Khartoum Journal: As Floods Ravage Sudan, Young Volunteers Revive a Tradition of Aid

Reuters

Men built a barrier to protect their houses from rising water in Khartoum, Sudan, this week. More than 300,000 people have been directly affected by the flooding, and dozens have died.

KHARTOUM, Sudan — Their temporary headquarters are a beehive of young volunteers buzzing in and out of rooms, up and down stairs, carrying bags of donated food, medicine and large packets of plastic sheets.

"What happened to your house?" one volunteer asks on the phone, as others load aid on trucks or create maps and charts on laptops. "And where do you say you are? We'll have a team out there soon."

They are the members of Nafeer, a volunteer, youth-led initiative that responded swiftly to the humanitarian crisis caused by heavy rains and flash floods that struck Sudan this month.

The deluge has taken a heavy toll. Beyond the dozens of people killed, more than 300,000 people have been directly affected, with 74,000 homes damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations. The spread of diseases like malaria is also reported to be on the rise.

The impact of the heavy rains and floods has been felt in most of Sudan, including the camps for displaced people in the war-torn region of Darfur. In one case, six United Nations peacekeepers were swept away by a current. Four are still missing.

But the area around Khartoum, the capital, suffered the hardest blow. More rain is expected, and as the Nile and the Blue Nile rise to record levels, many fear the worst is yet to come.

"We saw that the heavy rains and floods were going to impact the lives of many, and we felt we had a social responsibility to help people," said Muhammad Hamd, 28, a Nafeer spokesman. "The idea came out of a discussion on Facebook among friends."

A "nafeer" is a Sudanese social tradition that comes from an Arabic word meaning "a call to mobilize." The group's formation was all the more important because the Sudanese government was slow to respond, some critics say.

"It was a weak response," said Khalid Eltigani, the executive editor of Ilaf, a weekly newspaper. "The Nafeer youth broke the silence on the flood situation."

Government officials said that the level of rain this year had surpassed their expectations, but they maintained that matters were under control.

"There is no need to declare a state of emergency," said Sudan's interior minister, Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamid.

Mark Cutts, the head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Sudan, described the situation as a "huge disaster," which his agency called the worst floods in 25 years. Aid has arrived from United Nations agencies, Qatar, the United States, Japan, Egypt, Ethiopia and others.

The rainy season started late this year in Sudan, but when it arrived, it came with a vengeance.

"We can attribute this to climate change," said Nagmeldin Elhassan of the Higher Council for Environment and Natural Resources, a government agency.

Mr. Elhassan, who has contributed to reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, referred to studies that predicted what he called "incidents of frequent and intense droughts and incidents of high levels of rains" in the region and "shifts in rain patterns," like later start dates of the rainy season.

Poor urban planning, however, may have also contributed to the immense damage caused by flash flooding, especially around Khartoum.

"Khartoum is in a shallow basin that will always be prone to flooding," said Howard Bell of the United Nations Environment Program in Sudan, "and urban areas should be planned accordingly."

Over 5,000 volunteers have registered to help with the Nafeer campaign, organizers said. At the hot line desk, volunteers work in two-hour shifts, receiving emergency calls, 24 hours a day. Hundreds of Sudanese living abroad have joined the Nafeer campaign, with hot lines set up to receive donations in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries.

At the hot line desk in Khartoum, volunteers are glued to their cellphones. "The phones don't stop," said Wafa Tawfig, 16, a student volunteer. "People call for food, sheets and covers."

After receiving calls, Nafeer sends out assessment teams to evaluate the needs of different areas. The next day, a team goes back with whatever aid it can offer.

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What We Eat: Building a Better Mass-Market Tomato

David Manning for The New York Times

Heirloom tomatoes grow in a greenhouse at the University of Florida. 

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Science is trying to build a better supermarket tomato.

At a laboratory here at the University of Florida's Institute for Plant Innovation, researchers chop tomatoes from nearby greenhouses and plop them into glass tubes to extract flavor compounds — the essence of tomato, so to speak. These flavor compounds are identified and quantified by machine. People taste and rate the hybrid tomatoes grown in the university's fields.

"I'm 98 percent confident we can make a tomato that tastes substantially better," said Harry J. Klee, a professor of horticultural sciences. He hopes that the fruits of his labor will be available to commercial growers within four or five years and in supermarkets a couple of years after that. He thinks he can make seeds for better tomatoes available to home gardeners even sooner, within a year or two.

The insipid-tomato problem is well known both to salad lovers and scientists. For example, a gene mutation that tomato breeders love because it turns the fruit a luscious red also happens to make it blander. Refrigeration, transportation and other factors also take their toll. Over the decades, the average tomato has become not only less tasty but less nutritious.

Enter Dr. Klee, who helped found the Institute for Plant Innovation a decade ago and has been in a quest for a more flavorful and nutritious mass-market tomato ever since.

It is easy to find a better tasting and more nutritious tomato. Go to a farmer's market or grow one in the backyard. It is also easy to breed a plant that produces something tastier than a supermarket tomato — cross a sweet heirloom with the supermarket variety. In the greenhouse, Dr. Klee pulls one such hybrid tomato off a vine, and it does taste sweeter. But a hybrid also loses some of the qualities highly valued by commercial growers — it is not as fecund, not as resistant to disease, not as easily grown, not as pretty.

As growers are paid by the pound, a better-tasting but less productive tomato holds little economic appeal, and thus was the supermarket tomato doomed to blandness.

Dr. Klee's goal is to tweak the tomato DNA — through traditional breeding, not genetic engineering — to add desired flavors while not compromising the traits needed for it to thrive commercially. "I figure that with approximately five key genes we could very significantly improve flavor," he said. He said three genes that control the production of key flavor compounds have already been located. The next step is to identify versions of the genes that lead the tomato plant to produce more of them.

The chemistry of tomato flavor has three primary components: sugars, acids and what are known as volatile chemicals — the flavor compounds that waft into the air carrying the fruit's aroma. There are more than 400 volatiles in a tomato, and Dr. Klee and his collaborators set out to first determine which ones are the most important in making a tasty tomato.

This involved grinding up a lot of tomatoes, looking at what was in them, and asking a lot of people to taste them (unpulverized), gathering comments like "a bland firm watermelon," "soft and sloppy," and "Sweet! Finally a sample with some sweetness."

From there, Dr. Klee and his collaborators, who include Linda Bartoshuk, director of human research at the university's Center for Smell and Taste, used statistics to correlate people's preferences with the presence, or absence, of particular flavor compounds, to devise a chemical recipe for the ideal tomato.

The supermarket tomato — even when grown with care and picked ripe — did not excel. "The best it will do is middle-of-the-pack," Dr. Klee said.

Cherry Roma tomatoes were at the top of the charts, followed by heirloom varieties like Matina, Ailsa Craig and Bloody Butcher. Other heirlooms like Marmande and Oaxacan Pink ranked at the bottom, below the supermarket tomatoes, though perhaps these particular types just do not grow well in Florida.

The taste analysis produced several surprises. Some compounds, abundant in many tomato varieties and thus thought to be major contributors to flavor, turned out to be irrelevant, while others, in scant quantities, had major influences. With the new knowledge, "you can't help but get a better tomato," Dr. Bartoshuk said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 28, 2013

An article on Tuesday about the quest for a tastier supermarket tomato misstated part of the name of one variety of heirloom tomato. It is Ailsa Craig (not Alisa).

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 30, 2013

An article on Tuesday about building a better mass-market tomato misstated the amount of money it would take to get regulatory approval to sell a genetically engineered tomato. It would cost an estimated $15 million, not $1.5 million.

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Bruce C. Murray, Who Helped Earth Learn of Mars, Dies at 81

Bruce C. Murray, a planetary geologist who won his spurs interpreting findings of early missions to Mars and who led NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory through a time of flagging support for new flights in the late 1970s, died Thursday at his home in Oceanside, Calif. He was 81.

The cause was Alzheimer's disease, said the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is operated for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Dr. Murray was a professor emeritus at Caltech.

As director of the laboratory from 1976 to 1982, Dr. Murray faced shrinking budgets as the space agency shifted most of its resources to the emerging shuttle program. There were two Viking landings on Mars in his first year, and two Voyagers were launched to the outer planets. But prospects for any future missions were bleak.

On the brink of despair in 1981, Dr. Murray struck a defiant note in an interview with Discover magazine.

"We're sitting here watching the coffin being nailed shut, and what's inside is imagination and vision," he said. "I wasn't appointed director to preside over the dissolution of the U.S. space exploration program. I'm not going to be squeezed down to nothing."

Those were tough years, both for him and for the laboratory. In a New York Times Magazine article, the science writer Timothy Ferris described Dr. Murray as a "square-jawed man more comfortable giving orders than listening to advice," adding that he "brought to the lab an aggressive — some would say abrasive — style of leadership under which its fortunes have sharply improved."

John Casani, a retired project manager at the laboratory, told The Associated Press: "People at J.P.L. either loved or hated him. He was always shaking cages."

Through persistence, he kept the doors open. He managed to salvage a Jupiter orbital mission, later named Galileo, an imaging radar system for Earth mapping to be flown on space shuttles, an early Earth-observing satellite called Seasat and a joint project with Britain and the Netherlands called the Infrared Astronomy Satellite.

Out of concern for the future of planetary exploration, Dr. Murray joined with the astronomer Carl Sagan and the aerospace engineer Louis Friedman to found the Planetary Society, a public advocacy organization dedicated to exploring the solar system and searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. The society, based in Pasadena, has reported some 100,000 members. Dr. Murray was its retired chairman.

"We seem to have the idea that the space age started and ended with one generation," he said in an interview at the time. "We go to the planets and have a look and then walk away and do nothing."

Bruce Churchill Murray was born Nov. 30, 1931, in New York City. His family later moved to California, and he graduated from Santa Monica High School. He was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Ph.D. in geology in 1955.

After working as a geologist for Standard Oil, he spent two years in the Air Force as a geophysicist and then became a researcher at Caltech in 1960, at a time of growing excitement over space exploration.

He joined the faculty as an associate professor of planetary science in 1963, and became a member of the science team for Mariner 4, the first successful flyby of Mars, in 1965.

Those first pictures of a moonlike Mars of cratered plains were a disappointment to those who grew up imagining Martians. But further flyby exploration by Mariners 6 and 7, and especially Mariner 9's orbital survey in 1971-72 — all with Dr. Murray on the science team — began to reveal a more diverse Mars of mountains and canyons, with some evidence of water erosion in the distant past. He constructed a geologic history of Mars from these images.

From his Mars experience and as chief scientist for the Mariner 10 mission to Venus and Mercury, as well as his budget battles as the J.P.L. director, Dr. Murray wrote a popular book, "Journey Into Space: The First Thirty Years of Space Exploration," in 1989. He also collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Walter Sullivan on another book, "Mars and the Mind of Man," based on a symposium conducted at the time that Mariner 9 swept into an orbit of Mars.

He published more than 130 research papers and four other books as well, and was the associate director of an award-winning educational film, "Mars Minus Myth," first released in 1973 and revised in 1977.

His survivors include three children, Christine, Stephen and Peter, from his first marriage, to the former Joan O'Brien. They were divorced in 1970. The next year he married Suzanne Moss, who survives, as well as her daughter, Allison, whom Dr. Murray adopted; their son, Jonathan; and 11 grandchildren.

In a television interview in 1989, Dr. Murray spoke of the lingering disappointment of his experience as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's director.

"I went into J.P.L. full of hope that I could reverse the trend of backing away from space exploration — which started in '72 and by the time I got there in '76 was in full steam — and found I couldn't," he said. "I could alleviate the effects somewhat and kind of dampen it, but I couldn't change the trend. That was pretty upsetting."

Afterward, Dr. Murray said: "I had to decide what I wanted to do, and I tried some things and came to the conclusion what I enjoy more than anything else in the world is teaching and working with graduate students doing research. That is really satisfying."

So he returned to the Caltech faculty and served on the science teams for other Mars missions in the 1990s. On his retirement in 2001, he was made professor emeritus of planetary science and geology.

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Cave Collector in Minnesota Hunts for Additions to His Empire

RACINE, Minn. — John Ackerman has been called a tree hugger and a kook by two landowners and a devil worshiper by a local town board member. He has been accused of land snatching and gold prospecting. Others see him as an explorer and a fierce protector of an underground wilderness.

"This is what I do — I find a cave and find out where it goes," Mr. Ackerman said. "Then I knock on the farmer's door, and of course he's going to shut it.

"You're going to offer him some money, and he's going to say, 'Why would I want to sell you one acre or 10 acres in the middle of my property?' "

Then, Mr. Ackerman said, he sets out trying to persuade farmers to sign away the subterranean rights to their property, often for tens of thousands of dollars an acre.

Since the mid-1980s, Mr. Ackerman has been traveling to southeastern Minnesota from his home in the Twin Cities area to explore and acquire caves. He is the largest private cave owner in Minnesota and might be the largest in the country, but nobody is certain because not all of his caves have been fully explored to determine their extent.

Among his prized holdings is Spring Valley Caverns, located in what he calls the Minnesota Cave Preserve, his subterranean holding of six caves that run collectively over 40 miles.

"There are always passages to find," he said. "I've pretty much explored all of the hot ones and found five and a half miles."

He finds caves by scouting out sinkholes scattered throughout the region. Sinkholes can lead to caves, but the opening is usually plugged with a few thousand years of rocks and sediment. Mr. Ackerman has a modified excavator that claws out tons of dirt and rocks as he looks for a gap.

Once open, he crawls in and explores the cave as far as he can. With the help of a partner, he uses a device that beams low-frequency waves to the surface. Above ground, the partner marks the location sent out by the device, a small test hole is drilled and a camera is lowered to confirm they hit a cave passage. Then he hires a well driller to bore a 30-inch hole to the cave.

A ladder is mounted to the side of the hole to climb down into the cave. At the surface, the opening is capped with a corrugated metal tube that has a steel lid. It is padlocked, and only Mr. Ackerman has the key.

Such private power over an exclusive natural landscape has earned him enemies and supporters.

Among those who question Mr. Ackerman's pursuit is the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

"When I started opening up miles and miles of cave, they started looking at that and they weren't real happy," Mr. Ackerman said. "But I've constantly reminded them I'm protecting them and I'm allowing scientists to study them."

Indeed, he permits groups from elementary schools as well as university researchers to visit the caves. Exploration has unearthed fossils and rocks that have drawn the interest of scientists.

Mr. Ackerman grew up in Burnsville, Minn., and he developed an interest in caving by exploring abandoned sand mine tunnels under St. Paul as a boy. He runs a successful furniture restoration business that he started in his garage, which has been able to finance his pursuit of caves.

The 59-year-old Mr. Ackerman says he is at a time in his life where some decisions will have to be made about his caves. His three children are now adults and not particularly interested in inheriting them, he said, and he and his wife divorced three years ago.

"So who am I going to donate them to? I don't know yet," he said. "I've always said from the very first day I'm just a temporary steward of these caves.

"Who can own the cave anyway? These caves are a million years old. It's just a position I've gotten myself into."

He says he is apprehensive about a government agency taking over the caves and barring access, or worse, it becoming a commercialized roadside spectacle.

Mr. Ackerman contacted the Minnesota Land Trust, a nonprofit group that specializes in conservation, to explore his options. But three years ago, Mr. Ackerman had a revelation in the middle of the night, and he said he knew exactly what to do.

"I established a formal cemetery above the biggest room in this section of the cave where they would take tours," Mr. Ackerman said, referring derisively to the possibility of unwanted visitors to the caves after his death. "That's where I'm going to be buried. So now, let's see them conduct tours over my dead body."

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Canadian Documents Suggest Shift on Pipeline

OTTAWA — Ever since President Obama said in June that a litmus test for the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada was whether it would "significantly" worsen global warming, Canadian government officials have insisted it would not.

They reasoned that because the pipeline would not have any major effect on rate of development of Canada's oil sands, as a State Department environmental review concluded in March, it would not significantly raise the amount of carbon emitted.

But documents obtained by a Canadian environmental group suggest that the staff at Natural Resources Canada viewed Keystone XL as an important tool for expanding oil sands production. The documents were released to the Pembina Institute, a group based in Calgary, Alberta, after a request made under Canada's Access to Information Act.

Briefing notes prepared for the natural resources minister, Joe Oliver, before a trip to Chicago to promote Keystone XL in March, noted that "in order for crude oil production to grow, the North American pipeline network must be expanded through initiatives, such as the Keystone XL Pipeline project."

Clare Demerse, director of federal policy for Pembina, said in an interview on Saturday that expanding crude oil production in Canada is synonymous with developing the oil sands. Canada has 168 billion barrels of oil sands reserves compared to about 4.1 billion barrels of conventional oil reserves.

"This is the heart of the debate right now," she said. "The documents certainly suggest that Natural Resources saw Keystone as essential to increasing oil sands production until the State Department concluded otherwise."

Indeed, in late April, before Mr. Oliver took his pipeline campaign to Washington, the wording about growth in crude production vanished from largely similar briefing notes. It was replaced by a section noting that the State Department's environmental assessment "also concluded that 'approval or denial of the proposed project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands or the amount of heavy crude oil in the Gulf Coast area.' "

The apparent change in Canada's position underscores how approval of the pipeline from the Obama administration is a major priority for the Conservative government, a strong champion of the oil sands, which have brought billions of dollars into the economy. Blocking the pipeline has become an equally important priority for many environmentalists who view the oil sands as a particularly dirty source of oil.

In a statement, Mr. Oliver did not address questions about the apparent change in the government analysis of the pipeline's effect on oil sands production. But, he said: "We agree with the U.S. State Department that should Keystone XL not be approved, alternative modes of transporting natural resources, including rail, would likely deliver the crude intended for the Keystone XL market."

The proposed pipeline would carry about 800,000 barrels a day of heavy crude oil from tar sands in Alberta across the Great Plains to Gulf Coast refineries.

Canada has the world's third-largest oil reserves after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, but most of them are found in bitumen, a gooey, tar-like substance mixed with sand and other minerals that must be strip mined or steamed and pumped out of the ground.

In June, President Obama laid out his crucial test for approval of the $7 billion project. "Allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built requires a finding that doing so would be in our nation's interests," he said at Georgetown University. "Our national interest would be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution."

Because removing and processing bitumen from the oil sands and converting it into crude oil generates far more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil production, that would seem to be a tall order.

But Canadian politicians have repeatedly pointed to the State Department's environmental review to support their case that the pipeline would meet Mr. Obama's condition.

That study also predicted that Canada and its oil industry partners would probably continue to develop the oil sands even if Keystone XL were not built. And it stated that building or not building the pipeline would have no significant effect on demand for heavy crude in the United States.

"This is not going to create an environmental impact," Mr. Oliver told reporters shortly after the president's June speech. "That's what the U.S. State Department itself had concluded in a 3,500-page report, which was the second major independent comprehensive study that they had done on this subject."

Although the State Department is leading the pipeline review, its conclusions about growth and other issues have been challenged by the Environmental Protection Agency as well as environmentalists, and have also been contradicted by some financial analysts.

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A Blazing Giant Stirs California to High Alert

Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

Inmate firefighters hiked amid glowing forest on Highway 120 on Sunday as the Rim Fire burned along the northwest edge of Yosemite National Park.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — A wildfire near Yosemite National Park — already one of the biggest in California's history — continued to grow on Sunday, prompting mandatory evacuation orders for some residents and raising anxiety among officials because of the potential threat to a major source of San Francisco's water and power supplies.

The so-called Rim Fire had burned about 134,000 acres as of late Sunday — about 9,000 acres more than it had the previous day — making it the 14th largest fire since California began keeping records on wildfires in 1932 and the second largest in Tuolumne County.

Officials said that firefighters had contained about 7 percent of the fire, which began just over a week ago, and that it had caused no loss of life or significant property damage. And although the fire has burned some acreage in Yosemite, the most visited area of the park, the Yosemite Valley, is not threatened so far, officials said.

Despite its size, the fire has not threatened population centers or heavily trafficked parts of Yosemite, but it was more the potential of the fire than the actual damage so far that spurred officials into action. Officials said that the fire tripled in size from Wednesday to Thursday and then doubled again from Thursday to Friday.

Even though the spread of the fire had slowed by Sunday, officials said that it was still growing, and that they worried that strong winds could whip the blaze into unpredictable directions and further endanger firefighters.

"We've had success to the west," said Jerry Snyder, a spokesman for the federal Forest Service, "but the north is still expanding."

Nearly 3,000 firefighters are involved, some brought in from as far away as Florida, officials said, and the Forest Service has deployed nine helicopters.

State and local officials prepared for the possibility of home evacuations and disruptions to public utilities. The weekend began with a declaration by Gov. Jerry Brown of a state of emergency for San Francisco County.

Many eyes were on the status of public utilities in the Bay Area, about 140 miles west of Yosemite. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission said on Sunday that the fire had not affected the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which supplies water to 2.6 million customers. That reservoir accounts for 85 percent of San Francisco's water supply, but the commission emphasized in a statement that it also had "a large supply" of water stored in local reservoirs.

"We are monitoring water quality every minute of each day to ensure its quality and safety," the utility said.

Tuolumne County officials announced that all schools would be closed on Monday and Tuesday, mere days after the school year began. Most schools in the county opened on Wednesday.

"We felt it's the safest for the kids to close the schools," said Joseph A. Silva Jr., the Tuolumne County schools superintendent, citing both the air quality and the amount of equipment, like fire trucks and bulldozers, around the schools closest to the fire. He said the decision was made in conjunction with the multiagency incident command for the Rim Fire, a public health officer and the county's Air Pollution Control District.

The fire has also caused economic concerns in Tuolumne County, which stretches from about 30 miles west of Yosemite almost to the eastern edge of the park. Because a majority of the county's land area is inside the park, its economy is heavily reliant on tourism.

One store owner, Dan Vaughn of Pinecrest General Store, told The Sacramento Bee that sales had dropped by 95 percent since the fire began.

Residents in Pine Mountain Lake, on the southwestern side of the fire, were being allowed to return to their homes on Sunday afternoon after a mandatory evacuation order. As that was happening, four or five homes in a sparsely populated area to the southeast of the fire were put under a mandatory evacuation order, Mr. Snyder said, and residents of Tuolumne City and Ponderosa Hills to the northwest were under an evacuation advisory as the fire continued to spread in that direction.

As of Sunday afternoon, the fire had destroyed 23 structures, including at least 4 homes, officials said. But there were no reports of deaths or injuries.

The largest wildfire in California's history was the 273,246-acre Cedar Fire in October 2003, which killed 15 people. The largest in Tuolumne County was the Stanislaus Complex Fire in August 1987, which burned 145,980 acres and killed one person.

The fear is that the current fire may eclipse the county's record before being knocked down.

"You can look for the size to change upward," said Mr. Snyder of the Forest Service.

Max Whittaker reported from Yosemite National Park, and Maggie Astor from New York.

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Dot Earth Blog: From the Fire Hose: Obama’s Bus Stop in Gas Country, Al Gore’s ‘Category 6,’ an Unplugging Climate Blogger

Updated, 12:23 p.m. |
Here's another end-of-the-week roundup of noteworthy news and analysis on issues relevant to Dot Earth grabbed from the 24/7 fire-hose flow:

Fracking | Bryan R. Walsh of Time Magazine has beautifully summarized energy issues that are simmering today as President Obama takes his education-oriented bus tour to Binghamton, N.Y., at the epicenter of the fight over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and the gas drilling boom it has spawned:

Obama and Cuomo can't avoid the fracking debate in New York: http://t.co/fvePbkLB3A

— Bryan Walsh (@bryanrwalsh) 22 Aug 13

Pro- and anti-fracking campaigners are converging on the site of Obama's education speech, aiming to shift the news focus to energy and the environment. I posted the two sides' battle plans yesterday:

Photo: .@BarackObama bus tour aimed at education, but #fracking camps to make Binghamton stop about… http://t.co/e59BnVG8Uw

— Andy Revkin (@Revkin) 22 Aug 13

(In a related development, Lawrence Cathles, an earth and atmospheric sciences professor at Cornell University, sent me a fresh rebuttal to the Op-Ed article on the contribution of natural gas leaks to global warming by his colleague, Anthony Ingraffea (earlier critiques are here). I haven't had time to post it on Dot Earth but here's a link to Cathles's commentary set up on Slideshare.)

Climate Miscommunication | The Union of Concerned Scientists, demonstrated a welcome nonpartisan approach to tracking misstatements on human-driven global warming with "Al Gore, Climate Science, and the Responsibility for Careful Communication," its post on unhelpful hurricane hype from former Vice President Al Gore. Here's how the organization summarized the piece on Twitter:

.@algore=great #climate educator, so must get facts right http://t.co/3UXQjQfAkg Though real attacks on science >harm than overstatements

— Concerned Scientists (@UCSUSA) 22 Aug 13

There are echoes here of issues that arose in 2009.

[Update, 12:23 p.m. | Joe Romm, in eliciting the first public response on this issue from Gore's office, makes a convincing argument that the Washington Post needs to correct the record given the full unedited interview transcript of Gore's hurricane comment in his exchange with the Post's Ezra Klein:

"The scientists are now adding category 6 to the hurricane…some are proposing we add category 6 to the hurricane scale that used to be 1-5."]

Blogging | David Roberts, who's been blogging on energy, the environment and politics for a decade nearly nonstop at Grist, created a disturbance in the force when he announced he's going offline for a year, to focus on family, fitness and drafting a novel. Here's my Twitter farewell, and another fun riff on his departure:

Ever wise, @drgrist takes year off from run-on sentence of bloggery. http://t.co/4wVQTBD5Kv Relevant song: http://t.co/L8QcQE6sTE Good luck!

— Andy Revkin (@Revkin) 20 Aug 13

Climate Hawk Down: Grist's Dave Roberts @drgrist to go offline for a full year! http://t.co/UHfHCuUVch

— Climate Progress (@climateprogress) 20 Aug 13

If you missed it, here's a rare in-person encounter between the two of us at Grist's offices earlier this summer:

There's much, much more of interest out there that I don't have time to explore in full here. The best way to keep track is through my Twitter feed or by joining those who follow me on Facebook.

On Twitter this morning, for instance, I've explored trends and questions related to Arctic sea ice and noted an update on the sleepy start to this summer's Atlantic hurricane season (which doesn't say anything about the next several months).

Updated, 12:47 p.m. | On another Arctic front, the notion that a huge outburst of heat-trapping methane is nigh from the seabed off Siberia, here's an update:

Eight scientists post strong critique of Whiteman @cwhope Wadhams Arctic methane bomb piece: http://t.co/rTbexal7kG http://t.co/gGFa2NLpQ7

— Andy Revkin (@Revkin) 23 Aug 13

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Gray Matter: Does Media Violence Lead to the Real Thing?

EARLIER this summer the actor Jim Carrey, a star of the new superhero movie "Kick-Ass 2," tweeted that he was distancing himself from the film because, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, "in all good conscience I cannot support" the movie's extensive and graphically violent scenes.

Mark Millar, a creator of the "Kick-Ass" comic book series and one of the movie's executive producers, responded that he has "never quite bought the notion that violence in fiction leads to violence in real life any more than Harry Potter casting a spell creates more boy wizards in real life."

While Mr. Carrey's point of view has its adherents, most people reflexively agree with Mr. Millar. After all, the logic goes, millions of Americans see violent imagery in films and on TV every day, but vanishingly few become killers.

But a growing body of research indicates that this reasoning may be off base. Exposure to violent imagery does not preordain violence, but it is a risk factor. We would never say: "I've smoked cigarettes for a long time, and I don't have lung cancer. Therefore there's no link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer." So why use such flawed reasoning when it comes to media violence?

There is now consensus that exposure to media violence is linked to actual violent behavior — a link found by many scholars to be on par with the correlation of exposure to secondhand smoke and the risk of lung cancer. In a meta-analysis of 217 studies published between 1957 and 1990, the psychologists George Comstock and Haejung Paik found that the short-term effect of exposure to media violence on actual physical violence against a person was moderate to large in strength.

Mr. Comstock and Ms. Paik also conducted a meta-analysis of studies that looked at the correlation between habitual viewing of violent media and aggressive behavior at a point in time. They found 200 studies showing a moderate, positive relationship between watching television violence and physical aggression against another person.

Other studies have followed consumption of violent media and its behavioral effects throughout a person's lifetime. In a meta-analysis of 42 studies involving nearly 5,000 participants, the psychologists Craig A. Anderson and Brad J. Bushman found a statistically significant small-to-moderate-strength relationship between watching violent media and acts of aggression or violence later in life.

In a study published in the journal Pediatrics this year, the researchers Lindsay A. Robertson, Helena M. McAnally and Robert J. Hancox showed that watching excessive amounts of TV as a child or adolescent — in which most of the content contains violence — was causally associated with antisocial behavior in early adulthood. (An excessive amount here means more than two hours per weekday.)

The question of causation, however, remains contested. What's missing are studies on whether watching violent media directly leads to committing extreme violence. Because of the relative rarity of acts like school shootings and because of the ethical prohibitions on developing studies that definitively prove causation of such events, this is no surprise.

Of course, the absence of evidence of a causative link is not evidence of its absence. Indeed, in 2005, The Lancet published a comprehensive review of the literature on media violence to date. The bottom line: The weight of the studies supports the position that exposure to media violence leads to aggression, desensitization toward violence and lack of sympathy for victims of violence, particularly in children.

In fact the surgeon general, the National Institute of Mental Health and multiple professional organizations — including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association — all consider media violence exposure a risk factor for actual violence.

To be fair, some question whether the correlations are significant enough to justify considering media violence a substantial public health issue. And violent behavior is a complex issue with a host of other risk factors.

But although exposure to violent media isn't the only or even the strongest risk factor for violence, it's more easily modified than other risk factors (like being male or having a low socioeconomic status or low I.Q.).

Certainly, many questions remain and more research needs to be done to determine what specific factors drive a person to commit acts of violence and what role media violence might play.

But first we have to consider how best to address those questions. To prevent and treat public health issues like AIDS, cancer and heart disease, we focus on modifying factors correlated with an increased risk of a bad outcome. Similarly, we should strive to identify risk factors for violence and determine how they interact, who may be particularly affected by such factors and what can be done to reduce modifiable risk factors.

Naturally, debate over media violence stirs up strong emotions because it raises concerns about the balance between public safety and freedom of speech.

Even if violent media are conclusively found to cause real-life violence, we as a society may still decide that we are not willing to regulate violent content. That's our right. But before we make that decision, we should rely on evidence, not instinct.

Vasilis K. Pozios, Praveen R. Kambam and H. Eric Bender are forensic psychiatrists and the founders of the consulting group Broadcast Thought.

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Nuclear Operator Raises Alarm on Crisis

TOKYO — The operator of Japan's tsunami-hit nuclear power plant sounded the alarm on the gravity of the deepening crisis of containment at the coastal site on Friday, saying that there are more than 200,000 tons of radioactive water in makeshift tanks vulnerable to leaks, with no reliable way to check on them or anywhere to transfer the water.

The latest disclosures add to a long list of recent accidents, leaks and breakdowns that have underscored grave vulnerabilities at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant site more than two years after a powerful earthquake and tsunami set off meltdowns at three reactors.

They come two weeks after the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, promised that his government would take a more active role in the site's cleanup, raising questions over how seriously he has taken that pledge. Mr. Abe's government has continued to push for a restart of the country's nuclear power program, and he heads to the Middle East on Saturday to promote Japanese exports to the region, including nuclear technology.

Mr. Abe also plans to lead Tokyo's delegation to Argentina for the International Olympic Committee's final vote, set for Sept. 7, on the host city for the 2020 Olympics. Tokyo, 150 miles south of the stricken nuclear power plant, is one of three finalists competing to host the games. The others are Istanbul and Madrid.

Opposition lawmakers here have demanded that Mr. Abe stay home and declare a state of emergency.

"The nuclear crisis is real and ongoing, yet the government continues to look the other way," said Yoshiko Kira of the opposition Japan Communist Party, which made significant gains in parliamentary elections last month.

"The government should declare a state of emergency right now, and intervene to stop the outflow of contaminated water," Ms. Kira said at an anti-nuclear rally outside Mr. Abe's office in Tokyo.

Mr. Abe remains popular, and it is uncertain how large a liability the crisis at the Fukushima plant will become for him.

But it has become increasingly clear that the latest problems may be too large for the plant's operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, to handle.

Tepco has built nearly 1,000 tanks at the sprawling complex to store as many as 335,000 tons of contaminated water, the product of coolant pumped into the reactors to keep their cores from overheating, and groundwater pouring into their breached basements at a rate of 400 tons a day. This week, Tepco said one tank had sprung a huge leak.

On Friday, Tepco presented an even starker view of the situation, acknowledging that as much as 220,000 tons of that water is stored in makeshift steel tanks similar to the one that is leaking. The operator said the 36-foot-tall cylindrical tanks, meant as a temporary repository for the growing amount of radiated water at the complex, used vulnerable rubber sealing and that their ability to withstand radiation was not tested.

The tanks are susceptible to leaks at the seams and through their concrete base, said Noriyuki Imaizumi, the acting general manager of Tepco's nuclear power division. A nearby drain can carry any leaked water to the sea, Mr. Imaizumi said, and high radiation readings along a section suggest that water has already traveled through the drain to the ocean.

The makeshift tanks also lack water level gauges, making it difficult to detect leaks. Only two workers are assigned to checking nearly 1,000 tanks on two-hour patrols twice a day, Mr. Imaizumi said.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority, which the Japanese government ordered to more actively advise and monitor Tepco's activities at the plant, had told the company to begin transferring the water from the makeshift tanks to better-built vessels. But after visiting the plant on Friday, an authority commissioner, Toyoshi Fuketa, said the vast quantities made doing so quickly "unrealistic."

A series of pits Tepco dug to store some of the water also began leaking earlier this year, forcing workers to transfer the water into the steel tanks.

Experts have said they suspect that more contaminated water is seeping out from under the melted-down reactors into the groundwater and the Pacific. Elevated levels of radioactive cesium in surrounding waters seem to confirm those suspicions.

Tepco has said those leaks are not directly from beneath the reactors, but from maintenance tunnels that run along the coast and remain contaminated from the early days of the disaster.

But it also acknowledges that the water beneath the reactors is extremely contaminated, and experts say that if it does get into the ocean, it will surpass even the leaks that occurred in the disaster's early days.

"That prospect scares me," Michio Aoyama, a senior scientist in the Oceanography and Geochemistry Research Department at the government-affiliated Meteorological Research Institute, said in an interview this month.

"It's the ultimate, worst-case scenario," Professor Aoyama said.

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About New York: With Ships, Silt and a Giant Straw, a Beach in the Rockaways Is Reborn

Somewhere among the chutes and spider-web rigging and pivoting water guns was the younger faction of Chaya Genack's six children.

Just as Ms. Genack was itemizing the playground's importance in her life — "It's so gorgeous, we could be here all day" — the city parks commissioner, Veronica M. White, stopped by.

The happy mother did not hold back.

"I just want to say, 'God bless you!' " Ms. Genack said.

"Awww," Ms. White said.

The salutation did, however, come with a small "however."

"But one thing would make it perfect," Ms. Genack said. "We need some shade."

"We're trying to figure it out," Ms. White said, glancing at the spindly, leafless trees that rose from what were otherwise lush plantings.

Shade is not an idle concern to Ms. White, who is fair in complexion. She took over as the commissioner of parks and recreation on Aug. 30 last year, prepared to oversee the 30,000 acres of city parkland for the last year of the Bloomberg administration.

Two months later, the wind and tidal rampage of Hurricane Sandy tore up thousands of trees and erased vast stretches of city beaches.

"I've braved the beach more in a year than I did in my whole life, 54 years, before then," Ms. White said.

Like the playground at Beach 30th Street, the transformation of the Rockaways turned an epic corner this month. A powerful dredge ship arrived and docked in a federal water channel. Behind it were tugboats that had sailed up the East Coast from New Orleans, pulling 20 sections of pipe, each 800 feet long. Once in New York, they were assembled into a giant straw, three miles long, and sand and water were sucked from a silted-up channel and blown onto the beaches. (Besides the civil engineering, the dredging is an event of great excitement for sea gulls: they feast on an all-they-can-eat buffet of clams and fish suddenly hurled onto beaches.)

The storm swept away 1.5 million cubic yards of sand from the beach, the equivalent of about 50,000 big construction trash-hauling bins, said Daniel T. Falt, the project manager overseeing the dredging for the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

Even before the hurricane, erosion had taken two million cubic feet of sand from the peninsula.

Between now and next Memorial Day, the federal project will put 3.5 million cubic yards of sand on the beaches, at a cost of $37 million. This will effectively double them to about 200 feet wide, and they will be raised to a height of 14 feet.

It is as if the storm and its destructive forces are now being rewound, not in a few moments of devastation, but over a span of two years. The sand — much of which washed away from the beaches between 1975 and last year — will help to protect the communities behind it. But won't it just run back out to sea?

"We are designing it to absorb as much wave energy as we can, but it's an active system," Mr. Falt said. "As the winter progresses, the sand is going to move around and create a beach berm."

Before that is finished, the city is building up protection with a kind of artificial dune assembled with about 10,000 giant sand bags, each holding 5,500 pounds. It will stretch 4.7 miles, from Beach 149th Street to Beach 55th Street. The goal, Commissioner White said, is to absorb serious storm surges.

Hurricane Sandy opened a seam in history, and with it, possibilities that are now being realized. The concession stands along what had been the beach Boardwalk are now open, landscaped plazas. Concrete walkways, with blue glass embedded, have replaced parts of the old Boardwalk. The old planks have been salvaged and arrayed as steps that serve as a kind of amphitheater entry to the beach.

Most of the Boardwalk has not been rebuilt, but will be before Memorial Day, Ms. White said. It is sorely missed, as Kathleen Morris, a resident, told Ms. White.

"We're getting sand before we get a Boardwalk?" Ms. Morris said.

"It's coming back," Ms. White said. "We want to build it for the long term."

In the playground, Rechel Pollack, a grandmother, spoke about losing the bottom floor of her home. The rebirth of the playground had spiritual power.

"You come here, and life is going on," Ms. Pollack said. "It's normal. It's beautiful. Because it's normal."

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

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The Week: Progress in Quest for a Reusable Rocket, and Teleporting Data

By SpaceX

SpaceX

The SpaceX Grasshopper: On Aug. 13, the Falcon 9 test rig, also known as Grasshopper, completed a successful lateral fight maneuver.

Our theme this week is things that move in unexpected ways. In Texas, a rocket flew 800 feet in the air, then traveled sideways for 300 feet before returning to Earth. Elsewhere, two teams of researchers devised a method for teleporting small bits of information. And a wounded $600 million telescope is like a shopping cart with a broken wheel, says NASA. Onward and upward.

Developments

Engineering: A Reusable Rocket

The history of space travel is littered with disposable rockets. But the scientists at Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX, have been working to develop one that can land safely and then be used again. In its latest test run, a 10-story rocket known as the Grasshopper lifted off and briefly flew sideways, then landed smoothly on the spot from which it came, remaining upright throughout. SpaceX is still a long way from producing a practical reusable rocket, but the one-minute flight represented a significant step forward, and made for the week's coolest science video.

Space: Big, Fussy Eater

There is an enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and, given its size, scientists have long wondered why it doesn't grow faster and consume more than it does. Now, radio astronomers have discovered an elderly, rapidly rotating star known as a pulsar in the vicinity of the black hole, called Sagittarius A, that is providing some clues, reported Nature. By observing the pulsar's behavior, researchers have deduced that Sagittarius A generates a surprisingly strong magnetic field that may slow its intake of stellar material.

Biology: An Evolutionary Tail

Evolution isn't supposed to be predictable. But a common, single-tailed microbe, left alone to feed on sugar, consistently produced future generations with multiple tails that were better suited to eating and reproducing. The experiment, conducted by Joao Xavier of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, not only defies conventional wisdom, it suggests a path for disease research. The microbe in question can cause infections in the lungs, and clues to its behavior could help counter its natural defenses.

Physics: Quantum Leap

Two teams of physicists have successfully teleported tiny bits of information from one side of a computer chip to the other, reported National Geographic. The process involved two quantum bits, one on the sender side of the chip, and one on the receiving end. Because the bits were "entangled," to use a quantum physics term, what happened to one happened to the other. So when data was written to the sender side of the chip, it would leap to the receiving side without passing through the space between. The research could potentially improve computing and encryption speeds.

Environment: A Familiar Thaw

The modern melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet may be following a familiar pattern, says a study published in Nature. The middle of West Antarctica has warmed by about 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958, but East Antarctica has warmed barely at all. The study, based on new ice records, suggests that the same pattern played out during the thaw from Earth's last big ice age. The ice sheet over West Antarctica started heating up 20,000 to 22,000 years ago, earlier than previously thought. But East Antarctica, which was higher and colder, was in a deep freeze until 18,000 years ago.

Coming Up

Astronomy: New Careers in Space

NASA is asking astronomers to help it find a new mission for Kepler, the celebrated spacecraft that broke down in May when a wheel that controls its telescope failed. Launched in 2009, Kepler collected a trove of data as it searched for Earthlike planets across the galaxy. That data will keep researchers busy for years, but without that wheel, the telescope is just too wobbly for its intended mission.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 23, 2013

A report in The Week column on Tuesday about physicists' successfully teleporting tiny bits of information misstated, at one point, the distance the information, known as quantum bits, traveled. As the report correctly noted elsewhere, the information traveled from one side of a computer chip to the other — not from one computer chip to another.

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C. Gordon Fullerton, Early Space Shuttle Pilot, Dies at 76

Col. C. Gordon Fullerton, an astronaut who performed the first flight test of a space shuttle in 1977, then piloted two shuttle missions — including one in which an engine failed shortly after takeoff — died on Wednesday in Lancaster, Calif. He was 76.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said in a statement announcing the death that Colonel Fullerton had a severe stroke in 2009, after which he had lived in a nursing home in Lancaster.

As a test pilot for both the Air Force and NASA, Colonel Fullerton logged about 15,000 hours flying more than 130 different types of aircraft. In his two shuttle missions, he was the commander on board the Challenger and one of two pilots on the Columbia.

Both spacecraft failed in later flights with disastrous results, the Challenger breaking apart on its ascent over Florida in 1986 and the Columbia disintegrating in 2003 as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere over Louisiana and Texas, both crews perishing.

Perhaps the most harrowing moment of Colonel Fullerton's career came on July 29, 1985, when the Challenger lost one of its three main engines 5 minutes and 45 seconds after the launch. Colonel Fullerton ordered his crew to unstrap their flight harnesses in case they had to make a quick escape.

But with the help of technicians, astronauts and other NASA personnel, he was able to continue the mission and guide the shuttle and its six crew members into orbit, where they completed most of their scheduled scientific experiments.

"We breathed a great sigh of relief to get into orbit at all," Burton Edelson, NASA's associate administrator, said after the mission. "We all had our fingers crossed."

The engine failure came after the flight had been delayed on July 12 because of engine problems.

Colonel Fullerton was chosen as an astronaut in the late 1960s but waited more than 15 years for his turn to fly a spacecraft. When that chance came, however, his first assignment did not take him out the Earth's atmosphere.

Rather, on Aug. 13, 1977, he teamed up with Fred W. Haise, a civilian pilot, in the first flight of the shuttle Enterprise, a vehicle that was built purely for approach and landing tests and was incapable of flying into orbit.

The shuttle was the first reusable spacecraft: it was launched into space vertically like a conventional rocket and then orbited the Earth while scientific tasks were performed. It landed horizontally like an airplane. The first mission was in April 1981 and the last in July 2011.

For the Enterprise test flight, the shuttle was flown to 24,000 feet on the back of a Boeing 747, then cut loose over the Mojave Desert. The pilots descended and landed it as a powerless, giant glider at Edwards Air Force Base where it was greeted by scientists, movie stars and families in campers. The pilots brought the shuttle in at an 11-degree angle, more than three times the steepness of a commercial airliner's angle of attack.

"We were doing stuff that there wasn't any procedure for," Colonel Fullerton said at the time. "We were writing the procedure and then flying it for the first time."

Colonel Fullerton and Mr. Haise flew two more prototype missions, including the fifth and final one in October 1977. This time, they landed the shuttle on a hard-surface runway, not the smooth dry lake that surrounds the Edwards air base. Prince Charles of Britain attended.

"At no time were we concerned about loss of control," Colonel Fullerton said.

In March 1982, Colonel Fullerton was piloting the Columbia when weather conditions forced the landing to be postponed. The usual spot, the Edwards base, had been washed out by rain, and an alternate site, in White Sands, N.M., proved unusable when a fierce sand storm kicked up. NASA officials waved off the New Mexico landing just 39 minutes before Colonel Fullerton and the commander, Col. Jack R. Lousma, were to fire the engines that would have dropped the craft out of orbit. It was the first time in 20 years that an American spaceflight landing had been postponed.

The shuttle continued orbiting and touched down smoothly in New Mexico the next day.

"The spacecraft performed magnificently," Colonel Fullerton said. "Everything was better than my wildest dreams could imagine."

Charles Gordon Fullerton was born on Oct. 11, 1936, in Rochester, N.Y. His family moved to Portland, Ore., when he was in the first grade. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology and worked for the Hughes Aircraft Company before joining the Air Force in 1958.

Colonel Fullerton was a bomber test pilot before being selected for the Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory program in 1965. After the program was canceled in 1969, NASA accepted him into its astronaut corps, and he was part of the support crew for several lunar missions.

He left the astronaut corps in 1986 and worked as a NASA test pilot and executive. He retired from the Air Force in 1988 and from NASA in 2007.

His survivors include his wife, the former Marie Jeanette Buettner; a daughter, Molly Marie; and a son, Andrew.

Of all the experiments carried out on space shuttle missions, one of the least successful was to determine whether Coca-Cola or Pepsi was best for space travelers. On the 1985 Challenger mission, Colonel Fullerton and his crew found both unrefrigerated, carbonated beverages unpleasant and did not state a preference.

Colonel Fullerton often spoke of the beauty encountered in space and the joys of weightlessness. After the Columbia disaster in 2003, he said the seven crew members who died on the mission had probably not considered themselves heroes but rather simply "the luckiest people on earth."

"Columbia was a magnificent machine," he said. "She carried us to the greatest adventures of our lives."

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Green Column: Wind Farms Take Root Out at Sea

BREMEN, Germany — In a warehouse district on the outskirts of Bremen in northwestern Germany is a big, well-lighted work space dominated by the massive top section of a wind turbine called a nacelle.

It is here that Siemens, the German power systems giant, trains new employees and gives refresher courses on how to work safely on modern windmills that can rise 90 meters, or about 300 feet, and weigh more than 100 tons.

On a hot August day, employees wearing hard hats and protective clothing were squeezing in and out of the multi-ton module, practicing evacuating injured colleagues using pulleys and harnesses.

The training center, which pushes through around 2,500 people a year, is fully booked these days because Siemens is staffing up as it fills orders for building and operating offshore and onshore wind farms. The center, which now has eight trainers, plans to add an additional one this year and next year.

"We have to keep hiring," said Ralph Knödler, a trainer, because the wind business is getting "bigger and bigger."

Although onshore wind is a larger business, offshore is growing faster, and the contracts often come with long-term maintenance deals, creating a need to recruit new service workers from the ranks of landlubbers.

The turbines are formidably expensive and tricky to install and maintain, but countries blessed with ample sea breezes, like Britain and Germany, are coming to view them as a major part of their efforts to curb the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists say contribute to climate change.

"If you want to do wind on a big scale with power plants based on wind, you need to go offshore," said Michael Hannibal, chief of Siemens's offshore wind business.

"Power plants" are the important words here. Wind farms are no longer engineering experiments or small pilot schemes. They have grown very large, to the point where they are of the same scale as gas- or coal-fired power stations.

The world's largest wind facility, called the London Array, which uses Siemens equipment and cost almost $3 billion, was recently inaugurated off Britain's east coast. With 630 megawatts of capacity, it is comparable to or bigger than conventional generators.

Far larger projects, like one called East Anglia, which might be more than 10 times the size of the London Array, are under discussion for off the British coast.

Siemens figures there are about 3.3 gigawatts of offshore wind power connected to the grid in Europe. That is similar in size to a large contemporary nuclear power station. The company also expects the global market to grow 20 percent a year for the next few years, but that will depend on many factors, including costs and government support.

Offshore wind has advantages beyond the presence of sea breezes. The seabed is relatively cheap real estate, and much larger wind farms can be built there than on land. The vast expanses available at sea allow economies of scale that may bring down costs.

In addition, sea-based wind farms are less likely to set off aesthetic or environmental objections than land-based ones. Although there is worry that their fast-turning rotors may put seabirds at risk, particularly on foggy days, and grumbling that the big white pinwheels spoil views, they are being placed farther and farther out to sea to partly quell the complaints.

Siemens acquired a foothold in the industry by buying the Danish company Bonus Energy in 2004. Since then, it has been scaling up the turbines and trying to streamline their installation. The company is a global leader in the offshore business, with 1,200 turbines fully installed and another 1,200 on order, costing several million euros each. Major competitors include General Electric, Vestas and Chinese companies.

On an installation called Riffgat that Siemens is now finishing off Borkum, Germany, one of a chain of sandy islands that run along the German and Dutch coastlines, it managed to cut turbine installation times to 14 hours — no small feat for units that have rotor diameters of 120 meters and weigh 250 tons.

The key to cutting costs, Mr. Hannibal said, is to simplify the installation process and turn manufacturing of turbines into a cookie-cutter industrial process. The latest turbines are made of just a few components that are relatively easy to anchor to the sea bottom.

The offshore wind industry, which is also gaining ground in the United States, is also increasing its efficiency by building its own specialized ships for constructing and maintaining wind farms, rather than using less well-suited vessels from the oil industry or the merchant fleet.

Turbine suppliers are also figuring out ways to make them bigger so each unit generates more power. Siemens is now beginning to offer a six-megawatt turbine whose 154-meter diameter rotors are almost twice the wingspan of an Airbus A380 jumbo jet.

Still, costs remain stubbornly high. Mr. Hannibal figures that the power to be produced by new German offshore wind projects will cost 130 to 140 euros, or $175 to $185, per megawatt hour, which is about triple the wholesale power price. Locating turbines farther offshore also adds expense by increasing the time to reach them to bring maintenance workers and replacement equipment.

Like the oil industry, offshore wind operators are turning to solutions like floating hotels and helicopters, but these do not come cheap.

Mr. Hannibal said that costs are coming down at the rate of 40 percent per decade, but he concedes that the industry still has much to do to become competitive. The high costs mean that there is little incentive to build these plants without hefty subsidies.

"We are fooling ourselves if we depend on subsidies," he said. "We know we need to bring costs down."

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An Effort to Expand Access to a Drug That Could Save Victims of Overdoses

Ms. Dittmeier, 23, died of a heroin overdose in January, leaving behind her 3-year-old son, Aiden. Ms. Allar is haunted, she said, not just by her daughter's tumble into addiction, but also by the circumstances of her death. She wonders if her life might have been saved if the emergency workers who treated her had been armed with naloxone, a powerful drug that can reverse the effects of an overdose.

"You start to get that sick feeling again," Ms. Allar said, recounting a frantic race to the hospital just before Ms. Dittmeier's death. "I'm back at work. I'm trying to think positive about such a horrible situation."

On Long Island and across New York State, drug overdoses are taking an increasing toll. The most common killers are opioids, a class of painkillers that includes prescription drugs like Vicodin, OxyContin and Percocet, as well as illegal narcotics like heroin.

In Suffolk and Nassau Counties, the two that make up Long Island, 338 people died of opioid overdoses in 2012, up from 275 in 2008, according to county records. Statewide, opioid overdoses killed 2,051 people in 2011, more than twice the number that they killed in 2004.

The spate of deaths is spurred, in part, by the easy access to prescription drugs. As a result, the state has begun several efforts to stem access to prescription drugs. A new law aims to stop addicts from gaining access to multiple rounds of medication by requiring doctors to consult an Internet database that tracks prescriptions.

Law enforcement authorities have also cracked down on physicians who dispense painkillers illegally. New York City early this year took the unusual step of limiting access to pain medication in emergency rooms.

Some public health experts and antidrug advocates, however, are offering another way to prevent overdose deaths: naloxone, an easy-to-administer, inexpensive drug that is sprayed into the nose or injected into the body. The more people who carry it, they say, the better.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the drug to treat overdoses in 1971, and since then it has been widely used in hospitals. Now, it is slowly getting into the hands of nonmedical personnel across New York State.

"I wish I'd known about this beforehand," said Kelly O'Neill, 46, of Nassau County, whose son Billy died of a heroin overdose in 2011 at age 25. "It's kind of like, 'Thank God it's here,' but it's taken so long for them to get it here."

Opioids function in the body by attaching to specific proteins, called opioid receptors. When opioids attach, the body relaxes and breathing slows. But too much of an opioid can cause respiration to slow to a lethal level.

Naloxone acts by competing with opioids for the receptor sites, essentially pushing the opioids out of the way and reversing the effects of the drugs.

The timing is critical. Depending on the dosage taken and the conditions of a user, a person can die within minutes of taking an opioid, so naloxone must be administered quickly. The drug is used not just to save substance users, but also children who accidentally wander into a parent's medicine cabinet.

Until recently, though, the only emergency personnel in New York trained to use naloxone were the state's 7,500 paramedics, who have advanced training but are often not the first to arrive at the scene of an overdose.

Now, a pilot program in Suffolk, Nassau and four other New York regions is training emergency medical technicians — who have less training but are more likely to be the first to reach an overdose victim — how to use naloxone. There are 42,000 E.M.T.'s in New York, many of them also police officers and firefighters. The two-year pilot program is scheduled to end in 2014, when the State Department of Health will decide if all state E.M.T.'s should be trained. Since spring 2012, newly trained E.M.T.'s have administered naloxone to 197 people who overdosed.

A second statewide effort is aimed at getting naloxone into the hands of people without medical training, an effort spurred by a 2006 New York law that made it legal for community organizations and health departments to deliver naloxone training. Similar laws exist in at least a dozen cities and states, including New Jersey and Connecticut. People who might seek training could include parents of addicts or a volunteer who works with substance abusers.

A list of organizations that provide naloxone training is available on the State Health Department's Web site. The training takes 10 minutes to one hour, and graduates are given small blue bags containing two doses of the drug.

The recent addition of a nasal version of naloxone has made it easier for people without medical backgrounds to administer the drug. Still, some people caution against its widespread distribution.

Paul A. Werfel, who oversees the E.M.T. and paramedic training program at Stony Brook University on Long Island, said drug users can become combative after they are given naloxone. "The average E.M.T. in Suffolk may not necessarily have the tools to handle that," he said.

Others, however, say that the drug's lifesaving potential outweighs such concerns. A growing body of research about the drug's effectiveness has turned many skeptics into advocates, said Dr. Sharon Stancliff, the medical director at the Harm Reduction Coalition, a national nonprofit group.

A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2012 found that one life could be saved for every 227 naloxone kits distributed to heroin users and those close to them.

"Public health moves slow," Dr. Stancliff said. "This is really an extremely safe, safe medication."

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Mystery Virus That’s Killed 47 Is Tied to Bats in Saudi Arabia

Jonathan H. Epstein/EcoHealth Alliance

A match to the virus was found in a fecal sample of this type of bat, the Taphozous perforatus.

WASHINGTON — Health officials confirmed Wednesday that bats in Saudi Arabia were the source of the mysterious virus that has sickened 96 people in the Middle East, killing 47 of them.

The outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, has been going on for 15 months, with most victims falling ill in Saudi Arabia and others growing sick after having traveled to the Middle East. In a study released Wednesday, an international team of doctors blamed coronavirus in bats for the human outbreak, but said that many questions remained, in part because a perfect match for the virus was found in only a single insect-eating bat out of about 100 Saudi bats tested. And since such bats do not normally bite people, drool on fruit or do other things that might transmit the disease to people, it was still unclear how the virus leapt to humans.

The bat is a Taphozous perforatus, or Egyptian tomb bat, which roosts in abandoned buildings, and the virus was found in a fecal sample.

So it is possible, said Dr. Jonathan H. Epstein, a veterinarian with the EcoHealth Alliance who helped trap the bats, that victims, like shepherds who might seek shelter in the buildings, picked it up by breathing in dried bat guano — similar to the way that Americans have been infected with hantavirus while sweeping up dried mouse droppings.

But it is also possible that an animal picked it up that way and then infected a human. Pigs, for instance, can get Nipah virus from bats and then pass it to humans in slaughterhouses.

Further tests on camels, sheep, goats and a cow will be finished soon, said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, head of Columbia University's Center for Infection and Immunity, which has already done 15,000 polymerase chain reaction tests tracking the virus.

"It's a huge amount of work," he said.

It has been known for several months that bats in Africa and Eastern Europe carried viruses related to MERS, but the relevant virus had not been found in Middle Eastern bats before. Camels in Oman have shown antibodies to a similar virus.

Knowing that one bat had an identical virus is a start, but more testing will be needed, said Dr. Ziad A. Memish, the Saudi deputy health minister who was a co-author on the study and gave a presentation on the virus in Washington on Wednesday.

The infected bat was in an abandoned house in a date palm orchard in Bisha, a small Saudi Arabian city. Investigators from Columbia and EcoHealth Alliance took samples there because the first known victim of the MERS outbreak was a businessman who had lived in Bisha and had his business, a large paint warehouse, nearby. The warehouse had a large garden with fruit trees and insects that attract many kinds of bats. The victim, a wealthy 60-year-old man, got sick in mid-June and died two weeks later, Dr. Lipkin said.

The victim also owned four pet camels that were sampled, but those results are not in yet, Dr. Lipkin added. Samples taken from livestock in countries with endemic foot-and-mouth disease must first be delivered to an Agriculture Department laboratory on Plum Island, Mass., to be certified negative for foot-and-mouth before they can be released for further testing.

Those restrictions can add months to the testing process, Dr. Memish said. That is one reason the bat samples were tested sooner, although other problems emerged: one of two frozen shipments of bat samples – the one the positive bat was in – was opened at Customs on entry into the United States and had thawed out by the time it reached Dr. Lipkin's lab 48 hours later.

What was recovered from that sample, however, was a 100 percent match, which is virtually unheard of in virology, the study said.

The victim from Bisha had separate houses for his three wives and was building a fourth for a woman he planned to marry, "which suggests he was still vigorous," Dr. Lipkin said.

But most of those killed by the new virus were old and had chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease. Cases are being found of younger, healthier victims who often have milder symptoms, according to Dr. Memish, so it may soon be established that the disease's mortality rate is much lower than 60 percent.

In his presentation Wednesday, hosted in Washington by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Center for Health Security, Dr. Memish said he only learned of the existence of the new virus in his own country when he read about it late last September on ProMED, an outbreak-alert service.

Dr. Memish said that by then, it was too late to advise travelers not to come to the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, which draws 4.5 million pilgrims. "That put an incredible strain on our system," he said.

His department ordered all Saudi hospitals to look for and report unusual cases of pneumonia. The virus does not spread easily from person to person, but there have been case clusters in which family members or nurses and doctors who cared for patients were infected.

This year, the kingdom has suggested that older people, very young children and those in ill health or with suppressed immune systems not make the pilgrimage.

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Europe Set to Impose Sanctions on Faroe Islands Over Herring

Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A fishing boat in the Faroe Islands. The tiny territory's economy rests heavily on exports of herring and mackerel.

PARIS — The European Commission said on Tuesday that it was enacting tough trade sanctions against the Faroe Islands after the tiny North Atlantic territory unilaterally increased its herring quota.

The European fisheries commissioner, Maria Damanaki, said in a statement that the European Union was banning the import of herring and mackerel caught in waters under Faroese control, as well as products made from those fish, which make up the greatest part of the territory's exports. In addition, Faroese vessels will be prohibited from unloading their herring and mackerel catches at European Union ports.

"The Faroese could have put a stop to their unsustainable fishing but decided not to do so," Ms. Damanaki said. "It is now clear to all that the E.U. is determined to use all the tools at its disposal to protect the long-term sustainability of stocks."

Fish and fish products make up about 95 percent of Faroe Islands exports, said Gunnar Holm-Jacobsen, director of the Faroese foreign service, worth about $1 billion. The territory exports herring and mackerel worth about $232 million, he said, with about half of that going to the European Union.

The Faroese prime minister, Kaj Leo Holm Johannesen, denounced the European Union's move as "deeply disappointing" and said his government was seeking United Nations arbitration of the issue.

Clearly, the trade battle is an unequal one: the Faroes have a population of 50,000, compared to the European Union's 507 million. The Faroes, which are under Danish sovereignty, do not belong to the European Union.

The sanctions are aimed specifically at herring. but also encompass mackerel because the two species school together. The sanctions, set to begin by the end of the month, will heavily weigh on the Faroese economy, of which more than two-thirds is based on fisheries.

"It will be very painful," Mr. Holm-Jacobsen said. "Our industry will have to find new models now."

The total size of the Atlantic-Scandinavian herring catch is set according to the advice of scientists to ensure the stock's sustainability. The existing agreement, which had held since 2007, was set by a group of countries called the Coastal States: the European Union, Russia, Norway, Iceland and the Faroes. The agreement gives Norway the largest quota, at over 60 percent. Iceland has 14.5 percent; Russia, 12 percent; and the European Union, 6.5 percent.

But the Faroese have long claimed that their quota — just over 5 percent — is too low, especially considering that the fish are abundant in their fishing grounds and relatively scarce in European Union waters. With the other Coastal States unwilling to change their quotas, the Faroes in January said they were unilaterally tripling the size of their quota. Conservationists worry that the dispute will lead to a free-for-all on the seas and endanger the fish stock.

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Urgent Task for Insect: Stop a Relentless Vine

The beetles, each roughly the size of a sesame seed, are part of a broad strategy to combat the relentless mile-a-minute vine, which has invaded parks and forests from North Carolina to Massachusetts and as far west as Ohio.

Known scientifically as Rhinoncomimus latipes, the insects are considered biological control agents by invasive plant experts and are to be released at two places each in the Bronx and Queens and one on Staten Island.

The vines were first spotted in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx in 2006. "When we saw that mile-a-minute was growing there, we panicked," said Katerli Bounds, the director of forest restoration for the city's Department of Parks and Recreation. The park, she said, contains one of the best examples of natural forest in the city.

In 2007, the department received a grant from the State Department of Environmental Conservation to eradicate mile-a-minute from Pelham Bay Park. That campaign included the limited use of herbicides but chiefly involved teams of volunteers spending thousands of hours weeding out the vines. Those efforts, which continue, were not enough, Ms. Bounds said.

Mile-a-minute vine is native to Asia, but it is believed that at some point in the 1930s, its seeds contaminated a shipment of holly seeds in Japan, said Judy Hough-Goldstein, a professor of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware at Newark. Dr. Hough-Goldstein, who studies the relationship between insects and mile-a-minute, said those holly seeds were shipped to a nursery in York, Pa.

The vine has triangular leaves and can grow up to 20 feet in a single growing season, creeping up and over nearby plants and trees. Under ideal conditions, a single plant can produce thousands of seeds, which can germinate in the soil for up to six years after falling to the ground.

"The spread of mile-a-minute is strongly tied to soil disturbances," Dr. Hough-Goldstein said. Walking paths, roadsides, fallen trees — almost any exposed bit of ground will do.

On a recent sultry summer morning, Ms. Bounds pushed through a nearly shoulder-high wall of herbaceous plants, shrubs and small trees in a particularly lush area of Pelham Bay Park not far from the Orchard Beach parking lot. When she stopped, there was no need to point; a sprawling, strangulating net of mile-a-minute covered hundreds of plants. If nothing is done to curb the vine's spread, native plants like aster, goldenrod and pokeweed stand little chance of survival, she said. The vine can suppress saplings' growth and even lead to the death of mature trees.

"For a forest to remain healthy, you really need many varieties of native plants to survive and thrive," Ms. Bounds said. "You don't want a monoculture."

Plants and animals from foreign lands can take advantage of new ecosystems because they usually enter without the natural predators that have evolved with them. In 1996, entomologists began trying to identify insects that depended on the vine for food. After years of work, some of it in China and Japan, they finally zeroed in on R. latipes.

Dr. Hough-Goldstein then led five more years of research in special federal Department of Agriculture quarantine facilities at the University of Delaware to ensure that the weevil fed only on mile-a-minute. Her findings determined that the weevil's entire life cycle — from egg to larva, pupa and adult — was solely dependent on mile-a-minute. In 2004, the Department of Agriculture granted permission for the use of R. latipes as a biological control.

The weevils destined for New York were bred at the Phillip Alampi Beneficial Insect Rearing Laboratory in West Trenton, N.J., part of the New Jersey Department of Agriculture. In small, beige rooms filled with clear plastic containers, many generations of R. latipes are raised each year.

In the oviposition room, males and females are left undisturbed to mate on bushy mile-a-minute plants grown on site in a greenhouse. "We choose the plants with the thickest stems and the most growing tips because we want the plants to be the most delicious and ideal to lay eggs on," said Cyndi Detweiler, an entomologist at the lab.

The New York weevils were in the development room. But they were still tiny larvae and pupae burrowed away in the stems of the vine or the soil at the bottom of the container, roughly a week from becoming mature adults.

Since 2004, the lab has sent more than 500,000 weevils to 11 states, including New York. Mark Mayer, another entomologist at the lab, cautioned that biological control agents were not the only answer. "The weevils have substantially reduced mile-a-minute at many original release sites, but it will never be eradicated," he said.

Back in Pelham Bay, Ms. Bounds talked about the bigger picture and the role of the parks department.

"The term 'forest restoration' begs the question — what are you restoring to? The point isn't to go back; the point is to go forward," she said. "We know that we can't eradicate all invasive plants, but what we can do is hold them at bay long enough for the native populations to build back up again."

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