Viewing Where the Internet Goes

Will 2014 be the year that the Internet is reined in?

When Edward J. Snowden, the disaffected National Security Agency contract employee, purloined tens of thousands of classified documents from computers around the world, his actions — and their still-reverberating consequences — heightened international pressure to control the network that has increasingly become the world's stage. At issue is the technical principle that is the basis for the Internet, its "any-to-any" connectivity. That capability has defined the technology ever since Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn sequestered themselves in the conference room of a Palo Alto, Calif., hotel in 1973, with the task of interconnecting computer networks for an elite group of scientists, engineers and military personnel.

The two men wound up developing a simple and universal set of rules for exchanging digital information — the conventions of the modern Internet. Despite many technological changes, their work prevails.

But while the Internet's global capability to connect anyone with anything has affected every nook and cranny of modern life — with politics, education, espionage, war, civil liberties, entertainment, sex, science, finance and manufacturing all transformed — its growth increasingly presents paradoxes.

It was, for example, the Internet's global reach that made classified documents available to Mr. Snowden — and made it so easy for him to distribute them to news organizations.

Yet the Internet also made possible widespread surveillance, a practice that alarmed Mr. Snowden and triggered his plan to steal and publicly release the information.

With the Snowden affair starkly highlighting the issues, the new year is likely to see renewed calls to change the way the Internet is governed. In particular, governments that do not favor the free flow of information, especially if it's through a system designed by Americans, would like to see the Internet regulated in a way that would "Balkanize" it by preventing access to certain websites.

The debate right now involves two international organizations, usually known by their acronyms, with different views: Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and the I.T.U., or International Telecommunication Union.

Icann, a nonprofit that oversees the Internet's basic functions, like the assignment of names to websites, was established in 1998 by the United States government to create an international forum for "governing" the Internet. The United States continues to favor this group.

The I.T.U., created in 1865 as the International Telegraph Convention, is the United Nations telecommunications regulatory agency. Nations like Brazil, China and Russia have been pressing the United States to switch governance of the Internet to this organization.

Dr. Cerf, 70, and Dr. Kahn, 75, have taken slightly different positions on the matter. Dr. Cerf, who was chairman of Icann from 2000-7, has become known as an informal "Internet ambassador" and a strong proponent of an Internet that remains independent of state control. He has been one of the major supporters of the idea of "network neutrality" — the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications, regardless of the source.

Dr. Kahn has made a determined effort to stay out of the network neutrality debate. Nevertheless, he has been more willing to work with the I.T.U., particularly in attempting to build support for a system, known as Digital Object Architecture, for tracking and authenticating all content distributed through the Internet.

Both men agreed to sit down, in separate interviews, to talk about their views on the Internet's future. The interviews were edited and condensed.

The Internet Ambassador

After serving as a program manager at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Vinton Cerf joined MCI Communications Corp., an early commercial Internet company that was purchased by Verizon in 2006, to lead the development of electronic mail systems for the Internet. In 2005, he became a vice president and "Internet evangelist" for Google. Last year he became the president of the Association for Computing Machinery, a leading international educational and scientific computing society.

Q. Edward Snowden's actions have raised a new storm of controversy about the role of the Internet. Is it a significant new challenge to an open and global Internet?

A. The answer is no, I don't think so. There are some similar analogues in history. The French historically copied every telex or every telegram that you sent, and they shared it with businesses in order to remain competitive. And when that finally became apparent, it didn't shut down the telegraph system.

The Snowden revelations will increase interest in end-to-end cryptography for encrypting information both in transit and at rest. For many of us, including me, who believe that is an important capacity to have, this little crisis may be the trigger that induces people to spend time and energy learning how to use it.

You've drawn the analogy to a road or highway system. That brings to mind the idea of requiring a driver's license to use the Internet, which raises questions about responsibility and anonymity.

I still believe that anonymity is an important capacity, that people should have the ability to speak anonymously. It's argued that people will be encouraged to say untrue things, harmful things, especially if they believe they are anonymous.

There is a tension there, because in some environments the only way you will be able to behave safely is to have some anonymity.

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The Week: Unsettling News on Knee Surgery, and a Striking Neanderthal Gene

"Houston, you've got yourself a new pump module," Col. Michael S. Hopkins said last Tuesday after some maintenance on the International Space Station. Repairs to the cooling system were needed after a valve malfunctioned, forcing astronauts to dim the lights and curtail operations. "It's like Christmas morning, opening up a little present here," the astronaut Richard A. Mastracchio said.

Developments

Orthopedics

Doubts About a Knee Operation

Arthroscopic knee surgery is no more effective than fake operations for people with a certain kind of injury, according to an unusual study from Finland. People with a torn meniscus (the crescent-shaped cartilage that helps cushion and stabilize knees) were split into groups: One was given surgery, the other only anesthesia and incisions. A year later, most patients in each group said they felt better and would have the procedure again.

The study does not imply the surgery never helps, the authors said, but adds to a body of research that suggests it should be aimed at a narrower subset of patients.

Genetics

An Ancient Link for Diabetes

Researchers have identified gene mutations that may explain why Latinos are almost twice as likely to develop Type 2 diabetes as Caucasians and African-Americans. And in a twist, the quirk can be traced to Neanderthals.

While trying to explain the high rate of Type 2 diabetes among Latinos, an international team of scientists happened on an ancient gene, most likely involved in fat metabolism. Having mutations in that gene raises a person's risk by about 20 percent; having two copies, one from each parent, raises it by 40 percent.

"As far as I know, this is the first time a version of a gene from Neanderthal has been connected to a modern-day disease," David Altshuler, a geneticist at Harvard and an author of the study, told NPR.

Energy

A Plant Fuels Energy Hopes

A company in San Diego says it has cultivated hybrid strains of a plant that could produce enough biofuel to compete with energy sources like petroleum. The plant, jatropha, whose seeds produce a high-quality oil that can be refined into low-carbon fuel, was once dismissed because it produced too few seeds. But thanks to advances in molecular genetics and DNA sequencing, the start-up SGB domesticated the plant in a few years, rather than decades.

The company is also working to identify traits that make certain strains of the plant resistant to heat or cold. If such traits could be identified in cash crops like corn and soybeans, the knowledge could be valuable as climate change accelerates.

Psychology

For Anxiety, Don't Keep Calm

Feeling nervous? Don't bother calming down. You're better off getting excited, according to a new study from Harvard Business School.

Participants in several anxiety-inducing experiments consistently performed better when prompted to get excited rather than to relax, the study found. For example, people told to say "I am excited" before delivering a public speech gave longer, more competent presentations and appeared more relaxed than speakers told to say "I am calm." The shift from anxiety to excitement may be eased by the fact that both are highly aroused states, suggested the author of the study, published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Coming Up

Technology

Dry Cleaning Challenge

Can you build a washing machine that uses no liquid, creates no wrinkles and doesn't damage clothes? To win $20,000 from the "open innovation" firm InnoCentive, you don't have to.

The company, which builds inventions from crowdsourced ideas, is seeking proposals for better clothes-washing techniques — no working prototype needed — for its Future Clothes Washing Technology challenge. The deadline is Jan. 11, but be warned: The winner must surrender intellectual property rights. So maybe give them your second-best idea.

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Australia Plans Evacuation of Passengers Stranded in Ice

Andrew Peacock, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

An image from one of the passengers of the Akademik Shokalskiy shows the Russian research ship icebound off Antarctica.

Maritime safety officials began preparations on Tuesday for a helicopter rescue of scientists and others aboard a chartered research ship that has been stuck in Antarctic ice for a week.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said all 52 passengers aboard the Russian ship, the Akademik Shokalskiy, would be airlifted to a Chinese icebreaker. The ship's 22 crew members would stay behind, the authority said.

Bad weather in the area made it very unlikely that a helicopter rescue would begin before Wednesday, the authority said. But in preparation, a landing zone had been marked on the ice near the Shokalskiy.

The 233-foot Shokalskiy became stuck last Tuesday when strong winds pushed loose pack ice up against it near Cape de la Motte, about 1,700 miles south of Hobart, Tasmania. The ship set sail from Bluff, New Zealand, on Dec. 8, and is carrying scientists, tourists and several journalists on what is billed as the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, a planned monthlong voyage to study the changes to the environment of East Antarctica since the region was first explored by the Australian geologist Douglas Mawson a century ago.

The authority, which is coordinating the rescue, said the crew of an Australian icebreaker, the Aurora Australis, had advised officials earlier Tuesday that the ship would not be able to make another attempt to reach the Shokalskiy. The icebreaker "would be at risk of becoming beset by ice itself if it continued to make further rescue attempts," the authority said in a statement.

The passengers are expected to be airlifted in groups of 12 and will be taken to the Chinese ship, the Xue Long. The passengers will then be transferred to the Aurora Australis, by barge, the authority said.

Snow and winds of up to 35 miles an hour on Monday had forced the Aurora Australis to abandon its first attempt to reach the icebound ship. The icebreaker had been diverted from a resupply operation at an Australian Antarctic base, Casey Station, about 1,000 miles to the west.

The Xue Long, which was about two months into a five-month national Antarctic expedition when it was asked to help, failed in a similar attempt on Saturday, but has remained in the area. The Xue Long's helicopter will be used in the evacuation.

The safety authority statement did not say where the evacuees would be taken on the Aurora, but in addition to Casey Station, there is a French station, Dumont d'Urville, about 100 miles to the west, and several other stations to the east along the Ross Sea, including the United States base, McMurdo, which is the largest on the continent.

Chris Turney, a leader of the research expedition and a professor of climate change at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said in a phone interview on Sunday that those on board had been told of the possibility of a helicopter rescue, and that there was a sense of relief.

Dr. Turney said that all aboard were well and that morale was good, echoing assessments by some passengers posted in short YouTube videos. In one posted over the weekend, an expedition member named Mary Regan stood on the ice with the stranded ship behind her.

"Having a wonderful time," she said, looking around. "You can see we have this wonderful snowy wonderland."

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The Cancer Divide: India’s Efforts to Aid Poor Worry Drug Makers

NEW DELHI — Alka Kudesia needs an expensive drug to treat her breast cancer, but refuses to tell her children for fear they will take out loans to buy the medicine and spend the rest of their lives in debt.

"We're barely able to afford the treatment I'm already getting," Ms. Kudesia, 48, said with quiet defiance. "My kids are just starting out in life. There is no way I'm going to be a burden to them."

The drug, Herceptin, is one of the most effective treatments for an aggressive form of breast cancer. But in India, at a cost of at least $18,000 for one course of treatment, only a small fraction of the women who need it get it.

The Indian government last year threatened to allow production of less costly, generic versions of Herceptin. Its maker, Roche Holdings of Switzerland, initially resisted, but surrendered its patent rights this year in large measure because it concluded that it would lose a legal contest in Indian courts.

The skirmishing over Herceptin and other cancer medicines is part of a new and critical phase in a struggle to make drugs affordable to the world's poorest people, one that began in earnest more than a decade ago when advocates campaigned successfully to make AIDS medicines accessible to millions of Africans.

"Cancer is the next H.I.V./AIDS issue, and the fight has only begun," said Shamnad Basheer, a professor of law at West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata.

American trade officials have voiced concerns about India's treatment of drug patents, including its reasons for sometimes overriding them. President Obama discussed the issue this year with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India in the Oval Office, administration officials said.

Executives in the international pharmaceutical industry, increasingly dependent on drug sales in emerging markets like India, China and Brazil, contend that India's efforts to cancel patents threaten the global system for discovering cures while doing little to resolve the health challenges most patients here face.

"We are open to discussing what the best way is to bring innovative medicines to patients," said Daniel Grotzky, a spokesman for Roche, which has a large portfolio of cancer medicines. "But a society that wants to develop new medicines and technology must reward innovation through a solid protection of intellectual property."

Some health experts say investing in earlier diagnosis of breast cancer and improved testing, surgery and access to radiation therapy is more important than access to expensive drugs. "Chemotherapy is not the major issue for cancer control in India," said Dr. Richard Sullivan, a professor of cancer policy and global health at King's Health Partners' Integrated Cancer Center in London.

But health advocates say similar arguments were made by the United States government and the pharmaceutical industry as they sought to protect patents on AIDS medicines through much of the 1990s, a stance that former President Bill Clinton has since said he regrets. It would be unfair to delay improving access to cancer drugs until India's broken system for cancer care was fixed, they say. They note that more than twice as many people in India die of cancer than of AIDS.

As the world has made progress against malnutrition and infectious diseases, more people are living into old age and dying of chronic illnesses like heart disease and cancer, which now cause two-thirds of deaths globally. In 2012, there were 14.1 million new cancer cases across the world and 8.2 million cancer deaths, according to the World Health Organization. And the number of breast cancer cases is growing. About 6.3 million women were living with the disease last year.

The rise in the cancer caseload is already a heavy burden on India's hobbled health system. Indian women, while less likely to get breast cancer than those in the United States, are far more likely to die of it. Breast cancer is diagnosed in about 115,000 women here every year, and in 2008 some 54,000 died from it, according to the World Health Organization.

At intersections in New Delhi, women carrying doctors' notes beg for money for their prescribed treatments. India has just 27 dedicated public cancer centers for 1.2 billion people. The government has promised to add an additional 50 in the coming years, but medical experts say even that will be grossly inadequate.

India, which is one of the world's leading producers of generic pharmaceuticals, has long viewed patent rights on medicines skeptically. It has already ruled invalid patents protecting exclusive sales of Novartis's Gleevec, Pfizer's Sutent and Roche's Tarceva, all cancer medicines. In a landmark decision last year, the government agreed that the patent protecting Bayer's Nexavar, also a cancer drug, was valid but overrode it anyway because a generic company promised to lower the price from $4,500 to about $140 per month of treatment.

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Second Icebreaker Nears Ship Stranded Off Antarctica

Australian Maritime Safety Authority, via European Pressphoto Agency

The view from the Akademik Shokalskiy, stuck in pack ice near Cape de la Motte, Antarctica. An Australian icebreaker was in sight early Monday.

An Australian icebreaker worked its way slowly through thick ice off Antarctica early Monday in the latest attempt to rescue about 70 people aboard a stranded research ship.

The ship, the 233-foot Akademik Shokalskiy, became stuck in the ice last Tuesday when strong winds pushed loose pack ice up against it near Cape de la Motte, about 1,700 miles south of Hobart, Tasmania. It is carrying the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, scientists and tourists who are studying changes to the environment of East Antarctica in the century since the region was first explored.

By Monday, the icebreaker, the Aurora Australis, was 11 nautical miles from the Shokalskiy, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is coordinating the rescue operation. Chris Turney, a leader of the research expedition, said in a phone interview from the ship, "We've been in contact with them and we can see them."

The Australis is the second icebreaker to try to reach the ship. A Chinese vessel, the Xue Long, had tried early Saturday but was stalled by the thick ice.

Dr. Turney, who is a professor of climate change at the University of New South Wales, said that if the Australian ship was unable to clear a path to free the Shokalskiy, the Xue Long, which has remained in the area, had a helicopter that could be used to ferry people to the Australis. The Australis would take them to Casey Station, a base operated by the Australian Antarctic Division, and from there they would take other ships home.

"We've warned everyone on board that that's a possibility," Dr. Turney said. All on board are well and morale is good, he said.

The expedition, with a multidisciplinary team of about 25 professors and graduate students and 20 tourists, set sail from Bluff, New Zealand, on Dec. 8 on what was to be a monthlong voyage. The expedition is retracing some of the travels, and replicating some of the studies, of the Australian geologist Douglas Mawson, who first explored East Antarctica from 1911-14.

The ship anchored at the edge of pack ice on Dec. 18, and Dr. Turney and others spent a day journeying about 45 miles across the ice to Mawson's hut. The ship then headed east through open water. But as it began heading north, it "ran afoul of very strong winds" that pushed the loose ice in its way. "It pegged us in," he said, and the frozen expanse quickly grew as more ice piled up. "At first we were just two nautical miles from getting to open water, and now it's 20," he said.

Even though it is summer in the Antarctic, waiting for the ice to break up on its own is not an option, Dr. Turney said, because of the risk that the ship could drift along with the ice and collide with one of several icebergs in the area, which are drifting independently of the pack ice.

Since the ship became stuck, Dr. Turney and others have been a regular presence on Twitter and other social media sites. Some have made short videos describing their experiences.

Dr. Turney said that some of the people aboard had gone onto the ice to study birds and make other scientific observations, and that others had occupied themselves on board with ad-hoc classes in subjects like knot tying. And a steady diet of films has been available to help pass the time, he said.

"At first, people were starting to watch disaster movies," Dr. Turney added. "But I had to stop that." Now it is mostly comedies, although episodes of the hit series "Breaking Bad" have been popular, too.

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Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design

Jason Henry for The New York Times

A common area for students at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, commonly called the D.school.

PALO ALTO — Akshay Kothari's first assignment at the D.school — formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University — was to rethink how people eat ramen noodles. His last D.school assignment led to a news-reading app that was bought by LinkedIn for $90 million.

While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease people's lives. And that is a central lesson at the school, which is pushing students to rethink the boundaries for many industries.

At the heart of the school's courses is developing what David Kelley, one of the school's founders, calls an empathy muscle. Inside the school's cavernous space — which seems like a nod to the Silicon Valley garages of lore — the students are taught to forgo computer screens and spreadsheets and focus on people.

So far, that process has worked. In the eight years since the design school opened, students have churned out dozens of innovative products and start-ups. They have developed original ways to tackle infant mortality, unreliable electricity and malnutrition in the third world, as well as clubfoot, a common congenital deformity that twists a baby's feet inward and down.

Those successes have made the D.school the envy of universities around the world. Sarah Stein Greenberg, a D.school alum and managing director, says she receives inquiries every week from universities looking to mimic the D.school curriculum.

The school has also become one of the most highly sought destinations at Stanford. Some of the most popular classes get four times as many applicants as there are seats available. To meet the demand, the D.school is adding full courses and so-called pop-up classes, which focus on a more narrow problem. "Where Did You Go Olympia Snowe?," a recent pop-up class, challenged students to solve the seemingly most intractable problem of all: rekindling bipartisanship. Olympia J. Snowe, a former Republican senator of Maine, even made a brief guest appearance.

Mr. Kelley, who also started the design firm IDEO, says the goal is to give students — many of them analytically minded — the tools to change lives.

One emphasis is to get students to leave campus and observe people as they deal with life's messy problems.

That is how Mr. Kothari, a mechanical engineering graduate student, started his ramen project. He spent hours at local ramen shops watching and talking to patrons as they inevitably spilled broth and noodles. Together with a group of other D.school students, he built a prototype for a fat straw that would let patrons have their ramen and drink it, too.

The school challenges students to create, tinker and relentlessly test possible solutions on their users — and to repeat that cycle as many times as it takes — until they come up with solutions that people will actually use.

An important element of the school, Mr. Kelley says, is having students start small, and as they gain what he calls "creative confidence" with each success, they can move toward bigger, seemingly intractable problems. It is not all that different, he said, from teaching someone to play the piano.

A recent boot camp class dispatched students to local hair salons to tackle that age-old problem: the bad haircut.

One group was surprised to learn that sweeping hair off the floor is the bane of many hairdressers. That group designed a prototype for a device that sucks up clippings before they hit the floor. A few courses later, the same students were asked to apply that same analytical process to the shortage of organ donors.

"It's a guided approach to building that empathy muscle until, pretty soon, they are out there doing it on their own," Mr. Kelley said.

One of the D.school's most highly sought courses is "Design for Extreme Affordability." Over two quarters, students team up with partners from around the world to tackle their real-world problems. So far, "Extreme" students, as they are called, have completed 90 projects with 27 partners in 19 countries. This year, students will work with partners in Cambodia, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Senegal and South Africa.

One of Extreme's more successful projects is Embrace, a low-cost miniature pouch, not unlike a sleeping bag, that helps prevent newborns from developing hypothermia. Embrace's inventors say the pouch has helped prevent 22,000 infant deaths.

This year, Ian Connolly and Jeffrey Yang, D.school students, formed a partnership with Miraclefeet, a nonprofit based in North Carolina, to design a brace for children with clubfoot for less than $20.

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Novelties: Reading Your Palm for Security’s Sake

They aren't taking any chances at Barclays Bank in Britain. Stating an account number and other bona fides isn't enough to get to your money at the bank's wealth and investment management service. As an additional safeguard, a program analyzes customers' voices when they call in, to make sure they match a voice print on file.

At some A.T.M.'s in Japan, getting cash isn't simply a matter of entering a bank card and a password. The machine scans the vein pattern in a person's palm before issuing money.

And, since September, people have been using fingerprint sensors on their iPhone 5s to unlock their devices, or to shop at the iTunes store.

These are three examples of biometrics systems, which have long been the province of border control, military surveillance and national intelligence. Now they are rapidly moving into the consumer mainstream to unlock laptops and smartphones, or as a supplement to passwords at banks, hospitals and libraries.

But the technology also comes with a host of troublesome issues about its vulnerability to hacking and misuse.

The stakes can be high when inherently personal biometric data is hijacked, said Bruce Schneier, a security expert and author of "Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive." "If someone steals your password, you can change it," he said. "But if someone steals your thumbprint, you can't get a new thumb. The failure modes are very different."

Despite these concerns, the technology is making its way onto the office desktop — and the laptop, too. A new Fujitsu laptop, the Celsius H730, released recently in Japan, can be ordered  with a choice of biometrics: a fingerprint sensor or, for an additional $116, a palm scanner instead. To unlock the computer, you hold your palm over the sensor and the software checks your vein pattern to make sure you're the authorized user, said Joseph Dean, a Fujitsu spokesman.

Biometric devices can identify vein patterns in the finger, the back of the hand or the palm, said Anil K. Jain, a professor and expert in biometrics at Michigan State University. The technology works quite well, he said, adding that "it's difficult to forge because the vascular patterns are inside the body." The veins are revealed by a harmless infrared light.

Palm scans are gaining the most traction in the vein-reading market, Professor Jain said. Identifying features include the thickness of the veins, and the angles and locations where they intersect. Some systems combine fingerprints and finger vein patterns.

A different biometric, voice printing, is offered by Nuance Communications to many customers, including Barclays. The voice print is based on about 100 characteristics, including pitch and accent, said Brett Beranek, a manager at Nuance.

Voice prints, even if stolen, will not lead to identity theft, he said. "If someone did compromise the database, there's nothing they could do with it," he said. "We are not storing people's voices, but characteristics of their voice."

Consumers shouldn't expect that biometric technologies will work flawlessly, Professor Jain said. They can be a good solution, balancing convenience with security. "But they are not foolproof," he said. "There could and will be situations where a person may be rejected or confused with someone else." For example, people could be barred by a fingerprint mismatch from access to their smartphones or bank accounts.

Fingerprint sensing will be the most popular biometric identifier for the next few years, said Alan Goode, author of a recent report on the mobile biometric security market and founder of Goode Intelligence in London. Apple's introduction of fingerprint scanning, and many other manufacturers' plans to offer similar services, "are going to make fingerprint sensors a common feature on mobile devices," he said. A majority will be used to unlock phones, but they will also increasingly be linked to mobile payment services.

Ram Ravi, an analyst who studies the global use of biometrics for Frost & Sullivan, agreed that fingerprints would be the leading biometric system for the next few years. "But palm reading is also developing into a huge market," he said. Iris- and facial-identification biometrics are growing rapidly as well.

Mr. Schneier, the security expert, said biometric solutions could be attractive in consumer goods so long as the processing occurs entirely on the device. (Apple has stated that all biometric processing on its iPhone occurs directly on the phone.)

When information is handled and stored on the chip, the only problem — certainly a maddening one — may be occasions when the device doesn't recognize people and won't let them in, he said.

But if the information is stored on a central server and unauthorized parties gain access to it, that is an entirely different problem.

"The centralized database is the scary part," Mr. Schneier said. "That's where the risk is. If it's hacked into, suddenly everyone's biometrics are stolen."

EMAIL: novelties@nytimes.com.

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Dot Earth Blog: A Tutorial on Humanity’s Path to and Beyond 7 Billion

On Facebook, a friend posted a link this morning to a much-watched David Suzuki riff on exponential growth, bacterial reproduction and humanity's 59th minute:

That led me to sift for other video content on this issue of meshing human development and planetary limits, which I've explored here of course more than a few times.

I found "Malthus Miffed: Are People the Problem, the Solution, or Both? An Introduction to Demography and Populations Study Through an Examination of the World's Population":

The lecture, part of an online course from The Floating University, is a marvelous deeper dive on this question from my longtime source on all things demographic, Joel Cohen of Rockefeller and Columbia universities. (There's a transcript.)

The lecture is part of a fascinating course connecting "Great Big Ideas" with concrete issues (a joint venture between The Jack Parker Corporation and Big Think).

The end of a year is a good time to explore big ideas. I encourage you to invest 43 of the remaining minutes of 2013 with Cohen. If you're pressed for time, dip in for a minute or two.

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Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.

The first commercial version of the new kind of computer chip is scheduled to be released in 2014. Not only can it automate tasks that now require painstaking programming — for example, moving a robot's arm smoothly and efficiently — but it can also sidestep and even tolerate errors, potentially making the term "computer crash" obsolete.

The new computing approach, already in use by some large technology companies, is based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and connect with other neurons to interpret information. It allows computers to absorb new information while carrying out a task, and adjust what they do based on the changing signals.

In coming years, the approach will make possible a new generation of artificial intelligence systems that will perform some functions that humans do with ease: see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and control. That can hold enormous consequences for tasks like facial and speech recognition, navigation and planning, which are still in elementary stages and rely heavily on human programming.

Designers say the computing style can clear the way for robots that can safely walk and drive in the physical world, though a thinking or conscious computer, a staple of science fiction, is still far off on the digital horizon.

"We're moving from engineering computing systems to something that has many of the characteristics of biological computing," said Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who directs the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, one of many research centers devoted to developing these new kinds of computer circuits.

Conventional computers are limited by what they have been programmed to do. Computer vision systems, for example, only "recognize" objects that can be identified by the statistics-oriented algorithms programmed into them. An algorithm is like a recipe, a set of step-by-step instructions to perform a calculation.

But last year, Google researchers were able to get a machine-learning algorithm, known as a neural network, to perform an identification task without supervision. The network scanned a database of 10 million images, and in doing so trained itself to recognize cats.

In June, the company said it had used those neural network techniques to develop a new search service to help customers find specific photos more accurately.

The new approach, used in both hardware and software, is being driven by the explosion of scientific knowledge about the brain. Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist who leads Stanford's Brains in Silicon research program, said that is also its limitation, as scientists are far from fully understanding how brains function.

"We have no clue," he said. "I'm an engineer, and I build things. There are these highfalutin theories, but give me one that will let me build something."

Until now, the design of computers was dictated by ideas originated by the mathematician John von Neumann about 65 years ago. Microprocessors perform operations at lightning speed, following instructions programmed using long strings of 1s and 0s. They generally store that information separately in what is known, colloquially, as memory, either in the processor itself, in adjacent storage chips or in higher capacity magnetic disk drives.

The data — for instance, temperatures for a climate model or letters for word processing — are shuttled in and out of the processor's short-term memory while the computer carries out the programmed action. The result is then moved to its main memory.

The new processors consist of electronic components that can be connected by wires that mimic biological synapses. Because they are based on large groups of neuron-like elements, they are known as neuromorphic processors, a term credited to the California Institute of Technology physicist Carver Mead, who pioneered the concept in the late 1980s.

They are not "programmed." Rather the connections between the circuits are "weighted" according to correlations in data that the processor has already "learned." Those weights are then altered as data flows in to the chip, causing them to change their values and to "spike." That generates a signal that travels to other components and, in reaction, changes the neural network, in essence programming the next actions much the same way that information alters human thoughts and actions.

"Instead of bringing data to computation as we do today, we can now bring computation to data," said Dharmendra Modha, an I.B.M. computer scientist who leads the company's cognitive computing research effort. "Sensors become the computer, and it opens up a new way to use computer chips that can be everywhere."

The new computers, which are still based on silicon chips, will not replace today's computers, but will augment them, at least for now. Many computer designers see them as coprocessors, meaning they can work in tandem with other circuits that can be embedded in smartphones and in the giant centralized computers that make up the cloud. Modern computers already consist of a variety of coprocessors that perform specialized tasks, like producing graphics on your cellphone and converting visual, audio and other data for your laptop.

One great advantage of the new approach is its ability to tolerate glitches. Traditional computers are precise, but they cannot work around the failure of even a single transistor. With the biological designs, the algorithms are ever changing, allowing the system to continuously adapt and work around failures to complete tasks.

Traditional computers are also remarkably energy inefficient, especially when compared to actual brains, which the new neurons are built to mimic.

I.B.M. announced last year that it had built a supercomputer simulation of the brain that encompassed roughly 10 billion neurons — more than 10 percent of a human brain. It ran about 1,500 times more slowly than an actual brain. Further, it required several megawatts of power, compared with just 20 watts of power used by the biological brain.

Running the program, known as Compass, which attempts to simulate a brain, at the speed of a human brain would require a flow of electricity in a conventional computer that is equivalent to what is needed to power both San Francisco and New York, Dr. Modha said.

I.B.M. and Qualcomm, as well as the Stanford research team, have already designed neuromorphic processors, and Qualcomm has said that it is coming out in 2014 with a commercial version, which is expected to be used largely for further development. Moreover, many universities are now focused on this new style of computing. This fall the National Science Foundation financed the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, a new research center based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Harvard and Cornell.

The largest class on campus this fall at Stanford was a graduate level machine-learning course covering both statistical and biological approaches, taught by the computer scientist Andrew Ng. More than 760 students enrolled. "That reflects the zeitgeist," said Terry Sejnowski, a computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, who pioneered early biologically inspired algorithms. "Everyone knows there is something big happening, and they're trying find out what it is."

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2,500 Pigs Join Debate Over Farms vs. Scenery

Jacob Slaton for The New York Times

The barns of C&H Hog Farms can be seen among the trees. Many nearby residents wonder how such a large facility ended up in a major tourist area.

MOUNT JUDEA, Ark. — Anita Hudson's moment of realization came early this year when she saw cement trucks whizzing past her home in this blip of an Ozark town. For Sam Dye, it was when an employee at the school where he once was principal pointed out bulldozers clearing a wooded area in the distance.

Jacob Slaton for The New York Times

"I've lived in this country for, well, all my life, and cattle and hogs has been raised up and down the creek here and, to me, it ain't bothered nothing so far." Charles Campbell, 77, has permitted a hog farm's owners to spray manure on his land.

For many months, Ms. Hudson and Mr. Dye had been among those who brushed off rumors that a large hog farm would be built here in the scenic watershed of the Buffalo River.

But now they were confronting reality: a farm that could house as many as 6,500 hogs was being built near them, within the pristine ecosystem of the Buffalo — designated America's first "national river" and overseen by the National Park Service. Since then, the operation, C&H Hog Farms — which began producing piglets for the agricultural giant Cargill in the spring — has divided the community, drawn scrutiny from environmentalists, politicians, and state and federal officials, and left many wondering how one of the largest hog operations in the so-called Natural State ended up in the heart of a major tourist area.

For environmentalists, the development of the Mount Judea (pronounced Judy) hog farm provides a stark example of what they see as lax oversight of such farms by state and federal regulators. Many of them were dismayed last year, for instance, when the Environmental Protection Agency withdrew proposed regulations that would have required all concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, to submit "basic operational information" and would have increased the number of such farms that require permits.

But C&H Hog Farms has many supporters, who say that these farms have long dotted the watershed without causing major environmental damage. They argue that the owners of C&H followed all the required steps to obtain a permit and will do all they can to make sure that the farm does not hurt the ecosystem.

"We believe that modern farming and environmental conservation and protecting the environment can coexist," said Mike Martin, a spokesman for Cargill. "A lot of the fear and concern is based on a 'what if' scenario that may never take place."

The controversy simmers as a report released in October by a group of Harvard-led scientists found that nitrogen levels were too high in about half of the country's national parks — in large part because of ammonia emitted into the air by agricultural operations, which can deprive fish of oxygen or drive out some vegetation in an ecosystem. This phenomenon is expected to worsen in coming decades as corporate farming increases, according to the report.

In response to the uproar here, the state has temporarily imposed more stringent notification requirements for future CAFO applicants, acknowledging that many crucial players, including the superintendent of the river and the director of the state agency that permitted the operation, knew nothing about the project until after it had been approved.

Gov. Mike Beebe of Arkansas, a Democrat, has allocated more than $340,000 to test and monitor the water quality in the watershed. Both of Arkansas' United States senators — John Boozman, a Republican, and Mark Pryor, a Democrat — have said they were concerned about the location of the farm, and supported close monitoring.

Environmental groups have filed a federal lawsuit against the Farm Service Agency and the Small Business Administration to try to block $3.4 million in loan guarantees for the farm, arguing that the agencies had not properly considered its environmental impact.

"I was just sick over it — I just couldn't believe it," said Jewell Fowler, 87, who found out about the hog farm after it had been approved, through a notice in a local newspaper. Born in Mount Judea, Ms. Fowler has lived for the past four decades in a wooden cabin on the banks of the Big Creek, one of the main tributaries to the Buffalo River: a quiet oasis where the trees emit a sugary scent and water laps over rocks in a soothing whir.

"I'm just afraid of the stink, maybe contamination, make people sick," Ms. Fowler said.

But the farm in Mount Judea has received considerable support, not least from some residents who live close by. Many see it as an economic bright spot in Newton County, which has high poverty.

On a recent chilly morning, a scent evoking a mucky lagoon curled over the hill where Glen Ricketts lives. He cracked a smile.

"You smell it," he said.

From Mr. Ricketts's property, looking down a valley in the distance, a pair of white triangular roofs pop up like fins amid a sea of trees. They are the large barns that house the pigs.

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New Energy Struggles on Its Way to Markets

WASHINGTON — To stave off climate change, sources of electricity that do not emit carbon will have to replace the ones that do. But at the moment, two of those largest sources, nuclear and wind power, are trying to kill each other off.

In the electricity market, both are squeezed by pressure from natural gas, which provides some carbon reductions compared with coal but will not bring the country anywhere near its goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Natural gas has a carbon footprint that is at least three times as large as that goal.

Energy companies announced this year that five nuclear reactors would be closing or not reopening, and the owners blamed competition from natural gas and wind. In the Pacific Northwest, wind and hydroelectricity — neither of which produce carbon — are sparring to push each other off the regional power grid.

Output from the two has sometimes forced the Columbia Generating Station in Washington State, the region's only surviving nuclear reactor, to cut back its production. One recent study found that shutting down the reactor would save consumers $1.7 billion, partly because it cannot run full time, and partly because its costs are higher than some other technologies.

If electricity prices were slightly higher, renewable sources of energy would flourish and even some reactors would be built, experts say, lowering carbon emissions. But electricity prices are being forced down by federal subsidies for wind energy production and by cheap natural gas.

"Gas is raining on everyone's parade; gas is ruining it for everybody in most electricity markets," said one expert, Michael Webber of the University of Texas at Austin. In 2012, production of electricity from natural gas rose 10 times as fast as production from wind.

Wind energy is being added to the grid mostly because of state requirements, called renewable portfolio standards, but production would grow faster than the standards required if electricity prices from other sources were slightly higher, experts say. At the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit utility consortium, Anda Ray, the group's vice president for environment, said the electric system would incorporate more zero-carbon sources if natural gas rose to the level of few years ago.

Adding to the clean energy industry's cannibal behavior, wind farms are being built in places where there is lots of wind but not much demand for power, some experts argue.

Experts say a more intelligent use would involve dispersing the wind farms. Travis Kavulla, a member of the Montana Public Service Commission, said putting the wind machines in one place created an "all-on, all-off" problem. If the wind machines were spread more widely, he said, there was a far better chance that at any moment some would be running and some would not be, with less chance of a local useless surplus.

Montana has a cluster of wind machines near the town of Judith Gap, and Mr. Kavulla's commission has set up connection fees that charge extra for building in Judith Gap and reward developers for building elsewhere.

The nuclear industry makes the same complaint, but louder. David C. Brown, a Washington representative for Exelon, the Chicago company that operates the nation's largest network of nuclear reactors, said that the main subsidy for wind, the production tax credit, which pays operators about 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour for the first 10 years of production, "has been very effective at getting generation built."

"It's getting built without regard to whether it's actually needed for power supply purposes, and it distorts the market," he said. Existing nuclear plants do not get a subsidy per kilowatt-hour produced.

Wholesale energy prices fluctuate throughout the day. Exelon, he said, is "seeing this tipping point developing" when several of its zero-carbon reactors may have to be retired because wind power is suppressing those prices around the clock, and at some hours producers must pay the grid operator if they put energy on the grid. Wind operators still make money, though, through the production tax credit.

It is not clear how this struggle will play out over the next few years. At the moment, according to Mr. Webber, natural gas is so cheap that it is stunting construction of even new plants that would burn natural gas.

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World Briefing | Antarctica: First Attempts Fail to Free Ship Stranded by Heavy Ice

Icebreakers sent to free a stranded Russian research ship, the Akademik Shokalskiy, off Antarctica were stopped by heavy ice within sight of the ship, officials said early Saturday. A Chinese icebreaker in the area, the Xue Long, or Snow Dragon, was asked to divert toward the Shokalskiy, which is carrying members of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition and became stuck in the ice on Tuesday about 1,700 miles south of Tasmania. A spokeswoman for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said the Xue Long was about seven miles from the Shokalskiy when the ice became too thick to cut through. A French icebreaker also could not clear a path to the ship, said an expedition spokesman. The ships will await the arrival of an Australian icebreaker, which has a greater icebreaking capacity, he said.

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World Briefing | The Americas: Chile: Indian Leader Found in Reservoir

A Mapuche Indian leader who became the face of Chile's environmental movement was found floating in a reservoir she spent a decade trying to prevent from being created, and the authorities said Wednesday that they were awaiting autopsy results although the death appeared accidental. The leader, Nicolesa Quintreman, 73, who was nearly blind, was found Tuesday, a day after she was reported missing. With her sister Berta, Ms. Quintreman became a national figure in Chile during protests against the construction of a hydroelectric dam on tribal land in the forested mountains of southern Chile.

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New Tests for Brain Trauma Create Hope, and Skepticism

Revelations in recent years that thousands of former football players might have severe brain trauma from injuries sustained on the field have set off a rush in the medical community to seize the potentially lucrative market for assessing brain damage. But experts say claims regarding the validity of these assessments are premature and perhaps unfounded.

Most researchers believe that C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease found in dozens of former N.F.L. players, can be diagnosed only posthumously by analyzing brain tissue. Researchers at U.C.L.A. have developed a test they assert might identify the condition in a living person by injecting a compound that clings to proteins in the brain and later appears in a PET scan. But some are skeptical.

"There has really been so much hype surrounding C.T.E., so there is a real need for making sure the public knows that this type of science moves slowly and must move very carefully," said Robert Stern, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Boston University School of Medicine and a founder of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. He is part of a group that is developing a different biomarker to identify tau, the protein that is a hallmark of C.T.E.

"My fear is the people out there who are so much in need, scared for their lives and desperate for information, it might give them false hope," he said.

The debate over the scientific validity of such brain exams was highlighted recently when Tony Dorsett, a Hall of Fame running back for the Dallas Cowboys, and several other prominent former players said they were found to have C.T.E. after taking the experimental test developed by U.C.L.A. Dorsett, 59, told CNN that "they came to find out I have C.T.E." and that his memory lapses, short temper and moodiness were "all because of C.T.E."

Despite what was widely reported as a diagnosis, the experimental test is perhaps years from gaining federal approval. An antidote is even more remote because C.T.E. is a degenerative condition with no known cure.

That is why neurologists, researchers and bioethicists question whether the doctors at U.C.L.A. and at TauMark, the company with the exclusive license to commercialize the test, may leave some former players and their families with false hopes or undue worry.

For instance, the website for TauMark, which has helped find retired players to take the test, states that the test could soon provide a "clinical diagnosis and summary." One of the doctors backing TauMark called the test "the holy grail of C.T.E."

"I can see getting awareness and publicity, but this sounds like putting the cart before the horse," said Dr. John Morris, a professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "In theory, they'll be useful. But we don't know for an individual, does this mean inevitably they will dement? We just don't know."

The scan for tau is far from the first test promoted as a new window to an emerging medical problem. An array of medical experts is now developing and marketing treatments for former players that include vitamin regimens, strict diets, testosterone treatments and other therapies.

Bernie Kosar, a former Cleveland Browns quarterback, has said that he received oral and intravenous treatment for brain trauma from Rick Sponaugle, the director of the Sponaugle Wellness Institute in Palm Harbor, Fla. Dr. Daniel G. Amen, the founder of Amen Clinics Inc., said this year that he had developed "an interventional strategy" that would "reverse brain damage" in athletes.

The search for remedies to the long-term cognitive problems associated with concussions and chronic brain trauma has received great attention not only because N.F.L. players are involved, but also because the health of millions of young football players could be at stake. The N.F.L. is spending tens of millions of dollars on research into concussion-related ailments.

The ability to diagnose C.T.E. in living players also has potential legal and financial consequences as former players fight for insurance coverage, workers' compensation and other medical benefits well after they received their injuries.

A successful test to identify C.T.E. in living patients could also provide a big payoff for its inventors and rights holders. The tests cost as much as $15,000, but the price would presumably fall as more people signed up for them.

The retired players tested at U.C.L.A. said they did not pay for the test. Financing for the first group of tests was paid in part by the Brain Injury Research Institute, whose co-founder Julian Bailes co-wrote a study on the FDDNP biomarker.

But quick fixes in medicine are rare, even when fortunes are being spent developing solutions. For C.T.E., which still lacks a clinically accepted diagnosis among living people, let alone a biomarker approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the answers are even more elusive.

"The condition is very much under debate," said Dr. John Trojanowski, a researcher at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "We need to be patient to get more research to determine what statements we can make about football players' pathology."

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Mantecal Journal: Venezuela’s Fitful Effort to Save a Scaly Predator

By Jimmy Chalk

Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

Rescuing a Predator: South America's largest crocodile is on the verge of extinction, and government and private efforts to rescue the species are having limited success.

MANTECAL, Venezuela — Stealing the eggs from an enraged, 10-foot crocodile is a delicate operation.

"If you don't have your guard up, this crocodile can jump out of the water onto the sand, and in the same motion she can catch you," said Luis Rattia, 37, who runs a hatchery at the government-owned El Frío ranch, part of a sputtering effort to save the Orinoco crocodile, the largest predator in South America, from extinction.

There were once millions of Orinoco crocodiles living along the banks of the great river, which gave them their name, and its tributaries in Venezuela and eastern Colombia.

But the fearsome animals were nearly done in by fashion. They were hunted almost to extermination from the 1920s to the 1950s to feed a worldwide demand for crocodile-skin boots, coats, handbags and other items. Today, biologists estimate that there are only about 1,500 Orinoco crocodiles left in the wild, nearly all of them in Venezuela.

The El Frío ranch, which was expropriated by Venezuela's government in 2009, represents the hopes and the frustrations of conservationists who have worked to save the animal for years, often at cross purposes with a government that frequently views them with suspicion. Thanks in part to that disconnect, efforts to save the animal suffer from a lack of coordination and money, imperiling their already limited success.

"A properly defined program with funding and objectives doesn't exist," said Omar Hernández, the director of an environmental foundation called Fudeci. "The animal is in critical danger."

When the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt traveled through the Venezuelan plains in 1800, he found crocodiles lining the riverbanks, with the largest males measuring up to 24 feet long.

José Gumilla, an 18th-century priest who wrote a natural history of the Orinoco, told of the fear the huge crocodile inspired. "It is ferocity itself," he wrote, "the crude offspring of the greatest monstrosity, the horror of every living thing; so formidable that if a crocodile were to look in a mirror it would flee trembling from itself."

It is easy to see what Father Gumilla was talking about. On another government-run ranch near El Frío, a large crocodile lay in the shallows of a rushing stream one recent evening, its eyes nearly shut, its mouth open in what looked like a cruel smile. With a scaly dragon's back; spiky tail; long, white teeth; and fat, wormlike belly, it seemed like something out of a myth. Suddenly, it moved with lightning quickness, thrashing its tail and gorging on a fish that swam within range of its snapping jaws.

The first concerted efforts to breed the Orinoco crocodile were started in the 1980s by conservation-minded ranchers whose lands straddled the animal's once extensive territory.

Then, in 1990, scientists began releasing young crocodiles into rivers on the El Frío ranch, where wild crocodiles had not been seen in at least two decades. Today, researchers estimate that as many as 400 crocodiles inhabit the ranch, forming an entirely new population that shows the species' ability to recover if conditions are right.

"This is the great success of the program," said Álvaro Velasco, a former government biologist who heads an independent group of crocodile specialists. "The achievement is that there were no crocodiles here, and now there is a population that can reproduce itself."

He stood with Mr. Rattia on a recent morning at the edge of a wide lagoon on the ranch, as a large male crocodile surfaced 50 feet offshore. Mr. Velasco said that the animal, roughly 15 feet long, was about 20 years old, placing it among one of the first generations of crocodiles released here.

The program at El Frío was begun when the 153,000-acre ranch was in private hands, as part of a research station started in the 1970s that brought scientists from around the world to study the ecology of the Venezuelan plains.

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Hotel Ducks Gone Wild May End Up in Hunters’ Sights

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The flooded prairies and backwaters along the Arkansas River are a dangerous place during hunting season for even the toughest of ducks.

This year, locals learned that there has been a particularly vulnerable specimen: ducks that have been coddled and coiffed and accustomed to life in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel.

For more than a decade, four hens and a drake have marched twice daily from a marble mallard-size penthouse set up on the Peabody's roof overlooking the Old State House here, into a glass-enclosed elevator, and through the lobby to splash around in a grand indoor fountain. Then, last spring, the Memphis-based Peabody Hotel Group completed the sale of its Little Rock location to Marriott International Inc., and the ducks took their final waddle.

This fall, just as many hunters readied their camouflage to head out in the Arkansas Delta for the time-honored tradition of hunting greenheads, word spread that the Peabody's flock had flown back into the wild, raising concern over Little Rock's own duck dynasty.

"I hate to think anybody would shoot one of my Peabody ducks," said Odis Chapman, 79, a part-time Baptist preacher who raised the ducks that the Peabody used. He incubated them behind his white farmhouse on the grounds of a 5,000-acre former plantation in Scott, Ark.

Still, odds are against the ducks before hunting season ends late next month; nearly 530,000 mallards were killed last year during the state's 60-day duck-hunting season.

The Peabody duck march, still alive and well at the original Memphis hotel, had been a touchstone here.

Schoolchildren lined up along a red carpet rolled out each day for the march. A Marine just back from Iraq proposed to his girlfriend amid the pomp of the Peabody tradition. One local entrepreneur flew the ducks to Dallas on his Learjet.

"It was a five-minute escape from reality twice a day at 11 and 5," said Lloyd Withrow, the former duckmaster, who until Marriott took over had donned a red jacket and carried a cane with a bronze duck head to lead, or more likely, prod, the ducks to march.

Mr. Withrow now works as a bellman and van driver.

When the Peabody announced the sale of its Little Rock hotel last year, local news outlets broadcast melancholy segments about the last march, and conspiracies about where the ducks ended up abounded. (When did the restaurant at the Capital Hotel, across the street from the Peabody, start including duck in its famous gumbo?)

The sale required Marriott to remove all signs of the ducks. A marble mosaic of a drake's head on the floor of the elevator is the only piece of duck-related décor that remains. That, too, will be gone soon.

In recent weeks, nostalgia for the ducks has been replaced with anxiety as the brief season for hunting greenheads (or male mallards) gets into high gear. Duck hunting is a boost to the local economy in Arkansas, which last year proudly harvested more mallards than any other state, according to the federal Fish and Wildlife Service.

At a recent staff meeting at the new Little Rock Marriott, Bill Fontes, the general manager, chatted with a colleague about a coming weekend of duck hunting. Bruce Skidmore, director of sales and marketing, interrupted: "Bill, too soon."

For 11 years, Mr. Chapman quietly supplied a rotating "team" of ducks to the hotel, switching them out every few months so that the waterfowl would not get too accustomed to lobby life. The Peabody asked that he not reveal the ducks' location, so locals were not sure what had happened to them when the Marriott opened its doors in May. ("We do not disclose the location of our farms in order to protect their privacy," said Kelly Earnest, a spokeswoman for the Peabody Memphis.)

When a reporter showed up at Mr. Chapman's farm last month, he said he had asked local management if he could send the ducks to the remaining Peabody hotels in Memphis or Orlando. "They said, 'No, do whatever you want with them,' " Mr. Chapman said. (In October, the Peabody sold its Orlando hotel to the Hyatt Hotel Corporation, and its Florida-based duckmaster, whose name really was Donald, retired.)

Late last spring, Mr. Chapman said, he dropped the ducks off at a nearby ranch that does not allow hunting. But like his previously retired Peabody flocks, the ducks disappeared, as ducks do, most likely to southeastern Canada. Mallards typically return to Arkansas when the water in Canada freezes in the fall. That means the Peabody ducks would no longer have the safety of the ranch.

The Peabody Memphis makes sure its ducks do not become domesticated since "standard retirement procedure" requires that they be returned to the local farm to reacclimate to the outdoors. They can fly away and join the wild if they want to (potentially putting themselves in the cross hairs of hunting season), though most of them choose not to. "They're not just taken out to the woods and released," Ms. Earnest said. "We take their health and welfare very seriously."

The ducks are still in rotation ("not the rotisserie," as one Little Rock journalist put it) in the Italian Renaissance-style lobby of the Peabody Memphis, established in 1869, where the duck march tradition got its start. In 1933, the general manager returned tipsy after a hunt across the Mississippi River in Arkansas. He left his live duck decoys in the hotel fountain while he slept it off. The English call ducks delighted the guests, and the Peabody had stumbled on a million-dollar marketing opportunity.

The 20-story Little Rock Marriott, on a stretch of downtown that leads to the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, has its own, albeit more sordid, history. Before the Peabody took over in 1999, the hotel was the Excelsior, known locally as the Paula Jones Hotel since Ms. Jones, in a 1994 lawsuit, accused Mr. Clinton of propositioning her there in 1991.

The Marriott, with its bright print rugs and free Wi-Fi, appeals to conventioneers and business travelers. It may not have ducks, but Mr. Skidmore said, after an upgrade, each guest room has a coffee maker and a 42-inch high-definition TV set.

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Jet Fuel by the Acre

Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

Robert Schmidt, left, SGB's chief scientist; Eric Mathur, chief technologist; and Kirk Haney, chief executive, with a jatropha bush.

SAN DIEGO — In an unmarked greenhouse, leafy bushes carpet an acre of land here tucked into the suburban sprawl of Southern California. The seeds of the inedible, drought-resistant plants, called jatropha, produce a prize: high-quality oil that can be refined into low-carbon jet fuel or diesel fuel.

Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

Jatropha seeds burn easily because of their high oil content.

The mere existence of the bushes is an achievement.

Hailed about six years ago as the next big thing in biofuels, jatropha attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, only to fall from favor as the recession set in and as growers discovered that the wild bush yielded too few seeds to produce enough petroleum to be profitable.

But SGB, the biofuels company that planted the bushes, pressed on. Thanks to advances in molecular genetics and DNA sequencing technology, the San Diego start-up has, in a few years, succeeded in domesticating jatropha, a process that once took decades.

SGB is growing hybrid strains of the plant that produce biofuel in quantities that it says are competitive with petroleum priced at $99 a barrel. Oil is around $100 a barrel.

Call it, as SGB does, Jatropha 2.0.

The company has deals to plant 250,000 acres of jatropha in Brazil, India and other countries expected to eventually produce about 70 million gallons of fuel a year. That has attracted the interest of energy giants, airlines and other multinational companies seeking alternatives to fossil fuels. They see jatropha as a hedge against spikes in petroleum prices and as a way to comply with government mandates that require the use of low-carbon fuels.

"It is one of the few biofuels that I think has the potential to supply a large fraction of the aviation fuel currently used today," said Jim Rekoske, vice president for renewable energy and chemicals at Honeywell, who has visited the company's jatropha plantations in Central America.

Mr. Rekoske and biofuel analysts say SGB's biggest challenge will be to replicate the yields it generates in the greenhouse on a commercial scale.

"Given that this crop has somewhat of a checkered past, ultimately getting growers to plant the crop is going to be the key hurdle," says Michael Cox, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.

At the greenhouse, the fruits of SGB's technology are apparent. A typical wild jatropha bush will produce a cluster of six to eight seed-bearing fruits, according to Robert Schmidt, a specialist in corn genetics who is SGB's chief scientist. He picked up a grapefruit-size cluster growing on a hybrid jatropha plant and counted 37 fruits. "We have examples in Guatemala where we have 60 fruits in a cluster," Dr. Schmidt said.

SGB's success at improving jatropha seed yields by as much as 900 percent persuaded a consortium that includes Airbus, BP and the Inter-American Development Bank to sign a deal with the company to plant 75,000 acres of jatropha in Brazil. The consortium, called JetBio, aims to develop sources of biofuel for the airline industry as the European Union, Australia and other countries impose caps on aviation carbon emissions.

"The demand is huge — every single airline would like to be flying on biofuel today," Rafael Davidsohn Abud, JetBio's managing partner, said in an email.

Jatropha's value as a cash crop, though, may pale compared with a potential genetic gold mine SGB has begun to discover, identifying traits, for instance, that make certain strains of the plant resistant to extreme heat or cold.

"If you figure out how to do heat tolerance for corn or soybeans, what is that trait worth as climate change accelerates?" asked Arama Kukutai, managing director at Finistere Ventures, a San Diego venture capital firm that has invested in SGB.

For now, SGB plans to license its technology to energy companies. But the company is securing patents on its hybridization process, creating a technology platform that can be deployed to discover genetic traits in other agricultural crops.

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Essay: The Wind Cries ... Oe?

When I studied to become a pilot, I learned the names of the winds. It's hard to not be charmed by their poetry — the Sahara's Harmattan, France's Mistral, and the Oe, that consonant-denuded Faroe Islands whirlwind.

But this Aeolian aristocracy raises as many questions as it does Scrabble scores. Why are some winds named? And are Americans ready to rediscover their own terroir of tempests?

Named breezes, says Vladimir Jankovic, a scientist at the University of Manchester in England, usually have distinct personalities — a recognizable cocktail of strength, season, direction, temperature, duration or precipitation. A name, then, is a forecast. But winds carry the force of history and myth as much as weather.

It was Hippocrates, after all, who said a physician should know which breezes cause flabbiness and which induce humid heads. A 19th-century description of London's northeasterly winter blasts, Dr. Jankovic notes, warned of a catalog of side effects befitting a 21st-century pharmaceutical ad — among them "a sense of impending suffocation" and "restless sleep wetted by uncontrollable salivating." No wonder many Britons vacation in South Africa, where the Cape Doctor is famed (and named) for its healthful influences.

Mental health, too, was often held to be wind-borne. Legend has it that the Khamsin, known for elevating both "temperatures and tempers," was a mitigating factor when Arabian judges sentenced criminals. When California's Santa Anas blow, wrote Raymond Chandler, "meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks."

The Greeks had a kaleidoscopic compass of wind gods, and numerous named winds still fly the Mediterranean's skies. Two Volkswagen models, the Scirocco and the Bora, are named for Mediterranean and Adriatic winds. (A third, Passat, means "trade wind.")

Destructive winds often have particularly strong brand identities. In her 2007 book "An Ocean of Air," Gabrielle Walker chronicles the Piteraq, a Greenland wind gusty enough to toss sled dogs skyward; its force is occasionally measured by how much it damages a wind gauge. In the Adriatic, scientists can map the Bora's path by the density of stones used in roof construction. The Santa Anas all but breathe wildfire.

In contrast to California, which also has Sundowners and Diablos, New England's skies seem culturally impoverished. Herman Melville found no local name for what howled around New Bedford's Spouter-Inn in "Moby-Dick" (he resorted to Euroclydon, the wind that wrecked St. Paul's ship as he sailed from Greece to Italy). Perhaps New England's breezes are just hard to pigeonhole. Mark Twain's New England forecast: "Probably nor'east to sou'west winds, varying to the southard and westard and eastard, and points between."

California, though, has nothing on Hawaii. The wind beneath the wings of the Hawaiian-born Bette Midler could be a Ho'oluawahakole, a Malamalamamaikai or any of hundreds of other orthographic jawbreakers (best check a wind map). Many names have fallen from use, but they once carried enormous cultural weight, says Steven Businger, a meteorologist at the University of Hawaii.

Hawaii's lexicon of winds is surely America's richest, but it isn't entirely alone. Chicago has the evocatively named Hawk wind, and the Great Lakes have the Witch of November, notorious for sinking the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, with the loss of all 29 men aboard, in November 1975. Gore Vidal named "Williwaw," his first novel, for the Aleutian Islands' bitter blasts. But the most famous North American wind is undoubtedly the Chinook (co-marketed with a salmon, a helicopter and New Hampshire's state dog).

What is the future of named winds? Dr. Jankovic says climate change may strengthen some, weaken others, and make others "more nomadic." In Nigeria, climatologists have linked recent disruptions of the Harmattan to climate change. Will the cultural character of a named wind adapt with the weather? Or will the names of some changed winds be forgotten, artifacts of a former climate?

Other wind names, conversely, may become more important, especially if wind-driven disasters like dust storms, wildfires and even nuclear accidents grow more common. And climate change may conjure entirely new winds. Proposals to geo-engineer cooler sea breezes for Tokyo, for example, practically demand a great name.

If few Americans outside California know their local winds by name, perhaps our mobility is partly to blame. To name a wind is to live somewhere long enough to know a place intimately.

Still, ours is an age that venerates all things local. Could named local winds be ready for an American renaissance?

There are tantalizing precedents. A 1997 contest in Portland, Ore., that might today be mistaken for an episode of "Portlandia" invited suggestions for the "cold and crazy" east wind from the Columbia River Gorge. The winner was Coho; memorable losers included Columbia Screamer, Brutal Bellows and Big Bad Momma.

What about jet streams? As a pilot, may I suggest we ennoble something other than jets? The aviator Wiley Post chronicled these high, fast winds that speed or impede us. The first pilot to fly solo around the world, he died in the Alaskan crash that killed Will Rogers. "Folks, flight time to Raleigh is just four hours today, thanks to the Post Winds." I like it.

As for the trans-Atlantic jet stream, its importance became clear during World War II resupply efforts. Let's christen it the Allied Wind, and let generations of schoolchildren learn why.

And a humble suggestion for the icy, northwesterly breeze that so often benumbs New York City. Capt. Albert Theberge, a historian at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me about a boatswain he once knew on a NOAA vessel who described one East Coast howler this way: "It blowed so hard, it blowed a rooster up a bottle."

So: the Rooster Bottler. A wind or a cocktail? In this city, this winter, it could be both.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 25, 2013

An essay on Tuesday about named winds reversed two sections of type in the second column. The correct version can be found at nytimes.com/science.

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Catching Rays in California, and Storing Them

WASHINGTON — Solar power is growing so fast in California — with installations by customers increasing tenfold since 2006 — that it is turning the state's power system upside down.

In a twist that is being closely watched by power companies around the country, California utilities will install massive banks of batteries and other devices to store the power surplus created by solar panels in the afternoon, when the sun's rays are strong. The batteries are then to begin discharging power into California's electric grid in the early evening, around sunset, when the solar generation of energy dies down but demand rises as millions of people get home and turn on air-conditioners, televisions and other electricity gobblers.

The new system is the opposite of an idea utilities have considered for years: Use batteries to store power at night from traditional sources, like natural gas and coal, and run them down in the peak heat of late afternoon.

"It is the reverse of the way we've always thought of storage," Gregory Reed, director of the Electric Power Initiative at the University of Pittsburgh.

The relatively new idea of using batteries — which could be bundled in packs, each about the size of an 18-wheel truck trailer — to store electricity during the day and discharge it in the evening is aimed at coping with rapid changes in supply and demand. The expense of the batteries, possibly in the billions of dollars for California, has limited their use.

But booming solar power in California has changed the equation and made the California Public Utilities Commission take a different path.

At the end of October, the commission ordered the utility companies it regulates to install some form of energy storage equipment — exactly what was not specified — in the first mandate of its kind in the country. A critical purpose of the storage is to allow generators, which in California run largely on natural gas, to keep operating in the late afternoon, when the output from solar panels eliminates the need for their electricity.

With so many solar panels in California, "we may find ourselves in periods of time when we have oversupply, overgeneration," said Clyde Loutan, senior adviser for renewables integration at the California Independent System Operator, which runs the state's grid. That is just as destabilizing as shortage, he said.

The point of keeping the generators running is that they will be needed immediately after the sun sets, but the problem is that they cannot start instantly. By 2020, planners estimate, it will be difficult to balance supply and demand at sunset, because the combination of the sun setting and evening demand picking up will create the instant need for a vast amount of power. The system would have to double its output in about three hours, faster than it can now manage.

The problem is acute in California because the demand for power is concentrated in a narrow coastal band that runs north and south. "The sun sets on all of it at about the same time," said Philip Undercuffler, director of product management at Outback Power, a battery company.

This curve of the demand for electricity, formerly undulating like ocean waves, is projected to take an extremely steep pitch up every day around sunset, into a shape that industry insiders call the "duck chart" because a chart produced by the California Independent System Operator resembles the profile of a duck.

"There is no longer a peak during the day — that's now actually a valley," said Christopher R. Cook, president of Solar Grid Storage, a Pennsylvania company that installs batteries connected to solar arrays.

Batteries could bring far more value in adding flexibility to respond to changing positions than in other roles, specialists say, by providing what the utility industry calls "ramping," or helping the electricity supply increase or decrease quickly.

Installing batteries was once seen as a way to avoid building power plants, because a utility could use them to meet peak demand. But, so far, this has not proved profitable. In addition, batteries have never been inexpensive enough to pay for themselves with the profits from what utilities call "arbitrage" — buying power at off-peak prices and reselling it at higher prices.

Solar industry officials agree that the nation's electric grid must change to accommodate more solar power, but they contend that the problem is exaggerated. Ken Johnson, a spokesman for the Solar Energy Industries Association, said the duck chart assumes that solar panels are on platforms that change their angles to keep them pointed toward the sun, in which case energy generation would drop abruptly at sunset. In fact, most of the panels are in fixed positions, so generation falls more slowly, he said.

The Public Utilities Commission did not cite a cost estimate, but said it anticipated the price for storage would fall as storage equipment manufacturers developed new products to meet the mandate. It is not clear how costs would be shared among all rate payers, and companies or individuals who have put solar power on the grid. Already, energy can be stored as heat or cold.

The utilities commission's order for storage, which will be phased in starting in 2014, represents shifting needs, said Laura Wisland, a renewables specialist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "We're shifting from a need for capacity on the system to a need for flexibility on the system," Ms. Wisland said.

Some of the storage need could be met by the batteries in electric vehicles, said Ufuk Topcu, a specialist on storage and grid dynamics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. But that would require more electric cars than are now on the road.

But none of this is bad news, Ms. Wisland said. "The duck chart is illustrating that solar is doing its job," she said.

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Turning Tennis Rackets Into Data Centers

When Paolo Palmero plays tennis, he knows his racket can improve his game, not by adding power and spin but by measuring them.

Palmero was among 50 applicants chosen this fall to test the new Babolat Play Pure Drive rackets with sensors that measure power and spin as well as the contact point with the ball. Players can download the data to smartphones or computers using Bluetooth or a USB port.

"It has given me a hard look at my game," said Palmero, 40, who lives in Manhattan and works at the United Nations. "It's a reality check."

The Babolat Play, which sells for $399, is the latest in a wave of racket innovation. Modest adjustments have been common in the past to increase sales of new models, but this year, more significant innovations have been made. Head introduced a material, graphene, meant to generate more power, and Wilson and Prince changed their stringing patterns drastically to generate more spin.

"The tennis market is changing," said Roger Petersman, Head's United States product business manager. "It's becoming more competitive, and consumers are smarter, so you need something new to grab their attention."

This month, the company introduced the $399 Head Custom Made, which allows consumers to select length, weight, balance, grip shape and material, and string pattern for their rackets. Each one will be customized in Head's Austrian lab.

"We know what the economy has done to retail," Petersman said. "People need a reason to change rackets. This is for people who want the best, are very particular and are not afraid to spend money."

Eric Babolat, the president and chief executive of Babolat, said his company's high-tech racket, 10 years in the making, went beyond individualization.

"This is not a new page, it is a new book," Babolat said, likening it to the way sound changed movies and predicting that all rackets would eventually be connected.

A new International Tennis Federation rule will allow the Babolat racket to be used during tournament play but will prohibit players from looking at the data during matches.

Babolat acknowledged the racket's weaknesses, including its difficulty in discerning a first serve from a second serve. The racket's timing mechanism and algorithms will eventually be adjusted, he said, and early adopters will be able to upgrade the app without buying a new one.

"Until now, players have had no concrete information about their game," Babolat said. "Type and number of strokes, spin level, ball impact location, total and effective play time, power, endurance, technique, consistency, energy, rallies — all of this is brand-new information that has never before been available to players. Babolat Play allows players to essentially take a picture of their game, and understand how and where they can make key improvements."

Testing revealed that players loved comparing measurements like power levels, Babolat said. The data allow comparisons among Babolat Play owners worldwide, and he said he expected that to be popular with younger players who gravitate toward using technology for social interaction.

Although Fo Tien was among the Babolat racket testers, he said he did not feel he was ushering in a revolution.

"It's more of a novelty for me," said Tien, 43, who works in finance and lives in Diamond Bar, Calif. He was shocked to find that his hardest shots registered in the 50s on the scale Babolat established. Rafael Nadal, by comparison, hits in the 90s.

"But most of the data is confirming what I already knew," he said, adding that he found the community aspects "hokey."

"I already know I hit my shots on the upper part of the hoop so the ball stays on the string bed a split second longer," he said.

Tien is a 4.0-to-4.5 player on the United States Tennis Association's self-rating scale from 1.5 to 7.0. He said that the new Babolat racket could be good for beginners and for teaching professionals, but that it would be more helpful for his game if the information was broken down shot by shot. "This is still the first generation," he said. "There's a lot of opportunity there."

Palmero, a 3.5 player, said the Babolat racket was improving his game. The numbers provide reminders of his flaws and motivation to break his bad habits.

"I'm not as fast as I used to be, so when I run around my backhand, I'm hitting more defensive forehands," he said. "I'm also finding I hit more topspin on my backhand in practice, then I revert to slices during matches."

Goran Draskovic, 36, a software consultant in Orlando, Fla., said the racket was an effective coach and "a game changer."

Although he is a 4.5 player, Draskovic said he discovered that he hit more shots near the top of the racket and on the sides than he had thought.

"I had no clue I'm that bad," he said. "It's helping me because I'm reducing the percentage of off-center shots."

Lavie Sak, a teaching pro with an engineering background, said tennis was starved for such data, but he was moving in a different direction. This year, Sak and Sergey Feingold founded Shot Stats to design a device to provide instant feedback on racket head speed and a shot's rotations per minute. It will be small enough to attach to the strings like a vibration dampener, and they hope to make it available next summer.

"It will be more accurate than the Babolat Play because it is closer to the contact point, and you will get instant data," Sak said.

Such a device appealed to Tien because it could measure his play with different rackets or the effect of adjustments to his racket.

But Tien said much of what happened with the racket depended on the quality of a player's footwork, so he suggested one more gadget: "Someone should invent a sneaker with an electronic impulse center that gives you shocks to keep you on your toes and moving your feet."

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