Recent Stories in Science

Madison Park's beach is a prime source of Seattle's vitamin D intake.

Good news from the New York Times: "Given appropriate sun exposure in summer, it is possible to meet the body's yearlong need for vitamin D." Didn't know you could store up the D like a battery, did you? (Fun fact: it's actually a steroid hormone, not a true vitamin--if you get enough sun you don't need another source.)

The consulting physician on the article, Boston U's Dr. Michael Holick, suggests you take sun breaks "from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. two or three times a week for 5 to 10 minutes." Put sunscreen only on your face, and--think Lady Gaga--maximize your skin exposure.

What's the big idea? Nutritionists have discovered that we aren't getting nearly the amount of vitamin D that we need. While a serious vitamin D deficiency has long been known to cause rickets, it's becoming more evident that chronic low levels of vitamin D can have serious health impacts as well.

Besides documented effects on bone health, Holick references studies that show a lack of vitamin D impacting multiple sclerosis, arthritis, type I diabetes, and immune response in general. Locally, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has been researching vitamin D intake and colorectal cancer and breast cancer rates, and have also found that diet, geography, and lifestyle aren't good predictors of individual vitamin D levels; a blood test is the best way to be sure.

Here's the FHCRC line on vitamin D, what it does, how much you need, and how to get it....

We are the Evergreen State, after all. David Bramer, of the U.W.'s Green Futures Research and Design Lab (GFL), is one of nine U.S. landscape architecture students selected to draft a sustainable landscape for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.

The team will be joined by three Swiss students and will be overseen by three U.S. landscape architecture faculty. The project is a collaboration with the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) to create a comprehensive, sustainable landscape design for the Mission building grounds. Here's the details:

The prominence of the Mission building in international Geneva and the fact that it is regularly visited by diplomats and political figures from around the world were factors when the U.S. State Department selected Geneva as its "Flagship Post for Energy and Sustainability." The building is the site of the installation of the largest solar energy project ever undertaken by the Department of State overseas and home to an innovative magnetic levitation (MaglevTM) chiller air conditioning system that runs a virtually friction-free compressor.

Conserving the variety of plant and animal life is also a priority, and in 2009 the Mission became the first State Department facility to earn certification by the U.S. National Wildlife Federation as a Certified Wildlife Habitat. Seeking ways to further improve the sustainability of the building and grounds the Mission formed a Green Team which developed the concept with ASLA to recruit students for a collaborative sustainable design project. The students were selected by a committee which included representatives from ASLA and the Department of State. Applicants were required to be U.S. citizens and to submit a résumé; 400-word- statement of interest; faculty recommendations; and three samples of project work.

"I am very excited about this project, which will help reinforce the Mission’s reputation as the greenest US diplomatic building in Europe," said Ambassador Betty E. King, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva. "The efforts of this talented team of young landscape architects will not only help us make our environment more sustainable, but also provide our staff with an inspiring and healthy environment which we will enjoy for years to come."

...

The Geneva region is a major international center for conservation and the environment. The city is home to the European headquarters of the U.N. Environment Program, and to major organizations such as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Nearby Gland is the site of two of the world’s most important conservation organizations: the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the World Conservation Union (IUCN). During their stay in Geneva the students will also have an opportunity to visit some of these organizations, to meet with international diplomats, UN staff and NGOs, and to exchange ideas with major players in the environmental community in Switzerland.

Read the full press release here.

Western pond turtle, about to pounce. (Photo: Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo)

If you are eaten by a Western pond turtle on the way home today, you will likely have the Woodland Park Zoo to blame. (The zoo, your insect-like size, and the fact that you commute home through a pond. If, on the other hand, you try to eat them, you may be a large-mouth bass or bullfrog.)

Western pond turtles (Emys marmorata) are an endangered species, so as part of a "head start" reintroduction program, biologists from Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and Woodland Park Zoo are releasing 19 turtles into the vast wilderness that is Pierce County. 57 more will find themselves taking in the ponds of the Kitsap Peninsula.

It's all happening right about now, this very morning. But it began ten months ago, when the wee turtles hatched in the wild, and were gathered up to get a "head start" in the safer confines of Woodland Park Zoo. Now that they weigh in at about 2 ounces, they should be big enough to flee from hungry bullfrogs and large-mouth bass. And if not, hey, circle of life. Those bass didn't ask to be born with large mouths to feed.

Says the zoo:

Western pond turtles were once common from Baja California to Puget Sound, including the Columbia River Gorge. However, loss of habitat, disease and predation by non-native species such as bullfrogs decimated their numbers. They were on the verge of extinction in Washington in 1990, with only about 150 turtles left in the wild. Habitat degradation and disease were, and still are, problems, but the biggest threat to fragile baby turtles is the bullfrog. The state listed western pond turtles as endangered in 1993. ...

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The New York Times seems delighted to dispel any remaining myths about the untouched natural beauty of Washington state. Just this week readers have learned that there's three times the amount of plutonium waste at Hanford as "thought," and that the Puget Sound's pH level is declining in part due to ocean acidification and the water is growing more corrosive. (Thanks. We'll be expecting a make-up "36 Hours in Seattle," soon.)

The Seattle Times goes straight to the pH-decline bottom line: the impact on the Puget Sound shellfish industry.

The Taylor Shellfish hatchery on Hood Canal's Dabob Bay had its first good year in several in 2009, but company spokesman Bill Dewey said he suspects that's merely because the winds cooperated, preventing acidified seawater from entering the relatively stable bay.

The company recently installed sophisticated pH monitors at its hatchery to determine when it's best to draw water off the surface, from way down deep—or not at all.

In an earlier story, from January this year, the Seattle Times looked at the cause-and-effects of ocean acidification in general. The world's oceans act as a carbon dioxide sink, claiming excess CO2 from the atmosphere, but CO2 dissolved in water creates a weak acid solution. It turns out that shellfish larvae, for one, are very sensitive to changes in pH.

The new study on the Puget Sound's ocean-acidification intake represents the work of researchers with NOAA, the University of Washington, and the state's Department of Ecology. (It's published in the latest issue of Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science.) The researchers make it clear that the Sound is struggling mightily with the human activity around it--the toxic pollution and "nutrient-rich" flows that are channeled into it, both killing off life and promoting algae blooms that...also kill off life....

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely brought a big crowd to a sold-out Town Hall appearance on Tuesday night. He was wearing a black, Nehru-collared shirt; jeans; and red sneakers, and the crowd seemed hipper as well, than you might get at a typical economist's talk.

His new book, The Upside of Irrationality, is just out, and both New York Times reviewers and NPR reporters have fastened upon his claim that we're less like the cerebral Spock of Star Trek fame and more like the "fallible, myopic, vindictive, emotional, biased Homer Simpson."

Out of context this isn't news, because of course Spock was supposed to stand in contrast to humanity, while Homer Simpson is the de facto everyman. What Ariely is challenging, though, is that traditional economics is built on the fiction of a "rational" or "optimizing" actor, who in theory makes very Spock-like judgments on the basis on self-interested cost/benefit and utility analyses.

In other words, economists tend to think that everyone is just like them--or that enough people are--that it's close enough.

Ariely's adventures in behavioral economics, in contrast, provide a fundamental correction. It's rooted in the neuroscience of the last few decades, which has rewritten and resolved some old dichotomies. Joseph LeDoux's research into emotions and thought, for instance, that we're all emotionally driven, whether we're aware of it or not. Reason divorced from emotional impulse is simply the capacity to plot out decision trees, not to rate which one is preferable. The moment we evoke cognition, Ariely argues, people stop caring. Emotion propels us to action, not thinking.

Ariely had finished his last book, Predictably Irrational (Here's my recap of his 2008 Town Hall talk) just as the subprime meltdown was arriving. Finally, behavioral economics, which had been pooh-poohed as being too bottom-up to allow for strong theoretical claims, had an upset apple cart to stand on and shout from.

"I couldn't have hoped for a better marketing campaign," Ariely said. Those critics who said the stock market compensated for irrational behavior had some explaining to do. "All of a sudden we saw these things can actually have big consequences."

In that book, he focused a lot on the difference between social and market economies, and how adopting a pure market economics standpoint makes us, functionally, less human. (Whereas a pure social economy leads to Burning Man.) The thesis: "Social economy norms create more happiness than market economy norms."...

(via Seattle Weekly) The short answer--before you ask!--is that no, currently there's nothing all that practical you can do with a scramjet except watch it go really, really fast. Boeing's X-51A "Waverider" was purposefully blown up at the end of its test flight, in fact, because there's no way to land the thing. (Perhaps now is a good time to clarify that it's an unmanned vehicle.) Says Boeing's news release about the May 26, record-setting flight:

The X-51A was carried aloft under the left wing of an Air Force Flight Test Center B-52H Stratofortress that took off from Edwards Air Force Base. It was released while flying at approximately 50,000 feet over the Point Mugu Naval Air Warfare Center Sea Range.

Four seconds later, a solid rocket booster from a U.S. Army tactical missile accelerated the X-51A to about Mach 4.5 before it and a connecting interstage were jettisoned. The X-51A's engine ignited on a mix of ethylene and JP-7 jet fuel. After a short period, the X-51A ran exclusively on JP-7 jet fuel. The flight reached an altitude of about 70,000 feet and an approximate speed of Mach 5....

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Courtesy University of Washington Center for Public Health Nutrition, "The Supermarket Gap"

MSNBC has repackaged the results of the Seattle Obesity Study--by the University of Washington's Adam Drewnowski, who studies relationships between social class and obesity--to make it sound a little sexier, but in a way that also obscures the study's findings.

MSNBC's headline is "Pricey grocery stores attract skinniest shoppers," and the story contains a sidebar that lists grocery stores by customer obesity (a BMI of over 30): just 4 percent of Whole Foods customers are obese, followed by Met Market (8), PCC (12), QFC (17), Fred Meyer (22), Safeway (24), and Albertsons (38).

This is actually the opposite of what study wants to show you, which is that poverty drives the food choices that result in weight gain, not the stores you shop at.

The UW release says simply: "Obesity remains an economic issue." (And there's no photo of a slender blonde loading groceries into her SUV, there's bar graphs.) The study itself is titled, "The Supermarket Gap," and follows up on earlier research that found that "people who lived near supermarkets consumed more fresh produce and were less likely to be obese." Fine, everyone thought, we'll just build more supermarkets in so-called "food deserts" (places served only by convenience stores or fast food)....

Steve Malone, on Mount St. Helens with Scooter the seismo-dog

"The longer it's been since the last earthquake," said Steve Malone, brightly, "the sooner it is 'til the next one." We were in his office at the University of Washington--he's retired from full-time seismologizing, but still spends unpaid hours on campus answering questions from pesky bloggers, even if they're fueled by sensationalist speculation about more frequent quakes.

He refocused my question away from end-time paranoia toward common sense acceptance: "We have several of these faults: there's the Seattle Fault, and there's one down in the Tacoma basin, one up at Everett and Whidbey Island…so if you say, we've got eight or ten of these faults, even if the earthquakes go once every thousand years, you sum them up, you could have something every few hundred years of some consequence," explained Malone. "You don't know, it could be 500 years, or it could be tomorrow." 

He also assured me that, incredible as it seems, it's perfectly plausible that the recent Baja quake could have generated waves at a Ballard pool. "Large earthquakes generate big surface waves, and big surface waves generate a bit of a tilt as they go through. If a body of water's natural free period happened to be the same as the frequency of those surface waves, then after a couple of cycles you might see it get built up enough," said Malone. "The motions of surface waves can be on the order of centimeters. We just don't feel it because it's very slow." 

As an afterthought, he added: "The Denali quake of 2002--bigger than Baja [7.9] but further away--it generated a sloshing in Lake Union that damaged houseboats."

And because I had to ask: "Tunnels aren't usually an issue with earthquakes. The motion underground is less than on the surface, and they're already built to withstand the pressures of everything else."

As it turned out, we ended up talking across the breadth of Malone's career, covering volcanic earthquakes, megathrust quakes, and the mysterious Episodic Tremor and Slip (ETS). His interest in seismology developed in graduate school; he'd studied physics as undergraduate, but was not "keen on modern physics" and gravitated toward geology, then seismology. At first he enjoyed the outdoors aspects of the work, "particularly in the volcano world," but as his research progressed, he ended up in the office running computer models.

Malone on Mount Rainier

"Since I retired I get to go out and play," he said, smiling. "I volunteer for all sorts of fieldwork." He's been up on Mount Rainier working on an upgrade of instruments there, and out on the Olympic Peninsula conducting ETS studies in advance of the next appearance of the phenomenon.

"The ETS we have here are fairly regular, every 14 and a half months or so. The next one is scheduled--if you can call it that--for sometime mid-summer, maybe mid-August. We've got some experiments we're planning to gear up and get extra equipment in the ground for. There's some extra equipment out there now, running in background mode, but when the ETS arrives we'll double the equipment, trying to look ever closer at it."...

Sightline has a post up about "climate change denial," and how the U.S. is hip-deep in it: "nearly half the U.S. public now thinks that it’s impossible for carbon pollution to warm the Earth. That’s a gain of 20 percent since 2007 and more than at any point in the last 12 years."

What's the culprit? Well, how we talk about climate change can actually generate a psychological denial response, says Kari Marie Norgaard, a Whitman College sociologist. She tells Wired in a climate change Q&A that we're living in a developed world bubble. Wired recaps for you:

 So we don’t want to believe climate change is happening, feel guilty that it is, and don’t know what to do about it? So we pretend it’s not a problem?

Sightline goes on to give more detail on what's happening in our heads, when we hear about glaciers vanishing here in the U.S., and order pizza:

The “problem narrative,” is filled with global gloom and doom scenarios. The “solutions narrative” often calls for small personal steps that can seem insignificant or ineffective. Combined, the two narratives literally cancel one another out......

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From the Autism Speaks website

Sallie Tisdale has an article in Harper's (subscribers only) this month about her autistic daughter. There's an element of forestalled explanation to it; yes, she said "daughter."

My daughter, Annie, still lives with us. She is twenty-six now and at the moment is sitting on the porch, looking out at the street. Soon she will come in and pace for a while, her head down. Later she will read the first few pages of a book—the same book, the same pages, that she read last week and the week before, and will read again tomorrow.

"Autistic son" delivers 175,000 results on Google. "Autistic daughter," just 31,000. People are not sure why more boys than girls are found to have autism. Epidemiologically, the ratio is supposed to be about 3.6 boys to one girl.

It's known that girls can learn to mask some of the effects of autism more easily than boys, so it's possible that they are under-diagnosed in general. Studies show that hallmarks like "language deficits, tantrums, and aggression are all less common in girls than boys in the general population." A British researcher raises the specter of a shadow population of "shy" girls who like to keep lists and count calories (even to anorexia).

Tisdale's story is a primer on autism's variability, and its effects on everyone who struggles with it, including caregivers. Tisdale recounts the lifelong challenge of it: the official optimism with which her daughter was handed off as she finished school, the time her daughter started hallucinating and had to be given antipsychotic medication. Writes Tisdale:

Long-term studies of people with autism are not reassuring. Autistic adults generally read poorly, have few math skills. Very few go to college, are employed, or lead independent lives. The majority say they have no friends....

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This photo has nothing to do with Sand Point.

This just in over the e-wire: "In a letter sent today to U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Under Secretary Jane Lubchenco, Mayor Mike McGinn and the Seattle City Council argued that consolidating NOAA’s operations in Seattle at existing federal facilities is the best option for NOAA to achieve its mission and the best deal for federal taxpayers."

(Note to the Mayor: My mother would prefer you went by Michael, at least on official documents.)

The Seattle sites up for NOAA grabs are the Western Regional Center at Sand Point and Federal Center South, both conspicuously not located in a floodplain. (Due to pressure from, well, everyone outside of Newport, OR, but specifically a protest from the Port of Bellingham, NOAA has had to go back and prove the necessity of leaving Seattle to build in Newport, which is in floodplain territory.)

There are real heavyweights involved here--NOAA provides employment for 1,200 people, directly and indirectly, and is said to pump about $180 million in economic activity into the area. That's why we're presented with the unusual sight of the International Association of Machinist Local 160 linking arms with the Laurelhurst Community Club.

NOAA's reassessment should finish up by the end of May 2010.

Waves pound a beach and structure between Depot Bay and Boiler Bay on the Oregon Coast. (Photo by Erica Harris, Oregon State University)

Twenty years ago, a big winter storm might generate 25-foot waves offshore of the Pacific Northwest. Scientists pegged 33 feet as the maximum in a 100-year storm. But the intervening years--and a strong El Niño weather pattern--brought 33-foot waves...and then some (see photos here). Now researchers at OSU believe that the maximum wave height in a 100-year event is 46 feet (or as much as 55, depending on how you measure).

The largest wave increase, in fact, centers on the Washington coast, down to northern Oregon, says Science Daily. Wave height has grown about four inches per year, for a total of about ten feet over the past three decades.

"Possible causes might be changes in storm tracks, higher winds, more intense winter storms, or other factors," Ruggiero said. "These probably are related to global warming, but could also be involved with periodic climate fluctuations such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and our wave records are sufficiently short that we can't be certain yet. But what is clear is the waves are getting larger."

The change is a boon to storm watchers and shutterbugs, but the mundane result is coastal erosion that occurs two to three times faster than normal. That, in conjunction with the ongoing sea level rise from climate change, argues the NPI Advocate, means real money, as coastal development is damaged and roads wash away....

Dr. Colleen Delaney

Using cord blood for transplant, following chemotherapy for leukemia, significantly lowers the chance of host rejection--but because the cord blood contains fewer stem cells than a typical transplant, it usually takes a full month for white blood cells to generate in numbers that can protect a patient from infection.

That's four full weeks when the slightest thing could kill a patient.

Delaney's work (the results were just published in Nature Medicine) has cut that time in half, to fourteen days. As PhysOrg.com describes the study, "10 patients in an ongoing phase 1 clinical trial...received two units of cord blood to treat high-risk, acute leukemia." Each patient got one unit of regular cord blood, and one unit of cord blood that had been manipulated to increase its stem cell content.

For seven of the ten, the transplant worked completely: white cell counts are back, and there is no sign of leukemia. For three, the transplant and/or chemotherapy was apparently unsuccessful....

You've probably spent a lot of time the past week watching video and photos, reading news articles and tweets about the Haiti earthquake. You've felt sorry for the Haitians, aghast at the scenes of death and ruin, and agonized over the condition of the survivors. But you probably haven't imagined anything remotely similar happening in the Seattle area.

Back in June 2005, a half year after the earthquake and tsunami in Southeast Asia, and over four years after the Nisqually earthquake, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and the Washington Military Department brought out a "Scenario for a Magnitude 6.7 Earthquake on the Seattle Fault."

That is, an earthquake slightly lighter than what struck Haiti last week, and one that would come on the Seattle Fault, which runs through south Seattle, Mercer Island, Bellevue, and the Issaquah area. It wasn't pretty: the vision of the aftermath of a 14-mile surface rupture running roughly parallel to I-90 involved over 1,600 dead, another 24,000 wounded, $33 billion of damage, and months of transportation problems for Puget Sound.

The scenario said a 6.7 Seattle Fault quake will cause damage "far worse and more extensive than seen in any earthquake in the state's history."

"The viaduct will be heavily damaged or collapse," in a way very similar to how Oakland's Cypress Viaduct pancaked in the Loma Prieta quake, Boeing Field "will experience significant liquefaction" on its runways and close for several days, the Seattle ferry terminals "will shut down for at least a week due to damage from ground failures and failure of the seawall," and we'll see a lot of the brick buildings in Pioneer Square tumble, along with a lot of the concrete warehouses south of downtown....

Will it never end? This morning's New York Times brings news of the latest salvo in the long-running battle between the co-founders of the popular Baby Einstein series, William Clark and Julie Aigner-Clark, and the University of Washington. The Clarks are now suing the UW for records related to two studies in 2004 and 2007, where researchers Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis seemed to confirm that, as SunBreak photo editor James Callan put it in Seattlest at the time, the videos were nothing more than "21st century snake oil," with no demonstrable educational impact on children--while subjecting them to the potentially harmful effects of TV.

The Clarks sold Baby Einstein to the Walt Disney Company back in 2001, and at one point the brand was generating $200 million in sales and controlled 90 percent of the booming baby edutainment market. The problem was that for years, pediatricians had been discouraging parents from letting infants watch any television, to the point that in 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a formal recommendation that children under the age of two (Baby Einstein's target market) shouldn't be watching any television....

Direct primary care provider Qliance opened up its third clinic this week, at 7707 SE 27th Street, next to Walgreen’s on Mercer Island.

An open house is scheduled for the curious on Saturday, January 16, from 12-2 p.m., and if you are curious I recommend you stop in. You might read this interview with founder Garrison Bliss first. They also have clinics downtown and in Kent.

Back in December, the Qliance business model got a boost when Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) introduced the "Manager’s Amendment" to the Senate's health care reform bill. The amendment would let flat-fee direct primary care practices like Qliance take part in the insurance exchange--a provision that both the House and Senate bills include.

Qliance advertises itself as "insurance-free" because it charges monthly fees--from $39 to $129 a month, depending on your plan--for access to primary care physicians and nurse practitioners. But that doesn't mean you don't need any insurance at all.

What Bliss is arguing is that since 90 percent of your likely medical needs fall under primary, preventive or chronic care, you can reduce health costs by switching to a subscription model, and by using "wrap-around" insurance to cover more unusual or infrequent medical problems....

Mount Rainier's glaciers have shrunk by more than 25 percent in the past 50 years, says the Seattle Times in a story on the effects of melting glaciers. One of those effects is rivers choked by rock (and debris slides closing park roads).

It's not just glacial melt, either: "According to stream-flow data, what was once a 100-year flood on the Nisqually River now occurs every 14 years." Records show that the bed of the river is almost 40 feet higher today than in 1910 because of sediment and gravel collection.

The retreating glaciers are of particular concern in our neck of the woods because their runoff provides drinking water and hydroelectric power.

Autism is a major research driver in the Northwest--in Seattle we have both the UW's Autism Center and Seattle Children's Autism Center (along with an autism walk and the Lakeside Center for Autism). Seattle Children's Autism Center is a recent creation, resulting from Children's friendly takeover of ASTAR, and offers both clinical study and treatment, making it a one-stop autism shop for families.

Tonight at 8 p.m., KING 5 is airing a Children's Healthlink Special, "The World Within: Northwest Stories of Autism" (also on KONG at 7 p.m. on January 3). Local icon Jean Enersen will be exploring the startling spike in autism rates--it's estimated that one in a hundred children have autism spectrum disorder (ASD)--and why researchers still don't know precisely what is responsible for either ASD or its increase.

What we do know is that when the CDC compared rates of diagnosis in eight-year-olds in 2006 and compared that to 2002, autism's prevalence had increased 57 percent. We also know that early intervention treatment has good results, but that the "early" part is absolutely key. Parents tend to notice something unusual about their children at age two, but in most cases official diagnosis and treatment don't occur until the child is over four years old.

In the House health care bill, $17 would be set aside during the first year for a "National Training Initiative on Autism Spectrum Disorders." This is after NIMH allocated $60 million in "stimulus" funding to promote research on better, earlier means of diagnosis and/or effective treatment for older children and adults with ASD. So autism is literally in all the headlines, though for the short term it seems we're more focused on learning how to live with it than on solid leads for cure or prevention.

"Day 253/365 - Beware of Falling Fruit" from our SunBreak Flickr pool--thanks, Great Beyond!

The Seattle Times found on the PCC website the local flashpoint in the conflict over genetically engineered food: A letter came in from Dennis L. Weaver: "I caution the organic community to be watchful of this NEW Green Revolution, especially since The Gates Foundation science and technology efforts are led by a former Monsanto researcher."

PCC included an editor's note:

The Gates Foundation apparently is pushing genetically modified crops on African farmers. It named a 25-year Monsanto veteran, Rob Horsch, to be the senior officer for a program in sub-Saharan Africa. The foundation also reportedly gave $42 million to a project (believed to be Monsanto’s) involving genetically engineered (GE) corn...

Monsanto is of course a fighting word in organic and food cooperative circles, not least for its championing of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). Actually, it's a long list of things if you get into it, including Agent Orange.

Farmers themselves are also suspicious of a company that develops seed "terminator technology"--which would require farmers to buy new seeds each year. (Monsanto responds: "Sharing many of the concerns of small landholder farmers, Monsanto made a commitment in 1999 not to commercialize sterile seed technology in food crops.")

Briefly, this is why the Gates Foundation's hiring of a Monsanto executive would raise hackles. Monsanto has a "trust gap."

Genetically engineered food would seem to show such promise, on the face of it. Texas A&M's Normal Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, had an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal over the summer, promoting advancements and bemoaning the fact that "some elements of popular culture romanticize older, inefficient production methods and shun fertilizers and pesticides, arguing that the U.S. should revert to producing only local organic food."

Not all the opposition reeks of stinky hippiedom. Even Michael Specter, who thinks such risks as there are are worth taking, describes in his book Denialism how in 1995 Pioneer Hi-Bred "placed genes from a Brazil nut into a soybean...to make beans used as animal feed more nutritious." So far so good, but Specter adds that if someone allergic to Brazil nuts ate something made from that soy, "the results could be deadly."...

[UPDATE: I'm reposting this story from September because I just read its mirror image in The New Yorker: "The Ice Retreat" by Fen Montaigne is about the fate of the Adelie penguins on Litchfield Island, and how a researcher who's been visiting the Antarctic since 1974, is watching a once-thriving colony collapse. "Within several decades, Fraser believes, Adélie penguins will disappear from the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula." Compare that to George Divoky's field research with the black guillemots of Cooper Island, off the Alaskan coast.]

Right now, if you're looking for Arctic seabird researcher George Divoky, you might find him analyzing data at Capitol Hill's coworking space, Office Nomads , which he switched to from working at home.

Home alone was too isolating, he says, which sounds strange coming from a guy who spends three months each summer on a tiny, uninhabited island off Alaska's north coast. When he ventured out into the neighborhood, though, he discovered the dark side of peer pressure. "Madison Valley, Madison Park, is a bad place to be for me because I go into a coffee shop, there's a bunch of people of leisure, and I think, Oh, no one is working today."

In practice, Divoky really does have some nomad in him. Since the mid-1970s, he has been making a trek north to Cooper Island, up by Barrow, Alaska, to study the black guillemots of Cooper Island. At first the idea was to survey the offshore wildlife in conjunction with the '70s push for oil exploration, the impacts of pipelines vs. supertankers, but over time, it's become a case study for the effects of global warming.

At first, Divoky saw the birds' population flourish: "What seems like a long, long time ago, black guillemots on Cooper Island had the best of all possible worlds. The summer snow-free period was increasing annually, providing breeding birds with more time to raise their young, and the Arctic pack ice was close enough offshore that there was a readily accessible supply of Arctic cod to feed the nestlings."

Now, he's watching their population crash. Global warming has caused the retreat of even multi-year ice, and the cod that the black guillemots feed on have been retreating with the ice. The open water brought a proliferation of krill that Divoky hoped might keep the cod offshore, but the cod left. His birds are feeding instead on a bottom fish, sculpin, which is less nutritious. Egg laying has begun occurring earlier and earlier.

Though for decades Cooper Island sat adjacent to polar bear territory, and he felt safe in a tent, in 2002 his tent was been torn apart by polar bears ranging into new territory. Now Divoky sleeps in an 8' x 12' shack with a polar bear trip-wire alarm."You really appreciate the windows, compared to the tent, where you can't see anything coming up on you."

This year, a bear rampaged though the nesting boxes, downing chicks out of desperation--Divoky points out "a thousand-pound bear doesn't get much from something the size of a Cornish game hen." And homicidal horned puffins--which, like the polar bears, were once infrequent visitors to the island--have moved in and kill the black guillemots before and after they hatch.

Divoky wrote on his blog for the Discovery Channel: "It is important to recognize the one certain fledge from the colony this year, since it may well be one of the last guillemots to fledge from the island."...

Amnon Shoenfeld

Yesterday morning on my way to the office, I bicycled past a man who was shouting to someone from the sidewalk. "MA MEENY MA MOSEY!" he yelled, repeatedly, spittle flying. His eyes were fixed somewhere in the middle distance, his face was red with rage, and the object of his anger was invisible to me.

Depending on who you are, and the time of day, this is the kind of sight--after Shannon Harps--that usually reminds you that there's a good reason to walk a block out of your way. Stretch the legs.

I have felt that I've been seeing more and more homeless, mentally ill people in the grip of visible psychosis since the recession started, and I called Amnon Shoenfeld, director of the King County Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division, to see if this was purely anecdotal or not.

Shoenfeld has been director for the past seven years, and with the County in various capacities for 30. He earned his MSW from the University of Washington, and went to work for King County as a crisis outreach and involuntary commitment specialist in 1979.

There are about 27,000 people who rely (voluntarily or not) on King County's mental health services, and another 12,000 who are involved in substance abuse services. This number hasn't varied much recently, Shoenfeld said, but recent budget cuts at the state level have reduced funding by $7 million for mental health, and $3 million for substance abuse.

Funding cuts are about to worsen: Governor Gregoire has just released a doomsday balanced budget that would eliminate the Basic Health Plan and GAU (assistance for people unemployable because of mental or physical disabilities), slash financial aid for college students, and suspend "all-day" kindergarten and support for poorer school districts.

The Seattle Times notes that, "Most of the state budget is off-limits to cuts because it's either protected by the state constitution (such as funding for basic education) or by other requirements (such as the state's share of Medicaid, a federal-state insurance program for the poor.)"

"If I could say anything right now, I'd just say: Please don't cut us any more," Shoenfeld said near the end of our conversation.

I had asked him, looking for a bright spot, if extra funding was somehow found, where he would like it to go. But Shoenfeld, beleaguered, thinking of his case managers with up to 70 clients, couldn't go there at first.

Despite the fact that much of the mental health and substance abuse "bill" is associated with Medicaid, with the federal government footing as much as 60 percent, the state is perversely focused on what it is permitted to cut, rather than the overall cost-effectiveness  of combined federal and state dollars.

"We had to cut back on outreach to kids--mainly street kids--who are abusing substances." As in so many cases, prevention is the cheapest option, Shoenfeld explained, but it seems less critical to the budget-cutting eye.

"We've had to cut back on the number of people who can get into outpatient treatment, both adults and kids. In King County, we have to use all our 'non-Medicaid dollars' to cover crisis services and involuntary commitment services, our evaluation-and-treatment programs, our residential programs," said Shoenfeld.

Now he's expecting proposed cuts of over $1 million in those core crisis services, which for the general public, is related to the sense of insecurity you feel at noticing more people ranting and raving, and behaving unpredictably....

"dry docks" gives you Renoir's Seattle, courtesy of The SunBreak Flickr pool's Seattle_rainscreen

The UW's Probcast-ometer calls for below-freezing temperatures tonight (30ish) and tomorrow night (upper twenties). We should see a mostly sunny weekend, but temperatures will continue to drop, says UW meteorologist Cliff Mass.

To increase your Mass, drop by Elliott Bay Book Company at noon today for his talk, "Is Rainfall Getting More Extreme?" He's also signing his book, Weather of the Pacific Northwest.

If that's not enough weather for you, KIRO TV's Rebecca Stevenson is hosting a special tonight at 7 p.m. titled "What's Up With Our Weather?" Among other things, she'll be discussing the predicted El Niño effects for 2010, which has been on Cliff Mass's mind, too: He thinks a low snowpack might be in store.

Finally, if you haven't read it yet, Cliff's in the Seattle Weekly. Mike Seely wrote a nice long piece on Mass, his history with Carl Sagan, and the difference between deterministic and probabilistic weather forecasting.

Closer to home, Mount Rainier's glaciers have retreated, too.

The Copenhagen Diagnosis is out (23MB download here), authored by 26 researchers, one of whom is Eric J. Steig, professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. The report updates the last IPCC assessment in 2007, with the general tone being that, even then, the speed of climate change was underestimated.

In just one instance, the area of the Arctic's summer sea-ice that melted between 2007 and 2009 was about 40 percent more than the IPCC model average. Earlier, the models were off by as much as 80 percent: Over the past 15 years, the sea level has risen more than five centimeters, almost most double 2001 IPCC projections. At the time, various people dismissed those as "doomsday" predictions.

UW News quotes Steig as saying the Copenhagen Diagnosis "articulates a much clearer picture of what has to happen if the world wants to keep future warming within the reasonable threshold of 2 degrees Celsius that most scientists believe is prudent."

Steig also says if you've been paying attention to research results since 2007, you may not be all that surprised. However, if you've been told repeatedly that climate change has stopped, or pointed toward the effects of solar forcing, you might be taken aback. So that is really what the "diagnosis" does, is survey the climate change field and bring everyone up to date.

It's disquieting to read, then, that despite all the rhetoric around climate change, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 grew by 40 percent from 1990. That, too, was unanticipated. UW professor Edward Miles emphasizes to UW News that while the IPCC has consistently led with non-worst-case climate change forecasts, the growth in fossil fuel emissions since 2005 does exceed the worst-case scenarios of the IPCC.

The report concludes that to keep the sea level rising three to six feet, as ice caps and sheets reach a tipping point, we need to reduce CO2 emissions by...well, that's not going to happen. And I have bulletproof models of past political action to back me up on that. Maybe look into this option instead.

I often think of Seattle as a small town, but maybe it's only in a city that I would not have known one of my neighbors on the next block was "freelance rocket scientist" Jordin Kare. He's been living on Capitol Hill since March 2003, though his first visit to Seattle was back in 1979.

Previously at Lawrence Livermore, he moved up from the Bay to consult on a commercial satellite project at Boeing. Now he's associated with Bellevue's Intellectual Ventures, though it's his side project, LaserMotive, that brought him to my attention.

A weary but suddenly richer version of Kare greeted me at the Victrola last week to discuss LaserMotive's $900,000 win at the Space Elevator Games, held November 2 to 6, 2009.

"So, what can I do for you?" Kare asked. He's unprepossessing at first glance, clad for Seattle's cold and rain, unruly gray hair longer on the sides and back, and slightly reserved. After the interview he was off to catch a late show of 2012 with his wife, with whom I had a quick discussion about Joss Whedon's Buffy, Firefly, and Dollhouse. (She's still angry at Whedon for the way he killed off "Wash"--really, a shock for all of us Fireflyers.)

This is just proof that you can't tell by looking at someone that he's devoted his professional life to laser propulsion; Kare has been a leader in his field pretty much since he got into it as a post-grad in 1986. It is the power-beaming aspect of space elevators that got him into the Games. As it happens, it's a great, high profile way to demonstrate that you can beam power over a kilometer's distance in a challenging setting.

LaserMotive was founded, essentially, as a part-time enterprise that would have one product, or goal: to create a laser-powered climber that would win the Space Elevator Games power beaming competition. First prize, for a climber that could travel one kilometer vertically at speeds of five meters per second or more, was $2 million, provided by NASA.

LaserMotive's climber set a world record, doing the kilometer twice at an average speed of four meters per second (topping out at 4.13 m/s), which netted them $900,00. "Hopefully we'll pick up the spare next time we go back down there," said Kare, cheerful at the prospect of holding another huge novelty check, this one for $1.1 million.

This is not precisely the space elevator you've seen on NOVA, with carbon nanotubes. For the competition, pilot Doug Uttecht's helicopter hauled aloft a 3/16-inch steel cable, 4300 feet long, that weighed about 300 pounds. (The people with this niche expertise are Northwest Helicopters, who also flew the cables in for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.)...

It's like a bad advertising slogan: "Imagine yourself in a Mercury." Except this time it's "Imagine the mercury in you." Washington Toxics Coalition has produced a new study of pregnant mothers that illustrates just that. As the PostGlobe reports, Seattle mom Kim Radtke discovered eleven chemicals were coursing through her bloodstream, and "rated worst among nine West Coast women tested for a particular class of chemicals: perfluorinated compounds (PFOS)."

Every woman tested was found to have been exposed to , found in such things as the lining of food cans. Each woman had two to four so-called “Teflon chemicals” (All had detectable levels of , a chemical found in long-lived fish like tuna that is known to harm brain development. And every woman was exposed to at least four (pronounced THAL-ates).

This kind of news is just terrible for the chemicals industry, who have been on the lookout for a young, attractive pregnant woman willing to go on record about how the convenience of BPA outweighs its role as an endocrine disruptor. [Per Harper's magazine, subscription-only viewing] So far, no takers.

The hard news is voiced by Molly Gray, a Seattle midwife and naturopathic physician: "The answer I received from this study is that the fight is too big for just one person."

Seattle blog Sightline is running a series called "Sustainababy," about the real world challenges of mothering and sustainability, from polluted air to baby clothes. Anna Fahey writes that her eyes have been opened, too, by the impossibility of personal choice making a dent in her child's exposure to pollutants and contaminants. In a very real way, energy and air quality policy are where mothers need to focus their outrage, but that's not how anyone talks to moms.

The emphasis--and burden--is always on the mother to educate herself personally, to learn what to avoid, and to build a bubble of clean green living for the baby to enjoy.

But no mother goes out to shop for lead, carbon monoxide, or nitrogen dioxide. That comes for free with the air around her. Holding her breath for nine months is longer than most yogis can manage, and they really practice at it.