MINOS detector, courtesy Fermilab

Fermilab is dead. Long live Fermilab!

The Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., which had been the top U.S. particle collider—and for many years the most powerful such machine in the world—shut down last September. The collider’s physics breakthroughs, including the 1995 discovery of the top quark, were so eminent that it was easy to think of the Tevatron and its host institution as one and the same.

But even though protons and antiprotons no longer course through the six-kilometer loop of the Tevatron, life at Fermilab goes on. Physics World editor Margaret Harris reports on a recent lab visit (registration required):

The end of the Tevatron does not, however, mean the end of Fermilab. “We have 10 accelerators here on site,” says Fermilab physicist Steve Holmes, with the merest hint of irritation. “We turned one of them off, okay?” Like several scientists I spoke to, Holmes was keen to point out that colliding high-energy beams of particles is not the only way of discovering new physics with accelerators.

The U.S. has surrendered the “energy frontier” to Europe, Harris notes: the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, outside Geneva, is designed to accelerate particle beams to seven times the energies achievable in the Tevatron. New and ongoing projects at Fermilab, Harris writes, are focused on physics questions that do not require a gigantic, world-beating collider. Many of these projects depend less on energy and more on intensity—producing beams with copious amounts of particles to look for rare decays or interactions.

Take neutrino physics, for instance. Neutrinos are slippery subatomic particles that can only be seriously investigated with an intense particle beam. They interact so rarely with ordinary matter that for every 1,500 or so neutrinos registered by a massive, specially designed detector, billions more will pass right through. So you need to create a lot of them. Neutrinos, already mysterious, became even more so last fall when a European experiment called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus) found that neutrino pulses appeared to make the journey from CERN to an underground lab in Italy a bit faster than the speed of light, in violation of one of the central tenets of modern physics.

Fermilab has its own cutting-edge neutrino experiment that should be able to confirm or (as most suspect) refute the OPERA claim—as well as probe other puzzles of these particles. MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) shoots a beam of neutrinos through two detectors, one at Fermilab and one in a Minnesota mine some 735 kilometers away. In addition to clocking the neutrinos to determine their speed, MINOS is investigating an odd phenomenon called neutrino oscillation. Occasionally one of the particles oscillates between “flavors” on its journey across the Midwest, so that a muon neutrino becomes a tau neutrino. A planned project called NOvA will succeed MINOS, extending the baseline of the neutrino experiment to about 800 kilometers and adding a much larger detector on the Minnesota end.

Then there’s the proposed Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment, or LBNE, which would send neutrinos on an even longer interstate journey of 1,300 kilometers from Fermilab to a subterranean detector in South Dakota. LBNE, Harris reports, would be able to compare the flavor oscillations of neutrinos to those of their antiparticles. A major question about neutrinos is whether they are their own antiparticles. And a proposed multibillion-dollar lab upgrade called Project X would add new proton accelerators to increase the intensity of the beams feeding LBNE and other Fermilab projects.

As the memory of the Tevatron fades, all eyes are on the high-energy pursuits of the Large Hadron Collider, which has a good shot of finally discovering the long-sought Higgs particle this year. But no one lab, however powerful, can do it all. Older particle labs remain vibrant centers of discovery—places such as Brookhaven National Laboratory and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory were also once known primarily for their particle colliders but have since developed diverse research campaigns. If Fermilab can convince Congressional funders that the intensity frontier is worth exploring, this new direction may yield U.S. physicists a few surprises.

“This is an opportunity for the U.S. to establish a leadership position in this very important area of physics that will last for decades,” Fermilab’s Holmes told Physics World. “If we do it right, we’ll just blow away the competition.”

Image: Illustration by John Hendrix

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved a new drug that tackles the underlying cause of  cystic fibrosis (CF) in 4 percent of patients. The drug, called ivacaftor (brand name Kalydeco), acts by helping the body make better use of a protein that works incorrectly in cystic fibrosis patients.

The underlying research behind this and other drugs that may help even more individuals with cystic fibrosis was the subject of a feature length article, which I edited, called “A Breath of Fresh Air” [preview], and which appeared in the August 2011 issue of Scientific American.

Two things really intrigued me about the work:

1) the incredible way that the CF community has pulled together to prolong lives and improve quality of life for folks with the condition based on solid science, preventive care and smart nursing (by professionals and others)

2) although CF is a genetic condition, the research does not depend on gene therapy–which has had its ups and downs over the past couple of decades. Rather, researchers are trying to come up with drugs that help make the defective protein responsible for cystic fibrosis more effective.

With any luck, ivacaftor will be only the first of several new CF drugs–each designed to counter a different fundamental cause of the condition. Welcome to the era of personalized medicine.

PET image of Alzheimer's patient

Government declarations of war on drugs or disease often end in losing battles.

That’s why the news that the Obama Administration’s drafting of a plan that targets 2025 as a goal for preventing or treating Alzheimer’s met with skepticism in some quarters. “No one set a deadline for the ‘War on cancer’ or in the fight against HIV/AIDS We make progress and we keep fighting. The same should be true for Alzheimer’s,” Dr. Sam Gandy, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Mount Sinai School of Medicine told Reuters. “In my mind, that provides the unfortunate sense that we will have ‘failed’ if we don’t have a cure by 2025.” The president signed the National Alzheimer’s Project Act into law a year ago, and a final draft of the plan is due to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in the coming weeks.

At many scientific conferences, presentations  begin with a Powerpoint that chronicles the lengthy list of recent drug failures. But what if, just maybe, things aren’t quite as bad as they might seem. In war, anticipating the enemy’s next move is half the battle. The only meaningful advance in Alzheimer’s research in recent years has to do with reconnaissance.

Brain scans and spinal fluid tests have begun to emerge that may let a scientist peer underneath the cranial hood some 10 or 15 years before a patient first forgets a relative’s name or the word for a familiar household item.

The new tests might eventually show what’s going on even at a time when 6 A.M. workday alarms and getting the kids to school are life’s major preoccupations, when mortality seems but a distant abstraction.

Studies have shown that MRI , PET, spinal taps—and yet newer methods now in the lab—can detect the buildup of aberrant proteins characteristic of the disease before the first symptom appears. They may be able to go back further, identifying a persistent inflammatory response deep within the brain or capturing the period when the mitochondria, the cellular powerhouses, begin spewing junk, normal accompaniments of aging in all of us. But, for some of us, these changes interact with bad genes or perhaps some unidentified risk factors to initiate the torturously slow process that ultimately ends with dementia.

Already, leading research groups are calculating what they can do with this molecular intelligence report. It’s possible that one or more of the drugs on that Powerpoint list might prove effective if used before the disease begins.

A three- year clinical trial, slated to begin next year, will test whether a still-to-be-decided pharmaceutical can lower levels of the amyloid protein implicated in the disease in 1,000 study participants over 70 who have yet to develop dementia but who have been shown through testing to have accumulated significant amyloid deposits.  “This has been controversial and I will acknowledge that it’s pushing an envelope,” says Reisa Sperling of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a pivotal researcher in the study said at a recent conference of the New York Academy of Sciences. “But I will say that when I look at [what we’ve achieved in] medicine, we’ve really made a difference by going to a preclinical or a pre-symptomatic stage of the disease. In cancer we try to detect carcinoma in situ. If we wait until there’s pain or metastases we rarely cure the disease.”

Even without drugs, what if in middle age some lifestyle change might slow onset using a regimen similar to that for staving off cardiovascular disease? A recent study by researchers at Washington University showed with brain imaging and spinal fluid analysis that cognitively intact individuals with a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s who exercised regularly had the same levels of amyloid as others lacking the risk gene, whereas those with the gene who were sedentary retained an elevated buildup. The ability to look inside before cognition fades may allow similar studies of diet, stress reduction and bolstering brain capacity through education.

Of course, it might take a lot longer to put in place truly effective prevention and treatment, far past the 2025 goal. So the desire to improve technology for looking up close and early persists. At the New York Academy of Sciences researchers outlined efforts to look for disease signs in blood,  changes in the insulation around nerve fibers, and electrical signals altered by misfiring brain circuits.

For now, biomarkers, as researchers call them, offer the best hope for establishing a path toward staving off cognitive decline. Once the disease begins, a single drug, or even combination therapies, may be too late to revive nerve cells and circuits that are dying or already gone.

Image: U.S. National Institute on Aging, Alzheimer’s Disease Education and Referral Center

Epidemiologist Anthony McMichael of Australian National University surveyed how human societies fared during previous episodes of extreme weather brought on by climate shifts. The big threat is changes to food production, or as McMichael puts it “the drought-famine-starvation nexus.” And we’ve never weathered a climate change so big, so rapid and so widespread as the one we are now busily creating by burning fossil fuels, notes McMichael.

Long-running climate changes have often brought about the downfall of cultures, including foiling the earliest human attempts at settled farming nearly 13,000 years ago. Around that time, a major millennia-long climate cooling event known as the “Younger Dryas” coincides with the end of most settlements along the Nile Delta and in modern-day Syria. Skeletons from the era evince “an unusually high proportion of violent deaths, many accompanied by remnants of weapons,” McMichael noted. More recently, three back-to-back decades-long droughts afflicted Mayan society in Central America between roughly 760 and 920 CE, and marked the end of that culture’s regional dominance.

Shorter term climate changes have proven equally devastating. Decade-long droughts in 17th century China led to starvation, internal migration and, ultimately, the collapse of the Ming Dynasty. A seven year span of torrential rains, attendant floods and cold in the early 1300s helped cause a famine that may have killed as much as 10 percent of the people in northern Europe—a generation that would then face the Black Death a few decades later.

Even a single bad summer can be enough—like the hot summer of 1793 in Philadelphia that, paired with an influx of refugees from modern day Haiti, saw an outbreak of yellow fever that killed tens of thousands.

Of course, none of these societies had the benefits of modern technology or modern energy, whether medicine or air conditioning. But even that may not be enough to offset the roughly 2 to 4 degrees Celsius of warming in average global temperatures the world is on pace to achieve via emissions of greenhouse gases. “Such a change will surely pose serious risks to human health and survival,” McMichael wrote, “impinging unevenly, but sparing no population.”

Image: Sumerian cuneiform via © iStockphoto.com / Michael Fuery

The two-part video that I put together with my colleagues John Matson and Mary Karmelek, working with Sci Am‘s film guru Eric Olson, dramatizes entanglement. Part one presents it metaphorically; part two will show the real McCoy in a physics laboratory. The film follows in the footsteps of a steady progression of simplified versions of the original scientific arguments that has taken place over the past several decades. Not only has the theory been streamlined, so has the experimental apparatus. It could now fit on a living-room end table and should soon become a standard exercise in college physics-for-poets classes.

The basic point of entanglement is that the behavior of objects at spatially separated locations is random yet coordinated. Two (or more) particles behave as a single indivisible system, no matter how far apart they are. Indeed, even to speak of “particles” in the plural is a falsehood; we see them as individual parts, but they possess collective properties that cannot be partitioned. In the 1930s, Albert Einstein argued that for entangled particles to behave in such a coordinated way, either their behavior must be choreographed in advance or they must surreptitiously influence each other on the fly. This influence cannot pass through the intervening space—it would be, as Einstein put it, “spooky action at a distance.” Three decades later, physicist John Bell devised an experiment that rules out the first possibility, leaving the spooky one as a creepy fact of nature.

The first two card tricks in the video show the basic thought-experiment that Einstein devised and published in a famous paper with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen. The third trick shows Bell’s elaboration. His basic insight was that it’s easy enough to choreograph a simple pattern of behavior, but impossible to prearrange a sufficiently complicated one. By the way, you can use Bell’s approach if any of your friends ever claims to be psychic. Ask the right types of questions, and no one will be able to respond unless they really are psychic. Humans, of course, aren’t. But particles do have a telepathic power, albeit of a very limited sort.

Some technical details: For sake of getting across the idea, we neglect the role that probability plays in the actual experiment. If John and I were to exploit entanglement for real, we’d create a pair of entangled photons, he’d take one and I the other, and each of us would send his photon through a polarizing filter and see whether it emerges on the other side. The choice of “left” or “right” card in the video would correspond to the orientation of the polarizer. For John, “left” would be 0 degrees; “right,” 45 degrees. For me, “left” would be 22.5 degrees; “right,” –22.5 degrees. Assuming no experimental imperfections, the probability that we’d both see the same outcome would be about 85 percent for all possible permutations of orientations, except when both of us select “right,” in which case it would be about 15 percent. Cheaters trying to mimic entanglement could manage 75 percent at best.

I hasten to mention that some physicists and philosophers of physics doubt whether spooky action really occurs—to them, particles are no more psychic than humans are. But even in that case, something else equally weird must be going on to give the illusion of spooky action, such as a profusion of parallel universes, messages reaching us from the future, or a radically holistic view of reality. There’s no way to avoid the weirdness altogether. Researchers also debate whether entanglement conflicts—in spirit if not in letter—with Einstein’s special theory of relativity, as David Albert and Rivka Galchen discussed in our March 2009 cover story.

Leaving aside what the entanglement means, so much remains to be learned about the phenomenon itself. A big question is why, even though entanglement is pervasive, we don’t notice it in our everyday lives. Quantum physicist Dagomir Kaszlikowski recently offered a new approach to solving this problem. The answer, ironically, may be that the very pervasiveness of entanglement camouflages it.

To help explain further what entanglement means, we’ve also asked quantum physicist Vlatko Vedral and physicist-historian David Kaiser to describe the long and winding road that quantum entanglement took to becoming accepted. In a sense, entanglement is so weird that we hope our video will not demystify it, but mystify it.

Jumping Spider: image courtesy of Science/AAAS

To figure out how far away our dinner plate is our brain melds the slightly different images coming from our two eyes. Other creatures, including many insects, move their heads to glean how far a piece of food might be. But jumping spiders (Hasarius adansoni) don’t seem to possess either of these abilities. So how do they manage such quick and exacting lunges to capture their lunches?

Researchers have suspected the answer might have something to do with their four-layered eyes. Previous molecular and physiological work had shown that the third and fourth layers of the spiders’ two principal eyes are most receptive to ultraviolet light; and the first and second are tuned more toward what we consider to be the visible spectrum, in particular, to green light. But not all of the layers see things equally. In fact, only in the first layer is the green light focused clearly, meaning that “the second-deepest layer always receives defocused images,” according to Takashi Nagata, of the biology and geosciences department at the Osaka City University in Japan, and his colleagues. He and his team set out to figure out whether the spiders rely on that lack of focus to tackle a meal.

The investigators assumed that if the differences in the green layers were important for depth perception, spiders would not be able to determine how far to jump in the absence of green light. Sure enough, as they reported online Thursday in the journal Science, when they shone green light on the spiders and tempted them with tasty flies, the spiders made spot-on jumps—just as they did in natural light. When bathed in red light that did not contain green wavelengths, however, the spiders consistently missed their prey, often coming up short.

So instead of using a stereo focus like we do or a motion-based tactics like some other bugs, for these spiders, “depth perception might be achieved by comparison of defocused images received by [the second layer] with focused images received by [the first layer],” Nagata and his colleagues wrote. Investigators will need to do further studies to uncover how the spiders are processing this information.

In a commentary in the same issue of Science, Marie Herberstein and David Kemp, both of the biological sciences department at Macquire University in Australia note that the new finding does more than add new insight into the major challenge of understanding how animals perceive the world. It also serves as a reminder that advanced molecular research, as helpful as it is, is not always enough on its own. In this case, the “ultimate test still required behavioral experimentation with whole, live animals.”

But is that really true? Why couldn’t they?

The more I thought about it, the more confused I got, so let me float it as a trial balloon and see whether you can shoot it down. Ground rules: no weaselly appeal to “feasibility” or “practicality” allowed. You have to argue from pure physics.

What makes a space balloon conceivable is that space is not a true vacuum. Even intergalactic space is filled with matter, albeit tenuous; by its standards, Earth’s extended atmosphere is a thick soup. As long as the balloon’s interior density is lower than the ambient density, it should rise—no matter how low the ambient pressure is. Drag force will limit the balloon’s ascent velocity, but shouldn’t stop it altogether and can be minimized by choosing a prolate rather than spherical shape.

As the balloon rises, it will expand in inverse proportion to the ambient pressure and, neglecting temperature, density. At launch, the interior and exterior pressure is equal, and the interior density is lower; during the ascent, the pressure remains equalized, so the interior density will always be less than the ambient. Neglecting temperature is probably not a bad approximation: the absolute temperature will vary at most a couple of orders of magnitude, whereas the pressure and density fall off much more drastically, and in any event we can include a politician to regulate the temperature difference between interior and exterior.

The material tension would rise in proportion to radius. It has units of force, and the maximum possible force in nature, the Planck force, is 10⁴⁴ newtons, so the balloon could get bigger than the known universe before it absolutely has to pop. The balloon walls would become extremely thin and porous, but because of the scaling of area and volume, they should always remain able to confine the gas.

Bottom line: if you release a helium balloon on the ground, it should rise forever! It will float up until Earth’s atmosphere dovetails with the interplanetary medium, then float up and out of the solar system, then reach interstellar space and float out of the plane of the galaxy like the bubbles blown by supernova, and ultimately settle in one of the voids of large-scale cosmic structure.

Unless I’m missing something, it is a myth that balloons are inherently unable to work in space. The limit is set not by physics, but by trifling engineering problems such as material strength and permeability. Another caveat is that the laws of gas dynamics assume a continuum, an approximation that already fails in Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Now, someone, tell me what I’m missing.

Image credit: NASA/ARCADE/Roen Kelly

Gingrich in New Hampshire. Credit: Patrick Gensel via Flickr/Creative Commons

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich made a campaign stop on Florida’s Space Coast January 25, laying out a vision for NASA that included a manned moon base within a decade.

The former speaker of the House, who topped our rankings of the candidates in terms of geek cred, wasted no time in trotting out his space bona fides. “I have a deep passion about this because I’m old enough that I used to read Missiles & Rockets magazine,” Gingrich said at public event at a Holiday Inn Express in Cocoa, Fla. He also noted his love for science fiction, particularly for the writings of Isaac Asimov. “It helped shape my life,” he said. Lastly there was the self-described “weirdest” move of his career: introducing legislation in the 1980s to allow an American moon colony of sufficient size (13,000 residents) to petition the U.S. for statehood.

But the bulk of his speech was given over to laying out aggressive goals for NASA in a hypothetical Gingrich administration, and in placing those plans in a favorable historical context. “By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American,” Gingrich said. “By 2020 we will have the first continuous propulsion system in space capable of getting to Mars in a short time.”

Gingrich was not shy about making such grandiose predictions (“Americans are instinctively grandiose, because we believe in a bigger future”), drawing comparisons to similar goals set by Abraham Lincoln (transcontinental railroad), the Wright brothers (heavier-than-air flight) and John F. Kennedy (moon shot).

But he was less forthcoming on how he intends to achieve those goals. He proposed setting aside 10 percent of NASA’s budget for prizes to, for instance, figure out an efficient way to get to Mars. “If we truly inspire the entrepreneurial spirits of America, we may get some of this stuff a lot faster,” he said. He also made numerous references to bloated NASA bureaucracy and time spent conducting studies rather than actually trying new things, saying that “we want to become lean and aggressive.” He proposed applying the business concepts of lean six sigma to eliminate waste and speed innovation at NASA.

“It has been tragic to see what has happened with our space program over the last 30 years,” he said. “You know what a total mess, what an embarrassment our current situation is.” Had the U.S. carried the momentum of the Apollo program through the decades that followed, Gingrich claimed, lunar bases and manned Mars landings would have been accomplishments of the 1980s rather than lofty campaign promises in 2012.

But NASA was hardly lean in the days of Apollo. At its peak, the space agency chewed up more than 4 percent of the federal budget, whereas today its allotment is closer to 0.6 percent. Setting ambitious goals for space exploration is admirable—and prominent voices have argued that NASA could use such direction right about now—but it is unrealistic to expect the U.S. to reprise one of its greatest accomplishments without the kind of financial commitment that made past glories possible.

Encroaching seas have eroded southeastern Louisiana.

More than six years after Hurricane Katrina plowed into New Orleans and the Mississippi River delta, a plan has finally emerged to protect the area from future storms. It relies heavily on the restoration of wetlands to cut down high surges of ocean water like those that flooded the city in 2005—somewhat of a surprise, considering past efforts focused on levees and seawalls.

Last week, after prolonged deliberations over competing plans between state and federal agencies, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and cities and parishes (counties), the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority released the Louisiana Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast. If all its provisions are carried out, the work would require $50 billion over 50 years.

The plan includes maps of what the state’s refurbished delta would look like from the air by 2061. It also shows maps of the wetlands that would disappear by 2061 (see image below), as well as the extent of flooding that storms such as Katrina would bring, if the projects aren’t built. Southern Louisiana has lost 1,883 square miles of wetlands during the past 80 years, an area three-quarters the size of Delaware, largely because of erosion that has been catalyzed by hundreds of miles of manmade navigation channels and oil and gas pipeline canals. Most of that land will not be regained. But if the plan’s projects succeed, by 2042 the state would begin to gain more land annually than it loses, and by 2061 it would gain an average of about 2.5 square miles a year.

Land that would be lost (red) if the protection plan is not undertaken.

Several major strategies make up the bulk of the plan (see example below). Along the outer edge of the torn-up coast, furthest from New Orleans, former barrier islands that have been worn to thin wisps of land would be broadened with sandy sediment, mostly dredged from the ocean bottom and conveyed through pipelines. Natural ridges of land along the coast would be strengthened in similar fashion. Together, the islands and ridges would form a dotted line around southeastern Louisiana that can cut down storm surges. They would not all connect, so wind-driven water could still find its way through, but the many segments would break up the incoming wavefront into chaotic eddies flowing in conflicting directions that would at least partially cancel out one another.

Closer inland, large areas of wetlands that are severely tattered or nearly gone would be reconstituted. Large openings, called diversions, would be cut in the levees that line the  winding Mississippi River, as well as the Atchafalaya River to its west. Gates would be inserted, which would allow freshwater and sediment—the lifeblood of marshy terrain—to wash down into the wetlands when the river is running high. Decades ago the delta had thick, robust marshes and swamps that began behind the barrier islands and ran back for miles and miles to where towns and cities had sprouted. The vast marshes could absorb large storm surges, turning them into the equivalent of mild high tides by the time they reach metropolitan areas. Healthy wetlands also gradually dilute the salt from seawater, so it doesn’t kill plants that grow in fresher water closer to firm land, a mechanism that has further eroded today’s struggling regions.

Portion of New Orleans protection plan: better levees (purple), breakwaters (orange lines, top), refurbished wetlands (brown dotted areas), gates in Mississippi River levees to divert sediment and freshwater to sustain those wetlands (circles), and rebuilt barrier islands (orange dots, bottom).

Close to New Orleans, of course, levees would continue to be raised and connected, and breakwaters would also be erected along certain shorelines that are close to populated areas. Numerous homes and businesses would be raised or floodproofed. And some houses in areas that were destroyed by Katrina and are at the greatest risk for future flooding would simply be bought and removed, and the land left vacant.

These strategies strongly echo three different protection plans that experts had recommendations back in early 2006, which Scientific American detailed in an article before the infighting between stakeholders widened. As it was then, restoring wetlands remains a controversial strategy, yet the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority is clearly relying on it; the biggest chunk of money designated in the plan is $17.9 billion to improve thousands of acres in numerous locations.

Sediment and freshwater are needed to build and maintain wetlands; spring flooding by the Mississippi River is largely what built the vast stretches to begin with, until levees raised along the river prevented the annual overflows. Much of the initial rebuilding will be done by dredging sediment from nearby channels and pumping it into needed spots, but the diversions are important for supplying new sediment, freshwater and nutrients to the areas year after year.

Some interest groups, notably fishers, have already expressed opposition to the diversions, most recently on Monday during the first of three consecutive days of public meetings about the plan (the full comment period ends February 25). They claim that the inflows of freshwater will chase shrimp, crabs and certain fish that prefer brackish water further out to sea, harm spawning grounds or oyster beds, or impede the fishers’ ability to harvest the seafood. They also claim that two small, experimental diversions that have been running for at least a decade have failed to actually rebuild land. Studies by scientists have shown improvements in those places, however, although land has not always be regained at the rates initially predicted. Even if the planned diversions do work, it will be many years before large, healthy marshes return—years during which, proponents hope, no Katrinas come blowing in.

A barrier island before restoration.

The same island after restoration.

In the meantime, lessons learned while rebuilding the Mississippi delta could prove valuable across the U.S. The country has more than 30,000 miles of levees, and as much as 70 percent of them can no longer be trusted because of long-term erosion or poor construction, according to a 2010 report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Images: Courtesy of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/energyy

Heart disease is the leading killer in the U.S., and more than 27 million Americans currently have a cardiac condition. But what is your risk of developing heart disease at some point in your entire life? It might be a lot higher than you think, according to a new paper published online Wednesday in The New England of Medicine.

“We are giving incomplete and misleading risk information if we only focus on the next 10 years of someone’s life,” Donald Lloyd-Jones, an associate professor at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and study co-author, said in a prepared statement, referring to the time span that is often given.

“The majority of adults in the United states who are considered to be at low risk for cardiovascular disease are actually at high risk across their remaining lifespan,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

As part of a 50-year-long study, researchers have been following more than a quarter of a million adults in 18 different age cohorts. For the new analysis, researchers looked at key cardiovascular disease risk factors, including blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes and smoking, as well as the participants’ cardiovascular disease status each decade from the ages of 45 to 75 years.

Overall, white men had the highest risk—36 percent—of dying from heart disease or stroke during their lifetime. Black men had a 33 percent chance, and both black and white women had about a 27 percent risk.

Not surprisingly, traditional risk factors played a major role in the statistics. Nonsmokers whose blood pressure was less than 120 over 80 without medication, whose cholesterol less than 180 milligrams (per deciliter) and who did not have diabetes fared the best. Men in this category at age 45 have just a 1.4 percent chance of getting heart disease or having a stroke. When two or more of those factors are not optimal, however, the lifetime risk jumps to nearly 50 percent.

“Just even one small increase in risk,” Lloyd-Jones said, “like slightly elevated cholesterol or blood pressure, significantly bumps up a person’s lifetime risk.” And most people in the study had at least one major risk factor.

The new data will also “help guide public health policy” by giving a clearer picture of the future burdens of these diseases, the researchers noted in their paper. Annual costs of treating heart disease in the U.S. are already more than $272 billion and are projected to exceed $818 billion by 2030, according to a study released last year. It also “underscores the importance of lifestyle—particularly diet, exercise and smoking cessation” in fending off heart disease and stroke in the first place, said co-author Jerry Berry in a prepared statement.  Berry is an assistant professor at Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

Lloyd-Jones suggested one way to diminish lifetime risk is to focus on prevention early —that is, to get “kids and young adults off to better starts so they don’t gain weight and are following healthier lifestyles throughout their lives.”

The U.S. military constitutes a huge market for alternative fuels. The Air Force alone burns 2.4 billion gallons of jet fuel a year.  The Department of Defense burns $18 billion worth of oil a year, four fifths of the federal governments’ energy tab.

In truth, a shift within the U.S. military to green fuels has been under way for more than a year. The U.S. Navy has been purchasing jet fuel derived from camelina—a derivative of canola—and a diesel like fuel derived from algae for its ships. The U.S. Air Force in 2010 began testing camelina oil in place of petroleum in its fuels as part of a program to  derive as much as half of its fuel from alternative sources by 2016.

Whether Obama will be able to use clean energy to boost jobs may be tougher. A Google.org study released last summer projected that breakthroughs in clean energy technologies would add $150 billion in additional economic output and 1.1 million new jobs by 2030. (The study, “The Impact of Clean Energy Innovation,” is based on McKinsey & Co.’s Low Carbon Economics computer modeling.

For more on clean energy, see our in-depth report. http://www.scientificamerican.com/report.cfm?id=new-solutions-for-clean-energy

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy,” Obama said during his State of the Union address. ” I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here. We have subsidized oil companies for a century. That’s long enough. It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s rarely been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that’s never been more promising.”

In this particular session, “You Got Your Politics in My Science,” attendees related their experiences and their approaches to dealing with perceived advocacy and reactive attacks. Everyone realizes that both scientists and journalists strive for impartiality. Yet certain hot-button topics invite scrutiny. Heather Goldstone, who reports for a public-radio affiliate and hosts Climatetide.org, mentioned that whenever she wrote about climate change or evolution, she was asked if she’s advocating for something, even by her editors.

Science communicators often feel that the facts should speak for themselves. But public-relations firms practice “strategic communications” for a reason: framing and spin work. David Wescott, who writes the It’s Not a Lecture blog, cited the name change of the private military contractor Blackwater to Academi and the reference to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as “Obamacare” by opponents. Indeed, business history is full of such moves—how many people recognize that the Altria Group was formerly known as Philip Morris?

But even a nicely framed story would do little to change minds if the message isn’t properly targeted. People who have found their way to the fringe are unlikely to respond to persuasion going the other way. Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus (Simon & Shuster, 2011), which explored the autism fear of childhood vaccines, mentioned he wouldn’t bother writing about celebrity anti-vaccinationist Jenny McCarthy as it wouldn’t advance the story anymore. Of course, if McCarthy gets her own talk show, the vaccine-autism controversy could reenter the public discourse in a big way, demanding responses from more knowledgeable sources.

Instead, the attendees talked about reaching the unconvinced and finding the “bridge” audience. Mommy bloggers, for instance, are a good group to reach out to for dispelling myths about vaccines. One attendee mentioned trips to pharmaceutical labs as a means of demystifying the industry. The question then came up about who the “mommy bloggers” are for climate change, evolution and science literacy.

In terms of the climate change issue, the group discussed how contrarians have adopted some of the strategies of the tobacco industry. Big tobacco tried to cast doubt on the science showing the dangers of nicotine use as one way to preserve its hegemony.

Such attacks are not surprising. After all, science is all about change, but change inevitably threatens entrenched interests. (For counterpoints to climate change skeptics, see “Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense.”) In the end, divorcing science from politics may simply be an unrealistic goal.  As moderator John Timmer neatly summed up, if you communicate science at all, you’re an advocate.

See a video of the hour-long session here (very little action—think of it as a podcast):

See also the excerpt, “Good Science Always Has Political Ramifications.”

The finding adds a discouraging twist to worries that hackers might take over critical infrastructure. Indeed, individuals have regularly managed to electronically penetrate industrial systems, with destructive real-world consequences. Last year, David Nicol of the University of Illinois described how hackers could conceivably take down a good portion of the U.S. power grid. His analysis relied on simple techniques commonly used by hackers to steal credit cards and the like; never did he assume that the important control systems would be sitting out in the open without any protections in place.

It’s unclear how many of the 10,000 control systems were set up to control critical infrastructure like power stations, says Éireann P. Leverett, the researcher who published the study. He notified the U.S. Department of Homeland Security of his findings last September. But one thing is clear: If, as it appears, this many systems have been online without the knowledge of the people in charge, we can’t let the assumption that something isn’t connected to the Internet take the place of a real security protocol.

Image: Grizzly Peak Sub-Station, California; courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

At this month’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Sweden-based Tobii Technology showed off a sensor- and camera-laden device that works with PCs running Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system, which is scheduled to roll out on PCs, ultrabooks and tablets throughout this year. Tobii’s Gaze interface lets users activate, select, zoom and scroll, assisted by only a few mouse clicks or taps on a laptop touchpad.

The software takes advantage of the PCEye peripheral Tobii introduced in April 2011. PCEye has four LED sensors that emit near-infrared light invisible to the human eye to create reflection patterns on the cornea. Two digital cameras detect the exact position of the pupil and/or iris and calculate where the user’s gaze will fall on the computer screen. The first time a person tries the system, the device measures characteristics of that individual’s eyes and stores the profile for subsequent use.

Eye-tracking technology readily fits into the design of Windows 8, which arranges desktop applications in large tiles for easily manipulation on tablets, ultrabooks and other PCs using touch, keyboard and/or mouse. With PCEye and Gaze, users can scroll through the tiles using eye controls. When they find the app they want to launch, they stare at that tile and, while holding that stare, click their mouse or tap their laptop’s touchpad, says Barbara Barclay, Tobii’s general manager of analysis solutions. Whereas the company’s focus has been Windows, the Gaze software could likewise be used with Apple’s Mac OS and the open-source Linux operating system.

Tobii saved its neatest trick, however, for an arcade game called EyeAsteroids. Players blast asteroids drifting too close to Earth just by glaring at them for a few seconds. Perhaps this is what Superman feels like when he uses his energy-ray vision to reduce objects to smoldering rubble with just one glance.

Several other eye-tracking technologies exist, although none are yet being put to use to interface with mainstream Windows PCs. Tobii is one of more than two dozen organizations in the Communication by Gaze Interaction (COGAIN) Association, an offshoot of the COGAIN project launched in 2004 to help those with impaired motor skills control specialized computers using their eyes. IT University’s GazeGroup in Copenhagen, Denmark, for example, is an association member that designs technology to help the disabled type onscreen and even control a wheelchair through eye tracking.

Challenges remain for the further development of gaze-controlled technologies. Tobii is working to reduce tracking and accuracy problems sometimes caused when users wear very thick eyeglasses or bifocal lenses, which can distort the infrared light used to illuminate the eyes. In addition, bright sunlight makes it more difficult for the camera and software to track eye movement outdoors due to the surrounding ambient infrared light. As a team of German researchers pointed out as far back as 2007 (pdf), this would have to be overcome before gaze control is a realistic option for mobile phones. The infrared LEDs and sensors do, however, function properly under most lighting conditions and work even when a user wears sunglasses, according to the company.

Images courtesy of Larry Greenemeier and Tobii

Sunday's solar flare (in upper right quadrant), as witnessed by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. Credit: NASA

Last night the sun unleashed a flash of radiation called a solar flare, along with a generous belch of ionized matter that is now racing toward Earth at thousands of kilometers a second. The solar storm front from the ionized blast, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), should arrive tomorrow morning, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). The forecasters called the event the strongest solar storm since 2005.*

When a solar storm hits Earth, the impact can have a number of consequences, especially in Earth orbit and at high latitudes, where the planet’s geomagnetic shielding is thin. Solar storms can knock out satellites, cause blackouts and force aircraft to avoid polar routes. Storms can also bring the aurora borealis, aka the northern lights, down to unusually low latitudes. (You can see a slideshow of recent low-latitude auroras here.)

The SWPC is forecasting that the inbound storm will reach G2 (“moderate”) and possibly G3 (“strong”) levels on the geomagnetic storm scale, which tops out at G5. A G3 storm should not cause severe problems for satellite operators or power companies but could interrupt satellite-based navigation systems and some radio communications. Such storms can also produce auroras visible as far south as Illinois and Oregon, according to the SWPC.

Researchers predict that the coronal mass ejection should reach Earth around 9:00 A.M. (Eastern Standard Time) on Tuesday, January 24. But that timeline is a bit uncertain; SpaceWeather.com notes that the storm could hit up to seven hours sooner or later than that. It should continue into the following day, according to SWPC forecasts, so auroras could be visible Tuesday night in North America.

* UPDATE (5:20 P.M., 1/24/2012): NOAA says the geomagnetic storm from the CME has only reached G1 (“minor”) levels but that the storm of radiation is now the strongest since 2003.

The focus in Ross’s lab, however, is as serious as murder. Anthropologists, entomologists and other experts at NCSU tackle about a dozen complicated cases a year referred to the Osteology Lab by the state medical examiner—typically dismemberment or child abuse cases. Ross’s lab will conduct analyses to determine the tool used by a criminal to cut apart bones. In fact, she casually pointed to several sawed-up pig bones set out on a lab bench. Their job: to help analysts determine whether a hand saw or powered saw was used in a recent human dismemberment case.

In Ross’s wet lab, tissue is removed from bones by boiling them in water for 30 minutes, or letting borax, bleach or laundry detergent go to work on them. Ross had set out a disarticulated skeleton on an exam table to show a group of us from the ScienceOnline2012 conference. Holding up a femur, then the skull, a radius and the pelvic girdle, she showed us some of the features used to identify corpses and determine the probable cause of death—worn-down processes, muscle markings, a retreating chin. DNA, radiographic, morphometric and dental data also contribute, when available. In this case, two bullet holes through the skull and an exit blast made the cause of death clear. Patterns of radiating fractures in the skull revealed which bullet struck first and gave clues about the caliber of the firearm used. Skull bone suture patterns accumulated over the first couple of decades of the victim’s life revealed clues to his ancestry—MesoAmerican. Missing teeth indicated poor nutrition.

Forensic anthropology has also been put to systematic use by Ross to help identify risk factors for genocide. Her studies have shown that genocide victims typically suffer from such conditions as poor nutrition, spina bifida, middle-ear infections and severe dental enamel defects. Preventive policy could be implemented in areas where a high presence of these factors confirms other social data to suggest an increased probability for regional genocide. She has conducted such analyses on bodies collected in Rwanda, Bosnia and Croatia.

Ross stresses that her role as a forensic anthropologist is to present the facts as clearly and as objectively as possible. “I sit up nights and think about a case—did I miss something?” she said. Her goal is to “bring resolution to someone who had no voice,” to people, often children, whose cases fell through the cracks of the criminal justice system.

Image caption: Case of human skulls in NCSU forensic anthropologist Ann Ross’s Osteology Lab. Can you tell which one is not a cast/replica? Credit: Robin Lloyd

U.S. Strategic Bombers

U.S. Major General William A. Chambers came in to our offices today to talk about how things are going with the nation’s nuclear deterrence efforts. Chambers, who carries the title of assistant chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, talked about the stockpile stewardship program, the one intended to keep thousands of nuclear weapons functional without underground nuclear testing.

The most interesting event occurred after the general left, though. I fell into a conversation with two younger colleagues about the reality that we still have 5,000 nuclear warheads with almost 2,000 of them at the ready, waiting to launch at a moment’s notice. They thought that this embedded legacy of the Cold War was no big deal, just an unfortunate commonplace of contemporary living, something similar to their conception of climate change, avian flu, airport security, world poverty and the like. Both of them were born well after the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, so I guess they just hadn’t absorbed the strontium-90 in their baby teeth as I did.

Anyway, I was fascinated.

I grew up with duck-and-cover drills under the desk in elementary school and remember having vivid teeth-grinding nightmares around the time of the Cuban missile crisis. I still carry the distinct memory of my father and grandfather at the dining room table discussing plans for the number of sandbags needed in our basement to stop the gamma radiation. In thinking about the future, I always imagined that we would never make it to the turn-of-the-century without New York’s skyscrapers being flattened to burnt rubble in a fusion-induced conflagration. There had to be some glitch, some errant technicians in an ICBM silo who would turn the keys to set off a nuclear endgame.

None of this seemed to preoccupy my thirtysomething colleagues. They hadn’t had to learn to love the bomb like I had. From an early age, they had, it seems, achieved peaceful coexistence with the thermonuclear threat. Those multi-megaton haymakers were always there just looming, an abstraction from books, movies or a Scientific American article, similar to the threats from near-Earth asteroids. By the time they had reached adulthood, John  le Carré had largely moved beyond his Smiley series. So for these young’uns, yes, it could be bad.  But it was still just so much white noise in background. No big deal.

That conversation was in keeping with the one with General Chambers, one of the most earnestly agreeable people that you could ever hope to meet. You could see how he  had made his way up through the ranks, from  navigator in an FB-111A to two stars, serving as a public voice for the Air Force before Congress, or on a visit to a science magazine or a potentially hyper-critical audience at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he went after meeting with Scientific American. Every query we had about force levels and estimated failure rates for warheads met with a welcoming nod and smile. General Curtis LeMay, who inspired, in part, the General Buck Turgidson character played by George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, might have bristled at a subordinate with such an affable demeanor.

But although the messenger was softer, the message was not. Chambers echoed a mission statement from the earliest years of the Cold War—the need to retain, for one, a large stable of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The missiles, still on high alert as they have been for decades, serve as a counter-response that an adversary must take into account before considering a “bolt out of the blue” strike against the U.S. The punch line: A potential enemy “has to consider that we have 450 missiles across hundreds of miles of America, all ready to go.”

The Russian Federation, he said “still represents an existential capability, particularly in light of how the Russians continue to treat their strategic forces, continue to invest in them, continue to keep them in a high state of readiness.”

The New START treaty, which went into effect a year ago, calls for each superpower to cut back the number of deployed warheads to 1550 by 2017, with thousands still stored as backups. But the ability to wield superior firepower—encompassed by the Cold War triad of missiles, strategic bombers and nuclear submarines—will still be required moving forward, Chambers asserted. The Obama Administration, immersed in a review of the nation’s nuclear capabilities, will assuredly receive the same message that Scientific American editors did. Some cutbacks are feasible and the current nuclear arsenal can preserve its potency with high-powered “exoscale” computer simulations in place of underground testing. But a substantial stockpile and all three legs of the triad are still essential.

Whether the elaborate edifice of Cold War deterrence can be reshaped in an election year seems a stretch. Online piracy and Gingrich’s open marriage are likely to remain center stage. Progress on weapons reduction and proliferation may just have to wait.

On Jan. 10, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the doomsday clock one minute closer to midnight.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Two scientists who independently concocted potentially dangerous strains of bird flu viruses—and have had the bioweapons community in a tizzy for the past month with the pending publication of their work—today said that they would suspend their research for 60 days.  The announcement is intended to be a kind of time out, a chance for everyone to catch up with the realization that influenza is no longer solely a matter of public health, but is now a potential bioweapon.

The crisis began in December, when the U.S. National Science Advisory Board asked the journals Science and Nature to withhold publication of key aspects of the two papers—to merely to give the results of the research, minus details on methods. (Scientific American is published by Nature Publishing Group.)

The restriction is presumably to keep someone from using the research to make a bioweapon—to make a highly lethal, highly transmissible virus in a lab, and then release it into the wild, so to speak, with the aim of initiating a devastating human pandemic. (Think Al Qaeda, with molecular biologists instead of pilots.)

One irony in this story is that forestalling a doomsday pandemic was a motivation behind the work in the first place—the work that bioweapons defense specialists are now delaying.

Bird flu has been a source of great anxiety among infectious disease specialists at least since 1997, when an outbreak in Hong Kong among poultry farms caused a handful of human deaths. What’s particularly scary about H5N1, as bird flu is designated, is its high mortality rate—it apparently kills 60 percent of those who catch it, as opposed to less than one percent for a typical seasonal flu. Fortunately, fewer than 600 people have died from bird flu, because catching it requires the kind of close contact with birds that sometimes happens on small livestock farms or in the live animal markets in China. The Big Fear is that the genetic roulette wheel will one day turn up a strain of the virus that is not only lethal but also highly transmissible among humans.

What Yoshi Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Ron Fouchier of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam have done is figure out what mutations are necessary to make bird flu into a truly dangerous human pathogen. The idea is to use this knowledge to monitor the evolution of potential human flu viruses in the wild and on livestock farms, or perhaps to make vaccines and anti-viral medications before such a virus arises in nature. Currently it can take months to make an effective vaccine from scratch—enough time for a flu virus to spread from one end of the globe to another.

Kawaoka and Fouchier not the first scientists to have explored this question, but they are the first to have succeeded. That is what got the attention of bioweapons experts, who are now scrambling to figure out how to get a handle around this threat. They have been concerned about it for years, but until now had been largely theoretical.

What can they do? One tack is to restrict publication to the results of the work but not the methods by which researchers got those results. Whether or not this is effective is a matter of some debate. Some bio-security experts think that the key knowledge is not so much the methods as the fact that the results are possible.

Another avenue is to put international controls on influenza research, much like those placed on nuclear weapons research during the Cold War and still in place today. That would involve putting many constraints on influenza researchers, who are not going to take kindly to this prospect. Effective international controls would be exceedingly hard to work out, not only because scientists will resist them but also because the skills and the equipment needed to produce influenza viruses in the lab are also highly portable—restrict them in a few countries and they’ll likely find a home elsewhere. How do you control this research without squelching it at the same time? That is the puzzle the bioweapons community is grappling with now. They’re unlikely to solve it in 60 days.

In the end, the best defense against deadly pathogens, natural or unnatural, may be knowledge—knowledge of the pathogens themselves, technologies to fight them quickly when they arise, and intelligence (the old fashioned gumshoe kind) about the people who might turn these pathogens against us. As Steven Block, the Stanford biologist, has said: the best defense against biotechnology is more biotechnology.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/Yuri_Arcurs

Sex might seem like a risky occupation for the more than 27 million Americans who have been diagnosed with heart disease. But that’s not necessarily so, says a new report. The risk varies greatly depending on the severity of a person’s condition—as well as how stressful (or, perhaps, exciting) the sex is.

Cardiac patients whose condition is considered stable have a low risk of inducing further heart problems by having sex, according to the report, published online Thursday in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. Of all people who die suddenly, only about 0.6 percent did so while engaging in sexual activity, according to previous research. If that still sounds a little risky, consider that three quarters of those people were sleeping with someone other than their spouse—most with a younger partner, at a location other than home, or were trying to perform “after excessive food and alcohol consumption,” says report authors, led by Glen Levine, of the Baylor College of Medicine.

The researchers suggest that relatively healthy heart disease sufferers might do well to stress less about sex—and checking with their doctor is a good first step toward ensuring that it’s a safe endeavor. “Changes in sexual activity after a cardiac event may impair the patient’s quality of life, negatively affect psychological health, and strain marital or other important intimate relationships, which in turn may lead to depression and anxiety,” according to the report. Research published last year found that sexual satisfaction might actually help protect against heart disease.

The report also concludes that cardiovascular drugs have minimal effect on sexual function, and the authors recommend patients continue to take their meds. They also advise talking these things over with a doctor of counselor. Most patients and their partners feel that “they have been inadequately educated on this topic by healthcare providers and desire more information on how to resume their normal sexual activity,” the authors noted.