Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

Portland, Oregon, Says No To Fluoridation

Francie Diep — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:47:22 GMT

So when is Portlandia going to do a skit about this?

Residents of Portland, Oregon, voted down, yet again, an effort to add fluoride to their tap water.

With 80 percent of the expected ballots counted, Mayor Charlie Hales "conceded defeat," the Associated Press reported.

Portland is the largest U.S. city not to have added fluoride in the water, nor any plans to add it, the Associated Press reported. Portlanders in the past have defeated three other attempts to fluoridate their water since the 1950s, Livescience reported.

In the U.S., 196 million people have tap water that's fluoridated to the optimal level to prevent cavities, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Everyone else has either unfluoridated water or water that naturally or artificially contains fluoride at higher levels than recommended. Portland's water has naturally occurring fluoride, but not enough to make a difference to dental health.

Supporters say putting fluoride in the tap water gets the protective chemical to low-income children who might not have access to regular dentist visits. Opponents say fluoride will harm the environment, may have ill human health effects and constitutes medicating people without their consent.

The ongoing debate reshuffles the usual political alliances in Portland, the Oregonian reported. Slate reported on the groups on either side. Major medical and scientific organizations support tap water fluoridation as a safe way of preventing cavities. Opposing groups are more varied, including the Sierra Club, libertarian groups and even the local chapter of the NAACP. Anti-fluoridation lobbying is generally homegrown, Slate reported, and has received far less funding than proponents they defeated.

Curious about the studies both sides have brought up to support their positions? Livescience's reporting slants toward generally anti-fluoride studies, while Slate underlines those studies' weaknesses.

Got A Wound? Science Says Rub Some Dirt In It

Clay Dillow — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:15:12 GMT

Antibacterial clays can kill antibiotic-resistant E. coli and MRSA, researchers found.

The colloquial medical advice “rub some dirt in it” appears to have some merit. Researchers at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute have been experimenting with different clays, and it appears in research presented in the journal PLoS ONE that they’ve come across a family of antibacterial clays capable of killing pathogens ranging from E. coli to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as hard-to-kill MRSA.

Clays have been used as medical tools for ages, appearing in ancient medical texts going back as far as 3,000 B.C. Topically, they were used to treat wounds, a practice that became common in the 19th century. Early practitioners of clay therapy noted that clays tended to aid in healing, in reducing inflammation of wounds, and in pain management--though they couldn’t have known why exactly.

It turns out that’s probably because some clays--particularly clays rich in a certain group of metallic ions--work as antibacterial agents. In their study, the ASU researchers tested a variety of different clays with similar mineral composition but ranging compositions of metallic ions against E. coli and MRSA. They found that five metal ions--iron, copper, cobalt, nickel, and zinc--could fight the two bacterial strains, both of which are increasingly difficult to kill using standard antibiotics and antibacterials.

That doesn’t mean these clays are silver bullet or any kind of antibacterial panacea. Not all clays are created equal and some lack the necessary concentrations of the necessary metal ions. Moreover, clays can contain other metals as well, like cadmium, lead, mercury, and arsenic (if you weren’t paying attention in chem class, these are not metals you particularly want to introduce to your bloodstream).

But the researchers are optimistic that medicinal clays could find widespread use in certain therapeutic roles, particularly as bandaging agents as their absorptive and adhering characteristics make them somewhat ideal for sealing out external pathogens as well as absorbing and removing unwanted particulates or devitalized tissues from wounds--all while delivering a dose of antibacterial ions to the affected area.

Was The Oklahoma City Tornado The Worst In History?

Colin Lecher — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:45:00 GMT

A disaster by the numbers.

Monday's tornado in the Oklahoma City area killed at least 24 people and leveled a massive number of homes and businesses. The L.A. Times quoted weather officials as saying the twister "was at least in the same league" as the harrowing tornado that struck the same area in 1999, while one local meteorologist called it "the worst tornado in the history of the world."

There's no single measurement that totally describes the destructive force of a tornado, but there are several ways to get a sense of the impact.

THE ENHANCED FUJITA SCALE

This scale, employed since 2007 in the U.S. as a measure of damage that a tornado causes, rates destruction from zero to five: crews survey the damage, then assign the tornado an estimated wind speed based on that damage. There's a long list of how to quantify the damage: uprooted trees indicate a certain wind speed, and same goes for window damage at strip malls. (Here are some photos that show the rough idea.) The scale runs from EF-0 (65-85 mph) to EF-5 (more than 200 mph). The first tornado to receive an EF-5 ranking hit Greensburg, Kansas on May 4, 2007. Here's a description, via The Weather Underground, of what an EF-5 is like: "Incredible damage. Strong frame houses leveled off foundations and swept away; automobile-sized missiles fly through the air in excess of 100 m (109 yd); high-rise buildings have significant structural deformation; incredible phenomena will occur."

It's tough to compare tornadoes using the EF scale alone, since several make it to the EF-5 level. The Oklahoma City tornado was initially rated as at least an EF-4 by the National Weather Service (meaning 166 to 200 mph winds), but after further surveys of the damage, the National Weather Service revised it to an EF-5.

DAMAGE DONE

Dr. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground has a breakdown of the five costliest tornadoes of all time:

1) Joplin, Missouri, May 22, 2011, $2.8 billion
2) Topeka, Kansas, June 8, 1966, $1.7 billion
3) Lubbock, Texas, May 11, 19780, $1.5 billion
4) Bridge Creek-Moore, Oklahoma, May 3, 1999, $1.4 billion
5) Xenia, Ohio, April 3, 1974, $1.1 billion
6) Omaha, Nebraska, May 6, 1975, $1 billion

This event is being compared to No. 4, the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado, which struck almost the same area and was rated an EF-5 after it hit. That tornado, according to Masters, "damaged or destroyed 8132 homes, 1041 apartments, 260 businesses, 11 public buildings and seven churches." Early reports--maybe stressing very early, in this case--suggest the damage could be considerably worse than that event. (The front page of yesterday's Oklahoman proclaimed: "Worse Than May 3rd.") That could certainly prove true: Masters expects "that after the damage tally from the May 20 tornado is added up, Moore will hold two of the top five spots on the list of most damaging tornadoes in history, and the May 20 tornado may approach the Joplin tornado as the costliest twister of all-time."

PHYSICAL MEASUREMENTS

Smithsonian magazine examined a few other ways, besides the EF scale, that tornadoes might be measured. For example: estimates put the length of the tornado at between one mile and two, likely below the record 2.5 miles of a 2004 hurricane that hit Nebraska, which was ranked at F-4 (on an older version of the scale still comparable to EF-4) and only killed one person. Although the Oklahoma twister has been upgraded to EF-5, it still likely did not come close to the record-holder for wind speed--the 302-mph tornado that hit the same area on May 3, 1999.

LIVES LOST

But natural disasters like this will be remembered for the death toll. Although early estimates suggested it could be as high as 91, that number has since fallen to 24 confirmed deaths, which could rise as more bodies are uncovered. In the 40 minutes the tornado was on the ground, at least 237 people were injured.

The Tri-State Tornado is the deadliest twister in U.S. history, lasting for 3.5 hours in 1925 and killing 695 people in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. That makes it an outlier: the second most deadly tornado in history, the Great Natchez Tornado, killed 317 people in 1840. Worldwide, the deadliest tornado ever was the 1989 Bangladesh twister that killed at least 1,300 people.

THE OKLAHOMA CITY TORNADO

As Smithsonian points out, there are certainly some measurements, like time on the ground and sheer size, that made this tornado especially deadly, although it may not be the at the very top of any of those measurements. When all the damage has been accounted for, though, it might rank as one of the most damaging tornadoes in U.S. history, just thankfully not the deadliest.

These Self-Assembling Nanoflowers Are As Beautiful As They Are Tiny

Rose Pastore — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:32:37 GMT

Harvard researchers grew these lovely microscopic gardens using delicate chemical reactions.

Click here to enter the gallery

A nanorose may not smell as sweet as an organic one, but the red petals on this micron-scale flower are unquestionably just as beautiful. At Harvard University, materials scientists have perfected an underwater chemical reaction that results in these gorgeous, self-assembling nanoflowers.

The microscopic structures are crystals that build themselves, one molecule at a time, on a glass surface submerged in a beaker of water, barium chloride, and sodium silicate. When carbon dioxide from the air naturally dissolves in the water, it sets off the chemical reaction that causes the crystals to form.

Though the colors in these images are artificial, the intricate shapes of the nanoflowers are very real. The twists, curves, and ruffles are created when the scientists shift the components of the chemical reaction; the crystals naturally "grow" toward or away from various chemical gradients. For example, the broad-leaf shapes you'll see in the gallery formed in solutions with extra carbon dioxide.

"When you look through the electron microscope, it really feels a bit like you’re diving in the ocean, seeing huge fields of coral and sponges," says Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and lead author of the paper in Science. "Sometimes I forget to take images because it's so nice to explore."

Click here to see more of these amazing creations.

The Moore, Oklahoma Tornado, From Space

Dan Nosowitz — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:37:30 GMT

What the destructive tornado looked like from satellites high above.

Click to launch the gallery.

Satellites from NASA, NOAA, and others captured the devastating tornado that this week destroyed many towns and houses and claimed the lives of several (the exact death toll is still unclear) in Oklahoma. Click above for a tour through those shots.

[via Flickr]

The Oklahoma Tornado, From Space

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:37:30 GMT

Synthetic Biologists Engineer A Custom Flu Vaccine In A Week

Francie Diep — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:08:16 GMT

A synthetic biology method proves its chops.

A copy of the genetic code of an H7N9 avian flu—similar to, but not exactly the same as the flu that has killed 36 people in China—arrived in a lab in Boston Easter Sunday, 2011. By Saturday, scientists had made a vaccine against it, the Boston Globe reported.

That turnaround time is weeks faster than the current best vaccine-making methods. The new shot-making strategy still needs to undergo approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It also needs tweaking before it would able to make the large amounts of vaccine needed during a flu outbreak, the editors of the journal Science wrote in a summary of the work. If the method does make it to market, however, it could speed the response to flu pandemics.

"I think it does have great potential for more rapidly preparing vaccines for new strains as they evolve," Robert Finberg, chair of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and a flu researcher, told the Boston Globe.

The new method uses synthetic biology, or the creation of biological materials, such as viruses, without using nature's usual reproductive methods. In this case, scientists from the U.S. pharmaceutical company Novartis and from the J. Craig Venter Institute built H7N9 viruses from looking at the genetic code they received on Easter. Normally, vaccine manufacturers don't make copies of a flu virus simply from a "paper" (In this case it was electronic, like an email) copy of its code. They actually have to have some virus to make more virus.

It's as if in the past, scientists always needed to have a burger on hand to make more burgers. The Novartis and J. Craig Venter Institute scientists, on the other hand, looked at a recipe for a burger and made more burgers from individual ingredients. Scientists around the world have previously used synthetic biology to engineer bacteria. J. Craig Venter, namesake of the institute involved in making the new vaccine, made a bacterium almost entirely from scratch in 2010.

Once they had their synthetic H7N9, scientists made a vaccine from a benign form of the virus that stimulates the human immune system, but can't give people the actual flu. They also came up with some other innovations helped them speed the vaccine-making process. The Boston Globe has more details.

Making the original virus synthetically helps with speed because it's much faster to send electronic copies of a virus' code around the world than it is to carefully ship samples of the actual virus, MIT Technology Review reported.

The biggest bottleneck now is performing the tests that will convince regulatory agencies that this method makes safe, effective vaccines, the Science editors wrote. Science published a paper about the synthetic vaccine last week.

These Self-Assembling Nanoflowers Are As Beautiful As They Are Tiny

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:59:24 GMT

Harvard researchers grew these lovely microscopic gardens using delicate chemical reactions.

FEMA's 'Waffle House Index' Rates Moore, Oklahoma, At Disaster Level Yellow

Clay Dillow — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:15:46 GMT

No we're not kidding, and yes that's a good thing.

Moore, Okla., is currently running at Waffle House Index Level Yellow, and that’s not a joke. Craig Fugate, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has created his own informal system of rating disasters in a humanizing way, using the status of the local Waffle House as a measure of the impact of a natural disaster on a region or neighborhood. And if that sounds patronizing or nonsensical, read on, because it makes a lot of sense.

After a disaster--especially one of the magnitude of a Hurricane Katrina or the tornado that struck the southern Oklahoma City metro area on Monday--it takes a while to really gauge the state of things on the ground and to assess the overall level of damage. There are aerial photos of the devastation, sure, as well as anecdotal accounts of what’s happening on one block or the next, but a snapshot of the real impact on a community is hard to come by until an official accounting of the damage--both human and economic--can be made. And that takes a while.

Then there’s Waffle House. Waffle House is known--along with Home Depot, Wal Mart, and Lowe’s--for its resiliency during and in the days following a disaster. The company maintains pretty serious disaster planning year-round, as it sees itself and the service it provides--hot meals and hot coffee for first responders and affected members of the community--as important for helping communities get back on their feet. As such, Waffle House takes pride in its ability to remain open, or to quickly reopen, after disaster strikes a region. Fugate allegedly first used the phrase back in 2011 following the Joplin, Mo., tornado, stating to the Wall Street Journal that if you arrive at a place and the Waffle House is closed, you know the disaster is bad.

Moreover, Waffle House’s 1,600 locations are spread across 25 states in hurricane- and tornado-prone states, from Florida to Arizona and throughout the Midwest, as far north and east as Pennsylvania. And the restaurants are remarkably consistent throughout the country, in their construction, their menus, and their disaster-readiness. They all require basic utilities like electricity, water, and gas, though they can run at limited capability without them (by trucking in generators, propane, and clean water). All that makes for a good measure of comparison across the nation.

Fugate’s system is three-level color system. Waffle House Index Green means the Waffle House is still operational and serving a full menu. Yellow denotes a Waffle House running at limited capacity, usually on a generator and serving only a partial menu. A closed, badly damaged, or completely destroyed Waffle House draws a red rating.

During Katrina Waffle House had to close 100 restaurants, earning it red status. But within 24 hours 60 were up and running again, upgrading many neighborhoods to yellow almost immediately (seven locations were fully destroyed). But it’s important to keep in mind that the index is more a measure of the status on the ground after a disaster--the availability of generators or grid electricity, or of clean water, for instance--than a measure of the disaster itself. The 2011 tornado that devastated Joplin, Mo., closed none of the areas Waffle Houses. So the region remained yellow and green even though 162 people were killed.

The yellow rating for Moore is something of a courtesy rating at this point, as the power at the single Waffle House location there remains cut and the generator was still in transit last we heard. So Moore’s Waffle Hosue is technically still closed (level red), though it should be up and running shortly (by the time you read this we may already be at a hard Waffle House Yellow). And while hot meals and hot coffee can’t make up for everything that was lost in Moore on Monday afternoon, if you’re going to rebuild a community it can't hurt to start on a full stomach.

[Guardian]

FYI: Could Climate Change Cause More (And Bigger) Tornadoes?

Shaunacy Ferro — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:45:00 GMT

A warming world pulls the two factors of tornado formation in opposite directions.

Scientists generally agree that climate change will increase the likelihood of extreme weather events, but the jury is still out on how tornadoes will fare in a warming world. Tornadoes are fickle beasts, and it remains tough to predict a tornado a week from now, much less what they might be like over the next few years.

"The most common finding is a warming environment leads to more storms and more intense storms, but intensity doesn’t necessarily mean organizing and producing tornadoes," says Grady Dixon, an associate professor of geosciences at Mississippi State University who studies tornado climatology. "It takes a certain interaction."

Jeff Trapp, a professor of atmospheric science at Purdue University, says that while it's unclear how the intensity or frequency of tornadoes will increase, there may be more days featuring conditions ripe for twisters. "We would see an increase in the number of days that could be favorable for severe thunderstorm and tornado formation," he says. The tornado season, which varies by region, could be expanded.

In yet another theory, Harold Brooks of the National Weather Center recently told the AP that there could be a sort of condensing effect--more tornadoes occurring on fewer days of the year.

Tornado patterns have been especially wonky as of late: 2011 marked the second-deadliest tornado season for the U.S., with 1,700 tornadoes (including the particularly destructive Joplin one) and 553 deaths, according to the AP. And then, after an early start to the tornado season in 2012, the numbers reversed. The period between May 2012 and April 2013 featured the fewest tornadoes on record and the second-lowest death toll, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's U.S. Severe Weather Blog.

Where we’re going as a community is to try to have climate models that are finer resolution.It's also difficult to discern whether we're seeing more tornadoes in recent years, or if awareness of them has just gone up. Since the 1990s, Dixon says, there's been an increase in tornadoes in the Midwest and northern Great Plains region and a decrease in the southern Great Plains, but that could be merely a result of better reporting.

Oklahoma is a magnet for tornadoes because it's right at the convergence point where humid air from the Gulf of Mexico collides with cooler air from the high terrain of Mexico and the Rocky Mountains. Tornadoes require strong upper level winds, up to three miles above the ground, to contrast with slower currents near ground level in what's called wind shear. It often occurs when warm temperatures from the south run into colder temperatures from the north.

A warming climate creates warmer temperatures in the north, so in that respect, decreasing wind shear, so it could actually lead to fewer tornadoes, according to Dixon.

However, another factor suggests that climate change will do the exact opposite. Convective available potential energy, or CAPE--essentially the amount of energy that's available to for storms--is determined by moisture and temperature differences between the ground and higher regions of the atmosphere. "The CAPE increases with time in a globally warmed world, mainly because the temperature near the ground and lower parts of the atmosphere increases and becomes more humid," Trapp says. "In a globally warmed future world, that thunderstorm should be more intense."

Because of these conflicting factors, "what we don’t know is how this necessarily affects tornado intensity and frequency," Trapp says.

His research deals with climate change models, which are still very coarse when it comes to tornado prediction--a single pixel can be up to 100 km on a side, while individually storms are typically only half that size. "Where we’re going as a community is to try to have climate models that are finer and finer resolution, like how digital cameras have higher and higher resolution," he says. With higher resolution models, researchers hope to be able to analyze storm simulations that would allow them to determine which types of storms form tornadoes with more certainty.

FYI: Are Unvaccinated Kids Really Causing The Whooping Cough Resurgence?

Francie Diep — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:15:00 GMT

Deadly pertussis is on the rise in the U.S., but is it really the fault of the anti-vaccine crowd?

There were more cases of whooping cough in the U.S. in 2012 than in any year since 1955, provisional data suggest. The disease, which still sounds a little old-fashioned to these young ears, has been on the rise in America since 1980. What's going on?

It's easy to blame parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids, based on anti-science beliefs. Indeed, researchers have found that unvaccinated kids have sparked whooping cough (scientifically known as pertussis) and measles outbreaks in certain schools.

Yet because their numbers are small, they're not enough to explain the overall U.S. rise. "We don't believe the small numbers of parents who are refusing pertussis vaccines for their children are driving the large numbers of cases we’re seeing across the country," Alison Patti, a health education specialist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote in an email response to my questions.

Instead, the CDC attributes the trend to doctors' increased awareness of the disease, improved diagnostic tests, and a newer version of the vaccine that kids began receiving in the 1990s. That last reason has gotten extra scientific oomph recently, with the publication of several studies over the past year.

The newer vaccine is effective, says Nicola Klein, a physician and researcher at the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center in California. "It just doesn't last as long as we would like."

Klein performed the latest study to find that infants who received the newer vaccine, which has fewer side effects than its predecessor, begin to lose their immunity around age 8 or 10, Science reported. At that age, whooping cough is uncomfortable, but not usually dangerous. In infants, however, pertussis can be fatal.

The difference is that the older vaccine killed versions of the Bordetella pertussis bacteria. It offered long-lasting immunity, but it caused fever and severe pain in most infants. In some babies, it caused seizures or fainting fits—pretty scary for a parent. What followed was a lawsuit that led to the adoption of new vaccines that contain purified pertussis proteins, but not the entire bacterium. You can check out the whole history in Science. One milestone was that in 1991, an Institute of Medicine report found that the so-called whole-cell vaccine doesn't cause brain damage, as the parents in the lawsuit contended, but by then the changeover was already underway.

For those who like to extol the tougher characteristics of earlier generations… yes, some of the scarier side effects for the whole-cell vaccine probably had to do with its longer-lasting protection. "Probably some of that more severe reaction was because of its more brisk immune response," says David Witt, another Kaiser Permanente physician who has studied pertussis outbreaks in California.

But the whole-cell pertussis vaccine isn't coming back to the U.S., Witt says. U.S. companies no longer make it and if they were to start again, they would have to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration just as if they were introducing a whole new drug. That's probably not worth the risk. Instead, companies are more likely to work on a better, longer-lasting vaccine that doesn't have those whole-cell side effects. "It's probably the better solution," Witt says.

Meanwhile, everyone I talked with said it's important for kids to get all of their doses of the whooping cough vaccine on schedule. The CDC also recommends pregnant women, plus anybody who's in close contact with infants, get the vaccine.

Climate Change Will Increase Heat-Related Deaths In NYC, Study Says

Shaunacy Ferro — Tue, 21 May 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Summer in the city could get a whole lot more miserable in the coming decades, according to a new report.

Warming weather could make summer in the city deadly in the next few decades, according to a study published this week in Nature Climate Change. By the 2020s, New York City will see 22 percent more heat-related deaths per year compared with 1980s, the researchers predicted.

Urban centers like New York City are especially sensitive to extreme temperatures because of the heat island effect. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the annual mean temperature of a city with a million or more people can be up to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than its more rural surroundings. (NYC currently clocks in with more than 8 million.)

Using 16 computer models of present and future climate change, scientists at Columbia University and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that while warmer temperatures would reduce the number of deaths due to cold in the winter, the increase in heat-related deaths in summer months would cause a net 6.2 percent spike in weather-related mortality per year in the city by the 2020s.

By the 2080s, there could be as much as a 91 percent increase in heat deaths compared to 1980s levels:

"What our study suggests is that the heat effects of climate change dominate the winter warming benefits that might also come: climate change will cause more deaths through heat than it will prevent during winter," lead author Patrick Kinney, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, told The Guardian.

The study did not take into account potential changes in the use of air conditioning, heat alerts or cooling shelters in the future. Those factors can help mitigate the risk of extreme heat for vulnerable populations like the elderly.

[The Guardian]

Why Are Tornadoes So Hard To Predict?

Francie Diep — Tue, 21 May 2013 18:30:00 GMT

People in the path of a tornado typically get only 10 minutes of warning. Why?

Sixteen minutes before a tornado touched down in Newcastle, Okla., yesterday, the U.S. Storm Prediction Center sent a warning to the area. That heads-up was longer than the average warning time of 8 to 10 minutes.

Why are tornado predictions so short-term, especially compared to other predictions we're familiar with, such as weather forecasts or hurricane warnings?

Hurricanes and blizzards show up on satellites days beforehand, but the conditions that favor tornados appear much more quickly and unexpectedly, the Associated Press reported in 2011. Tornadoes are just made of much finer print, so to speak. Their paths are smaller and they last for shorter periods of time, so predicting any particular tornado requires a fine-grain understanding that's more difficult for scientists.

Instead, the Storm Prediction Center issues tornado watches hours ahead of time that cover very broad areas. In 2011, the Associated Press reported on a watch that included 14 states.

The Storm Prediction Center looks for patterns in temperature and wind flow that create certain levels of moisture, instability, lift and wind shear, according to the center's extensive frequently asked questions page. Even then, its predictions may be uncertain because tornado conditions don't always look the same. A number of different scenarios can result in tornados, while similar scenarios may not always produce tornados. Slight changes that meteorologists can't currently measure may tip a thunderstorm to form a tornado—or not, Storm Prediction Center warning coordinator Greg Carbin told Scientific American in 2011.

Researchers are now working on forecasts that apply to areas smaller than a state, but larger than a county, Garbin said. With future improvements, meteorologists could get about an hour's warning on tornados, but not much more. Researchers just can't read the fine print that closely.

Meanwhile, the Storm Prediction Center has a webpage of tornado safety tips, many geared toward the short lead times that people typically have before a twister.

Scientists Reveal The Cause Of The Irish Potato Famine

Dan Nosowitz — Tue, 21 May 2013 18:00:00 GMT

One of the most deadly pathogens in human history has been pinpointed.

It's widely acknowledged that Phytophthora infestans, a sort of fungus-like pathogen also known as potato blight, was responsible for the mid-19th-century potato famine that reduced Ireland's population, through death and emigration, by nearly 25 percent. But scientists have just uncovered the specific strain of this pathogen through a first-of-its kind procedure--by analyzing potato plants that have been dead for more than a hundred years.

The Irish Potato Famine lasted just a few years, from around 1845 to 1852, but killed about a million people and forced the emigration of around a million more. The Irish population at that point was reliant on one specific white potato, the Irish lumper, as a primary food source for about a third of the country. Potatoes, like most other members of the nightshade family (tomatoes, eggplant), are native to the New World, not to Ireland. In the mid-19th century, travel between the New and Old World increased, bringing over new strains of Phytophthora infestans. One of those strains eventually mutated into a killer.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology took dried plants, some from as far back as 170 years ago, and found that there was still trace amounts of DNA from the Phytophthora infestans. Previously, it was assumed that a strain known as US-1 was responsible for the Irish Potato Famine, but this research found that the strain on these dried potato plants is not, in fact, US-1. It's related, but genetically unique, and US-1 was more likely to be the strain that replaced the culprit after it was eliminated. They've named the new strain HERB-1.

This is the first time that scientists have decoded the genome of a plant pathogen from dried plants, and the researchers say that the study holds promise for the future. "These findings will greatly help us to understand the dynamics of emerging pathogens," one of the researchers says.

The study will appear in a coming issue of the journal eLife.

Reconstructing The Oklahoma Tornado From Start To Finish, In Videos

Clay Dillow — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:00:00 GMT

This is what real destruction looks like.

The devastation wrought by the mile-wide, EF-4 tornado that ripped through Moore, Okla., and south Oklahoma City yesterday is really difficult to put into words. You could start with the huge path of destruction, more than a mile wide at places, that wiped entire neighborhoods clean off the map like they were never even there. It’s more difficult when you get to the two elementary schools--concrete and cinder block buildings that gave way to the truly devastating force of this storm.

It’s tough to describe and easier to show. And given the camera-fication of everything these days, there’s plenty of footage floating around the web today, enough that one can pretty much reconstruct this twister--which was on the ground for 40 minutes with winds up to 200 miles per hour--from start to finish. Which is exactly what we’ve done below.

1. In Newcastle, Okla., (just southwest of Moore and due west of Norman), the funnel drops from the sky and starts picking up steam (and debris).

2. By the time this thing reaches Moore, it’s a monster. Even seasoned storm chasers can’t believe what they are seeing.

3. It doesn’t get better. The video below begins with footage shot near South Moore High School but culminates with scenes shot from a devastated neighborhood just minutes after the storm more or less flattened it.

4. Another perspective captured by a storm chaser from the east side of Moore offers a clear view of the massive, swirling debris field gathered by the funnel. At this point the tornado has traveled roughly three-quarters of its total journey and is tearing through the heart of Moore.

5. Just west of Lake Stanley Draper the tornado stops moving and begins to rope out and dissipate.

6. And of course there’s the timelapse, which quickly conveys--in a few brief, sped-up clips--just how destructive this storm was as it gathered steam and then slammed into the sprawling suburbia of Moore.

Megapixels: A Parasitic Worm Infects An Ant

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:35:08 GMT

In the jungles of Belize last January, entomologist Alex Wild noticed something odd about the trap-jaw ants passing through his outdoor insect photography class: They all had shrunken heads and swollen abdomens. A day after making the observation, Wild and his students came upon an ant with a worm bursting out of its side. Parasites were at work. Nematode worms enter the ants as larvae and grow inside the ants’ body cavity, siphoning off nutrients and distorting their hosts’ natural anatomy. When the eight-inch-long nematodes are ready to mate a few weeks later, they push their way out of their half-inch-long hosts, killing them.

INFECTED
In the abdomen of a trap-jaw ant, a parasitic nematode lives off nutrients from the surrounding fluids and changes the morphology of its host.

HEALTHY
The jaws of a parasite-free worker can snap shut on prey in just 1/10,000 of a second—the fastest known mechanical action in nature.

Cold Fusion Machine Gets Third-Party Verification, Inventor Says

Francie Diep — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:31:12 GMT

The E-Cat strikes again.

A well-known promoter of cold fusion technology—who's been demonstrating his latest invention here and there over the past two years—has announced that an independent third party has verified his machine works. That is, it creates a large amount of energy in the form of heat, far more than it consumes.

If Andrea Rossi's cold fusion reactor, called the E-Cat, really worked, it could power the world cheaply and without pollutants. Rossi has previously backed out of third-party testing with NASA and the University of Bologna in Italy, as Popular Science reported in November, but now he's saying that a team has tested the E-Cat.

His new third party verification says the E-Cat creates at least tenfold more power than energy sources at work today. A paper about the tests is available on arXiv, a database for publishing physics papers, often before they're peer reviewed. The paper, which is not peer-reviewed, leaves out crucial details, for example referring to "unknown additives" instead of specifying what chemicals actually go into the reaction.

There's plenty of reason to be skeptical. Rossi has a history of blocking even simple tests of the E-Cat. Many established experts are skeptical of his invention and with the idea that cold fusion is even possible. Even among those who work on cold fusion—often tinkerers not associated with major research institutions—Rossi doesn't necessarily inspire confidence. He has previously passed off spurious inventions, including a machine that was supposed to turn waste into oil.

Inside The World's Most Ambitious Eco-City

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:04:00 GMT

Why would a petro-state erect a solar-powered eco-metropolis in the middle of the Arabian desert? To change the world.

At first glance, Masdar City appears a mirage. From a distance it looks like a single multicolored building, standing lonely on the horizon. Part of the illusion is due to the city’s strange setting: next to Abu Dhabi airport, just across the highway from the Arabian Gulf, in a deeply inhospitable stretch of desert. Between it and downtown Abu Dhabi lie 20 miles of the most wasteful urban development I’ve ever seen—a featureless plain studded with ostentatious walled houses the size of the Supreme Court and crisscrossed by empty six-lane boulevards. But the illusion is also a matter of density. Masdar City, an $18-billion experiment, will hold 40,000 residents in only two square miles.

As the world’s most ambitious eco-city, Masdar does not allow cars. Visitors must instead leave their vehicles in a giant garage at the city’s northern edge. As I pulled in, a trim Westerner wearing a dark suit despite the heat stepped from the shade to introduce himself. Stephen Severance, a 45-year-old American, is the city’s program manager. He came to Masdar four years ago, after working at the consulting firm Booz Allen.

Severance led me past ranks of parked cars to a set of smoky glass doors, which opened with a whoosh upon a marble lobby. Beyond a second glass wall, Masdar’s Personal Rapid Transit pods, or PRTs, sat waiting. The little white driverless cars function as an ecological upgrade for passengers who have ditched their outmoded internal-combustion machines. Severance and I took seats facing each other, the automatic door slid closed, and the little pod began scooting through what looked like a gigantic basement at 15 miles an hour. It ran almost silently on rubber tires, following magnets buried in the floor and using proximity sensors to avoid collision.

Under the original plans, the PRTs were supposed to provide transportation across all of Masdar City, Severance explained. But to make space for them beneath the buildings, engineers would have needed to construct the entire city on 20-foot-tall pedestals. They built the existing center of Masdar City in this way—about a third of a square mile—but elevating the whole metropolis was unaffordable. The rest of Masdar will be built at ground level, and its transportation infrastructure remains undetermined: electric buses, perhaps, or solar-powered carts.

Severance gestured at the pod. “This is a little, I don’t know, Jetsons,” he said. “It was a nice idea, and we’ve proven that it works. We’re running right now on solar power. These cars get where they’re going and don’t run into each other.” But the PRT line that Severance and I boarded was the only functioning one, he told me, and the PRTs follow only one route: from the garage to Masdar Institute, about half a mile.

As the pod slid into its parking space, an electronic voice reminded us to take our belongings. We stepped into the lobby of the PRT terminal underneath the institute and followed a sweeping spiral staircase to an open-air courtyard at street level. A half-dozen mid-rise buildings rose in a cluster, separated by a tight maze of connected courtyards. One building, a terra-cotta–colored apartment house, is home to the 119 students of the Masdar Institute—the city’s only residents so far. Another, wrapped in a steel facade, houses the institute itself. Severance led me on a tour of the small and strange collection of businesses that make up the commercial district, among them a sushi restaurant, a coffee shop, a mini supermarket, a travel agency, and a cellphone-company office.

This small, artificial pocket of urbanity didn’t feel like the seed of a true metropolis, but that’s the plan. Over the next 12 years, this little cluster of buildings will grow into two square miles of dense mixed-use real estate. A recycling plant is already under construction. There will be a functioning smart grid and improved power generation and distribution. The city will draw residents on the promise of quiet walkable streets and a sustainable lifestyle. By 2025, Severance told me, Masdar, Arabic for “source,” will have transformed itself from university campus and commercial mishmash to a working city of the future.
* * *

THE EXPERIMENT BEGINS
In 2006, the government of Abu Dhabi, the largest and most oil rich of the United Arab Emirates, announced that it intended to spend $22 billion to become a leader in renewable energy. Abu Dhabi is the very definition of a petro-state. About the size of South Carolina, it holds the world’s sixth-largest oil reserves—20 percent more than Russia. The U.A.E., a nation that contains fewer people than the Los Angeles metropolitan area, has the third-highest ecological footprint per capita in the world.

Unlikely as it seemed, the government of this tiny state on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf proposed to do something no other nation had seriously attempted. It would build a carbon-neutral, zero-waste city from the ground up on an empty piece of desert. The entire city would be an experiment, a clean-technology incubator on a grand scale, powered by renewable energy projects. A graduate-level, sustainable-technology research university in partnership with MIT would serve as the idea factory, and a fleet of driverless electric cars would shuttle the inhabitants from place to place. Over every building, engineers would mount huge photovoltaic roofs. The initial drawings looked like fantasy. The Entire City Would Be An Experiment, A Clean-Tech Incubator On A Grand Scale.

For such a pillar of the oil economy to express such an interest in renewable energy reeks of either penitence—like the munitions tycoon Alfred Nobel sponsoring a peace prize—or outright fraud. But as the years passed, the project became real. High-efficiency apartment houses, offices, and businesses began to rise. The driverless electric cars materialized—and they worked. The fledgling city consumed less electricity than its solar arrays generated, and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology assembled a faculty of 76 PhDs, 13 of them from MIT. Even at the height of the financial crisis, as renewable energy projects stalled around the world, Masdar City moved forward. In 2009, the International Renewable Energy Agency made the unlikely selection of Abu Dhabi as its world headquarters. Then, in 2011, the Masdar Institute graduated its first class of 70 master’s students. But it wasn’t until 2012, when the German technology giant Siemens was putting the finishing touches on its new Middle East headquarters in Masdar City, that the experiment morphed from grand gesture to something much more significant: a new and viable model for renewable energy development on a massive scale.

But even a city of the future, muscled into existence by oil money and sheer will, was not immune to the troubles of the present. The financial crisis of 2008 forced planners to scale back their ambitions. After the crash, Masdar shaved about $4 billion from its budget, and engineers had to abandon the most futuristic features. The elaborate solar-collecting roofs disappeared from the drawing board; instead, they’ll situate photovoltaic arrays at the edge of town. The PRTs devolved from a citywide system to a parking-garage shuttle. Complicating matters, Masdar had originally intended to desalinate its own water using the sun, but the local well water turns out to be three times as salty as the Gulf’s. Desalinating it would require significantly more energy than planned and, perhaps worse, would create a gigantic brine-disposal problem. Instead, Severance told me, Masdar will aggressively monitor the use of water. Compared with the bold vision Masdar once was, the adjusted plans can’t help but disappoint.
* * *

THE NEW ENERGY MODEL
Oil made settled life possible in Abu Dhabi. The Trucial Coast Oil Development Company discovered the first commercial oil field here in 1960. At the time, the settlement was little more than a collection of camels and bedouin tents, a port where men in loincloths waded through the surf to unload dhows by hand. Then, in less than half a century, oil brought the Emirates from abject poverty to the world’s sixth-highest GDP per capita. Abu Dhabi is now a roaring metropolis filled with flamboyant skyscrapers—a tower shaped like a giant coin standing
on edge, another like a 40-story videogame joystick. Commuters drive Ferraris and Jaguars. Malls stock Piaget and Versace.

Yet Emiratis are planning for a post-oil world. In 2002, the Emirates’ crown prince, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, ordered the creation of Mubadala Development Corp., an investment firm owned by the government and dedicated to diversifying the nation’s economy beyond oil and gas. In 2005, Mubadala’s 31-year-old energy chief, Sultan al-Jaber, set off on a seven-month tour of renewable energy projects in such places as South Korea, Germany, and Silicon Valley and reached a very futuristic conclusion. Renewable technology, he determined, was far more mature and practical than the investment world at the time seemed to believe. But the various interests necessary to develop it were not coordinated. Scientists were discovering new materials and technology that stalled before reaching market. Companies tried to market clean-energy products at a steep cost disadvantage to fossil fuels, and government regulators hadn’t a clue how to support them. “There wasn’t a true champion across the world for renewable energy,” Jaber told me. “In Oil And Gas, The Question Is ‘Why Innovate?’ Here
It Is ‘Why Not Innovate? Why Do It In The Normal Way If You Don’t Have To?’ ”

Masdar is intended to unify those elements by addressing everything there is to know about renewable energy—from the technology of generation and consumption to the economics of financing projects to the politics of getting them approved. “We’re trying to capture the whole thing,” said Bader al-Lamki, the 38-year-old director of Masdar Clean Energy, which builds and owns solar projects in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere and has a big stake in a gigantic offshore wind farm near Great Britain. Lamki and I were sitting in a temporary building at the edge of the Masdar City construction site; he adjusted the red-and-white ghotra draped around his head and neck and nodded to a South Asian gentleman in a blue smock serving us tea. “In other places, people are focusing on only one part,” he said. “Here, we integrate the whole value chain.”

Lamki’s division is one of four components of Masdar, the others being the Institute of Science and Technology; Masdar Capital, which bundles investors’ money into projects; and the centerpiece city itself. Already, the organization has led renewable energy projects in Spain, Tonga, Mauritania, and elsewhere in the Emirates. One of Lamki’s most surprising prospects is in Saudi Arabia, which expects to have to triple its electricity production in the next 20 years. The Saudis already consume within their borders almost a third of the oil they produce, which is in large part due to air conditioning. They’re talking with Lamki’s group about trying to meet some of their future demand with power from the sun, the one resource the country has in greater abundance than oil.
* * *
MAKING SOLAR WORK
If it’s to prove anything, Masdar must get solar power right. Abu Dhabi, where the temperature reaches 120°F and every drop of water must be desalinated, now burns so much natural gas to generate power that it has become a net importer. With Masdar, the country is trying to show that it can create huge quantities of electricity without fossil fuels.

Masdar has spawned a handful of solar projects so far, but the largest is a concentrated solar power plant about a hundred miles from the city; on my second day, I drove out to see it. This part of the Arabian Peninsula looks less like the billowing-dune set of Lawrence of Arabia than like a vast plain of kitty litter. Crossing it in a rented marshmallow of a Kia was a 90-minute experiment in sensory deprivation. Airborne dust so obscured the horizon that the beige desert blended seamlessly with a beige sky.

Humans have generated heat by concentrating the sun’s rays at least since Archimedes reportedly used mirrors to torch a Roman fleet attacking Syracuse in the third century B.C. Masdar’s plant contains 192 parabolic-mirrored troughs, each a little longer than a football field and nearly 20-feet wide. A glass-clad steel pipe full of oil runs above each trough, at the focal point of the parabola. In the five minutes it takes electric pumps to push a gallon of oil up one trough and down another, the gathered rays of the sun heat that oil to a blistering 740°F. After leaving the troughs, the hot pipes pass through a chamber of water. The heat from the oil converts the water to steam, which turns a turbine. The cooled oil then flows back to the mirrored troughs for reheating. Computer-operated hydraulic pistons constantly rotate the mirrors to trace the sun’s arc across the sky.

After a safety briefing in a trailer, I donned a hard hat, joined a group of engineers, and was shuttled by truck into the reflector field. One of the troughs was pointed sideways for maintenance, so we walked along it to get a good look. By the time we reached the end, the heat was so intense that it had all but set the backs of our pants on fire.

Concentrated solar technology has been around for decades, but the Masdar plant was, when I visited last December, the biggest such project in the world. (This year, it will be surpassed by one near Phoenix and one in northern Nevada; several more, as much as four times the size of Masdar’s, are under construction worldwide.) It is growing fast, with almost two gigawatts—enough to power up to two million homes—expected online worldwide by the end of 2013 and four times that under contract. That’s small compared with other renewables, such as photovoltaic power, which generated 20 times as much electricity worldwide at the end of 2010, and wind, which generated 100 times as much that same year. But concentrated solar has advantages that wind and PV lack. Of the three, it alone generates heat, which, in addition to providing power, can be used to do things like desalinate water. And unlike photovoltaic, concentrated solar power plants can also contribute power much more cheaply at night because they store energy as heat instead of in expensive batteries. A Masdar-affiliated company built three concentrated solar power plants in Spain that use molten salt as its medium, improving heat capture and storage even further.Masdar Is A Model For Innovation, A Place Dedicated To The Generation Of Sustainable Ideas.

“Masdar wanted to make this simple and big, the first of its kind in the Middle East,” said Laurent Longuet, the plant’s project manager. Longuet came from the French oil-and-gas company Total and found the transition to the renewables world a pleasant shock. “Oil guys are very conservative,” he said. “In oil and gas, the question is ‘Why innovate?’ Here, it’s ‘Why not innovate? Why do it in the normal way if we don’t have to?’ ”

As we spoke, Longuet surprised me by conceding that his plant, though brand-new, is essentially obsolete. One of the concentrated solar power plants that Masdar built in Spain uses clustered mirrors around a central tower instead of parabolic troughs, which generates much higher temperatures. Also, between the time Longuet started building the Masdar plant in July 2010 and the day he switched it on in December, Chinese companies so flooded the market with inexpensive photovoltaic panels that concentrated solar lost a lot of its cost advantage. “If this turns out to be a transitional technology, that’s okay,” said Abdulaziz al-Obaidli, a wiry young Emirati engineer on Longuet’s staff. “We’re learning about optics. We’re learning about metallurgy, astronomy, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, manufacturing processes. It’s not just about power generation.” Obaidli also pointed out that the plant, obsolete or not, works. It can continue generating electricity for decades with, essentially, zero fuel costs.
* * *

INSIDE THE ENERGY LABS
The more time I spent at Masdar, the more I realized that every aspect of the city is a research project. Cloaked in a brushed steel facade, the Masdar Institute is a warren of electronics-cluttered benches, humming machinery, and glass dividers covered with algorithms scrawled in grease pencil. Each lab focuses on a different kind of technology. In the Bio-Energy and Environmental Lab, students are developing microbial fuel cells that could generate power while remediating waste. In the Smart Technology for Electric Vehicles and Automotive Systems lab, they are designing integrated networks that could connect drivers and vehicles to road and traffic conditions. There are labs that focus on artificial intelligence, nano-materials, nano-scale energy storage, solar cells, and more.

In the microsystems lab, I met Jerald Yoo, a professor of engineering from South Korea. Sitting at a bench littered with bits of wire and tools, he held up a black T-shirt with a silvery pattern silk-screened on it. “Printed circuits,” he said. Someday, he said, circuitry embedded into our clothes will constantly monitor our health, perhaps sending regular updates to our phones. That could have big implications for those with health conditions; for example, Yoo told me, bandages with his circuits could detect seizures 10 seconds before they happen. With that much warning, he said, a current can be applied to supress the seizure. I asked how his project related to Masdar’s goal of an energy-sustainable future. “The circuits have to consume extremely little energy,” he said. “Masdar’s mission is not only how to produce energy sustainably but also how to consume the least energy to do the work.”

The institute’s marquee project is a gigantic tower of mirrors on the edge of town called the Beam Down Solar Thermal Concentrator. The device not only concentrates solar rays to generate heat but will one day also split light into various wavelengths for scientific experiments, thermal energy production, and even more efficient energy generation. Its mastermind is Matteo Chiesa, a young Norwegian professor of nano-science who doused me with a fire hose of technical jargon in the apparent belief that I, too, held a PhD in applied mechanics. I nodded politely as he paced his office in a T-shirt and sandals, pulling on his long, wild hair. He struck me as a little stir-crazy. Chiesa has been in Masdar for five years—he claims to have been the institute’s 37th employee—and in that time, he and his colleagues have published more than 60 scientific papers. I asked him whether he liked being here. “Happiness means death,” he said. Until other residents beyond the students and faculty at the institute begin to call Masdar home, the place and its inhabitants will remain pretty isolated.
* * *
THE IMPOSSIBLE CITY
One particularly blazing afternoon, I joined Stephen Severance on a stone bench in the center of Masdar City. I wanted an impression of life in the city of the future. What struck me first was the almost shocking quiet of the place, devoid, as it was, of horns, idling trucks, and sirens. Then, I noticed the temperature. It was much cooler here than in downtown Abu Dhabi. For one thing, we were out of reach of the sun. Severance pointed out that the designers had angled the densely packed buildings to maximally shade one another and the courtyards in between. Pedestrians like us could sit in comfort and the buildings themselves require less air conditioning. Also keeping us cool was a stiff breeze. Severance stood and motioned me across the courtyard to a hollow tower on steel legs—a vertical tube 20 feet across and five stories high. The tower acts as a wind catcher, drawing in cool breezes from above the city and directing them down to the courtyard. The street-level breezes it generates are constant and virtually free. It’s not a modern invention—wind towers are likely Persian in origin and were used centuries before oil brought wealth to this part of the world. Engineers at Masdar improved upon the tradition by mounting computer-operated louvers at the top of the structure to maximize efficiency; the panels open and close according to prevailing winds. They also added misting units to cool the air even further.

On my way back to the hotel in Abu Dhabi, I made a wrong turn and ended up at the Al Wathba camel-race track, an eight-kilometer oval etched onto the hard, brown floor of the desert. From where I stood, in a grandstand built for thousands, the track disappeared into the distant haze.
I wandered down to the bedlam of the starting gate, expecting to be shooed away; instead, a beaming youth bearing a silver urn offered me tea in a china cup. As the camels lined up for the day’s third race, I noticed that they had on their backs not human riders but a metal contraption with a three-foot stick poking out the back. I struck up a conversation with a nearby cameraman, who turned out to be covering the race for Egyptian television. He explained that camel owners had pressed generations of children into service as jockeys, but after enough of them fell off and were trampled to death, the federation that regulates the sport ordered them replaced with robots.

The camels were lean and long-legged—genetically engineered at tremendous expense for speed and endurance. As they took off with their weird slow-motion gait, a phalanx of SUVs roared after them on a track, weaving for position and blaring their horns in a jumbled, parallel race. Each vehicle contained a trainer, shouting at his camel through a loudspeaker attached to the beast’s robot and stabbing at a button to remotely rap the beast with the three-foot stick. The trainers were in turn taking orders from the camels’ owners, who were watching at home on television and barking instructions via cellphone. The strategy, the cameraman explained, is to use the stick only when the camera is not on one’s own camel, because a camel seen on television as needing the stick is a less valuable camel than one that is not.

In the explosion of wealth and unchecked development that is Abu Dhabi, where ancient technology anchors a futuristic city and where robots ride camels, Masdar attempts to corral it all into a plan. Critics can complain that Masdar’s goals have been tempered, but that doesn’t make them irrelevant. If designers had not scaled back during the financial crisis, it would have signaled that the project was little more than a pricy plaything for an oil-rich emir. Instead, Masdar is bound to real-world economics, which means that it can teach real-world lessons. “You can talk about environmental sustainability all you want,” Lamki had told me, “but there has to be economic sustainability too.”

No one I spoke to during my visit to Masdar was under the illusion that the city was perfect. The world is not about to tear down its infrastructure and start over with walkable, solar-powered, smart-grid cities. In that regard, Masdar will never be a model for development. It is instead a model for innovation, a place dedicated more to the generation of sustainable ideas than sustainable technology. In creating an irreproducible city—isolated, expensive, and nearly empty—the architects of Masdar may be building a better place for us all.

Writer Dan Baum lives in Boulder, Colorado, and is the author of Gun Guys: A Road Trip.

Huge Tornado Flattens Towns Near Oklahoma City [Updated]

Rose Pastore — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:30:20 GMT

Preliminary reports from the National Weather Service classify the mile-wide tornado as an EF-4, with winds greater than 200 mph.

A massive tornado devastated suburbs south of Oklahoma City Monday afternoon, and rescue workers continue to search for people trapped by debris. Local TV stations are reporting multiple fatalities throughout the area. [UPDATED: The Oklahoma City medical examiner’s office says 24 bodies have been recovered as of Tuesday morning. That number could still rise.]

Preliminary reports from the National Weather Service classify the mile-wide tornado as an EF-4 (the second highest ranking on the Enhanced Fujita scale), with winds greater than 200 mph. The White House has offered the state all possible federal help.

Emergency workers in Moore, Okla., are currently searching for third graders believed to be trapped in Plaza Towers Elementary school, which was destroyed by the tornado. [UPDATED: At 7:30 p.m. ET, KFOR journalist Lance West reported that it is now a recovery mission at the elementary school, and workers are searching for the bodies of about 24 children.] All of the school's fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students are believed to be accounted for.

Video from earlier today showed a building on fire in Moore, amid block after block of flattened homes and businesses. On May 3, 1999, the same suburb was hit by an F5 tornado that killed 41 people and spawned wind gusts up to 318 mph. (The EF scale replaced the Fujita scale as the preferred measurement of tornado strength in the United States in 2007.)

The storm knocked out power at the Draper Water Treatment Plant, and residents of southeast Oklahoma City should not drink tap water until further notice. [UPDATED: The City of Oklahoma City announced via Twitter that water quality was not affected by the power outage and the water supply is safe to drink.]

Follow the KFOR live stream here:

Number Of Published Cancer Studies That Can't Be Reproduced Is Shockingly High

Francie Diep — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Half of cancer scientists have failed to reproduce the findings of other researchers, according to an anonymous survey.

In an anonymous survey taken by scientists at a prestigious cancer center, more than half of the respondents said they'd failed to reproduce published scientific findings at least one time.

Any one study may come to an interesting conclusion—"this chemical causes cancer" or "this drug works" or "penis size matters"—but the way scientists check if those studies are true is by doing them over again. When study after study gets the same results, you can be reasonably sure the conclusion is true. On the other hand, large numbers of irreproducible studies in the scientific literature indicate that something's wrong, reported Retraction Watch, a watchdog blog that first pointed us to the new survey.

The researchers involved in the irreproducible studies didn't always seem eager to make things right. Sixty-two percent of the survey respondents who tried to contact the original researchers found the study authors responded negatively, indifferently or not at all. Only one in three researchers in the survey, which a team of MD Anderson Cancer Center physicians sent to all scientists at the center, ever resolved the discrepancy they found.

The survey's lead author, Leonard Zwelling, told Retraction Watch he blamed academics for not policing each other adequately. His survey also found that many junior scientists felt pressured to prove senior scientists' hypotheses correct, even if they couldn't find the supporting data.

You do expect that once in a while, scientific studies will come to incorrect conclusions just by chance. And you've probably seen in many media reports on studies done in rats or a small number of people that say something about how far such studies are from clinical trials in humans. This is interesting, but don't get too attached, is the message.

So what's the problem? Those who run clinical trials themselves don't have the luxury of ignoring studies done in animals or just a few dozen people, Zwelling and his colleagues argued in their own paper, published in the journal PLOS ONE. That's all they have to help them choose what to test in major human clinical trials. Irreproducible studies performed all the way down the line, from the most basic experiments in Petri dishes to later animal studies, may be a major reason so many clinical trials fail. The failures waste time and money and slow the development of working therapies.

[Retraction Watch]

IMDB's Greatest Movies Ever, Beautifully Organized By Genre [Infographic]

Colin Lecher — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Sorry, animated movies. Drama is top dog.

You probably have your own choice for Greatest Movie Of All Time. But what do the masses say? The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) has a set of picks, rated by users, that you can peruse. And if you want to know a little more about what kind of movie makes it to the top, this awesome visualization designed by Martin Kruusimagi can show you.

For the infographic, Kruusimagi color-coded the top 50 IMDB movies by genre: dramas are organized and counted with blue, while sci-fi gets brown. The colors then snake across the map until they reach the relevant movies, so a line of pink (comedy) reaches an illustration representing No. 43, Chaplin's Modern Times. Multiple genres can be assigned to each movie, so Times also gets a light blue line for drama.

As you can see, drama is the most popular genre on the list (look how small comedy is!). Maybe that's not surprising, since drama can encompass many more movies than, say, film noir, but it's also interesting to think that movie-watchers (or at least IMDB voters) correlate seriousness with goodness.

Drama (is) King: Genre breakdown of IMDB top 50 films infographic

[viusal.ly]

Giant Carnivorous Plant Found In Silicon Valley

Dan Nosowitz — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:30:44 GMT

The precise method by which Yahoo! digests and dissolves its prey.

Yahoo! is a carnivorous plant whose prey-trapping mechanism features a deep cavity filled with liquid, known as a pitfall trap.

Startups, such as Flickr, Tumblr, and Del.icio.us, are attracted to the cavity formed by the cupped leaf, often by visual lures such as anthocyanin pigments and nectar bribes. Yahoo!'s rim (peristome) is slippery, when moistened by condensation or nectar, causing startups to fall into the trap. Yahoo! may also contain waxy scales, protruding aldehyde crystals, cuticular folds, downward pointing hairs, or guard-cell-originating lunate cells on the inside of the pitcher to ensure that startups cannot climb out.

The small bodies of liquid contained within the pitcher traps are called phytotelmata. They drown the startup, and it is gradually dissolved. This may occur by bacterial action (the bacteria being washed into the pitcher by rainfall) or by enzymes secreted by Yahoo! itself. Yahoo! may also contain mutualistic insect larvae, which feed on trapped startups, and whose excreta Yahoo! then absorbs.

Whatever the mechanism of digestion, startups are converted into a solution of amino acids, peptides, phosphates, ammonium and urea, from which Yahoo! obtains its mineral nutrition (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus). Like all carnivorous plants, Yahoo! exists in locations where the soil is too poor in minerals and/or too acidic for most companies to survive.

Description of Yahoo! is slightly altered from this Wikipedia entry. Idea inspired by Rusty Foster.

Candy Totally Won't Make You Fat, Says Study Funded By Big Candy

Colin Lecher — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:00:00 GMT

It's cool to eat as much candy as you want, you guys, no problem, just live off the stuff.

Good news, guys! Candy isn't going to make you fat or kill you or anything negative at all! Feast on M&M's like an 8-year-old on Halloween, because you're totally good on this one.

Says a study funded by the National Confectioners Association, a trade group representing the candy, chocolate, and gum industry.

Some findings from the study:

1.) "Frequency of candy consumption was not associated with the risk of obesity, overweight/obesity, elevated waist circumference, elevated skinfold thickness, blood pressure, low density lipoprotein (LDL) or high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, triglycerides, or insulin resistance."

2.) "Increased frequency of candy consumption among adults in the United States was not associated with objective measures of adiposity or select cardiovascular risk factors, despite associated dietary differences."

So in addition to "[fostering] industry growth by advancing the interests of the confectionery industry and its customers," the NCA apparently funds (sketchy) scientific studies about how it's cool to eat as much candy as you want, you guys, no problem, just live off the stuff. (Who runs this Association? I, personally, picture Candyland characters in suits sitting behind desks, barely visible through shadow and cigar smoke. But use your imagination!)

Well, some other studies would seem to disagree with the study's assessment. But who are you going to believe? The New England Journal of Medicine or Laura Shumow, MHS, Director of Scientific and Regulatory Affairs, National Confectioners Association, who said in a press release: "There is a place for little pleasures, such as candy, in life. A little treat in moderation can have a positive impact on mood and satisfaction, and as emerging research suggests, minimal impact on diet and health risk."

Oh, God, Big Candy, we want to believe!

How Science Got The 'Crack Baby' Epidemic So Wrong

Clay Dillow — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:30:00 GMT

A New York Times mini-documentary examines the flawed science behind the 1980s 'crack baby' scare.

The New York Times has a fascinating documentary on the crack cocaine epidemic that gripped the United States in the 1980s. The short of it: The “crack baby” scare that threatened to spawn a generation of damaged children never materialized.

For those of you who may not recall, the mid-1980s were rife with hysteria surrounding cocaine--in particular crack cocaine--and the huge social toll it was taking on the U.S. New and little-understood, crack was associated with all kinds of social ills, including rising crime rates, poverty, and (far more nebulously) the escalating HIV/AIDS crisis. But for a moment, the “crack baby” alarm sounded the loudest--the country and its social system was about to be completely overwhelmed with a generation of babies who, due to prenatal exposure to crack cocaine, would be born with all kinds of mental deficiencies and health problems.

That generation of “crack babies” never emerged. Crack, which was described by some medical doctors as being as devastating to an unborn fetus as heroin, turned out to be less damaging than alcohol (which is far more widely used and carries greater risks for long-term fetal damage). The symptoms early research associated with “crack babies” turned out to be the same as the symptoms for any prematurely born baby.

How did science get it so wrong? The primary study behind the “crack baby” epidemic scare involved just 23 infants--a sample set too small to be meaningful. It also included only infants rather than adults who had been exposed to crack as infants. Later studies conducted on adults who had been prenatally exposed to crack often showed very small changes in their brains rather than the sweeping deficiencies predicted by the science of the time. It’s a lesson in what happens when a misreading of the data leads to a publicly accepted narrative, especially one that feeds on society’s collective fears about the future. Click through below to watch the mini-doc.

[NYT]

FYI: Can A Bionic Eye See As Well As A Human Eye?

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:30:00 GMT

It's the difference between a grainy black-and-white film and HD.

Previously blind patients who receive the recently FDA-approved Argus II bionic eye system will regain some degree of functional sight. The retinal implant technology, developed and distributed by Second Sight, can improve quality of life for patients who have lost functional vision due to retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that causes retinal cells to die. But the implant doesn’t facilitate a sudden recovery of 20/20 vision.

Just as cochlear implants don’t have the sensitivity to accurately relay the complex mix of frequencies in music, bionic vision through the Argus II will be closer to a very grainy black-and-white film than an HD movie.

The multi-piece system starts with a digital camera mounted in eyeglasses. Images from the camera get translated into data through a miniature computer and sent via wireless transmitter to a computer chip on the side of the eyeball. From there, the chip activates an eyelash-thin electrode array implanted behind the retina, which then stimulates retinal cells to send visual information to the brain.

Bionic vision will be closer to a very grainy black-and-white film than an HD movie.While the prosthesis sounds complex, it doesn’t compare to the intricacy of the natural human eye. Shawn Kelly, a scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is currently working on his own retina implant system that includes the same basic technology as the Argus II. He explains that, with the technology available now, the electrode array isn’t finely tuned enough to produce the same detail and clarity of a fully functional human retina.

“It’s not going to be anything like normal vision,” Kelly says, describing the expected results of his implant. “It’s going to be very difficult to convey colors, and it’s going to be difficult to convey the type of visual resolution that we have in the center of our vision.”

The eye’s retinal cells, commonly known as rods and cones, are split up into six types of receptors that detect contrast between light and dark, red and green, and blue and yellow. Electrical signals from the retinal cells travel through the optic nerve to the brain to form a complete picture of what the eye is looking at.

Instead of trying to imitate the activity of all six receptor types, Second Sight’s Argus II implant focuses on stimulating retinal cells to show light and dark contrast. For a blind patient using an artificial retina, being able to detect the relative darkness of a hole or an approaching wall is a lot more important to independently navigating than knowing whether that wall is painted red or blue.

Brian Mech, vice president of business development at Second Sight, reports that in clinical trials, all of the company's 30 patients had some degree of vision improvement after receiving the retinal implant. “Basically they see black and white, shades of gray and they’re getting somewhere between 50 and 60 pixels of information on average,” Mech says.

In terms of acuity, the patient with the best result went from no useful sight to 20/1260 vision. This ratio means that to get the same amount of information a healthy human eye can discern from 1,260 feet, this patient would need to be standing 20 feet away.

Mech admits this level of acuity is limited. “[It] is still pretty poor considering normal vision is 20/20, but it’s pretty amazing when you’re completely blind to begin with,” he says. But he explains that as research and testing continues, there is plenty of room to improve the system’s performance just by working on the external technology. Even color vision is a possibility with improvements to the video processor and wireless transmitter. “I don’t want to make it sound too easy,” Mech says. “There’s a lot of work to be done before we can do color vision, but the good news is that they won’t need a new implant for it.”

Second Sight is currently developing more advanced retinal implants, but the timeline is still unclear. Mech says it will be five to seven years or more before the next generation of implants becomes a reality.

This story was produced in partnership with Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. For more FYIs, go here.