Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer

I used to believe that a mammogram saved my life. I even wrote that in the pages of this magazine. It was 1996, and I had just turned 35 when my doctor sent me for an initial screening — a relatively common practice at the time — that would serve as a base line when I began annual mammograms at 40. I had no family history of breast cancer, no particular risk factors for the disease.

So when the radiologist found an odd, bicycle-spoke-like pattern on the film — not even a lump — and sent me for a biopsy, I wasn't worried. After all, who got breast cancer at 35?

It turns out I did. Recalling the fear, confusion, anger and grief of that time is still painful. My only solace was that the system worked precisely as it should: the mammogram caught my tumor early, and I was treated with a lumpectomy and six weeks of radiation; I was going to survive.

By coincidence, just a week after my diagnosis, a panel convened by the National Institutes of Health made headlines when it declined to recommend universal screening for women in their 40s; evidence simply didn't show it significantly decreased breast-cancer deaths in that age group. What's more, because of their denser breast tissue, younger women were subject to disproportionate false positives — leading to unnecessary biopsies and worry — as well as false negatives, in which cancer was missed entirely.

Those conclusions hit me like a sucker punch. "I am the person whose life is officially not worth saving," I wrote angrily. When the American Cancer Society as well as the newer Susan G. Komen foundation rejected the panel's findings, saying mammography was still the best tool to decrease breast-cancer mortality, friends across the country called to congratulate me as if I'd scored a personal victory. I considered myself a loud-and-proud example of the benefits of early detection.

Sixteen years later, my thinking has changed. As study after study revealed the limits of screening — and the dangers of overtreatment — a thought niggled at my consciousness. How much had my mammogram really mattered? Would the outcome have been the same had I bumped into the cancer on my own years later? It's hard to argue with a good result. After all, I am alive and grateful to be here. But I've watched friends whose breast cancers were detected "early" die anyway. I've sweated out what blessedly turned out to be false alarms with many others.

Recently, a survey of three decades of screening published in November in The New England Journal of Medicine found that mammography's impact is decidedly mixed: it does reduce, by a small percentage, the number of women who are told they have late-stage cancer, but it is far more likely to result in overdiagnosis and unnecessary treatment, including surgery, weeks of radiation and potentially toxic drugs. And yet, mammography remains an unquestioned pillar of the pink-ribbon awareness movement. Just about everywhere I go — the supermarket, the dry cleaner, the gym, the gas pump, the movie theater, the airport, the florist, the bank, the mall — I see posters proclaiming that "early detection is the best protection" and "mammograms save lives." But how many lives, exactly, are being "saved," under what circumstances and at what cost? Raising the public profile of breast cancer, a disease once spoken of only in whispers, was at one time critically important, as was emphasizing the benefits of screening. But there are unintended consequences to ever-greater "awareness" — and they, too, affect women's health.

Breast cancer in your breast doesn't kill you; the disease becomes deadly when it metastasizes, spreading to other organs or the bones. Early detection is based on the theory, dating back to the late 19th century, that the disease progresses consistently, beginning with a single rogue cell, growing sequentially and at some invariable point making a lethal leap. Curing it, then, was assumed to be a matter of finding and cutting out a tumor before that metastasis happens.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 28, 2013

An article on Page 36 this weekend about breast cancer awareness misidentifies the reduction in the chance that a woman in her 50s will die of breast cancer over the next 10 years if she undergoes screening. It is .07 percentage points, not .07 percent.

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Researchers Put Sense of Touch in Reach for Robots

Department of Biomedical Engineering/Georgia Institute of Technology

In a video produced by the robotics lab at Georgia Institute of Technology, a robotic arm is shown adjusting a blanket.

Finding and recognizing objects by touch in your pocket, in the dark or among items on a cluttered table top are distinctly human skills — ones that have been far beyond the ability of even the most dexterous robotic arms.

Rodney Brooks, a well-known roboticist, likes to demonstrate the difficulty of the challenge for modern robots by reaching into his pocket to find a particular coin.

Now a group of roboticists in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, led by one of Dr. Brooks's former students, has developed a robot arm that moves and finds objects by touch.

In a paper published this month in the International Journal of Robotics Research, the Georgia Tech group described a robot arm that was able to reach into a cluttered environment and use "touch," along with computer vision, to complete exacting tasks.

This ability is vital if robots are to leave the world of factory automation and begin to undertake tasks in human environments, like patient and elder care or rescue missions during emergencies.

"These environments tend to have clutter," said Charles C. Kemp, the director of the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech and Dr. Brooks's former student. "In a home, you can have lots of objects on a shelf, and the robot can't see beyond that first row of objects."

Video by Georgia Tech

Robots Reach Through a Cluttered World

The development is part of a wide range of advances in the last two years that foretell a world in which robots will move freely in human environments, to be able to work near them and with them.

For the safety of workers, industrial robots are either kept in metal or glass cages, or protected from humans by "light curtains," which cause the robots to stop if a human approaches.

That has begun to change with a new generation of robots from companies like Rethink Robotics in Boston, and Universal Robots in Denmark, that make robot arms that can operate safely in proximity to human workers.

Robots, guided by machine vision, have also been limited by their inability to reach into spaces, the way living creatures can, to pick out an object. They are, in fact, programmed to avoid contact.

"We're flipping that on its head," Dr. Kemp said. "Let's say contact with the arm is fine, as long as the forces are low."

The Georgia Tech researchers have produced a robot arm that can reach and then use software to control its sense of touch, making it possible to find specific objects in a collection or area.

Dr. Kemp said the researchers were able to achieve success, both with a robot and with digital simulations, after a relatively small series of attempts, and using a simple set of primitive robot behaviors.

The algorithms used gave the arm qualities that seemed to mimic human behavior. For example, the robot was able to bend, compress and slide objects. Also, given parameters designed to limit how hard it could press on an object, the arm was able to pivot around objects automatically.

The arm was designed to essentially have "springs" at its joints, making it "compliant," a term roboticists use to define components that are more flexible and less precise than conventional robotic mechanisms. Compliance has become increasingly important as a new generation of safer robots has emerged.

The robot also has an artificial "skin" that can sense pressure or touch.

"If we look in biology, it's not just compliance at the joints that all of these organisms have," he said. "They also have good sensing of forces across their entire body."

The researchers built their software for a simulated "cluttered" world and for an operating robot. The robot's arms were designed by Meka Robotics, a San Francisco company that makes a variety of robot components. The software is based on the Willow Garage Robot Operating System, or ROS, which is intended to be shared freely.

The Georgia researchers have made their software open source as well, and shared instructions to make and adapt low-cost robot skin, in the hopes that other robot makers will improve and advance what they have done.

The research was financed by the "Maximum Mobility and Manipulation" program at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The researchers chose not to describe the new robotic behaviors as "emergent" — a term used for a complex system created from simple component functions — but Dr. Kemp said it was a reasonable description.

"To me, it does seem like sort of emergent intelligence, with the robot moving through this complex environment," he said.

Roboticists are most excited by the potential such a robotic ability holds. In a separate paper, which will be presented in June at the International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics at the University of Washington in Seattle, the Georgia Tech scientists have described how the technology might be employed in hospital or rehabilitation settings for patient care.

In a video produced by the lab, a robot arm is shown wiping the mouth of a disabled man and adjusting a blanket. Volunteers who allowed the robot to touch them said the sensations were not uncomfortable.

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Kenneth I. Appel, Mathematician Who Harnessed Computer Power, Is Dead at 80

Kenneth I. Appel, who helped usher the venerable mathematical proof into the computer age, solving a longstanding problem concerning colors on a map with the help of an I.B.M. computer making billions of decisions, died on April 19 in Dover, N.H. He was 80.

The cause was esophageal cancer, which was diagnosed in October, his son Andrew said.

Since the time of Euclid and Pythagoras, proofs of mathematical theorems had consisted of long strings of equations or geometric notations that any mathematician could read and quibble with, all marching logically, step by step, toward a conclusion. But the proof that Dr. Appel and a colleague, Wolfgang Haken, established in 1976 was of a different order.

Their conclusion, that four colors would suffice for any map, depended on 1,200 hours of computer time — the equivalent of 50 days — and 10 billion logical decisions all made automatically and out of sight by the innards of an I.B.M. computer at the University of Illinois in Urbana.

Hailed in some circles, including this newspaper, as "a major intellectual feat," the proof shepherded computers toward a greater role in higher math. But it made many mathematicians uneasy; they worried about computer bugs and wondered how they could check or understand a "proof" they could not see. And it ignited a long-running debate about what constitutes a mathematical proof.

"Like a landmark Supreme Court case, the proof's legacy is still felt and hotly debated," said Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley.

Kevin Short, a mathematician at the University of New Hampshire, where Dr. Appel spent his later years, called the feat "a watershed for modern mathematics."

"It has spawned whole fields of study," he said.

Kenneth Ira Appel (pronounced ah-PEL) was born on Oct. 8, 1932, in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens, where he graduated from Queens College with a degree in mathematics in 1953. His father, Irwin, was an electrical engineer, and his mother, the former Lillian Sender, had been an office worker.

After a short stint as an actuary and two years in the Army, Kenneth Appel enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in math in 1959. During the summers, he programmed computers for Douglas Aircraft.

Dr. Appel soon went to work for the Institute for Defense Analysis in Princeton, N.J., doing research in cryptography and number theory for the federal government. He joined the University of Illinois as a professor in 1961. Long interested in Democratic politics, he also served a term on the Urbana City Council.

Some of the thorniest problems in math are simple to state but hideously complex under the surface. Such is the case with the four-color theorem, first enunciated by an English mapmaker, Francis Guthrie, in 1852. He asserted that to create a map in which no adjacent countries are the same color, only four colors are needed. Although everyone believed it was true, proof had eluded a century of mathematicians until Dr. Appel attended a lecture in 1972 by Dr. Haken.

Because of the bewildering variety of map configurations, Dr. Haken was contemplating using computers to solve the problem, but as he related in his lecture that evening, experts had convinced him that it was not possible.

Dr. Appel, familiar with computers from his defense and government work, was more optimistic.

"I don't know of anything involving computers that can't be done; some things just take longer than others," he said to Dr. Haken afterward, according to an account in the journal Social Studies of Science by Douglas MacKenzie of the University of Edinburgh. "Why don't we take a shot at it?"

The two started off by showing that the universe of all possible maps must contain what mathematicians call an "unavoidable set" of 1,936 different configurations. One configuration might be a country surrounded by four neighbors, for example.

Their task, then, was to prove that each of these configurations could be rendered on a map using only four colors in such a way that no two adjacent land areas were of the same color. That was where the heaviest computation would come in. To help, they recruited a computer science graduate student, John Koch, and Dr. Appel persuaded the university to let them use its I.B.M. 370-168 computer, newly acquired for administrative services.

Those were the days when computers filled an entire room, although their memory capacities were minuscule compared with a modern smartphone. Dr. Short recounted an occasion, as described by Dr. Appel, when the computer gave an unexpected answer.

"Oh, that wire must have fallen out again," Dr. Appel said.

Dr. Appel began to think of the computer as a partner, though with a different kind of brain, with almost "an artificial intelligence," he told Dr. MacKenzie.

"The computer was, to the best of my feeling about the subject, not thinking like a mathematician," he said. "And it was much more successful, because it was thinking not like a mathematician."

In the summer of 1976, Dr. Appel and Dr. Haken announced their result to their colleagues by leaving a note on the department blackboard: "Four colors suffice." Their work was published in 1977 in the Illinois Journal of Mathematics.

Their four-color proof earned newspaper headlines and a prestigious award in mathematics, the Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize. But the notion of computer proofs drew skepticism in some academic circles. In a visit to one university, Dr. Appel and Dr. Haken said, professors barred them from meeting graduate students lest the students' minds become contaminated.

Dr. Appel became the chairman of the mathematics department at the University of New Hampshire in 1993. He retired in 2003. He also served on the Dover School Board and for a time was the treasurer of the Strafford County Democratic Party.

Before their revolutionary work was published, Dr. Appel and Dr. Haken enlisted their entire families to check hundreds of pages of calculations, making sure that diagrams of map configurations matched the computer printouts and did not have typos. Andrew Appel said his sister, Laurel, found some 800 mistakes, most of which she could fix herself.

Laurel F. Appel, a biology professor at Wesleyan University, died this year. Besides his son Andrew, a computer science professor at Princeton, Dr. Appel is survived by his wife, Carole S. Stein; another son, Peter; a sister, Lois Green; and five grandchildren.

Despite the criticism in more traditionalist quarters, Dr. Appel never agonized about his reliance on a computer to arrive at the four-color theorem, his son Andrew said. The mathematician Alan Turing, he noted, had shown long ago that even very short theorems could have very long proofs, running hundreds of pages. As his son recalled, Dr. Appel used to say, "Without computers, we would be stuck only proving theorems that have short proofs."

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In Midwest, Drought Abruptly Gives Way to Flood

CHICAGO — The nation's midsection, which was for months parched by severe drought, suddenly finds itself contending with the opposite: severe flooding that has forced evacuations, slowed commercial barge traffic down the Mississippi River and left farmers with submerged fields during a crucial planting time.

The flooding, driven in part by rainfall of as much as eight inches in some places last week, has affected a remarkably wide stretch in states along swollen rivers in the Midwest.

The deaths of at least three people have been linked to the flooding in the past week, officials said.

"It's so pervasive," said Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, who flew in a helicopter to survey the scope of damage to his state the other day. He recalled seeing an "ocean" beneath him.

Other sights he has seen: basement after basement where household items floated, ruined; sneakers bobbing through a flooded school.

"It is heartbreaking how many people suffered damage," he said.

In parts of Missouri, towns along the swollen Mississippi River on Thursday continued to brace for high waters, creating sandbag levees and makeshift barriers. In Chicago's suburbs and towns in Indiana and Michigan, residents were assessing the costs of damage already left behind in scores of soggy homes, cars and businesses. And in Fargo, N.D., officials were activating an elaborate preparation system and placing hundreds of thousands of sandbags to protect the city against the looming possibility of flooding as snow melts near the Red River.

It seemed a sudden, dizzying reversal for a region that had since last summer been contending with a drought that left water supplies in doubt, farm fields shriveled and water levels along the Mississippi River so low as to threaten, at times, to close down commercial traffic. By Thursday, because of high waters — and more than 100 barges that broke loose from their moorings near St. Louis over the weekend — portions of the river were, in effect, closed.

"We were just praying for rain three months ago, and now we'll pray for less," said Colin Fogarty, a lieutenant and a spokesman for the United States Coast Guard. "It's somewhat ironic. The conditions are so different, but the results, in a way, are the same."

Officials said recent flooding had certainly helped solve lingering dry conditions in some parts of the Midwest, while other areas — particularly west of the Mississippi — were still contending with a serious drought.

All that water and mud have left farmers in the region unable to plant much corn yet, though the planting season would typically be under way by now. For people like Jeff Miller, who farms land southwest of Peoria, Ill., the turn of events has been more painful. Last summer, he struggled at times to supply water to his cattle. By Thursday, he was facing hundreds of acres of flooded crop land — some of which he and others had successfully defended with sandbags until just a few days ago, until the water broke over the top.

"Initially, my thoughts were, hey, maybe the drought is broken, things are looking up," Mr. Miller recalled. "Then a couple days later it's going the other direction. It's quite a mental event."

The Midwest has seen its share of flooding over the years, and for some towns near the largest rivers, the preparations have grown almost routine. "We're ready," Doyle Parmer of tiny Dutchtown, Mo., said Thursday, describing the concrete barriers and sandbags quickly erected to block the waters. In the last two decades, Mr. Parmer said, Dutchtown has braced for the rising Mississippi five times.

And in Fargo, the city has prepared for major floods year after year. Filling sandbags has become almost a rite of passage for students at local schools. In recent days, weather experts predicted that the Red River might not rise as high as had been predicted only days before, offering some comfort in Fargo.

But some among its weary residents were skeptical. "This is our fourth big flood in five years, and people are getting tired of this," said Dennis Walaker, the mayor. "But I wouldn't want to be in this town if we were to lose the fight. We make the preparations and do what's necessary."

Elsewhere, the flooding came more suddenly and with little warning. In Grand Rapids, Mich., the Grand River rose to a record level, officials said, forcing evacuations. People in at least one downtown building said they were able to watch fish float by their windows. Boat rescues were made from homes. "It was touch and go," said Greg Sundstrom, the city manager.

In Kokomo, Ind., floodwaters rose higher than in recent memory, and nearly 150 homes and a dozen businesses were damaged, as was a senior center. And in Des Plaines, Ill., 800 homes and businesses were affected, and 60 people had to be rescued from rising waters.

Throughout the Midwest, the question now left for many — particularly farmers — was what lay ahead. More flooding? More drought? Officials at the National Weather Service said the outlook appeared less ominous than a year ago when drought was looming. Normal levels of rainfall and temperatures slightly higher than normal are predicted for the Midwest in the next three months.

"You just have to wait and see," said Mr. Miller, who said he was not yet sure what would come of his waterlogged fields. "Things can change fast, so you try not to stress out. What else can you do?"

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François Jacob, Geneticist Who Pointed to How Traits Are Inherited, Dies at 92

-/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

François Jacob, left, and Jacques Monod in 1971. They helped discover how genes are regulated.

Dr. François Jacob, a French war hero whose combat wounds forced him to change his career paths from surgeon to scientist, a pursuit that led to a Nobel Prize in 1965 for his role in discovering how genes are regulated, died on April 19 in Paris. He was 92.

The French government announced his death.

Dr. Jacob said he had been watching a dull movie with his wife, Lysiane, in 1958 when he began daydreaming and was struck with an idea of how genes might function. "I think I've just thought up something important," he told her.

Seven years later, Dr. Jacob shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Dr. Jacques Monod and Dr. André Lwoff, his colleagues at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, for their discovery that cells can switch on and switch off certain genetic information. Their work, which focused on bacteria, increased understanding of how genes could be selectively deployed by an organism. "They're all there in the egg. But how does the egg know when to turn from one type of cell type to another?" Richard Burian, a professor emeritus of philosophy and science studies at Virginia Tech, said of the question asked by Dr. Jacob and his colleagues. "There must be some kind of signal."

Their discovery, considered central to the development of molecular biology, offered new insight into how people inherit traits, how they grow and develop, and how they contract and fight diseases.

"The discoveries have given a strong impetus to research in all domains of biology with far-reaching effects spreading out like ripples in the water," Sven Gard, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, said when the three men were awarded the prize, according to the Nobel Web site. "Now that we know the nature of such mechanisms, we have the possibility of learning to master them."

 François Jacob was born on June 17, 1920, in Nancy, France. He had begun studying medicine when World War II began. France was occupied by Nazi Germany's forces in 1940, and Dr. Jacob, whose grandfather had been a four-star general in the French Army, fled to England by boat in 1940 and joined the Free French Army led by Charles de Gaulle.

He worked as a medical officer and fought with Allied forces in North Africa and in France, where he was seriously wounded in a German air raid. He received numerous high military honors, including the Cross of War and the Cross of the Liberation.

Dr. Jacob returned to medical school after the war, completing his studies in 1947, but damage to his hands from his combat wounds prevented him from becoming a surgeon. At a loss for what career to pursue, he was encouraged to try research and, though he had little training in it, he found a place at the Pasteur Institute in 1950. (He earned a doctorate in science at the Sorbonne in 1954.)

Working with other scientists at Pasteur, he quickly distinguished himself by identifying how bacteria adapt to drugs and bacterial viruses. It was a time of great discoveries in genetics. In 1953, James D. Watson and Francis Crick published their groundbreaking work on the double helix structure of DNA. At the Pasteur Institute, Dr. Jacob began working with Dr. Monod, and they soon had a breakthrough of their own. By means of a series of innovative experiments, they established that the transfer of genetic information could be controlled through two different types of genes, regulatory genes and structural genes, with the former controlling the expression of the latter.

"What mattered more than the answers were the questions and how they were formulated," Dr. Jacob later wrote. "For in the best of cases, the answer led to more questions. It was a system for concocting expectation, a machine for making the future. For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future."

Dr. Jacob expanded his research into other areas, including how cancer grows and spreads. He also waded into a debate about genetic superiority that arose when the Nobel-winning physicist William B. Shockley, who argued that race and heredity are important to intelligence, was among four Nobel laureates who contributed to a sperm bank intended to produce gifted children through artificial insemination. Dr. Jacob was amused at the notion, and he considered it misguided.

"For the group, as well as for the species, what gives an individual his genetic value is not the quality of his genes," he wrote in Le Monde in 1980 in an article that later appeared in The New York Times. "It is the fact that he does not have the same collection of genes as anyone else. It is the fact that he is unique. The success of the human species is due notably to its biological diversity. Its potential lies in this diversity."

Dr. Jacob became laboratory director at the Pasteur Institute in 1956 and four years later was appointed head of its new department of cell genetics. In 1964, he joined the Collège de France, where a chair of cell genetics was created for him.

Dr. Jacob married Lysiane Bloch, known as Lise, a pianist, in 1947. They had four children. After her death, he married Geneviève Barrier in 1999. Information about survivors was unavailable.

Dr. Jacob's inquiries included matters moral and philosophical as well as cellular. He once wrote that he wanted to discover "the core of life."

"What intrigues me in my life is: How did I come to be what I am?" he wrote in his 1988 autobiography, "The Statue Within." "How did this person develop, this I whom I rediscover each morning and to whom I must accommodate myself to the end?"

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Dot Earth Blog: A Cool But Splendid Spring in the Northeast

I had a rare moment to walk in the woods and breath the unusually cool spring air this morning and noted, thanks to my naturalist spouse, Lisa Mechaley, that the Canada mayflower (a.k.a. false lily of the valley) was bursting forth.

What's blooming near you this spring? Send links to your photos on Instagram, Twitpic, Flickr, Facebook or other online venues and I'll add them.

As you can see in the National Climatic Data Center records for March, a cool (or hot) spring in one place and year has little meaning if your concerns are with long-term climate change, so let's not get into that in the comments here, please.

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Texas Fertilizer Plant Fell Through Cracks of Regulatory Oversight

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Debris littered a field near the West Fertilizer Company plant in West, Tex., where a blast last week killed 14 people. Investigators believe it may have been set off by ammonium nitrate stored there.

WEST, Tex. — In the moments after a fire broke out at a fertilizer plant here last week, some of the volunteer firefighters and other first responders who rushed to the scene appeared to have known that there were tons of dangerously combustible ammonium nitrate inside, but others did not.

Ammonium nitrate is the same chemical that Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. The nitrogen-rich chemical, a crystal-like substance that resembles  coarse table salt, is popular with farmers as a fertilizer but in the wrong hands or in the wrong conditions it can turn explosive. Investigators say that the ammonium nitrate stored at the plant appeared to have caused the subsequent explosion that killed 10 firefighters and at least 4 civilians.

The uncertainty over who was aware of the chemical at the plant and who was not, both at the site and in Washington, illustrates the patchwork regulatory world the plant operated in and the ways in which it slipped through bureaucratic cracks at the federal, state and local levels.

One week after the blast, investigators were still not sure how much ammonium nitrate was stored there, whether it had been stored properly and which agencies had been informed about it — even though a host of federal, state and local officials were responsible for regulating and monitoring the plant's operations and products.

Many safety decisions — including moves in recent years to build homes, schools and a nursing home not far from the decades-old plant — were left to local officials who often did not have the expertise to assess the dangers. And the gaps in the oversight of the plant and a paper trail of records have left the essential question of how and why the ammonium nitrate ignited a mystery.

"The whole thing may have fallen through a number of regulatory cracks," said a federal official whose agency helped regulate the plant.

The explosion was so powerful it leveled homes and left a crater 93 feet wide and 10 feet deep. Judging by the size of the crater and the extent of the damage — pieces of twisted metal landed in distant pastures, and ceiling tiles and lights shook loose in buildings two miles away — the explosion was more powerful than the Oklahoma City bombing, experts said.

The blast occurred shortly before 8 p.m. on April 17, about 20 minutes after a fire was reported at the plant, the West Fertilizer Company, in this rural town north of Waco, in McLennan County. It appeared to have been set off by the accidental eruption of ammonium nitrate, an official familiar with the investigation said. The plant did not make ammonium nitrate, but was a retail distribution center; the chemical was brought in by train and stored and sold out of large bins.

When properly stored, ammonium nitrate is difficult to ignite. Investigators are exploring a number of theories, the official said, about what could have created the intense heat or other unusual conditions necessary to detonate the chemical: whether a fire that broke out earlier in the day flared up again and grew in intensity; the possibility that piles of seed nearby could have burst into flame; and whether the collapse of the roof of a wooden building damaged in the fire contributed to the conditions.

"These are just working theories," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person is not authorized to discuss the investigation. "None of these have enough substance for us to put forward as a scenario."

Experts had speculated that another chemical at the plant — anhydrous ammonia, a potentially flammable gas used as a commercial fertilizer — played a role in setting off the ammonium nitrate. But the official said the plant's two bullet-shaped anhydrous ammonia tanks were damaged but had not exploded. The blast crater is in the part of the plant where the ammonium nitrate was stored, the official said, though investigators do not yet know exactly how much of it was there at the time or how the storage bins were configured.

Under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, the plant is required to send an annual report detailing the hazardous chemicals it keeps on site to three state and local groups — the Texas Department of State Health Services, the local fire department and a group of county emergency officials known as the Local Emergency Planning Committee.

Plant managers sent the report, called a Tier II report, to the state agency this year and said that in 2012 the facility had 540,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate stored, for sale to local farmers. That amount is more than 100 times that used in the Oklahoma City bombing. The report was also sent to the Local Emergency Planning Committee, a county official said. It was unclear if the plant sent the report to the West Volunteer Fire Department, but it appeared likely.

A foreman at the plant who was killed in the explosion, Cody Dragoo, 50, was also a volunteer firefighter. Other firefighters who died worked in the local government or were knowledgeable about farming and agricultural chemicals. Dr. George N. Smith, the medical director of the West ambulance service, said he was not aware that the plant stored ammonium nitrate. He was not alone, however — neither the federal Environmental Protection Agency nor the Homeland Security Department knew, either.

Manny Fernandez reported from West, and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

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Police to Disperse Gas to See How It Would Flow in Terror Attack

On three separate days this July, invisible and odorless gases will be released in subway stations and at street level in all five boroughs of New York City. But officials in the New York Police Department will not be alarmed — it was their idea.

The gases, known as perfluorocarbons, will be dispersed to study how airborne toxins would flow through the city after a terrorist attack or an accidental spill of hazardous chemicals, the department said on Wednesday.

Researchers supervised by the Brookhaven National Laboratory will use about 200 monitors to trace the paths of the gases they release. The police intend to use the information gathered in the test, which they said would be the biggest such urban airflow study, to hone their plans for emergency responses.

One answer they seek is how the subway system affects the flow of air above and below ground. Knowing that will help them decide which subway lines may have to be shut down to limit the spread of hazardous material, said Paul Kalb, division head for environmental research and technology in the environmental sciences department at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

"The subways play a major role in how air moves through Manhattan and the five boroughs," Mr. Kalb said. "If you're in the subways and there's something released on the surface, you could be vulnerable." In the same way, he said, a gas released in the subway could affect people in a different part of the city. "It can spread further and in a way that you might not anticipate," he said.

Researchers got a glimpse of that complication from a smaller study conducted in Manhattan eight years ago, Mr. Kalb said. In the summer of 2005, a different group of researchers released similar harmless gases in several locations in Midtown, including one subway station.

Wanting to know more, the Police Department commissioned the laboratory, which is on Long Island, to conduct the more extensive two-year study at a cost of $3.4 million, Mr. Kalb said. The money came from a federal grant the police received from the Department of Homeland Security.

"The N.Y.P.D. works for the best but plans for the worst when it comes to potentially catastrophic attacks, such as ones employing radiological contaminants or weaponized anthrax," Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a statement. "This field study with Brookhaven's outstanding expertise will help prepare and safeguard the city's population in the event of an actual attack."

Mr. Kalb said his colleagues planned to enlist about 100 college students as interns to help set up the test and gather air samples to be analyzed. He said they would install small black-and-gray boxes containing monitoring equipment on subway platforms and lamp posts poles around the city. Then, the traceable gases will be released in seven different locations — three above ground and four below — on three nonconsecutive days in July.

The results will be tracked by researchers from Brookhaven, the Argonne National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. To minimize fear, each release will be announced to the public a day in advance and the boxes will show a phone number and a Web site people can contact for information, the police said.

"We're a little bit concerned that people are going to be nervous, especially after what happened in Boston," Mr. Kalb said. "Clearly, people are trained to say something if they see something."

The authorities' approach to this study is a world apart from the way the Army examined the spread of biological poison in the subways in the mid-1960s. According to a 1975 article in The New York Times, about 20 employees of the Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., threw "bulbs" of a "simulated biological poison" on the tracks of two subway lines in Manhattan.

"The bulbs burst and the wind of the passing subway trains" quickly spread the fake poison from 15th Street to 58th Street, the article said. It said the project's engineer had concluded that the subway system could not be safeguarded against that type of attack. If the attack were carried out during rush hours, the engineer said, it would "put New York out of commission."

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Pollution Is Radically Changing Childhood in China’s Cities

Adam Dean for The New York Times

Wu Xiaotian, 4, whose breathing problems are linked to air pollution, displaying the mask he usually wears outdoors.

BEIJING — The boy's chronic cough and stuffy nose began last year at the age of 3. His symptoms worsened this winter, when smog across northern China surged to record levels. Now he needs his sinuses cleared every night with saltwater piped through a machine's tubes.

The boy's mother, Zhang Zixuan, said she almost never lets him go outside, and when she does she usually makes him wear a face mask. The difference between Britain, where she once studied, and China is "heaven and hell," she said.

Levels of deadly pollutants up to 40 times the recommended exposure limit in Beijing and other cities have struck fear into parents and led them to take steps that are radically altering the nature of urban life for their children.

Parents are confining sons and daughters to their homes, even if it means keeping them away from friends. Schools are canceling outdoor activities and field trips. Parents with means are choosing schools based on air-filtration systems, and some international schools have built gigantic, futuristic-looking domes over sports fields to ensure healthy breathing.

"I hope in the future we'll move to a foreign country," Ms. Zhang, a lawyer, said as her ailing son, Wu Xiaotian, played on a mat in their apartment, near a new air purifier. "Otherwise we'll choke to death."

She is not alone in looking to leave. Some middle- and upper-class Chinese parents and expatriates have already begun leaving China, a trend that executives say could result in a huge loss of talent and experience. Foreign parents are also turning down prestigious jobs or negotiating for hardship pay from their employers, citing the pollution.

There are no statistics for the flight, and many people are still eager to come work in Beijing, but talk of leaving is gaining urgency around the capital and on Chinese microblogs and parenting forums. Chinese are also discussing holidays to what they call the "clean-air destinations" of Tibet, Hainan and Fujian.

"I've been here for six years and I've never seen anxiety levels the way they are now," said Dr. Richard Saint Cyr, a new father and a family health doctor at Beijing United Family Hospital, whose patients are half Chinese and half foreigners. "Even for me, I've never been as anxious as I am now. It has been extraordinarily bad."

He added: "Many mothers, especially, have been second-guessing their living in Beijing. I think many mothers are fed up with keeping their children inside."

Few developments have eroded trust in the Communist Party as quickly as the realization that the leaders have failed to rein in threats to children's health and safety. There was national outrage in 2008 after more than 5,000 children were killed when their schools collapsed in an earthquake, and hundreds of thousands were sickened and six infants died in a tainted-formula scandal. Officials tried to suppress angry parents, sometimes by force or with payoffs.

But the fury over air pollution is much more widespread and is just beginning to gain momentum.

"I don't trust the pollution measurements of the Beijing government," said Ms. Zhang's father, Zhang Xiaochuan, a retired newspaper administrator.

Scientific studies justify fears of long-term damage to children and fetuses. A study published by The New England Journal of Medicine showed that children exposed to high levels of air pollution can suffer permanent lung damage. The research was done in the 1990s in Los Angeles, where levels of pollution were much lower than those in Chinese cities today.

A study by California researchers published last month suggested a link between autism in children and the exposure of pregnant women to traffic-related air pollution. Columbia University researchers, in a study done in New York, found that prenatal exposure to air pollutants could result in children with anxiety, depression and attention-span problems. Some of the same researchers found in an earlier study that children in Chongqing, China, who had prenatal exposure to high levels of air pollutants from a coal-fired plant were born with smaller head circumferences, showed slower growth and performed less well on cognitive development tests at age 2. The shutdown of the plant resulted in children born with fewer difficulties.

Analyses show little relief ahead if China does not change growth policies and strengthen environmental regulation. A Deutsche Bank report released in February said the current trends of coal use and automobile emissions meant air pollution was expected to worsen by an additional 70 percent by 2025.

Some children's hospitals in northern China reported a large number of patients with respiratory illnesses this winter, when the air pollution soared. During one bad week in January, Beijing Children's Hospital admitted up to 9,000 patients a day for emergency visits, half of them for respiratory problems, according to a report by Xinhua, the state news agency.

Parents have scrambled to buy air purifiers. IQAir, a Swiss company, makes purifiers that cost up to $3,000 here and are displayed in shiny showrooms. Mike Murphy, the chief executive of IQAir China, said sales had tripled in the first three months of 2013 over the same period last year.

Amy Qin and Shi Da contributed research.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 24, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of the grandfather of 4-year-old Wu Xiaotian. The Pinyin transliteration of his name is Zhang Xiaochuan, not Xiaochun.

Also, the caption with main picture referred incompletely in an earlier version to the picture of Wu Xiaotian wearing his mask at home. His parents put the mask on to demonstrate what he usually wears outside; he normally does not wear it indoors.

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Pyramid Lake Journal: Lahontan Cutthroat Trout Make a Comeback

Max Whittaker for The New York Times

Ron Dunn, second from front, fishing for Lahontan cutthroat trout at Pyramid Lake in Nevada. The fish, noted for their great size, have made a comeback. More Photos »

PYRAMID LAKE, Nev. — For most fishermen a 20-pound trout is a trophy, but for Paiute tribe members and fish biologists here the one Matt Ceccarelli caught was a victory.

That Lahontan cutthroat trout he caught last year, a remnant of a strain that is possibly the largest native trout in North America, is the first confirmed catch of a fish that was once believed to have gone extinct. The fish has been the focus of an intense and improbable federal and tribal effort to restore it to its home waters.

"I was in awe," said Mr. Ceccarelli, 32, an engineer from Sparks, Nev., of the speckled trout with hues of olive and rose.

Early settlers told stories of Pyramid Lake Lahontan cutthroats that weighed more than 60 pounds, though the official world record was a 41-pounder caught by a Paiute man in 1925. The explorer who discovered this electric-blue oasis in 1844, John Fremont, called them "salmon trout." Mark Twain raved about their flavor. Clark Gable, the actor, chased them. President Bill Clinton and tribe members called for their restoration.

"When I heard about them I was like, man, I want to see these guys," said Desmond Mitchell, 40, a fish supervisor for the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe.

Lahontan cutthroats, Nevada's state fish, evolved in the Great Basin, which was flooded under a giant inland sea called Lake Lahontan during the last ice age. Pyramid Lake, which today lies on a Paiute Indian reservation, was part of that ancient lake, and inside its unique inland water system, which includes the Truckee River and Lake Tahoe, a giant strain of trout evolved.

"Our fish have deep meaning for us, spiritually," said Albert John, executive director of fisheries for the tribe. "And if they could get to 40 pounds again, whoa, that'd be awesome."

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fishermen netted scores of Lahontan cutthroats to feed miners and loggers gnawing at the Sierra Nevada Mountains. But the Truckee River, where the fish spawned, was dammed, and its level dropped as water was taken for irrigation. It was also polluted with chemicals and sawdust. And Lake Tahoe was stocked with a nonnative char called lake trout, which gobble baby cutthroat. By the mid-1940s, all the native trout in Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe were dead and the strain was declared extinct.

"They never should have gone in the first place," said Fred Crosby, 66, owner of Crosby Lodge, the only bar, restaurant, gas station and tackle shop in tiny Sutcliffe, Nev., a poor reservation town on the west shore of Pyramid Lake.

In the mid-1970s, the Paiute Tribe opened a fish hatchery in Sutcliffe and stocked Pyramid Lake with strains of Lahontan cutthroat from nearby lakes. The water in Pyramid Lake is saltier than Lake Tahoe, and that kept out the lake trout. The tribe re-established a Lahontan cutthroat sport fishery and saved Pyramid Lake's endangered Cui-ui sucker from extinction. Anglers bought tribal licenses, hauled ladders out into the lake's bracing water and considered any catch that weighed 10 pounds or more a trophy.

In the late 1970s, a fish biologist identified what he thought were surviving specimens of the vanished Pyramid Lake strain of Lahontan cutthroat in a small creek near a 10,000-foot mountain on the border of Nevada and Utah called Pilot Peak. A Utah man used buckets to stock the rugged stream with trout in the early 1900s, but made no record, federal biologists say. Geneticists recently compared cutthroats from the Pilot Peak stream with mounts of giant Pyramid Lake trout and discovered an exact DNA match.

"They are the originals," said Corene Jones, 39, the broodstock coordinator for the Lahontan National Fish Hatchery in Gardnerville, Nev.

In 1995, United States Fish and Wildlife Service biologists harvested cutthroat eggs from Pilot Peak and brought them to the Gardnerville hatchery, just a few years before a devastating wildfire scorched the mountain and killed off the creek. In 2006 federal officials, in cooperation with the tribe, began stocking Pyramid Lake with what many now call Pilot Peak cutthroats. They waited to see how the fish might readapt to its ancestral home.

The answer came from ecstatic anglers. Late last year, a Reno man caught and released a 24-pounder. David Hamel, 27, of Reno, just did the same with a pair of 20-pound cutthroats.

"Biggest fish of my life," he said. "Amazing."

Since November, dozens of anglers have reported catching Pilot Peak cutthroats weighing 15 pounds or more. Biologists are astounded because inside Pyramid Lake these powerful fish, now adolescents, grew five times as fast as other trout species and are only a third of the way through their expected life span.

Around this arid reservation of burnt sienna mountains and sagebrush tufts, workers from the gas station clerk in the windblown town of Nixon, Nev., to the bartender who sells fishing licenses in Sutcliffe say they have seen a spike in revenue because of the big fish.

"The lake is basically the bread and butter for the tribe," said Elwood Lowery, the tribal chairman. The reservation has no casinos because of competition from nearby Reno, he said.

Biologists and Paiute officials are calling the return of Pyramid Lake's original cutthroats a rare win-win-win for native wildlife restoration, the tribe's economy and anglers.

"The fish is now telling its own story," said Lisa Heki, 51, complex manager at the Lahontan National Fish Hatchery. "Along with the fishermen who get to catch them."

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Mind: Zeal for Play May Have Propelled Human Evolution

By Jeff DelViscio, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Abe Sater, Robin Lindsay and Kriston Lewis

Buckets of Blickets: Children and Logic: A game developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley hopes to show how imaginative play in children may influence development of abstract thought.

When it comes to play, humans don't play around.

Podcast: Science Times

Abby Ellin on the increasing numbers of older people turning up in therapy, Carl Zimmer on an effort to see why Spot runs or fetches or ignores you, and David Dobbs on how play contributes to human success.

Alison Gopnik and the Gopnik Lab/University of California, Berkeley

Esther and Benny, both 5, played Blickets with Sophie Bridgers in a lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Children, lacking prior biases, excel in the game, based on associations, but adults flunk it.

Other species play, but none play for as much of their lives as humans do, or as imaginatively, or with as much protection from the family circle. Human children are unique in using play to explore hypothetical situations rather than to rehearse actual challenges they'll face later. Kittens may pretend to be cats fighting, but they will not pretend to be children; children, by contrast, will readily pretend to be cats or kittens — and then to be Hannah Montana, followed by Spider-Man saving the day.

And in doing so, they develop some of humanity's most consequential faculties. They learn the art, pleasure and power of hypothesis — of imagining new possibilities. And serious students of play believe that this helps make the species great.

The idea that play contributes to human success goes back at least a century. But in the last 25 years or so, researchers like Elizabeth S. Spelke, Brian Sutton-Smith, Jaak Panksepp and Alison Gopnik have developed this notion more richly and tied it more closely to both neuroscience and human evolution. They see play as essential not just to individual development, but to humanity's unusual ability to inhabit, exploit and change the environment.

Dr. Gopnik, author of "The Scientist in the Crib" and "The Philosophical Baby," and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying the ways that children learn to assess their environment through play. Lately she has focused on the distinction between "exploring" new environments and "exploiting" them. When we're quite young, we are more willing to explore, she finds; adults are more inclined to exploit.

To exploit, one leans heavily on lessons (and often unconscious rules) learned earlier — so-called prior biases. These biases are useful to adults because they save time and reduce error: By going to the restaurant you know is good, instead of the new place across town, you increase the chance that you'll enjoy the evening.

Most adults are slow to set such biases aside; young children fling them away like bad fruit.

Dr. Gopnik shows this brilliantly with a game she invented with the psychologist David Sobel (her student, now a professor at Brown). In the game, which has the fetching name Blickets, players try to figure out what it is that makes an otherwise undistinguished clay figure a blicket. In some scenarios you can win even if you're applying a prior bias. In others you can't.

Last summer I joined Dr. Gopnik behind a wall of one-way glass to watch her lab manager, Sophie Bridgers, play the game with an extremely alert 5-year-old, Esther.

Seated at a child-size table, Esther leaned forward on her elbows to watch as Ms. Bridgers brought out a small bin of clay shapes and told her that some of them were blickets but most were not.

"You cannot tell which ones are blickets by looking at them. But the ones that are blickets have blicketness inside. And luckily," Ms. Bridgers went on, holding up a box with a red plastic top, "I have my machine. Blicketness makes my machine turn on and play music."

It's a ruse, of course. The box responds not to the clay shapes but to a switch under the table controlled by Ms. Bridgers.

Now came the challenge. The game can be played by either of two rules, called "and" and "or." The "or" version is easier: When a blicket is placed atop the machine, it will light the machine up whether placed there by itself or with other pieces. It is either a blicket or it isn't; it doesn't depend on the presence of any other object.

In the "and" trial, however, a blicket reveals its blicketness only if both it and another blicket are placed on the machine; and it will light up the box even if it and the other blicket are accompanied by a non-blicket. It can be harder than it sounds, and this is the game that Esther played.

First, Ms. Bridgers put each of three clay shapes on the box individually — rectangle, then triangle, then a bridge. None activated the machine. Then she put them on the box in three successive combinations.

1. Rectangle and triangle: No response.

2. Rectangle and bridge: Machine lighted up and played a tune!

3. Triangle and bridge: No response.

Ms. Bridgers then picked up each piece in turn and asked Esther whether it was a blicket. I had been indulging my adult (and journalistic) prior bias for recorded observation by filling several pages with notes and diagrams, and I started flipping frantically through my notebook.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 24, 2013

An article on Tuesday about the study of children's play and the role of play in human evolution misstated the surname of the lab manager at the University of California, Berkeley, who played a game called Blickets with young lab participants. She is Sophie Bridgers, not Bridges. The article also misstated the age of two of the participants, twins named Esther and Benny. At the time they were observed for the article, they had recently turned 5; they were not 4. The errors were repeated in an accompanying picture caption.

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Sylvia Todd, Science Star, Tinkers With the Idea of Growing Up

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Sylvia Todd, 11, produced a robot-drawn watercolor painting for President Obama on Monday at the White House Science Fair.

Sylvia Todd's desk is not tidy. It's cluttered with small robots (including a solar-powered grasshopper), motors, wires, resistors, a soldering iron and an array of other gadgets and tools.

A maker, tinkerer and online celebrity, Sylvia has attracted more than 1.5 million YouTube views of the show she produces and hosts, the Web-based "Sylvia's Super-Awesome Maker Show." She is sought after for speaking engagements, visits maker fairs and even addresses TEDx conferences.

Last week she won a silver medal at an international robotics competition. And on Monday she took part in the White House Science Fair, where President Obama tested her latest project, a robot that paints.

Not bad for an 11-year-old.

With her father, James Todd, filming her, Sylvia uses puppetry, theme music and her home as a laboratory to demonstrate how things work. She makes science fun, mostly by having fun herself.

An audience of fellow makers, especially science-minded parents and children looking for projects, follow her D.I.Y. episodes — 19 so far — on circuit boards, sidewalk chalk, rocket ships and her favorite, an LED shield.

In one episode, Sylvia made dough that can conduct electricity. The salty dough, when mixed with water, acts like wire to allow electricity to flow through it, while a second batch of dough made with sugar acts like insulation and resists electricity. Sylvia used the conductive dough to light up LEDs, make noise and run motors.

Her most popular episode, on copper etching, attracted more than 200,000 views. Her fans learned how to create a circuit board and a copper pendant.

Video by MAKE

Super Simple Copper Etching -- Sylvia's Mini Maker Show

And her latest continuing project, though not yet a subject on her show, is a robot that can paint. She showed it off at the White House Science Fair, an invitation-only symposium for 100 students that is hosted by Mr. Obama, who views and comments on the students' projects.

The president tried out her watercolor robot, doodling "Go STEM" — the acronym for the fields of science, technology, engineering and math — on an iPad. The robot painted his doodle, which Sylvia said she would frame.

"I shook his hand twice!" she said. "And he picked up a printed version of the White House logo that my robot did."

Sylvia's celebrity comes from her YouTube series, which she produces and hosts. It is a family collaboration — her mother, Christina, for instance, came up with the pendant idea — but is distinctly Sylvia. She can be age-appropriately silly, but she takes her projects seriously.

"Ever since I was really young I liked destroying stuff," Sylvia said. "I've always been interested in making and doing things hands-on."

The seeds for the show were planted when Sylvia was 5, and she and her father attended the Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif., an annual event organized by Maker Magazine that celebrates makers and their projects. Two summers ago, Mr. Todd began videotaping Sylvia's demonstrations, as a summer project. "We just wanted to do something fun," Sylvia said.

The popular blog Boing Boing reported on their first episode. Then Tech Crunch, Jezebel and other sites followed with praise. Make Magazine hired Sylvia to produce some of her episodes for its Web site.

Mr. Todd, 29 and a high-school dropout and Web developer, shares a tinkerer's spirit with his daughter. ("If you do the math, I was young," Mr. Todd said of Sylvia's birth. "Too young," she chimed in.)

"There was no formal maker movement when I was a kid," Mr. Todd said. "If there had been, I would have been part of it."

He and Ms. Todd have three other children, ages 3, 6 and 8, and he is the family's sole breadwinner. Money is tight, and most of the science kits that Sylvia uses in her videos are donated to her. She raises money online to pay for some of her trips.

For the White House Science Fair, for example, Sylvia and her father created a campaign on a site called gofundme.com. Two dozen well-wishers donated, and Sylvia was able to raise close to $2,000 for her trip to Washington.

"I would say we spend maybe $100 a year," Mr. Todd said of the episodes. "We don't have a lot of money for this; really, it just takes time."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 23, 2013

An earlier version of this article misquoted Sylvia Todd at one point. She said, "Ever since I was really young I liked destroying stuff" — not "Ever since I was really young I liked distorting stuff."

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Planned Cornell Tech School Gets $133 Million Gift

Cornell Tech, the applied sciences graduate school that Cornell University has planned for Roosevelt Island, has received a gift of $133 million that will help it offer an unusual two-year, two-degree master's program.

The gift is for a joint project with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology that had previously been announced. It will now be known as the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute, reflecting the donation from Mr. Jacobs, the founder of Qualcomm, and his wife.

Students at the Innovation Institute will specialize in connective media, healthier living or the built environment. At the end of their study, students will receive one master's degree from Cornell and another from Technion. The concentration in connective media is expected to be available in fall 2014; the other two will follow.

Cornell Tech, which promotes an unusually close relationship between university and industry, was the winning entry in New York City's competition for $100 million in cash and $300 million in real estate to go toward the development of an applied sciences campus. Officials have said they were impressed by the idea of collaboration with a prestigious foreign university, as well as by the amount of private financing that Cornell had already secured, most notably $350 million from Charles F. Feeney, who made his fortune from duty-free stores.

Construction of Cornell Tech is expected to begin early next year and last until 2037, at which time the school expects to have 2,000 graduate students, 600 of whom will enrolled in the institute. For now, the seven students in the school's initial — or beta — class are studying in donated space in Google's Chelsea office.

Joan and Irwin Jacobs, both Cornell graduates who live in San Diego, have previously made significant gifts to both Cornell and Technion. "We are delighted to partner with Cornell and the Technion on this unique educational initiative," they said in a statement. "We believe strongly in the mission of this international collaboration to drive innovation and to foster economic development.."

Cornell's president, David J. Skorton, called the gift "transformative" and said it would "support the distinctive international partnership between Cornell and the Technion that is already creating a new model of graduate tech education in New York City." Technion's president, Peretz Lavie, said that gift would "play a major and decisive role in fulfilling Mayor Bloomberg's vision of creating a leading global center of innovation in the heart of New York, enabling the city to become the technology capital of the world," and that the institute would "serve as a bridge between Israel and the U.S.A. and Haifa and New York."

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Natural Gas Use in Long-Haul Trucks Expected to Rise

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

A driver for United Parcel Service filling a truck with liquid natural gas in Ontario, Calif.

The natural gas boom has already upended the American power industry, displacing coal and bringing consumers cheaper electricity.

Now the trucking industry, with its millions of 18-wheelers moving products like potato chips, underarm deodorant and copy paper around the country, is taking a leap forward in switching from petroleum to cleaner-burning natural gas. And if natural gas remains cheap, consumers may benefit again.

This month, Cummins, a leading engine manufacturer, began shipping big, new engines that make long runs on natural gas possible. A skeletal network of refueling stations at dozens of truck stops stands ready. Major shippers like Procter & Gamble, mindful of both fuel costs and green credentials, are turning to companies with natural gas trucks in their fleets.

And in the latest sign of how the momentum for natural gas in transportation is accelerating, United Parcel Service plans to announce in the next few days that it will expand its fleet of heavy 18-wheel vehicles running on liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., to 800 by the end of 2014, from 112. The vehicles will use the new Cummins engines, produced under a joint venture with Westport Innovations.

U.P.S., like the rest of the industry, still has a long way to go in the conversion, but the company hopes to make natural gas vehicles a majority of its new heavy truck acquisitions in two years.

The company is benefiting from incentives provided by various states and the federal government, which offer tax credits and grants for installing natural gas fuel stations and using vehicles fueled by natural gas.

"By us doing this it will help pave the way and others will follow," said Scott Wicker, chief sustainability officer at U.P.S.

"Moving into L.N.G. is a means to get us onto what we see as the bridging fuel of the future and off of oil," he said. "It's the right step for us, for our customers and for our planet."

The move could also cut the country's oil import bill. There are currently about eight million heavy and medium-weight trucks consuming three million barrels of oil a day while traveling the nation's highways. That is nearly 15 percent of the total national daily consumption and the equivalent of three-fourths of the amount of oil imported from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Roughly two-thirds of the diesel used as transportation fuel nationwide feeds three million 18-wheelers, the main trucks hauling goods over long distances.

In the last four years, the natural gas shale drilling boom has produced a glut of inexpensive fuel, leading producers to argue that the country should wean its commercial and municipal transportation systems from a dependence on imported oil to domestically produced natural gas.

It is cheaper, saving truckers as much as $1.50 a gallon, and it burns cleaner, making it easier to meet emissions standards. The domestic fuel also provides some insulation from the volatile geopolitics that can drive up petroleum prices.

Still, manufacturers and fleet owners have been slow to switch, partly because natural gas vehicles can cost almost twice as much as conventional trucks and because only a few gasoline stations have the specialized equipment needed to dispense the fuel.

Now, as name-brand manufacturers and chains like Nike and Walmart have pressed for transportation of their goods by natural gas vehicles and companies like U.P.S., FedEx and Ryder System have started exploring the option, truck makers have begun bringing natural gas vehicles to the market. Major manufacturers, including Navistar and Volvo, have plans to offer long-haul natural gas vehicles.

Clean Energy Fuels — a company backed by the financier T. Boone Pickens and Chesapeake Energy — has peppered major routes with 70 stations, many at truck stops operated by Pilot Flying J. (The truck-stop company, whose chief executive is Jimmy Haslam, owner of the Cleveland Browns, is separately under investigation for potential rebate fraud.)

Clean Energy has plans to complete 30 to 50 more by the end of the year. Shell has an agreement to build refueling stations at as many as 100 TravelCenters of America and Petro Stopping Centers while ENN, a privately held Chinese company, hopes to build 500 filling stations as well.

That emerging network "really has changed the interplay between the shippers and the contracted carriers," said Andrew J. Littlefair, Clean Energy's chief executive. "The whole deal's beginning to change."

Though the network is growing rapidly, it has a long way to go. As of May 2012, only 53 L.N.G. fueling stations were in the United States, more than two-thirds concentrated in California, along with 1,047 compressed natural gas stations around the country, according to the Energy Department. In comparison, there were 157,000 fueling stations selling gasoline.

Vehicle use of natural gas in the United States is still negligible but it has been growing. Among fleets whose vehicles travel shorter routes, like transit buses, refuse haulers and delivery trucks, use of compressed natural gas is much further along. Last year, more than half of newly purchased garbage trucks ran on compressed natural gas.

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Motherlode Blog: Study Links Autism With Antidepressant Use During Pregnancy

A cautiously worded study based on data collected in Sweden has found that "in utero exposure to both selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (S.S.R.I.'s) and nonselective monoamine reuptake inhibitors (tricyclic antidepressants) was associated with an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders, particularly without intellectual disability."

The Swedish medical birth register (which contains data on current drug use reported by mothers early in their pregnancies), along with a system of publicly funded screenings for autism spectrum disorders and extensive national and regional registers of various health issues, make a detailed, population-based case-control study possible — one that controls for other variables like family income, parent educational level, maternal and paternal age and even maternal region of birth (all factors the authors note have been previously associated with autism).

This is the second study in two years to associate antidepressant use during pregnancy with an increased incidence of autism in exposed children. An earlier, smaller study in California also found a modest increase in risk. The Sweden-based study could not (and did not) exclude the possibility that it was the severe depression, rather than the use of antidepressants, that created the association, but the smaller California study (which considered only S.S.R.I.'s) found "no increase in risk" for mothers with a history of mental health treatment in the absence of prenatal exposure to S.S.R.I.'s.

The authors of the current study took a very cautious approach to their findings:

The results of the present study as well as the U.S. study present a major dilemma in relation to clinical advice to pregnant women with depression. If antidepressants increase the risk of autism spectrum disorder, it would be reasonable to warn women about this possibility. However, if the association actually reflects the risk of autism spectrum disorder related to the nongenetic effects of severe depression during pregnancy, treatment may reduce the risk. Informed decisions would also need to consider weighing the wider risks of untreated depression with the other adverse outcomes related to antidepressant use. With the current evidence, if the potential risk of autism were a consideration in the decision-making process, it may be reasonable to think about, wherever appropriate, nondrug approaches such as psychological treatments. However, their timely availability to pregnant women will need to be enhanced.

Others working in the field are more inclined to draw a line between the prenatal drug exposure and the increased risk of autism. "It really shouldn't come as that much of a surprise given that numerous animal studies have shown that exposure during development leads to changes in the brain and changes in behavior — often that mimic autism," said Dr. Adam C. Urato, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Tufts University School of Medicine and chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham, Mass. (Dr. Urato obviously didn't speak in links, but you can find the animal studies he refers to here and here.)

"And why should it surprise us that medications that can change brain chemistry and function might alter the development of the brain and behavior?" Dr. Urato argues that the risks of antidepressant use during pregnancy outweigh what he sees as the limited benefits.

One conclusion that is simple to draw is that it's extraordinarily difficult for a pregnant woman with clinical depression to find some definitive answer about what's best for her in her situation. I've spoken to other researchers in the past who have described for me how difficult it is to put together a study that separates the risks of depression itself in pregnancy from the risks, if any, of the drugs used to treat it. As the researchers in Sweden note, it's unlikely that conclusive evidence on this issue will ever be available.

If you've been pregnant with clinical depression, where did you go to find the information and advice you needed?

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Europe’s Carbon Market Is Sputtering as Prices Dive

Andrew Testa for The International Herald Tribune

The trading floor at CF Partners in West London. The market for carbon permits is more volatile than its founders envisioned.

LONDON — On a showery afternoon last week in West London, a ripple of enthusiasm went through the trading floor of CF Partners, a privately owned financial company. The price of carbon allowances, shown in green lights on a board hanging from the ceiling, was creeping up toward three euros.

That is pretty small change — $3.90, or only about 10 percent of what the price was in 2008. But to the traders it came as a relief after the market had gone into free fall to record lows two days earlier, after the European Parliament spurned an effort to shore up prices by shrinking the number of allowances.

"The market still stands," said Thomas Rassmuson, a native of Sweden who founded the company with Jonathan Navon, a Briton, in 2006.

Still, Europe's carbon market, a pioneering effort to use markets to regulate greenhouse gases, is having a hard time staying upright. This year has been stomach-churning for the people who make their living in the arcane world of trading emissions permits. The most recent volatility comes on top of years of uncertainty during which prices have fluctuated from $40 to nearly zero for the right to emit one ton of carbon dioxide.

More important, though, than lost jobs and diminished payouts for traders and bankers, the penny ante price of carbon credits means the market is not doing its job: pushing polluters to reduce carbon emissions, which most climate scientists believe contribute to global warming.

The market for these credits, officially called European Union Allowances, or E.U.A.'s, has been both unstable and under sharp downward pressure this year because of a huge oversupply and a stream of bad political and economic news. On April 16, for instance, after the European Parliament voted down the proposed reduction in the number of credits, prices dropped about 50 percent, to 2.63 euros from nearly 5, in 10 minutes.

"No one was going to buy" on the way down, said Fred Payne, a trader with CF Partners.

Europe's troubled experience with carbon trading has also discouraged efforts to establish large-scale carbon trading systems in other countries, including the United States, although California and a group of Northeastern states have set up smaller regional markets.

Traders do not mind big price swings in any market — in fact, they can make a lot of money if they play them right.

But over time, the declining prices for the credits have sapped the European market of value, legitimacy and liquidity — the ease with which the allowances can be traded — making it less attractive for financial professionals.

A few years ago, analysts thought world carbon markets were heading for the $2 trillion mark by the end of this decade.

Today, the reality looks much more modest. Total trading last year was 62 billion euros, down from 96 billion in 2011, according to Thomson Reuters Point Carbon, a market research firm based in Oslo. Close to 90 percent of that activity was in Europe, while North American trading represented less than 1 percent of worldwide market value.

Financial institutions that had rushed to increase staff have shrunk their carbon desks. Companies have also laid off other professionals who helped set up greenhouse gas reduction projects in developing countries like China and India.

When the emissions trading system was started in 2005, the goal was to create a global model for raising the costs of emitting greenhouse gases and for prodding industrial polluters to switch from burning fossil fuels to using clean-energy alternatives like wind and solar.

When carbon prices hit their highs of more than 30 euros in 2008 and companies spent billions to invest in renewables, policy makers hailed the market as a success. But then prices began to fall. And at current levels, they are far too low to change companies' behaviors, analysts say. Emitting a ton of carbon dioxide costs about the same as a hamburger.

"At the moment, the carbon price does not give any signal for investment," said Hans Bünting, chief executive of RWE, one of the largest utilities in Germany and Europe.

This cap-and-trade system in Europe places a ceiling on emissions. At the end of each year, companies like electric utilities or steel manufacturers must hand over to the national authorities the permits equivalent to the amount gases emitted.

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Bitter Battle Over Water Rights on Montana Reservation

Tony Demin for The New York Times

Jack and Susan Lake, who support the water bill, at their potato farm on the Flathead Reservation. Mr. Lake's family moved there from Idaho in 1934.

RONAN, Mont. — In a place where the lives and histories of Indian tribes and white settlers intertwine like mingling mountain streams, a bitter battle has erupted on this land over the rivers running through it.

A water war is roiling the Flathead Indian Reservation here in western Montana, and it stretches from farms, ranches and mountains to the highest levels of state government, cracking open old divisions between the tribes and descendants of homesteaders who were part of a government-led land rush into Indian country a century ago.

"Generations of misunderstanding have come to a head," said Robert McDonald, the communications director for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. "It's starting to tear the fabric of our community apart."

Dependable water supplies mean the difference between dead fields and a full harvest throughout the arid West, and the Flathead is no exception. Snowmelt flows down from the ragged peaks to irrigate fields of potatoes and wheat. It feeds thirsty cantaloupes and honeydew melons. Cutthroat trout splash in the rivers. Elk drink from the streams.

So when the government and the reservation's tribal leaders devised an agreement that would specify who was entitled to the water, and how much they could take from the reservoirs and ditches, there was bound to be some discord. But few people expected this.

There have been accusations of racism and sweetheart deals, secret meetings and influence-peddling in Helena, the state capital. Lawsuits have been threatened. Competing Web sites have sprung up. Some farmers have refused to sell oats to those on the other side of the argument.

For months, local newspapers have published letters from people who support the water deal — known as a compact — and from opponents who see it as a power play by the tribes to seize a scarce and precious resource from largely non-Indian farmers and water users.

The proposed compact is 1,400 pages long, a decade in the making and bewilderingly complex. Essentially, it helps to lay out the water rights of the tribe and water users like farmers and ranchers. It provides $55 million in state money to upgrade the reservation's water systems. And it settles questions about water claims that go back to 1855, when the government guaranteed the tribes wide-reaching fishing rights across much of western Montana.

The tribes say they have given up claims to millions of gallons of water to reach the deal. They say it is the only way to avoid expensive legal battles that could tie up the state's western water resources in court for decades to come.

But the deal has rankled farmers and ranchers on the reservation, who fear they could lose half the water they need to grow wheat and hay and to water their cattle. Under the compact, each year farmers and ranchers would get 456,400 gallons of water for every acre they irrigate. Tribal officials say that is more than enough, but farmers say the sandy soil is just too thirsty. They fear they will be left dry.

"They've literally thrown us under the bus, and we've had to fight this thing ourselves," said Jerry Laskody, who has joined a group of farmers and ranchers in opposing any deal. The group has held meetings and taken out advertisements to spread the word.

As visitors drive onto the reservation, a bright orange billboard declares, "Your Water & Property Rights Are in Jeopardy." The pact has also angered some conservative residents around the valley, who accuse the tribe and Montana officials of colluding in what they characterize as legalized theft.

"There's a lot of coercion, a lot of threats," said Michael Gale, who retired here looking for beauty, and has spent hundreds of hours attending meetings, writing letters and poring over documents in the hope of killing the compact. "Like they always say: Whiskey's for drinking. Water's for fighting."

At the heart of the dispute is a question that has haunted the United States' relations with indigenous people for centuries and provoked countless killings, dislocations, treaties and court battles: Who has a claim to the land and its resources?

It is an emotional issue, especially here.

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Patients’ Genes Seen as Future of Cancer Care

Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Dr. Laurie Glimcher, dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, visiting the new Belfer Research Building.

Electric fans growl like airplanes taking off and banks of green lights wink in a basement at Mount Sinai's medical school, where a new $3 million supercomputer makes quick work of huge amounts of genetic and other biological information.

Just a couple of miles away, a competitor, Weill Cornell Medical College and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell hospital are building a $650 million research tower. Across the street is a newly completed $550 million tower housing labs for another competitor, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Major academic medical centers in New York and around the country are spending and recruiting heavily in what has become an arms race within the war on cancer. The investments are based on the belief that the medical establishment is moving toward the routine sequencing of every patient's genome in the quest for "precision medicine," a course for prevention and treatment based on the special, even unique characteristics of the patient's genes.

Among other projects, Harvard Medical School has its Center for Biomedical Informatics, which among a broad array of approaches uses mathematical modeling to predict when genetic information could lead to more effective treatment. Phoenix Children's Hospital opened the Ronald A. Matricaria Institute of Molecular Medicine in December, recruiting researchers from Los Angeles and Baltimore and planning to sequence the genomes of 30 percent of their childhood cancer patients in their search for better therapies.

Johns Hopkins, with its focus on public health, wants to develop a "systematic genomic sequencing program" over the next two years that will combine genomic analysis with a patient's environmental exposure, family history and other factors to support preventive medicine, said Scott Zeger, vice provost for research.

"There will be a moment in time when whole genome sequencing becomes ubiquitous throughout health care," said Peter Tonellato, director of the Harvard personalized medicine lab and a clinical investigator in pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "Let's say we figure out all the individuals who might have a cancer, and we can predict that with a relatively high level of accuracy. Then presumably we can take steps to avoid those, let's say, decades of treatment."

Sequencing an entire genome currently costs in the neighborhood of $5,000 to $10,000, not including the interpretation of the information. It is usually not reimbursed by insurance, which is more likely to cover tests for genetic mutations that are known to be responsive to drugs. The treatments themselves, which are sometimes covered, typically cost several times that.

Even optimists warn that medicine is a long way from deriving useful information from routine sequencing, raising questions about the social worth of all this investment at a time of intense fiscal pressure on the health care system.

"What's the real health benefit?" said Dr. Robert C. Green, a Harvard professor and a medical geneticist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "If you're a little bit cynical, you say, well, none, it's foolish."

Dr. Green is part of a federally sponsored research project that is looking at the economic and medical impact of whole genome sequencing. "One of the most prominent downsides is you start chasing risks for a whole lot of disease you'll never have, and generate a lot of cost for little benefits," he said.

He was not ready to dismiss the efforts of Mount Sinai and others, though. "The other side of the question is, what was there to look up on the Internet when the first person got a personal computer? Very little."

The race entails large sums spent not only on construction and technology but also recruitment, salaries and incentives for scientists like Weill-Cornell's Dr. Lewis Cantley, who was lured from Harvard, or Eric E. Schadt, plucked from the biotech world to head the Mount Sinai Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology.

NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell announced a new Institute for Precision Medicine, headed by a prostate cancer expert, in January. (The newly fashionable term "precision medicine" is an updated version of another genomics buzzword, "personalized medicine.") "I am not in this for competition," said Dr. Laurie Glimcher, dean of Weill Cornell Medical College. "I consider it collaboration, and I think we all have the same goal in mind, which is to cure disease."

As Weill Cornell was courting Dr. Cantley, Memorial was pursuing another Harvard eminence, Dr. José Baselga, to be its physician in chief. "It's a small world," Dr. Baselga, a breast cancer specialist, said, recalling that he and Dr. Cantley had exchanged notes on what each was being offered.

Memorial sequenced 16,000 tumors last year, mainly in lung cancer patients, Dr. Baselga said. In addition to the research building just completed on East 68th Street, a new outpatient building on East 74th Street, to be finished in 2018, will have whole floors dedicated to early-phase clinical trials.

The promise of whole genome sequencing can be seen in trials like one for bladder cancer at Memorial, where the effects of a drug normally used for breast cancer were disappointing in all but one of about 40 patients, whose tumor went away, Dr. Baselga said. Investigators sequenced the patient's whole genome. "The patient had a mutation in one gene that was right on the same pathway as the therapy," Dr. Baselga said. "And that explained why this worked."

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