The beloved aspen forests that shimmer across mountainsides of the American West could be doomed if emissions of greenhouse gases continue at a high level, scientists warned on Monday. That finding adds to a growing body of work suggesting forests worldwide may be imperiled by .
The analyzed the drought and heat that killed millions of aspens in Colorado and nearby states a decade ago. Such conditions could become routine across much of the West by the 2050s unless global emissions are brought under control, the study found.
“I think of aspens as a good canary-in-the-coal-mine tree,” said William R. L. Anderegg, the Princeton University researcher who led the new study, released online Monday by the journal Nature Geoscience. “They’re a wet-loving tree in a dry landscape. They may be showing us how these forests are going to change pretty massively as that landscape gets drier still.”
The study found that large aspen die-offs were a near-certainty only if greenhouse emissions were to continue at the runaway pace that has characterized the last decade. If global emissions are brought under control, the chances will improve that large stands of aspens could be preserved, the paper found.
In the fall, stands of trembling aspens are among the most breathtaking sights in the West, turning hillsides an iridescent golden hue.
Dr. Anderegg grew up camping and hiking in the aspen forests of southwestern Colorado and was dismayed when the trees started dying a decade ago. He has devoted part of his early scientific career to understanding the dieback — and the implications of it for forests elsewhere.
A central focus of the research has been to get a better handle on exactly how trees die in droughts, crucial for predicting how they will fare as proceeds. Dr. Anderegg’s research on aspens suggests that when the ground gets too dry, air bubbles appear in the tiny tubes that carry water through the tree.
“These air bubbles block the pipes and interrupt water transport, giving the tree a kind of heart attack, basically,” Dr. Anderegg said.
He and his collaborators have devised a computer model that, when programmed with climate parameters, can predict aspen mortality with about 75 percent accuracy, and they are working to improve it. Applying their model to the rainfall and temperature conditions expected in coming decades as the climate warms under business-as-usual emissions yielded the prediction of a major aspen die-off.
Depending on exactly how dry the soil gets in the hotter climate, the mortality could extend beyond the West, with aspens — and perhaps many other types of trees — dying across the country, Dr. Anderegg said.
At a global scale, forests have been responding to the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with accelerated growth, allowing them to pull large amounts of the gas out of the air and thus helping to limit the effects of human emissions. How robust this forest “carbon sink” will remain through time is among the most important topics in climate science.
Dr. Anderegg’s paper fits with other recent findings suggesting that forests may not be as resilient to global warming as once hoped. For instance, a paper published two weeks ago found that the ability of the vast Amazon forest to pull carbon dioxide out of the air was through time, with trees growing faster and dying earlier.
Craig D. Allen, a forest expert with the United States Geological Survey who was not involved in the new research, said Dr. Anderegg’s work was a step toward understanding what might happen across broad landscapes.
But, he warned, a huge amount of work is still needed on other tree types, in other locales, before the picture becomes clear. “There’s just a lot of variability between species,” Dr. Allen said. He noted that aspens have relatively shallow roots, limiting their ability to tap deep water in a drought, whereas other trees could be more resilient.
Forest experts, including Dr. Allen, are particularly worried about future “hot droughts,” similar to the one that struck Colorado and nearby states in the early 2000s. Huge stands of aspens died, and heat-loving beetles millions of acres of pine trees.
These droughts are characterized not just by a lack of rainfall but by high temperatures that suck residual moisture out of the soil. They are predicted to increase in a warming climate.
In addition to killing forests, these types of droughts may make food production more difficult, as is becoming evident in California, which is suffering through the fourth year of an especially warm drought.
The frequency and intensity of such lethal droughts later this century will most likely be reduced if efforts to control carbon dioxide emissions are successful over the next few decades, scientists believe.
“The more we lower emissions, the less the risks become,” Dr. Anderegg said. “The choice is in our hands.”
is dropping all fossil fuel stocks from its endowment, the university announced on Tuesday. At $1.2 billion, Syracuse’s is the largest endowment to divest entirely of fossil fuel stocks. (Stanford University last year pledged to drop coal stocks from its $21.4 billion endowment.)
The university’s chancellor, Kent Syverud, said the move was part of Syracuse’s “long record of supporting responsible environmental stewardship and good corporate citizenship.”
Student protesters staged an 18-day sit-in in November Katie McChesney, a campus divestment campaign organizer with the climate action group , said the student action showed that “if you want results, turn up the heat.”
Fluoridation of water supplies, long ago proved to protect children from , also helps older adults keep their teeth, a has shown.
But fluoridation had no effect on overall bone density in the aged, a result that surprised the study’s authors because fluoridation had been shown to increase bone mass.
The study, part of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Aging, was done by researchers at the school of Trinity College Dublin and involved almost 5,000 adults older than 50.
Participants were asked to indicate roughly how many of their teeth they had; some had their bone density measured with .
Those who lived in areas with fluoridated water were more likely to report having all their teeth, the researchers found.
Fluoridation began in Ireland in 1964 and became universal in most urban areas by 1970. About 85 percent of the country has fluoridated water; areas with private wells often do not.
As in the United States, fluoridation was controversial, even though numerous studies found it safe
Healthy teeth have long been linked to general well-being in older adults. In recent decades, studies have linked gum and tooth disease to heart disease. The leading theory was that oral infections and inflammation reached the heart through the blood.
But concluded in 2012 that there was no proof that periodontal disease caused heart disease.
Idealism combined with an intriguing application of economic theory may accomplish what international conferences have not: solving the seemingly intractable problem of global warming.
Despite periodic flurries of optimism, diplomacy has been largely disappointing. The 1997 , for example, in which many nations agreed to impose strict taxes on carbon emissions, hasn’t accomplished much. And subsequent climate conferences haven’t come up with an effective solution. Secretary of State John Kerry summed up the diplomatic landscape in December at the United Nations climate change conference in Lima, Peru: “.”
From an economic standpoint, international efforts until now have foundered on a fundamental “free rider problem.” In a nutshell, individuals and nations that bear the immediate costs of measures to protect the atmosphere will experience only a small fraction of the benefits, which are shared by all the people and nations on the planet. Why not just take a “free ride” and let others do the hard work?
In traditional economic theory, the benefits of reducing emissions take the form of an “externality,” meaning they are external to the local environment because they are spread over the whole world. Our own contributions are often too small to see or feel.
When the problem is an externality, it is, for the most part, futile to ask people to volunteer to fix it — by taking actions like car-pooling or riding a bike to work to cut back on emissions or, in the case of governments, by enacting laws and regulations.
Yes, some individuals with a strong moral compass will take action, and some nations will do so occasionally, but most people and countries will not do so consistently. That’s what the theory says, anyway.
But in a new book, “” (Princeton 2015), Gernot Wagner of the Environmental Defense Fund and Martin L. Weitzman, a Harvard economist, question that assumption. In a proposal that they call the Copenhagen Theory of Change, they say that we should be asking people to volunteer to save our climate by taking many small, individual actions.
Copenhagen has motivated every day, the Danish government says. How did that come about? A half-century ago, the city’s inhabitants were becoming almost as reliant on cars as people anywhere else. But after the oil crisis of the 1970s, the authors point out, many Copenhagen residents made a personal commitment to ride bicycles rather than drive, out of moral principle, even if that was inconvenient for them.
That happened in American cities, too, but in Copenhagen there was more social support and, perhaps, social pressure to join in the movement. The sight of so many others riding bikes motivated the city’s inhabitants and appears to have improved the moral atmosphere enough to surmount the free-rider problem.
Elinor Ostrom won her Nobel in economics partly for observing that communities often solve free-rider problems. She was talking generally about contained communities like Copenhagen, not global ones. Its idealism about global warming has not spread worldwide. But she argued for a , with actions against global warming taken not just on a global scale but on a whole array of scales, involving smaller communities as well as the entire planet.
There are communities based on shared interests, not on geography, and people who believe in socially responsible investing may be considered one such community. If ethical investing takes the form of investing only in “green” companies, for example, excluding companies that pollute the atmosphere, such measures may have a similar positive impact.
Of course, one might dismiss ethical investing as achieving nothing more than creating opportunities for unethical investors, who will be more than happy to step in if there is money to be made. But placing a deviant enterprise on a list of companies to be avoided by ethical investors could change the moral atmosphere, much as bicycling has in Copenhagen — increasing the likelihood of a broader, successful social movement against pollution of the world’s atmosphere.
The world is a diverse and complicated place, however. To combat global warming, social movements aren’t enough. We also need a concrete framework on a global scale.
In his before the American Economic Association in Boston in January, William D. Nordhaus of Yale proposed what he calls “climate clubs.” Here is a genuinely concrete idea that might work to stop global warming. As he defines it, a climate club is a group of countries that agree to create incentives for people to reduce carbon emissions, while also erecting tariff barriers on imports from countries that are not members of the club.
The tariff barriers contribute to a virtuous cycle: They provide an incentive for countries in the club to create incentives for individuals to reduce emissions. Professor Nordhaus’s analysis relies on the and on his own , which shows costs and benefits from reducing emissions for each country or region in the world today.
A climate club may start with only a few countries and then grow as others join. The club may grow through time rather than collapse as we saw with the Kyoto Protocol. Now they will be coming into the club as they see, over the years, the advantages of membership.
In its pure form, the economic theory of clubs assumes that each country and individual is completely self-interested and has no interest in helping any others. But, in reality, people are not quite like that. There is some community feeling — including a sense of responsibility for the world community. Clubs might ultimately rely on such feelings to be successful.
Club founders must overcome real-world obstacles, objections from climate change deniers and those who simply don’t understand the issues or the stakes we are facing. Who is going to undertake such difficult and expensive actions without some sense of moral principle?
To solve the extremely challenging problem of climate change, we may want to rely on both theories: the Copenhagen theory and the climate club theory. As with other things in life, good things can happen when there is a sense of idealism that creates an atmosphere for change. But it will also help to have a realistic structure that puts clear penalties on bad behavior by individuals and by entire countries.
A new robotic wing, inspired by those of birds and bats, recovers from midair collisions with a simple mechanism: a pin joint that allows it to bend.
Birds and bats maneuver through forests easily and recover from collisions with branches because their wings fold upon impact, then unfold. An artificial wing “beats back and forth, but it doesn’t fold,” said David Lentink, a mechanical engineer at Stanford University.
Using a 3-D printer, the researchers designed a joint that connects part of the wing nearest to the body to the part farthest away, much like a real bird’s. He and his colleagues in a study published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.
“When this hits something, it won’t break,” Dr. Lentink said. “It will fold and then fall back into place within a wing beat.”
His graduate student and co-author, Amanda Stowers, tested the wing by hitting it with a steel rod. With every blow, the wing bent and then re-extended itself.
Based on mathematical calculations, the researchers say the design should work well regardless of the wing’s size.
Dr. Lentink and Ms. Stowers now hope to try the wing in flight, attached to a robot. “The goal of the project is to come up with solutions to fly through the forest,” Dr. Lentink said.
WASHINGTON — Even before became the oldest elected president, his mental state was a political issue. His adversaries often suggested his penchant for contradictory statements, forgetting names and seeming absent-mindedness could be linked to .
In 1980, Mr. Reagan if White House doctors found him mentally unfit. Years later, those doctors and key aides told me they .
Now a clever new analysis has found that during his two terms in office, subtle changes in Mr. Reagan’s speaking patterns linked to the onset of dementia were apparent years before doctors diagnosed his in 1994.
The , published in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease by researchers at Arizona State University, do not prove that Mr. Reagan exhibited signs of dementia that would have adversely affected his judgment and ability to make decisions in office.
But the research does suggest that alterations in speech one day might be used to predict development of Alzheimer’s and other neurological conditions years before symptoms are clinically perceptible.
Detection of dementia at the earliest stages has become a high priority. Many experts now believe that yet-to-be-developed treatments are likely to be effective at preventing or slowing progression of dementia only if it is found before it significantly damages the brain.
The “highly innovative” methods used by the researchers may eventually help “to further clarify the extent to which spoken-word changes are associated with normal aging or predictive of subsequent progression to the clinical stages of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Eric Reiman, the director of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix, who was not involved in the new study.
Visar Berisha and Julie Liss, professors of speech and hearing science at the university, compared transcripts of all 46 news conferences that Mr. Reagan held to the 101 sessions President George H. W. Bush held in his term.
The researchers assessed changes in the presidents’ speech patterns with a new algorithm based on a technique used by others to analyze changes in writing by novelists.
In an interview, Dr. Berisha said he did not set out to study Mr. Reagan, but found he was the only individual with progressive dementia for whom long-term transcript information is publicly available. He chose Mr. Bush because he was most comparable in age to Mr. Reagan at the start of their presidencies, and both men served during roughly the same decade.
Age and era are important issues for comparison because they can influence language measures. Mr. Reagan was 69 when he became president, and Mr. Bush was 64. in 2004.
The researchers found no changes in the speaking patterns of Mr. Bush, who is not known to have developed Alzheimer’s. But in Mr. Reagan’s speech, two measures — use of repetitive words, and substituting nonspecific terms like “thing” for specific nouns — increased toward the end of Mr. Reagan’s presidency, compared with its start. A third measure, his use of unique words, declined.
The researchers’ methodology was not designed to determine whether the changes were present in Mr. Reagan’s rare early news conferences, Dr. Berisha said. Other factors — like a deliberate decision to reduce the complexity of his speaking style, or the injury, surgery and from — could account for the language changes they found, Dr. Berisha said.
In 1984, Mr. Reagan’s poor performance in his first presidential debate with Vice President Walter Mondale renewed questions about his mental capacity. A study published in 1988 suggested that Mr. Reagan had some cognitive impairment during his debates with President Jimmy Carter and Mr. Mondale, but the authors said that their findings were insufficient to conclude that the changes affected Mr. Reagan’s policy judgments and ability to make decisions.
The new research is part of a larger effort to develop objective tests that would serve as bellwethers for Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases, Dr. Berisha said.
While the new study is “very clever,” said Dr. Richard Caselli, an Alzheimer’s expert at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., further research involving larger numbers of individuals is necessary to prove the methods actually predict dementia.
Imperceptible cognitive decline often predates by many years the precipitous downturn that occurs once compensatory strategies, like relying on well-rehearsed phrases and simple words, fail and an individual can no longer mask his cognitive deficit.
Dr. Berisha wanted to determine whether natural language processing and algorithms could be used to detect any such changes in news conferences, because spontaneous responses to questions require greater cognitive effort than a rehearsed speech does.
Sharing thoughts and ideas through spoken communication is a fragile process. Even the simplest verbal response requires a complex sequence of events. The brain must recall the words to best convey a message, put them in proper sequence, and then signal the muscles required to produce speech.
The slightest damage to brain areas that orchestrate these events can produce speech difficulties.
Earlier studies have shown that certain linguistic biomarkers change with disease progression. Spoken vocabulary size declines, for instance, and use of indefinite nouns increases.
Studies of a small group of American nuns have shown a strong relationship between the complexity of the language the women used in handwritten autobiographical essays when they were young and their cognitive health many decades later.
Canadian researchers have reported that analyses of syntax in novels by Iris Murdoch and Agatha Christie (Ms. Murdoch died of Alzheimer’s; Ms. Christie is suspected to have had it.) The same analysis applied to the healthy P. D. James, who died at 94 last year, did not find signs of dementia.
Dr. Berisha said his team intended to conduct similar analyses of transcripts of other presidents, as well as news conference transcripts of National Football League players known to have sustained .
He and his team also hope to devise a study in which the conversations between physicians and patients are recorded at each visit and later analyzed to determine if speech and language changes can predict the appearance of dementia.
If the day comes when such tests to detect the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases become widely established, a question will arise about their use to screen candidates for the White House and other public offices.
Much like human farmers, fungus-farming ants meticulously maintain their subterranean gardens. They regularly fertilize, weed and tend to their crops.
Now, that one primitive species cultivates a kind of fungus that is entirely domesticated.
“These ants make their living by being farmers, and they are absolutely dependent on this fungus,” said , an entomologist at the Smithsonian Institution. He and his colleagues will describe their findings in a coming issue of The American Naturalist.
Apterostigma megacephala was first described in 1999, based on four specimens found in Peru and Colombia. Ten years later, researchers discovered its nests in the eastern Amazon region of Brazil and realized that the ants cultivate a type of fungus that grows only in its nests and those of a species of leaf-cutter ants.
The fungus, Leucoagaricus gongylophorus, evolved only two to eight million years ago. DNA sequencing shows that the ant belongs to an ancient lineage that dates back 39 million years.
How and when the species got hold of the fungus remains a mystery, Dr. Schultz said. The leaf-cutter ant that cultivates the fungus evolved more recently, about 12 million years ago.
Other primitive fungus-farming ants cannot digest the fungus without dying, Dr. Schultz said.
A new strain of a common respiratory virus , researchers reported on Monday.
Since August, 115 children in 34 states have developed -like in an arm or a leg. The virus, enterovirus 68, has emerged as a leading suspect.
A study published Monday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases strengthens that possibility, although many questions remain.
Researchers at the , analyzed genetic sequences of enterovirus 68 cultured from 25 children in Colorado and California with limb , also called acute flaccid myelitis.
The viruses were genetically very similar, the scientists found, sharing certain mutations that resemble those found in the poliovirus genome.
The researchers concluded that the viruses were a novel strain of enterovirus 68, which they called B1. Using a method called “molecular clock analysis,” the team estimated that the B1 strain emerged four and half years ago.
“I don’t think it’s coincidental that it’s around the time the first cases were described,” said Dr. Charles Chiu, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of laboratory medicine at .
Only one child had evidence of the infection in his blood, the study found.
That 6-year-old had been taken to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles complaining of trouble moving his left leg. Dr. Grace M. Aldrovandi, the chief of at the hospital, ordered tests to see if enterovirus 68 could be found in his stool or nasal passages.
The resident who carried out her orders also sampled the boy’s blood, which was faintly positive for the infection. That is significant because poliovirus also enters the bloodstream before invading the central nervous system.
“We were fortunate to detect it,” Dr. Chiu said, adding that usually, “we are diagnosing these cases after the fact, when the sample you want is one taken when they start developing symptoms.”
Dr. Chiu and his colleagues also examined 14 samples of spinal fluid from children with paralysis using next generation sequencing in which millions of DNA strands can be sequenced at the same time and then assembled. The team found no evidence of enterovirus or any other potential infectious cause. “We didn’t find a virus, bacteria, fungus or parasite,” Dr. Chiu said.
On balance, he said, that strengthens the case that the B1 strain of enterovirus — detected in roughly half of the children’s nasal secretions — was linked to their paralysis.
Nine of the 25 children in the study were admitted to Children’s Hospital Colorado from Nov. 24, 2013, to Oct. 11, 2014. Others were seen at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles or were identified as early as June 2012 by the California Department of Health.
The new study also suggests that not every child infected with the new strain will develop paralysis.
One sibling pair — a school-age girl and her younger brother — were both infected with identical B1 strains of enterovirus 68 and got , Dr. Chiu and his colleagues found. The girl suffered paralysis in both arms and her trunk. Her brother experienced no lasting effects.
Dr. Chiu hopes to grow blood cells from the two siblings in culture and infect the cells with enterovirus 68 to “see if there are differences between his cells and her cells,” he said.
Enterovirus 68 may be a contributor to the children’s paralysis, said Priya Duggal, the director of the genetic epidemiology program at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who had nothing to do with the study. “But it must not be acting alone, because children with the same virus and siblings with the same clade have different outcomes.”
For another study, Dr. Duggal is enrolling children with paralysis and their siblings to compare their genes to see if there are telling variations.
Recovery for many of these children has been difficult and uneven. One woman, Marie, who asked to be identified by her middle name to protect her family’s privacy, said that six months after her 4-year-old son started experiencing weakness in his arms and legs, he can grab something with both hands or hop awkwardly.
Still, his right shoulder and upper arm are withered and limp, and his neck is crooked, Marie said.
“I can’t emphasize how scary this is,” Dr. Aldrovandi said. “You have a normal child, and then all of sudden they are pretty incapacitated.”
Take heart. Not everyone on the plane will catch whatever illness is being spread by those sneezes, and if you are uncomfortably close to a sick person, you might be able to request a seat farther away. Research published by the suggests that even a few rows of distance will cut risks significantly.
A of passengers on two long-haul flights carrying people infected with H1N1 influenza during the 2009 outbreak found that the transmission risk was increased by 7.7 percent for those within two seats of people with symptoms. If passengers were just in the same row or within two rows, the risk was increased by only 3.6 percent.
You can take a face mask that covers your nose and mouth. The C.D.C. says that N95-type face masks,which have been up to 90 percent effective in warding off infection in experiments. Even a less efficient mask could be useful on a plane, the researchers said, based on a of the transmission of H1N1 flu on another international flight.
And remember that not all disease transmission is airborne. The standard recommendations for washing your hands frequently and for avoiding touching your nose and eyes will go a long way toward protecting you on a plane. You can also carry disinfecting wipes for surfaces like seat trays.
Weather is free, of course, but predicting it, and anticipating changes like sudden storms or flash floods--that takes technical equipment and sensors. Thanks to 3D printing and cheap commercial electronics, USAID thinks they can bring weather stations to the developing world. And they should only cost about $200 each.
The 3D-printed weather stations are a collaboration between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and USAID. Printers make most of the parts, which makes it easy to locally build replacement parts when something breaks. The stations include a , as well as radiation shielding to prevent sunlight from damaging the equipment. The information recorded by the sensors is sent to ultra-cheap computers. The computer will do some data analysis on the spot, and can be set up with a tablet to display the information for a station operator to see. The information can also be sent beyond the station for analysis by meteorologists elsewhere.
In a blog post discussing the project, USAID notes that commercial weather stations can . retail for almost $7000, and Columbia Weather Stations’ starts at $7020. Home weather stations can easily run from hundreds to thousands of dollars, and only when looking at toy weather stations do we consistently see cheaper prices than USAID’s $200 3D-printed units. (NOAA also has a for making a rudimentary DIY weather station from paper cups, pencils, and other home goods, by the way).
The technology will be demonstrated at the United Nations World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction this week. Last summer, researchers began testing the station in Boulder, Colorado, and since then they’ve been to the project. USAID plans to set up pilot studies in one or two countries before deploying it over a wider scale.
A low price combined with easy repair and simple data recording means these weather stations could greatly expand the ability to predict and prepare for natural disasters.
The passage of Robin Williams left millions of people with a broken heart, but no one suffered as much as the children of the actor.
But Zelda Williams came in a rare appearance on Friday with his mother Marsha Garces to Noble Awards in Beverly Hills.
And although, of course, wants to keep the memory of her father alive - she admits is basically unlikely to ever forget the bigger man than life.
[Related: Zelda Williams Legacy Father recalls Robin Williams' In his first sit-down interview since his death]
Here's what he said:
"For me it's easy to remember someone who is impossible to forget."
Zelda also talked about back in the spotlight and like something I felt I had to do was. She explained:
"It is not difficult, it's just a strange feeling. Nothing happens, that will be fine, but it's a transition. It is recognizing that you have to stop feeling that there is a world out there, because for a short period of time doesn "t."
You may remember Zelda has a beautiful tattoo of a hummingbird in memory of his father, and she explained that the tattoo to her, saying:
"If you saw it fly, and if you know a bit about them, are impossible to keep in one place. Whenever people see them not as they say, 'Oh, my God, a hawk for a hummingbird -flor, and that was the reaction that my father has, kids, fans, old people, and that's what always hummingbirds meant to me. "
Robin Williams and Marsha Garces really did a wonderful job with their children and Zelda is a shining example of his father.
She is only 25 and yet she is so wise at this point in your life. Robin Williams would be very proud of it.
JI-PARANÁ, Brazil — As the night sky enveloped this outpost in ’s Amazon basin, the ceremony at the open-air temple began simply enough.
Dozens of adults and children, all clad in white, stood in a line. A holy man handed each a cup of ayahuasca, a muddy-looking hallucinogenic brew. They gulped it down; some vomited. Hymns were sung. More ayahuasca was consumed. By midnight, the congregants seemed strangely energized. Then the dancing began.
Such rituals are a fixture across the Amazon, where ayahuasca has been consumed for centuries and entire religions have coalesced around the psychedelic concoction. But the ceremony one night this month was different: Among those imbibing from the holy man’s decanter were prison inmates, convicted of crimes such as murder, kidnapping and rape.
“I’m finally realizing I was on the wrong path in this life,” said Celmiro de Almeida, 36, who is serving a sentence for homicide at a prison four hours away on a road that winds through the jungle. “Each experience helps me communicate with my victim to beg for forgiveness,” said Mr. de Almeida, who has taken ayahuasca nearly 20 times at the sanctuary here.
Atlantic
Ocean
VENEZUELA
COLOMBIA
Amazon River
ECUADOR
BRAZIL
Pôrto Velho
PERU
Ji-Paraná
BOLIVIA
Pacific
Ocean
PARAGUAY
CHILE
600 Miles
ARGENTINA
By The New York Times
The provision of a hallucinogen to inmates on short furloughs in the middle of the rain forest reflects a continuing quest for ways to ease . The country’s inmate population has doubled since the start of the century to more than 550,000, straining underfunded prisons rife with and violent uprisings complete with .
One of the bloodiest prison revolts in recent decades took place in the nearby city of Pôrto Velho, in 2002, when at least 27 inmates were killed at the Urso Branco prison. Around the same time, Acuda, a pioneering prisoners’ rights group in Pôrto Velho, began offering inmates therapy sessions in yoga, meditation and Reiki, a healing ritual directing energy from the practitioner’s hands to a patient’s body.
Two years ago, the volunteer therapists at Acuda had a new idea: Why not give the inmates ayahuasca as well? The Amazonian brew, which by blending and boiling a vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) with a leaf (Psychotria viridis), is in , the United States and other countries.
Acuda had trouble finding a place where the inmates could drink ayahuasca, but they were finally accepted by an offshoot here of Santo Daime, founded in the 1930s that blends Catholicism, African traditions and the trance communications with spirits popularized in the 19th century by a Frenchman known as Allan Kardec.
“Many people in Brazil believe that inmates must suffer, enduring hunger and depravity,” said Euza Beloti, 40, a psychologist with Acuda. “This thinking bolsters a system where prisoners return to society more violent than when they entered prison.” At Acuda, she said, “we simply see inmates as human beings with the capacity to change.”
Ms. Beloti and other therapists test aspects of this philosophy at a compound in a sprawling prison complex in Pôrto Velho. Judges and wardens allow about 10 inmates from maximum-security prisons in the city to live in the Acuda building, a former army installation. Dozens of other prisoners from surrounding penitentiaries attend Acuda’s therapy sessions each day.
Inside the compound, the inmates practice meditation. They perform ayurvedic massage on one another. They learn skills like motorcycle maintenance. A furniture workshop gives them access to tools like saws, hammers and drills. And they tend a garden, growing vegetables and the plants used to make ayahuasca.
Treating inmates with psychedelic drugs anywhere is thought to be rare. In one short-lived in the United States in the early 1960s, researchers from Harvard University under the direction of the psychologist gave psilocybin, a drug derived from psychoactive mushrooms, to inmates at a prison in Concord, Mass.
“It’s certainly novel among prisoners, but ayahuasca has great potential because under optimal conditions, it can produce a transformative experience in a person,” said Dr. Charles S. Grob, a professor of psychiatry at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine who has conducted extensive studies on ayahuasca.
Dr. Grob cautioned that there were risks. The brew could exacerbate the illnesses of people being treated with antipsychotic medications for or . Ingesting drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine before consuming ayahuasca is also dangerous.
“That would be a disaster, because the individual could have a hypertensive reaction leading to a stroke,” Dr. Grob said.
The supervisors at Acuda, who obtain a judge’s permission to take about 15 prisoners once a month to the temple ceremony, say they are mindful of the risks of ayahuasca, commonly called Daime in Brazil or referred to as tea. At the same time, Acuda’s therapists consume the brew with the inmates, as well as with the occasional prison guard who volunteers to accompany the group.
“This is how it should be,” said Virgílio Siqueira, 55, a retired police officer who works as a guard at the prison complex that includes Acuda. “It’s gratifying to know that we can sit here in the forest, drink our Daime, sing our hymns, exist in peace.”
Many people in Brazil, where conservative politicians are as they vow to crack down on crime in a country with per year than any other, remain unconvinced. Therapists who volunteer at Acuda said they had lost clients in their private practices who disagreed with providing such attention to convicts. Some relatives of victims who suffered at the hands of the Acuda prisoners contend that the project is unfair.
“Where are the massages and the therapy for us?” asked Paulo Freitas, 48, a manager at a leather factory whose 18-year-old daughter, Naiara, a college student, was kidnapped, raped and murdered in Pôrto Velho in 2013 by a group of men, a crime that many people in this corner of the Amazon.
Mr. Freitas said he had been shocked to learn recently that one of the men convicted in the killing of his daughter was expected to be transferred soon into Acuda’s care. “This is utterly revolting,” he said. “My daughter’s dreams were extinguished by that man, but he will be allowed to go into the jungle and drink his tea.”
Others question whether consuming Daime can help lower re-incarceration rates. Luiz Marques, 57, an economist who founded Acuda, said the organization hoped to reduce recidivism, but he emphasized that a more immediate goal was “expanding the consciousness” of prisoners about right and wrong.
At the temple here in Ji-Paraná, the inmates appeared to experience a range of reactions after drinking the ayahuasca. Sitting on plastic lawn chairs under a tile roof, some were stone-faced. Others seemed lost in contemplation. One was constantly in tears, as if demons were at the door. All of them sang at the top of their lungs when the rhythm of the hymns intensified.
“We are considered the trash of Brazil, but this place accepts us,” said Darci Altair Santos da Silva, 43, a construction worker serving a 13-year sentence for sexual abuse of a child under 14. “I know what I did was very cruel. The tea helped me reflect on this fact, on the possibility that one day I can find redemption.”
The Liberian government recommended on Saturday that survivors of practice safe sex indefinitely, until more information can be collected on the length of time the virus might remain present in body fluids including semen. Previously, male survivors were advised to abstain from sexual intercourse or to use for three months, reflecting that the active virus had been detected for up to 82 days in semen.
Acting on new developments, all countries affected by the Ebola outbreak need to consider applying similar recommendations, said Dr. David Nabarro, the United Nations secretary general’s special envoy for Ebola.
Agencies involved in the response were urgently reviewing the issue. “Yet again the Ebola-affected communities are asked to deal carefully with an unknown,” Dr. Nabarro wrote in an email, adding that survivors “should not be stigmatized as they take actions for the public good. They are the heroes.”
The new guidelines came one day after the death of ’s single confirmed patient with Ebola, Ruth Tugbah. Before her illness, the country had gone three weeks without a new Ebola diagnosis, and hopes had risen that Liberia was nearing the end of a yearlong epidemic that killed more than 4,000 people there. Ms. Tugbah’s only known risk factor was having a boyfriend who was an Ebola survivor.
Scientists detected the genetic material of Ebola from a semen sample the boyfriend provided to infectious disease investigators, officials from two Ebola response agencies said, speaking on background because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
In a potentially worrying development, officials learned that the man, whose name is not being released, was treated for Ebola last September.
A blood sample from his girlfriend, who tested positive for Ebola, was collected on March 19. Given a maximum incubation period of 21 days, the earliest she could have been infected was Feb. 26, well over three months after the man was cured of Ebola.
Even though traces of the virus were detected in the man’s semen, that does not prove that the fluid contained active virus particles, or that Ms. Tugbah was infected from it, the officials said.
To help determine that, the sample will be sent to scientists outside Liberia who have the facilities to try to grow the virus in a culture.
Scientists in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, were working to determine whether the virus carried by Ms. Tugbah matched the sequence of that from her boyfriend. The national laboratory gained the capacity to sequence the Ebola virus just last month with support from the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.
Officials from Liberia, the United States and the scrambled on Friday to come up with the new recommendations given the developments and their sensitivity.
“For now we are encouraging survivors to have safe sex,” said Tolbert Nyenswah, Liberia’s top Ebola official. He said the country planned to enroll survivors in a study to determine the maximum length of time the virus remains detectable. Condoms have not been tested with Ebola, but are thought to be effective because they block transmission of much smaller viruses, bacteriophages, which are 27 nanomillimeters compared with Ebola’s 80 nanomillimeters, said Nathalie Jeanne Nicole Broutet, a medical officer with the World Health Organization’s Department of Reproductive Health and Research in Geneva. “In theory the Ebola virus wouldn’t pass the condom,” she said, while noting that condoms “are not perfect for sexually transmitted illnesses. They have a 95 percent efficacy if you use them constantly and correctly.”
Dr. Broutet said that research protocols had been developed to test a range of body fluids for the virus — such as tears, sweat, semen, vaginal secretions and even — but that the studies had not yet started and were still awaiting ethical approvals. Certain parts of the body, including the testes, may harbor the virus longer than the blood because those areas are not well accessed by immune cells.
The research was sensitive, Dr. Broutet said. Some survivors accused of infecting their sexual partners have been incarcerated in Sierra Leone.
Dr. Broutet said research had been delayed because of competing priorities during the height of the epidemic. “Now that it’s quieter, it’s the right time,” she said. “The question is urgent.”
Dr. Philderald E. Pratt, assistant representative in Liberia of the United Nations Population Fund, known as UNFPA, a reproductive health agency, said there needed to be a campaign to inform the public about the uncertainties, while at the same time avoiding further stigmatizing survivors.
“We’ve thought about it, we’re planning it, but we hadn’t kick-started it,” he said.
Gov. signed legislation Friday that speeds up $1 billion in water infrastructure spending amid the worst drought in a generation. The bills he signed will offer some aid to residents hurt by the drought, but the vast majority is expedited spending on water infrastructure. California’s vast water delivery system is struggling under a fourth year of little snow and rain. Nearly two-thirds, or $660 million, of the water package goes to shore up flood protection structures to prevent mudslides and sudden storms from overtaking communities. Voters first approved this spending in 2006 after . An additional $267 million from a measure approved at the ballot last year would fund grants for water recycling programs and help small and poor cities provide drinking water by funding new wells and wastewater treatment facilities. Lawmakers said they needed to begin water projects early, especially as fear mounts that California is in the middle of a serious long-term drought.
An American aid worker being treated for at the clinical center in Maryland is doing better and has been upgraded from critical to serious condition, the N.I.H. Thursday. The patient, who worked with the American charity in , was to the United States on March 13. who also contracted Ebola in March has recovered and was discharged from a treatment unit, said Dr. Adikali Kamara, a district medical officer in Sierra Leone. People who came into contact with the two men, including who were evacuated in several groups to the United States, are still being monitored for symptoms.
Spending long summer evenings outside comes with a big nuisance: bug bites. Mosquitos and other insects are drawn to the lights illuminating your dinner party, which helps them hone in on their human prey. While that might mean a few days of itchy welts for some of us, the implications are much more dire in other countries where bug bites can mean infection of some nasty diseases such as , Chagas disease, and malaria. Now, a team of researchers is experimenting with LED lights that can ward off insects but still appear as functional white light for humans. They published in the May issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions B.
While fluorescent and traditional light bulbs emit light from of the visible spectrum, many energy-efficient light bulbs and electronics tend towards the blue end, which humans’ circadian rhythm. But this blue light also draws in insects. To make light bulbs less attractive for bugs, the researchers combined LEDs of different wavelengths and turned down the blue and green light that they find most appealing. The resulting light looked white to humans and attracted about 20 percent fewer insects.
"We don’t know that this is necessarily the best configuration of wavelengths, because this is the first time that people have tried to do this," Travis Longcore, a professor of spatial sciences at the University of Southern California, told . "What this does say is that there's an opportunity with LEDs to make light the way you want it instead of the way the lamp has to have it." With further testing, Longcore hopes that his team can figure out the right wavelength to keep the most insidious disease-causing insects at bay.
To fight against global warming, the world needs to sharply reduce emissions of carbon dioxide gas. A technology called carbon capture and storage can keep the gas out of the environment.
ESTEVAN, Saskatchewan — So much soot belched from the old power plant here that Mike Zeleny would personally warn the neighbors.
“If the wind was blowing in a certain direction,” Mr. Zeleny said, “we’d call Mrs. Robinson down the street and tell her not to put out her laundry.”
That coal plant is long gone, replaced by a much larger and cleaner one along the vast Saskatchewan prairie. Sooty shirts and socks are a thing of the past.
But as with even the most modern coal plants, its smokestacks still emit enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, the invisible heat-trapping gas that is the main contributor to global warming. So this fall, a gleaming new maze of pipes and tanks — topped with what looks like the Tin Man’s hat — will suck up 90 percent of the carbon dioxide from one of the boilers so it can be shipped out for burial, deep underground.
If there is any hope of staving off the worst effects of climate change, many scientists say, this must be part of it — capturing the carbon that spews from power plants and locking it away, permanently. For now, they contend, the world is too dependent on fossil fuels to do anything less.
If all goes as planned, the effort in Saskatchewan will be the first major one of its kind at a power plant, the equivalent of taking about 250,000 cars off the road. And at least in theory, that carbon dioxide will be kept out of the atmosphere forever.
“Think about how far we’ve come,” said Mr. Zeleny, who recently retired after four decades here, most recently as plant manager.
Despite President Obama’s push to from power plants across the United States, coal is not going away anytime soon. The administration expects coal will still produce nearly a third of the nation’s electricity in 2030, down from , even if Mr. Obama’s plan survives the political onslaught against it.
The challenge is even more stark overseas. China already burns almost as much coal as all other nations combined, and its appetite keeps expanding. Worldwide, coal consumption in 2020 will be what it was in 2000, according to the United States Energy Information Administration, and will continue to grow for decades.
Even the abundant natural gas unleashed by fracking, while cleaner than coal, is a major source of greenhouse gases. Ultimately, many scientists say, those emissions will need to be trapped and stored, too.
“If you want to carry on using those fossil hydrocarbons, that means cleaning up their emissions,” said Stuart Haszeldine, a geologist at the University of Edinburgh. Capturing carbon, he said, “is the single best way of doing that.”
Yet it is no magic bullet. Because it requires so much energy, sucking up carbon reduces a plant’s ability to make electricity — the whole point of its existence. There are basic questions of whether carbon dioxide can be safely stored underground. And the technology is expensive. Updating the Saskatchewan plant alone cost $1.2 billion — two-thirds of which went for the equipment to remove the gas.
In the pine woods of Kemper County, Miss., another carbon-capture effort is taking shape, in a massive new power plant that will be fed a steady diet of coal from the strip mine next door. Bruce Harrington, the operations manager, likened the hulking beast to an anthill: It seems curiously quiet on the outside, but deep within an army of workers is cutting, welding and testing. Disturb it, he said, and thousands of people will come pouring out.
Battling delays, the plant’s owner, , hopes to have it open next year. But it is more complex than the Saskatchewan effort, and the price tag has ballooned to $5.5 billion, more than double the original estimate.
“It’ll work,” Mr. Harrington said. “It won’t be easy at first, but it’ll work.”
Though the world has known for decades how to capture carbon dioxide from power plants, scant progress has been made. The United States and other nations have paid for research and helped some projects — Canada gave $220 million to the Saskatchewan plant’s owner, , and Southern Company received $270 million from the Department of Energy — but the costs are high enough that few other power companies have done much beyond study the concept.
“There’s no market,” said Edward S. Rubin, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, unless governments impose “a requirement to substantially reduce emissions.”
That is precisely what is happening here in Saskatchewan, given the Canadian government’s on coal plants both old and new. But whether Mr. Obama’s new rules are aggressive enough to spur a change in the United States remains unclear.
Some experts see the Obama policy as a turning point, a moment that could help drive the business of collecting carbon dioxide. Yet the administration has been wary of pushing too hard, warning that any move to force existing coal plants to siphon off their carbon dioxide emissions “would affect the nationwide cost and supply of electricity.”
The Obama administration plans to require that future coal plants capture their carbon dioxide, a rule that some utilities and politicians, particularly from coal-producing states, have vowed to fight. But for now the mandate is largely an empty one, because coal is so uneconomical compared with natural gas that no one expects many new American coal plants to be built in the foreseeable future.
“If you give power companies a loophole, they’re not going to do the thing,” said Howard J. Herzog, the director of a research program on carbon capture and storage, known as C.C.S., at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Why should we even consider C.C.S.? Let’s just do natural gas.”
So at a time when many experts say 10 or more projects need to be undertaken to improve the technology and reduce costs, the opposite is happening. Work to modify a coal plant in Texas is expected to start this year, but there are only a few other projects worldwide, all in the planning stage. And as some government subsidies have begun to dry up — notably, federal stimulus funds in the United States — several efforts have been delayed or canceled.
“I’m concerned,” Mr. Haszeldine said. “Governments around the world see C.C.S. as a good thing. But they’re not pushing hard enough on enabling that to happen.”
The technology has been around, in one form or another, for nearly a century, used at some refineries and other industrial plants, including large ones in Illinois, North Dakota, Canada and Norway.
But removing carbon dioxide from the swirl of gases unleashed at a power plant is challenging, akin to plucking just a few colored Ping-Pong balls out of the air from a swarm of mostly white ones.
To do the job, the equipment is enormous. At the Saskatchewan plant, called Boundary Dam, a liquid chemical latches onto carbon dioxide molecules after being sprayed onto a plume of combustion gases. The “stripper,” where the carbon dioxide is finally pulled away, is 160 feet high — so high it pokes out of the roof.
Beyond the equipment costs, efficiency is lost because some of the steam that would normally generate electricity goes to the stripper instead. And a monstrous motor compresses the carbon dioxide — until it effectively becomes a liquid — for transport. All told, capturing the carbon dioxide at Boundary Dam will sap electricity generation by about 20 percent, using as much energy as about 25,000 homes. Experts call it the “energy penalty.”
Injecting liquids deep underground can present problems, too. Pumping wastewater from oil and gas production into the ground has been linked to spates of small earthquakes in Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma and other states.
The carbon dioxide could taint drinking water, or eventually rise to the surface and bubble into the atmosphere, defeating the entire purpose.
In the most extreme case, leaking carbon dioxide could harm or kill people. In Cameroon, a volcanic lake suddenly released a cloud of naturally forming carbon dioxide in 1986, suffocating 1,700 people.
Still, carbon dioxide has been buried around the world with few problems. In Norway, a million tons have been stored every year since 1996, injected into sandstone about 3,000 feet beneath the North Sea. (By some estimates, that site alone could store as much carbon dioxide as the world could capture for years.)
Picking the right geological features could minimize the risk of earthquakes and leaks. But even then, storage wells would have to be monitored, presumably forever, at a cost someone would have to bear.
If done poorly, storing carbon dioxide can cause problems, said David Hawkins, the director of climate programs with the , an advocacy group. “But that’s also true with operating an oil refinery.”
Most of Boundary Dam’s carbon dioxide will not simply be buried in storage wells. Instead, the emissions from burning one fossil fuel — coal — will become a tool to extract and consume yet another: oil.
After being sold and shipped through a 40-mile pipeline to an oil field, the carbon dioxide will be pumped into old wells, where it will mix with the oil inside, making it flow better. The process is known as enhanced oil recovery, and while some of the carbon dioxide will come up with the oil, it will be compressed and injected again. Over time, nearly all of it should remain underground.
The oil and gas industry has done this for decades, mostly with naturally occurring carbon dioxide that accumulates underground. But each year in North America, more than 15 million tons of carbon dioxide from industry are used as well. Selling that carbon dioxide to the oil industry helps make a business case for capturing it at places like Boundary Dam.
The practice could be expanded at many oil fields around the United States and beyond, experts say, potentially storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide and serving as a bridge to the day when it becomes necessary, and economical, to store the gas elsewhere.
To prod the industry, Congress is weighing incentives, including tax credits, loan guarantees and tax exemptions.
“It’s not going to happen by itself,” said Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, a Democrat who is chairman of a Finance Committee panel on energy. “There ought to be broad bipartisan support for measures like these.”
As for the apparent incongruity of using carbon dioxide captured from coal to produce more fossil fuels, Mr. Hawkins said his group had struggled with the issue.
“Our view is that the most likely consequence is not to encourage more consumption of oil,” he said. Rather, drawing more oil from existing fields will reduce the need to develop new ones, “and that’s an environmental plus,” he said.
Boundary Dam’s owner will evaluate the project for two years before deciding whether to capture carbon dioxide from other boilers at the plant, which it says it could do at lower cost. Part of the calculus is that, less than 10 miles away, there is an almost limitless supply of cheap coal that it otherwise might not be able to use as Canada’s new standards take hold.
“We had to figure out if we could continue using coal as a fuel source for the next 100 years,” said Mr. Zeleny, the former employee.
As for the United States and the rest of the world, the prognosis for carbon capture is less clear. If the United States moves forward, China and other countries may make bigger strides as well. This month, the United States and China for several collaborative research projects.
“How this will play out over time is hard to tell,” said Professor Rubin of Carnegie Mellon. “Inevitably, there will be a balance between technological capability, cost and political realities.”Others were even more upbeat. Dan Reicher, who directs the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University, said the Obama administration’s recent moves on emissions could be a catalyst.
“We’re finally getting some clarity on where we’re headed on carbon emissions,” Mr. Reicher said, arguing that collecting carbon dioxide could become a significant industry.
“We need every tool in the toolbox to address climate change,” he said.
