Asteroid Hunter Gives an Update on the Threat of Near-Earth Objects An Earth impact by a large comet or asteroid could knock

out human civilization with a single blow, as most people are now aware thanks to recent Hollywood movies and public outreach by planetary scientists. Since 1998, when NASA initiated its Spaceguard program to find comets and asteroids 1 km in diameter and larger, researchers have made some crucial inventories of the risky space rocks with orbits that come into close proximity of Earth. For instance, there are almost 1,000 of these so-called near-Earth objects with diameters of 1-kilometer or more. However disconcerting this might seem, we can rest assured that none will make it here in our lifetimes. We can say with a very good deal of certainty that no asteroid or comet large enough to threaten life as we know it will hit Earth in the next 100 years, says Donald Yeomans. At NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Yeomans is a senior research scientist and manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office. He has spent his career studying the physical and dynamical modeling of near-Earth objects, as well as tracking them down. Yeomans works with an international network of professional and amateur astronomers who find and monitor asteroids and comets with orbits that come within approximately 0.33 AU, which is equivalent to 150 million kilometers. The team has identified 8,800 near-Earth objects as of early 2012, he noted during a talk at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on January 14 on his new bookNear-Earth Objects, Finding Them Before They Find Us. The book gives readers an inside account of the latest efforts to find, track and study life-threatening asteroids and comets. There are literally millions of asteroids and comets in the solar system, ranging in size from the microscopic to hundreds of kilometers in diameter. Both are made of rocky, metallic materials that failed to aggregate into planets during the early days of the solar system. Yeomans says the only real difference between asteroids and comets is that a comet actively loses its dust and ice when near the sun, causing a highly visible tail to form behind it. Scientists have made exponential progress in identifying and tracking near-Earth objects in the past decade. NASA-sponsored near-Earth object surveys have found 90 percent of all asteroids and comets larger than a kilometer in diameter and projected their orbits at least 100 years into the future. Yeomans says the challenge now is finding all asteroids larger than 35 meters across, the size where one would pose a threat to a town or city, rather than all life on Earth. Historically, Earth impacts by large asteroids and comets are rare. In addition, there is no clear record of a person being killed by one. Yeomans says that while Earth impacts by large asteroid and meteors are very low probability events, they are of very high consequence. A prime example is just outside Winslow, Ariz., where a large crater was blasted into the Earth 50,000 years ago by a nearly 30-meter asteroid. Despite its relatively small size, the asteroid generated around 10 megatons of energy upon collision. By comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II generated around 0.02 megatons. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was much largera chunk of rock 10 to 15 kilometers across. The crater that formed when it struck near what is now the Yucatn Peninsula is 150 kilometers in diameter. The impact caused an immense explosion that deposited a layer of debris 10 meters deep as far as several hundred kilometers away from the impact and rained burning ash down on all corners of the globe. Most animals on the surface of the Earth died, and debris in the upper atmosphere launched the planet into a global winter. Many of the life forms that survived were either in the ocean or underground. Today, if a survey detected a giant NEO headed for Earth, Yeomans says, humanity would have more than 50 years to prepare for it. He says a spacecraft could theoretically be used to divert such an asteroid off its Earth-colliding trajectory and out into space, and put in his plug for his employer, or at least organizations that support human ingenuity. We have conceptual plans on how this could be done, he says. The reason the dinosaurs went extinct is because they didnt have a space program. Why I Want My Students to Read Jared Diamonds Latest Blockbuster, Part 2 In my last post, I defended mega-pundit Jared Diamond against his critics, especially social scientists who imply that a book may be scholarly or a bestseller but not both. Bullshit. Envy more than genuine scholarly disagreement seems to underpin much of the resentment toward Diamond. Anthropologists and other investigators of human behavior should applaud Diamond, not denigrate him, for showing that popular appeal and scholarly rigor are compatible. That is not to say that we shouldnt question Diamonds propositions about humanity. The chief value of his bookslike those of Steven Pinker, Edward Wilson, Francis Fukuyama and other popular scientific synthesizers (all of whom Ive criticized)is that they provoke informed debate about major issues facing us: What are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Where do we want to go? Im not crazy, for example, about Diamonds discussion of pre-state warfare in The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? He presents a kind of soft version of the claim of Richard Wrangham, Steven LeBlanc, Pinker and Wilsonthe Harvard Hawksthat war was an affliction of prestate societies that civilization helped to solve. As I have pointed out on this blogand in The End of War, the evidence for this thesis is flimsy; according to the archaeological record, lethal group violence dates back only about 10,000 years, making warfare far more recent than art, music, religion and other cultural inventions. And yet Diamonds discussion of war, in spite of my quibbles, is intelligent, informed, interesting. The same is true of his analysis of societies treatment of the elderly. Diamond devotes a chunk of World Until Yesterday to this subject, and he also focused on it when he spoke at my school, Stevens Institute of Technology, last Friday. The topic is urgent, given that throughout the industrialized world birth rates are falling while people are living longer. As a result, in the U.S. and other firstworld nations, the elderly are the fastest-growing section of the population. We have more old people and fewer young people than ever, Diamond says. Some traditional societies, Diamond notes, venerate the aged. In rural Fiji, for example, old people live with and are cherished by their children, who may even pre-chew food for their toothless parents. Diamond quotes a Fijian acquaintance who was outraged that many old people are sent to retirement homes where they are visited only occasionally by their children. He burst out accusingly, You throw away your old people and your own parents. Diamond clearly sympathizes with this viewpoint. He criticizes the preference of companies for young job candidates; mandatory retirement rules, which are especially common in Europe; and a medical practice called age-based allocation of resources, in which hospitals give young patients priority over the old. He deplores the paucity of grey-haired, wrinkled actors in ads for soft drinks, beer and cars. Instead, pictures of old people are used to sell adult diapers, arthritis drugs and retirement plans. Listing these indignities, the 75-year-old Diamond sometimes sounds like, well, a grumpy old man. He acknowledges that older people today enjoy on the average much longer lives, far better health, far more recreational opportunities and far less grief from deaths of their children than at any previous time in human history. Moreover, living in a nursing home is surely preferable (isnt it?) to being abandoned, pushed off a cliff or buried alive, the fate of the old and infirm among many tribal societies. Diamond loves the fact that in some illiterate societies the elderly served as valuable sources of information about rare events. He describes a Southwest Pacific island in which cyclones periodically wiped out crops and other domesticated food sources. After such disasters the young relied on old people to tell them which

wild plants were edible. Today, Diamond points out, the young can learn so much from books and the internet that they dont need the memories of elders. But thats a good thing, right? Diamonds recommendations for improving the lives of the aged are also anti-climactic. He proposes that the elderly visit schools to tell students about wars, depressions and other historical events that they have witnessed first-hand. Grandparents could also stay busy taking care of their childrens children, replacing costly, unreliable babysitters and daycare centers. Reading this section I thought, What if grandparents dont want to talk to bored, sullen teenagers or take care of squalling, unruly toddlers? Diamond, to his credit, doesnt pretend that his suggestions will solve this huge problem of aging. His goal is not to solve all of our enormous social problems but to draw our attention to them and challenge us to find better solutions. He succeeds. What more can you ask of a social scientist? Skull in the Rock Brings New Paleo Science to Kids [Excerpt] In 2008, the 9-year-old son of paleoanthropologist Lee Berger discovered a fossil that landed Bergers team on the covers of the journal Science, of Scientific American, and on the front pages of newspapers including The New York Times. Berger and his son, Matthew, discovered a clavicle bone in Johannesburg, South Africa that belonged to an entirely new species of human, which Berger and his colleagues namedAustralopithicus Sediba. Bergers team then went on to find two skulls, a right hand, a foot and a pelvis, all exceptionally well preserved. Berger, with co-author Marc Aronson, has penned a book for children that describes the discovery, Bergers career path, and how A. sediba fits into the story of human evolution. Though the book is recommended for ages 10 and up, I read it to my 6-year-old, who got the main gist and enjoyed the lifelike illustrations of early human ancestors like Lucy. For me, the book was an essential reminder of how much the field has changed. In high school, my generation was taught that human evolution proceeded in a straight line from, as Aronson writes, chimps, to chimpish animals that walked upright, to animals with larger brains that walked on two legs like Homo habilis, to humans, so many different and puzzling branches of ancestors have been found that no one can say for sure which led to what. As he explains, We now believe that nature tried all sorts of experiments in the millions of years during which troops of animals that walked upright on two feet lived in Africa. Skull in the Rock is a great way to introduce young kids to evolution and to deepen older kids understanding of how humans came to be. Reprinted with permission of the National Geographic Society from the book The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins by Lee R. Berger and Marc Aronson. Copyright 2012 Lee R. Berger and Aronson & Glenn LLC. Chapter One: The First Bone Dad, Ive found a fossil. Nine-year-old Matthew Berger was fossil hunting with his dad when he stumbled and spied a brown rock with a thin yellow bone stuck in it. Matthew was lucky: His father is Professor Lee Berger, a scientist who has devoted his life to finding the remains of our ancient ancestors. They had often gone exploring together in the brown limestone hills and scraggly trees just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. So many important fossils have been found in this area that it is called the Cradle of Humankind and is protected by the government and listed as a World Heritage Site. Though only half an hour from one of the largest cities in Africa, the Cradle belongs to animalsvisitors are watched by troops of baboons, dodged by scampering warthogs, measured by soaring eagles. The Bergers always bring their Rhodesian ridgebacks with them in their customized Jeepsince leopards and other predators prowl nearby, and the dogs smell and sense them in time to give warning. On this pleasant August morning in 2008, Matthew called out to his dadand opened a door two million years back in time. Some day, Matthews words may be famous, the way we honor What hath God wrought? the first telegraph message sent in 1844, or Mr. Watson, come here the first telephone call 32 years later. What he found was that important. But that is not what his dad first thought. Every other time they had gone out together, Matthew found the remains of ancient antelopesfossils that are quite common in the area. As Dr. Berger came closer, Matthew could tell that his dad assumed it was just another old antelope and was trying to be nice by pretending to be interested. That is exactly what Dr. Berger was thinking until he was about fifteen feet (4.6 m) from his son, and could focus. Right then, just at that precise moment, he froze. His world went black and white. Time stopped. Matthew was holding a gift from the past so precious almost nothing like it had ever been found. And the one person in the world who knew that for sure was Dr. Lee Berger. For the fossil was a clavicle, the thin connecting bone across the shoulder that humans and our ancestors shareand that athletes in contact sports sometimes break. The bone is so fragile, not one of the famous skeletons of prehumans still has a complete one. Yet when he was a graduate student, Dr. Berger had written his Ph.D. thesis on just that bone and three others that would become important in this story, the bones that make up the upper arm. Because Matthew had trained his eyes, he recognized a fossil. Because his father had studied that part of the body, he realized the treasure in his sons hands. For Dr. Berger, it would have been enough to find that one special bone. But the clavicle was just the beginning. It was the rabbit hole beckoning Alice, the wardrobe flung open to Narnia, the first clue to what is becoming an entirely new way of understanding human evolution. It is easy to envy the Bergers, to wish you or I had the chance to find the bone, which turned out to be part of a nearly complete skeleton of an entirely new species (Australopithecus sediba) previously unknown to science. But as Dr. Berger says, that is getting it totally wrong. Because the most important thing about the find is the doors it opens for the next new discovery. Every door leads somewhere, even those that seem closedthat is what Dr. Bergers own life story told him. 40 Years of Health Care for Women that Includes Access to Abortion Services Todays political rhetoric in the U.S. makes it easy to fall into the trap of viewing abortion services as outside of womens health care, but a recent event in Manhattan belied that logical flaw, just as Scientific Americandid in an editorial in its May 2012issue. Abortion services, which can include counseling, in-clinic abortions, abortion pills, and pain management, are part of family planning, part of health care and a critical element of womens health care. At the event last week hosted by Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health to mark the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Courts decision to legalize abortion, in Roe v. Wade, Dr. Curtis Boyd, who has provided abortion care for about 50 years in clinics in Texas and New Mexico, talked about his years of practice before the landmark decision in 1973. During that time, he saw women patients in the hospital who were bleeding, infected and sometimes dying as result of botched illegal abortions. His decision to help women gain access to safe but then illegal abortions rested on the certainty that an unwanted pregnancy can ruin a womans life. I thought it was not fair. Women were at a disadvantage, a significant disadvantage. Similarly, asScientific Americans board of editors wrote, family planning has saved lives, opened new horizons for women and kept populations from soaring, all of which are major contributors to economic well-being. Boyd, whose name was not publicized as part of the event on the advice of the FBI due to threats against him for his work providing abortions, was joined on stage with Dr. Linda Prine, who brings reproductive health services to primary care, serves on the faculty at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, and

teaches at Planned Parenthood in New York City, and Dr. Willy Parker, an ob/gyn who serves on the boards for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and Choice USA. Prine suggested that people learn to talk more openly about their experiences around abortion to take the stigma and fear out of the decision and procedures to terminate a pregnancy, and to help women understand that abortion is sometimes a part of life, a part of womens experiences. Along with reminding the crowd of the importance of abortion services to womens health, the panelists also corrected a perception that abortion can ever be rare, as Sen. Hillary Clinton advocated in 2005 in a speech where she tried to reframe her partys position on abortion to making it safe, legal and rare, in part with more abstinence counseling for teens. Abortion as we know it will never be rare, because birth control pills are not perfect, Boyd pointed out. They fail three percent to four percent of the time. Multiply that by the number of women having sex on any given day and youll arrive at a lot of unwanted pregnancies, which tend to fall disproportionately into the lives of low-income women and African-American women in the U.S. Every contraceptive has failures, Boyd noted, also mentioning that other factors can intervene even with planned pregnancies such as the death of a partner, desertion by a husband or boyfriend, and pre-natal detection of birth defects. Rare will never be the case, he added. You do it as often as it is needed. Parker said that he reversed his position on whether he should provide abortion services as a physician after several years of opposing them. He was meditating one day on a sermon delivered by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the parable of the Good Samaritan. In the sermon, King broke down why the actions of the Samaritan were good as he helped a beaten traveler even though he was from a despised group. Parkers reflections led him to reverse the question of concern in the sermon to What would happen to this person if I didnt stop to help him? At that point, Parker said, he came to feel the immorality of not providing abortions if he was to represent himself as a womens health provider. He agrees that the reason a woman has for an abortion should not be subjected to hair-splitting. At what point does a woman lose her humanity to make the decisions over this organism, over her life? Parker said, adding that questions about abortion services force us to think about what is essential to human dignity and what it means to allow women to live out their lives with dignity. Parker said his dream regarding reproductive health is a day when abortion is a non-issue, when a woman is pregnant when she wants to be. Thats different from saying we want abortion to be legal, safe and rare. This statement drew loud applause from the 200 or so in the audience, an equal mix of men and women of various ethnic and racial backgrounds. How many abortions? Parker continued. As many as necessary! Alpha males and adventurous human females: gender and synthetic genomics In May of 2010, two influential Science papers changed the way that we think about the past and future of genomes. The decoding of the Neandertal genome showed that humans and Neandertals interbred some time before Neandertals went extinct some 30,000 years ago. A couple weeks later, the J. Craig Venter Institute announced theirchemical synthesis of a complete bacterial genome and its booting up in a closely related cell. The coincidence of the announcement of ancient and synthetic genomes, as well as the recent publication of technologies for large scale bacterial genome engineering from George Churchs lab led some people to ask whether it would be possible to clone Neandertals by a combination of gene synthesis, human genome editing, and stem cell cloning. While the New Scientist article about the implications of the Neandertal genome was pessimistic on the short-term prospect of resurrecting Neandertals, George Church himself has more recently made news by suggesting how such a future scenario might work in his recent book Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. In the books introduction, Church (with science writer Ed Regis) writes: Youd start with a stem cell genome from a human adult and gradually reverse-engineer it into the Neanderthal genome or a reasonably close equivalent. These stem cells cal produce tissues and organs. If society becomes comfortable with cloning and sees value in true human diversity, then the whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimpor by an extremely adventurous human female. While the news storm has made it seem like this is an active area of research in the Church lab, George has been clear that his statements were meant to spark discussion about the myriad social and ethical aspects of such an endeavor given its possible technical feasibility, not to recruit any surrogate mothers to a study. Ethical concerns have been paramount in the development of reproductive technologies, mammalian cloning, stem cell biology, genomics, and synthetic biology in recent decades, and the question of Neandertal resurrection would certainly engage with the ethical concerns arising from all of these fields. For now, I want to address just one very small social aspect of Churchs statement, and how it affects the practice of synthetic biology. For Church, the prospect of cloning Neandertals is in large part about diversity. In the Der Spiegel interview, Church contradicts the interviewer when asked whether it would be ethical to create a Neandertal for the sake of curiosity. Church says: Well, curiosity may be part of it, but its not the most important driving force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance. For such a technological commitment to human diversity, Churchs book tells a very different story about diversity amongst the practitioners of synthetic biology. Of the approximately 160 names mentioned in the books index, only 10% are the names of women, and only one of those names is a practicing academic synthetic biologist, involved in the founding of one of Churchs many startup companies. The extremely adventurous human female mentioned in the context of Neandertal surrogacy (and easily replaceable by a chimpanzee) therefore represents a significant percentage ofall the women mentioned in the whole book. This observation points at not only the continuing lack of women and minorities in science, engineering, and technology, but at perhaps a deeper problem about the culturally perceived character of the engineer and the growing mythology surrounding well-known synthetic biologists. Craig Venter, a major figure in genomics, both natural and synthetic, and no stranger to the myth-making of scientists, wrote about how he sees himself in response to the 2013 Edge question What *Should* We Be Worried About: As a scientist, an optimist, an atheist and an alpha male I dont worry. As a scientist I explore and seek understanding of the world (s) around me and in me. As an optimist I wake up each morning with a new start on all my endeavors with hope and excitement. As an atheist I know I only have the time between my birth and my death to accomplish something meaningful. As an alpha male I believe I can and do work to solve problems and change the world. As we write the history of synthetic biology and the pioneering scientists and engineers who are rewriting the code of life, it is these alpha males who are written as the adventurous creators of new life forms and adventurous females that are the anonymous vessels for their DNA-based creations. For Venters Synthia, the chemically synthesized genome came to be seen as life, while the host cell whose membrane, cytoplasm, and proteins booted up the inert DNA is but the chassis. In the potential design of a Neandertal baby, a human being is the chassis organism, the donor cell for a transplanted genome, the unpredictable host context that can confound synthetic biology designs.

In such scientific imaginings we get futuristic versions of some very retrograde cultural ideas about gender. While I know that these men dont actually think of the women in their lives and in their labs as simply vessels for DNA (some of my best friends are male synthetic biologists!), I also know that leaving these kinds of statements unexamined can lead to an environment that makes it harder for women working in these labs, harder for women to be chosen as speakers at quantitative synthetic biology conferences, and harder for women to be promoted and advance in their field. Before we discuss the potential of cloned Neandertals to boost human diversity, we must first consider our role in boosting the diversity of our labs, companies, faculty, and conferences with the humans that actually exist. What a fake Mars mission says about our own sleep habits On 4 November 2011, six men emerged from a windowless capsule based on the site of the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, Russia. They had been inside their spaceship for 520 days, enough time to (optimistically) go to Mars and back. They carried out the same kinds of activities and experiments that any astronauts would do on such a mission. Except for one thing: they never actually left Earth. A recent paper in the journal PNAS documents the six-strong crews sleep and activity patterns over the 520 days they were cooped up on their simulated mission to Mars and back. Each crew member wore a watch-like actigraph on their wrist, which tracked movement and monitored light exposure, and took a computer test every week to measure how alert they were. Mathias Basner, lead author of the paper and Assistant Professor of Sleep and Chronobiology at the University of Pennsylvania, along with his colleagues, found that four out of six of the crew members suffered sleep problems during their mission. By the end of the experiment, one crew member was living on a 25 hour day, meaning every two weeks there came a point when it was the middle of the day for everyone else, but for him it felt like the middle of the night. Another suffered partial chronic sleep deprivation. You can read more about the results of the study in Science Now(and other places, too). Basner and his colleagues think that the lighting on the spaceship was at least partly to blame for these problems, and that a real mission to Mars would require lighting that mimics more closely the natural light we are used to on Earth. But its not all bad. Apart from the one sleep-deprived crew member, everyones sleep time increased over the mission. This might not sound good (weve probably all experienced the sluggishness that sometimes follows a long morning lie-in). But it turns out that it is. Those five crew members who increased sleep time also increased their performance on this little attention test we had in the chamber, says Basner. All of the findings of this study are important for long distance space missions, of course, but this one in particular is also of relevance to us back here on Earth. Basner told me: Were chronically sleep depriving ourselves, especially during the work week, and trying to catch up on the weekend a little, and consuming caffeine during the day to keep us going. This [experiment] just shows us that once these crew members had the opportunity to get more sleep, and they did get more sleep, their performance was increasing. He also thinks that, while the situation the six Mars 500 crew members were in was quite unique, some aspects of it were not too dissimilar from our daily lives: The other message is were kind of doing the same that these crew members were doing. Were spending most of the day inside, the unfortunate dont even have a window in their office, so were living under artificial light as well. This could lead to similar kinds of circadian rhythm disorders as we saw in this one crew members, where we are not as alert during the day as we would want to be, and we may have trouble sleeping at times where we should sleep and we are sleepy at times when we should be fully awake. The last line of the paper sums up: The essential need for humans to maintain sleepwake activity cycles synchronized to the circadian biology that temporally coordinates human health and behavior appears to be as important on Earth as it will be en route to Mars. The astronauts that eventually go to Mars will need to be in top condition, physically and mentally, for a successful trip. By working out how to maintain that level of health for a long-distance spaceflight, using simulated missions like this one, we are also learning more about how we should be treating ourselves here on Earth. The Citizen Science of Climate Change: We are not bystanders Superstorm Sandy prior to the 2012 Presidential election put climate change on the mind of many voters. Earlier this month, a Federal Advisory Committee of 13 collaborating agencies released a Draft Climate Assessment Report for public review. The data show the climate is already changing: rising sea-level, ocean acidification, damage to infrastructure, and impacts on human health, water resources, and agriculture. Because the data make it hard to remain optimistic, many were thankful to hear Obama say at his inauguration, Well respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. One overlooked aspect of the data, however, can also give us reason for optimism. Although credit for the report is given to 240+ scientists and engineers who compiled the evidence about global climate change, the backbone of the knowledge presented arises from efforts of unsung (and unwitting) heroes: people who collect weather data. The coordinated, cross-generational, collective nature of the public data-collection efforts reveals an unexploited strength in our society that should give us hope. Its often unclear where climate change data come from; like many others, I had assumed its all generated by satellites circling the earth and buoys floating in the ocean. While those technologies play a role, data on the key variables of temperature and precipitation have been, and still are, collected by otherwise ordinary people. Thus, evidence for climate change is not because scientists say so, but rather because the collective observations of people show we have shorter, warmer winters, and longer, hotter summers, periods of extreme heat lasting longer than any living American can recall, and rain in extremes: either heavier downpours or droughts. Separately, people across the country have noted these observations in their backyards. Scientists have pooled the observations to reveal widespread patterns. The new assessment is an impressive synthesis of the most up-to-date studies in the peer-reviewed literature about climate change. It details negative impacts in a wide array of economic sectors, from maple syrup in Vermont to oysters in Washington. Each study that involved rain, snow, and temperature measurements drew those data from the U.S. Cooperative Weather Observer Program: a citizen science network. The Program is not often referred to as citizen science, probably in part because it started generations before the term was coined, but thats what it is. Public contributions of weather measurements date as far back as the availability of instruments to measure weather. When founding our nation, Thomas Jefferson wanted to deputize one person in every county in Virginia to collect temperature and wind data twice a day. The Revolutionary War pre-empted these plans.

The concept kept recurring. In the late 1840s, Matthew Maury wanted farmers to collect weather data and share them via the telegraph so that his naval office could aggregate reports and make forecasts. He adapted the idea from a maritime system he coordinated, whereby weather information crowdsourced from merchant ships was turned into wind and current maps that quickened ocean travel. The Civil War pre-empted his land-based weather plans. In 1870, President Grant formed an agency to coordinate a volunteer weather observer program. The program eventually became the U.S. Cooperative Weather Observer Program of the National Weather Service. Since then, gathering standardized weather data has been a tradition in many families at 12,000 sites in the U.S. Take a look at theNational Weather Service newsletters honoring long-term service and youll see Terrell Phillips of Douglas, Georgia, who took over observations after his father passed away so that their weather station has operated for a continuous 50 years. Youll see Sara Waddell of Woodruff, South Carolina, who received a 25-year length of service award, following in her parents footsteps. Her mother had observed since 1956 and her father since 1987. And we can thank Robert Hoppe of Broadwater County, Montana, for 40 years of service; he comes from a farming family that has recorded since 1939. Together, people contribute about one million volunteer hours annually. A core of about 1,200 of these sites has continuous history ideal for climate change research. It would be nearly impossible for me to accept the burden of the reports conclusions climate change is not only real, but accelerating if it werent for the one glimmer of hope that I see in all knowledge coproduced via citizen science: the power of the coordinated, collective efforts of curious, dedicated people. The discovery and understanding of global climate change, which has been so hotly debated, was possible because we are not a country of bystanders. We are participators. When the weather service asked for help, people helped. Because of participation, we have an inkling of the threats that we face. I dont know the solutions to global climate change. You probably dont either. But any solutions will certainly involve collective action. It was our uncoordinated collective action, in the form of burning fossil fuels, that has made the climate change problem. And it was our coordinated collected action that informed us of the problem. We all will be forced to deal with climate change, so the question is: which type of collective action do we prefer? The coordinated, dedicated, collective efforts embedded in family traditions and daily practices as seen in citizen science illustrate the attributes and possibilities we need to find the best path forward. As President Obama said, we wont let down our children or future generationsindeed, well teach them to participate. Plans for alien contact found wanting Enormous satellite dishes make up the search party for extraterrestrial life, but in the event of success, should a welcome party follow? Astronomers and biologists involved in the search for life on other planets are worried about a lack of regulatory and ethical policies to guide them. "No government has plans" for what to do in the event of the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life, says astrophysicist Martin Dominik of the University of St Andrews, UK, who organized a conference at the Royal Society in London that began today. For now, the only real framework for responding to the discovery of extraterrestrial life is in a document drafted by researchers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). It advises careful confirmation of the result, a prompt international announcement and refraining from responding immediately, says SETI founder Frank Drake of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Dominik says the United Nations should have a similar policy in place. "It's too important for any one country," says Dominik, who hopes the two-day conference will stimulate the interest of policy makers. Palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University, UK, warned of the possible consequences of detecting extraterrestrial life. He cited examples of convergent evolution in the Earth's biological history as evidence that there are a limited number of solutions to sensory and social organizational problems. Alien senses could be similar to human senses, he told participants, and social life elsewhere could be as violent as on Earth, where leaf-cutter ants pillage and plunder, and humans wage war. "If the phone rings," he says, "don't pick it up." The simple life Some researchers say there are important policy implications even for the discovery of less complicated life, such as microbes within the Solar System. "While microorganisms on Earth get very low moral regard on Mars such microbes would be in a different category because they would be the only representatives of life on Mars," says astrobiologist Christopher McKay, of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Nobody has decided whether it would be acceptable to commercialize microbes found in the Solar System, or to what extent they should be protected. McKay says that NASA abides by rules set by the international Committee on Space Research regarding environmental contamination during the exploration of other moons and planets. An upcoming workshop will continue the discussion of space bioethics, he adds. Researchers want to avoid the conflict and confusion which surrounded the 1996 claim that a meteorite from Mars, ALH 84001, contained potential evidence of primitive life.1Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, of the University of Oxford, UK, notes that a poorly handled scientific announcement of this scale would have massive consequences for the reputations and funding of researchers. There is no UK government policy on the detection or ethics of extraterrestrial life just yet, but the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) did send a representative to today's meeting. "It's over the horizon for us," says POST adviser Sarah Bunn. More Than Just a Bad Dream--A Nightmare's Impact on the Waking Brain Nightmares may fuel anxiety rather than serving as an emotional release. You awake with a pounding heart and clammy hands. Relax, you think to yourselfit was just a bad dream. But are nightmares truly benign? Psychologists arent so sure. Although some continue to believe nightmares reduce psychological tensions by letting the brain act out its fears, recent research suggests that nocturnal torments are more likely to increase anxiety in waking life. In one study Australian researchers asked 624 high school students about their lives and nightmares during the past year and assessed their stress levels. It is well known that stressful experiences cause nightmares, but if nightmares serve to diffuse that tension, troubled sleepers should have an easier time coping with emotional ordeals. The study, published in the journal Dreaming, did not bear out that hypothesis: not only did nightmares not stave off anxiety, but people who reported being distressed about their dreams were even more likely to suffer from general anxiety than those who experienced an upsetting event such as the divorce of their parents. It is possible, however, that some-thing is going wrong in the brains of individuals who experience a lot of anxiety, so that normal emotional processing during dreaming fails, says Tore Nielsen, director of the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory at Sacred Heart Hospital in Montreal. But Nielsens most recent results, published in the Journal of Sleep Research last June, actually bolster the Australian findings. To tease out how REM sleep during which most dreaming takes placeaffects our emotions, the Canadian researchers showed disturbing images (such as gory scenes or a women being forced into a van at knifepoint) to a group of healthy volunteers just before they went to bed. When the subjects viewed the same pictures in the morning, those who had been deprived of dream-filled REM sleep were less emotionally affected than those deprived of other sleep phases. The same was true for those who experienced fewer negative emotions in their dreams. In other words, having nightmares did not make dreamers more resilient in waking lifejust the opposite. What is not clear from these studies is whether nightmares play a causal role in anxiety or are merely an expression of an underlying problem. Most researchers agree that having an occasional nightmare is normal and not problematic. But if the dreams give rise to persistent anxiety and concern, something more serious could be going onand it may be a good idea to talk to a mental health professional about it.

Tapped Out?: Are Chlorine's Beneficial Effects in Drinking Water Offset by Its Links to Cancer? Although chlorine is widely used as an effective way to disinfect drinking water, researchers are concerned that it can lead to bladder, rectal and breast cancers. Dear EarthTalk: I am very concerned about the amount of chlorine in my tap water. I called my water company and they said it is safe just let the tap run for awhile to rid the smell of the chlorine. But that just gets rid of the smell, perhaps, not the chlorine? Anita Frigo, Milford, Conn. Thousands of American municipalities add chlorine to their drinking water to get rid of microbes [CORRECTED ACCORDING TO EARTHTALK EMAIL]. But this inexpensive and highly effective disinfectant has a dark side. Chlorine, added as an inexpensive and effective drinking water disinfectant, is also a known poison to the body, says Vanessa Lausch of filter manufacturer Aquasana. It is certainly no coincidence that chlorine gas was used with deadly effectiveness as a weapon in the First World War. The gas would severely burn the lungs and other body tissues when inhaled, and is no less powerful when ingested by mouth. Lausch adds that researchers have now linked chlorine in drinking water to higher incidences of bladder, rectal and breast cancers. Reportedly chlorine, once in water, interacts with organic compounds to create trihalomethanes (THMs)which when ingested encourage the growth of free radicals that can destroy or damage vital cells in the body. Because so much of the water we drink ends up in the bladder and/or rectum, ingestions of THMs in drinking water are particularly damaging to these organs, says Lausch. The link between chlorine and bladder and rectal cancers has long been known, but only recently have researchers found a link between common chlorine disinfectant and breast cancer, which affects one out of every eight American women. A recent study conducted in Hartford, Connecticut found that women with breast cancer have 50-60 percent higher levels of organochlorines (chlorine by-products) in their breast tissue than cancer-free women. But don't think that buying bottled water is any solution. Much of the bottled water for sale in the U.S. comes from public municipal water sources that are often treated with, you guessed it, chlorine. A few cities have switched over to other means of disinfecting their water supplies. Las Vegas, for example, has followed the lead of many European and Canadian cities in switching over to harmless ozone instead of chlorine to disinfect its municipal water supply. As for getting rid of the chlorine that your city or town adds to its drinking water on your own, theories abound. Some swear by the method of letting their water sit for 24 hours so that the chlorine in the glass or pitcher will off-gas. Letting the tap run for awhile is not likely to remove any sizable portion of chlorine, unless one were to then let the water sit overnight before consuming it. Another option is a product called WaterYouWant, which looks like sugar but actually is composed of tasteless antioxidants and plant extracts. The manufacturer claims that a quick shake of the stuff removes 100 percent of the chlorine (and its odor) from a glass a tap water. A years supply of WaterYouWant retails for under $30. Of course, an easier way to get rid of chlorine from your tap water is by installing a carbon-based filter, which absorbs chlorine and other contaminants before they get into your glass or body. Tap-based filters from the likes of Paragon, Aquasana, Kenmore, Seagull and others remove most if not all of the chlorine in tap water, and are relatively inexpensive to boot. Ask the Experts: What Is Pompe Disease? When a disease is rare, so is the funding for research to treat and cure it. Inspired by biotechnology executive John Crowley's efforts to save his children, the movie Extraordinary Measures shows basic science and biotechnology teaming up to help researchers develop a treatment for a rare and fatal neuromuscular disorder. With a prevalence of one in 40,000, according to a 2007 review published inPediatrics, Pompe disease results from a recessively inherited deficiency in the gene encoding acid alpha-glucosidase (GAA), an enzyme that converts glycogen to glucose. The defect results in a build-up of glycogenin the lysosome, a saclike storage organelle in the cell that acts as a waste-disposal system, leading to muscle weakness, organ damage including the brain, and possible death. (The infantile variant of the disease is fatal without treatment, usually within two years). In 1998, Crowley teamed up with glycobiologist William Canfield, founder of Novazyme Pharmaceuticals Incorporated (now part of Genzyme Corporation). Subsequent research at Genzyme in collaboration with scientists from Duke University led to the approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2006 of Myozyme under the Orphan Drug Act, which allows Genzyme to sell the drug without competition for seven years.* The treatment can cost up to $300,000 a year, according to The New York Times. Jonathan Cooper, head of the Pediatric Storage Disorders Laboratory at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, explains why Pompe disease is so rare, hard (and expensive) to treat. [An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

What is Pompe disease? Pompe disease is one of many lysosomal storage diseases, in which you have a defect in the lysosome. In this case the gene should be making [acid alphaglucosidase], but it doesn't. Then the lysosome doesn't work and things build up in cells that shouldn't be there. Unfortunately these types of diseases are progressive and fatal. You discover very quickly that there's a gene defect and your child will suddenly start showing signs of progressive disease. Why is it classified as an orphan disease? They're called orphan diseases because we don't have treatments for them. That's the worst part of the diagnosis for these children. We have no drugs to treat them with. Why is it so rare?

To get the effects of the disease, you need to have two mutant copies of the gene. Somewhere back in the mists of time there will have been a mutation. It is passed on from generation to generation. Then, two parents will be carriers, and each time they decide to have a child there is a 25 percent chance of the child having the disease. There is a 50 percent chance that the child will be a carrier. Why does it take so long to find treatments? You first have to figure out what the genetic defect isa long process. It's also harder to get funding for that sort of rare disease research. Every time you enter a grant competition you're competing with everybody elseAlzheimer's researchers, Parkinson's researchersso, unsurprisingly, the grant funding authority often opts for where they'll get the most for their money. Getting pharmaceutical companies interested in funding research is hard because of the limited profits. How do scientists and drug companies work together? If you have a basic scientist working on a particular disease who has some insight into the disease mechanism, then that person can be useful to a drug company. Drug trials require a preclinical development phase using animal models, and basic scientists are very useful for this. Sometimes the scientist will work for the company, sometimes they'll collaborate with the company. Why is the treatment for Pompe disease so expensive? Enzyme-replacement drugs are expensive to make and they need to be given frequently. They're quite effective but only have effects within the body. If you have a disease which affects the brain, you have considerably more problems because you have to get [the drugs] into the brain. Can cheaper therapies be developed? This is where the issue of intellectual property comes in. If a company has intellectual property on the genetic defect, like Genzyme does, they have exclusive rights to work on finding ways to make and deliver drugs to treat it. Until the intellectual property expires, they have the sole rights for working on that gene from a scientific standpoint. Are there alternatives that could be pursued once the intellectual property expires? You could use gene therapy to transfer the deficient genes into the cells and get them to make the enzyme for you. But you need finances to be able to do that type of research. What if people can't afford the treatment? There are a variety of philanthropic goodwill programs that are giving a discounted rate on the drugs or actually giving them away. Video Game Expands the Concept of Dark Energy for Mass Effect Mass Effect 2, the new sequel of the popular video game, lets players battle enemies by channeling something akin to the unknown force that causes the universe to continue expanding. Could a person harness the power of dark energythe mysterious and pervasive force suspected of speeding the universe's expansionto block bullets, hurl adversaries around like rag dolls, and create small gravitational vortices out of thin air using nothing more than thoughts? The short answer: no. That is, unless that person exists in the intricate cyber universe created by the makers of the video games Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, the latter of which drops on January 26. In the Mass Effect games, humans (excuse me, that is certain humans known as "biotics") have the ability to channel dark energy if they can survive in utero exposure to a substance known as "element zero," which causes them to develop nodules throughout their nervous systems that enhance the body's natural electrical impulses. If a biotic's natural abilities are cultivated properly, he (or she) is able to generate and control dark energy to move objects, generate protective barriers or restrain enemies. Got all that? There's much, much more to know about the Mass Effect games (enough to populate several wikis, blogs and online communities), but what of its fascination with a relatively new scientific concept as purely theoretical as dark energy? Incorporating the concept of dark energy into a video game is "not completely implausible," says astrophysicist Tamara Davis, a research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia and an associate of the Dark Cosmology Center in Denmark. "To the best of our knowledge, dark energy is everywhere. We do think it would change slightly in the presence of matter, but we don't know how." Still, it's unlikely that dark energy as portrayed in the game has anything to do with "real" dark energy, says California Institute of Technology physicist Sean Carroll. "I like to think of what's being used in the game as some force out there that resembles dark energy," he says. "There's a small amount of dark energy in every cubic centimeter of the universe, but it's not powerful enough to do the things described in the game." It was very important for BioWare to incorporate science into the Mass Effect trilogy (a third game is in development) and do so in a way "that didn't offend people who know about science," says Casey Hudson, project director for Mass Effect 2. What makes dark energy a promising component of a fantasy video game is that although scientists are learning more about it, "there's still so much more that we don't know," Hudson says. Taking this thought a step further, he asks, "What if we could understand how dark energy worked and manipulate it the way we've manipulated electromagnetism to create electronic devices like cell phones and computers?" Hudson likens the way that Mass Effect biotics summon dark energy to the way electric eels can sense and manipulate electricity in their environment. Hudson didn't formally consult any scientists during the making of the game, but he says that he and his staff soaked up the available research on dark energy. Neither Davis nor Carroll has played Mass Effect, but they're intrigued by the concept. "I sort of like the idea of having people who could sense [dark energy] and manipulate it," Davis says. In fact, "one of the reasons we're studying it is to find some way to manipulate it." One of the roles of video games and science fiction is to stretch what we know by using our imagination, she adds.

"It's a fun idea," Carroll says, adding that introducing gamers to even the concept of dark energy is a step in the right direction. "Someone might hear that term as part of a game and then hear it again in a more scientific context, and that might help them ultimately gain a better understanding of what it is. There's a tremendous untapped potential in games for incorporating cool science." Little girls are made of sugar and spice, and learn that math is not nice One of the first lessons that girls often learn in elementary school is that boys are better at math. Although this incorrect lesson is certainly not part of the curriculum, first- and second-grade teachers, who are predominately female and math-averse, communicate that math is not their strong suit to some female students, according to a study published January 25 inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers found that the girls who got the idea that math ability falls along gender lines had the worst achievementin this subject during the school year. "We speculate that having a highly math-anxious female teacher pushes girls to confirm the stereotype that they are not as good as boys at math, which, in turn affects girls math achievement," wrote the authors. The research team, led by Susan Levine, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, based its study on two key pieces of information. College students majoring in early elementary education in the U.S., of whom 90 percent are female, hold the highest level of math anxiety compared to students majoring in other subjects. And elementary students emulate the behavior of same-gender adults more than opposite-gender adults. To examine the impact of teachers math anxiety on students math achievement, Levines group gave 65 female and 52 male first- or second-graders in five public schools in one Midwestern school district an arithmetic-based tests at the beginning and end of the school year. In these sessions, Levines team also asked the students to draw pictures of a student who did well in math or reading and explain if that student was a boy or girl. At the end of the school year, the researchers also graded the students teachers, all of whom were female. The teachers were asked to complete a math exam. Levines group also evaluated the teachers math anxiety by asking them to rate how anxiousthey would feel in various situations, such as reading a cash register receipt or studying for a math exam. Although there was no difference among the girls and boys math improvement, the researchers found that the girls, but not the boys, whose achievement did lag were also the students who acquired math gender biases during the school year. In the gender belief test, these girls drew a boy doing well at math and a girl at reading. Moreover, these changes in gender beliefs were found to correlate with the teachers degree of math anxiety (but not her math ability). Levines team points out that these young children are also learning gender-based attitudes from parents, siblings and peers. But because teachers are probably confirming or strengthening sexist ideas about mathematical ability, the researchers suggest that elementary teachers be required to take more than the minimal college math courses. "More care needs to be taken to develop both strong math skills and positive math attitudes in these educators," the authors wrote. EPA Tightens NO2 Smog Standard The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today strengthened the federal public health standard for nitrogen dioxide pollution, a limit that has been in place for nearly four decades. U.S. EPA today strengthened the federal public health standard for nitrogen dioxide(NO2) pollution, a limit that has been in place for nearly four decades. The final rule introduces a new one-hour maximum standard for NO2 at 100 parts per billion (ppb), a level that EPA says will protect millions of Americans from peak short-term exposures. The agency is also retaining the existing annual standard of 53 ppb. "This new one-hour standard is designed to protect the air we breathe and reduce health threats for millions of Americans," said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. "For the first time ever, we are working to prevent short-term exposures in high-risk NO2 zones like urban communities and areas near roadways." The new standard also establishes newmonitoring requirements to measure NO2 levels near major roads. Cities with at least 500,000 residents must have monitors near roadways, and larger cities and areas with major roads will have additional monitors. Cities with at least 1 million residents will continue with communitywide monitoring. The revision marks the first time EPA has updated the national health-based NO2 standard in nearly four decades. The Clean Air Act requires the agency to set national standards for six "criteria" pollutants, including NO2, and to periodically review those standards. EPA has reviewed the health-based NO2 standards twice since the standard was first proposed in 1971 but both times chose not to revise the standards. Short-term exposures to NO2, which occur primarily near major roads, have been linked to impaired lung function and increased respiratory infections, especially in people with asthma, according to EPA. NO2 forms from the emissions of cars, trucks and buses, off-highway equipment and power plants. EPA's final rule falls within recommendations by EPA's scientific advisers but does not go far enough for some environmentalists and public health advocates. The agency's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) recommended setting one-hour limits at or below 100 ppb. EPA's staff scientists recommended a one-hour maximum standard between 50 and 200 ppb, with strong support for a level at or below 100 ppb. But groups including Clean Air Watch and the American Lung Association called for EPA to set a one-hour daily maximum standard of 50 ppb or lower to protect vulnerable groups. "This standard is a step forward for public health protection, but it is also a missed opportunity to do something better for the breathing public," said Clean Air Watch President Frank O'Donnell. "It suggests EPA may also do the bare minimum on other pending standards, including ozone." The American Petroleum Institute, which urged EPA to forgo a one-hour standard, expressed concerns that the short-term NO2 limit is based on a faulty scientific record. "There is no significant evidence that the short-term NO2 standard established today by the Administrator is necessary to protect public health," API said in a statement. "EPA is over-regulating this air quality standard for political -- not health -- reasons." EPA expects to identify areas in compliance with the standard based on the existing monitoring network by January 2012. New monitors must begin operating by Jan. 1, 2013. The agency intends to redesignate whether areas meet the new standard when three years of data are available from the new monitoring network. Buying Your First (Energy-Efficient) Home Energy-efficient homes, although more common, remain rare, and some 99 percent of U.S. homes are damp, drafty and expensive to heat and cool. EAST LANSING, Mich. - Krista and Micah Fuerst were looking near here to buy their first place together, and had narrowed it down to two houses: One built 25 years ago of standard materials, the other brand new and built to strict energy efficiency standards. The couple's choice was easy: They picked the Energy Star home, the U.S. Environmental Program's top energy ranking.

But they're in the minority. About 17 percent of new homes built in 2008 earned the Energy Star label. The proportion - which is expected to reach 20 percent when 2009's figures are tallied - marks a five-point increase from 2007 and "indicates such incredible success," saidSam Rashkin, national director of the program's section for homes. Home energy use accounts for 16 percent of the United States' greenhouse gas emissions. despite the EPA's gains, some 99 percent of American houses are "sick" - damp, drafty, dusty, noisy and expensive to heat and cool - and "could be made at least 30 percent more energy-efficient with highly cost-effective, tried-and-true energy-efficiency improvements," according to Rashkin. The Energy Star program won't solve this. Energy Star is meant to reflect the cream of the housing stock, and thus, program officers say, will always represent a minority of American homes. Experts say economics and regulations are the root of the problem: Mortgages are structured in ways that fail to recognize efficiency's benefits, while a patchwork of inconsistent and ill-enforced energy codes provides conflicting signals to industry. Meanwhile consumers remain largely unaware of efficiency's advantages, advocates say, thereby bypassing an easy target for considerable cuts in national carbon emissions. In this sense the Fuersts are typical of many homebuyers. Both in their late twenties, the Fuersts were aware of Energy Star-rated appliances, but didn't know the label also applied to homes, said Krista Fuerst, a childcare director. Their house'senvironmental bona fides were icing on the cake, she said, but they mostly just wanted a place big enough to raise the family they're planning. "We're certainly conscious of the environment," she explained, "but we're not hyper-conscious. We're not extreme green." Their home, which wouldn't stand out in any new subdivision, is a bit farther from conveniences and their jobs - Micah Fuerst is an insurance actuary - than some others they considered. But they decided that was a reasonable tradeoff for smaller energy bills and freedom from costly renovations. Retrofitting older houses can drastically cut their energy use, but it's also a lost opportunity. Once a home is built, experts agree, it gets much more difficult and costly to improve energy efficiency. That's where Energy Star comes in. Run jointly by the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy, the program uses third-party inspectors to ensure that qualifying homes are 20 to 30 percent more efficient than typical houses. It has made considerable strides since its 1995 inception. The number of certified homes recently reached one million, which the EPA says indicates a savings of $1.2 billion in energy bills and 22 billion pounds of greenhouse gases kept out of the atmosphere. Of course, the ultra-efficient heating and cooling systems, high-performance windows and other features that make the homes exceptionally comfortable also make them a bit pricier. The added cost for a new Energy Star home may only be about the price of a night at the movies on each month's mortgage payment, but it's enough to scare off many potential buyers. "It's an incredibly smart choice," Rashkin said, since smaller utility bills more than offset the higher price. "But consumers are overwhelmed by first cost." To get buyers over that hump, a handful of specialized mortgage options have for decades given buyers more cash up front, since they'll save on energy costs. But nobody's buying. Before the mortgage crisis, when loans were easier to come by and energy was relatively cheap, energy-efficient mortgages weren't very enticing, experts say, and lenders didn't bother with them. Now the specialized options are more valuable, but lenders have grown accustomed to ignoring them. "It's really unfortunate," said Jennifer Amann, buildings program director for theAmerican Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. "Energy-efficient mortgages have been available now for 20 years or so, but they're a really underutilized tool." Sam Rashkin agrees. "We need a massive education of how to use energy-efficient mortgages, now that they can offer a meaningful solution," he said. While energy-efficient mortgages are a good idea, there's a more obvious solution, according to Cliff Majersik, executive director of the Institute for Market Transformation, which advocates for energy efficiency: Make all mortgages - not just specialized ones - account for energy use. "The fact is that energy-efficient homes have much lower foreclosure and delinquency rates. So that's a market failure, that we're not giving homeowners credit for buying good, efficient homes," Majersik said. "The challenge is that there are processes that have been in place for a long time, and there's pretty clear evidence that they've let us down." The House climate bill includes a handful of provisions that would reward buyers of efficient homes. For example, the Federal Housing Administration would be required to insure at least 50,000 energy-efficient mortgages over three years, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would make the kind of wholesale changes to underwriting guidelines sought by Rashkin, Majersik and others. Advocates also say national efficiency efforts have been let down by the codes that set minimum requirements for efficiency. "Energy codes have existed for a long time, but they haven't really done anything," said Aleisha Khan, executive director of the Building Codes Assistance Project, a coalition that helps state and local governments implement efficiency requirements. Certification programs like Energy Star "pull the market" by spearheading efficiency efforts, "and then you've got codes, dragging up the bottom," she said. "Code is not Energy Star. Code is common sense." Yet there is no nationwide building code. Instead, states base their own requirements on the International Energy Conservation Code, which is usually updated every three years. Some states consistently follow the latest iteration of the IECC, but others adhere to years-old versions, and a few "have done virtually nothing at all," said Jean Boulin, program manager in the U.S. Energy Department's building energy codes program. States are legally bound to review and consider adopting the IECC, but can opt out if they deem the standards inappropriate - in fact, several have no mandatory code. Officials in Alabama, for instance, have declined to follow the code, citing their status as a home rule state. "There is no ability for any agency to penalize states if they don't follow the law," Khan said. And with so many homes being built to such various requirements, enforcement is tricky. "It's a mess," she said.

A measure in the climate bill would change that by establishing a nationwide code. The bill calls for a 30 percent increase in efficiency over the 2006 IECC upon enactment, a 50 percent jump by 2014 and a 75 percent increase by 2029. Khan and Boulin said there are other signs that more effective codes and more efficient homes are on the way. For example, Khan said the 2009 IECC is 15 to 20 percent stricter than the previous version -the biggest change so far. "I'm confident that we're moving forward quite well," Boulin said. "We're finding these are terribly cost-effective things to do, and people shouldn't avoid them." But further progress depends on knowledgeable consumers, Boulin and a number of other experts said. Homebuilders say they'll build more efficient homes when buyers ask for them, but demand won't grow until more people understand the benefits of efficiency. "Consumers really, really need more information about efficient homes," Khan said. "They just aren't getting it." Edward Vine, an energy efficiency expert at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the California Institute for Energy and the Environment, agrees. "That's where I'd focus most of my energy," he said. "We have to change the mentality of some people who say, 'We have energy-efficient homes, so why aren't people knocking down the doors?'" The Fuersts may not have given efficiency much thought before they bought their house, but the couple - along with their friends and family - has a newfound interest, and say they'll try to find another Energy Star home if they ever move. "The house is heated very evenly," Krista Fuerst explained. "There are no cold spots and no drafts." They set the thermostat at 67 degrees - much lower than would have been comfortable in their rental - and turn it down to 57 when they leave in the morning, but the temperature never drops that low, even after 12-hour days. So far their heating bills have been just over half what they paid last winter. "Now that we have lived in an energy-efficient house," she said, "it would be very difficult to go back." Early humans wiped out Australia's giants Humans, not climate change, caused the mass extinction of Australia's giant animals, such as huge kangaroos, tens of thousands of years ago. Scientists have long argued over what killed off about 50 species of animals weighing more than 45 kilograms, including the gigantic kangaroo,Procoptodon, and the two-tonne wombat-like marsupial Diprotodon, late in the Pleistocene epoch, which stretched from 2.6 million until about 12,000 years ago. Some have proposed that the ancestors of Australian Aborigines, who reached the continent between 60,000 and 45,000 years ago, rapidly hunted the animals to extinction. Others have argued for environmental disruption from human-lit fires a 'slow burn' to extinction as people set the bush alight to clear pathways or flush out prey, altering the continent's vegetation, hydrology and climate. In the climate change camp are scholars who blame the most recent Ice Age, which peaked about 21,000 years ago. Temporal overlap? Evidence for a human cause has been mounting over the past decade. One study dated the extinction of the 2-metre-tall, 200-kilogram flightless bird Genyornis to about 50,000 years ago, soon after human colonization, and at a time when the climate was benign1. That work, on the bird's eggshell, was later backed up by a coast-to-coast project dating the extinction of giant marsupials, reptiles and birds across the continent to about 46,000 years ago 2. However, one site, Cuddie Springs in New South Wales, has been held up as evidence for a long overlap between humans and megafauna, seemingly clearing people of being the main agents of the extinction of the animals. It is the only site with megafauna remains and Aboriginal artefacts in the same sedimentary layers. Those layers had been dated by radiocarbon and luminescence methods to between about 40,000 and 30,000 years old. But some researchers doubted the results, which dated the megafauna only indirectly, through charcoal and sand grains in the layers bearing the fossils and stone tools. They said the site had been disturbed, with megafauna fossils from older deposits working their way into younger deposits. Lacking the protein collagen, the bones could not be dated directly by the radiocarbon method. Dating discrepancy Now a team led by Rainer Grn, a geochronologist at the Australian National University in Canberra, has used electron spin resonance (ESR) and uranium-series techniques to date the megafauna teeth directly. Their laboratory is the only one in Australia and one of only a few worldwide using ESR in this way. All of the specimens of extinct species are at least 50,000 years old, some much older, the team reports in a paper in press withQuaternary Science Reviews3. The results debunk claims of the late survival of the giant animals and a long period of coexistence between them and people. The findings weaken arguments for climate change as the main cause of the demise of the megafauna. But they do not discriminate between the two possible mechanisms of the catastrophe rapid 'blitzkrieg' and slow burn because the date of colonization and the date of extinction are not known with sufficient precision. "Our results eliminate a strong argument against the blitzkrieg hypothesis but do not prove it," says Grn. Richard Roberts, a geochronologist at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and biologist Barry Brook, of the University of Adelaide, Australia, say in a commentary4 in Science that "human impact was likely the decisive factor", possibly through hunting of young megafauna. Increased aridity during the last Ice Age might have reinforced this effect, but Australian megafauna were well adapted to dry conditions because they had survived repeated droughts in the past, they say. Chris Johnson, an ecologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, says the direct dates from Cuddie Springs mean the site now "falls in line with a mass of other evidence" for the rapid extinction of the Australian megafauna between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago. Archaeologist James O'Connell of the University of Utah says the jury is still out. O'Connell, who has worked extensively in Australian archaeology including on the Cuddie Springs site, says there might have been a long period of overlap between megafauna and people, regardless of which Cuddie Springs dates are correct. "Climate may not be the only factor, but it can't be eliminated as a significant consideration," he says. New Study Suggests Autism Can be Outgrown There is more evidence that a minority of autistic children may eventually overcome their developmental issues, but experts caution that such recovery is rare. Its long been the hope of parents of autistic children that the right care and support can reduce or even reverse some of the developmental problems associated with the condition. But while a recent study found that behavioral intervention programs are linked with normalization of some brainactivity, the question of whether children can outgrow autism remains difficult to answer. Studies to date that have hinted at this possibility were plagued with lingering questions about whether the children who apparently shed their autism were properly diagnosed with the developmental disorder in the first place. The new research, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and led by Deborah Fein of the University of Connecticut, involved 34 people ages 8 to 21 who had been diagnosed with autism but no longer met criteria for the condition. The initial diagnosis had to be made in writing by a doctor or psychologist specializing in autism before the child turned five. And, to make sure they were studying severe cases, researchers included only children who had not spoken before 18 months or did not use phrases before age 2. The authors compared these optimal outcome (OO) participants to 44 people of the same age, gender and IQ with high functioning autism or Aspergers Syndrome, who still had symptoms. The OO group was also compared to 34 similarly matched, typically developing people. I view it as really a landmark kind of study that validates an observation that clinicians and families have made for many years, says Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer for Autism Speaks and a long time researcher in the field. This is the first empirical study to seek out children with optimal outcomes and systematically test them in a variety of functioning domains, to see if they are truly indistinguishable from typically developing children, says Sally Ozonoff, professor of psychiatry at the University of California Davis Medical Center and author of an editorial that accompanied the study, There have been no other studies of this kind in the past.

How did the scientists ensure that the participants no longer had measurable signs of autism? They tested the volunteers on various scales commonly used to diagnose the condition and videotaped the interviews. These were then reviewed by several experts who had to be in agreement about whether the participants no longer met criteria for the disorder, including factors such as their ability to attend regular classes without one-on-one assistance in school, no longer requiring social skills training classes, and having at least one typically developing friend. In addition, they were required to have an IQ over 77, which means that the results do not apply to autistic children who also have intellectual disability. Participants could, however, be in limited special education classes or have academic or psychological problems such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or depression, which could occur independently of autism, or may be connected with the condition. Depression, for example, could result from being bullied and from becoming more acutely aware of the pain of social isolation. ADHD and autism often occur together.We werent ruling out all other conditions, says Fein. Were [now] looking at what residual problems they [may be] vulnerable to. The study also found, not surprisingly, that having a higher IQ was associated with optimal outcomes. It is possible that above average cognition allowed individuals with ASD to compensate, the authors write. Fein is conducting a follow up study to pinpoint which interventions are likely to lead to these improved outcomes. All of the children in the study had received treatment, most of which used behavioral techniques to reward social and communicative behavior. Were really talking about kids who started off with very significant disabilities and likely would not have had good outcomes by any definition without intervention, Fein says. But while the research suggests that some children do extremely well, its also important not to give false hope or add to the guilt felt by some parents over their childrens prognosis, the researchers stress. This is generally a lifelong disability, says Fein. Ive seen thousands of children who had the best possible interventions continue to have significant intellectual disability and severe language deficits and we dont know how to remediate those things. Autism advocates have other serious concerns about the research. We dont think the idea that people outgrow autismor can be made through treatment to become non-autistic is accurate, says Ari Neeman, president of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. Instead, he says study participants are likely passing, or acting non-autistic in order to fit in. Inside, they may be experiencing the same urges to engage in repetitive behavior and endlessly talk about their obsessions, but they have learned to channel their intense drives into repressing this and behaving the way normal people expect. The idea of recovery is a deeply damaging one, he says. It sends a message that the only important objective [of] treatment is looking and acting normal, rather than anything to do with the quality of life or lived experience of autistic adults. Says Emily Willingham, a biologist, Forbes blogger and mother of an autistic child, I think that the bottom line is, autism isnt just outward behaviorit is also internal processing and self management. What comes easily to someone whos not autistic might take herculean but unseen effort for an autistic person. For instance, many autistic people are extremely sensitive to physical touch, loud sounds and bright lights: regulating their emotional reactions to these experiences in an ordinary day without relying on their familiar and soothing routines such as retreating into silence or engaging in repetitive behaviors can be exhausting. Fein agrees that the optimal outcome for autistic children isnt necessarily shedding their condition. Who could have a better outcome than Temple Grandin? she says, citing the Colorado State professor and author who has written and spoken widely about her autism and was the subject of an HBO film. Grandin did not speak until age four, but her parents refused medical recommendations to institutionalize her, providing intensive care at home instead. Shes incredibly productive and brilliant, but still quite autistic, Fein says. Indeed, Ozonoff worries that attempts to totally eliminate autistic behavior might also reduce autistic skills and talents, questioning whether the OO group genuinely has better outcomes in all areas. I think we will have to see, through further study of this group, whether these children are not doing as well as they could have, if they had let flourish certain characteristics that are common in autism, says Ozonoff. For example, many autistic people have obsessive interests that allow them to focus more intensely and this type of concentration may be what distinguishes a great computer programmer or musician from a merely good one. Attempting to suppress Grandins interest in animal perception, for instance, might have prevented her from developing the humane slaughterhouse designs for which she is known. Most of us in the field certainly agree that the most important outcome is happiness, functionality, and high quality of life, Ozonoff says, We do not mean to imply that OO (or recovery) is the only outcome worth working toward. We do not want to suggest that any other outcome is tragic and hopeless. There are many very special qualities and ways of being that autism can bring to individuals and to all of us in general. The researchers also caution that most autistic people will continue to have symptoms: earlier studies, which may have included inaccurate diagnoses, have suggested that only about 3% to 25% children who receive a diagnosis will eventually lose it. For parents with young children with autism, the take-home message is that there is a really wide range of outcomes from very severe disability to pretty much indistinguishable from typical [development], says Fein. We have to live with that uncertainty and give the best interventions and parenting that we can and applaud all the gains a child makes. Ultimately, concerns about happiness and ability to cope are more important than questions about whether someone does or does not retain a diagnostic label.