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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