Looking for a Way Around Keystone XL, Canadian Oil Hits the Rails

Ian Jackson for The New York Times

A Canexus terminal near Bruderheim, Alberta.

HOUSTON — Over the past two years, environmentalists have chained themselves to the White House fence and otherwise coalesced around stopping the Keystone XL pipeline as their top priority in the fight against global warming.

But even if President Obama rejects the pipeline, it might not matter much. Oil companies are already building rail terminals to deliver oil from western Canada to the United States, and even to Asia.

Since July, plans have been announced for three large loading terminals in western Canada with the combined capacity of 350,000 barrels a day — equivalent to roughly 40 percent of the capacity of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that is designed to bring oil from western Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast.

Over all, Canada is poised to quadruple its rail-loading capacity over the next few years to as much as 900,000 barrels a day, up from 180,000 today.

The acceleration has come despite a derailment in the lakeside Quebec town of Lac-Megantic in July, in which a runaway oil train bound for a refinery in eastern Canada exploded, killing dozens of people and bankrupting the railway company. That accident and others more recently have renewed concerns about the safety of transporting oil by rail, and given an added argument to some who favor the Keystone XL pipeline.

"They don't give up," Jesse Prentice-Dunn, a Sierra Club policy analyst, said of the oil industry.

If all the new terminals are built, Canada will potentially increase its exports to the United States by more than 20 percent — even if Keystone XL is never built.

Shipping by rail can cost an additional $5 or more per barrel, but oil companies have decided that they cannot afford to wait.

"The indecision on Keystone XL really spawned innovation and mobilized alternatives, and rail is a clear part of the options available to our industry," said Paul Reimer, senior vice president in charge of transport and marketing at Cenovus Energy, a Canadian oil company that is planning to increase rail shipments from 7,000 barrels a day to as many as 30,000 barrels a day by the end of 2014.

Opponents want to stop the pipeline project to keep the oil sands in the ground. They say that emissions from development — through mining or steam heating out of the ground followed by upgrading for shipment — are more harmful than those that come from extracting most conventional crude oil. Proponents say that Canadian heavy oil is no more environmentally harmful than some crude oils already used in the United States, and that it would replace similar crudes from Venezuela and Mexico that are refined on the Gulf Coast.

But now it seems that even if environmentalists win their battle over Keystone, Canada is destined to become an even more important energy provider, one way or another.

The developing rail links for oil sands range across Canada and over the border from the Gulf Coast to Washington and California. Railways can potentially give Canadian producers a major outlet to oil-hungry China, including from refineries in Washington and California.

At least that is the hope of Canadian oil companies, which now depend almost solely on the United States for exports.

"We want to diversify our markets beyond just moving our product south," said Peter Symons, a spokesman for Statoil, a Norwegian oil giant that has signed contracts to lease two Canadian oil loading terminals. "We can get that product on a ship and get it to premium markets in Asia."

Several Washington and Oregon refiners and ports are planning or building rail projects for Canadian heavy crude as well as light oil from North Dakota. The Texas refinery giant Tesoro and the oil services company Savage have announced a joint venture to build a $100 million, 42-acre oil-handling plant in the Port of Vancouver on the Columbia River that could handle 380,000 barrels of oil each day if permits are granted.

At the beginning of the year, only a trickle of Canadian oil was transported by rail, no more than 60,000 barrels a day. There was limited rail off-loading capacity in American refineries outside the Gulf Coast, and only a small number of rail cars suitable to transport bitumen, the raw substance in oil sands that can be refined into petroleum products.

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Activists Feel Powerful Wrath as Russia Guards Its Arctic Claims

MOSCOW — Gizem Akhan, 24, was about to begin her final year studying the culinary arts at Yeditepe University in Istanbul. Tomasz Dziemianczuk, 36, took a vacation from his job as a cultural adviser at the University of Gdansk in Poland that has now unexpectedly turned into an unpaid leave of absence.

Dmitri Litvinov, 51, is a veteran activist who as a child spent four years in Siberian exile after his father, Pavel, took part in the Red Square protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

"I didn't expect my son to get in their clutch," the elder Mr. Litvinov said in a telephone interview from Irvington, N.Y., where he settled to teach physics in nearby Tarrytown after being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.

Dmitri Litvinov and the others are just three of the 30 people aboard a Greenpeace International ship, the Arctic Sunrise, who are now confined in separate cells in the far northern city of Murmansk after staging a high-seas protest last month against oil exploration in the Arctic. All face criminal charges that could result in years in prison as a result of having grossly underestimated Russia's readiness to assert — and even expand — its sovereignty in a region potentially rich with natural resources.

The vigorous legal response by the authorities, including the seizure of the ship itself, appears to have caught Greenpeace off guard and left the crew's families and friends worried that the consequences of what the activists considered a peaceful protest could prove much graver than any expected when they set out.

"Naturally, every time Gizem sets out on a protest I feel anxious," Ms. Akhan's mother, Tulay, said in written responses delivered through Greenpeace. "I'm a mother, and most of the time she doesn't even tell us she is participating. I've known the risks but couldn't have foreseen that we would come face to face with such injustice."

Critics of the government of President Vladimir V. Putin have added the crew of the Arctic Sunrise to a catalog of prisoners here who have faced politically motivated or disproportionate punishment for challenging the state. Among them are the former oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the punk performers of Pussy Riot and the protesters awaiting trial more than a year after violence broke out on the day of Mr. Putin's inauguration last year.

But there is one crucial difference: Most of those who were aboard the Arctic Sunrise are foreigners.

They hail from 18 nations. Two of them, Denis Sinyakov of Russia and Kieron Bryan of Britain, are freelance journalists who joined the crew to chronicle the ship's voyage, which began in Amsterdam and ended on Sept. 19 when Russian border guards borne by helicopters descended on the ship in the Pechora Sea.

Alexandra Harris of Britain, 27, was on her first trip to the Arctic. Camila Speziale, 21, of Argentina, was on her first trip at sea. Others were veteran Greenpeace activists, including the American captain, Peter Willcox, who was skipper of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 when French secret service agents bombed it at dockside in Auckland, New Zealand, leading to the drowning of a photographer, Fernando Pereira.

The activists knew the protest was risky. Two of them, Sini Saarela of Finland and Marco Weber of Switzerland, tried to scale the offshore oil platform in the Pechora Sea owned by Russia's state energy giant, Gazprom.

They plunged into the icy waters after guards sprayed water from fire hoses and fired warning shots, and they were plucked from the sea by a Russian coast guard ship and held as "guests." The next day, Sept. 19, however, the Arctic Sunrise was seized by border guards in international waters.

Greenpeace staged a similar but more successful protest in the summer of 2012. In that instance, activists, including Greenpeace's executive director, Kumi Naidoo, scaled the same platform and unfurled a banner. After several hours, they departed, and the Russian authorities did not pursue any charges.

The authorities have shown little sign of leniency since the ship's seizure, despite an international campaign by Greenpeace to draw attention to the prosecutions and even an appeal from Italy's oil giant Eni, a partner of Gazprom, to show clemency for the crew, which includes an Italian, Cristian D'Alessandro.

The prosecution of the Arctic Sunrise crew has punctuated Mr. Putin's warnings that he would not tolerate any infringement on Russia's development in the Arctic. The region has become a focus of political and economic strategy for the Kremlin as its natural resources have become more accessible because of the warming climate.

When the government of the Netherlands, where Greenpeace International is based, filed an appeal to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea to have the ship and crew released, Russia's Foreign Ministry said it would not recognize the tribunal's jurisdiction, citing the country's sovereignty. The tribunal has scheduled a hearing on the Dutch claim anyway, but unless Russia seeks a compromise that would free the prisoners, the crew could be detained for months awaiting trial.

Greenpeace's activists and their cause have not found much sympathy in Russia, their fate shaped in part by hostile coverage on state-owned or state-controlled television. The main state network, Channel One, recently broadcast an analysis that suggested that Greenpeace's protest had been orchestrated by powerful backers with economic incentives to undermine Gazprom.

After their formal arrest on Sept. 24, the crew members appeared one by one in court and were charged with piracy and ordered held at least until Nov. 24. One by one their appeals for bail were denied. Last week, the regional investigative committee reduced the charges to hooliganism, a crime that nonetheless carries a penalty of up to seven years in prison.

The committee raised the possibility of new charges against some crew members that could result in longer sentences upon conviction.

According to Greenpeace and relatives, the prisoners have not been mistreated in the detention center where they are now held, next to Murmansk's morgue. They have had access to lawyers and diplomats from their respective countries. They are allowed care packages delivered by Greenpeace, occasional phone calls and sporadic visits from those relatives who can make it to Murmansk. The captain and chief engineer were taken to visit and inspect the Arctic Sunrise, now moored in Murmansk's port.

Conditions, though, are grim.

In letters or phone calls to their families, they have described small, unheated cells, unappetizing meals and Russian cellmates who smoke relentlessly. They spend 23 hours a day in their cells, with only an hour of exercise a day in an enclosed courtyard and the periodic visits with lawyers or trips to court for a hearing. "It's very cold now," Ms. Harris, the activist from Britain on her first Greenpeace operation in the Arctic, wrote in a letter to her parents and brother that was widely cited in the British press: "It snowed last night. The blizzard blew my very poorly insulated window open and I had to sleep wearing my hat."

She went on to express a measure of resolve, saying she practiced yoga in her cell and tapped on the wall to the music piped in, but she also wrote of uncertainty in a confinement that she compared to slowly dying.

"I heard that from December Murmansk is dark for six weeks," she wrote. "God, I hope I'm out by then."

Reporting was contributed by Andrew Roth and Patrick Reevell from Moscow, Ceylan Yeginsu from Istanbul, and Joanna Berendt from Warsaw.

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Closing of Live Poultry Markets Is Called Effective in Flu Fight

Chance Chan/Reuters

Chinese doctors and nurses at a training course in April for the treatment of the H7N9 virus.

Shutting down live poultry markets is extremely effective in preventing human cases of avian flu and should be considered if the disease reappears this winter, researchers in China reported Wednesday.

But experts, including the authors, warned that shutting such markets permanently would be impractical because consumers in many countries demand live birds, and small farmers cannot afford refrigerated slaughterhouses and trucks.

Even temporary shutdowns create economic problems but should be considered, they said.

The study, published by The Lancet, concerned last spring's outbreak of H7N9 flu outbreak in southern China. The flu is still rare in humans — only 135 cases were confirmed before it disappeared in the summer, but 45 were fatal.

Two new human cases appeared in China this month, raising fears that it will surge this winter.

In four cities that responded in April by closing their live poultry markets — Shanghai, Hangzhou, Huzhou and Nanjing — human cases dropped almost immediately by 97 to 99 percent, the researchers said.

The flu first appeared in March. Most victims caught it from birds and only a few passed it on to family members or medical personnel, scientists believe.

The closed markets have all reopened, and the outbreak cost the economy an estimated $1.6 billion. It also upset the poultry industry, which is believed to have "substantial political connections," said Benjamin J. Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong medical school and an author of the study.

Other experts warned that during outbreaks of H5N1 avian flu — another rare but potentially lethal influenza that has circulated since 1997 — live markets in countries like Vietnam and Egypt simply ignored orders to close. China, by contrast, is very effective at enforcing public health measures when officials decide to act.

Even in cities where refrigeration is available, many markets sell live poultry "because people like to look at the bird's color, its age, to see if it looks healthy," said Dr. Juan Lubroth, chief veterinary officer of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Live poultry markets are often crowded and filthy; bird flu spreads in droppings, and chickens, ducks, geese and other birds often wander over floors covered with them.

Some poultry is sold live in virtually every city in the world, including New York. In poor countries, live sales are the norm because slaughtered birds spoil quickly without refrigeration.

In China, live markets "are more common than Walmart is in the U.S.," Dr. Cowling said, adding that food scandals have made consumers wary of chilled or frozen meat.

To prevent H5N1 outbreaks, some Asian cities have mandated "rest days" on which markets must be empty for 24 hours while they are cleaned and disinfected.

A study published last year of 54,000 samples of droppings collected in live bird markets over 12 years found that the presence of flu viruses on market floors could be reduced by 84 percent through several measures less punitive than full shutdowns: two monthly rest days, bans on leaving poultry in markets overnight and bans on selling quail.

Some markets require that all birds not sold by closing time must be slaughtered and disposed of. But unless sellers are compensated, they will evade those rules, said Dr. Guillaume Fournié, an epidemiologist at the Royal Veterinary College in England, who wrote a comment on The Lancet's study.

Work he did in Vietnam, Dr. Fournié said, suggested that identifying "hub" markets, cleaning them regularly and disinfecting trucks hauling birds between markets could interrupt disease transmission with fewer shutdowns.

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Of Fact, Fiction and Defibrillators

In a chilling episode of "Homeland" last year, a terrorist killed the vice president with a fiendishly clever weapon: a remote-control device that attacked the computerized defibrillator implanted in his chest.

For former Vice President Dick Cheney, it was all too realistic.

Mr. Cheney, who had heart disease for decades before receiving a transplant last year, had such an implant to regulate his heart rate and shock his heart back into life, if necessary. The defibrillator could be reprogrammed wirelessly from a short distance away. In 2007, he had the wireless feature disabled.

About the "Homeland" scenario, Mr. Cheney said on the Oct. 20 episode of "60 Minutes": "I found it credible. It was an accurate portrayal of what was possible."

But was it really? Medical experts say the answers are surprisingly complicated.

Mr. Cheney's cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reiner of George Washington University, said in the "60 Minutes" interview that he agreed with his patient.

An assassin "on a rope line or in a hotel room next door" could have instructed the defibrillator to kill Mr. Cheney, he said, adding that a wireless programmable device "seemed to me a bad idea for the vice president of the United States."

Other experts say the scenario is highly unlikely, though they couch their answers carefully.

The devices, used by millions of Americans, transmit data from a patient's home to a doctor's office, alerting the doctor of a malfunction. But the remote communication goes only one way; the devices being used today cannot be reprogrammed remotely.

Instead, patients must go to a doctor's office. With some devices, they must be within inches of the reprogramming machine. Other devices can be reprogrammed from about 30 feet away, but a wand must be held close to patients' collarbones to identify them to the machine.

"My opinion is it is probably unlikely that a remote attack of this nature could happen today," said Kevin Fu, a University of Michigan expert on computer security.

But he emphasized the word "probably," adding that he would never say something is impossible. "There can always be a flaw we are unaware of," he said.

In fact, a precedent for the "Homeland" episode was a 2008 paper by Dr. Fu and other security experts, who reported that they had managed to change the settings on an implantable defibrillator so it would release deadly electric shocks.

Of course, Dr. Fu noted, the experiment required almost a dozen people in a lab full of Ph.D.s. And the investigators had to be as close as two inches from the defibrillator to do their work.

Still, the experiment became known as a proof of principle. It originated a decade ago, when Dr. Fu noticed that the Food and Drug Administration had issued a recall for software on an implanted heart device. He began to wonder about software updates and the security of medical devices. So he started calling cardiologists, trying to get more information.

Many of the doctors hung up on him, Dr. Fu said, adding, "They thought I was crazy to worry about the security of a device in the chest."

Finally, he got together with a colleague, Tadayoshi Kohno, a computer security researcher at the University of Washington. The two investigators and their colleagues set to work seeing if they could breach the security of a defibrillator that had been removed from a patient's chest.

The defibrillator and the device used to program it communicated in their own language from a distance no greater than a few inches, Dr. Kohno said. The group figured out the language by turning various therapy commands on and off.

"We would intercept the communications," Dr. Kohno said. "Aha — this is the command that means 'turn on,' this is the command that means 'turn off.' " After they learned the communication language, "we could generate the commands ourselves."

At that time, "security was not on the radar yet for the medical device community," Dr. Fu said. "But there was a rapid trend toward wireless communication and Internet connectivity. We definitely raised awareness."

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Vision of Prairie Paradise Troubles Some Montana Ranchers

Anne Sherwood for The New York Times

The American Prairie Reserve is planning to create a grassland reserve in Montana where 10,000 bison may roam.

MALTA, Mont. — On fields where cattle graze and wheat grows, a group of conservationists and millionaire donors are stitching together their dreams of an American Serengeti. Acre by acre, they are trying to build a new kind of national park, buying up old ranches to create a grassland reserve where 10,000 bison roam and fences are few.

The privately financed project — now a decade in the making — has ambitions as big as the Montana sky, tapping private fortunes to preserve the country's open landscapes. Supporters see it as the last, best way to create wide-open public spaces in an era of budget cuts, government shutdowns and bitter battles between land developers and conservationists.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," said George E. Matelich, the chairman of the conservation group, American Prairie Reserve, and a managing director of a New York private equity firm. "It's a project for America."

The trouble is many ranching families here in northern Montana say it is not a project for them. As the reserve buys out families and expands its holdings — it now has about 274,000 acres of private ranches and leased public lands — some here are digging in their heels and vowing not to let their ranches become part of the project.

They say they know the transformative power of real estate out West: Western mining towns become ski havens, high mesas become ranch retreats for business moguls, and cultures inevitably change.

"We don't intend to sell," said Leo Barthelmess, 57, who was 8 when his family moved here and settled on a 25,000-acre sheep and cattle ranch. "We have children coming back. We're working on a succession plan. We want this landscape to carry on to the next generation."

Mr. Barthelmess and other ranchers say families like theirs have rebuilt the prairie, season by season, since the destruction wrought by the Dust Bowl. They work with conservation groups, rotate their herds to encourage a healthy mix of prairie grass and set aside ample room for sage grouse, plovers and herons. They are trying to till less ground, which can destroy an underground ecosystem. Some even allow small colonies of prairie dogs, which many farmers exterminate as pests.

"We've already saved this landscape," Mr. Barthelmess said.

As more of their neighbors sell, some ranchers say they worry that this corner of Phillips County, population 4,128, will sacrifice its identity. Two years ago, people here railed against the whiff of a federal proposal to create a new national monument along the Canadian border. A billboard along the gravel roads informs visitors that the county can produce enough cattle to feed more than two million people.

"These are our livelihoods, these are our businesses," said Perri Jacobs, whose husband's family has run their ranch since 1917. "This is an agriculturally based economy. That's about being able to fund our schools and our government and being able to support our businesses on Main Street."

Officials at the American Prairie Reserve say they have done everything possible to be good neighbors and have not foisted their vision on anyone. They have installed electric fences to ensure that their 275 bison do not roam onto other people's property. They allow hunting on the land. They lease back some of their land to allow ranchers to graze their cows.

They say they take an understated approach to buying land. They approach families after they have decided to sell, and sometimes negotiate arrangements that let ranchers live or work on their land for years after a sale goes through. Because the reserve project is nonprofit, officials say they can bid only fair-market value and do not artificially drive up property prices.

"It's a misnomer that we're paying top dollar," said Sean Gerrity, the president of the American Prairie Reserve. "There are some properties we're interested in, but they're currently priced at above market value and we can't go there."

Still, the financial profiles of the reserve's supporters have created a divide in a county where the average job pays about $25,400, according to Montana State University. The group has several current and retired fund managers and retail billionaires on its board, and counts heirs to the Mars candy fortune as supporters. It has raised a total of more than $63 million in donations and pledges.

Mr. Gerrity estimated it would take 15 to 20 more years to quilt together the patchwork of public and private lands that represent the group's vision of three million acres of preserved prairie. Right now, the group owns about 58,000 acres outright and has grazing leases on an additional 215,000 acres of federal land.

The reserve's goal is to revive a landscape that existed when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark passed through in the early 1800s. They have taken down 37 miles of fence. They have replanted some tilled ground with native grasses. They have pulled down barns and sheds and cleared away heaps of trash. Their bison saunter across dirt roads.

"The idea is to open this place back up," said Dick Dolan, who oversees acquisitions and finances for the reserve. "The vision is to have an ecosystem functioning as naturally as possible."

A public campground has been open for two years, and the reserve has also put the finishing touches on a camp of high-end yurts, complete with hot showers and air-conditioning. Some in the area have grumbled that sleeping in a climate-controlled yurt and eating chef-prepared meals hardly qualifies as roughing it.

But what binds the ranching families and their new neighbors is a fierce love of the land. One evening, just before sunset, Mr. Dolan stood astride a bluff overlooking undulating stretches of sagebrush and prairie grass. The Little Rocky Mountains lay to his left. The Missouri River ran behind him. In the riverbeds below, the leaves of cottonwoods and box elders were burning yellow. He spread his arms wide.

"It makes you feel like you're in the middle of the ocean," he said. "It's a big, big place. It's such a beautiful landscape."

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‘Octonauts’ Series Adds Federal Partner in Ocean Awareness

Silvergate Media

A scene from "Octonauts," the animated pre-school-age television series about the ocean.

"Octonauts," the animated preschool series about a crew of eight undersea adventurers whose motto is "explore, rescue and protect," is getting a seal of approval of sorts from a unit of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The federal agency's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research and the "Octonauts" producer, Silvergate Media, have signed a letter of intent to develop a formal partnership to raise awareness of ocean exploration and science and advance NOAA's mission. The partnership, to be announced Monday and expected to be completed early next year, includes plans for events at NOAA-owned aquariums nationwide, joint development of educational materials and collaboration on new products like games, toys and mobile apps.

NOAA is already supplying images and sounds from its archives for an Octonauts game to be released next year by the toy company LeapFrog, said Kurt Mueller, the creator and executive producer of the "Octonauts" television show. The show is based on the books of the same name by Vicki Wong and Michael Murphy, who write under the name Meomi. In the United States, "Octonauts" is broadcast weekday mornings on Disney Channel's Disney Junior block.

The unusual agreement, which has no financial component, comes as a fellow agency, NASA, has also begun a less-extensive collaboration with a planned animated preschool series. The space agency is reviewing all the scripts for "Space Racers," a show about five adventurous spaceships that battle solar storms and visit far-flung space objects, which will be distributed to public television stations in the spring by American Public Television.

Among the changes already requested by Jeffrey Hayes, a discipline scientist at NASA, was the substitution of "hypothesis" for "theory" in an episode; the scientists also suggested the show emphasize "scientific inquiry," said Richard Schweiger, the show's creator and executive producer.

NASA has also provided experts for short live-action components in the program, which are being filmed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, among other places. "This is a real opportunity for NASA to get in early with young minds," said Ruth Netting, communications and public engagement director at NASA. Other than a series of videos with Elmo of "Sesame Street," NASA has not previously worked at the preschool level.

Little formal research has been done to examine what science concepts very young children can learn from television, but science-based preschool shows like "Sid the Science Guy" have proliferated in recent years and "Sesame Street" has also made it a focus.

NOAA, which initially contacted the "Octonauts" producers 18 months ago, is trying to encourage future oceanographers but also wants to raise its profile among the broader public. Through "Octonauts," "We find we're reaching their parents just about as effectively as we are reaching 3- to 5-year-olds," said David McKinnie, a senior adviser in NOAA's Ocean Exploration and Research office.

At a July event at NOAA's Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Calif., Stephen R. Hammond, a NOAA senior scientist, answered children's questions about the Mariana Trench after a screening of an "Octonauts" episode about the ocean's deepest location. "It's not a silly children's show," he said, praising its basis in real science.

Mr. Mueller said "Octonauts" already consulted marine biologists to make sure its content was accurate even before NOAA's involvement. But by adding such elements as a NOAA recording of the 52-hertz whale, "we're able to deepen the science within the body of the show," he said, and the joint events are "extending that learning beyond the screen." The NOAA collaboration, he added, "lends the show the rubber stamp of legitimacy."

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Museum Explores ‘The Power of Poison’

IN an office of the American Museum of Natural History, a team of scientists, artists and multimedia experts were discussing what had poisoned Skippy, a cute Jack Russell terrier that had keeled over sick in his virtual backyard. Was it the chocolate he found in the garbage can? Did a snake, or a black widow spider, bite him? Or was a poisonous cane toad to blame?

Skippy is just one of many victims in the museum's show, "The Power of Poison," opening Nov. 16, to which the staff was busy applying finishing touches. Using iPads, visitors can examine the circumstances surrounding Skippy's fictional poisoning and, controlling their experience individually, take a crack at solving the mystery.

But because the museum is popular with small children, Skippy does not die. Instead, his animated eyes turn into Xs, he runs erratically around the yard, he drools and he vomits a bit. Eventually, though, Skippy rallies to full health.

"We were not going to make this a scary show," said the exhibit's curator, Dr. Mark Siddall. "Instead you walk out saying, 'Wow. That was cool.' "

Dr. Siddall spent two hours enthusiastically discussing poison and its properties at the museum recently, walking through some of the show's highlights. The exhibit, which takes a look at poison's role in nature, myth, medicine and human history, examines killer caterpillars, zombie ants and deadly vipers. It also looks at the possible victims, like the heavily slumbering Snow White. Plus the age-old question of what killed Cleopatra. Was it an asp, or something else? And while we're at it, was Napoleon really poisoned with arsenic?

To keep things lively, there will be a Detecting Poison theater, featuring a live presenter, film clips and Monty Python-like animation, in which the audience helps track a true poisoning case involving a household outside London that fell ill in 1833. The father, George Bodle, died and the case was eventually brought to trial.

Not much was known about detecting poisons at the time, so murderers frequently used them, since symptoms often look much like those of many common diseases. Because of the Bodle case, tests were developed to detect poison in the body, leading to great strides in toxicology and forensics.

Museumgoers will visit a recreation of a 19th-century laboratory to try to solve the Bodle case, using props in the room and the clues on hand. They will then learn about the trial, its outcome and the scientific discoveries that followed.

"The 1800s were an amazing century when scientists mapped the periodic table, developed the first books on poison and learned how to treat them," said Lauri Halderman, senior director of exhibition interpretation for the museum. "This case and what grew out of it helped change the social epidemic of poisoning."

Arsenic, for instance, was so successful as a murder tool that it was known as "inheritance powder" in France — poudre de succession. If an old, rich uncle was taking too long to die of natural causes, arsenic was the poison of choice, said Ms. Halderman.

"The Power of Poison" not only focuses on foul play, but also looks at toxins in the natural world. In the introductory gallery, visitors will learn that poison is ubiquitous, found in everything from mango skins to butterfly wings. Foods like cinnamon, coffee and chili peppers get their strong taste and smell from chemicals that ward off animals and can be toxic if ingested in large doses.

Museum artists were busy building trees that will make up a miniature Chocó rain forest, a veritable land mine of poisonous plants and animals. Because the museum is science-based, poisonous animals from different parts of the world were not gathered in a fictional forest. The forest the artists have created is ecologically correct, with only animals that would share that particular Colombian ecosystem. There are models of yellow pit vipers, wandering spiders and grackles, birds that grab poisonous ants in their beaks and rub them on their own wings to help defend themselves against parasites, like lice and mites. Live golden poison frogs, which are ounce for ounce the most toxic animal on the planet, will also be on display, as will live poisonous anemones in an aquarium.

Final touches were also being placed on the three witches from Macbeth, life-size figures whose potion will be examined in the Myths and Legends part of the exhibit. A large book of potions, 4-by-2 1/2 feet, which the staff has unofficially named "the enchanted book," uses touch technology, electronically read by sensors hidden inside the pages.

The interactive book, which the creators were trying to make look like one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, has scribbled annotations and hand-drawn illustrations, but comes to life as the reader turns the giant pages and touches the drawings. The eight pages include stories from mythology and examples of the use of the four poisonous plants featured: monk's hood (also known as wolf's bane), rhododendron, conium (a k a hemlock) and belladonna.

"Do you know why it was called belladonna?" asked Dr. Siddall. Because, he explained, it was once dripped into the eyes of women to make their pupils dilate and make them more attractive.

Another innovative display includes Greek urns upon which mythological stories will be projected, including the myth of Hercules and the Hydra. What starts as a simple Greek vase painting suddenly comes to animated life. After Hercules successfully kills the Hydra by cutting off its heads and burning the wounds so more heads won't grow back, he dips his arrows into its poison blood to make his weapon more deadly. Hence, the Greek word "toxikon" which means "poison arrow" — the root for the word toxin.

To illustrate how poisons have been used over the years to treat medical conditions, a giant yew tree as high as the ceiling was being built for the exhibit. Yew trees, native to England, are so toxic that eating a handful of needles can be deadly. But a compound discovered in its bark is currently used in chemotherapy treatment for cancer patients. Dr. Siddall said that the healing properties of the yew actually come from a fungus that lives inside the tree, which scientists are now growing in laboratories.

On the literary end, there will be references to Harry Potter and Arthur Conan Doyle. A life-size Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland will be on hand to illustrate the term, "mad as a hatter." The saying dates back to the 19th century, when mercury was used in the millinery business. Workers exposed to mercury would experience anxiety, memory loss and trembling — known as hatters' shakes.

There's also a life-size, laid-out Capt. James Cook, who, with some of his crew members, was accidentally poisoned while on an exploration of the South Pacific in the 1700s.

And of course, there's Snow White.

"Do you think it's possible to poison someone with an apple?" Dr. Siddall asked. "What if they ask you to take a bite first?" Cutting the apple with a knife that has poison on only one side, he said excitedly, might just do the trick.

"The Power of Poison" will run to Aug. 10.

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Applied Science: Maybe Heaven Can Wait, but a Customer Can’t

"Patience is a virtue," we are taught. And when you think about it, much of our life is spent waiting for something rather than experiencing it, so that waiting becomes an experience in itself, filled with anticipation, annoyance, boredom or fear.

Waiting is a ripe subject for business researchers, it turns out. One effect of waiting is that people place more value on what they are waiting for, says Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago. "If you give people exactly what they want at the moment they want it, they might want it less," she says.

In one study she helped conduct, two groups of people were given a choice between waiting six days to get a box of Godiva chocolates and waiting 48 days for a bigger box. One group was asked questions meant to accentuate the idea of waiting, like "When was the last time you ate a Godiva chocolate?" Those who were primed to be more conscious of waiting were more likely to delay gratification and choose the bigger box.

If companies can find ways to artificially introduce waiting into the buying process — building excitement without giving the impression of bad service — customers may spend more, Professor Fishbach says. Apple is a master at this, she says, providing details of models before products are available.

Of course, many companies unintentionally do the opposite: they antagonize customers seeking help by forcing them to wait — whether in physical lines, on the phone or online. This leads to ill will and lost sales across many industries.

One researcher has studied this phenomenon in an area that can mean the difference between life and death: hospital emergency rooms.

Hospitals keep track of a category of patient known as "left without being seen," a high number of which is a bad sign. To help keep that number low, Christian Terwiesch, a professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, studied how emergency rooms might improve their admissions processes.

In E.R.'s, people are seen based on the severity of their medical condition. If you are otherwise going to die in the next half-hour, you get to jump to the front of the line. But fellow patients may not realize this, and seeing someone who only just arrived go first can upset people's sense of fairness. Some may leave the waiting room because they feel cheated, Professor Terwiesch says.

Typically, hospitals don't tell patients how long they may have to wait, and patients waiting in the E.R. have no idea when they will be called: "Every time the door opens, your adrenaline goes up."

He found that people in E.R.'s are constantly seeking visual clues as to who might be treated next. But these clues can mislead. At peak hours, an E.R. at full capacity may be able to handle 10 people quickly, yet it may not initially look that way to the 10th person in the waiting room.

Professor Terwiesch recommends that hospitals create multiple waiting rooms so that patients don't try to monitor one another this way. He also says that more hospitals should share waiting-time estimates with patients — something that is relevant across a broad range of industries: if customers know the probable wait time, their uncertainty and anxiety are reduced, along with the likelihood that they will leave the line.

Or, if they are on a call-center phone line and the automated voice says the wait will be 45 minutes, they may choose to hang up and do something better with their time. After all, so long as you're not on the brink of death in the E.R., deciding to stop waiting can be a virtue all its own.

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Vision of Prairie Paradise Troubles Some Montana Ranchers

Anne Sherwood for The New York Times

The American Prairie Reserve is planning to create a grassland reserve in Montana where 10,000 bison may roam.

MALTA, Mont. — On fields where cattle graze and wheat grows, a group of conservationists and millionaire donors are stitching together their dreams of an American Serengeti. Acre by acre, they are trying to build a new kind of national park, buying up old ranches to create a grassland reserve where 10,000 bison roam and fences are few.

The privately financed project — now a decade in the making — has ambitions as big as the Montana sky, tapping private fortunes to preserve the country's open landscapes. Supporters see it as the last, best way to create wide-open public spaces in an era of budget cuts, government shutdowns and bitter battles between land developers and conservationists.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," said George E. Matelich, the chairman of the conservation group, American Prairie Reserve, and a managing director of a New York private equity firm. "It's a project for America."

The trouble is many ranching families here in northern Montana say it is not a project for them. As the reserve buys out families and expands its holdings — it now has about 274,000 acres of private ranches and leased public lands — some here are digging in their heels and vowing not to let their ranches become part of the project.

They say they know the transformative power of real estate out West: Western mining towns become ski havens, high mesas become ranch retreats for business moguls, and cultures inevitably change.

"We don't intend to sell," said Leo Barthelmess, 57, who was 8 when his family moved here and settled on a 25,000-acre sheep and cattle ranch. "We have children coming back. We're working on a succession plan. We want this landscape to carry on to the next generation."

Mr. Barthelmess and other ranchers say families like theirs have rebuilt the prairie, season by season, since the destruction wrought by the Dust Bowl. They work with conservation groups, rotate their herds to encourage a healthy mix of prairie grass and set aside ample room for sage grouse, plovers and herons. They are trying to till less ground, which can destroy an underground ecosystem. Some even allow small colonies of prairie dogs, which many farmers exterminate as pests.

"We've already saved this landscape," Mr. Barthelmess said.

As more of their neighbors sell, some ranchers say they worry that this corner of Phillips County, population 4,128, will sacrifice its identity. Two years ago, people here railed against the whiff of a federal proposal to create a new national monument along the Canadian border. A billboard along the gravel roads informs visitors that the county can produce enough cattle to feed more than two million people.

"These are our livelihoods, these are our businesses," said Perri Jacobs, whose husband's family has run their ranch since 1917. "This is an agriculturally based economy. That's about being able to fund our schools and our government and being able to support our businesses on Main Street."

Officials at the American Prairie Reserve say they have done everything possible to be good neighbors and have not foisted their vision on anyone. They have installed electric fences to ensure that their 275 bison do not roam onto other people's property. They allow hunting on the land. They lease back some of their land to allow ranchers to graze their cows.

They say they take an understated approach to buying land. They approach families after they have decided to sell, and sometimes negotiate arrangements that let ranchers live or work on their land for years after a sale goes through. Because the reserve project is nonprofit, officials say they can bid only fair-market value and do not artificially drive up property prices.

"It's a misnomer that we're paying top dollar," said Sean Gerrity, the president of the American Prairie Reserve. "There are some properties we're interested in, but they're currently priced at above market value and we can't go there."

Still, the financial profiles of the reserve's supporters have created a divide in a county where the average job pays about $25,400, according to Montana State University. The group has several current and retired fund managers and retail billionaires on its board, and counts heirs to the Mars candy fortune as supporters. It has raised a total of more than $63 million in donations and pledges.

Mr. Gerrity estimated it would take 15 to 20 more years to quilt together the patchwork of public and private lands that represent the group's vision of three million acres of preserved prairie. Right now, the group owns about 58,000 acres outright and has grazing leases on an additional 215,000 acres of federal land.

The reserve's goal is to revive a landscape that existed when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark passed through in the early 1800s. They have taken down 37 miles of fence. They have replanted some tilled ground with native grasses. They have pulled down barns and sheds and cleared away heaps of trash. Their bison saunter across dirt roads.

"The idea is to open this place back up," said Dick Dolan, who oversees acquisitions and finances for the reserve. "The vision is to have an ecosystem functioning as naturally as possible."

A public campground has been open for two years, and the reserve has also put the finishing touches on a camp of high-end yurts, complete with hot showers and air-conditioning. Some in the area have grumbled that sleeping in a climate-controlled yurt and eating chef-prepared meals hardly qualifies as roughing it.

But what binds the ranching families and their new neighbors is a fierce love of the land. One evening, just before sunset, Mr. Dolan stood astride a bluff overlooking undulating stretches of sagebrush and prairie grass. The Little Rocky Mountains lay to his left. The Missouri River ran behind him. In the riverbeds below, the leaves of cottonwoods and box elders were burning yellow. He spread his arms wide.

"It makes you feel like you're in the middle of the ocean," he said. "It's a big, big place. It's such a beautiful landscape."

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Dot Earth Blog: Updates on America’s Persistent Air and Water Pollution Challenges

Air and water problems mainly make headlines these days when extraordinary pulses of pollution surge in places like Beijing and Shanghai. But there are still enormous, if largely hidden, health and environmental costs in many parts of the United States that have failed to meet the goals set decades ago under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act (e.g., see Muller, Mendelsohn, Nordhaus, 2011). Sometimes the issue is visible. I visited Houston briefly this week and snapped the photo above on the airport approach. Not pretty.

Read on for excerpts from two relevant articles. The first, from the Allegheny Front, explores how lessons learned in trying to cut pollution from natural gas facilities in Houston can be applied in Pennsylvania's fracking zone. The second, by my Pace University colleague and longtime water analyst John Cronin, digs in on the gap between Environmental Protection Agency statements on water pollution and the results in America's waterways.

Here's "Houston Air Pollution: Preview for Pennsylvania?" It's the second article in a planned four-part series, "The Coming Chemical Boom," that was in part paid for by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

HOUSTON ­­– The largest chemical hub in the Americas courses through this city in a seemingly unending line of plants that produce about a quarter of the country's petrochemicals.

These plants have helped fuel the city's economic rise. But they also have added to its poor air quality, with emissions that have been linked to asthma, cancer, and heart attacks.

In recent years, Houston has found ways to reduce air pollution, in part by zeroing in on chemical plant emissions. Experts say Houston's experience may show others how to keep chemical emissions down, even as the industry expands along the Gulf Coast, and possibly into Pennsylvania. [Read the rest here.]

[There's a valuable update below related to Pennsylvania's air pollution issues.]

Here's a short excerpt from "Has E.P.A. Given U.p on Clean Water?" — John Cronin's Earth Desk critique of the federal government's water plan:

Most revealing about the national water strategy announced by recently appointed E.P.A. Administrator Gina McCarthy is its contrast with her "reputation as a straight shooter," the defining quality President Obama praised at her nomination.

E.P.A.'s Themes – Meeting the Challenge Ahead, published on the agency website, offers small hope she will reverse the failed water policies of previous administrations or cure the pervasive contamination that has threatened the nation's human and ecological health for decades….

Administrator McCarthy's plan is timid, its voice feeble. Soft vocabulary such as, "focus," "paradigm," "coordinate," "reduce uncertainty" and "locally driven" are red flags that a meaningful national plan for clean water is not likely during the remaining years of Barack Obama's presidency.

For example, where are the policy proposals for:

• A major research and development program to innovate treatment and monitoring technologies and management practices.
• Economic incentives to induce polluters to perform beyond the minimum requirements of the law.
• The addition of public health objectives to the Clean Water Act.
• Priority emphasis on polluted waterways in economically disadvantaged communities.
• New target dates for achieving fishable, swimmable waters, and eliminating the discharge of pollutants.
• Massive public funding for upgrading, not just repairing, the nation's water and wastewater treatment and delivery infrastructure.
• Development of real-time monitoring technologies that protect water consumers and recreational users in real-time.
• Increased enforcement
• Aggressive oversight of states where discharge permit standards are no longer being improved.
• Mandatory monitoring for emerging pollutants, such as pharmaceuticals, hormones and synthetic musks.
• A national crackdown on "outlier" polluters such as CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations], fish-killing power plants, and industries that discharge toxins through public wastewater treatment facilities.
• A National Clean Water Commission of blue-ribbon experts in law, engineering, sciences, health, technology, finance and economics to recommend new national goals to replace the tired and expired goals of current federal water laws, and a policy and business plan to implement them.

Admittedly, President Obama and Administrator McCarthy should not bear the full burden of blame when much of what needs fixing requires amendment of four-decade old laws that were not written with the 21st century in mind. Where are the House and Senate when the major objectives of our two most important environmental statutes fail year after year? If they are aimlessly embattled and hopelessly paralyzed, where then is the voice of the straight shooter the president promised?

Administrator McCarthy, it is not too late for you to lead the conversation. The nation's water laws are badly in need of overhaul. Say so. [Read the rest here.]

Postscript, 12:55 p.m. | When I asked on Twitter whether Pennsylvania can learn from Houston's issues and responses, John Quigley, the former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, responded with two valuable links:

@Revkin Not unless PA's approach to regulation changes: http://t.co/tBvYTQPmZJ and http://t.co/oeNJ2lgQRn

— John Quigley (@JohnHQuigley) 25 Oct 13

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Gray Matter: Scent and the City

SUFFERING from writer's block? Try sniffing rotting apples.

This seemed to work for the 18th-century poet Friedrich Schiller, who kept the decaying fruit in his study because he felt the scent stimulated creativity. Though Goethe thought this a little nutty, a couple of hundred years later the University of Arizona psychologist Gary Schwartz found that Schiller might have been on to something. The scent of spiced apples, Prof. Schwartz discovered, significantly lowered the blood pressure of test subjects.

The therapeutic properties of scent have been cultivated since antiquity. They were a particular fascination of medieval monks in their cloistered gardens. Now modern science is revealing the wisdom of ancient practices.

In 2009, medical researchers at Tottori University in Japan found that exposing Alzheimer's patients to rosemary and lemon in the morning and lavender and orange in the evening resulted in improved cognitive functions. A 2006 study by researchers at the New York University Medical Center discovered that postoperative patients exposed to the smell of lavender reported a higher satisfaction rate with pain control. And a 2007 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology reported that cancer patients who received massage with aromatic oils experienced a significant improvement in anxiety and depression.

By contrast, last year researchers at the University of Dresden Medical School in Germany found that people without a sense of smell — anosmics, they're called — generally were more socially insecure and had a higher risk of depression.

While these findings have obvious implications for health care, the opportunities for architecture and urban planning are particularly intriguing. Designers are trained to focus mostly on the visual, but the science of design could significantly expand designers' sensory palette. Call it medicinal urbanism.

Fragrant herbs and flowers are already becoming common in healing gardens — for example, the jasmine bushes planted outside the windows of the Laguna Honda hospital and rehabilitation center in San Francisco. The aroma of basil, thyme, mint, lilac and lavender can be extraordinarily beneficial, relieving stress, headaches and inflammation and improving sleep, digestion and blood circulation.

While New York isn't exactly known for its pleasant odors, the High Line elevated park is covered with over 300 species of plants, many of which have distinctly pleasing scents. At a certain time of year, the brilliant purple asters known as Raydon's Favorite fill the air with a minty perfume — nature's air freshener.

According to a 2005 study by Dutch researchers, people tidy up more when there's a hint of citrus in the air. Imagine public places filled with aromatic blossoming trees and flowers, discouraging people from littering. A fragrant city is a clean city.

We associate so many places with their aromatic landscapes — the eucalyptus groves of Northern California, for example — and whole cities can be defined by their scent. Streetscapes fill with the aroma of roasting coffee spilling from Seattle's cafes, or the bouquet of fruit and flowers at Amsterdam's markets, or the sugar and cinnamon wafting out of Viennese pastry shops. The Spanish city of San Sebastián, set in a deep cove ringed by cliffs, is one of the most visually arresting places I know, but its most unforgettable feature has to be the distinctive scent of sea and sand lingering on the old fishing village at its heart. Tourists follow their noses.

Or run away from them. Earlier this year, the beach community of La Jolla, Calif., made national news during its battle with the increasingly putrid smell of bird droppings. While the foul odor was turning away tourists, biologists called it the smell of success, since environmental protections were luring endangered fowl back to the area. In New Zealand, natural emissions of hydrogen sulfide blanket the city of Rotorua with the stench of rotten eggs, earning it the nickname Sulfur City. Locals suffer from asthma and other respiratory ailments at a far greater rate than do people in neighboring regions.

That the scent of a city should have a potent impact shouldn't surprise us. Scent has a direct link to the brain, acting on the limbic system, triggering the release of endorphins. Smell is the most primal of our senses.

This powerful source of pleasure could spawn a whole new field of design.

Lance Hosey, the chief sustainability officer of the architecture and design firm RTKL, is the author of "The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design."

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Museum Explores ‘The Power of Poison’

IN an office of the American Museum of Natural History, a team of scientists, artists and multimedia experts were discussing what had poisoned Skippy, a cute Jack Russell terrier that had keeled over sick in his virtual backyard. Was it the chocolate he found in the garbage can? Did a snake, or a black widow spider, bite him? Or was a poisonous cane toad to blame?

Skippy is just one of many victims in the museum's show, "The Power of Poison," opening Nov. 16, to which the staff was busy applying finishing touches. Using iPads, visitors can examine the circumstances surrounding Skippy's fictional poisoning and, controlling their experience individually, take a crack at solving the mystery.

But because the museum is popular with small children, Skippy does not die. Instead, his animated eyes turn into Xs, he runs erratically around the yard, he drools and he vomits a bit. Eventually, though, Skippy rallies to full health.

"We were not going to make this a scary show," said the exhibit's curator, Dr. Mark Siddall. "Instead you walk out saying, 'Wow. That was cool.' "

Dr. Siddall spent two hours enthusiastically discussing poison and its properties at the museum recently, walking through some of the show's highlights. The exhibit, which takes a look at poison's role in nature, myth, medicine and human history, examines killer caterpillars, zombie ants and deadly vipers. It also looks at the possible victims, like the heavily slumbering Snow White. Plus the age-old question of what killed Cleopatra. Was it an asp, or something else? And while we're at it, was Napoleon really poisoned with arsenic?

To keep things lively, there will be a Detecting Poison theater, featuring a live presenter, film clips and Monty Python-like animation, in which the audience helps track a true poisoning case involving a household outside London that fell ill in 1833. The father, George Bodle, died and the case was eventually brought to trial.

Not much was known about detecting poisons at the time, so murderers frequently used them, since symptoms often look much like those of many common diseases. Because of the Bodle case, tests were developed to detect poison in the body, leading to great strides in toxicology and forensics.

Museumgoers will visit a recreation of a 19th-century laboratory to try to solve the Bodle case, using props in the room and the clues on hand. They will then learn about the trial, its outcome and the scientific discoveries that followed.

"The 1800s were an amazing century when scientists mapped the periodic table, developed the first books on poison and learned how to treat them," said Lauri Halderman, senior director of exhibition interpretation for the museum. "This case and what grew out of it helped change the social epidemic of poisoning."

Arsenic, for instance, was so successful as a murder tool that it was known as "inheritance powder" in France — poudre de succession. If an old, rich uncle was taking too long to die of natural causes, arsenic was the poison of choice, said Ms. Halderman.

"The Power of Poison" not only focuses on foul play, but also looks at toxins in the natural world. In the introductory gallery, visitors will learn that poison is ubiquitous, found in everything from mango skins to butterfly wings. Foods like cinnamon, coffee and chili peppers get their strong taste and smell from chemicals that ward off animals and can be toxic if ingested in large doses.

Museum artists were busy building trees that will make up a miniature Chocó rain forest, a veritable land mine of poisonous plants and animals. Because the museum is science-based, poisonous animals from different parts of the world were not gathered in a fictional forest. The forest the artists have created is ecologically correct, with only animals that would share that particular Colombian ecosystem. There are models of yellow pit vipers, wandering spiders and grackles, birds that grab poisonous ants in their beaks and rub them on their own wings to help defend themselves against parasites, like lice and mites. Live golden poison frogs, which are ounce for ounce the most toxic animal on the planet, will also be on display, as will live poisonous anemones in an aquarium.

Final touches were also being placed on the three witches from Macbeth, life-size figures whose potion will be examined in the Myths and Legends part of the exhibit. A large book of potions, 4-by-2 1/2 feet, which the staff has unofficially named "the enchanted book," uses touch technology, electronically read by sensors hidden inside the pages.

The interactive book, which the creators were trying to make look like one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, has scribbled annotations and hand-drawn illustrations, but comes to life as the reader turns the giant pages and touches the drawings. The eight pages include stories from mythology and examples of the use of the four poisonous plants featured: monk's hood (also known as wolf's bane), rhododendron, conium (a k a hemlock) and belladonna.

"Do you know why it was called belladonna?" asked Dr. Siddall. Because, he explained, it was once dripped into the eyes of women to make their pupils dilate and make them more attractive.

Another innovative display includes Greek urns upon which mythological stories will be projected, including the myth of Hercules and the Hydra. What starts as a simple Greek vase painting suddenly comes to animated life. After Hercules successfully kills the Hydra by cutting off its heads and burning the wounds so more heads won't grow back, he dips his arrows into its poison blood to make his weapon more deadly. Hence, the Greek word "toxikon" which means "poison arrow" — the root for the word toxin.

To illustrate how poisons have been used over the years to treat medical conditions, a giant yew tree as high as the ceiling was being built for the exhibit. Yew trees, native to England, are so toxic that eating a handful of needles can be deadly. But a compound discovered in its bark is currently used in chemotherapy treatment for cancer patients. Dr. Siddall said that the healing properties of the yew actually come from a fungus that lives inside the tree, which scientists are now growing in laboratories.

On the literary end, there will be references to Harry Potter and Arthur Conan Doyle. A life-size Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland will be on hand to illustrate the term, "mad as a hatter." The saying dates back to the 19th century, when mercury was used in the millinery business. Workers exposed to mercury would experience anxiety, memory loss and trembling — known as hatters' shakes.

There's also a life-size, laid-out Capt. James Cook, who, with some of his crew members, was accidentally poisoned while on an exploration of the South Pacific in the 1700s.

And of course, there's Snow White.

"Do you think it's possible to poison someone with an apple?" Dr. Siddall asked. "What if they ask you to take a bite first?" Cutting the apple with a knife that has poison on only one side, he said excitedly, might just do the trick.

"The Power of Poison" will run to Aug. 10.

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Agency Initiative Will Focus on Advancing Deep Brain Stimulation

Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Obama in April after announcing his administration's initiative intended to promote innovative basic neuroscience.

Worldwide, 100,000 people have electrical implants in their brains to treat the involuntary movements associated with Parkinson's disease, and scientists are experimenting with the technique for depression and other disorders.

But today's so-called deep brain stimulation only treats — it does not monitor its own effectiveness, partly because complex ailments like depression do not have defined biological signatures.

The federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, announced Thursday that it intended to spend more than $70 million over five years to jump to the next level of brain implants, either by improving deep brain stimulation or by developing new technology.

Justin Sanchez, Darpa program manager, said that for scientists now, "there is no technology that can acquire signals that can tell them precisely what is going on with the brain."

And so, he said, Darpa is "trying to change the game on how we approach these kinds of problems."

The new program, called Systems-Based Neurotechnology and Understanding for the Treatment of Neuropsychological Illnesses, is part of an Obama administration brain initiative, announced earlier this year, intended to promote innovative basic neuroscience. Participants in the initiative include Darpa, as well as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

The announcement of Darpa's goal is the first indication of how that research agency will participate in the initiative. The money is expected to be divided among different teams, and research proposals are now being sought.

Darpa's project is partly inspired by the needs of combat veterans who suffer from mental and physical conditions, and is the first to invest directly in researching human illness as part of the brain initiative.

The National Institutes of Health, which has not decided on its emphasis, appears to be aiming for basic research, based on the recommendations from a working committee advising the agency.

Dr. Helen Mayberg, a neuroscientist at Emory University School of Medicine who has pioneered work on deep brain stimulation and depression, said, "Darpa's initiative says in no uncertain terms that we want to concentrate on human beings." She said she was particularly pleased with the emphasis on deep brain stimulation: "This adds to a growing recognition that this approach to brain disease is a promising strategy."

Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University, one of the leaders of the health institutes committee dealing with the direction of that agency's work under the brain initiative, also applauded the direction of the Darpa research.

"It plays to their strength in brain recordings and devices, and it addresses psychiatric issues that are major concerns for the military," she said.

Darpa's goal would require solving several longstanding problems in neuroscience, one of which is to develop a detailed model of how injuries or illnesses like depression manifest themselves in the systems of the brain.

The next step is to create a device that can monitor the signs of illness or injury in real time, treat them appropriately and measure the effects of the treatment. The result would be something like a highly sophisticated pacemaker for a brain disorder.

Darpa is asking for research teams to produce a device ready to be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for approval within five years.

"Is it overambitious? Of course," said Dr. Mayberg, adding that working with the brain is "a slow process." But she said that it was an impressive first investment and that the clear emphasis on human illness was "stunning."

Whether or not the specified goal is fully achieved, Dr. Sanchez said, "We're going to learn a tremendous amount about how the brain works." And, he added, "we're going to be developing new medical devices."

The testing of any such devices would involve both animals and human subjects, and Dr. Sanchez said Darpa had set up an ethics panel for the new program and other Darpa neuroscience work. A presidential bioethics commission also oversees all aspects of the brain initiative.

The Obama administration is budgeting $100 million for the first year of the brain initiative. A committee of the health institutes produced a draft report in September that indicated the agency would concentrate its $40 million share on systems or networks in the brain, not individual cells and not the whole brain.

Darpa is allocated $50 million this year under President Obama's brain initiative. The agency would not specify precisely how much it would spend in the first year, and all the numbers are dependent on the final federal budget.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 24, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the day of Darpa's announcement. As the article correctly noted, it was Thursday, not Tuesday.

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Koch Brother Wages 12-Year Fight Over Wind Farm

Stephen Rose

"I've had the Turkish mafia after me, so bring it on, baby." WILLIAM I. KOCH, who has fought a proposed wind farm for more than a decade, on environmental groups' threats

OSTERVILLE, Mass. — If the vast wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound is ever built, William I. Koch will have a spectacular view of it.

Of course, that is the last thing he wants. Mr. Koch, a billionaire industrialist who made his fortune in fossil fuels and whose better-known brothers underwrite conservative political causes, has been fighting the wind farm, called Cape Wind, for more than a decade, donating about $5 million and leading an adversarial group against it. He believes that Cape Wind's 130 industrial turbines would not only create what he calls "visual pollution" but also increase the cost of electricity for everyone.

Now, as if placing a bet on the outcome of the battle, Mr. Koch, 73, who has owned an exclusive summer compound here for years, has acquired an even grander one — Rachel Mellon's 26-acre waterfront estate in the gated community of Oyster Harbors, for $19.5 million. He has also bought the nearby 12-plus-acre Dupont estate. All of this adds up to a prime perch over Nantucket Sound.

"I love the area," Mr. Koch said in an e-mail. "The ability to acquire a special property where I can create a family compound for my children and extended family was and is very meaningful to me." (His current home, in the same gated community, is on the market for $15 million.)

At one time, Cape Wind — which would produce 75 percent of the power for Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket — was expected to be the first offshore wind farm in the country, and supporters hoped it would serve as a catalyst for other offshore wind projects like those that ring Europe. But after more than a dozen years, the $2.6 billion proposal remains on the drawing board, thanks in large part to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, of which Mr. Koch is chairman.

Still, Jim Gordon, Cape Wind's developer, who has spent $70 million of his own money on the project since 2001, vows that it will go forward. He said that he would qualify for certain federal tax credits by the end of the year and that the necessary financing would be in place, but he declined to disclose details, saying he did not want to give Mr. Koch a "road map" of his plans.

"This is a very sophisticated adversary," Mr. Gordon said. "Koch has already spent a decade trying to push us off the path toward a better energy future."

The two men have circled each other for a decade in an escalating test of wills. Mr. Gordon has tried unsuccessfully to enlist Mr. Koch, who once financed green energy plants, in his cause; Mr. Koch has successfully delayed Cape Wind for years by tying it up in court. A few lawsuits, some of them backed by the Nantucket Sound alliance, remain to be settled.

Audra Parker, chief executive of the alliance, is skeptical that Mr. Gordon can move ahead. His plans, she said, are "built on a house of cards."

Mr. Gordon, for his part, contends that Mr. Koch "lives in a billionaire bubble" and that his efforts to block Cape Wind are self-defeating because climate change is already assaulting Cape Cod.

"Their beach is eroding, houses are falling into the sea, the ocean is getting warmer, lobsters are migrating away," Mr. Gordon said in an interview in his Boston office. "It's just sad that somebody who has the means to spend millions of dollars can hold something up that's going to produce a lot of benefits for Massachusetts and this region."

Mr. Koch is not the only opponent of Cape Wind. The late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, whose Hyannis family compound also looked out on Nantucket Sound, opposed the project too, as do many fishermen and business owners on the Cape who worry it will hurt their livelihoods. Hundreds of people have made donations to the alliance; Mr. Koch's $5 million in contributions account for only part of the $30 million raised.

But he is one of the few wealthy homeowners here who has taken a public role in the fight. And his ties to the fossil-fuel industry, and the fact that he is a Koch brother, make him a convenient target for pro-wind supporters.

Major environmental groups support the wind farm as a necessary step toward reducing carbon emissions, and they are furious with Mr. Koch. But when he was warned last year that environmentalists were going to start attacking him and try to stop his other projects, he said he welcomed the fight.

"The environmentalists are already after me," he told CommonWealth magazine in April. "I've had the Turkish government after me, I've had the I.R.S. after me and I've had a $50-billion-a-year corporation after me. I've had the Turkish mafia after me, so bring it on, baby."

Combative, flamboyant and litigious, Mr. Koch does not shy away from public scrapes. He has been involved in dozens of lawsuits over the years, including a tangled case against his own brothers that went on for two decades and that Forbes called "perhaps the nastiest family feud in American business history."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 25, 2013

A headline and a subheading on Wednesday about the billionaire industrialist William I. Koch's fight against a vast wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound referred incompletely in some editions to the area for which the farm would provide power. As the article noted, it is Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket — not just Nantucket.

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Memo From Japan: With a Plant’s Tainted Water Still Flowing, No End to Environmental Fears

Tokyo Electric Power Company, via Associated Press

The crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, where releases of contaminated water may not slow until at least 2015.

TOKYO — For months now, it has been hard to escape the continuing deluge of bad news from the devastated Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Even after the company that operates the plant admitted this summer that tons of contaminated groundwater was leaking into the Pacific Ocean every day, new accidents have added to the uncontrolled releases of radioactive materials. This week, newly tainted rainwater overflowed dikes. Two weeks before that, workers mistakenly disconnected a pipe, dumping 10 more tons of contaminated water onto the ground and dousing themselves in the process.

Those accidents have raised questions about whether the continuing leaks are putting the environment, and by extension the Japanese people, in new danger more than two and a half years after the original disaster — and long after many had hoped natural radioactive decay would have allowed healing to begin.

Interviews with scientists in recent weeks suggest that they are struggling to determine which effects — including newly discovered hot spots on a wide swath of the ocean floor near Fukushima — are from recent leaks and which are leftovers from the original disaster. But evidence collected by them and the plant's operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, shows worrisome trends.

The latest releases appear to be carrying much more contaminated water than before into the Pacific. And that flow may not slow until at least 2015, when an ice wall around the damaged reactors is supposed to be completed. Beyond that, although many Japanese believed that the plant had stopped spewing radioactive materials long ago, they have continued to seep into the air.

"This has become a slowly unfolding environmental misery," said Atsunao Marui, a geochemist at the Geological Survey of Japan who has studied contaminated groundwater flowing from the plant. "If we don't put a stop to the releases, we risk creating a new man-made disaster."

Even the most alarmed of the scientists who were interviewed did not extend their worries about the new releases to human health. With more than 80,000 residents near the plant evacuated almost immediately after the disaster, and fishing in nearby waters still severely restricted, they say there is little or no direct danger to humans from the latest releases. But, they say, that does not rule out other impacts on the environment.

And while the air and water releases are a small fraction of what they were in the early days of the disaster, they are still significantly larger than what would normally be permitted of a functioning plant.

Both Tepco and the government say the largest continuing problem, the water releases, is not a cause for concern, because the radiation is diluted in the vast Pacific, limiting any potentially dangerous effects to the plant's artificial harbor. But while scientists agree that dilution has made radiation levels outside the harbor, and even some places inside, low enough to pass drinking water standards, they say there are worrisome problems that may be the result of new leaks.

Besides the discovery of widespread radioactive hot spots, the government's fisheries agency said that more than 1 in 10 of some species of bottom-feeding fish caught off Fukushima are still contaminated by amounts of radioactive cesium above the government's safety level.

The latest concerns began in June, when Tepco announced a sharp rise in the amount of radioactive contaminants, including strontium 90, found in groundwater near two of the ruined reactors. The company says the source of the increased contamination appears to be highly radioactive water that had been trapped since the accident in conduits around the reactor buildings and had slowly found its way out.

The planned ice wall is meant to contain this water, as well as to sever the flow of groundwater that pours daily into the damaged reactor buildings while following its natural course from mountains behind the plant down toward the sea. (That water, which becomes sullied by radioactive materials from the melted nuclear fuel, is captured and stored in a cityscape of tanks.)

The magnitude of the recent spike in radiation, and the amounts of groundwater involved, have led Michio Aoyama, an oceanographer at a government research institute who is considered an authority on radiation in the sea, to conclude that radioactive cesium 137 may now be leaking into the Pacific at a rate of about 30 billion becquerels per year, or about three times as high as last year. He estimates that strontium 90 may be entering the Pacific at a similar rate.

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Fracking Fight Focuses on a New York Town’s Ban

But Dryden could soon be synonymous with something more than animals and agriculture. In August 2011, the town passed a zoning ordinance effectively forbidding hydraulic fracturing, the controversial gas extraction method also known as fracking. The ordinance, passed after a feisty local lobbying effort, prompted a lawsuit now being mulled by New York State's highest court, the Court of Appeals, whose ruling could settle the long-simmering issue of whether the state's municipalities can ban the drilling process.

Dryden was not the first place to act against fracking, nor the first place where such bans have been subject to legal challenges. Bans are increasingly common in cities, towns and even counties across the country, including Pittsburgh, which did so in 2010, and Highland Park, N.J., a New York City suburb, where the Borough Council outlawed fracking on Sept. 17.

While some of those votes are more symbolic than substantive — Highland Park was not likely to become a gas-drilling center — in the case of Dryden, the stakes could be high.

"It's going to decide the future of the oil and gas industry in the state of New York," said Thomas West, a lawyer for Norse Energy Corporation USA, which has sought to have the ban overturned and will file legal briefs on the appeal on Monday.

That Dryden and other local governments in New York have decided to take matters in their own hands is not surprising. Fracking has been the subject of five years of evaluation by state officials, including a continuing, and some say strategically delayed, "health impact analysis" by the State Health Department — a process whose pace has been criticized by both supporters and opponents of fracking.

"This is not about a D.O.H. study," said Brad Gill, the executive director of Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York, which has lobbied to legalize the drilling technique. "This is about indecisive leadership in the state."

The study was ordered by the Department of Environmental Conservation, an agency controlled by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who has said the health review will help guide his decision on whether to allow fracking.

Supporters say the mining method could bring thousands of jobs to economically depressed regions in the state's Southern Tier, a region along the northern border of Pennsylvania.

But Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, has also faced strong opposition to the method from environmentalists and others worried about its impact on watersheds and aquifers. Fracking uses water and chemicals to release natural gas trapped in deeply buried shale deposits.

In May, the governor said in an interview that he believed that the state's health commissioner, Dr. Nivah Shah, would be finished with his department's review "in the next several weeks," but, he added, "It's not done yet."

But more than a year after the review began, no report has surfaced. In late August, the Health Department released a timetable showing that Dr. Shah had been traveling to other states to investigate the mining method, including Texas, where fracking is under way, and Illinois, where he went "to discuss experiences and public health concerns" with shale gas development.

Asked for an update on the report, Bill Schwarz, a spokesman for the department, said on Wednesday, "The state health commissioner is continuing his analysis, and work on the public health review will continue until he concludes the review is fully informed, comprehensive and best serves the health and safety interests of the citizens of New York."

Polls, meanwhile, show no consensus on the issue. A Siena College poll conducted last week showed that 43 percent of voters statewide opposed fracking, while 38 percent approved of the method.

Some critics of the process have suggested that the Cuomo administration simply does not want to make a decision because New York voters, who will decide next year whether he gets a second term, are sharply divided.

Asked for comment on the delay, the governor's press office directed a reporter to comments Mr. Cuomo made in a radio interview in August.

"Look, fracking has obvious economic benefits," the governor said then. "Every area that has participated in fracking has had increased commercial activity and it has an economic boost effect. Question is, is there a cost to the environment, to health, etc.? And that's what has to be assessed, and that's what has to be weighed, and that's what we're going through now."

For her part, Martha Ferger, 89, a longtime Dryden resident and retired biochemist, said she feared that the governor had been "just playing it safe so far," though she still had hope.

"Maybe he can be seen as a national hero that preserved one spot in the country that isn't ruined," she said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 23, 2013

A picture caption with an earlier version of this article misstated the given name of a member of the Dryden Resources Awareness Coalition. She is Deborah Cipolla-Dennis, not Joan. (Her wife, also shown, is Joanne Cipolla-Dennis.)

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