuel from a friendly neighbor, it comes with environmental costs because extracting oil from oil sands results in heavy carbon dioxide emissions and can destroy ecosystems.

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Temperature Rising: A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself

Dr. Singh, a wheat breeder, grabbed seed heads that should have been plump with the staff of life. His practiced fingers found empty husks.

“You’re not going to feed the people with that,” he said.

But then, over in Plot 88, his eyes settled on a healthier plant, one that had managed to thrive in spite of the drought, producing plump kernels of wheat. “This is beautiful!” he shouted as wheat beards rustled in the wind.

Hope in a stalk of grain: It is a hope the world needs these days, for the great agricultural system that feeds the human race is in trouble.

The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.

Consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories — wheat, rice, corn and soybeans — has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels. The imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in two huge spikes in international grain prices since 2007, with some grains more than doubling in cost.

Those price jumps, though felt only moderately in the West, have worsened hunger for tens of millions of poor people, destabilizing politics in scores of countries, from Mexico to Uzbekistan to Yemen. The Haitian government was ousted in 2008 amid food riots, and anger over high prices has played a role in the recent Arab uprisings.

Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change.

Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming.

Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.

For nearly two decades, scientists had predicted that climate change would be relatively manageable for agriculture, suggesting that even under worst-case assumptions, it would probably take until 2080 for food prices to double.

In part, they were counting on a counterintuitive ace in the hole: that rising carbon dioxide levels, the primary contributor to global warming, would act as a powerful plant fertilizer and offset many of the ill effects of climate change.

Until a few years ago, these assumptions went largely unchallenged. But lately, the destabilization of the food system and the soaring prices have rattled many leading scientists.

“The success of agriculture has been astounding,” said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a researcher at NASA who helped pioneer the study of climate change and agriculture. “But I think there’s starting to be premonitions that it may not continue forever.”

A scramble is on to figure out whether climate science has been too sanguine about the risks. Some researchers, analyzing computer forecasts that are used to advise governments on future crop prospects, are pointing out what they consider to be gaping holes. These include a failure to consider the effects of extreme weather, like the floods and the heat waves that are increasing as the earth warms.

A rising unease about the future of the world’s food supply came through during interviews this year with more than 50 agricultural experts working in nine countries.

These experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand. And they need to do it while reducing the considerable environmental damage caused by the business of agriculture.

Agronomists emphasize that the situation is far from hopeless. Examples are already available, from the deserts of Mexico to the rice paddies of India, to show that it may be possible to make agriculture more productive and more resilient in the face of climate change. Farmers have achieved huge gains in output in the past, and rising prices are a powerful incentive to do so again.

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Scientist at Work: Life at the Edge of the Verde Island Passage

Rich MooiThe California Academy of Sciences team and its Philippine collaborators approach a new dive site, expecting new and amazing things. The Philippine boats we use are called bankas, and they are ideal dive platforms?— a fantastic blend of speed and stability.

Rich Mooi, curator of invertebrate zoology and geology at the California Academy of Sciences, writes from the Philippines, where he is surveying echinoderms off the coast of Luzon Island.

This is the most amazing place I have ever been in my 30 years of research. We are situated in Mabini, southern Luzon, at the edge of the Verde Island Passage, studying the marine biodiversity of this center of the center of species richness in the Indo-Pacific region. Each day starts with a series of dives, and ends in night dives that further reveal nocturnal denizens of the passage.

We have racked up more than 115 sampling visits over the past few weeks, yet surprises still keep us astonished. Like Mr. Gump and his box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. Our team is finding a new species of sea slug per day and more new bristle worms (polychaetes) than we can process, and our expert on sponges from the Philippines National Museum has more than doubled the size of that museum’s entire sponge collection. Our mutually beneficial collaborations with a team of experts on reef-building corals from the University of the Philippines netted 50 or more staghorn coral species from a single location. The Verde Island Passage is living up to its reputation: The ocean vibrates with the cycles of living things inhabiting every nook and cranny.

I, too, have stories from my own area of expertise, the sea urchins — those spiky balls that occur everywhere here. Urchins belong to a group known technically as the echinoids. Echinoids come in two main varieties: One is more or less spherical, with long-spined forms, and is a conspicuous inhabitant of reefs and rocks. The most familiar of echinoids, these are sometimes informally referred to as “regular” urchins because the mouth on the bottom is surrounded by five regularly radiating rows of tube feet that converge again at the top of the dome-shaped body. These animals wedge themselves into crevices with their spines or, in the case of the black urchins that have long spines that can inflict damage to the unwary (fish or divers), live brazenly out in the open. Another large group of urchins might be called “stealth” urchins. These are less seldom seen, and keep mysteries of their own.

Rich MooiThe rare, wily and newly discovered red form of Echinothrix. Is this the first new species of the genus in over 230 years?

In a few weeks here, I have identified 42 species of sea urchins, about half of which fall into the “regular” category. This is staggering diversity when it comes to these animals. Among these is a real stinger of an urchin in the genus Echinothrix that is normally pale, with banded spines. I received an e-mail from a colleague suggesting that I look out for a red variety that could be a new species. Within hours, a diver brought me an urchin that looked sort of familiar, yet not so. The red variety had karmically appeared, and molecular and other work can now be done to determine if this is a new species in the genus. Although these large, relatively dangerous urchins are known throughout the Indo-Pacific, there has not been a new species of Echinothrix in over 230 years.

Rich MooiThis small urchin, Lissodiadema, is only about an inch across the body. It hides under rocks and in small caves in the reef. It was known from Hawaii to Guam, but we have extended its known range to the Philippines.Rich MooiThe spines of Lissodiadema are so thin, they can flex at the slightest pressure. Why they are like this is completely unknown.Rich MooiJuvenile fire urchins, Asthenosoma, are almost never found. Every spine on this species has a venom gland, and the sting is like an electric shock. Note the iridescent blue spots common to this group of urchins — perhaps nature’s way of saying “do not touch”?

There are other ways of making new discoveries apart from finding new species. For many years I have been working on “regular” echinoids called hair-spined urchins. These are small-bodied, but with very long spines. The spines are as thin as or thinner than a human hair, even though they are made of the same limestone skeleton as the rest of the body. It’s as if these urchins have learned to “spin” limestone into fibers like we spin fibers of silica into fiberglass. Like fiberglass, the spines of these urchins are unexpectedly flexible. In spite of these fascinating attributes, this urchin remains very poorly known, and only a handful of specimens exist in all the world’s museums. The nearest record to the Philippines was 1,500 miles away as a fish swims, in Guam.

Another remarkable range extension was found for a species of fire urchins, so named because of a nasty sting deliverable by every spine on its body. So we have discovered major range extensions of some of the most mysterious and poorly known of all “regular” urchins found in shallow waters.

In my next entry, I will introduce you to the world of those stealthy “irregular” urchins. Sand dollars, sea biscuits, and sea mice have their own odd stories to tell.

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Scientist at Work: Getting to the Tundra

 Natalie Boelman Researchers returning to camp, with Toolik Lake in the foreground, still partly covered with ice.

Natalie Boelman, an ecosystem ecologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, writes from the North Slope of Alaska, where she is studying the effects of climate change on the interactions among plants, insects and migratory songbirds.

I’ve been doing fieldwork in the foothills of the Brooks Mountain Range on the Alaska North Slope since 2001. This area is part of the tundra ecosystem, which is characterized by permanently frozen ground and the absence of trees.? All of my work in this rather remote region has been based out of the Toolik Field Station. The purpose of most of my visits to Toolik has been to explore the use of remote sensing techniques to measure the response of tundra vegetation to climate change and, more recently, wildfire.

But last summer, my collaborators (Laura Gough from the University of Texas at Arlington, and John Wingfield from the University of California, Davis) and I began working on a new project that extends beyond the response of tundra plants to explore the effect that changes in vegetation have on organisms at higher trophic levels that depend on it for food and shelter.

In a nutshell, we are exploring how global climate change will affect songbirds that spend winters in our backyards and migrate to Alaskan tundra to breed every summer.? Among other effects, Arctic warming is causing spring snowmelt to occur earlier, and is changing the type of plant growth on the tundra. Over the course of five songbird breeding seasons (2010 through 2015), we’re testing a series of predictions related to songbirds and their interactions with plants and insects, to begin to untangle the complex relationships among these groups in the context of these warming-induced changes.? We began this project last spring, so this spring marks the beginning of our second field season, which began on May 1 and will end on Aug. 2.

I left New York City on May 25 to join other members of my science team at the Toolik Field Station.? Although I’m just getting to Toolik now, we’ve had a small early-season crew working to get this year’s field season up and running since May 1.? It takes two days to get from Manhattan to Toolik. On the way there, I made a stopover in Seattle to hand over our two children to my parents, who live down the road in Vancouver, British Columbia.? Our daughter, Aline (4 years old), was all smiles when I said goodbye, excited to play in a garden and get spoiled rotten for two weeks.? On the contrary, however, our son, Nico (2 years old), wasn’t too thrilled to see me walk away.? Poor little man — Mummy will be back soon!? I took a deep breath, waved goodbye, and continued northward on Alaska Airlines to Anchorage.

Caged next to me on the flight, in seat 18B, was Poncho the yellow cockatiel, a species of bird endemic to Australia and popular as a house pet worldwide. Poncho and his keeper, in 18C, were traveling from Phoenix, where they spend winters, to King Salmon, Alaska, where they spend summers.? Is migration via commercial jet considered migration fraud in the bird world?

Natalie BoelmanThe welcome sign at the general store in Deadhorse, Alaska.

After switching to a connecting flight in Anchorage, I arrived in Deadhorse, Alaska, which is located not quite at the Arctic Ocean, and is very obviously dedicated the extraction of oil. To be honest, it’s a rather unsightly gravel pad lined with semipermanent buildings — a charming place. Here I was met by the “Toolik Taxi,” a large and dusty pickup truck operated by field station workers.? Justin, the driver,? drove us south for about three hours along the Dalton Highway, a gravel road built to support the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which runs from Deadhorse to Valdez.

Natalie BoelmanA willow ptarmigan.

As we made our way toward the field station, we saw caribou, musk oxen, a 25-gallon barrel that we initially mistook for a grizzly bear, a very mischievous-looking red fox, some waterfowl and a few willow ptarmigan (a k a? tundra chickens).

Relative to other ecosystems, there are few animal species in the Arctic, and as a result there is little “functional redundancy” among Arctic species.??This means that Arctic ecosystems are both unique and fragile, because if a single species is lost — for instance, because they’re unable to adapt to life in an increasingly warmer Arctic — there will most likely be no other species available to fill in the ecological gap, or to perform the ecosystem functions the original species was responsible for.? To make a simple analogy, imagine that the factory worker whose job it is to attach the wheels to cars in an assembly line gets laid off and isn’t replaced because no one else with the right skill set is available to take over the job.? Without someone to put the wheels on, no marketable cars can be made and the factory is likely to shut down.? Similarly, every component of the Arctic tundra ecosystem is essential to its function. Remove one, and things are likely to fall apart.

Natalie BoelmanA musk ox.

We arrived at the field station around 9 p.m.? Of course, since we are north of the Arctic Circle, where the sun doesn’t set all summer long, it felt more like noon.? It’s always hard getting used to the perpetual daylight up here.? On one hand, it’s great because you can be in the field doing your work for as long as you please.? On the other hand, you can wear yourself out pretty easily, so we pay special attention to our watches, set time limits and force ourselves into bed every night.

I heated up some delicious leftovers from dinnertime, and briefly caught up with some friends and colleagues who have been in camp for a while.? I’m recovering from a cold that’s caused me to temporarily lose my voice, so I’m communicating through strained whispers. As a result, folks are joking that I’m talking about “secret science.”? By 11:30 p.m. I settled into my trailer room, pulled down the blinds to keep the sun out, and fell asleep.

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A Conversation With Ellen Bialystok: The Bilingual Advantage

Q. How did you begin studying bilingualism?

A. You know, I didn’t start trying to find out whether bilingualism was bad or good. I did my doctorate in psychology: on how children acquire language. When I finished graduate school, in 1976, there was a job shortage in Canada for Ph.D.’s. The only position I found was with a research project studying second language acquisition in school children. It wasn’t my area. But it was close enough.

As a psychologist, I brought neuroscience questions to the study, like “How does the acquisition of a second language change thought?” It was these types of questions that naturally led to the bilingualism research. The way research works is, it takes you down a road. You then follow that road.

Q. So what exactly did you find on this unexpected road?

A. As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language. We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language.

But on one question, there was a difference. We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.

Q. How does this work — do you understand it?

A. Yes. There’s a system in your brain, the executive control system. It’s a general manager. Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. It’s what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them.

If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient.

Q. One of your most startling recent findings is that bilingualism helps forestall the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. How did you come to learn this?

A. We did two kinds of studies. In the first, published in 2004, we found that normally aging bilinguals had better cognitive functioning than normally aging monolinguals. Bilingual older adults performed better than monolingual older adults on executive control tasks. That was very impressive because it didn’t have to be that way. It could have turned out that everybody just lost function equally as they got older.

That evidence made us look at people who didn’t have normal cognitive function. In our next studies , we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer’s patients. On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer’s symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn’t mean that the bilinguals didn’t have Alzheimer’s. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer.

Q. So high school French is useful for something other than ordering a special meal in a restaurant?

A. Sorry, no. You have to use both languages all the time. You won’t get the bilingual benefit from occasional use.

Q. One would think bilingualism might help with multitasking — does it?

A. Yes, multitasking is one of the things the executive control system handles. We wondered, “Are bilinguals better at multitasking?” So we put monolinguals and bilinguals into a driving simulator. Through headphones, we gave them extra tasks to do — as if they were driving and talking on cellphones. We then measured how much worse their driving got. Now, everybody’s driving got worse. But the bilinguals, their driving didn’t drop as much. Because adding on another task while trying to concentrate on a driving problem, that’s what bilingualism gives you — though I wouldn’t advise doing this.

Q. Has the development of new neuroimaging technologies changed your work?

A. Tremendously. It used to be that we could only see what parts of the brain lit up when our subjects performed different tasks. Now, with the new technologies, we can see how all the brain structures work in accord with each other.

In terms of monolinguals and bilinguals, the big thing that we have found is that the connections are different. So we have monolinguals solving a problem, and they use X systems, but when bilinguals solve the same problem, they use others. One of the things we’ve seen is that on certain kinds of even nonverbal tests, bilingual people are faster. Why? Well, when we look in their brains through neuroimaging, it appears like they’re using a different kind of a network that might include language centers to solve a completely nonverbal problem. Their whole brain appears to rewire because of bilingualism.

Q. Bilingualism used to be considered a negative thing — at least in the United States. Is it still?

A. Until about the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that bilingualism was a disadvantage. Some of this was xenophobia. Thanks to science, we now know that the opposite is true.

Q. Many immigrants choose not to teach their children their native language. Is this a good thing?

A. I’m asked about this all the time. People e-mail me and say, “I’m getting married to someone from another culture, what should we do with the children?” I always say, “You’re sitting on a potential gift.”

There are two major reasons people should pass their heritage language onto children. First, it connects children to their ancestors. The second is my research: Bilingualism is good for you. It makes brains stronger. It is brain exercise.

Q. Are you bilingual?

A. Well, I have fully bilingual grandchildren because my daughter married a Frenchman. When my daughter announced her engagement to her French boyfriend, we were a little surprised. It’s always astonishing when your child announces she’s getting married. She said, “But Mom, it’ll be fine, our children will be bilingual!”

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Despite Advances, Tornado Forecasts Show Limits

“There was a roar like hundreds of airplanes, then an explosion,” Joy Lutz recalled years later. She was crouching in a cave with her husband, Guy, and their three children at the next farm up the road. Then came a second explosion, “louder and longer than the first,” she wrote. Then quiet. Mr. Lutz went outside to reconnoiter. Their own house was flattened. The Madsen place had virtually disappeared.

That tornado, in Arcadia, Neb., on June 7, helped for six decades to make 1953 the deadliest year for tornadoes since the National Weather Service and its predecessor, the Weather Bureau, began keeping records. That record of 519 fatalities has been eclipsed, with more than 520 recorded so far this year. Neither year, however, has had anything remotely approaching the 1925 Tri-State tornado, the deadliest single tornado in United States history, which killed 695 people by unofficial count.

Tornado forecasting and the technology that accompanies it have improved greatly over the years, researchers say. Thanks to heightened reporting and awareness, better building practices and inventions like the radio and Doppler radar, tornado fatalities have declined steadily for nearly a century.

But the disasters of 2011 underline a lingering reality: Many of the circumstances that were beyond science in 1953 are still beyond science today.

One factor is that, for unknown reasons, 2011 has had many more tornadoes than other recent years. Another is what the historian Thomas Grazulis describes with a single word: coincidence.

A tornado “could easily hit nothing but empty farmland,” said Mr. Grazulis, who began collecting information on tornadoes for the government in 1979. Or it could instead wipe out three generations of Madsens at a family reunion. The farmhouse, beautifully remodeled not long before the storm, was not built wrong, or built in the wrong place. Tornadoes simply do not care.

“Move the Joplin tornado five miles to the south or to the north,” Harold Brooks, a meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory, in Norman, Okla., said of the twister that hit Joplin, Mo., this month, “and our death toll is maybe 10 or 15 — not more than 100. As much as we think we have control, that’s not the way the world is.”

In 1953, only weeks after tornado forecasting began, three monster tornadoes touched down in population centers: Waco, Tex. (114 dead); Flint, Mich. (116 dead); and Worcester, Mass. (94 dead). Before that year the only alerts were internal bulletins issued by the United States Air Force, intent on protecting its aircraft. Public warnings, shunned for fear of causing panic, began when civilians demanded the same information their Air Force neighbors had.

Meteorologists in those days knew the basic science about tornadoes — that they are caused by masses of warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico rising through cold, dry air moving south from Canada. The high-altitude jet stream carries strong winds that torque the warm air, making it rotate.

These two conditions — warm air in the south and fast-moving cold winds swooping down the alley between two mountain ranges (the Rockies and the Appalachians) — exist nowhere else in the world, said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for Weather Underground, a service based in San Francisco.

In 1953, the major tools for detecting tornadoes were the measurements obtained from twice-daily weather balloons that rose 1,000 feet per minute and periodically radioed sensor data on air temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure. Dr. Brooks said meteorologists could estimate wind speed and direction by observing the angular drift of the balloon through a theodolite, a tripod-mounted surveyor’s tool.

Weather balloons are still “very, very important” in tornado prediction, Dr. Brooks said, but while meteorologists could get 20 readings per balloon in 1953, today’s technology produces updated and more detailed information 10 times more often. Also, today’s scientists have decades’ worth of experience interpreting balloon results, so that “when you start seeing a particular result in your data set,” Dr. Brooks said, “you know it’s coming.”

The early forecasters created tracking maps, marking likely tornado threats with grease-penciled, rectangular red “watch boxes” that moved across the country as new sets of observations were obtained. The boxes were big because “the information was vague,” said Mr. Grazulis, the weather historian. Spotty and imprecise data produced many false alarms, and “people didn’t believe the warnings.”

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A Toxic River Improves, but Still Has Far to Go

Yet state officials were thrilled, because it was the first fish found in years in the northwest Indiana river that is widely considered the nation’s most toxic waterway.

A quarter century later, fish are more plentiful and look healthy. But state and federal agencies say they are still unsafe to eat, their flesh laced with toxins from sediment poisoned by decades of dumping from nearby steel mills, chemical plants, meatpacking operations and other industries.

The Grand Calumet carries this toxic brew into Lake Michigan about eight miles from Chicago, each year dumping about 200,000 cubic yards of sediment full of PCBs, heavy metals and “some of the nastiest, most toxic contaminants ever,” said Cameron Davis, the White House’s Great Lakes czar.

This summer the federal government will begin a new phase in an ongoing effort to bring the Grand Calumet back to health. The Environmental Protection Agency is beginning a project to clean up a section of the river, but even when that work and another imminent federal project is complete, about three-plus miles of the river and the canal that empties into Lake Michigan will still remain seriously contaminated.

This summer’s work is expected to cost $50 million, with 65 percent of it coming under the federal Great Lakes Legacy Act, designated to clean up contamination. The remaining 35 percent will be paid for with money collected as fines from steel mills and other polluters required to contribute to a trust fund under the Natural Resources Damages Assessment law.

Federal officials say they are encouraged by how much progress has been made even before this summer’s work. And Mr. Simon, who worked for the federal government for 20 years and is now an Indiana State University scientist, thinks a major study he began Thursday will most likely show marked improvements in fish health.

At a community meeting Thursday, officials from the E.P.A. described plans to begin dredging contaminated sediment from a mile-long stretch of the river in Hammond, Ind., and the nearby Roxana Marsh.

But many residents think the government should be doing more faster. They are especially concerned about the heavily contaminated canal by which the Grand Calumet empties into Lake Michigan. In the 1990s it was so toxic only sludge worms could live in it, Mr. Simon said. Now crayfish and some other small organisms have returned, but the canal is still full of chemicals dangerous to human health.

The Chicago River has been in the national spotlight recently because last month the conservation group American Rivers named it one of the nation’s most endangered rivers. But while the Chicago River’s chief problem is untreated sewage, the Grand Calumet deals with both sewage and much more serious ecological issues. For example, five Superfund sites border the Grand Calumet, including almost 500 underground chemical or oil storage tanks, many of them leaking. A toxic brew of chemicals and metals makes the Grand Calumet unsafe even for human contact.

The Grand Calumet, which at points emits an unpleasant odor, runs through largely low-income, black areas of East Chicago, Gary and Hammond, where residents say the river and the adjoining ship canal have not gotten the attention they deserve.

Next year the Army Corps of Engineers will start dredging sediment from the canal, which it has not done since 1972, because stirring up the poisonous muck can create serious health and environmental risks. The corps will remove only enough sediment to allow ships to pass through, and it will monitor air quality during the process, but will not insert clean material and plastic liners, as the E.P.A. is doing at the other dredging sites.

“We would have liked for it to be a full cleanup,” said Bessie Dent, program director of the Calumet Project citizens group. “But we’ve given up on it, because money was only allocated for the ships.”

On Memorial Day, a dead carp floated in the canal amid crumpled soda cans — past steel mills, scrap metal yards and massive white oil tanks. Other parts of the river also looked and smelled polluted. Where petroleum pipes enter the river next to Highway 12, brown oil with a suffocating smell coated rocks, and yards of sodden absorbent boom bobbed in the water and lay coiled on the banks like bloated brown worms.

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Vital Signs: Awareness: Top 5 Don’ts for Doctors in Primary Care

Antibiotics for sore throats and CT scans for minor head injuries in children are among the most wasteful practices in primary care medicine, a national physicians’ group said last week. Among the others are electrocardiograms performed routinely on healthy adults and widespread prescribing of brand-name statins to reduce L.D.L., or “bad” cholesterol.

The group issuing the report, the National Physicians Alliance, an organization of some 22,000 physicians, developed three separate “Top 5” lists for primary care doctors — internists, family doctors and pediatricians — that were essentially lists of medical “don’ts.” The lists were published online in The Archives of Internal Medicine.

The authors urged doctors not to perform bone-density scans on women younger than 65 and men younger than 70 who have no risk factors for osteoporosis. The researchers also urged physicians to forgo basic blood screening in healthy adults (though screening for cholesterol was recommended, as was diabetes screening in some cases).

“Doctors are inundated with ‘do this’ and ‘do that.’ We wanted to focus on what doctors should not do,” said Dr. Stephen Smith, professor emeritus of family medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University, who led the initiative. “We wanted to come up with the top things that primary care physicians can do that would enhance quality, but also reflect the idea of being good stewards of finite medical resources, save money and reduce harms and risks.”

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As Missouri River Rises, Control Efforts Take Shape

The sharp rise of the upper Missouri has forced officials to release unprecedented amounts of water from a series of dams that normally control the flow of the river, leading to the evacuations of homes and the construction of emergency levees in downriver communities, including the capital cities of North Dakota and South Dakota. The river is expected to remain at high levels for at least six weeks.

“Many communities along the river will experience flooding in proportions they haven’t seen,” said Jody Farhat, chief of the Missouri River Basin water management division of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Navigated by the explorers Lewis and Clark as they journeyed west through the middle of the country, the Missouri River remains a vital economic and recreational hub for the Great Plains region. The flooding, especially if it lasts as long as predicted, threatens to swamp freshly planted cropland, displace thousands of residents and define a summer normally spent celebrating events like the Prairie Rose State Games in Bismarck, N.D.

Floods, like the record one that soaked communities along the Mississippi River last month, are often slow, unfolding disasters. Despite its magnitude, this one is provoking less suspense because the release of water is being regulated by the Army Corps of Engineers, which has warned leaders as far away as Omaha and Kansas City as to the likely impact.

“It’s very unusual to deal with a predicted flood,” said Gov. Dennis Daugaard of South Dakota, where a number of cities have been scrambling to prepare.

Mr. Daugaard said the warning had given state and local leaders more time to build earth and sandbag barriers, like those put up around Pierre, Fort Pierre and Dakota Dunes. He called for voluntary evacuations of affected areas in all three towns.

“They don’t call it the Mighty Missouri for nothing,” he added.

There are six major dams along the upper stretch of the river that allow federal officials to slow down the sometimes violent rush of water that accompanies the melting snowpack in the region.

This year, though, torrential rains unexpectedly filled the reservoir to levels that had been reserved for a record-breaking snowpack, forcing the dams to begin releasing water to make room for the coming melt.

“We still have snow, lots of it and it’s just now starting to melt,” said Kevin Low, a river forecaster with the National Weather Service. Mr. Low said the entire river was likely to remain “above to well above flood stage” for weeks.

Each of the dams has begun releasing more water than at any time since the system was built more than a half century ago, and is scheduled to continue increasing the discharge in the coming days to the maximum level.

That influx of water, which represents as much as a fivefold increase over the normal flow into the river, is scheduled to remain at the maximum level for at least six more weeks. More rain or a fast melt would aggravate the risk.

“Even though we have these historic releases, the dams are continuing to provide some flood-risk reduction,” Ms. Farhat said.

The threat from the river provoked a mix of reactions in the states that it passes through. Al Berndt, the assistant director of the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency, said his many concerns included charts that showed that 10 of 14 levee systems could be topped, as well as the possible impact on two nuclear power plants along the river, both of which are taking protective measures.

Mayor Jim Suttle of Omaha, however, was confident that a local levee system that reaches well above the highest predicted levels would keep the city dry, particularly given the advance notice that has allowed workers time to fortify the wastewater treatment plant.

“It let us plan,” Mr. Suttle said. “Plan the work and work the plan. That’s why I can say, in all candor, we’re going to proceed with business as usual.”

Even as the Missouri continued to rise, the experience along the Mississippi River offered reason for both fear and hope. In southern Louisiana, evacuation orders were lifted and residents were returning; some found their homes destroyed, others undisturbed. The flooding threat is not over — and waters have been slow to recede in parts of the Delta — but it has been far less damaging than initially feared.

Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from New Orleans.

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Teeth of Human Ancestors Hold Clues to Their Family Life

The pattern of female dispersal is not unexpected, since it is practiced by chimpanzees, the closest living species to humans, and by some hunter-gatherers. But social behavior does not fossilize, and any data on the subject is invaluable in reconstructing how human social structure evolved.

“This is the first direct evidence that we have about the residence pattern of hominins,” said Bernard Chapais, a primatologist and expert on human social evolution at the University of Montreal.

The evidence emerged from study of the fossil teeth of 19 australopithecines, the still apelike ancestors of the human lineage. The makeup of teeth can reflect local geography because some chemicals like strontium are drawn from rocks into plants, and then into tooth enamel when the plants are eaten. In australopithecines, the absorption of strontium continued until the teeth were completed around age 8.

The researchers were measuring different versions, or isotopes, of strontium to see if the australopithecines traveled far from home in search of food. As the data rolled out of the measuring device, “we were at first disappointed,” said Julia Lee-Thorp of Oxford University, a member of the research team, “but we soon realized that we had found another prize.”

This was that half the females had been born far away, whereas all the males had grown up locally, the team reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. The team was led by Sandi R. Copeland of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

In most mammals, the females stay in the home community and the males disperse after adolescence to avoid inbreeding. But chimpanzees and many human hunter-gatherer groups are unusual in following the opposite pattern. The reason may have to do with the aggressive territoriality of both species: A group of males who have grown up with one another is more cohesive and better at defending a territory against competitors. This obliges the females to be the gender that disperses.

“It’s really nice to see there is biological continuity from chimpanzees to australopithecines,” said Joan B. Silk, an expert on primate social behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The joint ancestor of chimps and humans lived about five million years ago and is often assumed to have had a chimplike social structure, with a male hierarchy, promiscuous mating by the females and all-out war between neighboring bands. The central puzzle of human social evolution, in Dr. Chapais’s view, is to explain how promiscuity was replaced by the pair bond and aggressive relations were pushed up from the band level to that of the tribe, a group of bands tied together by the exchange of women.

The australopithecines studied by Dr. Copeland’s team still had a somewhat chimplike social structure, Dr. Chapais said, because the pair bond did not evolve until the appearance of Homo erectus around 1.8 million years ago. The australopithecine fossils came from the Sterkfontein valley, and one of them has been dated to 2.2 million years ago.

The pair bond, in his view, arose when human ancestors started to develop more dispersed sources of food and males increasingly guarded a group of females to protect both them and their own paternity. With the male around anyway, he could also help rear the children, which allowed for a longer period of juvenile dependence and hence for brain size to grow. The relatively small size of the australopithecine brain suggests that this process had not yet started, Dr. Chapais said.

Another far-reaching consequence of the developing pair bond was that individuals could at last start to recognize their relatives, which chimpanzees mostly cannot do. So when females dispersed to neighboring groups, males from their home community could recognize their daughters or sisters, together with their in-laws, who had an equal interest in their children’s welfare. This transformed the neighboring group from an adversary to an ally, and the human social structure expanded to being that of a tribe. Friendly relations, in Dr. Chapais’s view, then allowed males as well as females to transfer, the pattern typical of hunter-gatherers today.

“It is great to think that we might be in a position to begin dating such major events in our evolution,” he said of the new finding.

The australopithecine fossils are few and precious, and researchers are reluctant to damage them in any way. In a new technique, a barely visible pit is blasted out of a tooth with a laser and the vaporized enamel is passed into a mass spectrometer, which measures the amount of strontium or any other element of interest. The researchers started out looking at carbon isotopes, which showed them that australopithecines had a highly variable diet. To determine whether that was because they ranged far and wide, the researchers then looked at strontium isotopes, the ratio of which varies according to the local geology. And this led to the discovery of the female dispersal pattern.

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Observatory: In Penguin Huddle, Researchers Find a Wave of Warmth

 

To stay warm in Antarctica’s bitterly cold conditions, emperor penguins are known to form tight huddles. Researchers now report that while in these huddles, the penguins move in a coordinated periodic wave. This allows every penguin a chance to move from the colder outer region of the huddle into the warmer inner region.

Penguins form such tight huddles that it would be impossible for an individual to make an isolated movement, said Daniel P. Zitterbart, a physicist from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the study’s first author.

Instead, they move in a coordinated wavelike fashion every 30 to 60 seconds at a speed of about five inches per second, he and his colleagues write in the journal PloS One.

The wave is much like the coordinated waves of spectators during sporting events, Mr. Zitterbart said.

But the penguins’ movement is so slight that it is invisible to the naked eye. The researchers captured high-resolution time-lapse images of an emperor penguin colony near the Neumayer Station, an Antarctic research facility, for several hours, recording images every 1.3 seconds. They were then able to track and analyze the movements of the penguins over time.

“We see that they definitely have to be altruistic in their behavior to survive,” Mr. Zitterbart said.

There are still unanswered questions about the penguins’ behavior. It is unclear, for instance, whether a single penguin or multiple penguins trigger the wave.

Mr. Zitterbart and his colleagues plan to set up a remote-controlled observatory in Antarctica that will allow for year-round observation.

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Inspectors Pierce Iran’s Cloak of Nuclear Secrecy

The nine-page report raised questions about whether Iran has sought to investigate seven different kinds of technology ranging from atomic triggers and detonators to uranium fuel. Together, the technologies could make a type of atom bomb known as an implosion device, which is what senior staff members of the I.A.E.A. have warned that Iran is able to build.

Weapons based on implosion are considered advanced models compared with the bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima. In these devices, the detonation of a sphere of conventional explosives creates a blast wave that compresses a central ball of bomb fuel into a supercritical mass, starting the chain reaction that ends in a nuclear explosion.

Implosion designs, compact and efficient by nature, are considered necessary for making nuclear warheads small and powerful enough to fit atop a missile.

Iran has dismissed charges that it is pursuing such technologies as lies based on fabricated documents or real ones taken out of context. It insists that its atomic program is meant exclusively for such peaceful objectives as producing medical isotopes and electric power. The result has been a tense standoff.

Last week’s report said the director general of the I.A.E.A., Yukiya Amano, recently wrote to Iranian officials to reiterate the agency’s concerns about the arms evidence and request “prompt access” to a wide range of Iranian facilities and individuals.

The report said Mr. Amano “urges Iran to respond positively” in order to establish “the exclusively peaceful nature” of its program.

Official doubts about Tehran’s ambitions emerged publicly in 2002 and have resulted in four rounds of United Nations sanctions. To date, the penalties have failed to stop Iran from enriching uranium, which can fuel both reactors and atom bombs.

In 2009, senior staff members of the I.A.E.A. concluded in a confidential analysis that “Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device” based on highly enriched uranium.

The new report includes some of the technical evidence behind that charge. It describes the sources of the information as “many member states” as well as its own efforts. Nuclear experts assume that much intelligence comes from Israel, the United States and Western Europe, though the I.A.E.A. in total has 151 member states.

The report cites concerns about undisclosed nuclear activities “past or current,” implying that the agency believes the Iranian arms program may still be moving ahead despite reports of its onetime suspension.

The seven categories of technology all bear on what can be interpreted as warhead design: how to turn uranium into bomb fuel, make conventional explosives that can trigger a nuclear blast, generate neutrons to spur a chain reaction and design nose cones for missiles.

Two diplomats familiar with the evidence, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity under the usual protocol, emphasized that no single one of the technologies stood out as indicating bomb work. Some, they conceded, have peaceful uses.

But the totality of the evidence, they said, suggested that Iran has worked hard on multiple fronts to advance the design of nuclear arms.

“It’s the whole variety of information,” one of the diplomats said. “You have to look at the whole thing.”

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Vital Signs: Screening: Saliva Test for Cytomegalovirus Proves Accurate

 

A new test offers a rapid, inexpensive and highly accurate method for screening newborns for cytomegalovirus, which can cause permanent hearing loss, researchers said on Wednesday.

Though one in 150 babies are born infected with cytomegalovirus — known as CMV and part of the herpes virus family — current tests are not effective for widespread screening, the scientists said.

The new test does not require the culturing of blood samples; it employs saliva, easily obtained by swabbing the inside of a baby’s mouth.

Of 17,662 newborns screened, all 85 infants identified as infected with CMV by a blood culture test also were identified by the new test, researchers reported in a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Another 17,327 newborns were screened with a different saliva test. It was slightly less accurate, detecting CMV in 74 of 76 infants identified by culturing.

Infected babies must be monitored and tested frequently for hearing loss so that support services can be provided if necessary, said Dr. Suresh B. Boppana, a professor of pediatrics at University of Alabama at Birmingham and one of the paper’s authors.

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China Faces ‘Very Grave’ Environmental Situation, Officials Say

 

BEIJING — China’s three decades of rapid economic growth have left it with a “very grave” environmental situation even as it tries to move away from a development-at-all-costs strategy, senior government officials said on Friday.

In a blunt assessment of the problems facing the world’s most populous country, officials from the Ministry of Environmental Protection delivered their 2010 annual report. They pointed to major improvements in water and air quality — goals that the ministry had set for itself over a five-year period ending in December.

The targets were met, with pollutants in surface water down 32 percent, and sulfur dioxide emissions in cities down 19 percent.

But officials cautioned that many other problems were serious and scarcely under control.

“The overall environmental situation is still very grave and is facing many difficulties and challenges,” said Li Ganjie, the vice minister. Mr. Li said biodiversity was declining with “a continuous loss and drain of genetic resources.” The countryside was becoming more polluted, he added, as dirty industries were moved out of cities and into rural areas.

Mr. Li said reversing the countryside’s deterioration was a major focus for the coming five-year plan. He also pledged to control contamination by heavy metals, which resulted in nine cases of lead poisoning last year and seven more in the first five months of this year. He said China needed a law to regulate heavy metals, and he was confident it would be written and passed soon.

Founded as an agency 13 years ago, the environmental protection office was upgraded to a ministry in 2007 but has fought an uphill battle for money and power. The government has made growth a priority, worried that unemployment would lead to unrest.

But the signs are growing that environmental neglect is causing instability. Protests in Inner Mongolia last week were partly due to concerns that industries like coal and mining — largely dominated by ethnic Chinese — are destroying the grasslands used for herding by the indigenous Mongolians. Similar conflicts have arisen in other sensitive ethnic areas like Tibet and Xinjiang.

“In some of these areas that are very fragile, we will strictly limit development,” Mr. Li pledged.

He said that more than a fifth of the land that has been set aside as nature reserves had been illegally developed by companies, often with local government collusion. But he said the ministry had deployed a satellite that could detect illegal development and would put pressure on local governments to stop the work. Failing this, Mr. Li said, the ministry has the power to influence officials’ prospects for promotions because environmental compliance is now a part of their performance evaluation.

Independent observers say this is part of a gradual change to give the ministry more power.

“They’re now a serious player as to what happens and where and to what standards,” said Deborah Seligsohn, a senior fellow with the World Resources Institute who is based in Beijing. “You’re seeing a steady trajectory where they’re having more and more impact.”

Recently, the ministry canceled a high-speed train line that had not obtained its approval. Last year, Mr. Li said, the ministry turned down 59 projects worth $15 billion that had not obtained its approval. Well-connected ministries were once able to bypass the environmental ministry, but now, Mr. Li said, it had set up “an impassable firewall” to block harmful projects.

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Shuttles, Turning Sedentary, Leave Pieces Behind for Science and Safety

As the agency gets its space shuttles ready to be shipped out to museums, it will not be sending them off lock, stock and barrel. The crews doing the prep work have been flooded with requests to squirrel away parts of the spacecraft for analysis. Valves, flight-control instruments, even the tires and windows — little is safe from the clutches of NASA engineers.

“I’ve got a list of hundreds of items that have to come off the ship,” said Stephanie S. Stilson, who is directing the preparation of the shuttle Discovery for delivery to the Smithsonian Institution next year in what NASA calls its “transition and retirement” program.

In April, NASA named the permanent old-age homes for its shuttles, which have been escorting astronauts to space for 30 years. The Endeavour, which completed its last mission early Wednesday with a pinpoint landing after 16 days in orbit, will bask in glory only briefly before it is groomed for delivery to the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The Atlantis, which will make its final flight next month, is destined to live at the visitors’ center here at the space center.

The Discovery made its last flight in March and now sits in a maintenance bay, enclosed by platforms that would normally be crawling with workers inspecting and maintaining its many systems — including the thousands of thermal tiles that cover its skin — to be ready for its next liftoff. These days, as the shuttle program winds down and the staff has been winnowed by layoffs, technicians work on the Discovery only when there are no more pressing tasks. And rather than sprucing it up for another trip to space, likely as not they are taking something out of it.

“We in engineering, we want to hold on to things that we could potentially use, or we want to study them, which is a smart thing to do,” Ms. Stilson said. The shuttles are the only spacecraft that have been launched into orbit multiple times — the Discovery is the most-traveled, with 39 missions — and a better understanding of how the materials and equipment have fared could help future aerospace designers.

Ms. Stilson spoke near one of the Discovery’s main landing gears, where the tires used on the last flight had been removed in favor of what NASA calls “roll-around tires” — basically a bunch of old spares. On a higher platform, workers were putting the finishing touches on replacement windows for the spacecraft, the originals having been taken out so engineers could study what effect the microdebris encountered in so many trips in space had on the glass.

While those who are to receive the shuttles say they understand the need for research, they are a little surprised by how much will be missing.

“We’re considered to be the nation’s official repository of our past,” said Valerie Neal, curator for contemporary human spaceflight at the Smithsonian, which will display the Discovery at the National Air and Space Museum’s annex near Dulles Airport. “Our point of view would be to receive an orbiter in as intact a state as possible.”

Ms. Neal said that when she first started discussing the fate of the shuttle with NASA several years ago, “I rather na?vely thought it would be intact.”

Some of the removal work is dictated by safety concerns. There are small explosive charges all around the shuttle, including one designed to blow a latch and deploy the front landing gear should the normal systems fail. Although the firing mechanism has been disabled, “We don’t want to take a chance that if it’s sitting in the Smithsonian it could somehow detonate,” Ms. Stilson said.

The thrusters near the shuttle’s nose and the podlike maneuvering engines in the rear both contain propellants that are highly toxic and corrosive, even in tiny amounts. So these components have been removed and sent to a special facility where workers in hazardous materials suits will “cut and gut” them, removing much of the insides before shipping them back. “We’ll reinstall them, and from the outside they’ll look exactly the same,” Ms. Stilson said.

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Week in Review: Under the Sea, Coral Reefs in Peril

This draining of color results when heat-stressed corals expel the algae they rely on for food — and which are responsible for their bright and beautiful hues. Death often follows.

Reefs have long been under threat from destructive fishing practices, sediment and nutrient runoff, coral mining, reckless tourism and coastal development. Now, scientists say, global warming is accelerating the destruction.

One of the worst episodes of coral bleaching began last spring and summer, and affected reefs in virtually all the world’s tropical waters, from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean.

“In Panama, the bleaching was the most graphic I’ve ever seen,” said Nancy Knowlton, a marine biologist with the Smithsonian Institution. “Everything was just bone white.”

Preliminary assessments suggest that the impact will be the most damaging since the only other known global-scale bleaching event, in 1998 and 1999, when more than 10 percent of the world’s shallow-water corals were killed by heat.

Nearly three-quarters of the planet’s reefs are now at risk of serious degradation, according to a report by the World Resources Institute in February. Another analysis, by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, found that as much as one-fifth of the world’s reefs have been degraded beyond recognition or lost entirely.

By midcentury, virtually all reefs will be at risk, scientists fear, not just from local threats or global warming, but from an increasingly acidified ocean. Much of the carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere ends up in the oceans, where it forms a weak acid, lowering the pH level of the seas. Scientists have long speculated that the rising acidity of ocean waters would inhibit the growth of corals.

Now, a new study by an international research team offers some of the strongest observational evidence linking carbon emissions to reef damage. The study examined tropical corals off the coast of Papua New Guinea located near cool, natural undersea seeps of carbon dioxide. The results showed clearly that as acidity rose, coral diversity and resilience plunged.

“This study proves we must urgently transition to a low-CO2-emissions future or we face the risk of profound losses of coral ecosystems,” said Katharina Fabricius, a coral reef ecologist with the Australian Institute of Marine Science who led the research team.

The prospects for such a low-carbon transition in the near term seem increasingly remote, however. Just days before the study was published, the International Energy Agency released new data indicating that the world’s carbon dioxide emissions had reached a record-breaking 30.6 billion tons last year, despite the continuing effects of the global recession.

Coral reefs, which cover barely 0.2 percent of the ocean floor but contain roughly 25 percent of the ocean’s biodiversity, provide a crucial source of protein for an estimated 500 million people, protect shorelines from tsunamis and tropical storms and attract tourists that sustain coastal economies with tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue.

Even as climate change and changing ocean chemistry loom as potentially existential threats to reefs, many scientists say that confronting local perils such as overfishing is more important than ever.

Reef advocates say significant progress has been made in conservation efforts over the past two decades, including major international and national initiatives to create large-scale marine protected zones and local campaigns to educate coastal communities about sustainable fishing, agricultural and development practices.

These efforts must dramatically accelerate if reefs are to survive the added pressures of accumulating carbon emissions, scientists say.

“If we keep local threats low, coral reefs will be able to get over the climate hump,” said Lauretta Burke, a reef biologist.

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When the Melody Takes a Detour, the Science Begins

And not just any jazz standard, but an especially ubiquitous one: "Autumn Leaves."

His point, during this panel called "Music and the Spark of Spontaneity," was to illustrate what some of the scientists sharing the stage had been talking about, that our brains have a kind of two-track approach to deciding what we like in the world.

On the one hand, we are wired to respond to things that are familiar, to predictability and patterns that help us make sense of what is around us. But at the same time, too much familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least ennui or complacency. Our brains like newness too, things that surprise and deviate from an expected pattern. ?

"I love the idea of this question of novelty versus familiarity," Mr. Metheny said. "'Autumn Leaves,' everybody knows that." And, he added, "for the first few choruses, I'm going to use one finger on one string. I'm not going to do anything that's more complicated than anyone who could play simply would do."

Easy for him to say. Even the stripped-down version he started out with was exceptionally musical, bending the familiar melody around Mr. Grenadier's exuberantly rhythmic bass. But as their performance became more intricate and adventurous, it underscored the science: They ?could travel miles from the melody, they could do calisthenics with the chords, but the audience still understood it as "Autumn Leaves," something they knew spiced with something entirely different.

Our preference for combining what we expect with what surprises us was demonstrated in recent studies on what makes music expressive by Daniel J. Levitin at McGill University, and also in brain imaging research by Edward Large at Florida Atlantic University. Both scientists used classical music: Chopin piano nocturnes or etudes in which the length and volume of notes were adjusted to varying degrees. They found that musicians and nonmusicians alike responded most to versions of the Chopin that included a lot of variety but not too much, and not variety that was just thrown into the mix in a random, out-of-context way.

The World Science Festival panel in the Great Hall at Cooper Union focused mostly on improvised music, especially the intuitive art of jazz, trying to address the question of what is actually happening when a musician spontaneously creates melodies, harmonies and rhythms that have never been played before.

After "Autumn Leaves," the moderator, John Schaefer, the host of the "Soundcheck" show on WNYC, gestured to the four scientists on the panel, and said to Mr. Metheny, "Before I ask these guys what was going on in your brain, let me ask you."

Mr. Metheny gave a thoughtful recitation of the elements in a jazz musician's toolkit. "The harmony, the basic flow of the rhythms, the way the chords are divided from key to key," he said, adding that "there's a whole set of options" from which an improviser can choose, including playing different musical scales or modes over a chord – “It could be Dorian, it could be Mixolydian."

But then he Cheshire Catted it, saying, "but the real answer is I wasn't thinking about any of them." Consider that "you just asked me a question in perfect English," he said to Mr. Schaefer. "Did you think, 'O.K., I need a verb?'" or "about how to hold your tongue?"

Mr. Metheny's answer pointed up another duality in the way our brains work,?that we have both conscious and unconscious brain processes, said one panelist, Jamshed Bharucha, a neuroscientist and the incoming president of Cooper Union, who is also a violinist. "The vast majority of stuff that goes on in our brain we do not have conscious access to," he said. "It's automatic."

But music requires?"years and years of practice in order to make what is conscious unconscious," he said.?Plus, improvisation is not just free-form playing – there has to be a mastery of structure and discipline. "If you want to fly off the edge of a cliff, you have to know where the cliff is," he said.

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Greentech: Batteries That Can Multitask

The model has been modified by the researcher’s team to increase the amount of electrical energy it can store — but not by installing a bigger battery. Instead, the team added body components that double as capacitors, devices that hold an electrical charge until they are tapped.

“Although the energies they provide are fairly modest,” Dr. Greenhalgh, a composites expert, said, “they have shown that our material could be used to smooth the demands on the battery, thus enhancing its life.”

Designers of full-scale electric vehicles are working toward the same goal: battery reserves need to be extended because today’s technology typically delivers only enough power for about 100 miles of driving. Larger batteries are not necessarily the solution, either. Even the most advanced designs weigh hundreds of pounds, reducing the vehicle’s range.

To help cut weight and increase driving distances, engineers are developing car frames and bodies made of carbon fiber-reinforced composites, plastic materials that can be 50 percent lighter than steel but provide superior strength and rigidity. Although used in a handful of exotic sports cars, carbon composites remain too costly for mass-market cars.

One potential solution is to build autos with carbon composites that can also serve as batteries. The dual-function materials could make E.V.’s and hybrid vehicles lighter as they simultaneously provide extra electricity.

“Structural power technology combines mechanical structure and energy storage capabilities,” said Dr. Greenhalgh, who heads a group at the college working on the concept. “This could allow us to have our cake and eat it too.”

To enable the composite materials to store electricity, the resin that binds the carbon fibers is laced with lithium ions; the fibers serve as conductive electrodes for this type of charge-holding capacitor.

It is different from a battery, which produces electricity from a chemical reaction. Another research group, at the Swedish Institute of Composites, is working on a structural battery.

Dr. Greenhalgh also leads a wider European Union project, which includes Volvo Cars, to study the innovative materials. “Volvo says that structural power technology will be key to the E.V.’s they’re developing,” he said.

One of the project’s goals is to test a prototype E.V. with a trunk floor that provides electricity. “We’re expecting a 15 percent weight savings compared to the standard battery in a conventional structure,” said Per-Ivar Sellergren, an engineer at the Volvo Cars Materials Center in Gothenburg, Sweden.

“Even though the panel will not be large enough to power the entire car, it could provide enough power to switch the engine off and on when the car is stopped at a traffic light,” he said.

Mr. Sellergren said that if future composite battery structures could store energy as efficiently as lithium-ion batteries, an E.V. would require only the roof, hood and trunk lid to be made of such materials to achieve an 80-mile range.

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Observatory: Protein-Rich Diet Helps Gorillas Keep Lean

 

That’s because our primate brethren follow a lean diet with protein concentrations similar to the American Heart Association’s recommendations for humans, says Jessica Rothman, an anthropologist at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Dr. Rothman and her colleagues studied mountain gorillas in Uganda and found that they eat a protein-rich diet, supplemented with fruits. Protein makes up about 17 percent of their total energy intake, close to the 15 percent protein intake the heart association recommends for people.

The study appears in the current issue of the journal Biology Letters.

During certain times of the year, when fruits are not available, protein-rich leaves dominate the gorilla’s diet, the report found. About 31 percent of the total energy intake is protein during these times. This is similar to the protein content in high-protein weight-loss regimens like the Atkins diet.

“What they are doing during these times is overeating protein in order to meet their energy requirements,” Dr. Rothman said.

Understanding the gorilla diet can help researchers better understand the evolution of the human diet, said her co-author David Raubenheimer a nutritional ecologist at Massey University in New Zealand.

Foods rich in sugars, starches and fats, once scarcely available to humans, are now abundant.

Modern societies “are diluting the concentration of protein in the modern diet,” Dr. Raubenheimer said. “But we eat to get the same amount of proteins we needed before, and in so doing, we’re overeating.”

The research could also help in preserving and creating ideal habitats for mountain gorillas, which are endangered. Only about 800 are in existence today.

Dr. Rothman is in Uganda running similar nutritional studies on other primates, including red-tailed monkeys and baboons.

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Vital Signs: Patterns: More People Praying About Health, Analysis Finds

More Americans are praying about their health, researchers have concluded.

Scientists analyzed data on 30,080 adults ages 18 and older who took part in the National Health Interview Survey in 2002 and on 22,306 adults who participated in 2007.

Forty-nine percent of adults said in 2007 that they had prayed about their health during the previous year, up from 43 percent in 2002. In 1999, only 14 percent of survey participants said they had prayed about their health.

Among those least likely to pray were people who exercised on a regular basis; researchers speculated they may not have had any health concerns. Those with higher incomes were also less likely to pray.

According to the analysis, published in the May issue of the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, the use of prayer has increased in recent years among adults of all ages. Women, black people, older and married individuals and those whose health status had changed — for better or worse — were more likely than others to pray. People with episodes of depression and dental pain also turned to prayer at high rates.

“We were surprised,” said Amy Wachholtz, director of health psychology at University of Massachusetts and co-author of the paper. “Our best guess is that it has to do with 9/11, but that’s an untested hypothesis. There doesn’t seem to be any other primary, overwhelming issue that would have so globally affected people.”

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Groundwater Depletion Is Detected From Space

They found problems in places as disparate as North Africa, northern India, northeastern China and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley in California, heartland of that state’s $30 billion agricultural industry.

Jay S. Famiglietti, director of the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling here, said the center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, known as Grace, relies on the interplay of two nine-year-old twin satellites that monitor each other while orbiting the Earth, thereby producing some of the most precise data ever on the planet’s gravitational variations. The results are redefining the field of hydrology, which itself has grown more critical as climate change and population growth draw down the world’s fresh water supplies.

Grace sees “all of the change in ice, all of the change in snow and water storage, all of the surface water, all of the soil moisture, all of the groundwater,” Dr. Famiglietti explained.

Yet even as the data signals looming shortages, policy makers have been relatively wary of embracing the findings. California water managers, for example, have been somewhat skeptical of a recent finding by Dr. Famiglietti that from October 2003 to March 2010, aquifers under the state’s Central Valley were drawn down by 25 million acre-feet — almost enough to fill Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir.

Greg Zlotnick, a board member of the Association of California Water Agencies, said that the managers feared that the data could be marshaled to someone else’s advantage in California’s tug of war over scarce water supplies.

“There’s a lot of paranoia about policy wonks saying, ‘We’ve got to regulate the heck out of you,’?” he said.

There are other sensitivities in arid regions around the world where groundwater basins are often shared by unfriendly neighbors — India and Pakistan, Tunisia and Libya or Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories — that are prone to suspecting one another of excessive use of this shared resource.

Water politics was hardly on Dr. Famiglietti’s mind when he first heard about Grace. In 1992, applying for a job at the University of Texas, he was interviewed by Clark R. Wilson, a geophysicist there who described a planned experiment to measure variations in Earth’s gravitational field.

“I walked into his office and he pulled out a piece of paper saying: I’m trying to figure out how distribution of water makes the Earth wobble,” said Dr. Famiglietti. “This was 1992. I was blown away. I instantly fell in love with the guy. I said, ‘This is unbelievable, this is amazing, it opens up this whole area.’?”

Back then the Grace experiment was still waiting in a queue of NASA projects. But he and Matt Rodell, a Ph.D. candidate under his supervision, threw themselves into investigating whether Grace would work, a so-called “proof of concept” exercise that turned out to show that Grace data was reliable and could support groundwater studies.

“It was a wide-open field we came into,” said Dr. Rodell, now a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We were like kids in a candy store. There was so much to be done.”

When Grace was conceived by a group of scientists led by Byron D. Tapley, the director of the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas, it was the darling of geodesists, who study variations in the Earth’s size, shape and rotational axis. Climate scientists also were keenly interested in using it to study melting of ice sheets, but hydrologists paid scant attention at first.

But, Dr. Wilson recalled, “Jay jumped on the problem.”

Ten years later, the two satellites were launched from the Russian space facility at Plesetsk on the back of a used intercontinental ballistic missile in a collaboration between NASA and the German Aerospace Center and began streaming the gravity data back to Earth.

Acquiring the data for general research purposes would have been impossible before the end of the cold war because maps indicating the normal wiggles in Earth’s gravitational field were used for targeting long-range missiles and were therefore classified.

For decades, groundwater measurements in the United States had been made from points on the Earth’s surface — by taking real-time soundings at 1,383 of the United States Geological Survey’s observation wells and daily readings at 5,908 others. Those readings are supplemented by measuring water levels in hundreds of thousands of other wells, trenches and excavations.

The two satellites, each the size of a small car, travel in polar orbits about 135 miles apart. Each bombards the other with microwaves calibrating the distance between them down to intervals of less than the width of a human hair.

If the mass below the path of the leading satellite increases — because, say, the lower Mississippi basin is waterlogged — that satellite speeds up, and the distance between the two grows. Then the mass tugs on both, and the distance shortens. It increases again as the forward satellite moves out of range while the trailing satellite is held back.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 31, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Matt Rodell as Dr. Modell in some references.

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Wielding Genomes in the Fight Against Cancer

The warm-up act was a video of ?brightly colored cells, ropes of DNA and other mystery blobs — gorgeous and ominous — floating to solemn, New-Agey music with lots of strings and poignant piano notes. Slides broke in bearing scary statistics — cancer kills more than half a million Americans a year, for example — and quotes from researchers: “Cancer is always genetic.” Cancer cells are “more perfect versions of ourselves.”

The panelists were Eric Lander, an expert in genome sequencing; Mary Claire King, the first scientist to identify genes that can cause breast cancer; Olufunmilayo Olopade, a medical oncologist and breast cancer researcher; and Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist and researcher, and author of the Pulitzer prize-winning book "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer." The moderator was Dr. Richard Besser, a physician who is chief health and medical editor for ABC News. ?

Dr. Besser wore a sharp suit and tie, Dr. Mukherjee had artfully tousled hair and close-fitting white pants over boots, and the other three went business casual. Dr. Lander and Dr. King tried to high-five each other, missed once and then connected.

One major theme that emerged from the 90-minute discussion was that although genetic research has already helped in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of some cancers, it may be decades before the science produces new treatments that come anywhere near the dream of curing cancer or at least making it a chronic disease.

Why try to sequence cancer genomes? Dr. Besser asked.

Dr. Lander said that cancer was caused by mutations and that it was “nuts” to think the disease could ever be cured without understanding what had gone wrong genetically. But the first step was to sequence the normal human genome; then, cancer genomes could be tackled. Cracking the normal genome cost a few billion dollars, but since then, he said, the cost of sequencing had dropped to $10,000 or less per genome, and so it made sense to apply the technology to cancer. Samples are needed from many patients with each type of cancer, he said. Sequencing a cancer from one person will reveal many mutations, but not all of them will be involved with the disease.

But with samples from many patients, researchers can hunt for culprit genes that are mutated in, say, half the cases, or maybe even all of them.

“Let the cancer tell you what’s important,” Dr. Lander said.

Genetic information is already being put to use to help women from families with mutations that cause breast cancer. Researchers can offer them options, Dr. King said, though she acknowledged that the options are “not pretty,” because they require removing the ovaries or breasts to avoid the disease. But the surgery can prevent 10,000 cases of breast cancer a year in the United States, she said.

Genetic findings have also led to some very focused treatments for cancer: drugs like Herceptin, for women with a certain type of breast cancer, and Gleevec, which is used for some blood cancers and gastrointestinal stromal tumors with specific mutations.

But Dr. Lander cautioned that individual targeted treatments were not cures. He cited a drug that can make tumors “melt away” in patients with melanoma, a deadly type of skin cancer. But they melt away for only eight months, he said. Then, the tumors “come roaring back,” because the cancer develops a new mutation and becomes resistant to the drug. He said cancer treatment needed what he called the “Colin Powell approach” — overwhelming force, which will probably turn out to be a cocktail of targeted drugs like the combination of antiretrovirals that can now keep H.I.V. in check for most patients.

Dr. Mukherjee said that in “Let Me Down Easy,” a play by Anna Deavere Smith, a character observes that giving chemotherapy is like hitting a dog with a stick to get rid of fleas. Flea ointment would work better, he said — but you might need six types of ointment.

Dr. Olopade said that as a medical oncologist, she had to defend chemotherapy, because it has cured many childhood leukemias.

Why not try to sequence as many cancer genomes as possible in the next five years? Dr. Lander asked. But he warned that the information would not lead to new treatments right away. He said that could take decades, and he accused the news media of “overpromising” and misleading the public into expecting cures within a few years.??

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Observatory: Treasure Is Found Deep in a Gold Mine: A New Worm

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Single-cell organisms have been known to live deep in the earth, more than 9,000 feet below the surface.

Halicephalobus mephisto, a new species of bacteria feeding nematode, was discovered in a South African gold mine more than 9,000 feet below the surface.

But until now, it was thought that the temperature, energy, oxygen and space constraints of the subsurface biosphere were too extreme for multicellular organisms.

Now, Tullis Onstott, a geoscientist at Princeton University, and colleagues from Belgium, South Africa and the Netherlands report their discovery of a small multicellular worm that dwells at these depths.

The worm, known as Halicephalobus mephisto, is tiny — two hundredths of an inch at the longest — and belongs to the vast and diverse phylum of nematodes. Its discovery, in a shaft of the Beatrix gold mine in South Africa, is reported in the journal Nature.

The worm appears to tolerate temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit and feeds on subsurface bacteria.

The researchers studied soil and water samples from the mines to determine that the newly identified nematodes are uniquely subsurface organisms. The samples indicated that while the nematodes live in the deep fracture water of the mines, they do not inhabit the surface-level mining water.

The researchers say their findings should be considered as scientists search for life in other extreme conditions — like those on Mars and other planets in the solar system.

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