Web Privacy, and How Consumers Let Down Their Guard

Jeff Swensen for The New York Times

Intriguing experiments by Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist, suggest that people often reveal more than they mean to online.

SAY you've come across a discount online retailer promising a steal on hand-stitched espadrilles for spring. You start setting up an account by offering your e-mail address — but before you can finish, there's a ping on your phone. A text message. You read it and respond, then return to the Web site, enter your birth date, click "F" for female, agree to the company's terms of service and carry on browsing.

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Shoppers at a mall were offered $10 discount card — and an extra $2 discount if they agreed to share their shopping data. Half declined the extra offer.

But wait: What did you just agree to? Did you mean to reveal information as vital as your date of birth and e-mail address?

Most of us face such decisions daily. We are hurried and distracted and don't pay close attention to what we are doing. Often, we turn over our data in exchange for a deal we can't refuse.

Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, studies how we make these choices. In a series of provocative experiments, he has shown that despite how much we say we value our privacy — and we do, again and again — we tend to act inconsistently.

Mr. Acquisti is something of a pioneer in this emerging field of research. His experiments can take time. The last one, revealing how Facebook users had tightened their privacy settings, took seven years. They can also be imaginative: he has been known to dispatch graduate students to a suburban mall in the name of science. And they are often unsettling: A 2011 study showed that it was possible to deduce portions of a person's Social Security number from nothing but a photograph posted online. He is now studying how online social networks can enable employers to illegally discriminate in hiring.

Mr. Acquisti, 40, sees himself not as a nag, but as an observer holding up a mirror to the flaws we cannot always see ourselves. "Should people be worried? I don't know," he said with a shrug in his office at Carnegie Mellon. "My role is not telling people what to do. My role is showing why we do certain things and what may be certain consequences. Everyone will have to decide for themselves."

Those who follow his work say it has important policy implications as regulators in Washington, Brussels and elsewhere scrutinize the ways that companies leverage the personal data they collect from users. The Federal Trade Commission last year settled with Facebook, resolving charges that it had deceived users with changes to its privacy settings. State regulators recently fined Google for harvesting e-mails and passwords of unsuspecting users during its Street View mapping project. Last year, the White House proposed a privacy bill of rights to give consumers greater control over how their personal data is used.

Mr. Acquisti has been at the forefront, testifying in Congress and conferring with the F.T.C. David C. Vladeck, who until recently headed the agency's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said Mr. Acquisti's research on facial recognition spurred the commission to issue a report on the subject last year. "No question it's been influential," Mr. Vladeck said of Mr. Acquisti's work.

Companies, too, are interested; Microsoft Research and Google have offered Mr. Acquisti research fellowships. Over all, his research argues that when it comes to privacy, policy makers should carefully consider how people actually behave. We don't always act in our own best interest, his research suggests. We can be easily manipulated by how we are asked for information. Even something as simple as a playfully designed site can nudge us to reveal more of ourselves than a serious-looking one.

"His work has gone a long way in trying to help us figure out how irrational we are in privacy related decisions," says Woodrow Hartzog, an assistant professor of law who studies digital privacy at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. "We have too much confidence in our ability to make decisions."

This is perhaps Mr. Acquisti's most salient contribution to the discussion. Solutions to our leaky privacy system tend to focus on transparency and control — that our best hope is knowing what our data is being used for and choosing whether to participate. But a challenge to that conventional wisdom emerges in his research. Giving users control may be an essential step, but it may also be a bit of an illusion.

IF iron ore was the raw material that enriched the steel baron Andrew Carnegie in the Industrial Age, personal data is what fuels the barons of the Internet age. Mr. Acquisti investigates the trade-offs that users make when they give up that data, and who gains and loses in those transactions. Often there are immediate rewards (cheap sandals) and sometimes intangible risks downstream (identity theft). "Privacy is delayed gratification," he warned.

Mr. Acquisti, lean and loquacious, grew up in Italy. His father, Giancarlo, was a banker by profession and a pianist on the side. Mr. Acquisti inherited his father's passion for music; last year he helped him write an opera about Margherita Luti, the woman believed to be the painter Raphael's lover and muse. Mr. Acquisti's other passion is motorcycle racing — he rides a red Ducati — though the pursuit of tenure, which he acquired last year, has lately kept him off the racing circuit.

He earned a bachelor's degree in economics in Rome and master's degrees in the subject from Trinity College in Dublin and the London School of Economics, and he became interested in the economics of privacy while studying for a doctorate in the interdisciplinary School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Preoccupations: Why Innovators Get Better With Age

"WE need some gray hair" once referred to needing someone with more experience. But I haven't heard that expression in a very long time.

In fact, many companies are intentionally reducing the average age of their work forces in an effort to save money. Younger employees are generally paid less and have lower health care expenses and retirement costs. As one executive remarked to me recently, "I don't think anyone really likes this — we all know our own 50-year-old moment will be coming, too."

There is a surprising downside, however, to encouraging older workers to leave or, at some companies, pushing them out: Less gray hair sharply reduces an organization's innovation potential, which over the long term can greatly outweigh short-term gains.

The most common image of an innovator is that of a kid developing a great idea in a garage, a dorm room or a makeshift office. This is the story of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple. Last week, Yahoo announced that it had bought a news-reading app developed by Nick D'Aloisio, who is all of 17.

In reality, though, these examples are the exception and not the rule. Consider this: The directors of the five top-grossing films of 2012 are all in their 40s or 50s. And two of the biggest-selling authors of fiction for 2012 — Suzanne Collins and E. L. James — are around 50.

According to research by Alex Mesoudi of Durham University in England, the age of eventual Nobel Prize winners when making a discovery, and of inventors when making a significant breakthrough, averaged around 38 in 2000, an increase of about six years since 1900.

But there is another reason to keep innovators around longer: the time it takes between the birth of an idea and when its implications are broadly understood and acted upon. This education process is typically driven by the innovators themselves.

For Nobel Prize winners, this process usually takes about 20 years — meaning that someone who is 38 at the time of discovery will most likely be nearly 60 when he or she receives the prize. For most eventual laureates, that interval is spent attending and making presentations at conferences, networking with colleagues, writing additional papers, editing academic journals and talking with the press.

Let's assume that with company resources, it will take a corporate innovator 10 years instead of 20 to educate others about the nature, implications and applications of a new idea. If that's true, a reasonable target retention age for attaining an average level of innovation would be at least 50.

YET despite the overall aging of the work force, many organizations are heading in the opposite direction. One executive at a major investment bank remarked with concern that the average age at his firm was 32. This phenomenon is not unique to corporations. Many medical institutions and universities  have also shifted to younger workforces. But according to research by Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University, a 55-year-old and even a 65-year-old have significantly more innovation potential than a 25-year-old.

If an organization wants innovation to flourish, the conversation needs to change from severance packages to retention bonuses. Instead of managing the average age downward, companies should be managing it upward.

We can act within our own organizations to make a difference. For example, we can end policies that limit the time people are allowed to stay at a certain level in a given position. And we can stop rotating high-potential managers across different businesses. Instead, we need to encourage the best performers to stay put, giving them the years — perhaps even decades — to support and lead major innovations from inception to commercial launch.

And to encourage innovation, we must provide economic incentives to C.E.O.'s, boards of directors and investors through changes in the tax code and elsewhere that favor long-term returns driven by innovation over shortsighted pressure to reduce costs.

The journalist A. J. Jacobs has perfectly described our current situation when it comes to the relationship between age and innovation. In his book "The Year of Living Biblically," he writes: "I'm 38, which means I'm a few years from my first angioplasty, but — at least in the media business — I'm considered a doddering old man. I just hope the 26-year-old editors out there have mercy on me."

Relax, A. J., you still have a few more years to hit it out of the ballpark with a mega-best seller.

Tom Agan, 51, is a co-founder and the managing partner of Rivia, an innovation and brand consulting firm.

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Novelties: Robots and Humans, Learning to Work Together

FACTORY robots are usually caged off from humans on the assembly line lest the machines' powerful steel arms deliver an accidental, bone-crunching right hook.

But now, gentler industrial robots, designed to work and play well with others, are coming out from behind their protective fences to work shoulder-to-shoulder with people. It's an advance made possible by sophisticated algorithms and improvements in sensing technologies like computer vision.

The key to these new robots is the ability to respond more flexibly, anticipating and adjusting to what humans want. That is in contrast to earlier generations of robots that often required extensive programming to change the smallest details of their routine, said Henrik Christensen, director of the robotics program at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

"Researchers in labs worldwide are building robots that can predict what you'll do next and be ready to give you the best possible assistance," he said.

One of those researchers is Julie A. Shah, an assistant professor in the department of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Shah once taught robots to do tasks the old way: by hitting a button that essentially told them "good," "bad" or "neutral" as they did each part of a job. Now she has added a technique called cross-training, in which robots and humans exchange roles, learning a thing or two from each other in the process.

In a recent study, Dr. Shah and a student had human-robot teams perform a chore borrowed from the assembly line: the humans placed screws and the robots did the drilling. Then the teammates exchanged jobs and the robots observed the humans drill.

"The robot gathers information on how the person does the drilling," adding that information to its algorithms, Dr. Shah said. "The robot isn't learning one optimal way to drill. Instead it is learning a teammate's preferences, and how to cooperate."

When the cross-trained teams resumed their original roles, both robots and people did their jobs more efficiently, the study found. The time that the humans were idle while waiting for the robot to finish a task dropped 41 percent and the time that humans and robots worked simultaneously increased 71 percent, when compared with teams working with robots trained the old way.

"This is a fascinating application of cross-training," said Andrea Thomaz, an assistant professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech. "By learning the human's role, the robot can better anticipate actions and be a better partner, even if in the end it will only do one role."

The humans on the teams also improved their teamwork skills, said Illah R. Nourbakhsh, professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University and author of the book "Robot Futures," published this month by M.I.T. Press. "In the future, this idea of cross-training will turn out to be really important as robots start to work shoulder-to-shoulder with us," he said. "We are not very good at adopting the point of view of a robot. This study showed that we can learn, though, with the right signals."

Dr. Christensen of Georgia Tech said: "Robots of the future won't just be in manufacturing. Almost any area could have a robot that would help make our life easier," whether "lifting patients in hospital beds or helping at home.

"But they have to be safe, and they have to have the kind of anticipation that Julie Shah is working on, because they have to be able to automatically figure out what we need help with," he said.

Gentle, helpful robots aren't just being created in labs; they are also arriving in the marketplace. Since January, Rethink Robotics of Boston has been sending customers its two-armed robot called Baxter, which can work uncaged, moving among people. "We are shipping robots every day and have a backlog of orders of about three months," said Rodney Brooks, Rethink's founder, chairman and chief technology officer.

Baxter, which costs $22,000, can lift objects from a conveyor belt. "You don't have to tell it the exact velocity," Dr. Brooks said. "It sees objects and grabs them, matching its speed to the speed of the object."

Baxter is used in manufacturing plants and shops of varying sizes. One example is the Rodon Group, a plastic injection molding company in Hatfield, Pa., where Baxter packs boxes on the factory floor.

Baxter's cameras inspect what is to be lifted, recognizing an object from many angles. In the coming year, Baxter will be able to grab objects not only from above, but also from the side, putting them into a milling machine, for example, and pressing the "go" button. It will also be able to connect with other machines, to synchronize tasks.

"Baxter is a great starting point for this new generation of robots," said Dr. Christensen of Georgia Tech, who has no connection to Rethink Robotics' work, "making the technology accessible to companies that before would have had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars."

"He's opening up a new market," Dr. Christensen said of Baxter's work.

Baxter is not the only unfenced robot on the assembly line. A Danish company, Universal Robots, for example, sells a one-armed robot for $33,000 that can also be used without a cage.

IMPRESSIVE as the new robots are, they will soon have even more advanced skills, said Stefan Schaal, a professor of computer science, neuroscience and biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California and a director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany. In the future, robots will be able to go onto the Internet and exchange information, leading to vast gains in what they can accomplish.

"It will take time before we get there," he Schaal said, "but it will happen."

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

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Shroud of Turin Going on TV, With a Word From the Pope

ROME — The Shroud of Turin, which since medieval times has been revered by many Christians as the burial cloth of Jesus, is about to make its debut on modern media platforms.

On Holy Saturday, the linen cloth imprinted with the faint brownish image of what appears to be a man's body — and that skeptics dismiss as ancient forgery — will be shown live on the Italian state broadcaster RAI, 40 years after its first and only televised "ostentation," as a public exposure of the shroud is known.

Pope Francis is providing a video message for the event, which will be broadcast from 5:10 p.m. to 6:40 p.m. local time and streamed live on RAI's Web site and on www.sindone.org.

On Good Friday, a Piedmont company, Haltadefinizione, introduced a new app, Shroud 2.0, which features images of the cloth along with scientific and theological interpretations prepared with the Diocese of Turin and the International Center of Sindonology. Sindonology is the scientific study of the shroud.

The app "is a kind of digital ostension," said the Rev. Roberto Gottardo, vice president of the diocese commission that handles shroud-related matters. Turin has been home to the shroud since it was brought there by the Savoy family in 1578. It is kept in a specially made container in a chapel in the Turin Cathedral.

The Vatican has not officially recognized the shroud, which measures 14.3 feet by 3.7 feet, as a relic of Jesus, but neither has it discouraged popular devotion.

The artifact is arguably the most tested religious object in history, analyzed over the years by scores of scientists, their findings providing endless fodder for countless sindonologists.

Skeptics say plenty of evidence corroborates a medieval dating, including carbon-14 tests done in 1988 by three independent laboratories. They dated the cloth between 1260 and 1390.

But others dispute that. Using infrared light, multiparametric mechanical tests and spectroscopy to analyze tiny fibers of material from the cloth, Giulio Fanti, a professor at the University of Padua, found they were compatible with fibers dating from around the time of Christ.

"Crossing the data from the various tests, we arrived at an average date" to the time of Christ's death, plus or minus 250 years, said Mr. Fanti, whose findings were published this month in the book "Il Mistero della Sindone" ("The Mystery of the Shroud"), which he co-wrote.

Scientists have struggled to explain the image of the man on the cloth, which has markings compatible with the wounds of someone who was crucified. Mr. Fanti said he thought the image could have been created by a "very intense burst of energy," which could have mutated the percentage of carbon-14 in the linen, leading some scientists to wrongly date it to the 13th century.

Sustained interest in the shroud has led to some unorthodox theories, including one that posits it was created by Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century.

The Turin Diocese provided assistance to the makers of Shroud 2.0 "because we were sure it would not be one of those strange, sensationalistic products" that are all too common, said Father Gottardo.

The free version of the app offers an introduction to the cloth and its significance. For $3.99, users have access to a high-definition image of the shroud that can be magnified to show details invisible to the naked eye.

The shroud's live television debut was in November 1973, under the auspices of Pope Paul VI, and it has been shown on television many times. But "this is only the second time there's been a televised, live, devotional moment," Father Gottardo said.

The pope emeritus, Benedict XVI, who traveled to Turin to view the shroud when it was last shown in public in 2010, described it then as an "icon for Holy Saturday," so this weekend's broadcast "seemed appropriate," Father Gottardo said. Since this is the Year of Faith for Catholics, he said, "We thought it was significant to do something around this image that speaks of Christ."

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The Week: NASA Engines Found, News About Squid and More

So few people do favors for NASA these days. So when Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder, announced last week that an expedition he financed had hoisted two F-1 rocket engines from an Apollo mission off the ocean floor, the agency was understandably grateful.

Bezos Expeditions

An expedition retrieved two F-1 rocket engines from an Apollo mission that were sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor.

NASA/Reuters

The Mars Rover is back in good health after suffering some computer problems.

Esa/Planck Collaboration European Pressphoto Agency

Astrophysicists released a map of the infant universe, above, just 370,000 years after the Big Bang.

"We look forward to the restoration of these engines by the Bezos team and applaud Jeff's desire to make these historic artifacts available for public display," the NASA administrator, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., said in a statement.

The engines may have been among the five that helped launch Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 shipmates to the Moon in 1969, while Mr. Bezos, then 5, watched on television. Today Mr. Bezos, one of a lineup of millionaires keen on space and underwater adventure, noted in a blog post that the F-1 rocket engine is "still a modern wonder — one and a half million pounds of thrust, 32 million horsepower, and burning 6,000 pounds of rocket grade kerosene and liquid oxygen every second."

He was aboard the Seabed Worker as it spent three weeks at sea off Cape Canaveral, recovering engines that had come to rest nearly three miles from the surface. "We've seen an underwater wonderland," he wrote, "an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program."

Because the engines rightly belong to NASA, Mr. Bezos plans to deliver them. One is likely to go to the Smithsonian and the other to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, near the headquarters of Mr. Bezos's human spaceflight company, Blue Origin.

Developments

Space Exploration

That's No Heliopause, Silly

Speaking of space, a number of cool things happened since we checked in last week. One was that the Mars rover, Curiosity, which had been having some pesky computer problems, was restored to good health and given an excellent prognosis. Another was that astrophysicists released a map of the infant universe, just 370,000 years after the Big Bang, resplendent with specks that would one day grow into entire galaxies. And then there was the tantalizing report about Voyager 1, which has been hurtling away from the Sun since 1977 and aims to become the first manufactured object to leave the solar system. A headline on a news release from the American Geophysical Union suggested that Voyager 1 had entered the heliopause, or beginning of interstellar space, which would be totally exciting. Not so, said NASA quickly, explaining that while the plucky little spacecraft was busy speeding from the Sun at 38,000 miles an hour — and was now an impressive 11.5 billion miles from it — it was too soon to declare heliopause.

Health

A Leukemia Advance

Acute leukemia in adults, while rare, is usually lethal. Now come doctors with an experimental treatment that genetically alters a patient's own immune cells to fight this type of blood cancer. While it hasn't worked for all patients, some have gone into remission, even after chemotherapy had failed. The findings, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, included the startling case of one severely ill patient who, after undergoing the treatment, saw all traces of leukemia vanish in eight days. Dr. Renier J. Brentjens, a leukemia specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the first author of a new study of the therapy, said, "We had hoped, but couldn't have predicted that the response would be so profound and rapid."

Zoology

All in the (Squid) Family

The giant squid is fascinating in its size and ungainliness. It lives deep in the ocean, grows as long as 60 feet — including eight arms and two longer tentacles. Now it turns out that, even though they live all over the globe, giant squid are all very closely related genetically, scientists said in a paper last week, surprising the squid cognoscenti. The study looked at the mitochondrial genome of 43 giant squid samples, some that had washed ashore, some pulled up by deepwater fishing nets, and some culled from whale stomachs. In these samples, "the level of nucleotide diversity is exceptionally low," the scientists wrote.

Genetics

Reviving Extinct Species

"Who Wants to Live Alongside Sabre-Toothed Tigers?" asked a headline in the British magazine New Scientist, amid a clutch of reports, including one in this paper and one in National Geographic, about the prospects for bringing back vanished animals of yesteryear. One catalyst was a presentation in Washington at a one-day conference) by Australian scientists who are trying to revive the Southern gastric brooding frog, which died out about a quarter-century ago and which — brace yourself — gives birth through its mouth. So far, they have produced embryos only, and those have not survived. Such was also the immediate fate of the one extinct subspecies of animal that has been brought back, through cloning: a Pyrenean ibex — a sort of wild mountain goat — that went extinct in 1999 and was revived, once, for mere minutes, in 2003.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 30, 2013

A report in a roundup of science news on Tuesday about the recovery of two F-1 rocket engines from an Apollo mission off the ocean floor misstated part of the name of the ship used for the expedition. It is the Seabed Worker, not the Seabed Wonder.

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Space Coast Showing Signs of an Economic Recovery

Edward Linsmier for The New York Times

Embraer, a Brazilian company, was courted by 20 states but chose Florida, hiring many laid-off NASA employees to assemble jets in Melbourne.

MELBOURNE, Fla. — The day after the shuttle Atlantis landed for the last time at the Kennedy Space Center on July 21, 2011, Angel Telles, a man with three master's degrees, scooped up his white Mission 101 coffee mug and drove away from NASA after 24 years on the job there. The shuttle era had ended, and with it the jobs of 8,000 NASA and civilian workers who found themselves unemployed in the midst of a harsh economic downturn and a crush of home foreclosures.

So great was the blow to the state and NASA's traditional space program that it put politicians, including presidential candidates, on the defensive on the campaign trail.

"I mean, it was happening before our very eyeballs," said Mr. Telles, 50, whose most recent job at NASA was developing requirements for new vehicles, as he recalled his last day at the space center. "This is happening to me? Really? You are in shock."

"But then," he added, "you say, 'I am moving on.' "

He did, and finally, this month, Mr. Telles landed a well-paying engineering job with the Harris Corporation, an international telecommunications equipment company. His hiring is the latest sign that nearly two years after Brevard County was left staggering from the one-two punch of the downturn and the demise of the shuttle program, the Space Coast, while still struggling, has defied the bleak predictions.

Private employers on the Space Coast, which includes Cocoa Beach and Merritt Island, have created more than 4,000 jobs since 2010 and have added 1,000 more this year, including jobs in aerospace, aviation, engineering and other high-technology sectors. Companies like Embraer, which makes jets, Northrop Grumman and Rocket Crafters were among those that moved here or expanded. Small businesses are also opening at a faster clip. Housing prices are rising, and the pace of foreclosures is slowing in some areas.

The linchpin in Brevard's recovery was a plan to diversify beyond aerospace while maintaining its astronaut aura and capitalizing on its coveted labor force: well-trained, highly educated workers with security clearance who have demonstrated the ability to launch manned spacecraft into orbit.

"Everyone said we were going to get hit by a Category 5 storm — board up and get ready," said Robin Fisher, a Brevard County commissioner from Titusville, which has been slower to recover than the rest of the county. "After the national program shut down, there were a lot of reasons to fail. But we didn't."

The future after Atlantis was in many ways guided by the lessons of Apollo. More than four decades ago, this county was built on the gold rush that resulted from the Apollo program, back when astronauts were household names and Cocoa Beach was familiar to television viewers as the home of "I Dream of Jeannie." But in 1972, President Richard M. Nixon shut down the program, decimating the communities surrounding the Kennedy Space Center.

An estimated 18,000 jobs were lost in 18 months. Some residents walked away from their houses.

"The cancellation of Apollo was much more abrupt, and it was a lot bigger," said Dale Ketcham, who is in charge of strategic alliances for Space Florida, the state's port authority for space and its economic development engine. He grew up in Cocoa Beach and was headed to college at that time. "The economy was much less robust and diversified, so there really wasn't anything else to do."

This time around, local and state officials had years to plan for the end of the shuttle program, which was announced by President George W. Bush in 2004, after the Columbia shuttle disintegrated on re-entry. A scaled-down program called Constellation was begun, but that was canceled by President Obama after it, too, became expensive.

Despite the setbacks, Brevard kept one important project: the building of Orion, a multipurpose deep-space capsule. It was the first time the Kennedy Space Center moved from launching a craft to assembling one.

A few months after the shuttle program closed, Boeing stepped in, announcing it would establish a headquarters at the space center for its new spaceship program to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The program would create 550 jobs by 2015, a relatively small number, but one welcomed nonetheless by local and state officials.

The larger challenge was drafting a plan to diversify beyond the traditional parameters of government-run deep-space programs and finding a way to recoup the 8,000 lost jobs little by little.

But in the past three years, more companies have started to roll into Brevard. They have been enticed, in part, by government tax incentives sprinkled liberally across Florida to court business, a practice that has drawn some criticism.

"The problem in the past is that there was no plan of action," said Lynda Weatherman, the president of the Space Coast's Economic Development Commission. "It's as much a psychological promotion story as an economic one. It said there is a Chapter 2 in our lives. Part of the reason we got into this situation is because all we did was launch."

But, she cautioned, "We are not out of the woods yet."

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Soaring Bee Deaths in 2012 Sound Alarm on Malady

By Matt H. Mayes and Axel Gerdau

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

A Disastrous Year for Bees: For America's beekeepers, who have struggled for nearly a decade with a mysterious malady called colony collapse disorder that kills honeybees en masse, this past year was particularly bad.

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation's fruits and vegetables.

A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.

The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they are open to further studies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.

"They looked so healthy last spring," said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in Fairview, Mont. "We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We've been doing this 30 years, and we've never experienced this kind of loss before."

In a show of concern, the Environmental Protection Agency recently sent its acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and two top chemical experts here, to the San Joaquin Valley of California, for discussions.

In the valley, where 1.6 million hives of bees just finished pollinating an endless expanse of almond groves, commercial beekeepers who only recently were losing a third of their bees to the disorder say the past year has brought far greater losses.

The federal Agriculture Department is to issue its own assessment in May. But in an interview, the research leader at its Beltsville, Md., bee research laboratory, Jeff Pettis, said he was confident that the death rate would be "much higher than it's ever been."

Following a now-familiar pattern, bee deaths rose swiftly last autumn and dwindled as operators moved colonies to faraway farms for the pollination season. Beekeepers say the latest string of deaths has dealt them a heavy blow.

Bret Adee, who is an owner, with his father and brother, of Adee Honey Farms of South Dakota, the nation's largest beekeeper, described mounting losses.

"We lost 42 percent over the winter. But by the time we came around to pollinate almonds, it was a 55 percent loss," he said in an interview here this week.

"They looked beautiful in October," Mr. Adee said, "and in December, they started falling apart, when it got cold."

Mr. Dahle said he had planned to bring 13,000 beehives from Montana — 31 tractor-trailers full — to work the California almond groves. But by the start of pollination last month, only 3,000 healthy hives remained.

Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers' best efforts to ensure their health.

Nor is the impact limited to beekeepers. The Agriculture Department says a quarter of the American diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to onions, depends on pollination by honeybees. Fewer bees means smaller harvests and higher food prices.

Almonds are a bellwether. Eighty percent of the nation's almonds grow here, and 80 percent of those are exported, a multibillion-dollar crop crucial to California agriculture. Pollinating up to 800,000 acres, with at least two hives per acre, takes as many as two-thirds of all commercial hives.

This past winter's die-off sent growers scrambling for enough hives to guarantee a harvest. Chris Moore, a beekeeper in Kountze, Tex., said he had planned to skip the groves after sickness killed 40 percent of his bees and left survivors weakened.

"But California was short, and I got a call in the middle of February that they were desperate for just about anything," he said. So he sent two truckloads of hives that he normally would not have put to work.

Bee shortages pushed the cost to farmers of renting bees to $200 per hive at times, 20 percent above normal. That, too, may translate into higher prices for food.

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E.P.A. Wants to Cut Amount of Sulfur in Gasoline

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency will propose a rule on Friday that will cut the amount of sulfur allowed in gasoline by two-thirds to improve the performance of the catalytic converters in engines that fight smog, the agency has told refiners and clean-air advocates.

The proposal has been ready for about 15 months but was delayed until after the election because opponents will argue that it will raise the price of gasoline, according to people familiar with its history.

"They didn't want to have a big fight during an election year," said S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies.

The rule will essentially move the country to the sulfur standards now in place in California, Mr. Becker said.

Refiners said it could raise the price of a gallon by 6 to 8 cents, but clean-air groups said it would be more like 1 cent. The difference depends in part on details of the rule that have not been made public.

News of the proposal was first reported by The Washington Post on its Web site.

Gasoline in the other 49 states can now have up to 30 parts of sulfur per million, and the proposed rule will be 10. The main problem is that at the current level, sulfur reduces the effectiveness of the catalytic converter, which eliminates nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide.

Charles T. Drevna, president of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the refiners' main trade association, said the companies had in the last few years cut the sulfur content by 90 percent, to 30 parts from 300 parts, at a cost of $10 billion in capital improvements. He said that the proposed cut would cost another $10 billion. Because the process consumes energy, it will raise the carbon dioxide output of refineries.

Mr. Drevna said that the E.P.A. had not demonstrated that the cut was needed to meet existing air quality standards. He said he was hoping the industry would have time to respond.

But Mr. Becker said that when put in place, the rule would cut nitrogen oxide emissions by 260,000 tons, compared with about 10 million tons from all mobile sources. That is the equivalent of 33 million cars, he said.

The cut, Mr. Becker said, was huge, more than the E.P.A. was seeking from its cross-state air pollution rule, a major initiative that was blocked by a court ruling last year.

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2011 Oklahoma Quake Tied to Wastewater Disposal at Oil Wells

A damaging earthquake in central Oklahoma two years ago most likely resulted from the pumping of wastewater from oil production into deep wells, scientists say.

The magnitude 5.7 quake, which destroyed more than a dozen homes and injured two people, was one in a series that occurred in November 2011 in an oil-producing area near Prague, Okla. The researchers said the quakes occurred near wells where wastewater had been injected into porous rock for two decades.

"The link is pretty compelling," said Heather M. Savage, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, and an author of a paper on the quake published online this week by the journal Geology. "The aftershocks show that the first fault that ruptured comes very close to one of the active wells." The first quake then touched off the others, including the largest one, the researchers said.

The findings are the latest to link earthquakes to underground disposal of wastewater from oil and gas production. Most of those quakes have been minor, causing little or no damage; the 5.7 quake is the largest in the United States to be connected to disposal wells.

The National Academy of Sciences has called for more research into links between quakes and well activities.

Last year, a well in Youngstown, Ohio, that was used to dispose of waste fluids from the production method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was shut down after scientists showed a link to a series of small earthquakes in the area. The Oklahoma oil wells used more conventional production techniques, said the new study's lead author, Katie M. Keranen, a seismologist at the University of Oklahoma.

The Oklahoma Geological Survey, a state agency whose mandate includes promoting "the wise use of Oklahoma's natural resources," took issue with the findings. In a statement, it noted that earthquakes had occurred regularly in the state, including some of magnitude 4.0, and added, "The interpretation that best fits the current data is that the Prague earthquake sequence was the result of natural causes."

Pumping of wastewater continues at the wells in the area, and minor quakes still occur, but the authors of the new paper said it was not possible to say whether those smaller quakes were related to the disposal wells.

The researchers said that although the wastewater injection at the wells started in the early 1990s, data showed that injection pressures were increased beginning about a decade ago. Dr. Keranen said that was an indication that pressure down in the rock was rising when it became filled with water. The pressure would have reduced stress on the fault, causing it to slip.

But Steve Horton, a researcher at the University of Memphis who studied a series of quakes in Arkansas in 2010 and 2011 that were linked to disposal wells, said that in most cases the time between the start of wastewater disposal and the occurrence of earthquakes was much shorter.

"Even if the earthquakes just started five years ago, that would still be quite a long time," he said.

That is why the researchers could not say definitively that the disposal led to the quakes, Dr. Horton said, adding, "What they said is as much as they could say, given the data."

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3rd Oral Drug to Treat MS Is Approved by the F.D.A.

A chemical once used to treat sofas — until it was found to cause rashes and blisters in people who sat on them — is now poised to become a major therapy for multiple sclerosis.

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the chemical, dimethyl fumarate, which will be sold by Biogen Idec under the name Tecfidera, the third of a spate of oral drugs that are transforming the treatment of multiple sclerosis.

Despite the drug's seemingly odd history, Wall Street analysts, doctors and patients expect Tecfidera to become a blockbuster because of its combination of efficacy and relative safety and the convenience of being a pill. Doctors and analysts say some patients have been putting off starting treatment until Tecfidera is available.

Feedback from doctors was "highly positive, with a strong consensus that Tecfidera offers a more favorable clinical profile than other oral or injectable first-line options," Thomas Wei, an analyst at Jefferies, wrote on Monday.

About 400,000 Americans and more than two million people worldwide have multiple sclerosis, many of them women first stricken in their 20s. The disease is believed to occur when the body's immune system attacks the insulation around nerve fibers, causing symptoms like difficulty walking, blurred vision and fatigue.

The market for MS drugs is already $14 billion annually, with $8.5 billion of that in the United States, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

While self-injected medicines like Avonex from Biogen and Copaxone from Teva that entered the market in the 1990s are still used by the majority of treated patients, newer oral drugs are making inroads. In addition to Tecfidera, the other two oral drugs are Gilenya from Novartis, approved in 2010, and Aubagio from Sanofi, approved in September.

The approvals will solidify Biogen's position as a leader in multiple sclerosis drugs. In addition to Tecfidera and Avonex, the company also sells Tysabri, a highly effective intravenous drug but one that can cause a potentially fatal brain infection.

Biogen shares have more than doubled in the last two years, largely because of anticipation about Tecfidera. The shares closed on Wednesday at $182.68, up about 3 percent.

Biogen, which is based in Weston, Mass., did not immediately announce the price of Tecfidera, which was known as BG-12 during its development.

Stock fund portfolio managers polled by the research firm the ISI Group on Wednesday predicted a price of about $51,000 a year, which would be roughly in line with prices of the injectable drugs, but less than the $60,000 a year list price of Gilenya.

The effectiveness of multiple sclerosis drugs is often judged by how much they reduce the frequency of relapses, which are severe flare-ups of symptoms, compared to a placebo in clinical trials.

The injectable drugs reduced the frequency about 30 percent, as did the new oral drug Aubagio. Gilenya cut the rate about 54 percent.

Tecfidera cut the relapse rate 44 percent in one trial and 53 percent in another, which might put it a bit behind Gilenya. Tecfidera is also taken twice a day, while Gilenya is taken only once daily.

But Gilenya has side effects that make it off limits for some patients and require careful testing and monitoring for heart, liver and eye problems. Patients are supposed to remain in a medical facility for at least six hours after taking their first dose to make sure their heart does not slow down too much.

Tecfidera will have fewer restrictions and testing requirements. The prescribing information does recommend that blood cell levels be tested before a patient starts on the drug and annually thereafter. That is because Tecfidera can reduce white blood cell levels, leaving patients potentially vulnerable to infections. And some studies in animals suggest that the drug might cause fetal harm, making it a questionable choice for pregnant women, the label says.

Tecfidera's most common side effect is flushing, which occurs in about 40 percent of patients. The drug can also cause nausea and diarrhea.

Dimethyl fumarate and some closely related compounds are simple molecules that have been used as food additives. The compound was also used to protect upholstery and shoes from mold during storage. But people in Europe developed skin irritation and other problems, causing its use in consumer goods to be banned there.

The first use of it in medicine was in 1959, when a German chemist treated his own psoriasis. A drug called Fumaderm, which is similar to Tecfidera, was approved to treat psoriasis in Germany in 1994.

It is not quite clear how Tecfidera works. It is thought that one way is to activate a pathway known as Nrf2, which helps protect the body from oxidative stress.

Geoffrey C. Porges, a biotechnology analyst at Sanford Bernstein, said in a note on Monday that he expected global sales to reach $1.7 billion by 2015 and $2.6 billion by 2017. European regulators recommended last week that Tecfidera be approved as well.

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Dairy Finds Way to Let Cows Power Trucks

Peter Hoffman for The New York Times

Fair Oaks Farms in Fair Oaks, Ind., has long used livestock waste to create enough natural gas to fully power 10 barns, a cheese factory, a gift shop and more. More Photos »

FAIR OAKS, Ind. — Here at one of the largest dairy farms in the country, electricity generated using an endless supply of manure runs the equipment to milk around 30,000 cows three times a day.

For years, the farm has used livestock waste to create enough natural gas to power 10 barns, a cheese factory, a cafe, a gift shop and a maze of child-friendly exhibits about the world of dairy, including a 4D movie theater.

All that, and Fair Oaks Farms was still using only about half of the five million pounds of cow manure it vacuumed up from its barn floors on a daily basis. It burned off the excess methane, wasted energy sacrificed to the sky.

But not anymore.

The farm is now turning the extra manure into fuel for its delivery trucks, powering 42 tractor-trailers that make daily runs to raw milk processing plants in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. Officials from the federal Department of Energy called the endeavor a "pacesetter" for the dairy industry, and said it was the largest natural gas fleet using agricultural waste to drive this nation's roads.

"As long as we keep milking cows, we never run out of gas," said Gary Corbett, chief executive of Fair Oaks, which held a ribbon-cutting event for the project this month and opened two fueling stations to the public.

"We are one user, and we're taking two million gallons of diesel off the highway each year," he said. "That's a big deal."

The switch comes at a time of nascent growth for vehicles that run on compressed natural gas in the United States, as some industries — particularly those that require long-haul trucking or repetitive routes — have started considering the advantages of cheap natural gas, close to half the price of a gallon of diesel fuel for the same amount of power.

The American Gas Association estimates there are about 1,200 natural gas fueling stations operating across the country, the vast majority of which are supplied by the same pipelines that heat houses.

But the growing market is also drawing interest from livestock farmers, landfill management companies and other industries handling methane-rich material that, if harnessed, could create a nearly endless supply of cleaner, safer, sustainable "biogas," while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

To be sure, no one is pretending that waste-to-energy projects will become a major part of the larger natural gas vehicle market. But supporters say it could provide additional incentive to make biogas systems, which have lagged behind other sustainable energy solutions, more commercially viable.

"You're essentially harvesting manure," said Erin Fitzgerald, a senior vice president at the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, who says that farmers across the country are starting to think about whether the model tried at Fair Oaks will work for them. "It's not glamorous. It doesn't really catch your eye like wind and solar."

Mike McCloskey, a co-owner of Fair Oaks, said he first started looking into renewable energy options for the farm more than a decade ago, when the smell of manure, used as fertilizer on his fields, started drawing complaints from some neighbors.

Today, the farm is running sophisticated $12 million "digester" facilities that process its overabundance of manure, capturing natural gas that runs electric generators or is pumped underground to a fueling station. The leftover byproduct is still spread on the fields as fertilizer.

While Mr. Corbett would not divulge how much money the farm saves by its switch to biogas fuel, he said the gas stations had already brought in new revenue from other trucking fleets.

Dennis Smith, director of the Clean Cities program for the federal Department of Energy, said about 8,000 large-scale dairy and swine farms across the country could potentially support similar biogas recovery projects. When coupled with landfills and wastewater treatment plants, he said, there is potential to someday replace as much as 10 billion gallons of gasoline annually with renewable fuel.

Still, not everyone is convinced that the time is ripe for more manure-powered vehicles, particularly when regular natural gas remains abundant and cheap.

"The market is just not firm yet," said Michael Boccadoro, a bioenergy consultant from California who is finishing a study of the possibility of neighboring dairies in the San Joaquin Valley sharing a single digester. "It's all a tiny bit premature."

That has not stopped AMP Americas, a Chicago company that partnered with Fair Oaks on the fuel project. The company plans to build 15 more natural gas stations this year, with some in Texas and the rest along two major Interstates in the Midwest.

For now, each station will be supplied primarily by traditional pipeline gas, but the company plans to partner with more dairy companies along the way, getting help from Mr. McCloskey and the Fair Oaks story.

"I think the whole country is ready for this," Mr. McCloskey said. "I think you're going to look around in five years and be very surprised at what you see."

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Doctor for N.F.L. Says Study Overstates Effects of C.T.E.

When a government agency prepared a workplace safety fact sheet based on a study of degenerative brain disease in retired N.F.L. players, the organization invited several people to comment on a draft.

According to a memorandum obtained by The New York Times, most of the reviewers suggested simplifying the fact sheet so that players without a scientific background could better understand the findings. But one response stood out: a doctor on the N.F.L.'s head, neck and spine committee asked that a mention of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., be removed.

C.T.E. is a degenerative brain disease that is closely related to Alzheimer's disease and is believed to be caused by repeated head trauma. It has been found posthumously in dozens of football players, provoking widespread concern about the sport's potential long-term cognitive effects.

Against this backdrop of public awareness, the N.F.L. has drastically shifted its position on head injuries in recent years, introducing rule changes and promoting education. But the league has expressed skepticism about the possibility of a link between on-field head injuries and C.T.E., a sentiment captured in the league doctor's request to the federal safety agency.

The doctor, who was not named in the internal memo, said references to C.T.E. should be removed because it was "not fully understood" and because it was not listed on the death certificates of the retired players in the study and thus lacked "epidemiological validity." He suggested that traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I., be used instead because it "may accomplish what you want to say in more established medical terms."

Researchers from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which wrote the fact sheet, rejected the league doctor's proposed change. Independent medical experts said such a request was inappropriate and not in line with prevailing research.

"That's what bugged me the most," said Jeffrey Kutcher, a neurologist and the director of Michigan NeuroSport at the University of Michigan, referring to the request to use traumatic brain injury instead of C.T.E. "It's a huge jump and it goes completely away from what the Niosh study showed."

Richard Ellenbogen, the chairman of the University of Washington's neurological surgery department and a co-chairman of the N.F.L.'s head, neck and spine committee, said he did not know which doctor suggested changing the text of the fact sheet.

But he said the doctor was correct in wanting to include a reference to traumatic brain injury. T.B.I. is a clinical diagnosis that can be identified in living patients, Ellenbogen said, while C.T.E. is a pathological diagnosis that so far can be found only through autopsies.

"Whoever said that is right," Ellenbogen said. "We've got to be careful because C.T.E. is a pathological diagnosis. We know that exists. That's been proven forever. What's important about this study is, if I played sports and had concussions, what's my chance of getting these?"

Ellenbogen said there was not enough research to answer that question. "Right now, people are on the razor's edge cutting the words," he said. "The problem is, the science isn't there yet. But we have to be clear. I'm agreeing with the Niosh study, but we just have to be more careful to make clear that C.T.E. is a pathological diagnosis and T.B.I. is a clinical diagnosis."

Like Ellenbogen, independent medical experts said they agreed with the agency when it wrote that there was no known "cause-effect relationship between football-related concussions and death from these neurodegenerative disorders," as well as the agency's statement that "professional football players are at increased risk of death" from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

The medical experts also expressed dismay that an N.F.L. doctor would point to the death certificates of former players in the study. C.T.E. is often diagnosed months after death, when brain samples are examined.

"This is an epidemiological entity, and at this point it definitely garners this title because of the number of players we have diagnosed with it," said Alexander K. Powers, an assistant professor of neurosurgery who specializes in sports-related brain and spine injuries at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. "There's plenty of research that is active. It's a robust field. It's not some orphan ambition."

The fact sheet, sent to retired N.F.L. players in January, summarized research published in September in the journal Neurology that found that players "may be at a higher risk of death associated with Alzheimer's and other impairments of the brain and nervous system than the general U.S. population."

Before publishing its fact sheet, Niosh asked three former players, a representative from the N.F.L. Players Association and a representative from the N.F.L. Player Care Foundation, an independent organization that assists retired players, to review and comment on a draft. The foundation asked for advice from the doctor on the head, neck and spine committee.

Niosh researchers rejected the proposed change because C.T.E. "resonated with the players who reviewed the draft and provided feedback" and was widely acknowledged. Using T.B.I. was also inappropriate because it described an injury that might result in a disorder like C.T.E. and was therefore not equivalent, said Ann Mobley, the health communications specialist at Niosh who wrote the fact sheet.

The debate over the long-term effects of head injuries in football has engaged neurosurgeons, neurologists, neuropsychologists and other researchers and clinicians. It has also led to lawsuits. Several thousand retired players have accused the N.F.L. of deliberating playing down the dangers of head injuries.

Everett Lehman, an epidemiologist at Niosh and the principal author of the original mortality study of more than 3,400 retired players, said his department must balance accuracy and clarity in its research. He said the N.F.L. doctor's request was misguided.

"I just think they are different things, and we didn't think it was important to include T.B.I.," he said. "Maybe whoever looked at it didn't carefully look at our paper."

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Loppersum Journal: More Earthquakes in Loppersum, the Netherlands

Herman Wouters for The New York Times

Bert de Jong says the walls of his Loppersum house now bulge and will require buttressing.

LOPPERSUM, the Netherlands — Jannes Kadyk's modest brick home suffered more than $5,000 in damage. Bert de Jong's more stately home will need about $500,000 to get back into shape.

Both houses, like thousands of others, were damaged during recent earthquakes that have shaken the flat farmland in this area dotted with villages and tucked up against the North Sea.

The quakes were caused by the extraction of natural gas from the soil deep below. The gas was discovered in the 1950s, and extraction began in the 1960s, but only in recent years have the quakes become more frequent, about 18 in the first six weeks of this year, compared with as few as 20 each year before 2011.

Chiel Seinen, a spokesman for the gas consortium known as NAM, said the extraction had created at least 1,800 faults in the region's subsoil.

"These faults are seen as a mechanism to induce earthquakes," he said.

The findings in the Netherlands parallel the anxiety about hydraulic fracturing technology in the United States, where several states have halted drilling temporarily, though more commonly out of fear that chemicals used in the process may pollute water sources.

This month, the New York State Assembly voted to block so-called fracking, the process in which water is blasted through rock at high pressure to extract gas, until 2015, requiring further study on its environmental impact.

This is not Haiti. The worst tremor, last August, had a magnitude of 3.4, hardly enough to cause widespread devastation. Yet the number of claims for damaged property is already in the thousands, and the company extracting the gas, a consortium of Shell and Exxon Mobil, has set aside $130 million for measures to strengthen buildings against the shocks. Yet most troubling is that experts at government agencies are predicting that the quakes will worsen, to between a magnitude of 4 and 5.

Is the big one yet to come? Mr. Kadyk, 62, a retired city employee, pointed to cracks around doors and windows in his two-story brick home. He said he was "not an expert, so I cannot say yes or no, but the real experts say if we don't stop extracting gas, the country risks further earthquakes."

Yvonne Doesburg, who runs a small restaurant and hotel called De Oude Smidse near Mr. Kadyk's home, recalled the August quake, which had its epicenter in Loppersum. "The house shook enormously; it was scary," she said. Asked whether people expected worse, she replied, "The fear is there."

Ms. Doesburg's husband, Jorg Zart, believes the drilling should go on nonetheless. "It brings jobs," he said, "and traditionally, this was one of the poorest regions of Holland."

His wife dissents. "The money is made here, but spent elsewhere," she said.

Public sentiment sides with Ms. Doesburg. Membership in a grass-roots organization called the Groningen Soil Movement, for the province of Groningen, where Loppersum lies, has jumped to 800 people from 200 in the past two years. In a survey of 686 residents published this month, almost two-thirds said they wanted the amount of gas extracted to be cut; 16 percent wanted it stopped altogether.

"We believe safety is not the top priority," said Daniella Blanken, a computer programmer and a Soil Movement board member.

The national government in The Hague insists it is. The northern region is particularly vulnerable because much of it lies below sea level, protected from North Sea waters by huge dikes. If earthquakes threatened the dikes or the intricate system of canals and locks that lace the land, the loss of life could be catastrophic.

Albert Rodenboog, 60, the mayor of Loppersum for the past decade, compares the government to an acrobat doing a split: While The Hague has safety in mind, he explains, it is also bound by contractual obligations and serious financial considerations.

"We have to reckon in the future with heavier quakes, with heavier damage," the mayor said. "But there are domestic delivery contracts, export contracts."

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Lockheed Martin Harnesses Quantum Technology

Kim Stallknecht for The New York Times

Lockheed Martin bought a version of D-Wave's quantum computer and plans to upgrade it to commercial scale.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Our digital age is all about bits, those precise ones and zeros that are the stuff of modern computer code.

More Tech Coverage

News from the technology industry, including start-ups, the Internet, enterprise and gadgets.
On Twitter: @nytimesbits.

Kim Stallknecht for The New York Times

Geordie Rose, left, a founder and chief technical officer of D-Wave, and Vern Brownell, the company's chief executive.

But a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between — all at the same time.

It sounds preposterous, particularly to those familiar with the yes/no world of conventional computing. But academic researchers and scientists at companies like Microsoft, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard have been working to develop quantum computers.

Now, Lockheed Martin — which bought an early version of such a computer from the Canadian company D-Wave Systems two years ago — is confident enough in the technology to upgrade it to commercial scale, becoming the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business.

Skeptics say that D-Wave has yet to prove to outside scientists that it has solved the myriad challenges involved in quantum computation.

But if it performs as Lockheed and D-Wave expect, the design could be used to supercharge even the most powerful systems, solving some science and business problems millions of times faster than can be done today.

Ray Johnson, Lockheed's chief technical officer, said his company would use the quantum computer to create and test complex radar, space and aircraft systems. It could be possible, for example, to tell instantly how the millions of lines of software running a network of satellites would react to a solar burst or a pulse from a nuclear explosion — something that can now take weeks, if ever, to determine.

"This is a revolution not unlike the early days of computing," he said. "It is a transformation in the way computers are thought about." Many others could find applications for D-Wave's computers. Cancer researchers see a potential to move rapidly through vast amounts of genetic data. The technology could also be used to determine the behavior of proteins encoded by the human genome, a bigger and tougher problem than sequencing the genome. Researchers at Google have worked with D-Wave on using quantum computers to recognize cars and landmarks, a critical step in managing self-driving vehicles.

Quantum computing is so much faster than traditional computing because of the unusual properties of particles at the smallest level. Instead of the precision of ones and zeros that have been used to represent data since the earliest days of computers, quantum computing relies on the fact that subatomic particles inhabit a range of states. Different relationships among the particles may coexist, as well. Those probable states can be narrowed to determine an optimal outcome among a near-infinitude of possibilities, which allows certain types of problems to be solved rapidly.

D-Wave, a 12-year-old company based in Vancouver, has received investments from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, which operates one of the world's largest computer systems, as well as from the investment bank Goldman Sachs and from In-Q-Tel, an investment firm with close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and other government agencies.

"What we're doing is a parallel development to the kind of computing we've had for the past 70 years," said Vern Brownell, D-Wave's chief executive.

Mr. Brownell, who joined D-Wave in 2009, was until 2000 the chief technical officer at Goldman Sachs. "In those days, we had 50,000 servers just doing simulations" to figure out trading strategies, he said. "I'm sure there is a lot more than that now, but we'll be able to do that with one machine, for far less money."

D-Wave, and the broader vision of quantum-supercharged computing, is not without its critics. Much of the criticism stems from D-Wave's own claims in 2007, later withdrawn, that it would produce a commercial quantum computer within a year.

John Markoff contributed reporting from San Francisco.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 27, 2013

An article on Friday about advances in the development of quantum computing technology described incorrectly the potential use of the technology in assessing the human genome. Cancer researchers believe the technology could be used to determine the behavior of proteins encoded by the human genome, not proteins in the human genome. (The human genome itself contains no proteins.)

 

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New York State Bonds Include Warning on Climate Change

The warning, which is now appearing in the state's bond offerings, comes as Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, continues to urge that public officials come to grips with the frequency of extreme weather and to declare that climate change is a reality.

A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo said he believed New York was the first state to caution investors about climate change. The caution, which cites Hurricane Sandy and Tropical Storms Irene and Lee, is included alongside warnings about other risks like potential cuts in federal spending, unresolved labor negotiations and litigation against the state.

"The state determined that observed effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels, and potential effects of climate change, such as the frequency and intensity of storms, presented economic and financial risks to the state," the spokesman, Richard Azzopardi, said on Tuesday.

Mr. Azzopardi added, "The extreme weather events of the last two years highlighted real and potential costs from extreme weather events, including the need to harden the state's infrastructure and improve disaster preparedness, both of which have been a priority of the governor."

Last fall, Mr. Cuomo was quick to draw a connection between climate change and the severity of Hurricane Sandy, complaining that he seemed to spend much of his time as governor responding to extreme weather events. He has frequently spoken about climate change since then, saying in his State of the State address in January that New York needed "to learn to accept the fact — and I believe it is a fact — that climate change is real."

"There is a 100-year flood every two years now," Mr. Cuomo said at the time. "It's inarguable that the sea is warmer and that there is a changing weather pattern, and the time to act is now."

Experts in public finance said they had not heard of any other state that included an explicit warning about climate change in bond offerings.

But David Hitchcock, a senior director in the public finance practice at Standard & Poor's, said climate change was not a criterion in evaluating state finances. "I have a hard time finding a direct relationship for climate change on New York State's economy at this point," he said, adding, "It's not something that's really on our radar screen right now."

Emily Raimes, a vice president at Moody's Investors Service, said "more disclosure is always a good thing." But she added that most of the risk for local and state governments from powerful storms was mitigated by the presence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which provides disaster aid to assist states and local governments.

"One of the reasons they can get to ratings as high as they do, particularly in storm-prone areas, is because of the existence of FEMA," Ms. Raimes said. "After Hurricane Sandy, after big natural disaster events, FEMA picks up most of the cost of the immediate cleanup and rebuilding of public infrastructure."

She noted that Moody's had downgraded only a small number of local governments that were in areas hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, and that those governments had financial problems even before the storm hit.

The warning about climate change first appeared in the fine print of Mr. Cuomo's budget proposal in January, and was reported on Tuesday by Bloomberg News. It notes that recent storms "have demonstrated vulnerabilities in the state's infrastructure, including mass transit systems, power transmission and distribution systems, and other critical lifelines."

The warning adds, "Significant long-term planning and investment by the federal government, state and municipalities will be needed to adapt existing infrastructure to the risks posed by climate change."

Mr. Cuomo is taking a number of steps to prepare the state for storms; for example, his administration is developing a program to offer home buyouts to residents in flood-prone areas in a bid to begin reshaping how New York develops its coastline. The state budget that lawmakers are expected to approve this week also includes a provision requiring some gas stations to be wired to accept generators that could be used in the event of a power failure.

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Salesmen in the Surgical Suite

Ann Johansson for The New York Times

When Fred E. Taylor arrived at Harrison Medical Center in Silverdale, Wash., for a routine prostatectomy, he expected the best medical care new technology had to offer: robotic surgery, billed as safer, less painful and easier on the body than traditional surgery.

The operation, on Sept. 9, 2008, was supposed to take five hours. But it was marred by a remarkable cascade of complications and dragged on for more than 13 hours, leaving Mr. Taylor, who had been an active 67-year-old retiree, incontinent and with a colostomy bag, and leading to kidney and lung damage, sepsis and a stroke.

Mr. Taylor survived his injuries but died last year. Now, his wife, Josette, is suing Intuitive Surgical Inc., the company that makes the equipment and trained the surgeon to use it. As it turned out, the surgeon, Dr. Scott Bildsten, had never before used the robotic equipment without supervision.

"We are the old school, where you trust the doctor," said Mrs. Taylor, who noted that her husband's life was so limited after the operation that he used to cry about being "trapped in this body."

It is not the first time patients have claimed they were harmed by Intuitive's robotic surgical equipment, called the da Vinci Surgical System. But the Taylor case, set for trial in April, is unusual. Internal company e-mails, provided to The New York Times by lawyers for the Taylor estate, offer a glimpse into the aggressive tactics used to market high-tech medical devices and raise questions about the quality of training provided to doctors before they use new equipment on patients.

Intuitive, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., declined to comment on the lawsuit but said studies showed that its robotic equipment results in better outcomes than conventional open surgery. "The most objective and therefore best measure of efficacy for all of those involved in training — from Intuitive Surgical, the hospitals, the proctors and the surgeons themselves — is represented in the comparative clinical outcomes of da Vinci surgery," said Angela Wonson, the company's vice president for communications.

According to Intuitive, 1,371 hospitals in the United States have purchased a da Vinci system, and many have purchased two. Nearly half a million procedures worldwide were performed robotically last year, including prostatectomies and hysterectomies, among other operations.

A surgeon using the da Vinci system sits at a console with a camera that provides a high-definition, three-dimensional image of the surgical site. He or she manipulates miniaturized instruments; computer and robotic technology translates and scales the surgeon's hand movements.

Hospitals are responsible for setting the credentialing standards, or training requirements, for physicians who will use the equipment on patients. But internal company e-mails suggest that Intuitive's sales representatives were intimately involved in the process, presenting themselves as experts and pressing for lower standards in order to ease the training path for busy surgeons, to increase use of the equipment and to drive sales.

In an e-mail dated May 31, 2011, a Western regional sales manager for Intuitive noted that area surgeons had used robotic equipment only five times, although the company's goal was to see 36 robotic operations performed by the end of June. He urged sales staff to persuade surgeons to switch upcoming cases to robotic ones.

"Don't let proctoring or credentialing" — shorthand for supervised surgery and hospital certification — "get in our way," the e-mail said.

In December 2009, a sales representative urged a hospital in Billings, Mont., to ease up on its credentialing requirement, saying in an e-mail that requiring surgeons to do five supervised operations using the robot before going solo was "on the high side" and could have "unintended consequences." Hospital officials replied, saying, "We will review and most likely will decrease the 5 down to 3."

Ms. Wonson, the Intuitive spokeswoman, said the company does not get involved in determining who is qualified to operate its robotic equipment, which is the responsibility of the hospitals. "We do not make recommendations," she said in an e-mail.

Dr. Bildsten was one of six doctors given free training by Intuitive, including one day of hands-on training at the company's facility in California. He also had done two practice runs on the equipment with a more experienced surgeon before operating on Mr. Taylor, he said in a legal deposition. Still, he said, no one warned him that a patient like Mr. Taylor, who weighed nearly 300 pounds, was not a good candidate for robotic surgery.

He did not respond to telephone messages requesting comment.

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The Week: NASA Engines Found, News About Squid and More

So few people do favors for NASA these days. So when Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder, announced last week that an expedition he financed had hoisted two F-1 rocket engines from an Apollo mission off the ocean floor, the agency was understandably grateful.

Bezos Expeditions

An expedition retrieved two F-1 rocket engines from an Apollo mission that were sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor.

NASA/Reuters

The Mars Rover is back in good health after suffering some computer problems.

Esa/Planck Collaboration European Pressphoto Agency

Astrophysicists released a map of the infant universe, above, just 370,000 years after the Big Bang.

"We look forward to the restoration of these engines by the Bezos team and applaud Jeff's desire to make these historic artifacts available for public display," the NASA administrator, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., said in a statement.

The engines may have been among the five that helped launch Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 shipmates to the Moon in 1969, while Mr. Bezos, then 5, watched on television. Today Mr. Bezos, one of a lineup of millionaires keen on space and underwater adventure, noted in a blog post that the F-1 rocket engine is "still a modern wonder — one and a half million pounds of thrust, 32 million horsepower, and burning 6,000 pounds of rocket grade kerosene and liquid oxygen every second."

He was aboard the Seabed Wonder as it spent three weeks at sea off Cape Canaveral, recovering engines that had come to rest nearly three miles from the surface. "We've seen an underwater wonderland," he wrote, "an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program."

Because the engines rightly belong to NASA, Mr. Bezos plans to deliver them. One is likely to go to the Smithsonian and the other to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, near the headquarters of Mr. Bezos's human spaceflight company, Blue Origin.

Developments

Space Exploration

That's No Heliopause, Silly

Speaking of space, a number of cool things happened since we checked in last week. One was that the Mars rover, Curiosity, which had been having some pesky computer problems, was restored to good health and given an excellent prognosis. Another was that astrophysicists released a map of the infant universe, just 370,000 years after the Big Bang, resplendent with specks that would one day grow into entire galaxies. And then there was the tantalizing report about Voyager 1, which has been hurtling away from the Sun since 1977 and aims to become the first manufactured object to leave the solar system. A headline on a news release from the American Geophysical Union suggested that Voyager 1 had entered the heliopause, or beginning of interstellar space, which would be totally exciting. Not so, said NASA quickly, explaining that while the plucky little spacecraft was busy speeding from the Sun at 38,000 miles an hour — and was now an impressive 11.5 billion miles from it — it was too soon to declare heliopause.

Health

A Leukemia Advance

Acute leukemia in adults, while rare, is usually lethal. Now come doctors with an experimental treatment that genetically alters a patient's own immune cells to fight this type of blood cancer. While it hasn't worked for all patients, some have gone into remission, even after chemotherapy had failed. The findings, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, included the startling case of one severely ill patient who, after undergoing the treatment, saw all traces of leukemia vanish in eight days. Dr. Renier J. Brentjens, a leukemia specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the first author of a new study of the therapy, said, "We had hoped, but couldn't have predicted that the response would be so profound and rapid."

Zoology

All in the (Squid) Family

The giant squid is fascinating in its size and ungainliness. It lives deep in the ocean, grows as long as 60 feet — including eight arms and two longer tentacles. Now it turns out that, even though they live all over the globe, giant squid are all very closely related genetically, scientists said in a paper last week, surprising the squid cognoscenti. The study looked at the mitochondrial genome of 43 giant squid samples, some that had washed ashore, some pulled up by deepwater fishing nets, and some culled from whale stomachs. In these samples, "the level of nucleotide diversity is exceptionally low," the scientists wrote.

Genetics

Reviving Extinct Species

"Who Wants to Live Alongside Sabre-Toothed Tigers?" asked a headline in the British magazine New Scientist, amid a clutch of reports, including one in this paper and one in National Geographic, about the prospects for bringing back vanished animals of yesteryear. One catalyst was a presentation in Washington at a one-day conference) by Australian scientists who are trying to revive the Southern gastric brooding frog, which died out about a quarter-century ago and which — brace yourself — gives birth through its mouth. So far, they have produced embryos only, and those have not survived. Such was also the immediate fate of the one extinct subspecies of animal that has been brought back, through cloning: a Pyrenean ibex — a sort of wild mountain goat — that went extinct in 1999 and was revived, once, for mere minutes, in 2003.

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James Cameron to Donate Deep-Sea Craft to Woods Hole Institute

The Hollywood director James Cameron is donating the craft that he built and last year rode into the sea's deepest spot to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, as part of a new collaboration meant to speed ocean exploration, the partners announced early Tuesday.

The undersea craft, which cost Mr. Cameron, the maker of hit movies like "Titanic" and "Avatar," roughly $10 million of his own money, will be used mainly to aid the design of advanced vehicles and technologies, rather than for routinely carrying scientists into the sea's depths.

The announcement comes on the first anniversary of Mr. Cameron's solo dive through the dark waters of the western Pacific. Down nearly seven miles, he and his torpedolike vehicle came to rest at the bottom of the Challenger Deep — the lowest point of the Mariana Trench, the deepest of the many seabed recesses that crisscross the globe. (A Twitter message that was posted from his dive was hailed as one of the top social media events of 2012.)

No other vehicle can carry people down so deep, and ocean engineers praise the craft, which was designed by Mr. Cameron and a team in Australia, for its innovative features. Most notably, its vertical design lets it dive rapidly and sets it apart from the world's submersibles and submarines, which typically look like underwater ships and are optimized for horizontal travel.

"It's the ideal outcome," Mr. Cameron said Monday in an interview about the new partnership. The main goal, he added, "is to get the technology out there, to capitalize on the engineering advances to the highest possible degree."

He said the vehicle, known as Deepsea Challenger, should arrive at Woods Hole, in Massachusetts, sometime around June.

Mr. Cameron, who will become an adviser to Woods Hole, added that the craft will stay in operational readiness for the foreseeable future. Its future dives, he added, will depend on scientific interest, as well as the availability of money to pay for ancillary costs, like mother ships.

"Jim's record-breaking dive was inspirational," Susan K. Avery, the president and director of Woods Hole, said in a statement. "Partnerships such as this one represent a new paradigm and will accelerate the progress of ocean science and technology development."

The oceanographic institution, located on Cape Cod, has long pioneered the development of deep-diving vehicles. Alvin, the world's most famous craft for carrying people into the oceanic depths, was the first submersible to illuminate the sunken Titanic and the ecosystems that thrive in the ocean's icy darkness.

Today, however, submersibles from other nations can dive deeper — 3.7 miles down for France and Russia, 4 miles for Japan and 4.3 miles for China.

Oceanographers say Mr. Cameron's fresh ideas could help the United States recapture some of its pioneering spirit.

"I have tremendous respect for him," Andy Bowen, director of the National Deep Submergence Facility at Woods Hole, said in an interview. "He's a fantastic thinker. I admire his command of the details and the way he can see the larger picture and combine those in a unique way."

Mr. Cameron's success is part of an emerging trend to privatization in science and exploration, and his donation to Woods Hole illustrates a sharp reversal in how innovative technologies once found wide application.

For decades, NASA and the military financed research that resulted in breakthroughs, like computer chips, that would "spin off" into the private sector. But today, advances in the private sector often "spin in" to government bodies. Woods Hole is a private institution but works closely with federal agencies.

Mr. Cameron made his vehicle speedy to maximize its bottom time. Its solo passenger can explore the dark seabed for hours, taking pictures and extracting samples.

In an interview, the filmmaker said he was eager to dive again in the Deepsea Challenger, particularly to an area of the western Pacific known as the Sirena Deep, more than six miles down.

There, his team last year spotted a rocky outcropping covered with bizarre clumps of microorganisms known as microbial mats — life in the middle of nowhere.

"It's what always happens at the end of an expedition," he said. "You get a glimpse through the door that you have to go through the next time."

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